"Embers of War," by Fredrik Logevall As the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Franklin Roosevelt spoke bitterly to his son about European imperialism: "Don't think for a moment, Elliott, that Americans would be dying in the Pacific tonight if it hadn't been for the shortsighted greed of the French and the British and the Dutch." Earlier, he had spoken openly to the White House correspondents: "There has never been, there isn't now and there never will be, any race of people on earth fit to serve as masters over their fellow men. . . . We believe that any nationality, no matter how small, has the inherent right to its own nationhood. That was the core of the Atlantic Charter in 1941, which both Churchill and Roosevelt signed. It called on "the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live." Agence France-Presse Vietnamese soldiers during the battle of Dien Bien Phu, 1954. The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam By Fredrik Logevall Random House. $40. Four years later, with the war over and Roosevelt dead, the new president entered office knowing little about how his predecessor saw the future of the world. Harry Truman ignored the anticolonial passages of the Atlantic Charter (just as Churchill did) and supported the continuation of imperialism among the great powers - a decision that helped the French government to restore its hold on the empire. That included its lost colony: Vietnam. Over time, that decision led to what George F. Kennan once called "the most disastrous of all America's undertakings over the whole 200 years of its history." Fredrik Logevall's excellent book "Choosing War" (1999) chronicled the American escalation of the Vietnam War in the early 1960s. With "Embers of War," he has written an even more impressive book about the French conflict in Vietnam and the beginning of the American one - from the end of World War II to the beginning of the second Vietnam War in 1959. It is the most comprehensive history of that time. Logevall, a professor of history at Cornell University, has drawn from many years of previous scholarship as well as his own. And he has produced a powerful portrait of the terrible and futile French war from which Americans learned little as they moved toward their own engagement in Vietnam. Logevall begins with the efforts of Ho Chi Minh, who spent his life trying to bring independence to his country. He fought alongside Americans in the battle against Japan during World War II, and he hoped to build an independent Vietnamese nation with American support. But since Ho's Viet Minh party was both nationalist and Communist, American support in the deepening cold war was impossible. By 1946, Ho was already planning for a war to drive the French out. But the weak and frequently changing French governments had other ideas. They set out to restore Vietnam as a colony of France, and they did so with the financial help of the United States. The French insisted that without Vietnam their economy would collapse. But they wanted more than money. They wanted to secure what they considered the greatness of "eternal France," which included its colonial enterprises. The French campaign was a long and ugly conflict that lasted almost a decade. It reached its apex in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu, a remote area surrounded by hills in the North, where the French believed they could "withstand any kind of attack the Viet Minh are capable of launching." The long siege of Dien Bien Phu could have gone either way, but the French underestimated the power of the Viet Minh and lost. By the end, 110,000 French troops were dead - about twice the number of American deaths in the second Vietnam War. Approximately 200,000 Viet Minh soldiers were killed, along with 125,000 civilians. By 1955, the French had left Vietnam for good, abandoning what they had once considered the jewel of their empire. Logevall is not only skilled at describing the war. He is also adept at explaining the diplomacy of Vietnam during the 1950s. There was internal disagreement during the Geneva Conference of 1954 about what role the United States should play once the French left. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (who participated in the convention only briefly) believed that America should take the place of the French and continue the war. But Eisenhower, who understood what battle was like, refused to send American troops into Vietnam. Instead, he agreed with others at the Geneva Conference to partition the country - leaving the North under the government of Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh, and the South under Ngo Dinh Diem, an aristocratic Catholic who hoped to create a Western regime with strong ties to the United States. In 1956, there were to be elections to reunite the country under a single government - elections that never took place. Alan Brinkley is Allan Nevins professor of history at Columbia University.