Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (44 page)

In fact, however, his domino statement was window dressing aimed mainly at reassuring domestic hard-liners and, perhaps, to make the Chinese think twice about intervening. The President never did more than toy with the idea of air strikes or use of nuclear weapons. As a general, he knew that strikes would have little military value around Dienbienphu. "I couldn't think of anything probably less effective," he later explained, " . . . unless you were willing to use weapons that could have destroyed the jungles all around the area for miles and that would have probably destroyed Dienbienphu itself, and that would have been that."
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Shown an NSC paper recommending use of atomic weapons, he exploded, "You boys must be crazy. We can't use those awful things against Asians for the second time in less than ten years. My God."
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Eisenhower, moreover, had already taken steps to avoid unilateral American military involvement. He and Dulles agreed that there could be no such intervention without major French concessions, including significant movement toward Vietnamese independence. Testing British reactions, he had discovered what he already suspected: Great Britain, led by Churchill, had no stomach whatever for military engagement. Neither did army chief of staff Ridgway. American intervention, Ridgway said, could entail the drafting of 500,000 to 1,000,000 additional men and the fighting of a war in a country whose people, unlike most Koreans, passionately opposed American military presence. Ridgway ridiculed the "old delusive idea . . . that we could do things the cheap and easy way."
⁵⁵

With doubts like these in mind, Eisenhower shrewdly decided to consult key congressmen, knowing that they, too, were cool to American action. On April 3, four days before his domino pronouncement, the congressional leaders told him that sentiment on Capitol Hill opposed intervention . "No more Koreas," they said, unless America's allies, notably Britain, gave firm military commitments and unless the French agreed to speed the process of Vietnamese independence. The congressional leaders, like Ike, were virtually certain that neither the British nor the French would accept such conditions. So when France two days later asked for American air strikes, Eisenhower rejected the request, pointing out that it was "politically impossible."
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Radford and others kept up the struggle for American military action, but the die had been cast in early April: the United States had decided
not
to intervene. Americans would
not
have to go to war. On May 7, a month after the domino statement, France's 12,000-man garrison at Dienbienphu fell in a defeat that was disastrous to French resolve and pride. France still maintained a token presence in southern Vietnam, but their days were numbered. Ho, Giap, and the peasant-based Vietminh had won a resounding triumph against Western colonialism.
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The immediate aftermath of these historic events satisfied few of the contestants, who met at Geneva to work out a political settlement. Ho Chi Minh's representatives demanded a united, independent country but were pressured both by the Russians, who were trying not to drive the French into the EDC, and by the Chinese, who may have worried about American intervention, into accepting less at that time than they had fought for. Representatives of the French Union and of the Vietminh instead agreed to a temporary division of Vietnam, under separate governments, near the 17th parallel. Reunification of Vietnam, it was later specified, was to take place in July 1956 following free elections that would determine a new government. Though disappointed, Ho Chi Minh accepted the results. The North, which he was to govern, included a majority of the country's population. Southern Vietnam, by contrast, was to be governed by Bao Dai, who enjoyed French backing but virtually no popular support. It seemed certain that Ho Chi Minh, the George Washington of his country, would win elections in 1956.
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The United States publicly dissociated itself from these discussions and refused to be a party to the accords. Dulles visited Geneva but stayed only briefly, refusing to shake the hand of Chou En-lai, the Chinese foreign minister. A hostile biographer of Dulles said that he acted like a "puritan in a house of ill-repute."
⁵⁹
Dulles instead departed for a whirl of diplomacy that led in September 1954 to creation of the South East Asian Treaty Organization, or SEATO. The signatories were the United States, Great Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Thailand. All agreed to "meet common danger" in the region in accordance with each nation's "constitutional principles" and to "consult" in crisis. A separate protocol designated Laos, Cambodia, and southern Vietnam as areas which, if threatened, would "endanger" the "peace and security" of the signatories.
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As American leaders recognized, SEATO was a weak organization. The treaty envisioned no standing armed forces like those being developed under NATO, and it required only consultation, not military action. The pact failed to get the backing of key Asian nations such as India, Burma, and Indonesia.

American officials, however, emerged hopeful from these developments. The protocol to the Geneva accords, they recognized, gave them two years in which to improve the situation. Between 1954 and 1956 the CIA, following the designs of Colonel Edward Lansdale in Saigon, harassed the North by trying to destroy their printing presses, pouring contaminants into the gas tanks of buses, and distributing leaflets predicting that the North, if it won elections in 1956, would retaliate harshly against the South.

In looking ahead to 1956 the United States relied increasingly on Ngo Dinh Diem, who assumed the premiership of the South in 1954. Diem was an ardent Vietnamese nationalist who hated the French. He was also a staunch anti-Communist and devout Catholic. A self-exile after World War II, he had settled at a Maryknoll seminary in New Jersey and developed ties with influential American Catholics such as Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, an avid foe of Communism, and Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. These ties proved useful for cementing political support in the United States, which poured economic and military aid into the South in hopes of making Diem a viable leader.
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Sending large aid packages to Diem aroused sometimes splenetic protests from knowledgeable American officials, who considered Diem—accurately, as it turned out—a self-centered, stubborn, and power-hungry leader. Robert McClintock, the American chargé d'affaires in Saigon in 1954, branded Diem a "messiah without a message," whose sole policy was "to ask immediate American assistance in every form." Lawton Collins, who became American ambassador there in 1955, wanted Diem removed from office.
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Both Foster and Allen Dulles, however, backed Diem heartily, and other American officials saw no better alternative. The aid mounted.

Until mid-1955 Diem struggled to consolidate his power in Saigon. Lacking a popular base in the countryside, he also faced sharp opposition in the cities. But he proved a tough and resourceful leader, and substantial American backing gave him a stronger hold by late 1955, when a referendum ousted Bao Dai and established Diem as President of a new republic. Diem, with American approval, then made one of the most fateful decisions of the Cold War: to reject the holding of nationwide elections in 1956. The private reason for reaching this decision (in which the Chinese and the Soviets acquiesced) was that Ho Chi Minh would easily have triumphed. The excuses given publicly by Diem were that his government had not signed the Geneva accords and that, thanks to the authoritarian control by Ho in the North, the balloting could not be free. Nineteen fifty-six came and went without nationwide elections, and Vietnam remained divided, with unforeseen but ultimately terrible results for the Vietnamese people and for American society.

How to judge the record of the Eisenhower administration concerning events in Vietnam between 1953 and 1956? The answer is: critically. The refusal to agree to elections in 1956, combined with rising repression by Diem thereafter, prompted mounting nationalist rage, civil war, increasing American aid to Saigon, and—in the 1960s—full-scale American intervention. This is not to say, as some have, that American decisions between 1954 and 1956 (and later in the Eisenhower years) made the American-Vietnamese War inevitable: United States leaders in the early 1960s could have dared to cut their losses. It is to say, however, that Ike's decisions—which enjoyed bipartisan support at the time—were thereafter perceived by American political leaders of both parties as commitments to the protection of South Vietnam from Communism. This was a highly dangerous legacy to leave.

In 1954–56, however, virtually no one imagined that the United States would mire itself as deeply as it did in the 1960s. On the contrary, what many people were pleased about in the mid-1950s was that the United States did
not
intervene militarily in 1954. Given the pressures to do so—from the French, from high-ranking officials like Radford, and from others who wanted to take a stand against Communism—this was not a wholly obvious decision to have made at the time. Other, less prudent commanders-in-chief might have acted differently. That Eisenhower chose to stay out did not mean that he was smarter than later Presidents who sent in American troops: they had tougher decisions to make because the military situation in South Vietnam grew ever more desperate over time. Still, Eisenhower's decision not to intervene militarily testified to his prudence. That he was able to do so with relatively few domestic political recriminations, at a time when McCarthyism was at full tide (the Army-McCarthy hearings did not start until April 22), revealed the respect that Washington officialdom (and the American people) had for the general's understanding of foreign and military matters.
Not
becoming directly engaged militarily, in a rigid Cold War atmosphere that tempted overreaction, was to his credit.

T
HE NEXT MAJOR FOREIGN POLICY
controversy of the era arose from the bitterness following Chiang Kai-shek's withdrawal to Taiwan in 1949. American Asia-firsters, persistently lobbied by Chiang and his American-educated wife, still insisted that the United States had "lost" China and that the Nationalists should be helped to retake the mainland. Responding to these pressures from the Right, Eisenhower had announced that the United States would remove its Seventh Fleet from the straits between Taiwan and the mainland of China. Chiang, he implied, was now "unleashed" so that he could invade the People's Republic. This was hardly likely, given Chiang's profound military weakness, but he did manage to bomb the mainland, using American-made warplanes. In any event the symbolism of "unleashing" was of political benefit to an administration anxious to protect itself from right-wing attacks at home.

No one was more persistent on behalf of Chiang than GOP Senate leader Knowland of California. Writing in
Collier's
magazine in January 1954, Knowland left no doubt of his zeal. "We must be prepared," he wrote, ". . . to go it alone in China if our allies desert us. . . . We must not fool ourselves into thinking we can avoid taking up arms with the Chinese Reds. If we don't fight them in China and Formosa, we will be fighting them in San Francisco, in Seattle, in Kansas City."
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Silly as such rhetoric sounds in retrospect—and it was indeed absurd—it came from the mouth of the Senate majority leader. If Eisenhower hoped to hold his party together in Congress, he had to play his cards carefully in dealing with Chiang Kai-shek.

So it was that a crisis of sorts arose in September 1954, when the People's Republic responded to Chiang's provocations by shelling the small and well-fortified Nationalist-held island groups of Quemoy and Matsu, two miles or so off the mainland.
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The Nationalists shelled back. Radford, again reacting sharply, advised Eisenhower to place American troops on the islands and to authorize bombing raids, using tactical nuclear weapons, on the mainland. Some of these "tactical" weapons were potentially more destructive than the bombs used against Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Other anti-Communist activists perceived the confrontation as a major test of American credibility. If Quemoy and Matsu fell, they said, China would proceed to assault Taiwan. As in the crisis over Dienbienphu, Eisenhower faced loud and partisan demands for decisive action.
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Eisenhower responded shrewdly. Concluding that it would be politically risky to do nothing, he reaffirmed America's commitment to protect Taiwan and the neighboring Pescadores Islands. But he was deliberately ambiguous about Quemoy and Matsu, whose strategic value and defensibility struck him and other military experts as doubtful indeed. Instead, he arranged in December a mutual defense pact with Chiang. It formalized American commitment to Taiwan in case of enemy attack but did not include one to Quemoy and Matsu. The pact also stipulated that Chiang cease unilateral raids on the mainland.

In January 1955, however, the People's Republic sent troops to one of the Tachen Islands, which the Nationalists controlled. Though these islands were 200 miles from Taiwan and of no strategic importance, their plight again aroused the Asia-first lobby. Ike decided to let the islands go, but he also determined to involve Congress (newly controlled by the Democrats after the 1954 off-year elections) in his response, and he asked lawmakers to grant him blanket authority, as commander-in-chief, to use military force in order to protect Taiwan, the Pescadores, and "closely related localities."