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

by Fredrik Logevall

  Neither Vyacheslav Molotov that evening, nor Anthony Eden the following day, nor even Bidault a day after that, caused anything like this commotion, and there was no journalistic frenzy when a somber John Foster Dulles emerged from his plane late on April 25 and read a statement he had drafted a few minutes earlier while en route. A “durable peace” in Indochina ought to be achievable, he said, but it was not up to the Western powers to bring it about. “We hope to find that the aggressors come here in a mood to purge themselves of their aggression.”2

  Zhou Enlai, having declined to share a headquarters with the Russians, chose for his residence the splendid and ornate Le Grand Mont-Fleuri, a twenty-six-room mansion five miles from Geneva in the picturesque lakeside village of Versoix. Bidault, Molotov, and Eden found similar abodes, though in the case of Eden, only after several bad nights in the Hotel Beau Rivage. He railed at aides about the traffic noise outside his window and the lousy food service and said he could not bear the presence in the same hotel of Chinese support staff, whom he suspected of eavesdropping. A frantic search for new accommodations followed, and on April 29, Eden and his wife, Clarissa, along with a few top aides, decamped for Le Reposoir, a superb villa north of the city decorated with fine furniture and artwork. Only the Americans, more than a hundred strong, opted to stay together as a unit, in the ultramodern, cheerless Hotel du Rhône, a selection meant to show, some thought, that Dulles was merely passing through and that his delegation would be ready to leave at any time.3

  And the Vietnamese? They were not yet there. They didn’t need to be, for the first item on the agenda was Korea, and moreover the question of who among the Vietnamese would attend had yet to be settled. The Paris government struggled to round up representatives from the Associated States, whose leaders, especially Bao Dai and his ministers, were suspicious of the whole endeavor and fearful of the probable outcome. These Vietnamese also objected to any DRV participation in the conference, and they initially received the backing of Bidault, less because he shared their views than because he hoped to have no Vietnamese participation at all. Mistrustful of the Viet Minh, the Frenchman also understood that Bao Dai’s cabinet, along with the U.S. government, represented the greatest obstacles to a negotiated settlement in Geneva; as such, it would be best to deny both Vietnamese entities a voice in the proceedings. Bidault’s conviction on this score hardened on May 3, when Bao Dai declared that his government would attend only if France guaranteed it would not partition Vietnam. But Molotov and Zhou Enlai rejected out of hand any attempt to deny a seat to the Viet Minh, and even Dulles, though he shared the emperor’s opposition to partition, told Bidault that Viet Minh participation was inevitable.

  Bidault said he agreed, then changed his mind. Later he changed it again, and then yet again. It was his pattern, in these early days in Geneva, to go back and forth on the core issues, to temporize, as he waited anxiously for news from Dien Bien Phu and as the Laniel government, accused of insufficient ardor for a diplomatic solution, worked feverishly to survive a vote of confidence in the National Assembly. Ultimately Bidault agreed to the Viet Minh’s presence at the conference, and he secured the Bao Dai government’s participation by committing himself, in a letter to the emperor on May 6, to oppose partition. But his general indecision on all matters irritated the other chief delegates, including Dulles, who complained to Eden that the French seemed incapable of making up their minds on any subject.

  Eden concurred. Privately, though, he fumed at the American’s failure to acknowledge the obvious: that U.S. policy was in significant measure responsible for Bidault’s lack of resoluteness. The Eisenhower administration, after all, like Shakespeare’s whining schoolboy, was “creeping like snail unwillingly” to Geneva and had made no secret of its dim assessment of the prospects for an acceptable deal. Even now, Eden suspected, they were whispering dangerous ideas in Bidault’s ear—that he should hold firm, that the Communists, being Communists, would never abide by any agreement, that there was still the prospect of a U.S.-led military intervention in support of the Expeditionary Corps should the talks fail. Such notions, the Briton knew, appealed to Bidault, for although he grasped that he had no option but to seek a diplomatic settlement—French public opinion demanded it—he still clung to the possibility that he could salvage something from the Indochina mess he had done so much to create. At the start of May he still hoped that the threat, and if necessary the reality, of American intervention might change the dynamics on the ground, saving if not Dien Bien Phu then at least the French position in the Red River Delta.

  It was true: The Eisenhower administration was hardly in a position to complain about Bidault’s temporizing, given its own confused and uncertain posture as the conference got under way. Dulles, stern and unsmiling even in the most salubrious of circumstances, was in a sour mood from the get-go, as he contemplated having to appear on the same stage as the Chinese Communists. He was also dismayed at his government’s failure to secure a declaration of joint intention among the Western powers and annoyed with the British for, as he saw it, pressuring Paris to accept a cease-fire. He cabled Washington on April 29: “UK attitude is one of increasing weakness. Britain seem to feel that we are disposed to accept present risks of a Chinese war and this, coupled also with their fear that we would start using atomic weapons, has badly frightened them.”4

  Eisenhower too was frustrated on that second to last day of April, as he prepared to convene a crucial meeting of the National Security Council. In recent days, he had complained to friends about the French failure to heed his advice to internationalize the war, and he fully shared his secretary of state’s irritation at Britain’s fecklessness. The question was what to do. “The president was extremely serious and seemed to be greatly concerned about what was the right course to take,” Vice President Nixon wrote in his diary that evening of the NSC session, which began at ten A.M. and lasted three hours. Following reports on the military situation and the early jostling in Geneva, Nixon, Admiral Radford, and Harold Stassen, director of the State Department’s Foreign Operations Administration, urged the president to consider American military intervention. Stassen wanted American ground forces to replace French troops in Cochin China, while Nixon and Radford favored air strikes at Dien Bien Phu and perhaps elsewhere.

  Eisenhower was skeptical. It was all “well and good,” he commented in response to Stassen, to say that American GIs should take over from French soldiers. “But if the French indeed collapsed and the United States moved in, we would in the eyes of many Asiatic peoples merely replace French colonialism with American colonialism.” That wouldn’t do: Any intervention would have to be multilateral and would have to follow from a request by the Associated States. As for air strikes, Ike said he might be amenable to such action but only if it could be shown that it would stiffen the French resolve to remain in the war. Stassen, undaunted, warned darkly that people around the world would question America’s courage if she failed to act, if necessary unilaterally. The president shook his head. Going in alone would signify an attempt to police the entire world and risked bringing world condemnation, he said. Allies were essential; without them, the leader was just an adventurer like Genghis Khan. And the cause of the free world would never succeed if precious resources were squandered in local engagements.

  Nixon sensed an impasse and tried a new tack: Might it not still be possible, he asked the group, to put together a coalition without the British, who, after all, had been “as much a liability as an asset” in Asia? They had failed to stand up to Japan prior to World War II, and they were failing now again. Walter Bedell Smith, the acting secretary of state, liked this suggestion and noted that it would meet the president’s condition for intervention and thereby allow air strikes against Viet Minh positions at Dien Bien Phu. Even if the fortress should fall, such action might, as the president had suggested, induce France to carry on in the war. Eisenhower said he had been thinking along precisely these lines but wondered whether it would be possi
ble to cobble together a coalition without Britain. It worried him that the Menzies government in Australia, for example, seemed unwilling to act independently of London. Nixon was not so sure: His sources in Canberra indicated that Menzies, who was in an election campaign and had to be careful in his public statements, might in the end follow America’s lead.

  The meeting drew to a close. No one was quite sure what had been decided, though Nixon in his diary recorded a general consensus that a “united action pact,” excluding if necessary Britain, would be pursued, and that American airpower might be used to keep France in the fight. Ground troops were another matter, with Eisenhower near the end of the session emphasizing they should not be part of the equation. The American public was frightened of that prospect, he said, and would register opposition to it.5

  As so often on Vietnam (not least when Nixon himself was president), this was the audience the White House thought the most about: the American public. Not the Western allies, not the Soviets or the Chinese, not the Vietnamese. Having worked successfully since late March to build up congressional, journalistic, and popular support for United Action, the administration was now in the awkward position of having to explain why no such coalition agreement had been reached. The Washington Post spoke of a “major defeat for American diplomacy,” and there was bewilderment on Capitol Hill; Republicans in particular felt themselves pulled in two opposing directions. On the one hand, their reading of the public mood indicated little support for another land war in Asia. On the other, they had argued louder than anyone against striking any diplomatic bargains with Communists anywhere. No such deal would be worth the paper it was written on, for Communists were wicked and could never be trusted.

  Perceptive observers saw the problem. “The American position at Geneva is an impossible one,” columnist Walter Lippmann informed his readers that same day, April 29, “so long as the leading Republican senators have no terms of peace except unconditional surrender of the enemy and no terms for entering the war except as a collective action in which nobody is now willing to engage.” Echoed Newsweek: “Top officials, at this point, are unwilling to make war and unable to join in negotiated peace.”6

  That 1954 was an election year made Republicans all the more jittery. They had gained victory two years earlier in part by blasting Democrats for “losing China” and by assuring voters that “unnecessary wars” like Truman’s in Korea (as Robert Taft had put it) would not happen on their watch. More than Democrats, they—and not merely McCarthy and his crowd—had urged Americans to believe the United States to be so powerful that setbacks in foreign policy could be explained only by criminal stupidity or treason. How to proceed in those circumstances? The GOP could enter the fall campaign with American boys once again fighting “another Korea,” an inconclusive war on the periphery of the Communist empire; or, conversely, the party could find itself having to explain to voters how another piece of territory had been allowed to slip behind the bamboo curtain for want of effective American support.

  II

  UNDERSTANDING THIS REPUBLICAN DILEMMA—WOULD IT BE TAGGED as the war party or the appeasement party?—is essential to understanding the curious scene that was the Geneva Conference in May and June. The Swiss, veterans at hosting big gatherings of this kind, stood ready to help arrange lavish banquets of the kind made famous by the Congress of Vienna, but instead found they had very little to do. The Russians too were disappointed, having shipped vast stocks of caviar in the expectation of feasts that never took place. The Viet Minh delegation, hastily appareled in ill-fitting Western suits, was kept largely isolated by its security officers so as to minimize the chances of infection by the capitalist bug—there were evening sing-alongs and language classes, late-afternoon group strolls among the blooming chestnut trees and lilacs, and supervised games, but certainly no solo ventures around Geneva, with its well-stocked shops and brightly lit cafés and stylish nightclubs.7

  As for the Americans in Geneva, social contacts with Communists were anathema. If anyone had other ideas, Dulles’s instructions to the team quashed them. To counter any hint that Washington’s participation in the conference implied any softening in the U.S. refusal to recognize Mao Zedong’s government, the secretary of state forbade any contact—verbal or physical—with the Chinese. This of course meant that no American could sit at the same table as the Chinese, a problem in terms of the seating arrangement in the working sessions. The matter was resolved by the provision of separate small tables for each delegation, laid out in a U formation, a scheme hardly conducive to diplomatic intercourse.

  Dulles practiced what he preached. He kept social interactions to a minimum and repaired early each day to his accommodations in suite 545–546 in the Hotel du Rhône. When on one occasion he unavoidably found himself in close proximity to Zhou Enlai, the Chinese extended his hand in greeting. Dulles turned away.8

  Subordinates were not always so good about avoiding contact. Chester L. Cooper, a young CIA officer who would later write one of the best early histories of U.S. involvement in Vietnam (and whose first task at Geneva was to determine whether Ho Chi Minh, who had not been heard from in the West in several months, was still alive and, if so, still held the leadership of the DRV; yes and yes, Cooper soon determined), at one point spotted a familiar face among the Chinese group, a former classmate from MIT. Several days later, by sheer coincidence, the two men found themselves alone in an elevator. They hugged, exchanged a few brief sentences, and laughed, then hastily recovered their composure as the elevator doors opened. They did not speak again.9

  This American game of pretending the Chinese did not exist was observed with bemusement by Anthony Eden, who enjoyed a firmer domestic base than did Dulles, and by Georges Bidault, who did not. The Frenchman had his own suspicions about Beijing’s intentions, and he rejected urgings to meet one-on-one with Zhou Enlai, but his animus did not extend to refusing handshakes. Eden, meanwhile, worried that the Americans sought intentionally to kill the prospect of a negotiated deal. His dislike of their approach, and of Dulles personally, threatened to get the better of him, as an alarmed Evelyn Shuckburgh, opinionated as always, noted in his diary already on the second day in Geneva: “A.E. is so anti-American today that it is hard to get him to look for positive ways of bringing Dulles to a more patient frame of mind.”10

  Dulles’s impatience had to do with the continuing failure to generate Western unity in advance of the start of the Indochina portion of the conference, and with what he characterized as the “imprecision” of Eden’s strategy. He was in a surly mood when he called on the Briton before lunch on April 30. That morning Dulles had delivered a hard-hitting speech, whereupon Zhou Enlai had delivered a tough one himself, accusing Washington of imperialist intervention in Indochina. Eden had not come to Dulles’s defense. Shuckburgh’s diary again:

  [Dulles] said nobody was supporting the US; nobody had said a word to defend them against Zhou Enlai’s attacks; the alliance was nearly at an end; Asia lost; France finished, etc. “We have seen the best of our times … and the bond cracked between father and child” (Lear?) … He wants someone to make a speech, like his, attacking communism. I think one of us had better do it. A.E. says, “They would think in London I was mad”.… One major worry is the almost pathological rage and gloom of Foster Dulles, which we really must do something to allay. (Not easy; A.E. is fed up with Dulles, refuses to make concessions to his feelings, and almost resents seeing him.)11

  The following evening they tried again, this time over dinner. It went badly. After the spouses left the room, Dulles and three aides, including Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith, who had arrived from Washington earlier in the day, and the hard-line assistant secretary of state Walter Robertson, launched into a long disquisition on Anglo-American relations. The ties, formerly so strong, were in complete disarray, Dulles remarked. Eden, with only one colleague on his side (Lord Reading, the minister of state at the Foreign Office), felt ganged-up upon. The Americans said Gr
eat Britain had let them down, but they no longer sought any material assistance in Indochina from her—not a single airplane, or soldier, or pound. They knew Britain was fully stretched (an assertion Eden found contemptuous). Rather, all they wanted now was “moral support.” Eden asked what kind of action would require this moral support. That had not yet been determined, came the reply, but later in the discussion Dulles alluded to the possibility of maintaining a bridgehead, or foothold, for two years until Vietnamese troops had sufficient training to defend their country. To Eden and Reading’s ears, this sounded unmistakably like a plan to take over military operations from the French, and it alarmed them. When Reading remarked that the bridgehead notion “meant that things would remain on the boil for several years to come,” Dulles retorted: “That would be a very good thing.”12

  Little wonder that Eden believed, as he put it to Her Majesty’s ambassador in Washington some days later, that whereas his concept of a Southeast Asian defense organization was designed to guarantee a diplomatic settlement, the Eisenhower administration seemed to be contemplating a concept that would help them reconquer Indochina—an idea quite unacceptable to the London government.13

  Winston Churchill, for his part, when informed of Dulles’s demeanor and agenda in Geneva, said he had had his fill of the American, finding him a “dull, unimaginative, uncomprehending man; so clumsy I hope he will disappear.”14

  Churchill got his wish: Dulles did disappear—from Geneva. From the start, he had said he would remain in Switzerland only for a short period, and on May 3, a week after arriving, he made good on the vow and left for Washington. His departure proved a godsend, for at that moment, subordinates on both the American and the British sides feared the Eden-Dulles rift was beyond repair and might scuttle the whole enterprise. It helped as well that his replacement as head of the U.S. delegation was Walter Bedell Smith, the only one among the American foursome at the May 1 dinner whom Reading and Eden thought showed any comprehension of the complexities involved. A veteran bureaucratic infighter, Smith had been Eisenhower’s chief of staff during World War II and later served as ambassador to Moscow and director of the CIA. Since inauguration, he had served as Dulles’s number two, and it’s interesting to speculate what might have happened had Eisenhower selected him for the top job. With his abrupt speaking style and quick temper, and his ramrod-straight soldierly bearing, he did not at first glance resemble anyone’s idea of the flexible and accommodating diplomat. In the April deliberations in Washington, moreover, he had been notably hawkish on Indochina.