The Vietnam War was a long and complex war which has inspired many authors to write lengthy books. The shelves of libraries in the US and around the world are crowded with what appears to be a disproportionate number of heavy tomes about Vietnam. Not surprisingly, many of these books have examined the years from 1965 to 1973, the period of the heaviest US military intervention in Vietnam. But historians and other authors have not neglected the study of the pre-1965 US involvement in Indochina affairs. From Ellen Hammer's classic The Struggle for Indochina to the best-selling accounts produced by David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and Stanley Karnow, many of the most influential works of Vietnam War history have actually devoted the bulk of their prodigious page counts to the First Indochina War of 1945–54 and its tumultuous aftermath. In comparison to the other wars that the United States fought in the twentieth century, the origins of the Vietnam War have seemed particularly murky and confusing – hence the need for detailed and lengthy analysis.Footnote ¹

Fredrik Logevall's Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam is the newest entrant into the pantheon of big Vietnam War books. It is also one of the best studies of the origins of the war that has appeared to date. Although it weighs in at a door-stopping 715 pages of text, Embers is a beautifully written book with a compelling narrative that grips the reader from preface to epilogue. Logevall's interest in tracing the roots of “America's Vietnam” is reflected in his decision to concentrate on the period from 1945 to 1960, with particular attention to the Franco-Viet Minh war. This chronological focus reflects Logevall's main objective, which is to produce a “full-fledged international account of how the whole saga began” (xv). To a remarkable extent, he succeeds in realizing this goal. Embers is a welcome contribution to the canon of major works on the Vietnam War, and should be on the reading lists of both scholars and general readers.

The narrative that Logevall presents in Embers is built around two key elements. First, he presents evocative portraits of various American, French, and Vietnamese individuals. These include Ho Chi Minh, Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the other prominent leaders who played key roles in Indochinese affairs between 1945 and 1960; Logevall also details the ambitions and agendas of less familiar figures, such as Admiral Georges Thierry d'Argenlieu. While some might accuse Logevall of lapsing into a Plutarchian “great-man” mode of historical writing, Embers is much more than a mere collection of vignettes. Logevall aims to uncover the interactions between the personalities of leaders and the particular political contexts in which they operated. Thus the second distinctive feature of the book is its detailed and nuanced attention to the ways in which domestic politics – especially US and French domestic politics – shaped the course of war in Indochina. To be sure, Logevall is hardly the first to make connections between military clashes on Indochinese battlefields and the policy clashes that took place in Washington, Paris, and other capitals. But no previous author has woven the various domestic and international threads together quite as skillfully as Logevall does.

Readers familiar with Logevall's previous work know that he has long been interested in the intersections between personalities and domestic politics during the Vietnam War era. The kind of argument that Logevall crafts in Embers is in many respects similar to the one he presented in Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam.Footnote ² In that volume, Logevall carefully weighed the various explanations for Lyndon Johnson's decision to Americanize the Vietnam War during 1964 and 1965. He ultimately concluded that LBJ's motives were rooted above all in his psychological foibles and especially in his obsessive fear of weakness. Although Embers is less argument-driven than Choosing War, it still shows that leaders' decisions for war and peace often turned on their personal predilections, as well as on their responses to the political pressures they faced.

There is one key interpretive point on which Embers seems to depart from Logevall's earlier work. In Choosing War, Logevall argued forcefully against what he referred to as “structural” explanations of Vietnam War history – that is, interpretations which emphasized overarching geopolitical pressures, economic imperatives, or ideological convictions. Logevall was especially persuasive in refuting the oft-asserted view that LBJ's actions in Vietnam were overdetermined by a Cold War mindset. The notion that one could draw “a straight line between the Truman Doctrine and the landing of the marines at Danang” in 1965 was mistaken, Logevall maintained (385); LBJ chose war in Vietnam despite his recognition that the infamous domino theory of communist expansion likely did not apply in Southeast Asia.Footnote ³ For Logevall, this finding pointed not simply to the need to take account of leaders' personalities; it also underscored the sheer importance of contingency in Vietnam War history. A different President – such as the more cautious Kennedy, had he not been assassinated – might well have made different choices than LBJ did during 1964 and 1965.

In comparison to Choosing War, the emphasis on contingency in Embers is much reduced. In his opening pages, Logevall duly notes that “the story of the French Indochina War and its aftermath is a contingent one, full of alternative political choices, major and minor” (xvii). Yet he almost immediately backs away from this position, noting that “to argue for contingency and the inherent plausibility of alternative outcomes is not to say all were equally probable” (xviii). In contrast to the carefully crafted counterfactual scenarios presented in his earlier work, Logevall confesses that he finds it hard to imagine how any of the “alternative outcomes” he invokes for the 1945–60 period might have come to pass. French leaders, he asserts, were too deeply mired in the matrix of imperial thinking to embrace decolonization prior to 1954. Meanwhile, Vietnamese anticommunists were too “diminished by years of vacillation, compromise, and collaboration” to ever mount a credible challenge to Ho Chi Minh and the communist-led Viet Minh movement. Even the most successful anticommunist leader, South Vietnam's founding President Ngo Dinh Diem, was too inflexible and too instinctively authoritarian to permit the “South Korea-style” evolution that some of his admirers have retrospectively imagined (xix).

The downplaying of contingency in Embers is perhaps most strikingly apparent in Logevall's portrayal of American leaders and their decisions about Indochina. Like many other authors, Logevall notes that Franklin Roosevelt and other US leaders during the mid- and late 1940s were instinctively hostile to the continuation of French colonial rule in Indochina. Had Washington followed through on this impulse, Logevall suggests, Ho could have been converted into an “Asian Tito,” and the entire post-1950 American intervention in Indochina could have been avoided. But Logevall also maintains that US leaders never really came close to grasping this opportunity. Those State Department officials who opposed support for the French war effort on anticolonial grounds were all but predestined to fail; the rapid globalization of the Cold War during the late 1940s guaranteed that containment would crowd out any other strategic or ideological considerations in the minds of US decision-makers (219). For Logevall, the culmination of this trend appeared in the views and policies of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Contra the arguments of historians who portray Ike as a clever resistor of escalatory pressures during the 1954 Dien Bien Phu crisis, Logevall depicts him as a committed cold warrior who favored direct US military intervention. Indeed, Logevall finds that Eisenhower continued to press for such intervention even after the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu had fallen (568–69). At the conclusion of Logevall's narrative in 1960, the Cold War mindset is firmly ensconced in Washington – to the point where it holds even the previously cautious John Kennedy in its thrall (702–4).

Does Logevall's portrayal of US leaders as unreconstructed cold warriors mean that Embers is a repudiation of the conclusions that Logevall presented in Choosing War? Not necessarily. After all, it is entirely plausible to suppose that Eisenhower really did believe in the domino theory in 1954, even if Johnson did not in 1965. Nevertheless, it is not going too far to say that Embers is a book that draws straight-line connections of the kind that Logevall previously eschewed. In my view, Logevall's turn away from contingency is the most problematic aspect of an otherwise compelling book. As a long-time skeptic of the explanatory utility of “mindsets” (of the Cold War variety or otherwise), I am not persuaded that the thinking of US leaders was either as uniform or as reflexively anticommunist as Logevall suggests. But I am even less convinced by the claims that Embers advances about various Vietnamese leaders and groups. By invoking reductive and discredited notions about modern Vietnamese politics and Vietnamese political actors, Embers misses an opportunity to integrate these actors and their agendas into the larger international history framework that Logevall uses so effectively when writing about US and European leaders.

The most obvious problems with the representations of Vietnamese actors in Embers have to do with Logevall's treatment of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) and its founding leader, Ho Chi Minh. In his preface, Logevall suggests that the triumph of the Viet Minh over France served to bolster Ho's status as the leading champion of Vietnamese national liberation – an eminently defensible claim. But Logevall then goes on to assert that Ho and his fellow revolutionaries had “secured a nationalist legitimacy that was, in a fundamental way, fixed for all time” (xxii, emphasis added). This sweeping claim echoes the hagiographies and the other official accounts of the war that VCP historians have been cranking out for decades. But it also elides a wealth of contrary evidence which shows that the party's legitimacy, far from being “fixed,” was actually highly variable over time. To overlook the ebb and flow of the party's political fortunes after 1945 is to lapse into a teleological view in which the ultimate political and military triumph of the VCP was more or less foreordained, and in which non-VCP actors and groups are reduced to illegitimacy or irrelevance.

In fact, there were many instances in post-1945 Vietnamese history in which the VCP's legitimacy was undermined by its own actions. For the hundreds of thousands of Mekong Delta residents who embraced the heterodox religious faith known as Hoa Hao, the party's reputation as a liberating force was anything but “fixed” – especially after Viet Minh operatives captured, murdered, and dismembered the Hoa Hao movement's founding prophet in 1947. More generally, recent scholarship has challenged the received wisdom about state–society relations under the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), the VCP-dominated state that Ho founded in 1945. As demonstrated in the work of Christopher Goscha, the DRV's eventual triumph over France cannot be explained only or even primarily as a function of the party's ability to harness popular nationalist and anticolonial sentiments. Instead, the party's victories – including its spectacular triumph at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 – rested on mass mobilization techniques that included coercion on an astonishingly large scale.Footnote ⁴ Although Logevall identifies Goscha as one of the scholars who has been particularly influential on his thinking (720 n. 8), his telling of the Dien Bien Phu siege gives scant attention to the brutal compulsion that Goscha emphasizes. Instead, Logevall cites VCP-sanctioned official histories in which kindhearted Viet Minh commanders made conditions “less excruciating and dangerous” for their men (417). The avuncular Ho, Logevall tells us, insisted on issuing warm jackets to all of the troops bound for the battle (390).

Instead of endorsing the VCP's own claims about its legitimacy and the heroism of its leaders, it is more useful to think of nationalist legitimacy in Vietnam as something that was heavily contested throughout the 1945–60 period and afterwards. In addition to facilitating new interpretations of the VCP and the DRV during the war years, such an approach can also contribute to a reconsideration of noncommunist Vietnamese leaders and groups – especially those associated with the State of Vietnam (SVN) and its successor regime, the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). My point here is not that the heroic representations of Ho and the VCP should be replaced by a view which lionizes their anticommunist enemies. I mean merely to suggest that SVN and RVN leaders should be seen as active participants – rather than hapless bystanders – in the post-1945 process of decolonization in Indochina. I would also contend that the bids for political legitimacy made by noncommunist leaders and groups were rather more consequential than Logevall acknowledges. For example, Logevall briefly mentions the “National Congress” of anticommunist parties held in Saigon in October 1953, but does so only to detail the patronizing American and French responses to the event; he does not explain why the congress was called, or discuss its devastating impact on the political fortunes of Bao Dai, the SVN chief of state (371–72). Similarly, while Logevall duly cites the recent scholarship on RVN President Ngo Dinh Diem, he gives only the most cursory attention to the massive agrarian reform initiatives and other nation-building projects that Diem undertook after 1955. While Diem's efforts produced many more failures than successes, they still profoundly shaped the subsequent history of South Vietnam – including the rise of the communist-led insurgency after 1959.

Some readers of this review will no doubt object to the above comments on the entirely reasonable grounds that one ought not to criticize a 715-page book for what it leaves out. I would maintain, however, that the omissions I have identified in Embers point to a recurring issue in Vietnam War historiography: the problem of how to represent Vietnamese actors, perspectives, and experiences in more contingent and more historical terms. For a scholar who argues so persuasively for the deep importance of American and European domestic politics in the history of the war, Logevall seems strangely unwilling to consider the possibility that Vietnamese domestic politics should be given equal weight.Footnote ⁵

These criticisms do not in any way detract from Logevall's signal achievements in Embers of War. This book is a fine work of historical scholarship which provides a wealth of new insights into the origins of America's disastrous Vietnam intervention – especially with respect to the intersections between US policy decisions and domestic political imperatives. Embers is a remarkable book, and a major contribution to Vietnam War studies.

Fredrik Logevall's Embers of War is an epic tale of French decline in Indochina and the evolution of Washington's fateful commitment to defend a noncommunist state in South Vietnam. The arc of this richly nuanced, elegantly woven history extends from the heady days of Ho Chi Minh's anticolonial activity in Paris during World War I to the American decision to escalate the war against Vietnamese communist forces in the 1960s. Logevall depicts a collision between Ho's anticolonialism, France's determination to reclaim its prewar empire, and Washington's growing obsession with the Cold War that makes the eventual clash between the United States and North Vietnam seem all but inevitable. He insists, however, that “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” (xvii). True to that claim, he demonstrates time and again that, as important as the powerful worldviews of empire, Cold War, and revolutionary nationalism were to this period in which the seeds of Vietnamese–American conflict were sown, the process remained fluid. The individuals who made key decisions at critical moments in the story determined the course of history, and narrowed the choices available to their successors. This most impressive book goes a long way towards explaining why Lyndon Johnson's decision for war – a decision that Logevall wrote about so compellingly in his first book, Choosing War (1999) – would come to seem so unavoidable to the men who made it, even as they did so against their better judgment.

As early as 1919, when Woodrow Wilson turned a deaf ear to Ho Chi Minh's pleas for Vietnamese self-determination in the halls of Versailles, France and the United States shared a fundamentally conservative opposition to radical changes in the colonized world. Logevall makes clear that despite their vastly different attitudes towards empire – Paris searching for every means to preserve it and Washington condemning it as the principal source of violent conflict in the modern world – neither power could countenance a world fundamentally transformed by granting real independence to colonized peoples. Ho, recognizing the Western orientation of American liberalism and even of French communism, turned to the Soviet Union for support. Yet he soon found that Moscow too had its sights trained on the West. Throughout this story, Ho would struggle to gain significant backing from the very allies in Moscow and Beijing that Washington feared were the masterminds of Vietnam's communist movement. In making this point, Logevall distills the essence of the misunderstanding that led to America's creeping involvement in Vietnam: US officials failed to recognize that Vietnam's struggle for independence was primarily a North–South struggle for decolonization, implicated in but not driven by the East–West competition between Sino-Soviet communism and Western liberal capitalism.

In the waning months of World War II and into the early postwar era, the United States found its approach to France's empire in Indochina riven between competing impulses to oppose colonialism on one hand and to build alliances among great powers essential for preventing the spread of communism on the other. With FDR no longer alive to promote his vision of trusteeship for colonized peoples, and Stalin casting an ever more menacing cloud over Eastern Europe, the latter concern quickly prevailed over the former. By August 1945, Logevall shows, those in Washington who believed that the United States “had to stand for change, for a new order of things, a decolonization of the international system,” had lost out to those who stood for “the old order of things, and who moreover had their eyes fixed on Soviet moves in postwar Europe” (106). This meant that French pleas, motivated by overwhelming domestic political support for a restoration of imperial grandeur, would be heard and answered. Viet Minh pleas for assistance, motivated by a desperate need for international aid, would be ignored.

American Cold War concerns in these early postwar days were focussed not on Asia, but on Europe. Truman's administration gave tacit support for France's return to Indochina and refused to recognize Ho's calls for recognition not out of fear that Viet Minh ties to international communism would render Southeast Asia vulnerable to Soviet conquest, but out of a desire to win French support for anticommunist policies in Europe. By 1950, that would change. In 1949 the Soviets detonated an atomic bomb, years before anyone in Washington thought possible, and Mao Zedong's Chinese Communist Party emerged victorious in the civil war against Chiang Kai-shek. Both powers proceeded to extend formal recognition to Ho's government in Hanoi, stoking American fears that Asia was quickly becoming the next front in the Cold War struggle against Soviet aggression. Logevall details how French leaders shrewdly played upon this fear, exacerbated by the outbreak of war in Korea, to persuade the United States to support Bao Dai's new noncommunist State of Vietnam headquartered in Saigon. In short order the United States came to bankroll the French war effort and grew more convinced that a victory over the Viet Minh was essential for keeping Southeast Asia out of communist hands. Meanwhile, France grew weary of its long, costly struggle in Indochina, and began to look for a way out. The apogee of Franco-American disagreement over the war – and the American assumption of responsibility for noncommunist Vietnam – came amidst the catastrophic French military rout at the outpost of Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva conference that followed.

In his discussion of the drama surrounding those events, Logevall argues against the image of a restrained Eisenhower, one who cited Congressional refusal to authorize direct US military aid to the French and the failure of the United Action campaign to justify his own reticence to intervene militarily. Instead, he claims, Eisenhower “actively contemplated taking the United States directly into the war” and “sought to maintain his freedom of maneuver for whatever contingencies may arise” (472–73). According to Logevall, those who praise Eisenhower for his prudence in keeping the United States out of Vietnam fall into the trap of conflating “his overall restraint in foreign policy … with his more aggressive approach to crises in the Third World, including in Vietnam” (697). The President and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, true believers in the “domino theory” and concerned about the domestic political ramifications of ceding any ground to communism, were loath to negotiate with Soviet, Chinese, or North Vietnamese delegates at the Geneva conference that followed France's crushing defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Throughout the talks, fundamental disagreements beset the allies. Britain and France sought to end the war, perceiving the costs of escalation to be higher than the costs of a communist victory. Meanwhile, the United States condemned communist proposals, yet remained unwilling to do anything to bolster the French position. By mid-June, Dulles had reached the conclusion that the time had come for the French to exit Indochina to allow the United States to “rebuild from the foundations” (574).

This, Logevall argues, was a watershed moment. Although Eisenhower and Dulles could not recognize it at the time, Dulles's frustrated pronouncement was “the first clear sign of a monumental policy shift, from keeping the French fighting and resisting negotiations to moving France out of Indochina altogether and ‘rebuild[ing] from the foundations,’ without the taint of colonialism” (575). Indeed, the imperative of salvaging something noncommunist in Indochina “free of the taint of colonialism” would drive American policy in the ensuing decade, leading to the fateful commitment to Ngo Dinh Diem's South Vietnamese government and eventually to war (593).

In negotiating a final deal at Geneva, all parties had their eyes trained on what Washington would accept. The end result was an agreement that Eisenhower and Dulles could live with, but that they refused to endorse. Thereafter, the administration “moved energetically to … do alone what it had previously sought to do in association with France: Create and sustain an anti-Communist government in Vietnam” (623). The Americans told themselves that, freed from the old encumbrances of colonialism, they could finally develop a “genuine Third Force – neither French-backed nor communist – that could develop and sustain genuine support among the Vietnamese people” (625). Of course, there were doubts. Ngo Dinh Diem had serious flaws. Could he really earn and maintain popular support among his people? And what of his reluctance to align too closely with the United States for fear of being perceived as a neocolonial puppet? Should Washington cut its losses in Vietnam as Ambassador “Lightning Joe” Lawton Collins suggested?

All of these concerns faded into the background following Diem's impressive victory in the “sect crisis” in spring 1955. “That the underlying problems with his government had not gone away,” Logevall writes, “was either forgotten or pushed aside by his U.S. backers, who were focused on the here and now at the expense of longer-term considerations.” By redoubling his support for Diem at this time, “Eisenhower narrowed the options on Vietnam – for himself and for his successors” (646). Logevall suggests that Eisenhower might have chosen a different course at this time. The President “might have accepted Collins's argument that using Diem to build a strong, capable democratic alternative to Ho Chi Minh's DRV was in all likelihood illusory” (647). At the very least, Logevall notes, the United States could have used its leverage to force Diem to change his ways or step aside for an alternative leader or coalition government assembled in cooperation with the French. Eisenhower might even have been bold enough to pursue a “Titoist” solution for Vietnam. Without going quite so far as to affirm that the American-backed Diem government was doomed to fail by this early date, Logevall strongly implies that the dynamics that ultimately destroyed it were locked in place by spring 1955.

There is much evidence to support Logevall's implication. Indeed, the American objective of propping up a noncommunist South Vietnamese government may well have been impossible, barring a long-term military occupation. As Logevall notes, Ho and his communist government were popular, especially in the northern half of the country. Although the Hanoi leadership was even more embattled that Logevall allows, he is certainly correct that Ho would have defeated Diem by a landslide had countrywide elections taken place. And throughout the country, reunification and independence were objectives upon which almost all could agree, even if they differed widely in their visions for postcolonial Vietnam. In the South, Diem faced ongoing challenges from the Binh Xuyen, Hoa Hao, and Cao Dai organizations, powerful and influential groups even after the blows delivered by the sect crisis. Those three groups were representative of a historically heterogeneous southern political and cultural tradition that made the region particularly difficult to bring under centralized rule. French colonial authorities and Viet Minh officials had both learned the hard way what Diem was about to discover about southern political life. The challenges Diem faced from those groups, as well as the even bolder threats he anticipated from communist forces, heavily influenced his rapid development of authoritarian rule. That authoritarianism, as Logevall points out, troubled many Americans throughout the remainder of the decade, but their dependence on Diem to carry out their anticommunist program in Vietnam left them little leverage to demand reforms. Faced with the unpalatable choice of withdrawing support or continuing to back him even as he displayed blatant disregard for American advice, Washington continued to support him.

And so continued the pattern – begun under Truman, continued under Eisenhower, and to be inherited by Kennedy and then Johnson – of staying the course in Vietnam because it was the easiest bet in the short term, the least likely to damage American credibility on the world stage, the safest way to avoid provoking domestic political criticism from Diem's growing number of influential supporters. By this time the United States could “no longer blame the entire situation in Vietnam on French colonialism and wash its hands of the entire mess” (653).

American policymakers marched deeper into conflict with Vietnam over four successive presidencies, fueled by the belief that their adventure there was fundamentally different from that of the French. Logevall writes, “France, after all, had been fighting a colonial war; the United States would be fighting one of popular opposition to Communism” (707). Where the French had lacked military strength and sophistication, the United States fielded the mightiest arsenal the world had ever seen. As the champion of freedom in the world, America could not lose. There were always holes in this belief, doubts about the war's prospects. Yet with their categorical pronouncements and escalatory actions, Kennedy and Johnson “painted themselves into a corner” (709). To a large extent, Logevall claims, they were put in that corner by the choices of their predecessors that so constrained their freedom of action. They were not willing to risk the domestic and international consequences of going against the commitment to preserving a noncommunist Vietnam that was, by then, more than a dozen years old. And so they stayed the course.

At key points throughout this tale, Logevall is sure to note, individuals could have steered the United States along a different course. Had FDR lived beyond 1945, he might have worked to block France's return to Indochina. Had Dulles listened to Collins's warnings about Diem in 1955 rather that siding with Edward Lansdale's optimism, Washington could have backed away from its commitment to Diem before it took root. And so on and so forth. Logevall rightly claims that American policymakers had real choices at every step along the path to war, but always moved in the direction of deeper US involvement. Thus he warns against focussing too heavily on contingency and calls for attention to this earlier period of American involvement in Vietnam as a vital means of reckoning with the “continuities that permeate the entire American experience in Vietnam” (710). Indeed, Kennedy and Johnson's well-known decisions to up the stakes in Vietnam can only be understood in the context of the limiting commitments that came before them. Logevall has given us a brilliant tome that illuminates the early years of American involvement in Vietnam as never before, with rare style and grace.

At just over seven hundred pages, excluding notes, Fredrick Logevall's Embers of War is a thorough and highly readable account of the end of French colonial rule in Indochina and the origins of the United States' role in what would come to be Vietnam. Drawing on French, American and Vietnamese archival material the author interweaves the story of military strategy and battlefield horror with the political machinations of public and private diplomacy. Logevall demonstrates that despite later American claims to the contrary, the US involvement in the “second” Indochinese War was largely determined by its involvement in the first. The period from 1945 to 1954 fundamentally shaped the conflict that was to follow and perhaps more crucially reflected the intersection of some of the most potent fault lines of the twentieth century: colonial rule, nationalism and the Cold War.

However, throughout, Logevall emphasizes that there was nothing inevitable about the French war in Indochina, its outcome, or the American intervention that followed. Indeed, the most interesting and tragic part of this story is that at various points key actors were confronted with a range of possible choices and yet consistently appear to have chosen the path that led to confrontation.

Not all of these possibilities were equally probable, and probability on all sides was shaped by the ideological constraints within which individuals operated. As Logevall demonstrates in the first few chapters, such constraints began with the French colonial “mindset” as it emerged from the Second World War. The author points out that French officials “could not make the mental leap” to even imagine an independent Vietnamese state. Such a conclusion is perhaps too charitable to the French who were unwilling to make such a leap, rather than unable to do so. French politicians exited the Second World War with a strong desire to preserve the French Empire, arguing that France without an imperial presence was no longer France. To this end, the postwar empire was reinvented – becoming the “Union” in 1946 and the “Community” in 1958 – emphasizing a new “consensual” basis for the imperial framework. This reinvention, however, was more than cosmetic; it involved a deliberate attempt to recast empire as a collaborative effort between colonizer and colonized. In Indochina such designs can be seen in the French attempt to offer Ho Chi Minh “self-government” within the boundaries of the French Union, with guarantees of continued French cultural and economic privileges (132).

Logevall convincingly shows that in Indochina a “return” to empire was a centerpiece of the French effort to restore international prestige after the shame of defeat and occupation. Charles de Gaulle's emphasis on the cohesion between metropolitan France and the overseas territories, however, did not mean that he and others like him “failed to grasp” (as Logevall has it) the importance of liberation to colonized peoples; rather, it underscores that such importance was irrelevant to an administration bound (perhaps in multiple senses of the word) and determined to resurrect empire in a new, supposedly more acceptable form (73). In this imagining even decolonization was reconfigured as a part of the design; for France, as de Gaulle noted, decolonization represented “the success and the extension of the colonial project.”Footnote ¹ Indeed, throughout the empire, many French leaders envisaged a continued French presence in their former colonies that would transcend the formal strictures of colonial rule. This desire translated into last-moment cultural endeavors in several overseas territories; for example, the University of Dakar was established in French West Africa in 1958, just two years before the territory achieved independence. Thus, in Indochina, the French predicament beyond the loss of “colonial property” was the specter of an additional loss; ultimately US involvement threatened French ability to project their power onto the territory.Footnote ² In Indochina, as in French West Africa, the fear of losing cultural hegemony was perhaps most obviously expressed in anxiety over American public diplomacy efforts in French territory. As Logevall reports, the French commander de Lattre found the presence of the USIS (United States Information Service) “most upsetting” – especially given that its English-language learning programs were proving popular with the Vietnamese. It is not surprising, then, that at the opening of the USIS reading room in Saigon in 1951 de Lattre took pains to underscore the decidedly French context in which the United States was operating: “This necessary framework, without which there can be neither organization nor dynamic cohesion nor success, is at the present time furnished by the structure of the French Union” (279). Thus the tenacity with which the French maintained their presence in Indochina might be explained as much by fear of US involvement as by the demands that American politicians made for French Indochina to remain as a bulwark against communism.

For the United States, ideological constraints were equally influential in shaping policy and action in Indochina. As Logevall reminds us, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's anticolonialism, enshrined in the Atlantic Charter of 1941, initially suggested that the United States might be persuaded to support the independence of French Indochina. Indeed, Ho Chi Minh believed for some time that the Americans would ultimately sympathize with his position. Ho's ideological commitment is deftly portrayed here; we see a man who was moved above all by the desire to free his people, finding communism the best means to do that. The Vietnamese leader's hopes were eventually dashed with FDR's passing and as the divisions of the Cold War hardened into the later 1940s and the 1950s. While remnants of the anticolonial stance remained, US officials increasingly chose to understand the situation in Indochina as primarily driven by communism rather than by nationalism. Ultimately, then, this pushed the French and Americans together as strange bedfellows. The US concern was not just that Indochina would fall to communist control and thus set into motion what came to be known as the “domino theory,” but that the end of colonial rule in French Indochina would destabilize the French government to the extent that it, too, would fall to the French Communist Party.

Much of Logevall's work discusses the often tense relationship between French and American officials which emerged largely because they came to Indochina with such different ideological demands. While it became important for American administrators to thwart communism, this also had to be balanced with a fear of overcommitment (especially, for Eisenhower, after Korea) and being seen as “imperialists” themselves. By the mid-1950s American politicians were also wary of being branded “soft on communism,” especially as the witch hunts of the McCarthy era began to ravage US domestic politics. For the French, American support became crucial in developing an aura of legitimacy in their effort to essentially resurrect their imperial presence. Of course, material and military support was essential too, as the French could not levy the money or manpower to maintain their imperial presence alone. However, given the ultimate French goal of restoring their great-power status, US involvement was seemingly as dangerous as it was necessary. Thus a sort of codependency was established, increasingly marked by “mutual suspicions and growing rivalry” (308).

A great test of this uneasy alliance occurred at Dien Bien Phu, where French ground forces increasingly relied upon US air support in an attempt to hold off the Viet Minh's advances. In his discussion of the battle Logevall returns to the theme of individuals who made a difference, focussing particularly on the strategic expertise of Vo Nguyen Giap, who Logevall argues “ranks … with the finest military leaders of modern history” (147). Giap's careful planning, and especially his decision to delay the Viet Minh's attack on French positions, contrasts strikingly with the remarkable overconfidence of several French military tacticians. As one French journalist remarked after a 1954 briefing by French general Henri Navarre, “I would be ready to swear that the situation he has described has nothing in common with reality” (444). Logevall's analysis of the battle and the siege brings us back several times to the terrible losses being sustained on both sides of the conflict. The discussion is vivid and balanced, underlining the significance of Giap's accomplishments and the enormity of the French loss. Ultimately, the Viet Minh's victory was of global significance: “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” (534).

The book concludes with a discussion of the Geneva accords and their aftermath. Again, here Logevall elucidates the stories of individuals who maintained and negotiated, and very often found their actions circumscribed by, the ideological positions of their respective administrations. At Geneva the personal and ideological clashes of John Foster Dulles and Anthony Eden reiterate the human aspect of the decision-making process. Dulles emerges as an ardent anticommunist who was nevertheless able to be pragmatic on occasion and Eden's personal ambition and diplomatic skill is shown as crucial in the negotiations that eventually led to the partition of Vietnam in 1954.

Logevall argues that the decision made by Dulles and Eisenhower to agree to partition was as great as any made by American administrations from FDR to Ford: “The United States would henceforth take responsibility for defending most of Indochina” (593). Ultimately, it is the rigidity of such commitment in the wake of French withdrawal from Indochina that emerges as the real misfortune of the first Indochinese war. Nowhere is this clearer than in John F. Kennedy's changing views of the ideological stakes in Indochina. JFK's assessments bookend the narrative; in a 1951 visit to Saigon the Congressman could not comprehend the expectation that most Vietnamese would join the fight to stay part of the French Empire and concluded that the US presence was also becoming perceived as “colonialist.” Later, reflecting in 1957 on the growing conflagration in France's other engagement with the forces of nationalism, in Algeria, now Senator Kennedy remarked, “The most powerful single force in the world today … is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile – it is man's eternal desire to be free and independent” (703). But this is not, ultimately, how JFK approached Vietnam as President. Indeed, in JFK one is reminded of George Orwell's reflection on empire as something that imprisons the colonizers as well as the colonized; that an administrator of empire “wears a mask and his face grows to fit it.”Footnote ³ What was bequeathed to JFK and his successors was a new kind of empire, rooted, as he all but anticipated in 1951, in the French regime that crumbled. This new empire was precisely what the French feared on a global scale: the most offensive aspect of the American presence was its denial of imperialist characteristics; as Philippe Roger puts it, “it was the ultimate trick of the most modern of imperialisms, in [French] eyes, to pretend not to be an empire.”Footnote ⁴ The constant deferring to “staying the course” by both French and American officials was a function of particular ideological masks that were hard to break. As Logevall concludes, Kennedy's personal perception of independence movements became tragically increasingly irrelevant; a commitment had been made to Indochina. As President, he was to honor that commitment, bringing the United States, and a determined Vietnam, toward a new war.

In Embers of War, Fredrik Logevall points out that, despite the mountain of scholarship on America's Vietnam War, we still lack

Logevall has successfully and impressively written such a book. As his comment suggests, he tells the story of the French war with an eye toward the American intervention that would follow. But he also explores the decade and a half after World War II on its own terms, as a story of French arrogance, Vietnamese nationalist struggle, and high-stakes international maneuvering. In doing so he manages to write a book that is appropriate for both a wide public readership and scholars and students of diplomacy, the Cold War, and the conflicts in Vietnam.

Embers of War is a detailed account of the French War in Indochina, tracing it back to World War II and ending with America's early efforts to prop up the Ngo Dinh Diem regime in the late 1950s. In writing this book Logevall synthesizes an enormous collection of secondary sources, supplementing them with well-chosen primary sources to create a truly international account of the conflict. While French and Vietnamese players loom large, he also explores the actions of American, British, Chinese, and Soviet figures. Readers accustomed to books on America's Vietnam War will welcome the almost granular level of detail. Events and disputes that are sometimes glossed over or covered in a brief sentence or two receive the full treatment in Embers of War. To give one example: the outbreak of hostilities between France and the Viet Minh in 1946. Logevall devotes almost twenty pages to the topic, describing how the success of the Viet Minh in Cochin China led d'Argenlieu and French general Jean Etienne Valluy to turn their attention northward to Haiphong, where the fighting commenced on 20 November. But even this section of the book comes after a long account of the fighting in Cochin China that began almost immediately after the end of World War II; as Logevall points out, “September 23, 1945, may be as plausible a start date [for the French War] as any” (115).

Logevall's prose effectively brings the story to life. He peppers the narrative with short biographical sketches of the principal actors and some of the more peripheral ones: the “Warrior Monk” Georges Thierry d'Argenlieu; French scholar Paul Mus; Bao Dai, who receives much more balanced treatment here than in many accounts; storied English writer Graham Greene; the bellicose chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Arthur Radford; and American naval doctor and anticommunist crusader Tom Dooley. Logevall's writing is at times lively and evocative, such as in his detailed account of the conditions at Dien Bien Phu for French soldiers and their Vietnamese counterparts. The descriptions of medical treatment are especially chilling.

Several themes and motifs emerge in Embers of War. One is Logevall's strong interest in diplomatic affairs. In recent years many diplomatic historians have shied away from the label, downplaying diplomacy in order to focus on other arenas of international relations. Logevall has long been an advocate of returning to the study of diplomacy itself, the meetings between heads of state or foreign ministers, the compromises brooked at the negotiating table, the efforts of countries to enlist allies or outmaneuver enemies in closed-door meetings. In Embers of War, Logevall devotes considerable attention to these matters. Logevall is particularly adept at exploring the complicated relationship between France, the United States, and Great Britain at various points during the French War. But Logevall does not limit his attention to these actors; he also explores the diplomatic strategies of the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and the Viet Minh/DRV.

One of the most effective sections of the book deals with the intense British–American–French negotiations over the possibility of a US military intervention during the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. Logevall alternates between the battlefield and the meeting rooms of Geneva, illustrating how events in northwestern Vietnam affected decisions in Europe – and vice versa. As for the question whether the United States offered to give France atomic weapons to relieve the siege, Logevall is inconclusive. He points out that there is credible evidence to believe the story, but also notes the lack of a “smoking gun.” This ambiguity is frustrating, but it also acknowledges the reality that historians sometimes simply cannot know every detail.

Another recurring theme in Embers of War is the importance of choices and the possibility of alternative historical paths. Logevall employed a similar approach in Choosing War, his study of Lyndon Johnson's decision to Americanize the Vietnam War in 1964–65. In Embers of War he explains that “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” (xvii). These contingent moments surface throughout the narrative. If Harry Truman had supported trusteeship for Vietnam the French might not have been so aggressive in trying to maintain their colony. If Pierre Mendes-France had been elected prime minister in 1953 he might have found a way to extricate France from the conflict in Vietnam. Eisenhower was ready to withdraw support for Ngo Dinh Diem just before the Battle of Saigon in 1955 but he later reversed the decision. It is not unreasonable to think that Eisenhower could have stuck with his original decision and perhaps averted the slide toward war. For one example of when a counterfactual could have been raised: Lieutenant General Samuel Williams (head of MAAG) deciding to emphasize conventional military strength over political reforms (670–71). Logevall alludes to the importance of this decision, but does not explore the possibility of different outcomes had another strategy been employed.

Perhaps the most intriguing counterfactuals have to do with the climactic Battle of Dien Bien Phu. While analysts have long denounced France's decision to stand and fight in a seemingly indefensible site in the remote mountains of Vietnam, Logevall notes that the battle could have turned out differently. For example, if Vo Nguyen Giap had launched the initial offensive in January 1954 as originally planned, the French forces might have managed a repeat of their huge success at Na San a year earlier. Numerous other tactical decisions could have led to a different outcome in the fighting. But Logevall also points out that a victory at Dien Bien Phu would not necessarily have changed the outcome of the war.

All historians deal with alternative histories to some degree – any discussion of a key “turning point” is implicitly an acknowledgement that history could have unfolded in a different direction – but Logevall is much more explicit and straightforward in addressing these moments. Sometimes he outlines specific ways in which the outcome could have differed; other times he is content to ask open-ended rhetorical questions without attempting to answer them. In doing so he reminds the reader that historical outcomes are neither inevitable nor predetermined. History, for Logevall, is the study not only of what happened, but also of what might have happened.

While Logevall examines the First Indochina War in its own right, he does not ignore the obvious parallels between France's experience and that of the United States a decade later. The examples are too numerous to list, but they include France's failed efforts to identify a “third force” between communism and colonialism, a military strategy late in the war geared toward salvaging an acceptable peace rather than a battlefield victory, and lukewarm public support for the conflict. Logevall also highlights one of the more sobering parallels: the fact that, even as France pushed forward in its colonial war, many French observers and officials harbored serious doubts about the likelihood of success. As Logevall described in Choosing War, American officials were similarly pessimistic in the 1960s, yet decided to push forward with a military intervention. In both the French and the American cases, fear of losing “credibility” was a key factor driving policymakers.

Every book has gaps or omissions, though to be sure they are few and far between in Embers of War. One topic that Logevall might have covered in more detail was the actions and motivations of the Vietnamese outside the Viet Minh and DRV. The Vietnamese who were active in noncommunist nationalist movements are peripheral – perhaps understandably so, as by the end of World War II they were becoming more and more marginalized. By the same token, Logevall says little about the Vietnamese who, perhaps quixotically, were willing to cooperate with the French. While several of the leading figures in the State of Vietnam, including Bao Dai, Nguyen Van Tam, and Buu Loc, appear in Embers of War, readers do not get a sense of their motivations. Were they driven by craven self-interest, a sincere belief in the superiority of the French system, or (as I suspect) some combination of the two? The absence of these figures is not surprising. Their stories are not the most dramatic: they are neither the heroic victors in a national revolution, nor the hubristic colonial power brought to its knees.

In spite of this small omission, Logevall has written the definitive single-volume study of the French War in Indochina. Embers of War is an indispensable resource for historians of the conflicts in Vietnam, French colonialism, post-World War II decolonization and nationalism, and the Cold War.

I'm grateful to the journal for commissioning a roundtable on my book, and to the four reviewers for their robust, intelligent, and fair-minded reviews. It matters a great deal to me that these four discerning scholars would offer such complimentary assessments of Embers of War and that, to a very large degree, they get what I was hoping to accomplish in the book.

In the interests of discussion, I'll focus on the points of contention that emerge in the essays. One concerns contingency. The reviewers differ here, with Jessica Chapman, Matt Masur, and Louisa Rice highlighting my emphasis that the outcome in the struggle for Indochina was not preordained. “Another recurring theme in Embers of War,” Masur writes, “is the importance of choices and the possibility of alternative historical paths.” Echoes Rice, “throughout, Logevall emphasizes that there was nothing inevitable about the French war in Indochina, its outcome, or the American intervention that followed.”

Ed Miller, however, while acknowledging my nod to these unrealized paths, argues that my “turn away from contingency is the most problematic aspect of an otherwise compelling book.” He goes on, “Yet [Logevall] almost immediately backs away from this position, noting that ‘to argue for contingency and the inherent plausibility of alternative outcomes is not to say all were equally probable.’”

This is indeed my position: with the advantage of hindsight, we can say that not all counterfactual scenarios are as easy to imagine as others. Yet Embers of War examines any number of moments when history might have gone in a different direction: 1919, 1945, 1946, 1950, 1954, and 1956, to name but the most prominent. The book suggests, for example, that French leaders might have put Ho Chi Minh's conciliatory words to the test in the summer of 1946, before the real fighting started, when he was not staking out a maximalist position and indicated a willingness – maybe even a desire – to maintain an association with France. It argues that Ngo Dinh Diem had a real opening in 1954, and that Ho's Hanoi government feared what Diem might be able to do if he consolidated control in the South. And it maintains that Dwight Eisenhower might have followed Lawton Collins's advice the following spring and backed away from supporting Diem during the Battle of Saigon (as indeed Eisenhower for a time did).

To be fair to Miller, he is in part drawing a comparison between Embers of War and my earlier book Choosing War, and it's certainly true that the new book pays more heed to the deeper structural forces in the story than did the earlier work. Contingency is the theme in Choosing War; in the new book it's a theme. But a theme it nonetheless is, from start to finish. As Chapman puts it, the book “demonstrates time and again that, as important as the powerful worldviews of empire, Cold War, and revolutionary nationalism were to this period in which the seeds of Vietnamese–American conflict were sown, the process remained fluid.”

Miller asserts that I follow the traditionalist, orthodox position on Ho and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), and in particular on the question of legitimacy. He is correct. But that's because the evidence in my view overwhelmingly supports the orthodox position for the period of the French war and the early years thereafter. Ho Chi Minh and the DRV always had domestic opponents, no question, but they had opposed the Japanese and stood toe to toe with the French; in the process, I note in the preface, they secured a nationalist legitimacy that was, to an important degree, forever fixed, whatever their (very considerable) governing misdeeds. There's little doubt in my mind that Ho would have won a genuine national election at any point in the period covered by my book. The early histories, it turns out, got this part of the story mostly right.

There's a straw-man quality to the argument. According to Miller, my analysis

He adds: “There were many instances in post-1945 Vietnamese history in which the VCP's legitimacy was undermined by its own actions.”

Well, yes. To suggest that Ho and his lieutenants never took actions that undermined their legitimacy would be obtuse, to say the least; ditto for any claim that the party's political fortunes never ebbed and flowed. My book is replete with instances when the leadership made policy decisions that were counterproductive and unnecessary in this regard, not merely in retrospect but in the context of the time. But it's a considerable distance from that claim to Miller's contention that “it is more useful to think of nationalist legitimacy in Vietnam as something that was heavily contested throughout the 1945–60 period and afterwards.” This seems to me quite wrong. There is abundant evidence that the DRV had much more “nationalist legitimacy” than the succession of French client governments in 1945–54. With the Diem government that followed France's defeat it's a closer call, but not that much closer – the balance, in my considered judgment, always tilted toward Ho's DRV.

Miller further contends that in his view “the bids for political legitimacy made by noncommunist leaders and groups were rather more consequential than Logevall acknowledges.” Fair enough. I would merely say that the Ngo Dinh Diem of Embers of War is a serious and courageous and dedicated nationalist, a man of genuine strengths as well as serious shortcomings. I assert in the opening pages that it's not impossible to imagine a Diem-led South Vietnam surviving, South Korea-style, into the indefinite future. But neither is it easy, I go on to say, to imagine such an outcome; Diem's liabilities as a leader were just too severe. Miller seems to concede the point: “Diem's efforts,” he writes, “produced many more failures than successes.”

A final point. Masur and Miller are on solid ground in saying that I might have done more to elucidate the actions and motivations of the noncommunist Vietnamese who swallowed their misgivings and opted to cooperate with the French against the Viet Minh. Many of these Vietnamese grace the pages of the book (Bao Dai, Nguyen Van Tam, Buu Loc, to name but three), but it's true that I might have done more to explicate what drove them to adopt the positions they did. Masur asks, “Were they driven by craven self-interest, a sincere belief in the superiority of the French system, or (as I suspect) some combination of the two?” It's an important question, and Masur is right to ask it.