March–July 1954: Dien Bien Phu, Geneva, and the Harnessing of American Power

Late in the afternoon of March 13, 1954, Vietminh artillery guns, brought up through the mountain country by dint of stupendous effort, emplaced at Dien Bien Phu at the price of backbreaking manual labor, opened fire on the French fortress. Its defenders, confident the Vietminh would not have artillery, or if they did that it would never survive French counterfire, were stunned. Dien Bien Phu’s airstrip, instantly threatened, soon became altogether useless. That night one of the entrenched camp’s fortified complexes, held by a full battalion of the Foreign Legion, fell to the revolutionaries. A couple of nights later a second strongpoint fell too. General Navarre sent paratroops to reinforce Dien Bien Phu, but it was evident the Vietminh posed a real threat to the entrenched camp. The French would need to withstand a prolonged siege for Navarre to win the battle. Paris waited less than a week before appealing to Washington for help.

General Paul Ely led this mission to the Americans. Chief of the General Staff of National Defense, the French equivalent of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), Ely could answer U.S. questions at the highest level. He landed at New York on March 20 on a commercial airline flight, to be immediately taken aboard a military aircraft and flown to Washington. There he met Paris’s delegate to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Standing Council, General Jean Valluy, who had presided over the beginning of the French war during his time as Indochina commander. Valluy stood alongside Ely’s American opposite number, Admiral Arthur W. Radford, chairman of the JCS. The military leaders began talks that very night at Radford’s quarters in Fort Myers.

Paris knew, even if the Americans did not, that France had reached the end of its tether. But, jealous of their prerogatives, the French were not giving anything away. President Eisenhower needed to convince them that he stood foursquare behind Paris while somehow simultaneously crafting relationships with the Indochinese states the French had created. Suspicious of military aid independently given to the associated states, particularly the Vietnamese, the French erected obstacles wherever possible. But now they were fully extended and could not finance the Vietnamese army—expanding rapidly—without the United States. The French could not even meet their own basic staffing needs and had prevailed on the Americans to lend them mechanics to maintain French combat aircraft in Indochina.

Meanwhile, Eisenhower needed French help on a key European alliance issue. Ambitious force goals set by NATO to meet the threat of Soviet military power could not be achieved without rearming Germany, a measure that aroused dark fears in Paris. French concerns were assuaged by the formula for a so-called European Defense Community, and the treaty creating it was before the French National Assembly for ratification. Once again U.S. diplomacy in Europe posed problems for Southeast Asia policy. The president faced a Gordian knot in this situation.

Politics in the United States had also begun to foreclose options. The controversy over who had “lost” China, which Republicans had emphasized in the 1952 campaign, easily extended to Indochina. Eisenhower, along with John Foster Dulles, his secretary of state, were certainly determined to avoid a repeat. Pundits frequently drew parallels to the Munich crisis before World War II, and any mention of the “Munich analogy” automatically brought certain precepts to mind. The argument was that by attempting a peaceful resolution and making concessions to an aggressive power, the West had invited war rather than avoided it. The Munich analogy posited force as preferable to concession in resolving disputes with an ideological enemy.

In the heat of battle the French took full advantage of every argument. General Ely’s agenda included asking for more bombers and transport planes, parachutes for air supply, extended tours for the U.S. mechanics already working with the French, and other technical aid. The French also wanted guarantees in the event of Chinese intervention. Admiral Radford took that last item and broadened it, suggesting that American aircraft could hit the Vietminh around Dien Bien Phu and neutralize them. This proposal came to be called Operation Vulture.

An American fleet cruised off Indochina. It included two aircraft carriers whose planes could contribute mightily to any attack. Later, when tactical nuclear weapons briefly figured in U.S. planning, the carriers became even more necessary since they carried these munitions. The U.S. Air Force also expected to use its heavy B-29 bombers. Under Radford’s formula, once the French government made a formal request for intervention, these forces could launch a series of strikes on Vietminh positions. Other members of the Joint Chiefs opposed any attack, at least until they rendered written opinions. Then the Air Force submitted a qualified “yes,” and the Navy advocated posturing in such a way as to signal the capabilities of U.S. forces.¹

These events in the spring of 1954 remain poorly understood even five decades later. Most accounts follow the template laid down a few months afterward by reporter Chalmers Roberts, who published an article titled “The Day We Didn’t Go to War.”² Roberts understood that President Eisenhower stood ready to intervene, provided the action came as part of a joint international effort and that the French finally “perfected” the independence of the State of Vietnam. Roberts credits top congressional leaders, meeting with Secretary Dulles and Admiral Radford on April 3, with posing these conditions in a way that created insurmountable problems for the White House. Much subsequent scholarship has centered on identifying Washington’s failed approaches to various allies or the obstacles that supposedly dissuaded Eisenhower.³

In this view, Eisenhower was willing to be led, and either Radford or Dulles seized the initiative. Dulles gave a speech on March 29 calling for “united action,” the clarion call for an international effort, and approached the other powers. Eisenhower briefly considered the intervention, but his doubts began to increase from early April on. The congressional briefing marked a spike in the president’s misgivings, and true reluctance set in after a meeting with the JCS on April 5, where the Army objected that bombing would not be sufficient and that ground forces would have to be sent as well. The French delivered their formal request that day, but with the project already dead. As Ike put it in his 1963 memoir,“there was nothing in these preconditions or in this congressional viewpoint with which I could disagree; my judgment entirely coincided with theirs.”⁴ In interviews in 1964 and 1967 Eisenhower asserted his total opposition to intervention.

But this version of events cannot account for the ferocity of efforts to implement the scheme. First, Eisenhower was never the passive actor portrayed here. He reworked the draft of the “united action” speech himself and inserted wording that strengthened the text.⁵ On April 1 the president convened an off-the-record meeting in the Oval Office, something Ike did only when great events were afoot, and he hinted to outsiders that action in Indochina was forthcoming. He held another Oval Office meeting to prepare for the congressional briefing. Dulles, who phoned the president soon after that meeting, did not interpret its result as scotching the plan, telling Eisenhower, “on the whole it went pretty well.”⁶ In fact, in preparing his own account of these events, Roberts questioned numerous legislators and notes, “Their replies made clear that Congress would, in the end, have done what Eisenhower asked, provided he had asked for it forcefully and explained the facts and their relation to the national interest.”⁷

Meanwhile, President Eisenhower sent a letter to British prime minister Sir Winston Churchill to appeal the British rejection of intervention. Again, he reviewed the text of that letter and, in addition to changing the State Department’s prose, he suggested inserting references to Churchill’s own pre–World War II experiences, as reflected in the British leader’s account of those years, now used to allude to Dien Bien Phu.

Eisenhower’s diaries contain jottings that show his awareness of how the colonialist origin of the Franco-Vietnamese war had hampered the French, both in combat and in their efforts to erect a state that represented a credible noncommunist alternative to the Vietminh. But in the summer of 1953, as Ike considered whether to fund the Navarre Plan, Republican senator Barry Goldwater offered an amendment to the military aid bill that would have made funding contingent on France’s granting full independence to Vietnam and the other associated states. Eisenhower opposed the Goldwater amendment and defeated it. Now, faced with Dien Bien Phu, Eisenhower’s insights on colonialism were reflected palely, if at all, in actual U.S. policy. Instead, Eisenhower used the Munich analogy, explicitly, in his letter to Churchill: “If I may refer again to history; we failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time. That marked the beginning of many years of stark tragedy and desperate peril. May it not be that our nations have learned something from that lesson?”⁸

Despite British opposition—and that of many U.S. military leaders—on April 6 the president ordered officials to focus on obtaining London’s backing plus creating a regional alliance to sustain united action. At a news conference on April 7 Eisenhower posed a stark warning, postulating what became the infamous “Domino Theory.” Referring to the impact the fall of French Indochina would have, Eisenhower said, “You have a row of dominos, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.”⁹ A reporter gave the president a chance to make a forthright declaration rejecting colonialism, but Ike refused it. Instead he responded, “I can’t say that the associated states want independence in the same sense that the United States is independent. I do not know what they want.” His answer undercut the proposition that anticolonialism was anything more than a rhetorical pillar for U.S. policy.¹⁰

During the next several weeks, in separate trips to Europe, both Dulles and Radford did their best to enlist the British. In a notorious episode, Dulles apparently offered to “lend” the French tactical nuclear weapons that might neutralize the Vietminh. Eisenhower had discussed such an action.¹¹ On April 15 Vice President Richard M. Nixon made a speech widely interpreted as a trial balloon for U.S. intervention, saying that it might be time to seize the moment and act to save Asia. Eisenhower subsequently telephoned Nixon and congratulated him. The day Nixon spoke, the secretary of defense ordered the military to prepare necessary plans for action and have them ready by mid-May. Following the Nixon speech, pollsters for the first time measured public opinion on intervention in Indochina, only to find that 68 percent of Americans opposed it, adding public disapproval to political doubts and diplomatic obstacles. Yet the planning continued long past the expiration of the occasion for action, since Dien Bien Phu itself fell on May 7. At the beginning of June Eisenhower still spoke of unilateral U.S. intervention if the Chinese joined the conflict.¹² These were not the actions of a president unalterably opposed to entering the war.¹³

What accounts for Eisenhower’s pursuit of these schemes, despite all obstacles? It is now clear that much more important than congressional doubts was Washington’s desire to avoid a negotiated settlement of the Franco-Vietnamese war at an international conference at Geneva. As a result of the declassification of documents in many countries, it is possible to conclude that Geneva had been seen as a way to settle the Indochina issue. Of course the French were looking for a way out. The Vietminh were tired too, and Vietnamese documents show that Ho Chi Minh and his comrades both anticipated an offer at Geneva and were prepared to settle for a temporary division of their country. Chinese documents show the expectation of a truce based on such a division. Both the Vietnamese and the Chinese anticipated roughly the specific demarcation line that ultimately emerged. British documents also show that America’s closest ally was prepared to accept this outcome.¹⁴

Historian George Herring divined the basic structure of this situation long ago, writing in America’s Longest War that the Eisenhower administration “probably hoped there would be no agreement, and during the first five weeks of the conference it kept alive the prospect of military intervention.”¹⁵ This can now be affirmed from a host of evidence. Those who argue that U.S. actions at the time of Dien Bien Phu were aimed at creating a regional alliance by posturing for intervention either do not deal with this evidence or discount it.¹⁶ Such accounts also typically exaggerate Dulles’s freedom of action. Regional alliance represented a consolation prize, not the primary goal. The real alternatives in the spring of 1954 were U.S. escalation versus acquiescence in a negotiated settlement. The role of alliance lay in buttressing the U.S. position behind and around Indochina after that settlement.

But escalation was not really possible. All U.S. intervention schemes at the time of Dien Bien Phu presupposed that France would continue to fight. The fall of the entrenched camp brought the immediate collapse of the Laniel government (and parliamentary defeat of the European Defense Community treaty). Pierre Mendes-France, Paris’s next prime minister, promised to achieve an agreement or resign. He even set a deadline. Defeated at Dien Bien Phu, the French naturally had a poor negotiating position, equivalent to playing a hand of cards with the two of clubs and the three of diamonds, according to the outgoing foreign minister.¹⁷ The French were finished. As for the United States, Army chief of staff General Matthew B. Ridgway made it abundantly clear to Eisenhower that available forces could not substitute for the French, and Vietnam lacked the port facilities and infrastructure to sustain the required American forces.¹⁸ No alternative to a Geneva settlement actually existed.

The best Eisenhower could manage was a public relations stunt. He awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian award, to Genevieve de Galard Taraube, a French nurse stranded at the entrenched camp when her plane could not take off. She had become known as the “Angel of Dien Bien Phu” for her ministrations to the wounded. Permitted to leave in a casualty evacuation at the end of the battle, Galard came to America. In July she was treated to a ticker-tape parade in New York City attended by a quarter million people, given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Eisenhower, and recognized by the House of Representatives while she sat in its gallery.

The Dien Bien Phu crisis took place at a time when American presidents still had the ability to chart an independent course in Vietnam. Eisenhower could have walked away from the Navarre Plan. He did not. In the spring of 1954 Ike could have supported a negotiated settlement. He did not do that either. Until intervention became an issue, there had been no significant public opinion on Indochina. Indeed, by pressing the actions he did, President Eisenhower contributed mightily to the creation of American opinion on Southeast Asia. Apart from anything else, it can be argued that U.S. presidents would have retained greater freedom of choice for a longer time had there never been a scheme to intervene in Indochina at this time.

In addition, the Geneva settlement afforded the United States the opportunity for a graceful exit from the morass. Although the United States had opened relations with the states of Indochina, its primary commitment had been to the French. Why did Washington keep its shoulder to the wheel? Economic reasons have to be judged secondary. The emergent Vietnam, a minor producer of a few raw materials, would lack economic importance until the discovery of offshore oil deposits decades later. Nor were the Indochinese nations lucrative markets for American products. The United States sought no bases, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had argued that Indochina was devoid of important strategic objectives, derailing another possible rationale. On the geostrategic plane, President Eisenhower had some sympathy for the Domino Theory, but this served primarily as justification, not cause. After Geneva there arose the chance to take over from the French and “do it right,” which perhaps had a certain psychological importance, but a minor one. The anticommunism of the State of Vietnam fit with the U.S. international stance—again, a relatively minor consideration. The clearest way in which supporting Vietnam could serve U.S. objectives lay in its potential contribution to isolating communist China. Eisenhower’s commitment to combating China—a Cold War consideration—was the inevitable element in policy, support for South Vietnam the contingent one. Once Dwight D. Eisenhower made that choice, reversing it became increasingly difficult for him and virtually impossible for his successors. Vietnam acquired inevitability.

Many who would play crucial roles in the Vietnam war were present at this creation and drew lessons from it. That included every man who would inhabit the Oval Office. John F. Kennedy was the junior senator from Massachusetts. Lyndon B. Johnson, the Senate minority leader, was the senior senator from Texas. The vice president, of course, was Richard M. Nixon. And Gerald R. Ford had represented Michigan’s Fifth District in the House of Representatives since 1948. It is important to ask what Dien Bien Phu and Geneva meant to them. Decisions those presidents made cannot be properly understood without appreciating their positions, the lessons they drew, or the commitments they made during this crisis.

Kennedy takes pride of place, since he would be Eisenhower’s immediate successor. By 1954 John Fitzgerald Kennedy at least knew something about Vietnam. As a fresh-faced, recently minted congressman, Kennedy had visited Indochina several years earlier, at the height of France’s effort to energize the nationalists without endowing them with much in the way of sovereignty. JFK traveled the land for several weeks, picking up hints of Vietnamese frustration plus a bill of particulars from U.S. economic aid chief Edmund Gullion, whom Marshal DeLattre, the French commander at the time, regarded as a virtual enemy. Kennedy was impressed that even in Saigon, where the French claimed to have broken Vietminh power, the sound of gunfire punctuated the night. His brother Bobby believed the trip affected JFK greatly.

Upon his return to the States, Kennedy made a couple of speeches on Indochina, ones that staked out a sophisticated position on nationalism, recognized the French position as colonialist, and openly marked the pro-French regime as a puppet government. Kennedy spoke out against imposing Western values and institutions and feared that Americans were being identified too closely with the French. In 1952 Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas introduced Kennedy and Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, who had an abiding interest in Asia, to a fifty-one-year-old Vietnamese nationalist, Ngo Dinh Diem. JFK identified with Diem, who was Catholic like himself, and saw him as representative of those who had not been tainted by ties to the French. A year later, during the fight over Goldwater’s aid-for-independence condition on U.S. support, Kennedy, now a senator, offered amendments to attract Democratic backing for the initiative. When JFK feared that Eisenhower was maneuvering for war, he gave another speech extolling the nationalist alternative. Kennedy stood ready to lend weight to such an initiative. One appeared soon enough.

Lyndon Baines Johnson has been misrepresented in the standard version of the 1954 crisis. Because that narrative exaggerates congressional objections to U.S. intervention and ignores the tradition of a bipartisan foreign policy that held sway in 1954, the questions Johnson raised are interpreted as efforts to stymie the plan. But LBJ was minority leader in the Senate and expected to work with the Eisenhower team in securing bipartisan support for whatever the president chose to do. Johnson asked Dulles about the allies who had been lined up for U.S. intervention—a question LBJ knew would be asked by senators, and one that had been vital in the Korean war, when Johnson himself had raised it during the Truman-MacArthur controversy over extending that conflict to China. Immediately after the Dulles-Radford briefing in April 1954, Senator Johnson took the temperature of his Democratic colleagues on intervention, and he reported those results to the White House. Equally important is what LBJ did not say: he never spoke out against the intervention scheme. In fact, the day after the April briefing, LBJ used the fact of the Indochina war, which some feared might affect world tin supplies, as a reason to allocate federal funds to keep open a tin smelter in Texas—one of his few public speeches referring to the crisis.

Lyndon Johnson’s position was not the one historians often attribute to him. Less publicly but quite openly, Johnson’s newsletters to his Texas constituents consistently supported U.S. intervention, repeatedly making the case for it. The April 3 meeting was reflected in LBJ’s newsletter of the fifteenth, which advised that in Indochina “we are at the crossroads” and spoke of the need for “hard decisions—the kind that will tax our determination and willpower.” He warned that the fall of Indochina “would be disastrous to all our plans in Asia”—language very close to what Richard Nixon used in his trial balloon speech the same day. On the ally question—Johnson’s supposed objection to intervention—he noted, “Shall we continue without clear assurances that others will join us? Or shall we withdraw altogether and fall back upon the concept of Fortress America?” LBJ’s answer was implicit. He even raised the specter of falling dominos, writing, “ultimately, we might be driven out of the Pacific itself!” The punctuation was Johnson’s.¹⁹

This is but one example. Johnson’s newsletters went out twice a month. From that day through the conclusion of the Geneva conference, LBJ’s newsletters repeatedly framed intervention from the perspective of the need to act. Even after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, which the senator conceded was a major setback, he thundered, “we are ready at any time to cooperate in the preservation of our country.” Again, the emphasis was LBJ’s. His stance is all the more significant because Johnson was bucking his constituency. A survey of letters written by Texas voters reveals that the overwhelming majority of LBJ’s constituents rejected intervention. Yet even after Dien Bien Phu, Johnson was ready to go for broke.

As vice president, Richard Nixon actually sat in Eisenhower’s councils. He favored intervention and did what he could to bring it about. Except for Admiral Radford, Nixon was the only one of Eisenhower’s advisers who had actually been to Indochina, visiting during the early implementation of the Navarre Plan. He and Eisenhower privately discussed giving the French atomic bombs to save Dien Bien Phu, and Nixon complained in his diary when Ike’s determination seemed to flag. The lessons Nixon drew from the crisis concerned how difficult it was to get the U.S. military to take decisive action, the value of generating uncertainty in the mind of an adversary, and the potential of relying on naval and air forces. These too would be reflected in due course in Nixon’s own administration.²⁰

Gerald R. Ford left the fewest tracks. Congress never voted or held a floor debate on Dien Bien Phu, and Ford had little opportunity to be heard. But ten years later, at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin crisis—a manufactured rather than a real one—Ford was quick to demand that the United States take command, not merely advise the Saigon government. His aggressive response suggests that Ford saw the 1954 crisis as a missed opportunity.²¹

Aside from those who would be president, many other people destined for important roles in America’s Vietnam tragedy observed Dien Bien Phu from their own vantage points, a number of them quite closely. Ngo Dinh Diem had spent more than two years in America, mostly at Maryknoll seminaries in Lakewood, New Jersey, and Yonkers, New York. He left in the spring of 1953 for a cloister in Belgium but commuted frequently to Paris, where he saw events unfold from the French side, close to the Vietnamese expatriate community and to Emperor Bao Dai at Cannes. Dean Rusk, Truman’s assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, headed a foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation. Sugar magnate and occasional diplomat Ellsworth Bunker watched from the humanitarian perspective of the American Red Cross, which he headed and which might face a relief mission in Indochina.

Many key field commanders of the American war had front-row seats. William C. Westmoreland, then a brigadier general, was secretary to General Ridgway’s staff, whose intervention studies had so effectively torpedoed Eisenhower’s schemes. Also there was Major General James M. Gavin, who came away with a healthy skepticism. Frederick C. Weyand, who would be Army chief of staff when the American war ended, served as military assistant to the secretary of the Army, whose memos to Pentagon chiefs solidly backed Ridgway. General Maxwell D. Taylor headed the U.S. Eighth Army in Korea, which would have furnished the bulk of forces for any move in Indochina. Bruce Palmer, a lieutenant colonel in Europe, had just completed a tour as aide to General Alfred Gruenther, to whom he remained close and who corresponded from Paris with another good friend—Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, a Navy captain, was senior operations staffer for the Pacific Fleet, controlling the naval forces that would have had a primary role in Operation Vulture.

Others inhabited the world of the military war colleges, all of which closely monitored U.S. strategy. They included Army great Creighton V. Abrams and Marine officer Robert E. Cushman Jr., who would become national security adviser to Vice President Nixon. Way down the line, Dien Bien Phu affected even Daniel Ellsberg, then a junior officer in training to lead a Marine platoon. His drill sergeant told him they had better clean their rifles, as they could expect to deploy to Indochina very soon.

The first important rift among Americans over Vietnam developed not when the veterans marched on Washington but when a president and his senior commanders clashed at the time of Dien Bien Phu. The schemes of 1954 marked the onset of differences over the desirable versus the possible within Washington’s inner sanctum. General Ridgway and those who sided with him pointed to a lack of capability for the sweeping actions others wanted. Eisenhower, whose policy was to reduce conventional military power under his “New Look” strategy, had helped create those shortfalls. But the president nevertheless signaled his determination to call the shots—he effectively fired Ridgway a year later by refusing to extend the general’s term as Army chief of staff.²² With the Geneva conference the political-military cleavage became muted, but it was not resolved. Once the conflict escalated, these differences returned to help shape the American war.

Geneva resulted in a pair of agreements. One, directly between the French and the Vietminh, set a cease-fire; provided for a “Provisional Military Demarcation Line” plus a demilitarized zone, roughly across the seventeenth parallel of latitude; created two “regroupment zones,” one each in North and South Vietnam; and laid down strictures prohibiting the introduction of foreign troops or bases, mandating a French withdrawal from North Vietnam and an exchange of prisoners, plus creating an International Commission for Supervision and Control to monitor those provisions. The document expected but did not detail an election to reunify Vietnam. The second piece of the framework was a final declaration by most of the participants—a consensus document not formally signed or voted on—that recognized the agreement and stipulated “general elections will be held in July 1956, under the supervision of an international commission,” with arrangements to be made by consultations between “the competent representative authorities” of the two regroupment zones in North and South Vietnam.²³

Several points require comment. First is the fact that the agreements provided for an election to reunite Vietnam under a single government. Second—an element that would be seized on in subsequent years to claim the legitimacy of continued warfare—the main territorial provisions were contained in the cease-fire agreement between the French and Vietminh military, not in the final declaration among the nation-states. Third, the promise of elections existed in a declaration that lacked the force of an international treaty. These arguments are weakened by the fact that the cease-fire document had been the product of official French and Vietnamese military negotiators duly delegated by their respective governments, thus indeed endowing it with international status. Also, although the final declaration contained the major provisions for an election, the existence of that arrangement had been explicitly recognized by language in the cease-fire agreement.

Equally important, nowhere did Geneva create “nations” in North and South Vietnam. Rather, the entities were specifically created as “regroupment zones,” and national status was explicitly denied them. They were to be reunited by a political process and then become a nation. Most legal arguments Washington adduced to justify its war would be founded on an assertion that South Vietnam was a nation-state with full sovereign rights. This was simply not true. Rather than belabor that point, it is better to note that once the Vietnam war became controversial, its shaky legal basis furnished a ready objection for those who protested it.

The third pillar in justifying the war was the regional alliance called the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). This too existed because of Dien Bien Phu—it was the result of the Eisenhower-Dulles push for united action. In the heat of crisis there had been no possibility of lining up allies, but over a longer time and without pressure for intervention, Dulles succeeded in cobbling together a league of sorts. But SEATO had little in common with the NATO alliance on which it was modeled. It had no standing forces other than staff committees, and the treaty, signed at Manila in late 1954, contained no obligation to take action beyond considering appeals for help. Moreover, the Geneva agreements prohibited the two Vietnams from belonging to alliances, so South Vietnam was not a member. In a device too clever by half, Dulles arranged for the South, run by a government in Saigon, to be a SEATO “protocol” state. That turned out to be a completely ambiguous position affording even less standing to demand collective action. Justifications for war based on alleged SEATO obligations remained hollow ones.

Washington could not abide the Geneva agreements. Its reticence became one reason the conference’s final declaration did not take the form of a treaty. Dulles attended the opening of the meeting but then withdrew, leaving U.S. participation to subordinates. He used his presence in Europe to make one last push for intervention and then left, never to return. Chester L. Cooper, a Central Intelligence Agency officer and one of about 200 on the U.S. delegation, notes, “It was no secret, even within the rank and file of the American delegation, that President Eisenhower and his secretary of state had little taste for what was in store.”²⁴ But as much as Washington wished to forestall a communist victory in the Far East, it had no possibility of doing so. Once the negotiations came up with the formula of a demarcation line, the subsequent, protracted talks all centered on where to put it. American negotiators had some influence on provisions for an international control commission, but that was about it.

The Eisenhower-Dulles response to diplomatic progress was to disassociate the United States from the resulting agreement. When the Geneva negotiations were finalized, Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith made a unilateral statement in behalf of the United States. That declaration took note of the agreements, promised that the United States would not threaten or use force to “disturb” them, asserted support for the unity of divided states through “free elections, supervised by the United Nations,” backed the State of Vietnam, and said that the United States would view any violation “as seriously threatening international peace and security.”²⁵

This face-saving device of 1954, like other aspects of this whole situation, would come back to bite. Recognizing the Geneva agreements conceded their international legal significance. The solemn vow not to disturb their implementation would be broken by U.S. subversion of reunification elections, as will be seen. And American use of force in Southeast Asia in the 1960s constituted the very sort of violation the Eisenhower administration had publicly renounced. Contrary to later apologists, the United States did indeed make promises at Geneva that it then broke, and its declaration did not nullify the agreements or justify war. Worse, legal arguments for war that were based on Geneva put the United States in a position of relying on agreements that Washington had abstained from and had been the first to breach. The attempted evasion became more grist for the mill of controversy.

Also disassociating itself from the Geneva agreements was the State of Vietnam. Only at this point—the very nadir of their military fortunes—did the French finally “perfect” the Vietnamese political entity soon known as South Vietnam. By treaty, Paris recognized the State of Vietnam as fully independent and sovereign on May 29; another, coupled treaty a few days later associated the State of Vietnam with the French Union. In fact, however, South Vietnam did not gain sovereignty. For one thing, France had previously recognized another state—the Democratic Republic of Vietnam—occupying the same territory. In addition, these treaties were only initialed; they were never signed or ratified by either the Republic of France or the State of Vietnam. As legal instruments they were worthless. South Vietnam was not a country.

Meanwhile, Emperor Bao Dai dismissed his government’s cabinet after Dien Bien Phu and sought a more credible nationalist, appointing Ngo Dinh Diem the new prime minister. Bao Dai met Diem at his villa in Cannes on June 18, and the latter arrived in Saigon on the twenty-sixth. From the beginning Diem tried to act as if his state possessed the legal status it lacked, starting with forging an independent policy for Geneva. Diem’s foreign minister rejected the creation of zones but presented a full position only on July 19, when the agreements had already assumed final form. His statements at the last session of the conference solemnly protested key aspects and the fact that Saigon’s views had not been incorporated; he finished by asserting that his government “reserves for itself complete liberty of action.”²⁶ Diem denounced the agreements in similar terms the day after the Geneva conference ended.²⁷

Dwight D. Eisenhower’s actions during the year that followed Dien Bien Phu leave little doubt that he felt intense guilt in the wake of the collapse of his intervention schemes. The crisis had the effect of harnessing American power in the service of a nascent South Vietnamese state. It also pitted the United States against France in a competition for influence in the new Saigon. The spring and summer of 1954 proved crucial to the subsequent American experience in Vietnam.

The Dien Bien Phu crisis and its aftermath also brought into play most of the characters and factors that later operated in the Southeast Asian conflict. The legal framework of Geneva and the sunset of French control; the alliance structure, such as it was; the American commitment to action; the beginnings of cleavage between U.S. political and military leaders; and the preconditioning of the individuals who would serve as president of the United States throughout the war—all were the products of Dien Bien Phu. The issues would play out over years of agony, and some ecstasy, starting right in Saigon.