Back to a Forgotten

STREET
Bernard B. Fall and the Limits of Armed Intervention
By Robert Fahs
S
cholar and war correspondent Bernard Fall liked to
gather information about combat in the field, near the
front lines, where the fighting was going on—and he had
done a lot of it in the former French colony of Indochina.
He was there when the French were fighting a losing battle against
Vietnamese insurgents, leading up to their final defeat at Dien Bien
Phu in 1954. In 1961 he wrote a classic account of how French
commanders had tried to cope with the Viet Minh: Street Without Joy.
In the end, at Dien Bien Phu, the insurgents had more firepower
and mobility than the French. The Vietnamese victory should
serve as a lesson to the United States, he believed.
Fall was a thorn in the side of Washington policymakers in the
1950s and 1960s, arguing that, just as the French at Dien Bien Phu,
the United States could not defeat Communist insurgents in Vietnam
by conventional military means. Fall argued that only new military
strategies combined with economic aid and local political reforms could
defeat successful insurgencies like he had observed against the French.
Rather than heeding Fall’s advice, the U.S. government
responded by thwarting his earlier rise as a contract analyst in
Washington, D.C., and in 1958 terminated negotiations begun
by the International Cooperation Agency (ICA, a predecessor
of the U.S. Agency for International Development [USAID]),
to employ him at the Royal School of Administration in newly
independent Cambodia.
On January 21, 1967, Fall was back on the Street Without Joy,
the main highway between North Vietnam and South Vietnam,
as a journalist embedded with U.S. troops. On a patrol near Hué,
he was dictating into a tape recorder: “We’ve reached one of our
phase lines after the fire fight and it smells bad—meaning it’s a
little bit suspicious . . . Could be an amb—”
The recording stopped when Fall stepped on a land mine that
killed him and a Marine sergeant.
That explosion stilled a voice that resonates yet today, with
his warnings that counterinsurgency techniques are important
in modern warfare and that the old playbooks don’t
work anymore. Based on costly experience, Fall’s
insights even achieved some influence with the revival
of counterinsurgency doctrine that has shaped recent
American initiatives in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But Fall’s writings and public speeches, in which he
insisted that modern armies could not win against guerrilla
Opposite: Bernard Fall on a Vietnam street with soldiers, undated.
Until his death in Vietnam in 1967, he argued that American coun-
terinsurgency efforts against the Communist guerrillas must be
combined with economic aid and political reforms.
Right: Fall (right) posed with American and Vietnamese soldiers
in an undated image. As a scholar and reporter with long-time
experience in the area, he returned to Vietnam in 1965 and
embedded with U.S. troops.
Back to a Forgotten Street
forces by fighting in the same way they fought previous wars, put an end
to his own prospects for a government career. Newly opened Records
of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1942 –1963 (Record Group 469)
at the National Archives detail the government’s moves against Fall
beginning in the summer of 1958.
NARA Holdings Document
Bernard Fall’s Early Career
Throughout his short career, Fall stressed in his writings and public
speeches that to win against guerrilla forces, modern armies must
combine economic and political programs with superior military
means. He presented his ideas in a speech to the annual meeting of
the Association of Asian Studies in New York on April 1, 1958, and
then published them on May 31, 1958, in The Nation. Secretary of
State John Foster Dulles opposed Fall’s ideas about counterinsurgency
in Vietnam, and the State Department abruptly rejected a contract
to employ Fall by the ICA through the U.S. Operations Mission
(USOM) at the American embassy in Cambodia.
Until Dulles’s objection, Fall, a French citizen, had worked
successfully for the U.S. government and various federal
contractors throughout his career. His federal employment began
in 1946 with a job as a civilian research analyst and interrogator
under Russell H. Thayer, a chief counsel for the prosecution at the
Nuremburg War Crimes Trials in U.S.-occupied Germany. Fall
worked under Thayer through November 1948, including five
months as “acting head of [the] research section.”
In May 1955, after completing his doctoral dissertation on the
Viet Minh administration of North Vietnam, Fall took a position
as research associate for a federal contractor in Washington, D.C.
Fall Brings His Expertise
To Washington Venues
In 1956, Fall continued to apply his expertise in foreign affairs on federal
projects as he began teaching graduate and undergraduate courses at
French army vehicles drive through an unidentified Vietnamese city. The French were defeated in May 1954 at
Dien Bien Phu by the more heavily armed forces of the Viet Minh.
Right: After their victory at Dien Bien Phu, soldiers of the People’s Army of Vietnam repaired and rebuilt many
homes destroyed during the battle with French forces.
Howard University in Washington, D.C.,
including a course for the National Security
Agency (NSA). From September 1956 to March
1957, he also joined Systems Analysis Corp. in
Washington as a research associate reporting to
the firm’s director, Gene Z. Hanrahan. At Systems
Analysis Corp., under contract to the Senate
Committee on Foreign Relations, Fall wrote
briefs based on interviews with officials from the
Defense Department (DOD), State Department,
ICA, and the Military Assistance and Advisory
Group (MAAG) to South Vietnam.
As a professor at Howard University and a
research associate for federal contractors, Fall
developed contacts at the U.S. foreign assistance
agencies who tried to recruit him for work in
Southeast Asia. By the middle of 1957, officials of
the International Cooperation Administration
(ICA) responsible for the USOM in Cambodia
initiated contract negotiations, hoping to send
Fall to Cambodia as an adviser to the United
States embassy and professor of international
relations at the Royal School of Administration
in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. Fall
accepted the contract in March 1958, but the
telegram sent in May by the Department of
State put a stop to it.
After 1958, Fall continued his research in
Southeast Asia, but without financial support
40 Prologue
from the State Department, the ICA, or any other
part of the U.S. government. When, from 1961 to
1963, he did teach in Cambodia under contract to
the Royal School of Administration and without
American support, the U.S. Embassy in Phnom
Penh continued to view him with suspicion.
Fall Writes Two Books
On Waging Counterinsurgency
Fall’s authority on counterinsurgency issues
stemmed largely from his dedication to
gathering facts in the field, often at great
personal risk. He traveled repeatedly in Vietnam
after his first visit there as a graduate student in
1953, and he reported on the Vietnam War in
the 1960s while with American troops.
Based on his observations in Vietnam,
and extensive interviews with participants
in the French Indochina War (1946–1954),
Fall’s many publications include two seminal
critiques of French counterinsurgency
strategy: Street Without Joy (1961) and Hell
in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien
Bien Phu (1966). The first of these dealt
with the failure of technically superior
French military forces to defeat Vietnamese
insurgents on the same highway outside of
Hué where Fall himself died in 1967 while
reporting on American military operations.
Through his reporting and public speaking, Fall
sought to improve American counterinsurgency
efforts against Communist insurgents in the
newly independent nations of South Vietnam,
Cambodia, and Laos. He stressed the limits of
armed intervention and the need to address
broader issues of economic development and
political corruption that plagued the region.
However, despite Fall’s many years in the
field, during the American war in Vietnam
(1965–1975), such key presidential advisers
as Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy
never consulted him. Fall’s views gained the
most attention from lower-level Pentagon
officials, soldiers in the field, and the growing
minority of antiwar intellectuals.
In her memoir of their marriage, Memories
of a Soldier-Scholar (2006), Dorothy Fall
recounts how her husband’s views on Vietnam
also drew the opprobrium of U.S. government
officials, including J. Edgar Hoover and the
Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mrs. Fall
cites documents that she received in 2000
from the Department of Justice under the
Freedom of Information Act to support her
vivid descriptions of how after May 1958 “the
FBI accelerated its scrutiny of Bernard, with
Spring 2011
reports that spoke of his ‘activities on behalf
of the French government’ and called him
‘a possible propaganda agent for the French
government.’” The surveillance continued
even though Fall never worked in any capacity
for the French government.
According to Mrs. Fall, even before the FBI
surveillance began in earnest, elements within
the State Department took exception to Fall’s
reporting on counterinsurgency in Vietnam.
She writes that after her husband published
an article critical of South Vietnam’s President
Ngo Dinh Diem in the May 31, 1958, issue
of The Nation: “Incredibly, in Saigon, the
Diem regime, apparently working with the
U.S. Embassy, was able to kill Bernard’s
appointment as a professor to the Royal
School of Administration in Cambodia.”
In fact, the newly available records at the
National Archives demonstrate that the
State Department moved against Fall with
the telegram of May 26, 1958, two days
before The Nation article appeared. Soon
after that, FBI surveillance of Fall began and
would continue for years.
Contracting with the United States
To Work in Cambodia
In contrast to the disclosure of FBI
surveillance after May 1958, the records of the
U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies document
initially successful efforts in 1957–1958
by the ICA and the USOM to employ Fall
through the American embassy in Phnom
Penh, Cambodia. Indeed, Alvin Roseman,
an ICA official and the director of USOM in
Cambodia, together with Thomas L. Eliot,
an official with the ICA in Washington, first
approached Fall in Washington because of
his American education and the emphasis he
placed on reinforcing military initiatives with
political and economic reforms in Southeast
Asia. They sought to hire Fall as both a professor
at the Royal School of Administration and
adviser to the American embassy in Phnom
Penh. They hoped that Fall could advance the
U.S. objective of political reform by training
future Cambodian administrators through
the new Royal School of Administration.
Back to a Forgotten Street
The first modern U.S. ambassador to reside President Diem’s new government. As soon as
in Cambodia, Robert McClintock viewed Fall returned to Vietnam, he found Roseman
the new university as an opportunity to in Saigon on the way to his new assignment as
support bureaucratic reform in Cambodia, the USOM director in Cambodia. Roseman
although the Royal School’s inauguration invited Fall to Phnom Penh so they could
with a French curriculum on February 11, further discuss the possibility of his academic
1956, had disappointed him. Ambassador appointment to the Royal School.
McClintock thought that by training competent Before following Roseman to Cambodia,
administrators, the new university could Fall also met in Saigon with Michigan State
encourage the hiring of civil servants based on University professor Wesley Fischel, who
merit. However, in a telegram to his superiors asked him to think about teaching part-time
in Washington, the ambassador observed that in Vietnam if he took the job in Phnom
the Cambodians and the French in Phnom Penh. Fall told Fischel that if he worked at
Penh rejected his method of promoting the Royal School, he would enjoy the weekly
reform through university training as “being commute to teach a course at the Michigan
too American.” McClintock nevertheless State University Center in Saigon.
anticipated that “should United Nations On August 12, Fall met in Phnom Penh
consultants be called upon again in the future, with the Cambodian prime minister’s French
and should foreign aid other than French tackle adviser (Nolleaux), the U.S. embassy’s political
the critical problem of management reform, officer, and Roseman, who together “expressed
the school might usefully be made to serve as great interest” in developing a course of
the starting point for a modern reorientation of international relations at the Royal School.
the Government’s organization.” Roseman thought that the Cambodians would
In February, Eliot and Roseman in more readily accept Fall because he was “a
Washington tried to advance McClintock’s Frenchman teaching U.S. methods.”
method of reform by persuading Fall to teach As a result of these discussions, Fall planned
at the Royal School. Then,
in June 1957, Fall accepted
an invitation from
the South Vietnamese
government to conduct
fieldwork regarding the
status of political and
administrative reform in
Bernard Fall’s application
(page 3) for a position as
professor at the Royal School
of Administration in Cambodia
in March 1958. His American
education and emphasis on
reinforcing military initiatives
with political and economic
reforms in Southeast Asia
seemed to make him an
ideal candidate. Listed
experiences included those of
civilian research analyst and
interrogator at the Nuremburg
War Crimes Trials and as a
“child search officer” for a
temporary United Nations
agency in Munich.
Bernard Fall signed a one-year renewable contract on March 30, 1958, that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles opposed Fall’s appointment to the position
he received directly from the ICA in Washington. The contract identified his at the Royal School of Administration, arguing in a May 26, 1958, telegram that Fall
position as “Professor of International Relations and Public Administration, Royal “has been consistent and vocal critic U.S. policy, and in recent months has made
School of Administration, Phnom-Penh, Cambodia.” public statements extremely critical U.S. aid program Vietnam.”

to arrive in Cambodia in July 1958 to begin
teaching “P.A. [Public Administration] and
Problems of International Relations.” In addition
to teaching, Fall hoped to establish a student-run
Documentation Center as a source of information
about countries other than Cambodia.
The Terms of Fall’s Agreement to Teach
At the Royal School of Administration
By mid-September 1957, still waiting to hear
from Eliot, Fall sent a 600-word proposal
explaining the content of their discussions to
the Cambodian prime minister. He told Eliot
that he needed to inform Howard University
by January 1958 of his plans for the next year.
At least in the beginning, Roseman and
Eliot hoped to keep the U.S. government in
the background of any arrangements to get
Fall to serve in Cambodia. On November 18,
1957, the Royal Cambodian Government
(RKG) initially advised USOM of its interest
in hiring the Howard University professor as
the new “chair of international relations” at
the Royal School. Roseman then informed
the ICA in Washington that he assumed that
the Cambodian government communicated
directly with Fall: “USOM strategy [is]
to keep [the] official relationship directly
between [the] RKG and Fall. Do not envisage
ICA employment of Fall or any ICA dollar
expenditures, but may work out small counter-
part project to assist [the] school.”
By early March 1958, the prospect of sending
Fall to Cambodia remained unresolved. Rose-
man reiterated to the ICA in Washington that
his office had proposed a “direct contract”
between the Cambodian government and
Fall, but would wholly finance the agreement
through local currency if the RKG arranged
to convert an “appropriate part [of] his [local
currency] salary into dollars.”
Despite the initial efforts by ICA and
USOM to remain in the background of
any agreement, the Cambodian Ministry
of Education requested a “direct USOM
contract” to cover Fall’s position at the Royal
School. As a result, Roseman proposed
“writing [a] contract in [the] field as [a]
third country technician and still probably
on [a local currency] basis.” To facilitate the
new contract, Roseman requested that the
ICA start the background check for Fall’s
security clearance in Washington, provide
housing for the Fall family in Phnom Penh,
and advise the USOM on Fall’s salary
requirements.
On March 30, 1958, Fall accepted and
signed the one-year renewable contract that he
received directly from the ICA in Washington.
The contract identified his position as
“Professor of International Relations and
Public Administration, Royal School of
Administration, Phnom-Penh, Cambodia.”
Two days later, on April 1, Fall received a letter
from the Royal School’s French Director (M.
Bargue) that the Cambodian government had
approved his candidacy to join the faculty,
and his security clearance from the U.S.
government came through on April 4, 1958.
In cablegrams on April 8 and April 25, Eliot
then urged Roseman to affirm the contract as
soon as possible so that Fall could submit his

42 Prologue Spring 2011


plans for the 1959 academic year. According
to the April 28 cablegram, “Fall cannot afford
to jeopardize his relationships [with] Howard
University since he intends [to] return there on
[a] career basis.”
On April 29, 1958, from Phnom Penh,
Roseman then urged Eliot to resolve any
remaining questions with Fall directly through ICA
in Washington. However, Roseman stipulated his
agreement with the following contract terms.
First, Fall would receive a salary of $12,000,
“including differentials and in dollars.” As the
“French expert” in the U.S. embassy in Phnom
Penh, Fall “will have duty free entry privilege”
and access to the commissary, post office,
and embassy medical facilities along with
“holders of US special diplomatic passports.”
Furthermore, the USOM would provide
“official transportation” and receive “training
aids” for his classes directly through “the
Back to a Forgotten Street
Ed Hough of the State Depart-
ment’s Far Eastern Division noted
in a May 28, 1958, memo that he
had informed Tom Eliot, an ICA
official, that Hough agreed with
his division chief to let Fall “fall.”
The description of “shooting off”
referred to Fall’s recent speech to
the Association of Asian Studies,
which called for more effective
U.S. aid and less corruption
in the Diem regime to defeat
Communist insurgents in South
Vietnam. On May 31, 1958, Fall
published a similar analysis in The
Nation.
Mission to avoid any customs
difficulties.”
Breaking Fall’s ICA
Contract to Teach in
Cambodia
A telegram stamped “Dulles”
and sent on May 26, 1958,
from the State Department
in Washington, D.C., to the
American embassies in Saigon
and Phnom Penh represents the
first documented opposition
to Fall’s employment under
the ICA contract. Referring
to Fall’s possible “assignment
under [the] ICA contract to [the] Royal
School Administration as Professor Public
Administration and International Relations,” the
Dulles telegram continued:
Fall has been consistent and vocal critic
U.S. policy, and in recent months has made
public statements extremely critical U.S.
aid program Vietnam. Also has criticized
vocally Diem and his Government to
point where certain members Vietnamese
Embassy and American Friends Vietnam
are actively looking for means offset his
influence as one of self-styled experts on
Vietnam in U.S.
View these facts and fact Phnom Penh
already has several French citizens both
critical of and actively working against
Diem Government question whether Fall
should be employed in above capacity by
U.S. Government at present time.
The telegram ended with a request for the
U.S. embassies in Phnom Penh and Saigon
to comment, “Reply priority.” The folder on
Bernard Fall in the Records of the Foreign
Assistance Agencies includes comments
returned from Phnom Penh, but none from
Saigon.
On May 27, Roseman and the U.S.
ambassador to Cambodia, Carl W. Strom,
responded to the request for comment,
noting that Fall had already obtained a
security clearance. They reported that during
their interviews with him, Fall had expressed
neither “any anti-Diem bias” nor opposition
to U.S. policy in Vietnam. Furthermore,
as a result of their interviews with Fall, the
granting of his security clearance, and “many
messages exchanged between USOM and
ICA/W[ashington],” USOM had already
informed the Cambodian government about
Fall’s agreement to arrive in October.
Moreover, the U.S. embassy and USOM
in Cambodia regretted that the Department
of State in Washington had not earlier raised
objections to Fall. They repeated that during
interviews in Phnom Penh, Fall had “clearly
understood” that his teaching “could not
involve any political content,” especially
regarding Vietnam. They insisted that Fall’s
qualifications as a native French speaker with
training in American methodology uniquely
appealed to Cambodian officials.
If Fall were dropped, Ambassador Strom
insisted that the “decision must be made by
Washington agencies” without his concurrence
and that Washington should deflect the
Cambodians by simply claiming that Fall
was not available. Moreover, Strom warned
that since Fall might have already requested a
leave from Howard University, there remained
“some possibility that he will communicate
his own version to [the] Royal School of
Administration” at variance with whatever
reason that the U.S. government might convey.
Despite these admonitions, on May 29
Frederick H. Bunting, the ICA’s director of
Far Eastern Affairs in Washington, requested
that the American embassy in Phnom Penh
Prologue 43
inform the Cambodian government that the
embassy could not finance the hiring of Fall.
At the same time, other officials in
Washington backed away from supporting
Fall. On May 28, Ed Hough of the
Department of State’s Far Eastern Division,
noted that he had telephoned Tom Eliot to
confirm that after discussing the situation
Bernard Fall with villagers in “some Khmer village”
in Cambodia, ca. 1961–1963. Bottom: His note
explaining that they “apparently hadn’t seen a white
man for some time.”
44 Prologue
with his division chief, they both agreed to let
Fall “‘fall’.” Hough suggested to Eliot: “as [a]
personal friend tell him [that he had] ‘cooked
his own goose’ by ‘shooting off ’.” Hough
further authorized Eliot to say that the
“Vietnamese complained to State and certain
countries in SEA will be closed to him.”
Fall Pleads with State Department
To Save His ICA Contract
On May 26, 1958, ICA officials in Washing-
ton informed Fall that his contract had been
dropped “because he had
made a speech unfavor-
able to the Government
of the Republic of Viet-
Nam” at the April 1 meet-
ing of the Association
of Asian Studies in New
York. Fall then launched
a telephone campaign to
salvage his contract with
the ICA. He immediately
called Thomas J. Corcoran,
the Department of State
officer-in-charge of Laos
affairs in Washington, to
complain about the news
of losing his contract. Ac-
cording to a memorandum of conversation
dated June 3, Fall informed Corcoran over
the telephone “that Mr. Nguyen Phu Duc,
First Secretary of the Vietnamese Embassy,
had attended his speech in New York, and
persuaded the Ambassador of Viet-Nam to
write to the Department of State protesting
against his employment in Cambodia.”
Fall also conceded, according to the
memorandum, that he had been critical
of the situation in Vietnam “based on his
honest opinion,” but that he was not in
fact “anti-Vietnamese” and that he “clearly
favored the Ngo Dinh Diem Government
over the Communist regime.” Finally, as
Strom had warned, Fall told Corcoran that
he would inform the Cambodians why his
contract had been dropped.
Early in June, Fall directly approached
the ICA’s Bunting with his complaint. In a
memorandum of conversation that Bunting
distributed in the Department of State on
June 7, Bunting described Fall as being
somewhat contrite about his speech to the
Association of Asian Studies and his article
in The Nation. According to Bunting, Fall
knew “his talk in New York was indiscreet,”
and he also regretted letting the article
appear, even after receiving a telephone
call from the Vietnamese ambassador, who
complained to him personally on April 12.
Still eager to save his ICA contract, Fall
showed Bunting publications that he had
written for USIA, ICA, and the Department
of Labor, “saying that the U.S. had not
hesitated to use his services in the past.” In
the memorandum, Bunting warned that the
decision to drop Fall “may cause some later
repercussions,” and although he concurred,
he expressed his regret about the situation:
“I am not happy about it because of Fall’s
considerable knowledge and abilities. The
case is complicated. If you would like to
know more about it, let me know.”
In addition to informing the Royal School
and the Cambodian government of the
Department of State’s decision regarding his
Spring 2011
New!
contract, Fall apparently also complained to
the embassy of France in Washington that
“the Vietnamese Embassy had intervened
with the Department to obtain” their
cancellation of his ICA contract. As a result,
on June 12, 1958, Pierre Landy, counselor at
the French embassy, went to the Department
of State to hear an explanation of the matter
from Eric Kocher, the director of the Office
of Southeast Asian Affairs, and Corcoran.
Kocher expressed regret that “negotiations
between Fall and ICA had proceeded so far
before the department decided they should
be dropped.” He explained that “Dr. Fall’s
public criticism of the U.S. aid program
made it inappropriate to send him out as
a representative of that program,” and he
interpreted the article in The Nation as “a fair
illustration of the emotional and inaccurate
nature of some of his views on this subject.”
Kocher also flatly denied Fall’s claim that
the Vietnamese embassy had intervened. He
claimed that “the Vietnamese Government
had made no request to us concerning Fall’s
public comments on the aid program on
its own.” For his part, Landy characterized
Fall as “an extremely independent and
audacious man,” and he left the meeting
with an assurance from the Americans that
Fall (right) poses with French and Cambodian officers, undated.
Back to a Forgotten Street
they would not object “if another French
candidate came forward” for the post at the
Royal School in Phnom Penh.
On June 10, 1958, in his last documented
effort to reinstate the cancelled ICA
contract through the Department of State,
Fall telephoned Joseph A. Mendenhall,
an OSS veteran of intelligence operations
in the Second World War then serving as
officer-in-charge of Vietnam affairs at the
Department of State in Washington. In his
“Memorandum of Conversation” regarding
that telephone call, Mendenhall reports
that Fall assumed the Vietnamese embassy
had persuaded the Department of State to
drop his contract based on objections to his
speech to the Association of Asian Studies
by the Vietnamese press attaché Nguyen
Phu Duc. Mendenhall denied that the
Vietnamese embassy ever approached the
Department of State “on the matter of his
employment,” and he maintained that “the
decision to terminate further consideration
of his employment had been taken on U.S.
Government initiative.”
Fall argued further that he had received
a security clearance and that his writings
demonstrated his opposition to the
Communist government in Hanoi. However,
Mendenhall assured Fall “that the decision
concerning his employment had not been
taken on security grounds.”
Mendenhall then told Fall that two factors
determined the Department of State’s
decision. First, Fall had criticized U.S. policy
and the aid program in Vietnam: “The
U.S. Government does not customarily
employ persons who show publicly that
they are out of sympathy with its policies
and operations.” Second, Fall was “a public
critic of the Vietnamese Government,” and
it would be “embarrassing in our relations
with this friendly government, for the U.S.
to hire him.”
In concluding their conversation, Fall
repeated that he thought the decision to
drop his contract stemmed mainly from the
Vietnamese response to his briefing in New
York. He asked that the Department of State
review his “whole record” in support of South
Vietnam to reconsider him for employment.
He also alleged that the Department of
State had accepted biased information from
“persons in Saigon unfriendly to him,”
specifically “[Gene] Gregory, editor of the
English-language Times of Viet-Nam.”
Mendenhall responded that “the whole
record . . . had been taken into consideration
in reaching a decision in his case.” The
memorandum concludes with the statement
that Mendenhall “avoided comment for
various reasons on all of these points, and
gave him [Fall] no indication that he could
expect reconsideration of the decision about
his employment.”
Why Did the State Department
Cancel Fall’s Contract?
The folder on what some memoranda
refer to as “The Bernard Fall Case” neither
confirms nor refutes Mrs. Fall’s assertion
that in 1958, “in Saigon, the Diem regime,
apparently working with the U.S. Embassy,”
joined forces against her husband’s contract
to work in Cambodia. However, these
records do confirm that after Fall signed
Prologue 45

Fall (left) with American soldiers in Vietnam, undated.
the contract offered to him by ICA and
USOM in Cambodia, Dulles and other
State Department officials moved to cancel
acceptance of the contract.
The State Department explicitly opposed
the contract because Fall had publically
questioned the effectiveness of American
foreign aid in countering the rise of a
Communist insurgency against the regime
of President Ngo Dinh Diem in the
Republic of Vietnam. In the United States,
Fall’s views also provoked the ire of South
Vietnam’s embassy officials and members of
the anti-Communist lobby group American
Friends of Vietnam.
This opposition stemmed from Fall’s
speech in New York. In the subsequent
article that reiterated the main points of that
speech, however, Fall merely stressed the need
for real economic development stimulated
by more effective foreign assistance
programs in support of Diem. Although Fall
also attributed the growing unpopularity of
President Diem to political corruption, he
strongly preferred Diem to the unification of
Vietnam under a Communist dictatorship.
46 Prologue
For Fall in 1958, President Diem’s political
problems made it all the more important
for the United States to improve its foreign
assistance programs as a means of promoting
economic development that would win
popular support for Diem away from the
rising Communist insurgency.
Ironically, Mendenhall advocated much
stronger sanctions against President Diem
just four years after he explained that the
Department of State had dropped the
contract because, “as a public critic of
the Vietnamese government,” Fall might
embarrass the United States. By 1962,
Mendenhall flatly recommended that
the United States “Get rid of Diem,” in a
secret memorandum that he, as the former
political counselor in the American embassy
in Saigon, presented to Edward E. Rice,
the new deputy assistant secretary of state
for Far Eastern Affairs in Washington. The
Department of State first published the
memorandum in 1990.
Much as Fall had argued previously, the
1962 Mendenhall memorandum held that
“the government must win the support
of the villagers by providing adequate
protection and helping them improve their
lot.” Unlike Fall, by 1962 Mendenhall
concluded that since Diem’s “weaknesses
represent the basic underlying reason for the
trend against us in the war,” Diem should
leave the government. Mendenhall closed
the memorandum with a section speculating
on “How the Coup Might Be Carried Out.”
In November 1963 a coup d’état did
eliminate President Diem from office, if not
precisely as Mendenhall had recommended.
However, the U.S. government never resolved
the issues of economic development and
political reform in Vietnam, which Fall had
addressed in 1958 before the Association of
Asian Studies and in The Nation. Indeed, as
Mrs. Fall laments in her telling memoir of their
marriage, officials in Washington continued
to neglect the body of her husband’s writings
on counterinsurgency through the end of the
American war in Vietnam (1975).
The records of U.S. Foreign Assistance
Agencies indicate that this long period of
official neglect began with the telegram sent
in May 1958 over Secretary Dulles’s name,
which ended months of direct negotiations
by USOM and ICA to hire Fall.
Remembering What
Bernard Fall Wrote
Thomas E. Ricks, a former Washington Post
correspondent who covered the American
invasion of Iraq, reports that in 2002–2003,
American commanders in Iraq began to
rediscover Bernard Fall among other bygone
writers who suddenly seemed relevant as
American troops faced the insurgency that
rose against them after the defeat of Saddam
Hussein. Today Fall’s books on Dien Bien
Phu and the failure of France to maintain
its colonial holdings in Indochina deserve a
closer reading by diplomats and soldiers.
Even the short article in The Nation
summarizing the analysis that derailed Fall’s
early career as a government contractor
includes observations that may yet prove
valuable to Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Spring 2011
 The first point Fall made was that a less
obvious, if not a smaller, American presence
would have been more effective in backing
Diem. To support this observation, he
quoted an unclassified report submitted in
the spring of 1958 as testimony to Congress
by Leland Barrows, then serving as director
of USOM in Vietnam:
The number of American jeeps,
American uniforms, American faces,
which one encounters on the principal
streets of the principal cities . . . seems
disproportionately large to a native
population that has an innate destructor
resentment of anything alien or non-
national. . . . If the American presence is
over-obvious we will inevitably be made
the scapegoat for failure or shortcomings
in which we had little or no part.
Fall further observed that in the event
of legal disputes with the local civilian
population, the practice of prosecuting
U.S. personnel under U.S. law made the
American forces vulnerable to increasing
conflict with civilians. He quoted a MAAG
officer as saying, “We aren’t an occupation
force, you know. Our guys are spread in
small packets throughout the countryside,
wearing civvies, living in the local hotels,”
and this played into the hand of the
insurgents because if the U.S. personnel
“do get into trouble, they’re shipped out
to the Philippines for courts-martial. . . .
The Vietnamese don’t know what happens
to them. They probably think we just
To learn more about
• Military records from
the Vietnam War, go to www.
archives.gov/research/military/
vietnam-war/.
• “Vietnam and the Presidency,” a conference
at the Kennedy Library, go to www.archives.
gov/presidential-libraries/events/vietnam/.
• Electronic records of Korean and Vietnam
War casualties, go to www.archives.gov/
publications/prologue/2000/spring/.
Back to a Forgotten Street
white-wash all the cases, as the Commie
propaganda tells them.”
Fall believed that the failure of land reform
to allow more farmers to own the land they
farmed would over time lead discontented
farmers to support insurgents. He wrote,
“Land reform, widely hailed as giving
the small farmer a share in his country’s
economy, has bogged down in red tape and
inefficiency, and is not even keeping pace
with the natural growth of the farming
population.”
At the heart of Fall’s critique was the
observation that the failure of American
economic assistance to develop the
competitive advantages of the local
economy led to economic deterioration
and a dependence on foreign aid that fueled
local support of the insurgents. In Vietnam,
despite the potential to cultivate export
surpluses, the lack of local currency for local
investment led to increasing imports of food
and American consumer goods.
Devoted to finding the facts, Bernard
Fall presented such observations in a
relentless effort to improve American
counterinsurgency operations against
Communist guerrillas after the defeat
of France at the siege of Dien Bien Phu.
A veteran of the French Resistance in
World War II, he loyally served the U.S.
government in a series of projects that
began in 1946 on the U.S. staff of the
Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal and
continued until May 1958, when the
Department of State rejected his analysis
of the realities in South Vietnam.
Despite the ignorance of his work by
executive policymakers who might have
applied resources more effectively to
win the American war, Fall continued to
gather the facts until 1967, when he died
beside a forgotten street in Vietnam. His
writings remain signal contributions to
military science from a different war, long
ago, when perhaps the best of analysts
dodged police surveillance at home to wage
counterinsurgency abroad. P
Note on Sources
All quotations in this article regarding Bernard
Fall’s negotiations with the ICA and State Department
to teach in Cambodia come from documents in the
folder labeled “Cambodia—Contracts—Bernard Fall”
in Records of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies,
1942–1961 (Record Group [RG] 469). In this folder,
the telegram from the Department of State ending
those negotiations was sent over the name of “Dulles,”
stamped not signed, and approved for transmission
and classification by Eric Kocher, the director of
the Office of Southeast Asian Affairs: “Outgoing
Telegram, Department of State; Confidential; 1958
May 26,” NARA RG 469, Entry P85.
The same folder contains tear sheets of Fall’s
publication “Will South Vietnam Be Next?” The
Nation (May 31, 1958): 489–493, which is quoted in
the article. The quotations from Fall’s last tape appear
on page 271 of Last Reflections On a War (Garden
City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1967), the
posthumous selection of his late works with a preface
by Dorothy Fall.
Dorothy Fall cites FBI documents in her Memories of a
Soldier-Scholar (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, Inc.: 2006).
She writes there that in addition to tailing her husband
for seven years, FBI surveillance methods included
telephone taps, concealed microphones, snooping by
neighbors, and the solicitation of private information
from people whom the Falls considered to be friends.
The National Archives holds Joseph A.
Mendenhall’s OSS personnel files in Records of the
Office of Strategic Services, 1919–1948 (RG 226,
Entry 224). The Department of State published
Mendenhall’s August 16, 1962, recommendation
to “Get rid of Diem” in Vietnam 1962, Volume II;
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963
(Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1990), pages 596–601.
Former Washington Post Pentagon correspondent
Thomas E. Ricks reports about the renewed interest
in Fall’s views on counterinsurgency in: Fiasco: The
American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York:
Penguin Press, 2006).
Photographs of Bernard Fall in Cambodia (after
1961) and Vietnam appear here with permission
of Dorothy Fall, who very graciously discussed the
documents about her husband’s early career. I am
grateful for her patience in recalling the frustrations
they both endured.
Author
Robert Fahs works with civilian textual records as a
processing archivist at the National Archives. Before
joining the Archives, he received Fulbright Scholarships
to Germany and Kazakhstan, and he taught with the
University of Maryland University College (UMUC) in
Singapore, Japan, and South Korea. He received his Ph.D.
in history from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.
Prologue 47