Fredrik Logevall's "Embers of War": Exploring the Collapse of an Empire and the Creation of America's Vietnam

P-A: This must be the definitive walkthrough of not only the Vietnam war but the entire 20th century history of of Vietnam and especially Ho Chi Minh.
The shortsightedness and brutality of a France, USA and indeed most European countries is incredibly well documented and analyzed. The Vietnamese leadership and their actions during 30-40 years are described well but quite objectively.
A tour de force by a writer who obviously knows the subject extremely well.
A must read - even if it is a very long read - for anyone wanting to understand Vietnam, the futility of colonialism and how impossible it is to keep a population from fighting for freedom.
Very thought provoking at this very moment in time.

United Kingdom on Feb 28, 2022

AA: This is a great revelatory book describing how the US involvement in Vietnam started very early on and served multiple purposes. The 'domino theory' was just the latest in grand arguments underpinning the reasoning to stay. Perhaps more important was the US decision to support the French and relieve them of pressure to enable them to contribute to European Defence. On the great debate whether Vietnam was 'necessary', this book places itself in the No-camp. It drives home its argument well but could have benefitted from a broader analytical framework and considered other viewpoints on the war's significance. For example, it should have included Lee Kuan Yew's comments that the US support to South Vietnam, enabled the Asian Tiger economies to rise in the decades afterward.

Nonetheless, it is a pleasurable book to read and anyone with an interest in US foreign and security policy, international diplomacy and the Vietnam war more broadly should consider buying and reading it. It certainly provides perspective on current challenges facing the transatlantic alliance, Presidential leadership and the uncertainties of intelligence assessments.

United Kingdom on Apr 16, 2018

Samuel W. Coulbourn: America’s long war in Viet Nam left its mark on our country in many ways. Not only some 58,000 men and women died in that long war, but countless others were permanently scarred.
At home the country was deeply divided, in a way that those who had lived through World War II could not envision.
Fredrik Logevall has produced an excellent history of Indochina that takes the reader through World War II, and then those years from 1945 when the Japanese who had occupied the country pulled out, and the French tried to return. They did return, but the Vietnamese had had a bellyful of colonialism under the French, and they felt ready to throw them out.
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met in the early stages of World War II, even before the U.S. had entered the war aboard two naval warships in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland and worked out an agreement for the allied nations about the world after the war. That was the Atlantic Charter. One principal statement was a declaration that colonies all over the world would be given the right of self-determination after the war.
Roosevelt felt strongly about this, but Churchill agreed simply to get American cooperation at a time...

United States on Aug 27, 2015

H. Rogers: A well researched and well written account of American and French involvement in Vietnam (primarily 1945-59). I had always thought that France's involvement in Vietnam post 1945 was due to a failure to recognise that the days of empire were over. While this may have been true initially the author conclusively proves that in the latter years the only factors keeping the French in Vietnam were American support and pressure, with the latter coming from the US administration's dogmatic belief in the now defunct domino theory (Vietnam was seen as the front line in preventing the communist hordes sweep through Asia)and, after the Korean stalemate, to deflect criticism at home that they were 'losing' Asia. Eisenhower came very close to committing US ground forces into Vietnam in 53/54 and the UK deserves some credit for effectively preventing this by refusing to join the coalition of countries that Eisenhower required to justify ground forces. Eden was wary of the vietnam situation and did not subscribe to the domino theory- if only he had been around to advise Blair on Iraq. In another parallel with Iraq a constant theme of the book is the US administration's token understanding of both...

United Kingdom on Mar 13, 2013

Christopher Powell, PhD: Fredrik Logevall's Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's War in Vietnam is an outstanding piece of scholarship on the subject of France's war in Indochina and how it became America's war in Vietnam. It is also an exceedingly well-written piece of literature. Avoiding theoretical constructs and academic language, Logevall has provided a first-rate history that will appeal to scholars and the general public alike. His accessible writing style makes what initially appears to be a daunting tome (740 pages of text and 76 pages of notes) a hard-to-put-down, engaging read. Although a bit shy on Vietnamese sources, the author has synthesized generations of secondary literature and combined it with the most recent archival research on both sides of the Atlantic in English and French. He takes his title from a quote by the late David Halberstam, who covered America's war extensively in its early years. America's intervention took place, said the journalist, "in the embers of another colonial war" (xxi). But whereas Halberstam argued that Americans were prisoners of the French experience, Logevall argues that the United States played an important role in shaping...

Canada on Dec 05, 2012

J. McNeill: I have a large collection of books on the war in Southeast Asia, almost 700 as a matter of fact, and I am immodest enough to consider myself a fairly serious and knowledgable student of the conflict; yet Professor Logevall's books exposed gaps in my knowledge. This book is a first class study of the collapse of the French Indo-Chinese empire and the inexorable slide towards US commitment to military involvement in Southeast Asia. As with many of the books I have read on the subject Logevall exposes the French disconnection from reality, clinging to an outmoded Imperial past and in one breath excorating America yet in the next making extravagant demands for US support. Professor Logevall also places the conflict within the larger panorama of the growing Cold War; essential to any understanding of the Vietnam War. The accounts of the political machinations in great places among the great men of the age, judging how the final disposition of Vietnam would be of benefit or not to their position, is both fascinating and disturbing.

This is not a dry impenetrable tome rather an immensely readable account of the opening shots in a tragedy that engulfed America and Vietnam; and the...

United Kingdom on Dec 01, 2012

A. T. Lawrence: The twilight of colonialism -- during which the French really did very little to improve the lot of the Vietnamese other than educate a small percentage of the indigenous population to assist them in their exploitation of that Asian country. Under the Truman Administration, when colonialism was on the wane in India, the United States did not want to alienate the French, whose help was needed to confront the Soviet threat in Europe. It was also believed by U.S. officials that even if the Vietnamese were to obtain independence from France, they would be susceptible to Chinese and Soviet communist influence. Hence the United States, under President Truman, lost an opportunity to adopt a softer tack in its dealings with Vietnam at the end of WW II. Fredrik Logevall thoroughly and extensively covers these issues in a masterly style. In the days of the French, there was as yet no North or South Vietnam. The country would only be split in half, as a result of the Geneva Conference of 1954, following the battle of Dien Bien Phu, when the defeated French were striving to extricate themselves from their debacle, while saving what little face remained to them; each half contained 16 million...

United States on Aug 27, 2012