The Vietnam war's tragic prologue.

• Author: Langguth, A.J.
• Position: 'Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam' - Book review

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 E 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.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

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...