Embers of War (80 page)

If Dulles and Eisenhower were displeased with Nixon’s choice of words, they didn’t show it. Dulles teased Nixon on the phone about getting his name in the paper and assured him that the president was not disturbed by what he had said. Eisenhower, in a subsequent phone conversation, told Nixon not to worry, he probably would have said the same thing himself. Publicly the president refused to comment on the matter, leading journalists to speculate he approved of the remarks. Nixon,
The Wall Street Journal
declared, had “expressed a carefully considered administration view.”
²⁸

Whether intended as such or not, the statement did serve as a useful trial balloon for American planners, though which direction it drifted was not clear. Many editors who heard the speech in person were favorably impressed, it seems, or at least bought the underlying message. “More than a generation ago Lenin set down the dictum that the conquest of the world for communism lay, first, in the conquest of Asia,” pontificated
The New York Times
. The dictum had been followed, the paper continued, and much of Asia had since 1945 been lost to the West. The process could not be allowed to continue, for on the outcome at Dien Bien Phu hinged “survival in a free world, for us as well as for the Indochinese. This is the reason that the Vice-President and our Administration take the case seriously and the reason we must do likewise.”
The Wall Street Journal
announced it would support a decision to send troops and declared: “The premise of this decision, which Mr. Nixon stated with a candor and persuasiveness that does him great credit, is that Indo-China is vital to the security of the United States. Therefore, should it unhappily come to the ultimate choice, the United States must do what must be done.” And America must do it despite the fact—the paper added prophetically—that the “road through Indo-China will be a long one for the United States.”
²⁹

Nixon, like most ambitious politicians an assiduous reader of his own press coverage, welcomed these and other expressions of editorial support.
³⁰
He was taken aback, however, by the negative response in Congress, where many legislators feared that the
Journal
’s assessment was all too correct: The war, once entered, would last a long time. Hadn’t they made clear to the White House, moreover, that intervention would have to be multilateral? Why, then, was the vice president implying that the United States might act regardless of allied backing? Democrats voiced these concerns the loudest, but even Republicans acknowledged that the administration still had a job to do to build popular support. In a Gallup poll after Nixon’s speech, 68 percent of those surveyed opposed sending U.S. ground forces to Indochina.
³¹

Whether this mixed response to the speech had any appreciable effect on administration policy that April is hard to say. Probably it didn’t, except perhaps to remind top officials that unilateral intervention involving U.S. ground forces would not be an easy sell at home. Top policy makers were as committed after the speech to implementing United Action as they had been before and as leery of any kind of compromise settlement with the Communists at Geneva. Eisenhower and Dulles were exasperated by the London government’s attitude on both of these matters but had not given up on changing Britain’s policy or, if that failed, finding a way to proceed militarily without her. Both men were furious with France for seeking large-scale American aid while insisting on retaining full authority over war policy, and for refusing to grant full independence to the Associated States; but they still saw no option but to keep the French in the fight until the rainy season brought relief, and to stiffen the Laniel-Bidault team’s backbone in preparation for Geneva. On April 24, more than a week after Nixon’s speech, presidential press secretary James Hagerty would write in his diary that the option of using American airpower “to support French troops at Dien Bien Phu” remained alive.
³²

Walter Robertson, the assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs and a figure largely lost to history, gave a sense of the administration’s determination in a dinner conversation with an American journalist in Paris on April 22. Robertson was a hawk with a tendency toward hyperbole, but even so his comments are revealing. “We must recognize,” he told C. L. Sulzberger of
The New York Times
, “that it is impossible for us to lose Southeast Asia—which would follow the loss of Indochina.” America’s “whole civilization would be affected,” and therefore intervention was the only answer. “What is the difference,” Robertson asked, “whether the Communists start a war of aggression or we lose our civilization because we have failed to take a sufficiently powerful stand?” To Sulzberger this was a reiteration of Eisenhower’s domino theory as expressed two weeks earlier, and a recipe for “preventive war,” but the journalist noted that Robertson also said a war—any kind of war—would mean the end of “ ‘our civilization’—even in budgetary terms, quite apart from the destructive power of new weapons. [Robertson] remarked that the national debt was then $275 billion and ‘another war would bankrupt the country.’ ” Still, the United States must go in, and with as much force as necessary. “This is a time,” Robertson warned, “to tighten our belts, a time for unpopular decisions and higher taxes—not for a soft, easy, luxurious life.”

Robertson added that the Vietnamese hated the French and that Washington was stuck with France’s puppet emperor, “the horrid little Bao Dai.” He muttered dejectedly: “If only Ho Chi Minh were on our side we could do something about the situation. But unfortunately he is the enemy.”
³³

V

ROBERTSON AND SULZBERGER WERE DINING IN PARIS BECAUSE JOHN
Foster Dulles and top aides had returned to the French capital—less than a week after leaving—for more talks, this time in tripartite form involving also the British. Officially the meeting was to be devoted to NATO affairs, but Indochina dominated from start to finish. No one present doubted the importance of the moment: This was the last chance to develop a unified Western position in advance of the Geneva Conference, set to begin a few days thence.

Bidault made the first move, in a session with Dulles on the morning of April 22, before the British delegation had even arrived. In recent days had come more grim news from Dien Bien Phu, and General Navarre once again pressed for immediate and massive U.S. air support, à la Operation Vulture, despite deep private doubts that any such intervention would come in time to save the garrison. (On April 21, he wired Paris: “From now on, it is as much for the United States that we are fighting as for ourselves.”) General Valluy sounded out U.S. officials in Washington on April 18 but got a noncommittal response—it would be up to Eisenhower, he was told, and the president had not yet made up his mind. Dejected Paris policy makers considered negotiating a truce to allow the evacuation of the wounded, but the view prevailed that such a truce would give the Viet Minh too great a propaganda advantage heading into Geneva. What alternative remained? Perhaps only one, Bidault concluded: The government might have to accept United Action and its odious political elements, if that was the price to be paid for relieving Dien Bien Phu.
³⁴

But Bidault still could not bring himself to accept the Americans’ prescription, not fully. Dulles would have to bend a little too. At that first session on April 22, the Frenchman, looking exhausted and depressed and joined on his side only by General Ely, painted a dark picture of the situation at Dien Bien Phu; in the past few days, it had become, he said, virtually hopeless. Disagreements and recriminations between the top generals—a clear reference to the now-unbridgeable chasm between Navarre and René Cogny—made things even worse. Nor was any kind of breakout from the camp possible, since the wounded could not be moved and the able-bodied troops would not leave them behind. Only one thing now had any chance of saving the situation, Navarre and Ely continued, namely a massive air intervention, of the kind only America could undertake, involving two to three hundred carrier-based aircraft. Britain could be forgotten, since her participation would be minuscule anyway. Alongside such immediate action at Dien Bien Phu—here came Bidault’s concession—an internationalization of the struggle of the type Washington wanted would be possible, even though the French government had been opposed to it up to now.
³⁵

Dulles liked what he heard. At last Paris had moved toward acceptance of United Action. Much as he may have wanted to strike a deal right then and there, however, the secretary knew he could not. A collective defense system would have to be in place
before
any intervention; Congress had made that clear. Or at least Great Britain would have to be directly and explicitly on board. And there was one more thing, he told Bidault: France would have to give the Associated States an “independent” role in the new system, meaning they would be able to negotiate themselves to receive American aid. Bidault shook his head. If Dien Bien Phu fell, France would have no need for a coalition, he replied, and indeed would not want one, for in such an eventuality the French people would see a coalition as doing nothing but prolonging French bloodshed in Southeast Asia. According to Dulles’s account, the Frenchman concluded the meeting with an ominous warning: If the fortress fell, France would want to pull out completely from Southeast Asia and assume no continuing commitments, “and the rest of us would have to get along without France in this area.”
³⁶

It was an inauspicious start to the proceedings. Bidault, according to several sources, left the meeting enraged by the Americans’ stubborn fixation on United Action when he could think only of Dien Bien Phu, while Dulles for his part told the British delegation over lunch that the French were on the verge of quitting Vietnam altogether.
³⁷
When the tripartite talks got under way that afternoon, Bidault’s mood had not improved. He was garrulous, ironical, and obscure, and more than a few of the twenty-odd people in the room, aware of his weakness for drink, thought he was inebriated. A British observer suspected exhaustion more than alcohol, but the effect was the same: Nobody really understood what the Frenchman was saying. “[He] said he was casting himself to the wolves, into the waves, under the train, but we could not quite make out which wolves, waves, train.” Bidault also read out a “declaration of French intentions” that indicated a French commitment to defending the Associated States at all costs, but later in the meeting he seemed to dismiss it as merely “
une tendance
,” which he did not plan to publish.
³⁸

Turning to Dulles, the foreign minister noted the presence of American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin and Dulles’s repeated public statements that America would not tolerate the expansion of Communism. If Washington wished, it could now reconcile those twin realities by assisting France at Dien Bien Phu. “He merely looked glum,” Bidault later remembered, “and did not even promise to repeat my request to Washington.”
³⁹

AS TOP NATO LEADERS MEET IN PARIS TO DISCUSS THE NEXT COURSE OF ACTION IN INDOCHINA, FRENCH PARATROOPS FILE INTO THE NOSE OF A U.S. AIR FORCE GLOBEMASTER AT ORLY AIRPORT IN THE CITY’S OUTSKIRTS ON APRIL 23, 1954, BOUND FOR DIEN BIEN PHU.
(photo credit 20.1)

But Dulles did offer a response, the nature of which has been shrouded in controversy for half a century. According to Bidault, the American took him aside during an intermission and asked him whether atomic bombs could be effective at Dien Bien Phu. If so, Dulles allegedly went on, his government could provide two such bombs to France. Bidault said he turned down the request, on the grounds that the bombs would destroy the garrison as well as the Viet Minh, while dropping them farther away, on supply lines, would risk war with China. When informed a few months later of Bidault’s claim, Dulles said he could not recall making such an offer and insisted there must have been a misunderstanding. Given Bidault’s visible exhaustion on the day in question and his muddled speech-making, and given the lack of any British or American confirmation of the claim, it is reasonable to suppose Dulles might have been right. On the other hand, Bidault’s version is supported by senior French official Jean Chauvel in his memoirs, and by General Ely in his diary, which was kept on a daily basis. Ely wrote that he was of two minds about “the offer of two atom bombs. The psychological impact would be tremendous, but the [military] effectiveness was uncertain, and it carries the risk of generalized warfare.”
⁴⁰