The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

would permit the French to ...

all subsequent events would flow from this: t...

reassert their au...

the French Indochina war would begin, and the Vietnamese would gain their freedom by force of arms.

a minor point clouded over by great issues at the time,

the responsible political officer, John Carter Vincent, did not participate; in fact, he learned of it ...

there was no arrogance of American power, every resource was carefully weighed,

anticolonialism had not surfaced yet as the great global movement (though the very war which he was helping to mastermind

would speed the collapse of the old order and the end of colonialism),

He was

instinctively on the side of the little man, and anticolonialism seemed consistent with his own domestic political style;

He saw a role for the United States as a symbol of ...

receptive to the idea that the many poor of the world would turn ...

If Roosevelt did not like colonialism in general, he did not like French col...

had been in Indochina for fifty years

He had determined that the French would not automatically come back and reassert their control over Indochina; there would be some kind of international trusteeship,

Our goal must be to help them achieve independence—1,100,000,000 potential enemies are dangerous.

France to assume for herself the obligations of a trustee, then I would agree to France retaining these

colonies with the proviso that independence was the ultimate goal.

dominion ...

the pressure from old traditional allies, anxious to reassert their colonial control,

particularly if the threat of Communism were entwined with the new Asian nationalism.

but it also, for the first time, raised the question of Communism in the context of Vietnam;

those who did not help the

colonialists would be helping the...

A few short weeks later Roosevelt was dead, and with him any hope for a genuine declared policy of...

Europeanists

they quietly prepared a paper on Indochina saying that U.S. policy was to support

Abbott Low Moffatt,

Moffatt, who was deeply committed to the cause of Asian

nationalism, immediately understood what the game was and blocked the memo.

Asia was not a separate area; instead the colonies were handled through the European nations,

The U.S. government knew what was going to happen in Vietnam, but

committed to its European allies, it could not or would not use any leverage to change the course.

the political principle which it has frequently announced, that dependent peoples should be given the opportunity, if necessary after an

adequate period of preparation, to achieve an increased measure of self-government,

quite accurately that Vietnamese political aspirations and consciousness, which had been increasing sharply in the nineteen-thirties and were more heightened than ever, would lead the Vietnamese to fight the

French, and that the French would have “serious difficulty in overcoming this opposition and re-establishing French control.”

Paul Mus,

In France no one listened to either Leclerc or Mus,

The idea of Asian rebels standing up to a powerful Western army was preposterous at the time. No one had yet heard of political war, of Mao’s

concept of fish swimming in the ocean of the people,

of Asian guerrillas giving the European country the cities and strangling them by...

of an army losing battle after battle but win...

and thus t...

regain France’s tarnished greatness.

little yellow men.

Asian-oriented officers in the State Department desperately pleaded with their superiors to pressure France to have real negotiations, to give the Vietnamese some sort of independence,

pitter-patter of naked little brown feet.

as 1946