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  • Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam
  • Marianna P. Sullivan
Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam. By Kathryn C. Statler . Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8131-2440-7. Map. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xii, 378. $45.00.

The United States and France have always had a complicated alliance relationship. During the 1960s, French President Charles de Gaulle charged that the United States ignored his advice about Vietnam because it had long sought to replace France there. Replacing France, Kathryn C. Statler's valuable study of United States policy towards Vietnam in the 1950s, demonstrates how much truth there was to President de Gaulle's belief.

Professor Statler does much more in this well-documented and compelling book. Using archives in France and the United States, she provides a nuanced and detailed analysis of how the disjointed collaboration and obvious competition between the two allies complicated their policies in Indochina and in Europe. Her goal is to explain how the United States took over in Vietnam through the prism of alliance politics. The study is divided into three parts: the dénouement of France's role in Indochina culminating in the 1954 Geneva Accords; the crucial two years after Geneva when the United States replaced France in Vietnam; and France's post-1956 efforts to retain some influence even as the United States built its own Vietnamese colony.

In the first period, the United States repeatedly linked its support for the French in Vietnam with France's ratification of the proposed European Defense Community (EDC). Statler speculates about breaking the linkage which, she writes, "might have made the French more amenable both to the EDC and to American suggestions regarding Indochina" (p. 82). Thus, the discord between the allies was not only a question of different goals and strategies; it was also a result of misunderstanding and misperception.

During the second period, allied disagreements concerned the future leadership of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam and the Geneva provision for elections in 1956 to reunify the two halves of the country. Professor Statler develops her argument with close attention to all the various players and to tensions within the U.S. policy-making establishment as well as French-American rivalries. Indeed, her discussion of the importance to President Eisenhower of American Congressional and public opinion in the 1950s provides some contrast with contemporary circumstances.

One interesting theme which is treated in both the second and third parts of the book is France's doomed effort to retain influence in both North and South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese were counting on French success in replacing Diem so that elections to reunite the country foreseen in the Geneva Accords for 1956 might move forward. She concludes that "French influence, or lack thereof, rather than Soviet and Chinese influence was the determining factor in why Hanoi was not able to force the elections issue" (p. 174). In fact, during the third period (1956-60), France acquiesced in the establishment of an American colony in South Vietnam. [End Page 288]

This detailed, thoroughly researched book is a pleasure to read. The prose is so lively that the reader progresses easily through this complicated story. Professor Statler offers her judgments after carefully laying out the available evidence and citing the work of scholars with conflicting interpretations. In its depth of scholarship, careful analysis and clear prose, Replacing France is an important complement to previous scholarship on the origins of the United States commitment in Vietnam.

Marianna P. Sullivan
The College of New Jersey
Ewing, New Jersey
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