The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans: Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam (review)

The dusk jacket claims that Arthur J. Dommen's book "promises to be the definitive political history of Indochina during the Franco-American era." If bulk of text and extent of endnotes equate with "definitive," then this book qualifies. There are 1,011 pages of text with 4,090 references that add another 129 pages. The extent of Dommen's research, primarily in U.S. archives and supplemented by interviews, is impressive. Yet the study is less a definitive history than an extended argument and narrative in which the sovereign aspirations of non-Communist nationalists among the Laotians, Cambodians, and Vietnamese were betrayed first by the French and then by the Americans. Citing Thucydides, Dommen offers a "chronicling of events from the mid-nineteenth century to sovereignty" (p. ix) with retrospective judgments ("Looking Back") along the way. The author has a story to tell and a thesis to argue.

Treatment of the French presence is greatly overshadowed by that of the Americans from 1945 to 1973, which is the author's preoccupation. Relying upon the work of French specialists, Dommen sketches the historical background of French conquest and rule to the eve of World War II in the first forty-six pages with Laos as the main focus. The story of French mismanagement and deception picks up with the wartime Decoux regime (1940-45), for which the author finds some sympathy, and he continues into the Fourth Republic whose leaders are criticized for failing to sustain the non-Communist nationalists. Both Pierre Mendès-France and Jean Sainteny are "two-faced" in negotiating France's exit (pp. 278-79) from Indochina.

The Americans enter at the conclusion of the Second World War, and American involvement occupies most of the narrative. Using records at the U.S. National Archives, including Purple intercepts and State Department dispatches, Dommen presents a story of American duplicity. The documentation is extensive, even overwhelming, creating an impression that the author has left no document unturned. Every message major or minor gets recorded. The fate of Indochina is determined by exchanges between Washington and American diplomats negotiating in Saigon and Paris. Non-Communist nationalists are betrayed again, this time by American pusillanimity and capitulation. The Communists, having cleverly appropriated the mantle of nationalism, prevail.

Although the lengthy negotiation process and maneuvers to eliminate leaders who are unpopular with American representatives are minutely detailed, the reader is given little insight into the realities of the guerrilla war that the Communists conducted or the counterinsurgency tactics of the French, Americans, and their Indochinese allies. Dommen presents a chronicle of negotiations, not of the war that raged during much of this period. Finally, the voices of ordinary Vietnamese or Laotians are missing. For that perspective the reader will have to look elsewhere. History is seen from the top down.