Nixon was midway through a 10-week-long goodwill tour of over a dozen Asian nations, sent by Eisenhower to express American solidarity with friendly governments there. Of the many stops on his grand tour, however, none had quite the significance of Indochina. France’s colonial war there was entering its eighth year. The French expeditionary force was exhausted and demoralized. The communist independence movement—the League for the Independence of Viet Nam, or Viet Minh—had paid a high price in its struggle but by 1953 controlled large swaths of northern Vietnam. It could rely on the support of most of the Vietnamese population, as well as a steady supply of weapons and materiel from communist China. The French meanwhile had begun to float the idea of “an honorable peace” that would give them a way to cut their losses and exit Indochina.
Upon arriving in Saigon with his wife on October 30, the vice president delivered a stern and fateful message to the Vietnamese and to his French hosts. “What is at stake in this war is fundamentally the freedom and independence of southeast Asia,” he declared. Yes, the Vietnamese wanted independence, and they would have it—just as soon as the communists were defeated. Until then America would support France in its war effort, and the Vietnamese people must rise up against “the common enemy”: the communists. If America, France, and the Vietnamese people should fail, the consequences would be grave indeed: Southeast Asia as a whole would be gone forever. “The eyes of the world are fixed on this area, and free people everywhere are vitally interested in what will happen here.”2
The eyes of the world are fixed on this area. Nixon’s words remind us that for American leaders of the 1950s, Asia was the most dangerous theater of the global cold war. Unlike in Europe, where by 1953 the East-West rivalry had settled into a frosty standoff, in Asia the cold war still burned red hot, and the glowing ember at the heart of it all was China. As Nixon later put it, “The major new and unfathomable factor in Asia and the Pacific was Communist China. It was a giant looming beyond every Asian horizon—475 million people ruled by ruthless, disciplined ideologues.” And China’s influence “was already spreading throughout the area.”3
Just as Nixon was sweating his way through friendly Asian capitals, Eisenhower and his advisers gathered on November 5 at the usual Thursday meeting of the National Security Council to give final approval to a top-secret paper titled “U.S. Policy toward Communist China.” Designated NSC 166/1, it drew an alarming picture. “The emergence of a strong, disciplined, and revolutionary communist regime on mainland China has radically altered the power structure in the Far East,” the paper asserted. No one could doubt the fact of China’s power. “In the course of half a decade the Chinese Communists have succeeded in defeating and replacing the National Government of China on the mainland, in consolidating, extending, and intensifying the control of the central administration, and in largely rehabilitating the Chinese economy, while at the same time undertaking a Communist political and social revolution of vast proportions.”
The Chinese communists would not stop there. They wanted, the NSC asserted, to “recapture the historically Chinese territories which the U.S. and the West now hold or protect,” namely Taiwan and Hong Kong. They also wanted the “eventual expulsion of Western or Western-allied forces from adjacent mainland areas,” such as Indochina, Korea, and Malaya. And beyond that they desired the “substitution of Chinese Communist influence for that of the West in the other areas of the Far East,” especially Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
What should the United States do to halt China’s march? The NSC ruled out war. That would lead to “full U.S. mobilization, heavy casualties, the deployment of a major proportion of U.S. armed forces to the China theater, possible use of a significant proportion of the U.S. atomic stockpile and employment of a major proportion of its atomic carriers, almost certainly a split of the U.S.-led coalition, [and the] probability of military intervention by the USSR and a very high risk of global war.” Eisenhower had just ended one war in Asia; he certainly did not seek another.4
Instead the president preferred to combat communism in Asia using the same method that had worked effectively in Europe: containment. That meant generous economic and military aid to sympathetic governments in the region, along with close political, diplomatic, and personal ties—of the kind Nixon’s trip sought to foster. This strategic concept aimed to avoid war, but it also required the United States to turn every outpost of Western influence into a symbol of American resolve. South Korea, Taiwan, French Indochina, British Malaya, the Philippines, and Japan—all had to be defended from communist subversion. Ike’s advisers now conceived of East Asia as a single zone of struggle against China and communism from which America could not retreat.5
Eisenhower’s strategy of containment in Asia faced its first major test in Indochina in 1953–54, and the matter has been a subject of contentious debate among historians ever since. Searching for the long-term origins of America’s tragic war in Vietnam, scholars return again and again to that tumultuous moment in the early 1950s when the French Empire was collapsing and communism seemed poised for a stunning victory over the forces of Western colonialism. Eisenhower confronted a terrible dilemma: he could send U.S. military forces to prop up the rotten and unpopular French Empire, or he could stand aside as the communists seized northern Vietnam and took aim at the rest of Indochina.
Most scholars have praised Eisenhower’s wisdom and restraint as he worked through this awful problem. Despite considerable pressure from members of his cabinet, his leading military advisers, and the French government, Eisenhower did not commit American military forces to Indochina in 1954. Though willing to rattle his nuclear weapons at the Chinese to deter them from advancing into Vietnam, he “shrewdly vetoed American military intervention,” according to historian Robert Divine. Much later scholarship has sustained this argument.6
Yet the debate rages on. In his prize-winning study of the long-term origins of the Vietnam War, historian Fredrik Logevall paints a less flattering portrait of the president. Stressing Eisenhower’s adherence to the domino theory, Logevall argues that Eisenhower was “fully prepared to intervene with force” in order to halt the fall of Vietnam to the communists. What stopped him from doing so? Not his own innate caution, which Logevall dismisses. Instead he was blocked by external forces, especially the reluctance of the U.S. Congress to give him a carte blanche for military intervention, as well as the opposition of America’s crucial ally, Britain, to a wider war in Indochina. In this interpretation it was the restraint of Congress and especially the British government—not Eisenhower—that kept America out of war in Vietnam in 1954.7
The argument is difficult to resolve. Was Eisenhower a hawk or a dove? Does he deserve the praise he often receives for avoiding war in Vietnam, or was he truly spoiling for a fight, only to be hamstrung by Congress and his allies? As is typical with Eisenhower, the answer lies somewhere in between. There can be no doubt that he wanted to avoid an intervention by U.S. troops in Indochina; “no more Koreas” was his guiding dictum. Yet in pursuit of his overall strategic goal of containing China and halting the spread of communism, Eisenhower used every other tool at his disposal. He sent arms to fund the French war, spoke menacingly of falling dominoes, and pointedly issued nuclear threats to the Chinese to deter them from seizing Indochina as France withdrew. While his tactics worked in the short run to keep America out of another Asian war, Eisenhower nonetheless committed resources and prestige to Indochina in the cause of containment—and for that cause, just a decade later, Americans would fight and die. Eisenhower avoided war in 1954, but he also sowed many of the seeds that would yield a harvest of sorrow in later years.8
II
A French colonial creation made up of three kingdoms—Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam—Indochina had been France’s Asian jewel since the 1880s. Not only did the colony produce rice, rubber, tea and coffee, coal, and zinc, but it demonstrated France’s Great Power status. During the Second World War the Japanese conquered Indochina, b
ut in 1945 the French government set out to reclaim its colonial possession. It was not easy. France’s plans were foiled by a powerful Vietnamese anticolonial movement that had been much fortified during the war and was led by the well-educated and worldly communist Ho Chi Minh. In 1945 France began a military campaign to suppress the rebellion, inaugurating 30 years of bitter conflict in Vietnam.
The French pursued a two-pronged strategy to defeat the communist insurgency. Using French Foreign Legion and local Vietnamese soldiers supplemented by French regulars, they erected a protective cordon around population centers like Hanoi and Saigon and built static outposts in the countryside from which to launch raids into the hinterland. In addition the French tried to create a plausible Vietnamese nationalist alternative to the charismatic Ho. They transformed Bao Dai, the pliant former emperor of Annam and the scion of the Nguyen dynasty, into a head of state, and they set up a national parliament to provide the illusion of local political autonomy.
The strategy never worked. The communist Viet Minh used its control of the rural areas, especially in the northern province of Tonkin, to build popular support, resupply, strike at vulnerable French targets, and sap French morale. The Viet Minh also relied upon significant Chinese military aid. The French expeditionary force of about 75,000 soldiers, supplemented by 50,000 colonial troops from North and West Africa and 300,000 Vietnamese, rarely took the initiative in the fighting and never inspired confidence among a population that was largely hostile to French rule. Without military success, the political strategy withered, since noncommunist politicians perceived that Bao Dai did not have the leverage to deliver Vietnamese independence from France. The French could win neither on the battlefield nor in the hearts of the Vietnamese.
Initially American leaders looked warily at France’s recolonization of Indochina, but with the triumph of Mao’s communist revolution in 1949 and the outbreak of war in Korea just eight months later, the Truman administration came to see French Indochina as a front in the global war against communism. By 1952 the United States was paying for at least half the cost of France’s war there. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles believed, as Dulles explained in a speech in early 1953, that the Soviets wanted to control “Indochina, Siam, Burma, Malaya . . . what is called the rice bowl of Asia.” Such control would allow them to threaten Japan and India. During the long discussions on board the USS Helena after Ike’s Korean trip, cabinet officials agreed that Indochina must not fall to the communists.9
But how to avoid such a calamity? Upon taking office, Eisenhower and Dulles received dismal reports from the State Department and military officials, who depicted the French war in Indochina as likely to end in a desultory defeat for France. The Joint Chiefs of Staff asserted that the communist Viet Minh held all the initiative in military matters, striking the French at will, and the French forces were too defensive-minded to achieve victory. In language that foreshadowed the grim American experience in Vietnam in the 1960s, one internal intelligence assessment put the issue bluntly: “Although the French have been successful in inflicting severe losses on the Viet Minh, and have considerably disrupted the Viet Minh economy, overall French operations cannot be considered successful because of their failure to arrive at a political solution that obtains the support or patriotism of the Vietnamese people.” The picture was dark and getting worse.10
Such defeatist opinions did not satisfy the new team in Washington. The incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Arthur Radford, thought he knew a great deal about Asia. Trained as a navy pilot, he had led a carrier division in World War II, had sailed across every watery mile of the Pacific, and eventually commanded the entire Pacific fleet. An ardent advocate, not surprisingly, of air and naval power, he was also an admirer of General MacArthur and a charter member of the “Asia First” club that stressed the need to go on the offensive against communism in Asia. Radford considered the French poor soldiers, far too passive and defensive in their operations. “Two good American divisions with the normal American aggressive spirit could clean up the situation” in 10 months, he told the top State Department planners. The United States must use its leverage to force the French to adopt bolder tactics. “It was essential,” Radford felt, “that we take a more hardboiled attitude with the French in order to get them to adopt a more aggressive policy.”11
This kind of can-do talk appealed to Eisenhower, who thought Indochina was of critical importance to the position of the free world in Asia. In March 1953, in a private discussion, Ike and his secretary of state agreed that Indochina was “the top priority in foreign policy, being in some ways more important than Korea because the consequences of a loss there could not be localized, but would spread throughout Asia and Europe.” But merely stating Indochina’s importance did not constitute a strategy for saving it. In late May a worried U.S. Embassy in Saigon reported to the State Department, “Despite continuing effort of seven years and material increase in Vietnam[ese] native armed forces, successful termination of war against Communist arms is still as far from sight as ever.”12
In the meantime public opinion in France was turning ever more sharply against the war, as the moderate center-left newspapers Le Monde and L’Express called for a negotiated settlement and withdrawal. The maverick politician Pierre Mendès-France, a brilliant lawyer who led the Radical Socialist faction in Parliament (a center-left party despite its name), openly championed an immediate negotiated end to the war; on May 29, 1953, he came within a whisker of winning enough votes in the National Assembly to form a government and take the reins of power. Clearly time was running out on the French war effort.13
It may seem paradoxical that at the very moment of his most successful foreign policy achievement—the July 1953 armistice in Korea—Eisenhower expanded America’s commitment to the French war in Indochina. Yet in fact these two lines of policy were closely linked. Though hailed by most of the American public, Eisenhower’s decision to accept an armistice in Korea prompted much gnashing of teeth among the hawkish, Asia First faction of the Republican Party. To them the deal to cease fighting in a divided Korea looked too much like Yalta, where FDR acquiesced in the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe. During the 1952 campaign the Republican right wing had been told by Foster Dulles that they could expect rollback and victory, not compromise and containment. Although they could hardly bay for more war after three years of bloody stalemate in Korea, the GOP hard-liners did not like Ike’s decision to stop the war short of victory. As the Los Angeles Times put it, “The Old Guard is miserable about what’s happened at Panmunjom,” where the Korean armistice was signed. In order to shore up his right flank, Ike would have to show firmness in his policies toward Indochina lest he ignite a full-scale rebellion in his party over his Asia policy.14
Having settled for stalemate in Korea, Eisenhower now looked to Indochina for an outright victory to balance the ledger. In return for more aid to France, America demanded battlefield results against the Viet Minh. To meet this pressure, the French leadership unveiled a new commander of the Indochina war effort in May 1953. Gen. Henri Navarre, a soldier with a distinguished battle record earned in both world wars in the Near East and North Africa, went to Vietnam determined to succeed where his predecessors had failed. He had never been to Indochina, but he believed he could turn the tide of war. Navarre proposed a more aggressive strategy: build up the Vietnamese Army, send more mobile groups of elite French troops into the North to do the heavy fighting, and secure more air- and sea-lift capacity from the United States. All this, Navarre claimed, would bring a kind of victory in two years. Navarre’s confidence and aplomb won the approval of the Americans, though his actual plan raised eyebrows among the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who remained skeptical about French fighting capabilities. Nonetheless Navarre’s plan was the only game in town, and the Americans embraced it.15
But there was a catch: it was going to cost more, much more. And America would have to pay. Congress approved a $400 million package of military aid in July 1953
, but this was not enough to meet the needs of the Navarre plan. At the end of July, Prime Minister Joseph Laniel secretly approached the American ambassador in Paris, Douglas Dillon, and made a brazen demand. The French needed another $400 million to fund the Navarre Plan. If Laniel did not get these extra funds, he could not commit to the more aggressive strategy, and his government would fall, thus leading the way to a peace-at-any-price government led by Mendès-France. “If funds are not available to carry on in Indochina,” Laniel told Dillon, “the only alternative is eventual withdrawal.”16
Some might call it blackmail, but it was simply a statement of the truth: France could keep the war going only if the United States picked up the tab. And the American leadership accepted the arrangement. In a hastily written report to the National Security Council, the director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, Robert Bowie, put the issue bluntly: the United States could “grasp a promising opportunity to further a satisfactory conclusion of the war in Indochina” by spending an additional $400 million, or it could “accept the loss of Indochina and possibly other areas of Southeast Asia.” Seen in those terms, the choice looked easy. On August 6 the NSC gave provisional approval for $385 million in increased aid. A few weeks later Eisenhower formally signed off on the additional funds.17
Foster Dulles seemed to think it was a good deal. He told his colleagues on the NSC that Laniel and Navarre together promised a “dynamic approach to the military problem in Indochina.” If these additional funds would help push France into action, Dulles said, it would be “the cheapest money we ever spent.” But the Eisenhower administration was then wrangling with a painful budget-cutting exercise, and Ike had especially targeted the Defense Department for trimming. By providing a total of $785 million to France’s war just in fiscal year 1954 alone (equivalent to $6.3 billion today), Ike made plain that the Indochina war stood at the very top of his list of national security priorities.18
The Age of Eisenhower Page 25