The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s

by William I. Hitchcock

Although the United States was not a signatory to the Geneva Accords of July 21, 1954, which ended the war and divided Vietnam, the Eisenhower administration embraced them nonetheless. Secretary Dulles released a statement on July 23, saying that while the Geneva agreement contained “many features which we do not like,” the important thing was “not to mourn the past but to seize the future.” With France and its heavy colonial baggage gone, America could begin its own kind of nation-building in South Vietnam. One day this fledgling protectorate might come to look like West Germany or South Korea—other divided nations in which Western resolve had stabilized a dangerous frontier. South Vietnam would become a new test of America’s purpose in the cold war.