by Conrad Black
On the second point, the French knew that their real enemies were the inde-pendentists within Indochina, though they were being supported by the Russians and the Chinese. Unlike the British, who knew such a war to be unwinnable, the French were determined to hang on to what they could, even if they dragged down European defense and the security of France itself in doing so. Eisenhower was not prepared to commit America to defend French colonialism, and with the administration’s “New Look” of fewer men and greater firepower and air and sea forces, there was not the manpower to fight in Asia while maintaining an integrated conventional and nuclear deterrent in Europe, which remained the principal theater, as had been agreed since the beginning of the Anglo-American staff talks in 1939.
Apart from some desperate appeals by the French (a little like Reynaud’s to Roosevelt in 1940), there was no thought of nuclear weapons in Indochina. Eisenhower rejected Walter Bedell Smith’s recommendation of insertion of Nationalist Chinese forces (which Smith had made to Acheson in 1950 over Korea). Eisenhower considered that this would just draw the Chinese into Indochina and create another open artery such as Korea had been. (He was certainly correct then, but Bedell Smith, MacArthur, and others had been correct in Korea, where the Communist Chinese were already invading in large numbers. There would also, eventually, be an argument for using Taiwanese in Vietnam, after more than 300,000 Communist Chinese were dispatched to North Vietnam in non-combat roles; Chapter 14.) Eisenhower wanted Britain to join him in providing air assistance and materiel for the French, as long as they could make a plausible claim that self-government for Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia lay at the end of it. This conformed with current views of collective security and America’s refusal to promote colonialism, and should see the communists off. But Churchill, who, at 79, was erratic and rather intractable, claimed that only the English-speaking people mattered and that he didn’t care what happened in Asia.
The French asked for 25 B-26 bombers and 400 technicians to assist in operating and servicing them. They claimed they were going back on the offensive under de Lattre’s successor, Raoul Salan, and that the fortress at Dien Bien Phu was impregnable. Salan was a drug-addicted scoundrel, and no great military genius, a very inadequate replacement for de Lattre. As one of Eisenhower’s biographers, Stephen Ambrose, put it: “Eisenhower found it difficult to see how the French putting their most famous units into a fortress surrounded by high ground that was held by the enemy constituted taking the offensive.” He gave them 10 B-26s, which were certainly not going to provide a balance of victory.155 By March, French optimism had evaporated and their chief of staff, General Paul Ely, came urgently to Washington seeking help. Eisenhower agreed to the sale of some C-119 planes that could deluge the area around Dien Bien Phu with napalm and make the ant-like movements of the guerrilla enemy more detectable.
Eisenhower made it clear to Ely, as his capable ambassador in Paris, Douglas Dillon, did to the government of Laniel, that there would be no consideration of direct American intervention unless France subscribed entirely to the EDC and did the necessary to make it universally understood that this was not a war for preservation of the colonial status quo. He also said to intimates and wrote in his memoirs that jungle warfare was very difficult, no American units were now familiar with it, that casualties would be heavy, and that an influx of Western soldiers would “probably have aggravated rather than assuaged Asiatic resentments.”156 The president showed both his military expertise and his spectacular talents at tactical political maneuver, by seeking a national debate on the issue of intervention in Indochina in the context of joint action with the British, the French, the Australians, the components of Indochina itself, and also forces from Thailand, the Philippines, and New Zealand. It was on these terms that Eisenhower couched any possible direct American involvement. He was confident that the national debate would oppose intervention, that the Congress would balk, and that no one not already in the war (i.e., France and the Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians) would contribute one soldier, and meanwhile the French were not meeting his initial conditions. Salan, a devious French army careerist, was not up to commanding such a difficult theater, and the French were becoming defeatist and were dragging their heels on EDC.
All this activity of Eisenhower’s was an elaborate, incomprehensible ceremony, as his press conferences often were, designed to confuse everyone but hold the president invulnerable, in this case, to screams about “losing Indochina.” He did not now think a partitioning could be avoided, and hoped that at that point, an independent South Vietnam could be assisted to defend itself against the communist North. It was déjà vu from Korea, but with the knowledge gained from that struggle.
Eisenhower and Dulles suspected the French had decided to try to use the upcoming Geneva Conference, supposedly about Korea, to negotiate themselves out of Indochina, where Eisenhower wanted to preorganize a Western stance. On April 5, 1954, Ambassador Dillon reported that Ely claimed the U.S. had agreed to drop two or three atomic weapons on the Viet Minh. This was nonsense. As the conditions at Dien Bien Phu worsened, Eisenhower took the position that the U.S. would not intervene without allies in a collective-security operation. Eisenhower sent the Joint Chiefs chairman, Admiral Arthur Radford, to have another try with Churchill, but the old warrior said that if Britain hadn’t fought for India, it wouldn’t fight for French Indochina either. This was pretextual waffling from an aging man, but there weren’t going to be any allies apart from those desperately calling for their own rescue.
At his April 7 press conference, Eisenhower laid out the domino theory very graphically, but on the basis that they would only start falling on the abandonment of all of Southeast Asia. His plan was to avoid being drawn into a lost battle in North Vietnam, lay the defeat on the stupidity of the French and the balkiness of other allies, do a preemptive hosing down on excessive alarm about the imminent debacle at Dien Bien Phu, but warm up opinion for the activation of the SEATO Nixon had proposed setting up, and the organization of collective security in the Far East, with the Indochinese domino being whatever could be salvaged from the communists in the current struggle the French were about to lose.
The Geneva Conference opened on April 26, and Dien Bien Phu fell on May 7 (with a loss of 13,000 men—3,000 French and 10,000 pro-French Vietnamese). The French lost fewer of their own people than the Americans under General Horatio Gates did at Camden in 1779 (Chapter 2), and the whole garrison was barely half the number of American prisoners taken at the start of the Battle of the Ardennes (Chapter 10), but the international left played it up the way the North implied in 1864 that Atlanta was a city of 500,000 (instead of 14,000, Chapter 6).
Eisenhower found it incredible that “a nation which had only the help of a tiny British army when it turned back the German flood in 1914 and withstood the gigantic 1916 attacks at Verdun could now be reduced to the point that she cannot produce a few hundred technicians to keep planes flying properly in Indochina.... The only hope is to produce a new and inspirational leader—and I do not mean one that is 6 feet 5 and who considers himself to be, by some miraculous biological and transmigrative process, the offspring of Clemenceau and Jeanne d’Arc.”157 Of course de Gaulle was the only alternative to the communists as the Fourth Republic floundered from crisis to crisis. And Roosevelt’s canard about Le Tigre and St. Joan, coined in a letter to his cousin from the Casablanca Conference 11 years before,158 was becoming desperately tired by this time. Only de Gaulle had the prestige, cunning, and ruthless determination to restore French greatness, and Eisenhower at least avoided the Rooseveltian parlor game of trying to unveil and buff up implausible rivals to him such as the scoundrel Admiral Darlan and the ludicrous General Giraud. On his own authority, which he technically did not possess (and which caused French writer François Mauriac to wonder if de Gaulle were mad), de Gaulle called for a national demonstration at the Arc de Triomphe following Dien Bien Phu, in remembrance of the sacrifices of the French Army, but observed as he emerged f
rom his car that “The people have not really turned out.” They would turn out in the next crisis, Algeria, already looming.
Eisenhower’s handling of the crisis was his usual astute mélange of caution, self-immunization from reproach, and both tactical and strategic insight. Vice President Nixon spoke to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16. In response to the question of whether he would favor insertion of American forces to protect against a communist takeover of Indochina if the French pulled out, he said that he would, and added, “I believe the executive branch of the government has to take the politically unpopular decision of facing up to it and doing it, and I personally would support such a decision.”159 This caused, as it was intended to, quite a stir, as Nixon was trying to propel his chief forward by the small of the back and the scruff of the neck into a more forceful posture in Southeast Asia.
Eisenhower had his press secretary, James Hagerty, hose down the controversy without embarrassing Nixon. Despite ingenious and persistent efforts, Nixon could not persuade Eisenhower to budge. If the United States had carpet-bombed the area around Dien Bien Phu while airlifting out its 13,000 defenders, it would have spared France great humiliation and demoralization, and would have redounded to the immeasurable benefit of the old France-America alliance, which would soon assume greater importance than it had since the times of Wilson and Clemenceau. And if America were ever to be involved in Indochina, it should have been when France was an ally and before Ho Chi Minh had turned the majority of Vietnamese into fierce warrior-robots. Eisenhower implicitly conceded the partition of Vietnam, but drew the line there and set up SEATO to strengthen all the post-partition dominos. The ominous strategic mystery was whether half of Vietnam was practically salvageable at an acceptable cost.
Joseph Laniel’s government was defeated in the French National Assembly on June 12, and he was replaced by the highly intelligent but leftish Pierre Mendès-France, who promised to secure peace in Indochina by July 20. This convinced Eisenhower that a complete sell-out was in the offing, and he pulled Walter Bedell Smith, the under secretary of state, his representative at the Geneva Conference and wartime chief of staff, and the U.S. had only an observer status at Geneva thereafter.
Laniel had favored the European Defense Community, which was the only framework yet devised for rearming Germany, the fear of which was almost the only reprisal that had caught Stalin’s attention and had caused Roosevelt to indulge Morgenthau’s nonsense about the pastoralization of Germany. Mendès- France was ambiguous and even Churchill and Eden, who arrived in Washington in late June, were waffling about it; the British were not much more enthused about a rearmed Germany than the French and the Russians were. Although Eisenhower now found Churchill sluggish, largely deaf, and with limited powers of concentration, he had enormous admiration and affection for him (which was largely reciprocated), and offered the British leaders a deal: if Britain would support the EDC, the United States would supply Britain with more atomic bombs to ensure that their bomber force could be fully utilized in the event of such a conflict. And they should agree on Geneva terms: independence for Laos and Cambodia and withdrawal of all Viet Minh forces from those countries, and a division of Vietnam at the 17th parallel. The tired British leaders were ambivalent.
The Geneva Conference ended on July 21. The U.S. did not sign, but did not imply that it would obstruct the conclusions of the conference. Dulles, who was in Geneva but did not attend the conference, famously refused to shake hands with Chou En-lai, and when interrupted in his bath with the news that China was prepared to release all Korean War prisoners and normalize relations, without hesitation and on his own authority, Dulles declined. The agreement was a climbdown for the Chinese and the Americans (the French were now almost incidental). The Viet Minh could take all of Vietnam if new forces beyond France’s capabilities were not inserted, and the Republican and southern Democratic hawks, including the Joint Chiefs, endorsed the perfect compromise of staying out of Indochina but launching an atomic attack on China, which would supposedly avoid the partition of Vietnam—an insane proposal. Meanwhile, to put the feet of the British and the French to the fire, Eisenhower had Lyndon Johnson, William Knowland, and Nixon put through the Senate, which they did by unanimous vote, a measure authorizing the president to take any steps necessary to “restore sovereignty to Germany and to enable her to contribute to the maintenance of peace and security.” It was almost back to Woodrow Wilson’s threat of a separate peace with Germany in 1918; if the British and French did not get on board, the Americans would rearm Germany, outside a pan-European military command, but as a full partner in NATO, and even America’s chief ally in Europe just nine years after the surrender of the Third Reich.
While Churchill and Eden were in Washington, Chou En-lai and Mendès-France were meeting in Geneva. They settled on the compromise the British and the Americans were agreeing, but with the provision that there would be Vietnam-wide elections within two years on the issue of unification. This was a fig leaf of face-saving for France, as Ho Chi Minh was certain to win such elections with a unanimous vote from the North, in the familiar communist manner. Chou said he would deliver the Viet Minh if Mendès-France could deliver the Americans.
But that was not what Eisenhower agreed to; Dulles now bustled about recruiting adherents to SEATO, and rounded up Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, the Philippines, and Pakistan. The CIA reported that Ngo Dinh Diem was the only possible non-communist South Vietnamese leader who had any support, and the Americans recognized him and Eisenhower sent him a letter in September, with an aid mission designed to prop up a durable non-communist, independent South Vietnam. This made a Swiss cheese of Geneva from the start, as South Vietnam was recognized as a permanent state by the United States and its entourage, and South Vietnam joined SEATO, and the Geneva Accord had stipulated that neither Vietnam would be in an alliance. (Of course, this was also a fraud, given Ho’s relations with China and Russia.)
It is easy to forget, given how successful it ultimately was, how fragile NATO was even five years after its founding. It was convenient for the French to blame their decisive defeat in Vietnam on the U.S., and on August 30, the National Assembly in Paris rejected the European Defense Community. Eisenhower suspected that there were substantial elements of French opinion that would entertain defecting to an alliance with the Soviet Union. But, as always, he was ready with his contingency plan and ordered the immediate convening of a NATO meeting where the United States rammed through the election of Germany to the alliance as a fully sovereign (and effectively forgiven) state. The French, having been soundly trounced by the communist elements of their former Vietnamese colonial subjects, blamed the defeat on the Americans, who had given plenty of advice on how to avoid it and generous tangible support. They kicked the United States mindlessly on the shins by threatening to blackball Germany in NATO (denuding the defense of France itself, if the United States did not salvage their lost colonial escapade in Indochina). France was rewarded by being put over America’s knee and given a further international public thrashing as Germany, the Nazi pariah and rubble heap of just nine years before, was parachuted into NATO and seated higher up the table than France. This was all effected under the observant eyes of the British. If Churchill lamented his loss of what he fancied to be equality of influence with Roosevelt (Chapter 11), he could scarcely fail to notice where the correlation of forces within the Western Alliance stood now. France had learned little of how to manage its relations with the United States since the fiasco of the Citizen Genet and XYZ affairs (Chapter 3), and Napoleon III’s intrusion in Mexico (Chapter 6).
Even at this remove and after the end of the Cold War, it is not clear whether the MacArthur-Nixon-Dulles faction or Eisenhower and Truman were correct about Korea and Vietnam. If the Americans had imported 200,000 Nationalist Chinese into Korea, conventionally bombed Manchuria, and interdicted Chinese reinforcements across the Yalu by air, whether before or shortly after Stalin’s de
ath and with the Kremlin in disarray, Communist China would have been severely chastened in its infancy, and would not have enjoyed the moral victory it claimed in fighting the United States and United Nations to a standstill. It is not clear that peace would have taken appreciably longer or cost significantly more American lives than was actually the case. And, again, the world would have been spared the pestilential nuisance of the belligerently deranged Kim dynasty in Pyongyang.
And if Eisenhower had acted like a real ally at Dien Bien Phu and helped avoid a French debacle, he could presumably have reached an arrangement that Indochina would become the independent democracies of Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam as well as North Vietnam, and that the United States would assist the French in helping the South Vietnamese government resist the communists, as the British were doing in Malaya. SEATO would be set up, the other countries would provide some forces, as most of them eventually did, and France would wholeheartedly support the EDC. Dulles should have shaken hands with Chou En-lai; he was a good deal more civilized than many people Dulles fraternized with, and they should have moved to normalize relations with China as soon as favorable terms were available; nothing was gained by waiting for almost 20 years.
It was a powerful argument for Eisenhower to say that he ended the Korean War and kept the U.S. out of Vietnam. But 10 years later, as an ex-president, he was a Vietnam hawk, urging a strong stand in Vietnam after his successor had allowed Laos to be transformed into a conduit for North Vietnamese infiltration of the South, and after the French had become friendlier with the Asian communists than they were with their ancient American ally. Like most Oriental politics, it is very complicated.