The Americans were becoming extremely nervous that the French would pull out of Indochina. The National Security Council met on September 9, 1953, to deal with the Joint Chiefs’ recommendation to help fund the Navarre plan. Dulles began by giving a fairly pessimistic appraisal: All in all, he thought French chances were poor. But we might as well pay the money, he argued, because the Laniel government was as good as we were likely to get. George Humphrey, the secretary of the treasury, spoke like a small businessman: “Well look, we’ve got a proposition here in which we’ve put an awful lot of
...more
