ABSTRACT
Just a few months 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. By mid-1942, discussions were underway within the State Department on possible forms of international supervision for the development of indigenous political and civil society in postwar Vietnam. From 1942 onward, Roosevelt vigorously pressed members of the wartime alliance to support trusteeship, winning the support of Chiang Kai-shek and Joseph Stalin. At the same time, American officials in southern China were increasingly drawn into discussions about trusteeship for Vietnam. By the spring of 1945, however, the United States had retreated from these efforts, abandoning plans for the international supervision of Vietnam’s transition to independence and acquiescing to the return of the French to Indochina.
