Fifties (66 page)

But the problems of putting together some sort of joint action were immense. The French, stunned by the tragedy facing them at Dien Bien Phu, seemed to have lost all taste for battle. The British were just finishing up their own hard war in Malaya, and having given up India without firing a shot, they had little interest in shedding British blood for what was to them very clearly a colonial war for a French cause. Under no condition did they intend to come in. Nor was Eisenhower eager for another Asian war. He had just finished in Korea, for which there had been little public support from the start. Indochina promised, if anything, to be even worse. The Democrats in Congress, seeing the approach of a Republican dilemma and just having been attacked for being soft on Communism, sat back and watched with no small amount of glee as the administration juggled this. “The damn Republicans blamed us for losing China and now we can blame them for losing Southeast Asia,” Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., then a congressman, was heard to say after one congressional briefing.

At a meeting between the administration leaders and congressional leaders in early April, Senate minority leader Lyndon Johnson pointed out that the United States had carried some 90 percent of the burden in Korea in terms of both men and finances. How many other allies had Dulles consulted with, he asked, other than the French? There was a pause and Dulles admitted that he had consulted with none.

Dulles was now in the process of performing a very difficult and delicate balancing act. What he himself actually wanted to happen has always intrigued historians of the period. Certainly, those who opposed intervention—General Matt Ridgway, for instance—thought
he did want to intervene. What was clear is that he did not want the administration to be blamed for being soft on Communism or for losing Indochina. Therefore, the most important thing was to make sure that if the worst happened, the blame was assigned elsewhere, either to the Allies or to Congress.

Thus began an elaborate shadow dance: Perhaps we would go in, perhaps we would not. Perhaps we wanted to help the French, perhaps we did not. Perhaps we made them an offer of unconditional military aid, particularly of American aircraft, then again perhaps we did not. Perhaps we had offered the French atomic weapons, perhaps we had not. In all of this John Foster Dulles was the featured performer. Ostensibly, he seemed to favor intervention, and he spoke passionately at the meetings convened on the subject; evidently, he even asked the French foreign minister if they wanted atomic weapons. But the French demurred, pointing out that atomic weapons would not be helpful, since they would destroy the French garrison as well as the Vietminh.

The idea of intervention did not die lightly. Radford, more than anyone else, seemed to be pushing for it. At a meeting with congressional leaders from both parties, Radford pushed for a massive American air commitment in Indochina. Senator Earle Clements asked if the other Chiefs agreed with him, and Radford somewhat reluctantly admitted that no, they did not. How many agreed? Clements pursued. None, Radford admitted. Why was that? Clements asked. “I have spent more time in the Far East than any of them and I understand this situation better,” he had answered.

Radford seemed on more than one occasion to make commitments to the French that he was not authorized to. Eisenhower, in all this, remained ambivalent. At one point in early April, he wrote Churchill a surprisingly passionate letter asking him to join in united action: “If I may refer again to history; we failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time. That marked the beginning of many years of stark tragedy and desperate peril. May it not be that our nations have learned something from that lesson?” A few days later, at a press conference, he outlined for the first time what became known as the domino theory. In response to a question about Indochina he answered: “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. So you could have the beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound consequences.” The loss of Dien Bien Phu, he said, would have dire consequences for Australia, New Zealand, and even Japan.

Gradually, Dulles was forcing others to make the case against intervention and thereby take the blame. For if Eisenhower had really wanted to go into Indochina, he could easily have gotten congressional support, and Dulles and others may have asked for such support, but they never
pushed
for it. The real question, then, was not about using American ground troops; it was about using American air power.

General Matt Ridgway was unyielding in his opposition to the idea of intervention. He was also unalterably opposed to the New Look and the implication that wars could be fought quickly, easily, and antiseptically. He had witnessed the worst fighting in both World War Two and Korea, and in Korea, particularly, he had seen what the Air Force had promised to do with strategic bombing and how limited, in fact, strategic bombing was as an instrument of policy. If we bombed, he argued, we would end up inevitably using ground troops. Ridgway saw air power as a sort of high-tech aspirin; it gave some immediate relief, but it did not cure the underlying problem.

Ridgway thought the war in Indochina was a complete political and military mess. He did not merely dissent on such general terms, though. Since his President was a soldier, he made the case against intervention in terms that a soldier would understand: He sent a team of planners to Vietnam to find out what victory would take in terms of manpower. The answer was devastating: minimally, five divisions and quite possibly ten (there had been six divisions in Korea), plus fifty-five engineering battalions. Altogether, that meant between 500,000 and 1 million men. Draft calls would be far greater than those for Korea. The existing infrastructure was horrendous, and the construction costs would be immense. Worse, political conditions on the ground would be much worse than in Korea. There the indigenous population had generally supported American intervention. That would not be true in Indochina.

No one ordered the Ridgway report; he did it on his own because of a profound conviction that if you were going to send young men into battle, you had better know exactly what you were getting into. When he briefed Eisenhower on what the cost would be, a groan seemed to come from the President. Ike was, Ridgway noted laconically years later, a much better listener than Lyndon Johnson.

The other restraining influence was the British resistance to the idea. No matter how much Dulles pushed, neither Churchill nor Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, would bend. The pressure, much of it from Radford, continued all through the month of April; since Radford seemed to imply to the French that the Americans
were hell-bent to make a major commitment if only the British would come in, the French also applied significant pressure on the British. On April 26, Radford dined with Churchill. If Radford did not get exactly what he wanted—a British commitment to send troops—he got something more important: a wise lecture on the limits of power from one of the great men of the era who was watching his own nation’s power contract in the twilight of his career.

Churchill had begun by talking about the British decision to give up India in 1947. He had been in opposition then, he said, and he had hated the idea of giving up so important a country, one Britain had ruled for 250 years. He had regarded this as one of the most painful decisions of a long career, but he had come to accept it. Radford had to understand this when he viewed the British decision on Indochina. He was asking a nation that had given up the most valuable part of its own empire without firing a shot to fight to preserve French colonialism. That could not be done. The British people, he said, would not accept the idea of investing any of their limited resources in Indochina. When Radford tried to make the case about the danger to the entire area, Churchill accepted that there might be serious regional consequences, but he warned Radford, prophetically, that the most important thing was to defuse the tensions with the Soviets and not “to squander our limited resources around the fringes.”

As the idea of intervention began to die, Dulles continued to speak publicly of the importance of the garrison, but in a private cable to Eisenhower from Paris on April 23, he noted that the situation there was hopeless but that there was “no military or logical reason why loss of Dien Bien Phu should lead to collapse of the French ...” Then Dulles finally went on national television and blamed the British; we would have gone in, he seemed to be saying, but for the Allies. That took care of the domestic politics. We had not lost the war, our allies had. The post fell on May 7. The news reached Paris in the late morning of that day, and the prime minister, Joseph Laniel, dressed entirely in black, barely able to control his voice, broke the news to the national assembly. It was a terrible moment, filled with the deep, bitter shame of a nation betraying fighting men halfway around the world. That night all French television and radio networks canceled their regularly scheduled programs and instead played the Berlioz “Requiem.”

It was over. There was great bitterness among America’s most important allies, most particularly the French, whose garrison had been forced to surrender. The British felt the Americans had not merely tried to initiate a policy beyond their reach but behaved arrogantly. In April that year
The Times
of London had shrewdly
written of one of Dulles’s speeches that seemed to call for American intervention at Dien Bien Phu: “It has not always been easy to let Mr. Dulles’ speeches speak for themselves because, since he became Secretary of State, he has often seemed to be reversing the normal tactics for a Foreign Minister, and, instead of using his public statement to hint at policies, has made them stronger than the policies themselves.”

At a conference in Geneva, Vietnam was divided up, with the North becoming a Communist state under Ho Chi Minh and the South an anti-Communist society under Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic mandarin who had sat out the war in America and was now being installed by the Americans. Both sides, ironically, resented the Geneva settlement; the North, with good reason, felt it had been on the verge of a total victory but had been pressured by the Soviets to settle for half the pie. By contrast, in America there was a feeling that somehow the French had sold out and given the Communists a victory at the conference table. Dulles had dodged a bullet and came to believe that Dien Bien Phu was a boon to us. “We have a clean base there now without the taint of colonialism,” he told Emmet Hughes with stunning innocence during the 1956 campaigns. “Dien Bien Phu was a blessing in disguise.” Some blessing, some disguise.

Not all the Republicans were appeased by Dulles’s speeches. There were rumblings on the right that the new administration had not strengthened America’s position in the world. Thus in late 1955 it was decided that a major defense of administration policies should be made and that Dulles should do it in the friendly forum of
Life
magazine, in an article by a particularly friendly writer, James Shepley. Published in January 1956, it was called: “How Dulles Averted War.” The theme of the article was that foreign policy under Eisenhower and Dulles had not been merely a bland continuation of past (cowardly) policies, as some critics had charged, but that Dulles, backed by the atomic weapon, had walked to the very brink of war, had stared down the country’s enemies, and thereby brought back an otherwise unattainable peace.

In Indochina (one of the three places where Dulles had apparently rescued the peace—the other two were in Korea and the island of Quemoy), he had succeeded by sending two aircraft carriers steaming into the South China Sea. It was, he noted, “a modern version of the classical show of force designed to deter any Red Chinese attack against Indochina, and to provide weapons for instant retaliation ...” In fact, the aircraft carriers had been a bluff that did not work and had absolutely no effect on the Vietminh. “You have to take chances for peace,” Dulles told Shepley, “just as
you must take chances in war. Some say we were brought to the verge of war. Of course, we were brought to the verge of war. The ability to get to the verge without getting into war is the necessary art. If you cannot master it, you inevitably get into war. If you try and run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.... We walked to the brink and we looked it in the face. We took strong action.” From the article came the famous term for Dulles’s foreign policy,
brinkmanship.
Hearing later of Dulles’s boasts about his trips to the brink and the calculated risk involved, Georges Bidault, the former French foreign minister, noted with no small degree of bitterness that “It involved a great deal of calculation but no risks.”

How wrong Dulles was to claim that we had escaped the taint of colonialism, the next generation of American policymakers would find out. For in the minds of Ho and General Giap, only half the battle had been won. Of what eight years of revolutionary war had done to Vietnam, of the fateful future political alignments it had produced, Americans had no comprehension. We had given nearly $3 billion in aid to the French, yet it might as well have gone into a black hole. The Vietminh had emerged with a modern, confident army, in which young men had risen through the ranks, despite peasant origins, by ability alone; the army in the South, soon to be created by the Americans, was an extension of the colonial age, reflecting class and privilege. It was virtually impossible for a peasant to rise to any kind of command in it. Our side reflected the old feudal order; their side released the nationalism so powerful in an anticolonial war. Our side was nationalist because the Americans
said
that Diem was a nationalist; we even hired public relations experts to sell the American public on the idea. The other side did not have to announce its nationalism; it had earned the title by dint of hard and long fighting.

We could not see the affairs of Vietnam as they really were, mired as we were in prejudices generated by our own domestic politics. Rhetoric, repeated by Foster Dulles, emphasized that Vietnam was part of the larger struggle with
China.
We did not pause to understand why a peasant army had defeated a powerful Western army. Anyone who tried to talk about why the other side had won was vulnerable to charges of being soft on Communism. We had to see the struggle in Vietnam through the prism of the Cold War and had, in effect, already begun the process of making a commitment to a small, artificial country where the other side held complete title to nationalism. We thought the war in Indochina was over; the other side knew it had just begun.