Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

In Europe, the administration sought to bring France firmly into the structure of the fledgling European Defense Community (EDC). Proposed by France’s René Pleven in response to Washington’s desire for the rearmament of West Germany, the plan called for a common European army, under joint control, that would help counter the Soviet threat while not re-creating a sovereign German army. U.S. analysts fully understood that the ultimate ratification of the EDC treaty depended inordinately on attitudes in the house of its originator—where Charles de Gaulle, always a force to be reckoned with, immediately denounced it for allowing the dilution of the French army into an intra-European amalgam—and they were loath to do anything in Indochina that could anger Paris officials and journalists and thereby threaten passage.1