For almost two months in the spring of 1954, President Eisenhower and his foremost policy-makers promoted a military intervention which they were willing, and in some cases eager, to undertake. As would often be the case in Washington’s deliberations through the ensuing twenty years, they were unconcerned with the interests or wishes of the Vietnamese people. They merely perceived looming in Asia a new communist triumph that would raise the prestige of China, while lowering that of the West. Such an outcome must dismay the Republican domestic constituency, rendered fractious and dangerous by
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