notes to pages 204‒207 401Chapter 4
- Among many excellent accounts of the French war in Indochina (also
often referred to as the First Vietnam War), see especially Martin
Windrow, Th e Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in
Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press, 2004). On the early days
of the Vietminh and Giap, see A. J. Langguth, Our Vietnam: Th e War
1954–1975 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 51ff. - Langguth, Our Vietnam , 79–80.
- Langguth, Our Vietnam , 86.
- Langguth, Our Vietnam , 86–87.
- Herbert Y. Schandler, America in Vietnam: Th e War that Couldn’t Be Won
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefi eld, 2009), 18–19. - Langguth, Our Vietnam , 96–97, 99–100. Th e United States backed Di-
em’s decision, and it was accepted by Great Britain and the Soviet Union,
which acted as guarantors of the Geneva Agreement, in the interest of
stability. - Langguth, Our Vietnam , 101–3. Langguth reports that nearly 700 village
offi cials were assassinated by May 1958, more than a year before Hanoi
authorized an uprising in the South. Langguth, Our Vietnam , 107. - Langguth, Our Vietnam , 116, 118–19, 143, 184–85.
- For a vivid account of one such encounter, the battle of Ap Bac, see Neil
Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam
(New York: Random House, 1988). Although, strictly speaking, not all
South Vietnamese troops were part of the Army, I will use the acronym
ARVN here as a generic term to encompass all regular forces under Sai-
gon’s control. - Schandler, America in Vietnam , 21.
- Langguth, Our Vietnam , 211–15, 219–20.
- Kennedy told Senator Mike Mansfi eld, a critic of American involvement
in the war, that after he had been reelected president in 1964 he would
withdraw from Vietnam, an idea he also shared with McNamara. But
Kennedy did not suggest this to others and it seems unlikely, given the
many pressures to prevent a communist triumph that any American
leader at the time would have faced. Further, although it is true that he
would no longer need to worry about reelection, he still needed to main-
tain his political credibility to accomplish other goals. He had spoken too
often of the American commitment to preserve an independent South
Vietnam to simply walk away after 1964. See Langguth, Our Vietnam ,
208–9; Robert Dallek, “Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam: Th e Making of a
Tragedy,” Diplomatic History 20 (2) (Spring 1996): 147–62, at 148. - Langguth, Our Vietnam , 251ff.
- Langguth, Our Vietnam , 279; Schandler, America in Vietnam , 43.
- Th ere is still dispute about when NVA formations (strictly speaking,
People’s Army of Vietnam or PAVN) began to join the fi ghting in South