The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [156]
A new voice, that of Dean Rusk, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, who was to prove the most unwavering, the most convinced, the most sincere, the most rigid and the longest-lasting of all the policy-makers on Vietnam, found a way to put Vietnam’s struggle for independence, the source of so much American ambivalence, in a new light. The issue, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was not French colonialism but whether the people of Vietnam were to be “absorbed by force into a new colonialism of a Soviet Communist empire.” The Viet-Minh were a “tool of the Politburo” and therefore “part of an international war.”
By these arguments the American government convinced itself that it was a vital American interest to keep Indochina out of the Communist orbit and that therefore French victory in Indochina, whether colonial or not, was “essential to the security of the free world.” (The question of what France was fighting for if Vietnam was indeed to be “independent” was not discussed.) The word passed to the public in a New York Times editorial that proclaimed, “It should now be clear to all Americans that France is holding a front-line section of great importance to the whole free world.” While there was no impulse to send American troops, the United States was determined to “save for the West the Indochinese rice bowl, the strategic position, the prestige that could be shaken throughout Southeast Asia and all the way to Tunisia and Morocco.” The NSC at this time drew a prospect of even Japan succumbing if it were cut off from the rubber and tin and oil of Malaya and Indonesia and its rice imports from Burma and Thailand.
The process of self-hypnosis came to its logical conclusion: if the preservation of Indochina from Communist control was indeed so vital to American interest, should we not be actively engaged in its defense? Armed intervention, given the fear that it might precipitate a Chinese military response as it had in Korea, aroused no eagerness in the American military establishment. “No land war in Asia” was an old and trusted dogma in the Army. Cautionary voices were not lacking. Back in 1950, at the time of China’s intervention in Korea, a State Department memorandum by John Ohly, Deputy Director in the Office of Mutual Defense Assistance, had suggested the advisability of taking a second look at where we were going in Indochina. Not only might we fail, wasting resources in the process, but we were moving toward a point when our responsibilities would “tend to supplant rather than complement the French,” and we would become a scapegoat for the French and be sucked into direct intervention. “These situations have a way of snowballing,” Ohly concluded. As is the fate of so many prescient memoranda, his counsel made no impact on, if it ever reached, the upper echelon but lay silently in the files while history validated its every word.
Before it went out of office, the Truman Administration adopted a policy paper by NSC which recommended, in the event of overt Chinese intervention in Indochina, naval and air action by the United States in support of the French and against targets on the Chinese mainland but made no mention of land forces.
The advent of the Republicans under General Eisenhower in the election of 1952 brought in an Administration pushed from the right by extremists of anti-Communism and the China Lobby. Opinions of the Lobby were epitomized in a remark of the new