And he has produced a powerful portrait of the terrible and futile French war from which Americans learned little as they moved toward their own engagement in Vietnam. Logevall, a professor of history at Cornell University, has drawn from many years of previous scholarship as well as his own. It is the most comprehensive history of that time. With “Embers of War,” he has written an even more impressive book about the French conflict in Vietnam and the beginning of the American one - from the end of World War II to the beginning of the second Vietnam War in 1959. Kennan once called “the most disastrous of all America’s undertakings over the whole 200 years of its history.”įredrik Logevall’s excellent book “Choosing War” (1999) chronicled the American escalation of the Vietnam War in the early 1960s. Over time, that decision led to what George F. Harry Truman ignored the anticolonial passages of the Atlantic Charter (just as Churchill did) and supported the continuation of imperialism among the great powers - a decision that helped the French government to restore its hold on the empire.

It called on “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.”įour years later, with the war over and Roosevelt dead, the new president entered office knowing little about how his predecessor saw the future of the world. We believe that any nationality, no matter how small, has the inherent right to its own nationhood.” That was the core of the Atlantic Charter in 1941, which both Churchill and Roosevelt signed. During the Casablanca conference in January 1943, Franklin Roosevelt spoke bitterly to his son about European imperialism: “Don’t think for a moment, Elliott, that Americans would be dying in the Pacific tonight if it hadn’t been for the shortsighted greed of the French and the British and the Dutch.” Earlier, he had spoken openly to the White House correspondents: “There has never been, there isn’t now and there never will be, any race of people on earth fit to serve as masters over their fellow men.

Embers of war by fredrik logevall