Here Dulles summarized perfectly the position the Eisenhower administration would take in the all-important (as it turned out) first eighteen months after Inauguration Day. Never mind Eisenhower’s conviction that no military victory was possible “in that kind of theater”; never mind the low and sagging support for the war in metropolitan France; never mind that informed observers inside and outside the U.S. government had for years warned that the anti–Viet Minh cause was fraught with peril. For Dulles and Eisenhower both, Vietnam was a vital battle in the larger Cold War, one that had to be
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