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

by Fredrik Logevall

To acknowledge the possibility of national Communism was to acknowledge that the world was a complex place, and this Acheson and Truman and other American leaders were loath to do. If, for example, Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito (whose break with Moscow had become public the previous year) really was a nationalist as well as a Communist, and if Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh were the same, then the world was altogether more complicated than most Americans—including educated, erudite ones like Acheson—preferred to believe. It was far easier to see these leaders as mere pawns of a hyperpowerful superstate emanating from the Kremlin—regardless of what the evidence showed.4