Embers of War (70 page)

But it was not merely McCarthy and his ilk. For years, British analysts had marveled at the deep American aversion—across party lines—to negotiating with adversaries; at the ruling out of compromise and the demand for “unconditional surrender” (“the simple American ideal,” as one Briton put it); and at the unwillingness to recognize China or admit her into the United Nations.
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For years, they had noted the periodic anti-British broadsides in Congress and in the American press—especially the Hearst and Scripps-Howard papers—because of London’s willingness to engage with Beijing and Moscow. “Appeasers,” the British were called, guilty of disloyalty, of cowardice, of cozying up to robbers and murderers. In late 1953, the frustrations seemed to build—in large part, the British speculated, because of American irritation at the failure to achieve outright victory in Korea. Selwyn Lloyd queried veteran U.S. diplomat W. Averell Harriman about it over dinner one evening in New York City. The American was sympathetic. He condemned the prevailing temper and the Eisenhower administration’s habit of always taking publicly rigid diplomatic stances, and he pleaded for Britons to be tolerant from “the wisdom borne of your maturity.”
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Harriman needn’t have worried. London policy makers were not prepared to be anything other than forbearing. They reminded one another that at the end of the day, as one put it, “we and [the Americans] are basically on the same side.” And “anyhow, lecturing a patient in a state of hysteria will never do the slightest good.” Britain simply had to accept that domestic political considerations shaped U.S. foreign policy in crucial ways. Although obsessive hostility toward China “may not reflect an actual majority of opinion throughout the United States, the disturbing factor which emerges is that the United States Administration appear to be convinced that opinion in the Middle West (i.e. isolationist and xenophobic) must at all cost, at any rate for the present, be ‘appeased’; and that we can, with some certainty, expect current United States foreign policy to take this into account as a major, and, perhaps often, as a paramount consideration.”
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Yet despite this British determination to avoid raising hackles in Washington, Anglo-American differences over China policy, and over the fundamental notion of negotiating with Communists, would play themselves out in the first half of 1954, with profoundly important implications for the Indochina War. For the first time since 1945–46, when she had facilitated France’s return to Indochina, Britain would in these six months play a central role in the conflict, generating in the process much angst and anger in Washington—and more accusations of craven weakness in the face of the Communist peril. Time and again the Eisenhower administration would press London to agree to an internationalization of the military struggle in support of France; each time the British would resist, pointing instead to the need for a negotiated political solution. This despite the fact that British officials, who held to their own version of the domino theory, were hardly less keen than the Eisenhower team to see a French victory in the war.

II

ONE MAN WOULD DOMINATE THIS ACTIVE BRITISH DIPLOMACY ON
Vietnam: Anthony Eden, foreign secretary and Churchill’s heir apparent as prime minister. Nineteen-fifty-four would be a triumphant year for this talented, handsome, vain, intensely ambitious man, in large part because of Indochina. His annus mirabilis, one author called it, which is saying something, given that Eden had to that point enjoyed a spectacular political career. Born of landed gentry in County Durham in 1897, Eden survived the trenches of World War I, unlike two of his three brothers and a third of his Eton class. For his actions at the Somme in 1916 he won the Military Cross. In the interwar period, he moved steadily up the greasy pole of politics, becoming in 1935 the youngest foreign secretary ever. Few were surprised by this ascent: Here was a man, after all, who read Persian and Arabic literature in the original and presented an image of effortless suavity—“He had the talent for looking wonderful no matter what he wore,” noted one keen observer of his sartorial elegance—bolstered by an unrivaled knowledge of international affairs and diplomatic history. Only much later would many come to realize that the easy charm and unruffled competence were to some extent a facade, that Eden was, in the words of his authorized biographer, “an exceptionally tense, lonely, and shy man.”
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Eden resigned in 1938 in protest of Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, but he returned to the office during World War II. In 1951, he came back yet again, and the chattering classes predicted he would soon be prime minister. Eden believed it, for Churchill privately told him he’d hand over power in a year. One year became two, and now it was going on three. The waiting was intensely frustrating, not least because Churchill, his zest diminished, chose to focus most of his energy on Eden’s own area of responsibility, defense and foreign policy. It didn’t help Eden’s mood that his own health had been bad for much of 1953, the result of chronic overwork and a botched cholecystectomy in London in April that required several follow-up procedures, one of which almost killed him.

He felt better at Bermuda in December 1953, sunbathing on the beach with Dulles, and as the new year dawned, he was determined to assert himself on the world stage. It would be a momentous year, he sensed, for world politics and for his personal political ambitions; he was right on both counts. Eden’s diplomacy in 1954 would confirm the judgment of many—not least Eden himself—that he was a negotiator of the first rank, capable always of thinking two or three steps ahead, of finding openings, of sensing his adversary’s vulnerabilities and closing in for the kill. It would confirm the sense of seasoned Eden watchers that he was a man of overweening self-esteem and confidence in his own judgment, one result of which was to make him reluctant to delegate. And it would confirm that, his recent health problems notwithstanding, he was as prone to overwork as ever, to long days and short nights that drove him and his staff to the edge of exhaustion.

Eden gave a hint of the trouble to come with Washington in a cabinet memorandum late in 1953. He reminded his colleagues of Britain’s pragmatic approach to relations with Beijing, and of the decision early on to extend diplomatic recognition to Mao’s government and accept China as a legitimate member of the great-power club. British policy, he said, was a combination of containment and compromise, not—as in the case of the Americans—containment and confrontation. Aggressive Chinese expansion would be resisted, but more generally London’s policy rested upon “acceptance of the facts of the situation, the avoidance of provocation, gradual progress towards more normal trading and diplomatic relations, and the need to keep a toe in the door in case divergences between China and Russia develop and can be exploited.” Maintaining good relations with Beijing would also help London secure its interests in Malaya and Hong Kong.
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Eden therefore came to Berlin fully prepared to agree to a future great-power meeting that would include China. He knew Dulles would balk. For the U.S. leadership, Eden warned Churchill, there could be no question of admitting “the bloody Chinese aggressor into the councils of peaceful nations.” Though he and Dulles had gotten on quite well at Bermuda in December, Eden had left that meeting troubled by what he sensed was a growing gulf in Anglo-American relations. The U.S. approach to the matters under discussion at Bermuda had been crude, he thought, and Eisenhower in particular had been frightening with his casual talk of using nuclear bombs in the Far East and his reference to post-Stalin Russia as the “same old whore” in a new dress.
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On Indochina specifically, Eden’s memoirs claim that he arrived in Berlin convinced of the need for a negotiated solution.
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That may be clearer than the truth, for the contemporaneous documentation suggests he remained, in January 1954, desirous of gaining a turnaround of the military situation before any settlement. No fan of revolutionary nationalism in the developing world, he would have liked to see Ho Chi Minh’s cause decisively defeated. But Eden was a realist; such an outcome was unlikely to happen, he knew. From an early point in the conference he expressed a willingness to bring the great powers together to discuss the matter, and he got the cabinet to endorse his view that it would be unwise to oppose a proposal to include China in such a meeting.

Eden’s French counterpart, Foreign Minister Georges Bidault, was equivocal. Personally his instinct was to stand firm and to insist that Beijing first give a token of its goodwill, since “it has persisted in contributing to the equipment and training of the Viet Minh troops.”
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He still clung to the belief that French commander Henri Navarre’s Operation Atlante, then just under way, could dramatically alter the military picture below the eighteenth parallel in France’s favor, and that Dien Bien Phu could deal a crushing blow to Giap’s ambitions. The Americans would support him in this hard-line position, he believed.
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But Bidault also knew that Paris officialdom would expect him to make progress toward ending
la sale guerre
. In the view of most members of Joseph Laniel’s center-right coalition, a five-power conference including China seemed likely to hasten this development and therefore should be embraced. French public opinion, meanwhile, was losing faith in the war effort seemingly on a daily basis. A poll carried out during the Berlin meeting found that only 7 percent of respondents favored fighting to keep Indochina. Bidault didn’t doubt that there would be uproar, should the government refuse to follow every possible lead for an armistice, including an international conference with China.
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Even Charles de Gaulle, whose intransigence in 1945–46 had done so much to start the bloodshed, had given up on military victory in Indochina, Bidault knew. In recent weeks, the general had told numerous associates and reporters that France should disengage from the struggle. “We have no really direct interest in Indochina,” de Gaulle informed an American journalist in mid-January. “That is a reality. What is taking place there now is merely a prestige war. Not even the prestige of France is involved anymore. Indochina is of international interest more and more and of French interest less and less.… We will regret [leaving] greatly, but we must go.”
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It all pointed to the prospect of considerable Western disunity when the delegations arrived on January 25 for the start of the conference, held in the interallied building on the Potsdamerstrasse in the American sector of Berlin. No doubt relishing the prospect, Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov immediately proposed a meeting including China to discuss “measures for reducing international tension.” Dulles objected, insisting several times in the early days that the United States would not take part in a five-power conference, for to do so would mean conversing about world problems with unrepentant aggressors. Molotov refused to be put off, stressing the important role that China, “a great power,” could play in lessening world tension. The Russian suggested the meeting could be held in May or June and implied that the agenda could be confined to Korea and Indochina.

There matters might have rested had it not been for Eden, who now cast himself in the role of the honest broker. He received strong support from Churchill, who was keen to meet the Soviets halfway in furtherance of his personal “peace offensive.”
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With progress on the other agenda items—the German question and the matter of a peace treaty for Austria, still left unresolved from World War II—extremely unlikely, both men were eager to gain something, anything, from the weeks and weeks of speechifying in Berlin; an agreement for a five-power meeting seemed the best bet. That such a deal would come despite American objections didn’t deter Eden and may have added to his motivation. Dulles’s obstreperous refusal to admit China to international society annoyed him, for one thing. More broadly, he resented Britain’s standing as the junior partner in the “special relationship,” and he felt the (largely unspoken) resentment of one whose adult life had seen the gradual replacement of his nation by the United States as the preeminent force in world affairs. Though intellectually Eden knew that his country was a cash-strapped, declining power, he sought ways to assert her strength and independence, which, among other things, could strengthen the government’s as well as his own personal standing with voters at home. Here was such an opportunity.
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Eden accordingly embarked on a great personal mission to win an agreement for a five-power meeting, to be convened in May or June at a locale to be determined. He had noticed a chink in the Americans’ armor: At a preconference strategy session on January 23, Dulles had allowed that he might be willing to meet with the Chinese concerning one matter, namely Korea, about which many unsettled issues remained. Dulles had suggested that Molotov would never accept such a limited agenda, and he was right; the Soviet diplomat initially refused to consider anything other than an “international” agenda. Little by little, however, over a period of almost three weeks, Eden got the two men to come around. Bidault, at once insistent on negotiations and tempted by his dream of making China cease aiding the Viet Minh as the price of her participation, signed on as well and won approval for his preferred venue: Geneva. On February 18, the Berlin conference agreed that “the problem of restoring peace in Indochina will also be discussed at the Conference [on the Korean question], to which representatives of the United States, France, the United Kingdom, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the Chinese People’s Republic and other interested states will be invited.”
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