Pleased that Eisenhower’s early comments described Vietnam not as a colonial war but as a vital Cold War struggle, the French trio acknowledged among themselves that they could not offer Washington merely the “maintenance of a sterile and costly status quo.” But they also worried about the new administration’s aggressiveness on Indochina and concurred that there could be no thought of increasing the French war effort significantly, no matter how hard the Americans pressed.20 What ensued in Washington was another Franco-American dialogue of the deaf.
