Hence the equanimity with which U.S. officials greeted the splits that emerged in restricted sessions in mid-June. The disagreements concerned the authority and composition of an international supervisory commission that would monitor the peace, and the status of Cambodia and Laos. Resolution seemed impossible, and many delegates, Eden among them, concluded that a breakup of the conference was imminent. Dulles was pleased, or at least not disturbed. “It is our view,” he cabled Bedell Smith on June 14, “that final adjournment of Conference is in our best interest, provided this can be done without creating an impression in France at this critical moment that France has been deserted by US and UK and therefore has no choice but capitulation on Indochina to Communists at Geneva and possible accommodation with Soviets in Europe.”51
But what if such capitulation and accommodation occurred, or what if the Communists used the failure of the conference as an excuse to try to conquer the whole of the Indochinese peninsula? Robert Bowie, the director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, articulated precisely that fear at a meeting of the NSC on June 15. Here was the United States, Bowie said, withdrawing from the Geneva Conference because she found the Communist proposals unacceptable, yet she was unwilling to do anything to bolster the French position. The likely result: The Viet Minh would charge down the peninsula and get more of Indochina than they were demanding at the conference. In the wake of such a development, Nehru and other “Asiatics” would swing to the Communist side. Far better, Bowie asserted, to defend “South Vietnam,” if necessary with four U.S. divisions.52
Although U.S. diplomats in Saigon had made similar noises for several weeks, this was a revolutionary idea in the halls of power in Washington.53 Bowie had not merely asserted that partition served American interests better than allowing the negotiations to fail; he had said the southern half of Vietnam was militarily defensible. The five-power staff talks had come to the same conclusion, with a consensus that a line from Thakhek (in Laos) to Dong Hoi—that is, about 17°50’ north—could be defended. For the moment, Bowie found few takers for his argument, but his advocacy gained force among high officials in the days thereafter. Already by June 17, John Foster Dulles could be heard singing a new tune at another meeting of the NSC. Seconding Eisenhower’s comment that the native populations of Southeast Asia viewed the war as a colonial enterprise, the secretary, according to the note taker, said “perhaps the time had come” to let the French get out of Indochina entirely and then try to “rebuild from the foundations.” And later in the same meeting: “For the United States or its allies to try to fight now in the Delta area was almost impossible, if for no other reason than that the French have no inclination to invite us in. They are desperately anxious to get themselves out of Indochina.… Probably best to let them quit.”54
The “perhaps” and the “probably” were important. Although in hindsight Dulles’s words constituted a watershed moment—the first clear sign of a monumental policy shift, from keeping the French fighting and resisting negotiations to moving France out of Indochina altogether and “rebuild[ing] from the foundations,” without the taint of colonialism—at the time, in mid-June 1954, neither he nor President Eisenhower knew what they wanted. They still groped hesitantly for some means of reconciling the competing imperatives on Indochina: to keep the nation out of “another Korea” while avoiding any hint of “appeasement” of the Communists. Seeing danger whichever way they turned, especially in a congressional election year, the two men still saw advantages in letting the Geneva meeting collapse without an agreement. On June 12, Smith candidly told Eden that he had just received a “plain spoken” personal message from Eisenhower instructing him to do everything in his power to bring the proceedings to an end as quickly as possible. “We decided,” the president himself would recall of this period in June, “that it was best for the United States to break off major participation in the Geneva Conference. The days of keeping the Western powers bound to inaction by creating divisions of policy among them in a dragged-out conference were coming to an end.”55
In Paris, however, one man had a different idea. On June 18, six days after the Laniel government failed to win a vote of confidence (306 to 296), Pierre Mendès France, who had spoken out against this war longer and more fervently than any other leading politician, became France’s new prime minister. In soliciting the National Assembly’s support, the veteran Radical deputy didn’t merely proclaim as his first objective a cease-fire in Indochina; he vowed that he would resign within thirty days of his investiture if an agreement had not been reached. His last act before resigning, he added, would be to introduce a bill for conscription to supplement the professional army in the field, which the Assembly would have to vote on the same day. Mendès France was sufficiently encouraged by the results of the de Brébisson-Ha secret discussions to make this pledge, but he knew it was a gamble. How would the delegations at Geneva respond? Would he be able to bring the Viet Minh, the Americans, the Chinese, the Soviets along? And what about Bao Dai’s State of Vietnam, which that week had had her own change of leadership, one little noticed at the time but with enormous implications for the future? Buu Loc was out as prime minister, replaced by Ngo Dinh Diem. Would Diem, who immediately announced his opposition to any settlement involving partition, upset the Mendès France timetable?
So many questions, so much to work out. And the clock was now ticking.
CHAPTER 23
“WE MUST GO FAST”
IT WAS A GAMBLE, BUT A CONSIDERED ONE. PIERRE MENDÈS FRANCE had announced to the world that he would resign as French premier if he could not end his country’s eight-year war in Indochina within one month (that is, by end of the day on July 20, 1954). Since agreeing on June 13 to be premier-designate, Mendès France, well-known for his colossal zest for work and immense powers of concentration, had immersed himself in the details of the military situation in Vietnam. The more he learned, the more he realized he had to move quickly to secure an agreement. There was still a war on. The picture in the Red River Delta was growing more and more bleak, senior military officers told him on June 14; desertions from the VNA were reaching epidemic proportions, and the Hanoi-Haiphong road was in constant danger of being cut, not for hours as was happening already, but permanently. Within weeks, Vo Nguyen Giap would be ready to launch a large-scale attack from various points on the delta’s perimeter. Worse yet, the Viet Minh commander might not need to initiate such an all-out assault; so extensive was the pourrissement in the delta that the French position might quickly collapse anyway. “We must act quickly,” the officers implored the premier-designate, “we must make them put their cards on the table as soon as possible.”1
But it was not merely the dismal military situation that caused Mendès France to stake his political future on securing a rapid agreement at Geneva. For years, as we have seen, he had been a Cassandra in parliament, using his credentials as an economist to argue that France could not afford the war, could not afford to fight a major military campaign in Asia while seeking recovery at home. And without such an economic recovery, the country’s broader foreign policy objectives, including in Europe and North Africa, would be unattainable.2 Everything was connected to everything else. Admittedly, liquidating the Indochina enterprise short of success would not be easy—there would be denunciations from some commentators at home, and French prestige abroad would suffer a blow—but what alternative was there? “To govern is to choose,” Mendès France had once declared (gouverner, c’est choisir), and he had been withering in his criticism of previous French governments for avoiding the tough decisions on Indochina. Now he would get the chance to follow his dictum.
And besides, all was not necessarily lost. Grim though the military prospects might be, diplomatically Mendès France saw reason to be hopeful. From Jean Chauvel’s telegrams he knew that the bilateral Franco–Viet Minh negotiations in Geneva were making slow but steady progress, which seemed to indicate that the Viet Minh too sought an early end to the war.
The other leading delegations, meanwhile—with the exception of the Americans, that is, who he knew suspected his left-wing credentials—were pleased by his selection, and the task now was to strike quickly, while he had the advantage of freshness and could count on broad support in the Assembly. By announcing this deadline, he hoped to create a psychological situation closely approximating a truce. After all, a major enemy offensive operation during the four-week window would bring international opprobrium, and since only the enemy was in a position to be able to launch such an operation in the near future, the cost to French maneuverability in the field would be minimal. In Korea, the negotiations had been allowed to drag on for months and months; he could not let that happen here.3
But there were risks as well in setting a deadline, huge risks, and Mendès France knew it. His own reputation would suffer a blow, possibly a fatal one, if he failed to deliver a deal by July 20. Furthermore, his country’s adversaries might be tempted to slow down the negotiations with the aim of securing last-minute concessions as the clock ticked down. Tensions among the Western powers, palpable enough in recent weeks, could increase as the three governments worked to establish a common position before the deadline. Nevertheless, Mendès France took the plunge. At two A.M. on June 18, 1954, some hours after electrifying the delegates in the National Assembly with his Indochina wager, Pierre Mendès France became premier of France, by a vote of 419 to 47, with 143 abstentions. It was one of the strongest majorities in the history of the Fourth Republic. The left-wing press cheered the result, and “Mendèsiste” delight could be seen also in the more centrist papers such as Le Monde, Franc-Tireur, Combat, and France Observateur.
His rise to the highest political office in the land was at once extraordinary and entirely to be expected. A descendant of Marrano Jews who had fled the Portuguese Inquisition of 1684, Pierre Mendès France was born in Paris in 1907. From an early age, he assumed the wholly secular sense of identity long held by middle-class Jewish families of the Third and Fourth republics, who trusted that an assimilationist but condoning France would satisfy their sense of belonging. Ambitious and brilliant, he had served as the precocious undersecretary of finance in Léon Blum’s second ministry in 1938 and as de Gaulle’s minister of economic affairs in 1944–45. Yet Mendès France remained to an extent an outsider throughout the wartime and early postwar years, an emerging political star who drew his strength not from party maneuvering or parliamentary skill but from the force of his intellect and his moral fervor, from his willingness to face hard truths, make tough choices, and get things done. To his young supporters and staffers, he was “PMF,” after FDR, and to the journalistic allies who founded the weekly magazine L’Express to promote his cause, the future had at long last arrived.4
Mendès France retained much of the Geneva delegation headed by Jean Chauvel, while the Ministry for the Associated States he entrusted to Guy La Chambre, a veteran Radical Party member and former minister for the air. The Foreign Ministry Mendès France kept for himself, because the chief initial task he had set for himself—making peace in Indochina—he viewed as essentially diplomatic.
Thus came to a sudden end the Bidault phase of the Geneva Conference, after seven and a half weeks—and the Bidault phase of the Indochina War, after seven and a half years. Almost continuously the former history teacher had been at the center of things, from before the real shooting started in 1946, but he would not be there for the denouement. At Geneva he had initially pursued the policy of the victor, calling for a cease-fire based on the leopard skin formula (the irregular outline of territorial zones controlled by the opposing sides) and stubbornly refusing to discuss the political future of Vietnam or even to meet with Pham Van Dong. “I am not used to associating with assassins,” Bidault haughtily declared, adding: “What do I have to hear from him? I know that he has only one idea: to kick us out the door.”5 As the weeks passed, however, Bidault saw the need to shift ground somewhat, to appear more flexible. He allowed the de Brébisson–Ha Van Lau talks to proceed, even as he continued to rule out a personal encounter with Pham Van Dong. But to the end he was ambivalent, temporizing, circumspect.6 He never could bring himself to link the military and political questions, or to abandon hope for some kind of deus ex machina, inevitably involving U.S. military intervention. Even after many in his own delegation embraced partition as the only real solution, he remained resistant, proclaiming into mid-June that only the leopard skin suited him.7
It could be argued—and was argued, by Bidault and his supporters, and by some observers since—that this approach yielded real results for France. By resisting partition and by laying preparations with Washington for possible military escalation, so the argument goes, Bidault elicited concessions from the Communist side, concessions impossible to imagine at the time of Dien Bien Phu’s surrender six weeks earlier. The alternative view is that Bidault’s “diplomatic somnambulism” (to use Raymond Aron’s phrase), his evident revulsion at having to negotiate with Pham Van Dong and his Soviet and Chinese allies, only delayed an agreement.8 Vyacheslav Molotov, upon returning to Moscow in late June, complained to the Central Committee that the Frenchman’s reluctance to discuss an armistice line contributed to the sluggish progress of the conference. China’s Zhou Enlai agreed, as did Britain’s Anthony Eden, as indeed did key players in the French delegation. On June 19, with Bidault finally off the stage, Jean Chauvel told Eden that the French team was now able to discuss seriously the partition of Vietnam.9
For Eden, it was as though the clouds had suddenly parted. Where just days earlier he had despaired to colleagues that the conference seemed likely to collapse without agreement (a result, he ruefully noted, that would please the Americans), rendering all his hard work over the previous months meaningless, he now saw reason to be hopeful, even optimistic. Bidault was gone, and the new man wanted a deal. Not only that, in recent days both Molotov and Zhou, seeking to exploit the changed situation in Paris, had made concessions. On June 15, Molotov had proposed a compromise on the composition of the supervisory commission to come out of the conference, suggesting that neutral India could be named chair. He also affirmed his willingness to tackle military issues first, so long as political matters were not neglected. Zhou, for his part, said cryptically on June 14 and explicitly on June 16 that the situations in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were not wholly alike and should be treated separately. Laos and Cambodia could be considered neutral nations like India and Burma, he told Eden, and as such could be given the right to remain in the French Union provided they had no American or other foreign bases. On June 18, Zhou issued the proposal again in formal session and was followed by Pham Van Dong, who indicated the willingness of his government to remove its forces from Laos and Cambodia so long as no foreign military bases were established anywhere in Indochina.10
II
EDEN SAW ZHOU ENLAI AS THE REAL FORCE BEHIND THIS COMMUNIST diplomatic maneuver, and his judgment seems correct in hindsight. Molotov was content to let him play the key role. In the first several weeks of the conference, Zhou had mostly adhered to a firm line and showed scant signs of the refined charm that would enchant so many interlocutors in the years to come. Most of the time he had been the bitter challenger with the chip on his shoulder, quick to lash out, notably against Walter Robertson, the hard-line American assistant secretary of state who as head of the Far East desk helped shape the administration’s China policy. His words dripping with sarcasm, Zhou would mock Robertson’s pronouncements, reminding him and all within earshot of Washington’s errors of judgment concerning Chiang Kai-shek and the survivability of the revolution.11
But not this time. This time when Robertson rose to tell the conference (in tones Eden in his diary said constituted a “violent attack”) that the new Communist proposals were unacceptably imprecise, Zhou Enlai held his fire and reiterated his offer.12 Why his new conciliatory tone? Contemporary observers assumed that Mao Zedong was eager to keep the Geneva Conference from breaking up and to prevent the U
nited States from establishing a military presence in Laos and Cambodia. With the odious Bidault gone and a longtime foe of the war taking power in Paris, and with the Eisenhower administration seemingly intent on letting the negotiations fail, now was the time, these analysts imagined Mao and Zhou thinking, to move aggressively to secure a deal.
Recently released Chinese archival documentation supports this interpretation. It shows that the Chinese, Soviet, and Viet Minh delegations met on June 15 in Geneva to evaluate the changed situation in Paris and to coordinate strategy. Zhou Enlai took a firm line, warning Pham Van Dong that the Viet Minh’s refusal to acknowledge the presence of their troops in Cambodia and Laos threatened to kill the negotiations and squander a golden opportunity to secure a political agreement. Zhou accordingly proposed that the Communist side adopt a new line favoring withdrawal of all foreign troops from the two kingdoms, including the “volunteers” sent by the DRV, so that “our concessions on Cambodia and Laos will result in [the other camp’s] concessions on the question of dividing the zones between the two sides in Vietnam.” Molotov, having previously held several private discussions with Zhou, strongly backed the proposal. Pham Van Dong was noncommittal but ultimately seemed to imply assent.13 “The Chinese delegation has presented a proposal that contains a number of concessions,” he wrote in a cable to the DRV Central Committee, “such as acknowledging that there are dissimilarities between the Laotian and Cambodian problems and the Vietnam problem and that there are dissimilarities between [the] Laotian problem and the Cambodian problems as well, and the position that all foreign troops would be withdrawn from Laos and Cambodia (the proposal means that if our troops are present they too will have to be withdrawn).”14
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam Page 67