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By Root 1087 0

to strengthen France as the linchpin in Western Europe against Soviet expansion, which, as victory approached, had become the dominant concern in Washington. Until this time Roosevelt’s disgust with colonialism and his intention to see it eliminated in Asia had been firm (and a cause of basic dispute with Britain). He believed French misrule of Indochina represented colonialism in its worst form. Indochina “should not go back to France,” he told Secretary of State Cordell Hull in January 1943; “the case is perfectly clear. France has had the country—thirty million inhabitants—for nearly a hundred years and the people are worse off than they were at the beginning. [They] are entitled to something better than that.”

The President “has been more outspoken to me on that subject,” Churchill informed Anthony Eden, “than on any other colonial matter, and I imagine that it is one of his principal war aims to liberate Indochina from France.” Indeed it was. At the Cairo Conference in 1943, the President’s plans for Indochina made emphatic capital letters in General Stilwell’s diary: “NOT TO GO BACK TO FRANCE!” Roosevelt proposed trusteeship “for 25 years or so till we put them on their feet, just like the Philippines.” The idea thoroughly alarmed the British and evoked no interest from a former ruler of Vietnam, China. “I asked Chiang Kai-shek if he wanted Indochina,” Roosevelt told General Stilwell, “and he said point blank ‘Under no circumstances!’ Just like that—‘Under no circumstances!’ ”

The possibility of self-rule seems not to have occurred to Roosevelt, although Vietnam—the nation uniting Cochin China, Annam and Tonkin—had before the advent of the French been an independent kingdom with a long devotion to self-government in its many struggles against Chinese rule. This deficiency in Roosevelt’s view of the problem was typical of the prevailing attitude toward subject peoples at the time. Regardless of their history, they were not considered “ready” for self-rule until prepared for it under Western tutelage.

The British were adamantly opposed to trusteeship as a “bad precedent” for their own return to India, Burma and Malaya, and Roosevelt did not insist. He was not eager to add another controversy to the problem of India, which made Churchill rave every time the President raised it. Thereafter, with liberated France emerging in 1944 under an implacable Charles de Gaulle and insisting on her “right” of return, and with China as a trustee ruled out by her own now too obvious frailties, the President did not know what to do.

International trusteeship slowly collapsed from unpopularity. Roosevelt’s military advisers disliked it because they felt it might jeopardize United States freedom of control over former Japanese islands as naval bases. Europeanists of the State Department, always pro-French, thoroughly adopted the premise of French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault that unless there was “whole-hearted cooperation with France,” a Soviet-dominated Europe would threaten “Western civilization.” Cooperation, as viewed by the Europeanists, meant meeting French demands. On the other hand, their colleagues of the Far East (later the Southeast Asia) desk were urging that the goal of American policy should be eventual independence after some form of interim government which could “teach” the Vietnamese “to resume the responsibilities of self-government.”

In the struggle of policies, the future of Asians could not weigh against the Soviet shadow looming over Europe. In August 1944, at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference on post-war organization, the United States proposal for the colonies made no mention of future independence and offered only a weak-kneed trusteeship to be arranged with the “voluntary” consent of the former colonial power.

Already Indochina was beginning to present the recalcitrance to solution that would only deepen over the next thirty years. During the war, by arrangement with the Japanese conquerors of Indochina and the Vichy government, the French Colonial administration with its armed forces and civilian colonists