Embers of War (77 page)

Time was short. The meeting adjourned quickly so that U.S. ambassador Douglas Dillon could be brought to Hôtel Matignon (the French prime minister’s official residence) for consultation. But could he be summoned this late—it was after eleven
P.M
.—on a Sunday night? He could. Dillon arrived close to midnight to find Foreign Minister Bidault waiting. Prime Minister Laniel soon arrived and got right down to business: On behalf of the French government, he hereby requested that the United States intervene immediately with heavy bombers capable of delivering two-ton-or-heavier bombs, in order to save the entrenched camp at Dien Bien Phu. No other option existed. Given the heavy Chinese involvement on the side of the Viet Minh, including material aid, technical advisers, and communications system, it seemed entirely appropriate, Laniel added, for the American government to initiate the actions General Ely and Admiral Radford had discussed in Washington. Dillon was noncommittal. He said that in his personal view, Congress would have to be consulted before any action could commence, but he promised to submit the request to his government right away.
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Dillon’s cable arrived at the State Department at 9:43
P.M
. local time. MacArthur read it half an hour later. By 10:30, he had passed on the details to Dulles, Radford, and Smith. Dulles did not act immediately, in part because he was busy preparing a telegram from Eisenhower to Winston Churchill that amounted to, in one historian’s words, “a request for war.”
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Eisenhower in his correspondence was usually not given to oratorical flourish, but this time he and the secretary laid it on thick, rather in the way the Briton himself might do. After paying tribute to the “gallant fight” being put up by the French at Dien Bien Phu, Eisenhower warned that, whatever the final outcome there, greater efforts by the Western powers would be required to save Indochina from Communism. Simply to urge the French to redouble their efforts was no solution, not when the stakes were this high: The loss of Indochina could lead to a disastrous shift in the power ratio “throughout Asia and the Pacific” and severely undermine the global strategic position of both the United States and Britain. Even Berlin did not matter as much in grand strategic terms. Following a defeat in Vietnam, Southeast Asia could swiftly fall, and Australia and New Zealand would be threatened. Japan would be deprived of non-Communist markets and sources of food and would almost certainly have to make an accommodation with the Communist world. “This has led us,” the president continued, “to the hard conclusion that the situation in Southeast Asia requires us urgently to take serious and far-reaching decisions.”

Specifically, Eisenhower wrote, there should be a coalition of nations committed to stopping Communist expansion in the area and “willing to join the fight if necessary. I do not envisage the need of any appreciable ground forces on your or our part. If the members of the alliance are sufficiently resolute it should be able to make clear to the Chinese Communists that the continuation of their material support to the Viet Minh will inevitably lead to the growing power of the forces arrayed against them.”

Eisenhower concluded by offering to send Dulles to London “at the earliest date convenient to you” and by invoking a previous moment of similar peril: “If I may refer again to history, we failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini, and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time. That marked the beginning of many years of stark tragedy and desperate peril. May it not be that our nations have learned something from that lesson?”
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One must ask again: Would a president determined to avoid military intervention in Vietnam send this kind of letter—cajoling, flattering, bribing, bullying—to his old wartime partner, drawing direct parallels between their titanic struggle against the Axis powers and the present threat? Hardly. Would he reference the all-important question concerning fighting troops under United Action by saying he did not envisage the need for “
appreciable
ground forces” on Britain’s or America’s part? Not likely. Historian Kevin Ruane is surely right that Eisenhower’s missive (“a model of psychological profiling with barbs aimed at all the prime minister’s weak points”) constitutes powerful proof that he was utterly serious about intervention under the right conditions.
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The letter, sent by cable through the American embassy in London, went out six minutes before midnight. Due to problems in transmission, it did not reach Churchill until six
P.M
. the following day, April 5. The day after that came the reply:

“My dear friend,

“I have received your most important message of April 4. We are giving it earnest cabinet consideration. Winston.”
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VI

HOW TO RESPOND TO THE FRENCH REQUEST FOR IMMEDIATE AERIAL
intervention at Dien Bien Phu consumed White House attention early on April 5. First thing that morning Dulles telephoned the president and told him of Laniel’s conversation with Dillon and of his petition for air strikes. Eisenhower expressed irritation at Radford’s seeming indiscretion in the talks with Ely—the admiral had implied more than he should have—and said there could be no talk of early intervention absent explicit congressional support. Certainly the administration should take “a look to see if anything else can be done,” he went on, but “we cannot engage in active war.” Dulles concurred. He dispatched a cable to Paris informing Dillon that the United States would not intervene “except on [a] coalition basis with active British Commonwealth participation.” Congress, he added, would likewise have to be on board.
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Bidault, informed of the rejection later in the day, took it hard. The time for coalitions had passed, he told Dillon, for the fate of Indochina would be determined in the next ten days at Dien Bien Phu. As the American got up to leave, Bidault vowed that French troops would not quit even if they must fight alone. May God grant them success, he said.
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Or perhaps God plus some additional American aircraft. The following day, April 6, Bidault summoned Dillon back to the Quai d’Orsay and made a new request, this one for ten to twenty B-29 bombers, complete with maintenance personnel and bombs, to be put at the immediate disposal of France. As the runways in Indochina were probably too short to handle the B-29s, the French government hoped the aircraft could be based at U.S. facilities in the Philippines. It amounted to a Plan B, similar to Operation Vulture except involving no American airmen. The Frenchman expressed hope that prompt intervention by these B-29s over the following few days could break up the Viet Minh reinforcement columns moving toward Dien Bien Phu and thereby save the day.
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Dillon, sympathetic as usual to the Laniel government’s perspective on Vietnam, recommended to Dulles that the administration grant the request. Failure to do so, he warned, would allow Paris to lay significant blame for the fall of Dien Bien Phu on the United States and would “strengthen the already powerful group in [the] French Government who wish for peace at any price in Indochina.” Senior policy makers feared he might be right, but they rejected Plan B as well when the NSC met on Tuesday afternoon, April 6. The French had little experience with B-29s, Admiral Radford noted, and could not put them into effective use in time to make a difference at Dien Bien Phu. Even the B-26s already given to them had not been used efficiently. Eisenhower concurred. The group decided instead to give the French other aircraft, including Corsairs and light navy bombers, plus technicians and maintenance crews, subject to approval by Congress.

Congress in fact was the elephant in the room that afternoon, figuring into every part of the discussion. The Smith committee formed by Eisenhower back in January had submitted a report the day before rejecting negotiations and calling for “military victory” in Indochina using U.S. ground forces if necessary, but the NSC refused to go that far. Eisenhower, after declaring that the war was still eminently winnable and that even the fall of Dien Bien Phu would not necessarily be a defeat “since the French would have inflicted such heavy losses on the enemy,” said “with great emphasis” that a fundamental reality had to be faced: Unilateral American intervention was impossible. “Even if we tried such a course, we would have to take it to the Congress and fight for it like dogs, with very little hope of success.” John Foster Dulles agreed. The April 3 meeting with legislative leaders had shown, he said, that it would be impossible to get congressional support for unilateral action. Intervention would have to be multilateral and would have to include Great Britain. Accordingly, Dulles continued, he had with the president’s approval begun to work on allied governments and in particular to convince Britain of two salient facts: that her own position in Malaya would be gravely endangered if Indochina was lost, and that her “two children” Australia and New Zealand would likewise be imperiled.

As Eisenhower and Dulles no doubt knew, a prearranged colloquy on Indochina was at that very moment under way in the U.S. Senate, a few blocks away. Massachusetts Democrat John F. Kennedy, fifteen months into his first term in office and exhibiting the same contradictory impulses on Vietnam that he would later show as president, framed the discussion with an address blasting the administration for its lack of candor about the war. The time had come, he proclaimed, “for the American people to be told the truth about Indochina.” While he favored the concept of United Action, Kennedy feared where such a policy would lead the nation: “To pour money, matériel, and men into the jungles of Indochina without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile and destructive.” For that matter, he wondered, would the United States ever be able to make much difference in that part of the world? “No amount of American military assistance can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, ‘an enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.” No satisfactory outcome was possible, Kennedy concluded, unless France accorded the Associated States full and complete independence; without it, adequate indigenous support would remain forever elusive.

The Massachusetts senator’s support for United Action was seconded by many colleagues of both parties, as was his belief that gaining greater indigenous support was a prerequisite for success. Few, however, articulated his skepticism regarding what U.S. power could accomplish on the ground, and even Kennedy indicated a willingness to vote for a multilateral military intervention if it came to that. Turning the discussion to the practical implications of United Action, Mike Mansfield, Democrat from Montana, asked JFK what he thought John Foster Dulles had in mind when he announced the concept before the Overseas Press Club in New York nine days prior.

“There is every indication,” Kennedy answered, “that what he meant was that the United States will take the ultimate step.”

“And that is what?” Mansfield asked.

“It is war.”
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Back at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the NSC meeting, having taken up much of the afternoon, ended with an agreement to seek a regional grouping for the defense of Southeast Asia against Communist aggression. The conversation had been muddled at points, with no clear sense of what policy to pursue, or even of Dien Bien Phu’s and Indochina’s ultimate importance to the West, but by the end the principals were in basic accord. When a plainly skeptical George Humphrey, secretary of the treasury, asked whether the Dullesian notion of United Action might not eventually lead to “a policy of policing all the governments of the world,” Eisenhower responded firmly. Indochina, he lectured Humphrey, was the first in a row of dominoes. If she fell, her neighbors would soon topple as well. Where would the process end? “George,” he said, “you exaggerate the case. Nevertheless in certain areas at least we cannot afford to let Moscow gain another bit of territory. Dien Bien Phu itself may be just such a critical point.”
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The president evidently liked the domino metaphor, for he used it again the next day in what would become the most famous press conference of his presidency—and arguably of the entire Cold War. Asked to comment on Indochina’s strategic importance, he warned that the possible consequences to the free world of defeat in Indochina were incalculable because of the “falling domino principle.” If Indochina fell, the rest of Southeast Asia would “go over very quickly,” he declared, a disintegration that would have “the most profound influences.” Though the underlying imagery was not new to 1954 or even to the Eisenhower administration—recall Acheson’s “rotten apple” metaphor from 1947—it had not been articulated this way in public before; the metaphor quickly captured the popular imagination and came to define an era in American foreign policy. Lest any of the reporters doubt his determination, the president also said that America could afford no more losses to Communism; that Geneva would likely not bring an acceptable peace settlement; and that independence for the Associated States was not a condition for U.S. intervention. He did not tell them that simultaneously a carrier strike force, already present in the South China Sea, was moved to within one hundred miles of Hainan Island and had commenced air reconnaissance of Chinese air bases and other military installations.
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That afternoon John Foster Dulles received a phone call from Republican senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Everyone was talking about Indochina, Wiley said, and he wondered how he should comment. Dulles said every effort was being made to create a solid front of nations pledged to denying the area to the Communists. Everything would hinge on the British, who remained noncommittal, and on the French, whose government was close to collapsing and “who have been drawing on us like an unlimited bank account.” The time might be near, Dulles judged, for a showdown.
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