Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building, 1954-1968

Abstract

Scholarly investigations of U.S. involvement in Vietnam continue to accumulate at a dizzying pace, adding depth, nuance, and interpretive range to an already-prodigious literature. Yet, surprisingly, especially given the sheer volume of that scholarship, few monographs have devoted more than cursory attention to a central feature of America's involvement: the bold attempt by the United States to create from whole cloth a modern state structure south of Vietnam's seventeenth parallel. That deeply flawed and ultimately doomed enterprise, which drew enormous energy and lavish expenditures, certainly warrants the systematic focus that James M. Carter gives it here. After all, the enterprise constituted, in his apt depiction, “one of the most thorough and ambitious state-building efforts in the postwar period” (p. 6). Inventing Vietnam seeks to explicate the shortcomings of the state-building program and to integrate that story into the Vietnam War narrative. Between 1954 and 1961, Carter demonstrates, the United States designed and implemented a series of projects aimed at converting the fledgling Saigon regime into a strong, legitimate, and viable state, one able both to satisfy the basic needs of South Vietnam's population and to provide security against Communist North Vietnam as well as insurgent forces in the south. Those projects included, “installing a president; building a civil service and training bureaucrats around him; creating a domestic economy, currency, and industrial base; building ports and airfields, hospitals and schools; dredging canals and harbors to create a transportation grid; constructing an elaborate network of modern roadways; establishing a telecommunications system; and training, equipping, and funding a national police force and a military, among others” (ibid.). They were all abject failures, in the author's judgment, plagued from the outset by glaring contradictions and insurmountable obstacles.