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

by Fredrik Logevall

  Yet again the question loomed, for Viet Minh leaders and for their counterparts in Paris, Beijing, Moscow, and London: What will the Americans do?

  No easy answer presented itself as the opening of the Berlin meeting drew near or in the early days after it commenced. On the one hand, Washington continued to maintain, publicly and privately, that the essentials for victory were in place and that a better French execution of existing strategy was the only thing required. The Navarre Plan had not yet delivered much, it was true, but neither had it failed, and significant operational results were not expected for several more months. On January 16, Eisenhower approved NSC-177 (later NSC-5405), a policy paper that affirmed Indochina’s critical importance to American security and adhered to an essentially optimistic assessment of the overall military situation. “With continued U.S. economic and material assistance,” the paper stated, “the Franco-Vietnamese forces are not in danger of being militarily defeated by the Viet Minh.”3

  On the other hand, senior officials gave close and unprecedented consideration to what to do if the battlefield situation deteriorated, or if the French suddenly called it quits. Sending U.S. ground forces seemed out of the question, at least in the president’s mind; he told an NSC meeting on January 8 that he could not imagine putting American troops anywhere in Southeast Asia, except perhaps in Malaya, in his mind a crucial link in America’s defensive perimeter. Vietnam would swallow U.S. divisions whole, he said. But Eisenhower in the same meeting showed markedly more interest in other forms of intervention. When Treasury Secretary George Humphrey expressed opposition to the suggestion by Admiral Arthur Radford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for the use of U.S. air strikes to assist the French at Dien Bien Phu, Eisenhower interjected that it might be necessary to “put a finger in the dike” to protect vital interests in the region. To NSC adviser Robert Cutler’s suggestion that it could be a French finger, Eisenhower and Radford chorused in unison that France had been the problem all these years. It might take American airpower, both men agreed. With no consensus in the group, and no danger of imminent French collapse, the NSC left the question of air strikes open and agreed in the meantime to meet a request from Paris for additional B-26 bombers, needed, the French claimed, to counter an improvement in the enemy’s antiaircraft capability.4

  Eisenhower also created a high-level, ad hoc working group representing the State and Defense departments, the CIA, and the NSC staff to undertake an analysis of the Southeast Asian situation and produce an action plan for the region. The group’s charge included consideration of committing U.S. ground forces or airpower to Indochina, and it was instructed to proceed from the assumption that a defeat in Indochina would be a major blow to American national security. As a third step, the president ordered the creation of a smaller, top-secret Special Committee on Indochina, chaired by Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith, whose task was to “come up with a plan in specific terms, covering who does what and which and to whom” in Indochina and the surrounding region.5

  Late in the month the Smith committee recommended, and Eisenhower approved, the dispatch of two hundred uniformed U.S. Air Force mechanics to Indochina to service American-supplied aircraft, including the new B-26s, on the understanding that “they would be used at bases where they would be secure from capture and would not be exposed to combat.” The president also agreed to send U.S. civilian pilots hired by the CIA, using planes from the agency’s proprietary airline, the Civilian Air Transport (CAT), to assist the French with air transport. Within a few weeks, a squadron of C-119 transports based in Formosa, painted gray and manned by two dozen CAT pilots, began flying supplies into Dien Bien Phu. Their contribution would be crucial, for these “Flying Boxcars” had a six-ton capacity, as compared to the two-and-a-half-ton capacity of the French-piloted Dakotas. The supply of Dien Bien Phu would have been impossible without them.6

  “Don’t think I like to send them there,” Eisenhower said in front of Press Secretary James Hagerty, with reference to the technicians. “But we can’t get anywhere in Asia by just sitting here in Washington doing nothing. My God, we must not lose Asia. We’ve got to look this thing in the face.”7

  Secretary of State John Foster Dulles did not involve himself directly in these decisions, having meanwhile departed for Berlin. European security issues were at the top of the agenda for the meeting, but Dulles knew that the Soviets intended also to table a formal proposal for a five-power conference—that is, including Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic of China—to deal with Asian issues, among them Indochina. He was determined to resist. In its first year, the Eisenhower administration had steadfastly rejected negotiations on Indochina, and it remained committed to that position. With equal vehemence, the White House had refused to countenance any action that might be construed as even tacit recognition of the PRC’s legitimacy, let alone as signifying its membership in the great-power club; neither Dulles nor the president had any intention of changing that posture now. As Ike had put it in Bermuda, a five-power conference was a “bad word for the United States.”

  In phrasing it that way, Eisenhower may have been suggesting he was hemmed in by partisan politics. If so, he himself was partly to blame. His own Republican Party, as we have seen, had made China the partisan shibboleth of American politics with its attacks four years earlier on Truman and Acheson for allegedly “losing” the country to Mao and his Communists. “Red China,” it was thenceforth branded, to distinguish it from the Republic of China in Taiwan, and it generated in American political discourse—notably in the 1952 election campaign, with Eisenhower’s tacit consent—an intensity almost religious in nature. U.S. officials, Britain’s foreign secretary Anthony Eden lamented in late November 1953, “find it difficult to pursue a realistic policy towards China.” The following day Eden returned to the theme in a personal communication to Winston Churchill: “In the existing state of American opinion, the US administration would find it politically impossible to sit down with a high level meeting of the big Five.”8

  Or as Selwyn Lloyd, minister of state in the British Foreign Office, put it: “There is now in the United States an emotional feeling about Communist China and to a lesser extent Russia which borders on hysteria.”9

  It was the great difference between the United States and her main transatlantic partner, Britain: the degree to which fear of the Communist world conspiracy permeated political and popular discourse. Eden and Churchill and other British Conservatives were mystified by the seeming support in Middle America for extreme Red-baiters such as Senator Joseph McCarthy, who applied constant pressure on the White House to live up to their rigid standards of anti-Communist purity. No less than their Labour counterparts, these Tories shook their heads at the brutal antics of Scott McLeod, a McCarthy acolyte appointed by Dulles who (as head of the Bureau of Security and Personnel) was conducting an anti-Communist witch hunt in the State Department that, by the time it finished, ruined the careers of scores if not hundreds of officers and other staff. Among them were a number of China specialists.10

  But it was not merely McCarthy and his ilk. For years, British analysts had marveled at the deep American aversion—across party lines—to negotiating with adversaries; at the ruling out of compromise and the demand for “unconditional surrender” (“the simple American ideal,” as one Briton put it); and at the unwillingness to recognize China or admit her into the United Nations.11 For years, they had noted the periodic anti-British broadsides in Congress and in the American press—especially the Hearst and Scripps-Howard papers—because of London’s willingness to engage with Beijing and Moscow. “Appeasers,” the British were called, guilty of disloyalty, of cowardice, of cozying up to robbers and murderers. In late 1953, the frustrations seemed to build—in large part, the British speculated, because of American irritation at the failure to achieve outright victory in Korea. Selwyn Lloyd queried veteran U.S. diplomat W. Averell Harriman about it over dinner one evening in New York City. The American was sympat
hetic. He condemned the prevailing temper and the Eisenhower administration’s habit of always taking publicly rigid diplomatic stances, and he pleaded for Britons to be tolerant from “the wisdom borne of your maturity.”12

  Harriman needn’t have worried. London policy makers were not prepared to be anything other than forbearing. They reminded one another that at the end of the day, as one put it, “we and [the Americans] are basically on the same side.” And “anyhow, lecturing a patient in a state of hysteria will never do the slightest good.” Britain simply had to accept that domestic political considerations shaped U.S. foreign policy in crucial ways. Although obsessive hostility toward China “may not reflect an actual majority of opinion throughout the United States, the disturbing factor which emerges is that the United States Administration appear to be convinced that opinion in the Middle West (i.e. isolationist and xenophobic) must at all cost, at any rate for the present, be ‘appeased’; and that we can, with some certainty, expect current United States foreign policy to take this into account as a major, and, perhaps often, as a paramount consideration.”13

  Yet despite this British determination to avoid raising hackles in Washington, Anglo-American differences over China policy, and over the fundamental notion of negotiating with Communists, would play themselves out in the first half of 1954, with profoundly important implications for the Indochina War. For the first time since 1945–46, when she had facilitated France’s return to Indochina, Britain would in these six months play a central role in the conflict, generating in the process much angst and anger in Washington—and more accusations of craven weakness in the face of the Communist peril. Time and again the Eisenhower administration would press London to agree to an internationalization of the military struggle in support of France; each time the British would resist, pointing instead to the need for a negotiated political solution. This despite the fact that British officials, who held to their own version of the domino theory, were hardly less keen than the Eisenhower team to see a French victory in the war.

  II

  ONE MAN WOULD DOMINATE THIS ACTIVE BRITISH DIPLOMACY ON Vietnam: Anthony Eden, foreign secretary and Churchill’s heir apparent as prime minister. Nineteen-fifty-four would be a triumphant year for this talented, handsome, vain, intensely ambitious man, in large part because of Indochina. His annus mirabilis, one author called it, which is saying something, given that Eden had to that point enjoyed a spectacular political career. Born of landed gentry in County Durham in 1897, Eden survived the trenches of World War I, unlike two of his three brothers and a third of his Eton class. For his actions at the Somme in 1916 he won the Military Cross. In the interwar period, he moved steadily up the greasy pole of politics, becoming in 1935 the youngest foreign secretary ever. Few were surprised by this ascent: Here was a man, after all, who read Persian and Arabic literature in the original and presented an image of effortless suavity—“He had the talent for looking wonderful no matter what he wore,” noted one keen observer of his sartorial elegance—bolstered by an unrivaled knowledge of international affairs and diplomatic history. Only much later would many come to realize that the easy charm and unruffled competence were to some extent a facade, that Eden was, in the words of his authorized biographer, “an exceptionally tense, lonely, and shy man.”14

  Eden resigned in 1938 in protest of Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, but he returned to the office during World War II. In 1951, he came back yet again, and the chattering classes predicted he would soon be prime minister. Eden believed it, for Churchill privately told him he’d hand over power in a year. One year became two, and now it was going on three. The waiting was intensely frustrating, not least because Churchill, his zest diminished, chose to focus most of his energy on Eden’s own area of responsibility, defense and foreign policy. It didn’t help Eden’s mood that his own health had been bad for much of 1953, the result of chronic overwork and a botched cholecystectomy in London in April that required several follow-up procedures, one of which almost killed him.

  He felt better at Bermuda in December 1953, sunbathing on the beach with Dulles, and as the new year dawned, he was determined to assert himself on the world stage. It would be a momentous year, he sensed, for world politics and for his personal political ambitions; he was right on both counts. Eden’s diplomacy in 1954 would confirm the judgment of many—not least Eden himself—that he was a negotiator of the first rank, capable always of thinking two or three steps ahead, of finding openings, of sensing his adversary’s vulnerabilities and closing in for the kill. It would confirm the sense of seasoned Eden watchers that he was a man of overweening self-esteem and confidence in his own judgment, one result of which was to make him reluctant to delegate. And it would confirm that, his recent health problems notwithstanding, he was as prone to overwork as ever, to long days and short nights that drove him and his staff to the edge of exhaustion.

  Eden gave a hint of the trouble to come with Washington in a cabinet memorandum late in 1953. He reminded his colleagues of Britain’s pragmatic approach to relations with Beijing, and of the decision early on to extend diplomatic recognition to Mao’s government and accept China as a legitimate member of the great-power club. British policy, he said, was a combination of containment and compromise, not—as in the case of the Americans—containment and confrontation. Aggressive Chinese expansion would be resisted, but more generally London’s policy rested upon “acceptance of the facts of the situation, the avoidance of provocation, gradual progress towards more normal trading and diplomatic relations, and the need to keep a toe in the door in case divergences between China and Russia develop and can be exploited.” Maintaining good relations with Beijing would also help London secure its interests in Malaya and Hong Kong.15

  Eden therefore came to Berlin fully prepared to agree to a future great-power meeting that would include China. He knew Dulles would balk. For the U.S. leadership, Eden warned Churchill, there could be no question of admitting “the bloody Chinese aggressor into the councils of peaceful nations.” Though he and Dulles had gotten on quite well at Bermuda in December, Eden had left that meeting troubled by what he sensed was a growing gulf in Anglo-American relations. The U.S. approach to the matters under discussion at Bermuda had been crude, he thought, and Eisenhower in particular had been frightening with his casual talk of using nuclear bombs in the Far East and his reference to post-Stalin Russia as the “same old whore” in a new dress.16

  On Indochina specifically, Eden’s memoirs claim that he arrived in Berlin convinced of the need for a negotiated solution.17 That may be clearer than the truth, for the contemporaneous documentation suggests he remained, in January 1954, desirous of gaining a turnaround of the military situation before any settlement. No fan of revolutionary nationalism in the developing world, he would have liked to see Ho Chi Minh’s cause decisively defeated. But Eden was a realist; such an outcome was unlikely to happen, he knew. From an early point in the conference he expressed a willingness to bring the great powers together to discuss the matter, and he got the cabinet to endorse his view that it would be unwise to oppose a proposal to include China in such a meeting.

  Eden’s French counterpart, Foreign Minister Georges Bidault, was equivocal. Personally his instinct was to stand firm and to insist that Beijing first give a token of its goodwill, since “it has persisted in contributing to the equipment and training of the Viet Minh troops.”18 He still clung to the belief that French commander Henri Navarre’s Operation Atlante, then just under way, could dramatically alter the military picture below the eighteenth parallel in France’s favor, and that Dien Bien Phu could deal a crushing blow to Giap’s ambitions. The Americans would support him in this hard-line position, he believed.19 But Bidault also knew that Paris officialdom would expect him to make progress toward ending la sale guerre. In the view of most members of Joseph Laniel’s center-right coalition, a five-power conference including China seemed likely to hasten this development and therefore should be embraced. Fre
nch public opinion, meanwhile, was losing faith in the war effort seemingly on a daily basis. A poll carried out during the Berlin meeting found that only 7 percent of respondents favored fighting to keep Indochina. Bidault didn’t doubt that there would be uproar, should the government refuse to follow every possible lead for an armistice, including an international conference with China.20

  Even Charles de Gaulle, whose intransigence in 1945–46 had done so much to start the bloodshed, had given up on military victory in Indochina, Bidault knew. In recent weeks, the general had told numerous associates and reporters that France should disengage from the struggle. “We have no really direct interest in Indochina,” de Gaulle informed an American journalist in mid-January. “That is a reality. What is taking place there now is merely a prestige war. Not even the prestige of France is involved anymore. Indochina is of international interest more and more and of French interest less and less.… We will regret [leaving] greatly, but we must go.”21

  It all pointed to the prospect of considerable Western disunity when the delegations arrived on January 25 for the start of the conference, held in the interallied building on the Potsdamerstrasse in the American sector of Berlin. No doubt relishing the prospect, Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov immediately proposed a meeting including China to discuss “measures for reducing international tension.” Dulles objected, insisting several times in the early days that the United States would not take part in a five-power conference, for to do so would mean conversing about world problems with unrepentant aggressors. Molotov refused to be put off, stressing the important role that China, “a great power,” could play in lessening world tension. The Russian suggested the meeting could be held in May or June and implied that the agenda could be confined to Korea and Indochina.