![]() ![]() Logevall takes us inside the councils of warand gives us a seat at the conference tables where peace talks founder. In between come years of political, military, and diplomatic maneuvering and miscalculation, as leaders on all sides embark on a series of stumbles that makes an eminently avoidable struggle a bloody and interminable reality. It concludes in 1959, with a Viet Cong ambush on an outpost outside Saigon and the deaths of two American officers whose names would be the first to be carved into the black granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Embers of War opens in 1919 at the Versailles Peace Conference, where a young Ho Chi Minh tries to deliver a petition for Vietnamese independence to President Woodrow Wilson. ![]() How did it happen? Tapping into newly accessible diplomatic archives in several nations and making full use of the published literature, distinguished scholar Fredrik Logevall traces the path that led two Western nations to lose their way in Vietnam. ![]() For France, the defeat marked the effective end of her colonial empire, while for America the war left a gaping wound in the body politic that remains open to this day. Fought over a period of three decades, the conflict drew in all the world's powers and saw two of themfirst France, then the United Statesattempt to subdue the revolutionary Vietnamese forces. The struggle for Vietnam occupies a central place in the history of the twentieth century. ![]()
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