Facing the Phoenix: The CIA & the Political Defeat of the United States in Vietnam

by Zalin Grant

Foreword
Ye Shall Know
Blood Is Thicker
All the News
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Source Notes
Index

Genres: History, Military Fiction

397 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Zalin Grant is a journalist, author, editor and publisher. Although he is an American, he has lived for many years in France, in the ancestral village of his wife, Claude. Mr. Grant joined the U.S. Army after college, and after training as both an infantry & intelligence officer, was sent to South Viet Nam. After his military service, he worked as a war correspondent for Time magazine, and later for The New Republic. He spent a total of five years in Indo-China during the war, and has written four non-fiction books and one novel about that conflict. One of those books, 'Facing The Phoenix: The CIA and the Political Defeat of the United States in Vietnam', is widely considered to be one of the best works ever written on the wars in Indo-China. Zalin Grant is a co-founder, and serves as Editorial Director, of Pythia Press.

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Basically, this is a history of the wars in Southeast Asia from the time of the French return after WWII to that of the US withdrawal in 1975. The focus is primarily on Vietnam, but Laos figures prominently. An attempt is made to represent matters from a Vietnamese perspective, most particularly from that of Tran Ngoc Chau, one-time Speaker of their Assembly, later a political opponent and prisoner of President Thieu. American proponents of political solutions to the Vietnamese conflict, John Paul Vann and Edward G. Lansdale especially, are also well represented. The 'Phoenix' in the title refers, at once, to such a political approach which Chau had proposed (and implemented as a provincial governor) and which, in grotesquely distorted form, ultimately became US/GVN policy as well as to his own emigration from Vietnam to the States in the late seventies.

Having mentioned 'political' strategies, they deserve some elaboration. Chau himself had been a Viet Minh, opposed to the French and Japanese, but had ultimately opted for the establishment of a representative democracy in Vietnam under the Geneva Accords. He believed that this would hold more appeal to the populace than the communist alternative. He was not a strident anticommunist--indeed, his brother was an NLF cadre. What the USA did, however, was to subvert the Geneva agreements and impose a sham democracy while invading the country to effect a military solution--repeating, with more firepower, the mistakes of the French imperialists.