Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

Syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop argued likewise, notably in a quartet of columns he penned during a stay in Saigon in June, in which he excoriated the French for dragging their feet in the negotiations with Bao Dai.42 For Ho too, 1949 would prove to be pivotal. The astonishing developments in world politics during that year would influence his cause no less than the French. After years of diplomatic failure, of international isolation, his Democratic Republic of Vietnam would taste her first real success, though with implications that he could not foresee. The war was about to change. Up to now largely a Franco-Vietnamese affair, resulting from Paris leaders’ attempt to reclaim colonial control and Vietnamese nationalistic determination to thwart them and define a new postcolonial order, it would become something else, something more. The great powers were coming to Vietnam.