The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [151]
The snub was not given in ignorance of conditions in Vietnam. A report in October by Arthur Hale, of the United States Information Service in Hanoi, made it apparent that French promises of reform and some vague shape of autonomy, which American policy counted on, were not going to satisfy. The people wanted the French out. Posters crying “Independence or Death!” in all towns and villages of the north “scream at the passerby from every wall and window.” Communist influence was not concealed; the flag of the Provisional Government resembled the Soviet flag, Marxist pamphlets lay on official desks, but the same might be said for American influence. The promise to the Philippines was a constant theme, and a vigorous enthusiasm was felt for American prowess in the war and for American productive capacity and technical and social progress. Given, however, the lack of any American response to the Viet-Minh and such incidents “as the recent shipment of French troops to Saigon in American vessels,” the goodwill had faded. Hale’s report too was prophetic: if the French overcome the Provisional Government, “it can be assumed as a certainty that the movement for independence will not die.” The certainty was there at the start.
Other observers concurred. The French might take the cities in the north, wrote a correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor, “but it is extremely doubtful if they will ever be able to put down the independence movement as a whole. They have not enough troops to root out every guerrilla band in the north and they have shown little capacity to cope with guerrilla fighting.”
Asked by the State Department for an evaluation of American prestige in Asia, which it suspected was “seriously deteriorating,” Charles Yost, political officer in Bangkok and a future Ambassador to the UN, confirmed the Department’s impression, and he too cited the use of American vessels to transport French troops and “the use of American equipment by these troops.” Goodwill toward America as the champion of subject peoples had been very great after the war, but American failure to support the nationalist movement “does not seem likely to contribute to long-term stability in Southeast Asia.” The restoration of colonial regimes, Yost warned, was unsuited to existing conditions “and cannot for that reason long be maintained except by force.”
That American policy nevertheless supported the French effort was a choice of the more compelling necessity over what seemed a lesser one. George Marshall as Secretary of State acknowledged the existence of “dangerously outmoded colonial outlook and methods in the area,” but “on the other hand … we are not interested in seeing colonial empire administrations supplanted by philosophy and political organizations emanating from and controlled by Kremlin.” This was the crux. The French peppered Washington with “proof” of Ho Chi Minh’s contacts with Moscow, and Dean Acheson, Under-Secretary of State, was in no doubt. “Keep in mind,” he cabled Abbot Low Moffat, chief for Southeast Asia affairs, who went to Hanoi in December 1946, “Ho’s clear record as agent international communism, absence evidence recantation.”
Moffat, a warm partisan of the Asian cause, reported that in conversation Ho had disclaimed Communism as his aim, saying that if he could secure independence, that was enough for his lifetime. “Perhaps,” he had added wryly, “fifty years from now the United States will be Communist and then Vietnam can be also.” Moffat concluded that the group in charge of Vietnam “are at this stage nationalist first” and an effective nationalist state must precede a Communist state, which as an objective “must for the time being be secondary.” Whether he was deluded history cannot answer, for who can be certain that, at the time Ho was seeking American support, the development of the Democratic Republic