By the end of the third week in March the situation in Indochina had deteriorated. Dulles’s faith in the French continued to be strong—on March 23 he predicted that they would win—but the Pentagon was not so sure. The news from Dienbienphu was bleak. Giap’s guns on the rim of the basin had rendered the airfield virtually inoperable. Attempts to parachute supplies to the twelve surrounded battalions from C-54s were only partly successful. If the drops were made from 6,000 to 8,000 feet, half the material landed in the Viet lines, and at 4,000 feet Viet antiaircraft batteries hit most of the planes. On all sides enemy trenches nibbled toward the French strongpoints, splitting up here and there to allow the installation of automatic weapons. Diplomatic channels brought Washington an appeal from Paris for an American air strike to take the pressure off the isolated garrison, and on March 22 General Paul Ely, the French chief of staff, flew over to ask for it.
Ridgway was vehemently opposed. Once the use of American air power was approved, he said, dispatching infantry would only be a matter of time. He knew something of the terrain: rice paddies, jungle, an impossible road net, wretched communications. Even the harbors were poor. U.S. intervention would be a “tragic adventure.” He sent this opinion to Eisenhower, he later wrote in Soldier, his memoirs, explaining that “to a man of his military experience its implications were immediately clear.” But Radford, also a man of military experience, thought sending U.S. bombers was a good idea. And any doubts over where the Secretary of State stood were removed in a speech he delivered before the Overseas Press Club on Monday, March 29. Its tone says as much about cold war rhetoric as its text:
Under the conditions of today, the imposition on Southeast Asia of the political system of Communist Russia and its Chinese Communist ally, by whatever means, would be a grave threat to the whole free community. The United States feels that the possibility should not be passively accepted, but should be met by united action. This might have serious risks, but these risks are far less than would face us a few years from now if we dare not be resolute today.
On Saturday Dulles conferred with the congressional leaders of both parties at the State Department to explain the need for collective defense of the French position—expeditions from Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as the United States. He felt confident that he could frighten the Chinese Communists into forsaking Ho Chi Minh. That failing, he said, the Viet Minh must be wiped out. No compromise was possible, even in theory. One observer was left with the impression that the Secretary of State had “grave doubts whether the United States could survive the establishment of Communist power in Indochina.”
Sunday evening Dulles joined Eisenhower and Radford in the President’s oval study. The immediate issue before them was whether intervention was justified, and if so on what terms. In Paris Bidault was pressing Ambassador Dillon hard. It was a measure of French despair that they were asking for atomic bombs. Two aircraft carriers with nuclear weapons aboard were cruising in the Gulf of Tonkin with the Seventh Fleet, but virtually no one in Washington seriously considered using them.10 In fact, Eisenhower forbade any air strike. He was willing to consider Dulles’s “united action”—an allied effort—under certain circumstances. The French must agree to see the war through. They must grant complete independence to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Both the French and the Indochinese states must ask the allies—the U.S. and Britain—to come in. Lastly, the decisive step must be taken by Congress, which had the power to declare war, rather than by the President, who did not. Dulles was to do what he could within that context, and after an exploratory exchange of cables between Eisenhower and Churchill (whose reservations were later to become even greater than Ike’s), the Secretary of State took off to see whether he could put an alliance together in London and Paris.
Three days later the President added a metaphor to the language. Although reluctant to make any U.S. commitment in Vietnam, he remained a firm believer in cold war catechisms. He had read and approved Dulles’s Overseas Press Club speech before its delivery. Much more than French prestige was at stake in Indochina, he told the correspondents at that week’s press conference. A Communist triumph there would enlarge the Red empire and deprive the United States of vital raw materials. It could mean the loss to the free world of all Southeast Asia, followed by threats to the U.S. defense perimeter in the Pacific: Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Formosa, and Japan. He said: “You have a row of dominoes set up, and you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.”
Dulles, back from Europe, felt the chances for swift intervention were bright. Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay had seemed receptive to suggestions for united action. If there was any moment during the crisis in which substantial allied aid for the beleaguered Maison de France was a possibility, this was it. Churchill had not yet thrown his great weight against the idea. To get it, the French were ready to give up almost anything except the Arc de Triomphe (where noisy demonstrators were protesting the course of the war). Eisenhower seemed immovable, but he might have changed his mind; if he didn’t, Congress could act.
It was precisely at this point in the drama that Richard Nixon moved to stage center. His motives were obscure then, and he has never clarified them. At the time he appeared to be the fiercest hawk in Washington, but there is a large body of opinion in the capital which held then, and holds now, that the Vice President was merely floating a trial balloon for the administration. The occasion for its launching was the annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington on Friday, April 16. His remarks were supposedly made off the record, but they were too sensational to remain there. What should the United States do, he was asked, if the French withdrew their troops and abandoned Vietnam? Should U.S. soldiers take their place? Nixon answered that they should. The plight of the free world was desperate, he said; any further retreat in Asia was unthinkable. He prayed that the French would dig in and win. “But under the circumstances, if in order to avoid further Communist expansion in Asia and particularly in Indochina—if in order to avoid it we must take the risk now by putting American boys in, I believe that the Executive Branch has to take the politically unpopular position of facing up to it and doing it, and I personally would support such a decision.”
Reaction was immediate. Some members of the administration may have been ready for a new war, but the newspapers weren’t; editorials called on Ike to repudiate his Vice President. Congress wasn’t ready; Nixon was accused of irresponsible chauvinism. Abroad, garbled reports of imminent U.S. troop movements triggered nervous reactions which shattered all possibilities of an allied expeditionary force. London decided to see what could be accomplished at a nineteen-nation conference on Asia due to open in Geneva later in the month. On Monday Dulles returned from Augusta, where Eisenhower was golfing, to tell the press that American intervention in Vietnam was “unlikely.”
Late in April the French made their third and last appeal for help. Dulles and Radford were in Paris on NATO business. Bidault begged the secretary for an American air strike. Otherwise, he said, Dienbienphu would fall. Dulles said he would sleep on it, but he was just being polite. Eisenhower had told him once more that only an act of Congress could put American servicemen in Indochina. Besides, Dulles could read the Paris newspapers. All hope for the beleaguered French garrison had been abandoned.
By now the agony of Dienbienphu had captured the imagination of the world: editors were playing the most fragmentary dispatches from Vietnam on their front pages. The French code name for the operation, one learned, was Vautour (Vulture). Page one maps depicted the strongpoints within the surrounded fortress—little hills named Anne-Marie, Gabrielle, Dominique, Isabelle, Huguette, Françoise, Claudine, Béatrice, and the twin hillocks of Eliane One and Eliane Four—“the Lollobrigidas.” Christian de Castries, the senior French officer, had been promote
d from colonel to brigadier on the theory that a hero ought to be a general. Geneviève de Galard-Terraube, a French nurse, had refused to board the last plane back to Hanoi; she became “the Angel of Dienbienphu.” Several stories told how de Castries, discovering that his part of the post was doomed, had called down artillery fire upon himself.
Many accounts of the siege were apocryphal. De Castries sent no orders to his artillery because he had no artillery left. The Beau Geste stories being featured in American newspapers had no connection with actual conditions in the entrenched camp. War correspondents were not to blame, for the French high command was also uninformed. By Easter Sunday, April 18, when beribboned officers from the Maison de France sang their annual hallelujahs in Hanoi Cathedral, they no longer knew much about their Vautour. Observation planes arriving overhead to see what was happening to the post were either destroyed by Giap’s flak or driven away. The whole of the airstrip was being raked by Viet machine guns. A final attempt by C-54s to parachute supplies—together with de Castries’s brigadier’s stars, brandy to celebrate his promotion, and boxes of Croix de Guerre and Légion d’Honneur awards—failed completely. Recoilless guns on blockhouses, now in Viet hands, picked off Frenchmen pursuing the parachutes, and next morning the Viet Minh radio triumphantly announced the capture of everything dropped, including the brandy.
The men of Dienbienphu were now wretched beyond imagining. Half of them had already fallen. Alternately baked by the pitiless tropical sun and wrapped in sheets of rain, they lay burrowed under mounds of excrement and decaying corpses. Futile counterattacks on the lost emplacements left them in despair. Giap’s barrages of 105s never slackened. Zagging Viet trenches continued to inch toward the French, bringing enemy infantry closer. For a while hopeful rumors had predicted a relief column from Hanoi, then an American air armada. The reports were believed by the men, by their officers, and even by de Castries, who found it hard to accept the fact that Navarre had sent him here to die. Now in April he knew: Hanoi ordered him to destroy all arms and supplies before they could fall into enemy hands. His men, he was told, were to be rallied for a last stand by the knowledge that they were holding up a Viet battle corps and defending the honor of France.
On May 7, the fifty-sixth day of siege, the tricolor over Dienbienphu was replaced by a white flag and then by the Viet Minh colors, red with a star of gold. The honor of France would never be the same again. In Geneva the multination conference on Asia had already begun. There was still talk of a U.S. expeditionary force. “No decision has been made to send American troops to Indochina,” said Ed Murrow in a broadcast on the conference, “but neither has a decision been made not to send troops under any circumstances. And the second statement may prove to be more important than the first. If it comes down to the bare choice of losing Indochina to the Communists or saving it, some form of intervention may prove inescapable.”
Then Dulles informed the conferring powers that although Indochina was important, it was not essential to the salvation of Southeast Asia from Communist domination. That cleared the way for a compromise. Vietnam was to be temporarily divided at the 17th Parallel, with the understanding that free elections in both halves of the country would reunite it on July 20, 1956. It was the best of a bad bargain, wrote Robert J. Donovan of the New York Herald Tribune; the domino had been kept “from going all the way over with a crash.”
Meanwhile the Secretary of State’s attempts to put together an Asian alliance continued, spurred by Eisenhower’s declaration that “the free world” knew that “aggression in Korea and Southeast Asia” were “threats to the whole free community to be met only through united action.” In September Dulles’s mission ended successfully in Manila, where delegates from Australia, Britain, France, New Zealand, Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines, and the United States pledged a joint defense against aggression. Article Four of their pact, creating the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, committed them to act together if any one of them was attacked; provision was made to counter not only external threats but also internal subversion. A separate protocol extended the treaty’s protection to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
American diplomacy seemed to be riding high. Few thought it important that the Geneva agreement had not been signed by representatives from either South Vietnam or the United States—Dulles’s official role at the conference had been that of an observer—and that neither, therefore, was bound by the pledge to hold elections in Vietnam two years hence. Thus was set a historic trap. Failure to hold elections would lead to a renewal of hostilities. The difference would be that this time the Viet insurgency would be branded “aggression”—and thus a direct challenge to every member of the alliance forged in Manila. John Ohly’s “snowballing” had begun.
***
In October the Secretary of State, speaking with great deliberation, told the cabinet: “The United States has never been so respected nor had such good relations as now.”
In a private conversation afterward he said of Vietnam: “We have a clean base there, without the taint of colonialism. Dienbienphu was a blessing in disguise.”
Portrait of an American
NORMA JEAN BAKER
She was the bastard daughter of a paranoid schizophrenic—Gladys Pearl Baker, a film cutter for MGM, Paramount, and Columbia studios who was in and out of asylums all her life. Madness also claimed both Gladys’s parents and her brother, who killed himself. She named her unwanted baby after Norma Talmadge, a silent star of that year: 1926. Years later, when the infant was grown, the casting director at Twentieth Century-Fox rechristened her Marilyn Monroe. Once, before she became famous, Marilyn tried to telephone the man who had fathered her. A secretary said, “He doesn’t want to see you. He suggests you see his lawyer in Los Angeles if you have some complaint.”
She hung up without replying, but if ever a girl emerging from childhood had reason to complain, she did. At one time or another she had lived with twelve sets of foster parents. Their standards varied wildly. In one home she was given empty whiskey bottles as toys; two others were ruled by religious fanatics. In one of them she was taught to sing “Jesus Loves Me” in time of trial, punished with a razor strop for thinking impure thoughts, and, when she undressed with a little boy to compare the differences in their bodies, called a slut. She loved a dog; a neighbor killed it. On a visit, her grandmother tried to smother her with a pillow. She spent twenty-one months in an orphanage, and when she became sixteen she married an older man she didn’t love to escape her wretched situation as a ward of the state. Already she was a stammerer, a chronic insomniac—and a girl with a desperate, insatiable yearning to be wanted.
Her first husband taught her sexual ecstasy on a Murphy bed. She gloried in it and would pursue it for the rest of her life, but it wasn’t enough; she craved the adoration of millions. As a child she had spent Saturday afternoons in Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, watching Bette Davis in Jezebel and Norma Shearer in Marie Antoinette and wishing she were up there on the screen. Outside, she would try to fit her feet into the concrete prints of Clara Bow, Janet Gaynor, and Gloria Swanson. After Yank ran a picture of her in an article on women in war work, she was given a screen test. In it she entered a room, sat down, and lit a cigarette. The first man to see the rushes said: “I got a cold chill. This girl had something I hadn’t seen since silent pictures. This is the first girl who looked like one of those lush stars of the silent era. Every frame of the test radiated sex.”
Billy Wilder, who later directed her in Some Like It Hot, called it “flesh impact,” and said the only other stars who had it were Clara Bow, Jean Harlow, and Rita Hayworth. Audiences first saw it in a Marx Brothers comedy, Love Happy. Playing a bit part, Marilyn came swaying into the office of a private detective played by Groucho and said anxiously, “Some men are following me.” Suddenly everyone was tremendously interested in her problem. After The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve had made her a celebrity, that provocative walk was heavily insured by Lloyd’s of London.
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She was worth it. Her twenty-three films between 1950 and 1961 grossed 200 million dollars. Only Brigitte Bardot of France approached her in popularity. Each week on an average Marilyn received five thousand letters, a score of them proposals of marriage. In Turkey a distraught admirer slashed his wrists when she didn’t accept him. Pravda and the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano agreed that she symbolized a sinful society. Nunnally Johnson called her “a phenomenon of nature, like Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon.” To Life she was “a busty Bernhardt,” and her voluptuous dimensions—37.5–23–36—were familiar to millions of men who didn’t know those of their own wives. At various times her immense appeal was attributed to her breathless voice, her incandescence, her ash-blonde hair, her moist-lipped open mouth, her dreamy blue eyes, and that tremulous gait.
It was more elusive than that—and more earthy. Marilyn’s need to be desired was so great that she could make love to a camera. Because of this, her lust aroused lust in audiences, sometimes even among women. There was nothing subtle about it. She was no tease. She was prepared, and even eager, to give what she offered. By the time she was fourteen the fathers of her friends had pawed her, and one summer an off-duty policeman had cut through a screen door to get at her. She never pretended to be shocked, or even resentful.
She became the mistress of a theatrical agent. He lost weight; his physician told him he had a weak heart and must avoid strenuous exercise; but Marilyn’s demands increased until he collapsed while with her in Palm Springs and died. Once, when she was married to Joe DiMaggio and he was away, she slipped on moccasins and prowled the foggy streets of San Francisco looking for a companion. Costarring with Yves Montand in Let’s Make Love while she was Mrs. Arthur Miller, she seduced Montand on the set—and Miller knew it.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 103
