Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

  Truman’s globalism encountered prominent critics, among them former vice president Henry Wallace, isolationist senator Robert A. Taft, and columnist Walter Lippmann, who warned variously that the policy would bankrupt the Treasury and that it marked a misreading of both Soviet capabilities and intentions.30 The critique failed to find traction in the halls of power in Washington, for by spring 1947, Soviet hostility was a staple of both policy documents and much journalistic reporting. Equally important in historical terms and for Vietnam policy in particular, by then there was no mistaking the growing salience of apocalyptic anti-Communism in American political discourse. In March, Truman created the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, which gave government security officials authorization to screen two million employees of the federal government for any hint of political deviance. It marked the beginning of an anti-Communist crusade inside the United States that paralleled the Cold War abroad and had no real likeness anywhere else in the Western world, in either scope or intensity.31 More and more, a staunch and undifferentiated anti-Communism became the required posture of all aspiring politicians, whether Republican or Democrat; more and more, alternative visions for relations with Moscow were deemed illegitimate.

  In response to this emerging U.S.-Soviet confrontation and this changing American mood, French leaders shifted their public diplomacy on Indochina. In Vietnam, Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu early in the year moved what was then still a localized and strictly Franco-Vietnamese conflict to the highest international level, that of East versus West, Communism versus anti-Communism. Long convinced that Washington and Moscow would clash on the world stage, the admiral now told anyone who would listen that Ho and the Viet Minh were mere pawns in Stalin’s struggle for world supremacy. France, he vowed, would never allow the Sovietization of a people it had nurtured and defended for decades, and he called Indochina a key battle in the West’s emerging struggle with Moscow.32

  That basic message, articulated also by other French officials—though not by all; General Leclerc said in January that “anti-communism will be a useless tool as long as the problem of nationalism remains unresolved”—found a receptive audience in Washington. Despite the fact that the State Department saw no evidence of mass popular support for Communism within Vietnam, and further that it was not ideology but a desire for independence and a hatred of the French that drove the unrest, the principals in U.S. decision making proceeded on the basis of worst-case assumptions. Dean Acheson, the undersecretary of state and a figure of growing influence at Foggy Bottom, said that while the Viet Minh had never acknowledged any connection to the Kremlin, neither had they explicitly denied such a tie. Other U.S. analysts noted Ho Chi Minh’s training in Moscow in the 1920s and speculated that the Soviet government was cleverly concealing its involvement in Southeast Asian nationalist movements. Here again the lack of evidence for such involvement did not seem to matter, as skeptics were given the impossible task of proving a negative, of proving Soviet noninvolvement. Even liberals, who surmised (correctly) that France was using the Communist bogey to justify a war undertaken for other reasons, feared that Moscow would seek to exploit the situation if the fighting grew more bloody; hence their push for a serious U.S. effort at facilitating a negotiated settlement. Such a settlement would undercut the appeal of radicalism within Vietnam and at the same time deny the Soviets a propaganda advantage.33

  As before, American strategists also feared the effects in France herself of a French defeat in Indochina. To oppose Dutch efforts to use military force to subdue nationalists in Java was one thing—the Netherlands was a minor player on the European stage. France was different. Might a defeat cause Western-oriented moderates to lose their grip on power in Paris and enhance the prestige of the Soviet-supported PCF, maybe even bring that party to power? The thought gave the Truman team heartburn and made them reluctant to quibble with Paris over its pursuit of a military solution in far-off Southeast Asia. True, these men acknowledged, Stalin was not actively engaged in fomenting revolution in France and indeed kept the PCF at arm’s length, but this was only because he sought to avoid an international crisis while the future of Germany remained an open question; once that issue was resolved, he would surely turn his focus to France.

  But senior officials were loath to simply throw U.S. support behind Valluy’s war effort. They ruled out direct assistance to the military campaign and told Paris planners that any attempt to reconquer Vietnam by force of arms would be wrongheaded. At the same time, they knew full well that a sizable chunk of the unrestricted U.S. economic assistance to France ($1.9 billion between July 1945 and July 1948) was being used to pay war costs. General George C. Marshall, the new secretary of state and a man attuned to the complexities of Asian revolutionary wars (he had recently been a mediator between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists), showed this high-level ambivalence in a cable to ambassador to France Jefferson Caffery in February, in which he instructed the diplomat to discuss Indochina with French leaders. “On the one hand,” Marshall wrote, “we have only the friendliest feelings toward France and we are anxious in every way we can to support France in her fight to regain her economic, political, and military strength and to restore herself as in fact one of [the] major powers of [the] world.” In spite of any misunderstanding that might have arisen in the minds of the French in regard to the U.S. position concerning Indochina, “they must appreciate that we have fully recognized France’s sovereign position in that area and we do not wish to have it appear that we are in any way endeavoring [to] undermine that position.”

  On the other hand, Caffery was not one to shy away from criticizing French policy: “We cannot shut our eyes to the fact that there are two sides to this problem and that our reports indicate both a lack of French understanding of [the] other side (more in Saigon than in Paris) and continued existence of a dangerously outmoded colonial outlook and methods in the area. Furthermore, there is no escape from the fact that the trend of the times is to the effect that colonial empires in the XIX century sense are rapidly becom[ing] a thing of the past.”

  Marshall acknowledged the French claim that Ho Chi Minh had “direct Communist connections” and further that Washington did not wish to see a colonial administration supplanted by one controlled by the Kremlin. But he insisted—along with State Department liberals such as Moffat and Kenneth Landon—that the Vietnamese nationalists were motivated not by Marxist ideology but by a thirst for national independence. Should another government make a push for a UN diplomatic initiative, the general said, the United States would therefore have no option but to grant her support.

  What, then, should be Caffery’s final recommendation to his French interlocutors? There was none. Marshall could only throw up his hands as he concluded, in a startling admission of impotence: “Frankly, we have no solution [to the] problem to suggest.”34

  Washington’s continuing indecision left the initiative to the French. But Paris leaders knew they had merely dodged a bullet, and that they still had a job to do in overcoming opposition to their policy within the British and especially the American policy-making establishments. “It appears that the Indochina affair must now be dealt with not so much on its actual merits but even more so by taking account of the likely international impacts and consequences,” Jean Chauvel of the Foreign Ministry wrote in February.35

  Ho Chi Minh would not have put it much differently. From the start, the veteran revolutionary had understood the importance of gaining foreign support for his cause; now, with the military situation developing into an uneasy stalemate and with the enemy still holding the advantage by many indices of power, he thought it more vital still. Thus far France had played her political hand better than his DRV, he knew—Paris had secured a hands-off policy from all the major powers and the tacit backing of some of them, while his government fought alone. This, he determined, had to change.

  Diplomacy, that is to say, was about to assume new importance, for both sides. It would do so, however, in the cont
ext of a deepening rift in the global arena between East and West, this new thing called the Cold War.

  CHAPTER 8

  “IF I ACCEPTED THESE TERMS I’D BE A COWARD”

  “WOULD YOU ACCEPT THESE TERMS IF YOU WERE IN MY PLACE?” Ho Chi Minh asked the Frenchman who had come to talk peace with him at his headquarters in Thai Nguyen, forty-five miles north of Hanoi. It was near midnight on May 14, 1947, and the visitor had just arrived after a two-day trek through the threatening Viet Minh–controlled terrain, armed with a new French proposal for a diplomatic settlement of the war.

  He had been sent by Émile Bollaert, who some weeks earlier had replaced the notorious Admiral Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu as high commissioner in Indochina. The “bloody monk,” widely believed to have sparked the war with his aggressive actions in 1946, had become a liability in France’s efforts to create international legitimacy for her actions against the Viet Minh. His bombastic pronouncements, his rigid views, his thinly veiled anti-Americanism—it all proved too much for planners in Paris, not to mention American and British diplomats in Vietnam. Bollaert, a civilian with minimal background in foreign affairs, would be different, French officials promised, much more subtle and “constructive” than his predecessor had been. Hardly a revealing assertion, skeptics replied. Who wouldn’t be?1

  Bollaert’s first charge: to reopen talks with the Viet Minh. The move was undertaken partly for domestic political reasons—the Ramadier government wanted to show its Socialist members that contact with Ho was being maintained—and partly in order to show Americans and others in the world community that France really desired a political settlement. Bollaert assured U.S. ambassador Jefferson Caffery even before leaving for Vietnam that there could be no return to “previous colonial practices” and that Paris was committed to finding a peaceful resolution to the struggle. He repeated the vow when Ho Chi Minh in April formally proposed peace talks with a view to a cease-fire. But in fact few French policy makers were willing to compromise or to abandon the essence of “previous colonial practices.” Victory, after all, was within grasp. “There is no military problem any longer in Indochina,” Paul Coste-Floret, the minister of war, boasted in May. “The success of French arms is complete.” (But didn’t the Viet Minh control huge swaths of territory in Tonkin and Annam? a skeptical reporter asked. Yes, Coste-Floret allowed, but the territory in question was sparsely populated and would count for little in the end.) “Talks” with Ho Chi Minh were fine, he and others believed, so long as they concerned the modalities of the Viet Minh’s surrender.2

  For the mission to Ho’s jungle headquarters, Bollaert selected one of his most knowledgeable political advisers, a scholar and teacher who enjoyed considerable respect among many Vietnamese for his knowledge of the country and who ranks as one of the most extraordinary figures in our story. Paul Léon Joseph Mus was born at his parents’ home in Bourges in central France on June 1, 1902. He came of age in World War I–era Hanoi, his father having been in charge of establishing a Western education system to impart French technical expertise and traditions to elite Vietnamese youths. In 1907, the elder Mus opened the Collège du protectorat, later known as the École normale, from which a dozen years later his son would graduate. A child of empire, Paul was then an unquestioning believer in France’s civilizing mission, and through the 1930s, he wrote nothing critical of colonialism in Indochina or the empire—nothing, for example, about the bloody repression of the peasant uprisings in Nghe Tinh province in 1930–31, which occurred while he was in Vietnam as an officer-reservist in the Indochinese colonial army.3

  The Second World War, however, changed him. When the Nazis invaded, he was back in France, commanding a platoon of colonial machine gunners and peasant-soldiers at Valvin and Sully-sur-Loire. His actions earned him the Croix de Guerre. When he joined de Gaulle’s Free French movement in 1942, Mus’s Indochina expertise made him a prime candidate to conduct clandestine activities in Indochina. And so, in January 1945 he parachuted into Tonkin to contact the resistance and rally Vietnamese to the Free French cause. He was in Hanoi on the night of March 9, when the Japanese launched their coup de force. Under disguise, Mus managed to escape the city and make his way through two hundred and fifty miles of hostile territory—all of it on foot, and having to rely on Vietnamese villagers for shelter and travel guidance—before linking up with French colonial troops retreating into southern China. That September he accompanied General Leclerc’s delegation to the Japanese surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay, and then in the autumn participated in Leclerc’s reoccupation of Cochin China.4

  Already in 1945, in a remarkable report he titled “Note sur la crise morale franco-indochinoise,” Mus emphasized the profound sense of patriotism and national identity animating the Vietnamese. This moral fervor, he plainly implied, was as deep as that felt by Frenchmen living under the yoke of the Nazi occupation, and it had moved Vietnamese to resist foreign occupation throughout their history. “In short, what the Vietnamese have preserved, through all the vicissitudes of their history, is a community of blood, of language, of sentiment,” Mus wrote. “One can say that this is their essential milieu and one from which the Annamite never willingly distances himself for any length of time. For anyone who is familiar with this people, the background to this state of things, the model that is more or less unconscious, yet a concrete manifestation of this communitarian ideal, is the village. This is the form in which the Annamite lives as a social being, and the basis of his patriotism.”5

  For Mus, it was no longer possible by war’s end to hold easy assumptions concerning the French Empire and its legitimacy. How, he wondered, could one justify a colonial system that placed some men above others, particularly when those others resisted it? More specifically, how could one support a French effort to reclaim control over Indochina—by force if necessary—in view of the nationalist fervor sweeping the land? The questions gnawed at Mus’s sensibility. Though he was not yet prepared to advocate an immediate and unilateral French withdrawal from Indochina, he began to imagine a new, postcolonial order, in which all men would have to be seen as equals, in which the Vietnamese demand for independence would be met.

  By early 1947, when Mus agreed to become Bollaert’s political adviser, he hoped there might yet be time to avert an all-out war. But even before he set out for Ho Chi Minh’s headquarters in the second week of May—as in March 1945, he traveled on foot, this time some forty miles over narrow paths and through Viet Minh–controlled territory—that hope must have been largely dashed, in view of the talking points he had been given. He was to inform Ho that France would agree to a cease-fire if the Viet Minh laid down their weapons, allowed French troops to circulate freely in areas they presently held, and arranged for the handover of numerous Foreign Legion deserters.

  Mus had ample time to contemplate these terms on his trek and also to decide how he should begin the encounter. He opted to greet Ho with a simple “Comment allez-vous?” (How are you?) and to see how the Viet Minh leader answered. At three A.M. on May 12, he was brought into Ho Chi Minh’s presence and offered his greeting. “Suffisament bien” (Well enough) came the reply, which Mus thought was hardly the word choice of a man inclined to bow to a French ultimatum. Sure enough, as Mus laid out the specifics of the French proposal, he could see he was getting nowhere. “In the French Union there is no place for cowards,” Ho said after he had finished. “If I accepted these conditions I would be one.” Mus did not disagree. When Ho asked if Mus would accept the terms if the positions were reversed, he could only answer no. And with that, the session ended. The champagne bottle that Ho Chi Minh had set aside in the event of a successful meeting remained unopened, and Mus soon set off on the long walk back to Hanoi. He was despondent but could not help but admire the veteran revolutionary’s unshakable determination. The mission, he later recalled, taught him “more than in thirty years elsewhere about what a people could wish for and accomplish.”6

  After Paul Mus’s visit, no non-Communist
Westerner is believed to have seen Ho Chi Minh in the jungle until midway through 1954. By then the French war had ended in defeat and Paul Mus had published a classic study of contemporary Vietnam, a dense, convoluted, mesmerizing work titled Viêt-Nam: sociologie d’une guerre (1952).7 His stature in Vietnamese studies would be enormous, perhaps unmatched anywhere in the Western world, and he would hold joint professorial appointments at the Collège de France and Yale University (alternating semesters between the two institutions). But long before that, indeed already now in the spring of 1947, Mus had drawn three major conclusions: that Ho was the undisputed leader of the Viet Minh; that Ho had an almost serene confidence in the Viet Minh’s revolutionary program; and that this program had already accomplished an enormous amount in the countryside through which Mus was passing. French forces might be able to reoccupy these regions, the Frenchman reasoned, but they could never achieve lasting control over them. Why? Because France had already lost the battle that counted most: the battle for the support of the local population. Peasants by the tens of thousands were innocently working their fields by day, then turning into guerrillas after dark, engaging in sabotage and bolstering the fortunes of Viet Minh regular forces. How could France prevail in such a struggle? She could not. Already in 1947, Mus believed that it would be a war for people rather than for territory, and that the Viet Minh would be supreme.8

  II

  IRONICALLY, MUS FELT MORE CONFIDENCE ON THESE POINTS THAN did Ho Chi Minh himself. The onetime playwright had shown again that he was a pretty fair actor—but his steely determination in the Frenchman’s presence that night masked deep trepidations about the road ahead. No doubt Mus was right that politics would win out, that people mattered more than territory, and that the revolutionary forces had inherent advantages at the local level, where the mass of Vietnamese lived, that the colonials could never hope to match. But would it be enough? What about the colossal French superiority in military firepower, so transparent in the fighting to this point? To overcome this element, Ho Chi Minh believed he would need political strength of a very different kind. He would need support abroad, in France and among the great powers on the world stage.