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

by Fredrik Logevall

  52 Geoffrey Perret, Jack: A Life Like No Other (New York, Random House, 2001), 169; Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), 168; Robert Mann, A Grand Delusion: America’s Descent into Vietnam (New York: Basic, 2001), 85.

  53 Mann, A Grand Delusion, 86.

  54 NYT, January 8, 1951; Saigon to FO, November 8, 1951, FO 959/107, TNA. The author of this cable, British minister H. A. Graves, speculated that the suicide was not intentional; rather, the grenade got tangled in the assassin’s clothing and went off prematurely.

  55 Military Attaché, British Legation, to Minister, August 9, 1951, FO 959/107, TNA.

  56 Yves Gras, Histoire de la guerre d’Indochine (Paris: Plon, 1979), 424–28.

  57 See the accounts in Fall, Street Without Joy, 48–60; and O’Ballance, Indo-China War, 159–66.

  58 Greene, Ways of Escape, 164.

  59 Edward Rice-Maximin, Accommodation and Resistance: The French Left, Indochina and the Cold War (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1986), 113; Clayton, Three Marshals of France, 163.

  60 Paris to FO, January 19, 1952, FO 959/126, TNA.

  CHAPTER 12: The Quiet Englishman

  1 NYT, January 10, 1952.

  2 Life, January 28, 1952.

  3 Saigon to Washington, January 10, 1952, “Indo-China: Internal Affairs: 1950–54,” Central Files, NARA.

  4 Saigon to FO, February 29, 1952, FO 474/6, TNA. On Thé’s background and rise, see Sergei Blagov, Honest Mistakes: The Life and Death of Trình Minh Thê (1922–1955), South Vietnam’s Alternative Leader (Huntington, N.Y.: Nova Science, 2001), 27–30.

  5 Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980), 161.

  6 Ibid., 146; Richard Greene, ed., Graham Greene: A Life in Letters (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2007), 182, 187–88.

  7 Tom Curry, “Graham Greene’s Vietnam—The Quiet American,” Literary Traveler (www.​literarytraveler.​com/​authors/​graham_​greenes_​vietnam.​aspx). Last accessed April 20, 2009. Wartime Saigon in this period is described in David Lan Pham, Two Hamlets in Nam Bo: Memoirs of Life in Vietnam (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2000), chap. 4.

  8 Journalist Seymour Topping of the Associated Press would later claim that he and his wife introduced Greene to the opium dens. Seymour Topping, Journey Between Two Chinas (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 110–11.

  9 Andrew Forbes, “Graham Greene’s Saigon Revisited,” CPAMedia, www.​cpamedia.​com/​culture/​graham_​greene_​saigon/ (last accessed on April 18, 2009); Michael Shelden, Graham Greene: The Enemy Within (New York: Random House, 1994), 322; Howard Simpson, Tiger in the Barbed Wire: An American in Vietnam, 1952–1991 (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1992), 12.

  10 Quoted in Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, vol. 2: 1939–1955 (New York: Viking, 1995), 401.

  11 Time, October 29, 1951.

  12 Letter of November 16, 1951, in Greene, Graham Greene, 193. See also Graham Greene diary entry for November 13, 1951, Box 1, Graham Greene Papers, Georgetown University Library (hereafter GU).

  13 Graham Greene, The Quiet American (New York: Viking, 1956), 142.

  14 Ibid., 43; Greene diary entry for December 16, 1957, Box 1, Greene Papers, GU. See also Sherry, Life of Graham Greene, 2:395–96.

  15 Greene diary entry for February 2, 1952, Box 1, Greene Papers, GU; Joseph Buttinger, Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled, vol. 2: Vietnam at War (New York: Praeger, 1967), 782–83; Greene, Ways of Escape, 170.

  16 See Sherry, Life of Graham Greene, 2:417–20; W. J. West, The Quest for Graham Greene (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 157–58; Greene, Ways of Escape, 169–79.

  17 Greene, Quiet American, 124.

  18 Sol Sanders, “Viet Nam Has a Third Force,” New Republic, July 30, 1951. See also the even earlier article by Edwin Halsey, “The Third Force,” Integrity 5 (May 1951): 33–39.

  19 Shelden, Graham Greene, 327; Graham Greene, “Indo-China: France’s Crown of Thorns,” Paris Match, July 12, 1952, reprinted in Graham Greene, Reflections, ed. Judith Adamson (New York: Reinhardt, 1990), 129–47.

  20 Greene, “Indo-China,” 146.

  21 Letter to Catherine Walston, November 21, 1951, Box 12, Catherine Walston–Graham Greene Papers, GU; Greene, Ways of Escape, 125–27; Sherry, Life of Graham Greene, 2:481–88.

  22 Lucien Bodard, “L’appel aux américains,” L’Express, 1967, as quoted in Sherry, Life of Graham Greene, 2:482. See also letter to Catherine Walston, December 11, 1951, Box 13, Walston–Greene Papers, GU.

  23 Thomas A. Bass, The Spy Who Loved Us: The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An’s Dangerous Game (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 54–55. An’s remarkable life story is also detailed in Larry Berman, Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An (New York: Smithsonian Books, 2007).

  24 “Narrative of Lt. Col. A. G. Trevor-Wilson,” n.d., Peter Dunn Collection, Virtual Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Tex.; Shelden, Graham Greene, 328–30.

  25 Sherry, Life of Graham Greene, 2:437–46; Judith Adamson, Graham Greene, the Dangerous Edge: Where Art and Politics Meet (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), 131–32.

  26 Greene, Quiet American, 16–17, 29; H. Arthur Scott Trask, “The Quiet American: Graham Greene’s Brilliant Novel Shines as a New Film,” www.​lewrockwell.​com/​orig/​trask2.​html (last accessed May 2, 2009).

  27 Greene, Ways of Escape, 171; Sherry, Life of Graham Greene, 2:430.

  28 Heath to State, February 14, 1952, as quoted in Sherry, Life of Graham Greene, 2:432.

  29 Saigon to FO, February 29, 1952, FO 474/6, TNA.

  30 Jean Lartéguy, Soldats perdus et fous de dieu: Indochine 1945–1955 (Paris: Presses de la cité, 1986), 179–81; Nhi Lang, Phong Trao Khang Chien Trinh Minh Thé (Boulder, Colo.: Lion Press, 1989), 107–9.

  31 Sherry, Life of Graham Greene, 2:434.

  32 Jonathan Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 156–57.

  33 David Lan Pham, Two Hamlets in Nam Bo, 77, 90.

  34 Simpson, Tiger in the Barbed Wire, 4–5, 8.

  35 Ibid., 30–31.

  36 Ibid., 32.

  37 Ibid., 84, 105.

  38 Ibid., 34; Paris to FO, December 31, 1951, FO 474/5, TNA.

  39 Quoted in Sherry, Life of Graham Greene, 2:441.

  CHAPTER 13: The Turning Point That Didn’t Turn

  1 Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 110–25; Laurent Cesari, “The Declining Value of Indochina: France and the Economics of Empire, 1950–1955,” in Mark Atwood Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall, eds., The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 181–88.

  2 Robert J. McMahon, The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia Since World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 61.

  3 NYT, June 8, 1952.

  4 Cited in Alexander Werth, “Indo-China: The French Must Choose,” Nation, January 26, 1952.

  5 “Critical Developments in French Policy Toward Indochina,” January 10, 1952, CIA Office of National Estimates, www.​faqs.​org/​cia/​docs/​127/​0001167457/​critical-​developments-​in-​french-​policy-​toward-​indochina.​html (last accessed on September 19, 2010).

  6 Werth, “Indo-China,” 77.

  7 Le Monde, January 16, 1952.

  8 The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the First Indochina War, 1947–1954 (Washington, D.C.: Office of Joint History, Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2004), 240; Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, 1941–1960 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Military History, 1985), 152; “Military Situation in Indo-China,” February 5, 1952, FO 371/101069, TNA.

  9 Memo of Conversation, March 21, 1952, FRUS, 1952–1954, Indochina, XIII, 1:75–77; Edward Rice-Maximin, Accommodation and Resistance: The French Left, Indochina and the Cold W
ar (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1986), 117; Lloyd C. Gardner, Approaching Vietnam: From World War II Through Dienbienphu (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 119.

  10 Gardner, Approaching Vietnam, 118.

  11 Melvyn P. Leffler, “Negotiating from Strength: Acheson, the Russians, and American Power,” in Douglas Brinkley, ed., Dean Acheson and the Making of American Foreign Policy (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), 176–210.

  12 See Fredrik Logevall, “Bernath Lecture: A Critique of Containment,” Diplomatic History (September 2004); and Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2009), chap. 3.

  13 Rosemary Foot, The Wrong War: American Policy and the Dimensions of the Korean Conflict, 1950–1953 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); Foot, A Substitute for Victory: The Politics of Peacemaking at the Korean Armistice Talks (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), x–xi, 158. See also Bruce Cumings’s monumental study, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2: The Roaring of the Cataract (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), chap. 3.

  14 June 14, 1952, FRUS, 1952–1954, Indochina, XIII, 1:183–87; June 16, 1952, FRUS, 1952–1954, Indochina, XIII, 1:189–95; June 17, 1952, FRUS, 1952–1954, Indochina, XIII, 1:197–202; Irwin Wall, The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1945–1954 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 248.

  15 NSC-124/2, June 25, 1952, United States–Vietnam Relations 1945–1967: Study Prepared by the Department of Defense (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1971), 8:531–34.

  16 For Salan’s own description of this period, see his Mémoires: Fin d’un empire, vol. 2: Le Viêt-minh mon adversaire (Paris: Presses de la cité, 1971). For his interwar experiences in Indochina, see volume 1.

  17 De Gaulle quoted in Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954–1962 (New York: NYRB Classics, 2006), 180.

  18 Time, August 4, 1952.

  19 Martin Windrow, The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo, 2004), 119.

  20 Edgar O’Ballance, The Indo-China War, 1945–1954 (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), 171; Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 129.

  21 Chen Jian, Mao’s China, 130–31.

  22 Quoted in Bernard Fall, Street Without Joy: Indochina at War 1946–1954 (Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1961), 65.

  23 Yves Gras, Histoire de la guerre d’Indochine (Paris: Plon, 1979), 474–79; Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam at War: The History, 1946–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 141.

  24 Windrow, Last Valley, 121; Time, November 3, 1952. A classic account of the Bigeard battalion’s rearguard action is in Fall, Street Without Joy, 66–76.

  25 Newsweek, November 3, 1952.

  26 Time, November 3, 1952.

  27 Vo Nguyen Giap, Mémoires, 1946–1954, vol. 2: Le chemin menant à Diên Biên Phu (Fontenay-sous-Bois: Anako, 2004), 261–76; Windrow, Last Valley, 124.

  28 Gras, Histoire de la guerre d’Indochine, 479–82; David T. Zabecki, “Operation Lorraine: Costly French Failure,” Vietnam (December 2001), 18–25, 57; Salan, Le Viêt-minh mon adversaire, 337–40.

  29 Quoted in Joseph Starobin, Eyewitness in Indo-China (New York: Cameron & Kahn, 1954), 67.

  30 “Back to the Jungle,” Images of War 4, no. 51 (n.d.).

  31 Ibid.; Windrow, Last Valley, 120–22.

  32 Starobin, Eyewitness in Indo-China, 73.

  33 Jacques Favreau and Nicolas Dufour, Nasan: La victoire oubliée (Paris: Economica, 1999).

  34 Gras, Histoire de la guerre d’Indochine, 483–88; O’Ballance, Indo-China War, 184–86; Favreau and Dufour, Nasan.

  35 Time, January 12, 1953; Time, January 5, 1953.

  36 William J. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 442–43.

  37 Duong Van Mai Elliott, The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 229–30.

  38 Ibid., 230.

  39 Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, 444. For a description of an indoctrination session, see Xuan Phuong and Danièle Mazingarbe, Ao Dai: My War, My Country, My Vietnam (Great Neck, N.Y.: EMQUAD, 2004), 128–29.

  40 Time, January 12, 1953.

  41 “A Translation from the French: Lessons of the War in Indochina, Volume 2,” trans. V. J. Croizat (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Corporation, 1967), 112. See also David W. P. Elliott, The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–1975 (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2007), 71–75.

  CHAPTER 14: Eisenhower in Charge

  1 Richard H. Immerman, John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1998), 43; David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 197–202.

  2 Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon, vol. 1: The Education of a Politician, 1913–1962 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 298.

  3 See Chester Pach, “Introduction,” in Kathryn C. Statler and Andrew L. Johns, The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); and Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 7, 372n9.

  4 Eisenhower quoted in Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad, 1750 to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 2:537. Dulles’s mother quoted in David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard, 1993), 393.

  5 Immerman, John Foster Dulles, chap. 1.

  6 Halberstam, Fifties, 392; Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 333; Harold Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries: The Cabinet Years, 1950–1957, ed. Peter Catterall (London: Macmillan, 2003), 230.

  7 Niebuhr is quoted in Halberstam, Fifties, 389.

  8 Quoted in Robert Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 21.

  9 Elizabeth N. Saunders, Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2011), 56–57.

  10 Richard H. Immerman, “Prologue: Perceptions by the United States of Its Interests in Indochina,” in Lawrence S. Kaplan, Denise Artaud, and Mark Rubin, eds., Dien Bien Phu and the Crisis of Franco-American Relations, 1954–1955 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1990), 12–13.

  11 Diary, as quoted in James R. Arnold, The First Domino: Eisenhower, the Military, and America’s Intervention in Vietnam (New York: William Morrow, 1991), 74.

  12 Lodge diary, November 16, 1951, Papers of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass. I’m grateful to Zachary Matusheski for drawing this item to my attention.

  13 Arnold, First Domino, 83. See also John Foster Dulles, War or Peace (New York: Macmillan, 1950), 231.

  14 Quoted in Lloyd C. Gardner, Approaching Vietnam: From World War II Through Dienbienphu (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 135.

  15 Harry S. Truman, Memoirs by Harry S. Truman, vol. 2: Years of Trial and Hope, 1946–1952 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), 519; Heath to Sec. State, February 4, 1953, in FRUS, 1952–1954, Indochina, XIII, 1:378–81.

  16 Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1960), 16; Robert J. McMahon, The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia Since World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 63; NYT, January 28, 1953.

  17 Carl W. McCardle oral history (OH-116), by John Luter, August 29, 1967, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kan.; Memcon, January 28, 1953, FRUS, 1952–1954, Indochina, XIII, 1:362; Memcon, March 24, 1953, FRUS, 1952–1954, Indochina, XIII, 1:419–20.

  18 Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, 1941–1960 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Military History, 1985), 167–68.


  19 The War Office warned: “The fall of Indo-China to Communism, inevitably spreading to Siam and Burma, would give the enemy great influence elsewhere in Asia owing to their control of the vital rice supply ultimately making the defence of Malaya extremely difficult.” War Office, “Cabinet Policy in South East Asia, Memorandum by the Secretary of State for War,” November 52, DEFE 13/2/8, TNA. On the Indochina-Malaya connection, see also, e.g., Macmillan, Macmillan Diaries, 228.

  20 “Relations franco-américaines,” January 21, 1953, 457 AP 44, Dossier 2, Papiers Georges Bidault, AN; Irwin Wall, The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1945–1954 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 250; Kathryn C. Statler, Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 62–63.

  21 George W. Allen, None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 46.

  22 JCS memo to Wilson, April 21, 1953, in FRUS, 1952–1954, Indochina, XIII, 1:493–95; Arthur Radford, From Pearl Harbor to Vietnam: The Memoirs of Admiral Arthur W. Radford, ed. Stephen Jurika (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1980), 362. See also Spector, Advice and Support, 170–71; and Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change: 1953–1956 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963), 168.

  23 Arnold, First Domino, 114.

  24 Memo of discussion, NSC, April 28, 1953, in FRUS, 1952–1954, Indochina, XIII, 1:516–19; Eisenhower to Dillon, May 6, 1953, International File: France, 1953 (3), Box 10, Eisenhower Library.

  25 Vincent Auriol, Journal du Septennat, 1947–1954, vol. 7: 1953–1954 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1971), 220.

  26 Dillon Memorandum, April 9, 1953, Ann Whitman File, Box 1, Dulles-Herter Series, Eisenhower Library; SecState to Paris, May 6, 1953, FRUS, 1952–1954, Indochina, XIII, 1:550–51. See also ibid., 561–62.

  27 Memo of discussion, NSC, April 28, 1953, in FRUS, 1952–1954, Indochina, XIII, 1:516–19; Memo of discussion, NSC, May 6, 1953, in FRUS, 1952–1954, Indochina, XIII, 1:546–49.