The Age of Eisenhower

by William I Hitchcock

  Eisenhower, it seems, viewed the “united action” concept not as an allied invasion force but as a symbolic assertion of common purpose by the Western and democratic nations to halt communist expansion. “United action” was a shield rather than a sword. Dulles’s speech aimed to make the Chinese think twice about extending their reach into Indochina and to show the French that the world would not abandon them in their hour of need. Though bellicose, the speech was in fact a mask of angry words crafted to hide Eisenhower’s deep reluctance to enter another Asian war.

  V

  Eisenhower, a lifelong student of strategy, knew that deterrence could succeed in keeping the peace only if it was backed by a willingness to use force. He wanted to keep America out of war, but perhaps the best way to do that was to prepare for it. That meant sounding out Congress. On April 1, 1954, shortly after a meeting of his National Security Council, Eisenhower tasked the secretary of state to consult congressional leaders: How much appetite did they have for conflict in Southeast Asia? Would they support the use of American forces there? If Ike could tell the world that Congress had approved a resolution giving him the authority to use air and naval power to help the French, China could only conclude that America was truly girding itself for confrontation.36

  Dulles drafted a congressional resolution and reviewed it with Eisenhower in a meeting on April 2, which Radford and Defense Secretary Charles Wilson also attended. The resolution asked Congress to give the president authority to employ naval and air power “to assist the forces which are resisting aggression in Southeast Asia.” Was this a request for a blank check to begin a war in Vietnam? That is not how Ike and Dulles saw it. Dulles expressly told Eisenhower that the resolution was “designed to be a deterrent” and to make the call for united action among the allies seem more credible. Backing Radford into a corner, Dulles insisted that he did not see the resolution as the preliminary step to a military “strike.” Wilson agreed and characterized the resolution as an effort “ ‘to fill our hand’ so that we would be in a stronger position to negotiate” with the states that would join the new Asian security group. The proposed resolution would give Eisenhower the appearance of a man preparing his nation for war precisely so he could more effectively avoid it.37

  On Saturday, April 3, at 9:30 a.m., Dulles and Radford held a meeting at the State Department with a number of congressional leaders from both parties. Senate Majority Leader William Knowland, Senator Eugene Millikin, and Speaker of the House Joseph Martin represented the Republicans. Democratic senators Lyndon Johnson (Minority Leader), Richard Russell, and Minority Whip Earle C. Clements were joined by Democratic representatives John McCormack, the minority whip, and J. Percy Priest, the chief deputy whip.

  Dulles did not present them with the text of the draft resolution he had given Eisenhower. Instead, according to the summary of the meeting Dulles wrote afterward, he and Radford summarized the administration’s well-known view that Indochina possessed extraordinary geopolitical significance and its loss to communism would threaten vital American interests in Southeast Asia. Dulles expressed his belief that in light of the high-stakes battle now being waged there, “the president should have Congressional backing so that he could use air and sea power in the area if he felt it necessary in the interest of national security.”

  It was a clumsy overture. The congressional leaders sniffed out Dulles’s encroachment on their constitutional prerogative to declare war. Other than Knowland, an eager Asia Firster, the legislators demurred. They worried that Eisenhower, if granted such powers, might take actions that could trigger war. “We want no more Koreas,” they said, and in this they surely spoke for the great majority of Americans. Dulles and Radford insisted that “the administration did not now contemplate the commitment of land forces,” but the distinction between land and air forces did not assuage congressional concerns. The congressmen made the argument that “once the flag was committed,” whether attached to a plane or a naval vessel, “the use of land forces would inevitably follow.”

  Yet for all their caution, the congressmen did not flatly reject Dulles’s request. Instead they asked for a demonstration that America’s allies, especially Britain, supported the concept of united action and were ready to help create a coalition of nations to come to the aid of French Indochina. If such a public statement of support from allies could be secured, then “a Congressional resolution could be passed.”38

  Later writers invested this meeting with enormous, and probably exaggerated, significance. It became immortalized as “the day we didn’t go to war” after one of the men present, Congressman McCormack, leaked the content of the discussion to Washington Post reporter Chalmers Roberts. In McCormack’s telling, Dulles’s request for a congressional resolution as part of a policy of deterrence was overshadowed by Radford’s hair-raising briefing in which he laid out a plan for immediate airstrikes on Dien Bien Phu by carrier-based jets in the South China Sea. McCormack turned the encounter into an epic standoff: Radford seemed bent on starting a war, and the Democrats in the room rose to quash the idea.39

  But Dulles did not think the congressmen had stymied the administration at all. Right after the meeting ended, Dulles called President Eisenhower, who was spending the weekend at Camp David. Dulles was ambiguous at first, saying the meeting went “pretty well—although it raised some serious problems.” He did not specify what those problems were. He told Ike that he thought “Congress would be quite prepared to go along on some vigorous action if we were not doing it alone.” Eisenhower thought such a position was reasonable; indeed his entire policy depended upon mobilizing allied nations to come to Indochina’s defense. That meant Eisenhower and Dulles needed Britain to sign on to united action, and fast.40

  VI

  To win the support of the British government, Eisenhower dipped into his deep reservoir of personal friendship with Winston Churchill. Just before midnight on April 4, 1954, the president sent a powerful, and quite unprecedented, telegram to his old comrade in arms. Drafted by Eisenhower, Dulles, and Counselor of the State Department Douglas MacArthur II, the message sought to appeal to the prime minister’s well-known romantic streak by depicting April 1954 as a moment of world-historical importance akin to the early days of the war against Hitler. France was faltering before the onslaught of Chinese-backed aggression. The fall of Indochina would have a “disastrous” effect on the “global strategic position” of the United States and Britain. How could such an outcome be avoided? Eisenhower proposed to Churchill the allied coalition concept that he and Dulles had discussed, namely:

  a new ad hoc grouping or coalition composed of nations which have a vital concern in the checking of Communist expansion in the area. . . . The important thing is that the coalition must be strong and it must be willing to join the fight if necessary. I do not envisage the need of any appreciable ground forces on your or our part. If the members of the alliance are sufficiently resolute it should be able to make clear to the Chinese Communists that the continuation of their material support to the Viet Minh will inevitably lead to the growing power of the forces arrayed against them.

  This was the crucial element of the concept: action now by the free powers would compel the Chinese to back off, withdraw their support for the Viet Minh, and cease their inexorable drive into Southeast Asia.

  Deterrence required credibility; that is what Ike wanted Churchill to give him. By creating a powerful coalition, Eisenhower asserted, “we will enormously increase our chances of bringing the Chinese to believe that their interests lie in the direction of a discreet disengagement.” Ike’s bid for Churchill’s support was no battle cry; on the contrary, it was a means to deter the Chinese, buck up the French, and keep the dogs of war on a tight leash.

  Eisenhower’s telegram ended with an egregious and somewhat embarrassing invocation of the dark days of 1938–39, when Britain, against Churchill’s advice, preferred to appease rather than confront Hitler: “We failed to stop Hirohito, Mussolini, and Hit
ler by not acting in unity and in time. May it not be thought that our nations have learned something from that lesson?” To lecture Churchill, whose country fought Hitler for two years before the United States entered war, on the appropriate lessons of history was a shocking act of bad taste. But this reference to appeasement reinforced the basic logic of Eisenhower’s policy: in 1938, at Munich, the allies appeased Hitler and war followed; now, in 1954, the allies must stand together and act firmly in the face of aggression so that war could be avoided.41

  Eisenhower’s strategy of deterrence encountered some unexpected trouble late in the evening of April 4. At about 9:45 p.m. the State Department received a cable from Ambassador Douglas Dillon in Paris, reporting that he had been summoned by Prime Minister Laniel and Foreign Minister Bidault. “They said,” Dillon wrote, “that immediate armed intervention of U.S. carrier aircraft at Dien Bien Phu is now necessary to save the situation.” The Viet Minh were bringing in massive reinforcements and the garrison was in grave jeopardy. The French government was seeking to cash in the chip that Radford had slipped into General Ély’s pocket on March 26: a promise to bring American aircraft into battle should France request such aid. Bidault told Dillon that “for good or evil the fate of Southeast Asia now rested on Dien Bien Phu.”42

  Early on April 5 Secretary Dulles called the president and told him about Dillon’s cable. Ike was furious. Radford “should never have told a foreign country he would do his best [to get the president’s approval for intervention] because they then start putting pressure on us.” Dulles tried to protect Radford from Ike’s wrath, blaming Ély for the misunderstanding. “Radford did not give any committal talk,” Dulles said, untruthfully. Eisenhower rejected the idea of intervention out of hand. It would be “completely unconstitutional and indefensible. . . . We cannot engage in active war.” Any military act required congressional approval, the support of allies, and much greater preparation so it could be part of an overall strategy. Piecemeal airstrikes would jeopardize American prestige, anger Congress, and quite possibly draw a Chinese military intervention in response. In short, bombing Dien Bien Phu was about the worst thing Ike could imagine. Within the hour Dulles cabled a reply to Ambassador Dillon, rejecting the French request.43

  With all these elements of a complex story swirling around—Dulles’s united action speech on March 29, the meeting with congressional leaders on April 3, the Churchill telegram and the appeal from the French on April 4—Ike moved up the usual weekly meeting of the National Security Council from Thursday to Tuesday, April 6. The discussion again took up the question of military intervention by U.S. and allied forces in Indochina. Allen Dulles weighed in, noting that if the United States were to intervene strongly enough to bring about the defeat of the Viet Minh, there was a “very great danger” of the Chinese pouring across the border into Indochina, just as they had done in Korea in November 1950. CIA intelligence counted five divisions of Chinese soldiers 200 miles from Dien Bien Phu, just across the Vietnamese border, and an additional 200,000 men within 300 miles of the border. An American intervention would provide justification for these troops to sweep down into Vietnam.

  These chilling facts may explain the lack of enthusiasm at the April 6 meeting for military intervention. Eisenhower set the tone: speaking with “great emphasis,” according to the note-taker, he said “there was no possibility whatever of U.S. unilateral intervention in Indochina, and we had best face that fact.” Following Eisenhower’s lead, Foster Dulles now asserted that the NSC did not need to consider a military option at the present time, however desperate the situation at Dien Bien Phu. Instead America must concentrate on “an effort to build up strength in the Southeast Asia area to such a point that military intervention might prove unnecessary.” If he could win the support of other allied nations to form a united bloc, “the Communists might well give up their intent to seize the area.”

  Over the course of a long discussion, Radford, Nixon, and even Foster Dulles tried to keep open the option of using military force as a last resort if united action failed, but Ike seemed to have made up his mind against it. He instead “expressed warm approval for the idea of a political organization which would have for its purpose the defense of Southeast Asia even if Indochina should be lost. In any case, the creation of such a political organization for defense would be better than emergency military action.” Eisenhower would not go to war to save French Indochina, but he would gladly lead a collective security organization in Asia that would bolster the “free” nations, draw a line in the sand, and dare the Chinese to cross it.44

  VII

  The president had made his decision: he would not send Americans to fight in Vietnam. He told his advisers confidentially that he rejected the simplistic idea that “because we might lose Indochina we would necessarily have to lose all the rest of Southeast Asia.” Privately he argued that the domino theory should not force America’s hand. It was possible, he believed, to create a strong Western position in Asia even without Indochina.45

  But in public Eisenhower delivered a very different message. Just a day after telling the NSC that “there was no possibility whatever of U.S. unilateral intervention in Indochina,” he strode into the Indian Treaty Room in the Old Executive Office Building for his usual weekly press conference. When journalist Robert Richards of the Copley Press asked the president to comment on the strategic importance of Indochina, Eisenhower became expansive, and in some of his most famous words, asserted the viability of the domino theory. “First of all, you have the specific value of a locality in its production of materials that the world needs,” he began. “Then you have the possibility that many human beings pass under a dictatorship that is inimical to the free world. Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the ‘falling domino’ principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.” He went on to prophesy a total disaster in Asia if Indochina fell. “The possible consequences of the loss are just incalculable to the free world,” he concluded darkly.46

  No wonder his contemporaries were baffled by Eisenhower’s strategy toward Asia: while pursuing a policy of restraint and diplomacy, he publicly warned against the catastrophic consequences of communist success and hinted at the most severe American response to any direct challenge.

  The consequences of such double-talk were serious. When Foster Dulles arrived in London on April 11 to confer with his British counterparts to try to win their support for the allied coalition to support the French, he found the British both dubious about American objectives and deeply anxious about Eisenhower’s warlike words. Churchill and Foreign Minister Eden, longtime friends and partners of the Eisenhower team, fretted about Eisenhower’s nuclear saber-rattling. Just a month earlier the United States had tested the world’s largest explosive device, a 15-megaton H-Bomb, on a remote South Pacific island. The radioactive fallout reached Japan and Australia and also fell on a boat of Japanese fishermen, killing one and rendering the others gravely ill. The blast set off serious criticism of U.S. policy around the world and in the House of Commons.

  The British leaders also vividly recalled Eisenhower’s offhand remark in Bermuda the previous December, that “atomic weapons were now coming to be regarded as a proper part of conventional armament.” They had heard Foster Dulles on March 29 indict Chinese actions like a prosecutor in a courtroom. They noted Ike’s domino principle and his doom-filled prophecy should Indochina fall. They knew of Radford’s planning for air strikes against Viet Minh targets. Putting this evidence together, they had come to see American policy as reckless, driven by an obsessive anticommunism that might soon plunge the world into atomic war.47

  Dulles therefore received a cool reception upon his arrival in London. On the evening of April 11, after dinner at the American Embassy, he made his pitch to his British colleagues. He proposed the creation of a temporary coalition of 10 nations,
led by the United States and Britain, that would guarantee Indochinese security, deter further Chinese aggression in Asia, and create a united block at the upcoming Geneva conference so there would be no precipitous French withdrawal even if Dien Bien Phu should fall. Dulles wanted to demonstrate the resolve of free nations to halt the expansion of communism in Asia. The coalition would possess implied military power, but Eisenhower and Dulles hoped the forming of the coalition by itself would be a sufficient deterrent against future Chinese adventures.48

  Eden smiled politely and said he would think about it. In fact he had already decided to reject Dulles’s proposal. Eden thought the scheme was provocative and dangerous. He preferred what he considered the “least damaging solution—the partition of Vietnam into a communist North and a free South, an idea that was wholly poisonous to the Americas. Such a deal, Eden calculated, could be achieved at Geneva provided it was not undone by any “injudicious military decisions” imposed by the Americans. Threats and nuclear brinkmanship toward China were counterproductive; they could not be “sufficiently potent to make China swallow so humiliating a rebuff as the abandonment of the Vietminh without any face-saving concession in return.” And if threats failed, then what? Nuclear war? Eden would have no truck with that. So, to Dulles’s immense frustration, Eden rejected the “united action” plan for fear that it would lead to war, not avert it.49

  Dulles and Eden met again just two weeks later, this time in Paris during a NATO conference. On the evening of April 23, as they gathered for an official dinner in the ornate and gilded splendor of the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay, Dulles learned that the French government had just received another anguished appeal from General Navarre asking for American air intervention against the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu. Failing that, the surrounded French position could not last more than three days. Dulles and Radford, admitting that it was now too late to save those embattled French soldiers, nonetheless beseeched Eden to set aside his doubts and announce his support for the creation of a united Western coalition that would defend the rest of Indochina from Chinese aggression after Dien Bien Phu fell.50