Edward Miller is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College.
[Miller] mines new Vietnamese and French sources to advance
important arguments. Miller offers numerous new details of Diem’s
early career to present him as a serious modernizer seeking to
retain traditional principles. He illuminates Diem’s close personal
friendship with the iconic Vietnamese anticolonialist Phan Boi
Chau, with whom he spent long hours discussing the relevance of
Confucianism—its moral and philosophical precepts—to modern
politics and society.
*Wall Street Journal*
[Miller’s] book skillfully places the establishment of the new
nation in the great debate after World War II between the high
modernist (Walt Rostow et al.) and low modernist (The Ugly
American) development schools. Miller’s command of the various
parties and factions that jostled for power at the collapse of,
first, Japanese occupation and then French rule is exhaustive, and
his analysis of the economic development programs—land reform, the
Agrovilles, the Strategic Hamlet program—is fascinating in its own
right.
*Weekly Standard*
An extraordinary book, brilliantly conceived and cogently argued.
Miller transcends the scholarly and political polemics of Vietnam
War literature, presenting readers with a fresh and original take
on Ngo Dinh Diem and South Vietnam’s relationship with the U.S.
Misalliance is sure to be greeted with widespread acclaim.
*Andrew Preston, author of The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the
NSC, and Vietnam*
Miller rejects the simplistic and partisan interpretations that
have dominated earlier accounts of America’s partnership with
Vietnam. Misalliance will be not only a major advance in our
understanding of Ngo Dinh Diem and U.S.–Vietnamese relations, it
will fundamentally alter the direction of scholarship on the
Vietnam War.
*Keith Weller Taylor, author of The Birth of Vietnam*
A monumental contribution to our understanding of America’s
misguided intervention in Vietnam. Great books advance knowledge as
well as historical debate, and this is exactly what Miller
achieves. Misalliance could easily be the best new book of the
year.
*Larry Berman, author of Zumwalt: The Life and Times of Admiral
Elmo Russell “Bud” Zumwalt, Jr.*
An exemplary work of research and scholarship. Miller dispels in
definitive fashion the myth that Ngo Dinh Diem owed his appointment
as prime minister of a nascent South Vietnam to American
intercession or that he was ever a ‘tool’ of the Americans.
*Rufus Phillips, author of Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness
Account of Lessons Not Learned*
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