Embers of War (76 page)

The second article bore the title “The Day We Didn’t Go to War,” a standard bit of journalistic hyperbole that nevertheless contained more than a grain of truth. This was a pivotal moment, as the participants well understood. Joining Johnson from Congress were fellow Senate Democrats Richard Russell of Georgia and Earle Clements of Kentucky; Republican senators Eugene Millikan of Colorado and Knowland of California; House Speaker Joseph Martin, a Republican from Massachusetts; and House Democratic leaders John W. McCormack of Massachusetts and J. Percy Priest of Tennessee. With Eisenhower away at Camp David, Dulles presided and was joined on his side by Admiral Radford, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roger Kyes, Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith, Navy Secretary Robert B. Anderson, and Assistant Secretary of State and future U.S. senator from Kentucky Thruston B. Morton.
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The atmosphere was electric from the start. Dulles, who may have had the draft resolution already in his possession that day, opened by saying that the meeting had been called at the president’s request, with an eye toward organizing a response to the crisis in Southeast Asia. Then he cut to the chase: What the administration sought was a joint resolution by Congress authorizing the president to use air and naval power in Indochina. The mere passage of such a resolution might make its actual use unnecessary, he went on, but that only made its consideration more vital. The president believed it essential for Congress and the White House to be on the same page with respect to the war.

Radford then gave the legislators a comprehensive rundown of the military situation, painting a grim picture of the conditions at Dien Bien Phu. The fortress was in desperate straits, he declared, and might succumb at any time. Dulles voiced full agreement with Radford’s assessment and said defeat at Dien Bien Phu could have calamitous political implications, setting off a French move to withdraw entirely and leading to the Communist conquest of all of Indochina. America’s defensive line in Asia would in turn be gravely endangered. If Indochina was allowed to fall, “it was only a question of time until all of Southeast Asia falls along with Indonesia.” To prevent such a catastrophe, the secretary urged Congress to give the president solid backing “so that he could use air and seapower in the area if he felt it necessary in the interest of national security.”

Knowland immediately offered his support but quickly fell silent as probing questions poured forth from several of his colleagues. Clements asked Radford if the notion of using air strikes to try to save the French at Dien Bien Phu had the approval of the rest of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“No,” the admiral replied.

“How many of the three agree with you?”

“None.”

“How do you account for that?”

“I have spent more time in the Far East than any of them and I understand the situation better.”

The full-court press continued: What about allied involvement? “We want no more Koreas with the United States furnishing 90 percent of the manpower,” Lyndon Johnson said plainly, repeating a complaint made some weeks before by William Knowland. Dulles and Radford replied that the action they were contemplating would be on a much more limited scale than the effort in Korea, since French and Vietnamese troops would do all the fighting on the ground. The legislators were not mollified. They doubted France’s willingness and capability to maintain her share of the responsibility and expressed a concern that Johnson would have thrown back at him a decade later: Once the flag was committed, it would be impossible to limit U.S. involvement to air and sea power. Ground troops would inevitably follow. By acclamation, the eight lawmakers voted their response to the secretary’s plea: Before they would ask the rest of Congress to back any commitment of American military power to Indochina, they must be assured that it would be part of a multilateral effort. Could Dulles offer that assurance?

The secretary hedged. He realized he was caught in a catch-22. He could not secure foreign commitments to join a coalition without proof that his own government was fully on board. But the legislators were now telling him that a precondition for congressional backing was gaining allied support in advance. He tried to satisfy them by saying he had begun consultations with Britain and the Philippines and would soon talk to the French, and he added he felt confident that Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the Philippines were unofficially on board, willing to contribute troops to a defense coalition. All well and good, the legislators said, according to personal notes taken by Russell, but it was London that mattered. What about the likelihood of a British commitment? Dulles admitted he was “unenthusiastic.”
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And with that, the meeting broke up, a little more than two hours in. A consensus had been reached that if sufficient foreign commitments were obtained, a congressional resolution could be passed authorizing the president to deploy American armed forces in the area. Dulles phoned the president that afternoon and tried to put the best face on what had occurred. “On the whole it went pretty well—although it raised some serious problems.” Congress would be quite prepared to go along on “some vigorous action” but only if “we were not doing it alone” and only “if the people of the area are involved too.” Eisenhower agreed. “You can’t go in and win unless the people want you,” he told Dulles. “The French could win in six months if the people were with them.”
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Dulles got to work immediately on securing allied support for United Action. He arranged for the Australian and New Zealand ambassadors to come to his home the next afternoon, April 4, and began preparations for a campaign to get London to join the coalition. He also met with Henri Bonnet, the French ambassador to Washington, telling him that a negotiated peace would equal surrender and that partition of Vietnam—an idea slowly gaining currency in London and elsewhere, in which the Viet Minh would have control of the northern portion—was synonymous with defeat. French prestige in North Africa and elsewhere was at stake, he warned Bonnet; therefore Paris simply had to stay in the fight. Would Congress sanction U.S. military intervention? Bonnet asked. Only if such action was part of a coalition of powers, including Britain, and only if France remained an active participant, the American replied. Bonnet pressed the point: What if London refused? “The difficulties would be greatly increased,” Dulles acknowledged, “if the British would not agree,” but it might still be possible to proceed. Bonnet was reassured; the secretary had implied that British involvement was not essential, a position that seemed, Bonnet said, to accord with Dulles’s March 29 speech in New York.
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In fact, though, British participation
was
essential, at least under present circumstances, as Dulles made clear when Ambassadors Percy Spender of Australia and Sir Leslie Munro of New Zealand arrived at his home the following afternoon. Hardly had the visitors taken their seats in the library before he and Radford and Walter Bedell Smith lit into them on the vital importance of avoiding a French defeat, lest all of Southeast Asia fall and Japan seek accommodation with Communist China. A new military force was needed, Dulles said, and it had to include Great Britain, or Congress would not give its approval. Yet Winston Churchill’s government seemed altogether too inclined to seek the “least bad” exit from Indochina, perhaps by way of partition.

At this point, Dulles rose and walked over to a bookcase. He pulled out the first volume of Churchill’s monumental history of the Second World War. Opening it to a certain page, he pedantically read aloud the Briton’s account of the 1931–32 episode when Henry L. Stimson, then the U.S. secretary of state, had tried in vain to enlist British assistance in a joint effort to check Japanese expansionism. Churchill in the book excused London’s behavior on the grounds that Great Britain had no reason to expect corresponding American involvement in Europe, where the truly vital problems lay. That was a reasonable argument at the time, the solemn secretary told his guests as he closed the book and returned it to the shelf, but no longer. Today the United States was fully involved and had “definitely proved” her deep concern with European developments.
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Spender and Munro listened attentively but kept their counsel. They were not unsympathetic to the American’s claims, and they promised to pass on to their governments his specific request of naval support, probably in the form of a carrier from each. But they could do no more. Dulles plainly hoped that by taking Canberra and Wellington into his confidence he could meaningfully alter London’s policy, but this was a long shot at best, given the intimate nature of Commonwealth diplomacy and the residual subservience of the junior partners to British supremacy on global military strategy. Upon leaving the Dulles residence, the two ambassadors informed not only their home governments of the contents of the discussion, but also the British embassy in Washington.
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Eisenhower, meanwhile, had returned from Camp David. At 8:20 that same Sunday evening, April 4, he held an off-the-record meeting with five foreign policy advisers in the upstairs study at the White House: Dulles, Smith, Radford, Kyes, and State Department counselor Douglas MacArthur II. According to his assistant Sherman Adams, the president agreed “to send American forces to Indo-China under certain strict conditions”: that (1) the intervention take the form of a united action including Great Britain and other concerned states, that (2) France agree to maintain her own commitments in the area, and that (3) the Paris government pledge to grant full independence to the Associated States, so as to avoid any hint of colonialism. Though Adams didn’t say it, there can be no doubt the conferees that evening saw the first two conditions as of more immediate importance than the third and moreover felt securing the first could be essential to gaining the second.
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How to interpret Eisenhower’s decision to seek support from Congress on the issue of intervention? Scholars have lauded his inclusion of the legislative branch at a key juncture in the policy making; they often also praise his refusal to take the unilateralist path trod by so many of his successors in the White House. But historians have disagreed in their assessments of his underlying motivations. Some assert that he deliberately used the April 3 meeting to isolate hawks within the administration such as Radford and Vice President Nixon, whose desire for direct military intervention he did not share. According to this interpretation, Eisenhower had no intention of permitting the use of American military force in Indochina in the spring of 1954, and he cleverly used congressional doubts as a means to avoid action while simultaneously protecting his political flank from the inevitable fallout following French defeat.
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Others depict a president who was himself a hawk, who believed the apocalyptic rhetoric about Indochina’s transcendent importance, and who was serious about intervention, but who was determined to have Congress—and therefore allied governments—on board. With the long and frustrating Korean experience fresh in everyone’s minds, it was inconceivable to him to put Americans in harm’s way in Asia again without the explicit backing of Capitol Hill.
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The evidence makes it hard to come down firmly on one side or the other, but the best argument is the second one, or a variant thereof: that Eisenhower actively contemplated taking the United States directly into the war and sought a blank check from Congress to free his hands and strengthen his bargaining position vis-à-vis allies, or at least that he wanted to keep open the option of military involvement. A president scheming to use congressional nervousness as a pretext to avoid deeper involvement would not have tried to remove such constraints on his future decision-making authority; Eisenhower did.
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A president determined to stay out of the war would also have spoken more elliptically about the nature of the threat in Indochina, and would have instructed top aides to do likewise. He would not have worked so hard to bring the British around. Taken as a whole, Eisenhower’s statements and actions from the time of General Ely’s arrival on March 20 until April 4—and, as we shall see, in the days thereafter—suggest a man who was fully prepared to intervene with force under certain circumstances and who sought to maintain his freedom of maneuver for whatever contingencies might arise.

V

WHEN MACARTHUR LEFT THE WHITE HOUSE THAT EVENING OF
April 4, he decided to go back to Foggy Bottom and check his mail for any late messages. At 10:15
P.M
. he read a top-secret cable from the Paris embassy. It was a stunner: The Laniel government had decided formally to request American intervention at Dien Bien Phu, in the form of Operation Vulture. Two days earlier, on April 2, Colonel Raymond Brohon, a midlevel French officer, had arrived in Hanoi, charged with determining General Navarre’s views on Vulture and, more broadly, whether the general thought American air strikes could save Dien Bien Phu. U.S. Admiral Radford, Brohon noted, had told Paul Ely he supported such action. If Navarre signaled his approval, Paris leaders had decided on March 29, the French government would put the request forward to Washington.
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Navarre was initially skeptical—he questioned Vulture’s military utility and feared it could bring Chinese retaliation—but by April 3 he had warmed to the plan. Overnight the situation at Dien Bien Phu had grown still more ominous. Portions of Eliane and Dominique in the north-central part of the camp had fallen to the enemy, and the wounded could no longer be evacuated—the last flight out had left on March 26. The garrison was now totally dependent on air-drops that, on account of Viet Minh antiaircraft fire and the steady compression of the perimeter, were increasingly landing in enemy territory. On April 4, after Brohon had returned to France, Navarre radioed Paris his approval: “The intervention of which Colonel Brohon has told me can have a decisive impact, especially if it is made before the Viet Minh [major] assault.”
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Defense Minister Pleven, who that afternoon had been accosted by hostile Indochina veterans at the Ceremony of the Flame at the Arc de Triomphe, immediately called a meeting of a newly formed “war committee”—composed of the service chiefs and some key cabinet members—for late that evening. In short order, they voted to ask for American air strikes. Even those members fearful of “international complications” arising from U.S. intervention went along, as did those who doubted that even large-scale aerial bombardment could save the day. A desperate situation called for desperate action. But all also agreed that the intervention must be immediate and massive.
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