The Quiet American

Product Information

Jumping forward to two weeks after Pyle’s death, Fowler visits Vigot. Fowler insists that he’s not engagé—in other words, he’s not politically involved with either side in Vietnam. Nevertheless, Vigot insists, Fowler has chosen sides. Privately, Fowler thinks that he’s a suffering prisoner with a life sentence.

Anderson asserts that at the first sign of a civilian uprising, Khrushchev was willing to let Hungary go. But the US was distracted at the time because the British, French, and Israelis had invaded to seize the Suez Canal and topple Egypt’s leader Nasser. Sensing that the US had encouraged rebellion in Hungary but was unwilling to support it, Khrushchev sent in tanks to quash the revolt.

I stopped our trishaw outside the Chalet and said to Phuong, ‘Go in and find a table. I had better look after Pyle.’ That was my first instinct – to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we should be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm…” I shut my eyes and she was again the same as she used to be: she was the hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the night, and the promise of rest.'

She's no child. She is tougher than you'll ever be. Do you know the kind of polish that doesn't take scratches? That's Phuong. She can survive a dozen of us. She'll get old, that's all. She'll suffer from childbirth and hunger and cold and rheumatism, but she'll never suffer like we do from thought, obsession-she won't scratch, she'll only decay." Returning to Saigon, Fowler meets with Pyle, who tells him that he and Phuong are going to be married in the United States. Fowler feels a flash of sympathy for Phuong, who’ll be out of her element in a new country. He asks Pyle to keep Phuong’s interests in mind, and adds that he must not align himself with General Thé. He also accuses Pyle of planning the bicycle bombing, an accusation that Pyle doesn’t deny. For the young America had indeed entered Quietly into French Indochina - but would leave it injured and aged. Thomas Fowler is a British journalist in his fifties who has covered the French war in Vietnam for more than two years. He meets a young American idealist named Alden Pyle, a CIA agent working undercover. Pyle lives his life and forms his opinions based on foreign policy books written by York Harding with no real experience in Southeast Asia matters. Harding's theory is that neither communism nor colonialism are proper in foreign lands like Vietnam, but rather a "Third Force"—usually a combination of traditions—works best. When they first meet, the earnest Pyle asks Fowler to help him understand more about the country, but the older man's cynical realism does not sink in. Pyle is certain that American power can put the Third Force in charge, but he knows little about Indochina and recasts it into theoretical categories. The second issue was that a lot of the committed anti-Communists floating around Europe in the late 1940s were also committed Nazis who had participated in the Holocaust. Sichel was actually a Jewish refugee himself who wound up working with Nazis under a strict policy of "I don't care what you did during the war." Working with Nazis and war criminals provided a propaganda victory to the Soviets, and also seems to have minimal intelligence value, as most of these assets traded off of stale historical insights from the war, and were more concerned about avoiding accountability for their past than producing good intelligence.What can you offer her?" he asked me with anger. "A couple hundred dollars when you leave for England, or will you pass her on with the furniture?" The story is set in 1952 in Saigon, Vietnam ( French Indochina at that time), toward the end of the First Indochina War (1946–1954) in which French forces fought the Communist-led Viet Minh rebels. On one level, The Quiet American is a love story about the triangle that develops between Thomas Fowler, a British journalist in his fifties; Alden Pyle, a young American idealist, supposedly an aid worker; and Phuong, a young Vietnamese woman. On another level it is also about the growing American involvement that led to the full-scale American war in Vietnam. Alden Pyle takes second billing in this drama. He is the titular American, an undercover CIA officer who – in a few more years – would have fit perfectly into John Kennedy’s New Frontier, one of “the best and the brightest,” a brilliant Harvard grad almost overflowing with pet ideas and grand theories, along with the idealism to believe that the proper application of those ideas and theories could solve just about any problem. What may be the most consequential of the insights Anderson offers in this book regards the Eisenhower Administration’s dismissive response to overtures for peace almost immediately after the death of Stalin. “[B]y deriding the concept of ‘peaceful coexistence’ in favor of a continued policy of confrontation, they undercut the moderate faction within the Kremlin and bolstered the militants. In the estimation of President Eisenhower’s ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time, Charles Bohlen, by misplaying the aftermath of Stalin’s death in 1953, the United States may have missed a golden opportunity to dramatically alter the course of the Cold War.” And we paid for that miscalculation with the more than three decades of costly belligerence that followed.