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39 chapter three “Korea is important, but the really important spot is Indochina.” —John Foster Dulles EISENHOWER “My God, We Must Not Lose Asia!” During the 1952 presidential campaign, the Republicans, led by a popular wartime hero, wanted to put some strategic distance between their candidate’s vision of the world and the Truman policy of “containment.” They proclaimed a new policy: Once Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, the United States would no longer just contain communist aggression, it would advance democracy all over the world. It would roll back the Iron Curtain. It would liberate people enslaved by Marxist dogma and diktat. It would launch a new era of freedom. Eisenhower played along with his campaign mentors, but once in office, able for the first time to read the secret intelligence about Indochina, he began to realize the complexity and seriousness of the problem. For the next two years, he essentially followed his predecessor’s policy in Vietnam and echoed his reassuring rhetoric, at the same time increasing U.S. economic and military assistance to the French and their chosen leader in Vietnam, Bao Dai. At first Eisenhower offered the aid grudgingly. He was not a great fan of the French, or their leader, Charles de Gaulle, “who,” as he later put it in a snide aside, “considers himself to be, by some miraculous biological and transmigrative process, the offspring of Clemenceau and Jeanne d’Arc.”1 Nor was Bao Dai an example in Eisenhower’s view of the courageous nationalist leader he knew Indochina then needed to beat back the communists. But, after only a brief time in office, he came to appreciate Truman’s dilemma. John Foster Dulles was his instructor. The new secretary of state persuaded Eisenhower that “Korea is important, but the really important spot is Indochina , because we could lose Korea and probably insulate ourselves against the consequences of that loss; but if Indochina goes, and South Asia goes, it is 40 Eisenhower: “My God, We Must Not Lose Asia!” extremely hard to insulate ourselves against the consequence of that.”2 In the 1930s, Eisenhower had been based in Asia, working at the time for General Douglas MacArthur, and he developed an appreciation of the rising tension between Asian nationalism and European colonialism. Conflict between the two, he thought, was unavoidable. In the early days of his administration, attempting to explain his Indochina policy, Eisenhower often referred to a memo from outgoing secretary of state Dean Acheson, written during the transition between the two administrations, which warned the new president that the United States was already shouldering “between one-third and one-half of the financial burden” of the French “colonial war” in Indochina, that “overt Chinese intervention in Indochina” was a distinct possibility (just as it had proven to be the case in Korea), and that American involvement was inescapable. He also remembered Acheson’s somber conclusion: “This is an urgent matter upon which the new Administration must be prepared to act.”3 Eisenhower, new to presidential politics but not to war, was not eager for the United States to pick up French responsibilities in Indochina. He was, in truth, repelled by the tangled politics of Saigon, Hue, and Hanoi, and he was profoundly disturbed by the prospect of U.S. troops fighting in a colonial war on the Asian mainland. Years later, while writing his memoirs, he explained his thinking: “The jungles of Indochina . . . would have swallowed up division after division of United States troops, who, unaccustomed to this kind of warfare, would have sustained heavy casualties. . . . Furthermore, the presence of ever more numbers of white men in uniform probably would have aggravated rather than assuaged Asiatic resentments.”4 (How prescient he was about the “casualties”! How revealing that he could imagine only “white men in uniform”! How interesting the use of the word “Asiatic”!) In his first State of the Union address in February 1953, Eisenhower put his private reservations in a bank vault and spoke approvingly of how European allies had made “costly and bitter sacrifices to hold the line of freedom,” including in “the jungles of Indochina and Malaya.” He was, in fact, the classic hard-liner, ready at any time to denounce communism as “a hostile ideology —global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose and insidious in method,” but not eager to engage communism on the field of battle. Like most generals, he understood the costs of war. On his mind was Sun Tzu’s classic...

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