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

by Fredrik Logevall

  11 Note du Ministre des Etats Associés, September 30, 1954, Documents diplomatiques français, 1954 (21 juillet–31 décembre), 489–92. See also Paul Ely, L’Indochine dans la tourmente (Paris: Plon, 1964), 246–49; and 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), 193–94.

  12 The Dulles press conference is reprinted in Department of State Bulletin, August 2, 1954.

  13 Dulles is quoted in George McTurnan Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 75.

  14 NSC, “Review of U.S. Policy in the Far East,” August 1954, Pentagon Papers. United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: Study Prepared by the Department of Defense (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1971), 10:731–41.

  15 Saigon to MAE, July 10, 1954, Dossier V, DPMF Indochine, IPMF. See also Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 97.

  16 Two important studies are Edward Miller, “Grand Designs: Vision, Power, and Nation Building in America’s Alliance with Ngo Dinh Diem, 1954–1960,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2004; and 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.

  17 Thomas L. Ahearn, 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), 31. At another point in these weeks Harwood put it more starkly: The “task is hopeless, but [the] effort must be made.” Thomas L. Ahearn, Jr., CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 2001), 2.

  18 On the sects’ origins and their roles, see Jayne Susan Werner, Peasant Politics and Religious Sectarianism: Peasant and Priest in the Cao Dai in Viet Nam (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1981); Frances R. Hill, “Millenarian Machines in South Vietnam,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 13 (July 1971): 325–50; Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1983); Bernard B. Fall, “The Political-Religious Sects of Viet-Nam,” Pacific Affairs 28 (September 1955): 235–53.

  19 Don Oberdorfer, Senator Mansfield: The Extraordinary Life of a Great American Statesman and Diplomat (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 2003), 120–21. On Diem and relations with the U.S., see Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia, 1950–1957 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005); Chapman, “Debating the Will of Heaven”; Miller, “Grand Designs”; David L. Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–1961 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

  20 Mike Mansfield, “Indochina,” report prepared for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of a mission to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1953), 14–15.

  21 Oberdorfer, Senator Mansfield, 128; Memcon, Dulles and La Chambre, September 6, 1954, FRUS, 1952–1954, Indochina, XIII, 2:2007–10.

  22 Oberdorfer, Senator Mansfield, 128.

  23 Summary minutes of State Department meeting, September 25, 1954, FRUS, 1952–1954, Indochina, XIII, 2:2069.

  24 George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 57.

  25 Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 270.

  26 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), 228–30.

  27 The letter is reprinted in Marvin E. Gettleman et al., eds., Vietnam and America: A Documented History (New York: Grove, 1995), 113–14.

  28 NYT, October 25, 1954.

  29 “Compte rendu de la conversation entre M. Mendès France, M. Dulles, et M. Eden,” October 23, 1954, Dossier V, DPMF Indochine, IPMF; Memcon, Dulles and PMF, October 24, 1954, FRUS, 1952–1954, Indochina, XIII, 2:2198–99; Grosser, “La France et l’Indochine,” 1282–85.

  30 Eden quoted in Arthur Combs, “The Path Not Taken: The British Alternative to U.S. Policy in Vietnam, 1954–1956,” Diplomatic History 19 (Winter 1995): 51. A few weeks later, when Mendès France visited Washington, he reiterated the pledge. “Compte rendu de la conversation entre M. Mendès France, M. Dulles, et M. Eden,” November 18–19, 1954, Dossier V, DPMF Indochine, IPMF.

  31 Edwin E. Moïse, “Land Reform and Land Reform Errors in North Vietnam,” Pacific Affairs 49, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 70–92; and Moïse, Land Reform in China and North Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 178–268. See also Pierre Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh: A Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 152–60.

  32 Quoted in Hy Van Luong, Revolution in the Village: Tradition and Transformation in North Vietnam, 1925–1988 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992), 190. Another firsthand account is Xuan Phuong and Danièle Mazingarbe, Ao Dai: My War, My Country, My Vietnam (Great Neck, N.Y.: EMQUAD, 2004), 162–86.

  33 Moïse, “Land Reform and Errors in North Vietnam,” 73–78; Mark Philip Bradley, Vietnam at War (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2009), 70.

  34 Ho quotes are from Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh, 158.

  35 William J. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 486–88.

  36 A key study of Franco-American relations concerning Vietnam in this period is Kathryn C. Statler, Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), chap. 4. French policy is also closely examined in Pierre Grosser’s massive study, “La France et l’Indochine,” 1253–1342.

  37 Chester L. Cooper, The Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970), 129.

  38 Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York: Random House, 1989), 15.

  39 A fine study is Jonathan Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005). Also useful is a highly sympathetic account by a former aide, Rufus Phillips, Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lessons Not Learned (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2008). See also Ahearn, CIA and the House of Ngo; and Cecil B. Currey, Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988). Lansdale’s own recollections are in Edward Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars: An American’s Mission to Southeast Asia (New York: Fordham University Press, 1991). The Dulles quotes are in Nashel, Landsdale’s Cold War, 1.

  40 Phillips, Why Vietnam Matters, 14–15; J. Lawton Collins interview, 1981, WGBH Vietnam Collection, openvault.​wgbh.​org/​catalog/​org.​wgbh.​mla:​Vietnam (last accessed on November 18, 2010).

  41 Peter Schmid, “Free Indo-China Fights Against Time,” Commentary, January 1955, 28, quoted in Cooper, Lost Crusade, 136.

  42 Peter Hansen, “Bac Di Cu: Catholic Refugees from the North of Vietnam, and their Role in the Southern Republic, 1954–59,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 4 (Fall 2009): 173–211.

  43 Nashel, Lansdale’s Cold War, 60–61. On the exodus not being spontaneous, see Cooper, Lost Crusade, 130.

  44 Howard R. Simpson, Tiger in the Barbed Wire: An American in Vietnam, 1952–1991 (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1992), 127.

  45 Stump quoted in Spector, Advice and Support, 231.

  46 For Collins’s recollection of the appointment, see J. Lawton Collins, Lightning Joe: An Autobiography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 378.

  47 Ely to Paris, November 6, 1954, Dossier VII, DPMF Indochine, IPMF; Paul Ely, L’Indochine dans la tourmente (Paris: Plon, 1964), 168; Spector, Advice and Support, 236–37; Collins interview,
WGBH. Collins quoted in Ellen J. Hammer, A Death in November: America in Vietnam, 1963 (New York: Dutton, 1987), 71.

  48 Ely cited in Collins to Dulles, November 10, 1954, Box 25, Collins Papers, Eisenhower Library; Collins to Dulles, November 13, 1954, Box 25, Collins Papers; Oberdorfer, Senator Mansfield, 132–33. Ely’s low opinion of Diem at year’s end is described in C. Cheysson, “Opinion du General Ely sur le Viet-nam,” December 28, 1954, Dossier IX, DPMF Indochine, IPDF.

  49 Memo of conversation with Mansfield, December 7, 1954, FRUS, 1952–1954, Indochina, XIII, 2:2350–52; Oberdorfer, Senator Mansfield, 133.

  50 Memo from Lansdale to Collins, January 3, 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vietnam, I:3–4; Edward G. Lansdale interview, 1979, WGBH Vietnam Collection, openvault.​wgbh.​org/​catalog/​org.​wgbh.​mla:​Vietnam (last accessed on November 20, 2010).

  51 Memo from Collins to Dulles, January 20, 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vietnam, I: 56–57.

  52 A detailed summary of CIP is in Kahin, Intervention, 85–88. See also Anderson, Trapped by Success, 155–57.

  53 Seth Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of America’s War in Vietnam, 1950–1963 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 69.

  54 The best study of the sect crisis is Jessica M. Chapman, “The Sect Crisis of 1955 and the American Decision for Diem,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 5 (Winter 2010): 37–85. See also Chapman, “Debating the Will of Heaven,” chap. 3.

  55 Currey, Edward Lansdale, 172–73. Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars, 251; Collins to State, March 15, 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vietnam, I:125. For more on the amounts involved, see Chargé in Vietnam (Kidder) to Department of State, February 8, 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vietnam, I:79–80; Miller, “Grand Designs,” 162–63.

  56 Chapman, “Sect Crisis,” 45–46.

  57 Ely diary cited in Grosser, “La France et l’Indochine,” 1564. See also Ely to M. Laforest, April 6, 1955, Documents diplomatiques français (hereafter DDF), 1955, Vol. 1, Document 178, 410–14; and Ely to M. Laforest, March 31, 1955, DDF, Document 162, 364–77.

  58 Collins to State, March 31, 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vietnam, I:168–71; telcon, Eisenhower and Dulles, April 1, 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vietnam, I:175–76; Mansfield, memo for files, April 1, 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vietnam, I:176–77.

  59 Dulles to Collins, April 4, 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vietnam, I:196–97; Oberdorfer, Senator Mansfield, 135–36. On the last point, see Grosser, “La France et l’Indochine,” 1532.

  60 Collins interview, WGBH; NYT, April 18, 1955.

  61 Dulles to Dillon, April 27, 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vietnam, I:297–98.

  62 Anderson, Trapped by Success, 111–13; Ahearn, CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam, 12.

  63 NYT, April 30, 1955; Washington Post, May 2, 1955; Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin, 77.

  64 Life, May 16, 1955; U.S. News & World Report, May 13, 1955, as cited in Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin, 77; Larry Berman, Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xan An (New York: Smithsonian Books, 2007), 79

  65 NYT, May 7, 1955.

  66 George W. Allen, None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 84. See also Paul Kattenburg interview, 1981, WGBH Vietnam Collection, openvault.​wgbh.​org/​catalog/​org.​wgbh.​mla:​Vietnam (last accessed on November 18, 2010). His book is The Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign Policy, 1945–1975 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1980).

  67 Simpson, Tiger in the Barbed Wire, 152.

  CHAPTER 26: Miracle Man

  1 Quoted in Philippe Devillers, “The Struggle for the Unification of Vietnam,” China Quarterly 9 (January–March 1962): 8.

  2 Bernard B. Fall, The Two Viet-Nams: A Political and Military Analysis (New York: Praeger, 1964), 319–20.

  3 Chester L. Cooper, The Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970), 148.

  4 O’Neill to Macmillan, “Elections in Vietnam,” November 1, 1955, FO 371/106778, TNA.

  5 J. E. Cable, “Elections in Vietnam,” January 11, 1955, FO 371/117115, TNA.

  6 U.S. Policy on All-Vietnam Elections, NSC report, May 17, 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vietnam, I:410–12.

  7 John Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 51.

  8 Mari Olsen, Soviet-Vietnam Relations and the Role of China, 1949–1964: Changing Alliances (London: Routledge, 2006), chap. 4.

  9 Ilya V. Gaiduk, Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy Toward the Indochina Conflict, 1954–1963 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 61.

  10 Military History Institute of Vietnam, Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People’s Army of Vietnam, 1954–1975, trans. Merle Pribbenow (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 18.

  11 Ho is quoted in William J. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 474.

  12 Seth Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of America’s War in Vietnam, 1950–1963 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 89–90.

  13 Jessica M. Chapman, “Staging Democracy: South Vietnam’s 1955 Referendum to Depose Bao Dai,” Diplomatic History 30, no. 4 (September 2006): 671–703.

  14 Cooper, Lost Crusade, 151–52.

  15 Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia, 1950–1957 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 37.

  16 Edward Miller, “The Diplomacy of Personalism: Civilization, Culture, and the Cold War in the Foreign Policy of Ngo Dinh Diem,” in 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), 376–402; Philip E. Catton, Diem’s Final Failure: Prelude to America’s War in Vietnam (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 44.

  17 Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988), 138. See also Edward G. Lansdale interview, 1979, WGBH Vietnam Collection, openvault.​wgbh.​org/​catalog/​org.​wgbh.​mla:​Vietnam (last accessed on November 22, 2010). And see the insightful analysis of Lansdale’s role in 1954–55 in Larry Berman, Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An (New York: Smithsonian Books, 2007), 70–81.

  18 Howard R. Simpson, Tiger in the Barbed Wire: An American in Vietnam, 1952–1991 (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1992), 172. See also Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 98.

  19 Joseph G. Morgan, The Vietnam Lobby: The American Friends of Vietnam, 1955–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

  20 On modernization and postwar U.S. foreign policy, see, e.g., 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); David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009); and Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

  21 Jonathan Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 54.

  22 Ibid., 137.

  23 Times Literary Supplement, December 9, 1955; Manchester Guardian, December 6, 1955. The other reviews are quoted in Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, vol. 2: 1939–1955 (New York: Viking, 1995), 472.

  24 A. J. Liebling, “A Talkative Something-or-Other,” New Yorker, April 7, 1956, reprinted in John Clark Pratt, ed., The Quiet American: Text and Criticism (New York: Penguin, 1996), 347–55. Curiously, the Newsweek review appeared on January 2, 1956, three months before the book was published in the United States.

  25 Graham Greene, The Quiet American (New York: Viking, 1956), 156.

  26 Ibid., 87.

  27 Richard West, “Grah
am Greene and ‘The Quiet American,’ ” New York Review of Books, May 16, 1991. A perceptive scholarly assessment of the novel in the context of subsequent U.S. involvement is Stephen J. Whitfield, “Limited Engagement: The Quiet American as History,” Journal of American Studies 30 (1996): 65–86.

  28 See Pico Iyer, “The Disquieting Resonance of ‘The Quiet American,’ ” NPR All Things Considered, April 21, 2008, www.​npr.​org/​templates/​story/​story.​php?​storyId=​89542461 (last accessed on November 7, 2010).

  29 Graham Greene, “Last Act in Indo-China,” New Republic, May 9 and 16, 1954.

  30 Reinhardt quoted in David L. Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–1961 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 133. See also FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, 112–13.

  31 Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin, 102; Morgan, Vietnam Lobby.

  32 Robert E. Herzstein, Henry R. Luce, Time, and the American Crusade in Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 204–5.

  33 Pentagon Papers. United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: Study Prepared by the Department of Defense (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1971), 2: part IV, A.5, tab 1, p. 31. See also Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man, 241–45.

  34 Morgenthau quoted in Morgan, Vietnam Lobby, 41.

  35 An excellent biography is James T. Fisher, Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927–1961 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).

  36 Ibid., chap. 3; Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man, chap. 4; Lansdale interview, WGBH.

  37 Quoted in Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin, 49.

  38 Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin, 50. See also the interview with Daniel Redmond, who worked with Dooley in Vietnam, in Christian G. Appy, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (New York: Viking, 2003), 42–44.

  39 David L. Anderson, Trapped by Success, 133.

  40 James R. Arnold, The First Domino: Eisenhower, the Military, and America’s Intervention in Vietnam (New York: William Morrow, 1991), 306.