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

by Fredrik Logevall

  The son of a Presbyterian minister in Watertown, New York, Dulles had been involved in American diplomacy since 1907 when, as an undergraduate, he accompanied the U.S. delegation to the Hague peace conference. Well before that, he took a special interest in foreign affairs, sometimes accompanying his grandfather, the lawyer-diplomat John Watson Foster, who had been secretary of state under President Benjamin Harrison, to dinner parties at the White House. “Foster has been studying to be Secretary of State since he was five years old,” Eisenhower joked more than once, and he wasn’t that far off. When Dulles was five, his mother wrote of him, “Mentally, he is remarkable for his age. His logical acumen betokens a career as a thinker … he reasons with a clearness far beyond his age.”4

  Her judgment would be borne out time and again in the years to come, as her precocious child excelled at every level of education. Upon completing high school at age fifteen, he went to Princeton, where he threw himself into his studies and shunned the eating clubs that were the symbols of the school’s social success. He could have been popular at Princeton, he would later say, but it would have consumed too much of his time. Devoutly religious, Dulles opted against following his father’s path into the ministry and instead went to law school. Family connections—his uncle, Robert Lansing, was Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state—won him a place on the American delegation to the Paris peace conference in 1919, where he helped draft policy on German reparations and the war guilt question. In the interwar years, Dulles worked his way up the ladder at Sullivan & Cromwell, a prestigious law firm, all the while deepening his interest in politics and public service. By 1927, he was the firm’s sole managing partner and one of the highest-paid attorneys in the world.5

  An ardent believer in American internationalism, Dulles was also deeply anti-Communist and pro-business, and he thought Republicans more trustworthy than Democrats—they were more wealthy, after all, and therefore understood better how the world worked. In 1944 and again in 1948, Dulles advised Thomas E. Dewey’s campaigns for president, and he likely would have been the secretary of state in a Dewey administration. A subsequent failed run for the U.S. Senate from New York—Dulles decked his campaign car with a banner proclaiming him “Enemy of the Reds!” which about summarized his platform—convinced him that his political future lay in appointive rather than elective office. Now, in January 1953, at age sixty-five, he would get to run the State Department at last.

  Not everyone welcomed his selection. Many Europeans found him too sanctimonious by half and shuddered at his fire-and-brimstone anti-Communism, which they feared would lead to a Soviet-American confrontation and possible nuclear annihilation of the continent. They much preferred the less ideological Dean Acheson. Already in 1942, when Dulles undertook several minor missions to England, one British official found him “the wooliest type of pontificating American.… Heaven help us!” Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, remembering also that Dulles had been equivocal about the Nazi menace in the late 1930s, went so far as to write Eisenhower to express the hope that he would select someone else. Harold Macmillan, like Eden a future Tory prime minister, in his diary that spring referred to the “dunder-headed Dulles” who was “sure to make a ‘gaffe’ if it is possible to do so.”6

  In the United States, skeptics included Reinhold Niebuhr, the influential theologian, who said of him, “Mr. Dulles’s moral universe makes everything quite clear, too clear.… Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.”7 Some Republicans worried that Dulles’s propensity for hyperbole and oversimplification could lead also to heightened partisan tensions in Washington. Eisenhower thought so too, but the prospect did not worry him too much. Dulles, he shrewdly determined, could serve as a buffer between him and the Republican right and moreover had enormous experience on his side. Said the president-elect of his choice: “There’s only one man I know who has seen more of the world and talked with more people and knows more than he does, and that’s me.”8

  To the outside world, they presented two sharply different styles: Eisenhower was prudent, pragmatic, modest, easygoing; Dulles bombastic, severe, self-important, socially shy, even gauche. In conversation, the president tended to be plainspoken, while Dulles sought refuge in intellectual abstractions. Both men had been raised in deeply religious homes, but whereas Eisenhower wore his faith lightly, the secretary of state came across as inflexibly pious. Still, they developed a close working relationship, based on mutual respect if not perhaps deep affection. Behind closed doors, Dulles sometimes revealed a capacity for flexible and pragmatic thought that would have amazed outsiders, and—even more shocking—a sense of humor. He also showed he knew who was boss. Despite the claims of later detractors, he had no inclination to get ahead of the president on foreign policy, for he understood that his power derived from Eisenhower’s confidence in him. He vowed not to repeat the error of his uncle Robert Lansing, who had been dismissed for crossing Wilson. From the start, he and Eisenhower conferred frequently, in person or on the phone or—when the peripatetic secretary of state was abroad—via telegram. Whenever their schedules permitted, they got together privately for a late-afternoon drink at the White House to exchange views.

  II

  NEITHER EISENHOWER NOR DULLES HAD FOCUSED CLOSE ATTENTION on Indochina in the preceding years, but both were cognizant of the main developments. Eisenhower also possessed his own experience in Southeast Asia to draw upon. In the late 1930s, he served three years under Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines, assisting in the effort to build up a Filipino army to defend the islands against the encroaching Japanese. At that time, he defended America’s imperial record, comparing it favorably to that of the European powers; the latter, he wrote in his diary, viewed their overseas possessions as opportunities “for their own economic betterment,” whereas Americans believed in “government only by consent of the governed.”9

  As he took the oath of office, Eisenhower’s first policy priority was to make good on his campaign promise to end the Korean War as quickly as possible. But his very willingness to discuss peace terms with the North Koreans and the Chinese made him all the more determined to show firmness toward Communism elsewhere in Asia. From the start, he and Dulles sought at all costs to keep France from following their Korea example by negotiating with Ho Chi Minh. Domestic politics was one motivation—McCarthyism was a potent force in American politics that winter, and the two men were eager to avoid giving the Wisconsin senator and his supporters (or for that matter, partisan Democrats) ammunition for the soft-on-Communism charge. But Eisenhower and Dulles also saw Indochina as a key Cold War struggle; if anything, they were more convinced of the point than were their predecessors. Ho Chi Minh had to be defeated, they firmly believed, which meant the French had to stay in the fight.10

  Which is not to say that they were at all times confident about the prospects. Already two years before, in March 1951, when he commanded Western forces in Europe, Eisenhower had articulated an early version of the domino theory that would later be identified with his name—and his skepticism regarding a military solution in Vietnam. He wrote in his diary, after a Paris meeting with Jean de Lattre de Tassigny:

  The French have a knotty problem [in Indochina]—the campaign out there is a draining sore in their side. Yet if they quit and Indochina falls to Commies, it is easily possible that the entire Southeast Asia and Indonesia will go, soon to be followed by India. That prospect makes the whole problem one of interest to us all. I’d favor heavy reinforcement to get the thing over at once; but I’m convinced that no military victory is possible in that kind of theater. Even if Indochina were completely cleared of Communists, right across the border is China with inexhaustible manpower.11

  How to resolve the contradiction in the penultimate sentence Eisenhower did not explain. Later in 1951, as the de Lattre–directed efforts in Vietnam appeared to bear fruit, his doubts regarding the military outlook seemed to recede, and he now voiced consistent support for increased U.S. backing of th
e French. The cause was crucial. “General Eisenhower attaches the greatest importance to Indo China—to an extent to which I did not realize at all,” U.S. senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a Massachusetts Republican, wrote in his diary after the two men conversed that November.12

  Dulles felt likewise. At the time a lawyer in private practice, Dulles described Indochina as one of the “most difficult of all” international issues. Supporting the French cause was not pleasant, he conceded—she was a colonial power, after all—but “it seems that, as is so often the case, it is necessary as a practical matter to choose the lesser of two evils because the theoretically ideal solution [an independent, non-Communist Vietnam] is not possible for many reasons.”13

  Here Dulles summarized perfectly the position the Eisenhower administration would take in the all-important (as it turned out) first eighteen months after Inauguration Day. Never mind Eisenhower’s conviction that no military victory was possible “in that kind of theater”; never mind the low and sagging support for the war in metropolitan France; never mind that informed observers inside and outside the U.S. government had for years warned that the anti–Viet Minh cause was fraught with peril. For Dulles and Eisenhower both, Vietnam was a vital battle in the larger Cold War, one that had to be waged. A self-professed Francophile, Dulles told the French National Political Science Institute in 1952: “You are there [in Indochina] paying a heavy cost, in lives and money. I am glad that the United States is now helping substantially. I should personally be glad to see us do more, for you have really been left too much alone to discharge a task which is vital to us all.”14

  In its earliest pronouncements, the new administration radiated purpose and resolution on Vietnam. Harry Truman urged them on, telling the president-elect in November that the problem was one of insufficient French aggressiveness in the field and of fence-sitting on the part of the Vietnamese, and that Indochina was an “urgent matter” for the administration to address. From Saigon, the reports were downbeat as the year turned, with Ambassador Donald Heath (his title had been changed from minister in June 1952) expressing newfound pessimism regarding the prospects of the anti–Ho Chi Minh forces. The Viet Minh, he informed Dulles, held the initiative throughout Tonkin and even controlled much of the Red River Delta; should the highlands in the northwest be lost, the Communists would have an open shot at Laos and Thailand. In Saigon, meanwhile, the government under Prime Minister Nguyen Van Tam lacked popular support, and Bao Dai was more and more removed (in every sense of the word) from the struggle.15

  The only answer was to try harder. Eisenhower’s inaugural address drew a direct link between the French soldier killed in Indochina and the American life given in Korea. In early February, in his first State of the Union speech, he characterized the Indochina struggle as part of a worldwide fight against Communist aggression. France in Indochina, he declared in another speech the same month, was “hold[ing] the line of freedom” against “Communist aggression throughout the world.” Dulles, meanwhile, said in a nationwide broadcast that “if they [the Soviets] could get this peninsula of Indochina, Siam, Burma, and Malaya, they would have what is called the rice bowl of Asia.… And you can see that if the Soviet Union had control of the rice bowl of Asia that would be another weapon which would tend to expand their control into Japan and India.”16

  Privately too, senior officials expressed determination, and a conviction that the stakes were big—bigger even than in Korea. In December 1952, before the inauguration, Eisenhower and top aides discussed Indochina at length aboard the USS Helena, en route home from a visit to Korea. The president-elect stressed that the anti–Viet Minh effort was vitally important and would be a major foreign policy issue for his administration. In late January, Dulles told senior U.S. civilian and military officials that defeat in Southeast Asia would lead to the loss of Japan. In March, army chief of staff Joseph Collins produced a memorandum bearing the ominous title “Broadening the Participation of the United States in the Indochina Operation,” which called for greater U.S. financial and material support to the French. About the same time, Dulles informed French leaders that the president saw Vietnam and Korea as parts of a single front, and that this distinguished the new administration from its predecessor. Late that month, in his record of a conversation with Eisenhower, Dulles wrote that Indochina was probably the administration’s top priority in foreign policy, because unlike Korea its loss could not be localized “but would spread throughout Asia and Europe.”17

  By the time the secretary spoke those words, more than 139,000 metric tons of U.S. equipment had been delivered to the French, including some 900 combat vehicles, 15,000 other vehicles, 2,500 artillery pieces, 24,000 automatic weapons, 75,000 small arms, and almost 9,000 radios. In addition, the French had received 160 F-6F and F-8F fighter planes, 41 B-26 light bombers, and 28 C-47 transports plus 155 aircraft engines and 93,000 bombs.18 It was a massive amount of matériel, but the new administration offered to do substantially more if Paris would only provide a plan for winning the war.

  Britain too preached the need for victory in the struggle. In due course, London and Washington would drift apart in their assessments of what ought to happen in Vietnam, as we shall see; here, however, at the start of 1953, there was little daylight between them. No less than the Eisenhower administration, the Conservative government of Winston Churchill feared the consequences of a French withdrawal and a Viet Minh victory. From Her Majesty’s representatives on the scene in Indochina came a steady stream of reports in late 1952 and early 1953 detailing the continuing weaknesses of the Vietnamese National Army and of the French-backed government; at the same time, the embassy in Paris reported flagging support for the war among the metropolitan French populace. Prone to domino theorizing of their own—in particular, they worried that Western defeat in Indochina could render their own posture in Malaya untenable—British officials in this period fully matched the Americans in their desire to stiffen French resolve, and to convince Paris of the need for a more offensive military strategy.19

  But the French saw their task differently, as was made clear when a delegation headed by new Radical prime minister René Mayer visited Washington a few weeks after the inauguration. Foreign Minister Georges Bidault and High Commissioner for Indochina Jean Letourneau made the trip as well, and in the weeks prior to departure the three men discussed what could be expected of the new American administration, not only with respect to Indochina but also German rearmament, the European Defense Community (EDC), and other issues. Stalin had died suddenly at the beginning of the month, and the trio wondered how that might affect Washington’s Soviet policy. Pleased that Eisenhower’s early comments described Vietnam not as a colonial war but as a vital Cold War struggle, the French trio acknowledged among themselves that they could not offer Washington merely the “maintenance of a sterile and costly status quo.” But they also worried about the new administration’s aggressiveness on Indochina and concurred that there could be no thought of increasing the French war effort significantly, no matter how hard the Americans pressed.20

  What ensued in Washington was another Franco-American dialogue of the deaf. For the French, recalled a U.S. intelligence officer who sat against the wall during one Pentagon session, it was not even a question of winning the war:

  Their goal, Letourneau said, was simply to maintain a position of strength from which an honorable settlement could be negotiated. This, he noted, was exactly what the United States was then doing in Korea. This statement seemed to pass right over the heads of the Americans at the table, who suggested that the French seemed not to understand the American proposal. The American spokesman, an assistant secretary of state, restated the American proposition, emphasizing our willingness to provide the means if the French simply provided us with a viable plan for victory. Letourneau, in turn, restated his position, noting that it was “not the policy of his government” to seek a military victory in Indochina, that indeed victory probably was unattainable because of the likel
ihood that the Chinese would intervene in Indochina to prevent such an outcome, just as they had done in Korea.21

  Nor did the prime minister offer more assurances. In a conversation aboard the presidential yacht Williamsburg, Mayer was evasive on his government’s intentions for Indochina, causing Eisenhower to say sharply that there could be no talk of additional U.S. aid if Paris did not produce a plan that, “if it did not lead to complete victory, would, at least, give hope of an ultimate solution.” A chastened Mayer promised to drum up something.

  Named for Letourneau and largely drafted right there on the spot, while the French team was still on American soil, the core of the plan involved deploying newly raised, U.S.-financed “light” battalions (that is, six hundred men) that would occupy pacified areas in central and southern Vietnam, permitting groupes mobiles to be concentrated in Tonkin. Then, in 1955, Franco-Vietnamese forces would take the offensive against the main Viet Minh units and destroy them. Heavily dependent on a major expansion of the Vietnamese National Army, the plan was criticized by American military analysts who doubted that such an expansion would occur, or that the Viet Minh would oblige by remaining static in the meantime. Trying to clear rear areas before destroying the main Viet Minh forces, Admiral Arthur W. Radford said, would be like “trying to mop up water without turning off the faucet.” Some also complained that the proposal avoided the heart of the problem, namely the heavy and growing Viet Minh presence in the Red River Delta. But from Saigon, both Ambassador Heath and MAAG chief General Thomas J. H. Trapnell defended the Letourneau Plan as the best that could be achieved in the circumstances. For want of anything better, Washington officials signed off in April, not expecting much in the way of results.22