The Best and the Brightest (68 page)

Thus even the recognition of Bao Dai was neutralized, but the American aid to the French cause would come and come quickly. A follow-up mission was appointed by Acheson, headed by a California publisher named Robert Allen Griffin. Its purpose was to determine whether or not to send arms and other military equipment to the French. In Washington, Butterworth, who had consistently fought this kind of thinking, sensed that this was Acheson’s way of signaling an end to an unwanted policy. It was, he thought, an old Department way of switching policies while the same men were still there—send an independent commission, with the advance knowledge that the result would be a new line. A separate survey. A new position. Butterworth was finishing up his tour, anyway. He who had come in so clean and fresh because John Carter Vincent had taken too much heat had now taken too much heat himself. Just as there had been trouble getting Vincent an ambassadorial post which required Senate confirmation, Butterworth would have the same problem: when the Department wanted to send him to Sweden as ambassador, it had to cancel this for a lesser position because of Senate pressures.

Not surprisingly, the Griffin mission found that the Communist threat to Indochina was so acute that it advised the State Department to concentrate on short-range assistance in order to help the French achieve immediate political and military stability. It was not surprising because the reasoning was different: the given was not whether it was wise to aid the French, whether this was the right side or not, but whether the French needed the aid. Of course the French said they needed the aid. Thus began a major new policy of aid to the French in this colonial war, a policy by which the United States would eventually almost completely underwrite the costs, $2 billion worth, and would by 1954 be more eager to have the French continue fighting than Paris was.

There was, however, still one small detail to be taken care of, the question of whether the military equipment and economic aid would be channeled through the French or through the Bao Dai government. The French had been suspicious of American intentions from the start, believing that the Americans were eager to replace them in Saigon. Paris was filled with rumors to this effect. Would the Griffin mission mean that? In March 1950, while the Griffin mission was on its way home, Lieutenant General Marcel Le Carpentier, the French commander in Indochina, said in a statement filled with the feeling of the time (and with a good deal of insight into why the French lost): “I will never agree to equipment being given directly to the Vietnamese. If this is done I would resign within twenty-four hours. The Vietnamese have no generals, no colonels, no military organization that could effectively utilize the equipment. It would all be wasted, and in China the United States has had enough of that.” (The French of course needed the aid because they were being beaten by Vietnamese.)

Le Carpentier would have no problem; as it always did in conflicts between its anticolonialism and its anti-Communism, the United States backed down completely. The equipment arrived, through the auspices of the French; the Vietnamese were on the sidelines, a simple people, not capable of producing colonels and generals. So Griffin recommended that we give military aid; the only question now was, With what kind of leverage? Acheson had already talked with the Philippine statesman Carlos Romulo, one of the few Asians who was considered respectable both in Washington and in Asia, and Romulo warned him that the trouble with giving the French aid was that the moment it was done, you lost all leverage and influence.

In May 1950 Acheson made his decision; again it was not based upon what was good for the Vietnamese or what the needs were on the scene. It was a dual decision; it reflected, first, the general intensifying of the Cold War, and the consequent greater inability to make a distinction between any two parts of the Communist world; second, and perhaps more important in the case of Acheson, it was, like the original Potsdam agreement, a reflection of Indochina as a peripheral area, unimportant in terms of the real world and relationships with European allies. At this time the Americans, who wanted to stabilize Europe with a new and powerful pro-Western and anti-Communist anchor on the Continent, were pushing to revive the West German economy. The British were uneasy about American intentions, and the French were openly recalcitrant, fearing, as they had good reason to, the specter of German economic might and muscle, followed inevitably by German political might and muscle, and fearing this at least as much as they did the specter of international Communism. Then Robert Schuman, one of the great Europeanists of the French government, came up with a plan which would regulate European production of coal and steel under an ultranational regulatory body, and which would let the Germans have far greater coal and steel production. Thus the French had come around to the American demands for European protection and a rebuilding of the West German economy. But there was to be a sweetener. The French economy was troubled, the defense bill for the prolonged and distant war was mounting all the time; they could no longer afford it, and they needed American help for Indochina. On May 7, 1950, the day when Acheson learned of the Schuman Plan, he also agreed to give military aid for the war. It was a quid pro quo decision, though it was not announced as such (later Acheson admitted privately to friends that it was). The desire to strengthen Western Europe against the Communists would see us strengthening a Western nation in a colonial war.

The next day it was announced that the United States would give aid; it was a turning point in the postwar history of American policy; we would begin to finance a colonial war. But if the war was to be financed, then it could no longer be known as a colonial war, but as a war of freedom against Communists. Freedom of speech for the Vietnamese suddenly became an issue. In the past the State Department’s statements on Indochina had carefully abstained from defining the war as the French defined it; now, that too would change. On May 8, after making his deal with Schuman, Acheson announced: “The United States Government, convinced that neither national independence nor democratic evolution exists in any area dominated by Soviet imperialism, considers the situation to be such as to warrant its according economic aid and military equipment to the Associated States of Indochina and France in order to assist them in restoring stability and permitting these states to pursue their peaceful and democratic development.”

Stability,
that was the key word, to bring stability to that land, though stability as we defined it was colonialism as the Vietnamese defined it. Freedom to them was instability and revolution. Just as the policy had gotten turned around, so too had the words; as our policy had become an aberration, so too, and this was to continue for the next twenty years, our language. Yet the Acheson decision did not stand out as something terrible, an obvious turning point; rather, it was clearly part of the times and part of an era, the fifties were not a time for subtleties and distinctions. The day after the decision was announced, the
New York Times
commented editorially: “We cannot ask France to sacrifice for Indochina, merely then to give it up. Neither can we dictate terms to France, because we are not prepared to step in. Indochina is critical—if it falls, all of Southeast Asia will be in mortal peril.” All of this, of course, was before Korea.

Whatever desire to discern distinctions in the Communist world existed in June 1950 (and they had been fast diminishing) ended on June 25, when the North Koreans crossed the border to the South. Two days later Truman announced the American response, and the Korean War was on. Eventually China (because of American miscalculation) entered the war, and all of this made Vietnam totally and definitively part of the great global struggle. Immediately after the start of the Korean War, Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk made a brief list of steps to be taken in Asia; one of the priorities was a sharp increase in military aid to the French. In Washington, American statements reflected French statements; Acheson, who had once seen Ho as something of a nationalist, now was a hard-liner on the war. After Senators Homer Ferguson and Theodore Green made a trip through Asia they returned deeply concerned about what was happening there. They found that wherever they went, most people thought the Americans were supporting a colonial war, which was very damaging to the American reputation for being on the right side and against colonialism. Acheson moved to reassure the senators: they had it all wrong, they had completely misunderstood. It was not nationalism which was being fought there, he told them, it was Communism. The two were incompatible; you cannot be both a Communist and a nationalist. It was all very simple, he said.

It was a marvelous and definitive answer, reflecting the American capacity, and particularly the Achesonian capacity, to see things through our eyes rather than through anyone else’s. Since the situation was clear to Acheson, it should also be clear to the Vietnamese. That self-assurance which blinded him here always served him well against his critics; he did not lack for confidence. But there was a touch of genuine naÏveté about the world. In 1951 Acheson met with Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the famed French commander of the Indochina forces, a French MacArthur. De Lattre explained some of the problems of fighting an elusive enemy in a war without fronts. Then he told Acheson that his greatest need was to train Vietnamese officers, since the Vietnamese would not fight under French officers. Acheson in turn grandly suggested that American officers do the training, explaining that the United States had demonstrated in Korea that it knew how to train Asian officers and the French didn’t. The wars, he thought, and the problems, were the same.

One important minority voice was raised in the State Department at the time—George Kennan’s. There was an element of irony in his dissent, because it was his cables from Moscow toward the end of the war which had fascinated James Forrestal and which had led to a marked escalation in his career and reputation. But Kennan had resented the way his ideas had been used; as American foreign policy hardened after the war, he had a feeling that his ideas were being exploited by his superiors, one element of a broad outline of thinking plucked out by them for their purposes, which were not necessarily his; he was outlining a very complicated thing, and they were not interested in the complications. Kennan had little illusion about Soviet postwar intentions. He knew they would make certain moves which they considered in their national interest, and that we should be prepared for these moves. But he had not foreseen and did not want the spiraling tensions and arms race as the Cold War mounted, and by 1948 he had become the highest-ranking dissenter on what he termed the increasing militarization of American foreign policy. He had dissented on NATO, since, as far as he was concerned, the Marshall Plan was sufficient; Soviet penetration of Western countries, he felt, if it came at all, would come from within, it would not come in the form of Soviet tanks rolling across France. When the Korean War broke out he argued with Acheson that this was not a Soviet attack, but that almost surely the Soviets regarded this as a Korean civil conflict.

By 1950 Kennan had become very unhappy with the growth of the military influence in American foreign policy, and the instinct to have a simplistic approach toward the Communists as one great monolith; and he was uneasy with the embryonic attempts to do in Asia what we had done in Europe. As American involvement in Indochina deepened, he had written a long memo to Acheson saying that the French could not win in Indochina nor could the Americans replace them and win, and that we were now, whether we realized it or not, on our way toward taking their place. He wrote that if the Vietminh won, it would look like a Communist takeover at first, but eventually the local forces would find their own level, and the indigenous people would run things in their own way. Nationalism would inevitably express itself in hundreds of ways, and the people would not be dominated by Moscow or Peking. What he was really saying was that this was nature taking its course, a step in the national evolution of the people.

It was not a position which Kennan had come to easily, but he had been talked into it by a member of his staff at the Policy Planning Council, none other than John Paton Davies, already being hounded for his China prophecies. Kennan, basically a Europeanist like the others, had been against the idea of coming to terms with the Vietminh, but Davies had turned him around. Davies insisted that American policy makers had to get out of the habit of looking at Communism as a moral issue. Rather, he said, when a local indigenous force for a variety of reasons has a chance to form an insurgency, the metropolitan government would not be able to defeat it. Davies was extremely skeptical of the American capacity to put trained people into the field to deal with the complexity of these problems, having seen Americans failing at the same thing in China. Davies convinced Kennan that there was no real future for the West in areas like this, and yet the dangers were not so real as they seemed. The local forces, for example, would have to sell the same raw material to the West that they had in the past. It was, of course, similar to Davies’ thinking on China, which was that the Chiang government was never much of a friend, it was too Chinese; as such it inevitably had built-in conflicts with us, and thus, similarly, the Mao government could never be much of a friend to Moscow. The best thing we could do in situations like this was to deal with the realities and hope for the best; many of these forces were simply outside our control, and by trying to control them we could not affect them but might, in fact, turn them against us.