PositiveWall Street JournalA monumental history of the 2½ decades leading up to America\'s direct troop intervention in 1965 ... This book is a widely researched and eloquently written account of how the U.S. came to be involved in Vietnam and is certainly the most comprehensive review of this period to date ... For all the factual density of his narrative, Mr. Logevall should have questioned more acutely what has become, in some quarters, the conventional view of Ho ... Mr. Logevall skillfully describes the rise of the Vietminh resistance and the French\'s attempts to defeat it militarily while denying the non-communist Vietnamese real independence ... What [he] fails to consider is whether American intervention at various points might have taken a less clumsy form, one more attuned to South Vietnamese aspirations and realities.
