![]() ![]() ![]() Would America support their liberation or assist a wartime ally France.? Our Parisian caller, Ho Chi Minh, who was leading the insurgency, hoped not. The people of Vietnam were already fighting for their freedom. Led by General de Gaulle, France sought to resume its empire and reclaim its treasure Vietnam. At the close of World War II, two great countries, France and the United States were thwarting the birth of a third, Vietnam. Wilson did not receive him.Įmbers of War is the story of just such diplomatic missteps leading to war. ![]() ![]() Encouraged, Ho carried a petition, “Demands of the Vietnamese People” calling for just such self-rule. Wilson was, after all, in town redrawing the global map after World War I, claiming to be in favor of self-rule for citizens who had been colonists of former empires. That man was Ho Chi Minh, and he intended to make a plea to Woodrow Wilson, the American president. In 1919 Paris, a slight young man rented a morning coat to be properly dressed to make a diplomatic call. Logevall, with a storyteller’s voice, takes us step by fatal step from the end of World War II through the ravages of the Vietnam War. They are many and the men involved are familiar and not entirely admirable mid-twentieth notables. To a remarkable degree it is a book starring its sources. Embers of War by Frederik Logevall, the sad but sobering book that won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in history, is an intricate study of how the Vietnam War came to be. ![]()
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