Embers of War (92 page)

It’s telling that U.S. ambassador Amos J. Peaslee, when informed of this Australian position, remarked that its endorsement of a political over a military solution did not accord with his understanding of American policy. And it’s telling that Casey, in formally presenting his argument to the Australian cabinet on Friday, June 4, asserted that Washington sought to prolong the war through multilateral armed intervention. He won cabinet approval for a policy of seeking a diplomatic settlement and for his claim that, notwithstanding Canberra’s interest in keeping America engaged in the defense of Southeast Asia, “Australia’s destiny was not so completely wrapped up with the United States as to support them in action which Australia regarded as wrong.” Certainly, few in Canberra thought of America’s warlike breast-beating on Indochina as a mere ruse designed to scare the Communist delegations into making major concessions.
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This is why Australia’s decision to support a political settlement has historical importance: Not long after word of it reached the White House, the Eisenhower administration began to sing a different tune. At the end of May, Peaslee gave Washington hints of what was to come, and Ambassador Spender officially informed the State Department on June 4. The following evening Dulles indicated the administration was inclined to seek a negotiated solution to the war. “France would have to accept whatever terms they would get if they were to obtain a cease-fire,” Spender reported him as saying. Dulles also hinted the United States “would not engage in unilateral intervention … without the support of Australia and New Zealand.” (Wellington had in the meantime also said it would not commit to United Action.) To Roger Makins, the British ambassador in Washington, the secretary of state was clear as could be: Any American military action in Vietnam would have to be as part of a coalition force.
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If the news from down under was one reason for this apparent change in American thinking, there was also a second: a growing appreciation of just how dire the situation was on the ground in Vietnam. That same weekend witnessed the start of the five-power military staff talks in Washington, which featured chiefs-of-staff-level discussions by representatives from the United States, Great Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand. Some two weeks earlier a French military mission led by General Paul Ely, chief of the French general staff, and including also the former Indochina commander Raoul Salan, had visited Indochina. They returned with a sobering assessment of the war map. Major reinforcements were essential, they told the Committee on National Defense, and because of the sorry state of the Vietnamese National Army, these would have to come from France. This in turn would mean changing the law to allow conscripts to be sent. Even then it might be necessary to focus defenses on the truly vital parts of the Red River Delta—essentially the Hanoi-Haiphong corridor—and to sacrifice the rest.
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This same basic message was articulated by the chief French representative in the five-power talks, General Jean Valluy, the commander of the Expeditionary Corps at the start of the war in 1946 and now the head of the French Military Mission to the United States. Morale among French Union forces had plummeted, a despondent Valluy told Admiral Radford late on June 2, while the VNA had become a rabble, deserting right and left. The Viet Minh, on the other hand, enthused by their victory at Dien Bien Phu, were laying preparations to attack the delta in force, using as many as one hundred battalions. Could the delta be held? Valluy was skeptical and said so both to Radford and in the five-power talks that commenced the following day. He offered up some tough rhetoric on the importance of holding Tonkin and the desirability of United Action, but he knew that three of the other four delegations in Washington wanted nothing to do with multilateral intervention. As the talks progressed, Valluy hinted that French military opinion was now resigned to partition, whether through a negotiated agreement at Geneva or through a unilateral military withdrawal southward by French Union forces. Conceding that Ho Chi Minh would accept a cease-fire only if he won control over Hanoi, the Frenchman suggested seeking a division line as far north as possible, ideally at the eighteenth parallel.
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For Arthur Radford and like-minded members of the American military, such “defeatist” talk was contemptible. During the Washington talks, the admiral continued to press for United Action, continued to insist that the West faced a choice between military intervention and the rapid loss of all of Indochina and perhaps Southeast Asia too, continued to argue that Tonkin was the key to the whole region. He insisted that major troop reinforcements from France, combined with air and naval action by the United States, could hold Tonkin for the six or nine months American missions would need to train effective Vietnamese forces. But though Eisenhower and Dulles remained sympathetic to the admiral’s assessment of the stakes—
U. S. News & World Report
said that week that the president saw much wisdom in Radford’s plan—they had now to contend with the state of affairs on the ground in Vietnam, and the hardening views of the key allied governments. Moreover, they had to consider the opposition to Radford’s analysis from within the U.S. military. Army chief of staff General Matthew Ridgway, who with his formal bearing, cold gray eyes, and steel-trap mind exuded seriousness and gravitas, had not abandoned his deep skepticism concerning the utility of airpower in Vietnam. He was certain, moreover, that U.S. ground forces would inevitably be part of the equation—and in large numbers. This would put huge strains on Pentagon planners, given America’s existing troop commitments around the globe, and would constitute, Ridgway warned, a “dangerous strategic diversion … in a non-decisive theater.”
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Anthony Eden sensed the change in American thinking. On June 5, he was the picture of gloom before the British cabinet, telling his colleagues that a deal was unlikely because Bidault was indecisive and because Washington was only interested in military intervention. But later that day word came in from Makins in Washington that the Americans had a new policy, which was not to intervene in Indochina unless the Chinese did so by arms and airplanes. Eden in his diary scoffed at the idea that Beijing might intervene in force—“why they should when they are winning already I cannot imagine”—but he interpreted the policy change, if indeed it was real, as a sign that the interventionists (he listed Radford, Dulles, and Admiral Robert B. Carney, the U.S. delegate to the five-power staff talks) had suffered a setback.
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Bidault too felt a new wind blowing, and it made him shiver. What would be the point of continuing the Franco-American talks, he asked Dulles through Ambassador Henri Bonnet, if intervention was no longer a live option? And what incentive would the Communists at Geneva then have to compromise? Dulles replied that the situation had changed: Whereas six weeks earlier American air and naval power and a “token land force” would have been enough, now four or five U.S. divisions would in all likelihood be required. The military outlook was dire, and morale both in France and among allies in Vietnam had plummeted. Nor had the French government met the preconditions for U.S. involvement. The testy exchange concluded with Bonnet charging that agreement had been reached between the two governments when Washington all of a sudden pulled back.
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VI

IF AMERICAN MILITARY INTERVENTION IN VIETNAM WAS AT LONG
last off the table, the Eisenhower administration still could not bring itself to take the next step and support a negotiated settlement. Even as each of the other main players in Geneva gravitated toward partition as the preferred solution—Viet Minh and French negotiators made significant progress on the particulars in secret meetings on June 4, 5, and 10, even as Georges Bidault personally remained noncommittal—the administration was loath to sign on. (At least publicly; privately, Bedell Smith told Australia’s Casey on June 13 that he personally accepted the idea of partition.)
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In domestic political terms, it would be better for the conference to collapse than for it to agree to a compromise with Communists, especially of the Chinese variety.

Hence the equanimity with which U.S. officials greeted the splits that emerged in restricted sessions in mid-June. The disagreements concerned the authority and composition of an international supervisory commission that would monitor the peace, and the status of Cambodia and Laos. Resolution seemed impossible, and many delegates, Eden among them, concluded that a breakup of the conference was imminent. Dulles was pleased, or at least not disturbed. “It is our view,” he cabled Bedell Smith on June 14, “that final adjournment of Conference is in our best interest, provided this can be done without creating an impression in France at this critical moment that France has been deserted by US and UK and therefore has no choice but capitulation on Indochina to Communists at Geneva and possible accommodation with Soviets in Europe.”
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But what if such capitulation and accommodation occurred, or what if the Communists used the failure of the conference as an excuse to try to conquer the whole of the Indochinese peninsula? Robert Bowie, the director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, articulated precisely that fear at a meeting of the NSC on June 15. Here was the United States, Bowie said, withdrawing from the Geneva Conference because she found the Communist proposals unacceptable, yet she was unwilling to do anything to bolster the French position. The likely result: The Viet Minh would charge down the peninsula and get more of Indochina than they were demanding at the conference. In the wake of such a development, Nehru and other “Asiatics” would swing to the Communist side. Far better, Bowie asserted, to defend “South Vietnam,” if necessary with four U.S. divisions.
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Although U.S. diplomats in Saigon had made similar noises for several weeks, this was a revolutionary idea in the halls of power in Washington.
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Bowie had not merely asserted that partition served American interests better than allowing the negotiations to fail; he had said the southern half of Vietnam was militarily defensible. The five-power staff talks had come to the same conclusion, with a consensus that a line from Thakhek (in Laos) to Dong Hoi—that is, about 17°50’ north—could be defended. For the moment, Bowie found few takers for his argument, but his advocacy gained force among high officials in the days thereafter. Already by June 17, John Foster Dulles could be heard singing a new tune at another meeting of the NSC. Seconding Eisenhower’s comment that the native populations of Southeast Asia viewed the war as a colonial enterprise, the secretary, according to the note taker, said “perhaps the time had come” to let the French get out of Indochina entirely and then try to “rebuild from the foundations.” And later in the same meeting: “For the United States or its allies to try to fight now in the Delta area was almost impossible, if for no other reason than that the French have no inclination to invite us in. They are desperately anxious to get themselves out of Indochina.… Probably best to let them quit.”
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The “perhaps” and the “probably” were important. Although in hindsight Dulles’s words constituted a watershed moment—the first clear sign of a monumental policy shift, from keeping the French fighting and resisting negotiations to moving France out of Indochina altogether and “rebuild[ing] from the foundations,” without the taint of colonialism—at the time, in mid-June 1954, neither he nor President Eisenhower knew what they wanted. They still groped hesitantly for some means of reconciling the competing imperatives on Indochina: to keep the nation out of “another Korea” while avoiding any hint of “appeasement” of the Communists. Seeing danger whichever way they turned, especially in a congressional election year, the two men still saw advantages in letting the Geneva meeting collapse without an agreement. On June 12, Smith candidly told Eden that he had just received a “plain spoken” personal message from Eisenhower instructing him to do everything in his power to bring the proceedings to an end as quickly as possible. “We decided,” the president himself would recall of this period in June, “that it was best for the United States to break off major participation in the Geneva Conference. The days of keeping the Western powers bound to inaction by creating divisions of policy among them in a dragged-out conference were coming to an end.”
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In Paris, however, one man had a different idea. On June 18, six days after the Laniel government failed to win a vote of confidence (306 to 296), Pierre Mendès France, who had spoken out against this war longer and more fervently than any other leading politician, became France’s new prime minister. In soliciting the National Assembly’s support, the veteran Radical deputy didn’t merely proclaim as his first objective a cease-fire in Indochina; he vowed that he would resign within thirty days of his investiture if an agreement had not been reached. His last act before resigning, he added, would be to introduce a bill for conscription to supplement the professional army in the field, which the Assembly would have to vote on the same day. Mendès France was sufficiently encouraged by the results of the de Brébisson-Ha secret discussions to make this pledge, but he knew it was a gamble. How would the delegations at Geneva respond? Would he be able to bring the Viet Minh, the Americans, the Chinese, the Soviets along? And what about Bao Dai’s State of Vietnam, which that week had had her own change of leadership, one little noticed at the time but with enormous implications for the future? Buu Loc was out as prime minister, replaced by Ngo Dinh Diem. Would Diem, who immediately announced his opposition to any settlement involving partition, upset the Mendès France timetable?