Eisenhower publicly justified this largesse by invoking the specter of communist victory across Asia. In a speech on August 4 to the 45th annual Governors’ Conference in Seattle, he told his audience why he was so concerned with Indochina. “If Indochina goes, several things happen right away,” he claimed. India would be “outflanked” and “Burma would be in no position for defense.” “How would the free world hold the rich empire of Indonesia? . . . So you see, somewhere along the line, this must be blocked and it must be blocked now, and that’s what we are trying to do. So when the United States votes $400 million to help that war, we are not voting a giveaway program. We are voting for the cheapest way we can prevent the occurrence of something that would be of a most terrible significance to the United States of America.” Like Dulles, Eisenhower argued that money spent on the French war was money well spent.19
In addition to increasing aid to the French, Eisenhower and Dulles decided to put the Chinese on notice that America’s determination to hold the line in Asia was undiminished. Dulles took to the airwaves on September 2 to deliver a threat (carefully vetted by Ike) that if China took advantage of the Korean armistice to shift soldiers and resources to the war in Vietnam, the United States would immediately intensify its own military commitments there. If America was drawn into war in Indochina through Chinese provocation, Dulles asserted, the resulting conflict “might not be confined to Indochina.” Hinting at a possible nuclear war against China had become the signature Dulles style, no less hair-raising for all its familiarity.20
The weak link in all this was of course France, for if the French should falter in their commitment to the war, then America might well have to send in its own troops to rescue Southeast Asia—a prospect Eisenhower strongly opposed. So Eisenhower placed his bets, and his nation’s prestige, on the outcome of a war fought in tropical jungles by a beleaguered French colonial expeditionary force against a well-armed and ideologically motivated national liberation army. It was a colossal gamble. And for once Eisenhower’s usual luck at games of chance failed him.
III
In late November 1953, as part of General Navarre’s new aggressive strategy, the French sent an airborne force to seize a small outpost in Tonkin on the Laotian border, a hitherto insignificant crossroads called Dien Bien Phu. Navarre planned to build a powerful base from which to defend Laos and also stage offensive strikes against the Viet Minh. American analysts were unimpressed by this strategy, seeing it as too passive. In truth, the CIA believed the French were not trying to win the war in Indochina at all; they simply wanted to “improve their position sufficiently to negotiate a settlement which would eliminate the drain of the Indochina war on France.”21
Nixon, freshly returned from his extensive Asia journey, confirmed this gloomy picture in a detailed report to the president and the National Security Council on the day before Christmas 1953. His diagnosis confirmed what observers in Indochina had been saying for years: France had not given the Vietnamese people anything to fight for. The French had failed to build a serious Vietnamese army to share the burden of fighting and refused to offer Vietnam full independence. As a result nationalist leaders declined to work with French authorities. Bao Dai was widely seen as a puppet who lacked legitimacy. Vietnam had no powerful figure, like Korea’s Syngman Rhee, who could rally the nation to fight the communist foe. Even Nixon, who always tried to align himself with what Eisenhower wanted to hear, could not pretty up the picture. “The Communists have a sense of history,” he said, “and time is on their side.”22
At the start of 1954 Eisenhower held a number of crucial high-level meetings with his advisers to determine how the United States would react if France should suddenly lose its will to sustain the fight in Indochina. Should America fight for Indochina if France would not? The question could no longer be ignored. In the National Security Council meeting of January 8, when his advisers discussed the possible need for the United States to intervene in order to prop up the French war effort, Eisenhower spoke decisively. The minutes record his adamant opposition to sending American soldiers to Indochina: “He simply could not imagine the United States putting ground forces anywhere in Southeast Asia. . . . There was just no sense in even talking about United States forces replacing the French in Indochina. If we did so, the Vietnamese could be expected to transfer their hatred of the French to us. I cannot tell you, said the President with vehemence, how bitterly opposed I am to such a course of action. This war in Indochina would absorb our troops by divisions!” Indeed the U.S. Army had already run the numbers and concluded it would take seven army divisions and one marine division to defeat the Viet Minh. Along with support and logistics personnel, that meant sending 275,000 men to Indochina. Just months after halting a most unpopular war in Korea, Eisenhower clearly had no appetite for such a dramatic move.23
Having taken direct combat intervention off the table, however, Ike still had a number of measures open to him. When Admiral Radford suggested that American planes be used to help break the alarmingly large Viet Minh buildup around Dien Bien Phu, Eisenhower warmed to the idea and mused that non-American pilots might be allowed to fly “U.S. planes without insignia.” This action “could be done without involving us directly in the war, which he admitted would be a very dangerous thing.” Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, who loudly opposed such a step-by-step increase of direct military help, put the issue bluntly to Ike: “Suppose the French were to give up and turn the whole country over to the Communists, would the United States then interfere?” Eisenhower confirmed his position, saying, “No, we would not intervene.” Offering aircraft and pilots to the French, however, was like sticking your finger in a leaky dike. “And with leaky dikes, it’s sometimes better to put a finger in than to let the whole structure be washed away.”
The NSC therefore ordered that 40 B-26 bombers and 200 U.S. technicians be dispatched to Indochina. Just this small gesture—sending Americans into a combat zone—proved controversial, but Eisenhower told congressional leaders that this “small project” of a few hundred technical personnel would achieve “a very large purpose—that is, to prevent all of Southeast Asia from falling to the Communists.” In his public press conference on February 10 he stressed that he wanted to keep France in the war so Americans could stay out. “No one could be more bitterly opposed to ever getting the U.S. involved in a hot war in that region than I am,” Eisenhower declared in front of a room full of reporters. “Every move I authorize is calculated . . . to make certain that that does not happen.” This became the leitmotif of Ike’s Asian diplomacy: to maneuver in such a way that the war could be sustained without direct U.S. involvement. For emphasis he insisted, “I cannot conceive of a greater tragedy for America than to get heavily involved now in an all-out war in any part of those regions.”24
With public statements about the “tragedy” of war in Indochina clattering across the wire services, the French could be excused for trying to bring their part in the conflict to a close. In February the French government, desperate to appease a restive and war-weary public, successfully managed to secure the agreement of the Great Powers to include discussion of the Indochina war at a summit in Geneva in late April. The purpose of the meeting, initially proposed by the Soviets, was to discuss an easing of tensions in Korea, where the armistice remained fragile and unsteady. But Foreign Minister Georges Bidault, under express orders from Paris, asked the five powers—the USSR, the United States, Britain, France, and communist China—to take up the possibility of a compromise settlement in Indochina. U.S. policy had opposed any such talks for months, especially in the presence of the communist Chinese, whom the U.S. government did not recognize as legitimate representatives of the Chinese people. (The United States recognized Nationalist China, or Taiwan, as the only legitimate Chinese government.) Yet Bidault insisted that if the issue was not placed on the Geneva agenda, the Laniel government would be voted out of office and an antiwar government would be installed. The United States had
to accept placing Indochina on the agenda at Geneva as the price of keeping the war going.25
By circling a date on the calendar for a Great Power summit to discuss the future of Indochina, France motivated the Viet Minh to improve their bargaining position by winning a big battle in the weeks before the conference. And a large target had conveniently presented itself: the heavily fortified and now surrounded French garrison at Dien Bien Phu. By February, Navarre had transferred 15,000 elite French soldiers there. Engineers refitted and expanded a small airfield to allow DC-3 aircraft to bring in light tanks, howitzers, and plenty of ammunition. Navarre’s initial purpose was to use this strongpoint as a base and to sally forth from this heavy redoubt to block Viet Minh forays into Laos. The French military leadership expressed confidence in its ability to fend off the Viet Minh attacks. Indeed they seemed almost to welcome a showdown as an opportunity to draw Viet Minh forces into a large engagement in which heavy French firepower would take a murderous toll on the enemy.26
Welcome or not, the attack came. On March 13, 1954, thousands of Viet Minh soldiers threw themselves at the heavily defended outpost under cover of a ferocious artillery barrage. The battle of Dien Bien Phu had begun.27
IV
The next eight weeks marked an anxious, stress-filled period for Eisenhower, among the most complicated and controversial days of his presidency. France teetered on the brink of collapse in Indochina, and Eisenhower had to decide: Would the United States, which had fought to save South Korea from communism, now bail out the French in Vietnam?
As the first news reports about Dien Bien Phu reached Washington, American officials did not panic. To be sure, the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, Donald Heath, reported that the opening phase of the battle “gives cause for some concern. Viet Minh artillery is zeroed in on French positions. . . . Both airstrips in consequence are unusable.” Right from the start of the battle, the French had to rely on airdrops for their daily supplies of food and ammunition. Even so, CIA director Allen Dulles reported to the NSC on March 18 that the chances for a French victory stood at “50–50”—not great odds, but not desperate either. Viet Minh forces were taking huge casualties. Eisenhower took some comfort from the fact that the French were “fighting from prepared and heavily fortified positions.” Allen Dulles even went so far as to suggest that the French in Saigon might be playing up the gravity of the crisis so as to “exaggerate the extent of their final victory.” And Navarre confided to Ambassador Heath that even if the Viet Minh should take the besieged garrison, “his capacity to remain in the Indochina war would not be greatly impaired.”28
Another French emissary delivered the same message of sangfroid. On March 20 Gen. Paul Ély, chief of staff of the French armed forces, arrived in Washington for a week of discussions with the Eisenhower administration. Ély had served as French representative to the NATO Council and knew his American counterparts well. Radford welcomed him and took him to dine with leading members of the government, including Nixon, Allen Dulles, and the army’s chief of staff Gen. Matthew Ridgway. Ély, a tall, wiry veteran of both world wars, lauded the stalwart determination of the Laniel government to carry on the war in Indochina and stated that “newspaper reports,” especially the left-wing French press, “exaggerate in some degree the defeatist sentiment” in France. He acknowledged the enormous political significance of Dien Bien Phu; a communist victory there would amplify calls in France for a negotiated end to the fighting. But he felt reasonably confident that France could hang on, provided that the United States would send more combat aircraft for use in the battle. Ély did not sound especially worried.29
Indeed Ély’s demeanor struck Radford as far too calm. In Radford’s view, the situation at Dien Bien Phu and in Indochina generally looked catastrophic, and Radford clearly wanted Ély to make bigger demands on Washington while offering to share direction of the war effort. Radford believed that American airpower could save Dien Bien Phu and perhaps crush the Viet Minh altogether. On March 26, in a remarkable act that approached the boundaries of insubordination, Radford tried to get the French general to make a direct appeal to Eisenhower for American military intervention at Dien Bien Phu. Ély was wary, but Radford egged him on, telling him privately that if France would only ask for it, the United States would deliver massive air support to the embattled French outpost. Surprised, Ély reported Radford’s zeal to Paris, where this remarkable offer was duly noted and filed away for future use.30
While Radford was proffering airstrikes to the French, however, Eisenhower on March 24 repeated his opposition to a wider U.S. role. “We should not get involved in fighting in Indochina unless there were the political preconditions necessary for a successful outcome,” he told Foster Dulles. Those preconditions, such as immediate independence for the Indochinese states, full international approval for any military action, and a Vietnamese request for American intervention, were highly unlikely to be in place soon, as Ike knew. Dulles noted for the record that Eisenhower “did not wholly exclude the possibility of a single strike [against the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu], if it were almost certain this would produce decisive results.” But Eisenhower knew better than anyone that a single airstrike would not dislodge three full divisions of Viet Minh soldiers from their positions around Dien Bien Phu, and in fact the French were already bombing the Viet Minh positions with napalm and 1,000-pound bombs. Ike knew there was no easy way to break the Viet Minh troops, and he did not want Americans tangled up in a jungle war they could not win.31
On March 25, when the president met with his National Security Council, Allen Dulles reported that Dien Bien Phu was “relatively quiet” and that the French position had “improved somewhat.” The French seemed to be holding their own. Foster Dulles asked the group to take up the question of just how far the United States was willing to go to help the French in the event of their withdrawal from Indochina. Eisenhower asserted that any U.S. role would require the approval of the United Nations as well as an invitation from the government of Vietnam itself. It would also require the approval of Congress. “It was simply academic to imagine otherwise,” he said. Since the likelihood of securing UN, Vietnamese, and congressional approval for American military action in Indochina was nil, Eisenhower was indirectly vetoing intervention.32
Instead he began to outline what he considered a more constructive path: the creation of a group “of governments and nations who might be approached to assist” in securing Indochina—nations such as Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Britain, France, and other “free” Southeast Asian countries. Might there be a place for some kind of Asian collective security organization that could backstop the French in Indochina? As the former commander of NATO, Eisenhower could easily see that model applied in Asia.
In fact Eisenhower had been thinking about this idea for some time. In mid-January 1954 he had tasked a small group of his most trusted advisers, chaired by Undersecretary of State Bedell Smith, to think broadly about a Southeast Asia “area plan,” as he called it, “including the possible alternative lines of action to be taken in case of a reverse in Indochina.” In mid-February, while testifying to a closed executive session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Smith revealed that planning along those lines had moved ahead. Rejecting the domino theory, Smith said, “Even at the worst, part of Indochina might be lost without losing the rest of Southeast Asia. . . . One can think of the possibility of an area defense pact which might include Thailand as the bastion, Burma and possibly Cambodia and part of Indochina—and maybe some part of it could be lost without disastrous effect.” A man as savvy as Smith, Ike’s intimate confidante, would never have said such things unless they squared with the president’s thinking. When Senator William Langer asked Smith whether the United States would “go ahead alone . . . if France quits on us,” Smith replied curtly, “I do not think so, sir. No.”33
No unilateral U.S. intervention, then. But a regional confederation of allied states, operating perhaps with the blessing of the
United Nations and in concert with free governments to halt communist aggression—this tantalizing vision took hold in the Eisenhower administration. On March 29 Foster Dulles gave a speech at the Overseas Press Club in New York that explained this new policy. The speech had been, as usual, carefully edited by Eisenhower. It called for “united action” against the military interference of China in the affairs of the Vietnamese people and against the ideological imperialism directed from Beijing and Moscow. Dulles spelled out an indictment of the Chinese for aiding the Viet Minh insurrection and declared that communist China had placed all of Southeast Asia in jeopardy. Indochina was in the crosshairs now, but if it fell, the rest of Southeast Asia would soon be targeted. China’s subversive tactics constituted “a grave threat to the whole free community” and had to be stopped.34
Though full of ominous hints and hawkish bluster, Dulles did not specify what he meant by “united action,” and historians to this day disagree on how to interpret his speech. Perhaps his obfuscation was deliberate, designed to keep the Chinese guessing. Or perhaps his policy remained in flux, and his speech aimed to hide the confusion inside the administration. In his weekly news conference two days later, Eisenhower distanced himself somewhat from Dulles’s bellicose remarks. Asked by Martin Agronsky of ABC if he was considering direct military intervention, Ike hedged: “I can conceive of no greater disadvantage to America than to be employing its own ground forces, and any other kind of forces, in great numbers around the world, meeting each little situation as it arises.” That statement did not rule out the use of force, but it sounded less hawkish than Dulles’s remarks. “What we are trying to do,” the president went on, “is to make our friends strong enough to take care of local situations by themselves, with the financial, the moral, the political and, certainly, only where our own vital interests demanded any military help.”35
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