ABSTRACT
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed doubts about French colonial rule in Indochina and initiated plans to place Vietnam under some form of international trusteeship. While scholars debate Roosevelt's culpability for the quiet death of trusteeship in the spring of 1945, the postwar American diplomacy toward Vietnam marked a sharp break with Roosevelt's wartime plans for Indochina. The interconnections Roosevelt drew between Vietnam and the Philippines were central to his conception of Vietnamese development under trusteeship. Roosevelt's brief before the Pacific War Council that the success of American policy in the Philippines expressed faith in the universality of American models and the ease of their cross-cultural transfer. As President Roosevelt worked in 1943 to advance his plans for international trusteeship in Indochina, members of the State Department's postwar planning staff began to craft their own proposals to prepare Vietnam for independence and self-government.
