Beetle: The Life of General Walter Bedell Smith

4. The Geneva Conference

71  4  The Geneva Conference Eisenhower entertained no great expectations for Geneva. He instructed Dulles to “steer a course between the unattainable and the unacceptable.” He considered “a general Asian peace in which the free world could have real confidence” unattainable and said, “any division or partition of Indo-China was not included in what I considered acceptable.”1 In the end, he got both. The authors of American foreign policy subscribed to a set of firm preconceptions: communists never negotiated in good faith; the Soviet Union and its proxy China pursued foreign policy objectives based solely on strict adherence to the tenets of Marxist-Leninism; and the monocratic communist camp always acted as one. Stalin’s death— leading to a power struggle inside the Kremlin and evidence of tension between Moscow and Beijing—did not alter American perceptions. The American foreign policy elite, whose younger members would profoundly influence American diplomacy for decades, fervently believed that the lesson of Munich was that failure to resist aggression early ensured the need to contest it later at far greater cost. The Eisenhower administration worried about the domestic political consequences of American participation in a conference that produced any partition settlement. Given Dulles’s vociferous and oft-repeated assertions about “rolling back” communism, any settlement short of complete French success—a virtual impossibility— smacked of another Yalta. Unlike London and Paris, Washington refused diplomatic recognition of Beijing. Dulles, only half jokingly, remarked that the only way he would meet Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai was if their automobiles somehow collided. Smith would assume the difficult job of representing the United States at the Geneva talks on Indochina. To observers, Smith’s attendance indicated that the Eisenhower administration intended to remain on the periphery of the conference—a view not entirely mistaken. 72  BEETLE Geneva Discords Before he set off for Geneva, Smith had one other little matter that commanded his attention. He had received a summons to Capitol Hill to appear before McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. As Time reported, Smith “made a terse appearance, crunching out his answers as decisively as he stumped out his cigarettes.” Smith testified that Ray Cohn, McCarthy’s chief counsel, had approached him seeking a direct commission for David Schine, Cohn’s close friend and suspected homosexual paramour—but not with the CIA, because the agency “was too juicy a subject for investigation.” When asked if Cohn had attempted any high-pressure tactics on him, the incredulous “hardrock old soldier” snapped, “Not me, Sir!” Cohn had no luck with Smith. “Then Bedell Smith snuffed out a last cigarette,” the magazine reported. “McCarthy asked him no questions.” Cohn’s blatant influence peddling permitted the army to bring charges against McCarthy and Cohn later in 1954. That indignity done, Smith completed his preparations for the conference.2 As Smith forecast in his book, Stalin’s death generated some new thinking in the Kremlin. The troika dominated by Malenkov moved toward a form of perestroika and domestic reform that required normalization of relations with the West. In early March Molotov told the Chinese ambassador in Moscow, Zheng Wentian, “Although the Americans will try to wreck the Geneva Conference, the representatives of the democratic camp [the communists] will try to make full use of the conference in order to lessen international tensions.”3 Soviet embassies in western Europe and Washington made clear Moscow’s intention to pursue political settlements at Geneva. Aware of American resistance to partition in Vietnam or any coalition government, the Soviet embassy in Washington revealed that Beijing would be content with a buffer in the north. None of this made any impression in Washington. Despite Molotov’s sometimes provocative pronouncements during the Korea phase of the talks, the USSR wanted no major confrontations at Geneva. Moscow’s primary foreign policy objectives centered on improving fivepower relations, enhancing Soviet security, and normalizing bilateral relations. Molotov expected that the Chinese would manage the Indochina issue, including moderating Vietminh demands.4 As the recently opened Soviet and Chinese sources show, Moscow and Beijing wanted an Indochina settlement. So did the British and especially the French. Churchill and Eden never subscribed to the theory that Indochina was inextricably linked to the security of all Asia or that a settlement at Geneva must end in The Geneva Conference 73 the surrender of the whole region to the communists. Eden charted a cautious route between the shoals of curbing...