There was a solemn mood around the hospital bed as the priest was asked to administer the last rites to JFK, his brother Robert looking painfully on. Dallas, 1963? No, the year is 1951 and the future president, fresh from an orientation tour of Vietnam, lies perilously close to death in a hospital bed in Okinawa, the Addison disease that shadowed his life threatening to end it well before an assassin’s bullet. Tantalising, this is just one of countless vignettes that occupy Fredrik Logevall excellent Pulitzer Prize-winning book Embers Of War.
It is John F Kennedy’s encounter with Indochina that opens Embers, when the unwinding of the French Indochina mission civilisatrice was being played out against blood, sweat, tears and the diplomatic machinations of the world’s powers. And while these events culminated in an uneasy peace – including Vietnam’s partition along the 17th parallel – it is precisely in these, Logevall argues, that the origins of America’s Vietnam War lie.
At 700+ pages and an additional 77 pages of footnotes, Embers is a BIG read, but as its size suggests it’s also an exhaustive work of scholarship written, predominantly, in the narrative style of ‘great men, grand events’. This is especially so in the last third of the book, where attention falls on the events before and after the Geneva peace agreement, which ended the first Indochinese War in July 1954.
Yet arguably the most enticing aspect of Embers are the stories of the ‘little’ events and people, who provided the colour, intrigue and drama that make this period of history so unique. Thus we read about Allison Thomas, an American agent who parachuted into northern Vietnam in 1945 and collaborated with Ho Chi Minh’s guerrillas in operations against the Japanese. And Tom Dooley, an American medic whose accounts of working with Vietnamese refugees, published in the book Deliver Us From Evil, convinced Middle America of the horrors of the Vietnamese communists, only for the work to be revealed as a fabrication. And the journalist Seymour Topping, who introduced Graham Green to the opium dens of Saigon; the author of The Quiet American thereafter developing a taste for both these and the city’s brothels.
If the book has a fault, however, it’s the attention given to half of the world’s population: women. Their role and significance are largely absent from the pages of Embers (although Logevall is smitten by the fact the French forces at Dien Bien Phu included a team of prostitutes, mentioning it more than once in his description of the siege). Perhaps this is a reflection of the way events were recorded at the time, but Logevall could have acknowledged this fact and done more to introduce the role of women into his work. I also remain unconvinced by his largely uncritical assessment of Ho Chi Minh, who emerges from Embers as a man of few flaws or weaknesses.
Cambodia features sparingly in Embers, although it was unwillingness by the country’s delegates at the 1954 talks that nearly scuttled the entire peace agreement. Instead, drawing from Logevall’s research, one can see how, by the early 1950s, the French were desperate to throw their entire Indochine experiment under the bus. This suggests that the credit fawned on Norodom Sihanouk for negotiating Cambodia’s independence from its colonial power, in 1953, was due to these circumstances as much as the young king’s diplomatic skills.
At the end of the first Indochinese War, 110,000 French combatants were dead or missing (not all of them were native French, a large number had been drawn from colonial territories). This is nearly double the number of Americans who died in the Second Indochinese War. Yet despite this difference, the events of the first conflict have failed to generate the same volume of quality research. With Embers Of War, Logevall has gone a long way to righting this balance. Strongly recommended.
Embers of War: The Fall Of An Empire And The Making Of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall, is available now at Monument Books for $24