THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION AND THE COMING CLASS WAR----Episode 38

IT'S  ONLY 1954 AND THE U.S. IS ALREADY POKING ITS NOSE INTO VIETNAM 

The day before Eisenhower's "falling domino" press conference, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy had taken the floor of the Senate to oppose the proposed U.S. military intervention. He dismissed the optimistic blather with which U.S. and French officials had been regaling the public for the past three years, including recent assurances of French victory by Arthur Radford and Secretary Dulles :  "No amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, 'an enemy of of the people' which has the sympathy and covert support of the people." Senator Lyndon Johnson had recently said that he was "against sending American GIs into the mud and muck of Indochina on a blood-letting spree to perpetuate colonialism and white man's exploitation in Asia." 

On May 7, after fifty-six days, the French garrison fell. Representatives of the United States, France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China met in Geneva. Dulles attended just long enough to make his displeasure apparent. He refused to shake hands with Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai or to sit near any Communist delegates, and he objected to everything that was proposed, causing British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden's secretary to describe his "almost pathological rage and gloom." Despite the fact that the Viet Minh controlled most of the country and believed it deserved to govern it all, Viet Minh negotiators succumbed to Soviet and Chinese pressure and accepted a proposal that would briefly defer their nationwide takeover and allow France to save face. The two sides agreed to temporarily divide Vietnam at the 17th parallel, with Ho's forces withdrawing to the north and French-backed forces retreating to the south. The final declaration clearly stated, "the military demarcation line is provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary." The agreement also stipulated that neither side allow foreign bases on its soil or join a military alliance. 

The Viet Minh accepted this, in large part, because a national election was scheduled for July 1956 to unify the country. The United States refused to sign the accords but promised not to interfere with their implementation. But in fact it was betraying that promise as the words were coming out of the U.S. representative General Walter Bedell Smith's mouth.

So long as Bao Dai remained in charge in the South, the United States' prospects of holding Vietnam were virtually nonexistent. Bao Dai was unknown by the peasants and scorned as a French puppet and despised by the intellectuals, while Ho was heralded as a nationalist leader and adulated as the country's savior. As French troops prepared to leave the country, Americans maneuvered to replace Bao Dai with Ngo Dinh Diem, a conservative Catholic fresh from four years in exile, whom Bao had named prime minister. With the aid of Edward Lansdale, Diem wasted no time in crushing rivals and unleashing a wave of repression against former Viet Minh members in the South, thousands of whom were executed. 

In 1955, Diem called a referendum asking the South Vietnamese to choose between Bao Dai and himself. With the assistance of Lansdale, Diem "won"98 percent of the vote. Diem's U.S. backers formed the American Friends of Vietnam. Diem enthusiasts included Cardinal Francis Spellman and Joseph Kennedy, as well as Senators Mike Mansfield, Hubert Humphrey, and John F. Kennedy. Blinded by their anticommunism and their faith that this ascetic Catholic nationalist could turn the tide against overwhelming odds, they ignored what was obvious to independent observers like University of Chicago political theorist and foreign policy expert Hans Morgenthau. After visiting Vietnam in early 1956, Morgenthau described Diem as "a man . . . who acts with the craftiness and ruthlessness worthy of an Oriental despot . . . who as statesman lives by his opposition to Communism, but who is building, down to small details, a faithful replica of the totalitarian regime which he opposes." Morgenthau outlined a situation in which nine of the eleven opposition parties dared not operate openly : "Freedom of the press does not exist," and "nobody knows how many people are shot every day by the armed forces of the regime and under what circumstances." 

With the United States' backing, Diem subverted the most popular provision of the Geneva agreement, canceling the 1956 election that would have turned control of the nation over to the Communists. Eisenhower later commented, "I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indo-Chinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai." The insurgency was soon rekindled.