Few issues from the Vietnam War divided the American public more than the character and nature of the National Liberation Front (NLF). The US government claimed that communist North Vietnam controlled the NLF, and that it wanted to overthrow the government of South Vietnam by force. Antiwar scholars and activists, in sharp contrast, argued that the NLF was born in the tinder-dry rice paddies of South Vietnam in response to President Ngo Dinh Diem’s oppressive policies. The NLF was very skillful at portraying itself as local freedom fighters, organized simply to free South Vietnam from foreign domination and a corrupt Saigon government. This made it difficult for successive US presidential administrations to win support at home and abroad for their counterinsurgency programs. In reality, the NLF was both Southern and communist. The Lao Dong, the Workers’ Party of Vietnam, was a nationwide, unified movement with revolutionaries placed in most villages and hamlets throughout Vietnam. The party leadership in Hanoi included several southerners, like Le Duan – the partys general secretary – who favored armed rebellion to liberate Vietnam south of the 17th parallel and to reunify the country under the socialist banner.

Chapter 3 explains that Ho Chi Minh insisted on respecting the basic terms of the Geneva accords even as it became obvious that the rival regime headed by Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon had no intention of doing the same. Ho’s passivity in the face of Diem’s actions shocked and dismayed some of his own followers, especially in the South. In 1959, Hanoi finally sanctioned insurgent activity below the Seventeenth Parallel, but under restricting guidelines because Ho feared provoking US intervention. His tentativeness alienated growing segments of partisans, including Le Duan, a rising star in the communist ranks. By 1963, the tension between Ho and other “doves,” on the one hand, and Le Duan and other “hawks,” who favored all-out war to “liberate” the South, on the other, had split the Vietnamese communist movement into two competing, rival wings. Following Diem’s overthrow in a coup abetted by the United States in early November 1963, Le Duan and his chief lieutenants staged a coup of their own in Hanoi. The new regime at once escalated hostilities in the South, resuming the Fourth Civil War for Vietnam and setting Hanoi on an irreversible collision course with the United States.

By 1953, the communist-led Resistance had been marginalized in much of the Mekong delta. But the cost was high. "Traditional" institutions of the village had, in large swaths of the delta, been destroyed. The Franco-Vietnamese "coalition" had defeated the communist-led Resistance. But who would win the peace? The militia leaders, so skilled in war, were not fluent in the arts of peace. This chapter looks at the endgame of empire, when France was withdrawing from rural areas all over the South, downsizing its military presence, and shifting its support to the State of Vietnam. The end result by 1954, however, was a balkanized southern Vietnam with fragmented sovereignty where militias entrenched themselves in rural fiefdoms. The chapter shows how Ngo Dinh Diem, faced with this divided South, won the battle for post-war control of the South. It pays particular attention to his expulsion to Cambodia of the Cao Dai leader Pham Cong Tac, the co-optation of the Hoa Hao militia leader Tran Van Soai, and the arrest, trial, and execution of the Hao Hao militia leader Ba Cut. The chapter also examines the regional, national, and international legacies of the war.

Chapter 6 assesses the ambassadorship of Henry Cabot Lodge II, chosen by President John F. Kennedy to lead Embassy Saigon at the height of the 1963 "Buddhist crisis." South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem's crackdown on Buddhist demonstrators had alarmed American public opinion, and Lodge decided shortly after taking up his duties that Diem had to go. This view ran counter to that of every senior administration figure - Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, CIA Director John McCone, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy - all of whom believed that Diem, despite his flaws, was preferable to any alternative and ought to be supported. General Paul Harkins, Lodge's military counterpart in Saigon, likewise felt that Washington should stand by Diem. Lodge prevailed over this opposition through a campaign of secrecy, misinformation, and repeated disobedience. He formed ties with rebel generals and promised them U.S. backing if they overthrew Diem, a policy no one in the White House or State Department had approved. He withheld information about coup plots from his superiors. He refused to follow orders from Rusk to meet with Diem and resolve the situation diplomatically. Diem's deposal and murder were in great part Lodge's doing. However distasteful, that outcome gave America a fresh start in Vietnam.

In October 1963, McNamara went to Vietnam with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Maxwell Taylor. On his return, the administration convened a series of NSC meetings that culminated in a press release that the United States would withdraw by 1965. The end point for the withdrawal plans and for the announcement were not victory in the traditional sense but instead something more ambiguous: “until the insurgency has been suppressed or that national security forces of the Government of South Viet-Nam are capable of suppressing it.” Over the last few months and especially in October, McNamara was concerned with what he found in Vietnam where existing programs were deficient or lagging. Withdrawal was not premised on success but instead on a predetermined training program that fit with McNamara’s priorities at the OSD. He insisted on a public announcement as a bureaucratic move aimed at neutralizing those who might interrupt the CPSVN. A separate announcement that 1,000 troops would be withdrawn by December 1963 was aimed at quieting SFRC criticism that the United States was bogged down in Vietnam.