Embers Of War By Fredrik Logevall Sparknotes

In Embers of War, Fredrik Logevall offers an exhaustive review of the demise of the French colony in Indochina. Logevall is a Swedish-American author and college professor who has published several books about American foreign policy. Embers of War is his sixth book dedicated to the Cold War era, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2013 (“Fredrik Logevall,” 2015). Many of the views expressed in Logevall’s book would be described as moderately left of center on the political spectrum, though the tone of his book and the points he raises are well within the mainstream of contemporary thought about Vietnam and the Cold War.
Logevall sees the war as a disaster, as do most with knowledge of the topic. He places plenty of responsibility for the outcome on American foreign policy – a view that is also widely shared. His focus on the French as the primary source of the conflict and its disastrous outcome is the most novel aspect of the book, and is the likely reason that this book won the Pulitzer. Logevall’s primary thesis is that the situation in French Indochina never should have escalated into war, and the French could have seized on any of numerous opportunities to avoid
Using Ho’s own words, augmented by quotes from other leaders, Logevall advances the opinion that Ho was more concerned with evicting the French from Vietnam, preferably through peaceful means, than he was with aligning the country with the Soviet Union (or later, Mao’s regime in China). If only the world powers at the time had joined to end colonialism, the argument goes, the Vietnamese people would have remained friendly and cooperative with the West. Here too, Ho’s own statements about freedom and his admiration for the United States are used heavily in support of Logevall’s