THE STORY OF AMERICAN INTERVENTION in Vietnam begins with an alliance—the sometimes ambivalent, often contentious, and almost always misunderstood Franco-American alliance. Paris and Washington clashed repeatedly over how to respond to the dual threat of communism and nationalism in Vietnam when the forces of the Cold War and decolonization collided there during the 1950s. When a colonial power leaves a former colony, the new state usually grapples with growing pains on its own. In this case, the South Vietnamese were never given the chance as the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration systematically replaced French control in South Vietnam with American influence. Why and how the United States did so are the core questions of this book.
In answering these questions, a transnational perspective is critical.1 Throughout the 1950s, a significant cast of characters—including Paris, Washington, London, Saigon, Hanoi, Moscow, and Beijing—had a major impact on the denouement of events in Indochina.2 There is a world of difference between the 1950s, when the United States played the role of puppet just as often as that of puppeteer, and the 1960s, when U.S. policy was the most important of any country’s in determining the course of American intervention in Vietnam.3 In the earlier decade, a host of great and small powers vied to pull the strings; but by the end of Eisenhower’s presidency there was only one puppet master.
The story contained within these pages, featuring the Franco-American alliance as the main character, explains how—much to the consternation of the French—the United States emerged as that puppet master. The primary focus, therefore, rests on intra-alliance politics, among those who claimed to be on the same side. Decision making at the highest levels in Paris and Washington, and how these decisions played out domestically and abroad, receive the lion’s share of attention.4 Particular emphasis is placed on Franco-American unwillingness to work together against the communist threat in Vietnam. Saigon and London had major supporting roles, as they, too, often made a united policy against their adversaries in Moscow, Beijing, and Hanoi more difficult. The Soviets, Chinese, and North Vietnamese occupy more minor, but critical, parts in the story. Ultimately, the decision to replace France came from American officials’ certainty that their methods to create a viable noncommunist South Vietnamese nation had the best chance of success.
Momentous steps such as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Operation Rolling Thunder, and the commitment of ground troops dramatically increased the U.S. presence in Vietnam in the 1960s; however, this book is concerned with the evolving process of American involvement—the groundwork, so to speak—that began in the 1950s. Long before decisions made in the 1960s led to the Americanization of the war in Vietnam, an entire bureaucracy was set in motion on the political, military, economic, and cultural levels that paved the way for the Americanization of Vietnam itself. The mechanism that activated this machinery and sustained it, at least until the end of the Eisenhower administration, was the Franco-American alliance. In short, Franco-American discord ensured the decline of French influence and the rise of American power in South Vietnam. For this reason, American intervention in Vietnam can be understood only within the context of the French exit from Vietnam, an exit abetted by the United States.
Even though they faced the same threat, American and French leaders proved incapable of agreeing on a common policy to stop the communists in Vietnam. The question is, Why? What explains the mutual suspicion and animosity between Paris and Washington in the 1950s and the regular flareups ever since? After all, although they differ in terms of power and tactics, France and the United States are still allies, who should, in theory, collaborate. And yet this alliance breaks down with alarming frequency. When members of an alliance fail to cooperate, as in Vietnam, the potential fallout can be serious, as each player pursues an independent, contradictory, and sometimes directionless policy. A more recent example occurred in 2003, when French and American leaders, as well as their publics, preferred to savage each other in the diplomatic arena and press instead of hammering out their differences to forge a common strategy toward Iraq. Americans expressed bafflement and anger over French president Jacques Chirac’s contention that the “use of force [was] not a solution” to the Iraqi conundrum and his determination to veto a war resolution in the Security Council.5 In turn, the French could not understand why the George W. Bush administration was unwilling to give diplomacy, economic sanctions, and international pressure more time to work. Although both countries sought to neutralize Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, Franco-American disagreements on how to do so sabotaged a united policy toward Iraq.
What many Americans—and many French, for that matter—fail to grasp is that both nations have long-held convictions that they represent the future of western civilization, that they always know best and that this gives them the right to pursue a unilateral foreign policy, and that coercive tactics can be applied in convincing smaller nations to comply with their interests. The unease that leaders and citizens from both countries felt about one another in the 1950s was not a historical aberration, as was demonstrated in 2003, when the Western alliance once more failed to deliver on its promise of cooperation. Not only did Paris and Washington fall short of finding a common resolution to the situation in Iraq, but they also began to view each other as adversaries instead of allies.
In the period leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, many American officials described the Franco-American relationship as “difficult,” “annoying,” or “useless” and France itself as part of the “Axis of Weasels.”6 And these were the polite terms. According to one Gallup poll, only 28 percent of the American public viewed France as an ally, and many went so far as to proclaim France the enemy. Such views were not new. As French leaders struggled to resolve the First Indochina War, Eisenhower referred to the French as “hysterical” in their desire to keep their great power status and remain equal to the United States. And when it became clear that French prime minister Pierre Mendès France would settle the war at the negotiating table rather than on the battlefield, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced that the United States would have to either “beat the French into line” or “split” with France.7 Publicly and privately, American officials frequently expressed reservations about the value of their alliance with France. Just as often, their French counterparts voiced similar concerns about working with the Americans.
The Indochina conflict exacerbated problems within the Western alliance, and, in turn, French and American policy makers aggravated the situation in Indochina. Officials in Paris and Washington failed to understand their counterparts’ motivations, domestic political situations, goals, and perceptions. Conflict is often the result not of incompatible goals, but of misperceptions on the part of policy makers. Generally, misperception has been an issue for adversarial relationships. In this case, intra-alliance misperceptions increased tensions within the Western alliance.8
American views of France as an unreliable and weak ally led the Eisenhower administration to reject the lessons that the French experience in Indochina had to offer. Instead, U.S. officials made unilateral decisions, first replacing the French political, military, economic, and cultural presence in Vietnam with an American one and then escalating the conflict despite repeated warnings by French leaders that escalation would not lead to victory. Rather than appreciating French goals and interests, American leaders perceived the French as dupes of communist political warfare that raised false hopes for a relaxation of tensions and sowed dissension in the Western alliance. For the French, keeping an open dialogue—even with the enemy—was an essential component of diplomacy. But the Eisenhower administration saw French eagerness to negotiate an end to the First Indochina War as a betrayal of the Western alliance.
Part of the problem was that the two countries carried out diplomacy in very different ways. There is a strong tendency in U.S. foreign policy to view diplomacy as a zero-sum game rather than a legitimate means for nations to discuss issues in the hope of achieving positive outcomes for all. In addition, differing attitudes toward negotiating on the part of the French and the Americans frequently led the two allies to work against each other. For instance, the Eisenhower administration was inclined to view a negotiated settlement to the Indochina conflict as a form of appeasement, weakness, and defeat. French officials took the more flexible and pragmatic approach, stemming from their experience in Vietnam, that a diplomatic, rather than military, solution was required.9
Leaders in Paris and Washington also differed in their understandings of the postwar world, the future of colonialism, and the role each country would play in the international arena. French officials and the population as a whole continued to express deep gratitude for American efforts to liberate France during World War II and American generosity in rebuilding western Europe, but the superior attitude of U.S. officials that they possessed all the answers to Cold War problems had grown tiresome. The French saw their ally as well intentioned but naive, uneducated in world affairs, and overzealous in its anticommunist crusade and attempts to impose an American brand of democracy on the rest of the world. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Americans were flushed with success over halting communist advances in Europe but remained wary of the strong leftist presence in successive French governments. They were also disgusted with French attempts to hold on to their colonial empire. American leaders viewed the French as smart and sophisticated but equally egotistical, corrupt, and defeatist. These differences in worldviews help explain the fundamental ideological and political divisions between Paris and Washington and why they often failed to present a united front to their common enemies.
Compounding the problem was the rapidly evolving international situation. The French handover of power in Vietnam coincided with the emergence of the United States as one of the two major superpowers that would dominate the second half of the twentieth century. Financially and morally bankrupt colonial powers were out. Liberal capitalism and Eastern communism (depending on one’s geographic location) were in. Replacing France in Indochina was one way for the United States to score against both communism and colonialism. Early on, French officials had recognized the possibility that the United States could take control in South Vietnam. As Richard Kuisel has noted, “the most distinctive feature of French attitudes during the early 1950s was uneasiness about American domination. More than other Europeans, the French harbored misgivings about American political, economic, and cultural ambitions . . . and at the same time welcomed the Western Alliance and U.S. aid.” In the foreground were the “disappointments and quarrels” among the allies and the “intermittent explosions” of resentment over decolonization. In the background were dependence on “Yankee superpower” and the fear of war raised by the Cold War and American anticommunism.10 These concerns would only grow stronger as Franco-American negotiations over the fate of Vietnam intensified, causing the two allies to spend more time trying to modify each other’s behavior than finding a solution to the “Indochina problem.”
The story commences in 1950, the year that saw the first steps toward significant American involvement in what until then had been an essentially colonial war. In 1950, the United States made a small political and monetary investment in Indochina by recognizing the French-backed State of Vietnam in southern Vietnam, granting an initial financial outlay of $15 million to the French war effort against Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in the North, and sending a few economic advisers to help distribute American aid. Over the succeeding decade, this modest venture grew into a nation-building operation comprising thousands of Americans, billions of dollars, and a dangerous amount of American prestige. The American presence eventually pervaded every aspect of South Vietnamese life.11
Central to the story is the 1954 Geneva Conference, which represented both an end to the French military fight and a beginning to the American commitment to Vietnam. The accords reached at the conference brought to a close the 1946–1954 Franco-Vietminh War that had pitted France against its former colony and temporarily divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel. The communist DRV assumed power in the North and the noncommunist forces retained control in the South, with the stipulation that elections to reunify the country be held within two years. The diplomatic resolution of the First Indochina War also marked an end to American aid for the French war effort, but in the months following the conference the Eisenhower administration quickly sought to build a viable South Vietnamese state that would present a political challenge to Ho Chi Minh’s government in the North. Thus, whereas the Geneva Conference should have guaranteed the end of hostilities, instead it left a door ajar for future American involvement.
Various American officials had claimed they had no desire to become “more involved” or “take France’s place” in Vietnam as far back as 1950, the year the Franco-American partnership began. But American agencies in Vietnam and aid to the French war effort proliferated from 1950 to 1954, with the result that the United States insisted on an ever-increasing voice in French decision making vis-à-vis Indochina. At Geneva, differing American and French priorities sabotaged allied unity and ultimately the conference itself. After Geneva, American reassurances that the Americans had no intention of “replacing” the French rang hollow in the face of blatant American intervention in South Vietnam. By the end of Eisenhower’s second term as president, France had been eclipsed by a United States determined to preserve a noncommunist South Vietnam at nearly any cost.
Scholars who have studied the origins of American involvement in Vietnam typically focus on how the Cold War’s escalation resulted in the communist and anticommunist blocs squaring off in Indochina.12 The “loss” of China to the communists in 1949, the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, and the fear that Indochina would be the next domino to fall always figure prominently in histories of early American intervention in Vietnam, as they should. The East-West conflict did indeed play out on the battlefield during the eight-year conflict. The United States and Britain supported the French war effort while the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China furnished Ho Chi Minh’s Vietminh forces with aid and military supplies.
But what about the process of French decolonization? North-South tensions also drove the war as the Vietnamese struggled to break free of French imperialism and establish an independent nation, and as the Americans reluctantly supported a colonial ally. This study, rather than viewing decolonization as a minor player in the drama of the Cold War, places it on an equal footing. The Indochinese states of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were among the last areas in South and Southeast Asia to decolonize: the Philippines, Burma, and Indonesia beat them to it. American officials were exceedingly uncomfortable with this situation, and constantly pressured their French counterparts to grant independence to Indochina. The Cold War explains why the United States intervened, but the process of French decolonization explains why this intervention increased and led to a breakdown in western unity. American officials sneered at the French failure to stand up to the communists and keep the French colony and “civilizing mission” intact. Yet they too would attempt to create an artificial edifice in Vietnam, and they too would fail.
Seemingly inexhaustible sources exist on both the French experience during the First Indochina War and the American experience in the 1964–1975 Second Indochina War. But no systematic study exists of the interwar period and the transition from the French to the Americans. The Franco-American relationship with respect to Vietnam has not gone unnoticed. Indeed, a number of historians and former government officials have mentioned that the relationship was central to understanding American intervention. However, they generally focus on 1950, when the United States made its first significant contributions to the French war effort, or on 1954 and the events leading up to the Geneva Conference, specifically the battle of Dien Bien Phu.13 Those who do explore the post-Geneva period usually refer to it as “a truce between two wars,” make passing reference to France’s “displacement,” or claim that the United States “assumed” responsibility from the French.14 In the literature, at least, the United States magically became the dominant western player in Vietnam shortly after the Geneva Conference. This book seeks to modify such interpretations by detailing the deliberate American process of replacing France that began after Geneva and was completed by 1961. True, a military cease-fire was achieved at the 1954 Geneva Conference, but all the parties involved continued to wage political, diplomatic, economic, psychological, and cultural warfare in Vietnam and on the world stage. The transition from French to American control of South Vietnam occurred during a time of “war by other means.”15
Of these means, cultural factors proved the largest thorn in the side of western solidarity. The United States and France both disseminated abroad a sense of cultural purpose that emphasized each nation’s belief in its role as a preeminent force in world history, and both sought to use culture as an instrument of state policy in Vietnam. The Americans, in contrast to the French, had been relative latecomers to cultural diplomacy. The United States did not have a Department of Culture as France did, and although a Division of Cultural Relations was established in 1938, American officials failed to see the immediate value of expositions of art, music, and literature as a means of promoting their policies in foreign countries. But over time, the Eisenhower administration rallied to the idea of an aggressive cultural foreign policy in Vietnam, as the French had earlier.16
Were the Americans cultural imperialists in Vietnam? To a certain extent, yes. As with the French, eagerness to promote what they saw as their cultural superiority and exceptional way of life led the Americans to engage, not in cultural transfer or transmission, but in a type of imperialism. American influence was more informal but nonetheless imperialistic, if we follow the interpretation established by William Appleman Williams that the United States, as an advanced industrial nation, was attempting to play a controlling and one-sided role in the development of a weaker economy. The Eisenhower administration tried to impose American-style democracy, capitalism, ideology, values, and customs on the South Vietnamese population in a way that was far too systematic to be labeled merely cultural transfer or transmission. At the very least, this imposition of cultural values to achieve foreign policy goals could be considered cultural propaganda. Eisenhower officials would have said they were simply trying to export American exceptionalism abroad, but the French and Vietnamese took a different view. Undoubtedly, the resistance of the French to American cultural forays in Vietnam resulted from their self-image as a culturally unique people and their own colonial experience as cultural imperialists.17 Given their recent escape from French cultural control, the South Vietnamese were reluctant to embrace American culture.
This clash among cultures was personified in South Vietnamese premier Ngo Dinh Diem, whose career straddled the transition from French to American involvement in Vietnam. To administration officials, Diem appeared westernized, in part because of his Catholicism, and he seemed to be a man with whom business could be done. In addition, his anticommunist and anticolonial credentials appealed to U.S. leaders. Diem’s South Vietnam was thus the product of an American rather than a French missionary impulse.
Although American actions in South Vietnam cannot be compared to the first phase of French colonialism in the late nineteenth century, when the French engaged in a brutal and bloody conquest of Indochina, a number of similarities exist between the second phase of French colonialism and post-Geneva American nation-building.18 Although French colonialism and American neocolonialism differed markedly in some respects—the American version was indirect, informal, and incomplete—both versions rested on similar perceptions of Indochina as a place to be constructed on a western model. Paris planned to export its belief in the universal value of its civilization, as did Washington. The French called their economic, moral, and cultural policies in Indochina mise en valeur, or “development,” whereas the Americans preferred the term modernization.19 In the aftermath of Geneva, the United States tried to project the image that it was engaged in a moral mission based on generosity and protection, just as France had prior to Geneva. And both the French and the Americans employed subtle tools of empire, including cultural and language institutions, exhibits, propaganda, military and economic assistance, and political pressure in order to spread their western values.
American officials often appeared to run from the label of colonizer. The United States had freed the Philippines in 1946—the same year the French had started the war against the Vietminh to maintain their colonial empire—and Hawaii and Alaska eventually became states under the Eisenhower administration to avoid their being perceived as colonies. But in Vietnam there was a dissonance between what the United States would have said it was trying to do and what it was actually doing.20 The skeptical reader might disagree with the picture of the United States as a neocolonial power in Vietnam, but as the succeeding chapters will demonstrate, it is difficult to find a better term for American actions.
The book is divided into three sections that mirror the three phases of transition from the French to the Americans. Part 1 traces the inception of the Franco-American partnership in Vietnam and the ensuing search for allied unity. The first three chapters examine the actions of France as the main western player in Indochina and how American support of the French war effort became increasingly paramount from 1950 to 1954. The Eisenhower administration wanted to prevent the emergence of a communist Vietnam, but at the same time it agonized over its decision to support a colonial ally, fearing that other developing countries would view the United States as an abettor of colonialism. The French agenda was much more straightforward—Paris intended to ensure U.S. military and economic aid and achieve a united western policy against the DRV. Despite repeated Franco-American claims of pursuing a “common strategy” toward Indochina, all attempts at coordinated diplomacy failed, with the result that French and American representatives arrived at the Geneva Conference with conflicting agendas. The Geneva Conference resolved the First Indochina War between the French and Vietminh, but it contributed to American fears that Moscow, Beijing, and Hanoi planned to conquer the world through diplomacy rather than by force, ensuring that the Eisenhower administration would take steps to prevent any further losses to communism south of the seventeenth parallel. Part 1 thus provides a historical understanding of Franco-American disagreements about Cold War strategies, the process of decolonization, and the nature of the Western alliance that were fundamental to the future of U.S. intervention in Vietnam.
Part 2 examines how Paris sought to keep Vietnam French while Washington insisted on making it American. Accordingly, chapters 4, 5, and 6 emphasize the Franco-American battle for control in Vietnam. American leaders openly doubted the French ability to sustain an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam after the Geneva Conference, and although Vietnam had become a back-burner issue for the White House this did not mean the American presence in South Vietnam stagnated. Quite the opposite. Franco-American relations underwent a major shift as the United States and Ngo Dinh Diem took the lead in South Vietnam, thwarting the scheduled 1956 Vietnamese elections and reducing the French political, military, and economic presence in an attempt to eliminate all vestiges of French colonialism. Because of Washington and Saigon’s actions, Paris disengaged from its responsibilities to the 1954 Geneva Accords, leaving the United States to take unofficial control of the situation in South Vietnam. As the number of American agencies in South Vietnam increased, American influence there became more prominent. The Eisenhower administration’s primary goal in South Vietnam was to strengthen Asian defense against the communist threat by supporting Diem’s government. But with each additional function American agencies assumed, U.S. involvement deepened, ultimately reaching a point where disengagement would have meant a perceived American defeat to the communist bloc.
Part 3 highlights the cultural, economic, and propaganda initiatives used by France, South Vietnam, North Vietnam, and the United States from 1956 to 1961, exploring how all four nations sought to gain psychological ground through “soft power” tactics.21 Rather than using or threatening military force, governments in Paris, Hanoi, Saigon, and Washington pointed to the strength of their values and culture to further their goals on the international stage and in Vietnam. Cultural diplomacy thus came to the fore once France had lost military, political, and economic control and was left with no option except to continue cultural initiatives in the hope of maintaining some influence in both North and South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh and Diem used soft power tactics at home and abroad as well, attempting to depict their respective governments as the only legitimate one in Vietnam. And Washington sought to promote its political agenda in South Vietnam by replacing French culture with American. Increasing numbers of American personnel and American missions thus began to take over the “civilizing mission” previously performed by France: they moved into teaching positions at universities and secondary and primary schools; controlled training for Vietnamese administrators, military personnel, and ministers; replaced the French language with English; and disseminated American cultural propaganda throughout South Vietnam via newspapers, radio, expositions, movies, and mobile exhibits.
Ultimately, as Americans undertook these additional duties, they attempted to impose American values and culture on the Vietnamese population and to modernize and westernize South Vietnam. Washington had come to view the spreading of American values in Vietnam as a Cold War operational necessity. In replacing France, Eisenhower officials were convinced that they would construct a viable, self-governing, and economically stable South Vietnamese state that could defend itself militarily against North Vietnam. They thus engaged in a full-fledged nation-building effort in South Vietnam. But they did not create a nation there. Instead, their actions in the South prompted the North Vietnamese—who had never underestimated the danger American intervention posed to their plans for the reunification of Vietnam—to consolidate their power and to prepare for the coming fight over the South’s future. To the extent that Americans aided in the forging of a nation, it was on the northern side of the seventeenth parallel.