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Eisenhower and Vietnam

When Dwight Eisenhower assumed responsibility for the US commitment to the French cause in South East Asia, their contribution was approximately 40 per cent of the French war effort. By the time he left the White House, the US was upholding an independent South Vietnam, and providing over 700 advisors to the South Vietnamese Army. During his time in office, the US had assumed sole responsibility for the future of South Vietnam, and involved itself to an extent that withdrawal was not an option for his successors as President.

Eisenhower’s attitude to South East Asia was heavily influenced by the context of the Cold War. In particular, the communist victory in China in 1949, the subsequent North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950, and the British struggle with communist rebels in Malaya. A 1950 National Security Council report NSC–68, warned that Communism had become a global, rather than purely European, threat.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (from left) greet South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem at Washington National Airport, 8 May 1957

NARA

Accordingly, he described the nature of the threat posed in South East Asia in terms which would provide shorthand for US concerns for the next nineteen years. While not using the phrase himself, his description of the ’domino theory’ in a press conference on 7 April 1954, outlined the consequences for neighbouring countries if a communist State emerged in Vietnam after the French withdrawal. Eisenhower’s first major test in Indochina came in March 1954, with the impending French defeat at Dien bien phu. He had previously been critical of the French strategy in the months preceding the battle and believed that General Navarre’s plan to fight the decisive battle of the war in such difficult terrain seriously undermined any chance of a successful outcome. As the battle progressed, he was under pressure from the French and members of his own party to intervene with US airpower, in order to prevent both French defeat on the battlefield, which might then lead to the fall of South East Asia to Communism, and subsequent capitulation in the Geneva negotiations.

The President adopted a middle path designed to put off immediate US military intervention while at the same time placing this possibility in the public domain. His four preconditions for intervention were: clear objectives had to be met; intervention had to be restricted to air and sea; Congress had to support action; and France had to agree to full independence for Vietnam. Lacking Congressional support, Eisenhower kept US forces out of the battle.

The resulting Geneva peace conference temporarily divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel. The Viet Minh were given control of North Vietnam, while a capitalist state was created in the South. Formal unification elections were scheduled to take place in 1956. The response from the US was mixed. On the one hand, it represented the first time land had been voluntarily ceded to Communism; it allowed the US to develop South Vietnam into a shining example of a non-communist and non-colonial state in South East Asia; the two year period until unification elections would provide sufficient time to develop the vote and build support for the Diem regime.

After the division of Vietnam, the US took responsibility for South Vietnam from the French, and set itself the goal of making the country politically stable, economically self-sufficient, capable of providing for its own internal security, and dealing with an invasion from North Vietnam. To achieve these goals, it implemented a three-pronged strategy. Firstly, it established the South East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), a regional defence grouping consisting of the US, Great Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Philippines, and Pakistan. Although SEATO’s focus was on protecting a very wide area across South East Asia, the Treaty’s protocol identified Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam as areas of possible conflict, and that member states would ‘act to meet the common danger’ should these territories be threatened.

The second element of the strategy was targeted at the communist State above the 17th parallel, and was based on CIA subversion. Colonel Edward Lansdale, based in Saigon, controlled all efforts to undermine the Hanoi Government. The tactics deployed to achieve this goal were largely based around a campaign of psychological warfare against the North. This included such diverse actions as emptying sand into the petrol tanks of buses, bombarding the northern population with pornographic images (intended to entice them to support the South) and fake astrological charts predicting a troubled future for the North.

The third and most important strand of the US campaign in the regions, was the ‘nation-building’ project in South Vietnam. Between 1955–60, the US provided nearly $7 billion in aid, making South Vietnam the fifth largest recipient of US aid in the world. In spite of repeated warnings, Prime Minister Diem ignored demands to broaden his power base by cultivating popular support. Instead, he maintained a repressive regime, knowing that US fears about communist expansion in the region, heavily outweighed any other fears they may have had about the nature of the regime operating in the South.

In order to develop the military capabilities of South Vietnam, the US created the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), and despatched 750 advisors to train it in counter-subversion techniques. However, while they were giving Diem the means to create what was in effect a dictatorship, the US ignored the concerns of ordinary South Vietnamese villagers, who blamed Diem’s corrupt regime for denying them land ownership and poor living standards.

Placing the future of Indochina into the context of the wider Cold War, Eisenhower arguably committed future US Presidents to maintaining the security of an anti-communist State in the South. Furthermore, he had authorized a repressive, military-based approach to tackling the communist threat in the region at the expense of building a popular, democratic government. These measures therefore created a ‘quagmire’ which US was neither able to extricate herself from nor make any effective progress with. While Eisenhower had not committed any troops or bombers to the area, he left a commitment which became inextricably linked to US credibility in the Cold War, yet offered little hope of long-term success in its war against Communism.