Embers of War (115 page)

At a critical early point in the project, Mark Lawrence and I teamed up to organize an international conference on the Franco–Viet Minh War and to gather the papers from that meeting into an edited volume. Mark’s role in the success of both endeavors was enormous, and I’m grateful as well to Betty Sue Flowers, then director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, for agreeing to host the conference and for enthusiastically backing what we were trying to do.

Much of this book was written during a marvelous sabbatical year in England. I thank the Leverhulme Trust for providing a generous fellowship, the University of Nottingham for giving me a perfect institutional home, and Matthew Jones for his key role in shepherding the Leverhulme nomination through. I’m also grateful to Tony Badger of Clare College, Cambridge, for securing a second affiliation for me that year, as a Mellon senior fellow at Cambridge.

At Random House I thank my editor, David Ebershoff, for his steadfast support and superb editing, and Clare Swanson and Loren Noveck for their excellent labors. Special thanks to Jason Epstein, who had the idea for a book on the early years in Vietnam and encouraged me to give close attention to the Second World War, and to Scott Moyers, my original editor, who has been a keen and unstinting supporter throughout. My literary agent, John Hawkins, did not live to see this work published, but I am eternally grateful to him for betting on me early and for providing sound counsel throughout.

I’m fortunate to be surrounded by wonderful colleagues at Cornell: in the History Department, the Southeast Asia Program, and at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Three Einaudi Center colleagues deserve to be singled out for their skillful and energetic support in the latter stages of this project: Nishi Dhupa, Elizabeth Edmondson, and Heike Michelsen. At Cornell I also received very helpful feedback from the History Department’s Comparative History Colloquium and from the brown-bag seminar of the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Elsewhere, I benefited from trying out my ideas before learned audiences at the University of Cambridge, Harvard University, the University of Nottingham, and the l’Institut d’études internationales de Montréal.

My final and most important acknowledgments are to my family. My beloved parents have provided boundless support and encouragement for longer than I can remember and in more ways than I can convey. I’m also grateful to my sister and brother, who somehow knew when to ask how the book was going and when not to. As for my wife, Danyel, I am lost for words. All I will say is that she contributed to this book much more than she might modestly accept. Always patient, always wise, at just the right moments she summoned up, as if by magic, calm where before there was only storm. I dedicate this book to her and to our two children, Emma and Joseph, who grew up with this book and tolerated the disruptions created by it with their usual good cheer. All three fueled my efforts more than they can ever know.

NOTES

PREFACE

  
1
Near the end of the trip, Kennedy would be rushed to an Okinawa hospital with a temperature of 106. The doctors initially doubted he would live, and he received his last rites.

  
2
1951 travel journal, Box 11, Book 3, October–November 1951, pp.116ff, John F. Kennedy Personal Papers, John F. Kennedy Library (hereafter JFKL). See also Geoffrey Perret,
Jack: A Life Like No Other
(New York: Random House, 2001), 170.

  
3
1951 trips, Mid and Far East, travel diary, Box 24, Robert F. Kennedy Preadministration Personal Files, JFKL; Robert Mann,
A Grand Delusion: America’s Descent into Vietnam
(New York: Basic, 2001), 83.

  
4
Seymour Topping,
On the Front Lines of the Cold War: An American Correspondent’s Journal from the Chinese Civil War to the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 151–55;
The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of Decisionmaking on Vietnam
, Senator Gravel edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 1:68.

  
5
JFK travel journal, 1951, JFKL.

  
6
Robert Dallek,
An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963
(Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), 166–67;
Pentagon Papers
(Gravel), 1:72.

  
7
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,
Robert Kennedy and His Times
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 1:96.

  
8
Important works that cover parts of this story, and that are cited in the pages that follow, include those by Mark Bradley, Pierre Brocheux, Laurent Cesari, Jessica Chapman, Chen Jian, Chester Cooper, Philippe Devillers, William Duiker, David Elliott, Duong Van Mai Elliott, Bernard Fall, Lloyd Gardner, Christopher Goscha, Ellen Hammer, George Herring, Stanley Karnow, Jean Lacouture, A. J. Langguth, Mark Lawrence, David Marr, Edward Miller, Jonathan Nashel, John Prados, Pierre Rocolle, Alain Ruscio, Neil Sheehan, Martin Shipway, Ronald Spector, Kathryn Statler, Martin Thomas, Stein Tønnesson, Frédéric Turpin, Martin Windrow, and Marilyn Young. Also essential are the following reference works: Christopher E. Goscha,
Historical Dictionary of the Indochina War: International and Multidisciplinary Perspectives
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press/Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2011); Alain Ruscio,
La guerre “française” d’Indochine (1945–1954), Les sources de la connaissance: Bibliographie, filmographie, documents divers
(Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2002); Michel Bodin,
Dictionnaire de la guerre d’Indochine, 1945–1954
(Paris: Economica, 2004); Jean-Pierre Rioux,
Dictionnaire de la France coloniale
(Paris: Flammarion, 2007); and Edwin Moïse’s excellent online bibliography of the Vietnam Wars, which can be found at
www.clemson.edu/caah/history/facultypages/EdMoise/bibliography.html
. A fine atlas of the struggle is Hugues Tertrais,
Atlas des guerres d’Indochine, 1940–1990: De l’Indochine française à l’ouverture internationale
(Paris: Autrement, 2004). Special recognition needs to be extended to the quartet of Devillers, Fall, Goscha, and Lawrence, whose influence on this study has been especially great.

  
9
Although a great many Vietnamese archival sources remain inaccessible to scholars, it’s possible to learn a lot about Vietnamese—Communist as well as non-Communist—decisions in this period from official histories and memoirs, and from French, American, and British archival collections. Nevertheless, this book is not a full history of the DRV in this period, much less of all of Vietnam. Important recent studies that are more Vietnam-centric include Christopher E. Goscha,
Vietnam: Un état né de la guerre, 1945–54
(Paris: Armand Colin, 2011); François Guillemot,
Dai Viêt, indépendance et révolution au Viêt-Nam. L’échec de la troisième voie, 1938–1955
(Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2011); David Marr,
Vietnam 1945–1950: War, State, Revolution
(Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming); Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery,
Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954
, trans. Ly Lan Dill-Klein et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); David W. P. Elliott,
The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–1975
(Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2007); Shawn McHale, “Understanding the Fanatic Mind? The Viet Minh and Race Hatred in the First Indochina War (1945–1954),”
Journal of Vietnamese Studies
4 (Fall 2009); Jessica M. Chapman, “Debating the Will of Heaven: South Vietnamese Politics and Nationalism in International Perspective, 1953–56,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California–Santa Barbara, 2006; and Edward Miller, “Grand Designs: Vision, Power, and Nation Building in America’s Alliance with Ngô Dình Diêm, 1954–1960,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2004. A useful older work is Greg Lockhart,
Nation in Arms: The Origins of the People’s Army of Vietnam
(Wellington, N.Z.: Allen & Unwin, 1989). A major outlet for new research is the
Journal of Vietnamese Studies
.

10
Historians remain divided on what to call the conflict, referring to it variously as the French Indochina War, the First Indochina War, the First Vietnam War, the Franco–Viet Minh War, the Anti-French War, the First War of National Resistance, or simply the Indochina War. Here I most often use the French Indochina War and the Franco–Viet Minh War, recognizing that both have their limitations.

11
Works that explore this intersection include Mark Atwood Lawrence,
Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Mark Atwood Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall, eds.,
The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007); Christopher E. Goscha and Christian F. Ostermann, eds.,
Connecting Histories: Decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, 1945–1962
(Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2009); Tuong Vu and Wasana Wongsurawat, eds.,
Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia: Ideology, Identity, and Culture
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Hans Antlöv and Stein Tønnesson,
Imperial Policy and South East Asian Nationalism
(Surrey, U.K.: Curzon, 1995); and Marc Frey, Ronald W. Pruessen, and Tai Yong Tan, eds.,
The Transformation of Southeast Asia: International Perspectives on Decolonization
(Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2003).

12
Though my emphasis in this volume is on high politics and military affairs, I am in full accord with David Elliott’s argument that we also need local histories of the Vietnam struggle, which can capture what macrohistories cannot. See David W. P. Elliott, “The Future of the Past: Some Questions about the Vietnam War for the Next Generation of Historians,” unpublished paper in the author’s possession. See also Elliott,
Vietnamese War
.

13
See, e.g., A.J. Stockwell, “Southeast Asia in War and Peace: The End of European Empires,” in Nicholas Tarling, ed.,
The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia
, volume 4 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–32.

14
Paul Mus,
Destin de l’empire français: De l’Indochine à l’Afrique
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1954), Part 1.

15
Neil Sheehan, introduction to Jules Roy,
The Battle of Dienbienphu
, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Harper & Row, 1965; reprint New York: Carroll & Graf, 1984), xiv.

16
Westmoreland quoted in David F. Schmitz,
The Tet Offensive: Politics, War, and Public Opinion
(Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 69.

17
On this point as applied to Kennedy and Johnson in 1961–65, see Fredrik Logevall,
Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

18
Daniel Ellsberg,
Papers on the War
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 42–135.

19
“Problem” comment quoted in Thomas A. Bass,
The Spy Who Loved Us: The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An’s Dangerous Game
(New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 71. “Embers” quote is in David Halberstam, keynote address, conference on “Vietnam and the Presidency,” JFKL, March 10, 2006, available at
www.jfklibrary.org/Events-and-Awards/Forums.aspx?f=2006
(last accessed Feb. 25, 2012).

20
Quoted in Marilyn B. Young,
The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990
(New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 46.

21
On the American war as a colonial struggle, see, e.g., Michael Adas, “A Colonial War in a Postcolonial Era: The United States’ Occupation of Vietnam,” in Andreas W. Daum, Lloyd C. Gardner, and Wilfried Mausbach, eds.,
America, the Vietnam War, and the World: Comparative and International Perspectives
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 27–42.

22
Former
New York Times
Saigon correspondent A. J. Langguth, in his fine history of the American war, refers to Ho Chi Minh’s “lifelong admiration for Americans.”
Our Vietnam: The War, 1954–1975
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 55.

PROLOGUE:
A Vietnamese in Paris

  
1
The petition was cited in full in the socialist newspaper
L’Humanité
on June 18, 1919. See also Sophie Quinn-Judge,
Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years 1919–1941
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 11–28; Pierre Brocheux,
Ho Chi Minh: A Biography
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 11–14; and William J. Duiker,
Ho Chi Minh: A Life
(New York: Hyperion, 2000), 54–63.

  
2
Ho did get a short, formal reply from an aide to Wilson’s representative Colonel House, dated June 19, 1919. See David A. Andelman,
Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today
(Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2008), 124–25.

  
3
See the excellent analysis in Erez Manela,
The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  
4
Quinn-Judge,
Missing Years
, 20.

  
5
For the material covered in this chapter, helpful sources include Daniel Hémery,
Ho Chi Minh, de l’Indochine au Vietnam
(Paris: Gallimard, 1990); Duiker,
Ho Chi Minh;
Brocheux,
Ho Chi Minh;
E. V. Kobelev,
Ho Chi Minh
(Hanoi: Gioi, 1999); Quinn-Judge,
Missing Years;
Paul Mus,
Ho Chi Minh, le Vietnam et l’Asie
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971); Huynh Kim Khanh,
Vietnamese Communism, 1925–1945
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982); David G. Marr,
Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885–1925
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Thu Trang-Gaspard,
Ho Chi Minh à Paris
(Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 1992); and Alain Ruscio, ed.,
Ho Chi Minh: Textes, 1914–1969
(Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 1990).