A Triangle Comes Full Circle

He was a man whose warnings could have changed U.S. policy -- if only the American presidents, Kennedy and Johnson, had read his work. That is what former secretary of state Colin L. Powell, who served as an officer in Vietnam, wrote of Fall years later.

Fall was an outsize figure. A member of the French underground during World War II and a professor at Howard University, his home, where his wife still lives, was visited by politicians, government officials and journalists seeking guidance on Vietnam.

He interviewed the Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh and was deeply moved by the heroism and sacrifice of the French military, which lost 95,000 soldiers during its struggle in Vietnam.

But he was sobered by the enemy's resolve and by the crushing hardship of fighting in the fastness of Southeast Asia.

For a time, he was thought by the U.S. government to be a French spy, and the FBI staked out the family home, tapped the phone and read the mail, his wife said.

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Dorothy Fall, an accomplished artist, was 36 when her husband died, leaving her with an infant and two other small children. They had been married for 13 years.

She was the Dorothy to whom he dedicated one book and "the American girl who is now my wife" in the preface to another.

They met in 1952 at Syracuse University, where she was a student and he was a visiting Fulbright scholar.

He was a native of Vienna who had lost both parents in the Holocaust, but he fought in the French resistance and French army during World War II. He rarely told people where he was born; he considered himself French.

She was a sheltered girl from Rochester, N.Y., the daughter of an immigrant tailor who worked as a pocketmaker for a big clothing company.

The couple fell in love and married two years later. But Bernard had already come under the spell of a jealous mistress, as he and his wife both put it: Vietnam.