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. Late that month, in his record of a conversation with Eisenhower, Dulles wrote that Indochina was probably the administration’s top priority in foreign policy, because unlike Korea its loss could not be localized “but would spread throughout Asia and Europe.”17 By the time the secretary spoke those words, more than 139,000 metric tons of U.S. equipment had been delivered to the French, including some
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