Professor Seth Jacobs writes readably, sometimes even racily, as we already know from his two books on Ngo Dinh Diem, America's Miracle Man (Duke University Press, 2004) and Cold War Mandarin (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). There is no fashionable jargon nor burdensome ‘theory’. But he puts forward arguments that are well worth the consideration of historians and indeed of others.

His new book, covering American policy towards Laos between the Geneva conferences of 1954 and 1961–2, has two thrusts, which might be roughly categorised as ‘cultural’ and ‘political’. The first is concerned with the American ‘construction’ of Laos and the Lao. Here Jacobs is at his most entertaining. He writes well of ‘Dr Tom’ and ‘Mister Pop’, and of the image of the laid-back Lao who were unwilling to fight, retarded children who were not prepared to help themselves or be helped, lethargic and party-loving. Jacobs also offers some telling images of the Americans, most memorably of the pompous ambassador J. Graham Parsons, and, more broadly, of the obsession with the Cold War and the way it provided a lens through which to view the Lao and the international situation in general. Neutralism was as unacceptable to the Americans as the failure to take sides was incomprehensible to Mao. The two images combined in a disastrously simplistic policy towards Laos.

That is Jacobs' second focus. He gives some account of the policies of the Eisenhower Administration and of the changes that Kennedy made. It would be hard to obtain as clear a narrative from his book as that provided on a grander scale by Arthur Dommen, for example. Jacobs' prime intention is rather to argue that the ‘cultural’ attitudes he describes inflected the political approaches adopted even at the highest levels, not merely those of Americans who read their newspapers or listened on the radio to Dr Tom and Mr Pop. He is, he tells us, interpreting US policy towards Laos ‘as a product of cultural prejudices rather than logistical considerations or other ostensibly more salient imperatives’ (p. 7). Even those sympathetic to the Lao, like young Joel Halpern, were unable to shed a patronising attitude. Kennedy's decision for neutralisation, Jacobs suggests, was primarily based on his conviction that the Lao were ‘incorrigible pacifists’ (p. 250).

Certainly American leaders were quite unwilling to appreciate the most sophisticated Lao they met, Prince Souvanna Phouma, or to make a realistic assessment of his policies. He was a neutralist: he had to be distrusted. Neutrality was the only option for Laos if it was to be kept intact, independent and at peace. But the message, as Jacobs puts it, ‘never got through’ (p. 18). Indeed Parsons, later assistant secretary of state, worked against Souvanna, who bitterly complained that the former was ‘the most reprehensible and nefarious of men, … the ignominious architect of [the] disastrous American policy toward Laos’ (quoted, p. 102). But the Kennedy Administration was unwilling to accept Souvanna as prime minister, and most unwilling to drop the man the CIA had supported, Phoumi Nosavan. Indeed, after neutralisation the United States — while complaining of the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese — retained its connection with Phoumi, not to mention Vang Pao and the Hmong whom the United States had organised and armed under Eisenhower and to an even greater extent under his successor.

Jacobs makes his point, but other points might be made, even if ‘theory’ and ‘model-building’ are, happily, eschewed. It was not merely a matter of cultural attitude. It was also a question of the structure of policy-making. Throughout this era US policy was made in the context of a daily assessment of public opinion, and in particular that of the press that then had a more prominent role than it does now. If Eisenhower seemed lackadaisical over Laos to an extent that challenges recent attempts to develop a more positive re-evaluation of his presidency, he then told his successor that it was the chief task he had to face. But Kennedy was in any case acutely conscious of ‘public opinion’, as well as of the pressure of what Gareth Porter calls the ‘national security bureaucracy’. Washington policy-making seemed still to resemble what it was back in the days of FDR: in Lord Halifax's assessment, ‘a disorderly day's grouse-shooting’.

Nor was its execution other than chaotic. United States' aid policy, as Jacobs makes clear once again, was absurdly counter-productive. Win Brown, a better ambassador than Parsons, liked to think he was in charge of the Americans in Laos, but he was mistaken. The CIA was running a different line, and continued to do so, though Kennedy enjoined interagency collaboration at the embassy level, and the State Department liked to think of ‘country teams’.

Getting out is more difficult than getting in. Kennedy told Averell Harriman he wanted to get out of Laos, and Harriman worked towards that by persuading himself he could rely — as if he were back in Moscow in the Second World War — on the Russians. The President, as Jacobs points out, felt that he had to increase the commitment to Diem in order to show that the United States was not giving mainland Southeast Asia up. It was to be much more difficult to get out of South Vietnam, and Nixon and Kissinger can hardly be said to have done it well.

‘The American attempt to try to make an anti-Communist bastion out of Laos was never physically or objectively possible’, the British ambassador John Addis concluded. ‘We couldn't have got out with anything so good as the 1961 ceasefire and the 1962 settlement, such as they are, if we had all been behind the Graham Parsons line, and we could have got something much better if the Americans had seen reason earlier.’ Jacobs says almost nothing about the British or indeed other powers. That foreshortens the perspective even on American policy, let alone neutralism. Lord Home — strangely emerging doubly mistitled on p. 250 as ‘British foreign minister Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home’ — is not given the credit he deserves for getting the Geneva conference started in May 1961 in face of an obtuse Rusk. Regarding Harriman as the conference's ‘catalytic figure’ (p. 255] downgrades Malcolm MacDonald, as my own account of the conference suggests. Over Laos the British were able to play the moderating role that they were unable to play over Vietnam.