Forty years after the last United States combat forces evacuated South Vietnam the legacy of a war that was never formally declared -- whether it was a valid venture or a misguided endeavor -- remains shrouded in controversy. The ongoing debate is fueled by two overriding questions: What motivated America's initial intervention and its persistence in the face of mounting frustration? And could different strategies -- a full-fledged commitment, a massive attack against the North -- have produced a more desirable outcome?
To answer the second question first, Henry Kissinger calculated during his secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese that only the threat of total annihilation would convince them to compromise -- a course of action that neither Lyndon Johnson nor Richard Nixon was prepared to endorse. In fact, the enemy was so fanatically dedicated to a unified Vietnam under their control that they were willing to accept limitless casualties to attain their objective. Discounting the lives of tens of thousand of human beings, Commander Vo Nguyen Giap spoke of fighting fifteen, twenty, fifty years if necessary. The final toll of Communist military and civilian deaths reached one million (The South lost another 750,000.) -- a body count victory for the Americans of almost twenty to one. (Karnow, pp. 19-20)
Complexities swirl around the first question -- although two reasons for U. S. involvement were clearly articulated by its chief executives during its early stages. Echoing Henry Luce's characterization of America (in his famous essay "The American Century") as "the powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice," Harry Truman intoned, "The world looks to us for leadership." John Kennedy promised to "pay any price, bear any burden, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty." Lyndon Johnson professed a goal of bringing "peace and hope to all the world." (Karnow, p. 14)
A less cosmic justification but one just as compelling was the investiture of Vietnam as the last bastion of democracy against the relentless advance of the Red Terror. Coining an analogy that would reverberate through future administrations and become the rallying cry for a covey of stubborn hawks, President Eisenhower warned that all her sisters in Southeast Asia would topple like dominoes should Vietnam fall to the Communists. (Karnow, p. 14)
Considering their grievous past, it was understandable that Ho Chi Minh and his comrades would see the war in a different light -- not as one of conquest or ideology but rather as the continuation of two thousand years of resistance to Chinese and French domination. (Karnow, p. 17)
Because before Vietnam there was Indochina, and before the Vietnam War there was the French Indochina War.
French missionaries and traders had made their presence known in Cochinchina (South Vietnam) as early as the mid-seventeenth century, and both formalized it in 1664. Religious leaders created the Society of Foreign Missions to promote Christianity, and businessmen established the East India Company to foster trade. In 1799 a French priest turned politician, Pigneau de Behaine, helped the deposed Nguyen Anh reclaim his throne after a thirty-year hiatus and reestablish the dynasty that was to last until 1954. (Karnow, pp. 60-63)
In 1848 Nguyen's grandson, Tu Doc, instigated a campaign of persecution against the Vietnamese Catholics, and provoked Napoleon III into dispatching a pair of punitive expeditions in 1858 and 1861. The first failed, but as a result of the second Tu Doc surrendered to France the three provinces adjacent to Saigon and granted her the right to forbid any future cession of territory to another power. Twelve years later, in order to recover Tonkin (North Vietnam) from the two filibusters, Jean Dupuis and Francis Garnier, who had seized it without authorization, he relinquished Cochinchina unconditionally to the French. (Karnow, p. 76, 82)
Liberally interpreted, the treaty signed by Tu Doc permitted French intervention in Tonkin to quell disorders. In 1883, when Black Flag pirates and other bandits menaced French subjects in Hanoi and trade along the Red River, two companies of troops occupied the area while a fleet opened fire on the city of Hue, site of the imperial palace. The casualties were so severe that a chief mandarin emerged personally under a flag of truce to negotiate. In the wake of Tu Doc's untimely death, his putative successor, Hiep Hoa, was coerced into accepting extremely harsh terms: The French would regulate Vietnam's commerce, collect its customs duties, assure its defense, conduct its foreign relations, and install administrators and garrisons to enforce its jurisdiction. (Karnow, pp. 84-85)
Divided into three zones -- Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina -- Vietnam in name ceased to exist. It had become an outright French possession. (Karnow, p. 85)
In extending their control over the country, the French could have pursued a policy of "association," as the British did in India, governing indirectly through native institutions. Instead, they chose direct rule, which meant the deployment of the same number of officials as the British (five thousand) to manage an Indochina population one-tenth the size of India's three hundred million. (Karnow, p. 113)
The French were never able to delegate authority to indigenous persons. When local chiefs abandoned their posts, they were replaced with French officers, Vietnamese collaborators, or Catholics who were too detached from the populace to govern effectively. In the provinces, to collect taxes and mobilize labor, the French relied on village bosses who used their positions to embezzle funds and oppress peasants. They implemented a penal code that disrupted traditional practices, such as the prerogative of a father or respected dignitary to adjudicate disputes. Their efforts to reform the educational system -- like replacing Chinese ideographs with a romanized alphabet -- failed because young Vietnamese resisted colonial contamination. (Karnow, pp. 113-115)
France's biggest impact on Indochina was economic. Under the direction of Governor-General Paul Doumer, a former minister of finance who had been exiled from Paris in 1897 by his conservative friends for having the audacity to introduce the income tax, exploitation was perfected. He dissolved the powerless emperor's last vestige of sovereignty, the Council of Mandarins. He funneled customs duties and direct taxes into his central treasury. He created official monopolies for alcohol, salt, and opium, increasing production and consumption of the latter such that it eventually accounted for one-third of his administration's income. He dispossessed peasants of their small farms and encouraged the lucrative export of rice at the possible cost of food shortages. He backed French consortiums that owned coal mines and rubber plantations where virtually indentured labor suffered from disease and appalling working conditions. (Karnow, pp. 116-118)
When the discontented dared to protest, they would be "pacified" or suppressed, often by "acts of incredible brutality." (Karnow, p. 88)
Thus it was on December 29, 1920, in the city of Tours, that a slender, intense, thirty-year-old Asian known as Nguyen Ai Quoc rose to address the Congress of the French Socialist Party:
"It is impossible for me in just a few minutes to demonstrate to you all the atrocities committed in Indochina by the bandits of capitalism. There are more prisons than schools . . . Freedom of the press and opinion does not exist for us, nor does the freedom to unite or associate. We don't have the right to emigrate or travel abroad. We live in the blackest ignorance because we don't have the freedom of instruction. In Indochina they do their best to intoxicate us with opium and brutalize us with alcohol. They kill many thousands of [Vietnamese] . . . to defend interests that are not theirs." (Logevall, p. 12)
He had left his homeland five years earlier -- to explore the world, to study Western Civilization, perhaps, as a comrade said, to learn from it how to fight against it. He ported at Bombay, Oran, Le Havre, Boston, and San Francisco; he worked in Brooklyn, admired Manhattan skyscrapers, and was impressed by the legal rights granted to Chinese immigrants; he lingered in London, polishing his skills as a pastry chef and his fluency in English and fraternizing with anti-colonial nationalists. (Karnow, pp. 119-120)
He read Lenin's "Theses on the National and Colonial Questions," was enlightened by its analysis of the linkage between capitalism and imperialism and its viable blueprint for national liberation, and summarily rejected Socialism as flawed and embraced Communism. (Logevall, pp. 13-14)
After churning out his own political diatribes for three years, Nguyen concluded that the French Communists were too Eurocentric and moved to Moscow, where his expertise in Asian affairs brought him to the attention of Soviet leaders. In 1925 they sent him to Canton to found the first Marxist organization in Indochina, the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League. Although it would soon collapse in the aftermath of Chiang Kai-shek's betrayal and slaughter of his Communist associates, Nguyen's students would always remember him for the Confucian virtues he preached: thrift, prudence, modesty, and generosity. (Logevall, p. 17)
The deep factional splits and regional and tactical differences among a plethora of nationalist parties, the swift eradication of the most prominent one, the VNQDD, after it tried to foment an uprising by Vietnamese in the French army, and the woes of economic depression presented a golden opportunity for Nguyen. In June 1929, in Hong Kong, he prevailed upon several leaders to close ranks around a new organization: the Indochinese Communist Party; its program called for independence and a proletarian government. (Karnow, pp. 124-125)
Arrested as an agitator, he escaped a prison hospital -- even persuading an employee to declare him dead -- and resumed his wanderlust. Traveling aboard cramped freighters along Asian, African, and Mediterranean coasts, rolling slowly through the countryside in squalid compartments of the Trans-Siberian Railway, trekking for five days across the mountains of Central China to the Communist stronghold of Yenan, he left a trail of legends behind him. A French Communist agent who worked with him recalled: "He was taut and quivering, with only one thought in his head, his country, Vietnam." (Karnow, pp. 125-126)
In early 1941, in the wake of the Japanese tidal wave that surged across Southeast Asia and crushed the French in Vietnam, Nguyen slipped over the border from Southern China, his first return in thirty years. The time had come, he told five colleagues gathered around a bamboo table in a chilly mountain cave, to form a broad front "of patriots of all ages and all types, peasants, workers, merchants, and soldiers" to fight both the French colonialists and the Japanese occupiers. Although led by Communists, the emphasis of the Viet Nam Doc Lop Dong Minh, the Vietnam Independence League, would be national liberation. (Karnow, pp. 126-127)
Borrowing from the new movement, Nguyen Ai Quoc changed his name one last time. Henceforth he would be known to history as Ho Chi Minh, Bringer of Light. (Karnow, p. 127)
On the morning of September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh ascended a wooden platform in Hanoi's Ba Dinh Square, gazed into the faces of thousands who had journeyed from afar to see this man of mythical stature, and uttered a phrase whose origin was unknown to most of them: "We hold the truth that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." (Karnow, p. 135)
Emperor Bao Dai having abdicated, Ho proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam; its reign as the only civil government in the country was short-lived -- only twenty days.
Ho was invoking not only the words of Thomas Jefferson but also the sentiments of the American president who had led the allies to victory over the Germans and Japanese; by the time of Pearl Harbor Franklin Roosevelt had become a committed anti-colonialist. In March 1941 he told the White House Correspondents' Association: "We believe that any nationality, no matter how small, has the inherent right to its own nationhood." Six months later, in drafting the Atlantic Charter, he included a clause respecting "the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live." As for Indochina, in 1943 he declared to his son Elliott that he would work "with all my might and main" against any plan "to further France's imperialistic ambitions." (Logevall, pp. 46, 48; Karnow, p. 136)
Thus it was not surprising that Ho and his comrades looked to the world's sole superpower as their savior, "the shining giant whose commitment to freedom was real, who would end forever colonial control." (Logevall, pp. 98-99)
But Franklin Roosevelt was dead in 1945 and no longer a factor in their destiny. In the interests of building a stable and friendly France atop the ruins of a war-ravaged Europe and of maintaining positive relations with her government, the Truman Administration chose to defer to Charles de Gaulle on the subject of Indochina. Its silent concurrence spoke volumes when, during his triumphant tour of the U. S., de Gaulle asserted to a group of reporters: "The position of the French on Indochina is very simple: France means to recover its sovereignty over Indochina." (Logevall, pp. 103-104)
One young American on the scene was astute enough to perceive where such pronouncements were headed. The son of a congressman, already by the age of twenty-eight Peter Dewey had worked as a foreign correspondent, authored two books, fought in the Polish Army, and parachuted into occupied France to conduct espionage and assist guerillas. Head of an OSS contingent which had been sent to Saigon to find allied POW's and gather intelligence, he soon ran afoul of British Major General Douglas Gracey, whose purported mission was to disarm the Japanese. (Logevall, p. 116)
But Gracey was an unreconstructed colonialist who saw himself as a French standardbearer. He instituted martial law, evicted from the Governor-General's Palace the legitimately installed Viet Minh Provisional Government, closed down the Vietnamese press, and released and rearmed more than a thousand excitable French soldiers; they promptly set about terrorizing any Vietnamese they encountered. The Viet Minh retaliated -- mobilizing a massive general strike, storming the local jail to liberate their own imprisoned, and attacking and massacring scores of French and Eurasian civilians in the Cite Herault section of the town. Thus was ignited on September 23, 1945, a conflagration would rage for thirty years. (Logevall, pp. 113-115)
Dewey disapproved of Gracey's French bias while Gracey suspected Dewey of conniving with the Viet Minh and ordered him to leave the country. On the way to the airport Dewey swerved to avoid a barricade, saw three Vietnamese standing at a roadside ditch, and unleashed a string of curses in French. They opened fire and killed him, the first American casualty of the Vietnam War. In his final dispatch before his departure, Dewey wrote, "Cochinchina is burning. The French and British are finished here and we [the United States] ought to clear out of Southeast Asia." (Logevall, pp. 116-117)
On October 5, 1945, General Jacques Philippe Leclerc debarked in Indochina. Charged with reimposing French rule, he swiftly cracked a Viet Minh blockade around Saigon and drove through the Mekong delta and up into the highlands. Within five months, he announced victory in the south, but his claim was illusory. The French, like the Americans later, could conquer territory, but they could not hold it. "If we departed, believing the region pacified, the Viet Minh would arrive on our heels," wrote an historian serving with Leclerc. "There was only one possible defense, to multiply our posts, fortify them, arm and train the villagers . . . What was required was not thirty-five thousand troops but a hundred thousand." (Karnow, pp. 150-151)
Leclerc was a quick study. Telling aides that "one does not kill ideas with bullets," he soon realized that a military solution was impossible and that the best he could do was lay the groundwork for a political resolution -- for which the moment was actually propitious. (Logevall, p. 119)
While Ho Chi Minh's influence in the north was largely uncontested and his popularity widespread -- he had abolished onerous taxes, left landowners unmolested, and courted the middle class -- all was not benign. A horde of Chinese Nationalists -- who had been delegated at Potsdam the task of rounding up the Japanese -- roved the countryside, plundered villages and homesteads, and provided aid and comfort to his principal rival, a resurgent VNQDD. The Soviet and French Communists had shown little interest in his cause. The economy was in shambles, and his treasury lacked the funds to supply his burgeoning army with weapons and ammunition. (Logevall. pp. 125-128)
Ho indicated his receptivity to an accommodation in a series of conversations with de Gaulle's representative in Tonkin, Jean Saintenay. As their mutual respect deepened, the two men argued strenuously for months -- particularly over the fate of Cochinchina -- until Leclerc's flotilla of gunboats steamed into the Haiphong harbor and forced the issue. Under the terms of the "Preliminary Convention" signed on March 6, 1946, France recognized the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as a "free state" within the French Union; twenty-five thousand French troops were allowed to enter the North (and stay for five years), replacing the Chinese whose departure had also been negotiated; and whether Cochinchina would end up under French or Viet Minh dominion would be determined by plebiscite at some future date. (Logevall, pp. 128-135)
If some militants condemned the accord as a sellout, at least Ho had extracted one painful thorn from his side. "If the Chinese stay now, they will never go," he told his critics. "I prefer to eat French shit for five years than eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life." (Karnow, p. 153)
Western observers during this period portrayed Ho as both conciliatory and determined. American intelligence officer George Wickes wrote, "He strikes you as above the run of ordinary mortals . . . Perhaps it is the spirit that great patriots are supposed to have. Surely he has that -- long struggling has left him mild and resigned, still sustaining some small idealism and hope [that war can be avoided]. But I think it is particularly his kindliness, his simplicity, his down-to-earthness." A British diplomat reported, "There is no doubt in my mind that he is prepared to go to any lengths to attain his object." (Logevall, pp. 134-135)
On May 31, Ho left for France, where he would spend the next four months trying to resolve the Cochinchina dilemma. Saintenay described the resulting Modus Vivendi, or "interim understanding" as "pathetic"; Ho got far less than he had hoped for, and the French retained their economic stranglehold on the North. Once again, the difficult political questions were postponed indefinitely. (Logevall, p. 144)
While in Paris, Ho urged an American journalist, David Schoenbrun, to help rally public opinion in support of peace and Vietnamese independence. Schoenbrun replied that Americans did not think Communism was compatible with freedom. "If the men you call Communists are the only men who lead the fight for independence," said Ho, "then Vietnam will be Communist. But independence is the motivating force, not Communism." (Logevall, p. 143)
Schoenbrun marveled at the man's self-assurance when he asked how Ho expected to wage war against the French with no army and no modern weapons. "It would not be hopeless," said Ho. "It would be hard, desperate, but we could win . . . The spirit of man is more powerful than his own machines." (Logevall, p. 143)
Viet Minh theoretician Truong Chinh similarly elucidated the fundamental tenet of revolutionary war in his 1947 book La Resistance Vaincra (The Resistance to Win): "[There are] those who have a tendency only to rely on military action . . . They tend to believe that everything can be settled by armed force; they do not apply political mobilization, are unwilling to give explanations and to convince people . . . fighting spiritedly, they neglect political work; they do not . . . act in such a way that the army and the people can wholeheartedly help one another." (Fall, pp. 372-373)
The intransigence of the French was personified in their High Commissioner for Indochina, Admiral Georges Thierry d'Argenlieu. A former monk, d'Argenlieu was aloof, arrogant, autocratic, and too intellectually obtuse to see the world in any terms other than black and white, good versus evil. On June 1, 1946, without consulting his superiors in Paris, he proclaimed an autonomous "Republic of Cochinchina," a clear violation of the March 6 Accords. (Logevall, pp. 124, 137)
With Ho Chi Minh on the other side of the globe, leadership of the DRV devolved upon his principal lieutenant, the precocious Vo Nguyen Giap -- lawyer, historian, author, and now military commander at the age of thirty-five. Giap was at Ho's side when he founded the Viet Minh in May 1941, presided over the creation of the National Liberation Army in December 1944, and headed the interior ministry in Ho's first government. A self-taught logistician, strategist, and organizer, Giap possessed the steely determination that enabled him to take on and defeat two Western powers, accomplishments no less remarkable than those of Wellington, Grant, and Lee. The crucible was forged in December 1946. (Logevall, pp. 147-149)
On November 22, following an altercation between a French patrol boat and Viet Minh troops in the harbor of Haiphong, General Jean Etienne Valluy -- who had replaced Leclerc -- ordered his local subordinate "by every possible means to take complete control of Haiphong and force the Vietnamese government and army into submission." (Logevall, pp. 156-157)
During the next two days, a prolonged aerial and naval bombardment -- which had been sanctioned by French Prime Minister Georges Bidault -- reduced the Chinese and Vietnamese quarters to rubble, killing over a thousand civilians. On December 19, two days after Valluy himself had landed in Haiphong and announced, "If those gooks want a fight, they'll get it," Viet Minh militia sabotaged the Hanoi municipal power plant, and broke into French homes to murder and abduct their occupants. Giap called for a universal uprising, sent reinforcements into the city, and assured his partisans that though "the resistance will be long and arduous, our cause is just and we will surely triumph." His units held Hanoi for two months, giving his government enough time to reconstitute itself in a mountain stronghold. (Karnow, pp. 156-157; Logevall, p. 163)
If the Viet Minh fired the first shots in Hanoi on December 19, 1946, the French must bear primary responsibility for precipitating the conflict. Fifteen months earlier, with British complicity, they had ousted by force a Vietnamese administration in Saigon after a national government had proclaimed independence. According to d'Argenlieu, who seemed determined to provoke the Viet Minh into full-scale hostilities, France would never "relinquish her hold on Indochina." Bidault opposed not only negotiations with the Viet Minh but the granting of independence to any Vietnamese regime. During Ho Chi Minh's sojourn in Paris Charles de Gaulle affirmed that France must remain "united with the territories she has opened to civilization," lest she forfeit her great power status. (Logevall, pp. 163-165; Buttinger, p. 670)
Nineteen forty-seven was a year of strategic defense for the Viet Minh. Too weak to pursue open, large-scale engagements, General Giap ceded the major towns and lines of communication in Tonkin and Annan, and was content to harass an enemy hampered by primitive road networks and a populace harboring a deep anti-French animus. (Logevall, pp. 170-173)
The frustrations mounted for a French Corps confounded by the Viet Minh's "elusiveness, their capacity for surprise . . . and the impossibility of telling friend from foe. It was a war without fronts, where the enemy was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Time and again units would move into a target area in force, only to find no one there." If they pulled out, the natives would return as quickly as they had left. If they stayed, they found themselves isolated, detached from their supply base, and unavailable for major combat elsewhere. (Logevall, pp. 177-178)
In May 1947 a French scholar and war veteran named Paul Mus journeyed sixty miles from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh's jungle headquarters in Thai Nguyen. Mus was the emissary of d'Argenlieu's successor, High Commissioner Emile Bollaert, who had been charged by the moderate Socialists now in power in Paris with reopening talks with the Viet Minh. (Logevall, pp. 189-190)
A fervent imperialist for the first forty years of his life, Mus had been disillusioned by an intimate exposure to its injustices and to the irrepressible patriotism and nationalism sweeping the land. Duly presenting his conditions for a ceasefire -- the Viet Minh must lay down their arms, allow French troops freedom of movement inside their zone of control, and hand over deserters from the Foreign Legion -- he could only utter a weak "No" when Ho Chi Minh posed the question: "Would you accept these terms if you were in my place?" He left the meeting convinced that the French had already lost the battle for the hearts and minds of a humble peasantry who, when the sun set, mutated into a race of warriors. (Logevall, pp. 192-193)
Nevertheless, as 1947 progressed, senior French strategists pondered a tantalizing question. "What if you could win the people's allegiance away from the Viet Minh?" What if you could persuade non-Communists to coalesce around a leader who was less inimical to French aims, who might curry favor with the United States, who could garner greater support for the war effort in the French Assembly? Once in place, such an alternative to Ho Chi Minh would transform the colonial struggle into a civil war with a virtuous France fighting on the side of the Vietnamese against the Red Menace and serving as America's surrogate in the region to stanch the spread of Communism. (Logevall, pp. 197-199)
One name stood out: Bao Dai, the portly, thirty-four-year-old former emperor who had abdicated in 1945 and was currently living in Hong Kong. He was an ideal candidate -- not only because he possessed considerable influence among the Vietnamese but also because, at least in the eyes of his presumptive masters, he was weak, malleable, and prone to excessive gambling, womanizing, and self-indulgence. (Logevall, p. 199)
Bao Dai may have been a hedonist but he was no fool. He insisted to the stream of messengers and collaborators sent to lure him back to the throne that the French must first accede to Vietnam's independence and unity. Finally succumbing to their importunities, he put his signature on two agreements, one on December 7, 1947, the other on June 8, 1948 -- and promptly repudiated both as so hedged with qualifications and contingencies as to render them meaningless. (Karnow, pp. 173-174)
Two developments in early 1949 brought Bao Dai once more to the negotiating table: the looming victory of Mao Zedong's Chinese Communists -- who could strengthen Ho Chi Minh -- and the Viet Minh's own military successes, which had enabled them to extend their reach over one-half the population and amass an army of 250,000. (Logevall, pp. 207-210)
Thus, on March 8, Vietnam's figurehead emperor Bao Dai and France's figurehead president Vincent Auriol concluded by an exchange of letters the Elysee Accords, so named for the grand palace in Paris where the ceremony took place. (Logevall, p. 211)
The French reconfirmed Vietnam's independence and, going beyond mere promises, outlined measures to incorporate Cochinchina in a cohesive Vietnamese state. But France still retained control over the country's defense, foreign relations, and finances. "What they call a Bao Dai solution," admitted the discomfited signatory himself soon afterward, "turns out to be a just a French solution." (Karnow, p. 175)
And one the latter would deploy almost before the ink was dry in pursuit of what had been their principal objective all along: securing American material and diplomatic backing. (Logevall, p. 212)
The time was ripe for the consummation of this lengthy courtship. Appointed Secretary of State by President Truman in January 1949, the haughty Dean Acheson could rightly claim to have been "Present at the Creation" of America's global hegemony -- as well as its long and arduous commitment to Vietnam. A staunch anti-Communist, he was often brusquely impatient with and wary of nationalist leaders. On the other hand, he couldn't entirely rid himself of the notion that Bao Dai was a weak leader with no chance of winning over the broad populace and of the suspicion that France's professed liberalism was merely a new guise for furthering her colonial ambitions. (Logevall. pp. 217-219)
Ultimately, Acheson landed on the side of the conservatives, convinced by arguments like the one offered by his new consul general in Saigon, George Abbott: "Our support will not insure Bao Dai's success but the lack of it will probably make certain his failure." (Logevall, p. 220)
Some viewed the situation through a lens of greater magnification, like Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in June 1950: "This is a civil war that has been captured by the [Soviet] Politburo, and, besides, has been turned into a tool of the Politburo. So it isn't a civil war in the usual sense. It is part of an international war." (Karnow, p. 179)
And like researchers in the National Security Council, who wrote in June 1949: "If Southeast Asia is also swept by Communism, we shall have suffered a major political rout the repercussions of which will be felt throughout the rest of the world, especially in the Middle East and then in a critically exposed Australia." (Logevall, p. 222)
The tipping point came in January 1950 when first the People's Republic of China and then the Soviet Union announced formal recognition of Ho Chi Minh's government. Three weeks later Dean Acheson followed suit for Bao Dai and his fellow puppets in Laos and Cambodia. As neither security, democracy, nor independence could exist in any area where Soviet imperialism reigned, he declared, the United States would extend economic and military aid to France and her allied governments in Indochina. (Logevall, p. 229)
Washington's chieftains decided that continued French domination of Indochina was a lesser evil than another Communist victory in Asia. In justification they concocted the cliches that would be regurgitated ten years later when they stepped into the vacuum created by the French departure: that the Vietnamese were a "free people" resisting "subversion by armed minorities or by outside pressure"; and that the fall of Indochina would lead to a Communist takeover of all Southeast Asia. (Buttinger, p. 810)
Not all of Acheson's colleagues concurred. Charlton Ogburn, head of the Southeast Division, excoriated Bao Dai as "a figure deserving of the ridicule and contempt with which he is regarded by the Vietnamese." (Karnow, p. 177)
Another expert, Raymond B. Fosdick, emphasized that the regime was doomed and foretold the future with stunning prescience: "This shabby business . . . probably represents an improvement over the brutal colonialism of earlier years, but it is now too late in the history of the world to settle for the price of this cheap substitute . . . Whether the French like it or not, independence is coming to Indochina. Why therefore do we tie ourselves to the tail of their battered kite?" (Karnow, p. 178)
Nevertheless the die was cast. The great powers were coming to Vietnam. (Logevall, p. 213)
REFERENCES
Buttinger, Joseph. Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled; Volume II: Vietnam at War. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1967.
Fall, Bernard. Street Without Joy. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: The Telegraph Press, 1965.
Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. New York: The Viking Press, 1983.
Logevall, Fredrik. Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2013.
