Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam (review)

Now that scholars too young to remember the Vietnam War are writing revisionist tracts on the conflict, Kathryn Statler’s thoughtful contribution to the discussion is particularly welcome. She has taken as her subject the underexamined transition from France’s effort to reestablish its Vietnam colony to the time when the United States assumed the burden of keeping South Vietnam free from Communism. Her study centers on three major events: (1) the Geneva Conference of 1954, which divided Vietnam into North and South, with the promise of elections to unify the country two years later; (2) the installation of Ngo Dinh Diem to lead South Vietnam; and (3) the decision in 1956 to forgo the promised elections and instead wage a campaign to prevent Diem’s South Vietnam from joining with Ho Chi Minh’s regime in the North.

To each of those topics, Statler brings an impressive command of documentation and a patent desire to be fair to the historical record. In the process, she demonstrates how the Eisenhower administration forced the French to give up any surviving influence in the North and instead to join in Washington’s crusade on Diem’s behalf. One can agree that this was an early missed opportunity in Vietnam, even without fully accepting Statler’s conclusion that a French presence in the North might have “helped create conditions for a much earlier reunification”(p. 236) than the one finally imposed by the collapse of the South Vietnamese army in 1975.

Because this is a diplomatic not a military history, a major turning point like the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 figures only for its effect on the political maneuvering in Washington. Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, became worried that the French defeat would leave a vacuum in Asia that the Soviet Union would fill. Statler’s outlining of the debate over what America should do to relieve the French soldiers under siege at their outpost west of Hanoi is absorbing even at this late date.

The reader may be surprised to learn that it was Senator William Knowland of California, a prominent member of the China lobby, who advised Dulles that the U.S. Senate would not authorize intervention unless the French guaranteed immediate independence for Indochina (p. 92). Because that would have negated France’s entire nine-year effort in the region, the French refused.

One of the book’s most valuable contributions is a painstaking dissection of the failure in 1956 to hold the promised election to unify the country. Received wisdom has held that the United States pressed a compliant Diem to avoid the vote because Ho Chi Minh would be the sure winner. Some have suggested that North Vietnam was less outraged than its propaganda might indicate because, with Northern farmers protesting the botched agrarian reform, the North Vietnamese Politburo was not eager at that moment to absorb the fractious South.

In separate sections dealing with each world capital, Statler points out that Washington was torn between affirming traditional American support for free elections and fear of their outcome. Dulles used the example of East and West Germany, where elections had been discussed fruitlessly for ten years, to urge Diem simply to agree to elections in principle. Meantime, the French were pushing for a vote, worried that if it was not held, Ho’s forces might resume fighting and trap the sizable number of French troops still in Vietnam. But as Ho discovered to his dismay, neither Moscow nor Beijing wanted to risk confrontation with the United States over a comparatively minor issue (p. 170).

In the end, Washington learned, not for the last time, that its anointed leaders in the South had their own agendas. Despite U.S. pressure, Diem ignored the July 1955 deadline for consulting with the North on election procedures. Statler writes: “The Eisenhower administration considered using the threat of cutting American aid in order to force Diem to consider...