Writing in a lucid and vivid style, Logevall captures the dramatic events and personalities - Vietnamese, American, French and others - that transformed Vietnam from a French colony to Cold War battleground. A Cornell University historian who wrote the well-received "Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam" (1999), Logevall draws on a substantial secondary literature and archival research to analyze the interplay of Vietnamese nationalism with international upheavals marked by World War II, the Cold War and the demise of Western imperialism. To revisionists, the war was eminently winnable - the Americans failed to adopt military strategies that would have exploited the enemy's weakness and strengthened America's ally.īoth orthodox and revisionist historians thus acknowledge the significance of the political-military context of American involvement.įredrik Logevall's "Embers of War" stands as the definitive history of the critical formative period from 1940 to 1960. To orthodox historians, the relative strength of the two Vietnamese sides meant that the tides of history worked against the United States, which fought a fundamentally unwinnable war. By Fredrik Logevall ( Random House 839 pages $40)Ī central issue in the contentious scholarship on the Vietnam War centers on whether American military intervention in 1965 was doomed to fail or had the potential to achieve its objectives.
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