The Best and the Brightest (19 page)

Because later his career, along with those of many of his colleagues, would be destroyed during the post-China Red-baiting, John Carter Vincent would gain a kind of fame that he had neither expected nor desired. And somehow, because those men were attacked for what were alleged to be left-wing sympathies, the idea would grow that John Carter Vincent was a radical. The truth could hardly have been more different. He was a charming, social, pleasant, nominally conservative man who had unusually good connections on the Hill, came from a good Georgia family and was called, in that gracious Southern tradition, John Carter by almost everyone. Having spent a large part of his career in Asia, he felt a distinct empathy for Asian nationalism, and had a rather realistic view of the future. By early 1945 he had come to the conclusion that the President in particular believed in indigenous nationalism in Asia and was moving in that direction. Those days, in fact, would be the high-water mark of American support for nationalism in Vietnam, with Roosevelt talking about a trusteeship for the area. It would end with the trip Vincent was on at that moment, the trip to Potsdam. He did not think a great deal about Vietnam at Potsdam because it was not on the agenda, and because it was not supposed to be discussed at all.

But a decision was made at Potsdam on Vietnam, without any real consultation. It concerned the surrender; the British would accept the Japanese surrender below the 16th parallel, the Chinese above it. It appeared quite inconsequential at the time, but the matter of who accepts a surrender is a vital one; it determines who will control the turf and who will decide future legitimacy. The British, uneasy about questions that Roosevelt had raised in the past about independence in Asia, worried about what it might mean for Burma and Malaya, since they were anxious to control future colonial questions in Asia; the British, after all, were not eager to see the dissolution of their empire. Truman, pushed by his military advisers who were wary of what anticolonialism might mean as far as the future of U.S. naval and air bases in Asia was concerned, urged that we go along with the British. There had been no prior discussion among the Americans (though later evidence would show that there had been a good deal of collusion beforehand between the French and the British on this issue). Having accepted the surrender, the British would permit the French to return, and all subsequent events would flow from this: the French would reassert their authority, they would smile politely at all American requests to deal with the indigenous population, but they would pay no attention; the Americans, after all, had given away the leverage, the French Indochina war would begin, and the Vietnamese would gain their freedom by force of arms.

It was, of course, a minor point clouded over by great issues at the time, and the responsible political officer, John Carter Vincent, did not participate; in fact, he learned of it after the conference was over. A fateful decision unfatefully arrived at. It was, he would acknowledge many sad years later, the turning point, the moment at which it all began to go wrong.

Vietnam up to then had only come into the public’s eye through articles in the
National Geographic,
or old newsreels. It was filled with exotic but dutiful natives, whom the French were helping to become modern. In Washington it was viewed as a land with vital resources—vital, but not that vital. In 1941, when the United States learned from radio intercepts that the Japanese planned to move against southern Indochina, its reaction had been modest. The military argued against any action which might take us to war with Japan, because of our lack of preparedness (General Marshall and Admiral Harold Stark noted that America should go to war “only if Japan attacked or directly threatened territories whose security to the United States is of very great importance,” which included Indonesia, and British and American possessions in Asia). What became clear as events progressed in 1941 and during the war was that Vietnam was important not in itself, but to the extent that the Japanese used it as a gateway to move toward other areas (“We must let them [the Japanese] see the seriousness of this step they have taken and let them know that such constitutes an unfriendly act because it helps Hitler to conquer Britain,” Secretary of State Cordell Hull told Sumner Welles in 1941). But at a time when resources were limited and needs were crucial, there was no arrogance of American power, every resource was carefully weighed, and a young general named Dwight Eisenhower wrote in February 1942: “We must differentiate sharply and definitely between those things whose current accomplishment in the several theaters over the world are
necessary
to the ultimate defeat of the Axis powers, as opposed to those which are merely
desirable
because of their effect in facilitating such defeat.” Thus Europe was the prime theater, Asia was the second one. It would be nice to stop Japanese expansion, but it was not that vital. “The defeat of Germany,” Roosevelt wrote to Harry Hopkins, George Marshall and Admiral Ernest King in July 1942, “means the defeat of Japan, probably without firing a shot or losing a life.” So American wartime policy was set. Prime effort in Europe, little effort in Asia, as little engagement of the Japanese mainland as possible, indeed a maximum use of technology, and a war which reflected that faith in technology—island hopping, moving from island to island securing bases for American air power to be aimed at Japan, rather than the more painful (and postwar politically more profitable) crawling up the mainland.

In Indochina itself, the collapse of the French had given enormous new momentum to political stirrings among the Vietnamese, and there was a belief that somehow the great war was being fought for them as well, a view shared by some Americans, notably their President. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a man before his time: anticolonialism had not surfaced yet as the great global movement (though the very war which he was helping to mastermind would speed the collapse of the old order and the end of colonialism), but Roosevelt had strong ideas about colonialism that were a reflection of his own—and his wife’s—domestic political egalitarianism. He was instinctively on the side of the little man, and anticolonialism seemed consistent with his own domestic political style; indeed his national security advisers thought him very soft on the dangers of world Communism. He saw a role for the United States as a symbol of the new freedoms, and he was intuitively receptive to the idea that the many poor of the world would turn against the few rich. If Roosevelt did not like colonialism in general, he did not like French colonialism in particular. Part of this was due to his general annoyance with France as an ally during the war, part of it to his special pique with Charles de Gaulle, Roosevelt’s failure to understand the unique role which that particular leader had chosen to play, grandeur
in absentia.
The French, Roosevelt was fond of telling people, had been in Indochina for fifty years and the people were worse off than when they had arrived. He had determined that the French would not automatically come back and reassert their control over Indochina; there would be some kind of international trusteeship, and if the French came back at all, it would be as some sort of partner in the trusteeship. But though this idea was real and he talked of it with a few close advisers, Roosevelt was, as the war progressed, an overburdened, exhausted man who was preoccupied with too many decisions of greater immediacy. There were no plans on Indochina, no inner workings of the bureaucracy set in motion on a postwar philosophy of colonial policy. On January 1, 1945, Roosevelt wrote a note to Edward Stettinius, his Secretary of State, saying: “I still do not want to get mixed up in any Indochina decision. It is a matter for post-war. By the same token I do not want to get mixed in any military effort towards the liberation of Indochina from the Japanese. . . .”

At the Yalta meeting between Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt in February, the question of Indochina was discussed. Charles Bohlen’s notes record that Roosevelt had a trusteeship in mind; further that the British did not like the idea because of its implications for Burma. The notes also reveal the ingenuousness of Western leaders talking about Asians in that period, and a first hint of the French desire to return:

The President said that the Indochinese were people of small stature like the Javanese and Burmese and were not warlike. . . . he said that General de Gaulle had asked for ships to transport French forces to Indochina. Marshal Stalin inquired where de Gaulle was going to get the troops. The President replied that de Gaulle said he was going to find the troops when the President could find the ships, but the President added that up to the present he had been unable to find the ships.

Less than a month later, on March 15, 1945, Roosevelt asked Charles Taussig, a State Department adviser on Caribbean affairs, to give him guidance on colonial questions for the forthcoming United Nations meeting. The conversation reflected more clearly than anything else the crystallizing of Roosevelt’s feeling about both the French and the area. Taussig recorded the conversation for the Department:

The President said he is much concerned about the brown people in the East. He said that there are 1,100,000,000 brown people. In many eastern countries they are ruled by a handful of whites and they resent it. Our goal must be to help them achieve independence—1,100,000,000 potential enemies are dangerous. He said he included the 450,000,000 Chinese in that. He then added, Churchill doesn’t understand this. The President said he thought we might have some difficulties with France in the matter of colonies. I said that I thought that was quite probable and it was also probable that the British would use the French as a “stalking horse.” I asked the President if he had changed his ideas on French Indochina as he had expressed them to us at the luncheon with Stanley [Colonel Oliver Stanley, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, who had lunched with Roosevelt and Taussig on January 16]. He said no, he had not changed his ideas: that French Indochina and New Caledonia should be taken from France and put under a trusteeship. The President hesitated a moment and then said—Well if we can get the proper pledge from France to assume for herself the obligations of a trustee, then I would agree to France retaining these colonies with the proviso that independence was the ultimate goal. I asked the President if he would settle for dominion status. He said no—it must be independence. He said that is to be the policy, and you can quote it in the State Department.

This was to be the high-water mark of American governmental interest in pure anticolonialism in Indochina. Roosevelt’s interest was strictly personal. He was supported neither by his bureaucracy (even at State the dominant force was the European desk, which reflected the views of the existing colonial powers), nor by his national security people (who were more sympathetic to the old allies, and who held to the military view that broad anticolonialism might threaten U.S. rights to its own Pacific possessions), nor by his traditional European allies. To bring the bureaucracy with him would have been a considerable struggle, something he could have done, but there was not enough time. By the same token, it would have taken a considerable amount of political effort to withstand the pressure from old traditional allies, anxious to reassert their colonial control, to go back to business as usual in areas they claimed to know best, particularly if the threat of Communism were entwined with the new Asian nationalism.

That this latter was the case became clear in March 1945 when De Gaulle summoned the American ambassador to France, Jefferson Caffery, to discuss U.S. aid for French troops to return to Indochina. The French had appealed for American aid and had been told none would be forthcoming. Now De Gaulle told Caffery that there was an expeditionary force ready to go, but promised British transport had failed to materialize, largely, he gathered, because of American pressure. “This worries me a great deal,” De Gaulle said, “and it comes at a particularly inopportune time. As I told Mr. [Harry] Hopkins when he was here, we do not understand your policy. What are you driving at? Do you want us to become, for example, one of the federated states under the Russian aegis? The Russians are advancing apace, as you well know. When Germany falls, they will be upon us. If the public here comes to realize that you are against us in Indochina, there will be terrific disappointment and nobody knows to what that will lead. We do not want to become Communist; we do not want to fall into the Russian orbit, but I hope you will not push us into it.” It was a significant response; it reflected not only the intention of the French to return to Indochina, but it also, for the first time, raised the question of Communism in the context of Vietnam; those who did not help the colonialists would be helping the Communists.

A few short weeks later Roosevelt was dead, and with him any hope for a genuine declared policy of anticolonialism for Vietnam. He was the only high player truly committed to the idea of keeping the French out. The other principals would reflect their own bureaucratic weight: State the pressure from the European allies, the military the pressure to keep bases. Indeed, Roosevelt’s death was a signal to the Europeanists in the State Department that the road was cleared, and since the one high official who might have been a real enemy was out of the way, they moved immediately to present Truman with a
fait accompli
policy in Indochina. Within a week the Europeanists in the Department acted: they quietly prepared a paper on Indochina saying that U.S. policy was to support the French position, and to work through the French in that region. Before handing it to superiors, they needed the concurrence of their colleagues in Southeast Asia, and so at five o’clock the paper was handed to Abbott Low Moffatt, the Department officer responsible for Southeast Asia, with a note that it was to go to the White House at nine the next morning. Moffatt, who was deeply committed to the cause of Asian nationalism, immediately understood what the game was and blocked the memo. But it signified to him that with Roosevelt gone, it was all going to be much tougher, that the French desk would be more aggressive.