The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [181]
Laos was the mouse that roared. In this landlocked upland country lying lengthwise between Vietnam and Thailand, with a population believed to number hardly more than two million, another Communist specter was abroad. This was the Pathet Lao, the nationalist-Communist Laotian version of the Viet-Minh. Because Laos touched China at its northern border and opened onto Cambodia in the south, it assumed in foreign eyes extraordinary importance as a corridor through which Ho’s and Mao’s Communists would pour, on some awful day of Red advance. Without deeply disturbing the easygoing life of the Laotians, sovereignty swayed among multiple rivals, of whom the leading figures were the legitimate ruler, Prince Souvanna Phouma, a neutralist in cold war politics; his half-brother, another Prince who was leader of the Pathet Lao; and a third claimant, who was the American client and had been in place for a while, installed by CIA manipulations, and had subsequently been ousted.
Because the half-brothers were negotiating a coalition which could have neutralized their country and left the Pathet Lao in control of the mountain passes, Laos suddenly became during the Eisenhower-Dulles period a small oriental Ruritania, “a vital factor in the free world,” a “bulwark against Communism,” “a bastion of freedom.” American money and matériel inundated and bewildered the parties. Briefing Kennedy before his inauguration, Eisenhower promoted the country to primary domino, saying, “If we permitted Laos to fall, then we would have to write off the whole area.” He advised that every effort be made to persuade SEATO members to join in common action, but contemplated “our unilateral intervention” if they did not. Since Laos was rough in terrain and unreachable by Pacific-based sea and air power, clearly no place for effective combat, Eisenhower’s astonishing remark, in contrast to his resistance to active intervention in much more accessible Vietnam, suggests that Laos had some peculiar faculty of bemusing men’s minds.
In one of those minor frenzies that periodically craze international relations, the situation by 1961 had reached a crisis of complex cabals. Coalition in Laos threatened to become a casus belli. The Geneva Accord was invoked by Britain and France and a fourteen-nation conference re-convened at Geneva. In Washington all-day meetings ran late into the night at the White House. Kennedy, still sweating from the Bay of Pigs fiasco only days before, was determined to show that America meant business against Communism and to avert an outcry on the right if coalition should succeed. He authorized movement of the 7th Fleet to the South China Sea, helicopters and combat units to Thailand and alert of forces in Okinawa.
When advised by General Lyman K. Lemnitzer, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, that if China and North Vietnam interfered they could be contained by nuclear arms, Kennedy was shocked into a less inflated view of the issue. He decided to accept neutralization and the return of Souvanna Phouma and sent the veteran diplomat Averell Harriman to Geneva to arrange an agreement to that effect. The solution was feasible because it was acceptable to both the Soviets and the United States and because the Laotians preferred to be let alone rather than to fight. While neutralization blocked intervention, it also had a negative effect: by leaving the Pathet Lao in place, it raised doubts in the local SEATO nations of the firmness of America’s commitment against Communism in Asia. Loudly professed, these doubts made a great impression on the next visitor, Vice-President Lyndon Johnson.
Johnson was despatched in May 1961 to Taiwan, South Vietnam