Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012), 864 pp., $40.00.

WHEN FREDRIK Logevall published Choosing War in 1999, he joined the ranks of historians and journalists who have contributed essential books about America’s war in Indochina. Although many writers had covered the years from 1963–1965, Logevall’s approach was distinguished by his wide lens, revealing the war’s repercussions in foreign capitals beyond Washington and Hanoi—in London, Tokyo and Ottawa.

Now, with his huge and engrossing new study, Logevall surveys the less familiar ground of France’s attempt to assert control over its colonies in Indochina after World War II. Again, he writes with an ambitious sweep and an instinct for pertinent detail, and his facility in French allows him to include material seldom available from previous histories in English. If Logevall’s earlier work stood up well in a crowded field, Embers of War stands alone.

The John S. Knight Professor of International Relations at Cornell University, Logevall was born in Stockholm in 1963. He received his bachelor’s degree from Canada’s Simon Fraser University in 1986—eleven years after the collapse of the U.S. effort in South Vietnam—and a PhD from Yale in 1993. As a result, he brings to the subject a detachment that shields him from the surly revisionism of a few younger American-born academics.

These days, any history of Vietnam, no matter how scholarly and objective, will be read for what it teaches us now, a point seen in the title of Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons In Disaster. If the American Century began in Los Alamos on July 16, 1945, why did it come to its end thirty years later on the roof of the Saigon embassy?

Drawing lessons from history is a different exercise from posing counterfactuals—alternatives to what actually happened and the consequences of those imagined changes. Counterfactuals are sometimes dismissed as science fiction for historians. In contrast, lessons proceed from the legitimate “why” rather than a fanciful “what if.” Logevall has acknowledged that counterfactuals can be “tantalizing” and has occasionally indulged in them in his earlier writing on Vietnam. His latest volume, however, remains solidly anchored in the facts themselves.

Although most of the twenty-seven chapters of Embers of War focus on French politics and military operations, Logevall makes a concession to American readers with a preface about John F. Kennedy’s junket to Saigon in 1951. Savvy New York editors advise launching a volume of history with a brand name, and few names from the second half of the twentieth century resonate like Kennedy’s.

Logevall recounts a two-hour discussion Kennedy had with Seymour Topping—then the Associated Press bureau chief in Saigon, later the managing editor of the New York Times—that helped convince him that French troops were unlikely to prevail against Vietnamese nationalists.

Logevall then offers a prologue with another towering American figure. He repeats the story—no less poignant for its familiarity—of the moment in June 1919 when President Woodrow Wilson denied an audience at Versailles to a young Vietnamese man calling himself Nguyen Ai Quoc.

Other writers have remarked on the Chaplinesque image of a spindly nationalist in his rented morning coat, jostling with other spokesmen from Asia and Africa as they sought to persuade Wilson that his global idealism should extend to them.

Since two hundred thousand Asians and Africans had just died fighting in Europe, the colonies could claim that the sacrifice gave them a right to be heard. But the Vietnamese manifesto brought to Versailles made modest demands: representation in the French parliament, freedom of the press and right of assembly.

Focused on the future of Germany and Austria-Hungary, the American president had neither time nor interest in those issues. And as a Virginian indifferent to Jim Crow at home, Wilson was unlikely to be moved by repression in colonies half a world away.

Logevall reminds us that one agency did take Nguyen Ai Quoc seriously. France’s Surete Generale—the bureau responsible for tracking foreign spies in the country—was apparently concerned about articles agitating for political rights, and dispatched agents to stake out his apartment in the thirteenth arrondissement and intercept his letters. In time, the Surete would update his dossier under the name Ho Chi Minh—“He Who Enlightens.”

Because Ho had spent the year of 1913 in Boston and New York, where he was appalled by America’s treatment of its black citizens, he already knew that the lofty language of the country’s Founding Fathers was not always matched by its actions. Yet for the next three decades, he would go on hoping that the United States would live up to its aspirations.

IN FRANKLIN Roosevelt, Ho seemed to find an American president who embraced his cause, and Logevall is ready to begin his first chapter with the emergence of Charles de Gaulle as France’s leader in exile during World War II. Winston Churchill grudgingly admired de Gaulle, but Roosevelt’s hostility was implacable. The Frenchman was insisting on a postwar restoration of his nation’s empire. Even before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had spelled out his opposition. In an address to a White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the president said: “There has never been, there isn’t now, and there never will be, any race of people on earth fit to serve as masters over their fellow men.”

Entering the narrative with de Gaulle come less familiar names: Indochina’s French governor-general Georges Catroux, fearful of a Japanese invasion; Vice Admiral Jean Decoux, the pro-Vichy commander who replaced him; and Japan’s foreign minister Matsuoka Yosuke, who rejected Washington’s early offer to turn Indochina into a neutral zone.

During the interim between world wars, Ho and his band of Vietnamese nationalists already had decided that the communism of Vladimir Lenin was their most dependable ally in fighting for liberation. In Logevall’s summation, “They saw no contradiction between their Communism and their fervent desire to make Vietnam Vietnamese again.”

Since the United States was allied with the Soviet Union, Ho’s strategy did not trouble most officials in Washington. Ho faced a greater obstacle in Winston Churchill. After Churchill adamantly refused Roosevelt’s recommendation that Britain grant independence to India, Roosevelt dropped the subject and scaled back his vision for the future. The fate of South Asia, Logevall writes, could be set aside as “relatively unimportant in geopolitical terms.”

He argues, however, that Roosevelt never abandoned his long-range goal. When the president proposed trusteeships for the French colonies under the authority of the new United Nations, he tried to recruit China’s Chiang Kai-shek for his plan. But at their single meeting in Cairo in 1942, Roosevelt found Chiang weak and indecisive. Worse, Chiang rejected a trusteeship in favor of immediate independence.

By the time a haggard Roosevelt met with Churchill and Joseph Stalin at Yalta in February 1945, he “had begun to lose control of events,” but Logevall rejects the conclusion that “the United States abandoned her anticolonial impulses and supported a French return to Indochina.” Rather, Roosevelt was relying on his lifelong talent for indirection. He might be forced to agree that the colonial powers themselves should administer the trusteeships, but his goal remained independence.

In a chapter called “Crossroads,” Logevall offers a step-by-step description of the winding down of the war in the Pacific, with Ho watching warily as the Japanese loosened their grip on North Vietnam. At his camp at Pac Bo, Ho had relished his partnership with agents from the U.S. Office of Strategic Services.

When an OSS team led by Colonel Allison Thomas parachuted into Ho’s base, they were met by two hundred of his Viet Minh troops with a banner reading: “Welcome to Our American Friends.” Ho greeted Thomas in his serviceable English, but he was shaking badly and obviously running a high fever. An OSS medic diagnosed him with malaria and dysentery, prescribed quinine and sulfa drugs, and saved Ho’s life.

Ho’s American allies were so taken with his warmth and intelligence that they took to calling him “OSS Agent 19.” Logevall’s expansive approach to his story permits many agreeable detours, including the 1944 report from U.S. captain Charles Fenn, who had studied graphology and produced a character analysis based on Ho’s handwriting: “The essential features are simplicity, desire to make everything clear, remarkable self-control. Knows how to keep a secret. . . . Faults: diplomatic to the point of contriving. Could be moody and obstinate.”

Entirely won over by Ho, Colonel Thomas radioed to his headquarters in Kunming in South China, “Forget the Communist Bogy. Viet Minh League is not Communist. Stands for freedom and reforms against French harshness.” Ho responded by exempting the United States from his attacks on French colonialism and assuring his new friends that his country would “welcome 10 million Americans.”

Logevall weighs Thomas’s evaluation judiciously, writing that it

was wrong, or at least incomplete. If the Viet Minh stood for independence and against French repression, its core leadership that summer also remained staunchly Communist. But Ho in particular among top strategists wore the ideology lightly, so much so that even Soviet officials questioned his Communist credentials. In Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party, too, analysts wondered where the Viet Minh, should it win the right to rule a free Vietnam, would take the country.

That ambiguity would persist throughout Ho’s lifetime. Moscow and Beijing treated him with suspicion even as they provided him with material support. And twenty-five years later, some U.S. antiwar demonstrators could not believe that so appealing a personality as “Uncle Ho” would also be ready to sacrifice his countrymen by the tens of thousands to achieve his goal.

ROOSEVELT’S DEATH on April 12, 1945, changed everything. At first, the Viet Minh seemed poised for success. The collapse of the Japanese four months later allowed General Vo Nguyen Giap to lead Ho’s “Viet-American Army” into Hanoi in early September. To avoid further killing, Ho dismayed many of his supporters by agreeing to allow the French to return to Vietnam south of the sixteenth parallel.

In the confrontation that soon developed between the West and the Soviet Union, Logevall does not suggest that Ho would have allied himself with the United States. But, he writes, “A decision by the Truman administration to support Vietnamese independence in the late summer and fall of 1945 would have gone a long way toward averting the mass bloodshed and destruction that was to follow.”

Nor does he accept that war between Giap and the French was inevitable or that both sides shared equally in the blame. He largely faults the provocations of Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu, a former Carmelite monk who had risen in the Free French resistance and arrived in Vietnam as de Gaulle’s high commissioner for Indochina.

Logevall notes that d’Argenlieu had “thwarted the prospects for a negotiated solution at several junctures in 1946; he seemed determined to provoke” Ho’s forces “into full-scale hostilities.” In Paris, left-wing newspapers called him “the Bloody Monk.”

As d’Argenlieu treated the wire service Agence France-Presse as his personal propaganda machine, the French public was deprived of information from the scene. With de Gaulle’s backing, d’Argenlieu’s policies in the first months of 1947 left whole neighborhoods of Hanoi leveled and the city’s public buildings in ruins.

Over his next four hundred pages, Logevall presents in meticulous detail the military and diplomatic skirmishing of the seven years that culminated in the siege at Dien Bien Phu. By that time, he concludes, “even Charles de Gaulle, whose intransigence in 1945–46 had done so much to start the bloodshed, had given up on military victory in Indochina.”

Logevall cuts skillfully between troops within the demoralized French redoubt and the exhausted Viet Minh, who were, Giap wrote, “fatigued, worn and subject to great nervous tension.” Even though readers know the outcome, his method creates genuine suspense. Some great military victories—Andrew Jackson’s in New Orleans is another—continue to carry us along to their startling conclusions.

Logevall’s re-creation draws on many familiar sources—Lloyd Gardner, Lucien Bodard, Ted Morgan and Bernard Fall with his evocative title Hell in a Very Small Place. But he also includes material from Pierre Rocolle’s 1968 Pourquoi Dien Bien Phu?, Pierre Pellissier’s Dien Bien Phu: 20 Novembre 1953—7 Mai 1954 and Robert Guillain’s Dien Bien Phu: La Fin Des Illusions, both from 2004.

Logevall’s understatement serves him well in presenting the last radio contact between Dien Bien Phu and Major General Rene Cogny in Hanoi. Cogny was forbidding the fort’s commander, Colonel Christian de Castries, from trying to protect the wounded by raising a flag of surrender. “Mon vieux,” Cogny began, “of course you have to finish the whole thing now. But what you have done until now surely is magnificent. Don’t spoil it by hoisting the white flag. You are going to be submerged [by the enemy], but no surrender, no white flag.” The colonel makes another futile appeal. “There was a silence. Then de Castries bade his farewell: ‘Bien, mon général.’”

Logevall writes:

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was over. The Viet Minh had won. Vo Nguyen Giap had overturned history, had accomplished the unprecedented, had beaten the West at its own game. For the first time in the annals of colonial warfare, Asian troops had defeated a European army in fixed battle.

The book’s epilogue, titled “Different Dreams, Same Footsteps,” returns the reader to John Kennedy, now president and confronting the collapse of South Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem. Logevall is sympathetic to the dilemma of both Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, whose

freedom of maneuver was already constrained by the choices of their predecessors—by Truman’s tacit acknowledgment in 1945–46 that France had a right to return to Indochina; by his administration’s decision in 1950 to actively aid the French war effort; and by the Eisenhower team’s move in 1954 to intervene directly in Vietnam, displacing France as the major external power.

All the same, Logevall previously has suggested in Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived that if Kennedy had survived Dallas, he would have regarded the commitment of U.S. ground troops as the worst in a range of bad options.

But before that, of course, there would be a presidential election to win, an objective that was never far from the thoughts of Kennedy, Johnson or Richard Nixon, as well as their advisers. Logevall establishes that for Nixon’s two predecessors in the White House, a central consideration in waging war in Vietnam had been ensuring another four years. But fate—and Dallas, Tet and Watergate—intervened to guarantee that none of them would serve two full terms.

READERS MAY find a final counterfactual occurring to them throughout Embers of War: What if Logevall’s book had been mandatory reading for Kennedy and his policy makers while they were escalating the U.S. presence in South Vietnam from a few hundred advisers to more than sixteen thousand? Would any lessons from France’s doomed adventure have deterred those same policy makers later when they found themselves working for Lyndon Johnson?

On the evidence, probably not. What makes Gordon Goldstein’s account of the Kennedy years particularly infuriating is the blithe ignorance of a man like McGeorge Bundy. A dazzling young academic, Bundy seemed to put his brilliance in a blind trust when he entered government service.

In February 1965, he urged a bombing campaign against North Vietnam by making the strange point that the odds were between 25 percent and 75 percent that such a strategy would fail. And yet, “even if it fails, the policy will be worth it.” At home and around the world, according to Bundy, people would have more confidence in a United States that had failed than if Washington had assessed the long odds and held back.

When Bundy’s old friend Walter Lippmann returned from Paris to pass along de Gaulle’s latest peace proposal to the White House, the columnist bridled at the disdain with which Bundy received him. The Kennedy men might not have inherited FDR’s vision, but they shared his dislike for Charles de Gaulle. They knew the French had nothing to teach us.

In the decades after the Vietnam War, former secretary of defense Robert McNamara set off on a quest for public absolution and in the process displayed persistent blind spots of his own. During the mid-1990s, for example, McNamara welcomed the prospect of conferring in Hanoi with North Vietnamese military commanders and politburo leaders. Then the early planning hit a snag.

McNamara, who wanted to begin their discussion with the year that he joined the Kennedy administration, was puzzled and resistant when Vo Nguyen Giap insisted on exploring the period before 1961. McNamara seemed surprised that anything could much matter that had happened before he entered the scene.

Not for the first time, General Giap prevailed, and the conference got under way in June 1997, with Vietnam’s former foreign minister Nguyen Co Thach as its chairman. McNamara’s hosts treated him throughout the several days with exemplary courtesy. Only once did they become visibly angry—when McNamara repeated the canard, popular with General William Westmoreland, that the United States had been at a disadvantage on the battlefield because Americans put a higher value on human life than the Vietnamese did. A seething North Vietnamese delegate responded, “Let me assure you, Mr. McNamara, that our mothers grieve for their sons every bit as much as American mothers do.”

McNamara was challenged again, though less emotionally, whenever he lectured North Vietnamese officials for failing to appreciate the difference between America’s goals and those of the French. We did not come as colonists, he would say. We never intended to stay.

The North Vietnamese looked grimly amused at that defense of his country’s clean hands. Patiently, they explained that while the distinction might be clear to McNamara, their countrymen were being killed by the same bullets, by the same bombs.

To conclude, a personal note:

After three years away from South Vietnam, I returned as a journalist because of the 1968 Tet Offensive. I was hitching a ride with a young Marine driving a truck out of Danang, and as we passed the roadside villages, children ran out to smile, wave and hold out their palms in hopes of candy.

“Look at that!” said the driver, no more than nineteen. “They love us here.”

I said, “I’d feel better if they hadn’t been smiling that same way at the French right up until 1954.”

“The French!” the boy exclaimed. “What the fuck were the French doing here?”

Thanks to Professor Logevall’s Embers of War, no one need ask that question again.

A. J. Langguth is professor emeritus at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California. The author of Our Vietnam: The War 1954–1975 (Simon & Schuster, 2000), he was the Saigon bureau chief for the New York Times in 1965.

Pullquote: In the interim between world wars, Ho and his band of Vietnamese nationalists already had decided that the communism of Vladimir Lenin was their most dependable ally in fighting for liberation.Image: Essay Types: Book Review