Andre Gunder Frank's latest work, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age definitely is a book with a message. Its author sets out to challenge what according to him are the received opinions in historiography and social science on the making of the modern world. He does so relentlessly and overturns the ideas of such influential scholars as Marx, Weber, Polanyi, Rostow, Braudel and Wallerstein. As a matter of fact, of almost everybody who has ever touched upon the subject. All these misled if not downright misleading scholars are thought to suffer from Eurocentrism. Which of course is a Bad Thing. Frank uses the word to refer to people who profess to tell the history of the world but do so by preponderantly gazing at their European navel, unduly magnifying Europe's uniqueness and role in world history.

Towards the end of his lengthy study of the United States, De la démocratic en Amérique, the early nineteenth-century French liberal Alexis de Tocque-ville wrote:

Il y a aujourd'hui sur la terre deux grands peuples qui […] semblent s'avancer vers le même but: ce sont les Russes et les Anglo-Américains. Leur point de départ est différent, leurs voies sont diverses; néamoins, chacun d'eux semble appelé pas un dessein secret de la Providence à tenir un jour dans ses mains les destinées de la moitié du monde.

The analysis of the French view on the American first commitment in Vietnam depends on the point of view from which the study is made. The bilateral relations background has created different sensitivities on this issue. On the one hand, the United States was an ally of the French government, even if an ambiguous one; on the other hand, a large part of the French opinion, headed by the French communist party, was very suspicious of ‘American imperialism’, in Southeast Asia as well as in Europe. This paper will focus on the official government position, as it emerges from the French archives, especially the financial archives. Indeed, a core issue in this conflict was a financial one.

Before World War II, French Indochina little concerned American policymakers. The idea of sending half a million men to fight a war there would have seemed as fantastic as sending a man to the moon. Even after John F. Kennedy decided that the United States should - and could - send a man to the moon, the idea of sending half a million men to Vietnam still seemed fantastic. When George Ball expressed fears that such a possibility indeed existed if matters were allowed to continue until incremental creep became an avalanche, the president was astounded. ‘George’, Kennedy admonished him, ‘you're just crazier than hell. That just isn't going to happen.’ Historians still debate whether Kennedy would have followed the same path Lyndon Johnson took in Vietnam, thereby fulfilling George Ball's seemingly absurd prophecy. My purpose here is not to rehearse the arguments in that debate. Instead, I want to talk about the American ‘cause’ in Vietnam, and how, beginning in World War II, a generalised concern with the problem of closed economies and the creation of a post-colonial world order finally became focused on Vietnam.

Before discussing Vietnam, I would like to begin in a more general mode by citing a recent instance of remembering and retelling which, as is always the case, also involves as much forgetting and silencing. Last year, the history of the Khmer Rouge occupied television news and newspapers on the occasion of the unmourned death of Pol Pot. With only one exception that I have seen – the British journalist John Pilger's report for the Nation magazine, every press account of Pol Pot's death referred to the support the Khmer Rouge received from Thailand and China.

Since this conference is a small and intimate affair, the question I want to raise today is a modest: Why did President Kennedy in July 1963 appoint Henry Cabot Lodge Jr as the American Ambassador to Saigon?

The question is not only modest, Professor Gardner might say that it is redundant. In Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam, Gardner writes about Kennedy's decision to replace Frederick Nolting and nominate Lodge, that the new ambassador could offer him ‘protective coloration’ against Republicans attacking the Administration's Vietnam policy.

Although the United States granted the Philippines formal independence in 1946, American influence in the former colony did not disappear overnight. In the decades following independence, American policymakers continued to play key roles in Philippine politics; American businessmen, presidents, legislators, and bureaucrats and US-based international money lending agencies continued to have a considerable impact on the Philippine economy; and American popular culture continued to penetrate Philippine society and culture (as it did elsewhere). But perhaps no sector of Philippine society was as profoundly influenced by Americans as the academic one, and no subdivision of the Philippine academy bore the American imprint as visibly as Philippine social science. This paper examines the academic career, writings, institution-building efforts, and scholarly agenda of the US-born scholar who arguably had the greatest impact on post-war Philip- pine social science: Father Frank Lynch, a Jesuit professor of anthropology and sociology at Ateneo de Manila University.