Number One Realist

In a 1965 letter toNewsweek, French writer and academic Bernard Fall (192667) staked a claim as the Number One Realist on the Vietnam War. This is the first book to study the thought of this overlooked figure, one of the most important experts on counterinsurgency warfare in Indochina. Nathaniel L. Moirs intellectual history analyses Falls formative experiences: his service in the French underground and army during the Second World War; his fathers execution by the Germans and his mothers murder in Auschwitz; and his work as a research analyst at the Nuremberg Trials.Moir demonstrates how these critical events shaped Falls trenchant analysis of Viet Minh-led revolutionary warfare during the French-Indochina War and the early Vietnam War.In the years before conventional American intervention in 1965, Fall argued thatfar more than anything in the United States military arsenalresolving conflict in Vietnam would require political strength, willpower, integrity and skill.Number One Realistilluminates Falls study of political reconciliation in Indochina, while showing how his profound, humanitarian critique of war continues to echo in the endless conflicts of the present. It will challenge and change the way we think about the Vietnam War.