Dr Alex Ferguson

My current book project, entitled Operation Eggshell: The American Struggle to Keep France Fighting in Vietnam, 1950-54, provides a new history of the fragile and turbulent Franco-American relationship at the centre of U.S. efforts to prevent a communist takeover in Vietnam during the early 1950s. While existing scholarship tends to focus on high-level Franco-American exchanges, this book adopts an ‘on the ground’ perspective. It focuses on the interactions that took place between French representatives and a diverse cast of Americans – from idealistic aid workers to ambitious visiting politicians to grizzled war reporters to dutiful diplomatic spouses – in the cafes, press rooms, cocktail bars, and diplomatic residences of the Vietnamese city of Saigon. The book demonstrates that the Franco-American alliance was more than just a strategic entente forged by senior policymakers in response to shared geopolitical goals, as scholars have tended to describe it; it was also an alliance which waxed and waned in response to the words, actions, and behaviours of Americans at the local level. The book deepens scholarly understanding of the everyday interactions that defined and inhibited alliances within Cold War blocs and the place of postcolonial cities as sites of collision between different Western conceptions of empire, war making, and state building.

I have also begun work on a new project on the U.S. alliance with Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem, the man whom the United States hitched their hopes of creating an anti-communist bulwark in South Vietnam on between 1954 and 1963. The first output from this research is a forthcoming article with the Journal of Cold War Studies. The piece, entitled 'Reassessing U.S. Involvement in Ngo Dinh Diem's Appointment', draws on newly available sources to reassess the often-repeated claim that the United States engineered Diem’s appointment as Vietnamese prime minister. This article reveals that Diem’s ascent to high office relied as much on his ability to bypass U.S. covert machinations as it did his capacity to capitalise on his American connections. While the contacts that Diem formed with influential Americans were a factor in his appointment, I show that Washington’s most important contribution to Diem’s rise to power came not from the decision to intervene on Diem’s behalf but on the choice not to back a covert plan to install a rival Vietnamese candidate, Nguyen Huu Tri, in power. In emphasising the importance of U.S. inaction to Diem’s appointment, the article contributes to broader debates about the limits of American power in the early Cold War and the legitimacy of the South Vietnamese state. 

I am also interested in the development of the historiography on Diem. I have a forthcoming article, tentatively entitled ‘From Puppet to Pluralism: Changing Interpretations of Ngo Dinh Diem’, set to be published in Cold War History in 2025 as part of a special issue commissioned to mark the 50^th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.   

The third output from this research, a new book project provisionally entitled The Analogous Alliance: The United States, Ngo Dinh Diem, and the Struggle for Vietnam, 1954-1963, will investigate how historical and contemporary analogies emerged as a lingua franca through which Americans debated and determined Ngo Dinh Diem’s suitability as their chief ally in Vietnam. Americans used Syngman Rhee, Winston Churchill, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, George Washington, and several other former and current world leaders as barometers to assess whether Diem had the right characteristics to forge a strong South Vietnam capable of keeping communist forces at bay.