Embers of War

Placing the Vietnam War in a global context, Logevall (John S. Knight Professor of International Studies, Cornell Univ.; Choosing War: The Last Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam) concludes that it was not an unavoidable quagmire. (Indeed, France, from its own experience, had warned that the war was unwinnable and advised U.S pursuit of diplomatic rather than military solutions.) His engrossing investigation begins in 1919 with an idealistic Ho Chi Minh seeking Vietnam's freedom from the French and concludes with the 1959 deaths of the first two American soldiers in the second Indochina War. In between, Logevall vividly recounts the demise of French imperialism in Southeast Asia and the emergence of a war-torn Vietnam during the Cold War. The highlight is the author's recounting of the 1954 Geneva Conference, which brought the ruthless and despised Ngo Dinh Diem to power in South Vietnam and made inevitable the permanent partitioning of Vietnam and the second Indochina War.