Embers of War Quotes

“Try as U.S. officials might to get him to broaden his government, to show more sensitivity to the needs of his people, to show greater tolerance for the expression of political opposition, they got nowhere. Instead Diem, his utter confidence in his own political instincts wholly unimpaired, turned increasingly inward, relying almost exclusively on an ever-shrinking circle of confidants headed by his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. More than ever, personal loyalty, rather than ability and efficiency, became the criterion for promotion and reward.”
― Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

“Even those who saw only a part of the country witnessed so much that was new to them—the vast deltas, the astonishingly eroded limestone peaks, the sand-dune coastal forests, the forest mosaics and savannalike grassland. Many wrote home with vivid descriptions of the flora and fauna, the countless species they had never seen before. Many commented on the sheer luster of the place, of the seemingly infinite number of shades of green, in the rice paddies, the grasses, the palms, the rubber trees with their green oval leaves, the pine trees on faraway hills.”
― Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

“A decision by the Truman administration to support Vietnamese independence in the late summer and fall of 1945 would have gone a long way toward averting the mass bloodshed and destruction that was to follow.”
― Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

“The spirit of man is more powerful than his own machines”
― Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

“and province at the mouth of the Mekong River), the plan had”
― Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

“The skeptics had been there all along, since before the shooting started. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt was their champion, and it’s not fanciful to believe that had he lived beyond 1945, FDR would have tried to keep France from forcibly reclaiming control of Indochina, and might well have succeeded, thereby changing the flow of history. But Roosevelt died, and soon thereafter patterns of thought were laid down that would drive U.S. policy for the next twenty years. American leaders in this era always had real choices about which way to go in the anti–Ho Chi Minh struggle, choices evident not only in retrospect but also at the time, yet the policy always moved in the direction of deeper U.S. involvement. Successive administrations could have shifted course, but they never did. Hence the danger in focusing exclusively on contingency: It can blind us to the continuities that permeate the entire American experience in Vietnam. And hence the vital importance, if we are to understand the U.S. war, of reckoning seriously with the earlier era.”
― Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

“It’s no surprise that many later analysts, in judging these and other actions and statements by Diem in the course of 1955, depicted him as a power-hungry and hypocritical autocrat, a reactionary mandarin, a pliant U.S. puppet, and nothing more. But this is insufficient. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, Diem was a modernizer of sorts, a man who had his own vision for Vietnam’s future and who sought to strike a balance between progress and Vietnam’s cultural traditions. “We are not going to go back to a sterile copy of the mandarin past,” Diem told journalist Marguerite Higgins. “We are going to adapt the best of our heritage to the modern situation.”15 Along with his brother and chief adviser Ngo Dinh Nhu, he embraced the ideology of personalism, which was rooted in the efforts of humanist Roman Catholic intellectuals in interwar France to find a third way to economic development, between liberal democracy and Communism. A key figure was philosopher Emmanuel Mounier, who expounded his ideas in books and in the journal Esprit. For Nhu, an intellectual and a graduate of France’s L’École des chartes, personalism’s emphasis on the value of community, rather than individualism, while at the same time avoiding the dehumanizing collectivism of socialism, held tremendous appeal and could complement the traditional concern of Vietnamese culture with social relationships.”
― Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

“And so, seemingly overnight, French political and military influence in South Vietnam withered. On May 20, 1955, French forces withdrew from the Saigon area and assembled in a coastal enclave. From there, their numbers steadily dwindled, until on April 28, 1956, the last French soldier departed Vietnam—signifying the symbolic end, some said, of France’s century in the Far East.”
― Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

“Only later would the grim tallies for France be known. Between September 1945 and July 1954, Paris sent a total of 489,560 soldiers to the Indochinese peninsula: 233,467 French nationals, 72,833 legionnaires, 122,920 North Africans, and 60,340 Africans. In addition, hundreds of thousands of Indochinese troops served with the French forces or in associated armies. By the end of the Geneva Conference, approximately 110,000 troops from the French Union side had been killed in combat or were presumed dead.”
― Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

“America’s intervention, Halberstam said on a later occasion, occurred “in the embers of another colonial war.”
― Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

“Successful American presidents project a populist image. They do not place themselves above their compatriots but strive whenever possible to show qualities typical of “average” Americans. If they have an intellectual bent, they do their best to hide it. To be likable, smiling, and unpretentious is all-important, to express the values of middle America an essential prerequisite for greatness.”
― Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

“In practice, American modernizers tended to be distrustful of populist politics and inclined to favor elite-led societies; often they turned to modernization as a means of counterinsurgency and social control.”
― Fredrik Logevall, Embers Of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

“GVN and its local officials,” even if they were afraid to show”
― Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

“If we have to fight, we will fight. You will kill ten of us, and we will kill one of you, and in the end it is you who will be exhausted.”
― Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

“It will be a war between an elephant and a tiger. If the tiger ever stands still the elephant will crush him with his mighty tusks. But the tiger does not stand still. He lurks in the jungle by day and emerges only at night. He will leap upon the back of the elephant, tearing huge chunks from his hide, and then he will leap back into the dark jungle. And slowly the elephant will bleed to death. That will be the war of Indochina.”39”
― Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

“The soldiers were overwhelmed and blinded by the forces of nature, by the soaking vegetation, the mountains that vanished in the clouds, the rivers swirling with turbid, dangerously rapid water, by the mud, the heat, by everything. It was a formless, green-gray world, devoid of outline, inimical, a world in which every movement, even eating was an effort.”
― Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam