Embers of War (36 page)

“Every night the explosions, coming one after another like a stick of bombs, formed the background of the city’s noise,” the journalist Lucien Bodard, who was in Vietnam for much of the war, would write of the grenade attacks, which usually took place in the twilight, just after sunset. “Each outburst lasted only a few seconds; each grenade was a sharp bang, a few shrieks from those who had been hit, one or two flying shadows, and then several minutes later the klaxon of an ambulance and a police car.”
³⁴
In retaliation, French agents assassinated Viet Minh suspects and dumped their bodies on street corners as a warning to the insurgents to desist.

A young Canadian who would go on to become prime minister of his country was traveling through Asia that fall and winter. Handsome and cosmopolitan at age twenty-nine, Pierre Elliott Trudeau arrived from Thailand to find in Saigon “hate, strife, and inevitable waste of men, money, and morals.” Once again, he wrote his mother, the youth of France were in uniform, fighting a war that was going “nowhere fast.” Soldiers filled the streets, and people could travel only in convoys. The French held the towns and main roads while the insurgents ruled the countryside, and “nobody holds the peace, though on both sides men die, [are] wounded, suffer and atrocities are committed in the name of elusive righteousness and honor.” After a brief visit to Angkor Wat, Trudeau returned to Saigon, where he managed to get admission to Le Cercle Sportif and saw women whose “bathing suits have gone one better than those in France.”
³⁵

Elsewhere in the south, the Viet Minh were strongly entrenched in the Plain of Reeds west of Saigon and in the Ca Mau peninsula in the far south. In 1948, they regularly ventured outside these areas to stage numerous successful attacks, not all of them under the cover of darkness—in one daytime assault, on a convoy of seventy vehicles traveling between Saigon and Dalat on May 1, a Viet Minh battalion killed 82 persons and took 150 civilians hostage. (The hostages were freed by a Moroccan unit following an intense firefight.)
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The French countered with an impressive security sweep in the Mekong Delta in the second half of the year. With Vo Nguyen Giap content to rely on guerrilla attacks and the French unable to mount major operations, the war settled into an uneasy stalemate in all three regions of the country. And a stalemate, while ideal to neither side, suited Giap’s purposes much more than they suited Valluy’s, not least because Giap’s troop count was increasing much more rapidly than his opposite number’s—by year’s end, Viet Minh forces numbered some 250,000 men. By then, more than half the population of the country lived in territory controlled by the Viet Minh.
³⁷

Casualties, meanwhile, continued to mount. When a British officer visited the French military hospital in Saigon at the end of the year, he found that the number of wounded was much increased over the previous December. The total was now almost eight hundred men, roughly a quarter of whom had serious injuries—the loss of one or more limbs, head wounds, lungs pierced by shrapnel. During the officer’s two-hour visit, twenty-four serious operation cases were received. Nearly all were the result of road mines.
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VI

BAO DAI TOO SAW THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE VIET MINH’S MILITARY
success and of Mao’s gains in China. They gave him increased leverage but also reduced his options. The French, with one eye on Mao’s advancing armies and the other on their own stalemated war, might now give him more of what he wanted, but they might also abandon him if he dithered; they could opt simply to back Xuan and start a new Cochin China experiment with a puppet government run from Paris. He decided to take the plunge, hopeful also that the Americans—who were always at the forefront of his calculations—would now be more inclined to get involved. The reasoning went like this: To contain the Chinese Communists, the Truman administration would step up assistance to France in Indochina, but only if U.S. officials were persuaded that the French cause was vital to the West. This, however, presupposed that the Vietnam that was to be “saved” from Communism was not a mere colonial entity but an independent nation, one headed not by a French puppet but by a genuine nationalist with broad popular support. Paris leaders would balk initially, but they too needed to stay in America’s good graces. If Washington stood firm, the prospects were good for far-reaching French concessions to anti-Communist nationalism.
³⁹

On March 8, 1949, Bao Dai and French president Vincent Auriol concluded, by an exchange of letters, the Élysée Accords, so named for the grand presidential palace in Paris at which the ceremony took place. The accord reconfirmed Vietnam’s autonomy and her status as an “Associated State” within the French Union (Laos received the same status that July, and Cambodia in November), and it spelled out how the liquidation of Cochin Chinese separatism would occur. This new “State of Vietnam” also was promised her own army for internal security reasons, but with the crucial proviso that this army would be equipped and, in effect, directed by France. Many Vietnamese already serving in the Expeditionary Corps (some thirty-eight thousand in early 1949) resisted transfer to the new army, and there was from the start an acute shortage of officers. More important, under the Élysée Accords, Vietnam’s foreign and defense relations would remain under French control, and in various other ways too the accord showed that Paris retained ultimate sovereignty. Vietnam under Bao Dai, that is to say, would become independent only when French leaders decided she was good and ready.

To no one’s surprise, the announcement of the agreement aroused scant enthusiasm in Vietnam. The DRV leadership immediately denounced the deal, and Ho Chi Minh went on the radio to declare he would continue the struggle until complete independence was won. In April, the Viet Minh issued a warrant for Bao Dai’s arrest on the charge of high treason. French efforts to drum up excitement among other Vietnamese, meanwhile, foundered on the widespread feelings of apathy (“it means no improvement in my life”) or cynicism (“the so-called independence is a sham”) or both.
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Still, the French had their Bao Dai solution. They now turned to what had been a principal motive behind the plan in the first place: securing increased American material and diplomatic backing. Barely had the ink on the accord dried than the Ministry of Overseas France showed the text to U.S. diplomats. Not even the National Assembly got to see it sooner. In the weeks that followed, officials took every chance to try to convince Americans of the liberality of French policy and of Bao Dai’s stature as the only thing standing in the way of a Communist takeover. The tactic worked. It did so despite the fact that Washington had long held doubts about Bao Dai’s viability as a nationalist leader. Already in December 1947 the Central Intelligence Agency had concluded that any government under the emperor would be fatally harmed by association with France and would never pose a serious threat to the “fanatical loyalty” inspired by Ho. Thirteen months later, in January 1949, a State Department analysis predicted that a Bao Dai administration “might become virtually a puppet government separated from the people and existing only by the presence of French military forces.” Should that happen, an April 1949 memo warned, “we must then follow blindly down a dead-end alley, expending our limited resources … in a fight that would be hopeless.”
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It might be a dead-end alley, others in the administration said, or it might not be. What swung the Truman administration in favor of the Élysée Accords was the possibility, distant though it might be, that Bao Dai really was a viable moderate nationalist alternative to Ho Chi Minh, and moreover that the risks of committing to him and to the French were smaller than the risks of doing nothing. Mao’s forces were pressing forward to victory in China, and global Communism seemed to be on the march. Something had to be done.

It mattered too that powerful voices in American society were pressing the argument. In 1949, Henry R. Luce’s
Time
and its sister publication,
Life
, insisted—more and more loudly as the year progressed—that France was fighting for the West in Indochina and therefore must have robust U.S. support. A great many people heard the message.
Time
was for many Americans at midcentury more than a magazine: It was a kind of unofficial but authoritative version of America’s noble cause in the Cold War.
Life
, for its part, was read by an astonishing 44.4 percent of college-educated males. Though few Americans had heard of Luce, they lapped up the news as filtered through his prism. “If the U.S. goes into Asia,”
Time
declared in October 1949, then she will have to “go in with both feet, with money and authority, with the will to help Asians build their own strong, free societies and with the result of preventing them from committing national suicide under the strains of that painful process.” The magazine left no doubt that the effort must be made. Syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop argued likewise, notably in a quartet of columns he penned during a stay in Saigon in June, in which he excoriated the French for dragging their feet in the negotiations with Bao Dai.
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For Ho too, 1949 would prove to be pivotal. The astonishing developments in world politics during that year would influence his cause no less than the French. After years of diplomatic failure, of international isolation, his Democratic Republic of Vietnam would taste her first real success, though with implications that he could not foresee. The war was about to change. Up to now largely a Franco-Vietnamese affair, resulting from Paris leaders’ attempt to reclaim colonial control and Vietnamese nationalistic determination to thwart them and define a new postcolonial order, it would become something else, something more.

The great powers were coming to Vietnam.

CHAPTER 9
“THE CENTER OF THE COLD WAR”

“H
AVING PUT OUR HAND TO THE PLOW, WE WOULD NOT LOOK
back.”
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Such was Dean Acheson’s characterization of the American decision to effectively abandon her neutral policy and back the French war effort with substantial economic and military aid. It was an apt characterization, not only for 1949 but for many years to come. For the better part of twenty years, it would be the mantra of American administrations on Vietnam: Don’t look back; keep pressing ahead. Not until 1968, when Lyndon Baines Johnson curtailed the bombing, agreed to negotiations with Hanoi, and announced he would not seek reelection, did the direction change. Even then, the war had another five years to run.

Acheson’s words come from his memoir, which appeared at about the time the beleaguered LBJ fled Washington in 1969, a man broken by the war. The year before, Acheson had been among the “Wise Men” who had counseled Johnson that there was no light at the end of the tunnel in Vietnam, that he had no choice but to reduce U.S. involvement. Acheson was in a position to know, for he had been there at the start two decades prior. Hardly one to be accused of excessive modesty, Acheson titled his memoir
Present at the Creation
, and indeed he was. He was a central player, arguably
the
central player, in the drama of the late 1940s and early 1950s that saw the United States become a global hegemon, the self-appointed defender of Western civilization. As one account has it, he was more responsible for the Truman Doctrine than Truman, more the architect of the Marshall Plan than Marshall. Later, he was instrumental in frightening the Senate into ratifying the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, America’s first-ever peacetime military alliance. More than any other presidential adviser, arguably more than President Truman himself, Acheson shaped the nation’s postwar role on the world stage.
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Including in Southeast Asia. Though the latter-day Acheson wasn’t keen to underscore the fact, he was also “present at the creation” of his country’s long and difficult commitment to Vietnam. The State Department dominated decision making on Indochina in the second half of the 1940s, and Acheson, by virtue of his role as secretary of state after January 1949—and a forceful and decisive one at that—was the man in charge when the big decisions of 1949–50 had to be made.

His rise in government had been rapid. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, on April 11, 1893, the son of an Episcopal bishop, Acheson attended Groton and Yale, followed by Harvard Law School. After a period with the Washington law firm of Covington & Burling, he entered the federal government as undersecretary of the treasury in 1933. During the Second World War, he served as assistant secretary of state, and in 1945 he became undersecretary (the second-ranking position in the department), quickly earning a reputation for being orderly, efficient, savvy, and discreet. In January 1949, after a period away from government, he was summoned back by Truman to assume the top job.