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In Saigon, the French position if anything seemed stronger now than in the spring and summer, as evidenced by the drastic reduction in the number of assassinations and bombings in the city in the final months of the year. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese National Army, though still a weak entity, showed at least fleeting signs of becoming a legitimate fighting force.
This was the approach Bernard de Lattre de Tassigny had called for in 1950, one aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the peasantry and based on the premise—later central to U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine—that although political action alone is insufficient to defeat an insurgency, neither can military force alone achieve decisive results.
The French had made sporadic efforts in this direction since 1948; even now their commitment to it was fitful at best. Smart French planners knew that what worked in the Sahara—where there were obligatory watering points that could be occupied and denied to the rebels—might not work so easily in Indochina. They understood that the oil-spot approach is usually an expensive, time-consuming, chancy proposition, especially for a foreign power—it is always hard for a local population to feel that an army of occupation is its friend. Success is often temporary and tends to come only in areas where
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He reminisced about seeing the Statue of Liberty and Harlem as a young man and asked Starobin why the supposedly anticolonial Americans would supply bombers to imperial France for use against innocent Vietnamese. Yet again, as 1953 opened, U.S. plans and policies were very much on Ho Chi Minh’s mind.
In reality, Eisenhower was a savvy political operator, the possessor of what his vice president, Richard Nixon, termed, with no little admiration, a “devious mind.” Well aware of the enormous political advantage that his military pedigree conferred on him, Eisenhower was content to follow what scholars later called a “hidden-hand” political strategy. In the campaign, this meant taking the high road and letting others make the most strident attacks on the Democrats and their candidate Adlai E. Stevenson. It was Nixon—who seemed to relish taking the low road—who saddled Stevenson, an ardent Cold
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It was McCarthy who charged George Marshall, five-star general and secretary of state and then defense under Truman (and a mentor to Eisenhower), with participating in “a [Soviet-led Communist] conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.”
Eisenhower privately cringed at such rhetoric, but he didn’t repudiate it. He frowned on the “purple, prosecuting-attorney style” of the Republican Party platform but didn’t disavow it. To the dismay of friends, he did not come to Marshall’s defense, even removing, at McCarthy’s urging, a passage praising Marshall from a Milwaukee speech.
He himself castigated Truman for “losing” China and for weakening America’s posture in the Far East, and he vowed to stop Communist advances elsewhere in the region. In due course, these assertions would come back to haunt him, to box him in and limit his options on Indochina. In the near term, though, they worked:
“Foster has been studying to be Secretary of State since he was five years old,” Eisenhower joked more than once, and he wasn’t that far off. When Dulles was five, his mother wrote of him, “Mentally, he is remarkable for his age. His logical acumen betokens a career as a thinker … he reasons with a clearness far beyond his age.”
Family connections—his uncle, Robert Lansing, was Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state—won him a place on the American delegation to the Paris peace conference in 1919, where he helped draft policy on German reparations and the war guilt question. In the interwar years, Dulles worked his way up the ladder at Sullivan & Cromwell, a prestigious law firm, all the while deepening his interest in politics and public service.
To the outside world, they presented two sharply different styles: Eisenhower was prudent, pragmatic, modest, easygoing; Dulles bombastic, severe, self-important, socially shy, even gauche.
In conversation, the president tended to be plainspoken, while Dulles sought refuge in intellectual abstractions. Both men had been raised in deeply religious homes, but whereas Eisenhower wore his faith lightly, the secretary of state came across as inflexibly pious. Still, they developed a close working relationship, based on mutual respect if not perhaps deep affection. Behind closed doors, Dulles sometimes revealed a capacity for flexible and pragmatic thought that would have amazed outsiders, and—even more shocking—a sense of humor. He also showed he knew who was boss. Despite the claims
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About the same time, Dulles informed French leaders that the president saw Vietnam and Korea as parts of a single front, and that this distinguished the new administration from its predecessor.
Prone to domino theorizing of their own—in particular, they worried that Western defeat in Indochina could render their own posture in Malaya untenable—British officials in this period fully matched the Americans in their desire to stiffen French resolve, and to convince Paris of the need for a more offensive military strategy.19
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.
Letourneau, in turn, restated his position, noting that it was “not the policy of his government” to seek a military victory in Indochina, that indeed victory probably was unattainable because of the likelihood that the Chinese would intervene in Indochina to prevent such an outcome, just as they had done in Korea.21
Trying to clear rear areas before destroying the main Viet Minh forces, Admiral Arthur W. Radford said, would be like “trying to mop up water without turning off the faucet.”
For want of anything better, Washington officials signed off in April, not expecting much in the way of results.22
In early May, satisfied that he had achieved these goals and with the monsoon season fast approaching, he withdrew from all but one Laotian province (Sam Neua), leaving the French and their Laotian supporters badly shaken and Americans further convinced that the war effort was foundering.23 Eisenhower was particularly distraught. Until the Laos invasion, he told the National Security Council on April 28, he had thought the French would ultimately win the war; now that seemed far less likely. French commanders lacked the requisite aggressiveness and moreover had failed to “instill a desire to
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He was frustrated by his government’s dependence on Washington and by the Eisenhower administration’s insistence on a military solution in Indochina at the same time it sought a political settlement in Korea.
But the problem was insoluble; the Americans in effect called the shots. Any unilateral move to withdraw from Indochina could lead to an immediate end of U.S. aid, which would expose the Expeditionary Corps and the colon community to grave dangers, forcing decolonization. It could also complicate Franco-American relations concerning German rearmament and other issues.
The question was left hanging, suggesting the answer for the moment was no. But that it was raised at all, and that NSC-149/2 won approval, shows how seriously senior policy makers saw the situation.27
In April, a downbeat Bidault complained to Dulles that the government was “caught in a crossfire” between those who opposed the war on moral grounds and those who said it was ruining France economically.
The magazine came out firing in its first issue, charging that certain political groups, with vested financial interests in Indochina, were “conspiring” to keep the war going. Featured on the cover was Pierre Mendès France of the Radical Party, who declared on page six, in an interview titled “France Can Bear the Truth”: “We cannot approach problems of economic recovery without resolving the problem of unproductive costs like rearmament and the Indochina War.”
Mendès France elaborated his vision for a political resolution of the war, and his fears for what a stay-the-course policy would bring. France, he began, should guarantee immediate and full independence to the Indochinese states and should set a definite time schedule for the withdrawal of French forces.
Few doubted the depth of his conviction that the war was having a devastating impact on France’s financial, diplomatic, and military health. Then again, just what Mendès France would have done as prime minister in 1953—and when he would have done it—is not easy to gauge.
It’s a remarkable thing, in view of the dizzying turnover of governments in the Fourth Republic, that Bidault was seemingly always there, putting his stamp on the policy, pushing forward, ruling out compromise. This was Bidault’s war if it was anyone’s.
Navarre’s very lack of experience in Indochina was an asset, Paris leaders insisted. He could approach the issue, they told skeptical Americans, with “an absence of prejudice.”
This bullishness put Navarre somewhat at odds with his primary mission in Indochina, which was not to destroy the Viet Minh or win an outright victory but merely to create the conditions for an “honorable” exit from the struggle.
French sources do not support this contention that the “Navarre Plan” was entirely American in conception and structure; they see the French commander as shaping the basic contours on his own. But there is no doubt that U.S. pressure for a more vigorous application of military power lay behind the scheme.
He claimed to detect an “increased aggressiveness in attitude” on the part of the French High Command and a greater openness to American ideas and recommendations. Navarre, he enthused, possessed “a new aggressive psychology to the war” and seemed determined “to see this war through to success at an early date.”10
But the bigger problem, as far as some American analysts were concerned, was the growing evidence of disillusion in Paris. On
Talk of peace in Korea had a contagious effect in France, and as a result Paris would be forced to seek an early end to the war, by negotiations if necessary. Dulles countered that in Korea the United States had fought her way to a strong bargaining position and that France needed to do the same; only after the military outlook improved should she enter talks with Ho. Bidault nodded in seeming agreement but offered no assurances, beyond the murky promise that France would “liquidate the war with honor.”12
THE KOREAN ARMISTICE, SIGNED ON JULY 27, HAD A DEVASTATING effect on French thinking, causing a further slackening of the will to continue the fight. Marc Jacquet, the minister for the Associated States, told British officials a few days later that his compatriots were nonplussed: They saw the United States securing a truce in Korea and Britain trading with China and could not understand why their allies should expect them to continue a war in Indochina in which there was no longer a direct French interest.
“The whole thing was a matter of sheer, unforeseeable luck, because for a while we had toyed with the idea of staying with the convoy for more protection.” The convoy too was fortunate, Fall continued, losing only one dead and a few wounded, but the overall situation was perilous.
Would the taciturn Navarre inspire his troops and turn the tide? Would America step up her involvement in the war, perhaps to the point of sending troops? Would China intervene? Would the French (with Washington’s help) be able to keep the non-Communist nationalists in Vietnam in check? Would Laniel and Bidault seek direct negotiations with Ho?
Millions cast their lot with the Viet Minh not out of attachment to Communism but out of frustration with the lack of strong nationalist alternatives. An editorial in the same issue endorsed Duncan’s findings and accused the French of pursuing “sophisticated defeatism,” even as it called victory “entirely feasible” and advocated more U.S. support in the war. Bidault, well aware of Life’s huge circulation in the United States, was outraged by Duncan’s claims and threatened to have the magazine pulled from Parisian store shelves. He also instructed officers at the embassy in Washington to
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This was the prevailing theme also in Luce’s other publication, Time. Issue after issue in the spring and summer, while acknowledging setbacks and problems in the war effort, gave readers the impression that the trends pointed in the right direction, that the Franco-American partnership functioned smoothly like a well-oiled machine, and that the “Reds” were on the ropes. Never mind that several of the cables coming in to Time Inc.’s editorial offices from correspondents offered a much different picture, one showing a faltering war effort and expanding Viet Minh reach.24
The two magazines did have that in common: Victory in Vietnam, both said, was “entirely feasible.” Life may have been downbeat about the outlook, but it put the blame squarely on French civilian and military leaders for, in effect, giving up just as victory was near.
If defeat occurred, principal blame would lie with France, for her unwillingness either to expend more of her human and material resources to fight the war, or to grant the Indochinese people real independence. The New York Times, for example, was straightforwardly hawkish, insisting that the defense of Indochina was vital “not merely to France but to the whole of the free world.”
“If Indochina goes,” Eisenhower warned his audience, “several things happen right away. The Malayan peninsula, with its valuable tin and tungsten, would become indefensible, and India would be outflanked. Indonesia, with all its riches, would likely be lost too.…
By “all-out” effort, did Eisenhower mean potentially using U.S. ground forces? It’s hard to be sure. He knew that lawmakers would be in no mood to send soldiers back to Asia immediately on the heels of the long and frustrating struggle in Korea, and he himself was not keen on such a prospect.
Some of the congressional leaders consulted grumbled about the massive outlay, but none was prepared to block the administration on Indochina strategy. Unlike in previous years, when the war had elicited only sporadic interest on Capitol Hill, now, with an armistice in Korea and concerns on the rise regarding Communist expansion elsewhere in Asia, more and more House members and
KNOWLAND’S VISIT, HOWEVER, WAS NOT THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL by a U.S. senator to Vietnam that fall. That honor belonged to Mike Mansfield, a freshman Democrat from Montana who was destined to be the leading congressional voice on Vietnam matters in the years to come.
It could have been John Foster Dulles speaking. Though Moscow’s involvement in Indochina was minimal—especially compared to Washington’s—both the senator and the secretary of state were inclined in this early period to see the Soviet bear looming large and menacing behind the scenes, directing the struggle. Regarding the dire consequences of a defeat in Indochina, certainly, the two men were in full agreement, and in the months that followed, Mansfield held to that view.
“Diem’s godfather,” but for the moment it is enough to note that the senator came away from the luncheon further convinced of Vietnam’s importance—and of the need for a “Third Force” in between the French and the Viet Minh.
His arrival in Saigon on September 21 received little notice, which surprised no one who knew him, for he was by nature reticent and unassuming, the very antithesis of the charismatic and glad-handing politician.
Neither witty nor silver-tongued, he was in many ways a prototypical gaunt and laconic westerner (though he was born in the east), who could be monosyllabic in public.
An exception was Australian journalist Denis Warner, who told him the French strategy was gravely flawed and the war likely lost. Mansfield, Warner recalled, refused to accept the analysis, replying, “I’m sure you can’t be right. I’m sure you can’t be right.”34
Navarre, on the other hand, sang a different melody, one much more to the senator’s liking. He would implement the Navarre Plan, he assured Mansfield, and so would take the fight to the enemy.
