The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

by Barbara W. Tuchman

The aggression of the 1930s in Manchuria, North China, Ethiopia, the Rhineland, Spain and the Sudetenland was overt, with armed invasions, planes and bombs, and occupying forces; the envisaged aggression against Indochina of 1950 was a self-induced state of mind in the observers.

That the Russian danger in the world was nevertheless real, that the Communist system was hostile to American democracy and American interests, that Soviet Communism was expansionist and directed toward the absorption of neighboring and other vulnerable states, was undeniable. That it was joined in aggressive partnership with Communist China was a natural conclusion but exaggerated and soon to prove mistaken.

That it was right and proper in the national interest for American policy-makers to try to contain this inimical system and to thwart it where possible goes without question.

That the Communist system threatened American security through Indochina, however, was an ext...

American security entered the equation when China entered the Korean war, a development that President Truman said put the United States in “grave danger” from “Communist aggression.” Doubtless General MacArthur’s crossing of the 38th parallel into Communist-held territory—the action which provoked the Chinese entry—put China’s security in grave danger from the Chinese ...

The Viet-Minh were a “tool of the Politburo” and therefore “part of an international war.” By these arguments the American government convinced itself that it was a vital American interest to keep Indochina out of the Communist orbit and that therefore French victory in Indochina, whether colonial or not, was “essential to the security of the free world.”

(The question of what France was fighting for if Vietnam was indeed to be “independent” was not discussed.)

When a Senator in 1949, following the fall of Nationalist China, he stated that “our Pacific front” was now “wide open to encirclement from the East.… Today the situation is critical.” His concept of encirclement was a Chinese Communist advance to Formosa and from there to the Philippines, and a capacity, if once allowed to push beyond the Chinese mainland, “to move and keep on moving.” When MacArthur’s forces in Korea were thrown back by the Chinese, Dulles’ estimate of the enemy grew more bloodcurdling. Huk banditry in the Philippines, Ho Chi Minh’s war in Indochina, a Communist rising in Malaya, Communist revolution in China and the attack on Korea were “all part of a single pattern of violence planned and plotted for 35 years and finally brought to a consummation of fighting and disorder” across the length of Asia. This melding of the several countries of East Asia as if they had no individuality, no history, no

differences or circumstances of their own was the thinking, either uninformed and shallow or knowingly false, that created the domino theory and allowed it to become dogma. Because Orientals on the whole looked alike to Western eyes, they were expected to act alike and perform with the uniformity of dominoes.

The Plans Division of the General Staff struck the central issue when it asked for a “re-evaluation of the importance of Indochina and Southeast Asia in relation to the possible cost of saving it.”

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.

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...

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 shou...

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.

Senator Mike Mansfield,

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. ...

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 sil...

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...

November 1953, General Navarre had sent 12,000 French troops to occupy the fortified area of Dien Bien Phu in the...

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.

The five-power meeting was scheduled for Geneva at the end of April.

Contingency plans for American armed intervention to replace the French took formal shape, and the strenuous Chairman of the Joint Chiefs produced a policy paper in preparation for the Geneva Conference that carried exaggeration to dizzying heights.

The specters that thronged Admiral Radford’s imagination—which have so far fallen rather short of being realized—raise an important question for the study of folly. What level of perception, what fiction or fantasy, enters into policy-making?

What wild flights soar over reasonable estimates of reality? What degree of conviction or, on the contrary, conscious exaggeration is at work? Is the argument believed or is it inventive rhetoric employed to enforce a desired course of action?

Whether Radford’s views were shaped by Dulles or Dulles’ by Radford is uncertain but either way they ref...

Dulles now bent his energies to ensure that the Geneva Conference would allow no inch...

He summoned Congressmen, newspapermen, businessmen and other persons of prestige to briefings on the American stake in Indochina. He showed them color charts of Communist influence radiating outward in a red wave from Indochina to Thailand, Burma, Malaya and Indonesia.

The impression conveyed itself to Vice-President Nixon, who, in a supposedly off-the-record speech naturally widely quoted, said, in a foreshadowing of Executive war, “If to avoid further Communist expansion in Asia and Indochina, we must take the risk now of putting our boys in, I think the Executive has to take the politically unpopular decision and do it.”

The President made the most important contribution to the hypnosis at a press conference on 7 April 1954 when he used the phrase “falling dominoes” to express the consequences if Indochina should be the first to fall.

Anticipating Geneva, the Viet-Minh gathered forces for a major show of strength. By raids and artillery they laid siege to Dien Bien Phu, destroyed the French airstrips in March 1954, cut off French supply lines and with the aid of augmented Chinese supplies, which reached a peak of 4000 tons a month during the battle, reduced the fortress to desperate straits.

Eisenhower remained adamant on his conditions for intervention. His firmness had two foundations: an innate respect for the constitutional processes of government and a recognition that air and naval action would draw in ground forces, whose employment he opposed.

He told a press conference in March that “There is going to be no involvement of America in war unless it is the result of the constitutional process that is placed upon Congress to declare it. Now let us have that clear; and that is the answer.” Further he agreed with the military conclusion that air and naval action without ground forces could not gain the American objective, and he did not believe ground forces should again be committed, as in Korea, without prospect of decisive result.

Like fibers of a cloth absorbing a dye, policy-makers in Washington were by now so thoroughly imbued, through repeated assertions, with the vital necessity of saving Indochina from Communism that they believed in it, did not question it and were ready to act on it. From rhetoric it had become doctrine, and, in the excitement of the crisis,

On April 5 it recommended as a first principle that “It be United States policy to accept nothing short of a military victory in Indochina.” Considering that the United States was not a belligerent, an element of fantasy seems to have entered into this demand.

Secondly, if failing to obtain French support for this position, the United States should “initiate immediate steps with the governments of the Associated States aimed toward continuation of the war in Indochina to include active United States participation” with or without French agreement. In plainer language that meant that the United States should take over the war by request of the Associated States.

Further, that there should be “no cease-fire in Indochina prior to victory” whether the victory came by “successful military action or clear ...

Since, with Dien Bien Phu falling, military action hardly pointed toward success, and since concession of defeat by the Viet-Minh was a hypothesis made of air, and since the United States was in no position to decide whether or not there ...

The fate of this document, whether discussed, rejected or adopted, is not recorded. It does not matter, for the fact that it could be formulated at all reflects the thinking—or what passes for thinking by government—that conditioned developments and laid the path for future American intervention in Vietnam.

The French, in spite of their crisis and their request for an air strike, refused to invite the United States to take part in their war, feeling that outright partnership would damage their prestige, which no nation takes so seriously as the French. They wanted to keep Indochina their own affair, not part of a united front against Communism.

The reluctance Dulles met in both cases was in part of his own making because the alarm raised by his “massive retaliation” speech of the previous January caused the allies to worry about America initiating atomic warfare. On 7 May, Dien Bien Phu fell, giving the Viet-Minh a stunning triumph to support their claims at Geneva. Braving it out, Dulles assured a press conference that “Southeast Asia could be secured even without perhaps Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia”—in other words, the dominoes would not be falling as expected.

the gloom of the day after the news from Dien Bien Phu, the parley on Indo...

Partition of Vietnam was pressed as the only means of separating the belligerents;

The Soviet Union, moving toward détente after Stalin, exerted pressure on Ho Chi Minh to settle. Chou En-lai, China’s delegate, told Ho that it was in his interest to take half a loaf in order to get the French out and keep the Americans out, and that he would gain the whole eventually.

He was prevailed upon very unwillingly to settle for the 17th parallel and a two-year lapse before elections. Settlement was reached in time for a final declaration on July 21 that brought the French war to an end.

Insofar as France had to acknowledge defeat by conceding half of Vietnam to the rebels, the result was more damaging to her prestige than if she had conceded voluntarily at the start. In t...