Assuming The Burden Europe And The American

Commitment To War In Vietnam Mark Lawrence

download

https://ebookbell.com/product/assuming-the-burden-europe-and-the-
american-commitment-to-war-in-vietnam-mark-lawrence-51818622

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.

Assuming The Burden Europe And The American Commitment To War In

Vietnam From Indochina To Vietnam Revolution And War In A Global
Perspective 1st Edition Mark Atwood Lawrence

https://ebookbell.com/product/assuming-the-burden-europe-and-the-
american-commitment-to-war-in-vietnam-from-indochina-to-vietnam-
revolution-and-war-in-a-global-perspective-1st-edition-mark-atwood-
lawrence-1655802

Assuming The Ecosexual Position The Earth As Lover Annie Sprinkle

https://ebookbell.com/product/assuming-the-ecosexual-position-the-
earth-as-lover-annie-sprinkle-36258746

Assuring The Confidentiality Of Social Research Data Reprint 2016

Robert F Boruch Joe S Cecil

https://ebookbell.com/product/assuring-the-confidentiality-of-social-
research-data-reprint-2016-robert-f-boruch-joe-s-cecil-51967860

Future Of The Publics Health In The 21st Century 1st Edition Committee
On Assuring The Health Of The Institute Of Medicine

https://ebookbell.com/product/future-of-the-publics-health-in-
the-21st-century-1st-edition-committee-on-assuring-the-health-of-the-
institute-of-medicine-2160416
Adolescent Nutrition Assuring The Needs Of Emerging Adults 1st Ed
Yolanda N Evans

https://ebookbell.com/product/adolescent-nutrition-assuring-the-needs-
of-emerging-adults-1st-ed-yolanda-n-evans-22456372

Managing The Unexpected Assuring High Performance In An Age Of

Complexity Karl E Weick

https://ebookbell.com/product/managing-the-unexpected-assuring-high-
performance-in-an-age-of-complexity-karl-e-weick-24005240

Assuring Development Gains And Poverty Reduction From Trade The Labour
Mobility And Skills Trade Dimension United Nations Conference On Trade
And Development United Nations

https://ebookbell.com/product/assuring-development-gains-and-poverty-
reduction-from-trade-the-labour-mobility-and-skills-trade-dimension-
united-nations-conference-on-trade-and-development-united-
nations-1916036

Kali Linux 2018 Assuring Security By Penetration Testing Unleash The

Full Potential Of Kali Linux 2018 Now With Updated Tools 4th Edition
Shiva V N Parasram

https://ebookbell.com/product/kali-linux-2018-assuring-security-by-
penetration-testing-unleash-the-full-potential-of-kali-linux-2018-now-
with-updated-tools-4th-edition-shiva-v-n-parasram-22090796

Realtime Student Assessment Meeting The Imperative For Improved Time

To Degree Closing The Opportunity Gap And Assuring Student
Competencies For 21stcentury Needs Peggy L Maki

https://ebookbell.com/product/realtime-student-assessment-meeting-the-
imperative-for-improved-time-to-degree-closing-the-opportunity-gap-
and-assuring-student-competencies-for-21stcentury-needs-peggy-l-
maki-50689244
Assuming the Burden
FROM INDOCHINA TO VIETNAM: REVOLUTION
AND WAR IN A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
Edited by Fredrik Logevall and Christopher E. Goscha

1. Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment

to War in Vietnam, by Mark Atwood Lawrence
Assuming the Burden
Europe and the American Commitment
to War in Vietnam

Mark Atwood Lawrence

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley · Los Angeles · London
Portions of this book were published in an earlier
form as “Transnational Coalition Building and the
Making of the Cold War in Indochina, 1947–1949” in
Diplomatic History 26, no. 3 (summer 2002): 453–480,
and are reproduced here by permission of Blackwell
Publishing Ltd.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2005 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lawrence, Mark Atwood.

Assuming the burden : Europe and the American
commitment to war in Vietnam/Mark Atwood
Lawrence.
p. cm. — (From Indochina to Vietnam : revolution
and war in a global perspective; v. 1)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-520-24315-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Indochina—History—1945– 2. Indochinese War,
1946–1954. 3. United States—Foreign relations—
France. 4. France—Foreign relations—United States.
5. United States—Foreign relations—Vietnam.
6. Vietnam—Foreign relations—United States.
7. France—Foreign relations—Great Britain. 8. Great
Britain—Foreign relations—France. I. Title. II. From
Indochina to Vietnam; v. 1. III. Series.
DS550.L385 2005
959.704'12—dc22 2004020239

Manufactured in the United States of America

13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum

requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997)
(Permanence of Paper).
For my mother,
whose memory inspires me in all things,
and for my father,
who made all things possible
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Preface ix

Introduction 1

part one · Contesting Vietnam

1. Visions of Indochina and the World 17
2. U.S. Assistance and Its Limits 59
3. Illusions of Autonomy 102

part two · Constructing Vietnam

4. Crisis Renewed 147
5. Domestic Divides, Foreign Solutions 190
6. Closing the Circle 233

Conclusion 276

Notes 289

Bibliography 333

Index 347
This page intentionally left blank
Preface

This book, undertaken during one momentous transitional phase in

international affairs, looks backward to another. Just as the end of the
Cold War confronted nations around the globe with great uncertainty
and opportunity, so too did the end of the Second World War a half cen-
tury earlier. The process by which governments grappled with those
uncertainties and opportunities and crafted a new global order holds
immense relevance to our own times. By understanding the failures of
an earlier generation of Western leaders to take adequate account of the
complexity of politics in unfamiliar parts of the world—and by recog-
nizing the consequences that can flow from such errors—perhaps we
can make better decisions this time around.
But there is more to the connection between the 1940s and the first
decade of the twenty-first century. In both periods, prevailing geopoliti-
cal ideas were the work of political elites in many nations. Few would
dispute this statement in connection with the current era of globaliza-
tion, a process defined by the growing interchange of influence across
increasingly porous national borders. This book demonstrates that the
late 1940s were similar in key respects. Western policies during the Cold
War have too often been described as uniquely American in origin, as if
U.S. policymakers could sit safely behind impermeable national bound-
aries, survey the world, and pronounce their decisions. In fact, as this
book demonstrates, the United States, in the Cold War era as much as
in the period since the fall of the Berlin Wall, should be seen as one

ix
x Preface

participant, albeit an inordinately powerful one, in an international web

in which influence flowed in multiple directions. Other actors some-
times set the international agenda by advancing self-serving ideas, con-
straining choices, and practicing coercion. The ideas that underpinned
Western policy for forty years during the Cold War were constructions
crafted through constant interaction of decision makers from many
nations.
This book seeks to explain the origins of American involvement in
Vietnam, but it also endeavors to contribute to a new body of American
history that, inspired by globalizing currents, attempts to place the
United States within an international context. How, it asks, was the
United States affected by the rest of the world even as it was affecting
that world in ways that are relatively familiar? Answering this question
was a considerable challenge, not least because it required intensive
work in the archival holdings of multiple nations—a process that
entailed many months of research, a good deal of travel, and mastery of
the political cultures and decision-making processes of each govern-
ment. The outcome, I hope, is nothing less than a fresh way of under-
standing the roots of America’s war in Vietnam and some new ideas
about how nations interact with each other to produce policy.
Completing such an ambitious project was possible only thanks to
the generosity of numerous individuals and organizations. I am grateful
to the Bradley, MacArthur, and Smith-Richardson foundations as well
as the Harry S. Truman Library for supporting much of the research. I
also wish to thank the Mrs. Giles M. Whiting Foundation for enabling
me to complete my writing with minimal distractions. A postdoctoral
fellowship from the John M. Olin Foundation allowed me to work on
revising and expanding the project during my final year in New Haven.
The Yale International Security Studies program also helped me in
myriad ways, both tangible and intangible, to achieve my goals. I am
grateful to the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas for
summer funding and a semester of leave that helped me put the finish-
ing touches on this book.
I also wish to thank the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library
and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, whose ceaseless support
has helped make my adjustment to life in Austin such a delight. I am
especially grateful to Harry Middleton and Betty Sue Flowers for allow-
ing me and Fred Logevall to live out every scholar’s dream—to gather
together the world’s leading authorities on a particular subject for a
long weekend of intensive discussions. I wish to thank those who
Preface xi

traveled to Austin in November 2002 to take part, especially Laurent

Cesari, Chen Jian, Bill Duiker, Lloyd Gardner, David Marr, Hang-Lien
Nguyen, John Prados, Kathryn Statler, Martin Thomas, Stein Tønnesson,
and Marilyn Young. I learned a great deal from all of them and deeply
appreciate their comments on my work. Chris Goscha was unable to
attend but nevertheless deserves my heartfelt thanks for hunting down
photographs and helping me with questions that only he could answer.
For guidance at an earlier stage, I am grateful to Paul Kennedy, Ben
Kiernan, John Merriman, and Gaddis Smith. All four provided a con-
stant stream of insightful feedback despite fierce competition for their
time. Moreover, they never lost patience with me despite my occasional
scholarly forays into the 1960s and my year-long journalistic foray into
the European Union. They are models not only of scholarly excellence
but also of kindness, generosity, and good cheer. I owe equal thanks to
John Gaddis. Even though John arrived at Yale when my work was
nearly complete, he treated me practically as one of his own students
and provided enormously helpful comments. His enthusiasm for my
ideas gave me a critical dose of confidence at exactly the right moment.
I am also indebted to the remarkable collection of young international
historians who surrounded me during my years in New Haven, partic-
ularly Matt Connelly, Will Hitchcock, Jeremi Suri, and Salim Yaqub.
Since coming to the history department at the University of Texas, I
have benefited from the advice and encouragement of an extraordinary
collection of colleagues. I am especially indebted to George Forgie,
Roger Louis, and Michael Stoff. Their generosity and friendship have
meant more to me than I can express, and I treasure their comments on
the manuscript. This book also profited from the advice of many others,
including Bob Abzug, Caroline Castiglione, Judy Coffin, Tony Hopkins,
Ward Keeler, Gail Minault, Joan Neuberger, Bat Sparrow, and David
Oshinsky. My research assistants—Tala Gharagozlou and Van Nguyen
in New Haven, and Christelle LeFaucheur and Paul Rubinson in
Austin—performed routine miracles of proofreading, translating, and
library sleuthing.
At the University of California Press, Monica McCormick offered a
perfect mix of enthusiasm, patience, and constructive pressure over the
many months since we first discussed this project. I am also indebted to
Randy Heyman and Marilyn Schwartz for handling my questions and
lowering my anxieties at key moments, to Steven Baker for his meticu-
lous work with the manuscript, to Niels Hooper for helping to see the
project through to its end, and to two readers for providing comments
xii Preface

that immeasurably strengthened the manuscript. Most of all, I owe a

profound debt to Fred Logevall, the dean of the younger generation of
Vietnam War historians and the person who introduced me to UC Press.
Part mentor, part colleague, Fred has influenced my life in countless
ways over the years. He is a model for me and someone I am proud to
call a friend.
And then there is the small group of kindred spirits who shared my
trials and tribulations over the years. Jenni Siegel and Mark Weiner
were steadfast supporters and motivated me through their stellar exam-
ples. I also value the friendship and wise counsel of Susan Ferber, who
knows a thing or two about publishing and expertly coached me
through the final stages of this project. Phoebe and Neil Olcott showed
me overwhelming hospitality during a particularly memorable month
of writing in California. Jolie Olcott was the best proofreader imagin-
able as well as a true inspiration and an extraordinary intellectual part-
ner throughout the entire process. In Texas, Susan Boettcher, Erika
Bsumek, and Carolyn Eastman have been valued companions and con-
fidantes. Stephanie Osbakken gave me boundless support and, most
important, told me that the time had come to send the book off into the
world. Priscilla, Patrick, Elizabeth, and Jane Melampy lifted my spirits
throughout the entire process and helped keep my priorities in order.
Most of all, this book stands as testament to a staggering amount of
love and generosity from my parents, Elizabeth Atwood and Robert
Lawrence, who long ago shared their enthusiasm for history, taught me
to love books, and gave me every advantage in pursuing my studies over
the years. That my mother did not live to see the publication of this
book is the greatest disappointment of my life. I know how proud she
would have been to hold it in her hands, and perhaps to slide it onto the
shelf next to her own books. With inexpressible gratitude, I dedicate
this book to her and to my father.
Introduction
. . . the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
T. S. Eliot

Cold War tensions weighed heavily on U.S. secretary of state Dean

Acheson as he wearily climbed aboard the presidential plane Indepen-
dence on May 6, 1950. Recent months had brought little but bad news.
In August 1949 the Soviet Union had shattered the nuclear monopoly
enjoyed by the United States by detonating an atomic device. Two
months later Mao Zedong’s armies swept to final victory in China,
pushing the world’s most populous country into the communist orbit.
Meanwhile, U.S. efforts to build a robust anti-Soviet front among West
European nations lay in doubt as old animosities between France and
Germany threatened to block cooperation. It was, Acheson later
recalled, a “long, strenuous, wearying” time.1 The secretary’s trip to
Europe promised a crucial opportunity for face-to-face discussions with
his French and British counterparts to forge common positions on a
vast array of problems. “They have been talking about the ‘Atlantic
Community’ for over a year,” the New York Times pointed out. “Now
they are going to try to give it substance.”2 Mostly, the Western powers
faced questions about European security. How could the Western allies
put more military muscle behind the North Atlantic Treaty, the mutual-
defense pact they had signed a year earlier? How could they overcome
lingering suspicions within Western Europe so as to create a more uni-
fied, integrated bloc?
The most urgent question of all, however, concerned not Europe but
Indochina, the distant territory where the French military had been

1
2 Introduction

waging a costly war against Vietnamese revolutionaries for more than

three years. Would the Western powers be able to submerge their dif-
ferences over colonialism and find a basis for common action in a part
of the world that seemed increasingly to be threatened by communist
advances? For years, the status of Indochina had deeply divided the
Western allies and provoked bitter, inconclusive debates among U.S.
policy makers. Now Acheson was ready to tell the French and British
governments what they desperately wanted to hear: Washington would
provide military and economic aid to bolster the French war effort. The
United States was prepared to extend the principle of transatlantic coop-
eration all the way to Southeast Asia, to assume part of the burden of
waging war in Vietnam.
Acheson’s trip, culminating in his assurances to French foreign min-
ister Robert Schuman on May 8, marked a landmark moment in the
development of U.S. policy toward Indochina. Less than a decade ear-
lier, the territory had barely registered in American consciousness. To be
sure, the United States had become increasingly concerned with South-
east Asia over the previous half-century as burgeoning American indus-
tries fueled a drive for markets and raw materials in the Far East. U.S.
trade with British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies grew in the early
twentieth century as rubber and tin became commodities of major
importance to the U.S. economy. But trade with the Indochinese territo-
ries of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos lagged far behind, excluded by an
uncompromisingly autarkic French imperial system.3 Although Vietnam’s
rubber and oil drew the covetous eye of U.S. firms, Americans could do
little to gain a foothold. Nor did Indochina attract much attention from
U.S. diplomats or journalists. The State Department operated a tiny
consulate in Saigon, and only a handful of Americans, mainly Protes-
tant missionaries, resided in the French territories. For most Americans,
as the Asia scholar and travel writer Virginia Thompson observed in
1937, Indochina had been “largely lost to view.”4
Within a few years after the Second World War, everything had
changed. “Indo-China Has Become Vital Cold War Front,” trumpeted
a New York Times headline on February 12, 1950, three months before
Acheson’s trip. Proclaiming Indochina the “Greece of the Far East,” the
Times described the French territory as the battleground where Asia’s
destiny appeared about to be decided, just as Europe’s seemed to depend
on the outcome of fighting between Greek communists and the pro-
Western Greek government, the major focus of America’s Cold War
anxieties at the time.5 Many policymakers in Washington spoke in
Introduction 3

equally drastic terms. If France were defeated in Indochina, the Central

Intelligence Agency warned, “the forces of International Communism
would acquire a staging area from which military operations could be
launched against other countries in Southeast Asia, whether on the main-
land or across the South China Sea.”6 There was no telling where the
communists would stop once they had gained control of Indochina. In the
most alarmist scenarios, Mao Zedong’s victory seemed to open the flood-
gates to communist expansion all the way to India or even the Middle
East, areas of great value to the West. The fate of Vietnam seemed directly
connected to crucial geopolitical priorities of the United States.
The decision to throw American aid behind the French war marked
the first definitive American step toward deep embroilment in Indochina
affairs, the start of a long series of moves that would lead the adminis-
tration of Lyndon Johnson to commit U.S. ground forces to Vietnam fif-
teen years later. But if 1950 signaled the beginning of that process, it
marked the end of another. As U.S. officials began shipping weapons,
aircraft, and other military supplies to Vietnam and as they set up the
first U.S. military mission in Saigon, many had already embraced the set
of fundamental assumptions about Vietnam that would guide American
involvement over the following twenty-five years. They now believed
that the fate of Vietnam carried heavy implications for the destiny of
Asia. They saw Vietnamese insurgents as the agents of international
communism and assumed that their success would serve the interests of
Moscow and Beijing. And they embraced the idea that the United States,
through the proper application of material aid and political guidance,
could play a key role in establishing a new Vietnamese political order
reconciling the nationalist aspirations of the local population with the
requirements of Western security.
To be sure, U.S. thinking about Vietnam continued to evolve in sig-
nificant ways in the 1950s and 1960s, and policymakers had opportu-
nities to change course in those years.7 It would be going too far to
argue that patterns of thinking established in the early Cold War years
made a U.S.-Vietnamese war inevitable. Yet the pattern is unmistakable:
basic ideas conceived in the late 1940s had remarkable staying power.
To understand America’s war in Vietnam, one must reckon seriously
with the years before 1950, a period that figures only marginally in
most Americans’—and even in many historians’—perceptions of the
U.S. experience in Southeast Asia.8
How did U.S. policymakers come to think of Vietnam as they did
during those years? How did a faraway corner of the French empire
4 Introduction

acquire such significance that Americans saw fit to intervene with eco-
nomic and military aid? Why were other roads not taken? Unsurpris-
ingly, these questions, like so many connected to Vietnam, have drawn
a good deal of interest from historians over the years. The resulting
body of scholarship, although little accounted for in general histories of
the war, is large, complex, and contentious. Fundamentally, historians
have offered three explanations for American behavior—one stressing
geostrategic calculations, another highlighting U.S. economic objec-
tives, and a third focusing on the imperatives of domestic politics.
The first line of argument emphasizes that Vietnam acquired urgency
in American minds in the late 1940s because the situation there increas-
ingly seemed to conform to a global pattern of communist aggression
against the West and its interests. In the early postwar years, according
to this interpretation, American alarm about Soviet expansionism had
focused on Eastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. Following
the communist victory in China in 1949, however, Truman administra-
tion policymakers came to view the threat as global. Under these new
circumstances, it was only natural that they extended their solution to
communist expansion in the European theater—the containment of
Soviet power within its existing bounds—to Asia. Scholars, then, have
seen the 1950 decision to support the French war effort as just one
prong of a global effort to check communist expansion. That effort
began with the Truman Doctrine in 1947 and continued through a long
chain of worldwide interventions calibrated to squash challenges from
the Kremlin and its allies wherever they arose.9
A second explanation for Vietnam’s emergence as a major U.S. con-
cern stresses American calculations about the region’s economic value.
Few scholars, it is important to note, contend that Americans were
guided by a belief that Vietnam’s natural resources and markets were
critical to U.S. prosperity. Unquestionably, American business wished
for greater access to the French territories, and U.S. officials occasion-
ally fretted that a communist victory in Vietnam would deprive the
United States of raw materials potentially useful to the American econ-
omy or to U.S. national security. But these considerations were minor
since Vietnam offered little that could not be obtained elsewhere.
Indochina’s economic assets were, as the CIA put it in 1950, merely
“desirable,” not “absolutely essential.”10 Still, several historians have
argued that economic considerations drove U.S. policy. Many U.S. offi-
cials, they argue, concluded by 1950 that Indochinese resources and
markets mattered to the economic health of crucial U.S. allies, especially
Introduction 5

Britain and Japan. Vietnam’s economic significance lay not in the terri-
tory’s contribution to the American economy but in its potential contri-
bution to industrialized nations that American policymakers regarded
as crucial to the establishment of a new global order. In helping to keep
Vietnam embedded in the Western orbit, Washington sought to enhance
not a bilateral relationship of limited importance so much as a system
of global economic interaction in which it had a colossal stake.11
A third explanation for Vietnam’s emergence as a major U.S. preoc-
cupation emphasizes domestic politics. In this view the Truman admin-
istration fixed its attention on Southeast Asia and began pumping U.S.
material assistance into the region to fend off critics at home. Central to
this interpretation is the contention that Harry S. Truman’s narrow
reelection victory in 1948 left a frustrated Republican party searching
for an issue it could use against the president. The administration’s fail-
ure, despite years of effort and vast expenditures, to prevent a commu-
nist victory in China provided the cudgel the president’s enemies sought.
As Mao Zedong triumphed in 1949, Republicans assaulted Truman and
the Democrats as weak willed and demanded vigorous action to prevent
the further spread of communism in Asia. Truman, the argument runs,
had little choice but to go along. The president not only feared political
damage from charges of being soft on communism but also saw no
alternative to bold policies in Asia if he was to secure congressional sup-
port for his most cherished objective aboard, the construction of a
strong transatlantic relationship. When Congress insisted in December
1949 that the administration spend $75 million to fight communist
insurgency in Asia, the White House accepted the task without quibble
as the price of attaining its Eurocentric priorities.12
All three arguments hold merit, and none excludes the others. Taken
together, this body of work leaves little doubt that several reciprocally
reinforcing considerations helped propel the Truman administration
toward supporting the French in Indochina. Nonetheless, this scholar-
ship falls short of offering a satisfactory explanation of American
behavior. Above all, it fails to reckon with the fact that Washington, as
it crafted policy toward Vietnam, was merely one participant in a com-
plicated, decidedly international dynamic in which other governments
usually held the initiative and set the agenda. Historians have largely
treated U.S. policymaking in isolation, removing the Truman adminis-
tration’s deliberations of geostrategy, economics, and politics from the
complex transnational interchange in which those calculations were
embedded. This approach has generated two problems. First, it has
6 Introduction

attributed too much autonomy to the United States and overlooked

crucial ways in which other governments shaped U.S. choices. Second,
the conventional approach has reified the alleged distinctiveness of
American consideration of colonial questions, making it impossible to
discern the ways in which U.S. policymaking fit into broad patterns of
debate that cut across nations. In fact, toward the end of the Second
World War and in the immediate postwar period, several governments
engaged in far-reaching deliberations of what should become of European
empires. U.S. policymaking involved nearly constant interplay among
representatives of various nations.
This book offers a fresh look at the origins of U.S. involvement in
Vietnam by treating the United States as just one participant in a com-
plicated transnational deliberation over the destiny of Indochina. In
part, the innovation lies in the simple matter of sources. This study
makes sustained and rigorous use of archival material from the three
nations that most determined Indochina’s postwar destiny—France,
Britain, and the United States. Other scholars have occasionally drawn
on material from more than one of these countries in attempting to elu-
cidate Indochina’s emergence as a Cold War battleground. But they
have almost always isolated one leg of the Washington-Paris-London
triangle (usually, in the case of American historians, the Washington-
London leg). The French diplomatic record has received little attention
in English-language studies. Scholars, moreover, have usually focused
on relatively narrow periods of time, usually the months around the
end of the Second World War or the months in 1949 and 1950 follow-
ing the communist victory in China.13 By contrast, this book rests on
extensive reading of diplomatic, political, and military records in all
three countries—in more than a dozen archives stretching from the
French colonial archive in Aix-en-Provence to the Truman presidential
archive in Independence, Missouri. And it covers the entire period from
the middle years of the Second World War until the U.S. decision to aid
the French war effort in 1950, encompassing the whole span of time
over which U.S. attitudes changed so dramatically.
In examining material from several nations, this study does more
than write three stories where there was only one. It explores the complex
patterns of interplay over Vietnam among the three key Western gov-
ernments. For the first time, we can see the transformation of American
perceptions of Vietnam as the result of efforts by policymakers in Paris
and London as well as Washington to recast the Vietnam problem in a
way that would overcome disagreements over colonial questions and
Introduction 7

permit common military and political action to suppress the Vietnamese

revolution. In this analytical context, it becomes clear that American delib-
erations over Vietnam were hardly unique. To the contrary, American
debates paralleled—and were affected by—discussions in other nations.
Washington’s decisions were only one part of a series of decisions taken
in capitals around the world as various governments sought to shape
Indochina’s future.14
The risk, of course, is that geographical breadth comes at the expense
of analytical depth. This book aspires to avoid that danger by delving
into the inner workings of each government as it grappled with
Indochina. Through deep research into the U.S., French, and British
foreign-policy bureaucracies, it examines decision-making currents not
just at the level of presidents, premiers, foreign ministers, and ambas-
sadors but also at the equally important level of ministry desk officers,
embassy staff, and midlevel military and intelligence personnel. Although
Indochina sometimes held the attention of high-level national leaders
in France, it rarely drew the gaze of their counterparts in the United
States or Britain. During these years when the attention of the Western
powers was fixed on matters of profound significance—among others,
the status of Germany and Eastern Europe, the reconstruction of West-
ern economies, the control of atomic weapons—Indochina ranked as a
minor issue at best. To appreciate policymaking in Washington and
London (and often Paris as well) therefore requires careful attention to
the obscure bureaucrats who actually managed the issue. For this reason,
Harry Truman, Clement Attlee, and even Charles de Gaulle appear only
occasionally in the pages that follow, while individuals such as James
O’Sullivan, M. Esler Dening, and Philippe Baudet receive sustained
attention. These were the sort of men who counted most in recasting
Indochina as a Cold War crisis by 1950. The development of their views
and, more important, the debates that they carried on within their own
bureaucracies as well as with their foreign counterparts form the central
focus of this study.
Taking an approach that is both global and national, I argue that the
transformation of American thinking about Vietnam occurred as part
of a grand, transnational debate about Vietnam in particular and the
fate of colonial territories in general following the Second World War.
As the book’s first half demonstrates, each capital became deeply
divided over Vietnam during the war or in its early aftermath, torn
between contradictory impulses to reestablish French colonial rule and
to acknowledge the legitimacy of Vietnamese nationalism and permit at
8 Introduction

least a degree of self-determination. Although the precise dynamics of

the debate differed among the three countries in question, the basic
contours were the same. Each policymaking establishment wrestled with
the same set of fundamental problems that faced Western nations as
they confronted colonialism in the mid-twentieth century: Should they
attach higher value to the stability of their own political and economic
interests or to the desires and grievances of colonized peoples? Should
they seek the near-term benefits of continued Western domination or the
potential long-term advantages of harmonious relationships with Asian
peoples? Should they take Asian nationalist movements seriously as
legitimate negotiating partners, even protogovernments, or dismiss
them as irresponsible minorities unprepared to lead their nations? Con-
testation only intensified in the first months and years following the end
of the Second World War as Western governments gradually became
aware of the enormous anticolonial discontent brewing in Southeast
Asia and the difficulty of finding satisfactory compromises. By mid-
1947, Paris, London, and Washington were deeply split over what
course to follow—divided from each other but also divided internally,
with different groups of policymakers advancing conflicting prefer-
ences. To the considerable extent that Vietnam’s political destiny lay in
the hands of the Western powers, its future remained highly uncertain.
Between 1947 and 1950, as the book’s second half reveals, division
and hesitancy gave way to decisiveness and, finally, action. In 1950 the
three governments came together to form a coalition aimed at destroy-
ing the Vietnamese revolution. They agreed to hold military talks on the
defense of Southeast Asia, and the Truman administration promised to
supply military and economic support to resist communist aggression.
The intensification of the Cold War between 1947 and 1950, especially
the triumph of communism in China in 1949, helps explain this con-
vergence of Western policy. Amid an increasingly threatening global
and regional environment, policymakers who advocated a firm multi-
lateral response stressing the need for short-term stability in Southeast
Asia were bound to attract support. The intensification of Cold War
pressures is not sufficient, however, to explain U.S., French, and British
behavior. The shift in Western policymaking rested not only on a reap-
praisal of the broader geopolitical environment but also on a reconcep-
tualization of the political situation within Vietnam. Decision makers
who advocated a bold, concerted Western effort to suppress Ho Chi
Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam faced a difficult task, more dif-
ficult than most accounts of the early post–Second World War years in
Introduction 9

Vietnam have suggested. Even as the Cold War intensified, influential

officials in each bureaucracy clung to a nuanced view of events in
Vietnam and questioned whether the perilous situation there could be
resolved through the relatively blunt methods conceived for waging the
Cold War in Europe: Western partnership and military preparedness.
These skeptics cautioned against hasty repressive action that might
alienate Vietnamese nationalists permanently and create the very out-
come that Western governments wished so much to avoid. It might, in
other words, drive Vietnamese radicals further into the arms of Moscow
and Beijing.
To overcome this skepticism, supporters of a bold Western policy in
Vietnam worked in the late 1940s to reconfigure the political situation
in Vietnam so that it would conform more closely to the Manichean
vision that had given rise to Western solidarity and activism elsewhere
around the globe. Like-minded U.S., French, and British officials
worked together to recast Vietnamese politics in a way that would pro-
mote international consensus, as well as bureaucratic harmony, sustain-
ing an activist policy in each of the three key capitals. In constructing
Vietnam as a Cold War battleground, the three governments jointly
undertook to demonize Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh movement as
full-fledged communists, to advance the idea that the future of South-
east Asia depended on the outcome of the conflict in Vietnam, and to
promote the possibility of establishing a viable alternative to Ho Chi
Minh’s leadership to satisfy legitimate Vietnamese nationalist demands
and preserve a high degree of French influence. Only after establishing
a common set of rationales and assumptions could the three govern-
ments find a solid basis for the partnership that would draw the United
States into Indochina and open a new phase in Vietnam’s postwar his-
tory, the period in which Vietnam’s political struggles would be seen
principally as expressions of the global confrontation of Soviet commu-
nism and Western liberal capitalism.
In arguing for this process of construction, this book rests partly on
the theoretical insight that “reality” is established through social inter-
action. Simply put, the situation in Vietnam acquired new meaning
between 1945 and 1950 partly because powerful policymakers said it
did and because they took actions that gave substance to their coalesc-
ing representations of reality. The enormously complex Vietnamese
political situation defied easy categorization, as nationalists, commu-
nists, royalists, and many other elements jockeyed for power in the tur-
bulent years following the Second World War.15 Viewed from Western
10 Introduction

capitals, the situation seemed to clarify over time as government offi-

cials brought to bear assumptions and fears generated by menacing
developments in the larger geopolitical environment. The Cold War
was, as political scientist Alexander Wendt has phrased it, “a structure
of shared knowledge” that gave meaning to international politics for
more than forty years. This book explores how a particular set of ideas
about a particular country took shape during a transformative phase of
the twentieth century—a case study that can help us to understand, in
Wendt’s words, “how agency and interaction produce and reproduce
structures of shared knowledge over time.”16
This analysis also rests on a more literal notion of what it means for
policymakers to have “constructed” Vietnam. Even as “construction”
has acquired a particular meaning for theorists such as Wendt, it has
retained a simpler definition that is central to this book’s claims. To con-
struct something—whether a house, a bridge, or a policy—can simply
refer to the process of assembling an integrated, functioning whole out
of disparate materials that might have been combined to create some-
thing different.17 So it was with Vietnam. Before 1948 the U.S., British,
and French governments were stymied by the complexities of making
policy toward Vietnam, especially the contradictory needs to give rein
to Vietnamese nationalism while maintaining order and stability in the
region. Division and uncertainty prevailed in Western capitals, with no
clear solutions in sight. Thereafter, factions within each government
worked in a reciprocally reinforcing fashion to craft solutions that sat-
isfied each and enabled them to move jointly toward a common
approach. Over three years or so, participants in this complicated inter-
change assembled an edifice that contained elements of French, British,
and American origin. The end point of this process, the agreement in
1950 to proceed in unison to wage a counterrevolutionary war in
Vietnam, represented a compromise that made no one entirely happy
but provided a basis on which Western governments could respond to
what they perceived as a deepening crisis. In later years the problems
and contradictions inherent in the 1950 solution would begin to show.
First the French and then the Americans would confront the impossibil-
ity of allowing full expression of Vietnamese nationalism while keeping
Vietnam securely within the Western economic and political order.
Beyond this concern with elucidating the circumstances of America’s
first Vietnam commitment, this study has two other aims. For one thing,
it sheds light on the origins of the Cold War in the colonial world (the
“Third World”) more generally. In retrospect, we tend to see the Cold
Introduction 11

War as a global phenomenon, a conflict that touched places like Indone-

sia, Guatemala, and Angola as much as the nations on either side of
Europe’s “iron curtain.” But there was nothing inevitable about the
Cold War’s global scope. U.S.-Soviet tensions erupted during the Second
World War and in the war’s aftermath because of conflicts over the
future of Europe and contiguous areas of southwestern Asia—places
where Soviet political and territorial ambitions were relatively easy to
see. Although we can fairly criticize Western leaders for overreacting to
Soviet assertiveness, we can surely understand why they responded as
they did. In the Third World, the range of options was much broader
and the difficulties of choosing which path to follow much greater. It
falls to historians to explain why Western policymakers extended
assumptions and policies developed in the European theater to parts of
the world where social and political tensions emerged from a different
set of causes. The misapplication of the Cold War paradigm produced
little but horror and tragedy for forty years.
The pages that follow offer insight into the process by which the
Cold War came to the Third World. While diplomacy connected to
Vietnam has generally attracted scholarly attention because of the turmoil
of the 1960s and 1970s, it is worth recalling that Vietnam was in fact one
of the first parts of the Third World to attract sustained American and
international attention after the Second World War. Even if Vietnam
had never emerged as a major issue for the United States in later years,
the controversies surrounding it in the late 1940s would merit careful
attention. It was there as much as anywhere that Americans first con-
fronted the need to craft a response to surging anticolonial passions after
the Second World War. It was there that Americans confronted the diffi-
cult choice between supporting nationalists seeking self-determination—
the course that their oft-professed anticolonial convictions dictated—and
supporting the neocolonial objectives of France, the course suggested by
their determination to promote a new global order built on cooperation
among Western states.
The solution to this conundrum, an awkward compromise that paid
lip service to America’s anticolonial principles while leaning toward the
interests of France, established a pattern that would play out repeatedly
in the Third World over the course of the Cold War. From Vietnam to
Indonesia, Guatemala to the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia to South
Africa, American policymakers would invoke dedication to liberal,
democratic solutions and sometimes would take concrete steps in that
direction by sponsoring elections, pushing the pace of reform, or
12 Introduction

attempting to build popular bases of power for the regimes that they
preferred. Almost always, however, Americans set the highest priority
on the protection of short-term U.S. economic and geostrategic interests
and embraced policies geared to limit the scope of social reform and the
expression of genuine nationalism if those developments seemed to
threaten American objectives, as they often did. The United States, then,
often invoked liberal principles and sometimes even insisted on conces-
sions to those principles while carrying out illiberal policies. Vietnam
provides a telling case study of the pressures that helped establish this
pattern in the aftermath of the Second World War, a period of unique
fluidity in the history of U.S. foreign relations that might have yielded a
different outcome.18
This book also offers insight into the nature of the transatlantic part-
nership between the United States and Western European countries that
came into existence over the five years following the Second World War.
Above all, it demonstrates that European governments sometimes held
the initiative in their relationship with the United States and dictated
policies ultimately embraced in Washington. The Western economic
and security system was, in other words, the work of government offi-
cials in multiple nations, not a unilateral imposition of U.S. preferences
for remaking the world. In making this case, I offer new evidence for a
view of transatlantic alliance that has gradually gained currency over
the last fifteen years—a vision of the alliance as a complicated partner-
ship in which power and influence ran in all directions across permeable
borders, not just outward from Washington. The North Atlantic part-
nership, we now know, allowed for substantial give-and-take among its
members.19 While confirming this basic idea, this study also elaborates
on it in various ways. To begin with, it shifts the focus of transatlantic
discussions from European problems to colonial problems. Most of the
existing scholarship arguing for European agency in the formation of
Western policy concentrates on European controversies, especially eco-
nomic reconstruction and the postwar status of Germany and Eastern
Europe. But how successful were European governments in influencing
American behavior in the non-European world, where the Soviet
menace was anything but obvious and where the U.S. rhetorical com-
mitment to self-determination tended to divide Washington from, rather
than bond it with, Western Europe? This study reveals the more difficult
challenges the Europeans faced in trying to build a common front with
the United States and the strategies necessary to overcome them.20
Introduction 13

It also builds on previous scholarship by showing that France—in its

Gaullist wartime guise and then during the Fourth Republic—success-
fully influenced U.S. behavior. That Britain wielded influence over U.S.
thinking about colonial problems is hardly surprising given the enor-
mity of British power in 1945 and the long tradition of close Anglo-
American cooperation. But in the French case, historians have long
painted a picture of a hopelessly divided, ineffective, and even clumsy
nation where cabinets came and went with astonishing regularity and
where policymakers could maintain little consistency. Scholars have
suggested that most of the time, the U.S.-French relationship was wholly
dominated by American power and influence. Although the French
policy establishment frequently suffered from division and that division
sometimes produced disastrous results in Vietnam, key French officials
were nevertheless remarkably successful in the overall strategy they pur-
sued in connection with Indochina—to internationalize the problem
and thereby to put foreign resources to use in the service of French
objectives. French competency and consistency in connection with
Vietnam suggests the need for a new understanding of the French role
in crafting the postwar international order.21
Finally, this study identifies precisely how governments with diver-
gent aims and interests came together around a specific policy in Vietnam,
providing a case study that might help illuminate similar processes
related to other issues of contestation within the Western alliance. In his
controversial narrative of the Cold War We Now Know, historian John
Lewis Gaddis suggests that Western cooperation was built upon shared
democratic principles and practices. Governments, he contends, under-
stood the need for bargaining and compromise and frequently managed
to submerge their differences in the interest of the common good. This
book offers a much less exalted view of how Western nations crafted
policy. After carefully examining intragovernmental disputes over
policy toward Vietnam, I argue that hawkish factions in each country—
those who viewed the turmoil in Indochina as an expression of binary
Cold War tensions—made common cause with one another to recast
Vietnam, to assure the triumph of their policy preferences, and to mar-
ginalize those with different ideas. In each country, dissenters against
the extension of Cold War thinking to the colonial world represented a
serious threat to those who wished to pursue a vigorous anticommunist
war in Vietnam. By working together and drawing strength from one
another at critical moments of decision, factions in each country favoring
14 Introduction

a bold Cold War posture were able to have their way by 1950.22 The
policy embraced by the three leading Western powers in that year rep-
resented not the triumph of democratic principles or processes but the
victory of thinking that lacked subtlety and sensitivity to the peculiari-
ties of Vietnamese history and society. This victory, achieved more
through maneuvering and manipulation than democratic deliberation,
marked a moment of great tragedy. Over the following twenty-five
years, the Western powers would reap what they sowed in 1950.
part one

Contesting Vietnam
This page intentionally left blank
chapter 1

Visions of Indochina
and the World

The Second World War ended one epoch of Vietnamese history and
launched another. For half a century France had dominated the territory
collectively known as Indochina—the Vietnamese provinces of
Cochinchina, Annam, and Tonkin, plus neighboring Cambodia and
Laos. Vietnamese nationalists had periodically challenged colonial rule,
but French authorities had squelched demands for change in every case,
reaffirming their nation’s supremacy through a mix of armed repres-
sion, economic subjugation, and cultural domination that had charac-
terized colonial rule in Indochina since its beginnings in the nineteenth
century. Nationalist agitation aggravated the colonial administration
but did not threaten its control. Nor was French rule much challenged
from beyond Indochina’s borders. The Western powers, respectful of
French claims and excluded by formidable trade barriers, took little
account of the area. China, for centuries the main Asian aspirant to
power in the region, remained too weak and divided during the decades
of French rule to interfere. For its part, Japan steadily emerged as a
regional power during the early twentieth century but posed no direct
threat to European dominance in Southeast Asia until 1940.1
The events of that year changed everything. In May Nazi armies
launched a crushing attack against France and, a month later, forced the
French government into a humiliating armistice that shattered the coun-
try’s pretensions as a global power. The defeat had immediate conse-
quences in the Far East, where the Japanese government eagerly

17
18 Contesting Vietnam

exploited French weakness. Seeking to bolster its war effort against

China, Tokyo demanded that the colonial administration close the
Chinese-Tonkin border, thus sealing off an important channel of West-
ern supplies for the beleaguered Chinese army. Severed from Paris,
hopeless of challenging Japanese military power, and doubtful of receiv-
ing support from Western nations, French governor-general Georges
Catroux capitulated. Over the next eighteen months, the trickle of
French concessions grew to a flood as Catroux’s Vichy-appointed suc-
cessor, Admiral Jean Decoux, struggled to appease Tokyo and avert an
outright Japanese takeover. First Japan demanded airfields in northern
Indochina and the right to transport troops across Tonkin to fight in
China. Then in summer 1941, as the Japanese military prepared to
attack southward toward the Dutch East Indies and Singapore, Tokyo
insisted on establishing bases in southern Indochina. By the time of
Japan’s assault on Pearl Harbor, the French administration had become
a virtual accessory to the Japanese war effort.2
In a sense, Catroux’s strategy was successful. In return for French
cooperation Tokyo permitted the colonial administration to remain in
place at a time when Japanese forces were uprooting Western regimes in
Malaya, Singapore, Burma, the Philippines, and the East Indies. Even in
its hour of humiliation France nominally remained master of its South-
east Asian empire, a privilege that the colonial administration struggled
to protect over the following years. But this arrangement—really an
expedient that served Tokyo’s interests by relieving it of administrative
and military burdens—could not mask the underlying reality of French
impotence.
To Vietnamese nationalists the crumbling of French power signaled
an unprecedented opportunity to overturn the colonial order. They
understood that their goal would not be realized quickly. There
remained not only the matter of ending what was left of French control
but also that of evicting the Japanese. Still, the rapidly changing inter-
national situation generated hope. Amid surging optimism Ho Chi
Minh and other Vietnamese nationalist leaders gathered in a damp
mountainside cave near the Chinese border in northern Tonkin to begin
laying the groundwork for revolution. The delegates agreed to submerge
clashing agendas within a broad patriotic coalition—the Viet Nam Doc
Lap Dong Minh Hoi, or Viet Minh—and chose guerrilla warfare as the
principal method of struggle against foreign occupiers. With those
matters settled, Ho Chi Minh appealed to Vietnamese patriots to join
the fight. “The hour has struck!” he proclaimed. “Raise aloft the
Visions of Indochina and the World 19

insurrectionary banner and guide the people throughout the country to

overthrow the Japanese and the French!”3
The Viet Minh’s unalloyed enthusiasm contrasted sharply with the
deep anxiety that prevailed among Western policymakers concerned
with Indochina’s future. Events that inspired optimism and boldness in
the Tonkin mountains generated fear and discord among Free French,
British, and American officials charged with settling Indochina’s destiny
following Japan’s defeat. Above all, the evisceration of French control
raised the vexing question of how—and, at least in Washington,
whether—colonial rule should be reestablished. In the early months of
the Pacific war, Allied deliberations amounted to little more than acad-
emic exercises since Japan totally dominated the region. As the tide of
war turned toward the allies in 1943 and 1944, however, Indochina’s
postwar status became a steadily more pressing issue. Small clusters of
French, British, and U.S. policymakers focused on a full slate of ques-
tions: Who should govern Indochina after the war? How should the
aspirations of local nationalists be taken into account? What would be
Indochina’s place in the postwar international order? In attempting to
answer these questions, the three Western governments laid down pat-
terns of thinking and debate that would underlie policymaking for the
next half decade.

free france and the recovery of indochina

As Allied victory grew more certain in 1944, the Free French organiza-
tion under General Charles de Gaulle became increasingly anxious
about Indochina. To be sure, the matter ranked below the most pressing
national concerns—the reestablishment of the French state, economic
rehabilitation, and the war against Germany. Consumed by these chal-
lenges, ordinary citizens, the Free French media, and the renascent polit-
ical parties showed little interest in the fate of a territory on the other
side of the world. For the small leadership group concerned with recov-
ering France’s traditional role as a global power, however, the issue did
not lag far behind the nation’s top priorities. These men—bureaucrats,
diplomats, politicians, and military officers—shared a conviction that
their country’s long-term prospects rested on its ability to preserve the
empire, not least Indochina. François de Langlade, a one-time rubber
planter who became one of de Gaulle’s chief delegates for Indochinese
affairs, succinctly stated the group’s thinking in early 1945. “Without
Indochina,” he wrote, “France is no longer a world power.”4
20 Contesting Vietnam

The equation of French grandeur with imperial prowess ran deep in

French history. Since the early nineteenth century, French colonial ambi-
tion had swelled during times of national crisis as leaders strove to com-
pensate for setbacks in Europe with victories overseas. It was no
accident that the most active phase of French conquest followed the
humiliations of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–1871 or that French
determination to maintain the empire soared during the Second World
War. Indeed, the necessity of preserving the empire was as plain to Vichy
officials as to Gaullists. Both regimes struggled desperately to preserve a
glimmer of French independence following the debacle of 1940. “The
colonial peoples represented the best reason for France to believe and to
hope,” the Vichy colonial minister, Admiral Charles Platon, asserted in
fall 1940. De Gaulle, employing remarkably similar language, pro-
claimed the empire “a strong ray of hope,” offering France “trump
cards in the game where its destiny will be decided.”5 For both regimes,
Indochina held special significance. Although less directly tied to French
national identity than Algeria and perhaps other African possessions, it
surpassed any other imperial holding in conferring great power status
on France. The farthest-flung of major French territories, it rivaled
India, the jewel in Britain’s imperial crown, and entitled France to a
major role in Far Eastern affairs.
French determination to hold Indochina also stemmed from a perva-
sive, if less explicitly stated, belief in the territories’ economic value. To
be sure, Indochina had not yielded the returns that French colonial
enthusiasts had hoped for over the years. As one U.S. study remarked,
French fiscal, tariff, and wage policies since the late nineteenth century
had been “unfortunate” at best, failing to generate a healthy colonial
economy or to bring many benefits to the metropole. A small group of
white planters and the Banque de l’Indochine reaped most of the rewards,
while French consumers paid high prices for colonial goods. So ques-
tionable was Indochina’s economic value that one U.S. study suggested
in 1944 that France might simply be better off without it.6 Still, the
French economy had become dependent on Indochinese exports, espe-
cially rice, tin, and rubber, before the war, making the territory the
second most important source of French imports (after Algeria) within
the empire. In addition, Indochina represented a source of food and
labor for other French possessions and served as a hub of the French
colonial economy in the Far East and Pacific.7 All in all, Free French
leaders had reason to believe that Indochina, however weak its prewar
performance, could play a valuable role in metropolitan recovery.
Visions of Indochina and the World 21

While officials agreed on the need to recover Indochina, they differed

over precisely how French rule should be reconstituted after the war. A
conference of colonial administrators in Brazzaville, the capital of
French Equatorial Africa, in January 1944 revealed a wide range of
views about the possibility of postwar colonial reforms. Formally, the
Brazzaville meeting dealt only with Africa. But discussions reflected
thinking about the empire in general—its structure and the degree of self-
rule that should be permitted within it. On one side, the embryonic Gaullist
colonial ministry based in Algiers offered relatively ambitious propos-
als.8 Henri Laurentie, head of the political section of the Commissariat
aux Colonies, laid out plans not only to liberalize administrative prac-
tices but also to reconfigure the empire as a federation allowing greater
autonomy for the various component territories. Laurentie stopped well
short of proposing self-government. “If there is to be self-government,”
he insisted, “it can come only at the end of a fairly long and strictly con-
trolled evolution.”9 But there was no mistaking that Laurentie’s pro-
posals envisioned significant change.
This view encountered stiff opposition from the assembled colonial
governors, most of whom had risen to positions of influence under a
prewar system that eschewed federalism and emphasized the assimila-
tion of colonial peoples into a unified French empire. Under their sway
the meeting accepted only minute steps to improve indegène opportuni-
ties and coldly rejected Laurentie’s guarded language about self-deter-
mination. To the conservatives, talk of “le self-government”—a phrase
so alien that it was always rendered in English, as historian Martin
Shipway has pointed out—flew in the face of the hallowed Jacobin prin-
ciple of “France One and Indivisible.” The conference’s final declara-
tion, though only an advisory document, left no doubt where the
conservatives stood. The French “civilizing mission” in the colonies
excluded “any idea of autonomy [and] all possibility of evolution out-
side the French bloc,” the statement asserted. “Also excluded,” it added,
“is the eventual establishment of self-government in the colonies, even
in a distant future.”10
These opposing viewpoints laid out the parameters of a debate over
Indochina’s future that would percolate within the Gaullist bureaucracy
for the remainder of the war and would, in later years, break into the
open. For the time being, however, deliberation over postwar reforms
remained muted. Far more pressing was the challenge of assuring that
France, rather than some other power, would make the decisions when
the moment came. On this score French officials of all political stripes
22 Contesting Vietnam

were united in anxiety. While every other part of the prewar French
empire had rallied to de Gaulle by 1944, Indochina floated in precari-
ous limbo, nominally under the control of a French administration loyal
to the Vichy regime but vulnerable to Japanese takeover.
From 1940 Gaullist leaders had done what they could to show their
determination to recover Indochina and to reclaim for France a promi-
nent role in the Far East. Free France declared war on Japan immedi-
ately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and
a month later began planning for the eventual dispatch of forces to fight
alongside the allies in the Pacific. De Gaulle’s Comité Français de la
Libération Nationale stepped up its efforts in 1943, approving creation
of an expeditionary force in North Africa for use in Indochina and
requesting British and U.S. permission to post an officer to the Allied
headquarters supervising the war in Southeast Asia. In December the
French National Committee condemned Vichy’s collaboration with
Japan and proclaimed its intention to recover the territory. “In partner-
ship with the United Nations, [France] will pursue the fight until the
aggressor’s defeat and the total liberation of all the territory of the
Indochinese Union,” asserted a declaration.11
None of these acts held more than symbolic significance, however,
for Free France lacked any capacity to challenge Japanese domination.
Distasteful as it was, Gaullist policymakers saw no alternative during
1943 and 1944 to Vichy’s accommodation with Japan. Any attempt to
coax the Vichyite administration into the Gaullist camp or to push the
sixty thousand or so French-led troops in Indochina to take up arms
against Japanese control seemed certain only to compound the prob-
lems of recovering the territory by provoking a Japanese takeover.
Under the circumstances, asserted René Massigli, a prominent Free
French diplomat, it was “better to leave things alone.”12 Convinced of
this logic, the French National Committee contented itself with plan-
ning for a military effort that would come when more auspicious con-
ditions developed in the Far East.
That moment seemed to draw nearer in late 1944. French officials took
note in October when American military successes in the Philippines
seemed to clear the way for Allied operations on the Vietnamese coast—
a prospect that French officials viewed as a mixed blessing. On one
hand, it would presumably bring closer the day of Indochina’s libera-
tion. On the other, it would disrupt the fragile administrative status quo
in Saigon and place Indochina’s destiny in the hands of foreign armies
with unpredictable objectives. Gaullists worried that U.S. advances in
Visions of Indochina and the World 23

the Pacific would provoke Tokyo to end French rule altogether. But the
prospect of U.S. or Chinese forces operating on Indochinese soil, unac-
companied by French troops, caused almost as much alarm. The best
way out of this bind was to introduce Free French military forces into
Indochina ahead of any Allied operation in order to defend French inter-
ests. “It is in our fundamental interest to supply our own troops in
Indochina so they will be in force in order to welcome [the allies] with
dignity and in force,” advised General Zinovi Pechkoff, the battle-
scarred foreign legionnaire who served as Free French ambassador to
the Chinese Nationalist government in Chungking (Chongqing).13 The
problem was that France, depleted by four years of war and still bur-
dened with fighting in Europe, utterly lacked the troops, warships, and
other equipment to reinforce its position over such great distances and
in the face of the still-formidable Japanese occupation. “Unfortunately,”
a Foreign Ministry study asserted with notable understatement, “the
resources available to France today are too limited and it will be years
before they can be reconstituted.”14
Of the two nations most likely to challenge French sovereignty in
Indochina, China represented the lesser threat. French officials were
keenly aware of long-standing Chinese designs on Indochinese territory
and worried that any Chinese incursion into Tonkin might prove impos-
sible to dislodge. They also feared that Chinese patronage of various
Vietnamese political organizations during the war would lead to
dangerous cross-border meddling in Indochinese politics after the fight-
ing ended. Nevertheless, these dangers seemed manageable. Chinese
Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek repeatedly assured Ambassador
Pechkoff that his government had no territorial ambitions in Indochina
and even suggested that he was willing to help restore French rule.
While the possibility remained that rogue Chinese military officers
might have ideas of their own, Chiang’s assurances eased fears that the
Nationalist government would interfere as a matter of state policy.
French observers also drew confidence from the growing likelihood that
China, consumed by internal rivalries and rapidly descending into civil
war, would have little energy for peripheral adventures. Foreign Min-
istry experts even speculated that Chiang might steer clear of Indochina
out of a desire to cultivate French cooperation with his anticommunist
fight inside China.15
The United States represented a much more serious threat. For years,
both Vichy and Gaullist leaders had watched anxiously as Franklin
Roosevelt had grown increasingly vocal about his desire to grant
24 Contesting Vietnam

independence to colonial territories after the war. In August 1941

Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill had proclaimed
the Atlantic Charter, whose third article, pledging to “respect the rights
of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will
live,” seemed to promise postwar independence to any nation seeking
freedom from foreign rule.16 During 1942 Roosevelt focused his anti-
colonial agenda on the British empire, demanding especially that
London promise independence for India. By 1944, however, Roosevelt
had fixed his attention on Indochina. In a stream of pronouncements to
aides and foreign leaders, the president advocated plans to bar the
return of French colonialism and to establish an international trustee-
ship that would prepare the territory for eventual independence.
To make matters worse, Americans of all political persuasions
appeared to share the president’s agenda. “The colonial problem is one
of the few issues on which American opinion is not divided,” Foreign
Ministry analysts wrote in a survey of U.S. attitudes in early 1945. “For
different reasons, emancipation of European colonies is desired as much
by Republicans as by Democrats, by conservative industrialists and
radical intellectuals, by the Chicago Tribune as much as the New
Republic.” Both ideology and self-interest seemed to propel U.S. anti-
colonialism. French views on this matter echoed widely held stereotypes
of Americans as simultaneously naive and materialistic. In its analysis
of U.S. ideology the Foreign Ministry despaired of changing American
minds. “The American people, born of an anticolonial revolution, are
hostile to colonies by tradition,” asserted the report, adding, with ques-
tionable historical insight, that the United States had always sought to
avoid acquiring colonies of its own and had secured those it had merely
“by accident.” The American “penchant for crusades” compounded the
problem. “Of the two wars that [the United States] fought before 1914,
one was carried out to achieve its own emancipation, the other for that
of black slaves,” wrote the ministry, adding that in their latest war
Americans naturally sought a new ideological aim to endow their sacri-
fices with ennobling purpose. Liberal internationalists, Europhobes,
and Protestant moralizers, the study added, were filling the void by
reviving Wilsonianism and promoting decolonization as the latest vari-
ation on the American commitment to self-determination for oppressed
peoples.17
Much as it decried such zealotry, the Foreign Ministry worried even
more about a narrower segment of U.S. society allegedly motivated by
avarice. The study contended that American businessmen, backed by a
Visions of Indochina and the World 25

compliant political and military establishment, were cleverly exploiting

anticolonialism in pursuit of less lofty objectives. “The people of the
United States barely perceive these influences,” the report stated.
American businessmen seemed to support decolonization partly out of
eagerness to exploit previously inaccessible raw materials. At the same
time, the study asserted, American entrepreneurs were anxious to open
new markets in the hope that new overseas customers for their goods
would help maintain the pace of wartime production in the United
States and minimize postwar unemployment. The overall aim seemed to
be “an open door for merchandise as well as capital,” contended the
report, whose authors had no doubt as to who would win once colonial
areas were opened to all comers: “The open door would favor powerful
Americans over European competitors.”18
By 1945 French officials suspected that Americans were already
busily exploring economic opportunities in Indochina. Diplomats in
Washington and the Far East sent numerous reports to Paris warning
that agents of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) seemed to be
operating on behalf of American oil companies. From Chungking, for
example, Pechkoff alleged that an American agent in Vietnam was busy
not only gathering intelligence about the Japanese military but also col-
lecting information on the region for Texaco. Still more alarming, these
corporate agents sometimes seemed determined to bypass French
authorities and make contact with Vietnamese nationalists in hopes of
securing concessions. Speculation about such activity was fueled by a
belief that Americans had already begun taking a keen interest in the
region in the years just before the war. The statistics suggested a worry-
ing trend. In 1933 the value of Indochinese exports to the United States
had totaled 20.8 million Indochinese piastres, while imports from the
United States had amounted to a mere 3 million piastres. In 1940 the
figures jumped to 64 million piastres and 24 million, respectively. It was
hardly a bold leap to believe that Americans would attempt to exploit
wartime conditions to tap further into Indochina’s resources and
markets.19
French officials also suspected Washington of exploiting anticolo-
nialism to mask its plans to extend U.S. military power around the
globe. “It is possible that the American government favors indepen-
dence in certain colonial territories only in order to gain possession of
bases,” asserted the Foreign Ministry’s postwar planning committee.
This theory rested on a widely held belief that U.S. leaders were deter-
mined, no matter what the objections of their own people or of foreign
26 Contesting Vietnam

governments, to establish a new global order tailored to U.S. commer-

cial and strategic interests. The postwar planning committee suspected
that the U.S. military, bristling with power and convinced of its unique
ability to keep the peace after the war, desired the means not only to
defend the Western Hemisphere but also to project power into the Far
East. Zealous assertions of anticolonial principle were, in this view,
mere cover for illiberal designs on various Pacific islands and possibly
even on the Asian mainland. The committee alleged that Washington
policymakers suffered from a “guilty conscience” over these cynical
plans and hoped to conceal them within idealistic language that would
“satisfy the public’s appetite for progress and new ideas.”20
All these anticolonial motives—ideological, economic, strategic—
seemed to converge on Indochina. “The appetite for power that the
dominant U.S. role in the war has excited in Washington, concern about
security in the Pacific, the defense of American commercial interests in
the Far East, and the Methodist ideology determined to liberate
oppressed peoples have combined to create an attitude strongly unfa-
vorable to the maintenance of our position in Indochina,” Ambassador
Pechkoff wrote from Chungking. Aware of the quickening pace of
Roosevelt’s assertions of hostility to French rule, the provisional
government feared the worst. “There is no longer any doubt that the
Americans now envisage depriving us of our sovereignty, or at least
greatly constraining it,” Henri Hoppenot, one of de Gaulle’s chief emis-
saries in Washington, reported in November 1944. “President Roosevelt,”
Hoppenot added, “is personally the author [of a trusteeship scheme]
and has sketched an outline for some of his intimates.”21
For all this anxiety, however, some French officials detected cracks in
the American anticolonial facade. The Foreign Ministry’s office for
Asian affairs, for example, judged that behind routine expressions of
hostility to French rule the U.S. position on Indochina in fact remained
“extremely fluid.”22 Washington’s policy seemed vague and contradic-
tory. Exactly how would a trusteeship work? Who would take supervi-
sory responsibility? Would China, the United States itself, perhaps even
France take the leading role in preparing Indochina for independence?
On these questions, French observers noted, U.S. policymakers
appeared to have few answers. Imprecision in the U.S. position became
especially obvious in February 1945, when Roosevelt, meeting with his
Soviet and British counterparts at Yalta, seemed to backtrack on earlier
pronouncements, agreeing that trusteeships would be established only
with the consent of the imperial powers concerned.
Visions of Indochina and the World 27

Three further considerations inspired confidence that Washington

would back down. First, as Foreign Ministry officials repeatedly empha-
sized in internal correspondence, U.S. diplomats had offered several
assurances early in the war that the French empire would be fully
restored following Germany’s defeat. Ministry personnel acknowledged
that those promises may have been desperate bids to maintain French
fighting spirit, but they nevertheless expected that Washington would
honor explicit commitments. Second, French officials speculated that
Americans would ultimately back away from policies predicated on the
inherent rights of colonized peoples—a principle that, if generally
accepted in international affairs, might expose the United States to crit-
icism for its treatment of its own minority populations. “Above all,”
asserted the Foreign Ministry’s study of American anticolonialism, “the
condition of blacks in the United States leaves the Americans open to
easy counterarguments from their European interlocutors.” Third,
French officials doubted that Washington would push its anticolonial
agenda at the risk of alienating France and Britain, countries whose
cooperation the United States would obviously need in constructing a
postwar order. “The American government,” the ministry report
insisted, “cannot ignore the resistance that [trusteeship] would encounter
among European governments and public opinion.”23
Washington’s unpredictability exasperated French officials, who pri-
vately railed against U.S. behavior. Even the Foreign Ministry’s normally
cautious reports indulged in vituperative language on the subject, with
one paper decrying the “disconcerting amateurism” and “inexperienced
zeal” of U.S. policymaking. Almost any flip-flop seemed possible.24 For
all the aggravation it caused, however, the muddiness of U.S. policy also
represented an opportunity. As long as U.S. policy remained in flux, the
door would remain open for the restoration of French rule. No other
power, after all, was likely to block the way. French diplomats judged
that Chiang Kai-shek and Soviet premier Josef Stalin, despite verbal sup-
port for Roosevelt’s trusteeship scheme, had little interest in pressing the
matter. The only other nation with authority over the postwar colonial
settlement, Great Britain, resolutely supported French objectives.
Hoping to exploit this disunity to their advantage, the small group of
French cabinet ministers, bureaucrats, diplomats, and military officers
concerned with Indochina intensified their effort over the last months of
1944 and the first weeks of 1945 to reestablish their nation’s claim.
One method of strengthening the French position was to involve
French troops in a military campaign to liberate Indochina. With the
28 Contesting Vietnam

war obviously entering its closing stages, Free French officials calcu-
lated by the end of 1944 that fighting in and around Indochina,
whatever the short-term risk of destroying the Franco-Japanese condo-
minium, would strengthen French claims over the long term by demon-
strating that French people were willing to fight and die for their
possession. After that, it would presumably be more difficult for other
governments to deprive France of its territory. “I was not distressed by
the prospect of taking up arms in Indochina,” de Gaulle recalled in his
memoir, adding:
Measuring the shock inflicted on France’s prestige by Vichy’s policy,
knowing the state of public opinion throughout the [Indochinese] Union,
foreseeing the outbreak of nationalist passions in Asia and Australasia,
aware of the hostility of the Allies—particularly the Americans—in regard
to our Far Eastern position, I regarded it as essential that the conflict not
come to an end without our participation. Otherwise, every policy, every
army, every aspect of public opinion would certainly insist upon our abdi-
cation in Indochina. On the other hand, if we took part in the battle—
even though the latter were near its conclusion—French blood shed on
the soil of Indochina would constitute an impressive claim.25

On this logic, de Gaulle and his advisers believed it was essential to

organize forces capable of waging a military campaign against the
Japanese. In July 1944 the general’s personal emissary, Major de
Langlade, parachuted into Indochina to establish contact with Gaullist
sympathizers and to organize resistance. Several more agents of the pro-
visional government followed soon after. Meanwhile, the provisional
government stepped up its effort to move fresh troops from Algeria to
Indochina. Above all, French diplomats pressed their demands for
Allied help to transport the Corps Léger d’Intervention, a force of
twelve hundred men designed to fan out across Indochina and to lead
guerrilla operations against the Japanese.26
Efforts to organize resistance within Indochina went hand in hand
with a diplomatic campaign to convince Washington to allow regular
French units to participate in the broader Pacific war. French leaders
hoped that such forces might take part in an eventual liberation of
Indochina, but they understood that any insistence on the point might
result in Allied rejection and therefore proposed only that French units
serve as the U.S. and British commands wished. In September 1944 the
provisional government formally offered to send a naval task force as
well as an expeditionary force of as many as thirty thousand troops to
the Far East as soon as fighting had ended in France. Half the force
Visions of Indochina and the World 29

would join the U.S. campaign in the Western Pacific, while the rest would
serve under South East Asia Command, the British-dominated head-
quarters in Kandy, Ceylon, that supervised the war in Burma. So urgent
did de Gaulle’s top military aide, General Alphonse Juin, consider these
initiatives that he urged taking equipment away from forces in Europe if
necessary to demonstrate a powerful presence in the Far East.27
French hopes foundered not on equipment shortages but on U.S. hos-
tility. Despite intense French pressure the Roosevelt administration
blocked French forces from the Far East and excluded French officers
from Allied war-planning councils. Such opposition underscored the
importance of obtaining political support for French aims from other
foreign governments, another major feature of French diplomacy in late
1944 and early 1945. One focus of French hopes—ironically, in view of
later developments—was the Soviet Union. Foreign Ministry experts
predicted that Moscow, at the end of the European war, would reassert
traditional Russian dominance in northeast Asia while also trying to
extend its influence in China by supporting the communists there. Yet
French experts believed that Soviet ambitions stopped at China’s south-
ern borders. In Southeast Asia, they anticipated that Soviet leaders
would welcome the restoration of European colonialism as a valuable
stabilizing force. “The USSR does not wish to see Chinese influence or
American imperialism gain predominance in that strategically impor-
tant region,” asserted one study prepared for the foreign minister.
“France, strong enough to resist foreign ambitions and sufficiently dis-
interested to constitute a precious element of stability in the Far East,
seems to them best qualified to protect and administer Indochina.”28
If French diplomats hoped to gain from benevolent passivity in
Moscow, they looked to fellow Southeast Asian colonial powers for
active help. “We must not miss a single chance to remind London and
The Hague of common interests based on the similarity of the situations
of France, England, and the Netherlands in Asian matters,” the cabi-
net’s foreign affairs committee asserted. “Without doubt,” it added,
“the British and Dutch governments will wish to see the French govern-
ment’s national and international standing ever more firmly estab-
lished.” French officials saw strong parallels between their nation’s
position in Indochina and the Dutch predicament in the East Indies,
where American anticolonialism raised similarly annoying questions
about the future of European rule. To bolster their colonial positions,
the two countries’ colonial bureaucracies routinely shared information
and sought common diplomatic positions. Nevertheless, French officials
30 Contesting Vietnam

doubted that the Netherlands could offer decisive assistance. The

Hague obviously lacked equipment or ships to help France achieve its
objectives in Indochina. Moreover, the Dutch government seemed
unlikely to risk its relationship with Washington by advocating the
French cause.29
The provisional government expected much more from Britain,
which possessed far greater resources and infinitely more influence over
postwar settlements. On the whole, the British government gratified
French hopes. René Massigli, the French ambassador in London, found
“no reason to doubt” British dedication to French interests by January
1945.30 As with the Netherlands, however, French officials saw limits to
Britain’s capacity to help. For one thing, British resources, while con-
siderably greater than those available to the Dutch, were still badly
depleted by years of war, and it was obvious that little could be spared
to assist a foreign ally. Moreover, French officials suspected that they
could not depend on London much more than The Hague for help in
recovering Indochina if doing so risked a rupture with Washington. As
Pechkoff put it, “England depends too heavily on the United States for
us to rely on London to support us openly against the wishes of
Washington.” Ultimately, then, there was no escaping the fact that
Indochina’s postwar fate rested with one country: the United States.
“Some might say,” Pechkoff asserted, “that once we have British support
in Indochina, we can ignore China and the United States. No illusion,”
he warned, “is more dangerous.” However annoying the conclusion
may have been, Washington obviously bore the brunt of the fighting
against Japan and would dictate postwar arrangements in the Far East.
“Nothing will or can be done in Indochina without their agreement, at
least tacit,” wrote Pechkoff. Even the French embassy in London, a
strong proponent of Anglo-French cooperation, recognized the danger
of overreliance on Britain. “It is the Americans who will have the last
word at the moment of decision,” advised Ambassador Massigli. “The
Pacific war is above all an American war, a fact which the British them-
selves recognize with bitterness.”31
Inescapably, the only sure method of restoring French control over
Indochina was to change American minds and obtain U.S. support.
Only Washington, it was clear, possessed the authority to approve
French ambitions and, just as critical, the resources to fulfill them. Only
with access to American material power—shipping, military equipment,
and economic aid to rebuild the Indochinese economy—could France
recover its prewar position. The indeterminacy of U.S. policy left space
Visions of Indochina and the World 31

for optimism that it might be possible to change American views and

harness U.S. strength, but there was no obvious way to do it. Conse-
quently, French political leaders, diplomats, and military officials
embraced a range of strategies to convince, cajole, and if necessary,
coerce the United States into backing French aims in Indochina.
In a quickening series of bilateral meetings devoted to Indochina,
French representatives in Washington worked hard to persuade Americans
to abandon their hostility to colonial restoration. Above all, French
diplomats strove to appeal to American sensibilities by stressing their
country’s good intentions toward the Indochinese population. The pro-
visional government, of course, had no detailed plan to reform French
rule in Indochina. Deliberation of postwar colonial problems had not
proceeded very far. But in contacts with U.S. officials and in public pro-
nouncements, French officials hinted otherwise, promising repeatedly
that Indochina would be allowed a greater degree of autonomy after the
war. In its December 1943 declaration proclaiming its determination to
reestablish colonial rule, the French National Committee pledged that
Indochina would be given “a new political status” involving new gov-
erning arrangements of a “liberal character.” De Gaulle reiterated that
pledge during a July 1944 trip to Washington, although he provided no
details. A diplomatic note handed to the U.S. ambassador in Chungking,
Patrick Hurley, similarly promised that a revived French republic,
“together with the populations concerned,” would work out new
arrangements providing Indochina “autonomy within the framework
of the French Empire.”32
Officials also sought to appeal to Americans by recasting the histori-
cal record of French imperialism in Asia. Diplomats had orders from
Paris to emphasize the metropole’s accomplishment in promoting eco-
nomic development and bringing advancement to the Indochina’s
twenty-four million inhabitants. This was no difficult task for French
leaders accustomed to touting their nation’s accomplishments in South-
east Asia. For decades colonial enthusiasts had pointed with pride to the
symbols of modernity that France had created: a rationalized agricul-
tural system, Western-style schools, advanced hospitals, and a network
of roads, railways, and port facilities. Thanks to these accomplishments,
French officials could proudly trumpet Indochina’s transformation by
the eve of the Pacific war from a subsistence, single-crop economy to a
rich polyculture that produced vast exports. Grateful for such progress,
“les indigènes” genuinely supported the French presence, according
to French officials steeped in the Orientalist assumptions about the
32 Contesting Vietnam

docility of Asian peoples. “The population of our colonies has always

had confidence in us,” Colonial Minister René Pleven told foreign jour-
nalists in October 1944. “The mass of the natives want us to help and
protect them,” added Pleven, rebutting American charges that only elite
profiteers supported French imperialism.33
French officials also attempted to shape American perceptions of
Indochina by appealing to presumed U.S. ambitions to penetrate the
region economically and militarily. They understood that their coun-
try’s long record of exclusionary economic policies made it impossible
for France, even more than for other colonial powers, to pose as a cham-
pion of economic liberalism. The provisional government’s relative inat-
tention to colonial matters also made it impossible to state with any
specificity the types of economic reforms that might ensue after the war.
Nevertheless, discussions with American interlocutors often included
vague promises to open the Indochinese economy to foreign trade and
investment. In its December 1943 declaration the French National
Committee pledged to overhaul Indochina’s “economic status” by
granting local authorities autonomy over fiscal and customs policies.
New promises, though still vague, followed a year later. The note given
to Ambassador Hurley pledged that Indochina “will be granted an eco-
nomic regime enabling her to profit greatly from the advantages of inter-
national competition.” Similarly, French leaders hinted that they were
prepared to satisfy the other material objective they believed Americans
held in Indochina: access to military bases. De Gaulle himself indicated
willingness to allow foreign use of Indochinese airfields and ports as
long as French sovereignty remained unchallenged.34
This persuasion campaign formed a central part of French contacts
with American counterparts through the second half of 1944 and the
first weeks of 1945. French officials were not, however, naive about
their chances, at least in the short term, of overcoming entrenched anti-
colonialism through this means alone. Another, more forceful current
also ran through French diplomatic activity—an attempt to coerce the
United States into backing French objectives. Above all, French officials
hoped to gain leverage from possession of two commodities that they
believed U.S. authorities coveted—intelligence and rubber. They cor-
rectly judged that the OSS, the American intelligence agency, hoped to
obtain information about Indochina in order to plan bombing opera-
tions against Japanese forces and to recover U.S. airmen shot down over
the region. For French officials the American need for information rep-
resented an opportunity to exact a price. “On this point, as on others, it
Visions of Indochina and the World 33

is necessary to apply pressure in order to obtain vital cooperation from

the Americans,” the interministerial committee in charge of Indochina
affairs concluded in January 1945 while turning down a U.S. request
for data concerning Indochinese beaches. De Gaulle had already set a
precedent for such a refusal in September 1944 by ordering French intel-
ligence agents to suspend cooperation of all kinds with the OSS in the
Far East so as to make clear French exasperation over American atti-
tudes toward Indochina. Although information continued to flow to
U.S. authorities, cooperation was strained and a total breakdown
remained possible. Threats to cut off rubber supplies were bound to be
less impressive to American officials, partly because of rapid wartime
advances in production of synthetic rubber. Still, Massigli proposed in
early 1945 that France exploit its potentially important role in global
production to demand that Washington agree to permit French recovery
of Indochina after the war.35 So great was the French predicament that
he precluded no avenue of applying pressure.

great britain and the regional imperative

British policymakers backed the restoration of French colonialism for
three reasons. First, they anticipated that a successful American chal-
lenge to French control in Indochina might lead Washington to question
British rule in other parts of Southeast Asia that had been occupied by
Japan, including the economically vital territories of Hong Kong,
Malaya, Singapore, and Burma. Those possessions had played impor-
tant roles in the British economy before the war and promised to offer
crucial advantages, especially the capacity to earn foreign exchange,
during the inevitably difficult reconstruction period following the war.36
Most alarming to British observers was the seeming ease with which
Washington contemplated radical solutions that carried potentially dev-
astating consequences for its allies. “We’d better look out,” Alexander
Cadogan, the Foreign Office’s permanent undersecretary, warned in
early 1944 after Roosevelt had complained of the “hopeless” French
record in Indochina. “Were the French more ‘hopeless’ than we in
Malaya or the Dutch in the E[ast] Indies?” he wondered. Like his French
counterparts, Cadogan judged that imperial solidarity in the face of
such dangers was vital. “In view of the well-known American attitude
towards the restoration of colonies generally, there is much to be said
for the Colonial Powers sticking together in the Far East,” Cadogan
advised Churchill.37
34 Contesting Vietnam

The second reason for Britain’s support of French colonialism was a

belief that France stood a better chance than any alternative source of
authority to maintain stability in Indochina. This was no small matter
given the critical importance that British policymakers attached to
Indochina as the linchpin of all Southeast Asia. Already in 1944 strate-
gists in London viewed Indochina as a principle barrier between Chinese
power to the north and the chain of territories to the south that included
several British possessions. The loss of Indochina to a hostile power,
Foreign Office officials conjectured, prefiguring what would later be
known as the “domino theory,” might set off a chain reaction across
Asia. The pattern of Japanese aggression during 1940 and 1941 offered
a model of how such a process might play out. “The potential threat to
Australia, New Zealand, India, Burma, Malaya, and the East Indies
Archipelago resulting from Indo-China being in the hands of a weak or
unfriendly power,” asserted one April 1944 Foreign Office study, “has
been sufficiently demonstrated by the action of Japan in this war.”38 To
be sure, doubts abounded about the capacity of France, badly weak-
ened by the war, to defend the region. But British officials trusted that
with adequate foreign assistance France could once again exert reliable
control.
In any case, there existed no promising alternative to continued
French rule. British officials shuddered at what they considered to be
the most likely alternate scenario: Chinese control. Chinese Nationalist
forces might, with U.S. blessing, simply invade Indochina and establish
puppet regimes in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Or China might gain
control under the cloak of international trusteeship. Either way, London
foresaw nothing but chaos. An invasion carried the nightmarish
prospect of fighting between French and Chinese troops, while a trustee-
ship would undoubtedly, in the cabinet’s scornful words, “open the
door wide to Chinese intrigues.” Instability, in turn, promised to invite
intervention over the long term by other powers—a renascent Japan or
perhaps the Soviet Union. “We should expect the Japanese to start fish-
ing in the troubled waters at the first opportunity,” the cabinet’s post-
war planning committee asserted in a January 1944 memorandum. As
for the Soviet Union, British planners saw no likelihood of direct inter-
ference in Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, they found it impossible to pre-
dict the extent of Soviet ambitions in Asia and could not exclude the
possibility that within several years Moscow might exert significant
influence in the Far East through a Japanese puppet state or through
construction of a substantial Pacific fleet.39
Visions of Indochina and the World 35

Beneath British anxiety about foreign meddling lay an assumption that

the Indochinese people were unprepared to resist such intrigue if left to
their own devices. Some British observers sharply criticized the French
record in Indochina, blaming Paris for harsh repression, underdevelop-
ment of the economy, and heavy-handed administrative techniques that
left little space for indigenous involvement. But British officials also had a
degree of sympathy for the French. “In judging the achievements of a
colonial administration, some consideration must be paid to the material
it has to work upon,” the Foreign Office’s research department asserted
in a study of Indochina. Reflecting widely held Western notions of Asian
societies, the report depicted the Indochinese population as stunted by
centuries of war, poverty, and oppression as well as the “extremely debil-
itating” effects of a tropical climate. The study went on to quote American
author Virginia Thompson, whose 1937 book on Indochina criticized the
Vietnamese for their deep-seated “apathy, insensitivity, and placidity” as
well as their taste for “ruse and intrigue.” If granted self-rule, such people
would, in the British view, unleash political and economic havoc, with
potentially devastating consequences for the region as a whole. Above all,
many officials feared mass starvation across Southeast Asia if Indochina’s
rice industry fell under indigenous supervision.40
The third reason that Britain supported French claims to Indochina
was the consensus among London policymakers that they must do
everything possible to restore France as a robust partner in European
affairs. No matter what scenario played out in the postwar years—
German revival, Soviet expansionism, U.S. withdrawal, general social
and economic collapse—British officials agreed that a reliable France
was essential. Winston Churchill stated the matter grandly in a 1944
speech, telling the House of Commons that his government, as well as
the entire Commonwealth and empire, wished “to see erected once
more, at the earliest moment, a strong, independent, and friendly
France.” Behind such altruistic bluster lay hardheaded calculation of
British national interests. “It is strategically essential in Europe, so long
as there is any possibility of aggression by a European Power against the
British Isles, that our policy should aim at maintaining a strong and
friendly France,” asserted one paper for the cabinet. Even if France
remained feeble, the report added, “she should at least be friendly”—
willing to play its part, in other words, in British-centered defense
arrangements in the postwar period.41
No one doubted that losing Indochina would be a grievous blow to
France. In material terms, British observers believed it would deprive
36 Contesting Vietnam

France of economic advantages as the country embarked on what would

inevitably be a difficult recovery from war and occupation. More often,
they cited the likely damage to the French national psyche if Indochina
were taken away. The loss would “cause bitter resentment in France,”
asserted one Foreign Office paper. The postwar planning committee
sketched a horrific scenario that might follow such a setback. Com-
bined with the material and psychological damage already afflicting
France after years of national humiliation, the loss of Indochina might
push Paris to look to the East, rather than to Britain and the United
States, for postwar cooperation. Franco-British partnership, the com-
mittee worried, “would be jeopardized if it could be represented to the
French that we had willingly connived at a plan to despoil their Empire
during the period of temporary weakness.” Paris might respond by forg-
ing an alliance with Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union—the Eastern
option that had tempted France in earlier decades. “One way to keep
the French loose from such a bloc,” the Foreign Office committee
asserted, “would be to give them as far as possible a sense of common
interest with this country as an overseas colonial power.”42
As vital as British policymakers considered the fate of Indochina for
all these reasons, their deliberations remained hypothetical until the
second half of 1944. With the U.S. arrival in the Philippines, British offi-
cials, like their counterparts in France, sensed that decisions could no
longer be put off. Although French demands often exasperated officials
in London, most were convinced that the moment had come to demon-
strate sympathy for French objectives. Fearful of antagonizing the
United States, the British government had not done much to promote
French interests during earlier stages of the war. Now some in London
understood French restlessness. “[The French] suspect, not without
reason, that we are not putting ourselves out to give them a substantial
military part in the reconquest of Indo-China,” asserted L.H. Foulds, a
Southeast Asia specialist in the Foreign Office. Among other risks was
the alarming possibility that the French would give up on cooperation
with Britain in Asia. The British commander in Kandy, Lord Louis
Mountbatten, predicted a “disastrous effect” on the “whole British
position in the Far East” if Franco-British cooperation in the region
broke down. Only by demonstrating clear determination to protect
French interests could Britain secure crucial French cooperation in the
future, he maintained.43
More immediate considerations also encouraged British policy-
makers in summer and fall 1944 to seek decisions about Indochina’s
Visions of Indochina and the World 37

postwar status. For one thing, they knew that South East Asia Com-
mand would benefit from clearer planning as it began contemplating
more intensive military operations in Southeast Asia. Firm decisions to
restore French sovereignty would obviously encourage greater French
cooperation with those activities while also eliminating the danger that
U.S. and British propaganda would clash. The cabinet worried that any
contradiction between U.S. emphasis on self-determination and British
stress on restoration of colonial rule could confuse potential resistance
forces in Southeast Asia and create long-term political problems with
local nationalists. The danger of rice shortages following the war in the
Far East also suggested a need for quick decisions. Early 1945 estimates
predicted a major shortfall in regional production, due largely to an
anticipated two-thirds drop-off in Indochinese production from 1940
levels. Fearing the political consequences of starvation in India and
other British territories, experts in London hoped to establish a regional
approach to the food problem as quickly as possible. Any such scheme
clearly required decisions about postwar authority in Indochina, the
world’s second largest rice exporter before the war.44
Motivated in all of these ways, the British government provided a
good deal of military and diplomatic assistance for French efforts to
recover Indochina. To some extent, London was committed under its
basic wartime agreement with Free France, the Anglo-French Protocol
of Mutual Aid of February 1944, which called for cooperation not only
in Europe but also overseas. But British support went beyond formal
commitments. Officials repeatedly took up the French cause in meetings
with U.S. counterparts, hoping to coax the Roosevelt administration
into accepting a significant French role in the Pacific war. Although the
British Chiefs of Staff were reluctant to give French officers any part in
war planning until the liberation of Indochina was imminent, they per-
sistently argued in favor of French requests to send a liaison mission to
South East Asia Command and to involve French forces in the Far East
as soon as possible.45
Meanwhile, the British military did what it could to support French
ambitions, often exploiting American ambivalence in order to go
beyond what U.S. policy formally allowed. At the end of 1944, the
British Chiefs of Staff, after failing repeatedly to win U.S. backing to
attach a French military mission at South East Asia Command head-
quarters, went ahead anyway, welcoming General Roger Blaizot and his
fifty-member staff on a mission thinly disguised as a “personal visit.”46
Eden told French officials that he hoped the move would make the
38 Contesting Vietnam

United States “less difficult than earlier,” apparently by forcing Washington

to accept the inevitability of French involvement in the Far East. For his
part, Mountbatten provided extensive air support for Free French
agents in Indochina throughout 1944 and encouraged cooperation
between the British intelligence apparatus in the Far East and the
Gaullist intelligence organization. In December 1944 alone, British
forces carried out forty-six air operations and succeeded in establishing
a radio network among resistance cells in Indochina, building up stores
of military equipment for use in a possible future campaign against
Japan, and occasionally transporting French agents into and out of the
region—all acts undertaken without U.S. approval and arguably in vio-
lation of Anglo-U.S. agreements about the boundaries of operational
theaters in the Far East. All in all, British diplomats impressed them-
selves with their accomplishments. “I do not think the Americans realize
anything like the extent to which our penetration of French Indo-China
jointly with the French has already progressed,” one Washington-based
diplomat confided to the Foreign Office.47
London policymakers held no illusions, however, that these efforts,
even if successful, would be sufficient to accomplish British objectives in
Southeast Asia. Merely winning U.S. tolerance of a larger French role in
the Far Eastern war would not come close to accomplishing the larger
purposes of restoring France to its prewar position and reconstructing a
stable political and economic order across the region. To achieve those
aims, British officials recognized as clearly as their French counterparts
that they had no choice but to obtain active, material support from the
United States. Britain by itself was simply too weak to undertake the job
of restoring the prewar order. Even before 1941 British leaders had fore-
seen that their country would have great difficulty maintaining a lead-
ing role in the Far East while fighting a major war in Europe. Four years
of draining warfare proved them right. By 1944 British resources were
badly depleted, leaving London with limited capacity for independent
action.
By any measure, the disparity between British and U.S. power was
gargantuan. While the United States tripled its production of manufac-
tured goods between 1940 and 1944 and expanded its fleet to three
times the size of the Royal Navy, Britain lost about a quarter of its
national wealth and became overwhelmingly dependent on the United
States for war matériel of all sorts. By fall 1943, for instance, Britain
relied on the United States for 88 percent of its landing craft, 60 percent
of its tanks, and nearly all of its transport aircraft.48 Such imbalances
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
was her clear memory of the charming, inconsequent American boy
whom she had met in Vienna five years before. It had been on one of
her trips, that were always solitary, since Captain Essington was too
busy spending her neat little fortune in various very private and
proper gambling-clubs to care how his wife amused herself.
How this boy, Fox Longacre, with his facile Gallic Americanism, had
stood out among the miscellaneous lot of students of the Vienna
Conservatory! She remembered his passionate enthusiasm for the
music that he whimsically called his “trade,” his spasmodic
application.
They had got on famously in their short, merry acquaintance.
She had felt it the greatest pity in the world that he should be an
orphan, a waif, with just enough money to let him be comfortably
idle, and such potentialities of power running riot.
She had regretted the end of that gay little friendship when she
returned to her sad-colored London.
Between this first encounter and the next intervened her
catastrophe. Something done in those private and particular
gambling-houses—something that never clearly came out of them—
swallowed the half of the money remaining, and directed the shot
that ended Captain Essington’s life. A grim, a bitter wrench it had
been! The mere memory of it brought back the ghost of the old ache.
She had realized then what depths of suffering might be, in which
love and bereavement bore no part. Even the relief of freedom had
been overwhelmed in the shock of violent death, of disorganized
existence.
How vividly it had set before her the instability of present
circumstances, the danger of depending on what had been! She had
been frightened to drawing into herself, away from the interests of
the world around her that had meant so much to her.
In her vague retrospection it seemed to her it had been more the
kindness of her friends than any effort on her own part that had not
only kept, but lifted her place among them in the difficult years that
followed; such a place that, when the brilliant boy of her Vienna
memory turned up in London, older, less confident, more moody by
three years, and desperately “out” of everything he should have been
“in,” she had almost bewildered him by the number of doors she
could open to him. All her social threads so casually picked up, at
once had significance, were manipulated to a purpose. What a zest,
what a spirit her life had had! How self-distrustful he had been! How
she had, at moments, pulled him after her! It had been desperate at
times to keep him up to it, but every minute had been worth living.
And now that her long hope was almost realized, now that he
seemed on the very verge of his success,—now—
She shifted her eyes to the two bright glints on the toes of Cissy
Fitz Hugh’s patent leathers. The car was one dusky tone in the
deepening twilight, and these two hypnotic points of light helped to
fix her memory more clearly on the past.
Well, she had been the one woman to him. He had glorified her as
a boy will. What a joy it had been, that adoring loyalty of his, even
while she knew she cheated him! The memory of his old impetuosity,
his insistence, his unhesitating confidence over the inevitable
question that had risen between them, came back to her, a warm,
pleasurable emotion. And then the sadder sequence! For it had come
to her then that a woman seasoned, sophisticated, settled, who
would marry a boy ten years her junior—and such a boy—would be
either a knave or a fool.
And yet to get on without her? She knew he couldn’t afford it then.
Could she, on the other hand, get on without him? She had made her
peace with herself, through the next three years, with what she had
given—the balance to his chaotic impulse, the spur to his ambition.
She had so lived into his interests, so made herself identified with
them, that she had lost sight of her old dread of changing
circumstance.
Six months ago, when she had left London, she had been so
secure in his allegiance—an allegiance so settled, so taken for
granted, that its first significance was almost lost sight of—that the
separation had not given her a passing anxiety. Now she asked
herself if his mad dash with the Gretrys across an ocean and a
continent was to have brought him to her again merely to shake her
faith in that allegiance.
The slamming of the car door brought her back shrewdly to her
surroundings. She looked up. In the pictures of her memory Longacre
had figured always as a boy, a Viennese student as she had seen him
first. Now the sight of him as he was, coming down the aisle upon
her, struck her as freshly as the impression of a stranger. He was no
longer youth, painted in full curves and raw colors, but young
maturity grayed over, sharp-lined, strenuous with the vital endeavor
he had put into living.
He seemed to be catching up the years between them. She had a
quick revulsion. She asked herself, if, after all—
Cissy Fitz Hugh was yawning prettily, stretching herself awake.
“We’ll be in in five minutes,” Longacre said, his hand on the back of
Florence Essington’s chair. “Will you have your cloak?”
 CHAPTER II

JULIA STEPS OUT OF IT, AND ANSWERS A QUESTION

N
IGHT had come down in a smother of fog made infinitely
dreary by the interminable sound of the sea. The two light rigs
that had sped on the sand road, through the thick oak
shadows, now spun sharply over the crisp gravel of the ascending
drive toward the “Miramar” lights, trembling in misty penumbra. The
house loomed immediately above, huge, undefined, confused in its
lesser masses of trees. It seemed so shut up against this dreary
outside that it made not even a sign of welcome to the arrivals
under the porte-cochère.
Florence, as Longacre lifted her from the cart, felt the damp of his
greatcoat chill through her glove. She saw him, mounting the wide
wooden steps in the band of light from the veranda windows, haloed
with silvery moisture. The veranda presented the appearance of a
deck cleared for action. All the graces of hammocks and cushions,
removed, left a sentinel row of reversed cane chairs against the wall.
Somewhere out in the dark a tree dripped steadily.
She felt her hair cling to her cheek.
Cissy Fitz Hugh in her frills was limp as a wet doll, and prettily
cross.
“They must have heard us, with all that row on the gravel!” she
fretted. “There—at last!”
 The door had opened, presenting them precipitately with the heart
of the house—the big wainscoted living-hall, rugged, divaned, firelit,
and full of people. They were not really more than a dozen, the
women in golf-shirts, the men in shooting-coats and leggings—the
flotsam and jetsam of a day’s sport made sociable with tea.
Their high, cheery babble just paused and caught its note again as
Mrs. Budd, hard upon the heels of the maid who had opened the
door, fairly pounced upon her belated guests, and sucked them in to
a pleasant snapping of talk and wood fires. Her tall, robust figure in
its red golf-waistcoat bristled with welcomes.
“Now I know you’re drenched! The fog’s a perfect rain! I’m so
glad.”
She kissed Cissy warmly, her eyes snapping meanwhile from
Florence to Longacre.
“Come straight to the fire. Do come to the fire, Mrs. Essington,
and Agnès shall take your wet things.”
Alert for impending introductions, she half turned to Florence with
the name of a guest at her lips, but Florence had already been cut
off from the rest of the party by a large man with his hands in the
sagging pockets of an old shooting-coat. He had at the same time,
in an incredibly short space, furnished her with tea, and now stood
above her while she drank it, rocking softly to and fro on his feet,
and talking steadily. Occasionally he gesticulated with a large, open
hand.
Cissy Fitz Hugh had gone her own way some distance into a
number of conversations. It devolved upon Longacre to be led about
the circle with a name here and a name there, and a blur of
presences that vexed his continental habit, and left him, at the
finish, still face to face with his hostess.
She promptly cast upon the shore of conversation the first drift of
her own interest.
 “And what in the world has become of Julia!” she exclaimed. She
almost challenged him with it. “You would think two hours would be
enough to ride round ‘Tres Pinos,’ especially with her friends coming
—and all this fog!”
Her smile stayed with him while her eyes roved to the windows.
She was notably expectant, but not, as Longacre seemed to sense it,
so anxious as would be natural to a mother whose daughter has
chosen the coast road on a thick night. While he said something
amiable about the safeness of sand roads and the instinct of a
horse, he felt that he was looking hardly less expectant than she.
“And where’s dear Julia?” Cissy Fitz Hugh’s voice preceded her into
the group.
“Oh, Julia—”
The name, tossed back and forth, arrested Florence Essington’s
attention.
“Julia is a very naughty child,” Mrs. Budd happily proclaimed. “She
said she would be home by five, and then she made me promise not
to wait tea for her.” Her eloquent hands deprecated those of the
clock, which pointed to half after six. “And now she’s hardly time to
dress for dinner!”
“Julia,” said Holden, turning his large head on his shoulder, “may
come to dinner in her riding-boots, so long as she comes.”
“Just what I’ve always said, Mr. Holden,” Cissy seconded. “Dear
Julia—”
“Well, there they are!” cried Mrs. Budd, her eyes flying to the door.
Holden opened it on the white darkness.
Two voices, basso and falsetto, were calling through the fog. Two
horses were backing and sidling at the steps. Then a tall young
woman came laughing and stamping through the open doorway.
The magnetism of her bounding vitality touched Florence
Essington before she looked; for her first look was to Longacre. He
was suddenly brightened, more interested in what he was saying to
Cissy Fitz Hugh; and Florence, seeing, had a sensation of loneliness,
of desertion, that amounted to antagonism as she turned her eyes
to the girl. The feeling ached through her pure pleasure in the
other’s extraordinary beauty.
Julia was hatless. Her hair, crystalled with mist, stood off her
forehead in a glistening bush. That dark, back-brushed nimbus gave
the suggestion of some great, fine lady of another day. The
magnificent sweep of her black brows seemed to dress her forehead.
The blood of her vigorous body burned in her crimson cheeks and
lips. She moved in an atmosphere of vital energy. She dominated the
room.
Her mother seemed scarcely able to keep her hands off her.
“Why, darling, what is the matter? Why are you so late?”
“Awfully sorry, mama. We couldn’t help it. Mr. Thair couldn’t see
the face of his watch.—How d’ y’ do, Mrs. Fitz Hugh.—Besides, the
ocean was too splendid!”
“But where is your hat, pet?” Mrs. Budd still hovered, tender and
voluble.
“Blew off,” said Julia, blithely. “Mr. Thair tried to find it, and nearly
lost himself in the fog. Bless you, mother, we couldn’t see our
saddle-pommels!”
“Here’s Mr. Longacre,” murmured her mother, remindingly.
The girl gave him a full hand-clasp. Her spirits seemed to take
another leap.
“Why didn’t you come down earlier, Mr. Longacre? We should have
given you a run for your money.”
“Oh, there’ll be another night like this for me,” said Longacre, with
confidence.
Mrs. Budd looked at him with dim dismay, but the entrance of
Charlie Thair diverted her. Lean, keen, and smiling, his unusually
animated, not to say joyous, bearing gave her reassurance. Her eyes
traveled to Julia for confirmation, but Julia was disconcertingly
oblivious of Thair’s presence. Her vivid gestures and high animation
were all for Longacre. Mrs. Budd’s forehead showed a cleft of
anxiety not to be erased by her most scrupulous smiles. Among the
groups, dispersing to dress for dinner, she tried to reach her
daughter; but the girl had been swept up-stairs, the center of a knot
of women. The slow-moving Holden detained Mrs. Budd until she
had left hardly that allotted time in which the most expeditious
woman can be groomed and gowned.
But Mrs. Budd was superior to time in point of determination. She
hurried her maid to the woman’s distraction, and half an hour before
the first of her guests could be expected she knocked at her
daughter’s door.
Julia was in a white and crimson combing-gown, with her hair
streaming; but she had not yet removed her wet riding-boots, and
there was, to Mrs. Budd’s eye, something distressingly indiscreet in
such foot-gear appearing from the folds of a peignoir.
“Oh, Julia dear!” she remonstrated.
Julia laughed, and offered a spurred heel to the maid. “I can’t
bear to take them off,” she said.
“You did have a nice time, didn’t you, pettie, in spite of the
dripping fog and the dreadful wind! But I should have been anxious
if you had been with any one but Charlie Thair. You did have a nice
time, didn’t you?”
“Magnificent! Uproarious!”
“Oh, not uproarious!” her mother protested.
“Yes, really. I should think you would have heard us! We sang,
‘The Hounds of Maynell,’ from the landing to the lighthouse as hard
as we could shout. We got the triple echo to saying all sorts of
things. And then—” she paused, fitting her feet into white satin
shoes, while Mrs. Budd agonized in suspense—“well, then, when we
got out to ‘Tres Pinos’ there was such a surf we simply had to yell to
make each other hear. And there,” concluded Julia, with a flourish of
animation, quite as though she had reached the climax of her tale
—“there my hat blew off.”
Mrs. Budd threw her hands in her lap with a gesture of resignation
not lost upon her daughter.
“And Charlie was such a dear!” Julia smiled tenderly at the toe of
her shoe, and Mrs. Budd gathered a faint hope.
“He piled off his horse and fell around in the fog for half an hour,
and nearly drowned himself, till I said, ‘Oh, let it go,’ and he said, ‘All
right, young madam,’ and off we went.”
Mrs. Budd’s expression of acute disappointment arrested her
daughter’s attention. “Why, what did you expect he did, mama?
Surely not something horrid?”
“Indeed, no. I’m quite certain, Julia, if Charlie Thair ever did
anything at all, it could not be horrid.”
Julia stared a minute at this ambiguous paradox. Then she
chuckled.
“I never liked him so much, mama. I got him all waked up. He
didn’t have any time to be witty or tiresome. And on the way home
what do you think he said?”
Mrs. Budd hung upon the revelation.
“He said,” Julia continued, with a touch of pride, “that I was
awfully good sorts, if I was a beauty. Now wasn’t that nice of him,
mama?”
Mrs. Budd gasped. There were almost tears in her reply.
“My dear Julia, you must not encourage that sort of attitude in a
man. You must not forget that you are no longer a child. And I don’t
at all approve of your stramming round the country, singing at the
top of your lungs, in your second season! Suppose you had met
those people driving up from the station!”
 “Who is the woman who came with Mr. Longacre?” Julia inquired
irrelevantly.
“Oh, that’s Mrs. Essington, Kitty Wykoff’s daughter. Kitty married
her to some Englishman—a wretch! She’s lived in London for years.
She knows Mr. Longacre. I’m so glad she’s come! I don’t know what
we should have done with him if she hadn’t! He’s queer as ‘Dick’s
hatband’!”
“Queer?” Julia threw the word out like a missile.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Mrs. Budd said vaguely. “He’s written an
opera, and when he does talk one can’t always make sure of what
he means. And look at his neckties!” Mrs. Budd’s eloquent gesture
condemned them out of hand.
“There’s nothing the matter with his neckties,” said her daughter,
coldly. “I hear some one going down, mama.”
“Well, I don’t know what it is,” her mother threw over her
shoulder; “but if they were quite right, one wouldn’t notice them.”
After the door had closed on Mrs. Budd’s glittering wake, the girl
stood motionless, her eyes on her mirror. But her conscious sight
was turned inward. She was struggling to recall a clear image of the
neckties, which she was certain she had never noticed. What was it
about them her mother so earnestly deplored? But her mental vision
persisted in rising above the garment in question to the eyes that
could look so steadily without staring; and through those eyes she
began to see her own. Shining hazel shot with hot yellow replaced
the blue—two flowering cheeks, and a crimson line of lips. Presently
these smiled at her.
She drew back a step, turned half away from the glass, looked
again, wriggled her white shoulders luxuriously in her lace bodice,
held the hand-mirror high, and, brows drawn to one black line,
earnestly contemplated her own profile.
Then she smiled, threw the glass on the dressing-table, and
turned to the door.
 She had a pleasant excitement in the thought of meeting
Longacre. Those cool, blue eyes she had vaguely felt to be a bit
critical through their admiration. They roused in her the child’s
impulse to “show off,” to surprise them into unreserved praise. Other
men were satisfied to find her beautiful, but he seemed to require
more. Well, he should see, she thought, with a shake of her darkly
burnished head.
He loomed so large to her mental vision that when she actually
saw him he seemed small and quiet, less than she had expected—
yet (the eyes again) somehow more. He was opposite her at dinner.
She caught herself comparing his tie with Thair’s, relieved to find
them identical, to see, as Longacre’s head turned toward the woman
on his right, that the blond hair, longish over the forehead, was
clipped close behind the ears. Correct as one could wish; and yet,
her mother had said he was queer. Well, he was—different, odd. She
felt ashamed of her inventory, but—well, a man could not afford to
be odd.
She reproached herself. He would not condemn her for—wearing
lawn over satin. But again, he would—if she sang a false note. Well,
he should see!
They had not exchanged a word between the time she had come
down and the serving of dinner; but with coffee in the drawing-room
she asked him casually if he would play an accompaniment.
Longacre was vaguely dismayed. He had not known that Julia
sang. He abhorred drawing-room songs, built to show the voice as a
stage gown to show the figure. At the worst, he felt he could not
forgive her. At the best, it must be less beautiful than she. And that
he should second such a performance! He felt he had changed color.
He said he would be delighted. So far, he rose to her conventional
ideal. It would not, he felt, have been so bad had they two been
alone together; but all these people coming in, murmuring, looking
expectant, made a show of it, in which he seemed, to himself,
exhibiting Julia, at her worst, to—well, Florence Essington at her
best. He fancied the girl’s cheeks were hot, her hands nervous as
they skimmed the music.
The song she chose was some selection from a modern Italian
opera, a passionate, melancholy thing.
All through the long prelude he found himself expecting and
dreading her voice.
When it came at last it bewildered him. It was everything he had
not expected, liquid, pliant, full, unerringly true in its leaps and falls
through alarming intervals, astonishingly trained. But it chilled him,
distressed him, so much more disappointed him than he had feared.
It failed in the one thing he had made sure of. The voice was a
lovely, hollow shell of sound. Could not a creature with her strong
pulse of life, her gorgeous senses, put more of herself, of her
passion, into her voice? His accompaniment sang the composer’s
meaning with keener comprehension than she, he thought savagely
as his fingers fell on the last chord.
But the approval, the banalities, the applause, were all for the
singer. They must have it again, Mrs. Budd’s guests.
But Julia, looking covertly at Longacre, whose approval alone was
withheld, refused brusquely. No, she told Mrs. Fitz Hugh, the most
voluble of the group around her, she would not sing again to-night.
She looked laughing and triumphant, standing separated from him
by the people.
He felt irritated, out of tune with everything. The evening that had
promised so well was spoiled. But as he turned from the piano Julia
was suddenly at his elbow, still flushed, but now her voice was weak
in her murmur.
“You didn’t like it, did you?”
It was hard to meet her eyes, yet he experienced a swift pleasure,
as if one in whom he had feared to be disappointed had not failed
him, after all.
“It’s not as beautiful as you,” he said simply.
 His sincerity startled her.
“Does it have to be that for you to stand it?” She tried to laugh it
off.
“N-no-o—but,” he hesitated—“it’s because—because I could
forgive you every fault but the one.”
That odd, intimate way he talked amazed her. She had never
heard anything just like it. It was unconventional—oh, queer! She
felt her color rising, but she stayed.
“Is it the method?” she ventured.
How young she was, he thought; how could one put it!
“The method is all right,” he said, “and the voice is lovely; but how
can you sing that song when you don’t know what it means,—or
sing anything, when you don’t know, yet, what anything means?”
Then he saw he had tried too much. Generations of convention
rose up to cut off her instinct for what he was saying.
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” she murmured. Her eyes
had fluttered fearfully from his, caught Thair’s across the room. In
answer to their unconscious distress, Thair quizzically smiled. He
came dawdling across to where Julia and Longacre stood, by this
time conspicuously isolated.
Longacre turned not too graciously to this approach, and saw that
their situation had drawn another regard. Mrs. Essington, just
quitted by Thair, was looking, and she too, he fancied, not without a
smile.
 CHAPTER III

MRS. ESSINGTON RUNS AWAY FROM HERSELF

F
LORENCE ESSINGTON woke with a flood of early sun across her
bed, and the sound of the ocean in her ears. But the fringes of
hardy yellow jessamine around her windows smothered the salt
smell of it. The air of the room suggested gardens, and the sea
sound was but a background for the clear human voices a-chatter
somewhere among the hydrangeas and heliotrope. The out-of-doors
invaded the house in a positive summons. A dozen retrospections
had lifted and dissolved with the fog.
Her veins seemed distended with fresh blood, her heart quickened
with the sharp chorus of wild canaries, the chattering flights of
linnets flashing across her window. She asked her reflection in the
glass if a woman who appeared fresh at seven in the morning could
well accuse herself of age? Her foot was like a young girl’s on the
wide stair descending to the reception-hall. That sharp, exquisite
freshness that a wet night leaves behind it met her on the threshold.
The house stood back in the billow of a hill. The drive rushed in
wide sweeps down a glittering greensward dashed with dark oaks
that thickened to a belt at the base of the hill, where the road cut
whitely through them; beyond, the cypresses standing up against
the blue circle of sea, and the fog, a continent of pearl and shadow,
stealing back across the ocean’s floor. It hid the southern horizon,
but northward she could see the sunlight on the windows of Santa
Cruz. She looked over the whole semicircle of sea and shore. The
length of the coast, trembling out of sight in a quivering mist of
spray; the unending hill and hollow, lifting and falling away into the
sky; the everlasting, encompassing ocean, lifted her out of herself
with their power of infinity. The sparkle of the sea drew into her
eyes. The buoyant spirit of a joy that only breathes under a new-
risen sun was reflected in her face.
But the small sounds of things near and finite, drumming
persistently on her ears, at last made themselves audible, growing
upon her attention until she found herself listening to a murmur of
talking, broken now and then by a rich, vibrant note of laughter. She
heard it first as a little part of her pleasure of sight and sound, but
presently some disturbing reminder in it, some painful memory,
distracted her; finally turned, first her face, then her feet, in the
direction of the flower-planted western terrace.
With a few steps she had the talkers in sight,—Thair, his riding-
crop slashing at the ragged chrysanthemums; Julia Budd, a sheaf of
heliotrope in one arm; and Longacre, whose hand, while Thair
talked, plucked and plucked and strewed the path with the small
purple blossoms of one of the hanging sprays.
Florence paused, her impulse to join them somehow quenched.
Thair, with his genial talk, seemed to have no association with the
other two. He might as well have been somewhere else. Though the
girl’s face was turned toward the sea, and Longacre’s eyes were on
the heliotrope, they seemed, by something akin in expression,
somehow sharply, intimately drawn together.
Florence saw them thus for a moment. Then Julia turned,
Longacre looked up at her, their eyes met. The spirit of the girl’s
voice had shot Florence with sharp misery; but it was the full look of
Longacre’s eyes that, had they moved a hair’s breadth from Julia’s
face, would have seen Florence standing, looking through the
passion-vines, that held her for a minute still, and staring. Then
noiselessly, like an eavesdropper, she retreated. She felt wretchedly
that she had spied on him, had interrupted something not meant for
her to see. She had an overwhelming impulse to escape the confines
of flowers and voices, a need of something not less large and bitter
than the sea. It was not thought, but impulse that directed her
steps, that turned them so precipitately down the drive. Near the
end of the grounds she began to run. Under the shelter of the oaks
she slackened her pace, but her gait still had a headlong haste, and
only when she broke from the fringe of foliage out upon the slope of
sand, with the green waves bowing and breaking at her feet, did she
stop to get breath.
Even then she did not look back over the way she had come, but
out across the water that had grown less blue than gray. The only
thing before her was that she had seen another receive what she
had thought her own. Intolerable! It goaded her to motion. Blind to
seeing, deaf to hearing, incapable of thought, she hurried down a
space of endless sound and emptiness. Oh, to get away from
herself! She ran to outstrip herself, that self that could only
remember the look in the garden, that could only endlessly repeat
that she had lost him! It was upon her, the possibility she would not
face yesterday. It had her unawares. She could not endure it!
She ran. Before her tripped a sandpiper, his fine web of footprints
following him. Shadows of gulls, swept across the sand, were like
great blown leaves.
She had put her whole life into a failure! She had lost him!
She heard the soft sucking of wet sand under her feet. The point
of rocks before her made three ragged steps down to the sea. Above
them that cypress had a shape of human agony. The breakers rising
over the lower rock were like a succession of slippery, watery stairs
meeting the stones. And oh, the thunder of the coast!
The strong voice of the ocean, the breakers’ shock, the biting
taste, the long sigh of subsiding waves, the eternal iteration of great
sounds, encompassed her. Wild, unthinkably vast! Ordered
commotion! Inevitable change! What, in the face of sky and sea, did
it matter if this one man loved one woman, or another?
 “One man, one man!” She said it over. And his voice, his face, and
small forgettable things—tricks of eye, of manner—came back upon
her and possessed her. The woman the years had made rose in her.
The man was hers. Because she had willed it, the boy had been
drawn to her; because of her, again, he had found himself; with her
he had fashioned the beginning of his man’s life; he and she had laid
the foundations of it.
Could she let go all that had been so understandingly wrought to
—what? Had the girl anything but her glorious flesh—any latent
possibility of power to meet his need? She asked herself, with
increasing calm, could she be sure her stimulated imagination had
not deceived her. But when that look of his had first been hers, had
she not known it as a fact, tangible as a hand to grasp? And was she
so feeble as to repudiate the new fact because it stung?
No! She saw laid on him, ever so lightly, the touch of a younger,
stronger vitality; and yet how fully aware was he? She knew so well
his oblivious self-absorption, his mind incurious, slow to recognize
the possibility of change. They had so grown to take each other for
granted. She knew that anything threatening their mutual
dependence could not come to him and leave him steady.
But her own position? It was that she sought in the labyrinth of
her mind; but where reason had been was only a succession of
violent emotions. She had been generous while she had been sure
of him. Now the feeling of right that custom gives, the passion of
possession, was fermenting in her. It consumed everything else.
What her strength could hold was hers. She wondered how strong
she was. The strength of suffering! The wisdom of failure! Oh, she
would hold him! How long? She put it away.
She turned back along the ringing beach. It was better, she
thought, to be rooted like the cypress, even to be fastened in a great
melancholy unrest, than to be as one of the gulls, flying on every
wind, fishing at random.
 The fog was lifting toward the north. The coast showed dark
under it. There was something sterile in the thin black line of land
across the waste of water, but she faced it rather than the deep-
bosomed, soft-shadowed hills. But when, perforce, she turned her
back on it to climb the “Miramar” terrace by a path through the
oaks, she felt her high tension relax, a less triumphant confidence.
Yet her eyes were calm, her pulse steady; she held her
determination unwavering. Life thus far had taught her that of
tenacity was the habit of success.
Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.

More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge

connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and

personal growth every day!

ebookbell.com