Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

  VI

  BAO DAI TOO SAW THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE VIET MINH’S MILITARY success and of Mao’s gains in China. They gave him increased leverage but also reduced his options. The French, with one eye on Mao’s advancing armies and the other on their own stalemated war, might now give him more of what he wanted, but they might also abandon him if he dithered; they could opt simply to back Xuan and start a new Cochin China experiment with a puppet government run from Paris. He decided to take the plunge, hopeful also that the Americans—who were always at the forefront of his calculations—would now be more inclined to get involved. The reasoning went like this: To contain the Chinese Communists, the Truman administration would step up assistance to France in Indochina, but only if U.S. officials were persuaded that the French cause was vital to the West. This, however, presupposed that the Vietnam that was to be “saved” from Communism was not a mere colonial entity but an independent nation, one headed not by a French puppet but by a genuine nationalist with broad popular support. Paris leaders would balk initially, but they too needed to stay in America’s good graces. If Washington stood firm, the prospects were good for far-reaching French concessions to anti-Communist nationalism.39

  On March 8, 1949, Bao Dai and French president Vincent Auriol concluded, by an exchange of letters, the Élysée Accords, so named for the grand presidential palace in Paris at which the ceremony took place. The accord reconfirmed Vietnam’s autonomy and her status as an “Associated State” within the French Union (Laos received the same status that July, and Cambodia in November), and it spelled out how the liquidation of Cochin Chinese separatism would occur. This new “State of Vietnam” also was promised her own army for internal security reasons, but with the crucial proviso that this army would be equipped and, in effect, directed by France. Many Vietnamese already serving in the Expeditionary Corps (some thirty-eight thousand in early 1949) resisted transfer to the new army, and there was from the start an acute shortage of officers. More important, under the Élysée Accords, Vietnam’s foreign and defense relations would remain under French control, and in various other ways too the accord showed that Paris retained ultimate sovereignty. Vietnam under Bao Dai, that is to say, would become independent only when French leaders decided she was good and ready.

  To no one’s surprise, the announcement of the agreement aroused scant enthusiasm in Vietnam. The DRV leadership immediately denounced the deal, and Ho Chi Minh went on the radio to declare he would continue the struggle until complete independence was won. In April, the Viet Minh issued a warrant for Bao Dai’s arrest on the charge of high treason. French efforts to drum up excitement among other Vietnamese, meanwhile, foundered on the widespread feelings of apathy (“it means no improvement in my life”) or cynicism (“the so-called independence is a sham”) or both.40

  Still, the French had their Bao Dai solution. They now turned to what had been a principal motive behind the plan in the first place: securing increased American material and diplomatic backing. Barely had the ink on the accord dried than the Ministry of Overseas France showed the text to U.S. diplomats. Not even the National Assembly got to see it sooner. In the weeks that followed, officials took every chance to try to convince Americans of the liberality of French policy and of Bao Dai’s stature as the only thing standing in the way of a Communist takeover. The tactic worked. It did so despite the fact that Washington had long held doubts about Bao Dai’s viability as a nationalist leader. Already in December 1947 the Central Intelligence Agency had concluded that any government under the emperor would be fatally harmed by association with France and would never pose a serious threat to the “fanatical loyalty” inspired by Ho. Thirteen months later, in January 1949, a State Department analysis predicted that a Bao Dai administration “might become virtually a puppet government separated from the people and existing only by the presence of French military forces.” Should that happen, an April 1949 memo warned, “we must then follow blindly down a dead-end alley, expending our limited resources … in a fight that would be hopeless.”41

  It might be a dead-end alley, others in the administration said, or it might not be. What swung the Truman administration in favor of the Élysée Accords was the possibility, distant though it might be, that Bao Dai really was a viable moderate nationalist alternative to Ho Chi Minh, and moreover that the risks of committing to him and to the French were smaller than the risks of doing nothing. Mao’s forces were pressing forward to victory in China, and global Communism seemed to be on the march. Something had to be done.

  It mattered too that powerful voices in American society were pressing the argument. In 1949, Henry R. Luce’s Time and its sister publication, Life, insisted—more and more loudly as the year progressed—that France was fighting for the West in Indochina and therefore must have robust U.S. support. A great many people heard the message. Time was for many Americans at midcentury more than a magazine: It was a kind of unofficial but authoritative version of America’s noble cause in the Cold War. Life, for its part, was read by an astonishing 44.4 percent of college-educated males. Though few Americans had heard of Luce, they lapped up the news as filtered through his prism. “If the U.S. goes into Asia,” Time declared in October 1949, then she will have to “go in with both feet, with money and authority, with the will to help Asians build their own strong, free societies and with the result of preventing them from committing national suicide under the strains of that painful process.” The magazine left no doubt that the effort must be made. Syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop argued likewise, notably in a quartet of columns he penned during a stay in Saigon in June, in which he excoriated the French for dragging their feet in the negotiations with Bao Dai.42

  For Ho too, 1949 would prove to be pivotal. The astonishing developments in world politics during that year would influence his cause no less than the French. After years of diplomatic failure, of international isolation, his Democratic Republic of Vietnam would taste her first real success, though with implications that he could not foresee. The war was about to change. Up to now largely a Franco-Vietnamese affair, resulting from Paris leaders’ attempt to reclaim colonial control and Vietnamese nationalistic determination to thwart them and define a new postcolonial order, it would become something else, something more.

  The great powers were coming to Vietnam.

  CHAPTER 9

  “THE CENTER OF THE COLD WAR”

  “HAVING PUT OUR HAND TO THE PLOW, WE WOULD NOT LOOK back.”1 Such was Dean Acheson’s characterization of the American decision to effectively abandon her neutral policy and back the French war effort with substantial economic and military aid. It was an apt characterization, not only for 1949 but for many years to come. For the better part of twenty years, it would be the mantra of American administrations on Vietnam: Don’t look back; keep pressing ahead. Not until 1968, when Lyndon Baines Johnson curtailed the bombing, agreed to negotiations with Hanoi, and announced he would not seek reelection, did the direction change. Even then, the war had another five years to run.

  Acheson’s words come from his memoir, which appeared at about the time the beleaguered LBJ fled Washington in 1969, a man broken by the war. The year before, Acheson had been among the “Wise Men” who had counseled Johnson that there was no light at the end of the tunnel in Vietnam, that he had no choice but to reduce U.S. involvement. Acheson was in a position to know, for he had been there at the start two decades prior. Hardly one to be accused of excessive modesty, Acheson titled his memoir Present at the Creation, and indeed he was. He was a central player, arguably the central player, in the drama of the late 1940s and early 1950s that saw the United States become a global hegemon, the self-appointed defender of Western civilization. As one account has it, he was more responsible for the Truman Doctrine than Truman, more the architect of the Marshall Plan than Marshall. Later, he was instrumental in frightening the Senate into ratifying the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, America’s first-ever peacetime military alliance. More than any other pr
esidential adviser, arguably more than President Truman himself, Acheson shaped the nation’s postwar role on the world stage.2

  Including in Southeast Asia. Though the latter-day Acheson wasn’t keen to underscore the fact, he was also “present at the creation” of his country’s long and difficult commitment to Vietnam. The State Department dominated decision making on Indochina in the second half of the 1940s, and Acheson, by virtue of his role as secretary of state after January 1949—and a forceful and decisive one at that—was the man in charge when the big decisions of 1949–50 had to be made.

  His rise in government had been rapid. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, on April 11, 1893, the son of an Episcopal bishop, Acheson attended Groton and Yale, followed by Harvard Law School. After a period with the Washington law firm of Covington & Burling, he entered the federal government as undersecretary of the treasury in 1933. During the Second World War, he served as assistant secretary of state, and in 1945 he became undersecretary (the second-ranking position in the department), quickly earning a reputation for being orderly, efficient, savvy, and discreet. In January 1949, after a period away from government, he was summoned back by Truman to assume the top job.

  Truman chose him because of his loyalty and his qualifications, and his formidable intelligence, but it didn’t hurt that he so much looked and sounded the part. He strode forth as the quintessence of the striped-pants diplomat, with his Savile Row suits, his erect bearing, his astonishing mustache, his manners, his precision, and his dry Anglo wit. “He looked more like a British foreign secretary than any British foreign secretary I ever saw,” said the longtime New York Times Washington bureau chief James “Scotty” Reston, who saw a few. And in fact, Acheson was an Anglophile of the first order, who could be outspoken in his admiration for the British Empire. He was also a staunch anti-Communist and was often brusquely impatient with, and suspicious of, the nationalist leaders of the colonial world. When a State Department analyst in February 1949 noted the general absence of anti-American propaganda coming out of Viet Minh headquarters, and suggested that Ho Chi Minh still hoped for U.S. backing for—or at least noninterference in—his cause, Acheson was unmoved. The question, he said some weeks later, of whether Ho Chi Minh was as much a “nationalist as a Commie is irrelevant. All Stalinists in colonial areas are nationalists.” Ho, he said, was an “outright Commie.”3

  To acknowledge the possibility of national Communism was to acknowledge that the world was a complex place, and this Acheson and Truman and other American leaders were loath to do. If, for example, Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito (whose break with Moscow had become public the previous year) really was a nationalist as well as a Communist, and if Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh were the same, then the world was altogether more complicated than most Americans—including educated, erudite ones like Acheson—preferred to believe. It was far easier to see these leaders as mere pawns of a hyperpowerful superstate emanating from the Kremlin—regardless of what the evidence showed.4

  All of which would suggest that Acheson was a godsend for the men hunkered down in the French defense ministry. In actuality, though, he was torn in his early months in office about which way to go on Vietnam. In February 1949, he commented acidly, “Over the past three years,” the French “have shown no impressively sincere intention or desire to make the concessions which seem necessary to solve the Indochina question.” In the early spring, Acheson resisted pressure from State Department conservatives to throw full U.S. support behind France and the Bao Dai solution. He couldn’t get away from the notion that Bao Dai was a weak leader with no hope of winning broad popular support, couldn’t get away from the suspicion that France sought merely to continue her colonial war under a new guise. In this respect Acheson endorsed the views of the liberal voices at Foggy Bottom, Asian specialists such as Charles Reed, the former consul general in Saigon who had penned the “dead-end alley” memo in January and who continued in the spring to voice deep pessimism regarding the prospects in Indochina. Far better, Reed advised, for the United States to make her stand against Communism in a more hospitable environment such as Thailand.5

  Ultimately, however, Acheson couldn’t bring himself to act on this knowledge and instead sided with the conservatives. When he visited Paris for a foreign ministers’ meeting in June, he listened sympathetically as the new U.S. ambassador, David Bruce, laid out why a failure to back France in Indochina could have disastrous effects in French politics. The centrist governments comprised of the MRP, the Socialists, and the Radical Socialists, Bruce noted, faced ever-mounting pressure from the Communists on the left and the Gaullists on the right. With the NATO treaty close to signing, any policy that harmed the centrists—whose credibility, after all, was most on the line in Indochina—risked harming U.S. strategic interests. Granting full independence to the Vietnamese would compel Paris to make similar pledges to other colonies, notably Morocco and Tunisia. The French public would oppose a swift loss of the empire, and therefore the government would fall, thereby endangering French policies with respect to German sovereignty and European security. And besides, the ambassador tossed in, the Vietnamese were not ready to assume the responsibilities of independence in any case.6 As for Bao Dai and his chances against the Viet Minh, Acheson in the end backed the argument put forth by the new consul general in Saigon, George M. Abbott. “Our support will not insure Bao Dai’s success,” Abbott acknowledged, “but the lack of it will probably make certain his failure.” Acheson concurred, though even in accepting the point, he continued through the end of 1949 to withhold formal recognition of the Bao Dai regime, at least pending the French National Assembly’s explicit endorsement of the Élysée Accords.7

  And Ho Chi Minh? Acheson’s view of him grew more and more dim in 1949. In radio interviews with Western journalists, Ho steadfastly denied that he was a Russian puppet and insisted that his government was not Communist but was composed of many elements. Newsweek concluded that Ho might be “more of a Vietnamese nationalist right now than a Communist stooge,” but Acheson wasn’t buying. When French analyst Paul Mus told midlevel State Department officials in April that Ho had the full support of the Vietnamese except for a tiny minority in Cochin China, Acheson no doubt heard or read a recap of the conversation but again refused to budge. He and his colleagues chose instead to believe that support for the Viet Minh would plummet once France gave real and meaningful authority to an “independent” Bao Dai regime.8 The obvious questions that followed—What if Bao Dai was not granted such powers? Why should France continue the fight if Vietnam was to be independent?—were not discussed.

  II

  BROADER INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS ALSO SHAPED ACHESON’S thinking on Vietnam in 1949. He began to pay more attention to Southeast Asia’s economic potential, particularly in terms of facilitating Japan’s recovery. Given the instability in China, Washington planners deemed it absolutely essential to secure a stable, prosperous Japan under U.S. control. Southeast Asia, rich in rice, tin, oil, and minerals, and with a population of 170 million (bigger than the United States), could play a principal role in this endeavor. George F. Kennan, head of the Policy Planning Staff, influenced Acheson in this direction, as did the young Dean Rusk, deputy undersecretary of state and a man Acheson asked to take on a larger role in Asian policy. The maintenance of a pro-Western Southeast Asia, they and other government analysts argued, would provide the markets and resources necessary for Japan’s economic revival—and help the recovery of Western Europe (by then well under way, but showing signs of a slowdown) as well. According to Rusk, the importation of rice from Indochina, for example, could be a terrific boon in securing Japan’s revitalization.9

  Then, in the second half of the year, came two momentous developments: In August, the Soviet Union for the first time detonated an atomic device; and in September, Mao Zedong’s forces completed their rout of Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang. Specialists had known that it was only a matter of time before Stalin got the bomb, but most thought the time
would be the early or mid-1950s, not August 1949. The implications were huge (if not quite as enormous as some doomsayers in Washington proclaimed). It meant the end of the U.S. atomic monopoly and immediately raised fears that Stalin might embark on an aggressive course to expand his global reach. That worrisome thought only gained more currency the next month, when Mao Zedong consolidated his victory in China. Here neither the event nor the timing was a surprise to specialists—Nanjing had fallen in April, Shanghai in May, and Changsha in August—but for ordinary Americans it was sobering to hear Mao dramatically declare, from the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing, the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Chiang and the remnants of his army fled to Formosa (now Taiwan).

  Though some senior U.S. officials, Acheson among them, believed that the USSR and Mao’s government would ultimately experience a rift, in the short term the dangers seemed all too real. Instantly, the number of major Communist foes had doubled. As a report by the National Security Council (NSC) had put it in June, “the extension of Communist authority in China represents a grievous political defeat for us.… If Southeast Asia is also swept by Communism, we shall have suffered a major political rout the repercussions of which will be felt throughout the rest of the world, especially in the Middle East and in a then critically exposed Australia.… The colonial-nationalist conflict provides a fertile field for subversive Communist movements, and it is now clear that Southeast Asia is the target for a coordinated offensive directed by the Kremlin.”10