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

by Fredrik Logevall

  Copyright © 2012 by Fredrik Logevall

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Illustration credits are located on this page.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Logevall, Fredrik

  Embers of war: the fall of an empire and the making of America’s Vietnam / Fredrik Logevall.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-64519-1

  1. Indochinese War, 1946–1954. 2. Indochinese War, 1946–1954—Diplomatic history. 3. France—Colonies— Asia. 4. Vietnam—Colonization. 5. Vietnam—Politics and government—1945–1975. 6. United States—Foreign relations—France. 7. France—Foreign relations—United States. 8. United States—Foreign relations—Vietnam. 9. Vietnam—Foreign relations—United States. 10. Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Causes. I. Title.

  DS553.1.L64 2012

  959.704′1—dc23

  Maps by Mapping Specialists, Ltd.

  www.atrandom.com

  Title page photos: Fox Photos/Getty Images (left) and

  ECPAD (right)

  Jacket design: Base Art Co.

  Jacket photograph: Guy Defives/Ecpad, France

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map

  PREFACE

  PROLOGUE: A VIETNAMESE IN PARIS

  PART ONE LIBERATIONS, 1940–1945

  1. “The Empire Is with Us!”

  2. The Anti-Imperialist

  3. Crossroads

  4. “All Men Are Created Equal”

  PART TWO COLONIAL STRUGGLE, 1946–1949

  5. The Warrior Monk

  6. The Spark

  7. War Without Fronts

  8. “If I Accepted These Terms I’d Be a Coward”

  PART THREE EAST MEETS WEST, 1949–1953

  9. “The Center of the Cold War”

  10. Attack on the RC4

  11. King Jean

  12. The Quiet Englishman

  13. The Turning Point That Didn’t Turn

  14. Eisenhower in Charge

  15. Navarre’s American Plan

  PART FOUR THE CAULDRON, 1953–1954

  16. Arena of the Gods

  17. “We Have the Impression They Are Going to Attack Tonight”

  18. “Vietnam Is a Part of the World”

  19. America Wants In

  20. Dulles Versus Eden

  21. Valley of Tears

  PART FIVE PEACE OF A KIND, 1954

  22. With Friends Like These

  23. “We Must Go Fast”

  24. “I Have Seen Destiny Bend to That Will”

  PART SIX SEIZING THE TORCH, 1954–1959

  25. “We Have No Other Choice but to Win Here”

  26. Miracle Man

  27. Things Fall Apart

  EPILOGUE: DIFFERENT DREAMS, SAME FOOTSTEPS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  FURTHER READING

  PHOTO CREDITS

  About the Author

  PREFACE

  IT IS SAIGON, IN SOUTHERN VIETNAM, IN THE HEART OF COLONIAL French Indochina, on a brilliantly sunny autumn day in October 1951. A young congressman from Massachusetts, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, age thirty-four, arrives by plane at the city’s Tan Son Nhut airport, accompanied by his younger siblings Robert and Patricia. Pale and thin, and suffering from a secret illness—Addison’s disease—that will almost kill him later in the trip, he is on a seven-week, twenty-five-thousand-mile tour of Asia and the Middle East designed to burnish his foreign-policy credentials in advance of a Senate run the following year.1 Besides Indochina, other stops include Israel, Iran, Pakistan, India, Singapore, Thailand, Malaya, Korea, and Japan.

  Kennedy views this stop on the journey with special anticipation. Indochina, he knows, is in the midst of a violent struggle, pitting colonial France and her Indochinese allies, supported by the United States, against the Ho Chi Minh–led Viet Minh, who have the backing of China and the Soviet Union. For almost five years, the fighting has raged, with no end in sight. Originally it had been largely a Franco-Vietnamese affair, resulting from Paris leaders’ attempt to rebuild the colonial state and international order that had existed before World War II, and Vietnamese nationalists’ determination to redefine that state in a new postcolonial order. Now the crisis is moving steadily toward the epicenter of Asian Cold War politics, and the congressman understands it could loom ever larger in U.S. foreign policy and by extension in his own political career.

  Hardly have the Kennedys landed and disembarked when there is a sudden outburst of gunfire nearby. “What was that?” asks JFK. “Small-arms fire,” comes the reply. “Another attack by the Viet Minh.” The three siblings soon realize that the bustling facade that Saigon (the “Paris of the Orient,” in the hoary cliché of travel writers) always presents to the visitor is a thin disguise for tension and insecurity. The cafés are packed, the bakeries loaded with French baguettes, and the shopkeepers along the fashionable rue Catinat do brisk business. But the restaurants have antigrenade netting over their terraces, and palpable nervousness hangs in the air. There’s a war on, and though the main action is in Tonkin to the north, Saigon lies in a war-dominated countryside. The Viet Minh have base areas less than twenty-five miles away, and they conduct frequent—and often brazen—attacks on villages right next to the city.2

  The Kennedys are told they cannot venture outside Saigon by car. Though the French rule the roads during daylight hours, at twilight control shifts to the insurgents, and there’s always the danger of getting stuck in the countryside as the sun sets. So the siblings stay put, conscious of the fact that even in the heart of town, there are occasional grenade attacks, kidnappings, and assassinations. They spend the first evening on the fourth-floor rooftop bar of the waterfront Majestic Hotel, glimpsing gun flashes as French artillery fires across the Saigon River, hoping to hit Viet Minh mortar sites. (The novelist Graham Greene, who will immortalize the war with his classic work The Quiet American, and who will enter our narrative in due course, is also a guest at the hotel.) “Cannot go outside city because of guerrillas,” the twenty-six-year-old Robert writes in his diary. “Could hear shooting as evening wore on.”3

  The next afternoon Jack ventures off alone, making for the small flat on the nearby Boulevard Charner occupied by Seymour Topping, the Associated Press bureau chief. “I’ll only be a few minutes,” Kennedy says at the door. He stays more than two hours, peppering the journalist with questions about every aspect of the war. The answers are sobering. The French are losing and likely can’t recover, Topping tells him, for the simple reason that Ho Chi Minh has captured the leadership of the Vietnamese nationalist movement and has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of recruits for his army. He also controls the mountain passes to China, whose leader, Mao Zedong, is supplying the Viet Minh with weapons and training. Kennedy asks what the Vietnamese think of the United States. Not much, Topping replies. At the end of the Pacific War in 1945, Americans had stood supreme, immensely popular throughout Southeast Asia for their vanquishing of Japan and for the steadfast anticolonialism of the just-deceased Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Their esteem grew when they followed through on a pledge to grant independence to the Philippines. But that was then. Now the United States is r
esented and even hated by many Vietnamese for her vigorous backing of the French colonial war effort.4

  Topping’s grim analysis impresses Kennedy, and he is further convinced after a conversation with Edmund Gullion, the young counselor at the American legation, who speaks in similar terms. Kennedy poses tough questions during briefings with the U.S. minister, Donald Heath, and the French high commissioner and military commander, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. Why, he asks Heath, should the mass of the Vietnamese people be expected to join the struggle to keep their country a part of the French empire? What would be their motivation? The questions irritate Heath, a Francophile of the first order, and de Lattre is no happier after his session with the lawmaker. The Frenchman, a blazingly charismatic figure who earlier in the year demonstrated his strategic and tactical sagacity in turning back three major Viet Minh offensives, has just returned from a triumphant visit to the United States, where journalists lauded him as the “French MacArthur” and senior officials proclaimed the vital importance of his mission to the broader Cold War. He vows to take the fight to the enemy now that the rainy season is drawing to a close, and he assures Kennedy that France will see the struggle through to the end. The American is skeptical, having heard differently from both Topping and Gullion. De Lattre, sensing his guest’s doubt, sends a formal letter of complaint to Heath but nevertheless arranges for the Kennedy brothers to visit Hanoi in the north and tour the fortifications guarding the Red River Delta approaches to the city.5

  “We are more and more becoming colonialists in the minds of the people,” Kennedy writes in a trip diary. “Because everyone believes that we control the U.N. [and] because our wealth is supposedly inexhaustible, we will be damned if we don’t do what they [the emerging nations] want.” The United States should avoid the path trod by the declining British and French empires and instead show that the enemy is not merely Communism but “poverty and want,” “sickness and disease,” and “injustice and inequality,” all of which are the daily lot of millions of Asians and Arabs.

  Upon returning to Boston in late November, Kennedy continues the theme in a radio address and in a speech before the Boston Chamber of Commerce. “In Indochina we have allied ourselves to the desperate effort of the French regime to hang on to the remnants of an empire,” he declares. “There is no broad general support of the native Vietnam Government among the people of that area,” for it “is a puppet government.” Every neutral observer believes “a free election … would go in favor of Ho and his Communists.”6

  Bobby Kennedy’s perspective is much the same. The French, he writes to his father, are “greatly hated,” and America’s aid has made her unpopular by association. “Our mistake has been not to insist on definite political reforms by the French toward the natives as prerequisites to any aid. As it stands now we are becoming more & more involved in the war to a point where we can’t back out.” He concludes: “It doesn’t seem to be a picture with a very bright future.”7

  Indeed. After the Kennedys’ departure, despite ever-rising levels of U.S. assistance, France’s fortunes continued to spiral downward, until by mid-1954 she had lost the war, following a spectacular defeat in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, one of the great military engagements of modern times. The Eisenhower administration, by then far more committed to the war effort than were the French themselves, actively considered intervening with military force—perhaps with tactical nuclear weapons, in a heatedly debated secret plan ominously code-named Operation Vulture—to try to save the French position, and came closer to doing so than is generally believed. Neither President Dwight D. Eisenhower nor the U.S. Congress wanted to proceed without allied and especially British involvement, however, and the Winston Churchill government in London resisted strong administration pressure to go along. A peace agreement signed in Geneva divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel pending nationwide elections in 1956. Ho’s Communist nationalist government took control north of the parallel, its capital in Hanoi, while the southern portion came under the rule of the Catholic nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem gradually solidified his authority in South Vietnam and, with Washington’s staunch support, bypassed the elections. For a time he seemed to prosper, and U.S. officials—Senator John F. Kennedy among them—crowed about a “Diem miracle.” But the appearances deceived. In the late 1950s, an insurgency, supported by Hanoi (at first hesitantly), took root in the south.

  By 1959, a new war for Vietnam had begun, a war the Vietnamese would come to call “the American war.” That July, two American servicemen, Major Dale Buis and Master Sergeant Chester Ovnand, were killed in an insurgent attack on a base near Bien Hoa, twenty miles north of Saigon. Theirs would be the first of more than 58,000 names carved into the black granite wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

  FEW TOPICS IN CONTEMPORARY HISTORY have been studied and analyzed and debated more than the Vietnam War. The long and bloody struggle, which killed in excess of three million Vietnamese and wreaked destruction on huge portions of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, has inspired a vast outpouring of books, articles, television documentaries, and Hollywood movies, as well as scholarly conferences and college courses. Nor is there any reason to believe the torrent of words will slow anytime soon, given the war’s immense human and material toll and given its deep—and persisting—resonance in American politics and culture. Yet remarkably, we still do not have a full-fledged international account of how the whole saga began, a book that takes us from the end of World War I, when the future of the European colonial empires still seemed secure, through World War II and then the Franco–Viet Minh War and its dramatic climax, to the fateful American decision to build up and defend South Vietnam.8 Embers of War is an attempt at such a history. It is the story of one Western power’s demise in Indochina and the arrival of another, of a revolutionary army’s stunning victory in 1954 in the face of immense challenges, and of the failure of that victory to bring lasting peace to Vietnam.9 To put it a different way, it is the story of how Dale Buis and Chester Ovnand came to be stationed and meet their fates in a far-off land that many of their compatriots barely knew existed.

  But it’s not merely as a prelude to America’s Vietnam debacle that the earlier period merits our attention. Straddling as it did the twentieth century’s midpoint, the French Indochina War sat at the intersection of the grand political forces that drove world affairs during the century.10 Thus Indochina’s experience between 1945 and 1954 is intimately bound up with the transformative effects of the Second World War and the outbreak and escalation of the Cold War, and in particular with the emergence of the United States as the predominant power in Asian and world affairs. And thus the struggle is also part of the story of European colonialism and its encounter with anticolonial nationalists—who drew their inspiration in part from European and American ideas and promises. In this way, the Franco–Viet Minh War was simultaneously an East-West and North-South conflict, pitting European imperialism in its autumn phase against the two main competitors that gained momentum by midcentury—Communist-inspired revolutionary nationalism and U.S.-backed liberal internationalism. If similar processes played out across much of the globe after 1945, Vietnam deserves special study because it was one of the first places where this destructive dynamic could be seen. It was also where the dynamic remained in place, decade after bloody decade.11

  My goal in this book is to help a new generation of readers relive this extraordinary story: a twentieth-century epic featuring life-and-death decisions made under profound pressure, a vast mobilization of men and resources, and a remarkable cast of larger-than-life characters ranging from Ho Chi Minh to Charles de Gaulle to Dean Acheson to Zhou Enlai, from Bao Dai to Anthony Eden to Edward Lansdale to Ngo Dinh Diem, as well as half a dozen U.S. presidents. Throughout, the focus is on the political and diplomatic dimensions of the struggle, but I also devote considerable space to the military campaigns that, I maintain, were crucial to the outcome.12 Laos and Cambodia enter the narrative at various
points, but I give pride of place to developments in Vietnam, far more populous and politically important than her Indochinese neighbors.

  In retrospect, given the broader historical context, there is an air of inevitability about the flow of events in this story, as there is about a great river. A prostrate France, having been overrun by Nazi Germany in a mere six weeks in 1940 and further humiliated in meekly ceding Indochina to the advancing Japanese, sought after 1945 to reestablish colonial control, at a time when the whole edifice of the European imperial system was crumbling; how could she possibly hope to succeed? Add to this the ruthless discipline, tenacity, and fighting skill of the Viet Minh, and the comparative weakness of non-Communist Vietnamese nationalists—before and after 1954—and it becomes seemingly all but impossible to imagine a different result than the one that occurred.

  Yet the story of the French Indochina War and its aftermath is a contingent one, full of alternative political choices, major and minor, considered and taken, reconsidered and altered, in Paris and Saigon, in Washington and Beijing, and in the Viet Minh’s headquarters in the jungles of Tonkin. It’s a reminder to us that to the decision makers of the past, the future was merely a set of possibilities. If the decolonization of Indochina was bound to occur, the process could have played out in a variety of ways, as the experience of European colonies in other parts of South and Southeast Asia shows.13 Moreover, difficult though it may be to remember now, in the early going the odds were against the Viet Minh. They were weak and vulnerable in military and diplomatic terms, a reality not lost on Ho Chi Minh, a political pragmatist who labored diligently and in vain both to head off war with France and to get official American backing for his cause. Nor could Ho get meaningful assistance from Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who was preoccupied with European concerns and in any event deemed the Vietnamese leader too independent-minded to be trusted. Even the French Communist Party, anxious to appear patriotic and moderate before the metropolitan electorate, repeatedly refused his pleas for support, and indeed connived in the venture of reconquest.