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

by Fredrik Logevall

On March 18, 1965, President Charles de Gaulle, whose unwavering determination to reclaim Indochina for France at the end of World War II had done so much to start the bloodshed, and who had been summoned back to power in 1958 as his country struggled to defeat another insurgency, this one in Algeria, told his cabinet that major war was now inevitable. The Americans had failed to learn from France’s example, he said, and the fighting “will last a long, long, long time.” The following month de Gaulle offered a more precise estimate: Unless the Johnson administration moved to halt the war immediately, the struggle would go on for ten years and would completely dishonor the United States. When U.S. ambassador Charles Bohlen called on de Gaulle in early May, he found the French leader in a philosophical mood, accepting the wholesale escalation of the fighting with “oriental fatalism.”21