Fredrik Logevall
Ebook
041414
Ho Chi Min did everything he could do to ensure his country"s independence. He appealed to Wilson after WWI And Truman after WWII all to no avail. Inspite of our tendency against colonoialism we would not help him acheive independency. He turned to the communists and thats when out benign neglect turned to all out hostility.
12.9% Truman blew it. He lime some many others at the time had his eye on Russia and what the picture was going to be post war. And inspite of Ho Chi Min using parts of our Declaration of Independence, The Truman team goes with France and the old colonial model. This decision would have grave consequences for all involved down the road.
13.5% Lovely description here of Saigon the "Paris of the east" circa 1900's. It describes the Rue Catinat with the big Continental hotel at one end and the other the Majestic.
14.1% first American death in Viet Nam: 1945
"Peter Dewey was the first of nearly sixty thousand Americans to be killed in Vietnam. His body was never found, and the French and Viet Minh accused each other of being responsible for the murder. Washington reacted to the killing by scaling back the OSS presence and activities in Saigon. Before he left for the airport on that final day, Dewey had summarized his thinking in a report: “Cochinchina is burning, the French and British are finished here, and we [the United States] ought to clear out of Southeast Asia.”54.
15.8% “I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life.”
Ho chi min on the deal that lead to Vietnamese recognition.
19.1% " Whatever date one chooses for the start of the First Vietnam War—September 1945, with the outbreak of fighting in Cochin China, or November–December 1946, with the conflagration in Tonkin—by the start of 1947 there was fighting throughout Vietnam."
24.7% America decides to get involved.
The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made with a new int
Walter Isaacson, Evan Thomas
Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department
Dean acheson
The Truman Doctrine was an international relations policy set forth by the U.S. President Harry Truman in a speech[1] on March 12, 1947, which stated that the U.S. would support Greece and Turkey with economic and military aid to prevent them from falling into the Soviet sphere.[2] Historians often consider it as the start of the Cold War, and the start of the containment policy to stop Soviet expansion.[3] Truman pledged the US to contain in Europe and elsewhere and impelled the US to support any nation with both military and economic aid if its stability was threatened by communism or the Soviet Union. The Truman Doctrine became the foundation of the president's foreign policy and placed the U.S. in the role of global policeman. As Foner reminds us, the Truman Doctrine "set a precedent for American assistance to anticommunist regimes throughout the world, no matter how undemocratic, and for the creation of a set of global military alliances directed against the Soviet Union" (1st edition, p. 781; 2nd edition, p. 844)
This Truman Doctrine becomes the law of the land.
24.8% So keep in mind now that this Ho Chi Min had done everything he could to convince the western powers to let his country be free. Only after all those options were exhausred did he flirt with the communists. And to the US this was unforgivable.
24.9 " Charles Reed, the former consul general in Saigon who had penned the “dead-end alley” memo in January and who continued in the spring to voice deep pessimism regarding the prospects in Indochina."
25% " Newsweek concluded that Ho might be “more of a Vietnamese nationalist right now than a Communist stooge,” but Acheson wasn’t buying."
34.2% " IN LATER YEARS, GREENE WOULD INSIST THAT HE HAD GOOD REASON to believe that the CIA was involved in the actual January 9 bomb attacks. Wasn’t it a little too convenient, he asked in his memoirs, that Life happened to have a photographer right there on the scene? “The Life photographer at the moment of the explosion was so well placed that he was able to take an astonishing and horrifying photograph which showed the body of a trishaw driver still upright after his legs had been blown off. This photograph was reproduced in an American propaganda magazine published in Manila over the caption ‘The work of Ho Chi Minh,’
Intresting....
44.7% With troops.already at battle stations in Dien Ben Phu, The superpowers sit down to.a conference on world affairs.
" Regarding superpower relations, Eisenhower generated nervous smiles from the Europeans with his graphic description of the new, post-Stalin Soviet Union. Russia, he declared, was “a woman of the streets, and whether her dress was new, or just the old one patched, it was certainly the same whore underneath.” America intended to drive her off her present “beat” into the back streets."
Holy shit Ike said that? I guess we really hated the Russians.
45.5% Monday morning quarterbacks wonder in the realm of what if history. What if Navarre had called retreat in Dien Bien Phu?
"As a U.S. undersecretary of state would say years later, in arguing vainly against making Vietnam a large-scale American war: “No great captain has ever been blamed for a successful tactical withdrawal.” A more clueless and incorrect statement has never been ordered, preposterous! Everyone blames a retreater.
47.9% " Late in the month the Smith committee recommended, and Eisenhower approved, the dispatch of two hundred uniformed U.S. Air Force mechanics to Indochina to service American-supplied aircraft, including the new B-26s, on the understanding that “they would be used at bases where they would be secure from capture and would not be exposed to combat.” The president also agreed to send U.S. civilian pilots hired by the CIA, using planes from the agency’s proprietary airline, the Civilian Air Transport (CAT), to assist the French with air transport." This Jan 54 the first bonified American boots on the ground and this before Diem Bien Phu.
49.5% March 1954 operation "fukyu frenchie" (the attack on Dien Bien Phu begins.
50% "
Colonel Piroth fell into extreme despair. “I’m completely dishonored,” he muttered to a fellow officer. “I have guaranteed de Castries that the enemy artillery couldn’t touch us—but now we’re going to lose the battle.”58 Perhaps too he remembered his dismissive assertion to Marc Jacquet on January 26: “I have more guns than I need.” Sometime that morning of March 15, Piroth slipped away to his dugout. Being one-armed, he could not charge his pistol. He lay down on his cot, pulled the pin from a grenade with his teeth, and clutched it to his chest. De Castries initially tried to keep the circumstances of the death secret,"
66% Viet Nam is split at the 17th parallel.
Books
Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam
James A. Warren
Advice and Support: The Early Years, 1941-1960 (United States Army in Vietnam)
Ronald H. Spector
The Quiet American Graham Green
The Ugly American William J Lederer
Deliver Us From Evil Tom Dooley
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