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

by Fredrik Logevall

  Of course, behind Zhou Enlai there loomed always the imposing figure of Mao Zedong. Zhou always deferred to Mao in matters of significance—usually in a fawningly servile way—and there is no doubt that Zhou acted, in these climactic days in Geneva, at the behest of his leader.32 In this sense it is Mao Zedong who could be considered the true godfather of partition. Whatever one’s position on the matter, the broader point stands: The Chinese contribution to the final settlement of the Indochina War was crucial.

  That DRV officials chafed under the pressure from their powerful allies is undeniable. “He has double-crossed us,” Pham Van Dong is alleged to have muttered to an aide after one of the final haggling sessions, in reference to Zhou, a remark that has the ring of truth.33 But the argument should not be taken too far. The Viet Minh, as we have seen, had their own reasons for wanting a negotiated settlement in mid-1954, their own concerns about the balance of forces on the ground, their own fears of American intervention. Even before Geneva, internal documents show, they thought in terms of the area around the sixteenth parallel as a possible line of division, and they reiterated this suggestion in the early, secret Franco–Viet Minh negotiations in Geneva. The demand for the thirteenth parallel came later, after the investiture of Mendès France and his promise to end the war in a month or resign; most likely it was an attempt to drive a hard bargain in an altered environment rather than a firm negotiating position. And if the sixteenth parallel was the real Viet Minh objective all along, the common assertion in the literature that the acceptance of the seventeenth parallel was a surrender forced on the DRV by her allies seems excessive. A concession, yes, but not a surrender.34

  Surrender is a term better applied to the Viet Minh’s acceptance of another Sino-Soviet proposal: namely, to delay the elections for reunification well beyond the six months demanded by Pham Van Dong. Confident that the Viet Minh would win any nationwide election, the DRV foreign minister and his colleague Ta Quang Buu clung to this demand up until the final few days. Western officials understood only too well that Ho Chi Minh would win in such a vote, which was why they wanted as long a delay as possible, or—even better—no fixed date at all. “I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs,” Dwight Eisenhower later famously remarked, “who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai.”35

  Neither Zhou nor Molotov seemed willing to force the issue. Zhou did not object when Mendès France, at their pivotal meeting in Berne on June 23, said elections could not be held in Vietnam until the people had been given sufficient time to cool off and calm down. The Chinese premier said the final political settlement should be reached via direct negotiations between the two governments in Vietnam, and he gave no sense that these negotiations needed to happen right away. He even assured Mendès France that Paris could play a useful role in the talks and that he saw no reason why the eventually united State of Vietnam could not remain within the French Union.36 Molotov, for his part, was initially a bit more helpful to the DRV’s cause, pressing as late as July 16 for elections to take place in June 1955. That very day, however, he backed off and said any time in 1955 would be acceptable. The Western representatives refused, and with time running out on July 20, he made his suggestion of July 1956.

  The Western negotiators made their own concessions, but fewer than each of them had initially thought would be necessary to secure an agreement. Anthony Eden had arrived in Geneva deeply desirous of gaining a deal, and he never gave up even when prospects were at their lowest—at times, it seemed his will alone kept the conference going. Arguably he did as much as anyone to facilitate a successful outcome, and his performance from start to finish drew tributes from all sides—except perhaps from the American duo of Dulles and Smith. Australia’s foreign affairs minister R. G. Casey wrote in his diary of Eden’s “almost inhuman good humour and patience.” Echoed France’s Jean Chauvel: “Towards his foreign partners he had the best conference table manners I have ever seen.”37

  But it was more than that. Eden’s advocacy—fully supported by Winston Churchill in London—greatly complicated the Americans’ not-so-secret hopes of seeing the conference break up without agreement. He disrupted the Eisenhower administration’s preferred narrative—that negotiations with Communists had yet again been a fruitless endeavor, proving once more that talk should be resolutely avoided unless they involved the terms of said Communists’ surrender—just as he had confounded it for several months, going back to the Berlin conference in January–February. This was no ordinary ally speaking, after all; this was Great Britain, America’s most important partner in world affairs, the one whose opinion mattered most. The personal feud between Eden and Dulles was real and deep and important, as we have seen, but it should not obscure the fact that the two countries disagreed fundamentally about how to proceed in Indochina, and that Britain’s stance limited Washington’s options.

  “I was continually producing proposals,” Eden recalled, “because if I did not we stuck fast. On the other hand, we were constantly being criticized for doing so, particularly in the American press.… I had been compelled to adopt the role of intermediary between the Western powers and the Communists. My activities in this respect were open to every kind of misrepresentation. I was concerned about their effect on Anglo-American relations.”38 This account omits important elements in Eden’s calculations—a Geneva agreement would strengthen his political standing at home, as he waited impatiently for Churchill to vacate 10 Downing Street, and also elevate Britain’s standing in East-West matters generally—but overall it seems right: The foreign secretary did serve a vital intermediary role, especially in the early phases of the conference.

  He was less vital after that because by then Pierre Mendès France was on the scene. The premier took an enormous risk that he could end the war within a month of taking office, and he won. He made clear his determination both to achieve a settlement and to gain concessions for France, and he succeeded. The right-wing Le Figaro, not normally a supporter, on July 21 paid tribute to his efforts, while making a nod also to Laniel and Bidault, who went before:

  We are in mourning. Half our positions in the Far East are lost, and the rest are severely shaken. The free world, which must concede a new territory to Communist expansion in Asia, is also in mourning. But once things have gone this far, a failure by Mendès France in Geneva would have made the immediate future look dark and stormy indeed.

  Let us be thankful to him for his success. Soon, French blood will no longer flow in a hopeless battle.

  M. Mendès France has worked hard and well for his nation in Geneva. It would be unjust to permit him to bear alone the burden of surrenders that had already been written into the record before he came to power. It would be equally wrong to forget—and we can be sure he would not think of doing so himself—that his predecessors in Geneva undertook the task, started the talks, and laid out solutions.39

  At a press conference in Washington that same day, President Eisenhower expressed satisfaction that an agreement had been reached to stop the bloodshed in Indochina. But he emphasized that the United States was not a party to the accords or bound by them, for the agreement contained elements that the administration could not support. The task now, he continued, would be to pursue the formation of a collective defense organization to prevent further direct or indirect aggression in Southeast Asia.40 Privately, Eisenhower knew what every other informed observer knew: that the terms of the agreement at Geneva were far better, from France’s perspective and the West’s perspective, than would have been expected on the day the proceedings opened. He felt a measure of vindication. America’s tough words, starting with Dulles’s speech in September 1953 that warned of major retaliation if China intervened directly in the war, had had their effect. The threat of direct U.S. military involvement caused nervousness in Be
ijing and Moscow and helped persuade the Viet Minh to accept concessions in the final agreement—the sources make that clear.

  Which is not to say the administration should get great credit for conscious policy planning. Quite the contrary, senior policy makers were usually uncertain and hesitant as they tried to maneuver around an imposing set of obstacles: a grim battlefield situation in Vietnam and a poor bargaining position in Geneva; powerful—and contradictory—congressional pressure to prevent any territorial loss to the Communists and, at the same time, to avoid “another Korea”; the troubles and the fall of a Laniel government in which Washington had vested so much hope, with respect not merely to Indochina but also to the European Defense Community. Nevertheless, at the end of the day Eisenhower and Dulles had a deal they could live with. They had two years before the elections, two years in which to build up the South Vietnamese government, free of the taint of French colonialism. Canada, a loyal ally, had a seat on the International Control Commission and could be counted on to “block things.”41 All in all, hardly a catastrophe.

  For others, including two of the principal craftsmen of the agreement, the time to look ahead had not yet come; it was enough now to reflect on what had been and what had been achieved. “The agreements,” said Anthony Eden in the wee hours of July 21, “are the best that our hands could devise.” Jean Chauvel was more somber: “There is no good end to a bad business.”42

  CHAPTER 25

  “WE HAVE NO OTHER CHOICE BUT TO WIN HERE”

  THEY ARRIVED AT DAYBREAK IN HANOI’S OUTER NEIGHBORHOODS. the green-uniformed troops of the People’s Army, in Molotova trucks, in jeeps, on bicycles, and on foot. In the lead were infantry of the 308th Division, many of them veterans of Dien Bien Phu, carrying their mortars and machine guns as well as bouquets of gladiolas. Word spread quickly among the city’s residents, who rushed out on the sidewalks to cheer the procession. “Long live President Ho!” they chanted. “Long live the People’s Army!” “Free Vietnam!” Already the gold-starred red flags of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam fluttered from almost every window, and banners had been hung proclaiming “Doc lap!” (independence). It was the eve of the formal Viet Minh takeover of the city, under the terms of the Geneva Accords. It was Saturday, October 9, 1954.

  Later in the day, a very different scene played itself out. Near the Citadel at the city’s heart, a lone French bugler sounded taps as the tricolor was lowered for the last time. A steady rain fell. A small contingent of battle-weary officers and men watched passively as a silently weeping colonel accepted the furled flag. In eight years of war, the French Expeditionary Corps had won more engagements than it had lost, had killed far more enemy soldiers than it had lost, yet victory had not come. “We shall never come back,” a French colonel murmured, his head bowed. “My heart is heavy when I think of the great heritage we are abandoning.”1

  The French withdrawal occurred sector by sector, almost street by street, the engines of the armored cars growling in low gear. The last three streets were those converging on the road leading to the Paul Doumer Bridge that spanned the rain-swollen Red River. At long last, in the early evening, the last car made its way up the slope of the bridge. The three French officers who had been directing traffic glanced around, looked at one another, then walked slowly up the slope. The Vietnamese onlookers, sensing the moment, surged forward to the edge of the bridge. After a few minutes, the three men were gone from view. In that instant, Hanoi, the apple of French colonialism’s eye since a detachment under Lieutenant Francis Garnier marched into town in 1873 and claimed it for France, passed fully into Viet Minh control.

  The following day General Vo Nguyen Giap, after a victorious parade by his troops through the heart of the city, said under clear blue skies: “After eight years of resistance and eighty years of struggle for the liberation of the nation, our beloved capital is now completely free.”2

  One man was conspicuously absent during the celebration: Ho Chi Minh, who would slip into Hanoi unannounced two days later in the back of a captured French three-quarter-ton truck, shake hands with members of the International Control Commission, then disappear behind closed doors with a few aides. He would not be seen in public until the arrival of Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru on October 17.3 In a newspaper editorial on October 18, Ho explained that he did not wish to waste his compatriots’ time with a public gala ceremony. “Our mutual love,” he said, “does not depend on appearance.” But the satisfaction Ho felt in these first days was immense. It was thirty-five years since he had made his appeal in vain to the great powers at the Versailles Peace Conference, and nine years since that glorious day in September 1945 when he declared Vietnamese independence before the cheering throngs in Ba Dinh Square. At the start of 1946 he and his lieutenants fled Hanoi for the Viet Bac, just as the fighting began. Now they were back, having prevailed over a great Western power on the field of battle. Never before had a colonial people achieved such a feat.

  VICTORIOUS VIET MINH TROOPS PARADE THROUGH HANOI, OCTOBER 10, 1954. THE TOP BANNER READS: “VIETNAM: PEACE, UNITY, INDEPENDENCE, LONG LIVE DEMOCRACY” (photo credit 25.1)

  It was dizzying, on some level, hard to fully digest even now, five months after the smashing victory at Dien Bien Phu. The sight of the departing French signified the breaking of a bond, and for many educated revolutionaries, Ho Chi Minh among them, the moment was not without its bittersweet element. “I felt a sudden twinge of sadness, in the midst of the cheering and singing,” recalled Luu Doan Huynh, a veteran of both the French and American wars, half a century later. “We were never happy slaves under the colons, and yet when I went into the jungle in 1946 I carried with me a book of French poetry! I believed in the eternal truths: liberté, égalité, et fraternité. And now it was over. Separation had occurred.”4

  II

  FOR HO CHI MINH, THERE WERE OTHER, MORE IMPORTANT REASONS to temper the celebrations that mid-October day. To begin with, the price of victory over France had been enormous, in both blood and treasure. From 1946 to 1954, the Viet Minh suffered some 200,000 soldiers killed, and an estimated 125,000 civilians also perished, the majority of them in Tonkin.5 Much of the DRV zone, moreover, lay in ruins. Roads and railways had been cut, bridges blown up, buildings destroyed. Rice production in the Red River Delta had declined precipitously. By the end, in Geneva, Ho had been almost as desperate for a cease-fire as his counterpart in Paris, Pierre Mendès France. Now he and his colleagues were faced with the task of rebuilding their war-torn economy, and of carrying out a revolutionary transformation of the DRV. In many areas, it meant starting essentially from scratch, for the departing French had dismantled post offices and hospitals and stripped factories of tools and machinery, even lightbulbs in some cases.

  Most of all, for Ho Chi Minh, there was no getting around the fact that his victory, however unprecedented and stunning, was incomplete and perhaps temporary. The vision that had always driven him on, that of a “great union” of all Vietnamese, had flickered into view for a fleeting moment in 1945–46, then had been lost in the subsequent war. Now, despite vanquishing the French military, the dream remained unrealized, as the country was divided into two zones and as the ethnic and social and political contradictions within Vietnamese society threatened to become more sharply defined—already the two entities were becoming known around the world as North and South Vietnam. In Saigon, Ho knew, Bao Dai’s regime under Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem was working to expand and strengthen its authority. If Diem could have broad American backing in that effort, as seemed highly likely, then the temporary partition at the seventeenth parallel might not be so temporary at all. Even the Soviet Union and China, Ho feared, would be unlikely to work hard to end the split by insisting that the elections for reunification scheduled for 1956 take place; they had bigger fish to fry in global politics, he knew, and especially China might prefer to have a weak and—in every sense of the word—divided Vietnam over a strong and united one.

  Ho Chi Minh according
ly determined that he would have to tread carefully, the better to win broad support from the outside world and thereby better the chances of the elections taking place. Even as he secretly left behind Viet Minh cadres in the south to agitate for the 1956 elections and to undermine Diem’s government, he determined he would project the image of that now-familiar figure: Ho the conciliator.6 The new government, he told a group of party officials on October 16, represented the will of the people and would subject itself to popular criticism. The same day he urged foreigners to remain in Hanoi and to continue their jobs, emphasizing that he envisioned a very slow transition to socialism. In choosing his residence, he rejected the Governor-General’s Palace near Hoan Khiem Lake, for the reason that it was too ostentatious, and selected instead a small gardener’s house on the palace grounds. During Nehru’s visit, Ho assured his guest that the Hanoi government would maintain correct and cordial relations with Laos and Cambodia and would seek diplomatic contact with countries on both sides of the East-West divide. On October 18, he offered the same assurances to his old acquaintance and negotiating partner Jean Sainteny, who had been sent by Pierre Mendès France as a special envoy to represent French interests in North Vietnam. Ho told Sainteny that he hoped France would retain a cultural and economic presence in the DRV and insisted he was not a pawn of hard-liners in his government.7

  Sainteny responded in kind. Even before the meeting, he warned Paris that Viet Minh leaders would never give up the struggle for a reunited Vietnam under Hanoi’s control, and that any attempt to create a permanent division of the country would ultimately provoke renewed war and ruin all attempts to facilitate improved French-Vietnamese relations. Following his encounter with Ho, Sainteny dwelled on this theme while also stressing the Viet Minh leader’s forthcoming attitude. Ho Chi Minh, he stressed, sought to resume the dialogue where it had been interrupted at Fontainebleau in 1946 and evinced no bitterness about the life-and-death struggle that had just concluded. “Democratic Vietnam asserts that it is ready to talk, to negotiate, to keep a very acceptable position open for us, in other words to respect the Geneva agreements and to ‘play the game,’ ” Sainteny said. He stressed that the DRV would be no puppet of the Soviet Union or China: It would be a Communist state, certainly, but it wanted to follow an independent line. France’s policy should be aimed at supporting this independent policy.8