The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [158]
Stalin’s death in March 1953 was the event that opened a path to the Geneva Conference of 1954 and an international settlement of the war in Indochina. Taut confrontation in Europe loosened when the new Russian premier, Georgi Malenkov, used the funeral oration to speak of the need for “peaceful coexistence.” Foreign Minister Molotov followed with overtures toward a conference of the powers. President Eisenhower responded, much to Dulles’ distaste, with a speech welcoming signs of détente and expressing Americans’ desire, once an “honorable armistice” was concluded in Korea, for “a peace that is true and total” throughout Asia and the world. Pravda and lzvestia paid him the compliment of printing the speech verbatim. Dulles had attempted to write into it a condition linking American agreement to a Korean armistice dependent on the Kremlin’s explicit promise to end the Viet-Minh’s rebellion against the French; he was making his usual assumption that Moscow pulled the operative strings in Hanoi. In this case his suggestion did not prevail, but his premise of the Soviet Union as an omnipotent master criminal of world conspiracy never wavered.
Conclusion of the Korean armistice in July 1953 had raised a new alarm that China might transfer its forces to aid a Communist victory in Vietnam. The Viet-Minh had succeeded in opening supply lines to China and they were receiving fuel and ammunition that had risen from a trickle of ten tons a month to more than 500 tons a month. The option of American military intervention was now intensively debated in the government. As the arm that would bear the burden of land war, and sullen from the experience of limited war in Korea, the Army did not want to fight under such restrictions again. The Plans Division of the General Staff struck the central issue when it asked for a “re-evaluation of the importance of Indochina and Southeast Asia in relation to the possible cost of saving it.” The same concern had once worried Lord Barrington when he argued that if Britain made war on its colonies, “the contest will cost us more than we can ever gain by success.” This crucial question of relative value was never answered for Vietnam, as it never had been in the case of the colonies.
While several naval and air commanders in the discussions urged a decision in favor of combat, Vice-Admiral A. C. Davis, the adviser on foreign military affairs to the Secretary of Defense, counseled that involvement in the Indochina war “should be avoided at all practical costs,” but if national policy determined no other alternative, “the United States should not be self-duped into believing in the possibility of partial involvement such as ‘Naval and Air units only.’ ” Air strength, to be worth anything, he reminded the group, would require land bases and bases would require ground force personnel and these would require ground combat units for protection. “It must be understood that there is no cheap way to fight a war, once committed.”
“Partial involvement” was—not without reason—the key objection. Pentagon chiefs in advice to the Executive deplored a “static” defense of Indochina and stated their belief that war should be carried to the aggressor, “in this instance Communist China.” That was the enemy in Asia; the Vietnamese, in the Pentagon’s view, were only pawns. The chiefs added a warning that would echo through the years to come: “Once United States forces and prestige have been committed, disengagement will not be possible short of victory.”
The factors that could make any victory elusive were known to Washington—known, that is, if we assume that department heads and presidents avail themselves of the information they have sent government agents to obtain. A CIA report, speaking of the “xenophobia” of the indigenous