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

by Fredrik Logevall

  But there was another side to the man, as French diplomat Jean Chauvel’s portrait suggested: “Rather a small, thin man whose face, all bumps and furrows, made him look as if he had chewed some bitter pill. He did in fact have stomach trouble and was thus prone to attacks of indigestion and to brief but violent fits of temper … an intelligent man, who appreciated what was concrete, understood politics, and did not deal in false coin.”15

  Lord Reading saw Dulles’s departure as “pure gain.” “He was beginning to act as a powerful irritant upon Anthony and others and seemed to devote himself to telling us where to get off, though never how we got on. Bedell is, of course, quite a different proposition and the relations between him and Anthony are increasingly ‘frank and friendly.’ ” Reading also appreciated that Smith seemed to have tighter rein on subordinates—by which he no doubt meant Robertson, a loathsome figure to the British delegation.16

  For Eden, the improvement was instantaneous. “I went to see Foster off,” he wrote in his diary on May 3. “It was meant as a gesture but I don’t think it did much good. Americans are sore, mainly I suspect because they know they have made a mess of this conference.… Bedell came to dinner. We arranged the ground at length & I gave him proposals for talks to supplement any Indo-China agreement. I think that we made progress.” It pleased Eden to hear Smith urge him “not to pay too much attention to some of the stupid things being said in the USA,” and in the first days of May he used words such as “sympathetic” and “reasonable and receptive” to describe the American. Perhaps too Eden had an inkling of the fact that Smith disliked his own boss Dulles, considering him a pompous blowhard. On May 5, Eden made a concession to Smith for five-power military staff talks on Southeast Asian regional security—a concession he might not have made to Dulles.17

  III

  BY THE TIME THE INDOCHINA PART OF THE CONFERENCE COMMENCED on May 8, therefore, the prospects for Western unity in the negotiations had begun to tick upward. But there was a long way to go. Even now, as Bidault prepared to initiate the proceedings, the three delegations were not in full agreement on what the talks should accomplish: Eden had a commitment to a negotiated settlement of the war that neither Bidault nor Smith fully shared. The Frenchman in previous days had continued to vacillate, and not even the news of Dien Bien Phu’s fall on May 7 had lessened his determination to drive a hard bargain. Smith, for his part, acting substantially on instructions from Washington, said his government wanted nothing to do with a deal that would subvert the governments of the Associated States or sell out the interests of the West, a line echoed by Bao Dai’s foreign minister Nguyen Quoc Dinh. On the other side, Zhou Enlai went through the first week saying little and revealing less, and the Viet Minh delegation, led by Pham Van Dong, was likewise inscrutable after its arrival on May 4. Only Molotov seemed to share Eden’s desire to move expeditiously to start the talks, and it was their joint efforts on May 5–7—prodding their respective allies, assuring them that no harm would come from conversing—that brought things to this point.

  No one envied Bidault his task that afternoon. The little man had not only to open the conference but also to acknowledge the fall of Dien Bien Phu, and in the presence of the world’s press as well as Pham Van Dong and his Communist allies. Looking gray with fatigue, his voice quiet at the start, Bidault paid tribute to the defenders of the fortress and recalled the civilizing role of France in Indochina. If that didn’t cause Pham Van Dong’s blood pressure to rise, Bidault’s description of the war—“this conflict that was imposed on us”—and his insistence that France fought only for defensive purposes, surely did. Bidault then proposed “that the Conference should start by adopting the principle of a general cessation of hostilities in Indochina supported by essential guarantees of security.… These guarantees are intended to preserve the security of the troops of both sides and to protect the civil population against any abusive exploitation of the truce.” There ought also to be a release of prisoners and the disarming of irregulars, he went on, and any final settlement should be guaranteed by the member nations of the Geneva Conference.18

  It was now the Viet Minh’s turn, but Pham Van Dong was not yet prepared to show his hand. Perhaps he was too stunned—the French foreign minister had come close to demanding the Viet Minh’s surrender, twenty-four hours after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. A thin man with hollow cheeks, Pham Van Dong had helped lead, it will be recalled, the Vietnamese delegation in negotiations with the French during the abortive Fontainebleau conference in 1946. Thereafter he had continued to rise in the party, becoming DRV deputy prime minister in 1949 and in 1951 taking a seat on the Politburo. A tenacious negotiator whose bargaining style shifted easily into caustic truculence, he was no one’s idea of the affable interlocutor.

  When Pham Van Dong took the podium on May 10, he pointed out that Bidault had offered no political proposals but only military ones, based on an “outdated colonialist outlook,” and moreover that he had utterly failed to take account of the actual military situation on the ground. Following a vehement, sarcastic denunciation of American “imperialists” and their intervention in Indochina, Pham Van Dong put forward the DRV’s core points, on which he had reached agreement in the days prior with Molotov and Zhou Enlai.19 In particular, he called for the independence and sovereignty of the three Indochinese states, elections to create a unified government in each of them, the withdrawal of foreign troops and advisers, and the inclusion in the Geneva talks of the Viet Minh–backed Pathet Lao and Khmer Issarak “resistance” governments. Also, persons who collaborated with the opposite side in the war would be free from repression, and there would be an exchange of prisoners. Implementation of these provisions would be preceded by a cease-fire, followed by readjustment of occupied territory to separate the two sides and a ban on the importation of new troops, weapons, and munitions into Indochina. As a sop to the French, Pham Van Dong pledged the DRV’s willingness to consider membership in the French Union based on free will and said his government recognized France’s considerable cultural and economic interests in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.20

  The sides were thus far apart, but the gap was not as wide as one might have expected. That Pham Van Dong would offer any kind of compensation at all to the enemy seems surprising in retrospect, in light of the crushing victory three days earlier at Dien Bien Phu. More tellingly, his proposal clearly envisioned partition, followed by national elections, as the best way to end the war. The three Communist countries, as we have seen, had reached basic agreement on the desirability of partition already weeks earlier, and on May 1 a senior Soviet official in Geneva had repeated his government’s support for such a solution.21 With the stunning development in the Tonkin highlands, however, one might have expected Pham Van Dong now to put forth a maximalist demand: immediate French withdrawal and the formation of a national government led by the Viet Minh. From his perspective, after all, a cessation of hostilities would appear counterproductive, now that General Giap plainly had the Expeditionary Corps in so much trouble. Pham Van Dong’s failure to stake out such a position resulted in part from Chinese and Soviet pressure in recent months to maintain a flexible negotiating posture. But it also suggests that the DRV leadership continued to have its own reasons for wanting a settlement, continued to see the overall balance of forces as uncomfortably close, continued to worry about morale problems among its own troops and its own supporters. The vehement denunciation of U.S. policy pointed yet again to another concern: that a prolongation of the fighting would bring the powerful Americans into the war.

  Colonel Michel de Brébisson, one of the French negotiators at Geneva, saw ample evidence that the Viet Minh wanted an end to the war. “The eight years of war they have waged with increasing intensity have led their troops to a certain degree of tension in the precarious economic situation in which they live,” he wrote at the time. “The population they control is weary of the burden of this war. Dien Bien Phu was a victory that exerted a high price. They may be able
to take over the Tonkin delta, but this will exact a higher price and will give rise to fresh depredations. Finally, and above all, the danger of internationalization [of the war] is not excluded.” DRV leaders themselves, it will be recalled from the previous chapter, in candid moments described their predicament in strikingly similar terms.22

  None of which is to suggest that the Viet Minh leadership was desperate for an early agreement at Geneva, or that it had overcome its earlier skepticism regarding the prospects for multilateral diplomacy. On May 11, the Vietnamese Workers Party issued a set of instructions, warning against “peace illusions” among the Vietnamese people and cautioning them that Geneva would not bring an end to the struggle for independence and national unity. Simultaneously, Vo Nguyen Giap continued to make preparations for a large-scale assault on the Red River Delta. And in its deliberations with the Chinese and Soviets at Geneva, the Viet Minh delegation affirmed the need to drive a hard bargain.23

  That the Viet Minh proposal implied support for partition was lost on neither Bao Dai’s State of Vietnam, which on May 12 categorically rejected “partition, direct or indirect, definitive or provisional, in fact or in law, of the national territory,” nor on the Eisenhower administration, which followed suit the next day.24 Though Anthony Eden reported hopefully to the Foreign Office that some members of the U.S. government now recognized that partition represented a viable option, contemporaneous American sources give a different picture. Twice on May 14—once to the cabinet and once to his brother, CIA director Allen Dulles—John Foster Dulles said he did not think it possible to “draw a line,” given both the present balance of forces and the geography of Indochina. Nor, he anticipated, would partition end the Viet Minh insurgency in the south. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, long of the opinion that Tonkin was the key to the defense of Southeast Asia, warned additionally that partition would provide Ho Chi Minh with contiguous territory within which he could reorganize his forces. And Walter Bedell Smith, in a meeting with Bidault and Eden on May 15, said such a solution would mean the loss of Tonkin forever and thus should be avoided.25

  Yes, Bidault concurred, and this was impossible: France could not agree to surrender Haiphong and Hanoi. Physical separation of the combatants was necessary, but it should be in the form of enclaves controlled by each side throughout the country (the so-called leopard skin approach), not partition into two separate regroupment zones.26 The Laniel government expected to retain control—for France or for Bao Dai’s government—in the south, but it also hoped to keep a foothold in the Red River Delta. Dien Bien Phu did not change this calculation, at least not in Bidault’s mind or that of cabinet colleagues such as Maurice Schumann and René Pleven. Drawn up by General Navarre’s staff in Saigon at the urging of Paris, the leopard skin plan gave the Viet Minh the Ca Mau peninsula in the far south, three enclaves around Saigon, a huge slice of Annam in the center, and most of Tonkin; the French Union, however, got all of the urban areas in the country, including Hanoi and Haiphong, and the Viet Minh were also to withdraw all forces from Cambodia and Laos. The plan would protect French political and economic interests in Indochina and also allow the French High Command to resume combat operations if necessary.27

  But there were murmurings of dissent from some French military planners, who questioned the leopard skin plan’s strategic value. “Nothing would be more dangerous than an armistice which will involve, from one end of the territory to the other, the two sides’ cohabitation,” remarked the French military attaché in Bangkok, after a meeting in which Chinese officials made clear to him their support for partition. Anthony Eden, for his part, was shocked to see how much Navarre’s scheme gave up to the Viet Minh, while the British chiefs of staff charged that the plan “abandons Vietnam” by leaving enemy “footholds all over the country.”28

  To compound the problem for Bidault, the fall of Dien Bien Phu had strengthened the forces of peace in France. The Laniel government was living on borrowed time. On the eve of the garrison’s fall, Laniel won a vote of confidence on his government’s Indochina policy by a vote of 311 to 262. A mere six days later, on May 13, this margin had been reduced to two votes: 289 to 287. The government had public opinion against it, while in the press, more and more commentators spoke out in favor of partition, if that would secure an agreement. In Le Monde, for example, the respected Robert Guillain saw numerous formulas for the division of Vietnam into two regroupment zones, any one of which provided the means to “internationalize the peace.”29

  IV

  BIDAULT, HOWEVER, PINNED HIS HOPES ON SECRET TALKS THAT might do the opposite, namely, internationalize the war—less because he sought such an escalation than because he hoped to use the prospect of it to force concessions from the Communist powers. From mid-May, bilateral Franco-American negotiations considered the scenarios under which joint military action could occur. French and American archival sources differ on the origin of the endeavor, but what is clear is that Dulles, on May 11, cabled conditions for U.S. intervention to Ambassador Douglas Dillon in Paris, who waited until after Laniel survived his vote of confidence to deliver them on May 14. The request must have the backing of the National Assembly, Dulles asserted, and must be addressed to other countries as well. The French troop level in Indochina must be maintained, and agreement must be reached on the training of Vietnamese troops and the nature of the command structure for joint intervention. Finally, the secretary of state maintained, the French government was expected to grant full independence to the Associated States and to give them the right to secede from the French Union.30

  Eden, having secured provisional agreement from the other delegations to move the conference into restricted session—where, he believed, the real negotiating could commence—knew nothing of these Franco-American contacts until he learned about them in the Swiss newspapers on Saturday morning, May 15. The articles said that discussions would shortly begin in Paris, where Dulles would meet Laniel. Eden was flabbergasted. He confronted Bidault and Smith the next day; the former was evasive, but the American confirmed the reports were correct. Distressed at Washington’s inability to keep a secret, Smith, in strict confidence, showed Eden some of the top-secret telegrams setting out the details of the intrigue. Eden thanked him for this gesture but said Britain could not possibly proceed with the five-power staff conversations he had agreed to on May 5. He reconsidered this refusal two days later, after Bidault assured him France would not request intervention unless and until the Geneva Conference had failed to bring about a settlement, but his suspicions remained. Paris and Washington seemed as uninterested as ever in giving negotiations a serious try, and the belligerence the Americans had shown during the disastrous encounter over dinner on May 1—with their talk of holding a bridgehead in Vietnam for two years while the VNA was being properly trained—evidently had not dissipated.31

  A skeptic could ask whether the Franco-American plan was really meant to succeed. Could any French government, given the mood in the National Assembly, ever meet the American preconditions? And why was the scheme leaked to the press? Was this not simply a means by which the White House could show toughness to hawks at home and to Communists in Geneva while setting the bar so high, there was little chance of intervention actually occurring?

  The evidence suggests there was more to it than that. Eisenhower did seek to keep the bar high and to bring Congress in on any decision for intervention, but he and Dulles, in the last half of May, worked hard to do what Vice President Nixon had advocated on April 29: create an allied coalition without the British. Thus, on May 19 at the White House, Dulles reminded Eisenhower that America’s proposed military intervention “did not make UK active participation a necessary condition.” The president concurred but noted the importance therefore of Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, and, of course, the Associated States. The next day Dulles met with Australia’s ambassador to Washington, Percy Spender, and New Zealand’s minister for external affairs, Clifton Webb, who was stopping off in W
ashington on his way home from Geneva. Congressional criticism of Britain as a U.S. ally was growing, Dulles told them, and “the United States is prepared to persevere with an organization which does not include the United Kingdom.” Could the administration count on Canberra and Wellington to join this coalition, if necessary without Britain’s participation? The two men were noncommittal, just as Spender and New Zealand’s Leslie Munro had been noncommittal when Dulles, six weeks earlier, had urged them to use their influence on the stubborn British. They promised merely to consult with their respective governments.32

  “With friends like these …,” Dulles might well have muttered. He was fed up. Fed up with dithering allies who always wanted more time, more consultation, more negotiation, who failed to see the need for swift and resolute action. He articulated his frustration in a letter to Dean Rusk, former assistant secretary of state and current head of the Rockefeller Foundation, who as secretary of state himself a decade later would face his own frustrations regarding allies’ views of Vietnam. “I do not think that any adequate thought has been given to the implications of our so-called ‘alliances,’ ” Dulles wrote. “How much should it in fact tie our hands with respect to many areas as to which there is no agreement?” The letter implied that the two men had already discussed the matter the previous week, and Dulles said there might be an important meeting on the subject a few weeks thence, in mid-June, for which he would value Rusk’s input.33