Facing the Phoenix: The CIA and the Political Defeat of the United States in Vietnam [Hardcover]

Zalin Grant (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1991

In an engrossing narrative that moves from a manhunt in Saigon to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C., Grant provides the key to the last great untold story of Vietnam: how the U.S. won the battles and lost the war. Photos.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

The author of Over the Beach ( LJ 11/1/86) and Survivors ( LJ 2/1/86), former Vietnam War correspondent and Army officer Grant turns his attention to pacification efforts in Vietnam, including the CIA's controversial Phoenix program. Based on his own experience and extensive interviews with recognized key players, Grant's study begins with post-World War II Hanoi and hopscotches from Saigon to Washington to California, covering 30 years in an attempt to explain the personal actions and motives of Vietnamese and American officials. For a basic sketch of Phoenix and the CIA involvement in Vietnam, standard histories of the war suffice--e.g., Stanley Karnow's Vietnam ( LJ 10/1/83), John Ranelagh's The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA ( LJ 6/1/86), Cecil B. Currey's Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American (Houghton, 1989). Unique is the story of Tran Ngoc Chau, noted Vietnamese general and government official, who advocated a political rather than military solution to the war. Although the excess of personal and peripheral detail is distracting, Grant's energetic style and his analysis of little-publicized political controversies will hold the attention of casual or scholarly readers. For comprehensive collections on the CIA and Vietnam-era politics and most academic libraries. Notes, index, and photographs not seen.
- Pamela J. Peters, SUNY at Oneonta Lib., N.Y.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 395 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; 1st edition (January 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393029255
• ISBN-13: 978-0393029253
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,151,593 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Book on the Vietnam War?, August 15, 2006

By 

Alex McGrady (North Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Facing the Phoenix: The CIA and the Political Defeat of the United States in Vietnam (Hardcover)

This book is a contender for the title of "Best Book on the Vietnam War." This is not a "war story" book or a record of military fights on the battlefield. Instead, it recounts the struggles among the allies, both in Indochina and in Washington, D.C., to find and pursue a strategy. The fact that it took the U.S. so long to come to a winning strategy explains why the American Congress eventually lost enthusiasm for the war and pulled the plug just when the South Vietnamese had risen to the point of viability as an independent nation capable of self-defense against the determined enemy that controlled the people of the North.

The title of this book is questionable because it's not a good guide to the wide range of subjects treated authoritatively by the book, nor does it deal exclusively with the CIA's role as the title might suggest. It is taken from the name of the allied effort to crush the communists' war-directing apparatus among the thousands of South Vietnamese villages. That effort was intially conceived by a South Vietamese military officer who had served in the North Vietnamese military forces before becoming disillusioned with the communists' heavy-handed approach to dominion over all the nationalist groups working for independence. The author pegs his story around the history of that officer. The book's special strength is in the first-hand information obtained by the author's interviews of key actors in the key events of the war.

It is also of importance that the author picks up the story at the end of World War II. Without that background, it is difficult to put later developments into meaningful context, or to see the continuity of the French and American wars. The French had been in Indochina for over a century, and the drive to wrest independence from the French -- and, later, to maintain it in the face of well-intended but often misdirected U.S. invervention -- was fundamental to the Vietnamese motivations throughout the war.

From the Vietnamese point of view there was simply one war -- a 40-year war for independence. From the Western perspective, there was first the "French War" and then the "American War."

The major American strategic gaffes are made evident, along with the background that explains how they happened. The gaffes include America's misguided and high-handed killing of South Vietnam's president, Ngo Dinh Diem (and the author provides the evidence that U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge was instrumental in eliminating Diem and his entire government), the only South Vietnamese patriot of sufficient stature to have had a chance of rallying the moral opposition to the communists under Ho Chi Minh in the North; the introduction of American fighting forces onto a field that should have been occupied only by the contending North and South Vietnamese (and the corollary neglect of the essential political and military mobilization of the South Vietnamese); and, ultimately, the U.S.'s egregious abandonment of the South Vietnamese when the Southern people, relying on promised American military aid, had fully mobilized themselves to resist Northern aggression. The invidious role of the American media, some of whose leading representatives became involved to the point of taking sides in the strategic wrangling, is covered more explicitly and pertinently here than in most other accountings.

The author does not explore the possibility of an earlier military victory had American politics not precluded the allies cutting the enemy's supply lines into the South. That possibility, and the curious story behind it, is well told in "Laos: The Key to Failure." But the author does cover the events in Laos and Cambodia that were critical to the war in Vietnam. Indeed, for the commmunists it was all one war for control of Indochina. America's keeping the wars compartmentalized was another strategic error.

"Phoenix" nicely moves between the battlefields of Indochina and the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. And "Vietnam" cannot be understood without a grasp of that vital connection.

The four books that I would recommend for a basic grasp of the Vietnam War are 1) "A soldier Reports" by William Westmoreland (the Eagle Scout who lacked Asian experience and who had little sense of the complex political nature of the war he was fighting, but who made many crucial decisions during four critical years of the war); 2) "Lost Victory" by William Colby (who worked on Indochina longer than any other senior U.S. official, and who had a keener insight into what happened there and why; 3) "Laos: The key to Failure" by Norman Hannah (who saw the Indochina theater more strategically than most from his post in Hawaii with the Commander in Chief of the Pacific); and 4) the book here reviewed -- "Facing the Phoenix" by Zalin Grant. These four will provide an understanding of the hisorical background, the complex reasons for the U.S. taking the decisions it did, the people who played significant roles on all sides of the conflict, the mistakes that were made in pursuing American aims in Vietnam (and Southeast Asia more generally),and the strategic successes and failures of the undertaking.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Sordid Saga of American Involvement in Vietnam, November 16, 2010

By 

Ted Marks (Phippsburg, ME, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Facing the Phoenix: The CIA and the Political Defeat of the United States in Vietnam (Hardcover)

One of the seminal events in American history in the 20th century was the American war in Vietnam - a duplicitous conflict that swamped a nation founded, theoretically and historically, on honesty and equal justice.

The duplicity of the Vietnam War was not restricted to U.S. government actions; the events of that war also involved deception on the part of the Vietnamese governments (both North and South), Russia, China, France -- and the American press, according to the author of this book.

The impact of U.S. intervention in Vietnam on the American psyche was enormous. Some observers claim that the events in Southeast Asia still have a morbid influence on the conduct of the American government - 35 years after that war was lost.

So the story of the American involvement in Vietnam remains fascinating, and this book, FACING THE PHOENIX: THE CIA AND THE POLITICAL DEFEAT OF THE UNITE STATES IN VIETNAM is an important study of that era in American history. The book was published in 1991 and is now out of print. So this is a belated review, to be sure, but the importance of this book can be overstressed because the author, Zalin Grant, was able to interview most of the principals who managed the war on the front lines before they died.

In researching this book, Grant interviewed such key players as Edward Lansdale, Lucien Conein, William Colby, Daniel Ellsberg, Rufus Phillips, Mike Dunn, J. William Fulbright, George Jacobson, Robert Komer, Frank Snepp, Charles Timmes and others. Many of these names may seem obscure, but the fact is that they were all intimately involved in the history of the Vietnam War. Many of them have written their own memoirs, and Grant draws on those accounts, as well. But his interviews with the principals clarify the discrepancies between each of their formal accounts of their lives and careers.

Grant, a war correspondent for Time Magazine and the New Republic, also tells the story of the war through the eyes of the Vietnamese. Towards this end, his narrative focuses on a Vietnamese soldier and politician by the name of Tran Ngoc Chau. Chau was initially a member of the communist Viet Minh, but in 1949, he defected to the French colonial government, and later became a military commander in the South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem, who was to be assassinated in 1963 (partly at the direction of the U.S. government).

Chau became intimately involved with the Americans in Vietnam. He was a provincial governor, a member of the National Assembly, and he helped formulate the civic action programs that were designed to win the loyalty of the South Vietnamese people. The overall program was known as Phoenix, and parts of it were unsavory, to say the least, including the Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRU) that were, essentially, assassination squads. But there was a war to win, and Chau and his mentor, Edward Lansdale felt the various civic action elements of the Phoenix program were the only way for the south to fend off the North Vietnamese aggression.

Of course, that turned out to be a doomed effort and Chau himself became a victim of his close alliance with the Americans. His American friends tried to help him escape before the fall of Saigon in 1975, but other Americans closed off his escape. After the war was lost the Hanoi government imprisoned Chau. He went through reeducation camp and only escaped from Vietnam in 1980 when he fled the country by boat. He finally resettled in the Los Angeles area.

Chau's story is truly a sordid one--certainly not a credit to the Americans. But Grant writes that there is plenty of blame for the American failure in Vietnam.

Grant writes that the American press was complicit in the loss of the war, and he specifically cites such well known American correspondents as David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and Francis Fitzgerald (all Pulitzer Prize winners) for providing the American public with slanted coverage of the war in Vietnam. Grant's position is that most of the American press had an agenda that was in conflict with the American anti-communist policy in Vietnam and the slanted coverage was a key factor in that failure of that policy. The point being, according to Grant, that there was nothing wrong with the agenda the reporters held -- rather, their biased coverage ruined their credibility as impartial observers of the war. Ergo, according to Grant, the American press was explicitly complicit in the American defeat in Vietnam.

If that is the case (and it is debatable), then there are ramifications to consider on the overall role of the American press, particularly in this modern age when technology is reshaping the media. With the advent of modern technology, opinions are driving much of the news media, on cable and the internet in particular, and the public perception of the press is at an all-time low. If the American press continues to lose its credibility, then the consequences on the nation will be considerable. Vietnam may have been only a harbinger of the future.

This is an excellent, well-researched book that was published 15 years after the fall of the South Vietnamese. It was not final word on that war, but it is a valuable addition to our understanding of what happened when America intervened in Southeast Asia.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Phoenix, June 25, 2010

By 

Joseph - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Facing the Phoenix: The CIA and the Political Defeat of the United States in Vietnam (Hardcover)

If you are a regular reader of history, especially military history, I highly recommend this book. It was full of great information and well documented. It gave me great insight into the Phoenix Program and dispelled a lot of myths in the process. Personally, I consider it a must read for any serious student of the Vietnam War period.