Vietnam's Lost Revolution: Ngô Đình Diệm's Failure to Build an Independent Nation, 1955–1963 by Geoffrey C. Stewart (review)

In Vietnam's Lost Revolution, Geoffrey Stewart, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Western Ontario, analyzes the Republic of Vietnam's nation-building efforts through its Civic Action Committee between 1955 and 1963. Unlike many other nation-building institutions, the Civil Action Committee worked across ministries, was highly mobile and operated at the village level. Its main purpose was to bring the 'national revolution' directly to the peasantry.

The book's six chapters study this initiative chronologically. The first explores the origins of the Civic Action Committee, which was originally to serve as a local propaganda unit preparing the ground for a 1956 referendum. Once it became clear that the vote would never take place, the Civic Action Committee had new objectives: to improve the peasant's moral and material standards. Chapter two studies the conflicting views exchanged in redefining the Committee's mission, while chapter three examines how the Committee translated its mission into practice. Chapter four covers the period 1957–59, when the Civic Action Committee provided economic and infrastructure support at the village level—the "apotheosis" of its program. The last two chapters turn to its downfall, from the resumption of the Communist insurgency to the creation of a National Liberation Front in December 1960, and underline its failure to reinvent itself into a counter-insurgency organization.

The book contributes to the scholarship which has appeared in the last fifteen years, challenging historians' earlier tendency to belittle Vietnamese actors as passive puppets. Stewart's study portrays Vietnamese as protagonists with strong views about what constituted modernity, political or social revolution, and possessing the means and methods to achieve these goals.

The author offers substantial historical context so that anybody, not just specialists, can appreciate the book. Sometimes, however, it becomes overwhelming. Chapter two, for example, starts with an anecdote and then summarizes Jessica Chapman's Cauldrons of Resistance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the 1950s Southern Vietnam (2013) and Edward Miller's Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States and the Fate of South Vietnam (2013) for more than eight pages before Stewart makes his own argument. With such an extensive reference to the existing literature, a sceptical reader might wonder: is Stewart's research really changing our understanding of nation-building in the Republic of Vietnam or is the Civic Action Committee merely a variation of a project which is already known? Even the book's title, Vietnam's Lost Revolution: Ngô Đình Diệm's Failure to Build an Independent Nation, evokes recent scholarship: to Chapman and Miller's volumes one could add, for example, Philip E. Catton's Diem's Final Failure (2002), David W. P. Elliott's The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–1975 (2007), and David Hunt's Vietnam's Southern Revolution (2008). A close reading of Stewart's study, however, should reassure the reader: the book unveils a new dimension—the grassroots level of nation-building—differentiating it previous studies, which had focused on the Republic's creation, its partnership with the United States, or the peasants' support for the Communist Revolution.

There is another strength to this book. The author did his research in archives both in North America and Vietnam. Access to the archives in Vietnam is difficult because of political, institutional and linguistic barriers. Yet Stewart uses an impressive array of the Civic Action Committee's reports. He reveals important points of disagreements between the Vietnamese government and American bodies involved in Vietnam, such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the U.S. Operation Mission (economic and technical assistance), and the U.S. Information Service. While the author has obviously read these reports 'against the grain' in order to reveal those tensions, additional sources might have been useful in order to truly appreciate the work of the...