Most scholars have praised Eisenhower’s wisdom and restraint as he worked through this awful problem. Despite considerable pressure from members of his cabinet, his leading military advisers, and the French government, Eisenhower did not commit American military forces to Indochina in 1954. Though willing to rattle his nuclear weapons at the Chinese to deter them from advancing into Vietnam, he “shrewdly vetoed American military intervention,” according to historian Robert Divine. Much later scholarship has sustained this argument.
