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John Foster Dulles celebrated his sixty-sixth birthday the very day Bricker’s amendment was defeated. He was an elder statesman and looked it. Everything about him emanated distinction: his leonine head and craggy face; his membership in the Metropolitan, Piping Rock, Down Town, and Century clubs; his chairmanships of the Carnegie Foundation and the Federal Council of Churches Commission on a Just and Lasting Peace; his Phi Beta Kappa key; and his degrees from Princeton, the Sorbonne, and George Washington Law School.
The most important fact in Dulles’s life was his membership in the Presbyterian church. He regarded his religiosity as a great strength. In fact it was an encumbrance. In him anti-Communism was an extension of Presbyterianism—just as Communism itself, in George Kennan’s view, was a gospel in the minds of Soviet leaders—and as a result his diplomacy, like theirs, was rigid and dogmatic. Eisenhower believed in compromise and conciliation, but the man he had chosen to conduct his foreign policy deeply distrusted both. Dulles skillfully sabotaged Stassen’s disarmament plans on the ground that America’s NATO partners would look upon them as a sign of slackening U.S. resolve. To him flexibility was worse than frailty; it was downright immoral. Dissent from his hard doctrines carried with it the stigma of sin. On one of his first trips abroad in 1953 he presented President Mohammed Naguib of Egypt, as a present from President Eisenhower, a nickel-plated automatic pistol. It was a reminder to statesmen in all uncommitted nations that militant vigilance against designing Communists was the price of American friendship. To neutral leaders like India’s Nehru the world was not that simple. Nehru was trying to stake out a position between the two great rival blocs. He believed it important to be anti-colonialist as well as anti-Communist. Dulles saw neutralism as wicked; he virtuously shipped arms to Pakistan and lost India’s friendship.
Despite Dulles’s rhetoric, the only pro-Soviet government to be unseated in the 1950s was in Guatemala, a little country in America’s back yard. Even that success was questionable; it sowed the seeds of later defeats in Latin America. The most disturbing aspect of Dulles evangelism, however, was its deliberate appeal to the populations of eastern Europe—his promises of a “rollback” of Russian tyranny there. In a cabinet meeting on July 17, 1953, he reported with immense satisfaction that Georges Bidault of France and Britain’s Marquess of Salisbury had joined him three days earlier in an expression of concern over “true liberty” for East Europeans. This, he said, was “the first time to my knowledge that London and Paris have been willing to embrace this principle.”
In his notes on that meeting Hughes wrote furiously, “Does he really believe that words are going to free anyone, any people?” But what Dulles believed was less important than the credulity of his listeners from Stettin to Trieste. There his failure to explain that America’s determination to hasten their liberation must be confined to “every peaceful means”—a qualification Eisenhower was always careful to include—was to have tragic consequences. East German cities erupted in strikes, arson, and rioting. After Soviet tanks had suppressed an uprising by thirty thousand East Berliners, Ike emphasized to the press that the United States planned no physical intervention in eastern Europe, but by late November Dulles was inciting unrest in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia by declaring that the United States would not recognize Russia’s incorporation of them and thereby “confirm their captivity.”
To the relief of those who preferred diplomacy in a lower key, Dulles was frequently absent from the capital. In effect he was traveling round offering alliances as insurance policies against aggression, knitting the non-Communist world together with the steel thread of American military might. To NATO were added a rejuvenated Organization of American States (OAS), the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), and, in the Middle East, the Baghdad Pact, later to become the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), which the United States did not join but backed heavily. Year by year new clauses were added to the covenants encircling the Communist countries, until America was committed by eight security treaties to the defense of forty-two nations. “Dulles,” Walter Lippmann wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, “has shown himself to be not a prudent and calculating diplomat but a gambler who is more lavish than any other secretary of state has ever dreamed of being with promissory notes engaging the blood, the treasure, and the honor of this country.”
Although none of the notes was called in Dulles’s lifetime, there was considerable anxiety among those who would be called to account if they were. A parade of alarmed witnesses marched into congressional committee rooms to protest that while the administration was expanding U.S. military obligations, it was reducing the country’s strength. For a general, Eisenhower was showing scant regard for the Pentagon. In one maneuver he cut five billion dollars from an Air Force budget, thereby estranging General Hoyt Vandenberg; another directive, issued while Formosa was approaching one of its periodic boiling points, reduced the size of the armed services from 3,200,000 men to 2,850,000. Only a President who had worn five stars could have accomplished that. He rejected all the strategic arguments that were raised as inapplicable in the nuclear age. “If you want to be coldly logical about it,” he said at one White House meeting called to discuss further reductions in Army force levels, “the money being spent for ground forces could be used to better advantage on new highways to facilitate the evacuation of large cities in case of an enemy attack.”
The President knew what he wanted, and George Humphrey, who had become the strong man of the cabinet, was behind him. Their goal was relief for the taxpayer, and they believed that this was the right way to go about getting it. “The New Look, with its planning predicated on nuclear retaliation,” Sherman Adams wrote, obviously “led to an order from Eisenhower to reduce the number of army ground troops.” Ike was commander in chief; the responsibility was his. To dispel any further confusion he instructed the Pentagon to assume that the United States would fight any future war with nuclear weapons. Democrats on the Hill complained that America was being lulled into a false sense of security, that the President’s motives were political. They were, partly. One of the tinnier administration promises was “a bigger bang for a buck.” Strategic monism also appealed to searchers for simplistic solutions. Clearly the United States planned no wars of conquest. Therefore, they said, the Department of Defense should be concerned, literally, with just defense. They only wanted America left alone, and the threat of massive retaliation was designed to guarantee that it would be.
Of course, their doctrine did no such thing, and with the Secretary of State marching to a different drum there was no way it could. It is amazing that so few observers spotted the discrepancies between the largesse of the administration’s foreign policy and the relative parsimony of its military policy. Retaliation might have been an effective deterrent between the two world wars, when Presidents were sedulously avoiding entanglements abroad, but America was no longer that kind of country. The Pax Britannica had been replaced by a Pax Americana; where the British had once sent gunboats the United States now sent John Foster Dulles and his ballpoint pen. Superpowers need a wide range of deterrents to keep the peace, and it was precisely here that phrasemongering about a bigger bang for a buck—as though global politics were an old-fashioned Fourth of July celebration—became so irrelevant.
Young Henry Kissinger saw it. After taking his Ph.D. in 1954 and becoming a junior member of Harvard’s government department, Kissinger wrote Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, a closely reasoned examination of America’s world posture. Massive retaliation, he concluded, was a fallacy: with the government’s capacities for fighting a limited war sharply reduced, and with nothing left but the bomb, national survival became a stake in every diplomatic disagreement that verged on the use of force. Dean Acheson also saw the inconsistency. In a magazine article he examined administration claims that massive retaliation gave the United States “initiative” and rejected them as absurd; retaliation, he pointed out, is a response to somebody else
’s initiative. Richard Rovere saw the anomaly vividly; in a “Letter from Washington” dated April 8, 1954, he predicted that “if the worst-happens in Indochina, where atomic bombs would be about as useless as crossbows, the ground forces will have to be restored to their former strength—and then some.”
Washington and Indochina are exactly twelve hours apart—midnight in one is noon in the other—and so evening darkness had already enveloped the Maison de France, French army headquarters in Hanoi, when, at 10:30 on the morning of February 10, 1954, President Eisenhower entered the Indian Treaty Room for his regular Wednesday press conference. He was asked about the critical military situation half a world away. He said, “No one could be more bitterly opposed to ever getting the United States involved in a hot war in that region than I am. Consequently, every move that I authorize is calculated, so far as humans can do it, to make certain that that does not happen.”
“Mr. President,” the next reporter asked, “should your remarks be construed as meaning that you are determined not to become involved or, perhaps, more deeply involved in the war in Indochina regardless of how that war may go?”
Eisenhower replied that he could not forecast the future. However, he added: “I say that I cannot conceive of a greater tragedy for America than to get heavily involved now in an all-out war in any of those regions, particularly with large units.”
Compared to what would come later, the American presence in Indochina at that time was slight. It dated from the previous administration. Until the late 1940s the three states of Indochina—Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—had been French colonies. On December 30, 1949, their status had changed somewhat; Paris had recognized them as “independent states” within “the French Union.” That was mostly show, a token gesture of anti-colonialism designed to counter Russia’s support of Ho Chi Minh’s insurgent Viet Minh. On February 7, 1950, Washington and London had recognized the three states, Acheson stressing America’s “fundamental policy of giving support to the peaceful and democratic evolution of dependent peoples toward self-government and independence.” He had hoped that recognition from some Asian nations would follow, but they hung back, repelled by France’s puppet ruler of Vietnam, Prince Bao Dai, an absentee chief of state who preferred to lie in the Riviera sun. Undeterred by the widespread contempt for Bao Dai, Acheson had doggedly continued to risk American prestige in Indochina. Later he would ruefully recall that one State Department colleague, John Ohly, had warned him that the U.S. was moving into a position in which “our responsibilities tend to supplant rather than complement those of the French.” America could become a scapegoat for the French and be sucked into direct intervention, said Ohly, noting that “These situations have a way of snowballing.” In his memoirs Acheson commented: “I decided… that having put our hand to the plow, we would not look back.”
By the time of Eisenhower’s inaugural the United States was paying a third of French costs, shipping arms to Indochina, and providing two hundred U.S. Air Force technicians. Ike continued the aid, but it was no longer enough. The Vietnam crisis deepened. On the morning of that February press conference it had come to center around one battle, a classic engagement which would alter world history and affect the United States more profoundly than Shiloh or the Argonne. For seven years now, the French army had been kept off balance by Ho Chi Minh’s brilliant generalissimo, General Vo Nguyen Giap. Baffled by Giap’s guerrilla tactics, so unfamiliar to officers trained at Saint-Cyr-l’École, the French had vowed to lure the Viet Minh into a pitched battle. On November 20, 1953, they had dropped 15,000 parachute troops on a strategic point almost two hundred miles west of Hanoi. The position covered lines of communications linking China, Tonkin, and Laos. This was Thai country, and the name of the place was a combination of three Thai words: dien (big), bien (frontier) and phu (administrative center). Dienbienphu: a big administrative center on the frontier. No name could have been more ordinary.
Geographically, that part of Southeast Asia is mostly chaos: cliffs, jagged peaks, unfathomable jungle, impenetrable canyons, impassable rivers. Here and there, however, the face of the land is dimpled by relatively smooth hollows, the larger of which may be cleared and used for airstrips. Dienbienphu was such a basin. Shaped like a long oak leaf in which brooks represent the ribs of the leaf and a central stream the median line, it was eleven miles long and three miles wide. Hills darkened by forests surrounded Dienbienphu. The French paratroopers built an airfield and then a series of porc-épics (porcupines)—strongholds to protect the field and harass the enemy. Military strategists since the time of Machiavelli have urged commanders to seize high ground, pointing out that should one side become entrenched on it, it can crush the other side with its artillery. The French, however, failed to seize the crests overlooking Dienbienphu. Holding them against guerrillas would have been difficult, and the high command in Hanoi decided that it was unnecessary. In the Maison de France war correspondents were told that French artillery was superior to anything Giap could mount, and besides, the Viet Minh couldn’t possibly drag cannon through the mountains studding the countryside all around.
The Maison de France was wrong. Since November, 90,000 Vietnamese peasants had been hauling batteries of 105-mm field guns across the savage land to Dienbienphu. By January the greater part of Giap’s artillery was in position overlooking the plain of gray and yellow clay below, and on February 10 in Washington, as Eisenhower was answering questions about Indochina in the Indian Treaty Room, Viet Minh soldiers of the 57th Regiment, resting from their backbreaking toil, were looking down the moonlit slopes to the blockhouses shielding twelve sleeping French battalions. Later the guerrillas’ commanding officer, Captain Hien, would tell how the flickering torches around the airstrip that night had reminded him of the flames of the little sticks of firewood traditionally left on the thresholds of huts in his village to honor the dead.
Giap opened the siege of Dienbienphu with a dawn bombardment on March 13. A smoke screen which the French laid down to hide the airfield was unsuccessful, and pilots began to call the shallow basin “un pot de chambre.” Three days earlier, at another Wednesday press conference, a correspondent had reminded the President of an observation by Senator John Stennis of Mississippi. Stennis had warned that the presence of the Air Force technicians already in Vietnam might be enough to bring the United States into the war. Not so, said Ike; there would be no U.S. intervention in Indochina unless Congress exercised its constitutional right to declare war.
Historians may wonder why the question of American involvement was even being discussed. The United Nations had no commitments in Indochina, and until the recent past the United States had had nothing to do with it; the only President who had expressed a genuine interest in the place was Franklin Roosevelt, and he had wanted to see it freed from French colonial rule. Eisenhower had refused to widen one Asian war against Communists only a year before. He had pointed out that even an air strike at Dienbienphu would be hazardous; it might pit U.S. airmen against the Chinese air force. Chances of a decisive blow were slight anyhow. French military strength in Indochina was much smaller than the U.N. force in Korea.
With the exception of Eisenhower, however, most administration leaders did not see it that way. In their view, the United States, as the strongest power in the free world, was the leader of a global struggle against world Communism. Since the Korean armistice Indochina had been the scene of the only active conflict in it. If the Communists were victorious on one front, interventionists reasoned, the security of all fronts would be endangered. That was also the reasoning of the intellectual community; writing in Daedalus, Walt W. Rostow, professor of economic history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argued:
The balance of power in Eurasia could be lost to the United States by the movement of Soviet or Chinese ground forces. And, equally, it could be lost if, in hope or despair, men and women in the decisive regions of Eurasia should turn to Communism…. the survival of the United States… would be in
jeopardy if we were to become a democratic island in a totalitarian sea.
The consensus was that as long as American troops had been engaged in Korea, sending the French money, guns, and advice had been enough. Now more was needed, the argument went; failure to provide it would endanger the free world.
Eisenhower had authorized larger payments to the French the previous September—$385,000,000 before the end of 1954. At that time Dulles had defined America’s goal in Indochina as success for the Navarre Plan, named for the French commander there. This, Dulles had explained, would defeat “the organized body of Communist aggression by the end of the 1955 fighting season,” leaving only mopping-up operations, “which could in 1956 be met for the most part” by Vietnamese troops. The Navarre Plan failed, but as late as January 4, 1954, when the President reviewed his forthcoming State of the Union message with the congressional leadership, no consideration had been given to the possibility of shipping U.S. troops to Indochina. Ike planned to ask congressional approval of continued military aid to France. A Republican senator asked whether this meant sending American boys to Vietnam. “No,” the startled President replied. He said, “I can write in ‘material assistance,’” and he did.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 102