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

by Fredrik Logevall

  And so the Viet Minh for a long time fought alone, largely isolated in non-Asian world opinion. The French had a massive superiority in weapons and could take and hold any area they really wanted. Even after Chinese aid started to flow to the Viet Minh in early 1950, the outlook remained uncertain, as France could now claim a still-more-powerful patron of her own, in the form of the United States. Throughout the struggle, Vietnamese sources show, Viet Minh units under General Vo Nguyen Giap endured unfathomable hardships, including acute food shortages and logistical difficulties and, after 1950, the terrifying effects of a new U.S.-produced industrial weapon of the age: napalm. In May 1954, at the moment of the glorious Dien Bien Phu triumph, Giap’s army was exhausted, a spent force with sagging morale, in desperate need of a respite.

  Politically too, Ho, for all his deep and broad popular support and charismatic appeal, always faced domestic challenges to his authority. Beginning in 1947, the French tried to rally to the anti–Viet Minh cause Vietnamese nationalists who so far had stayed neutral, and to peel away from Ho those anti-Communists who to that point had endorsed him. Ho himself saw the danger: What if Paris made far-reaching concessions to a rival Vietnamese regime, involving the transfer of genuine executive and legislative authority and a commitment to eventual independence? It could be a disaster. Later, after the partition in mid-1954, another worry: What if the South Vietnamese government—with a leader, Diem, whose nationalist credentials were almost as sterling as his own—could strengthen its authority to the point that it could doom forever his dream of a unified Vietnam under Viet Minh control? These were live possibilities, much discussed and debated in the Viet Minh inner councils and among informed analysts elsewhere.

  Which is not to say they were ever close to being realized. To argue for contingency and the inherent plausibility of alternative outcomes is not to say all were equally probable. This is the advantage that hindsight affords. Though many senior French officials understood that in Vietnamese nationalism they faced a very potent entity, one made immeasurably stronger by the nature and outcome of the Pacific War, they could never bring themselves to grant the concessions necessary to have a hope of mollifying this force. An independent Vietnamese nation-state wholly or even mostly free of French control remained outside their imaginations; they could not make the mental leap required.14 Even Pierre Mendès France, a heroic figure to many for his longtime advocacy of negotiations with Ho and his key role as prime minister in ending the fighting in 1954, did not embrace decolonization, not fully, and not until after the game was up. American officials, who pressed Paris hard to grant full independence and continue the war against the Viet Minh, did not comprehend the basic problem: Why should France fight a dangerous, bloody, inconclusive war that would end in the abandonment of French interests in Asia?

  As for Diem’s prospects after 1954, these were never as hopeless as most early histories claimed or as rosy as some later authors asserted. An intelligent and courageous patriot, Diem was the only major non-Communist political figure to emerge in Vietnam from 1945 to 1975 even remotely able to think disinterestedly of his country’s future, of constructing a political framework, or of challenging the Communist leadership in the north on something approaching competitive grounds. Given the indifference among the great powers—including North Vietnam’s allies China and the Soviet Union—about following through with the elections for reunification called for at Geneva, it’s not impossible to imagine a scenario in which Diem’s South Vietnam survives, South Korea–style, into the indefinite future. But neither is it easy to imagine such an outcome. Over time, Diem’s shortcomings as a leader—his rigidity, his limited conception of leadership, his easy resort to political repression—became more and more obvious. U.S. officials, well aware of these weaknesses but seeing no viable alternative leader on the horizon, stayed with him, their leverage declining with each passing year despite the regime’s utter dependence on American aid. Contrary to common wisdom, it was Diem, not the United States, who possessed the dominant voice in South Vietnamese politics. Washington never had as much influence over Vietnamese affairs after 1954 as France had had before.

  The Saigon regime faced difficult odds for another reason too. Many thousands of Vietnamese who might otherwise have wanted no part of Communism joined the Viet Minh against the French, motivated by a deep desire to achieve national independence. Among them were many of the most able and dedicated patriots in the country. Other nationalist groups, meanwhile, had either withered because they refused to choose sides or had thrown in their lot with the French against the Communists, hoping to achieve independence through incremental political reform, but instead losing all credibility with their compatriots for partnering with the hated colonial overlord. As a result, the human resources available to build a viable state in southern Vietnam after 1954 constituted, in author Neil Sheehan’s words, “a mere residue,” diminished by years of vacillation, compromise, and collaboration, riven by dissension and intrigue.15

  Readers familiar with the American war in Vietnam—and with the debates surrounding more recent U.S. military interventions—may experience feelings of déjà vu at points in this book. The soldierly complaints about the difficulty of telling friend from foe, and about the poor fighting spirit among “our” as compared to “their” indigenous troops; the gripes by commanders about timorous and meddling politicians back home; the solemn warnings against disengagement, as this would dishonor the soldiers who had already fallen (the “sunk-cost fallacy,” social psychologists would call it); the stubborn insistence that “premature” negotiations should be avoided—all these refrains, ubiquitous in 1966 and 1967 (and in 2004 and 2005), could be heard also in 1948 and 1949. The same was true of the tactical and strategic “innovations” U.S. planners offered up; most of these, including the concept of “counterinsurgency” (as the Americans would call it), had been tried also under the French. And always, there were the promises of imminent success, of corners about to be turned. When U.S. commanding general William Westmoreland in late 1967 exulted that “we have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view,” he was repeating a prediction made by French commander Henri Navarre a decade and a half earlier, in May 1953.16

  Civilian leaders, meanwhile, in Paris as much as in Washington, boxed themselves in with their constant public affirmations of the conflict’s importance and of the certainty of ultimate success. To order a halt and reverse course would be to call into question their own and their country’s judgment and to threaten their careers, their reputations. Far better in the short term—always the term that matters most to the ambitious politician—to forge ahead and hope for the best, to ignore the warning signs and the contrary intelligence and diplomatic reports. With each passing year after 1949, the struggle for senior French policy makers became less about the future of Indochina, less about grand geopolitical concerns, and more about domestic political strategizing, careerism, and satiating powerful interest groups at home.17 The main objective now was to avoid embarrassment and hang on, to muddle through, to avoid outright defeat, at least until the next vote of confidence or the next election. “The stalemate machine,” Daniel Ellsberg would call it with reference to the American war; it was fully operational also during the French struggle.18 Sophistry and vapid argumentation became the order of the day, as leaders sought to save face—or, as they would put it, to achieve an “honorable peace”—while treasure and lives were being lost. That the general public was for a long time apathetic about the war—most French voters, like most Americans later, were too preoccupied with their own lives to become interested in a small Asian country thousands of miles away—did not lessen this imperative, even if in theory it should have; it merely made it easier for officials to offer rote affirmations in favor of the status quo.

  Journalist David Halberstam, asked by a British colleague to comment on his wartime reporting in Vietnam, remarked, “The problem was trying to cover something every day as news when in
fact the real key was that it was all derivative of the French Indochina war, which is history. So you really should have had a third paragraph in each story which should have said, ‘All of this is shit and none of this means anything because we are in the same footsteps as the French and we are prisoners of their experience.’ ” America’s intervention, Halberstam said on a later occasion, occurred “in the embers of another colonial war.”19

  Somehow, American leaders for a long time convinced themselves that the remarkable similarities between the French experience and their own were not really there. What mattered, they maintained, was that the French were a decadent people trying vainly to prop up a colonial empire, their army a hidebound, intellectually bankrupt enterprise. They had fought badly in Indochina and deserved to lose. Americans, on the other hand, were the good guys, militarily invincible, who selflessly had come to help the Vietnamese in their hour of need and would then go home. “We have a clean base there now, without a taint of colonialism,” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles crowed to a friend as France pulled the last of her soldiers out of Vietnam. “Dien Bien Phu was a blessing in disguise.”20

  It was, for the most part, self-delusion. For one thing, the French Expeditionary Corps usually fought with bravery and determination and skill, as we shall see. For another, France’s war was also America’s war—Washington footed much of the bill, supplied most of the weaponry, and pressed Paris leaders to hang tough when their will faltered. Well before the climax at Dien Bien Phu, Viet Minh leaders considered the United States, not France, their principal foe. Furthermore, what Dulles and other U.S. officials for a long time didn’t fathom, and then refused to acknowledge after they did, was that colonialism is often in the eyes of the beholder: To a great many Vietnamese after 1954, the United States was just another big white Western power, as responsible as the French for the suffering of the first war and now there to impose her will on them, to tell them how to conduct their affairs, with guns at the ready.21 The other side, led by the venerable “Uncle Ho,” had opposed the Japanese and driven out the French and thereby secured a nationalist legitimacy that was, in a fundamental way, fixed for all time—whatever their later governing misdeeds. They, much more than the succession of governments in South Vietnam, were the heirs of an anticolonial revolution.

  Ironically, Ho Chi Minh had been among those who for a long time resisted drawing this conclusion about America and her role. For thirty years, from the 1910s until 1948–49, he clung to the hope that the United States was different—a new kind of world power that had been born out of an anticolonial reaction and was an advocate of self-determination for all nations, large and small. Like many deeply held beliefs, this one had taken root early, when the twenty-something Ho visited Boston and New York in 1912–13 and a few years later read Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The United States, he came fervently to believe, could be the champion of his cause. (In the French nightmare, he was right.)22 In 1919, at the end of the Great War, with Wilson due in Paris to negotiate a peace “to end all wars,” the unknown young nationalist set out to make his case. It’s here that our story begins.

  PROLOGUE

  A VIETNAMESE IN PARIS

  IN JUNE 1919, AS WORLD LEADERS GATHERED IN PARIS TO SHAPE the peace following “the war to end all wars,” a young man from Vietnam set out to present them with a petition called “The Demands of the Vietnamese People.” He hoped in particular to reach Woodrow Wilson, the American president who stood at center stage in Paris and whose Fourteen Points seemed to promise self-determination for all peoples. “All subject peoples,” the petition read, “are filled with hope by the prospect that an era of right and justice is opening to them … in the struggle of civilization against barbarism.” It then listed eight demands for the French overlords of Vietnam, including Vietnamese representation in the French parliament, freedom of the press and the right of free association in Vietnam, freedom of emigration and foreign travel, and the establishment of rule of law instead of rule by decree. The petition was signed, “For the Group of Vietnamese Patriots, Nguyen Ai Quoc.”1

  To better his chances of winning an audience with Wilson, Quoc had rented a morning coat for the occasion. But he never got anywhere near the American president—or any of the other principal players. Thin and frail, with gaunt facial features and piercing black eyes, his unimposing figure was lost among the other nationalist representatives from Asia and Africa who also clamored to meet the American president. Wilson probably never even saw the petition; he certainly did not reply to it.2 Throughout the war, he had framed his principles in sweeping, universal terms, but it’s clear that when he spoke of self-determination he had Europeans primarily in mind—in particular the peoples dominated by the defeated Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. If he did not explicitly exclude non-European peoples from the right to self-rule, neither did he expect the peace conference to grapple with colonial questions beyond those arising from the war itself. Colonial peoples might achieve independence, Wilson evidently believed, but not right away and not without the tutelage of a “civilized” power that would prepare them for self-government.3

  One group that did pay attention to Nguyen Ai Quoc’s appeal was the Sûreté Générale, the French security police. They soon began tailing him and confiscating letters and articles he wrote, and they appealed for information to the colonial administration in Hanoi. Who was this mystery agitator? Where did he come from? Why did his name not show up in the immigration records for Indochinese entering into France? Gradually that autumn, a picture took form. He hailed from Nghe An province on the narrow and mountainous coast of north-central Vietnam, but had apparently been abroad for several years, spending much of his time in London. He had a wide circle of acquaintances among the disparate community of Vietnamese in Paris—intellectuals as well as workers and soldiers conscripted during the war—and appeared to have broad support among them. He maintained contacts with Irish and Korean nationalists who had come to Paris to lobby the great powers for independence. To pay the bills, he worked as a photo retoucher and took whatever freelance journalism assignments he could find. His age was uncertain, but Sûreté officials took him to be about thirty. By the start of 1920, they had staked out his apartment at 6 Villa des Gobelins, a quiet, residential cul-de-sac in the thirteenth arrondissement in southeastern Paris.4

  Little did anyone know that this wraithlike and penniless scribe would in time become one of the great revolutionaries of the twentieth century, his face more recognizable to more people than those of the great statesmen who snubbed him in 1919. He would lead his people into total war against not one but two Western powers, first France and then the United States, in a struggle lasting three decades and costing millions of lives. His name then would no longer be Nguyen Ai Quoc (He Who Loves His Country). It would be Ho Chi Minh (He Who Enlightens).5

  II

  VIETNAM UNDER FRENCH DOMINATION WAS ALL HO CHI MINH HAD ever known, but this was not saying a great deal: He was still a young man in 1919. Compared to the Dutch in the East Indies, or the British in India, the French were neophyte imperialists in this part of the world, having gained full colonial control of Vietnam only a few years before Ho’s birth.6 Their initial arrival had come much earlier—already in the mid-seventeenth century Paris had established missionary and trade organizations in Vietnam—but only in 1850, under the pretext of protecting Vietnamese Catholics, did they begin their conquest. By 1884, they had achieved colonial domination of Vietnam, and in short order they added neighboring Cambodia and Laos to what now became the Indochinese fold.

  It was a long trip from home for the young Frenchmen sent to take up colonial posts. The journey covered some 8,500 miles and might take weeks, with stops along the way in places such as Port Said, Aden, and Singapore. Upon arrival in Vietnam—or Annam, as the French called it—some adjusted quickly, some did not, but a great many in both categories expressed stupefied wonder at the extraordinary biodiversity they encountered. 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. And they wrote of the challenge of enduring the heavy rains of the monsoon (which were to have a profound impact on the fighting to come) and the soaring temperatures of the dry season.

  From early on, the lure of profit was the engine that drove French colonial policy. Commercial interests and government officials sought economic gain by exploiting the area’s natural resources and opening up new markets for the manufactured goods of metropolitan France. Indochina, in this regard, held special appeal, offering an entry point into the (theoretically) immense market of China.7

  But colonies were not merely a hedge against the vicissitudes of the capitalist economic cycle; they were also a potential source of military strength, grandeur, and national security. The colonial venture in Southeast Asia would, so the argument went, enhance French power and increase its credibility on the world stage. It would also prevent rival world powers, notably Great Britain, from staking a claim on the territory. “The political interest in this expedition,” the Commission de la Cochinchine (Special Commission for Indochina) noted in 1857, “arises from the force of circumstances propelling the Western nations toward the Far East. Are we to be the only ones who possess nothing in the area, while the English, the Dutch, the Spanish, and even the Russians establish themselves there?” With the British holding a dominant position in eastern China along the coast, French planners turned their focus southward, to the Vietnamese shore of the South China Sea. In the words of the Marseille Chamber of Commerce in 1865, the goal was “to make Saigon a French Singapore.”8