RN

by Richard Nixon

  I was presiding over a tense Senate chamber when the final debate began on December 2. It was late afternoon by the time the vote was taken. A sudden hush fell over the Chamber as a lone figure came through the swinging doors at the back and walked slowly down the aisle. Joe McCarthy had arrived for the vote on his own censure. His arm was in a sling from an attack of bursitis that had kept him in the hospital for several days.

  When the vote was taken, every Democrat voted against McCarthy; the Republicans split right down the middle, 22 for and 22 against. Among those voting against the resolution was Bill Knowland, the Minority Leader. The final vote was 67 to 22, and at 5:03 P.M. on December 2, Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin became the third United States Senator ever to be censured by his colleagues. He sat quietly in his seat, staring at the bare desktop in front of him, surrounded by his supporters.

  There was a brief procedural hassle when Styles Bridges of New Hampshire pointed out that as the word censure did not appear in the body of the resolution, it should be struck from the title. The parliamentarian advised me that Bridges was technically correct and that the resolution as formally passed was one of condemnation rather than censure. But by this time the rhetoric did not matter. McCarthy had already left the chamber. For him it was all over.

  Joseph McCarthy cast his shadow over four critical years of American politics. From the Wheeling speech in February 1950 to his condemnation in December 1954, intense controversy surrounded everything he said and did.

  I remember a luncheon at the White House a few days after the chicken luncheon had brought the Stevens episode to fever pitch. As I noted in my diary at the time, everyone was very tense:

  At the luncheon, the President for some reason brought up the story of his old boxing instructor at West Point who he said used to hit him clear across the ring. He said that unless he got up smiling every time the boxing instructor would turn his back and walk out of the room.

  Apparently the purpose of the story was to see that everybody did not get too excited about the whole McCarthy incident and the attacks that he made.

  The President seems to have been convinced that people in the administration were actually afraid of McCarthy. Another purpose, I think, was the line he had been developing during the past week or so, that he wanted to see smiling faces around him.

  My own feelings about Joe McCarthy were mixed. I never shared the disdain with which fashionable Washington treated him because of his lack of polished manners. In fact, I found him personally likable, if irresponsibly impulsive. At the end, I felt sorry for him as a man whose zeal and thirst for publicity were leading him and others to destruction. But it is despicable to make a racket of anticommunism or any other cause—to stir people up and then give them no positive leadership or direction. By the spring of 1954 J. Edgar Hoover was telling Eisenhower that McCarthy had reached a point where he was actually impeding the investigation of communists. As Eisenhower expressed it, “McCarthy is probably Malenkov’s best helper in the United States.”

  I broke with McCarthy when he began to attack the administration openly. For some time he had picked up one of Senator Jenner’s lines and been referring to the period before Eisenhower was elected as “twenty years of treason.” In 1954, he began talking about “twenty-one years of treason,” thus including the first year of Eisenhower’s administration.

  McCarthy was sincere, and I know from personal investigation that there was real substance to some of his charges. But he could not resist grossly exaggerating his facts. The communists and the compulsive anti-anticommunists, together with many who were as anticommunist as McCarthy himself, ended up discrediting everything the man had to say when McCarthy became the issue instead of communism.

  CRISIS IN INDOCHINA: 1954

  The names Vietnam and Indochina meant little to most Americans when, in March 1954, the first news stories appeared about the Communist siege of a remote French military outpost called Dien Bien Phu. Within a few weeks, however, we shared the daily agony and valor of its defenders, and we saw the threat of a Communist takeover in Vietnam bring America to the brink of war. After seven years of fighting and 50,000 men killed, there were serious questions in France about whether to continue the fight against Ho Chi Minh’s Communist guerrillas.

  A French withdrawal from Vietnam would have placed us in a very difficult position because American policy was predicated upon the vital importance of maintaining an independent Vietnam. Early in 1952 Truman’s National Security Council had prepared a study of Southeast Asia that set forth what Eisenhower later referred to as the “falling domino” principle: that “the loss of any single country would probably lead to relatively swift submission to or an alignment with communism by the remaining countries of this group.” The study described America’s vital interests in the natural resources of this area—rubber and tin—and concluded that the French effort to defeat Ho Chi Minh’s Communist Vietminh was “essential to the security of the free world, not only in the Far East but in the Middle East and Europe as well.”

  In February 1954, Eisenhower had sent two hundred Army mechanics as advisers to the French and Vietnamese forces. There was no serious opposition in Congress because the men would be in Vietnam only as technical advisers, and Eisenhower promised that they would not stay longer than June.

  As the French and Vietminh settled in for a long siege, the press began to build up Dien Bien Phu as the first test since Korea of the free world’s ability to resist Communist aggression. In Washington the Joint Chiefs of Staff, under their Chairman, Admiral Arthur Radford, devised a plan, known as Operation Vulture, for using three small tactical atomic bombs to destroy Vietminh positions and relieve the garrison. Both Eisenhower and Dulles, however, felt that nothing less than overt Chinese Communist aggression would be sufficient provocation for our going into Vietnam in any such a direct and unilateral way.

  The Communist Chinese were the Vietminh’s patrons and principal source of military supplies. At a congressional leadership meeting at the end of March, Eisenhower said that if the military situation at Dien Bien Phu became desperate he would consider the use of diversionary tactics, possibly a landing by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces on China’s Hainan Island or a naval blockade of the Chinese mainland. Very simply, but dramatically, he said, “I am bringing this up at this time because at any time within the space of forty-eight hours, it might be necessary to move into the battle of Dien Bien Phu in order to keep it from going against us, and in that case I will be calling in the Democrats as well as our Republican leaders to inform them of the actions we’re taking.”

  Reports of the situation in Dien Bien Phu were constantly changing, and our day-to-day attitude frequently reflected the shifting tides of the battle. I made a diary note of an NSC meeting on April 6:

  The President was in a very serious mood in this meeting. Dulles presented his plan about trying to get united action among the allies. I said that such a plan was all right as far as it goes but that, if it were limited to resisting overt aggression alone, it would not meet the real future danger in Asia. I said that we must adopt the principle of uniting together to resist subversive aggression of the Indochina and Chinese Civil War type. I pointed out that we had never yet found a formula to resist this kind of aggression on a united basis.

  The President said, “What about Korea?” I answered that Korea was a case of the Communists marching across a line even though it was technically in the same country and that, therefore, the united action principle applied because what was really involved was overt aggression.

  I also said that I didn’t think the President should underestimate his ability to get the Congress and the country to follow his leadership. I suggested that more technicians could be sent to Indochina if the President asked for them. He asked Wilson to check on this immediately.

  From the conversation, however, it was quite apparent that the President had backed down considerably from the strong position he had taken on Indochina t
he latter part of the previous week. He seemed resigned to doing nothing at all unless we could get the allies and the country to go along with whatever was suggested and he did not seem inclined to put much pressure on to get them to come along.

  The challenge we faced in 1954 was to convince the American people of the importance of Dien Bien Phu—that much more was at stake than the defense of some French troops besieged at a colonial outpost. No one, except possibly Admiral Radford, wanted American military intervention. We were all convinced, however, that unless the Communists knew that their so-called wars of liberation would be resisted by military means if necessary, they would not stop until they had taken over Southeast Asia, just as they had Eastern Europe.

  Dulles spent several weeks trying to get the British and French to join us in concerted opposition to the Communists. The French government, however, was too much on the psychological defensive to be able to mount or sustain the kind of military and diplomatic offensive required.

  Admiral Radford went to London to consult with Churchill, who said bluntly that if his people had not been willing to fight to save India for themselves, he did not think they would be willing to fight to save Indochina for the French. Churchill admitted that the rest of Indochina might fall if Vietnam were lost, but he did not foresee any threat to the rest of Southeast Asia, Japan, or Australia. Both Radford and I were astonished that Churchill, who had understood the communist problem so well as early as 1946, could have made this statement.

  It was clear that we could not count on Britain or France for support in resisting communism in Indochina. If we decided to move, we would have to move on our own.

  Early in April there was a respite from the crisis; it seemed that the French troops might be able to hold on at Dien Bien Phu. Eisenhower decided to go to Augusta for a few days, and Dulles, exhausted and disheartened by his unsuccessful attempts to promote allied unity, went to Canada. The news from Vietnam continued hopeful, and in order to extend his stay in Georgia, Eisenhower asked me to fill in for him at the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ annual convention in Washington on April 16.

  The ASNE convention is a prestigious and responsible forum, and I asked that all my remarks be off the record so that I could speak candidly. After delivering a prepared speech I agreed to take questions from the floor. I was asked whether I thought we would send American troops to Indochina if the French decided to withdraw and it was the only way to save Indochina from being taken over by the Communists. I said that I did not believe that “the presumption or the assumption which has been made by the questioner will occur, and I recognize that he has put it as a hypothetical question.” Given those major reservations, however, I said that if sending American forces was the only way to avoid further Communist expansion in Asia, particularly in Indochina, “I believe that the executive branch of the government has to take the politically unpopular position of facing up to it and doing it, and I personally would support such a decision.”

  Two foreign reporters who were not at the meeting heard about my response and sent the story to their papers. By the next morning it was headline news all across America. It was widely interpreted as a trial balloon aimed at reversing the administration’s policy, which, so far, had drawn the line at direct American military intervention in Vietnam.

  I was concerned that Eisenhower might be upset over the incident, but he told me that if he had been confronted with a hypothetical question under similar circumstances he probably would have answered it the same way.

  At a meeting with the Republican congressional leaders a week later, Eisenhower supported me when the matter was raised. I made a note of the meeting:

  Charlie Halleck, during the course of the discussion, said that the suggestion that American boys might be sent to Indochina “had really hurt,” and that he hoped there would be no more talk of that type. The President, however, immediately stepped in and said he felt it was important that we not show a weakness at this critical time and that we not let the Russians think that we might not resist in the event that the Communists attempted to step up their present tactics in Indochina and elsewhere. He said that we had to think of whether it was best to take a strong stand now when we could or wait until later when we could not. He also pointed out that it was not well to tell the Russians everything as to what we would or would not do.

  At the end of April the situation at Dien Bien Phu took another turn for the worse, and it did not look as if the French forces could hold on much longer. I made a diary note on April 29:

  The NSC meeting started at ten o’clock and did not end until one. The last hour and three-quarters was spent discussing Indochina.

  Radford reported on the military situation and on his conversations with the French and British. Bedell Smith read a message from Dulles which indicated considerable pessimism but that Dulles was going to stand firm for the American position.

  The President was extremely serious and seemed to be greatly concerned about what was the right course to take.

  After the reports were made, Harold Stassen said that he thought that decision should be to send ground troops if necessary to save Indochina, and to do it on a unilateral basis if that was the only way it could be done.

  The President himself said that he could not visualize a ground troop operation in Indochina that would be supported by the people of the United States and which would not in the long run put our defense too far out of balance. He also raised the point that we simply could not go in unilaterally because that was in violation of our whole principle of collective defense against communism in all places in the world.

  After Stassen’s proposal had been discussed, I said that in my judgment winning the war in Vietnam was not necessarily a question of committing a lot of ground troops to combat. Sending an Air Force contingent representing a unified alliance would have the double effect of letting the Communists know that we were going to resist further expansion in the area, and of bolstering the morale of the French and the Vietnamese troops. I suggested that we explore the possibilities of developing a Pacific coalition without the British, an alliance with Thailand, the Philippines, Indochina, Australia, New Zealand, and whatever other nations would join.

  The next morning I met with Eisenhower and General Robert Cutler, his Special Assistant for National Security Affairs. Cutler reported that the NSC planning board had been discussing the possibility of telling our allies that if we went into Indochina, we might use the atom bomb. Eisenhower asked me what I thought about this idea; I said that whatever was decided about using the bomb, I did not think it was necessary to mention it to our allies before we got them to agree on united action. I emphasized, as I had at the NSC meeting, that it might not be necessary to have more than a few conventional air strikes by the united forces to let the Communists see that we were determined to resist. Eisenhower turned to Cutler and said, “First, I certainly do not think that the atom bomb can be used by the United States unilaterally, and second, I agree with Dick that we do not have to mention it to anybody before we get some agreement on united action.”

  On May 7, after a gallant but utterly hopeless defense of a territory that had been reduced to the size of a baseball field, the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu was overrun by the Vietminh. The almost universal reaction was relief that the crisis had ended without precipitating a major war. But while attempting to put the best face on it publicly, we knew that the defeat at Dien Bien Phu would probably lead to French withdrawal from Vietnam, and that America would either have to take over the burden of stopping Communist aggression in Indochina or abandon the entire region.

  On May 20 the NSC discussed the possibility of keeping the two hundred American mechanics in Vietnam past June, but Eisenhower dismissed the idea. First, he said, the French were already going back on their word to keep up the fighting. Second, he said that such an extension would make our future relations with Congress very difficult, because he had given a solemn pledge that the mechanics woul
d come out by June 15, and he intended to honor his pledge.

  After the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the heart fell out of the French will to win, and the next several weeks of desultory battle were a holding action until a negotiated settlement could be reached at the Geneva Conference, which had opened eleven days before the fortress fell. Dulles was infuriated and dispirited by the plan to surrender half of Vietnam to the Communists. When the Indochina settlement was made on July 21, the United States did not sign it. I agreed with this decision. In fact, a month earlier, I had urged Dulles not to be part of any settlement that would result in the surrender of any part of Indochina to the Communists.

  The press perceived Dulles, Radford, and me as the hawks in the Indochina crisis. To some extent Radford did believe that the early use of tactical nuclear weapons would convince the Communists that we meant business. Dulles and I both believed that if the Communists pushed too far we would have to do whatever was necessary to stop them. Eisenhower fully agreed, although I think that Dulles and I were probably prepared to stand up at an earlier point than he was. We all hoped that by being prepared to fight we would never actually have to do any fighting.

  Years later, after Dulles was dead and America was deeply involved in a war in Vietnam under another President, Eisenhower was asked privately whether he and Dulles had agreed on the question of being ready to send troops into Vietnam. “All the way,” Eisenhower said.

  MEETING CHURCHILL

  In June 1954, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden visited the United States for meetings with Eisenhower and Dulles. I dictated an extensive diary note describing the visit, beginning with my first meeting with the great man: