That was in the future: In the here and now, Dulles had to work within the existing system, which meant continuing the quest for collective action. The president had indicated he would not order unilateral intervention, certainly not without the backing of a Congress that showed scant enthusiasm for going in alone. Dulles therefore continued the Franco-American negotiations over intervention, continued to apply pressure on Australia and New Zealand, continued to warn the British and French against agreeing to partition. The latter task became more difficult on May 25, for in restricted session on that day, Pham Van Dong explicitly endorsed the concept—or as explicitly as was possible without uttering the word. Each side would have complete administrative and economic control over its territory, he said in his characteristically staccato French, and would withdraw its military forces from the other zone. A similar arrangement would be implemented in Laos and Cambodia, with one zone for the royal governments of the Associated States and one for the Viet Minh–supported Pathet Lao and Khmer Issarak. Pham Van Dong stressed that his proposal did not represent a violation of the national unity of each country; the division in each case would be temporary and would lead to elections for reunification.
Pham Van Dong knew the general concept he was outlining would find favor in the British delegation and among many in the press corps. More important, he knew partition had growing support in the French camp. Georges Bidault, anxious to assuage the fears of the South Vietnamese government, remained hostile, but several officials—Claude Cheysson and Raymond Offroy, both of them Indochina specialists, as well as Jean Chauvel and Colonel de Brébisson—were convinced of the wisdom of attempting some kind of division of Vietnam, one that would give each side one of the deltas. A week earlier de Brébisson had commenced a series of face-to-face sessions with the Viet Minh’s Colonel Ha Van Lau, the first such Franco–Viet Minh meeting of the conference. Their initial charge was to discuss the evacuation of the wounded from Dien Bien Phu (it will be recalled that several hundred had been too ill to march to Viet Minh prison camps and had been left behind) as well as a possible exchange of prisoners, but in the days thereafter, they also considered other issues of contention, including the mechanics of a cease-fire and how to achieve the regroupment of the two sides. In the weeks to come, these two colonels, who had fought on opposite sides since the outbreak of the struggle—de Brébisson had been among the first French troops to disembark in Saigon, in November 1945, and Ha, a former clerk in the French colonial administration, had been political commissar in the 320th Division—would contribute as much as anyone to the final work of the conference.34
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Smith seemed to be coming around to the need for some kind of division of the country. At a press conference on May 27, he admitted that one could not ignore Ho Chi Minh’s well-disciplined and formidable fighting force, which controlled a significant proportion of the territory. This Viet Minh position of strength on the battlefield could not be wished out of existence. What the Eisenhower administration sought, Smith continued, was some means of reconciling this reality with American principles, leading to a “termination of hostilities on an honorable basis.”35 (See map on this page.)
That was the rub, of course: What constituted “honorable”? With voices in Congress and the American press branding partition a sellout—U. S. News & World Report compared “Winston Churchill’s proposal” to Chamberlain allowing partition of Czechoslovakia at Munich, while Time said British leaders “look alarmingly like appeasers”—Smith’s superiors in Washington still sought to preserve flexibility and to avoid committing the United States fully to any particular plan concerning the political aspects of the cease-fire.36 Better no agreement at all, the White House believed, than one that would reward “Communist aggression.”
In restricted session on May 29, Eden and Smith squabbled over the Briton’s proposal that the French and Viet Minh military commands should meet to discuss “the cessation of hostilities, beginning with the question of regrouping areas in Vietnam.” The American warned that his government would reserve the right to judge whether the recommendations coming out of these bilateral discussions prejudiced the U.S. position with respect to the independence of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. This was a holding action, and it annoyed Eden, though not as much as what Smith did next: He declared his desire—no doubt with American domestic opinion firmly in mind—to make his reservation public. Eden countered by saying he would not release his own proposal to the press, so that Smith would not feel compelled to announce his reservation. “For some reason or other this apparently annoyed the Americans,” he wrote in his diary, an understatement of the first order. Smith was outraged by what he called, in a cable to Dulles, Eden’s “exhibition of impatience and pique.” Despite the foreign secretary’s plea, both his proposal and the unenthusiastic American reception to it were leaked to the press.37
Eden would have blanched had he seen what else Smith said to Dulles that day: “I want you to know that I believe it will be a sad day for Britain and America when Eden becomes Prime Minister. I am convinced, after long association, that he is without moral or intellectual honesty, and his vanity and petulance are not counterbalanced, as in the case of Churchill, by genuine wisdom and great strength of character.”38
That evening Eden got more alarming news. At 7:36 a cable arrived at the Foreign Office from Sir Gladwyn Jebb, Britain’s ambassador in Paris, who asked that it be sent on to Geneva immediately. It contained a bombshell: According to Maurice Schumann, the French undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, the Franco-American negotiations regarding possible U.S. intervention in Indochina had that day achieved a breakthrough, with the result that “agreement has now practically been reached with the Americans on all points.” The French government didn’t actually want this intervention, Schumann told Jebb; what it wanted was the “deterrent effect” that an agreed-upon plan, involving both American airpower and ground forces, would have on the Viet Minh negotiators and their Soviet and Chinese backers. This last assertion did little to mollify Eden. Convinced, as he wrote Churchill the following day, that the Americans “want to intervene,” he determined he would reiterate in the strongest terms Britain’s unwillingness to support any plan for military action while the Geneva talks had even one breath of life in them. Schumann might claim that France did not want an escalation of the war, but “their wavering between pusillanimity and intransigence may well bring it about.”39
When Eden confronted Bidault about the matter, the Frenchman confirmed the veracity of Schumann’s claim. If the Geneva negotiations failed to yield an acceptable peace, Eisenhower would go to Congress and request authorization for intervention. Airpower would be used, and probably also three marine divisions. The administration had even dropped its requirement that France give the Associated States the right to secede from the French Union. Eden heard Bidault out, then restated his government’s refusal to commit to military action, whereupon Bidault said he himself saw the plan mainly as a political weapon designed to strengthen the French diplomatic hand.40
Was this true also of the Americans? Did they too see this roll of distant thunder primarily as a means to induce the Communists in Geneva to lower their demands? Was the show of strength more show than strength? Or was Eden right in insisting to Churchill that Washington wanted to intervene? The evidence is not conclusive, but almost certainly it was some of both. To imagine that the Eisenhower administration viewed this Franco-American arrangement purely as an elaborate ruse is difficult, to say the least; surely the president and his aides knew that if no settlement emerged from the negotiations (as they expected and half-hoped would be the case), they would face enormous pressure to implement the plan. Loath for ideological as well as pragmatic partisan reasons to be associated with a “Far Eastern Munich,” and fearful of the geopolitical as well as domestic political consequences of allowing a Viet Minh military victory, the administration continued to plan for possible military intervention, continued to
lean on Australia and New Zealand to join in the endeavor even if Britain would not. On June 2, Bedell Smith, acting on instructions from Washington, told a press conference that the United States could not associate herself “with any formula which partitions or dismembers Vietnam.”41
V
THEN SOMETHING CHANGED—OR MORE PRECISELY, TWO THINGS. First, word arrived in Washington that neither Australia nor New Zealand was willing in the foreseeable future to participate in military action in Indochina. Canberra, the more influential of the two ANZUS partners, had in fact quietly been coming to this position over a period of weeks. Eager, on the one hand, to remain on good terms with the United States and to keep the Americans committed to underwriting the defense of Southeast Asia, the government was reluctant, on the other, to come out in open opposition to British policy. What tipped the balance was the state of the war on the ground. With Giap’s victory at Dien Bien Phu and the increasing pressure on the delta, Australian military officials saw little hope for French Union forces in Tonkin, and even in Annam and Cochin China the prospects were bleak. An American-led multilateral intervention would undoubtedly help the situation, but not enough to turn things around, at least in the short or medium term, and consequently the best means of blocking further Communist expansion was through an early cessation of hostilities. The Menzies government agreed; on May 23, Richard Casey, the minister for external affairs, concluded in a secret cable that the optimum solution would be an armistice “with some political solution (even entailing partition).”42
It’s telling that U.S. ambassador Amos J. Peaslee, when informed of this Australian position, remarked that its endorsement of a political over a military solution did not accord with his understanding of American policy. And it’s telling that Casey, in formally presenting his argument to the Australian cabinet on Friday, June 4, asserted that Washington sought to prolong the war through multilateral armed intervention. He won cabinet approval for a policy of seeking a diplomatic settlement and for his claim that, notwithstanding Canberra’s interest in keeping America engaged in the defense of Southeast Asia, “Australia’s destiny was not so completely wrapped up with the United States as to support them in action which Australia regarded as wrong.” Certainly, few in Canberra thought of America’s warlike breast-beating on Indochina as a mere ruse designed to scare the Communist delegations into making major concessions.43
This is why Australia’s decision to support a political settlement has historical importance: Not long after word of it reached the White House, the Eisenhower administration began to sing a different tune. At the end of May, Peaslee gave Washington hints of what was to come, and Ambassador Spender officially informed the State Department on June 4. The following evening Dulles indicated the administration was inclined to seek a negotiated solution to the war. “France would have to accept whatever terms they would get if they were to obtain a cease-fire,” Spender reported him as saying. Dulles also hinted the United States “would not engage in unilateral intervention … without the support of Australia and New Zealand.” (Wellington had in the meantime also said it would not commit to United Action.) To Roger Makins, the British ambassador in Washington, the secretary of state was clear as could be: Any American military action in Vietnam would have to be as part of a coalition force.44
If the news from down under was one reason for this apparent change in American thinking, there was also a second: a growing appreciation of just how dire the situation was on the ground in Vietnam. That same weekend witnessed the start of the five-power military staff talks in Washington, which featured chiefs-of-staff-level discussions by representatives from the United States, Great Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand. Some two weeks earlier a French military mission led by General Paul Ely, chief of the French general staff, and including also the former Indochina commander Raoul Salan, had visited Indochina. They returned with a sobering assessment of the war map. Major reinforcements were essential, they told the Committee on National Defense, and because of the sorry state of the Vietnamese National Army, these would have to come from France. This in turn would mean changing the law to allow conscripts to be sent. Even then it might be necessary to focus defenses on the truly vital parts of the Red River Delta—essentially the Hanoi-Haiphong corridor—and to sacrifice the rest.45
This same basic message was articulated by the chief French representative in the five-power talks, General Jean Valluy, the commander of the Expeditionary Corps at the start of the war in 1946 and now the head of the French Military Mission to the United States. Morale among French Union forces had plummeted, a despondent Valluy told Admiral Radford late on June 2, while the VNA had become a rabble, deserting right and left. The Viet Minh, on the other hand, enthused by their victory at Dien Bien Phu, were laying preparations to attack the delta in force, using as many as one hundred battalions. Could the delta be held? Valluy was skeptical and said so both to Radford and in the five-power talks that commenced the following day. He offered up some tough rhetoric on the importance of holding Tonkin and the desirability of United Action, but he knew that three of the other four delegations in Washington wanted nothing to do with multilateral intervention. As the talks progressed, Valluy hinted that French military opinion was now resigned to partition, whether through a negotiated agreement at Geneva or through a unilateral military withdrawal southward by French Union forces. Conceding that Ho Chi Minh would accept a cease-fire only if he won control over Hanoi, the Frenchman suggested seeking a division line as far north as possible, ideally at the eighteenth parallel.46
For Arthur Radford and like-minded members of the American military, such “defeatist” talk was contemptible. During the Washington talks, the admiral continued to press for United Action, continued to insist that the West faced a choice between military intervention and the rapid loss of all of Indochina and perhaps Southeast Asia too, continued to argue that Tonkin was the key to the whole region. He insisted that major troop reinforcements from France, combined with air and naval action by the United States, could hold Tonkin for the six or nine months American missions would need to train effective Vietnamese forces. But though Eisenhower and Dulles remained sympathetic to the admiral’s assessment of the stakes—U. S. News & World Report said that week that the president saw much wisdom in Radford’s plan—they had now to contend with the state of affairs on the ground in Vietnam, and the hardening views of the key allied governments. Moreover, they had to consider the opposition to Radford’s analysis from within the U.S. military. Army chief of staff General Matthew Ridgway, who with his formal bearing, cold gray eyes, and steel-trap mind exuded seriousness and gravitas, had not abandoned his deep skepticism concerning the utility of airpower in Vietnam. He was certain, moreover, that U.S. ground forces would inevitably be part of the equation—and in large numbers. This would put huge strains on Pentagon planners, given America’s existing troop commitments around the globe, and would constitute, Ridgway warned, a “dangerous strategic diversion … in a non-decisive theater.”47
Anthony Eden sensed the change in American thinking. On June 5, he was the picture of gloom before the British cabinet, telling his colleagues that a deal was unlikely because Bidault was indecisive and because Washington was only interested in military intervention. But later that day word came in from Makins in Washington that the Americans had a new policy, which was not to intervene in Indochina unless the Chinese did so by arms and airplanes. Eden in his diary scoffed at the idea that Beijing might intervene in force—“why they should when they are winning already I cannot imagine”—but he interpreted the policy change, if indeed it was real, as a sign that the interventionists (he listed Radford, Dulles, and Admiral Robert B. Carney, the U.S. delegate to the five-power staff talks) had suffered a setback.48
Bidault too felt a new wind blowing, and it made him shiver. What would be the point of continuing the Franco-American talks, he asked Dulles through Ambassador Henri Bonnet, if intervention was no longer a live option?
And what incentive would the Communists at Geneva then have to compromise? Dulles replied that the situation had changed: Whereas six weeks earlier American air and naval power and a “token land force” would have been enough, now four or five U.S. divisions would in all likelihood be required. The military outlook was dire, and morale both in France and among allies in Vietnam had plummeted. Nor had the French government met the preconditions for U.S. involvement. The testy exchange concluded with Bonnet charging that agreement had been reached between the two governments when Washington all of a sudden pulled back.49
VI
IF AMERICAN MILITARY INTERVENTION IN VIETNAM WAS AT LONG last off the table, the Eisenhower administration still could not bring itself to take the next step and support a negotiated settlement. Even as each of the other main players in Geneva gravitated toward partition as the preferred solution—Viet Minh and French negotiators made significant progress on the particulars in secret meetings on June 4, 5, and 10, even as Georges Bidault personally remained noncommittal—the administration was loath to sign on. (At least publicly; privately, Bedell Smith told Australia’s Casey on June 13 that he personally accepted the idea of partition.)50 In domestic political terms, it would be better for the conference to collapse than for it to agree to a compromise with Communists, especially of the Chinese variety.
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam Page 66