Routledge Advances in American History. New York; London: Routledge [an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business], 2017. xvi, 251 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos.) US$160.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-138-20846-9.
Frank Cain’s America’s Vietnam War and its French Connection provides a detailed narrative history of US policy in Vietnam during the early phase of American involvement, from the French return to Indochina in 1945 to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Making use of primary source material drawn from the British and American national archives, Cain’s study explores the deepening of the American commitment under the Truman, Eisenhower and, to a lesser extent, Kennedy administrations; a commitment that made it more difficult—though not impossible—for future US policy makers to avoid war in Vietnam.
The book is arranged into sixteen chronological chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the end of World War II and France’s recolonization of Indochina. Chapters 3 to 6 examine the failed negotiations between France and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) led by Ho Chi Minh, the outbreak of the Franco-Viet Minh War and early French difficulties in the conflict. Chapter 7 reveals the importance of Mao Zedong’s communist victory in China and the French establishment of an anti-communist Vietnamese government led by the former emperor Bao Dai in enticing the Truman administration to lend military and economic assistance to the French in 1950. Chapters 8 to 11 document the expanding assistance the United States provided to the French as their European ally struggled to subdue the Viet Minh and construct an anti-communist state capable of rivalling Ho’s DRV. Chapters 12 to 15 detail the battle for Dien Bien Phu, the negotiations at Geneva that brought an end to the Franco-Viet Minh War and the American decision to support Ngo Dinh Diem as leader of South Vietnam. Chapters 15 and 16 provide a succinct overview of the turbulent US-Diem relationship that ended in 1963 with his removal and murder in an American-supported coup.
The book’s detailed narrative will act as a useful reference work for researchers and students, acquainting readers with the key actors, developments, deliberations, and decisions of the First Indochina War and its aftermath. Scholars, for example, will find Cain’s work helpful in identifying the changing roles occupied by major participants, particularly on the French side, where individuals like Georges Bidault served in various capacities in Paris. In addition, the incredible detail the author offers on the type and volume of aid that the United States provided to the French, and later Diem’s government, is of great value. Cain weaves much of this information into the text, but helpfully summarizes some of this data in a series of tables. Cain’s careful mining of the available records at the US national archives in College Park is also impressive. Indeed, his footnotes will act as an excellent starting point for scholars interested in tracking down relevant material at that repository.
However, there are two major weaknesses to Cain’s book. The first is the absence of a clear argument. It is very difficult to determine the book’s central thesis or the intervention it aims to make in the historiography as Cain provides no introduction and jumps straight into a blow-by-blow narrative in his chapters. The only reference to an argument is a short and rather misleading abstract at the front of the book. The abstract contends, “That America was drawn into the Vietnam War by the French has been recognized, but rarely explored” (i). Cain oversells his intervention here. US involvement in the First Indochina War and the difficult Franco-American relationship that helped ensconce the US more deeply in Vietnam has received significant attention from a number of historians, including Fredrik Logevall (Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, Random House, 2012) and Kathryn Statler (Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam, University Press of Kentucky, 2007). The abstract’s reference to the Korean War’s significance in pushing US policy makers to divert more resources to Indochina also exaggerates Korea’s importance in Cain’s book, with the conflict receiving little more than a few pages of attention.
The second major weakness is that the book does little to advance scholarly understanding of early US involvement in Vietnam. The reasons for this are two-fold. First, the book’s main source base, files at the US national archives that have been well combed by previous scholars, and focus, a general history of early US involvement in Vietnam, are not particularly novel. While recent scholarship on the Vietnam War has shown the value of incorporating newly available Vietnamese sources, those scholars unable to speak Vietnamese have also demonstrated that there remains interpretative mileage in a US-centric approach that incorporates new and underutilized American archival material, adopts new methodological approaches, and casts light on unexplored aspects of the struggle for Indochina. See, for example, work by Meredith Lair (Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War, University of North Carolina Press, 2011) and Seth Jacobs (The Universe Unraveling: American Foreign Policy in Cold War Laos, Cornell University Press, 2012). Unfortunately, Cain’s study does not exhibit these traits. The second factor that limits this study’s contribution to the historiography is its largely descriptive approach. For the most part, Cain mobilizes primary source evidence to tell a story, not to analyze. Readers looking for new interpretations on some of the period’s most important questions, such as Franklin Roosevelt’s attitude on a French return to Indochina as his life neared its end or Dwight Eisenhower’s interest in a US intervention at Dien Bien Phu, will be disappointed.
Overall, Cain’s book is a useful reference study for students and scholars interested in tracing the deepening of the US commitment in Vietnam. However, the absence of a central argument and the book’s largely descriptive approach prevent it from packing a weightier historiographical punch.
Alex Ferguson
University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom