The Tragedy of Vietnam After Roosevelt’s Death

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

The death of a single leader can shift the course of nations, topple empires, and condemn millions to suffering. Few examples are as stark as the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April 1945, just weeks before the Allied victory in Europe. Roosevelt’s sudden passing did more than end a presidency. It extinguished a vision for a postwar world in which colonial empires—French, British, Dutch—would not be restored at bayonet point but would instead give way to independence movements already stirring across Asia and Africa.

Nowhere was this failure of vision more tragic than in Indochina. The story of America’s three-decade entanglement in Vietnam, with its toll of millions of Vietnamese dead and more than 58,000 American soldiers killed, has many causes. But the earliest turning point lies at that moment of Roosevelt’s death.

The Collapse of the Old Colonial Order

World War II shattered European empires in Asia. Japan’s lightning victories between 1941 and 1942 humiliated colonial powers that had long claimed superiority. The British garrison in Malaysia and Singapore, thought impregnable, surrendered after only 70 days to a smaller Japanese invasion force. France, already defeated by Germany, saw its Indochinese colony occupied by Japan. The Dutch East Indies fell, and the Philippines endured brutal Japanese occupation.

When the war ended in 1945, the colonial order looked hollow. Nationalists across Asia declared that if Japan could topple Western armies in months, then Europeans were no longer invincible. From Jakarta to Manila, independence movements surged. The Philippines gained independence in 1946, Indonesia after a brief struggle by 1949, and Malaysia within a dozen years through largely peaceful negotiation. Even Singapore, once the crown jewel of Britain’s Asian empire, went its own way less than a decade later.

In this context, the French determination to cling to Indochina—Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—was an anachronism, a refusal to recognize history’s direction.

Roosevelt’s Anti-Colonial Vision

Roosevelt had no illusions about French weakness. He despised the old colonial system and told his aides repeatedly that Indochina must not return to French rule. In March 1945, he declared to General Albert Wedemeyer, “I am going to do everything possible to give the people of that area their independence.” His view was pragmatic as well as moral: colonial rule was unstable, costly, and guaranteed further conflict.

Roosevelt also understood the importance of nationalist leaders like Ho Chi Minh, who had spent decades pressing for Vietnamese independence. Ho was, in 1945, not yet fully aligned with global communism; he was a nationalist first, eager to seek American support. In February and March of that year, Ho reached out to U.S. agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), offering cooperation against Japan and signaling openness to a postwar relationship.

FDR imagined a settlement in which Indochina would be placed under international trusteeship—possibly Chinese, American, or United Nations supervision—until independence could be secured. He believed colonial empires were relics of the past and saw decolonization as part of the Four Freedoms he had championed throughout the war.

Truman’s Reversal

Roosevelt died suddenly on April 12, 1945. His successor, Harry Truman, did not share Roosevelt’s anti-colonial instincts. Truman’s worldview was shaped less by opposition to European empire than by fear of Soviet expansion. Within months, the Cold War began to dominate American thinking. In that struggle, France was no longer a colonial oppressor but a vital ally whose cooperation was needed in Europe. Supporting France’s reassertion of control in Indochina became, in Washington’s eyes, a lesser evil compared to alienating Paris at the very moment NATO was taking shape.

Thus, when the French returned to Indochina in late 1945 to reclaim their colony, they did so with tacit American blessing. Ho Chi Minh’s declaration of independence, borrowing words from the American Declaration itself, fell on deaf ears in Washington. The United States, which might have championed Vietnamese independence under Roosevelt, instead bankrolled the French war effort by the early 1950s.

The War That Did Not Have to Be

The tragedy of Vietnam was not inevitable. If Roosevelt had lived, it is plausible he could have cut a deal with Ho Chi Minh and perhaps even with Mao Zedong, who was still consolidating power in China. Roosevelt’s skill in negotiation, his personal authority at the close of World War II, and his moral opposition to colonialism might have shaped a very different trajectory.

Instead, France fought a brutal war of reconquest, climaxing in its defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The Geneva Accords called for national elections to unify Vietnam. But Cold War logic again intervened: Eisenhower admitted privately that Ho Chi Minh would have won 80 percent of the vote. Instead of elections, the United States backed the artificial creation of South Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem.

This decision locked America into a decades-long conflict, first by proxy and then directly with U.S. combat troops. Millions of Vietnamese perished, along with tens of thousands of Americans, all in a war fought to preserve a colonial arrangement Roosevelt had already declared obsolete in 1945.

China and the Wider Consequences

Roosevelt’s death also shaped China’s fate. Roosevelt had distrusted Chiang Kai-shek’s corrupt regime and was open to pragmatic relations with Mao. Truman, however, quickly defined Mao’s movement as Soviet-aligned, missing opportunities for negotiation. The result was a hardened Cold War divide in East Asia, with the United States locked into supporting weak regimes in both China (until Chiang’s flight to Taiwan) and South Vietnam.

The consequences were immense: civil war in China, Communist victory in 1949, the Korean War beginning in 1950, and the Vietnam War escalating through the 1960s. Each conflict can be traced back to choices made in the immediate aftermath of Roosevelt’s death.

The Cascade of Death

The cascade of history that followed Roosevelt’s passing illustrates the fragility of turning points. One man’s vision might have offered independence without decades of bloodshed. Instead, Truman’s acquiescence to French ambitions, his fixation on Europe, and his early Cold War framing condemned Vietnam to thirty years of war.

By the time the last U.S. helicopters lifted off from Saigon in 1975, the toll was staggering: more than three million Vietnamese dead, Cambodia and Laos devastated, American society bitterly divided, and trust in government shattered. What might have been a peaceful decolonization like Malaysia or Indonesia had become a tragedy of global proportions.

History does not turn on inevitabilities but on choices. Franklin Roosevelt, even in his final months, made clear he intended to strip France of its empire in Indochina and support independence. His death removed that possibility. Truman’s different priorities, born of Cold War anxieties, restored empire where history had already passed its verdict.

The result was not only the Vietnam War (Called the American War in Vietnam) but also a chain reaction that reshaped China, Korea, and America itself. The lesson is stark: leadership matters. The death of one leader can alter the lives of millions and change the destiny of nations. In Southeast Asia, it meant tragedy instead of freedom, war instead of independence.

Nothing Ever Dies: Re-Reading a Haunting Book About War and it's Aftermath

I am re-reading the book Nothing Ever Dies because I first enlisted during the war in Vietnam 51 years ago and this book holds a mirror to my service during that war and all the wars I served in and during over the fifty years that followed. 

The notes below are thoughts from reading the first chapters.

Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen 

The opening chapter, “Just Memory” begins: “This is a book on war, memory, and identity. It proceeds from the idea that all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” 

Nguyen then tells us the war known as the Vietnam War in America is American War in Vietnam. This identity crisis is central to the war as perceived by those who lived through and after it in Vietnam and neighboring countries. 

It is one of the truisms of history that the winners write the history. But in the modern world history gets written by everyone with the means to tell their story. America was the clear loser of the wars in Southeast Asia from the mid 1960s to 1975. But America names the war and controls much of the narrative because America is the biggest producer of movies, books and other forms of bringing story to the world: all published in English. 

The stories from Vietnam can never have the distribution of American narrative, especially stories in the Vietnamese language. Language itself is a tool in the hands of those who want to shape war as it happens. Russia is “liberating” Russian-speaking citizens in Ukraine. 

The sovereign country of Ukraine is a territory when defined by Russia. Those who are with Russia, like the Christian Nationalist propagandist Tucker Carlson, sided so openly with Russia that his shows were a regular part of Russian state news programming. 

The people of Ukraine describe what happened as an invasion. They describe war crimes committed by Russia. They want freedom. They want peace. They have a compelling message, but Russia is bigger. Someday, the war will end and the two narratives will compete in the world of ideas. 

Before the opening chapter is a short prologue. The first sentence of the Prologue: “I was born in Vietnam but made in America. I count myself among those Vietnamese dismayed by America’s deeds but tempted to believe in its words.” Like so many Americans who lived during the war, I “mistake Vietnam with the war named in its honor.” 

When I enlisted in 1972 near the end of the Vietnam War, I signed up for the education that I did not care about when I graduated just the previous spring. But education, career, learning beckoned after several months of loading trucks and looking at the men beside me doing the same thing I was as at triple my age. 

For me the war meant a chance to get away from home, from the small world of Stoneham to a world I could not imagine. I had not been south of Erie, Pennsylvania, west of Cleveland, Ohio, or ever flown on an airplane. I cannot remember any dread in connection with the Vietnam War. It was a route to freedom. 

The war I saw on TV news was no different than the war movies and serial dramas, showing endless American heroism and victory. The world looks so different now. I served in the military four times, each time getting out I was sure I was done. Then three times, I re-enlisted. During those four enlistments, I served in or during four different wars. 

Until 24 February 2022, I thought I served during three losses, one win. Now the one win, the Cold War, needs an asterisk. The peace we thought would follow the end of the Soviet empire cracked immediately in the Balkans and broke in Ukraine. We watched as oligarchy followed empire in Russia. 

Beginning in 2014 and with open fury in 2022, The Empire Struck Back. 

Reading Nothing Ever Dies it was clear from the first pages that more than four wars shaped the psyche of the kid who so happily signed up in 1972. My Dad was a veteran of World War II. For good and ill, those were the best years of his life—it was clear every time he told and retold his stories from the war. 

My uncle Jack served in the Air Force from 1958 to 1978. He had three full tours flying over southeast Asia in a tanker plane then and F4 Phantom II fighter plane. To say I worshipped them shows how shallow my actual religious practice has been in my life. My regard for them in uniform had none of the skepticism I always felt toward God Himself. Which means in addition to the wars I was in or around, I was haunted by wars before I was alive, wars that happened between my last two enlistments (The Gulf War, Grenada, Somalia, The Balkans) and the wars that formed the backbone of the history of America, Europe, and Israel. 

Nguyen says, “…the most important reason for Americans to remember what they call the Vietnam War, the fact that it was one conflict in a long line of horrific wars that came before it and after it. The war’s identity—and, indeed, any war’s identity—cannot be extricated from the identity of war itself. … because war is not just about the shooting but about the people who make the bullets and deliver the bullets and, perhaps most importantly, pay for the bullets, the distracted citizenry complicit in what [Martin Luther] King calls the “brutal solidarity” of white brother and black.”

Who Fights Our War? Veteran of the Tet Offensive in 1968 Working Security at Kennedy Airport

The Tet Offensive in 1968 was the beginning 

of the end of the War in Vietnam

This afternoon I checked in for a flight to Paris on IcelandAir.  Checking in for boarding took a while because of COVID documents, but once I had a boarding pass, there was almost no line for security.

When I approached the screening area, I told the guy at the metal detector that I would need the alternative screening.  I said,"I have metal here, here and here" pointing to my neck, left knee and left elbow.  James, the TSA screener, said "Go ahead and try anyway." I did. The alarm sounded and I waited for the technician to check me. After I put my arms over my head in the plexiglass booth, James came over to do the pat down. The technician was a woman and could not do the hands-on check. 

When James walked over I held my arms out straight to my sides.  He said, "You don't need to do that, you're not an airplane."

'And you are a native New Yorker,' I thought.  

Then he said, "You got metal all over the place, was it shrapnel from a war?" 

"As a matter of fact, in 1973......"

"No way," he said. "You were in 'Nam? I was there during the Tet Offensive. '68. Radio man." 

"I managed to get blinded by shrapnel in a missile explosion in America," I said.  "Live fire test."

"That sucks," he said. "No Purple Heart, right?"

"Right?" I said.  Then I told him about my fingers hanging off and getting re-attached.  With professional curiosity and gloved hands, he checked the first fingers on my right hand.

He then told me about his communications site being surrounded, then the North Vietnamese went around his bunker and moved on. "I was sure I was dead," James said.  

We fist bumped then waved as he went back to the check-in line.  

I have talked to many TSA agents who were Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. I don't remember a lot of Vietnam War veterans.  Certainly not recently.  But it was fun to talk with him.  

Draft Dodgers Let Another Man Serve in Their Place

When President Bill Clinton visited the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in 1993, veterans of that war considered his presence an insult. They believed their service and the service of their dead comrades on the Wall a matter of honor. So dodging the draft was a matter of dishonor, and the assembled veterans let Clinton know how they felt.

From the Washington Post, 1 June 1993:

They waited for hours, some of them, to make a simple but emphatic gesture. And when President Clinton was introduced at the Wall yesterday, they did it, in unison, on cue.

They turned their backs.

"He's not my commander in chief," said Tom Stephanos, a Manassas resident who was wounded five times during the Vietnam War and wore 15 medals on his denim shirt yesterday. "It's a slap in the face to all of us that he had the gumption to show up here today."

------

Today veterans of the Vietnam War cheer and embrace President Donald Trump. Trump has publicly sneered about those who served. He had five deferments to avoid serving his country.

So why are Vietnam War veterans now supporting a draft dodger who sneered at Vietnam War service?

If service was a matter of honor in 1993 and is suddenly not an issue in 2016, that means honor got sold out.

If one draft dodger dishonors those who served in his place, the other does too. A recent Pew poll said Trump's job approval rating is 98% among veterans who are Republicans. That number includes all veterans, but 98% means everybody.
Draft dodging means letting another man serve and possibly die while you stay home. Clinton did that. Trump did that. Any veteran who attacked Clinton and embraces Trump cannot make any claim to honor.