The Columbia History of the Vietnam War

Historians have exonerated few U.S. policymakers for their culpability in the long and tragic trajectory of America’s military involvement in Vietnam. Among presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower has emerged from the ordeal with the highest marks. Eisenhower’s decision against committing U.S. forces in 1954 to relieve the French forces besieged at the fortress of Dienbienphu, despite intense pressure from many in his administration and in his party and from one of America’s most pivotal allies, has received almost universal praise from historians as a model of prudence and restraint. Indeed, his refusal to intervene militarily in Vietnam served as the catalyst for the “Eisenhower Revisionism” phenomenon, which turned the once-dominant image of an inept and passive president on its head. As the number of casualties from the war escalated during the decade and a half after he left the Oval Office, and America came no closer to achieving its goals, Eisenhower’s reputation rose in inverse proportion to those of the presidents who succeeded him.

A careful examination of Eisenhower’s entire record of policymaking toward Vietnam, however, produces a more nuanced, more mixed assessment. Further, comparisons of his behavior with that of his successors, John F. Kennedy in particular, no longer seem as stark as the historiography once suggested. Although Eisenhower wisely decided against going to war in Vietnam in 1954, his subsequent decisions bequeathed a legacy of volatile instability and discord. And although Kennedy’s rhetoric signaled a reckless Cold Warrior committed to paying any price and bearing any burden to prevent the Communists from uniting Vietnam, his actions reveal more restraint—and more wisdom.

Nevertheless, the success with which Eisenhower managed the crisis at Dienbienphu and the difficulty of the choices he had to make must not be minimized. Even as the Harry S. Truman administration battled the Communists in Korea, it committed the United States to supporting the French effort to defeat the Communist-led Vietminh’s anticolonial war in Indochina. With the U.S. military already overextended, Truman provided France only with financial assistance. But it was massive—more than $2 billion by the time Eisenhower took office. The incoming president perceived a Communist victory with more dread than did Truman because of its potential ramifications far beyond Southeast Asia. The former supreme commander during World War II knew all too well Vietnam’s strategic value to Japan in its campaign of conquest in Asia and the Pacific. In the postwar environment, moreover, Vietnam became a principal link in the offshore island chain on which American strategists depended for containment from Japan to the Middle East. Its fate was likewise tied to France’s willingness and ability to contribute to containment in Europe. Eisenhower also understood that, deprived of Vietnam as both a source of raw materials and a market, Japan, the “workshop of Asia” on which he counted to spur regional development and stability, would require vast infusions of U.S. aid for its recovery—money that the fiscally conservative president was loath to dole out.¹ And even if he did, Tokyo might conclude that defecting to the winning side was a safer bet for its future. As Eisenhower’s blunt-speaking secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, put it a week after taking office, “The situation of the Japanese is hard enough with China being commie.” The fall of Vietnam would lead to Communism’s takeover of all Southeast Asia, and, as a consequence, “the Japs [sic] would be thinking of how to get on the other side.”² Because Dulles was addressing the many Asia-Firsters who composed the Robert Taft wing of the Republican Party in Congress, he was preaching to the choir.

Yet even as France’s deteriorating military situation in Vietnam appeared to generate irresistible momentum for the deployment of U.S. forces, the same dynamics, in the president’s view, militated against the deployment. While serving as military commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Eisenhower had successfully advocated for stationing four additional U.S. divisions in Western Europe. He had hoped that doing so would encourage America’s allies to increase their NATO force levels. Beyond buttressing capability, the presence of this large American contingent would provide the security guarantee that Paris needed in order to sanction the rearmament of the Federal Republic of Germany by ratifying the European Defense Community (EDC) treaty. But now with this many troops stationed in Western Europe and the talks in Panmunjom still far from achieving an armistice in Korea, Eisenhower appreciated that direct military intervention in Vietnam would so tax U.S. capabilities as to undermine America’s strategic posture worldwide. Making matters worse, once America committed its forces to Vietnam, its credibility would demand a successful outcome. Even though Eisenhower had led the coalition that defeated mighty Germany less than ten years earlier, according to his estimate the defeat of the less mighty Vietminh was no sure thing. He confided to his diary, “I am convinced that no military victory is possible in this type of theater.”³

The solution was to provide the French with more resources and better advice and to tie the two together. The administration promised to continue to relieve France of its war’s financial burden, but only if it attracted greater indigenous support by firmly promising independence for all the states of Indochina and fought the war more aggressively and hence more effectively. In Paris, Prime Minister Joseph Laniel responded by pledging ambiguously to “perfect” Vietnamese independence and appointing a new military commander in Indochina. General Henri Navarre designed a strategy that called for massing the French forces scattered throughout northwestern Vietnam and then launching a major offensive south to the Red River Delta. The Eisenhower administration saw no choice other than to support the plan and ante up an additional $385 million for its execution. The offensive was stillborn nevertheless. No sooner did Navarre begin to combine his forces than Vietminh general Vo Nguyen Giap’s invasion of Laos forced the redeployment of some 12,000 elite French forces to the fortress of Dienbienphu in the remote northwestern corner of Vietnam near the Laotian border. While Navarre waited for a set-piece battle to ensue, Giap circled back to lay siege to the fortress in December 1953.

Eisenhower’s worst nightmare verged on becoming a reality. Not only might the French surrender on the battlefield, but they also might surrender at the negotiating table. Paris used the threat of refusing to ratify the EDC treaty to coerce Washington into including Indochina on the agenda of the meeting at Geneva scheduled for late April 1954 to reach a final settlement on Korea. Determined both to “keep our men out of these jungles” and “not [to] forget our vital interests in Indochina,” Eisenhower sent France forty bombers and two hundred U.S. Air Force mechanics to ensure their serviceability.⁴ He concurrently appointed a special committee to identify scenarios that could require direct U.S. intervention, and he instructed the Joint Chiefs of Staff to formulate operational plans for that contingency. While the administration deliberated, the Vietminh’s heavy artillery began to shell the fortress. At the end of March, French general Paul Ely, chief of the Armed Force’s General Staff, rushed to Washington to probe the administration as to what circumstances might provoke the United States to intervene. Ely did not meet with Eisenhower, and Dulles was noncommittal, but Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Arthur Radford raised the possibility of executing Operation Vulture, a huge U.S. nighttime air attack on Vietminh positions. According to Ely, Radford assured him of Eisenhower’s approval.

Either Ely or Radford lied. Eisenhower had approved nothing of the kind, although he had not ruled anything out. Intervention remained on the table. Radford was one of its very few proponents, however. Still deeply conflicted, Eisenhower focused on creating the most favorable conditions for U.S. military engagement should he decide it was imperative. Toward this end, he sanctioned a widely broadcast speech by Dulles on the evening of March 29, 1954, in which the secretary outlined a plan entitled “United Action.” Designed to sound “menacing without committing anybody to anything,” the speech called for creating a coalition dedicated to the defense of Southeast Asia against Communist expansion.⁵ Composed of the United States, Great Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, the Philippines, and the Associated States of Indochina, the coalition would either deter Communist aggression or, if deterrence failed, guarantee that U.S. military action would be in concert with allies, including nonwhite, noncolonial nations.

Mindful of the grief that befell Truman over China and Korea, Eisenhower simultaneously moved to implicate Congress in whatever decision he made. Avoiding the potential costs of personal involvement, he instructed Dulles and Radford to meet with congressional leaders on the morning of Saturday, April 3. The State Department had drafted a resolution providing the president with the authority to use the navy or air force to defeat Communist aggression in Southeast Asia. Eisenhower likely sought the authority not because he intended to use it, but to facilitate the assembly of the United Action coalition and as a signal of resolve to the Communists before the Geneva meeting convened. But a bipartisan consensus surfaced that Congress would sanction U.S. military intervention only after the administration received two explicit commitments: (1) from France to grant Vietnam independence and turn over greater responsibility to the United States for the conduct of the war and (2) from its allies, especially the British, to wage the war. Rather than allow the resolution’s certain defeat, Dulles never acknowledged its existence.

The administration would have preferred Congress to have authorized U.S. military action before it sought the requisite commitments from its allies, but it would have proceeded along the path it did regardless. There “was no possibility whatever of U.S. unilateral intervention in Indochina,” Eisenhower declared to the National Security Council shortly after the April 3 congressional leaders meeting. “[W]e had best face that fact.”⁶ The council postponed making any recommendation. The next week, Eisenhower articulated the notorious “domino theory,” and Dulles began to shuttle feverishly between London and Paris in an effort to put in place the first cornerstones of the United Action coalition. It became evident that even had Congress given Eisenhower everything he wanted, Dulles’s mission was an exercise in futility. Having accepted the loss of India, the jewel of its empire, Britain was not about to risk expanding the war in Southeast Asia to bail out France, especially with the potential of a negotiated settlement in Geneva. The French wanted nothing to do with United Action or any other mechanism for internationalizing the war, nor did they want to continue the war if victory would leave them without their colonies. What they wanted was direct U.S. military assistance with virtually no strings attached. For the Eisenhower administration, acquiescing would have been politically and strategically catastrophic.

Both France and Britain would have needed to violate their respective definitions of the national interest for Eisenhower to have overcome his reluctance to commit U.S. forces to Vietnam. They did not, and he did not. On April 29, the president accepted the National Security Council’s recommendation that the United States “hold up for the time being any military action on Indo-China” until the results of Geneva began to emerge, but at the same time the United States should “continue its efforts” to organize the United Action coalition and “give hints to the French that we have not made our final decision as to our intervention in Indochina.”⁷ On May 7, the French surrendered Dienbienphu. Thus in 1954, Eisenhower decided against war in Vietnam. Nevertheless, he only put on “hold” a decision to intervene because conditions were not right. He retained the option of intervening if those conditions changed. The subsequent political commitments he made contributed immensely to changing those conditions.

In fact, the defeat of the French at Dienbienphu, the political consequence of which the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimated “would be considerably more adverse than the strictly military consequences,” intensified the administration’s resolve to prevent a diplomatic defeat.⁸ Dulles was well suited for this purpose. Exploiting his reputation as a fire-and-brimstone moralist impatient to get on with the final battle between good and evil, the dour secretary of state arrived at the Geneva Conference of 1954 projecting an attitude of “almost pathological rage and gloom.”⁹ He complained about the seating arrangements, refused to shake hands with China’s Zhou Enlai, and otherwise acted in a manner that suggested he would like the negotiations to collapse. That was the administration’s preferred outcome. If properly orchestrated, the failure of the conference to produce a settlement congruent with Western interests would shatter the illusion in both Paris and London that the Communists would bargain in good faith. As a consequence, each would sign on to the United Action coalition. Their doing so would not necessarily lead to intervention and the renewal of hostilities, but, juxtaposed with Washington’s taking few measures to conceal its ongoing military preparations, the threat represented by United Action would be sufficient to deter further Communist aggression and safeguard against the falling of additional dominos.

Having signaled America’s hostility toward the Geneva proceedings, Dulles turned over the U.S. delegation to Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith. Smith’s demeanor was less contemptuous than Dulles’s, and he made a greater effort to probe the intentions of America’s adversaries. Yet the undersecretary proved no more accommodating than his department head. With the Communists manifesting no inclination to concede to anything less than control over all of Indochina, and the British and French persevering along a course Washington considered tantamount to appeasement, the talks deadlocked. “It is our view that final adjournment of Conference is in our best interest,” Dulles cabled Smith.¹⁰ None of the other parties would let that happen, however, and from Foggy Bottom’s point of view, a very bad situation was about to take a turn for the worse.

While the United States considered downgrading its representation at Geneva in order to distance itself from whatever deal resulted, the French elected a government headed by the Socialist Pierre Mendès-France. To America’s consternation, the new prime minister, who doubled as foreign minister, seemed to weaken further the West’s bargaining position by pledging to resign if an accord was not reached by July 20. The last opportunity to put United Action into play evaporated—or so the administration thought. Washington had succeeded in convincing the Soviets and Communist Chinese that it remained prepared to intervene militarily, perhaps even unilaterally. With both Moscow and Beijing preoccupied with domestic concerns, neither felt it could afford to accept this risk. Neither, therefore, supported the demand made by Pham Van Dong, the Vietminh’s chief delegate, for the withdrawal of all foreign military forces and the international recognition of the full sovereignty and independence of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Dong acquiesced. The conferees agreed to Vietnam’s partition at the seventeenth parallel until 1956, when elections, supervised by an international commission composed of Communist Poland, non-Communist Canada, and nonaligned India, would be held to unify the country. Notwithstanding an outcome more favorable than it expected, the United States refused to sign the July 21, 1954, Final Declaration. In a separate statement, it pledged “to refrain from the threat of the use of force to disturb” the agreed-on provisions.¹¹

Although America claimed it honored its pledge by never threatening to use force, disturb the provisions it did. Not only did the administration have little confidence that the Communists had abandoned their goal of securing control of all of Southeast Asia and beyond, but it also had no confidence in the Geneva Accords as a viable means to thwart that design. It remained convinced that a collective security mechanism, even if feebler than a United Action coalition, was essential to quarantine Communist North Vietnam. Making clear his dissatisfaction with the accords, Dulles stated publicly that the “important thing from now on is not to mourn the past but to seize the future opportunity to prevent the loss in northern Viet-Nam from leading to the extension of Communism throughout Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific.” He then explicitly alluded to the necessity of establishing “collective arrangements” to secure the region.¹²

The administration decided on the need for a regional security treaty that would envelop all non-Communist territory in Southeast Asia before the conclusion of the Geneva Conference. It envisioned a pact that included the same nations Dulles had proposed in his March 29 speech, but that also added a carefully worded protocol with sufficient elasticity to include non-Communist (southern) Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Although Geneva’s Final Declaration precluded incorporating any of the three into a military alliance, the protocol circumvented this restriction by stipulating that a threat to any of the three states constituted by definition a threat to the signatory nations. None of the charter members of what would soon be called the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) would dedicate forces directly to the organization. Achieving sufficient force levels from its NATO antecedent had proven frustrating enough. When signed in Manila on September 8, 1954, the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty (the “Manila Pact”) obligated its members—which in the end also included Pakistan, but, to America’s disappointment, neither India nor Indonesia—only to consult with one another as to the most effective means consistent with their respective constitutions to respond to aggression should it occur. Aware of SEATO’s inherent weakness, the U.S. administration hoped that it would develop sufficient coherence to deter Communism’s advance.

Over time, the Manila Pact would paint the United States with the same imperial brush once reserved for the European powers and provide a legal foundation for the United States to intervene militarily in Southeast Asia. What it did immediately was tacitly acknowledge the permanency of Vietnam’s partition and recognize an independent state in South Vietnam. Prior to the treaty’s ratification, two separate but interdependent dynamics all but ensured that the unification elections scheduled for 1956 would never be held. First, the Eisenhower administration made very clear that it would never officially agree to a Communist Vietnam north of the seventeenth parallel, that it could never tolerate the spread of Communism south of the seventeenth parallel, and that it assumed that the Communist Ho Chi Minh would doubtless triumph in any election. Second, in June 1954 the United States acquiesced to Emperor Bao Dai’s invitation to Ngo Dinh Diem to form a new government in South Vietnam.

Diem was not unknown to the Eisenhower administration. An inflexible, uncompromising nationalist who refused to countenance the French, the Japanese, Ho Chi Minh, or Bao Dai, he had spent the four years prior to the Dienbienphu crisis and the Geneva Conference in self-imposed exile from Vietnam. A devout Catholic in a country where Buddhism was the dominant religion, he spent almost half of this time in Maryknoll seminaries in New York and New Jersey. From this base, he developed a network of American supporters, drawing them from journalistic, academic, political, and clerical circles. Indeed, Bao Dai, taking up permanent residence in Cannes by the summer of 1954, probably overcame his objections to Diem, who had resigned as the emperor’s minister of the interior in protest during the 1930s, and invited him to return to Vietnam as prime minister in order to cement the bond between Washington and Saigon.

The U.S. perception of Diem was complicated and even contradictory. Bao Dai was right to recognize the Eisenhower administration’s appreciation of Diem’s anti-Communism, his incorruptibility, and his commitment to an independent South Vietnam. Yet U.S. officials also were aware of his shortcomings. Diem had a well-earned reputation for intransigence, an almost mystical belief in his infallibility, and an egotism that bordered on megalomania. Although he had some government experience, his administrative abilities were highly suspect because he appeared not only to favor Vietnam’s Catholic minority, but also to trust few individuals beyond his own family. Among the three sisters and four brothers in the family (Diem’s eldest brother had died in 1945, a victim of the Vietminh), Ngo Dinh Nhu portended special problems because of his influence on Diem and his outspoken and irascible wife, Tran Le Xuan, known widely as “Madame Nhu.” Nevertheless, Diem, flaws and all, appeared to be the sole indigenous Vietnamese capable of building a bulwark against North Vietnam’s expansion. “We are prepared to accept the seemingly ridiculous prospect that this Yogi-like mystic could assume the charge he is apparently about to undertake,” wrote U.S. ambassador to France Douglas Dillon, reflecting the prevailing view within Eisenhower’s State Department, “only because the standard set by his predecessors is so low.”¹³

Washington kept its misgivings to itself to avoid adding to the challenges Diem already faced. The new government of South Vietnam could count on little loyalty from either the public or the military. Nguyen Van Hinh, the commander of the weak Vietnamese National Army, wanted Diem’s job. Diem had his family, but not a political party. Better organized were two political-religious sects, the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao, and the Binh Xuyen, gangsters who ran Saigon’s police force, brothels, and gambling operations. None saw a Diem government in its future. Diem could depend on the support of the close to 1 million Catholics who, urged on by the “Christ has gone to the South” campaign of the CIA’s Edward Lansdale, had poured across the seventeenth parallel, but absorbing them into South Vietnam’s “polity” would take years. What is more, France retained extensive interests and clout throughout South Vietnam, and the French saw the Francophobic Diem as more of a problem than a solution for the fledgling state. Because of the combination of these factors, estimated the CIA, “a favorable development of the situation in South Vietnam is unlikely…. [I]t appears more likely that the situation will deteriorate in South Vietnam.”¹⁴

The immediate threat to Diem’s regime, judged the Eisenhower administration with good reason, came from South Vietnam, not North Vietnam. Its survival required at least a modicum of cooperation from Paris, whose rejection of the EDC treaty in August demonstrated once again its obduracy. Diem’s survival also required Washington’s maintaining sufficient distance from Saigon to avoid creating the impression that he was an American puppet or stooge. Toward these ends, as soon as negotiations over the Manila Pact reached fruition, the United States reached a modus vivendi with Mendès-France. The French agreed to drop their opposition to Diem and to America’s providing military and economic aid to him and to use their influence with the sects, military officers, and other Diem foes to give the new government a chance. In return, the United States would consult with the French over the kinds of assistance Washington extended to South Vietnam and try to persuade Diem to broaden his government by including Vietnamese more to France’s liking.

Aware that the agreement merely papered over the profound differences between Paris and Washington, Eisenhower determined that what Diem needed more than anything else was a capable army. Hence, the administration had to “get busy and get [him] one.”¹⁵ For this purpose, Eisenhower dispatched General J. Lawton Collins to South Vietnam as special U.S. representative with the rank of ambassador. “Lightning Joe” had performed exceptionally well for Eisenhower as a corps commander during World War II, and he had ably served as army chief of staff during the Korean War. The president had the utmost confidence in him. Collins also held the four-star rank that would demand the respect of the French, whose high commissioner was now former chief of staff General Paul Ely. Eisenhower charged Collins with the responsibility of “getting” Diem a credible army and otherwise advising him on how to shore up his government.

By early 1955, Collins had made progress, or so it seemed. Under his guidance, the stability of the Vietnamese National Army’s command structure improved. More significant, the French consented to establish autonomy for the army and to turn over to the United States responsibility for its training. To Collins, nevertheless, Diem remained a monstrous roadblock. No matter what the issue, the prime minister resisted advice on how to govern more effectively, especially the need to initiate reforms aimed to broaden his appeal and co-opt dissidents. Collins’s patience ran out in the spring of 1955. The religious sects, allied with the Binh Xuyen, insisted that Diem grant them greater authority in the government and the military. Collins opposed Diem’s giving it to them. Yet whereas he recommended that Diem defang the sects by expanding his administration to include more diverse representation, the prime minister was bent on a showdown that Collins did not think he could win.

For several months, Collins had been hinting to Eisenhower that the French might have been right about Diem and suggesting that the United States would be wise to drop its contention that Diem was South Vietnam’s best and, indeed, only hope. His warnings had little impact in decision-making circles. But the environment and thinking in Washington changed dramatically at the end of March 1955, when the cold war between Diem and the Binh Xuyen erupted into a hot one. Even as rapid intervention by the French forces that remained in Vietnam produced a fragile truce, Collins decided that he had had enough. Although he did not hold Diem unilaterally responsible for the most recent crisis, he did conclude that the prospects for a stable Vietnam were nil as long as Diem ran the government. The United States and France should work together to support the establishment of a new coalition. It “looks like the rug is coming out from under the fellow [Diem] in Southeast Asia,” Secretary Dulles conceded to his brother Allen, head of the CIA. The administration had no choice other than to explore alternatives. After ordering Collins back to Washington for consultations, Eisenhower instructed Dulles to cable Edgar Faure, Mendès-France’s successor as French prime minister, that America now supported France’s opinion that Diem must be replaced.¹⁶

No sooner had Dulles drafted the cable than the environment again changed. With Collins in Washington at the end of April, Diem’s primary U.S. contact was one of his most forceful and dogged advocates, the CIA’s Edward Lansdale. Probably prompted by Lansdale and certainly aware that he was at the brink of being jettisoned by the Americans and hence had nothing to lose, Diem broke the truce with the Binh Xuyen. Dulles, who had with great reluctance acceded to Collins’s position, was delighted. He defined the evolving situation as win-win for the United States—and probably for South Vietnam. The best scenario was that Diem would emerge a triumphant hero. Further, even if he lost, the outbreak of what was tantamount to a civil war would provide cover for America’s abandonment of Diem. Such cover proved unnecessary. As the drama unfolded, the administration determined that Diem retained sufficient control to obviate the need for his replacement. On May 6, 1955, Eisenhower replaced Collins, assigning in his stead an ambassador who was a career foreign-service officer. G. Frederick Reinhart received instructions to provide Diem with unqualified support.

The battle of Saigon did more than reinforce the administration’s commitment to Diem. At the most fundamental level, the crisis forced it to decide between Diem and France. Eisenhower had favored a continuing French presence in Vietnam in order to lessen the burden on the United States and avert intensifying Franco-American discord. He now arrived at the judgment that Diem would never be secure so long as the regime’s opponents could expect at a minimum Paris’s tacit approval. Further, with the Federal Republic of Germany’s entry into NATO imminent, Eisenhower need not worry so much about fracturing the Western alliance. As a consequence, the president calculated that the containment strategy would be best served if France were tactfully and incrementally phased out of Vietnam. At NATO talks in Paris the week following May 6, Dulles told Faure that while the French Expeditionary Corps remained welcome in South Vietnam, Diem would henceforth have but a single patron: the United States. Faure understood the message. Shortly thereafter, Ely left Vietnam, never to return. In the words of the Pentagon Papers analysts, “The undertones were distinct: the days of joint U.S.–French policy were over; thereafter, the U.S. would act independently of France in Vietnam.”¹⁷

American policy in Vietnam had crossed a watershed. Eisenhower had made the fateful decision, in the soon-to-be-popular phrase, to “sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem.” Rid, from the U.S. point of view, of counterproductive French meddling, America would achieve what France could not. It would nation build in South Vietnam to produce not only a state sufficiently robust to thwart North Vietnamese expansionism, but also a model for development throughout the Third World. For this reason, Washington was no more willing to countenance an election to unify Vietnam than was Saigon. Further, because the Geneva Accords did not specify how elections were to be conducted, and because neither the United States nor the State of (South) Vietnam was a signatory, they did not need blatantly to refuse to participate in such elections. They could simply not cooperate with the feeble efforts made by the Indochinese Communist Party and others, such as Britain and France, to organize the elections. The July 1956 date for the elections thus passed with little notice—or protest. In the interim, Diem continued to consolidate his control in the South. In October 1955, he staged a referendum in which South Vietnamese could vote for him to replace Bao Dai as chief of state. Diem received 98 percent of the votes cast (which in some cases exceeded the number of registered voters). Bao Dai doubtless would have lost under any circumstances, but, in any event, Diem prohibited him from campaigning and designated the color green, which Vietnamese believed was bad luck, for Bao Dai’s ballots. Diem’s ballots were colored red, for good luck. Then, in March 1956, Diem orchestrated a parallel success with the election of a “representative” assembly to write a constitution for the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). With Diem’s supporters dominating the assembly, it produced a constitution that invested the new president, Diem, with the powers of both prime minister and chief of state.

By July 1956, therefore, Diem had effectively seceded from the unified Vietnam envisioned by the Geneva Accords and for which Ho Chi Minh and the Vietminh had fought. Ably assisted by his family, his brother Nhu in particular, he had manipulated democratic processes in order to assemble south of the seventeenth parallel “what could only be termed a police state.”¹⁸ Diem’s Denunciation of Communists campaign, analogous to but more pernicious than colonial America’s Salem witch trials, claimed as victims as many innocent Vietnamese as it did former or current Vietminh. Diem also abolished local governments, decreeing that the national government of Vietnam (GVN) would appoint all village officials, and he otherwise used oppression and repression to impose his philosophy of “personalism” (a rationale for authoritarianism) throughout South Vietnam. The Eisenhower administration recognized that it had a tiger by the tail but realized that it could not let go. Portraying Diem as the “Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam,” it lavished on him millions of dollars—paying for some two-thirds of the GVN’s entire budget.¹⁹

In conjunction with the dollars poured into the RVN, Washington offered Diem vast amounts of advice. It earmarked the bulk of both money and advice for the South Vietnamese army, which the administration considered the sine qua non of a stable state. Headed by no-nonsense Lieutenant General Samuel Williams, the small (numbering almost seven hundred personnel, but double the size allowed by the Geneva Accords) Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) took on the yeoman task of modernizing indigenous forces that lacked cohesiveness, training, equipment, a nationalist spirit, and competent leadership. Concurrently, scores of civilian officials—sometimes with the support of experts from U.S. universities (Michigan State most notoriously) and nongovernmental organizations, but sometimes in competition with them—set to work creating a civil society capable of meeting the needs and aspirations of the South Vietnamese population in terms of both security and prosperity. The chief priorities were land reform, land development (large-scale resettlement in different locations), and the agroville program (regroupment of the inhabitants of one area, the Mekong Delta in particular, into larger towns). The goal was to improve the citizenry’s financial well-being, protect them from Vietminh marauders, and prevent the Vietminh from living off and recruiting the South Vietnamese. Americans assumed that democracy was a universal value toward which the Vietnamese would naturally gravitate, but civil society had to develop and stabilize first.

Success was limited on all fronts. Without American assistance, the RVN would not have survived its early years. In suburban centers such as Saigon, the standard of living in a number of pockets did rise. This was as much testimony to the wretched conditions left by the French as to the effectiveness of U.S. programs; nevertheless, U.S. generosity found its way to many appreciative hands. South Vietnam became the prototypical dependent nation, however. Furthermore, rural villages benefited little from American largesse, and in fundamental respects their quality of life declined. In part, this was due to the clash of cultures between the Americans and Vietnamese. Villagers resisted U.S. efforts to run roughshod over their traditions, more so because the Americans’ paternalistic attitudes, not infrequently tinged with racism, worked at cross-purposes with their good intentions. Then there was the heavy-handed repression from Diem’s policies, which manifested ill-concealed favoritism toward the wealthy and did not distinguish among Communists, dissenters, and apolitical innocents against whom another villager bore a grudge.

Nevertheless, the overarching constraint on American programs was Diem and his family network. Much as had been the case during Collins’s mission, Diem—fiercely proud, independent, and self-righteous—was confident that he knew better than the Americans what was good for his country. Refusing to play the role of subservient client and relying on his brothers and select others for implementation, he pursued his own vision of nation building. “There probably had never before in American foreign affairs been a phenomenon comparable to our relations with the Ngo Dinh family,” wrote one U.S. embassy official. “It was like dealing with a whole platoon of de Gaulles.”²⁰

The same held true in the military sphere. With more than three-quarters of U.S. aid to South Vietnam available to it, MAAG equipped, trained, and reorganized Diem’s Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). That army’s mission, however, was twofold, and, as a consequence, progress was plagued by internal conflicts. MAAG focused on building an army capable of responding to an invasion from the North, akin to the experience in Korea. Preparing for an unconventional guerrilla war was a lower priority. Diem conversely assessed the gravest threat to his regime as emanating from insurgents within the South, whether natives or postpartition “stay behinds.” Hence, he identified the army’s chief mission as internal security. Not only did Diem disrupt the ARVN’s chain of command by personally issuing or countermanding orders, but he also insisted on controlling the process for promotions and placed a higher value on loyalty than on competence. Because of American advice and assistance, the ARVN was better than it was before 1955, but because of Diem’s interference it was not nearly as good as it could have been.

The RVN’s vulnerabilities were not of urgent concern to the Eisenhower administration for several years following Geneva, Manila, and America’s assumption of the mantle of patronage from France. Eisenhower and Dulles wrestled with more pressing problems, ranging from Suez, the Taiwan Straits, Lebanon, and Berlin to Little Rock and civil rights, budget deficits, Sputnik and the bomber gap, and even their own illnesses (Dulles succumbed to abdominal cancer in May 1959). Although the president claimed success for American nation building and extended a hero’s welcome when Diem made a two-week state visit to the United States in 1957 (Diem had his own lobby, the American Friends of Vietnam), South Vietnam went from the Cold War frontline to the back burner. Even foreign aid to the RVN declined.

Beginning in 1959, however, Vietnam began its reascent to the top of the national security agenda. On the one hand, with land reform stalled and Diem’s “rule by terror” producing the incarceration of tens of thousands of villagers in “reeducation centers” (an unspecified number were guillotined), unrest throughout rural South Vietnam intensified, as did sympathy for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North.²¹ On the other hand, Diem’s internal security machine, although not particular about whom it caught in its dragnet, took a toll on the Vietminh (referred to in Washington after 1959 as the “Vietcong”). Le Duan, who headed the Vietminh’s Central Office for South Vietnam, beseeched Hanoi for help. At the same time, in light of obvious signs that the unification of Vietnam would not come about through elections, momentum grew within North Vietnam’s Communist Politburo to resume armed conflict. Le Duan’s election as party secretary tipped the balance in this direction. At its meeting in Hanoi in January 1959, the Central Committee adopted Resolution No. 15.

Although Resolution No. 15 emphasized the continued importance of political action, it stipulated that final victory would be achieved only through protracted and heroic struggle. It also proclaimed the need to create and coordinate insurgent forces in the South. Within months, southern commanders began to build a revolutionary base in Vietnam’s central highlands; the clandestine Group 559 began to construct what would become the Ho Chi Minh Trail through the Laotian mountains adjacent to Vietnam; and the Vietminh initiated “spontaneous uprisings” from central Vietnam extending southward to the Mekong Delta. The Communist Party’s Third National Congress formally approved the initiation of armed struggle in September 1960. At the end of the year, representatives of a broad spectrum of political, social, religious, and ethnic groups convened near the Cambodian border to form the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam. Under the leadership of Nguyen Van Linh, who was Le Duan’s successor in the Central Office for South Vietnam, in early 1961 the NLF established its fighting arm, the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF).

In the last year of his presidency, Eisenhower viewed with increasing alarm the growing insurgency, which strengthened with the influx of adherents from the countryside. He knew that Diem’s military forces were not capable of responding. Yet more worrisome were events occurring in neighboring Laos. The civil war there threatened to produce a union between the leader of one faction of the Royal Lao Government, Prince Souvanna Phouma, and his half-brother, Prince Souphanouvong, founder of the Communist Pathet Lao. The alliance between the Pathet Lao and Hanoi could shift the balance of power in Southeast Asia against Western interests. So serious did Eisenhower perceive the danger that when on January 19, 1961, he briefed his successor John F. Kennedy at the White House on the most pressing global problems, the agenda included Laos, not Vietnam. According to Kennedy’s note takers, Eisenhower advised the president-elect that he should take whatever measures necessary, not excluding unilateral military intervention, to prevent a Communist takeover of Laos and, by extension, Vietnam. The president, according to the briefing memorandum published in the Pentagon Papers, “stated that he considered Laos of such importance that if it reached the stage where we could not persuade others to act with us, then he would be willing, as a last desperate hope, to intervene unilaterally.”²²

Other memoranda of this meeting suggest that Eisenhower may not have been this categorical in his advice to Kennedy. Regardless, his commitment to preventing the fall of another Southeast Asian domino to Communism was categorical. And so was the untested Kennedy’s. Kennedy had scored points during his presidential campaign against incumbent vice president Richard M. Nixon by promising to prosecute the Cold War with more “vigah” and imagination than his aged predecessor, and he had excoriated the Republicans for allowing the global tide to turn in the Soviets’ favor. Moreover, Kennedy pledged to pay greater attention to the challenges confronting America in the Third World, and as a Catholic and early champion of Ngo Dinh Diem, he had singled out Vietnam as one of the few foreign-policy issues about which to claim expertise. Gathering around him advisers who shared his can-do spirit (among the “best and the brightest” were Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Bundy’s deputy Walt Whitman Rostow, and special military adviser and then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell Taylor), Kennedy was confident that with assistance and under his guidance, the RVN could defeat the still nascent insurgency.

It had to. Concurrent with Kennedy’s inaugural, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had proclaimed Soviet support for national wars of liberation. Nevertheless, unwilling to pay the price and bear the burden required militarily to defeat Souvanna Phouma’s coalition with Souphanouvong’s Pathet Lao, Kennedy opted for negotiations aimed at neutralizing Laos. Although serving America’s immediate interests, this solution would not bolster Kennedy’s credentials as a better defender of the free world than Eisenhower. Worse, also during his first one hundred days, Kennedy gave the green light to the CIA’s project to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government in Cuba. Cutting back on plans initially developed under Eisenhower, Operation Zapata produced the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The administration’s early stumbles made Vietnam even more important as an opportunity for Kennedy to prove his mettle. Yet he initially approved only a modest increase in MAAG’s size and authorized minor clandestine operations against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam north of the seventeenth parallel. Kennedy did dispatch several hundred troops from the army’s Special Forces (popularly called the Green Berets after the president’s visit to Fort Bragg in October 1961) to instruct the South Vietnamese in counterinsurgency techniques. And he sent Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to South Vietnam to signal U.S. loyalty. Johnson played his part well, juxtaposing Diem’s name with that of George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and, most famously, Winston Churchill.

By the summer of 1961, it was evident that these measures would suffice only temporarily. The insurgency in the South intensified even as Diem, nervously watching the negotiations taking place in Geneva over Laos, began to wonder whether the U.S. administration might sanction a neutralization scheme for Vietnam as well. At this time, he did not want more U.S. troops in Vietnam, but he wanted more U.S. money, equipment, and training for his troops, not to mention an iron-clad guarantee of America’s commitment to his GVN. Unsure of what to do next, Kennedy sent an investigative mission to Vietnam headed by Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow, both hawks when it came to Vietnam. They concluded that although conditions in Vietnam were deteriorating, the situation was not hopeless. Kennedy, they recommended, should immediately send Diem assistance and advisers to strengthen the ARVN, Civil Guard, and Self-Defense Corps. Taylor and Rostow also proposed deploying to Vietnam a logistical task force composed of 8,000 infantry, engineers, and medical personnel. Although the excuse would be to assist the flood-ravaged Mekong Delta, the purpose would be to boost the morale of the South Vietnamese and show Diem that Washington remained fully committed to the “limited partnership” it had forged with him.²³

Most of Kennedy’s top advisers, such as Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy, immediately endorsed the Taylor–Rostow report. Their only significant criticism was that it did not go far enough in safeguarding the RVN. Kennedy agreed with the report’s general diagnosis. The deterioration in South Vietnam had to be arrested, only the South Vietnamese could win their war, and both Diem and the ARVN would benefit from American confidence-building measures. But along with other advisers, typically lower-level ones such as Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles and Ambassador W. Averell Harriman, the president had reservations about the recommended logistical task force. Diem and his cohort would see the deployment of a force of this composition and size as what it was: a halfway measure at best. Its impact on their morale, therefore, was likely to be minimal. It would more likely lead to the ARVN’s greater dependence on America. Further, once the United States had committed this many troops, the pressure to commit more if the going got tougher would be irresistible. America’s—and Kennedy’s—credibility would be that much more on the line. “It’s like taking a drink,” Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. quotes Kennedy as saying about this kind of deployment. “The effect wears off, and you have to take another.”²⁴

But for Kennedy, negotiations, let alone a diminution of the U.S. commitment to Diem, were equally out of the question. The only option was a compromise between the extremes. He rejected the Taylor–Rostow proposal to send to Vietnam a sizable force that included combat troops. But he agreed to expand exponentially the amount of U.S. assistance to and number of advisers in Vietnam. In 1962, moreover, even as he backed off from his initial inclination to tie an increase in U.S. generosity to Diem’s agreeing to reform the GVN, Kennedy created a new military command structure, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), in the hope that it would be more effective than the MAAG in inducing the South Vietnamese to make better use of America’s assistance and advisers.

For a time in 1962, the prospects for the RVN brightened. Not only did Kennedy create MACV, but its new commander, General Paul Harkins, also provided the South Vietnam forces with more direct U.S. assistance. Harkins initiated a campaign, Project Beefup, that relied on defoliants and herbicides to deny the insurgents shelter and food. The number of U.S. advisers almost tripled, surpassing 9,000 by the end of the year, and they came ever closer to harm’s way themselves. American personnel flew planes and helicopters and accompanied the South Vietnamese on missions, sometimes offensive combat missions. Provided with greater resources by the United States, the ARVN grew by more than 30,000 troops, who now had at their disposal helicopters and armored personnel carriers. The ARVN forces appeared to have gained the initiative.

Side by side with, but independent from, Project Beefup was the evolving Strategic Hamlet Program. Before Kennedy took office, Diem’s brother Nhu began to study such precedents as the British experience in Malaya and the American experience in the Philippines in order to formulate a security plan at the village level that would improve on the failed agrovilles. After consulting with William Colby, who in 1960 became CIA station chief in Vietnam, Nhu came up with the Strategic Hamlet Program, a system of government-controlled and government-fortified hamlets formed from an existing population. Nhu envisioned establishing multiple hamlets proximate to each another, each secured by moats and bamboo fencing, collectively composing a village. Provided with military training, political indoctrination, medical care, and economic rehabilitation for its inhabitants, the hamlet would become the building block for a more prosperous, capable, and loyal state and society in South Vietnam even as it denied the NLF resources and recruits. In January 1962, the Diem government declared the implementation of the Strategic Hamlet Program to be the number-one national priority. Although construction of the hamlets fell short of the goals set by Nhu, the countryside appeared to stabilize.

By the latter part of 1962, however, it had become apparent that the improvement was illusory. ARVN offensive actions never gained the initiative because the Vietcong guerrillas did not provide a stationary target. Their location often remained concealed until a helicopter set down, and they came out of hiding to ambush the landing party. The guerrillas usually escaped before the ARVN arrived to secure an area. In January 1963, the battle of Ap Bac proved to be an exception, but an ominous one. The ARVN identified a concentration of Vietcong near the village of Ap Bac. Encouraged by the legendary adviser John Paul Vann and far outnumbering its adversary, it attacked. Rather than engineer a preemptive escape, the guerrillas dug in to fight. Only after inflicting more than 150 ARVN casualties and downing five helicopters did they retreat to fight another day.

Further, the Strategic Hamlet Program was of little help to the counterinsurgency effort. It may in fact have exacerbated the RVN’s problems. Many insurgents and their sympathizers already lived within the hamlets, and issuing identification cards was of paltry value in distinguishing friend from foe. In many hamlets, Vietcong infiltration continued unabated, and the terror the insurgents visited upon the hamlet’s leadership and those suspected of supporting Diem made a mockery of RVN claims that it could protect the villagers. Populations were removed from their ancestral homes despite promises that they would not be, and Diem’s agents administered the education, land-distribution, medical, and other programs within the hamlets so poorly that the inhabitants had no incentive to stay. The hamlets became prisons rather than sanctuaries. Instead of enhancing pacification by winning the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese, they became breeding grounds for the NLF and PLAF. “It’s no happy hollow,” conceded one U.S. adviser after visiting a hamlet. Commented another, “the relocated people … appeared to be going through the motions of participation instead of manifesting enthusiasm at the prospect of making the hamlet a bastion of freedom.”²⁵

By what turned out to be Kennedy’s and Diem’s last year, 1963, U.S. policy and the RVN’s government and society were coming apart. The U.S. press began to challenge the claims of progress that came out of both Saigon and Washington, and an influential minority in Congress, mostly from Kennedy’s Democratic Party, began to warn about America’s repeating France’s mistakes. The president, having recently spent thirteen harrowing days during the Cuban Missile Crisis, instructed McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to outline a plan for a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces. Diem, sensing that developments were not going his way, became more intractable than ever and resisted all U.S. recommendations, especially those that concerned reforming the GVN. He likewise became less tolerant of internal dissent. On May 8, 1963, a Buddhist protest began in Hue after GVN troops mistakenly fired into a demonstration in support of flying Buddhist flags, and it escalated on June 11 when an elderly monk, encircled by others, immolated himself before a crowd in Saigon. Diem responded as if he and his government were under siege. Madame Nhu appeared to confirm that the Ngo family had locked into an “us against the world” mentality when she contemptuously dismissed the self-immolation as a “barbecue.” With less fanfare, her husband ordered the ransacking of Buddhist pagodas throughout South Vietnam and the arrest of more than 1,400 additional monks. An official in the U.S. Embassy later wrote that at this juncture he realized that the United States was “dealing with a government of madmen, whose words were meaningless, where nothing that was supposed to have happened had really happened.”²⁶

Kennedy was furious. He was also uncertain as to what, if any, measures he should take. Adding to his dilemma, he learned through secret channels that a cabal of ARVN generals was prepared to take action against Diem’s government. Evidence Kennedy received through other channels indicated that Nhu, doubtless suspecting that Washington was poised to abandon him and his brother, had contacted Hanoi about striking a deal. Kennedy realized that whatever he did would entail great risks. He could decide on only one move: to appoint former senator and vice presidential candidate Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. as ambassador to Saigon. If Kennedy “lost” South Vietnam, at least a prominent Republican would share the heat.

Kennedy did not lose Vietnam. He and America lost something worse. Lodge quickly concluded that any hope of salvaging South Vietnam demanded the replacement of Diem. Using CIA agent Lucien Conein as a go-between and supported by select but avid anti-Diemists in the White House as well as in the State Department, Lodge got in touch with the dissident generals, assuring them that the administration approved of their plan in principle. Diem retained supporters back in Washington as well, however, and they protested that the president had not approved such a fundamental change in U.S. policy. Kennedy again hedged his bets. He declared that it remained U.S. policy to support the GVN, but he instructed Lodge to discuss a possible coup with the conspirators. But Lodge must explicitly warn them, Kennedy stressed, that the United States would not provide any assistance in ousting Diem. If they failed, Washington would deny any knowledge, let alone complicity.

It appeared that the plotters had promised more than they could deliver, or they got cold feet. By the end of August, there was no coup attempt. Yet tension within the RVN was as high as ever, and the Kennedy administration continued to debate whether Diem had to go and, if so, what to do because he would not resign. Further, there was still no consensus as to whether there existed in South Vietnam a viable alternative to Diem. Kennedy would not foreclose any option. He agreed to entertain a proposal, ironically from the French, for neutralizing Vietnam along the lines of the 1963 Laotian settlement. He continued to allow McNamara and the Pentagon to formulate plans for a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces. He sent multiple new investigative missions to South Vietnam. And, of course, he did not rule out staying the course and even increasing U.S. assistance if appropriate conditions could be achieved. In public, he was no less equivocal. If Diem did not change “his pattern,” Kennedy told CBS’s Walter Cronkite, he “can’t be successful.” That said, the president uttered in the next breath that Diem had time to “regain the support of the [Vietnamese] people” and that for America to withdraw “would be a great mistake.”²⁷

Kennedy never reached a definitive decision. He did approve the application of “selective pressure,” such as curtailing aid and reducing the number of U.S. advisers, in a last-ditch effort to induce Diem to reform or resign.²⁸ Diem probably would have done neither, but he never had the opportunity. The generals set their plan in motion on November 1, 1963, perhaps interpreting the application of selective pressure as a sign of support or perhaps simply realizing that Kennedy’s refusal to oppose a coup equaled a decision to promote one. After losing control of vital military assets and communication systems, Diem phoned Lodge. Lodge replied that he lacked information on the U.S. position. Diem and Nhu then fled the palace, took communion, and accepted the offer of safe passage out of Vietnam. Both were summarily executed. Kennedy was “shocked” and conceded that “we must bear a good deal of responsibility” for the “abhorrent” murders.²⁹ Three weeks later, the president was assassinated in Dallas.

Whether Kennedy would have withdrawn U.S. forces from Vietnam, as some have speculated, cannot be known. He probably would not have. He was as determined as Eisenhower had been to support or to build a viable state in South Vietnam opposed to Communist North Vietnam. But just as Kennedy should not be commended for planning to end the U.S. military commitment to South Vietnam, Eisenhower should not be congratulated for avoiding one. Both warrant plaudits for putting the brakes on more zealous, reckless advisers. Yet neither demonstrated the foresight or political courage to make a decision based on the realistic assessment that there never would be a viable state of South Vietnam and that a unified Vietnam under Communist leadership would not threaten the United States or its allies. For different reasons, Eisenhower and Kennedy would likely have responded to the challenges in Vietnam that confronted Lyndon Johnson differently and more effectively than he did. Yet neither can escape responsibility for their role in forcing those challenges on their successor.

Notes

1. Richard H. Immerman, “Prologue: Perceptions by the United States of Its Interests in Indochina,” in Dine Bien Phu and the Crisis of Franco-American Relations, 1954–1955, edited by Lawrence S. Kaplan, Denise Artaud, and Mark R. Rubin (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1990), 8.

2. Substance of discussions of State Department, Director for Mutual Security, JCS meeting, January 28, 1953, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, vol. 13, Indochina (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1982), pt. 1:361 (series hereafter cited as FRUS, with dates and volume titles).

3. Entry for March, 17, 1951, Dwight D. Eisenhower, The Eisenhower Diaries, edited by Robert Ferrell (New York: Norton, 1981), 196.

4. Memorandum of Discussion, National Security Council (NSC), January 8, 1954, in FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 13, Indochina, pt. 1:952.

5. Robert R. Bowie, interview by the author, October 29, 1981, Washington, D.C. (transcript in author’s possession).

6. Memorandum of Discussion, NSC, April 6, 1954, in FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 13, Indochina, pt. 1:1253.

7. Memorandum of Discussion, NSC, April 29, 1954, in ibid., pt. 2:1440–46.

8. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) 63-54, “Consequences of the Fall of Dine Bien Phu,” April 30, 1954, in Estimative Products on Vietnam, 1948–1975, edited by John K. Allen Jr., John Carver, and Tom Elmore (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2005), 50–54.

9. George C. Herring, “‘A Good Stout Effort’: John Foster Dulles and the Indochina Crisis, 1954–1955,” in John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War, edited by Richard H. Immerman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 220.

10. Dulles to U.S. Delegation, June 14, 1954, in FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 16, The Geneva Conference (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1981), 1146–47.

11. Smith to Dulles, July 21, 1954, in ibid., 1500–1501.

12. Quoted in Gary Hess, “The Geneva and Manila Conferences,” in Kaplan, Artaud, and Rubin, eds., Dine Bien Phu and the Crisis of Franco-American Relations, 140.

13. Douglas Dillon to State Department, May 24, 1954, in FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 13, Indochina, pt. 2:1608–10.

14. NIE 63-5-54, “Post Geneva Outlook in Indochina,” August 3, 1954, in Allen, Carver, and Elmore, eds., Estimative Products on Vietnam, 69.

15. Memorandum of Discussion, NSC, October 22, 1954, in FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 13, Indochina, pt. 2:2153–58.

16. Memorandum of telephone conversation between John Foster Dulles and Allen W. Dulles, April 11, 1955, Telephone Memoranda (except to and from the White House), March–April 1955, Telephone Conversations Series, John Foster Dulles Papers, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kans.

17. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Armed Services, United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1965, 12 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1971), 2:pt. 4, A3:V.

18. David L. Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–1961 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 131.

19. John Osborne, “The Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam,” Life, May 13, 1957, 156–76.

20. Quoted in Philip E. Catton, Diem’s Final Failure: Prelude to America’s War in Vietnam (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 24.

21. Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 223–24.

22. Quoted in Fred I. Greenstein and Richard H. Immerman, “What Did Eisenhower Tell Kennedy About Indochina? The Politics of Misperception,” Journal of American History 79, no. 2 (1992): 573 (emphasis in original).

23. Taylor to President Kennedy, November 3, 1961, and attachments, in FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. 1, Vietnam, 1961 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1988), 493.

24. Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1965), 505.

25. Both advisers quoted in Catton, Diem’s Final Failure, 174.

26. John Mecklin, Mission in Torment: An Intimate Account of the U.S. Role in Vietnam (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965), 205.

27. Quoted in Howard Jones, Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 348.

28. Report of McNamara–Taylor Mission to Vietnam, October 2, 1953, in The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, 5 vols., Senator Gravel ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 2:765.

29. Quoted in David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 277.