The March of Folly (47 page)

“Partial involvement” was—not without reason—the key objection. Pentagon chiefs in advice to the Executive deplored a “static” defense
of Indochina and stated their belief that war should be carried to the aggressor, “in this instance Communist China.” That was the enemy in Asia; the Vietnamese, in the Pentagon’s view, were only pawns. The chiefs added a warning that would echo through the years to come: “Once United States forces and prestige have been committed, disengagement will not be possible short of victory.”

The factors that could make any victory elusive were known to Washington—known, that is, if we assume that department heads and presidents avail themselves of the information they have sent government agents to obtain. A CIA report, speaking of the “xenophobia” of the indigenous population, stated that “Even if the United States defeated the Viet-Minh field forces, guerrilla action could be continued indefinitely,” precluding non-Communist control of the region. In such circumstances, the United States “might have to maintain a military commitment in Indochina for years to come.”

The debate of the departments—State, Defense, NSC and the intelligence agencies—continued without a solution, knotted as it was in a tangle of what-ifs: what if the Chinese entered; what if the French asked for active United States participation, or, alternatively, pulled out, as a strong current of French opinion was demanding, abandoning Indochina to Communism. Every contingency was examined; an interagency Working Group delivered exhaustive reports of its studies. Again there were few illusions. It was recognized that the French could win only if they gained the genuine political and military partnership of the Vietnamese people; that this was not developing and would not, given French reluctance to transfer real authority; that no valid native non-Communist leadership had emerged; that the French effort was deteriorating and that United States naval and air action alone could not turn the tide in France’s favor. The conclusion reached by President Eisenhower was that armed American intervention must be conditional on three requirements: joint action with allies, Congressional approval and French “acceleration” of the independence of the Associated States.

In the meantime, in proportion as a French slide appeared imminent, American aid increased. Bombers, cargo planes, naval craft, tanks, trucks, automatic weapons, small arms and ammunition, artillery shells, radios, hospital and engineering equipment plus financial support flowed heavily in 1953. Over the previous three years, 350 ships (or more than two every week) had been delivering war matériel to the French. Yet in June 1953 a National Intelligence estimate judged that the French effort “will probably deteriorate” during the following
twelve months and if current trends continued could subsequently “deteriorate very rapidly”; that “popular apathy” would continue and the Viet-Minh “will retain the military initiative.” Whether taken as a prescription to withdraw from an inherently flawed cause or to bolster it by increased aid, the Intelligence estimate should at least have resulted in sober second thought. That it did not was due to fear that a cut-off of aid would mean losing French cooperation in Europe.

“The French blackmailed us,” as Acheson put it; aid in Indochina was France’s price for joining the European Defense Community (EDC). American policy in Europe was tied to this scheme for an integrated coalition of the major nations, which France feared and resisted because it included her late conqueror, Germany. If the United States wanted France’s membership and her twelve divisions for NATO, it must in turn pay for her holding back Communism—and incidentally holding on to her empire—in Asia. EDC would become operative only if France joined. The United States was committed to it, and paid.

The reason why the French with superior manpower and American resources were doing so poorly was not beyond all conjecture. The people of Indochina, of whom more than 200,000 were in the colonial army together with some 80,000 French, 48,000 North Africans and 20,000 Foreign Legionnaires, simply had no reason to fight for France. Americans were always talking about freedom from Communism, whereas the freedom that the mass of Vietnamese wanted was freedom from their exploiters, both French and indigenous. The assumption that humanity at large shared the democratic Western idea of freedom was an American delusion. “The freedom we cherish and defend in Europe,” stated President Eisenhower on taking office, “is no different than the freedom that is imperiled in Asia.” He was mistaken. Humanity may have common ground, but needs and aspirations vary according to circumstances.

There was no delusion or ignorance about the absence of will to fight in the Associated States. A high-ranking officer, Major General Thomas Trapnell, returning from service with MA AG in 1954, reported a war of paradoxes, in which “there is no popular will to win on the part of the Vietnamese” and in which “the leader of the Rebels is more popular than the Vietnamese Chief of State.” His recognition of absent will, however, did not preclude this officer from recommending more vigorous prosecution of the war. Eisenhower, too, had to admit at a press conference to “a lack of enthusiasm which we would like to have there.” In his memoirs, published in 1963 (well before his
successors took America into the war), he acknowledged that “the mass of the population supported the enemy,” making it impossible for the French to rely on their Vietnamese troops. American aid “could not cure the defect.”

By 1953 French domestic opinion had grown weary and disgusted with an endless war for a cause unacceptable to many French citizens. The conviction was growing that France could not at the same time maintain guns in Indochina and guns for the defense of Europe while providing the butter of domestic needs. Although the United States was paying most of the bill, the French people, assisted by Communist propaganda, were raising increasing clamor against the war and mounting heavy political pressure for a negotiated settlement.

Dulles’ desperate effort was now exerted to keep the French fighting lest the awful prospect of losing Indochina to the Communists become a reality. Early in 1954 forty B-26 bombers with 200 United States Air Force technicians in civilian clothes were despatched to Indochina, and Congress appropriated $400 million plus another $385 million to finance the offensive planned by General Henri Navarre, in a last fevered burst of French military effort. By the time of the terminal catastrophe at Dien Bien Phu a few months later, American investment in Indochina since 1946 had reached $2 billion and the United States was paying 80 percent of the French expenditure for the war, not counting aid to the Associated States intended to stabilize their governments and strengthen their resistance to the Viet-Minh. Like most such aid, the bulk of it trickled away into the pockets of profiteering officials. As the Ohly memorandum had predicted, the United States was ineluctably approaching the point of supplanting rather than supplementing the French in what remained, whether we liked it or not, a colonial war.

Knowing what was wrong, American officials kept insisting in endless policy papers addressed to one another and in hortatory advice to the French that independence must be “accelerated” and genuine. Here was folly shining bright. How could the French be persuaded to fight more energetically to hold Vietnam and simultaneously be brought to pledge eventual true independence? Why should they invest a greater effort to retain a colonial possession if they were not going to retain it?

The contradiction was clear enough to the French, who, whether they were for or against the war, wanted some form of limited sovereignty that would keep Indochina within the French Union, a postwar euphemism for empire. French pride, French glory, French
sacrifice, not to mention French commerce, demanded it, the more so as France feared the example for Algeria if Indochina succeeded in breaking loose. In American policy the underlying absurdity of expecting both battle and renunciation from the French was possible because Americans thought of the war only in terms of fighting Communism, which could include independence, and closed their eyes to its aspect as the dying grip of colonialism, which obviously could not.

Mesmerized by a vision of Chinese intervention, Dulles and Admiral Arthur Radford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and others believed that as long as the Chinese were discouraged from entering by subtle warnings of “massive”—meaning nuclear—retaliation or other American action against the mainland, the balance in Indochina would eventually swing toward the French. Characteristically this ignored the Viet-Minh and a hundred years of Vietnamese nationalism, a miscalculation that would dog the United States to the end.

At the same time, policy-makers understood, as their anxious memoranda show, that the United States was becoming tainted in Asian eyes as the partner in a white man’s war; that French success via the Navarre Plan was illusory; that, in spite of the optimism expressed by General “Iron Mike” O’Daniel, chief of MAAG, increased American supply could not assure General Navarre’s victory. American aid remained somehow ineffectual. They knew that unless the Chinese supplies, which had now reached 1500 tons a month, could be cut off, Hanoi would not give up; they were painfully conscious of the growing disaffection of the French public and the French National Assembly and the possibility that the war might be terminated by political crisis, leaving the United States with a wasted effort or the alternative of taking on the ill-omened cause for itself. They knew that without American support, the Associated States could not sustain themselves. In this knowledge and this awareness, what was the rationale of continued American investment in a non-viable client on the other side of the world?

Having invented Indochina as the main target of a coordinated Communist aggression, and having in every policy advice and public pronouncement repeated the operating assumption that its preservation from Communism was vital to American security, the United States was lodged in the trap of its own propaganda. The exaggerated rhetoric of the cold war had bewitched its formulators. The administration believed, or had convinced itself under Dulles’ guidance, that to stop the advance of the Communist octopus into Southeast Asia was imperative.
Morever, to “lose” Indochina after the “loss” of China would have invited political catastrophe. Liberals, too, joined the consensus. Justice William O. Douglas, after visiting five regions of Southeast Asia in 1953, pronounced his judgment that “each front is indeed an overt act of a Communist conspiracy to expand the Russian empire.… The fall of Vietnam today would imperil all of Southeast Asia.” Senator Mike Mansfield, normally a steadying influence in foreign policy and an influential member of the Foreign Relations Committee with a special interest in Asia dating from his years as a professor of Far Eastern history, returned in 1953 from a survey of the situation on the spot. He reported to the Senate that “World peace hangs in the balance” along the avenues of Communist expansion in the Far East; “Hence the security of the United States is no less involved in Indochina than in Korea.” Our aid in the conflict was being given in recognition of Indochina’s “great importance to the non-Communist world and to our own national security.”

The matrix of this exaggeration was the state of the union under the paws of the Great Beast. The witch-hunts of McCarthyism, of the House Un-American Activities Committee, the informers, the blacklists and the fire-eaters of the Republican right and the China Lobby, the trail of wrecked careers, had plunged the country into a fit of moral cowardice. Everyone, in and out of office, trembled in anxiety to prove his anti-Communist credentials. The anxious included Dulles, who, according to an associate, lived in constant apprehension that the McCarthy attack might turn next upon him. Less intensely, it reached up to the President, as shown by Eisenhower’s silent acquiescence in McCarthy’s attacks on General Marshall. Nothing was so ridiculous, Macaulay once wrote, as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality—and nothing so craven, it could be added, as the American public in its fit of the 1950s.

During the Eisenhower Administration the New Look had overtaken military strategy. The New Look was nuclear, and the idea behind it, as worked out by a committee of strategists and Cabinet chiefs, was that in the confrontation with Communism, the new weapons offered a means to make prospective American retaliation a more serious threat and war itself sharper, quicker and cheaper than when it relied on vast conventional preparations and “outmoded procedures.” Eisenhower was deeply concerned about the prospect of deficit budgets, as was his Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, who said flatly
that not defense but disaster would result from “a military program that scorned the resources and problems of our economy—erecting majestic defenses and battlements for the protection of a country that was bankrupt.” (That was thirty years ago.) The New Look was motivated as much by the domestic economy as by the cold war.

Intending a warning to Moscow, Dulles made the strategy public in his memorable “massive retaliation” speech of January 1954. The idea was to make clear to any “potential aggressor” the certainty and force of American response, but the gun was muffled by the uproar and confusion that greeted the speech. Half the world thought it was bluff and the other half feared it was not. It was in this context that crisis approached in the affairs of Indochina.

In November 1953, General Navarre had sent 12,000 French troops to occupy the fortified area of Dien Bien Phu in the far north, to the west of Hanoi. His purpose was to tempt the enemy into frontal combat, but the position, surrounded by high ground in a region largely controlled by the Viet-Minh, was a rash choice that was to prove disastrous. At about the same time, at the Foreign Ministers’ conference in Berlin, Molotov proposed extending the discussions to the problems of Asia at a five-power conference to include the People’s Republic of China.

Harried by disturbing reports from Dien Bien Phu, and by extreme pressure at home to end the war, the French clutched at the opportunity to negotiate. The five-power proposal horrified Dulles, who considered any settlement with Communists unacceptable and sitting down with the Chinese, which might be taken to imply recognition of the People’s Republic, unthinkable. He believed that Russian overtures ever since Malenkov’s coexistence speech were a “phony peace campaign,” and a ruse designed to make opponents drop their guard. He set himself to resist the five-power conference by every twist and device of intimidation in his arsenal while at the same time trying to keep France fully committed to the war and yet not so irritated by American pressure as to jeopardize EDC. As the French government, to save its political skin, was bent on putting Indochina on the agenda, Dulles could persist only at the cost of a quarrel he could not risk. He had to give way. The five-power meeting was scheduled for Geneva at the end of April.