Penguin History of the United States of America (122 page)

The French Empire in Indo-China had been founded in the nineteenth century chiefly to annoy the British and the Germans. It was destroyed beyond possibility of restoration by the Japanese conquest in the Second World War. This was so clear at the time to men on the spot, and was so much in accord with the repeatedly affirmed policy of Franklin Roosevelt, who disliked all European imperialisms, that the American representatives in Indo-China collaborated quite closely with Ho Chi Minh at the end of the war, in the expectation that he would soon be recognized as the ruler of an independent Vietnam. The French, however, deemed otherwise. National vanity and national obstinacy bred in them the illusion that they could repossess Indo-China, and General de Gaulle, the head of the French government at the time (1944-6), committed his country to the attempt, which was persisted in even after the General’s sudden abdication in January 1946. His successors immediately came up against the problem which should have made them abandon the policy: France, shattered by the Second World War and its aftermath, was simply not strong enough to subdue her former subjects; nor was it clear what the French people would gain even if the impossible undertaking succeeded. Not for nine years, however, was any French government brave enough to acknowledge the inevitable. Instead ministers looked about for ways of entangling the United States, with its apparently limitless resources, in their enterprise.

The American anti-colonial tradition was so strong, and the war in Indo-China was so exactly the sort of thing that George Washington’s Farewell Address had warned against, that the French could never have succeeded in their scheme, but for the Cold War. The Cold War unfortunately made it possible for the United States government to believe the message, constantly in French mouths, that the nationalist movement in Indo-China was simply another manifestation of’the international communist conspiracy’. Furthermore, co-operation in Indo-China was a small price to pay for getting French co-operation in Europe against Russia. The Truman administration also believed that the USSR was constantly probing the West’s will, and would, wherever it detected weakness, mount an offensive. So it was as important to stand firm in Indo-China as in Korea. This explains why, after the 1950 invasion of South Korea, Truman
increased aid to the French. For if Stalin was foiled in Korea, he might, with his right hand so to speak, launch an assault in South-East Asia, unless deterred.

So America before long became the chief supplier and paymaster for the French war-effort; but that was still not enough to bring victory. In 1954 the French suffered a complete and humiliating defeat at the siege of Dienbienphu, and it became clear that the game was up. A new French Prime Minister, Pierre Mendes-France, negotiated a more or less graceful withdrawal at a conference of the powers in Geneva. It was a splendid opportunity for the Americans to cut their losses like the French. Unfortunately John Foster Dulles did not see the occasion in those terms. He was depressed and indignant at the French admission of defeat, and at one time hoped to send in American troops as a replacement, or just to stiffen morale. This idea got no support from anyone except the more brutal American admirals and generals, and Dulles was reduced to an attempt to wreck the Geneva conference by a spectacular sulk (he even refused to shake hands with the Chinese premier, Chou En-Lai). The composure of the other participants (Britain, Russia and China, as well as the belligerents) survived his tantrums, and agreement was reached after a month of hard bargaining. To this agreement (known as the Geneva Accords) Dulles refused to put his name. He accepted it as
a fait accompli
, but thereafter lost no opportunity of sabotaging it. For instance, the Accords divided Vietnam into two parts, north and south, pending countrywide elections which were supposed to take place in 1956. Anti-communist Vietnamese fled south, communists fled north. Dulles made this unpromising situation worse by inciting the provisional administration of South Vietnam to refuse to participate in the elections, which were therefore not held; for the Secretary of State believed, no doubt correctly, that such elections would be won by Ho Chi Minh, and thus the communists would take over the whole of Vietnam, which Dulles was determined to prevent. He was convinced that South-East Asia was the Western alliance’s weak point and the object of special attention by the fiends in the Kremlin (Stalin was dead, but that made no difference to Dulles). As well as snuffing out the last faint hope that Vietnam could be unified peacefully, he set up a South-East Asia Treaty Organization on the model of NATO. The members, besides the United States, were Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Thailand and the Philippines: they pledged themselves to defend each other against any attack, which might have embarrassed them if SEATO had ever amounted to anything solid. But like so many of Dulles’s schemes, it was only a castle in the air. It was neither a deterrent nor a defence.

America was now deeply committed to resisting communism in Indo-China, but the point of no return was still some way ahead. This was in part due to President Eisenhower’s willingness to rein in John Foster Dulles. A common canard of the time showed Ike viewing the Presidency simply as an agreeable place in which to pass the early years of his retirement, with
wonderful opportunities for golf. It was a grotesque exaggeration, but it conveyed a truth, as good caricature always does. Eisenhower had no great sense of mission; prudent passivity was more his line. This attitude left a lot to be desired in domestic affairs, but it had great advantages internationally. Unfortunately Ike was not consistent. He took the struggle against communism very seriously; not only did he permit the CIA to begin the planning which was to end so catastrophically in the Bay of Pigs, he also identified Indo-China as a region where the United States must, if necessary, resist the communists with its own military forces. If any one country of South-East Asia – Laos, for example – fell to the communists, all the rest would tumble over like a row of dominoes. When he met his successor, just before Kennedy’s inauguration, he said that the US should send troops into Laos, if necessary. Kennedy was appalled.

Laos was only one of the unpleasant problems which the Kennedy administration inherited. To be sure, the ‘missile gap’ of which the Democrats had made much during the election campaign of 1960 turned out to be a fiction: the United States was vastly stronger than the Soviet Union in rocketry as in all other forms of sophisticated weaponry. But relations between America and Cuba were abysmal, and the communists were plainly gaining ground in both Laos and Vietnam. The story of the Kennedy administration’s struggle with the Cuban difficulty has already been told; its handling of Indo-China displayed the same mixture of shrewdness, idealism and misplaced energy. Laos, the new President soon realized, was beyond all but diplomatic aid; as a result an agreement was negotiated, on the sort of unsatisfactory, compromised, provisional basis which has been known to last for ever, which more or less froze the Laotian civil war. Although the settlement was soon undermined by United States action, it lasted until the collapse of South Vietnam a decade later. It was easy to hope that Kennedy would finesse the Vietnamese problem in the same way. Unhappily he did not see the cases as similar. He believed that the Eisenhower administration had needlessly alienated the South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem, and devoted most of such time as he could spare for Vietnam between 1961 and 1963 to reassuring Diem, or trying to. Besides, his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, encouraged him to believe that the problem was essentially a military one, and that for every military problem there was a military answer if you looked for it hard enough. For instance, British success in suppressing the communist guerrilla movement in Malaya during the 1950s was put down to superior training in jungle warfare – superior, that is, to anything which the Americans practised; accordingly a new corps was set up, the so-called Green Berets, which followed the British model. Kennedy was infatuated with this invention, and his ghost must have been pleased to see a Green Beret among the sentinels round his coffin during his lying-in-state; but even if counter-insurgency forces were truly the means to victory in South Vietnam, which is anything but certain, the American armed services were far too
conservative in doctrine to give them a fair chance. What the admirals and generals (of the army and air force) believed in was fire-power: they were always anxious to recommend the use of nuclear weapons. They continued in that belief to the end. So Kennedy’s hopes for the Green Berets were misplaced; and it was folly to think that hugely increasing the number of American ‘advisers’ in Vietnam would be very helpful either: ‘advisers’, led by General Stilwell, had never been able to achieve much with Chiang Kai-shek during the Second World War, or after it either. President Diem was very like Chiang, and eventually Kennedy recognized that the problem was essentially political. Diem was an unmanageable ally, an incompetent ruler, and a hopeless commander in war. In the summer of 1963, when Diem’s great unpopularity with his people at last became undeniable, Kennedy realized that he was groping in a minefield in the dark. He acquiesced in a coup against Diem, but was horrified when that resulted in Diem’s murder. His own murder came three weeks later. All he had achieved in Vietnam was to lose time and deepen the American commitment. Yet it is only fair to add that the point of no return had still not been passed at the time of his death.

That death was, possibly, the decisive event. During his tenure of office Kennedy had shown himself all too ready to act as leader of the ‘Free World’ against the communist crusade – he despised his predecessor’s comparative inactivity – and he showed little scepticism about Cold War orthodoxies. On the other hand, his three years as President had seasoned him, and his cool intelligence was not one to be content with shibboleths. By contrast, Lyndon Johnson was not only inexperienced in foreign affairs, but distracted by the demands of the job into which he had been so suddenly dropped. He could never shake off a feeling that he had to act as the executor of the dead President’s will, so to speak; he dared not seem to betray his memory by abandoning policies (such as the defence of South Vietnam) to which Kennedy seemed to have been committed; besides, he himself believed firmly in the cause, and he could not forget how the Republicans had abused Truman for ‘losing’ China. So it seemed right to him to assure Henry Cabot Lodge Jr, a leading Republican, even before Kennedy was buried, that ‘I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.’ He stuck to this simple view of the business throughout his term of office. Yet he did not at first give Vietnam all his attention. He had to get himself elected President in his own right, and the way to do that, in 1964, was by concentrating on domestic issues. When at last he felt free, in the winter of 1964–5, to turn seriously to Vietnamese affairs, time had run out. The communists were on the verge of total victory over their enemies, and the American government could no longer evade a radical choice: to increase the stakes or give up the game.

Not that the little group of men round the President saw it in quite that way. Their individual choices had been made long before. All their training made it certain that the majority of them would see the decision before
them in the most conventional Cold War terms. Dean Rusk, for example, the Secretary of State, Assistant Secretary of State in charge of Far Eastern affairs during the Truman administration, had been a strong believer in the Stalinist conspiracy as an explanation of the invasion of South Korea and as a justification of America’s resistance to it. He applied the same reasoning to the Vietnamese case and came up with the same answer. Others may have been more influenced by the memory of McCarthyism: like Lyndon Johnson, they did not want to be persecuted for acquiescing in a Red victory. And they all accepted the blend of rationalizations, commitments and beliefs which made up American global policy. They were staunch anti-communists, sincerely wishing to save the Vietnamese from a fate worse than death. They were uncritically convinced that if America were seen to retreat in Indo-China all faith in her will and power would be shattered everywhere else, even in Europe: some no doubt still dreaded a return to isolationism, the bugbear of their youth, others may have taken note of General de Gaulle’s earnest efforts to undermine faith in the American commitment to European defence (the General was back at the head of French affairs and proving as obstructive to American designs as ever). All were sure that the Russians would seize the opportunity presented to them by such American weakness to make gains all over the place. Then there was the so-called ‘domino theory’ – the belief that if Indo-China fell to communism, so would every other independent state in the East, beginning with Thailand and Malaysia. Finally, there was the question of America’s inescapable commitments in the western Pacific: Guam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan. Would any of these be safe if the communists drove the United States and its allies off the mainland? Would not success in Saigon lead them on to attack Manila, or Chiang Kai-shek? Victory might make the Reds reckless: a forward defence was best. So all aid should be offered to the Saigon government, just as it had been to Syngman Rhee of South Korea. American military might was now so overwhelming (thanks to the enlightened reforms of Secretary McNamara) that victory ought not to take very long.

President Johnson listened to all these points, and indeed could have made most of them himself: he too was a product of Cold War Washington. They necessarily seemed very persuasive. But as President he was inevitably aware of countervailing pressures; he could not conceal from himself that there was still a choice to be made, by him. His advisers could take comfort in their own righteousness and consistency: he could not. If America were to go to war yet again, her people would demand success. Could he be sure of attaining it?