Embers of War (37 page)

Truman chose him because of his loyalty and his qualifications, and his formidable intelligence, but it didn’t hurt that he so much looked and sounded the part. He strode forth as the quintessence of the striped-pants diplomat, with his Savile Row suits, his erect bearing, his astonishing mustache, his manners, his precision, and his dry Anglo wit. “He looked more like a British foreign secretary than any British foreign secretary I ever saw,” said the longtime
New York Times
Washington bureau chief James “Scotty” Reston, who saw a few. And in fact, Acheson was an Anglophile of the first order, who could be outspoken in his admiration for the British Empire. He was also a staunch anti-Communist and was often brusquely impatient with, and suspicious of, the nationalist leaders of the colonial world. When a State Department analyst in February 1949 noted the general absence of anti-American propaganda coming out of Viet Minh headquarters, and suggested that Ho Chi Minh still hoped for U.S. backing for—or at least noninterference in—his cause, Acheson was unmoved. The question, he said some weeks later, of whether Ho Chi Minh was as much a “nationalist as a Commie is irrelevant. All Stalinists in colonial areas are nationalists.” Ho, he said, was an “outright Commie.”
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To acknowledge the possibility of national Communism was to acknowledge that the world was a complex place, and this Acheson and Truman and other American leaders were loath to do. If, for example, Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito (whose break with Moscow had become public the previous year) really was a nationalist as well as a Communist, and if Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh were the same, then the world was altogether more complicated than most Americans—including educated, erudite ones like Acheson—preferred to believe. It was far easier to see these leaders as mere pawns of a hyperpowerful superstate emanating from the Kremlin—regardless of what the evidence showed.
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All of which would suggest that Acheson was a godsend for the men hunkered down in the French defense ministry. In actuality, though, he was torn in his early months in office about which way to go on Vietnam. In February 1949, he commented acidly, “Over the past three years,” the French “have shown no impressively sincere intention or desire to make the concessions which seem necessary to solve the Indochina question.” In the early spring, Acheson resisted pressure from State Department conservatives to throw full U.S. support behind France and the Bao Dai solution. He couldn’t get away from the notion that Bao Dai was a weak leader with no hope of winning broad popular support, couldn’t get away from the suspicion that France sought merely to continue her colonial war under a new guise. In this respect Acheson endorsed the views of the liberal voices at Foggy Bottom, Asian specialists such as Charles Reed, the former consul general in Saigon who had penned the “dead-end alley” memo in January and who continued in the spring to voice deep pessimism regarding the prospects in Indochina. Far better, Reed advised, for the United States to make her stand against Communism in a more hospitable environment such as Thailand.
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Ultimately, however, Acheson couldn’t bring himself to act on this knowledge and instead sided with the conservatives. When he visited Paris for a foreign ministers’ meeting in June, he listened sympathetically as the new U.S. ambassador, David Bruce, laid out why a failure to back France in Indochina could have disastrous effects in French politics. The centrist governments comprised of the MRP, the Socialists, and the Radical Socialists, Bruce noted, faced ever-mounting pressure from the Communists on the left and the Gaullists on the right. With the NATO treaty close to signing, any policy that harmed the centrists—whose credibility, after all, was most on the line in Indochina—risked harming U.S. strategic interests. Granting full independence to the Vietnamese would compel Paris to make similar pledges to other colonies, notably Morocco and Tunisia. The French public would oppose a swift loss of the empire, and therefore the government would fall, thereby endangering French policies with respect to German sovereignty and European security. And besides, the ambassador tossed in, the Vietnamese were not ready to assume the responsibilities of independence in any case.
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As for Bao Dai and his chances against the Viet Minh, Acheson in the end backed the argument put forth by the new consul general in Saigon, George M. Abbott. “Our support will not insure Bao Dai’s success,” Abbott acknowledged, “but the lack of it will probably make certain his failure.” Acheson concurred, though even in accepting the point, he continued through the end of 1949 to withhold formal recognition of the Bao Dai regime, at least pending the French National Assembly’s explicit endorsement of the Élysée Accords.
⁷

And Ho Chi Minh? Acheson’s view of him grew more and more dim in 1949. In radio interviews with Western journalists, Ho steadfastly denied that he was a Russian puppet and insisted that his government was not Communist but was composed of many elements.
Newsweek
concluded that Ho might be “more of a Vietnamese nationalist right now than a Communist stooge,” but Acheson wasn’t buying. When French analyst Paul Mus told midlevel State Department officials in April that Ho had the full support of the Vietnamese except for a tiny minority in Cochin China, Acheson no doubt heard or read a recap of the conversation but again refused to budge. He and his colleagues chose instead to believe that support for the Viet Minh would plummet once France gave real and meaningful authority to an “independent” Bao Dai regime.
⁸
The obvious questions that followed—What if Bao Dai was not granted such powers? Why should France continue the fight if Vietnam was to be independent?—were not discussed.

II

BROADER INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS ALSO SHAPED ACHESON’S
thinking on Vietnam in 1949. He began to pay more attention to Southeast Asia’s economic potential, particularly in terms of facilitating Japan’s recovery. Given the instability in China, Washington planners deemed it absolutely essential to secure a stable, prosperous Japan under U.S. control. Southeast Asia, rich in rice, tin, oil, and minerals, and with a population of 170 million (bigger than the United States), could play a principal role in this endeavor. George F. Kennan, head of the Policy Planning Staff, influenced Acheson in this direction, as did the young Dean Rusk, deputy undersecretary of state and a man Acheson asked to take on a larger role in Asian policy. The maintenance of a pro-Western Southeast Asia, they and other government analysts argued, would provide the markets and resources necessary for Japan’s economic revival—and help the recovery of Western Europe (by then well under way, but showing signs of a slowdown) as well. According to Rusk, the importation of rice from Indochina, for example, could be a terrific boon in securing Japan’s revitalization.
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Then, in the second half of the year, came two momentous developments: In August, the Soviet Union for the first time detonated an atomic device; and in September, Mao Zedong’s forces completed their rout of Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang. Specialists had known that it was only a matter of time before Stalin got the bomb, but most thought the time would be the early or mid-1950s, not August 1949. The implications were huge (if not quite as enormous as some doomsayers in Washington proclaimed). It meant the end of the U.S. atomic monopoly and immediately raised fears that Stalin might embark on an aggressive course to expand his global reach. That worrisome thought only gained more currency the next month, when Mao Zedong consolidated his victory in China. Here neither the event nor the timing was a surprise to specialists—Nanjing had fallen in April, Shanghai in May, and Changsha in August—but for ordinary Americans it was sobering to hear Mao dramatically declare, from the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing, the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Chiang and the remnants of his army fled to Formosa (now Taiwan).

Though some senior U.S. officials, Acheson among them, believed that the USSR and Mao’s government would ultimately experience a rift, in the short term the dangers seemed all too real. Instantly, the number of major Communist foes had doubled. As a report by the National Security Council (NSC) had put it in June, “the extension of Communist authority in China represents a grievous political defeat for us.… If Southeast Asia is also swept by Communism, we shall have suffered a major political rout the repercussions of which will be felt throughout the rest of the world, especially in the Middle East and in a then critically exposed Australia.… The colonial-nationalist conflict provides a fertile field for subversive Communist movements, and it is now clear that Southeast Asia is the target for a coordinated offensive directed by the Kremlin.”
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There was in fact no such coordinated offensive. Stalin’s interest in Southeast Asia remained minimal, it was soon clear, and his feelings about the Chinese developments were decidedly mixed. Still, U.S. leaders could be forgiven for thinking that Communism was on the march in the region. In addition to Mao in China and Ho in Vietnam, there were Communist-led rebellions in Indonesia, in newly independent Burma, in Malaya, and in the Philippines. All four rebellions would fail in due course, but in late 1949 their mere existence fueled American fears. Did the historical momentum now lie with the Communists? Even if it didn’t in objective terms, might the perception gain hold that it did, producing a bandwagon effect that could have a pernicious impact on American national security interests? It seemed all too possible.

The NSC report, with its warnings of the far-reaching consequences—the Middle East! Australia!—of a loss of Southeast Asia, was an early version of what would come to be known as the domino theory. Knock over one game piece, and the rest would inevitably topple. For the next twenty-five years, high U.S. officials, on both the civilian and the military sides, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, linked the outcome in Vietnam to a chain reaction of regional and global effects, arguing that defeat in Vietnam would have calamitous consequences not merely for that country but for the rest of Southeast Asia and perhaps beyond. Though the nature and cogency of the domino theory shifted over time, the core claim remained the same: If Vietnam was allowed to “fall,” other countries would inevitably follow suit.

It was always an odd theory, and it became more so with the passage of time, as we shall see. Most egregiously, it posited that the countries of East and Southeast Asia had no individuality, no history of their own, no unique circumstances in social, political, and economic life that differentiated them from their neighbors. Yet the theory had a certain plausibility at the outset in 1949–50, while the regional implications of Mao’s triumph were unclear. Its simple imagery also perfectly suited the charged political atmosphere in the United States in the period. Apocalyptic anti-Communism was the order of the day, and the assaults on the Truman administration were ferocious. Tapping into the solipsism that can course through the American body politic, Republicans (and some conservative Democrats) said that only Americans could have been responsible for the Soviet bomb and the China debacle. Soviet spies, working with American accomplices, must have speeded Stalin’s atomic timetable by stealing U.S. secrets (they did). Truman must have “lost” China, must have allowed Chiang Kai-shek to be defeated when it was well within his power—with American assistance—to prevail (it wasn’t). Now all of Asia was ripe for Communist plucking (not exactly). Said a young California congressman named Richard M. Nixon, in reference to China, “The deck was stacked on the communist side of the table.”
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Acheson was an early target of the Red-baiters. At his 1949 confirmation hearing, he refused to criticize Alger Hiss, the former State Department official accused of espionage; a year later, after two sensational trials ended in a conviction for perjury, Acheson grandly announced to reporters, “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.” For the Republican right, already disdainful of Acheson for what they saw as his superciliousness and arrogance (he talks, said one, “as if a piece of fish had got stuck in his mustache”), it was an irresistible opening. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin interrupted a Senate hearing to report the “fantastic statement the Secretary of State has made in the last few minutes.” McCarthy asked aloud if this meant that Acheson would not turn his back on other Communists in Washington as well. Richard Nixon called Acheson’s remarks “disgusting,” and later referred to him as the “Red Dean of the College of Cowardly Containment,” in a choice bit of alliteration. Senator William Jenner, Republican of Indiana, chimed in that Acheson was a Communist whose treachery had caused China to fall. Later, in his memoirs, Nixon elaborated that Acheson had presented a perfect target to Republicans seeking a symbol of the effete Eastern establishment. His “clipped mustache, his British tweeds, and his haughty manner made him the perfect foil for the snobbish kind of foreign service personality and mentality that had been taken in hook, line, and sinker by the Communists.”
¹²

These were absurd charges against a principal architect of America’s Cold War strategy, a man whose aversion to Communism went down to his very bones. But in the context of 1949–50, such attacks on the administration left their mark, and the decision to aid France in Vietnam cannot be understood without consideration of the charged domestic political milieu out of which it emerged. Especially with the defeat in China, Acheson and Truman felt compelled to show America’s mettle
somewhere
, especially in that region, in part to insulate the administration against Republican charges that it was too soft on Moscow—and now Beijing too. Southeast Asia was the logical place.