VIETNAM: A HISTORY

by Stanley Karnow ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 4, 1983

This companion to an upcoming, 13-part public television documentary on Vietnam has the weaknesses of TV without its visual strength--but it is nonetheless a readable digest. Karnow, a former Time/Life reporter and author of Mao and China (1972), begins his story with the French colonization of Vietnam: a century-long process touched-off by a French bishop's vision of a Christian empire in Asia, and completed by creation of the Indochinese Union in 1887. By integrating colonized intellectuals into French culture, the French helped to create an educated intelligentsia--which, in turn, gave form to the inchoate Vietnamese nationalism that had long restricted foreign control. The story of that intelligentsia, and of Ho Chi Minh in particular, Karnow handles comfortably if not innovatively. Independence was spurious, he shows, under the French puppet emperor Bao Dai. American concern arose in the context of anti-communist containment: Karnow notes that George Kennan, originator of the concept, opposed a serious American commitment to mainland Asia. Nonetheless, Congress approved a $75 million Asian slush fund, to be used as the White House chose--and this became the first of $3 billion eventually spent to aid the French. On the 1954 Geneva accords that divided Vietnam, Karnow emphasizes Soviet and Chinese pressure on the Vietnamese communists to accept partition before a political solution. As he is at pains to point out, the resulting Diem regime in the South was thoroughly corrupt and hard-hearted. Buddhist monks immolated themselves in protest: Karnow's descriptions are harrowingly accurate, though he balances the indifference of Diem's Catholic household with the calculated political savvy of the monks. Diem's assassination is seen to have come about, conventionally, from a combination of American desire to unseat Mm and mixed signals over how far the perpetrators of the coup should go. The second half of the book is devoted to the 1965-75 decade--the period from Johnson's first, massive troop commitment and Saigon's fall. Here, the story is ""objective"" and mostly pitched at a general level of decisions made and actions taken. On the ground level, noncommittally: ""The only reality about death in Vietnam was its regularity, not its causes,"" For people not looking for causes, Karnow's account--sure to have greater impact on television--is a good general map. Those in search of depth should look to its complement--by Arnold Isaacs, above.

Pub Date: Oct. 4, 1983

ISBN: 0140265473

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1983

Categories: NONFICTION