Lodge in Vietnam
WARNING
You are viewing an older version of the Yalebooks website. Please visit out new website with more updated information and a better user experience: https://www.yalebooks.com
A Patriot Abroad
Anne E. Blair
View Inside
Format: PaperPrice: $21.00
e-book
Anne Blair is the first to draw on Lodge's collected papers, including an unpublished memoir, as well as on previously unavailable U.S. Saigon Embassy reports and on interviews with former U.S. officials and others who served with Lodge in Vietnam and Washington. According to Blair, Lodge felt strongly that U.S. troops should not be involved in the war, but his sense of the proper conduct of foreign affairs prevented him from opening a public debate on the matter. In addition, after the coup against Diem, Lodge regarded his mission in Saigon as completed and was disengaged in the vital 1964 period when the U.S. government should have reviewed its aims and vital stakes in South Vietnam. Lodge took up the Saigon mission and stayed with it because he was a patriot. But, Blair concludes, his good intentions were not coupled with effective policymaking, and the results proved disastrous for the future.
"A thoughtful and unsettling account of Vietnam policy, beginning with Diem's overthrow and concluding with the realization that the Vietnam war had to be an American war. Blair makes excellent use of Lodge to follow and personalize these broad developments."—Michael H. Hunt, author of Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy
"Lodge in Vietnam . . . will be of value to all scholars of the Vietnam War, as well as to those studying empire, war and public morality."—Val Noone, Asian Studies Review
"Embedded in Anne Blair's judicious account of Henry Cabot Lodge's ambassadorship to South Vietnam is a seminal analysis of a critical but curiously neglected moment in the history of American relations with South Vietnam."—Mark Bradley, Journal of Asian Studies
Publication Date: January 21, 2014
12 b/w illus.
