Embers of War (137 page)

44
Quoted in Elliott,
Vietnamese War
, 103.

45
Pentagon Papers
(Gravel) 1:312. On the agrovilles and their development, see, e.g., Catton,
Diem’s Final Failure
, chap. 3; and Biggs,
Quagmire
, 188–93. A more or less contemporaneous account is Joseph J. Zasloff, “Rural Resettlement in Vietnam: The Agroville Program,”
Pacific Affairs
35 (1962–63).

46
Elliott,
Vietnamese War
, 127, 103. See also FitzGerald,
Fire in the Lake
, 194–95; and David Hunt,
Vietnam’s Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), chap. 3.

47
Nguyen Thi Dinh interview, 1981, WGBH Vietnam Collection,
openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/org.wgbh.mla:Vietnam
(last accessed on November 22, 2010).

48
Mrs. Nguyen Thi Dinh,
No Other Road to Take
, translated by Mai V. Elliott (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1976); Nguyen Thi Dinh interview, 1981, WGBH Vietnam Collection,
openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/org.wgbh.mla:Vietnam
(last accessed on November 22, 2010).

49
Dinh,
No Other Road
, 69–70.

50
Arnold,
First Domino
, 342;
NYT
, July 7, 1959, as quoted in Moyar,
Triumph Forsaken
, 81.

51
Bernard B. Fall,
The Two Viet-Nams: A Political and Military Analysis
(New York: Praeger, 1964), 327–28.

52
Operations Coordinating Board Report, January 7, 1959, Box 25, NSC 5809 Policy Paper Subseries, Eisenhower Library.

53
Catton,
Diem’s Final Failure
, 48–50. On Diem’s conception of democracy, see also FitzGerald,
Fire in the Lake
, 109–11.

54
Nhu quoted in Catton,
Diem’s Final Failure
, 29.

55
Diem quoted in James Fisher, “ ‘A World Made Safe for Diversity’: The Vietnam Lobby and the Politics of Pluralism, 1945–1963,” in Christian Appy, ed.,
Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 229.

56
Ahearn,
CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam
, 31. The intelligence agent quoted in Barbara W. Tuchman,
The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 280.

57
Spector,
Advice and Support
, 371; William J. Duiker,
U.S. Containment Policy and the Conflict in Indochina
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 241. On Diem continuing to frame the problem in military terms, even as Williams finally appeared to concede that the political dimension also mattered, see Ahearn,
CIA and the House of Ngo
, 136.

58
Time
, July 20, 1959; Spector,
Advice and Support
, 329;
Mien Dong Nam Bo Khang Chien
, 70–71. See also
Houston Post
, July 8, 1984; and
USA Today
, July 8, 2009.

59
People
, July 9, 1984.

60
Ibid.

61
Stanley Karnow,
Vietnam: A History
(New York: Viking, 1983), 10–11. Due to his name being misspelled as “Ovnard,” Ovnand’s name was later added to the Wall a second time, at Panel 7E, Row 46. A case for the first American to be killed in South Vietnam could also be made for Captain Harry Griffith Cramer, Jr., who died in an explosion of uncertain cause near Nha Trang in October 1957. His name was added to the Wall in 1983 and appears on panel 01E, Row 78. Another candidate is Air Force T-Sgt. Richard B. Fitzgibbon, Jr., killed on June 8, 1956. His name, added in 1999, appears on Panel 52E, Row 21.

62
Spector,
Advice and Support
, 329.

63
Time
, July 20, 1959; Karnow,
Vietnam
, 10–11.

EPILOGUE:
Different Dreams, Same Footsteps

  
1
Quoted in Barbara W. Tuchman,
The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 283. Paul Kattenburg, in 1961 a State Department specialist on Vietnam, would later write of this period: “Policy-planning exercises never defined vital interest positions themselves, but always assumed them.” Paul Kattenburg,
The Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign Policy, 1945–75
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1980), 101–2.

  
2
Robert Dallek,
An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963
(Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), 166–67; and
The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of Decisionmaking on Vietnam
, Senator Gravel edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 1:72.

  
3
Quoted in Christopher Matthews,
Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 118.

  
4
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,
A Thousand Days
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 505, 547.

  
5
Christian G. Appy,
Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides
(New York: Viking, 2003), 66–67.

  
6
NYT
, February 25, 1962, reprinted in
Reporting Vietnam, Part 1: American Journalism 1959–1975
(New York: Library of America, 1998), 11–17.

  
7
Lorenz M. Lüthi,
The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008); Sergey Radchenko,
Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962–67
(Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2009). The JCS memo is quoted in Seymour Topping,
Journey Between Two Chinas
(New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 178.

  
8
The literature on the 1961–65 period is very large. See, e.g., David Halberstam,
The Best and the Brightest
(New York: Random House, 1972); Fredrik Logevall,
Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); David Kaiser,
American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Gordon Goldstein,
Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam
(New York: Times Books, 2008); Andrew Preston,
The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).

  
9
White letter quoted in Michael E. Latham,
The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2011), 136.

10
Lansdale speech, “Soldiers and the People,” August 30, 1962, Box 7, #239, Lansdale Papers, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. On another occasion, Lansdale argued that the preferred way to get rid of the Viet Cong in one particular area was to use “human defoliation” in the hardwood forests: Instead of using chemical defoliants, officials should award a timber concession to a Taiwanese firm that would arm its workers. “They might very well have to fight to get to the trees so they would clean up the Viet Cong along the way,” Lansdale reasoned. The scheme was quietly filed. Jonathan Nashel,
Edward Lansdale’s Cold War
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 66.

11
Richard Stubbs,
Hearts and Minds in Guerrilla Warfare: The Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960
(Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1989); Susan L. Carruthers,
Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media, and Colonial Counter-Insurgency, 1944–1960
(Leicester, U.K.: Leicester University Press, 1998); Michael Osborne,
Strategic Hamlets in Vietnam
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965).

12
David Halberstam, “The Americanization of Vietnam,”
Playboy
, January 1970, as quoted in Nashel,
Edward Lansdale’s Cold War
, 151.

13
For counterfactual assessments regarding what a surviving Kennedy might have done in Vietnam, see, e.g., Logevall,
Choosing War
, 395–400; and James G. Blight, Janet M. Lang, and David A. Welch,
Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived: Virtual JFK
(Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). For the argument (which I find unpersuasive) that Kennedy had initiated a withdrawal at the time of his death, see James Galbraith, “Exit Strategy,”
Boston Review
, January–February 2004, 29–34; and Gareth Porter,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 165–79.

14
LBJ-Bundy telcon, September 8, 1964, in Michael Beschloss, ed.,
Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson’s Secret White House Tapes, 1964–1965
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 35–36; LBJ-Russell telcon, March 6, 1965, ibid., 210–13.

15
On Kennedy and Johnson’s options in 1963–65, see Logevall,
Choosing War
.

16
On this vulnerability and its influence on foreign policy in the Cold War as a whole, see Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall,
America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2009).

17
Ho is quoted in William J. Duiker,
Ho Chi Minh: A Life
(New York: Hyperion, 2000), 535.

18
O.A. Westad, Chen Jian, Stein Tønnesson, Nguyen Vu Tung, and James G. Hershberg, eds., “77 Conversations Between Chinese and Foreign Leaders on the Wars in Vietnam,” Cold War International History Project Working Paper, 1998, pp. 83–84.

19
Duiker,
Ho Chi Minh
, 548.

20
David Schoenbrun,
As France Goes
(New York: Atheneum, 1968), 232–35.

21
Alain Peyrefitte,
C’était de Gaulle: La France reprend sa place dans la monde
(Paris: Fayard, 1997), 501; Paris to State, May 5, 1965, Box 171, National Security File, Country File, France, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library. On French policy in this period, see Pierre Journoud,
De Gaulle et le Vietnam, 1945–1969
(Paris: Éditions Tallandier, 2011), chap. 4.

22
Bernard B. Fall, “The War in Vietnam,”
Current
(December 1965), 9–10. Emphasis in original. See also Christopher E. Goscha, “ ‘Sorry About That …’: Bernard Fall, the Vietnam War, and the Impact of a French Intellectual in the U.S.,” in Christopher E. Goscha and Maurice Vaïsse, eds.,
La Guerre du Vietnam et l’Europe (1963–1973)
(Paris: LGDJ, 2003), 363–82.

23
The literature on counterinsurgency has grown enormously in the years since 9/11 and the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. See, e.g., David Kilcullen,
The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); John A. Nagl,
Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife
(New York: Praeger, 2002); Gian P. Gentile, “A (Slightly) Better War: A Narrative and Its Defects,”
World Affairs
(Summer 2008); Edward Luttwak, “Dead End: Counterinsurgency Warfare as Military Malpractice,”
Harper’s
(February 2007); and
The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). See also Jeffrey Record,
Beating Goliath: Why Insurgencies Win
(Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2007); and Andrew J. Bacevich,
Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War
(New York: Metropolitan, 2010), chap. 5.

24
Quoted in David Halberstam,
Ho
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), 106. On Fall and his experience, see Dorothy Fall,
Bernard Fall: Memories of a Soldier-Scholar
(Washington, D.C.: Potomac, 2006). In early 1966, the Harvard historian John K. Fairbank would put it slightly differently: “On the long thin coast of Vietnam, we are sleeping in the same bed the French slept in even though we dream different dreams.”
New York Review of Books
, February 17, 1966.

FURTHER READING

Although the literature on the period covered in this book pales in size next to that detailing the years of heavy U.S. military involvement (1961–73), interested readers can find numerous studies that shed light on key parts of the story—and that were exceptionally helpful to me. Here follows a selected list of English-language works I utilized. For additional published sources, please see the endnotes.

Ahearn, Thomas L., Jr.
CIA and the House of Ngo: Covert Action in South Vietnam, 1954–63
. Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 2000.