Eden immediately flew back to England and went to see the prime minister at his weekend retreat, Chequers, where he and Churchill discussed and again rejected the American proposal. Churchill hit the nail on the head: a small-scale military intervention would be both ineffective and likely to trigger a wider war with China and the USSR—in short, the worst possible outcome. The partition of Vietnam now appeared a safer and more plausible solution. That could be done at Geneva without paying the heavy price of war. Once again the British stymied Dulles’s plans.51
These developments left Eisenhower deeply unhappy. He fumed about the foolishness of the French, who kept asking for U.S. military intervention but refused to respond to repeated requests to grant immediate independence to the Indochinese states. He thought the decline of France as a serious power was tragic and that the French government had virtually “abdicated.” And he seethed about the cautious British and their “morbid obsession that any positive move on the part of the free world may bring upon us World War III,” as he put it to Swede Hazlett. But he did not waver from his basic policy: unilateral intervention by the United States was out of the question. If the coalition idea did not inspire the allies, the United States would not act alone.52
On that point Eisenhower was unbending, as he made clear on April 29, when the NSC met again to review the situation. The team heard a depressing report from Radford, who carefully spelled out the dismal predicament of the besieged French soldiers at Dien Bien Phu. When Radford had finished, Harold Stassen, the director of the foreign aid program, spoke up. Stassen had a reputation as a politically ambitious maverick; it must have been embarrassing to all in the room when he burst out with an impassioned plea that the United States intervene unilaterally to save Vietnam from collapse. French and British weakness should not “render the United States inactive and impotent,” he declared.
This was a slap in Eisenhower’s face, drawing him into a pointed colloquy with Stassen. If the United States moved in to rescue the French, Ike stated, “we would in the eyes of many Asiatic peoples merely replace French colonialism with American colonialism.” Furthermore unilateral American intervention “would mean a general war with China and perhaps with the USSR.” The only way to sustain America’s moral position in the world was through collective action in the name of freedom. To intervene alone in Indochina “amounted to an attempt to police the entire world.” Showing his sensitivity to the politics of the matter, he asserted, “We would soon lose all our significant support in the free world. We should be everywhere accused of imperialistic ambitions.” Stassen, who obviously did not know when to quit, kept pleading. “To do no more than we have done,” he cried, “would be tantamount to giving Britain a veto on U.S. action in Southeast Asia.” Eisenhower was unmoved.53
Such criticisms of Eisenhower’s actions—or inactions—were not confined to the cabinet. Hawks in the press, none more voluble than Joseph and Stewart Alsop, wondered why the Eisenhower team, once so bold in its anticommunism, had lost its nerve. Dien Bien Phu, they suggested, was like Yorktown: its loss will surely be such a “psychological blow” that “Indochina must eventually fall into Communist hands.” The normally friendly editorial page of the Washington Post questioned why France had been abandoned and why Eisenhower had allowed the “erosion of our vital interests in Asia.” Calls for action rang out on the Senate floor, where on May 4 Republican Majority Leader Knowland urged Eisenhower to act. Knowland proposed American military intervention to save Indochina even if the British refused to join the effort. There should be no British veto of American policy, he argued, nor could he tolerate what he labeled an “Asian Munich,” a sellout of pro-Western nations in Asia in exchange for a fragile and short-term peace.54
And these comments came from friends of the administration! When the Democratic Party held its annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel on May 6, party leaders took off the gloves and hit Eisenhower mercilessly. President Truman lambasted Ike for “insulting” America’s allies, and Lyndon Johnson, who until that moment had never publicly criticized the president’s foreign policy, launched into a bitter attack. Having alienated both Britain and France, he said, America stood “naked and alone in a hostile world.” The failure of Dulles to close the deal on his united action program marked “a stunning reversal” of policy. “What is American policy on Indochina?” Johnson asked the assembled Democrats as they dined on roasted capon in the cavernous ballroom. It was nothing more than “a dismal series of reversals and confusions.” Worse, “we have been caught bluffing by our enemies.” Johnson’s attack, which kicked off the 1954 congressional midterm campaign, ended with a cruel barb: “This picture of our country needlessly weakened in the world today is so painful that we should turn our eyes from abroad and look homeward.”55
The next day, as if on cue, the terrible news arrived: Dien Bien Phu had fallen. Having suffered over 3,500 killed, the French garrison was reduced to about 9,000 wounded, emaciated, and ill Frenchmen who now entered captivity. Many of them would die there. The French Empire in Asia faced total collapse. The dreaded Indochinese domino that Ike had prophesied looked ready to fall. Yet the president had refused to act.
VIII
Although Eisenhower would eventually win the praise of posterity for staying out of the Indochinese war in 1954, at the time most observers believed that he and the United States had suffered a terrible defeat. Critics said that Eisenhower had abandoned France, an old ally, as it was engaged in a death struggle with communist insurgents. The president looked on as Dien Bien Phu and northern Vietnam fell to communist battalions. After much bluster about the domino theory, Eisenhower was compelled to reveal that he did not believe all of Indochina was worth fighting for. Most embarrassing, Ike and Foster Dulles could not even persuade Britain, the most stalwart of friends, to join a coalition to help defend Asia from communism. The Washington Post called America’s failure on united action “one of the most humiliating diplomatic defeats in its history.”56
Secretary Dulles wearily rebutted the charges of failure. In a nationally televised address on May 7 he explained that the president had resisted military intervention because the United States did not wish to be seen as propping up colonialism in Asia and did not want to act without allied support. Yet he went on, curiously, to reemphasize the domino principle: if Indochina fell to the communists, the rest of Asia would rapidly follow. The tensions in the policy were obvious: the sky was falling, Dulles said, but America would not act to hold it in place.57
Dulles publicly tried to rationalize his administration’s policy, but on May 12, while testifying in executive session before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he seemed genuinely flummoxed and unsure of himself. America had done everything it could short of war. It tried to press the French to decolonize more rapidly, helped train Vietnamese troops, gave France huge sums of money and military hardware, and sought to build an Asian NATO to rally morale. None of it had worked. His plan for united action was now “in the doldrums,” he confessed. American policy “has at the present moment fallen into a state which I would not like to call exactly collapse but a state of suspended animation.”
Asked to explain why the French had been so badly beaten at Dien Bien Phu despite having chosen that ground to defend, Dulles blamed poor French intelligence, a greater quantity of Chinese military materiel than was expected, and—inevitably—the “devious” behavior of the Oriental. “Almost always it seems our Western people underestimate the capacity of the Asian troops to move surreptitiously through the jungles at night, through trails that are impassable to white people.” The senators nodded in assent.58
The Eisenhower administration had no plan for what to do next. The world’s attention turned to Geneva, where delegations from the Great Powers had been meeting to discuss Korea and, after May 8, Indochina. (The United States, not a combatant in Indochina, did not officially participate in those discussions.) French foreign minister Bidault, in obvious
anguish, was compelled to call for a cease-fire following the fall of Dien Bien Phu. The Viet Minh representatives, working under the close supervision of the Chinese, might well have scoffed at such a proposal: they were winning the war, after all. But unbeknownst to the Western powers, China and, behind the scenes, the USSR, wanted the Indochina conflict to come to an end—perhaps a temporary end, but an end nonetheless. They saw how much the Viet Minh had gained and wanted to forestall an American military intervention. Widening the war, seizing the rest of Vietnam, and planting the red flag across all of Indochina—that would surely tip American opinion toward war. So the communist side floated the idea of a temporary partition of Vietnam in order to separate the warring parties and implement a political process for a postcolonial Vietnam.59
The French hesitated: Bidault, an archimperialist who hated to give up Indochina, tried to quash talk of partition. He even engaged in secret and fruitless talks with the Americans about some kind of military operation in southern Vietnam that would resurrect the defunct “united action” scheme. Dulles was sympathetic, for he too opposed partition: it would look precisely like the “Asian Munich” that the GOP had decried. But the military option had been foreclosed by France’s collapse in the North, and in any case Eisenhower would not budge from the principle that any intervention had to be coordinated with America’s allies.
The Americans instead fell back on the barren idea of launching an all-out nuclear war on China if the Chinese now “overtly” intervened in Vietnam as the French were pulling out. In discussing this position with his senior advisers, Eisenhower revealed that his patience was running out. If the communists tried to snatch all of Indochina now, he said, the U.S. response would be massive: “There should be no half-way measures or frittering around. The Navy and the Air Force should go in with full power, using new weapons, and strike at air bases and ports in mainland China.” As Dulles put it to Smith, war with China, “waged primarily with sea and air power and modern weapons”—by which he meant nuclear weapons—was “infinitely to be preferred to the task of intervention in Indochina.” Rather than wage an unending jungle conflict, the United States could simply launch a nuclear strike on China.60
This war talk illustrated the administration’s frustration rather than a plausible policy. In any case, events on the ground in Vietnam made Chinese intervention quite unnecessary. After Dien Bien Phu, soldiers in the French-backed Vietnamese Army deserted at an alarming rate. The confident and powerful Viet Minh redeployed its forces to threaten Hanoi and could if it chose snap up the rest of northern Vietnam without much trouble. Whether at the point of a gun or at the peace table, the Viet Minh was going to take northern Vietnam.
Events in Paris too drove the action. On June 18 the French National Assembly voted Pierre Mendès-France into office as prime minister. Publicly committed to ending the war and signing a peace agreement within one month, Mendès-France dismissed Bidault and set about making a deal that would temporarily cut Vietnam in half, impose a cease-fire, secure some Western influence in the southern portion of the country, and allow for nationwide elections in 1956. Once he had settled a crucial sticking point—the neutralization of Cambodia and Laos and the removal of all Viet Minh troops from those two states—Mendès-France moved rapidly to accept the partition of Vietnam.
The Eisenhower administration, its policy in tatters, had little choice but to make the best of these distressing events. On June 23 Eisenhower and Foster Dulles met with congressional leaders in a private conference. Senator Knowland inevitably frothed that the French were going to agree to a “Far Eastern Munich” and accused the administration of appeasement. Dulles had anticipated this and met Knowland with a coolly reasoned and optimistic reply. The shift in the French position toward partition was “not as black as it might appear on the surface,” he said. If the French left Indochina altogether, a South Vietnam could emerge under U.S. tutelage: “There is today the possibility of salvaging something free of the taint of French colonialism.” With the French out of the way, the United States could “establish a military line, and we must hold that line.” It would cost much more money, perhaps $800 million a year, and commit the United States to defend the free states of Southeast Asia, but this was the path forward. “We must hold the western side of the Pacific or it will become a Communist lake,” he concluded. Eisenhower agreed and summed up the new American position: “In simple terms, we are establishing international outposts where people can develop their strengths to defend themselves. We cannot publicly call our allies outposts, but we are trying to get that result.” The American era in South Vietnam had begun.61
Ike and Dulles had realized that the peace deal in Geneva rescued a confused and contradictory American policy in the region. Rather than working alongside a rotten French colonial administration to suppress a powerful communist-nationalist insurgency in the North, the Eisenhower administration could write off the French experience as a terrible failure. In its place the Americans would use their know-how to construct a new South Vietnam on the ashes of the French Empire. In this emerging state, America could showcase its way of life and its democratic ideals and declare its unalterable opposition to further communist encroachment.
Although the United States was not a signatory to the Geneva Accords of July 21, 1954, which ended the war and divided Vietnam, the Eisenhower administration embraced them nonetheless. Secretary Dulles released a statement on July 23, saying that while the Geneva agreement contained “many features which we do not like,” the important thing was “not to mourn the past but to seize the future.” With France and its heavy colonial baggage gone, America could begin its own kind of nation-building in South Vietnam. One day this fledgling protectorate might come to look like West Germany or South Korea—other divided nations in which Western resolve had stabilized a dangerous frontier. South Vietnam would become a new test of America’s purpose in the cold war.62
In August 1954 Eisenhower signed off on a new statement of American policy in Asia. NSC 5429 asserted that, in order to compensate for the loss of prestige the West had suffered due to the communist victory in northern Vietnam, the United States would rededicate itself to shoring up military and economic ties to Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines, as well as Australia and New Zealand. Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam too would come under the American umbrella. A new regional security treaty, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, would pull Asian states into a military alliance backed by American power. Rather than being an outdated colonial structure designed to prop up European influence, SEATO would serve as a joint enterprise of Asian states that desired American partnership to keep communism at bay. In discussing this new, muscular policy in the NSC on August 12, Dulles relished its simplicity: “In the Southeast Asia treaty it was proposed to draw the line to include Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam on our side. The theory of the treaty was that if the Communists breached the line we would attack Communist China.”
Eisenhower agreed. America had suffered a black eye in northern Vietnam, even if the defeat had been France’s. Ike welcomed the opportunity to clarify American policy. From now on, with the colonial question out of the way, things would be different. The president wrapped up the NSC meeting with the simplest of statements: “Sometime we must face up to it: We can’t go on losing areas of the free world forever.”63
IX
Within weeks he would have his first chance to demonstrate America’s newfound resolve, not in Vietnam but in Taiwan (then called Formosa). Taiwan was the island redoubt of Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese Nationalist leader. Following his defeat by the communists in 1949, Chiang and his Nationalist Army had fled to Taiwan, where he became one of America’s most important allies, much admired by hawks in Washington for his stout anticommunism, his Methodism, and his Wellesley-educated wife, Soong Mei-ling. To communist China, however, Taiwan represented a strategic threat as well as a highly embarrassing piece of unfinished business. Mao Zedong desperately desired the destruction of
Chiang’s outpost, and in July 1954 he asked the Chinese military to draw up plans for an invasion to “liberate” Taiwan from foreign control. As a preliminary move, China had to seize a group of tiny islands right off its coastline that Chiang’s Nationalists had held since 1949 and that could hamper China’s military operations. These island groups, collectively called Quemoy and Matsu, became the site of one of the most dangerous confrontations of the cold war.64
On September 3, 1954, Mao gave the order to unleash a major artillery barrage on the island of Quemoy and its 50,000 Nationalist troops. Analysts in Washington tried to divine Chinese intentions: Was this the start of an invasion of Quemoy and perhaps of Taiwan itself? Or was China simply testing America’s resolve to back up the Nationalists? Either way, the Chinese attack presented the administration with a serious problem. Eisenhower could signal indifference to the shelling, effectively abandoning the small offshore islands to the Red Chinese. But that would undermine Chiang, damage America’s prestige in Asia, and cause a firestorm of protest by the Asia First Republicans at home. Or Eisenhower could declare America’s unalterable support for the tiny islands and reply to Chinese attacks with a war on China. As Secretary Dulles put it in an NSC discussion, it was a “horrible dilemma.”65
The NSC debated this awful predicament in mid-September, and its members fell out much as they had over Indochina. Radford urged a swift response to the attacks and wanted to provide air and naval support for Quemoy, knowing full well this would mean war with China. Secretary of Defense Wilson said he “was opposed to getting into war over these ‘doggoned little islands,’ ” and Treasury Secretary Humphrey agreed. Much as they had done in Indochina, Eisenhower and Dulles tried to find a way to delay, prevaricate, and keep the Chinese guessing. On September 12 Dulles suggested to Ike that sympathetic allies might raise the issue of Chinese “aggression” in the UN Security Council, thus perhaps embarrassing the communist bloc and buying time.66
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