CHARLES DE GAULLE FIRST CALLED for the “neutralization” of Vietnam, whereby South and North Vietnam would resolve their problems without external influence, in the summer of 1963. President Kennedy angrily responded by questioning de Gaulle’s right to suggest such an action, noting that France had “neither armed forces, nor an economic aid program in Vietnam,” and that the entire burden was being “shouldered by the United States.”1 True enough, but as the preceding chapters have shown, the reason France no longer had a military or economic presence was that Washington and Saigon had systematically pushed France out of Vietnam. The burden the United States “shouldered” was not imposed, but chosen.
A number of theories exist as to how and why early American involvement in Vietnam occurred. The “quagmire thesis” holds that successive U.S. presidents gradually became entangled in the war by small steps, each convinced that a limited commitment would eventually lead to victory. The “stalemate thesis” asserts that U.S. involvement was a series of deliberate acts by presidents who saw the quagmire for what it was, but could not bring themselves to accept defeat while in office. Other scholars claim that the United States “stumbled” into Vietnam.2 For the period under examination here, none of these descriptions apply. The Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations did not slip into Vietnam by inadvertence, nor did they deliberately use Vietnam as a holding action. Earlier interpretations have ignored the intra-alliance politics that were responsible, to a considerable degree, for increasing American intervention in Vietnam.
Intra-alliance conflict among France, Britain, and the United States hindered, rather than helped, western policy in Indochina. The three countries, while agreeing on common policies in theory—creating a coordinated Southeast Asian defense, building a national Vietnamese army, implementing the Navarre Plan, supporting South Vietnamese prime minister Ngo Dinh Diem, and encouraging consultations for the 1956 elections—never managed to carry through these policies in practice. The search for “common action” always appeared just out of reach. But in attempting to realize this goal, America increased its influence in Vietnam, with the result that by 1960 the Americans had replaced the French in almost all domains in South Vietnam and dissuaded them from maintaining a presence in North Vietnam. In the end, the western bloc as much as the communist one furthered the American commitment to a noncommunist South Vietnam, as the American entrance onto the scene went hand-in-hand with the French exit.
When exactly did this transfer occur? It is almost impossible to pinpoint an exact date or action. Certainly no French politician wanted to assume responsibility for the French loss of control. Witness Pierre Mendès France’s defense that his administration could not be held accountable for the “relève,” or replacement of France by the United States. He argued that Americans were already installed in Saigon long before he came to power, and that the French “eviction” was a result of previous governments trying to obtain additional American economic and military aid. Regarding the U.S. assumption of French duties, he noted France had “systematically” initiated the Americans into first military and then civil and local affairs. According to Mendès France, the “fundamental French error” was “introducing” the Americans in the first place.3
This introduction, and the beginning of the transition from the French to the Americans, began in earnest in 1950. Chinese recognition of North Vietnam and French success in portraying their war effort as an anticommunist crusade led to the first tentative American steps toward intervention. During numerous tripartite meetings from 1950 to 1953, French officials slowly but surely persuaded Washington of Indochina’s importance as an outpost for western defense. Thus, efforts to coax the United States into seeing the French cause in Indochina as an allied one were deliberate and longstanding. French success in convincing the United States not only to aid the French war effort but also to support a common Southeast Asian defense policy paved the way for future American involvement.
The portrayal of Indochina as an international affair by successive French governments did, to a certain degree, backfire. Paris found its liberty of action impeded as it coordinated with the Bao Dai government and the Americans in the fight against the DRV. To be sure, the French underappreciated the various American missions and dignitaries sent to observe and aid the war effort. But constant American claims that independence for the Associated States would magically resolve the situation also led to increased Franco-American tensions in Indochina. As Laurent Cesari has stated, “the Cold War, rather than leading the Americans to support colonial empires, forced them instead to denounce colonization.” Since the United States could not support revolution as the Soviets did, “the Americans had to find other myths, such as national independence, that would mobilize Vietnamese opinion.”4
By 1953, the American commitment to the French war effort had become linked to European defense issues. Because Paris claimed that it could not win the war in Indochina and build up the European Defense Community (EDC) simultaneously, the incoming Eisenhower administration agreed to supply additional aid for Indochina with the assumption that France would ratify the EDC—an American top priority. The French never ratified the EDC, but as a result of continued American aid for Indochina throughout 1953–1954, Washington found itself increasingly engaged there. In particular, Secretary of State Dulles’s decision to informally link the EDC and Indochina and his refusal to consider alternatives to the EDC obliged Washington to acquiesce to French demands for more aid and accelerated the administration’s financial and political commitment to prevent a communist takeover in Indochina.
The Indochina-EDC connection demonstrates the dangers of tying one policy goal to another. Both Paris and Washington thought they had linked policies in a way that would allow them maximum leverage against one another, but in the end, both became mired in their own cleverness. French leaders thought that by portraying their effort in Indochina as part of the greater battle against communism they would be assured American support. While the French did obtain this support, they also acquired increased American meddling in Indochina. The United States, in implicitly tying American aid to Indochina to the EDC’s ratification, lost the EDC but ended up more committed to the Indochina effort. In addition, the United States could have insisted on Vietnamese independence prior to Geneva if it had been a little less concerned with the impact such insistence would have on the EDC’s prospects for ratification by the French National Assembly.
The year 1954 was a critical one for American involvement in Vietnam. Dulles had agreed to a negotiated settlement of the Indochina conflict at the Berlin Conference, allowing France to place Indochina on the agenda for the forthcoming Geneva Conference. In addition, the Eisenhower administration came close to intervening militarily at Dien Bien Phu in the spring of 1954 through united action. The Americans did not intervene, and the Franco-Vietminh agreement at the Geneva Conference to temporarily divide Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel ended military hostilities between the French and the Vietminh. But the American refusal to sign the Geneva agreements left the door open for future American involvement in Indochina.
Lloyd Gardner has described the American commitment to Vietnam as being a “halfway” one until the Geneva Conference.5 After Geneva, this commitment would become full-blown as the United States became primarily responsible for South Vietnam’s future. Because Eisenhower and Dulles viewed the Geneva Accords as a setback for the noncommunist world, they decided that the United States needed to play a larger role in South Vietnam to ensure that it too was not lost. Washington thus demanded more control of military, strategic, economic, and administrative matters. Indeed, Eisenhower administration officials relished reducing the French presence in Indochina so that South Vietnam could be rebuilt from the foundation. The Diem government offered the best chance for doing so, according to Washington.
Following Geneva, Paris intended to maintain a significant amount of influence in Vietnamese affairs, but American support of Diem created a number of difficulties for the French. Franco-American conflict heightened once again as the two countries disagreed over Diem’s future as a viable South Vietnamese leader. The French wanted to develop a joint Franco-American policy toward South Vietnam to preserve western interests there. But the Eisenhower administration resisted tying itself too closely to French policy. In the end, Diem, with some help from the Americans, succeeded in keeping himself in power, resulting in a reduced French presence in South Vietnam.
France continued to lose influence as the western bloc attempted to resolve the 1956 elections issue. The elections failed, in part, because the primary countries involved, with the exception of North Vietnam, placed a low priority on elections. In addition, Diem’s insistence that the French withdraw the last of the FEC from Indochina, as well as his, and American, efforts to reduce the French political and economic presence, caused Paris to disengage from its commitment to holding the 1956 elections. Diem’s refusal even to consider consultations, despite American pressure to do so, indefinitely postponed the issue. The British, Soviets, and Chinese allowed the election deadline to pass, having decided that maintaining the shaky peace in Vietnam was more important than holding the elections. The non-elections of 1956 ensured that the Americans would have time to shape South Vietnam as they saw fit.
If it had been anyone but Diem in charge of South Vietnam, the French and American presence in that country could have played out very differently. In fact, if it had not been for Diem, there is a good chance that France would have persuaded a different South Vietnamese government to begin negotiations with the DRV, maintained a presence in the North, and perhaps even overseen the 1956 elections. Granted, this is mere speculation, but it is worth considering the path not taken.
By 1956, French influence in Indochina had greatly diminished as the United States superseded France politically, militarily, economically, and administratively. The final Franco-American battle for control occurred in the cultural realm. The French resisted American attempts to take over various French educational institutions in Indochina, but American agencies made significant gains. French observers noted that the “overwhelming” American presence in South Vietnam meant that the Americans were determined to forge ahead with their nation-building experiment.
French influence had not been completely eradicated. In an effort to counterbalance the United States, the Diem government slowly began to work toward better relations with France. But the American presence still pervaded almost every aspect of South Vietnamese life. The extent and ramifications of American investment and development assistance in Vietnam after Geneva were vast as the Eisenhower administration shifted from military defense assistance to programs oriented toward nation-building. During Eisenhower’s second term, the administration understood more clearly the importance of using economic and cultural aid as weapons in the Cold War and furthered the efforts of American agencies engaged in nation-building work. Overall, the amount of aid to Vietnam actually went down from 1955 to 1961, but the numbers and activities of official and unofficial Americans in South Vietnam climbed steadily.
When examining the American nation-building effort in South Vietnam, the British observed in 1956 that the broad picture of American activities in South Vietnam was one of “gradual, unspectacular success.”6 This comment serves to underscore two key points. First, while Vietnam appeared relatively quiet on the surface after Geneva, the Americans were stealthily moving into the political, administrative, economic, and military domains. Second, observers at the time deemed American efforts in South Vietnam “successful.” But successful at what? The various agencies at work built and modernized, to be sure, but had they ensured greater internal stability? Had they halted the communist-directed insurgency? Had they created a democratic and economically stable nation? The answers appear obvious today But at the time most Eisenhower administration officials in Washington would have answered “yes” to all these questions.
If they had not created stability, stopped communist insurgency, and created a democratic nation, what exactly had the Americans achieved? They had completed the transition from French to American control in Vietnam, which represented a transition between two different types of imperialism—the old-fashioned French variety of formal, bureaucratic control and a new American neocolonial, or informal, one. Washington’s determination to replace the French on every possible level in South Vietnam and its accelerated commitment to the Diem regime because it saw no other anticommunist and anticolonial alternative led to American activities in Vietnam that looked suspiciously like earlier French ones. Americans from 1954 until well into the 1960s claimed that the French effort failed because French leaders had sought to reestablish colonial rule and employ Bao Dai as a political façade to maintain control. The irony is difficult to miss, as these same Americans attempted to establish their own way of ruling South Vietnam and to use Ngo Dinh Diem as the front man for their efforts. After resisting all-out aid to the French effort for so long because of French colonial behavior, the Americans had become the colonialists. Neither western power ever delivered on its promise of an independent government in the South.
Imperialist activities were costly, not merely in terms of dollars or American anticolonial credentials, but also with respect to the Franco-American alliance. As French senator Michel Debré remarked, it was “not possible for France to be allies with the United States in Europe to be half abandoned by them in Africa and totally betrayed in the Far East. An alliance with the United States should not be limited geographically.”7 French foreign minister Christian Pineau went a step further in early 1956, declaring that “no common policy [existed] among the United States, United Kingdom, and France anywhere in the world.”8 Pineau believed that the United States had made a serious mistake in hoping to increase its strength in Indochina by eliminating the French. According to Pineau, the “loss of Western prestige” in the Far East was caused primarily by “divisions” in the Atlantic alliance.9 Gaullist leader Jacques Soustelle also wrote in 1956 that the western alliance did “not prove favorable to France” in the Far East.10 What troubled Debré, Pineau, Soustelle, and so many other leading French figures, was the American position of being allied when and where it was convenient.
Melvyn Leffler has written that Eisenhower and Dulles did seek solidarity with their allies and wrote guidelines into their national security strategy for the maintenance of “alliance cohesion.” But they also emphasized that the United States should “act independently of its major allies” when the advantage of achieving U.S. objectives by such action clearly outweighed the danger of “lasting damage to its alliances.” Therefore, American officials should consider the “likelihood” that unilateral action prior to allied acceptance might bring about subsequent allied support. Allied reluctance to act should not “inhibit the United States from taking action.”11 The administration wanted it both ways—it engaged in multilateralism on the diplomatic level but its methods and practice were unilateral. Clearly, the Eisenhower administration was not inhibited from pursuing an independent course of action toward Vietnam.
Looking back on the 1950s, Robert McNamara points out that there were a number of missed opportunities to settle the Indochina conflict long before major U.S. intervention occurred in the mid-1960s. In particular, McNamara notes that the Truman administration’s decision to underwrite the French effort in Indochina in 1950 was an error, as was the American refusal to participate fully in the 1954 Geneva Conference and to sign the final agreement.12 His focus on these two events indicates the importance of the Franco-American relationship in increasing the American presence in Vietnam. The Americans certainly did not learn the “lessons” that the French experience in Indochina had to offer; they, as the French had earlier, rejected diplomatic possibilities in order to reserve their independence of action.
In pursuing a transnational perspective—one that is neither American, nor French, nor Vietnamese—this study emphasizes a number of agencies and actors as well as specific conferences and events. Individuals and groups from one country within the alliance either cooperated, or more likely, did not cooperate, with other individuals and groups from another allied country. For example, chapter 1 looks at the sustained effort on the part of French military and political leaders to convince their counterparts in the United States and Britain to view Indochina as a Cold War battle and to create a Southeast Asian common defense, whereas chapter 2 looks at how Stalin’s death persuaded France that peace in the Far East was possible while prompting the Americans to resist negotiations even more ferociously. Chapter 3 revolves around the alliance crisis before, during, and after the Geneva Conference, and chapter 4 centers on Diem—perhaps the key player in determining Franco-American diplomacy toward Vietnam from 1954 to 1963. Chapter 5 tackles political centers—Washington, Paris, London, Hanoi, Saigon, Moscow, and Beijing—whereas chapter 6 focuses on specific military, economic, bureaucratic, and cultural entities. Chapter 7 addresses the dual nature of French policy as France struggled to maintain a presence in both North and South Vietnam, and chapter 8 details the role official and unofficial American agencies played in trying to build South Vietnam into a nation. The point is that individuals mattered, players on the ground in Saigon as well as in Washington and Paris, although the ones in Washington, with the possible exception of Diem, tended to matter most.
There are no heroes in this story. Still, a number of actors displayed thoughtful sensitivity to the myriad of problems that existed in Vietnam and the dangers of American intervention, and their advice warranted serious consideration. Unfortunately, most of them spoke French. Americans who painted a pessimistic picture, and in particular those who served as ambassador or special representative on the ground in Saigon, were also routinely ignored by Washington. Donald Heath, J. Lawton Collins, G. Frederick Reinhardt, and Elbridge Durbrow all sought to implement policy at a tactical level and all ultimately concluded that the American effort in South Vietnam was doomed. But the strategists in Washington always overrode them. Thus, the story becomes more than the difficulties the Franco-American relationship faced, or even the manner by which the United States replaced France in Vietnam to become the dominant player; this is the story of how the United States became committed to a noncommunist South Vietnam.
If there is a villain in the story, or at least someone to hold primarily responsible for this commitment, it might be John Foster Dulles. Dulles was undeniably fighting the good fight against communism. In fact, he no doubt enjoyed the opportunity to do battle with evil and supported Diem in part because the two men shared the same belief of one moral authority. For Dulles, neutralism was not an option, nor was the middle ground, which helps explain why Dulles and various French officials clashed so often. Dulles’s villainy lies in his Manichean worldview, which precluded serious negotiations with his adversaries, and oftentimes with his allies. His failure to engage in diplomacy played a critical role in the breakdown of the Geneva Accords, making the resumption of hostilities much more likely.
The other villain, perhaps, is the pesky notion of American exceptionalism, which Dulles, among others, embraced wholeheartedly. While the Americans were happy to serve as a “shining example upon a hill” in Vietnam, they often found this tactic a little slow in helping South Vietnam become like the United States. Americans on the ground favored a more active role, believing that additional resources and American methods, training, and values would create a stable, noncommunist South Vietnam. Thus, American cultural conceptions of themselves propagated an assertive foreign policy.13
And what of the enemy in the North? Hanoi’s biggest mistake, and an ironic one at that, was relying on France to control the situation in the South after Geneva. The North Vietnamese leadership had also counted on the fact that the French, if they did not eliminate the Diem regime, would at least become so annoyed with it that they would turn their efforts to saving their considerable presence in the North. And indeed the French did weigh this option, as witnessed by the Sainteny mission. Hanoi had not foreseen how quickly Diem and the Americans would force France to withdraw, thus ending any possibility of negotiations. Nor had the DRV expected the lack of interest from the other Geneva conferees and neutralist countries, who preferred, as long as hostilities did not break out again, to bury the Vietnamese problem.
But Hanoi was not alone; all the signatories to the Geneva Accords had assumed that they would be sitting back down at the conference table at some point. No one anticipated that the United States and South Vietnam, who had not signed, would ensure a different outcome. Hanoi was caught by surprise and would spend a good part of the 1954–1960 period engaged in diplomatic and propaganda efforts designed to combat its relative isolation outside the communist orbit and to persuade the South Vietnamese that they were being oppressed by the Americans and Diem. Hanoi did not entirely close the door on negotiations with Saigon, but the North Vietnamese eventually began to embrace the idea of reunification by military rather than political means. As Philippe Devillers has noted, the Vietnamese people had always been caught between communism and a form of anticommunism that they could not accept. During the period of French control it was communism or colonialism. Once the Americans came onto the scene, it was communism or a dictatorship that, in the words of Devillers, was “Fascist and medieval.”14
The East-West superpower clash presented both risks and opportunities to those in Vietnam during what they conceived as a crucial moment in North-South relations. Neither the Vietnamese nor the French frame of reference was dominated by Cold War politics the way the American one was. Because of its inability to see the situation without Cold War lenses, the Eisenhower administration underestimated the forces of nationalism and decolonization.
Nation-building is a tricky business. For the United States, the reasons for its going awry are often similar. Nation-builders tend to focus on military buildup and internal security first and nation-building second. Moreover, the superimposition of American culture and values on a fundamentally different society is usually met with eventual hostility. Americans also have a tendency to operate on an ad hoc basis, with various organizations duplicating each other’s efforts. And then there is always the seemingly unshakable twentieth and thus far twenty-first century American hubris that the United States can build better than anyone else. For example, in addition to the American military presence in 1950s Vietnam was the political, economic, administrative, and cultural structure the United States created. The Geneva Accords said nothing about nonmilitary personnel, which was why the Eisenhower administration came to embrace soft power tactics—economic aid, land and administrative reform, and cultural activities, to name a few. The catch was that eventually these tactics precipitated and facilitated hard power ones, at least in Vietnam.
One of the soft power tactics employed by Americans in Vietnam was the use of cultural initiatives. The United States initially disparaged the French cultural mission in Indochina and tended to associate France’s civilizing mission with colonialism from 1950 to 1954. And yet, after Geneva, Washington soon began to export its own cultural mission and American agencies began to take on shades of neocolonialism. Returning to the theme of the United States as a neocolonial power and Vietnam as its, shall we say, neo-colony, this study has been most interested in attempted indirect rule (the American variety) as opposed to attempted direct rule (the French variety from the 1880s to World War II). Indirect rule is less visible and usually cheaper, but it still obliges its adherents to intervene in local society, and, in the case of Vietnam, to deal with political and military leaders, bureaucrats, teachers, religious-political sects, peasants, refugees, and others.
In reflecting whether the United States built a colony rather than a nation, it is worth considering this: the United States is founded on the practice of actual rather than virtual representation. In other words, the essential criterion of a successful democratic nation, according to American leaders, is voting—free, fair, and regularly occurring elections. The Eisenhower administration never reconciled its rhetoric of free elections with its attempts to subvert the 1956 elections in Vietnam. For Diem, there was no such dilemma—his concern was staying in power, not promoting democracy. And the United States went along with his flagrant abuses of power for a very long time. Although historians have duly noted that the 1956 elections were not held, that Diem’s 1955 referendum was a mockery, and that Diem repeatedly engaged in political oppression and failed to ensure fair representation of political parties until his assassination, the deeper implications have not been fully articulated. If the United States supported a truly undemocratic leader, how could South Vietnam possibly be a nation? It had to be a colony, or at the very least a dependency. During his 1957 visit to the United States, Diem himself stated that “the frontier of the United States extends to the 17th parallel.”15 Frontier it certainly was. In 1950, the South Vietnamese had limited control over monetary and economic policy, could not participate in elections, experienced no freedom of press or assembly, and feared arbitrary arrest. What had changed by 1961? Very little.
Is there any way American nation-building in South Vietnam could have avoided becoming neocolonial in the existing Cold War circumstances? The answer, alas, is probably not. Mary Ann Heiss writes that “achieving both anticolonialism and Cold War foreign policy needs proved impossible.” The nation “chose cold war over anticolonialism—informal rather than formal and defensive rather than offensive, but empire nonetheless.”16 Nowhere was the U.S. abandonment of anti-imperialism and reinvigoration of the idea of a U.S. mission more evident than in post-1954 Vietnam. In this case, the colonizer claimed it was not a colonizer, but American actions belied American rhetoric.
American sentiments might have been postcolonial in the idea of modernizing and nation-building, and of course they had no “territorial ambition,” as they were fond of pointing out, but American methods did not differ significantly from French colonialist Albert Sarraut’s 1920s policy of association. One of the amazing truths that emerges from evaluating U.S. policy during 1950–1960 is that the Americans constantly worried about appearing “colonial” in the first half of the decade, but in the second half they embraced the trappings and some of the substance of colonialism. Americans felt almost entitled to replace the French because they were sure their anticolonial methods had a better chance of preserving a noncommunist South Vietnam.
How deep did the change from the French to the Americans go? For the Vietnamese, there was little difference between the two western nations. If the South Vietnamese failed to distinguish between the French civilizing mission and the American modernization effort, then the two could not have been that different in practice. There is a reason colonialism ended up in the dustbin of history—it is unsustainable. The Americans, like the French, would learn this lesson the hard way.
The story contained within these pages has traced Washington’s transition from a partner in the French war effort to the dominant western power in South Vietnam in the 1950s. It has also been a story of alliance failure. Challenging conventional interpretations of the origins of the Vietnam War—which generally emphasize the importance of decisions taken by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations—the focus here has been the critical role that the Franco-American alliance played in fostering the U.S. commitment to Vietnam in the 1950s and the importance of paying close attention to allied as well as adversarial motivations, behavior, and goals in times of crisis. It is a story that has relevance for current and future alliance members and one that policy makers might want to consider.
Of particular concern is the American tendency to equate allied dissent with disloyalty. U.S. leaders have been quick to criticize allies’ motives and to penalize them for their lack of support. After Geneva, the French were punished when the United States, along with South Vietnamese prime minister Ngo Dinh Diem, forced them out of Vietnam. In return, the French washed their hands of the entire affair, including providing political or economic aid for the subsequent American war effort. After the Second Iraq War, the Bush administration carried out its threat of consequences by banning French firms from bidding on primary contracts for Iraq and barring French participation in long-planned military exercises. As a result, French cooperation in the Middle East, and elsewhere, has been difficult to attain. Thus, just as the United States replaced France in Vietnam and then ended up absorbing the costs of American intervention, Washington pushed away its allies in Iraq and continues to pay the political, economic, and physical price.
At first glance, the United States’ overwhelming military superiority in the 1950s, and today, would seem to indicate its ability to go it alone—without need for an alliance. But the costs—economic, physical, and diplomatic—of this military superiority tend to undermine U.S. power, and, ultimately, American national interests, as witnessed in South Vietnam. Unilateralism should not be undertaken lightly as it often leads to accusations of imperialism. Vietnam was perhaps the one “real imperial nightmare” of the twentieth century for the United States.17 While the Eisenhower administration’s policies could be considered “imperialism lite,” they set a tone and created a precedent upon which subsequent administrations would rely The cumulative weight of ten years of direct American involvement from 1950 to 1960 created a momentum in South Vietnam that was not easily stopped. Even as Washington became more discouraged with the Diem regime, the American presence in Vietnam continued. The later American war effort was not inevitable, but the decisions and developments of the 1950s made it more difficult for future American leaders to disengage from Vietnam. At least one goal had been achieved—the process of replacing France was complete.