France, however, was already on her way, and with tacit American blessing. At almost the same moment that Archimedes Patti’s airplane touched down in Hanoi, Charles de Gaulle, leader of the French Provisional Government, arrived in Washington, D.C., for a much-anticipated set of meetings with administration officials. No less than his nationalist rival in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, de Gaulle considered the United States the single most important player in the emerging Indochina drama, the main potential obstacle to his plan to once again tie the tricolor to the mast in Saigon and Hanoi.
