Embers of War (75 page)

Did the president mean what he said here, or was he merely using strong language—America might have to “move into battle” at any time; he would
inform
lawmakers rather than
consult
with them—to assess the lawmakers’ reaction and to make Dulles’s speech that evening seem safely moderate by comparison? It’s hard to know. Certainly, his convening of the meeting on minimal notice and his choice of words showed how engaged he had become by late March on the Indochina issue. And it is telling that, in reading over the draft of Dulles’s speech, Eisenhower toughened the language in several places.
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That evening a sense of anticipation filled the room as Dulles stepped up to the lectern a little after nine o’clock, stiff and somber as always. Word had spread that he would deliver more than the ordinary after-dinner foreign policy overview. He didn’t disappoint, though the precise meaning of his words would be intensely parsed in newsrooms and chancelleries the world over in the days to come. A guideline for action more than an actual statement of policy, the speech stressed the importance of Indochina to American interests and raised the prospect of military action to “save” it. Even a partial Viet Minh victory would be disastrous, Dulles declared: “If the Communist forces won uncontested control over Indochina or any substantial part thereof, they would surely resume the same pattern of aggression against other free peoples in the area.”

The propagandists of Red China and Russia make it apparent that their purpose is to dominate all of Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia is the so-called “rice bowl” which helps to feed the densely populated region that extends from India to Japan. It is rich in many raw materials, such as tin, oil, rubber, and iron ore. It offers industrial Japan potentially important markets and sources of raw materials. The area has great strategic value. Southeast Asia is astride the most direct and best developed sea and air route between the Pacific and South Asia. It has major naval and air bases. Communist control of Southeast Asia would carry a grave threat to the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand, with whom we have treaties of mutual assistance. The entire Western Pacific area, including the so-called “offshore island chain,” would be strategically threatened.

But it was even worse than that. The Viet Minh victories, Dulles continued, had come about because of active Chinese Communist assistance. Mao’s lieutenants were training Ho Chi Minh’s forces, were supplying them with arms, even directing them in the field. Should the United States and her allies fail to thwart this Chinese expansionism, Beijing leaders would conclude that as long as they refrained from open invasion they had freedom to do as they wished. Of this idea they had to be disabused. Should Beijing choose to “send its own army into Indo-China, the grave consequences might not be confined to Indo-China.”
¹⁵

How, then, to thwart these Communist designs? Dulles called for a coalition of nations composed of the United States, Great Britain, France, Australia, Thailand, the Philippines, and the Associated States that would pledge collectively to defend Indochina and the rest of Southeast Asia against aggression. This was United Action, and its ambitions were, it seemed, enormous: to deny
any
Viet Minh takeover in Indochina—whether as a result of a total battlefield victory or a compromise agreement made at the bargaining table. Either Ho Chi Minh would have to surrender, Dulles and Eisenhower (for the president had approved every word) appeared to be saying, or the United States would have to join the war against him.

Of course, they didn’t say that. Not quite. The speech was carefully crafted—it went through twenty-one drafts—to sound menacing while remaining vague on specifics; as one Dulles deputy recalled, it did not actually commit “anyone to anything.”
¹⁶
Dulles and Eisenhower hoped the strong words would have a deterrent effect on the Chinese and would boost French morale, that the speech would torpedo the upcoming Geneva negotiations and induce Britain to pledge support to a multilateral intervention should one be required. With respect to the domestic front, the speech was a means to test the waters, to see how the public would respond to the prospect of U.S. involvement in the fighting. As Dulles and Eisenhower surely understood, in describing the danger in such grandiose terms, in terms they seldom used in private meetings, they risked hemming themselves in. It might be very difficult to change course after you’ve all but declared that the loss of Indochina could lead to mass starvation all over Asia, that the Viet Minh were puppets of a Soviet-Chinese allied leadership bent on world domination. But they said it anyway. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the two men had made up their minds: All of Indochina would have to be held, with direct American intervention if necessary.

III

THAT WAS CERTAINLY THE CONCLUSION DRAWN BY MANY WHO HEARD
the speech or read the transcript. “The Eisenhower administration has decided that Indo-China will not be allowed to fall into Red hands—whatever the cost,” declared
The Wall Street Journal
the next day. Echoed
U.S. News & World Report
: “Blunt notice is given to Communists that [the] U.S. does not intend to let Indochina be gobbled up, even if it means big war.”
The New Republic
, commenting on Eisenhower’s approval of the text, likewise said the address could have only one possible meaning: “The administration has decided to do whatever is necessary to win in Southeast Asia—if necessary it will commit US ground forces.” And in
The New York Times
, the lede of James Reston’s front-page news analysis read, “The Eisenhower Administration has taken a fundamental policy decision to block the communist conquest of Southeast Asia—even if it has to take ‘united action’ with France and other countries to do so.” How did Reston know this? Because “the highest authority” told him so.
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Of course, Southeast Asia was not the same as Indochina, so the
Times
and
The New Republic
may have been hedging their bets slightly on what the immediate implications were for the fighting in Vietnam. But that distinction was lost on many observers, as was the distinction between intervening with airpower at Dien Bien Phu (which Dulles in particular doubted would do much good) and elsewhere in Indochina. On Capitol Hill, the predominant reaction to the speech—especially among Democrats—was surprise and uncertainty. Was the administration trying to lead the nation into war? And what was “United Action” precisely? “I followed Secretary Dulles’s speech very carefully,” remarked Democratic senator John Stennis of Mississippi, “and I have not been able to decide exactly what he means by ‘united action.’ ” Senator Arthur Watkins, a Republican from Utah, warned the White House not to follow Truman’s example “and take action without consulting the Congress.”
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Misgivings came also from a more unexpected quarter in the aftermath of the speech: the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On March 31, Admiral Radford convened a meeting of the group to ascertain his colleagues’ views about recommending the commitment of U.S. naval air and air force units for the defense of Dien Bien Phu—and, by extension, their views of the Indochina struggle more broadly. If he expected full support for such a recommendation, he was soon disappointed. None of the other service chiefs was keen on the idea. General Matthew Ridgway, chief of staff of the army, said any benefits to be accrued from intervention to support the garrison would be outweighed by the costs. The use of airpower at Dien Bien Phu would not decisively affect the military picture in Vietnam, Ridgway said, but would greatly increase the risk of general war. Nor did the army chief like the way Radford had introduced the matter. “Unless the question emanated from proper authority,” he continued, “any such recommendation—for or against—was clearly outside the proper scope of the authority of the JCS.” To advocate a specific policy would be to “involve the JCS inevitably in politics.”
¹⁹

Underlying Ridgway’s opposition, and that of his subordinates in army intelligence, was a deeply skeptical view of what the use of airpower could accomplish in Vietnam. Dismissed as a parochial argument by some, as reflecting a desire to rationalize an institutional army viewpoint, it was in fact a reasoned position. To Ridgway, recent history showed clearly that airpower alone could not effectively interdict lines of communication if the adversary had the resources and the motivation to keep supplies moving, as the Viet Minh clearly had. The Italian campaign in World War II had demonstrated this, as had Korea. In Indochina, moreover, the obstacles were greater, for unlike in Italy and Korea the approaches to the front were not constricted by a peninsula. The Viet Minh had shown time and again the relative ease with which they could overcome French aerial interdiction efforts, and there was little reason to believe aircraft operating from American carriers would have markedly more success. The imminent start of the rainy season, with its heavy cloud cover and low ceiling, would further reduce effectiveness.
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The White House took note of the alarms raised in Congress and among the service chiefs. During a press conference on March 31, Eisenhower, after affirming his “complete agreement” with Dulles on Indochina policy, said he “could conceive of no greater disadvantage to America” than to send U.S. forces “in great numbers around the world, meeting each little situation as it arises.”
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That phraseology, of course, signified little about what he might do or not do in Indochina, but some interpreted it as an attempt to soothe congressional concerns. The next morning the president told the NSC he was troubled by the division of opinion within the JCS regarding Radford’s air strike plan but then said the intervention question was not for the Joint Chiefs but for “statesmen” to answer. And the decision would have to be made soon. But not by the full NSC—Eisenhower announced he would not delegate the decision to the NSC but would pursue it after the meeting with a smaller group in the Oval Office.

No records of this second meeting have been found, but it must have been a dramatic session. Two days earlier, on March 30, General Vo Nguyen Giap had launched the second phase of his attack plan on Dien Bien Phu, and the reports coming into the White House were ominous: The garrison had suffered withering blows in two nights of savage fighting, much of it at strongpoints Eliane and Dominique. Radford’s prediction of an imminent Viet Minh conquest seemed to be coming true. The transcribed summaries of Dulles’s telephone conversations from later in the day indicate that a sense of urgency pervaded the second gathering, and that those in attendance agreed on the need for a meeting with the bipartisan congressional leadership. The tenor of these telephone conversations, following on the heels of the NSC and Oval Office meetings, implied the very real possibility of implementing the Vulture plan or some variant. Eisenhower, shortly after the second session, told two newspaper chieftains over lunch that he might have to send squadrons from two aircraft carriers to bomb the Reds at Dien Bien Phu—then added, “Of course, if we did, we’d have to deny it forever.”
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The next morning, Friday, April 2, Eisenhower met with Dulles, Radford, NSC head Cutler, and Secretary of Defense Wilson in the Oval Office. The issue on the table: how to nudge Congress to approve military action? Dulles presented a draft congressional resolution on Indochina that he hoped to show lawmakers at what now shaped up to be a key session the following day. The operative paragraph read:

That the president of the United States be and he hereby is authorized, in the event he determines that such action is required to protect and defend the safety and security of the United States, to employ Naval and Air Forces of the United States to assist the forces of which are resisting aggression in Southeast Asia, to prevent the extension and expansion of that aggression, and to protect and defend the safety and security of the United States.

The nonmention of army ground forces in this passage is perhaps telling, or perhaps not. Naval forces can after all include marines, and, depending on the interpretation of the subsequent phrases, army ground troops could be used to prevent further Communist aggression, and/or to defend American security.
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Dulles dominated much of the discussion that morning. Over the previous days he had become increasingly persuaded of the Dien Bien Phu battle’s enormous symbolic importance—far greater than the strategic value of the actual territory in contest—and of the very real possibility that its fall could trigger an immediate French withdrawal from Indochina. Such a withdrawal would be disastrous, and thus a way must be found to stiffen French spines. Dulles still doubted that a one-off air intervention could save the garrison, however, and said he saw the congressional resolution as a tool by which to deter Beijing and realize United Action with allied governments. Radford, chastened by the lack of support he had received from the other Joint Chiefs, sung an unexpected tune: The outcome at Dien Bien Phu, he now opined, would be determined within hours and therefore U.S. intervention was not advisable at present. Ike listened intently. He liked the draft, he said, but—ever the savvy pol—he instructed Dulles to gauge congressional leaders’ thinking on the subject before presenting them with the text. It should be made to appear that the resolution was their idea, Ike advised, and not one “drafted by ourselves.”
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IV

THE MEETING BEGAN AT NINE-THIRTY IN THE MORNING. IT WAS
April 3, a Saturday. As tourists began arriving on the Mall to catch the explosion of cherry blossoms, a few blocks away in Foggy Bottom, fourteen somber-faced men filed into a conference room at the State Department. In the months and years to come, this meeting would take on mythical status, in part due to the reporting of
Washington Post
correspondent Chalmers M. Roberts, and in part due to the statements at the meeting by Senate minority leader Lyndon Johnson, who as president of the United States eleven years later would take his country into large-scale war in Vietnam. Roberts filed two articles, the first on the front page of the
Post
in the late spring, the second some weeks later in
The Reporter
, a weekly. So detailed were they, and so apparently accurate, that they touched off an FBI investigation of Roberts’s sources.
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