Embers of War (47 page)

So impressed was Dewey that he suggested de Lattre visit the United States personally to make the case for the vital importance of France’s struggle. De Lattre had been entertaining the idea himself. The road to victory in the war, he was convinced, led through Washington, but the Truman team still needed to be convinced of the full importance of Vietnam in the world picture. He trusted no one else to make the case. In September, accordingly, he left Saigon for the American capital, stopping in France en route. British officials thought he looked tired and worn during a dinner in Paris on the fourth but were impressed by the case he laid out, by his passionate defense of French policy. Also impressed were two prominent Americans he saw in the French capital, General Dwight Eisenhower, who had succeeded him as Western Europe’s top general and was now NATO commander, and Henry Cabot Lodge, Republican senator from Massachusetts. Both men accepted de Lattre’s claim that France wasn’t fighting a selfish colonial war but was defending one of the hinges of the allied front against the East. Both agreed that France deserved greater material and political support in the struggle.
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VI

HE ARRIVED BY SHIP, ENTERING NEW YORK HARBOR ON SEPTEMBER
13 aboard the stately
Île de France
. Resplendent in kepi and pigskin gloves, he posed for photos with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, who were returning from location filming for
The African Queen
, in which Bogart starred with Katharine Hepburn. De Lattre then asked for a picture of himself with the Statue of Liberty as a backdrop. The massed photographers were quick to oblige, and de Lattre turned his chiseled profile to the lenses and gestured theatrically toward his country’s copper gift to America. A fawning cover story in Henry Luce’s virulently anti-Communist
Time
called the photo request a “deliberately significant gesture: the general had freedom—and mutual aid—very much in mind.” For nine months, the magazine enthused, de Lattre “has been fighting one of freedom’s bloodiest and most crucial battles,” and he was now coming to the United States to get more aid for Indochina, “the rampart against the Communist surge toward Singapore and the Indies.”
⁴³

That was precisely the message de Lattre wanted to convey during his two-week stay. At every stop, he framed the Indochina struggle in Cold War terms, as a war against “Red colonialism.” Just as United Nations forces were fighting the Communist world dictatorship in Korea, so French troops were fighting it in Indochina; these were two fronts in the same struggle. But in Indochina France fought alone. She had willingly assumed the burden of war in Indochina at a tremendous cost to her manpower and financial resources, and while America had provided essential assistance, more must come, in the form of larger and prompter arms deliveries. To assuage American concerns regarding France’s ultimate plans, de Lattre insisted that his government had no colonial ambitions in Indochina but was doing everything possible to build up the strength and independence of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
⁴⁴

The message went over well, in large part, both inside and outside the halls of power, but behind the scenes there were tensions. In Washington, where the general got the number one treatment—honor guard, military band, howitzer salute, receptions, dinners—President Truman told him he regarded the Indochina struggle as “the same fight for liberty” as the war in Korea and pledged full support for the French effort. Secretary of State Acheson offered his own assurances: “We shall do all that is possible for you.” De Lattre sought clarification: Did this mean that Korea and Indochina would get equal billing in terms of U.S. expenditures? No, came the reply, Indochina’s needs, while highly important, would be acted upon only after those in Korea had been fulfilled.
⁴⁵

At the Pentagon a few days later, de Lattre tried again. “If you lose Korea,” he told Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Asia is not lost; but if I lose Indochina, Asia is lost.” Tonkin was the key to Southeast Asia, and if Southeast Asia were lost, India would “burn like a match,” and there’d be no hindrance to the march of Communism before Suez and Africa. The Muslim world would be engulfed, the Muslims of North Africa would fall in line, and Europe itself would be outflanked. Lovett praised de Lattre’s exegesis and said he agreed the stakes in Vietnam were huge, but he added that “the United States has a primary obligation in other theaters, whereas your primary obligation is in your own theater.” When de Lattre complained that he felt at times during his visit like a “beggar” and that “your spirit should lead you to send me [greater military aid] without my asking,” Lovett said, “We all regard General de Lattre as a comrade in arms and will do everything possible for his theater within our capabilities.” The general shot back: “Do not say
my
theater; it is
our
theater.”
⁴⁶

And so it went, at each stop on the tour. In public, the charismatic Frenchman made a great impression, charming Americans with his heavily accented (but near-fluent) English and winning smiles when he tripped over an idiom. Always he cut a striking figure, whether praying at George Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon, or visiting the naval and military academies as well as Fort Benning and Langley Air Force Base, or laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, or attending a gala dinner in his honor hosted by Henry Luce at the Union Club in Manhattan. He won praise for his performance on NBC’s
Meet the Press
, before an estimated viewing audience of twelve million, and for his address before the National Press Club, where again he pressed the theme that Indochina was the key to saving Asia from the Communist peril: “The loss of Southeast Asia would mean that Communism would have at its disposal essential strategic raw materials, that the Japanese economy would forever be unbalanced, and that the whole of Asia would be threatened.” Hanoi was the key to victory, he continued, its importance comparable to Bastogne, where American armies fought off German encirclement in December 1944, and to Berlin, which the Soviets unsuccessfully blockaded some four years later.
⁴⁷

From Truman on down, senior U.S. officials publicly affirmed support for the war effort and pledged to speed up military deliveries. In private sessions, though, they refused to accept that Korea and Vietnam were one war, and they pressed the general for more proof that France was sincerely committed to full independence for Indochina, and for greater efforts to build up the Vietnamese fighting forces.
The Washington Post
spoke for much of American officialdom when it editorialized, in the middle of the French general’s visit, that “the great problem in increased military aid is to avoid the appearance of propping up colonialism.”
⁴⁸

Still, when de Lattre and his wife left New York by air shortly before midnight on September 25, bound for Paris, he took satisfaction in the results of the trip. As well he might. The Americans had unambiguously affirmed the critical importance of the fight against Ho Chi Minh and had pledged to bolster their military assistance and to deliver it with more dispatch. In Congress and in the press, and among the general public, awareness of the French war and of French military needs was now much greater than before. As a laudatory
New York Times
editorial put it, the Washington talks made two points plain: “First, we are in basic political agreement with the French. Second, our aid to the Associated States of Indochina will be stepped up. Both are vital.”
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VII

EVEN BEFORE DE LATTRE’S VISIT, THE AID HAD BEEN SUBSTANTIAL
. He had already received upward of a hundred U.S. fighter planes, fifty bombers and transports, and ground arms for thirty battalions, as well as artillery and naval craft. But other promised deliveries, including trucks and tanks, were months behind schedule. Only 444 of a scheduled 968 jeeps and 393 of 906 six-by-six trucks, for example, had been sent in fiscal year 1951. Lovett blamed the slow pace on production problems and a lack of expertise at some plants, but he and other officials also said the French themselves were partly responsible, chiefly because of their inadequate maintenance practices. Distribution of matériel already delivered was another problem: Armed convoys were forced to move slowly—whether by road or water—and were subject to frequent Viet Minh attacks. Nevertheless, Army Chief of Staff J. Lawton Collins pledged to de Lattre that U.S. deliveries would be stepped up, and they were: In the four months following his visit, the French received more than 130,000 tons of equipment, including 53 million rounds of ammunition, 8,000 general-purpose vehicles, 650 combat vehicles, 200 aircraft, 14,000 automatic weapons, and 3,500 radios.
⁵⁰

DE LATTRE AND A THOROUGHLY SMITTEN GENERAL LAWTON COLLINS IN HANOI ON OCTOBER 23, 1951.
(photo credit 11.2)

Collins paid glowing tribute to the success of de Lattre’s U.S. trip when he called on the general in Saigon a few weeks later. “You came like a crusader to present the cause for which you were fighting in Indo-China,” the American gushed. “You pleaded with all your incomparable ardor and conviction. Few of your campaigns have created enthusiasm that is comparable to that which you raised by your visit to America. No one has ever shown, as you showed, in such simple language, all that is at stake in Indo-China, nor made clear the issues that are possible. To our people you have rendered a great service.”
⁵¹

That was one possible view of the Frenchman’s mission and cause, but not the only one. Another American, who held a starkly different view, called on de Lattre in Saigon that autumn, a young Democratic congressman who in time would stand at the very apex of America’s Vietnam decision making. This was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose visit to Indochina in mid-October—accompanied by his brother Robert and sister Patricia, during a tour of Asia and the Middle East—is described at the start of this book. JFK was taken aback by what he saw, it will be recalled—France was engaged in a major colonial war and was plainly losing. The United States, as France’s principal ally in the effort, was guilty by association and risked being forced down the same path as the European colonialists. The French-supported Vietnamese government lacked broad popular support, Kennedy determined, and Ho Chi Minh would win any nationwide election.

It was a remarkable message coming from a man who hitherto had sounded every bit the Cold Warrior, blasting the Truman administration, for example, for allowing China to fall to Communism and bragging to constituents about his ties to the rabidly anti-Communist Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy. But it’s clear that the Asian tour changed JFK’s outlook. It convinced him that the United States must align herself with the emerging nations, and that Communism could never be defeated by relying solely or principally on force of arms. His Indochina experience led him to that conclusion, as did a dinner conversation in New Delhi with Jawaharlal Nehru, who called the French war an example of doomed colonialism and said Communism offered the masses “something to die for” whereas the West promised only the status quo. War would not stop Communism, Nehru warned him; it would only enhance it, “for the devastation of war breeds only more poverty and more want.” Kennedy agreed, but he wondered if U.S. officials grasped these essential truths. Many of “our representatives abroad seem to be a breed of their own,” he said a few weeks later, “moving mainly in their own limited circles not knowing too much of the people to whom they are accredited, unconscious of the fact that their role is not tennis and cocktails, but the interpretation to a foreign country of the meaning of American life and the interpretations to us of that country’s aspirations and aims.”
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Other Americans also held these twin convictions—that the United States was becoming too enmeshed in the war, and that the prospects were nevertheless bleak. At the CIA and at the State Department, numerous midlevel officials held them, as did some of Kennedy’s colleagues on Capitol Hill. Indeed, a sizable number of informed Republican and Democratic lawmakers in this period saw the war as resulting primarily from France’s determination to preserve her colonial empire; some spoke in language similar to that of JFK.
⁵³
For that matter, even Truman and Acheson themselves agreed on the need for French reforms “toward the natives” and on the danger to American interests of seeming to support colonial control. So did Heath in Saigon, and so did Ambassador David Bruce in Paris. But all four parted company with the Kennedy line in their conviction that the French military effort nevertheless needed America’s full support. Cold War imperatives demanded it. Hence the tens of thousands of tons of U.S. military equipment that flowed in to Indochina—that is, to the French, not directly to the VNA—as 1951 turned into 1952.