He taught at Howard University for most of his career and made regular trips to Southeast Asia to learn about changes and their societies.

When the French were defeated at the critical Battle of Dien Bien Phu, Fall claimed that the United States had been partly responsible for France's loss.

[7] In 1954, Fall returned to the United States and married Dorothy Winer, a 1952 graduate of Syracuse University, and submitted his dissertation, Viet-Minh Regime: Government and Administration in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

While teaching at the Royal Institute of Administration in Cambodia in 1962, Fall was invited to interview Ho Chi Minh and Phạm Văn Đồng in Hanoi.

Ho Chi Minh told Fall of his belief that communism would prevail in South Vietnam in about a decade's time.

He obtained his data on the war while he slogged through the mud of Vietnam with French colonial troops, American infantrymen, and ARVN soldiers.

Fall's dire predictions caught the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which began to monitor his activities.

In Colin Powell's 1995 autobiography, My American Journey, he wrote: I recently reread Bernard Fall's book on Vietnam, Street Without Joy.

I cannot help thinking that if President Kennedy or President Johnson had spent a quiet weekend at Camp David reading that perceptive book, they would have returned to the White House Monday morning and immediately started to figure out a way to extricate ourselves from the quicksand of Vietnam.Noam Chomsky has called Fall "the most respected analyst and commentator on the Vietnam War.

"[9] Towards the end of his life, Fall suffered from retroperitoneal fibrosis, which resulted in the loss of a kidney and a colon blockage.

[10] He was dictating notes into a tape recorder, which captured his last words: "We've reached one of our phase lines after the firefight and it smells bad—meaning it's a little bit suspicious... Could be an amb—."