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

by Fredrik Logevall

  The Massachusetts senator’s support for United Action was seconded by many colleagues of both parties, as was his belief that gaining greater indigenous support was a prerequisite for success. Few, however, articulated his skepticism regarding what U.S. power could accomplish on the ground, and even Kennedy indicated a willingness to vote for a multilateral military intervention if it came to that. Turning the discussion to the practical implications of United Action, Mike Mansfield, Democrat from Montana, asked JFK what he thought John Foster Dulles had in mind when he announced the concept before the Overseas Press Club in New York nine days prior.

  “There is every indication,” Kennedy answered, “that what he meant was that the United States will take the ultimate step.”

  “And that is what?” Mansfield asked.

  “It is war.”47

  Back at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the NSC meeting, having taken up much of the afternoon, ended with an agreement to seek a regional grouping for the defense of Southeast Asia against Communist aggression. The conversation had been muddled at points, with no clear sense of what policy to pursue, or even of Dien Bien Phu’s and Indochina’s ultimate importance to the West, but by the end the principals were in basic accord. When a plainly skeptical George Humphrey, secretary of the treasury, asked whether the Dullesian notion of United Action might not eventually lead to “a policy of policing all the governments of the world,” Eisenhower responded firmly. Indochina, he lectured Humphrey, was the first in a row of dominoes. If she fell, her neighbors would soon topple as well. Where would the process end? “George,” he said, “you exaggerate the case. Nevertheless in certain areas at least we cannot afford to let Moscow gain another bit of territory. Dien Bien Phu itself may be just such a critical point.”48

  The president evidently liked the domino metaphor, for he used it again the next day in what would become the most famous press conference of his presidency—and arguably of the entire Cold War. Asked to comment on Indochina’s strategic importance, he warned that the possible consequences to the free world of defeat in Indochina were incalculable because of the “falling domino principle.” If Indochina fell, the rest of Southeast Asia would “go over very quickly,” he declared, a disintegration that would have “the most profound influences.” Though the underlying imagery was not new to 1954 or even to the Eisenhower administration—recall Acheson’s “rotten apple” metaphor from 1947—it had not been articulated this way in public before; the metaphor quickly captured the popular imagination and came to define an era in American foreign policy. Lest any of the reporters doubt his determination, the president also said that America could afford no more losses to Communism; that Geneva would likely not bring an acceptable peace settlement; and that independence for the Associated States was not a condition for U.S. intervention. He did not tell them that simultaneously a carrier strike force, already present in the South China Sea, was moved to within one hundred miles of Hainan Island and had commenced air reconnaissance of Chinese air bases and other military installations.49

  That afternoon John Foster Dulles received a phone call from Republican senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Everyone was talking about Indochina, Wiley said, and he wondered how he should comment. Dulles said every effort was being made to create a solid front of nations pledged to denying the area to the Communists. Everything would hinge on the British, who remained noncommittal, and on the French, whose government was close to collapsing and “who have been drawing on us like an unlimited bank account.” The time might be near, Dulles judged, for a showdown.50

  And indeed, a showdown was coming. On April 10, Dulles embarked on a climactic trip to Europe, a final, all-out effort to make United Action a reality. “One of the most concentrated periods of diplomatic arm-twisting in the nation’s history,” a leading scholar has called it, and so it was.51 For the stakes were huge, and time was running out.

  The first stop: London.

  CHAPTER 20

  DULLES VERSUS EDEN

  BY APRIL 1954, JOHN FOSTER DULLES HAD LOGGED SOME HUNDRED thousand miles in his capacity as secretary of state, visiting most of the non-Communist capitals of Europe and Asia and even making it to Africa and South America. More than two hundred miles per day he averaged. He was America’s great traveling salesman, transforming U.S. diplomacy by his use of the airplane, by his willingness to dash off overseas on short notice, by his penchant for the quick in-and-out visit lasting mere hours. Constantly he was on the go, to-ing and fro-ing around the globe, returning home just long enough to huddle with Eisenhower and speak to a congressional committee or two before grabbing his homburg and flying off again to some distant locale. Or so it seemed to the exhausted newsmen who covered him, one of whom is said to have quipped, “Don’t just do something, Foster; stand there.”1

  But he couldn’t just stand there, not this time. If Indochina was to be saved from the Communists, the threat and perhaps the actuality of direct American military intervention would be necessary. Of that Dulles was certain. Congress had made starkly clear that it would not approve such action except as part of a multilateral intervention including Great Britain, yet the Churchill government had so far proved maddeningly resistant to United Action. The French too had to be brought around; even as they clamored for immediate American air strikes to save the battered Dien Bien Phu garrison, they stubbornly resisted talk of internationalizing the war, and they seemed alarmingly close to giving up the fight altogether. The future of Indochina, of Southeast Asia, and therefore of America’s and the West’s position in the Far East, Dulles believed, could well depend on the outcome of the talks set to begin over dinner in London on April 11 and continuing there and in Paris over the next three days.

  Dulles had great confidence in his abilities as a negotiator and statesman, but he was under no illusion that his task in Europe would be easy. The American embassies in the two capitals had provided extensive reports of local governmental and popular attitudes in the weeks prior, and he had also met with the respective ambassadors to Washington, Britain’s Roger Makins and France’s Henri Bonnet. From them he knew that although all three Western governments desired a French victory in the war, they differed on how best to try to achieve it, on what could be accomplished by military means, and on what could be expected from the negotiations scheduled to begin in Geneva at the end of the month. Yet the enormity of Dulles’s task in creating even the semblance of unity on these issues became evident only after he arrived and the discussions began. Only then was the depth of the Anglo-American schism on Indochina brought fully into the open; only then was the full extent of the mutual suspicions between Paris and Washington made clear.

  In London, frustrations with the Eisenhower policy had grown steadily in the weeks since the Berlin conference, and not only on account of Indochina. The Bravo hydrogen bomb test at Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands on March 1 generated enormous concern in British official and popular thinking and fed already-existing fears of a new and perhaps uncontrollable nuclear arms race. The fate of the crew of the unfortunately named Japanese fishing trawler Lucky Dragon, which though outside the supposed danger zone of the Bravo test still felt the effects of the fallout—twenty-three seamen suffered radiation sickness, and one died—increased worldwide fear. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, remembering the chillingly casual way in which Eisenhower at Bermuda in December 1953 had referred to the bomb as just another weapon, expressed his horror at the power of the new H-bomb. He wrote to Eisenhower in mid-March and—as he had at Bermuda—pointed out the vulnerability of the densely populated British Isles, and London in particular.2 The revelation that the Bravo test, at fifteen megatons, was three times greater than expert predictions added to the fear that, as one British official wrote in his diary, the process was out of control: “Very great excitement everywhere about it, as if people began to see the end of the world.”3

  There ensued a raucous H-bomb debate in the Hou
se of Commons, which Churchill barely survived. Privately disdainful of “the bloody invention,” in the chamber he gamely defended the Americans’ right to test the bomb, even welcoming the new weapon’s deterrent value, but his performance was wooden and halting and read entirely from a text. There were constant Labour interruptions as he spoke, while his own side sat glum and silent behind him. Even some Tories hinted that the old man should resign. Critics both in Parliament and in the press depicted a prime minister fawningly servile to Eisenhower, and a British government far too ignorant of America’s nuclear program—and her foreign policy generally. Inevitably, Indochina came into the picture, as Labourites said they would seek to quash any thought of joining a U.S.-led intervention to defeat Ho Chi Minh. Such an intervention, they said, could lead swiftly to a dangerous and uncontrollable escalation of the conflict, drawing in China and the Soviet Union and culminating in World War III.4

  Such fears resonated also at the highest levels of government. At a meeting of the full cabinet on April 7, Churchill read aloud Eisenhower’s letter of April 4, whereupon Anthony Eden summarized a paper setting out his own views. The American proposal contained a fatal flaw, Eden said, for it wrongly assumed that the threat of retaliation against China “would cause her to withdraw her support from the Viet Minh.” Such a threat would hardly be potent enough to make Beijing buckle, at least initially, and therefore the West would be faced with a terrible choice: either “to withdraw ignominiously or else embark on a warlike action against China.” Nor would such military action be likely to achieve success. “Neither blockade nor the bombing of China’s internal or external communications, which the United States Government appear to have in mind, were considered by our Chiefs of Staff to be militarily effective when these were discussed in connection with Korea,” Eden maintained. “They would, however, give China every excuse for invoking the Sino-Soviet Treaty and might thus lead to a world war.” The time to contemplate a warning to Beijing, he concluded, was later, after an agreement at Geneva, when Mao Zedong could be cautioned against breaching the accord.5

  The cabinet endorsed Eden’s position and then considered the nature of possible action inside Indochina. Eisenhower’s letter to the prime minister had acknowledged that some American and British ground troops might need to be deployed; no one in the room doubted that land forces would indeed have to follow air and naval action. And would aerial action against China include the use of nuclear weapons? This was a question that must be put to Dulles during his visit.

  Eden’s reluctance to threaten China also had another source: He did not believe that Beijing’s aid to the Viet Minh was decisive. A rough assessment by the Joint Intelligence Board showed that the scale of U.S. assistance to the French was “immeasurably greater” than the Chinese aid to the DRV. “Exactly,” wrote Eden in the margin of the report. Even if one somehow persuaded the Chinese to withdraw their support, he and other British believed, the Viet Minh would still present a formidable threat for a very long time to come, because the keys to victory were not in China but in Vietnam and the rest of Indochina. Given the continuing weakness of the Bao Dai regime and the Vietnamese National Army, and the inability or unwillingness of the French to send major ground reinforcements, and given the need for France to play her full part in the defense of Western Europe, British policy makers concluded the best that could be hoped for was a negotiated settlement at Geneva leading to the partition of Vietnam.6

  Such a solution was anathema to the Eisenhower administration, London officials knew—Concede territory to Communists? At the negotiating table? In an election year?—but they saw no reasonable alternative. Still, they worried that Eisenhower, so determined in his letter to Churchill, would be impossible to stop. Evelyn Shuckburgh, Eden’s generally pro-American private secretary, wrote in his diary on April 8 of the period since the arrival of the letter: “two terrible days … the Eisenhower plan for the Far East worrying everybody.”7

  II

  ON SUNDAY EVENING, APRIL 11, DULLES HOSTED EDEN FOR DINNER at the American embassy. Once the dishes were cleared and the cigars smoked, they got down to what one Foreign Office representative called “a singularly unfortunate series of discussions.”8 Dulles began with a falsehood, asserting that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had recommended, two weeks earlier, the use of air and naval power in Indochina, and that consequently carriers had been deployed from Manila. (In fact, as we have seen, only Admiral Radford among the Joint Chiefs supported such action.) The administration had decided, however, that there were two prerequisites to military action: the granting by France of complete independence to the Associated States, and the declaration by a coalition of countries of their readiness for united action. Should those two preconditions be met, the secretary continued, there was every reason to believe that Congress would authorize the president to use air and naval forces in Indochina, and perhaps even ground troops. Making no mention of an explicit warning to Beijing—he sensed Eden would never go along—Dulles asked for British consent to a public declaration of common purpose.9

  Eden resisted. His government could not enter such an agreement before the Geneva Conference, he said, and he indicated skepticism that any allied intervention could be confined to the air and sea. Ground forces would inevitably soon follow. The prospects for holding Indochina were in any event dim, though consideration could certainly be given to drawing a line elsewhere in the region. The two men then sparred over the makeup of the still-hypothetical coalition. Eden stressed that Asian representation would have to be broadened beyond the Americans’ suggestion of Thailand and the Philippines—both, he told aides, were too pro-U.S. to be representative of Asian opinion—and specifically mentioned India and Burma. Dulles, intensely suspicious of India’s neutralist inclinations and her conciliatory attitude toward Communist China, immediately objected and said Washington would have to counter by offering membership to Formosa (Taiwan) and South Korea, maybe even Japan. Then what? he asked. There would be endless bickering among the members while the Communists gobbled up more territory.10

  Throughout the evening Dulles made little effort to hide his feeling that Eden himself was largely to blame for the impasse. While the foreign secretary spoke, one observer recalled, Dulles doodled, “looking up occasionally out of the corner of his eye to give Eden a rather quizzical or skeptical look.”11

  The next morning, April 12, it was the subordinates’ turn, but they too failed to find common ground on the key issues. There followed a second Eden-Dulles session that again yielded no real breakthrough. Dulles tried invoking history, comparing the present situation to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland, two occasions when the West had failed to act and paid a dear price; Eden rejected the analogy. Dulles tried scare tactics, asserting that U.S. willingness to assume additional responsibilities in Southeast Asia “would diminish if agreement could not be reached now to make this stand”; the Briton was unmoved. And he tried pleading, invoking the shortage of French air mechanics in Indochina to ask for some British personnel so that Congress would in turn approve an increased American presence; again, Eden refused to be engaged.12

  Dulles hit hard that day, but to many in the Foreign Office, he was the voice of moderation next to that of his rabidly anti-Communist assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs Walter Robertson, a high-bred and bellicose Virginian. Robertson still seethed over America’s failure to prevent Chiang Kai-shek’s defeat in the Chinese civil war, and he referred to Chinese premier Zhou Enlai as a “charming gentleman who would cut his grandmother’s throat if he saw advantage in it.” In an afternoon encounter with Shuckburgh, Robertson vowed that neither he nor Dulles had any intention of sipping whiskey with the Chinese at Geneva. “You do not take a drink, when the court rises, with the criminal at the bar.” But this is not a court, Shuckburgh protested—you are meeting them at a diplomatic conference. “No, we are not, we are bringing them before the bar of world opinion.” Shuckbur
gh could not let that one pass. “I beg your pardon, but you are not bringing them, they are coming.”

  In his diary, Shuckburgh recorded the rest of the exchange: “I asked this Robertson whether Dulles had entirely given up any idea of trying to play the Chinese off against the Russians at Geneva. He scorned such a thought, said it was no use, never would be, what good had it done you (British) to recognize China, they just spurn you. A wholly inelastic and opinionated man.”13

  The final communiqué, agreed upon on the morning of April 13, was vacuous and open to varying interpretations. “We are ready to take part with the other countries principally concerned,” read the key sentence, “in an examination of the possibility of establishing a collective defense.” Just when this “examination” might commence, and with which participants, was left unclear, though Dulles claimed in a cable to Eisenhower that Eden had agreed to make Ambassador Makins available for pre-Geneva planning sessions. The cable was upbeat in tone—Dulles closed with a quip that the London Daily Worker had called him the most unwelcome visitor to England since 1066—but it could not hide the fact that the secretary had failed to achieve his main objective. United Action was hardly closer to becoming reality. Though Eden was hammered in Parliament that afternoon for even agreeing to a communiqué, the percipient Shuckburgh got closer to the truth in his assessment. “The actual agreement is so favorable to us,” he wrote in his diary, “and so far from what Dulles’s speeches before he came here led everyone to suppose he would demand, that the extremists [in the Commons] were quite discomfited, and the opposition cloven in half. A.E. enjoyed this very much.”14