Cauldron of Resistance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and 1950s Southern Vietnam

Preface

Preface A few notes on language and sources are necessary at the outset.Readers familiar with theVietnamese language will notice the absence of diacritics and tone markers on Vietnamese words in the pages of this book.These marks are, of course, critical for understanding and identifyingVietnamese words. I have chosen to exclude them from the text to render it more accessible to a wider range of readers. However, several important proper names, place names, and names of organizations appear with diacritics in an appendix. This book is a product of many years of research inVietnam,France,and the United States, in the languages of those three countries. My desire to understand the complex political sphere of 1950s southern Vietnam took me first to Ho Chi Minh City, where I poured over documents from the Republic of Vietnam in the Vietnamese National Archives #2, as well as stacks of southern Vietnamese newspapers from that same period in the General Sciences Library across town.While those sources did not always illuminate the inner workings of Ngo Dinh Diem’s government,they spoke volumes of his administration’s broad objectives, methods, and processes. Just as important, they presented a full picture of the southernVietnamese civil society with which his government interacted. x Preface French sources from the colonial archives in Aix-en-Provence and the army archives inVincennes provided a surprisingly rich supplement to the materials I collected inVietnam.The collections I explored contained detailed French intelligence reports and translations of pamphlets, petitions, letters, and radio broadcasts produced by a variety of southern Vietnam’s most influential political groups.These sources revealed a great deal about the perspectives of those organizations and their leaders,as well as the views of the French officials who commented on them. The insights I gleaned from Vietnamese and French sources led me to approach American archives with a very different set of questions than I might have otherwise. Rather than simply asking how Washington made the early decisions that would eventually lead the United States to wage war in Vietnam, I wondered how American officials perceived southern Vietnam’s wide range of political actors, why they assessed them as they did,and what the consequences of their views might have been.Trips to the National Archives II in College Park, Maryland, the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, provided ample material to help me answer those questions. I could not have conducted all of this research without generous funding from a number of sources. I am deeply grateful for support from the following: the Foreign Language and Area Studies Program, the Fulbright Program, the Pacific Rim Research Program, the Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation, the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the UCSB Department of History,theWoodrowWilson National Fellowship Foundation,the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the American Council of Learned Societies,the National History Center,the Oakley Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Hellman Foundation.Williams College provided funding to support the research and publication of this book. Special thanks must be reserved for Fredrik Logevall, who was a wonderful graduate adviser and remains a remarkable colleague and friend. So many steps along the way to this book began with sage advice from Fred, from the suggestion that I learnVietnamese to the proposal that there might be something interesting to discover about Vietnam in the 1950s. I am deeply appreciative of his enduring interest in this project. I am also extremely grateful for the stimulation, support, encouragement, and critical feedback that I received from professors and fellow graduate students at the University of California at Santa Barbara.Toshi Hasegawa,Mark Elliott, Jennifer See, and John Sbardellati especially helped me see how the subject Preface xi of this book fit into the larger processes of decolonization and the Cold War in which we all share a great interest.Thanks also to Darcy Ritzau, a wonderful graduate assistant, for making sure I never fell through the administrative cracks. I could not possibly name all of the scholars who have contributed in some way to my thinking about this book. I owe a great debt to those who patiently helped me learn the Vietnamese language and navigate my way throughVietnamese archives and libraries,especially BacTran,MaiThi Thuyet Anh, Nguyen Van Kim, Nguyen Thi Huong Giang, and Nguyen Thi Hue. Bob...