| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950. By Mark Philip Bradley. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xvi, 304 pp. Cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-8078-2549-2. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4861-1.)

This book is a rare and wonderful thing: a study of United States–Vietnam relations that says new things in new ways. Mark Philip Bradley focuses on the development of American and Vietnamese perceptions of each other from the end of the Great War to the beginning of U.S. aid for the French-backed Bao Dai government in Vietnam and concludes with a brief look at the resumption of diplomatic relations between the United States and Vietnam in 1995. 1

Here is what Americans thought of the Vietnamese: they were backward, lazy (the tropical heat was "too fatiguing for revolutionary feelings," one scholar wrote in 1927), dishonest, and cowardly. No such people were capable of self-government. Here is what the Vietnamese thought of Americans: they were heroic in their revolutionary past and idealistic in their faith in democracy but also materialistic, at the expense of moral values that ought to reside at the core of any proper society. Such people could be of help in the anticolonial struggle. Or, they might abandon principle in their quest for less exalted goals—and that, of course, is how it turned out. . . .

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