Embers of War (91 page)

Eden, having secured provisional agreement from the other delegations to move the conference into restricted session—where, he believed, the real negotiating could commence—knew nothing of these Franco-American contacts until he learned about them in the Swiss newspapers on Saturday morning, May 15. The articles said that discussions would shortly begin in Paris, where Dulles would meet Laniel. Eden was flabbergasted. He confronted Bidault and Smith the next day; the former was evasive, but the American confirmed the reports were correct. Distressed at Washington’s inability to keep a secret, Smith, in strict confidence, showed Eden some of the top-secret telegrams setting out the details of the intrigue. Eden thanked him for this gesture but said Britain could not possibly proceed with the five-power staff conversations he had agreed to on May 5. He reconsidered this refusal two days later, after Bidault assured him France would not request intervention unless and until the Geneva Conference had failed to bring about a settlement, but his suspicions remained. Paris and Washington seemed as uninterested as ever in giving negotiations a serious try, and the belligerence the Americans had shown during the disastrous encounter over dinner on May 1—with their talk of holding a bridgehead in Vietnam for two years while the VNA was being properly trained—evidently had not dissipated.
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A skeptic could ask whether the Franco-American plan was really meant to succeed. Could any French government, given the mood in the National Assembly, ever meet the American preconditions? And why was the scheme leaked to the press? Was this not simply a means by which the White House could show toughness to hawks at home and to Communists in Geneva while setting the bar so high, there was little chance of intervention actually occurring?

The evidence suggests there was more to it than that. Eisenhower did seek to keep the bar high and to bring Congress in on any decision for intervention, but he and Dulles, in the last half of May, worked hard to do what Vice President Nixon had advocated on April 29: create an allied coalition without the British. Thus, on May 19 at the White House, Dulles reminded Eisenhower that America’s proposed military intervention “did not make UK active participation a necessary condition.” The president concurred but noted the importance therefore of Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, and, of course, the Associated States. The next day Dulles met with Australia’s ambassador to Washington, Percy Spender, and New Zealand’s minister for external affairs, Clifton Webb, who was stopping off in Washington on his way home from Geneva. Congressional criticism of Britain as a U.S. ally was growing, Dulles told them, and “the United States is prepared to persevere with an organization which does not include the United Kingdom.” Could the administration count on Canberra and Wellington to join this coalition, if necessary without Britain’s participation? The two men were noncommittal, just as Spender and New Zealand’s Leslie Munro had been noncommittal when Dulles, six weeks earlier, had urged them to use their influence on the stubborn British. They promised merely to consult with their respective governments.
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“With friends like these …,” Dulles might well have muttered. He was fed up. Fed up with dithering allies who always wanted more time, more consultation, more negotiation, who failed to see the need for swift and resolute action. He articulated his frustration in a letter to Dean Rusk, former assistant secretary of state and current head of the Rockefeller Foundation, who as secretary of state himself a decade later would face his own frustrations regarding allies’ views of Vietnam. “I do not think that any adequate thought has been given to the implications of our so-called ‘alliances,’ ” Dulles wrote. “How much should it in fact tie our hands with respect to many areas as to which there is no agreement?” The letter implied that the two men had already discussed the matter the previous week, and Dulles said there might be an important meeting on the subject a few weeks thence, in mid-June, for which he would value Rusk’s input.
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That was in the future: In the here and now, Dulles had to work within the existing system, which meant continuing the quest for collective action. The president had indicated he would not order unilateral intervention, certainly not without the backing of a Congress that showed scant enthusiasm for going in alone. Dulles therefore continued the Franco-American negotiations over intervention, continued to apply pressure on Australia and New Zealand, continued to warn the British and French against agreeing to partition. The latter task became more difficult on May 25, for in restricted session on that day, Pham Van Dong explicitly endorsed the concept—or as explicitly as was possible without uttering the word. Each side would have complete administrative and economic control over its territory, he said in his characteristically staccato French, and would withdraw its military forces from the other zone. A similar arrangement would be implemented in Laos and Cambodia, with one zone for the royal governments of the Associated States and one for the Viet Minh–supported Pathet Lao and Khmer Issarak. Pham Van Dong stressed that his proposal did not represent a violation of the national unity of each country; the division in each case would be temporary and would lead to elections for reunification.

Pham Van Dong knew the general concept he was outlining would find favor in the British delegation and among many in the press corps. More important, he knew partition had growing support in the French camp. Georges Bidault, anxious to assuage the fears of the South Vietnamese government, remained hostile, but several officials—Claude Cheysson and Raymond Offroy, both of them Indochina specialists, as well as Jean Chauvel and Colonel de Brébisson—were convinced of the wisdom of attempting some kind of division of Vietnam, one that would give each side one of the deltas. A week earlier de Brébisson had commenced a series of face-to-face sessions with the Viet Minh’s Colonel Ha Van Lau, the first such Franco–Viet Minh meeting of the conference. Their initial charge was to discuss the evacuation of the wounded from Dien Bien Phu (it will be recalled that several hundred had been too ill to march to Viet Minh prison camps and had been left behind) as well as a possible exchange of prisoners, but in the days thereafter, they also considered other issues of contention, including the mechanics of a cease-fire and how to achieve the regroupment of the two sides. In the weeks to come, these two colonels, who had fought on opposite sides since the outbreak of the struggle—de Brébisson had been among the first French troops to disembark in Saigon, in November 1945, and Ha, a former clerk in the French colonial administration, had been political commissar in the 320th Division—would contribute as much as anyone to the final work of the conference.
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Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Smith seemed to be coming around to the need for some kind of division of the country. At a press conference on May 27, he admitted that one could not ignore Ho Chi Minh’s well-disciplined and formidable fighting force, which controlled a significant proportion of the territory. This Viet Minh position of strength on the battlefield could not be wished out of existence. What the Eisenhower administration sought, Smith continued, was some means of reconciling this reality with American principles, leading to a “termination of hostilities on an honorable basis.”
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(See map on
this page
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That was the rub, of course: What constituted “honorable”? With voices in Congress and the American press branding partition a sellout—
U. S. News & World Report
compared “Winston Churchill’s proposal” to Chamberlain allowing partition of Czechoslovakia at Munich, while
Time
said British leaders “look alarmingly like appeasers”—Smith’s superiors in Washington still sought to preserve flexibility and to avoid committing the United States fully to any particular plan concerning the political aspects of the cease-fire.
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Better no agreement at all, the White House believed, than one that would reward “Communist aggression.”

In restricted session on May 29, Eden and Smith squabbled over the Briton’s proposal that the French and Viet Minh military commands should meet to discuss “the cessation of hostilities, beginning with the question of regrouping areas in Vietnam.” The American warned that his government would reserve the right to judge whether the recommendations coming out of these bilateral discussions prejudiced the U.S. position with respect to the independence of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. This was a holding action, and it annoyed Eden, though not as much as what Smith did next: He declared his desire—no doubt with American domestic opinion firmly in mind—to make his reservation public. Eden countered by saying he would not release his own proposal to the press, so that Smith would not feel compelled to announce his reservation. “For some reason or other this apparently annoyed the Americans,” he wrote in his diary, an understatement of the first order. Smith was outraged by what he called, in a cable to Dulles, Eden’s “exhibition of impatience and pique.” Despite the foreign secretary’s plea, both his proposal and the unenthusiastic American reception to it were leaked to the press.
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Eden would have blanched had he seen what else Smith said to Dulles that day: “I want you to know that I believe it will be a sad day for Britain and America when Eden becomes Prime Minister. I am convinced, after long association, that he is without moral or intellectual honesty, and his vanity and petulance are not counterbalanced, as in the case of Churchill, by genuine wisdom and great strength of character.”
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That evening Eden got more alarming news. At 7:36 a cable arrived at the Foreign Office from Sir Gladwyn Jebb, Britain’s ambassador in Paris, who asked that it be sent on to Geneva immediately. It contained a bombshell: According to Maurice Schumann, the French undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, the Franco-American negotiations regarding possible U.S. intervention in Indochina had that day achieved a breakthrough, with the result that “agreement has now practically been reached with the Americans on all points.” The French government didn’t actually want this intervention, Schumann told Jebb; what it wanted was the “deterrent effect” that an agreed-upon plan, involving both American airpower and ground forces, would have on the Viet Minh negotiators and their Soviet and Chinese backers. This last assertion did little to mollify Eden. Convinced, as he wrote Churchill the following day, that the Americans “want to intervene,” he determined he would reiterate in the strongest terms Britain’s unwillingness to support any plan for military action while the Geneva talks had even one breath of life in them. Schumann might claim that France did not want an escalation of the war, but “their wavering between pusillanimity and intransigence may well bring it about.”
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When Eden confronted Bidault about the matter, the Frenchman confirmed the veracity of Schumann’s claim. If the Geneva negotiations failed to yield an acceptable peace, Eisenhower would go to Congress and request authorization for intervention. Airpower would be used, and probably also three marine divisions. The administration had even dropped its requirement that France give the Associated States the right to secede from the French Union. Eden heard Bidault out, then restated his government’s refusal to commit to military action, whereupon Bidault said he himself saw the plan mainly as a political weapon designed to strengthen the French diplomatic hand.
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Was this true also of the Americans? Did they too see this roll of distant thunder primarily as a means to induce the Communists in Geneva to lower their demands? Was the show of strength more show than strength? Or was Eden right in insisting to Churchill that Washington wanted to intervene? The evidence is not conclusive, but almost certainly it was some of both. To imagine that the Eisenhower administration viewed this Franco-American arrangement purely as an elaborate ruse is difficult, to say the least; surely the president and his aides knew that if no settlement emerged from the negotiations (as they expected and half-hoped would be the case), they would face enormous pressure to implement the plan. Loath for ideological as well as pragmatic partisan reasons to be associated with a “Far Eastern Munich,” and fearful of the geopolitical as well as domestic political consequences of allowing a Viet Minh military victory, the administration continued to plan for possible military intervention, continued to lean on Australia and New Zealand to join in the endeavor even if Britain would not. On June 2, Bedell Smith, acting on instructions from Washington, told a press conference that the United States could not associate herself “with any formula which partitions or dismembers Vietnam.”
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V

THEN SOMETHING CHANGED—OR MORE PRECISELY, TWO THINGS
. First, word arrived in Washington that neither Australia nor New Zealand was willing in the foreseeable future to participate in military action in Indochina. Canberra, the more influential of the two ANZUS partners, had in fact quietly been coming to this position over a period of weeks. Eager, on the one hand, to remain on good terms with the United States and to keep the Americans committed to underwriting the defense of Southeast Asia, the government was reluctant, on the other, to come out in open opposition to British policy. What tipped the balance was the state of the war on the ground. With Giap’s victory at Dien Bien Phu and the increasing pressure on the delta, Australian military officials saw little hope for French Union forces in Tonkin, and even in Annam and Cochin China the prospects were bleak. An American-led multilateral intervention would undoubtedly help the situation, but not enough to turn things around, at least in the short or medium term, and consequently the best means of blocking further Communist expansion was through an early cessation of hostilities. The Menzies government agreed; on May 23, Richard Casey, the minister for external affairs, concluded in a secret cable that the optimum solution would be an armistice “with some political solution (even entailing partition).”
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