Abstract
In May 1972 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held yet another set of hearings on the seemingly endless Vietnam War. The committee was still seeking to understand the ‘origin and evolution of American involvement in Vietnam’, the chair, Senator William J. Fulbright, explained.’ The invited witnesses included academics with widely different viewpoints on the American war in Vietnam, who all agreed, however, that the problem began when President Roosevelt — or his immediate successor, President Truman — abandoned a supposed commitment to postwar independence for the French colony. They did not concur on why the reversal took place. The reason why policymakers made that fateful decision, the Roosevelt expert Arthur M. Schlesinger maintained, was the precarious and chancy situation in Europe immediately after the war. ‘The real reason’, he told the committee, ‘why we acquiesced in the British-French imperial determination … to put the French back … was because of our concern with the French situation in Europe. … In other words, our policy in Vietnam was based, in that period, essentially on European reasons rather than on Asian reasons.’2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
US Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearings: Causes, Origins and Lessons of the Vietnam War, 92nd cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, 1973), p. v.
Steven Hugh Lee, Outposts of Empire: Korea, Vietnam, and the Origins of the Cold War in Asia (Montreal, 1995). This outstanding monograph provides a well-argued case for an activist American policy, and a consistent one.
Draft Memorandum, 9 July 1954, reprinted in William Appleman Williams, et al. (eds), America in Vietnam: a Documentary History (New York, 1985), pp. 166–8.
Diary entry, 27 November 1942, in Geoffrey C. Ward (ed.), Closest Companion: the Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship between Franklin Roosevelt and MargaretSuckley (Boston, 1995), p. 187.
Warren F. Kimball, Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill and the Second World War (New York, 1997), concludes: ‘Roosevelt was convinced that the pressure of nationalism in the European empires was the most serious threat to postwar peace’ (p. 301).
Diary entry, 27 October 1942, in Beatrice Bishop Berle and Travis Beal Jacobs (eds), Navigating the Rapids, 1918–1971: from the Papers of AdolfA. Berle (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1973), pp. 421–2.
Elliott Roosevelt, As He Saw It (New York, 1946), p. 116. From the time it was published, Elliott Roosevelt’s account of his father’s deep dislike of European imperialism, and especially FDR’s supposed suspicion of British machinations to hold on to every part of every empire lest their own be threatened, has been denounced as inaccurate in detail and exaggerated in conclusions. Subsequent documentary evidence from various archives and memoirs has, however, strengthened confidence in Elliott’s reportage of his father’s attitudes.
Kimball, Forged in War, p. 300. See also Albert E. Kersten, ‘Wilhelmina and Franklin D. Roosevelt: a Wartime Relationship’, in Cornelius A. van Minnen and John F. Sears (eds), FDR and His Contemporaries: Foreign Perceptions of an American President (New York, 1992), pp. 85–96.
See Lloyd C. Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Madison, 1964), pp. 275–80, for a brief discussion of the debates at the Atlantic Charter Conference in 1941, and the debates over Article VII of the Lend-Lease Agreement which committed London to wartime negotiations over postwar trade and the removal of empire preferences. For a recent account that deals with the British predicament, see
John Charmley, Churchill’s Grand Alliance (New York, 1995), pp. 89–101.
Anthony D. Biddle to Roosevelt, 27 March 1942, and Roosevelt to Queen Wilhelmina, 6 April 1942, both in The Papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York, PSF, The Netherlands, 1942. The Dutch Prime Minister, Dr Gerbrandy, who conveyed this delicate request, was at the same time expressing his hope to British officials that the centre of gravity in the Pacific War would not shift to Washington from London, out of concern for the future of the East Indies. See Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: the United States, Britain, and the War against Japan, 1941–1945 (New York, 1978), p. 219.
See Warren F. Kimball, ‘A Victorian Tory: Churchill, the Americans, and Self-Determination’, in William Roger Louis (ed.), More Adventures with Britannia (New York, 1998).
Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (New York, 1979), pp. 377–8.
Cordell Hull, Memoirs (2 vols, London, 1948), II, p. 1595.
Notes of Roosevelt-Molotov Meeting, 1 June 1942, in Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: an Intimate History (New York, 1950), p. 573. This remarkable book, published so soon after the war, would provide the most complete history of American policy for years to come, and still bears rereading no longer for documents once unavailable elsewhere, but for a feel of the atmosphere.
See Lloyd C. Gardner, Approaching Vietnam: from World War II through Dienbienphu (New York, 1988), p. 35.
Robert Murphy, Diplomat among Warriors (New York, 1964), p. 192.
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearings: Causes, Origins and Lessons of the Vietnam War, pp. 156–7. See also Archimedes L. A. Patti, Why Vietnam? Prelude to America’s Albatross (Berkeley, 1980) for another account by a former OSS officer stationed in Vietnam.
Robert J. McMahon, ‘Truman and the Roots of U.S. Involvement in Indochina, 1945–1953’, in David L. Anderson, Shadows on the White House: Presidents & the Vietnam War, 1945–1975 (Manhattan, 1993), pp. 27–8.
McMahon, ‘Truman and the Roots of U.S. Involvement’, p. 32. And see Andrew J. Rotter, The Path to Vietnam: Origins of the American Commitment to Southeast Asia (Ithaca, 1987), p. 141.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2000 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gardner, L.C. (2000). How We ‘Lost’ Vietnam, 1940–54. In: Ryan, D., Pungong, V. (eds) The United States and Decolonization. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333977958_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333977958_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-40644-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-333-97795-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)