In 1947, when congressional support for aid to Greece and Turkey was wavering, when the British, clearly bled white by two world wars, could no longer function as the dominant Western power, the torch was passed to the United States, and it was Acheson who assisted in relaying the torch of Anglo-Saxon sanity and order. The British said they could not bail out the Greek economic situation, which was near collapse, nor could they underwrite the modernization of the Turkish army. Reading the cables at the time, Loy Henderson, then director of the office of Near Eastern and African Affairs, thought “that Great Britain had within the hour handed the job of world leadership with all its burdens and all its glory to the United States.”
With congressional leadership dubious, it was Acheson who rallied everyone; he painted a picture of a world slowly being infected by Communism, country by country, one rotten apple contaminating the barrel. Only the United States stood between freedom and this latest totalitarian threat of all Western civilization. The dark ages were the alternative: the Russians would get control of the Mediterranean, then Africa, then Asia. In Europe our friends would feel the impact. He said it forcefully and with passion; these were not sham views. Fine, said Senator Arthur Vandenberg, but “if Truman wants it he will have to go and scare hell out of the country.”
This became the origin of the Truman Doctrine. Truman, charged with scaring hell out of the country, did exactly that, to such a degree that when the message for the Doctrine went before Congress it surprised Secretary Marshall, then flying to Moscow. Uneasy with the extent to which the anti-Communist element was stressed, Marshall sent a cable to Truman questioning the wisdom of this presentation, saying he thought Truman was overstating the case. Truman replied that after talking with Senate leaders, he felt sure that this was the only way to get the message through. So it was that Acheson, even more than Marshall, was the architect of containment, the architect of an attitude of universality toward Communism (one could not struggle with them in Europe and acquiesce to a different form of them in Asia. It was not a time for subtleties. Subtleties blew up in your face).
But he was not a man concerned or interested in Asia; he was a man of Europe, which was the serious world, with values that were Western, Christian, democratic-elitist. It was not really Europe as a whole that shared his values, but specifically Anglo-Saxon Europe; as one went farther south and the people became darker and more Mediterranean, they tended to be less worthy and dependable (with the exception of Portugal’s Salazar). But Europe was the world: the Russians to be stopped there, the British held together and given a rest period, the French encouraged to be more worthy of us and their own past, the Germans to be re-created in our image. The French were perhaps the most troublesome, surprisingly unstable for a major European power, insisting always on being French. The underdeveloped world was not a serious place. Though Acheson presided as head of State at a time of great restlessness and changes in the colonial world, with its deep longing for a new order, there is little evidence of it in his memoirs other than a certain irritation with Nehru for his lack of appreciation for Acheson’s grace and wit as a host. Instead, his is an Anglo-Saxon book, dealing mainly with the passing of the torch.
It was this basic disinterest in the underdeveloped world, a belief that it was not only less important but somehow less worthy, and above all the unwillingness to rock any European boat, which came back to haunt, if not him, then his country and his party on Indochina. In October 1949 Acheson, now Secretary of State, talked about Indochina with Nehru, who was extremely pessimistic about the French experiment there (“the Bao Dai alternative,” as it was known). He outlined the failings of the prince and said that the French would never give Bao Dai the freedom necessary to hold the hopes and passions of his people. Acheson told Nehru he was inclined to agree, but that he saw no real alternative. This was an odd answer, since he was in effect saying that we were committed to a dead policy. Nehru, who like other newly independent Asian leaders refused to recognize Bao Dai, told Acheson that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist, albeit a Communist. Nehru argued that European judgments on the failures of popular fronts were specious in an Asian context, and Acheson replied by talking about France and Italy. But at that early date, Acheson knew the French cause was both wrong and hopeless.
Even that attitude would shift in the waning days of 1949 and the first days of 1950. It was not that events in Indochina were different, but that domestic perceptions in the United States, pushed by developments in China, were changing. No longer would the Americans be so even-handed, if that is the word, in their policy toward Indochina. Up until that point Walton Butterworth, still Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East, was fighting valiantly against all the French attempts to involve us in the war with aid and arms, but things were fast moving out of his control. Among other things, the fall of China to the Communists had released a vast amount of money which had been ticketed for Chiang Kai-shek, and there was now talk of giving some of it to the French in Indochina. Philip Jessup, the ambassador-at-large for the Administration, was to go on a special mission in which part of his assignment was to bestow official recognition upon the Bao Dai government (which we had previously thought worthless). After the recognition, the Bao Dai government might receive some leftover China aid. Jessup was to be accompanied by Ray Fosdick and Everett Case. Of course the American options were steadily narrowing; the most hopeful possibility by this time was Bao Dai, since the Ho Chi Minh alternative was now long gone. If we could not support him up to 1949, when there was no domestic pressure, it was impossible now. Bao Dai represented a frail, non-Communist, nationalist alternative, even if the French were co-operative, which they were not likely to be.
Jessup carried with him a letter from Acheson to Bao Dai saying that the Americans were delighted that he had been chosen to lead Vietnam. Jessup, an authority on international law, considered this a letter of recognition. After the visit he went to Singapore, where he held a press conference praising his own visit and saying that the United States was extremely pleased that the French had granted the Vietnamese independence. There was an immediate uproar in Paris, and Jessup was ordered by Washington to give a second press conference, in which he very carefully stated that he had referred to Vietnamese independence within the French union. Once more we had caved in to the French; even within the already limited and probably futile framework of working with Bao Dai, the United States was accepting further limitations. Rather than being the high-water mark of the U.S. commitment to Vietnamese nationalism, it was a reflection of one more concession to the European ally. All in all, it was not a happy trip; on his way back to the United States, Jessup learned that he would have to answer McCarthy’s charges that he had an “affinity for Communism.”
Thus even the recognition of Bao Dai was neutralized, but the American aid to the French cause would come and come quickly. A follow-up mission was appointed by Acheson, headed by a California publisher named Robert Allen Griffin. Its purpose was to determine whether or not to send arms and other military equipment to the French. In Washington, Butterworth, who had consistently fought this kind of thinking, sensed that this was Acheson’s way of signaling an end to an unwanted policy. It was, he thought, an old Department way of switching policies while the same men were still there—send an independent commission, with the advance knowledge that the result would be a new line. A separate survey. A new position. Butterworth was finishing up his tour, anyway. He who had come in so clean and fresh because John Carter Vincent had taken too much heat had now taken too much heat himself. Just as there had been trouble getting Vincent an ambassadorial post which required Senate confirmation, Butterworth would have the same problem: when the Department wanted to send him to Sweden as ambassador, it had to cancel this for a lesser position because of Senate pressures.
Not surprisingly, the Griffin mission found that the Communist threat to Indochina was so acute that it advised the State Department to concentrate on short-range assistance in order to h
elp the French achieve immediate political and military stability. It was not surprising because the reasoning was different: the given was not whether it was wise to aid the French, whether this was the right side or not, but whether the French needed the aid. Of course the French said they needed the aid. Thus began a major new policy of aid to the French in this colonial war, a policy by which the United States would eventually almost completely underwrite the costs, $2 billion worth, and would by 1954 be more eager to have the French continue fighting than Paris was.
There was, however, still one small detail to be taken care of, the question of whether the military equipment and economic aid would be channeled through the French or through the Bao Dai government. The French had been suspicious of American intentions from the start, believing that the Americans were eager to replace them in Saigon. Paris was filled with rumors to this effect. Would the Griffin mission mean that? In March 1950, while the Griffin mission was on its way home, Lieutenant General Marcel Le Carpentier, the French commander in Indochina, said in a statement filled with the feeling of the time (and with a good deal of insight into why the French lost): “I will never agree to equipment being given directly to the Vietnamese. If this is done I would resign within twenty-four hours. The Vietnamese have no generals, no colonels, no military organization that could effectively utilize the equipment. It would all be wasted, and in China the United States has had enough of that.” (The French of course needed the aid because they were being beaten by Vietnamese.)
Le Carpentier would have no problem; as it always did in conflicts between its anticolonialism and its anti-Communism, the United States backed down completely. The equipment arrived, through the auspices of the French; the Vietnamese were on the sidelines, a simple people, not capable of producing colonels and generals. So Griffin recommended that we give military aid; the only question now was, With what kind of leverage? Acheson had already talked with the Philippine statesman Carlos Romulo, one of the few Asians who was considered respectable both in Washington and in Asia, and Romulo warned him that the trouble with giving the French aid was that the moment it was done, you lost all leverage and influence.
In May 1950 Acheson made his decision; again it was not based upon what was good for the Vietnamese or what the needs were on the scene. It was a dual decision; it reflected, first, the general intensifying of the Cold War, and the consequent greater inability to make a distinction between any two parts of the Communist world; second, and perhaps more important in the case of Acheson, it was, like the original Potsdam agreement, a reflection of Indochina as a peripheral area, unimportant in terms of the real world and relationships with European allies. At this time the Americans, who wanted to stabilize Europe with a new and powerful pro-Western and anti-Communist anchor on the Continent, were pushing to revive the West German economy. The British were uneasy about American intentions, and the French were openly recalcitrant, fearing, as they had good reason to, the specter of German economic might and muscle, followed inevitably by German political might and muscle, and fearing this at least as much as they did the specter of international Communism. Then Robert Schuman, one of the great Europeanists of the French government, came up with a plan which would regulate European production of coal and steel under an ultranational regulatory body, and which would let the Germans have far greater coal and steel production. Thus the French had come around to the American demands for European protection and a rebuilding of the West German economy. But there was to be a sweetener. The French economy was troubled, the defense bill for the prolonged and distant war was mounting all the time; they could no longer afford it, and they needed American help for Indochina. On May 7, 1950, the day when Acheson learned of the Schuman Plan, he also agreed to give military aid for the war. It was a quid pro quo decision, though it was not announced as such (later Acheson admitted privately to friends that it was). The desire to strengthen Western Europe against the Communists would see us strengthening a Western nation in a colonial war.
The next day it was announced that the United States would give aid; it was a turning point in the postwar history of American policy; we would begin to finance a colonial war. But if the war was to be financed, then it could no longer be known as a colonial war, but as a war of freedom against Communists. Freedom of speech for the Vietnamese suddenly became an issue. In the past the State Department’s statements on Indochina had carefully abstained from defining the war as the French defined it; now, that too would change. On May 8, after making his deal with Schuman, Acheson announced: “The United States Government, convinced that neither national independence nor democratic evolution exists in any area dominated by Soviet imperialism, considers the situation to be such as to warrant its according economic aid and military equipment to the Associated States of Indochina and France in order to assist them in restoring stability and permitting these states to pursue their peaceful and democratic development.”
Stability, that was the key word, to bring stability to that land, though stability as we defined it was colonialism as the Vietnamese defined it. Freedom to them was instability and revolution. Just as the policy had gotten turned around, so too had the words; as our policy had become an aberration, so too, and this was to continue for the next twenty years, our language. Yet the Acheson decision did not stand out as something terrible, an obvious turning point; rather, it was clearly part of the times and part of an era, the fifties were not a time for subtleties and distinctions. The day after the decision was announced, the New York Times commented editorially: “We cannot ask France to sacrifice for Indochina, merely then to give it up. Neither can we dictate terms to France, because we are not prepared to step in. Indochina is critical—if it falls, all of Southeast Asia will be in mortal peril.” All of this, of course, was before Korea.
Whatever desire to discern distinctions in the Communist world existed in June 1950 (and they had been fast diminishing) ended on June 25, when the North Koreans crossed the border to the South. Two days later Truman announced the American response, and the Korean War was on. Eventually China (because of American miscalculation) entered the war, and all of this made Vietnam totally and definitively part of the great global struggle. Immediately after the start of the Korean War, Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk made a brief list of steps to be taken in Asia; one of the priorities was a sharp increase in military aid to the French. In Washington, American statements reflected French statements; Acheson, who had once seen Ho as something of a nationalist, now was a hard-liner on the war. After Senators Homer Ferguson and Theodore Green made a trip through Asia they returned deeply concerned about what was happening there. They found that wherever they went, most people thought the Americans were supporting a colonial war, which was very damaging to the American reputation for being on the right side and against colonialism. Acheson moved to reassure the senators: they had it all wrong, they had completely misunderstood. It was not nationalism which was being fought there, he told them, it was Communism. The two were incompatible; you cannot be both a Communist and a nationalist. It was all very simple, he said.
It was a marvelous and definitive answer, reflecting the American capacity, and particularly the Achesonian capacity, to see things through our eyes rather than through anyone else’s. Since the situation was clear to Acheson, it should also be clear to the Vietnamese. That self-assurance which blinded him here always served him well against his critics; he did not lack for confidence. But there was a touch of genuine naÏveté about the world. In 1951 Acheson met with Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the famed French commander of the Indochina forces, a French MacArthur. De Lattre explained some of the problems of fighting an elusive enemy in a war without fronts. Then he told Acheson that his greatest need was to train Vietnamese officers, since the Vietnamese would not fight under French officers. Acheson in turn grandly suggested that American officers do the training, explaining that the United States had demonstrated in Korea that it knew how to train Asian officers and the F
rench didn’t. The wars, he thought, and the problems, were the same.
One important minority voice was raised in the State Department at the time—George Kennan’s. There was an element of irony in his dissent, because it was his cables from Moscow toward the end of the war which had fascinated James Forrestal and which had led to a marked escalation in his career and reputation. But Kennan had resented the way his ideas had been used; as American foreign policy hardened after the war, he had a feeling that his ideas were being exploited by his superiors, one element of a broad outline of thinking plucked out by them for their purposes, which were not necessarily his; he was outlining a very complicated thing, and they were not interested in the complications. Kennan had little illusion about Soviet postwar intentions. He knew they would make certain moves which they considered in their national interest, and that we should be prepared for these moves. But he had not foreseen and did not want the spiraling tensions and arms race as the Cold War mounted, and by 1948 he had become the highest-ranking dissenter on what he termed the increasing militarization of American foreign policy. He had dissented on NATO, since, as far as he was concerned, the Marshall Plan was sufficient; Soviet penetration of Western countries, he felt, if it came at all, would come from within, it would not come in the form of Soviet tanks rolling across France. When the Korean War broke out he argued with Acheson that this was not a Soviet attack, but that almost surely the Soviets regarded this as a Korean civil conflict.
By 1950 Kennan had become very unhappy with the growth of the military influence in American foreign policy, and the instinct to have a simplistic approach toward the Communists as one great monolith; and he was uneasy with the embryonic attempts to do in Asia what we had done in Europe. As American involvement in Indochina deepened, he had written a long memo to Acheson saying that the French could not win in Indochina nor could the Americans replace them and win, and that we were now, whether we realized it or not, on our way toward taking their place. He wrote that if the Vietminh won, it would look like a Communist takeover at first, but eventually the local forces would find their own level, and the indigenous people would run things in their own way. Nationalism would inevitably express itself in hundreds of ways, and the people would not be dominated by Moscow or Peking. What he was really saying was that this was nature taking its course, a step in the national evolution of the people.
The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library) Page 53
