"Dreaming Different Dreams than the French but Walking in the Same Footsteps"

"Eisenhower has long been admired for his refusal to go to war in Vietnam. But Logevall makes clear that he was far from a peacekeeper. He did not want to send American troops into Vietnam, but he was also determined not to allow South Vietnam to fall. For a time, Diem seemed a powerful and successful leader, able to stop any efforts by the Viet Minh to conquer the South. And for a time, Diem was a hero to Americans—revered by leaders in Washington and by much of the American public. But the more success he had, the more resolved Ho was to undermine him. By 1959, Viet Minh soldiers were infiltrating the South and escalating the violence in South Vietnam. When Eisenhower left office, there were about 1,000 American 'advisers' (almost all of them military men), with many more to come."

Alan Brinkley in The New York Times reviews Fredrik Logevall's Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam.