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How It All Began David Halberstam april 1973 Where, then, are the roots of it? How did it happen? How in fact could it happen? Did the roots invisibly grow while we still slept, watched the more visible crises mount at Berlin, in the Congo, in the Middle East? It did not, after all, just happen in February 1965, when Lyndon Johnson, with the consent of those around him, began the bombing, or in July 1965, when he Wrst sent combat troops. Too much had been prepared long in advance. And why, if there was no great chorus of enthusiasm for what he was doing, was there such a mute acceptance of his course from the Congress, the press, the business community—indeed, the State Department itself? Could we really have a country in the seventh enlightened decade of an enlightened and rational twentieth century, the United States, anti-colonial in its origins and traditions , pick up a colonial war where the French had left o¤ without a single oªcer from the Department of State resigning? The answer is yes, we could. Why had the men who might have doubted been winnowed out, how had the course been set? Where had the damage been done? Why did intelligent, rational men go against the course of history, against, Wnally, common sense, so that the United States would end up in Vietnam, in the words of the late Bernard Fall, “walking in the same footsteps as the French, although, dreaming di¤erent dreams”? The answers, it seems to me, lie in the damage done to the Government, the Democratic Party, and the press by the Joseph McCarthy period, and by the general tensions created in the domestic reaction to the Cold War. To blame it all on McCarthy is far too simple; he was merely a crude symptom of the time, an accident looking for a place to happen, a name grafted on an era. Indeed, the fears that his name evokes had existed even before his famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950, and the foreign policy accommodations to those fears had already begun to take place. In Vietnam one of the most crucial of these decisions took place in May 1950, before McCarthy was a household word, before the Korean war broke out: the decision to supply military aid to the French in Indochina. Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s decision, not his successor, John Foster Dulles’s. It was a fateful moment, for until then we had not supported the French cause. We had resisted the French claim that this was part of the great global struggle against world Communism, that the French were Wghting for freedom in Vietnam, that their enemy was our enemy. From the very start, in 1945, we had refused French requests for troop ships to return the white colonial troops to Vietnam. Other requests for military aid had followed, and we had always rejected them. Acheson himself in the past had referred to the French cause as a colonial war, loath though he was to pressure the French to do anything about it. Halberstam / How It All Began 61 May 1950 changed all that. Acheson threw the switch, deciding to give the French military support and therefore—even more important as far as American history was concerned—moral support. (One does not give military aid without legitimizing the cause as well.) His reasons were two-fold. The Wrst was his abiding concern to stop the Communists in Europe: Acheson felt that a strong Europe required a strong West Germany, and increasing German steel production was the best means of reviving that economy. The French had been recalcitrant, uneasy about mounting German strength; yet they desperately needed economic aid for Indochina. A deal was made, what Acheson later would call a simple quid pro quo: West German steel production could go up, and the United States would give major military assistance to the French in Vietnam. On May 8, after making his deal with Robert Schuman, Acheson announced: “The United States Government, convinced that neither national independence nor democratic evolution exists in any area dominated by Soviet imperialism , considers the situation to be such as to warrant its according economic aid and military equipment to the Associated States of Indochina and France in order to assist them in restoring stability and permitting these states to pursue their peaceful and democratic development.” What would follow was two billion dollars in American aid, and...

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