The requests were under consideration in Washington when a high-profile French visitor arrived for consultations with senior U.S. officials. It was chief of staff of the armed forces Paul Ely, France’s highest active officer, who only a few weeks earlier had accompanied René Pleven on his tour of Indochina. Important though that trip had been, this one would be even more so.64 For it would set in motion the most intensive period of Franco-American and Anglo-American deliberations on Indochina since the outbreak of war seven-plus years earlier. For more than a month the discussions would last, and they would reveal deep fissures in relations among the three Western allies as they debated the most pressing question of all: Should the United States, either alone or in concert with Britain and other allies, intervene directly in the war?
CHAPTER 19
AMERICA WANTS IN
LITTLE DID ANYONE IN WASHINGTON KNOW THAT WHEN GENERAL Paul Ely’s plane touched down at National Airport on Saturday morning, March 20, 1954, after a fourteen-hour transatlantic flight, it marked the start of the most intensive period of American policy making on Indochina, a period that would last more than a month and would take the nation to the brink of war. Allied military leaders were always descending on the American capital, and if this wasn’t quite a routine visit—Ely was his country’s chief active military officer, and his forces faced a serious predicament in Vietnam—neither was his arrival greeted with a great deal of anticipation in a city where preponderant attention was focused on the Army-McCarthy hearings about to begin. News of the Viet Minh attack on Dien Bien Phu had filtered in and was a source of concern, but hopes remained high that the French could withstand the attack and that, regardless, the battle in remote Tonkin would not be decisive. When the NSC convened on March 18, President Eisenhower did not exhibit any particular urgency about Dien Bien Phu, even after CIA director Allen Dulles reported the agency’s assessment that the fortress had only a fifty-fifty chance of holding out. The soldier-president noted that France had air supremacy and napalm, as well as heavily fortified positions, which meant that the Viet Minh’s two-to-one numerical superiority mattered little. Director Dulles did not disagree and said the pessimistic French reports from Saigon might be a ploy to exaggerate the extent of their ultimate victory.1
If anyone did see Ely’s visit as a potential watershed moment, it was Admiral Arthur C. Radford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—that is, Ely’s American counterpart. An Asia-firster in the mold of MacArthur who had an abiding faith in the efficacy of airpower, Radford saw Dien Bien Phu as both an impending disaster and an opportunity: as the potential setting of France’s symbolic defeat in the war, and as a chance for the United States to strike a blow against the real menace in the region, the People’s Republic of China. The admiral would be a principal player on Indochina in the weeks to come, as the lead advocate of direct U.S. intervention in Vietnam, with airpower and if necessary with ground troops. On March 19, the day before Ely’s arrival, he met with General Jean Valluy, the former commander in chief in Indochina who now was chief of the French military mission and French member of the NATO standing group in Washington. Valluy had just returned from Paris, and he told Radford that Ely would bring a sobering message: Paris authorities had concluded that victory could not be achieved in 1954 or 1955 and that France could carry on the fight into 1956 only if the United States contributed military forces to the campaign.2
On Saturday morning, as snow flurries dusted the city, Radford went to the White House for a ninety-minute off-the-record meeting on Indochina with Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers. Though no notes were taken, Radford must have relayed Valluy’s comments. From there, the admiral went to meet Ely’s plane, and that evening he hosted a small stag dinner at his home in the Frenchman’s honor, attended also by Allen Dulles and Vice President Nixon and a few others. A graduate of Saint-Cyr and a veteran of both world wars, the gaunt, leathery Ely knew Washington well: Before becoming chief of staff, he had been the French member of NATO’s standing group on military strategy, which convened in the U.S. capital. On this night, the subject of direct American involvement in the war apparently did not arise, but Ely acknowledged that Dien Bien Phu might fall, leading to a further deterioration of French morale. The garrison’s fate was actually not crucial in military terms, he said, for France still held the advantage in the two major deltas in Vietnam, but psychologically a great deal hinged on the outcome in the basin.
In meetings with U.S. officials over the following days, Ely asked for twenty-five additional B-26 bombers and American volunteers to fly them, as well as eight hundred parachutes required for the continued support by air of the forces at Dien Bien Phu. Eisenhower approved the requests and did his best to buck up French morale. While posing for photographers after an Oval Office meeting on the morning of March 22, the president was heard to remark to Ely that things sometimes had looked bleak for the Allies during World War II, “but we won in the end and we will win again.” Radford chimed in: “The French are going to win. It is a fight that is going to be finished with our help.”3
It was a congenial start to Ely’s visit, and he no doubt expected more of the same when he arrived at Foggy Bottom the next day for a session with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Not only was Dulles widely perceived in the mid-1950s as the prime architect of American foreign policy; he had also made clear his fervent desire to prevent a Viet Minh victory in Indochina. But the secretary was notably cautious on this day, refusing to be drawn into a discussion of what Washington would do if China sent aircraft into the war. Before any such decision could be reached, he told Ely, several factors would have to be examined, and it was premature for him even to venture an opinion. U.S. prestige would be involved with any move to intervene, and thus extreme care had to be taken. Certainly the United States would insist on playing a larger role in war planning and training of the VNA than was currently the case, and she would expect a greater French commitment to granting full independence to the Associated States.4
PRESIDENT EISENHOWER RECEIVES GENERAL ELY (MIDDLE) AND ADMIRAL RADFORD IN THE OVAL OFFICE, MARCH 22, 1954. (photo credit 19.1)
Dulles maintained his careful line in a meeting with Eisenhower on the morning of March 24 and in a subsequent telephone conversation with Radford. The United States should not intervene, he told both men, unless Paris provided concrete assurances that the two governments could work well together. Any commitments would have far-reaching implications, and the administration should not move without good answers to crucial questions, concerning not only Indochina but France’s status as a key player in the West. Significantly, the president and the JCS chairman seemed prepared to move farther, faster. Eisenhower agreed with Dulles that political preconditions had to be met prior to a major U.S. intervention in Vietnam, but he added that he would “not wholly exclude the possibility of a single strike, if it were almost certain to produce decisive results.”5
Radford, for his part, engaged in hours of private talks with Ely and even persuaded the general to remain in Washington an extra day so they could properly examine the various exigencies. The results of this final meeting, which took place on March 26, remain unclear, but they would be the subject of intense controversy in the months and years to come. The agreed record of the session said they discussed potential responses to a Chinese aerial intervention in the war, but the conversation ranged also to the specific military assistance Washington might provide to the beleaguered garrison at Dien Bien Phu. Both men knew of a plan—code-named Vulture (Vautour)—conceived by U.S. and French officers in Saigon, involving massive nighttime attacks on Viet Minh positions surrounding the basin by U.S. carrier-based aircraft as well as B-29s from Clark Air Base in the Philippines. Some 350 planes could be over the valley with two days notice, the American said. Ely later claimed that Radford strongly supported this plan and intimated that he could overcome Dulles’s reservations and gain the president’s approval. Radford admitted only that he had told Ely that American pl
anes could be over the valley within two days of a formal request. He never made any promises, he insisted, and emphasized that higher authorities would have to make the final decision.6
Probably at least some miscommunication occurred. The two chose not to use an interpreter for this final session and were barely conversant in each other’s language. The Frenchman may also have heard what he wanted to hear, reading more into the JCS chairman’s assertions than he should have, and confusing American capability with American intent. Yet in all likelihood, as one judicious historian of the episode has concluded, “Ely received the impression that Radford intended.”7 The admiral personally favored using airpower at Dien Bien Phu and more broadly sought expanded U.S. involvement in the war; he had even at times advocated the use of atomic weapons against China. Aware that Ely had been disappointed in Dulles’s words, Radford may well have wanted to buck him up, to prevent any further diminution in the French military’s will to continue. And besides, Radford might well have told himself, wasn’t it official U.S. policy, as articulated in NSC-5405 and in countless other documents, to prevent a Viet Minh victory? Hadn’t President Eisenhower himself, back in January, fully shared Radford’s position that American airpower might have to be used? What was Vulture but an affirmation of those twin views?8
Just the day before, on March 25, in an NSC meeting that focused heavily on the war, Eisenhower had provided additional grist for Radford’s mill. To Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson’s suggestion that one might “forget about Indochina for a while and concentrate on the effort to get the remaining free nations of Southeast Asia in some kind of condition to resist Communist aggression against themselves,” Eisenhower was unequivocal. “The collapse of Indochina,” he shot back, “would produce a chain reaction which would result in the fall of all Southeast Asia to the Communists.” A Viet Minh victory would be a disaster, and it was necessary to contemplate new measures to prevent it. Accordingly, the president went on, “this might be the moment to explore with the Congress what support could be anticipated in the event that it seemed desirable to intervene in Indochina.” Congress, he declared, was the key: Lawmakers “would have to be in on any move by the United States to intervene in Indochina. It was simply academic to think otherwise.”9
Radford was in the room when Ike uttered those words, and he grasped the implications. The president of the United States had just said that the fall of Indochina would be a calamitous development and that he was contemplating expanded U.S. involvement to keep this from occurring. Congress would have to be on board prior to any intervention, Eisenhower had made clear, but the JCS chairman could be forgiven for thinking that such backing would be forthcoming, no matter how distasteful many lawmakers might find the prospect of another Asian war so soon after Korea. Few of them, he could sensibly conclude, would ultimately be prepared to stand in the president’s way. Little wonder if Radford made certain assurances about American steadfastness to Ely the following day.
Had Radford known of John Foster Dulles’s comments at dinner on March 25, he would have been further emboldened. The secretary of state, who had also witnessed Eisenhower’s outburst before the NSC earlier that day and seemed to have shifted his stance somewhat in response, told Australia’s ambassador in Washington, Percy Spender, a close personal friend, that Vietnam was too important to leave to the French. The Laniel government did not appreciate the stakes in the struggle and seemed inclined to go into Geneva in a vacillating frame of mind. Some way simply had to be found to make the French hold on militarily until the start of the monsoon season brought its annual respite.10
II
IN THE FINAL DAYS OF MARCH, AS THE BATTLE RAGED ON IN DIEN Bien Phu, the administration thus began to prepare congressional and public opinion for the possibility of direct American intervention in Indochina. As The New York Times reported on March 28, a public education offensive was under way, led by Dulles, to explain to the public “what is at stake in Indochina.”11 According to Richard Rovere in The New Yorker, Dulles had undertaken “one of the boldest campaigns of political suasion ever undertaken by an American statesman,” in which congressmen, journalists, and television personalities of all stripes were being “rounded up in droves and escorted to lectures and briefings” on the crucial importance of achieving victory in Vietnam. Should Indochina be “lost,” the color charts showed that Communist influence would radiate outward in a semicircle from Indochina to Thailand, Burma, and Malaya, and far to the south to Indonesia. The briefing officers also listed the raw materials that would fall into Soviet and Chinese hands and be denied forever to the West, and they warned darkly that an American failure here likely would cause anti-Communist resistance to falter throughout Asia, from India to Japan. The secretary of state, Rovere wrote, was represented in the briefings as believing that “we should not flinch at doing anything that is needed to prevent a Communist victory,” including, if necessary, committing American ground forces.12
Operation Vulture per se was thus not the issue in this public education effort: A large-scale one-off air attack to save the Dien Bien Phu fortress was but one possible form of intervention and not perhaps the preferred option. (Even advocates wondered if the hour had not passed for such an operation.) The aim, rather, was to test the waters more generally, to gauge the likely response on Capitol Hill and beyond to the use in Vietnam of American military force, in whatever scenario and to whatever extent.
Explicit congressional authorization would be required. Eisenhower had made that clear. He had only slim majorities in both houses, after all (48–47–1 in the Senate, 221–213–1 in the House), and he could scarcely depend on Republicans to remain unified. In the upper house, especially, the debate over Joseph McCarthy’s sensational charge that the army had covered up alleged foreign espionage activities had badly split the GOP caucus. More generally, Republicans lacked a consensus on foreign policy and on how far to go to check Communist expansion in Asia. The right wing of the party was unreliable; Majority Leader William Knowland of California, for example, expressed equal distaste for sitting down at the bargaining table with Communists (Geneva, he declared, could be a “Far Eastern Munich”) and for sending U.S. forces to rescue the French. The Democrats, meanwhile, who had by and large supported administration foreign policy through 1953, were in a restive mood as winter turned to spring. Remembering well the GOP’s attacks on Truman for his unilateral decision to send American troops to Korea in 1950, some now said they were not eager to rally to the aid of a Republican president contemplating a similar move.
A centerpiece of the administration’s public education campaign was John Foster Dulles’s “United Action Speech” (as it came to be known), delivered before the Overseas Press Club in New York City on March 29. The secretary, following his usual custom, drafted it himself, with input from aides as well as congressional figures—lest they “say they were not advised.” Eisenhower too went over it carefully. It was important to get both tone and content right. To encourage a favorable reception to the speech, the president also called in Republican legislators, including Knowland and House Speaker Joseph Martin, and conveyed his own concern over the worsening situation in Vietnam. Vice President Nixon, who attended, recorded in his diary that Ike referred to the situation at Dien Bien Phu as desperate, so much so that he would consider the use of a diversionary tactic such as a landing by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces on China’s Hainan Island or a naval blockade of the Chinese mainland. “I am bringing this up at this time,” the president said, “because at any time within the space of forty-eight hours, it might be necessary to move into the battle of Dien Bien Phu in order to keep it from going against us, and in that case I will be calling in the Democrats as well as the Republican leaders to inform them of the actions we’re taking.”13
Did the president mean what he said here, or was he merely using strong language—America might have to “move into battle” at any time; he would inform lawmakers rather than consult with them—to
assess the lawmakers’ reaction and to make Dulles’s speech that evening seem safely moderate by comparison? It’s hard to know. Certainly, his convening of the meeting on minimal notice and his choice of words showed how engaged he had become by late March on the Indochina issue. And it is telling that, in reading over the draft of Dulles’s speech, Eisenhower toughened the language in several places.14
That evening a sense of anticipation filled the room as Dulles stepped up to the lectern a little after nine o’clock, stiff and somber as always. Word had spread that he would deliver more than the ordinary after-dinner foreign policy overview. He didn’t disappoint, though the precise meaning of his words would be intensely parsed in newsrooms and chancelleries the world over in the days to come. A guideline for action more than an actual statement of policy, the speech stressed the importance of Indochina to American interests and raised the prospect of military action to “save” it. Even a partial Viet Minh victory would be disastrous, Dulles declared: “If the Communist forces won uncontested control over Indochina or any substantial part thereof, they would surely resume the same pattern of aggression against other free peoples in the area.”
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam Page 53
