Embers of War (55 page)

More worryingly still from Ho’s perspective, the enemy’s effort at pacification in the south was showing some signs of success. Utilizing the “oil-spot” (
tache d’huile
) technique pioneered in African colonies in the late nineteenth century by Joseph-Simon Gallieni (so named because it resembled an oil spot gradually spreading outward), the French in 1952 worked to extend their control from secure to contested to insecure areas through a mix of military, political, and economic means. This was the approach Bernard de Lattre de Tassigny had called for in 1950, one aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the peasantry and based on the premise—later central to U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine—that although political action alone is insufficient to defeat an insurgency, neither can military force alone achieve decisive results.

The French had made sporadic efforts in this direction since 1948; even now their commitment to it was fitful at best. Smart French planners knew that what worked in the Sahara—where there were obligatory watering points that could be occupied and denied to the rebels—might not work so easily in Indochina. They understood that the oil-spot approach is usually an expensive, time-consuming, chancy proposition, especially for a foreign power—it is always hard for a local population to feel that an army of occupation is its friend. Success is often temporary and tends to come only in areas were revolutionary forces are not already entrenched. Still, the gains, however modest, were a source of concern to Viet Minh officers, one of whom candidly confided to a French counterpart that he had no enemy more dangerous than a doctor who treated the villagers without regard to their political allegiance.
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And what about developments outside Vietnam? Always a keen observer of international events, not least those in the United States, Ho Chi Minh knew that a new president had been elected in Washington, a war-hero general whose Republican Party had hammered Democrats for “losing” China and negotiating in Korea, and whose vice-president-elect, Richard Nixon, was a Red-baiter of the first order. What would the new administration do in Indochina? It was too soon to tell, but Ho had ample reason to be worried. When Joseph Starobin interviewed him at a secret location in the mountains of Tonkin early in 1953, Ho used every chance to turn the conversation to things American. He reminisced about seeing the Statue of Liberty and Harlem as a young man and asked Starobin why the supposedly anticolonial Americans would supply bombers to imperial France for use against innocent Vietnamese. Yet again, as 1953 opened, U.S. plans and policies were very much on Ho Chi Minh’s mind.

CHAPTER 14
EISENHOWER IN CHARGE

T
HE NEW AMERICAN PRESIDENT HAD NOT PROVIDED MUCH DETAIL ON
his foreign policy plans during the campaign. He didn’t have to. For millions of voters, it was enough that he was Ike, supreme commander of the D-day invasion that liberated Nazi-occupied Europe and later chief of staff of the army and supreme commander of NATO. Even many of the delegates at the 1952 Republican convention knew little about his policy stances and didn’t care. With his famous grin and soldierly presence, Eisenhower seemed the perfect candidate to restore stability to a troubled land—and to win back the White House after twenty years of Democratic control. Though a Republican, he seemed to much of the electorate somehow above politics, a trusted father figure who could unite a country wracked by division over the Korean War and McCarthyite Red-baiting.

In reality, Eisenhower was a savvy political operator, the possessor of what his vice president, Richard Nixon, termed, with no little admiration, a “devious mind.” Well aware of the enormous political advantage that his military pedigree conferred on him, Eisenhower was content to follow what scholars later called a “hidden-hand” political strategy. In the campaign, this meant taking the high road and letting others make the most strident attacks on the Democrats and their candidate Adlai E. Stevenson. It was Nixon—who seemed to relish taking the low road—who saddled Stevenson, an ardent Cold Warrior, with the designation “Adlai the Appeaser,” and with having “a PhD from Acheson’s College of Cowardly Communist Containment.” It was McCarthy who charged George Marshall, five-star general and secretary of state and then defense under Truman (and a mentor to Eisenhower), with participating in “a [Soviet-led Communist] conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.”
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Eisenhower privately cringed at such rhetoric, but he didn’t repudiate it. He frowned on the “purple, prosecuting-attorney style” of the Republican Party platform but didn’t disavow it. To the dismay of friends, he did not come to Marshall’s defense, even removing, at McCarthy’s urging, a passage praising Marshall from a Milwaukee speech.
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Though Eisenhower didn’t entirely trust Nixon, he chose him as his running mate because he believed that Nixon—the man who had “gotten” Alger Hiss—could help him win over Polish American and other ethnic minorities and the Republican Old Guard. When his foreign policy adviser John Foster Dulles got carried away vowing to dump the Democrats’ feckless
containment
strategy in favor of one dedicated to the
liberation
of “captive” peoples, Eisenhower reprimanded him, but gingerly, in a way that made him, Eisenhower, seem sensible and prudent but allowed the underlying charge to remain. He himself castigated Truman for “losing” China and for weakening America’s posture in the Far East, and he vowed to stop Communist advances elsewhere in the region. In due course, these assertions would come back to haunt him, to box him in and limit his options on Indochina. In the near term, though, they worked: The Stevenson camp had no effective answer, and on election day the Republican ticket rolled to victory.

Foreign policy issues dominated much of the campaign, and no wonder: America was at war in Korea, and no end seemed in sight. Moreover, all signs that autumn pointed to deepening Cold War tensions. Soviet-American relations were marked by intense mutual suspicion, and an atmosphere of hysteria gripped life within both superpowers. In the United States, McCarthy and his allies searched for Communists in the government and in Hollywood, while in the Soviet Union, Stalin unleashed another of his campaigns of “vigilance” against “internal enemies,” this one targeting a supposed Jewish “doctor’s plot” against the Kremlin leadership. The Americans that fall tested their first thermonuclear weapon, and the Soviets were not far behind. In Asia, the two superpowers jockeyed for supremacy and cast a wary eye on Mao Zedong’s China.

It stands to reason that intense speculation surrounded Eisenhower’s choice for secretary of state. He named Dulles, a fateful selection that determined the basic coloration of the administration in international affairs, and therefore also the contours of U.S. foreign policy, for the rest of the 1950s. A formidable duo they were. Some early studies exaggerated Dulles’s role in policy making, while more recently some historians have unduly minimized it. The truth is that both men were crucial, with Eisenhower ultimately controlling policy but Dulles doing much to shape decisions.
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The son of a Presbyterian minister in Watertown, New York, Dulles had been involved in American diplomacy since 1907 when, as an undergraduate, he accompanied the U.S. delegation to the Hague peace conference. Well before that, he took a special interest in foreign affairs, sometimes accompanying his grandfather, the lawyer-diplomat John Watson Foster, who had been secretary of state under President Benjamin Harrison, to dinner parties at the White House. “Foster has been studying to be Secretary of State since he was five years old,” Eisenhower joked more than once, and he wasn’t that far off. When Dulles was five, his mother wrote of him, “Mentally, he is remarkable for his age. His logical acumen betokens a career as a thinker … he reasons with a clearness far beyond his age.”
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Her judgment would be borne out time and again in the years to come, as her precocious child excelled at every level of education. Upon completing high school at age fifteen, he went to Princeton, where he threw himself into his studies and shunned the eating clubs that were the symbols of the school’s social success. He could have been popular at Princeton, he would later say, but it would have consumed too much of his time. Devoutly religious, Dulles opted against following his father’s path into the ministry and instead went to law school. Family connections—his uncle, Robert Lansing, was Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state—won him a place on the American delegation to the Paris peace conference in 1919, where he helped draft policy on German reparations and the war guilt question. In the interwar years, Dulles worked his way up the ladder at Sullivan & Cromwell, a prestigious law firm, all the while deepening his interest in politics and public service. By 1927, he was the firm’s sole managing partner and one of the highest-paid attorneys in the world.
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An ardent believer in American internationalism, Dulles was also deeply anti-Communist and pro-business, and he thought Republicans more trustworthy than Democrats—they were more wealthy, after all, and therefore understood better how the world worked. In 1944 and again in 1948, Dulles advised Thomas E. Dewey’s campaigns for president, and he likely would have been the secretary of state in a Dewey administration. A subsequent failed run for the U.S. Senate from New York—Dulles decked his campaign car with a banner proclaiming him “Enemy of the Reds!” which about summarized his platform—convinced him that his political future lay in appointive rather than elective office. Now, in January 1953, at age sixty-five, he would get to run the State Department at last.

Not everyone welcomed his selection. Many Europeans found him too sanctimonious by half and shuddered at his fire-and-brimstone anti-Communism, which they feared would lead to a Soviet-American confrontation and possible nuclear annihilation of the continent. They much preferred the less ideological Dean Acheson. Already in 1942, when Dulles undertook several minor missions to England, one British official found him “the wooliest type of pontificating American.… Heaven help us!” Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, remembering also that Dulles had been equivocal about the Nazi menace in the late 1930s, went so far as to write Eisenhower to express the hope that he would select someone else. Harold Macmillan, like Eden a future Tory prime minister, in his diary that spring referred to the “dunder-headed Dulles” who was “sure to make a ‘gaffe’ if it is possible to do so.”
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In the United States, skeptics included Reinhold Niebuhr, the influential theologian, who said of him, “Mr. Dulles’s moral universe makes everything quite clear, too clear.… Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.”
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Some Republicans worried that Dulles’s propensity for hyperbole and oversimplification could lead also to heightened partisan tensions in Washington. Eisenhower thought so too, but the prospect did not worry him too much. Dulles, he shrewdly determined, could serve as a buffer between him and the Republican right and moreover had enormous experience on his side. Said the president-elect of his choice: “There’s only one man I know who has seen more of the world and talked with more people and knows more than he does, and that’s me.”
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To the outside world, they presented two sharply different styles: Eisenhower was prudent, pragmatic, modest, easygoing; Dulles bombastic, severe, self-important, socially shy, even gauche. In conversation, the president tended to be plainspoken, while Dulles sought refuge in intellectual abstractions. Both men had been raised in deeply religious homes, but whereas Eisenhower wore his faith lightly, the secretary of state came across as inflexibly pious. Still, they developed a close working relationship, based on mutual respect if not perhaps deep affection. Behind closed doors, Dulles sometimes revealed a capacity for flexible and pragmatic thought that would have amazed outsiders, and—even more shocking—a sense of humor. He also showed he knew who was boss. Despite the claims of later detractors, he had no inclination to get ahead of the president on foreign policy, for he understood that his power derived from Eisenhower’s confidence in him. He vowed not to repeat the error of his uncle Robert Lansing, who had been dismissed for crossing Wilson. From the start, he and Eisenhower conferred frequently, in person or on the phone or—when the peripatetic secretary of state was abroad—via telegram. Whenever their schedules permitted, they got together privately for a late-afternoon drink at the White House to exchange views.

II

NEITHER EISENHOWER NOR DULLES HAD FOCUSED CLOSE ATTENTION
on Indochina in the preceding years, but both were cognizant of the main developments. Eisenhower also possessed his own experience in Southeast Asia to draw upon. In the late 1930s, he served three years under Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines, assisting in the effort to build up a Filipino army to defend the islands against the encroaching Japanese. At that time, he defended America’s imperial record, comparing it favorably to that of the European powers; the latter, he wrote in his diary, viewed their overseas possessions as opportunities “for their own economic betterment,” whereas Americans believed in “government only by consent of the governed.”
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As he took the oath of office, Eisenhower’s first policy priority was to make good on his campaign promise to end the Korean War as quickly as possible. But his very willingness to discuss peace terms with the North Koreans and the Chinese made him all the more determined to show firmness toward Communism elsewhere in Asia. From the start, he and Dulles sought at all costs to keep France from following their Korea example by negotiating with Ho Chi Minh. Domestic politics was one motivation—McCarthyism was a potent force in American politics that winter, and the two men were eager to avoid giving the Wisconsin senator and his supporters (or for that matter, partisan Democrats) ammunition for the soft-on-Communism charge. But Eisenhower and Dulles also saw Indochina as a key Cold War struggle; if anything, they were more convinced of the point than were their predecessors. Ho Chi Minh had to be defeated, they firmly believed, which meant the French had to stay in the fight.
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