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

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. “South Vietnam:The Disquieted Americans,” Time, 25 February 1957, 34–37; Arthur J. Dommen, The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans: Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, Laos, andVietnam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 362. 2. See Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man inVietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia, 1950–1957 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 3. Mark Philip Bradley,“Making Sense of the French War:The Postcolonial Moment and the FirstVietnam War: 1945–1954,” in Mark Atwood Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall, eds., The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 39. 4. “McClintock to Department of State,” 4 July 1954, Foreign Relations of the United States (Hereafter FRUS), 1952–1954, Indochina,Vol. 13, 1783–1784. 5. See Carlyle A.Thayer, War by Other Means: National Liberation and Revolution in Vietnam 1954–1960 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989), esp. 1–67; and Pierre Asselin,“Choosing Peace: Hanoi and the Geneva Agreement on Vietnam, 1954–1955,” Journal of Cold War Studies 9:2 (spring 2007), 95–126. 6. See David F. Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side:The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921–1965 (Chapel Hill:The University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 7. Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 95; Dommen, The Indochinese Experience, 406– 423; David W. P. Elliott, The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–1975 (NewYork: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), 147. 208 Notes to Pages 9–11 8. See Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake:TheVietnamese and the Americans inVietnam (New York:Vintage Books, 1972), 90–172; Kolko, Anatomy of AWar; Robert Mann, A Grand Delusion: America’s Descent into Vietnam (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Robert D. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press), 96. Schulzinger credits Ngo Dinh Diem with being honest and a sincere nationalist, but personally unsuited to lead the nation. Moreover, he claims that the U.S. strategy of nation building in Vietnam was doomed from the outset because it would be impossible to create a separate state in what was a single nation; James M. Carter, Inventing Vietnam:The United States and State Building, 1954–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Carter discounts Ngo Dinh Diem’s role entirely and claims that American state building in Vietnam was destined to fail, arguing,“In reality,‘SouthVietnam,’ to the extent that it came into being at all, was a failed American invention” (13). 9. Bradley,“Making Sense of the French War,” 20. 10. Brian VanDeMark and Robert McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). Prominent historians of the Vietnam Wars echo McNamara’s claims about the failure among both policymakers and scholars to uncover the Vietnamese sides of the story, and note that historians have only recently begun to take up the task. See George Herring, “‘Peoples Quite Apart’: Americans, South Vietnamese, and the War in Vietnam,” Diplomatic History 14:1 (January 1990), 1–23; Fredrik Logevall, “Bringing in the ‘Other Side’: New Scholarship on theVietnam Wars,” Journal of ColdWar Studies 3:3 (fall 2001), 77–93; and Edward Miller, “War Stories: The Taylor-Buzzanco Debate and How We Think about theVietnam War,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1:1–2 (2006), 453–484. 11. Andrew J. Rotter,“Chronicle of a War Foretold:The United States andVietnam, 1945– 1954,” in Lawrence and Logevall, The FirstVietnamWar, 284. 12. Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken:The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 13. Mark Bradley and Robert K. Brigham, “Vietnamese Archives and Scholarship on the Cold War Period: Two Reports,” Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) Working Paper #7 (Washington, DC, September 1993); for an updated overview of archives in South Vietnam see Matthew Masur and Edward Miller, “Saigon Revisited: Researching South Vietnam’s Republican Era (1954–1975) at Archives and Libraries in Ho Chi Minh City,” CWIHP (September 5, 2006). 14. Among this first cut are Thayer, War by Other Means; Robert K. Brigham, Guerrilla Diplomacy: The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the Vietnam War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Mark Philip Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam 1919–1950 (Chapel Hill:The University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 15. Edward Garvey Miller,“Grand Designs:Vision,Power,and Nation Building in America...