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

by Fredrik Logevall

It was a bitter pill for Ho to swallow, not least because he knew the taste so well. He responded by redoubling his efforts to strengthen contacts with the French Communists and with Moscow. In September, the indefatigable Pham Ngoc Thach, fresh off his efforts with the Americans in Bangkok, traveled to Europe as Ho’s special envoy. He met with PCF leaders Jacques Duclos and Maurice Thorez, but he appears to have made no headway—Duclos impressed upon him the importance of Vietnam doing her utmost in the struggle for liberation, to which Thach replied that it was a shame the PCF had done so little to try to prevent the war. The Soviets too were more or less unresponsive. A measure of the importance they attached to Thach’s mission is that they chose not to bring him to the Kremlin to meet with senior officials; he got only an audience in Bern, with the Soviet ambassador to Switzerland. When Thach asked the ambassador if a later visit to Moscow might be possible, he received a noncommittal reply. No invitation ever came.12