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

by Fredrik Logevall

  There was in fact no such coordinated offensive. Stalin’s interest in Southeast Asia remained minimal, it was soon clear, and his feelings about the Chinese developments were decidedly mixed. Still, U.S. leaders could be forgiven for thinking that Communism was on the march in the region. In addition to Mao in China and Ho in Vietnam, there were Communist-led rebellions in Indonesia, in newly independent Burma, in Malaya, and in the Philippines. All four rebellions would fail in due course, but in late 1949 their mere existence fueled American fears. Did the historical momentum now lie with the Communists? Even if it didn’t in objective terms, might the perception gain hold that it did, producing a bandwagon effect that could have a pernicious impact on American national security interests? It seemed all too possible.

  The NSC report, with its warnings of the far-reaching consequences—the Middle East! Australia!—of a loss of Southeast Asia, was an early version of what would come to be known as the domino theory. Knock over one game piece, and the rest would inevitably topple. For the next twenty-five years, high U.S. officials, on both the civilian and the military sides, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, linked the outcome in Vietnam to a chain reaction of regional and global effects, arguing that defeat in Vietnam would have calamitous consequences not merely for that country but for the rest of Southeast Asia and perhaps beyond. Though the nature and cogency of the domino theory shifted over time, the core claim remained the same: If Vietnam was allowed to “fall,” other countries would inevitably follow suit.

  It was always an odd theory, and it became more so with the passage of time, as we shall see. Most egregiously, it posited that the countries of East and Southeast Asia had no individuality, no history of their own, no unique circumstances in social, political, and economic life that differentiated them from their neighbors. Yet the theory had a certain plausibility at the outset in 1949–50, while the regional implications of Mao’s triumph were unclear. Its simple imagery also perfectly suited the charged political atmosphere in the United States in the period. Apocalyptic anti-Communism was the order of the day, and the assaults on the Truman administration were ferocious. Tapping into the solipsism that can course through the American body politic, Republicans (and some conservative Democrats) said that only Americans could have been responsible for the Soviet bomb and the China debacle. Soviet spies, working with American accomplices, must have speeded Stalin’s atomic timetable by stealing U.S. secrets (they did). Truman must have “lost” China, must have allowed Chiang Kai-shek to be defeated when it was well within his power—with American assistance—to prevail (it wasn’t). Now all of Asia was ripe for Communist plucking (not exactly). Said a young California congressman named Richard M. Nixon, in reference to China, “The deck was stacked on the communist side of the table.”11

  Acheson was an early target of the Red-baiters. At his 1949 confirmation hearing, he refused to criticize Alger Hiss, the former State Department official accused of espionage; a year later, after two sensational trials ended in a conviction for perjury, Acheson grandly announced to reporters, “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.” For the Republican right, already disdainful of Acheson for what they saw as his superciliousness and arrogance (he talks, said one, “as if a piece of fish had got stuck in his mustache”), it was an irresistible opening. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin interrupted a Senate hearing to report the “fantastic statement the Secretary of State has made in the last few minutes.” McCarthy asked aloud if this meant that Acheson would not turn his back on other Communists in Washington as well. Richard Nixon called Acheson’s remarks “disgusting,” and later referred to him as the “Red Dean of the College of Cowardly Containment,” in a choice bit of alliteration. Senator William Jenner, Republican of Indiana, chimed in that Acheson was a Communist whose treachery had caused China to fall. Later, in his memoirs, Nixon elaborated that Acheson had presented a perfect target to Republicans seeking a symbol of the effete Eastern establishment. His “clipped mustache, his British tweeds, and his haughty manner made him the perfect foil for the snobbish kind of foreign service personality and mentality that had been taken in hook, line, and sinker by the Communists.”12

  These were absurd charges against a principal architect of America’s Cold War strategy, a man whose aversion to Communism went down to his very bones. But in the context of 1949–50, such attacks on the administration left their mark, and the decision to aid France in Vietnam cannot be understood without consideration of the charged domestic political milieu out of which it emerged. Especially with the defeat in China, Acheson and Truman felt compelled to show America’s mettle somewhere, especially in that region, in part to insulate the administration against Republican charges that it was too soft on Moscow—and now Beijing too. Southeast Asia was the logical place.

  III

  BY THE START OF 1950, THEN, THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL NATION seemed poised to throw her full support behind the French war effort. No official action, however, had yet been taken, and there matters might have rested for some time but for dramatic news out of the east: On January 18, the People’s Republic of China extended formal recognition to Ho Chi Minh’s government, and on January 30 the Soviet Union did likewise. In the weeks thereafter, Moscow’s Eastern European satellites followed suit, as did North Korea. Viet Minh diplomacy, so dismally unsuccessful for so long, had scored a colossal victory (if one with a hefty price tag, as we shall see), one that Ho desperately needed even as he also feared its implications.13

  His efforts had centered initially on the Soviet Union. But he had a tricky path to walk, given his determination (strongly held through much of 1949) to avoid spurring the Americans into full and open support of France and her counterrevolutionary Bao Dai–led state. In 1948, the ICP reminded party functionaries to refrain from criticizing Washington in their pronouncements and to adopt a neutral line:

  The foreign policy of our government towards the United States of America for the actual period and for as long as the United States of America does not betray us, will not have the intention either to turn [our government] against them or to act in any way so as to incur their animosity.… Nevertheless, when it comes to public matters, it is formally prohibited to write, in any document, newspaper or book, one single word or one single line capable of incurring harmful repercussions on the foreign policy of our government in terms of its relations with the United States of America.14

  Such a posture was unlikely to score points with a Soviet leadership already questioning Ho Chi Minh’s socialist bona fides. Nor was this declaration exceptional for the period—in his interviews in 1945–50, when asked about the broader international situation and the growing rift between East and West, Ho always took care to strike a neutral pose. Even as party leaders took great satisfaction in the successes of Mao’s Communist forces to the north, therefore, they rejoiced quietly; even as they sought to win recognition as well as assistance from Moscow, they also continued to meet with American diplomats in Bangkok, among them Lieutenant William H. Hunter, an assistant naval attaché who had traveled widely in Indochina and knew players on both sides personally. Stalin, at odds with independent-minded Yugoslavian leader Josip Broz Tito since 1948, couldn’t abide Communists who showed anything less than complete fidelity to the Kremlin line.15

  When French Communist Party leader Maurice Thorez tried to convince Stalin that he could trust Ho’s commitment to the cause, Stalin demurred. Ho had collaborated too much with the Americans in World War II, he replied, and failed to solicit advice from the Kremlin before making key decisions. Case in point: Ho’s decision to dissolve the ICP in 1945. Thorez tried to say that the dissolution had been merely tactical, but the Soviet dictator would not hear it. A Soviet Foreign Ministry memo dated January 14, 1950, spoke of “ambiguity” in Ho Chi Minh’s interviews. “Speaking about the Vietnam government’s attitude towards the U.S., Ho Chi Minh evades the issue of U.S. expansionist policy towards Vietnam.… Until now Ho Chi Minh abstained fr
om the assessment of [the] Imperialist nature of the North Atlantic Pact and of the U.S. attempt to establish a Pacific bloc as a branch of this pact.”16

  And yet before that month was out, the USSR had taken the important step of extending diplomatic recognition to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Why? In large part because Stalin felt compelled to follow Mao’s lead. And for the Chinese, the decision was, by all accounts, a relatively easy one. Contacts between Ho’s government and Mao’s forces, for a long time modest because of geographic separation and because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had been too preoccupied fighting its own war to provide direct and substantial support, increased markedly beginning in late 1948. In January 1949, Truong Chinh told the Sixth Plenum of the ICP that Mao’s army might soon conquer all of China and that “we must be ready to welcome it.” In April, Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang forces fled Nanjing and the Red Army crossed the Yangtze, and in midyear the Vietnamese dispatched about a thousand men to southern China to attack Guomindang units in collaboration with local CCP troops. To senior CCP leaders, never as bothered as Stalin had been by Ho’s dissolution of the party in 1945, it was a welcome sign of the Viet Minh’s internationalist commitment.

  In mid-1949, as the Chinese Communists publicly proclaimed their determination to “lean to one side” in the Cold War and their rejection of Titoism, Liu Shaoqi, the CCP’s second in command, traveled to Moscow for secret meetings with Kremlin leaders, including Stalin.17 A key item of discussion was the Vietnamese revolution and how to respond to it. Stalin, showing again his lack of interest in Southeast Asia, expressed his desire to see the CCP take primary responsibility for providing support for the Viet Minh. Liu Shaoqi agreed, and he promised a skeptical Stalin that Ho Chi Minh was a true internationalist at heart. Mao Zedong offered the same assurance when he held talks with Stalin in Moscow on Christmas Eve. That same day Liu Shaoqi, now back in Beijing, chaired a Politburo meeting to discuss Indochina policy. Any decision to assist the Viet Minh would exact a price, he told his colleagues, since the French government had not yet decided whether to grant diplomatic recognition to the new China and would obviously be offended should Beijing opt to recognize the DRV. Nevertheless the Politburo decided to invite a Viet Minh delegation to the Chinese capital for consultations, and to send a senior commander of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Luo Guibo, to Vietnam as the CCP’s general representative.

  The following week Ho Chi Minh set out on foot for the Chinese frontier, dressed in his now-familiar khaki suit. He traveled under the name Ding. For seventeen days he walked, arriving at Guangxi on about January 20, 1950. On January 30, he arrived in Beijing. Mao was still in Moscow, but Liu Shaoqi assured Ho that major assistance would be forthcoming, including diplomatic recognition.18

  From Beijing, Ho continued on to Moscow, arriving in the Soviet capital by train on February 10. Mao was still there, having himself gotten his fill of both the bitterly cold Russian winter and Stalin’s vast reservoir of distrust. The Kremlin leader had long thought Mao unreliable, an ersatz Communist whose motives were always to be questioned. As early as 1940, Stalin had complained that the CCP was largely a peasant organization that gave far too little role to the working class. He referred to Mao as that “cave-dweller-like Marxist,” whose ideas were primitive and who—like Ho Chi Minh—was probably, underneath it all, much more nationalist than internationalist. It mattered not that the CCP had supported Moscow in excluding Tito from the Cominform in 1948; Stalin still considered Mao and Ho both to be closet Titos. “He mistrusted us,” Mao later complained, speaking of Stalin’s view of the CCP. “He thought our revolution was a fake.”19

  Of course, Stalin’s own nationalism had something to do with his stance, as did his security priorities emerging out of World War II. For much of the Chinese civil war he adhered to a neutral position, calculating that a divided China served the USSR’s interests. As late as the beginning of 1949, he had urged Mao not to send his forces across the Yangtze but to be content with holding the northern half of the country. This was prudent, he said, to avoid provoking the United States. But as Communist troops continued to advance and victory became assured, Stalin shifted his rhetoric. He now praised Mao as a “true Marxist leader” and during Mao’s visit agreed—though only after a delay of several weeks, during which the Chinese leader was left to seethe, half prisoner, half pampered guest, in Stalin’s personal dacha—to rescind the Sino-Soviet friendship treaty that Stalin had concluded with Chiang Kai-shek in favor of a new one with the PRC.20

  At Mao’s urging, Stalin agreed to meet with Ho Chi Minh. Still focused on European concerns and still distrustful of Ho, the Soviet leader affirmed his government’s recognition of the DRV but ruled out direct Soviet involvement in the war against the French. “There must be a division of labor between China and the Soviet Union,” Stalin said. As his government had to meet its commitments in Eastern Europe, it would be up to China to give Vietnam what she needed. “China won’t lose in this deal,” the Soviet leader added, “because even if it provides Vietnam with second-hand articles, it will be given new ones by the Soviet Union.” Ho Chi Minh pressed the issue, urging Stalin to sign the same treaty of alliance with the DRV that he had just signed publicly with Mao. Impossible, came the reply; Ho, after all, was in Moscow on a secret mission. Ho responded—perhaps in jest—that he could be flown around Moscow in a helicopter and then land with suitable publicity, to which Stalin replied: “Oh, you orientals. You have such rich imaginations.”21

  It was hardly the reception Ho had hoped for, but Mao promised him (both there and in Beijing, to which the two leaders returned on March 3) that the PRC would do her best “to offer all the military assistance Vietnam needed in its struggle against France.” He soon set about making good on his word. For Mao, the Vietnamese struggle represented an opportunity to promote the Chinese model for revolution and also served his country’s national security interests. Like so many Chinese rulers before him, he sought to keep neighboring areas from being in hostile hands, and he worried in particular that the United States might become more involved—whether in Indochina, in the Taiwan strait, or in the increasingly tense Korean peninsula.22

  Personal ties between Ho and senior Chinese Communists may have made a difference too. Already in the early 1920s, while in Paris, Ho had met CCP leaders such as Zhou Enlai, Wang Ruofi, and Li Fuchun; later, it will be recalled, he spent time in Canton (Guangzhou) assisting Mikhail Borodin, the Comintern representative to the new Chinese revolutionary government led by the Nationalist Party. In Canton he had also engaged in various anticolonial activities, including teaching a political training class for Vietnamese youth. Among the guest speakers he invited in: Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi. Fluent in Chinese, Ho later translated Mao’s study “On Protracted War” from Chinese into French.23

  Now, a quarter of a century later, Ho could board the train for the trip home secure in the knowledge that he had Chinese backing for his cause. But he also must have had feelings of ambivalence as he looked out the window of his train car, contemplating what lay ahead. The Sino-Soviet recognition of his government, however necessary, was certain to alienate a lot of Vietnamese moderates, after all, and limit Vietnam’s room for maneuver with respect to non-Communist Asia. It also would isolate the DRV from the United States, Britain, and Japan and drastically increase the danger of a major American intervention on the side of Bao Dai and the French. A certain degree of independence had been lost. At various points in 1949, Ho had denied publicly that his government was about to identify itself with either the CCP or Stalin’s Russia. In a radio interview with American journalist Harold Isaacs, for example, he ridiculed the notion of the Viet Minh falling under Soviet or Chinese domination and vowed that independence would come through the DRV’s own efforts. For that matter, could the Chinese Communists really be trusted? Notwithstanding the toasts and vows of eternal friendship in Beijing, mutual suspicions remained, including on Ho’s part.24

  IV

>   AND THERE WAS ONE MORE REASON FOR HO CHI MINH TO FEEL APPREHENSION on that long journey home: His fervent hope of bringing American support for his cause, held with varying degrees of conviction since World War I, since he had tried to get an audience with Woodrow Wilson at Versailles, was now definitively and probably permanently dashed. For on February 7, while Ho had still been en route to the Soviet capital, Dean Acheson had announced formal U.S. recognition of the Bao Dai government and its sister regimes in Laos and Cambodia. As neither security, democracy, nor independence could exist in any area “dominated by Soviet imperialism,” the United States, Acheson had declared, would extend economic and military aid to France and her allied governments in Indochina.25

  At last, French officials had what they had so long sought. They were further pleased to see recognition come also from Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, and in short order from a range of other governments: Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Thailand, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Honduras, Brazil, Venezuela, Jordan, and South Africa. That only two Asian countries—South Korea and Thailand—were on the list was a concern, but Paris analysts nevertheless thought a corner had been turned. “The situation has had the effect of internationalizing a problem which before this was a French problem,” one Foreign Ministry cable enthused.26

  Truer words were never spoken by a fonctionnaire. Paris officials had made the sale: They had brought the Cold War to Vietnam. Just like the Viet Minh, they retained their age-old ambivalence about opening Indochina to foreign influence; and, like the Viet Minh, they had nevertheless chosen to bet on the internationalization of the war, to take the struggle to the diplomatic front. France had convinced her principal Western allies that she was bearing the brunt of an international struggle between East and West, between the forces of Communism and the forces of freedom. French colonial power was no longer the only thing at stake in Indochina, each of these governments in effect now agreed, and because France was fighting her allies’ battle, she was entitled to a generous measure of military and political assistance.27