Chapter 4

The Ashes of Geneva: 1954

It is a commonplace observation that wars tend to arise out of preceding peace settlement. Nowhere can this have been more obvious than in respect to the Geneva Conference of 1954. Even before it began it was clear that the Conference itself was going to be unusual. In the first place, rather than providing the possibility of a political settlement, one may, indeed, from a different position, suggest that Dulles and the US negotiators saw it as a dangerous distraction from a policy which would somehow have contained communism in South-East Asia. On the assumption that, in the absence of victory, negotiation usually involves some concession, the prospect of a negotiated settlement at Geneva as far as the US was concerned seemed to have disappeared the moment Dulles set foot in Geneva. ‘We hope’, he said, ‘to find that the aggressors [North Korean as well as Vietminh] come here in a mood to purge themselves of their aggression’. The public posture coincided with the private instructions. Before he left Washington Dulles had told the Australian and New Zealand Ambassadors that partition, coalition, and elections must all be rejected; and in his message to Bedell Smith, head of the US delegation, the basic instructions, ‘approved by the President’, suggested that there was to be very little negotiation at all. The Vietminh and the Chinese Communist régimes could be dealt with on a de facto basis (‘in order to end aggression, or the threat of aggression, and to obtain peace’) but the US was not prepared ‘to give its express or implied approval to any cease-fire, armistice, or other settlement which would have the effect of subverting lawful governments (of the three Associated States) or of permanently impairing their territorial integrity’. Moreover, the US was described as being ‘neither a belligerent nor a principal in the negotiation’ but, simply, as ‘an interested nation’ which was there to assist in the establishment of ‘territorial integrity and political independence under stable and free governments’.¹

On the level, therefore, of formal negotiation, with the US negotiating position set at auto-destruct, it is hardly surprising that the Conference turned into a sort of surrealist boxing match in which contestants, seconds, trainers and spectators were all mixed in together and from which no decision could have been expected even if, surprisingly, a number of points were agreed simply in order to call the match to an end. Not that, for many of the participants, there were unrealizable objectives. For France, it was simply a matter of how to end a colonial war, in which she was well on the way to defeat and, if possible, how to retain some interests and presence in Indo-China. For the Vietminh, the objective was to take over as much of the country as they might be allowed and to which they felt they were entitled, not least by their victory at Dien Bien Phu. For China, the purpose was to secure peace in Indo-China and to keep the US out. For Britain, it was a matter of limiting the advance of communism as far as possible but, more important, it was to prevent a wider war. The objective for the USSR was probably to reach a settlement that would provoke neither the Chinese nor the US. But for the US it was an unfamiliar experience in that it was to be a negotiated rather than a dictated peace; in that she was not the leader of a victorious alliance; and in that, while there was certainly no victory on which to build, her status as ally was also in question.

What was, of course, even more in question was the status of ‘Vietnam’ itself, its government, its sovereignty, and its existence; but in the conspicuous absence of the Emperor Bao Dai it was sometimes easy to forget that there was a Vietnamese delegation at Geneva at all. Whatever its status was reckoned to be when the conference ended, or to have become in the course of the negotiations, when it began, at least, Vietnam was promised its integrity by the French. There was, said Bidault, to be no partition; but in the circumstances, his proposals were both ambitious and absurd. As a purely military solution the French plan was to be based on a cease-fire and a regroupment of regular military forces but as the political solution was to be left to the government of Vietnam, i.e. that of Bao Dai to decide, this obviously had a limited appeal. The Vietminh alternative, as proposed by Pham Van Dong, was also based on a cease-fire but envisaged the departure of French troops, free elections, and some rather limited supervision by a mixed commission. In the opening stages Bidault had refused to negotiate directly with the Vietminh but on 12 May the French government survived a vote of confidence by only two votes: which was a reminder that Bidault's terms might not be the ones which were finally agreed.

On what terms then, if any, would a settlement be made at Geneva? When the agreement was finally reached by Bidault's successor, Pierre Mendès France, he described it as the end of a nightmare for France. Before that particular settlement was made which allowed France to end the war it could equally well be said that, at least for the US Secretary of State, the nightmare was just beginning and although, as a sort of legal document, the Geneva settlement was to open up almost undreamt of possibilities for avoidance if not evasion, the Geneva experience for the US was something to be endured rather than approved and evoked the same kind of bitterness that might attend a hopelessly deformed birth. In the end it was perhaps this US attitude of suspicion and hostility to practically whatever the Geneva Conference produced which ensured that, as one distinguished Canadian observer described it, ‘Of all the important peace-making documents of our time none was so badly drafted and curiously drawn as the so-called “Geneva Settlement” of 1954’² and which led, in the words of two French authors, to the situation where the US ‘could neither accept nor openly reject the Geneva Settlement’.³

Much the same, of course, could also be said of the other dissatisfied party at Geneva, the Vietminh, although in their case restraint was the price they had to pay when they found their own objectives overlain by the purposes of their powerful communist allies. Indeed, another of the curiosities of Geneva was how the great powers negotiated among themselves the fate of a country on whose behalf they were variously committed, and how, having to a greater or lesser extent satisfied their own needs, they managed both to postpone the political settlement that was required if the ‘agreement’ was to be very much more than a cease-fire and, at the same time, avoid any responsibility for seeing that their terms were ever carried out. Measured against the standards of good statesmanship one may argue that it was irresponsible of them not to have produced an acceptable solution for what, at least on one level, may be seen in retrospect as a manageable problem – the end of a colonial war – which was in itself no more and perhaps rather less difficult than negotiating an end to France's Algerian war. The fact that so many great powers were involved at the end of France's Vietnam war, at the same time as complicating the issue, could also at least in principle have enhanced the quality of the agreement had they been prepared and able to offer some kind of guarantee. But this at once begs the question whether, in respect to Vietnam, the Vietminh could have been reconciled to the prospect of permanent partition or whether the US would have accepted the prospect of a communist victory even if it was achieved politically and postponed for two years.

Neither of these two questions was even considered by either party when the Conference began and both the Vietminh and the US took up positions of impregnable rectitude. The attitudes can be explained by a belief, perhaps, on the Vietminh side that the war was practically over while for the US there was a determination that the war had not been and should not be lost. Indeed, in one sense, that it had hardly begun. The gap was, of course, unbridgeable but the positions, for all the manifest intransigence, were not as secure as they might have seemed.

Although they sometimes gave the impression that the Vietminh were allowed to make the running, the Russians and the Chinese at Geneva left little doubt that the substantive negotiations would not be left to their Vietnamese ally and Molotov, after an argument with Bedell Smith on what percentage of Vietnamese supported Ho Chi Minh, said ‘Perhaps the Vietminh deserve more than we were going to give them’. Perhaps, he said, they were entitled to more than 50 per cent of the spoils of war: as much as 75 per cent; a claim that was ‘strongly contested’.⁴ Molotov was described in this US report as ‘courteous, friendly, in excellent humor and absolutely immovable’ and while he is credited with last-minute intervention and improvisations to ‘save’ the conference, he might in fact have produced the winning formula quite early on, even if hardly anyone was prepared to accept it at the time. If one adds partition and elections, and subtracts the international guarantee, the outline of the final settlement can be seen in Molotov's 5-point proposal of 21 May. Essentially, it was that a military arrangement had to come first: which meant that the success of the Vietminh depended on the nature of the political settlement which followed.

For the US it was a question of whether to allow France to make peace on the best terms that could be got or whether it should again face up to the costs and implications of intervention. The two were not entirely and mutually exclusive and it is possible that some of the plans for intervention may have been designed to encourage the French and to dishearten their opponents. Even if the French hand was not as poor as Bidault suggested – the two of clubs and the three of diamonds – there was not much, practically, that France could do on her own to influence the negotiations. Quite a lot of the US war preparations may indeed have been intended as ‘distant thunder’ or ‘noises off’, as they were variously described by Eden and others, and, being designed to bolster the French, they can be considered as a means primarily to that end. But the French were themselves intent on making peace and, for all Bidault's original obstinacy, whatever settlement eventuated it could hardly be based on the US principle of ‘no surrender’. Unless the US was prepared to deploy its own forces, and this was by no means out of the question, its own implacable objective of containment was bound to be compromised by the conditions which would be necessary for the French to make peace.

Acting on the pessimistic assumption that, if there were an armistice, it would only be one which paved the way for a communist take-over of the whole of Indo-China it is perhaps not surprising that, if anything, the fall of Dien Bien Phu seems to have induced even greater turmoil and confusion among US decision makers about which of the twin tracks to follow at Geneva: war or peace. For example, whether or not to ‘bust up’ the Conference; whether to put four US divisions into the Tonkin Delta in order to ‘ginger up’ the French and the Vietnamese; whether, if this resulted in Chinese intervention, the US should pull out of Indo-China ‘and clobber the Chinese at the heart of their power, wherever that might be, and in spite of the consequences’⁵; and whether, in extremis the USSR would provide the Chinese with nuclear weapons and the technical personnel required for their use.⁶

The irrepressible Radford would soon be offering Korean divisions to General Ely but there were other, more substantial, offers which must have been made to the French: probably in response to their request for a limited commitment of US ground forces. That particular telegram, from the US Ambassador in Paris, (17 May) is missing from the State Department files but contained some reference to US Marines.⁷ When Dulles and Eisenhower met on 19 May ‘the President said he would not necessarily exclude sending some marines if we went in’⁸ and in a telephone conversation with Dulles on the following day MacArthur, the State Department Counsellor, said ‘What they [the French] want is a commitment of ground forces, and not what we offered’ and one may infer that the offer was something to do with US naval and air forces.⁹ Whatever it was, as Dulles told Nixon in the National Security Council meeting that day (20 May), seems to have been made in Ambassador Dillon's negotiations with Laniel and Schuman which were ‘Strictly on an oral basis. Nothing in writing passed either way.’¹⁰

INTERVENTION STILL AN OPTION

Believing that there could be no serious negotiations with the communists at Geneva and certainly not prepared themselves to offer any compromise it was obvious that almost as soon as the Indo-China Conference opened the US was once again keeping its intervention option open as well. The French, however, could hardly be trusted not to give their position away: which meant that the preconditions were still critically important. There had to be a formal request from France and the three Associated States. France (as always) would have to guarantee complete independence, including the unqualified option to withdraw from the French Union at any time. But, conversely, France would undertake not to withdraw its forces from Indo-China during the period of united action so that US forces – it was Eisenhower who had stipulated ‘principally air and sea’ – and those of any other participating states would be supplementary and not in substitution and that agreement was reached on the training of native troops and on a command structure for united action. In the strictest confidence Ambassador Dillon in Paris was told that Admiral Radford contemplated a French Supreme Command and a US Air Command. All these conditions would have to be accepted by the French cabinet and authorized or endorsed by the French National Assembly so that, as Dulles put it, the US, having fully committed itself once it agreed to intervene, would be able to rely on the adherence to conditions by any successor French government.¹¹

These proposals might indeed be seen as providing the US with a water-tight contract so far as France was concerned, even though the current French political crisis meant that the US initiative was postponed, and in Washington Dulles had gone so far as to draft a congressional resolution which he showed to Eisenhower on 19 May.

The President is authorised to employ Naval and Air forces of the US to assist friendly governments of Asia to maintain their authority as against subversive and revolutionary efforts fomented by Communist régimes, provided such aid is requested by the governments concerned. This shall not be deemed to be a declaration of war and the authority hereby given shall be terminated on June 30, 1955, unless extended.¹²

Perhaps to Dulles' surprise, when he discussed the draft resolution with Senator Knowland, an ardent anti-communist and supporter of Chiang Kai-shek, he encountered strong opposition. It would, said Knowland, amount to giving the President a blank cheque to commit the country to war. Knowland was also a vociferous critic of those who hesitated to halt the march of communist aggression in Asia and it is interesting to note that his accusations that the British were promoting an Asian Munich were also shared by Eisenhower, who apparently told Dulles that it was incomprehensible that the British should be acting as they were. It is even more interesting to find that Dulles and Eisenhower now agreed that active UK participation was no longer a necessary condition for intervention, although that of Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand and of course, the Associated States, was. Having discarded one condition, UK participation, Dulles and Eisenhower now seemed to be faced with another problem: their Congressional and, more particularly, Republican support might be fading away and one may speculate that it might have been Knowland's opposition to the draft Congressional resolution on 17 May which knocked out the linchpin for active US intervention. The previous night, as the author of the Congressional research monograph records: ‘Secretary Dulles had held a very high level secret dinner meeting at his home to discuss the situation and to plan US strategy.’¹³ In attendance were CIA Director Allen Dulles, the State Department's MacArthur, Vice-President Nixon, who was flown back specially from West Virginia and, as the only ‘outsider’, Dean Rusk, former Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East and at that time president of the Rockefeller Foundation.

THE UNITED STATES v. CHINA

As Dr Gibbons notes there is no information available with respect to what was discussed and in an interview (with the author) Mr Rusk himself declined to comment on the discussion. From the memorandum of a telephone call in which Rusk was invited to the meeting, Dulles said that critical decisions would have to be made in relation to Britain and France. Should the US go in alone or allow itself to be bogged down?¹⁴ A few days later, Dulles having lunched with Admiral Radford, one may deduce that they had been talking about some sort of action involving the Paracel Islands, close to Vietnam, and occupied by the Chinese Nationalists more or less continuously since 1950. Radford was still the principal advocate of the cataclysmic solution to the Indo-China war – ‘The only military solution was to go to the source of communist power in the Far East, i.e. China, and destroy that power’ – and even in private conversation it seems that Dulles and Radford talked about the ‘international Communist conspiracy’ and agreed that the true source of its power lay in Russia. Radford reckoned that in three or four years' time, when they had a sufficient stockpile of nuclear weapons, the USSR would have the necessary capability to initiate and carry on general war on favourable terms and at no point in the future would the US be confronted with as clear-cut a basis for taking measures directly against China as was the case then in Indo-China.¹⁵ On this occasion perhaps it was to counter the sheer belligerence of the JCS Chairman that Dulles somewhat surprisingly suggested there was much to be said for the UK point of view that if you drew a line in advance you gave the enemy an opportunity to retreat, an option that was not open if the war was already under way. Radford was unimpressed but he was not the only one at this time, mid-May, who was presenting a case for intervention in apocalyptic terms. Harold Stassen, Director of the Foreign Operations Administration, who had previously argued passionately with Eisenhower in favour of US intervention, had again discussed the issue with Dulles and followed this up with a suggested Presidential address to a joint session of Congress and a Senate resolution based on the premise that while they wanted the Geneva negotiations to succeed the Conference would have a better chance of success if the US was, at the same time, prepared for its failure. Which presumably meant that, if they wanted peace, they must prepare for war. And for Stassen, Southeast Asia, ‘an area of high strategic significance’, simply must not fall. ‘If it does it would make a Third World War almost inevitable.’¹⁶

There were a few unexamined propositions in Stassen's premise – ‘The manner of preventing the fall of South-East Asia is to act in time, to act with others, to act in keeping with a very successful experience with the Atlantic Community’ – but the idea of some kind of collective security arrangement seemed to be taking hold now as something which could be put into effect more or less independently of the outcome at Geneva. It was obviously far more congenial to the US to be able to set its own conditions, rather than have to comply with terms that might be agreed by others in Geneva, and if Thailand and the Philippines, as well as Australia and New Zealand, could be brought to subscribe to common purposes one could at least pretend that there was some sort of incipient free-world community whose interests might properly be defended. It is not easy to decide whether this line of argument ran parallel to the purposes of the Geneva Conference, which were presumably to make peace, or directly against them. Whatever position one takes in the continuing historical controversy about the Seven Last Conditions For American Intervention – whether they were intended as a prelude for action or as an excuse for inaction – it is hard to disagree with Dr Gibbons' conclusion ‘It seems clear that the alternative of US military intervention in Indo-China was more of a consideration than it had been earlier, and that, in this sense, the response to Laniel was genuine and straightforward’ in that there was, indeed, ‘further preparation for the contingency of intervening with force’.¹⁷

All this, it will be remembered, was at a time when the Geneva Conference on Indo-China had already begun; and even though Eden, for example, was given no hint of US activities, at least by the Americans, and although Bedell Smith went out of his way, whether deliberately or not, to play down reports that were appearing in the papers, continuing US policy towards Vietnam was characterized at this stage at least as much by the mailed fist as it was by the velvet glove. The plenary sessions, reported as fully as national positions demanded, or as the stamina of reporters allowed, were for striking attitudes and scoring debating points and with some speeches lasting two hours or more were both tedious and uncompromising. There were, in addition, smaller, unreported, and restricted sessions which might have been expected to produce a little more movement and, eventually, highly secret conversations between French and Vietminh military representatives once the point had been conceded that a cease-fire would precede a political settlement. One such highly secret occasion was when Molotov gave a dinner for the US delegation on 22 May and, in an atmosphere of some cordiality, it seemed that both Molotov and Bedell Smith were prepared for some kind of settlement. Twice, perhaps with the implication that they were impatient or new at the diplomatic game, Molotov described China as a young country; and the other inference was that at Geneva at least there was something less than a united communist front. On the face of it Bedell Smith's outline of an armistice, a withdrawal of regular contingents to specified areas and what he said would probably be prolonged discussions leading towards a political settlement, all under supervision of some genuinely neutral authority, was equally frank as was his admission to Molotov that he doubted whether there could be any meaningful negotiations at all with the Chinese.¹⁸

As a point of practical comparison the US had the recent experience of over two years' negotiation with the Chinese and North Koreans at Panmunjon, during which time the fighting had continued practically unabated in Korea, and was determined to avoid a similar experience over Indo-China. Eisenhower for one seemed to have serious doubts about Geneva generally and was particularly disturbed by what he thought was the heavy reliance which the UK placed on the value of negotiating with the Communists.¹⁹ Dulles was convinced that the Communists would be negotiating in bad faith while others, such as Robertson or Judd, thought the Chinese were unappeasable and Bedell Smith told Dulles: ‘I know that China has been after the Red River Valley and the Delta for years, and it seems to me that they now intend to have it, or at least the greater part.’²⁰ Whether or not these were realistic assessments – and the Chinese seen in their first international conference since the revolution at times seemed remarkably obdurate – Eden reckoned ‘that the Americans were unwise in thinking this the moment to challenge China. The Chinese were in no mood to be browbeaten’. Conversely, he told the Cabinet on 24 May, that while an agreement might be possible it would depend among other things on dissuading the US from military intervention, from organizing their own Southeast Asia security organization, and from appealing (in the shape of a complaint from the Thai government) to the UN.²¹ From this position, therefore, it would appear as if the Chinese and the Americans were the principal adversaries at Geneva even though the immediate issues had to be resolved by the French and the Vietnamese. The French, well before the Conference had begun, had identified the problem in terms of outside support for the communists in the Greek civil war and were said to be overwhelmingly in favour of the ‘Markos hypothesis’: that the war could only be ended as the result of some form of international negotiation in the course of which the Chinese would be persuaded to drop their support of Ho Chi Minh.²² At that time the French Foreign Office thought that a settlement based on partition was a non-starter but a couple of days later the USSR told the Foreign Office in London, that having provided a Korean solution, this might also be a suitable arrangement for Indo-China. Indo-China, they said – and they repeated it twice – was a question on which China was particularly sensitive and it must therefore have come as a pleasant surprise to the French at Geneva when they were told, on 18 May, by Wang Ping-nan: ‘We are not here to uphold the Vietminh point of view but to make every effort to re-establish peace.’²³ In subsequent negotiations with Zhou En-lai, according to Joyaux, Mendès France was convinced that China was clearly in favour of the prolonged existence of two Vietnams²⁴; and Zhou had, apparently, told him pointedly: ‘If France would give way a little the Vietminh would give way a lot.’²⁵

Before this could happen, however, it would first be necessary for both Chinese and Russians to limit the scope of their ideas of partition. Whether the Russian démarche in London meant IndoChina or Vietnam it took some time for them and the Chinese at Geneva to realize that the situation and revolutionary potential in Laos, and even more in Cambodia, was very different from Vietnam. In a free-scoring attack in the fifth plenary session on 8 June Molotov ridiculed claims of the Associated States to independence and objected that half of Laos, for example, was not under government control; but on 16 June Zhou En-lai conceded that the situation was not the same in all the states of Indo-China and when he subsequently developed his ideas to Eden the latter concluded:

It really looks as if the Chinese may want a settlement in Laos and Cambodia: Zhou went so far as to say that the Vietminh would respect the unity and independence of Laos and Cambodia and that the Chinese would recognize the Royal Governments, who might be members of the French Union, provided they could be left as free countries without American or other bases.²⁶

The breakthrough in Geneva at this time was practically simultaneous with what may be regarded as the breakthrough in France itself. On 9 June, the day after Molotov's verbal attack at Geneva and in spite of Bidault's defence in the National Assembly debate, the Laniel government was defeated and on 12 June, by a narrow majority and after continuing debate on Indo-China, it fell. More than a month before it happened Dulles had told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that if the Laniel government fell it would probably be succeeded by a left-wing defeatist government which would accept almost any terms at Geneva.²⁷ What happened in the event was not what Dulles and others had predicted but in the interval between the fall of Laniel and the arrival of Mendès France, and fearing the worst, Dulles told Bedell Smith ‘Final adjournment of Conference is in our best interest’: provided that could be done without creating the impression that, at the critical moment, France had been deserted by the US and, he added, the UK.

Both from the explicit instructions and the tone of this telegram it was obvious that Dulles saw no reason to continue the conference, let alone negotiations, and before the communist concessions became known he derived a certain grim satisfaction from thinking that it would be obvious even to the British that diplomacy was getting nowhere; so there could be no excuse for any further delays in ‘collective talks on SEA defence’.²⁸ Perhaps that was what was uppermost in Dulles' mind all the time, the collective defence of Southeast Asia, but as the matter of Indo-China, particularly Vietnam, had still to be resolved, ideas, not to mention the contingency plans, that surfaced in Washington suggested that the US was still not very far from the knife-edge of intervention. In Geneva, speaking, as he said, as a soldier, Bedell Smith was under the impression that the Franco-Vietnamese forces had a two-to-one superiority in numbers, and a great superiority in armament which, he told the leader of the Vietnamese delegation, Prince Buu Loc, should be enough to defeat the Vietminh even under a second-class general, provided of course, there was the right political situation and leadership.²⁹ It was obvious however, that Bedell Smith's optimism notwithstanding, hopes of a decisive outcome still rested on the possibility of US intervention and although, in the end or at least in the dying days of the Laniel government, Dulles had been unable to discover whether the French were prepared to internationalize the war or not, the US Administration had prepared a most elaborate and far-reaching scenario, NSC 5421 ‘Possible US Action Regarding Indo-China’ 1 June 1954, which involved separate studies by the Department of State, the Department of Justice, the CIA, Defense, the Office of Defense Mobilisation, the Foreign Operations Administration, and the Bureau of Budget.³⁰ This suggested that it was rather more than an intellectual exercise.

MENDÈS FRANCE ARRIVES

Preparing itself, fitfully, for war it may seem as if the US was largely unprepared for peace or at least for negotiations that might lead to an acceptable peace settlement; and although it had only allowed itself a minor part on stage at Geneva it now found itself caught up in a drama which began in Paris on 17 June in the sensational, in some ways obvious, but equally fraught announcement by the incoming French premier, Pierre Mendès France, that he had given himself one month in which to make peace in Indo-China. If by that time he had not succeeded his government would resign. When the offer, or the wager, was made the draughtsmanship for the contract was by no means clear although there were signs that for France at least peace was possible. Her principal hope lay not so much with her military and political opponents, the Vietminh, but in their supporters, China and the USSR; but with the US maintaining a position of impregnable inertia France depended heavily on UK initiative and negotiating skills. The British, in turn, were at least aware of if not directly responsive to Indian sensitivities, as well as those of the Colombo powers and Asia generally, and in spite of bouts of almost morbid pessimism Eden for one acted as if a successful outcome to the Geneva negotiations was possible. Successful, of course, begs the definition of success but for the French, the British, and perhaps the Russians and the Chinese, this was identified in the first place as a cease-fire, to be followed by a political settlement which reflected the realities of time and place. In spite of last-minute complications the settlement that was agreed for Cambodia and Laos might, other things being equal, have been workable but proposals made on behalf of the Bao Dai government – in effect an amnesty for surrendered Vietminh rebels and the reincorporation of their troops within the forces of the French Union – while they may have had a certain naive simplicity could hardly have appealed to anyone else. In any event the French felt themselves entitled, as the architects of the French Union and at least co-ordinator of its forces, to decide not only how and with whom negotiations should be conducted but also whether there was any need to accord anything other than a supernumerary role to representatives of the Vietnamese ‘state’ whose future turned on negotiations with her actual and potential enemies.

The greatest uncertainty soon attached itself to the exact status of Bao Dai's government and whether the Treaty of Independence of the State of Vietnam that was initialled in Paris on 4 June, 1954, but never signed or ratified either by France or Vietnam, meant that Vietnam was a sovereign state or not.³¹ Effectively at any rate it was not. It was not until a week or so before agreement was reached that either the Vietnamese delegation in Geneva or the government in Saigon seemed to have been told what was going on. What the US thought was going on, however, was enough to make Dulles withdraw Bedell Smith's basic instructions on 25 June and by this time any semblance of common purpose seemed to have dissolved when the French were told that if, in the course of their negotiations, they surrendered even a minimum enclave north of Haiphong, the US would disown the settlement. In reply they were told that as no French parliament would approve the conditions which the US had laid down for intervention, France had no choice but to make the best deal she could. Even though by this time he realized that the US could hardly count on unwavering UK support, it must nevertheless have been disappointing for Eisenhower to find Churchill endorsing this French opinion a couple of days later and on the eve of Churchill's arrival with Eden in Washington the US took stock of its position.

A SALVAGE OPERATION

Conceptually, at least, Dulles had little to offer as long as there seemed to be a tacit alignment with France and there was the possibility that the US might be asked to underwrite a settlement of which it profoundly disapproved. As he told the National Security Council on 17 June, the day Mendès France was invested as Prime Minister and the day after it had finally become clear that France was not prepared as a condition of American intervention to go on fighting, it might be best to let the French get out of Indo-China altogether – then try to rebuild from the foundations.³² A week later Dulles was doing his best to sell the idea to Congress, or at least a group of 30 Congressmen and Senators, who heard him present the optimistic alternative after Bedell Smith had come back from Geneva with the bad news. Instead of partitioning Vietnam, handing over at least a third of Laos to communist control and, said Bedell Smith, giving Zhou En-lai what he really wanted – a guarantee by the Geneva powers of three little buffer states south of the Tonkin Delta – Dulles, without being very specific, said it was presumably possible to salvage something from an Indo-China that would be free of the taint of French colonialism. Whatever it was, he suggested, would have the support of Burma and other Asian states as well as the benevolent neutrality of India ‘and this something could be guaranteed by a regional grouping which would include the US’. The latter, obviously, referred to the still unformed SEATO but what was of equal interest, not least because Dulles said that in losing Tonkin the US had not lost valuable assets, was a suggestion that territory might be lost, at least for the time being, and that what was left could be put under what would be largely US protection.

In retrospect one may see or at least argue that this could have been the beginning of a Two Vietnams policy which, other things being equal, might have enlisted enough support to have got it going. Burmese acquiescence and Indian benevolence may have been rather too much to expect but for the plan to have worked would have required some prospect of support from at least one of the major communist powers. This in turn would almost certainly have meant some agreement with them, particularly China, that while there could well be ‘a build-up of indigenous military strength’ it would not be an opportunity to replace French with US forces or bases. To reach that agreement would almost certainly have meant a US signature on a treaty of guarantee and it was on the rock of American refusal that such a settlement foundered. Perhaps in any event the negotiations would have been too delicate and the prospect was too remote but, ultimately, for Dulles and for what may be called the attentive US public, it was apparently a matter of principle.

Assume that the Soviet will want the eventual settlement to be ‘guaranteed’ in some way by the principal powers, including the US. This guarantee would presumably be designed to preclude any efforts on the part of the US at the liberation of the peoples who were subject to captivity. This, on a small scale, would be what we have refused on many occasions to do in relation to Europe, where we have said we would never make a statement which would give the stamp of approval to the captivity of Eastern European peoples. We believe that a ‘guarantee’ which committed the US to sustain Communist domination of the peoples of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, or at least many of them, would be unacceptable as cutting across our basic principles for dealing with the Communist world. We believe also it would be deeply resented by the American people and the Congress.³³

Dulles did not exaggerate: as Eden for one discovered when he arrived in Washington, even though he seems to have wondered what it was he had said to bring the roof down on his head. The day before Churchill and Eden had left London, Eden had told the House of Commons that he hoped there would be an international guarantee of any settlement that might emerge at Geneva and, more specifically, he mentioned a reciprocal arrangement in which both sides would take part ‘such as Locarno’. The thought behind Locarno, according to Eden, was that of ‘a reciprocal defensive arrangement in which each member gives guarantees’ and if the settlement was broken the guarantors could act without waiting for unanimity.³⁴ As a procedure this might have been commendable but while the reference to the Locarno Agreements of 1925 may have been intended to suggest a spirit of conciliation, to the US it suggested first, a guarantee of the ‘fruits of aggression’ and second, as Locarno had led to Germany's admission to the League of Nations, the entry of the Chinese Peoples' Republic into the UN.³⁵ Whether or not they appreciated the historical nuances 11 members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee wrote to the President as soon as they had heard of Eden's statement – ‘He advocates that the free world not only accepts Communist conquests and gains, but in fact guarantee them’ – and warned Eisenhower that unless this was repudiated the whole Mutual Security concept and programme would have to be re-examined. When the House debated the Mutual Security Bill a few days later Representative Vorys moved an amendment which provided that none of the funds for the Far East could be used ‘on behalf of governments which are committed by treaty to maintain Communist rule over any defined territory of Asia’. That it should have been passed by the House 389-0 was almost incredible, but it was nevertheless accepted by the Senate and enacted into US law.³⁶

Another historical comparison that was being made in Washington was ‘a Far Eastern Munich’ although, as Bedell Smith pointed out to Senator Knowland, ‘in Korea nobody gave away one damned inch while in Indo-China we haven't given up anything that wasn't first occupied by force of arms which cannot now be retaken’.³⁷ At the time, however, with Bedell Smith suggesting that the Reds might not take Hanoi and Haiphong, Dulles' emphatic statement that the US was not going to be a party to giving away anything that belongs to someone else, Bedell-Smith's assertion ‘We are going to draw a line somewhere’, but no one responding to the question ‘If there should be a partition, would the free world guarantee the free side of the line?’ it was not easy to see this or any other line that the US would draw or follow at Geneva.³⁸ In Vietnam, however, a line was already being drawn, one that had its origins in operational rather than diplomatic considerations, and one which might be defended at either the military or the diplomatic level. With the French anticipating a major defeat in the Delta in September unless they were heavily reinforced, and convinced that the loss of Dien Bien Phu had rapidly altered the military balance in favour of the Vietminh, Admiral Carney reported to the National Security Council on 17 June that it was now a matter of considering a new defence line ‘at the narrow waist of Annam’.³⁹ This, at any rate, was the conclusion drawn at the Five Power Staff conversations in Washington and it depended on whether or not sufficient French forces could be extricated from the Delta. If the attempt was made to provide the French forces from southern Indo-China it was reckoned that security there would collapse but the implication, of course, was that northern Indo-China would have to be abandoned. Carney himself didn't think that even such a restricted defence line could be held for long but the opportunity was seized by Dulles and what may at first have seemed to be little more than a straw was soon to become a plank. As Dulles first saw it there was the opportunity to man such a defence line by forces representative of ‘the coalition’, in which case he thought it was unlikely to suffer a frontal attack. It was, he admitted, problematic whether real military strength could be built up south of the line, because political factors would play such an important role, but apart from the uncertainty of knowing what to do, there was a growing conviction in the State Department in favour of intervention and at the beginning of July it seemed ‘that all the people below the Secretary and Under-Secretary are unanimous that we should intervene or rather make up our mind to intervene now with or without the French’.⁴⁰

SEVEN CONDITIONS FOR A SETTLEMENT

Among the more intervention-minded members of the State Department the point had been reached where they were prepared to tell the French ‘that Indo-China could only be saved if French troops were not doing the fighting’⁴¹ but although Bowie, the head of the Policy Planning Staff, was in favour of offering four US divisions to hold a defence line at about the 17th parallel in Vietnam, and of dropping the pre-conditions for US intervention, this was apparently an option which Dulles did not forward to the President. For the moment, at least, and in spite of the gravest doubts whether the French would strive to secure or the Communists be prepared to concede, there was still a possibility of a not completely unacceptable settlement, the criteria for which seemed to have been established in the course of the Churchill-Eden visit to Washington and which would be confirmed a few days later by Mendès France. The terms on which the American and British governments ‘would be willing to respect an agreement’ were that it:

1.preserves the integrity and independence of Laos and Cambodia and assures the withdrawal of Vietminh forces therefrom;

2.preserves at least the southern half of Vietnam, and if possible an enclave in the Delta; in this connection we would be unwilling to see the line of division of responsibility drawn further south on a line running generally west from Dong Hoi;

3.does not impose on Laos, Cambodia or retained Vietnam any restrictions materially impairing their capacity to maintain stable non-Communist régimes; and especially restrictions impairing their right to maintain adequate forces for internal security, to import arms and to employ foreign advisers;

4.does not contain political provisions which would risk loss of the retained area to Communist control;

5.does not exclude the possibility of the ultimate unification of Vietnam by peaceful means;

6.provides for the peaceful and humane transfer, under international supervision, of those people desiring to be moved from one zone to another of Vietnam;

7.provides effective machinery for international supervision of the agreement.⁴²

As Dulles subsequently told the National Security Council the US would continue to take a stiffer line than the UK: something which seemed to be epitomised in point 4: the settlement would not contain political provisions which ran the risk of losing the retained area to Communist control. Unless, however, it was to be assumed that any ‘unification of Vietnam by peaceful means’ in the foreseeable future would be effected under a non-Communist government the anomaly of points 4 and 5 could hardly be resolved. Nevertheless, it was a blueprint for a partitioned Vietnam and the semblance of a compromise if such a settlement could be obtained.

That a settlement could be made was in doubt almost up to the last moments of the Conference but in the meantime, and to some extent, at least the military negotiations between the French and the Vietminh reflected the realities of a war that was still going on. In the matter of the ‘Dong Hoi line’, referred to in point 2 of the desiderata that were agreed by the US, Britain and France, this was approximately 17½° north. The French were offering 18° but the Vietminh were demanding a line drawn at 13°, far to the south, which, in effect, would have left the French forces and the state of Vietnam in control of little more than Cochinchina. At this point the French were about to abandon a major part of Tonkin and they had just suffered at Ankhe, far down the coast of Annam, what was described as their third greatest defeat in Indo-China and by far the biggest reverse they had ever known in the south. It seemed unlikely therefore that the Vietminh had been exhausted by their efforts at Dien Bien Phu and even in terms of set-piece battles, and even if they were carefully chosen, they looked capable of inflicting further heavy losses on the French Expeditionary Corps. Left to themselves it seems unlikely that the Vietminh would have concluded an agreement which would have met the Mendès France deadline and almost certainly not on the approximate terms that had been agreed with the Americans. But by discounting the possibility that their Russian and Chinese allies might prevail upon the Vietminh to reduce their demands or to offer France what in effect would be extended credit terms the US not only excluded itself from the settlement but also from the negotiations that might conceivably have produced a more durable arrangement.

Durability, in the case of the Geneva Settlement, would have meant not only that there was, in fact, agreement among the negotiating powers but also enough residual common purpose to have produced some sort of guarantee. Dulles was certainly right in his assumption that the USSR wanted one, and he had explained in terms of current US politics and ideology how this would have offended US principles of dealing with the Communist world, but if one goes further it is easy to see how difficult it would have been in the form of a full-scale treaty to have enlisted the support of two-thirds of the US Senate. But it was not only the USSR which was looking for a guarantee. The French had proposed it, the UK was in favour (and had strong Australian support)⁴³ while it was only at the very last moment that the Chinese dropped their demand that the agreement should bear a US signature. As subjects of the settlement, the successor states of Indo-China would not be expected to contribute to the guarantee, and the US was already considering them as objects of a collective defence arrangement; but their individual agreement, and particularly that of Vietnam, was now brought forward by the US as an extra criterion for an acceptable settlement⁴⁴ and although, in spite of an extraordinary eleventh-hour drama involving Cambodia, which meant that the agreements were not concluded until the morning of 21 July, there was no express dissent on the part of either Laos or Cambodia. Vietnam, which was the centre of the conflict and on behalf of whose government a political settlement was being prepared, announced its vehement and unalterable opposition.

NGO DINH DIEM

As a government that was recognized by more than 30 countries it was of course entitled to speak on behalf of the state even though it was obviously and actively opposed by large numbers of its citizens. It may or may not have represented national feelings but it certainly had nothing like a representative government and in so far as it was a sovereign state it depended upon French forces, US money and an absentee emperor. For the first time, it had as Prime Minister a passionate and uncompromising nationalist whose violent dislike of the French was exceeded only by the intensity of his opposition to communism and who, if one were to take his government's claim and the new US ground rules seriously, was now empowered to cast a veto on behalf of the US on whatever settlement that was reached which did not meet with his approval.

In just under ten years, up to his violent death in 1963, Ngo Dinh Diem and his family came to represent a war that could not be won. When, however, he was asked by Bao Dai to form a government in June 1954 and accepted, two days after Mendès France took office, Diem could present himself by virtue of his unusual but almost impeccable record of attachment to Vietnamese independence as a symbol of an alternative and in some respects purer nationalism than that represented by Ho Chi Minh. The fact that he was a Catholic, had spent most of the previous three years in American seminaries and had the support of such influential figures as Cardinal Spellman and Senator Kennedy did not immediately disqualify him. If anything and in so far as the US, too, was interested in genuine Vietnamese independence it was an advantage; and within days of his return to Vietnam he was making it perfectly plain, and with frequent reiteration, that the future of Vietnam depended on the US. Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu were described as being at an almost insane pitch of hatred against the French and while the US chargé in Saigon described Diem as ‘a messiah without a message’ nevertheless Diem was asking for immediate US assistance in every possible form which included not only refugee relief but the training of troops and armed US intervention as well.⁴⁵ Bao Dai's choice of Diem as Prime Minister provided the US with a more or less unexpected and fortuitous opportunity. With only six weeks to go before an agreement was reached at Geneva Diem was scarcely more unrealistic than his predecessors in government had been in his attachment to an undiminished Vietnamese sovereignty; but Diem was different in his almost mystical belief that Vietnam would be saved, through him, by a reassertion of its national integrity and its national, pre-colonial, traditions. In some of the earliest reports filed by the US embassy in Saigon on his position Diem was presented as quite obsessed with the loss of northern territory: to the point where he said he intended to attack the Vietminh in their heartland around Vinh (which, incidentally, was the birthplace of both Diem and Ho Chi Minh) even if the French did start withdrawing from the North; and convinced also that if the French gave up Hanoi it would be practically impossible to form a viable state from what was left even if it included Annam as well as Cochinchina. The Cochinchinese he said, ominously, were too easy-going either to become soldiers or to resist communist subversion.⁴⁶

Given these opinions, and assuming that Diem went to no trouble to conceal them from the French, it is all the more surprising that when Mendès France confirmed with Dulles in Paris on 14 July that the seven points⁴⁷ could be obtained by negotiation and were acceptable to France, the French should say they were also believed to be acceptable to Vietnam as well. While the settlement was not to contain political provisions that would risk the loss of the retained area of Vietnam to communist control, and even, it will be remembered, would not exclude the possibility of ultimate reunification, nevertheless there could be no doubt that North Vietnam would be lost and that the French and the US and the UK agreed. Yet, if, as the US insisted, the settlement had to have the agreement of the Vietnamese government in Saigon, it was doomed from the start. Nor did the US take kindly to the idea of, and certainly not to the word, ‘partition’: a point that was not lost on the French who, as soon as they had established the possibility with the Chinese (at Mendès France's momentous meeting with Zhou En-lai in Bern on 23 June), seemed to go out of their way to help the US conceal its naked reality. As Chauvel, of the French Foreign Office, told the US Ambassador in Paris it could be made clear that the settlement was merely an armistice; Vietnam could continue to be considered as one country and it would eventually be reunited under one government after free elections at some indeterminate time in the future.⁴⁸ Among the great powers, whatever the settlement that was likely to be made, it was going to depend upon multilateral, hopeful, and ultimately rather disingenuous salesmanship. Of those principally concerned, the Chinese, while they might or might not have been prepared to wait indefinitely for reunification,⁴⁹ apparently did not press for early elections and even encouraged the French to think that a united Vietnam might remain within the French Union.⁵⁰ The French were selling the idea of an honourable end to their war in Indo-China to the US and soft-pedalling the political arrangements. It remained for Dulles to sell the idea to Congress and the US people. Of the three, and in spite of the fact that he was selling the smallest and most basic model of a settlement, Dulles probably had the hardest job. Not the least of his difficulties lay in countering the charge that even the idea of negotiation was wrong and so Geneva was a mistake whatever settlement was produced.

This surprising, partisan and perhaps irresponsible criticism came not from the China lobby, someone such as Knowland or Judd, but from the influential Democratic Senator Mansfield who was probably evening the score for previous Republican criticisms of the Democrats and Korea; and Dulles had also to deal with those in his own party who were worried about the ‘loss’ of territory to Communism as well as any sort of guarantee. On 16 July, when the outline of the settlement was becoming clear, Dulles told Congressman Vorys ‘we are free to work peacefully against it’ and the next day he admitted to the publisher Henry Luce that it would be a partial surrender but insisted ‘we can move in there and bolster their position’.⁵¹ The position Dulles had in mind was presumably that of the non-communist Vietnamese but first the French had to be persuaded not to make last-minute concessions. Reluctant that either he or Bedell Smith should return to Geneva for fear of putting their heads into a noose Dulles was eventually persuaded (by Eisenhower, it seems, as much as anyone else) to see Mendès France and Eden in Paris and although, even at this stage, Mendès France was still unwilling to concede that Vietnam could withdraw from the French Union (nor did he seem to regard Vietnam as independent) Dulles was apparently impressed by Mendès France's timetable and preparations for continuing the war in the event that a decent peace could not be made by 20 July. He finally agreed that Bedell Smith might return to Geneva at least to create the impression of solidarity among the western allies but that, however, was about as far as he was prepared to go.

AN IMPOSED AGREEMENT

The day after the Geneva Conference ended Dulles told the National Security Council that, considering their actual capabilities, the communist demands had turned out to be relatively moderate: a statement which prompts two questions. First, why were they so moderate? Second, if this was the case, why did the US specifically dissociate itself from the final settlement to which the other great powers had agreed? The general answer in both cases would seem to be that, just as the involvement of China and the US had transformed a French colonial war, so a settlement in the various transcendental interests of what may be regarded as a consortium of great powers was imposed on what might otherwise have been a limited but finite proceeding.

In the case of the Vietminh, 15 years after Geneva when they had become established as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the country had been united, they let it be known that after Dien Bien Phu the Vietnamese people had been capable of liberating the entire country. The only thing that had stopped them – and prevented a total victory in Laos and Cambodia as well – was, they claim, China, whose leaders had betrayed them. By then, they had taken sides in the Sino-Soviet dispute and chosen to blame China for their earlier frustration but on at least one reading of the situation they would never have come to the Conference table at all had not a peaceful settlement of the Indo-China war been initiated by Moscow and the Cominform and at that time, almost as soon as Stalin died in March 1953, Moscow and Peking agreed ‘there is no international dispute that cannot be settled through negotiations’.⁵²Significantly, however, as Professor Chen points out, within days of his return from Stalin's funeral Zhou had proposed an immediate resumption of armistice talks on Korea and was endorsed by almost every communist country except Vietnam. It was not until the end of 1953 that Ho Chi Minh had held out the prospect of peace talks with France but, having brought off the marvellous victory at Dien Bien Phu, two months later, somewhere on the Chinese border, Zhou arrived from Geneva to present the big picture. In the 1979 White Paper the Vietnamese make no mention of the Ho-Zhou meeting although at the time a laconic communiqué announced that there had been a full exchange of views. Some idea of what went on between the Chinese and the Vietminh is to be found in the White Paper's assertions and brief documentation from which it seems that at one point and in one sense Zhou had proposed that the Vietminh should abandon Hanoi and Haiphong: the latter to be a free port and both to be part of a demilitarized zone.⁵³ For the Vietminh/Democratic Republic of Vietnam this evidence of what they called collusion between French and Chinese imperialism is what denied them total victory, particularly, they say, the pressure which the Chinese applied in the last ten days before Mendès France's deadline of 20 July. Instead of a temporary military demarcation line at the 13th parallel and elections within six months for national reunification the Vietminh were constantly urged to make concessions; and what the Chinese leaders advocated was a Korean-type solution, i.e. cessation of hostilities without any political solution.

At least it was not a political solution which the Vietminh accepted – a prolonged partition of Vietnam – even if, as they said, by sacrificing the interests of the Indo-China people China managed to secure its own security in the south. Although the Chinese evidently made use of the US threat of an expanded war to coerce the Vietminh, after the event, at least, they claimed flatly that the US had not been capable of direct military intervention in Indo-China. So, as far as the Vietminh were concerned and when, under duress, they accepted a settlement that was being made for them, Geneva for the moment represented a punctuation mark. Like other ‘agreements’ in the colonial territories of Southeast Asia after the war when the contending imperial and nationalist forces were manoeuvring for advantage it was more of a postponed disagreement⁵⁴ but it was nevertheless an arrangement that, other things being equal, might have worked. It might, for example from a western point of view, have provided a fig leaf of diplomatic respectability which would have concealed the starker realities of a French defeat and in any event would have postponed presently unbearable consequences for another two years. At any rate France had been rescued from war: she had been allowed to make peace and by the end of the conference, although it had come very close to the edge, the US had not committed itself to military intervention. Had it, conversely, committed itself to a peaceful solution of the Indo-China war? What was the nature and form of the settlement anyway?

CURIOSITIES OF THE FINAL DECLARATION

The Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities in Vietnam bore only two signatures: that of a French Brigadier-General, on behalf of the C-in-C French Union Forces in Indo-China, and that of the Vice-Minister of Defence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Although it was essentially an arrangement in which most of the details of the armistice were set out, and although it left major details of the political settlement blank, it made sense only in relation to what was agreed about the future political configuration of Vietnam. Nevertheless, even though it was a limited agreement certain provisions were unmistakably clear. There was, for example, no mention of partition: it was a provisional military demarcation line. On either side of the line civil administrations would be in the hands of whichever party's forces were being regrouped there (this seemed to beg the question which, in the south, was the competent political authority representing the French Union forces) but only until such time as general elections brought about the unification of Vietnam. In the meantime, civilians who wished to move from one zone to another were to be permitted and helped by respective authorities; there was to be no destruction or sabotage; no reprisals or discrimination against persons or organizations on account of their activities during the hostilities and their democratic liberties were to be guaranteed.

Chapter III of the Agreement was headed: ‘Ban On The Introduction Of Fresh Troops, Military Personnel, Arms And Munitions, Military Bases.’ No troop reinforcements or additional military personnel apart from rotation, replacement and temporary attachment were permitted and except for piece for piece replacement the same ban applied to arms and munitions, in particular to the heavier varieties such as combat aircraft and armoured vehicles. Both the French and the US knew of Chinese sensitivities about US bases in Vietnam⁵⁵ and in Article 19 it was agreed:

No military base under the control of a foreign State may be established in the re-grouping zone of either party; the two parties shall ensure that the zones assigned to them do not adhere to any military alliance and are not used for the resumption of hostilities or to further an aggressive policy.

and, of equal importance both for China and the US, the establishment of new military bases was prohibited throughout Vietnam territory (Article 18).

As far as the implementation of the Agreement was concerned, and after the membership had eventually been decided as Poland and Canada with an Indian chairman, an International Commission would operate in Vietnam (as well as in Laos and Cambodia which had their own analogous agreements) by a majority vote concerning recommendations but unanimously in the matter of amendments and additions. In certain circumstances majority/minority reports would be submitted to Conference members – which might suggest that they had some sort of continuing entitlement or responsibility – but under Article 27 it was the signatories of the Agreement and their successors in their functions who were to be responsible for ensuring the observance and enforcement of the terms and provisions thereof.

These were the substantive agreements. Between the other countries that were present at Geneva nothing at all was agreed and signed although by listing them all as taking part, and speaking in the name of the Conference, the Final Declaration may convey the impression of an agreement and indeed had sufficient weight of numbers to suggest that in any event it would not be easily overturned. Taking note of the political implications of the cease-fire agreement in respect to foreign troops and bases and the declarations made by the Laotian and Cambodian governments regarding the elections, the Conference expressed its conviction that Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia would be fully independent and sovereign members of the peaceful community of nations; although in the case of Vietnam, where the military demarcation line was not in any way to be regarded as a political or territorial boundary, a political settlement was expected in the near future or, at least, the cease-fire arrangement plus the provisions of the Final Declaration were deemed to create the necessary basis for such an achievement. At this point the text lapsed into hopeful and alarming uncertainty. The settlement of Vietnamese political problems (effected on the basis of respect for the principles of independence, unity and territorial integrity) so the Conference declared, ‘shall permit the Vietnamese people to enjoy the fundamental freedoms, guaranteed by democratic institutions’ but these were to be established as a result (italics supplied) of free general elections by secret ballot.

ELECTIONS AND RESPONSIBILITIES

It could be, and it was, later, argued that this order should have been reversed: that to have free general elections democratic institutions should have been established in the first place but, again, in the next sentence, it was the general elections to be held in July 1956 which were to ensure that all the necessary conditions obtained for free expression of the national will as well as sufficient progress in the restoration of peace. The International Commission was to supervise the elections; and what were called the competent representative authorities of the two zones were to consult on the matter from 20 July 1955 onwards. Who these representative authorities would be, what they would do and how effective the understandings were likely to be were all affected by the last four paragraphs of the Declaration. It was noted that the French had announced they would withdraw their troops from the Indo-China states on request of their governments. France, and all the Conference members, undertook to respect their sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity and to refrain from any interference in their internal affairs. Finally, to ensure that the agreements on the cessation of hostilities were respected, the Conference members agreed to consult each other on any question referred to them by the International Supervisory Commission and to study such measures as might prove necessary.

As a statement of intent the Final Declaration did seem to suggest at least the outline and some important detail of a political settlement in Vietnam but as a statement of fact it was vitiated if not invalidated by one major fault: it did not have the unconditional support of the US. Indeed, one may ponder America's own declaration and ask whether it amounted, rather, to a dissenting vote. Certainly and strictly speaking it was a non sequitur in that it was prepared in advance of the Final Declaration itself, rather than in response, at a time (16 July) when Dulles could only guess at the final shape of the agreements that might be reached but even if they conformed more or less to the Seven Points, Bedell Smith was only authorized to make the extraordinary statement that, in line with the general obligation of the UN charter, the US would not use force or the threat of force to disturb them.⁵⁶ The Declaration, Bedell Smith was told, was to be unilateral. In no circumstances would the US become co-signatory with the Communists.

Given America's political points of reference at the time this is understandable. Dulles had declared ‘We could not get ourselves into the “Yalta business” of guaranteeing Soviet conquests’⁵⁷ and in his final instructions to Bedell Smith before the latter returned to Geneva Dulles had written:

7) You will avoid participation in the negotiations in any way which would imply, or give the Communists plausible case for contending, that the US was so responsible for the result that it is in honor bound to guarantee that result to the Communists. We apprehend that the Communists might offer to make certain concessions if the US would then guarantee the settlement so far as they were concerned. You should, so far as possible, avoid getting yourself into a position which would lend itself to such a Communist maneuver.⁵⁸

The ‘Communist maneuver’ that was probably least expected, and to this day one cannot be sure whether or not it was a deception or whether it was to be taken seriously, was the possibility that the Chinese would take it on themselves to deny the Vietminh their anticipated and immediate triumph and the fact that it was a last-minute proposal hardly gave the US time to react even if Dulles, for example, had thrown caution to the winds.⁵⁹ There seems little doubt that the overriding Chinese objective at Geneva was the neutralization of the Indo-China states and the assurance, if not guarantee, that they would not be host to US bases or ‘aggressive intentions’. The Chinese had already been assured by Eden that if the Indo-China states agreed not to join military alliances they would not become members of SEATO (they were not told, however, that they might be designated in the SEATO protocol: one reason why Zhou could subsequently claim that he had been duped)⁶⁰ but with two days to go before the Mendès France deadline they let it be known to the US delegation in Geneva that they were ‘pressing for the stamp of American approval on the armistice agreement’ (which, they said, was already agreed in principle by Britain and France) ‘which would divide Vietnam between communist leader Ho Chi Minh's Vietminh and Bao Dai's pro-western regime’.⁶¹ Made by the Chinese through the AP correspondent in Geneva it might, of course, have been a misunderstanding and of more immediate concern to the US at this point was the Chinese insistence that the US was obliged to subscribe to and guarantee any settlement. Nevertheless, even if one discounts the retrospective criticism of the Chinese from Hanoi there was the further supporting but circumstantial evidence of Zhou, in the presence of Pham Van Dong, at a dinner when the conference ended proposing the health of Bao Dai and suggesting to one of Diem's brothers, who was also a guest, that the State of Vietnam should open a legation in Peking.⁶² Were, then, the Chinese prepared to see the indefinite partition of Vietnam into two separate and neutralized states if the arrangement had been guaranteed by the US and the other Geneva powers? Could they have persuaded the Vietminh that the balance of world forces and the needs of international socialism demanded such a sacrifice? Was this really what they were suggesting? Whatever the answers it seemed clear that the US at any rate was taking no chances. In any event they were more concerned that hints if not promises and inducements had not been made to the CPR by America's allies which might even involve displacing Chiang Kai Shek's representative at the UN in return for allowing Mendès France to meet his deadline. But in any event, too, Dulles was convinced that the Russians, the Chinese and the Vietminh between them would not let Mendès France win his wager even though he was, as he said, keeping his fingers crossed that there would be no last-minute under-the-table deals.

As Dulles described it the US had to play a war-of-nerves game: initially to arrive at an acceptable settlement and then to preserve it. Both stages involved the threat of war although when Dulles and Eisenhower discussed the matter on Sunday, 18 July, they agreed that Eisenhower should not, after all, go to Congress on the following Wednesday to ask for immediate war-time powers. As Dulles said, that would be too drastic and would scare everybody to death.⁶³ Nevertheless when the outcome at Geneva became known and it turned out to be less of a disaster than they had feared, Bedell Smith was able to issue the prepared declaration on behalf of his government whose second part came close to a ‘guarantee’ of what had been agreed. Any renewal of the aggression (which was one way of describing the revolutionary war that had just ended in Vietnam) in violation of the agreements would be viewed with grave concern and as a serious threat to international peace and security. What the US would do then was left to the imagination but it applied to only one side of the bargain. It should, of course, have provided some encouragement for the State of Vietnam who may or may not have been further heartened by another assertion that in the case of nations now divided against their will the US would continue to seek to achieve unity through free elections (supervised by the UN to ensure that they were conducted fairly). Much more important however was the reiterated statement of the traditional US position: that peoples are entitled to determine their own future and that the US would not join in an arrangement which would hinder this. If that did not make the position clear enough Bedell Smith added ‘nothing in its declaration just made is intended to or does indicate any departure from this traditional position’. Unfortunately the position was ambiguous and the statement was equivocal. The entitlement of peoples to determine the future of Vietnam in 1954, if one were to take it seriously, would suggest something in the nature of a referendum. The entitlement of a government to determine what its people should be allowed to decide suggests something else. Obviously it was the intention of the Vietminh to have elections as soon as possible. Having been the first to raise the matter when the conference began, it was, apparently, the sticking point when the conference ended. At first they suggested six months, the French preferred something indefinite but, on the last day, they agreed on two years. It was of course a major concession but it seems to have been made in exchange for Vietminh agreement that the partition line might now be withdrawn to the 17th parallel.⁶⁴

Obviously the prospect of elections, even though postponed for two years, carried with it a high probability of a communist victory. Eisenhower's often-quoted passage in his memoirs that ‘Had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai’ can perhaps be regarded as the worst case but even after the fighting had stopped it was hard to envisage the circumstances in which the prestige of Ho and the Vietminh would have collapsed.⁶⁵ Hard, but not impossible. The advanced position of the US on elections seems quite reasonable: that they should only be held as long after the cease-fire arrangement as possible and in conditions free from intimidation to give democratic elements the best chance.⁶⁶ The role of the control commission was obviously going to be important to the US in this respect and although the presence of the Poles was alarming and that of the Indians somewhat suspect because of their inclination to what Dulles subsequently described as the immorality of neutralism, at least the Canadians would be there: even if they realized ‘they have the delicate task of upholding an agreement to which the Americans were not prepared to give their support’.⁶⁷

The most important as well as the most disputed feature of all that concerned the elections and, ultimately, the validity of the entire agreements was whether, if the state of the Vietnam was not a party to the arrangements, they should from the beginning have been considered null and void. When they eventually discovered that the ground had been negotiated away from under their feet the Vietnamese delegation lodged their formal objection to the principle of partition and the unhappy M. Tran Van Do, Foreign Minister in the new Diem government, rejected both the French and the Russian drafts for the final Conference resolution although he followed this up with a rather half-hearted and ambiguous statement that his government would not use force to resist the cease-fire.⁶⁸ In Saigon, where the French were anticipating some sort of popular backlash, there was no ambiguity. Flags flew at half-mast and Diem denounced the seizure by what he called Soviet-China – through its satellite the Vietminh – of over half the national territory. It was for that reason, he said, that they had not signed the agreement and had lodged the most solemn protest against the injustice.⁶⁹

In the flurry of unilateral declarations that marked the end of the Geneva Conference on Indo-China one is sometimes overlooked: that of the Government of the French Republic, 21 July, 1954:

For the settlement of all the problems connected with the re-establishment and consolidation of peace in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, the French Government will proceed from the principle of respect for the independence and sovereignty, the unity and territorial integrity of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.⁷⁰

For Cambodia and Laos this was more or less reality but for Vietnam unity and territorial integrity were no more than a principle; sovereignty was divided, if only for the time being; while for that part of southern Vietnam which was territorially ‘retained’, independence was and has been called in question. For operational purposes it looked as if Dulles, for one, did not assume that the state of Vietnam was in fact independent. He told a news conference on 23 July that Mendès France had instructed French representatives in Vietnam to complete by 30 July ‘precise projects for the transfers of authority which will give reality to the independence which France had promised’ and if, as he said, by comparison, that independence was already a fact in Laos and Cambodia, then the completion of independence in Indo-China could only refer to Vietnam. Nevertheless if the French were ascribing sovereign independence to the state of Vietnam then the sovereign independent state of Vietnam had the legal entitlement, as well as a political disposition, not to be bound by either the cease-fire agreement or any of the implications of the Final Declaration, in particular the provision for elections. In practice, particularly as the state of Vietnam depended on French Union forces, there was an unacknowledged condominium in south Vietnam but the problems posed were far greater than deciding whether it was independent before 20 July or after 30 July. For example, in his exhaustive but still, in part, controversial treatment of Geneva Professor Randle says, of problems involving the law of state succession, that the facts are of such vital importance that it is almost impossible to make uncontroversial generalizations. As if to bear out this argument the relevant footnote continues for two pages; and in order to answer the question whether what he calls a provisional sovereign entity such as the Republic of Vietnam could refuse to consult for the purpose of planning elections he feels it would be necessary to elucidate the incidence and attributes of quasi-sovereignty and perhaps even to re-examine the whole concept of sovereignty and its place in international legal theory.

Apart from what at the time, and before more documentation became available, was the most comprehensive account of the Conference itself Randle takes as his legal premise (with, of course, enormous political implications) that whether sovereign in 1954, 1955 or 1956 the State of Vietnam government, and its successor, the Republic of Vietnam government, could refuse to be bound by the political provisions of the Final Declaration when it achieved sovereign status, and in so doing this violated no rules of customary international or treaty law.⁷¹ Others, such as Professor Richard Falk, stress the context of international society within which the Geneva agreements were reached.⁷² By contrast with the principle of textuality, i.e. that the text of an agreement must be taken as the only authentic expression of the intentions of the parties, the alternative thesis of ‘contextuality’ is adopted by Professor Hannon who attempts to determine whether a political settlement was an integral part of the Geneva Agreement or not.⁷³This essentially political but persuasive argument is a recommendation ‘to interpret the focal agreement according to the expectations shared by the parties during the course of their interaction, including both the making and performance of the agreement, as indicated by the context considered as a whole’; concludes that it was and, furthermore, that the major share of the responsibility for its failure must be shouldered by the US.⁷⁴

State succession is, by all accounts,⁷⁵ one of the most confused areas of post-Second World War international legal practice and even when one examines, as Hannon does, comparable French treaties of independence for Tunisia and Morocco or the ‘faculties of denunciation’ which had been written into previous French treaties with the Associated States of Indo-China and by which the State of Vietnam might have absolved itself of responsibilities incurred by the French, it is tempting to cut the Gordian knot and say that the war did not begin again because of a failure to solve a problem of international law. Nor was there an obvious legal remedy, given the inconsistencies and anomalies of the Geneva Conference, its agreements and postponed disagreements, and the immense scope they provided for favourable but incompatible interpretations; so perhaps all one may do in the end is to agree with Professor Moore that they largely contained the seeds of their own destruction.⁷⁶ Before that happened, and whether or not it was expected to connive at its own destruction, the sovereign basis for and validity of the State of Vietnam had to be proved. Was it, in fact, a state or a temporary administration? Two forms which had mutually exclusive purposes but which were, perhaps, a true reflection of the contradictions of Geneva.

REFERENCES AND NOTES

1. United States-Vietnam Relations, Book 9, p. 458.

2. John W. Holmes, ‘Geneva 1954’ Internationaljournal, 1967, Vol. XXII, summer.

3. Philippe Devillers and Jean Lacouture, End of a War (London 1969). A more recent French study is François Joyaux, La Chine et le Règlement du Premier Conflit d'Indochine (Geneve 1954) (Paris 1979). Sir James Cable's The Geneva Conference of 1954 on Indo-China (London 1986), is the most detailed and revealing study of Geneva based on Foreign Office documents and the author's own experience as a member of the British delegation.

4. FRUS, 1952–4 Vol. XVI, The Geneva Conference, p. 1060.

5. FRUS, 1952–4 Vol. XIII, Part 2, Indochina, p. 1694.

6. Ibid. p. 1708.

7. Ibid. p. 1580, footnote 2.

8. Ibid. p. 1583.

9. Ibid. p. 1593.

10. Ibid. p. 1589.

11. Ibid. p. 1535.

12. According to the Dulles memo Eisenhower's only response was to suggest that the resolution could be redrafted to define more closely the area of operations. FRUS, Vol. XIII, Part 2, pp. 1584–5.

13. The US Government And The Vietnam War, Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships Part I, 1945–1961, US GPO (Washington 1984). p. 233. (hereinafter cited as ‘Gibbons’).

14. JFD, Telephone Memos, May 1–June 30, 1954 (3), (May 14, May 21), Eisenhower Library.

15. JFD Papers. Subject series. Box 8, May 9. Eisenhower Library.

16. JFD Papers. Subject series. Box 8, May 11. Eisenhower Library.

17. Gibbons, op. cit. p. 231.

18. FRUS, Vol. XVI, pp. 895–9.

19. Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, (Signet), pp. 41–2.

20. FRUS, Vol. XVI, p. 1055.

21. Cable, op. cit. pp. 88–9.

22. FO 371 1071/63, March 16. PRO.

23. Joyaux, op. cit. p. 183.

24. Ibid. pp. 322–3.

25. Ibid. p. 276–7.

26. Cable, op. cit. p. 97.

27. Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Historical Series), Vol. VI, 83rd Congress, 2nd session, 1954, p. 269.

28. FRUS, Vol. XVI, p. 1147.

29. The British estimates, on the other hand, suggested that it was in fact the Vietminh who had a two-to-one advantage in their strike force of mobile battalions compared to the French Union forces – 132 opposed to 57 – while even in static battalions the French did not have that much of an advantage – 185 compared to 170 Vietminh. Cable, op. cit. p. 92.

30. NSC Records, National Archives, Washington. The Department of Justice had prepared a promising joint resolution which anathematised ‘An illegal and rebellious combination known as the Vietminh League’ supported by the ‘International Communist Movement’ and declared that the peace and safety of the US demanded that their insurrectionary and aggressive acts should be suppressed.

31. Translation of the treaty may be found in Allan W. Cameron (ed.), Vietnam Crisis: a Documentary History, 1940–1956 (Ithaca N.Y. 1971), pp. 268–9.

32. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 1716.

33. Dulles to US Delegation at Geneva, 9 June 1954. FRUS, Vol. XVI, p. 1104.

34. Eden, Full Circle, pp. 132–3.

35. Cable's comment is that Locarno ‘seems to have made an impression on Churchill and Eden that easily survived the failure of the Locarno system at its first test: Hitler's invasion of the Rhineland in 1936’. op. cit. p. 110. David Thompson, Europe Since Napoleon, offers a devastating critique of the treaties and their implications, pp. 636–7.

36. Gibbons, op. cit. pp. 249–50.

37. Whitman File Box 1, Memorandum for the record, June 23rd, 1954, Eisenhower Library.

38. Ibid.

39. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 1714.

40. FRUS, Vol. XVI, p. 1281. Gibbons has extracted the evidence and presents it op. cit. pp. 241–3.

41. Gibbons, op. cit. p. 242.

42. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 1758.

43. According to an Australian dispatch, which Eden circulated to the Cabinet on 15 June, Australian policy favoured an international guarantee, provision for enforcement, and the association of Asian countries, especially India. CAB 129/68. PRO.

44. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 1792, footnote 5.

45. Ibid. p. 1783.

46. Ibid. p. 1793.

47. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 1830.

48. FRUS, Vol. XVI, p. 1239.

49. According to Joyaux, Mendès France in his negotiation with Zhou was convinced that China was clearly in favour of the prolonged existence of two Vietnams, op. cit. pp. 322–3.

50. FRUS, Vol. XVI, p. 1240.

51. FRUS, Vol. XIII, pp. 1841–2.

52. King C. Chen Vietnam and China 1938–1954 (Princeton 1969), p. 283.

53. The White Paper may be found in the BBC Survey of World Broadcasts (Far East), 6 October 1979.

54. For example between the Dutch and their Indonesian nationalist opponents at Linggadjati in November, 1946 or Ho's rather threadbare modus vivendi with the French in September of that year.

55. The AP correspondent in Geneva, whom the Chinese had used to establish their position with the Americans, provided some visual impressions as well. ‘When Huang spoke of possibility of American bases in Indo-China or anti-Communist pact in South-East Asia, he became very agitated, his hands shook, and his usually excellent English broke down, forcing him to work through interpreter.’ FRUS, Vol. XVI, p. 1449.

56. FRUS, Vol. XVI, p. 1389.

57. To the NSC, 15 July. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 1835.

58. FRUS, Vol. XVI, p. 1390.

59. At the time the US seem to have been even more worried about the manoeuvres of its allies, e.g. in regard to SEATO.

60. Cable, op. cit. p. 118.

61. FRUS, Vol. XVI, p. 1428.

62. The point was initiated, innocently enough, by Diem's brother who said that in Hanoi war had destroyed part of the temples constructed on the Chinese model by the emperor Minh-Mang. Zhou said ‘Come and see the originals in Peking’ and Luyen asked under what title he should present himself. Apparently Zhou said ‘Certainly Pham Van Dong is closer to us in ideology but that doesn't exclude representation of the South. After all, aren't you both Vietnamese and aren't we all Asians?’ Joyaux op. cit. p. 297.

63. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 1852.

64. Franklin Weinstein's monograph Vietnam's Unheld Elections, East Asia Data Paper no. 60, Cornell University, 1966, cites Philippe Devillers as evidence. Cable says the two issues had to be settled together and concludes that the Vietminh price for their concessions ‘was a definite date for the elections which would enable them to win politically that southern half of Vietnam which their allies had refused to help them conquer militarily’. Op. cit. p. 120. From Joyaux's account it seems that the date might have been fixed in bi-lateral Sino-French negotiations, op. cit. pp. 281–2 and, to confute the possibility that the Chinese were prepared for an indefinite postponement, prompted by a British comparison with the time it had taken to organize elections in India, Burma and even China itself, they said a specific date such as two or three years was the only way to make clear to the people of Vietman that the Conference was not fooling. FRUS, Vol. XVI, p. 1437.

65. Mandate for Change (Signet 1965), p. 449.

66. FRUS, Vol. XIII, pp. 1791–2.

67. Holmes, op. cit. p. 472. Holmes provides a first-hand Canadian account that is both sensitive and revealing.

68. Cmnd. 2834. Documents Relating to British Involvement in the Indo-China Conflict 1945–1965, p. 87.

69. Gareth Porter, Vietnam: the Definitive Documentation of Human Decisions, Vol. I, p. 656.

70. Cmnd. 2834, Documents, p. 83.

71. Robert F. Randle, Geneva, 1954 (Princeton 1969), Ch. 23.

72. Falk takes as one of his starting points the implications of the Treaty of Westphalia which concluded the Thirty Years War in 1648 and argues that its legal political implications are too much orientated towards the status quo. Richard A. Falk, The Six Legal Dimensions of the Vietnam War, (Princeton 1968), pp. 25–9.

73. It derives, in part, from the study by McDougal, Lasswell and Miller The Interpretation of Agreements and World Public Order, (New Haven 1967).

74. John S. Hannon, Jr. ‘Implications of the 1954 Geneva Conference’ in Falk, The Vietnam War and International Law (Princeton 1969), Vol. 2.

75. Particularly Douglas A. Ross, In the Interests of Peace: Canada and Vietnam, 1954–73 (Toronto 1984).

76. John Norton Moore, ‘A Political Settlement for Vietnam: The 1954 Geneva Conference and the Covert Implications,’ Falk, The Vietnam War and International Law, Vol. 2.