When Nguyen Khanh issued a public threat to break relations with France over de Gaulle’s sponsorship of neutralization, U.S. officials moved quickly to kill the idea, not because they disagreed with his assessment of the French leader’s plans but because they believed a break would do nothing but embolden Paris and the South Vietnamese neutralists to push still harder for such a solution. The roughly seventeen thousand French citizens still living in Vietnam would be infuriated by the move, and the chances for a French-supported neutralist coup would be that much greater.
