The Fifties

by David Halberstam

are lost.... We walked to the brink and we looked it in the face. We took strong action.” From the article came the famous term for Dulles’s foreign policy, brinkmanship. Hearing later of Dulles’s boasts about his trips to the brink and the calculated risk involved, Georges Bidault, the former French foreign minister, noted with no small degree of bitterness that “It involved a great deal of calculation but no risks.” How wrong Dulles was to claim that we had escaped the taint of colonialism, the next generation of American policymakers would find out. For in the minds of Ho and General Giap, only half the battle had been won. Of what eight years of revolutionary war had done to Vietnam, of the fateful future political alignments it had produced, Americans had no comprehension. We had given nearly $3 billion in aid to the French, yet it might as well have gone into a black hole. The Vietminh had emerged with a modern, confident army, in which young men had risen through the ranks, despite peasant origins, by ability alone; the army in the South, soon to be created by the Americans, was an extension of the colonial age, reflecting class and privilege. It was virtually impossible for a peasant to rise to any kind of command in it. Our side reflected the old feudal order; their side released the nationalism so powerful in an anticolonial war. Our side was nationalist because the Americans said that Diem was a nationalist; we even hired public relations experts to sell the Ame...