University of Colorado, Boulder
CU Scholar
History Graduate Theses & Dissertations
History
Spring 1-1-2014
The Indochina Syndrome: War, Memory, and the
Franco-American Conflict over Vietnam,
1963-1973
Douglas Joseph Snyder
University of Colorado Boulder, [email protected]
Follow this and additional works at: http://scholar.colorado.edu/hist_gradetds
Part of the Diplomatic History Commons, Military History Commons, and the Political History
Commons
Recommended Citation
Snyder, Douglas Joseph, "The Indochina Syndrome: War, Memory, and the Franco-American Conflict over Vietnam, 1963-1973"
(2014). History Graduate Theses & Dissertations. 22.
http://scholar.colorado.edu/hist_gradetds/22
This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by History at CU Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in History Graduate Theses &
Dissertations by an authorized administrator of CU Scholar. For more information, please contact [email protected].
THE INDOCHINA SYNDROME: WAR, MEMORY, AND THE FRANCO-AMERICAN
CONFLICT OVER VIETNAM, 1963-1973
by
DOUGLAS J. SNYDER
B.G.S., University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, 2004
M.A., Wayne State University, 2006
A thesis submitted to the
Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Colorado in partial fulfillment
of the requirement for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of History
2014
This thesis entitled:
The Indochina Syndrome: War, Memory, and the Franco-American Conflict over Vietnam,
1963-1973
written by Douglas J. Snyder
has been approved for the Department of History
Dr. Thomas W. Zeiler
Dr. Robert D. Schulzinger
Date
The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we
Find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards
Of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline.
Abstract
Snyder, Douglas J. (Ph.D., History)
The Indochina Syndrome: War, Memory, and the Franco-American Conflict over Vietnam,
1963-1973
Thesis directed by Professor Thomas W. Zeiler
This dissertation examines how competing memories of the First Indochina War (19451954) influenced disagreements between U.S. and French policymakers about the American war
in Vietnam. The thesis seeks most fundamentally to determine why American policymakers
rejected advice about Vietnam from France—the Western ally with a unique connection to
Southeast Asia—and why exactly the United States was so averse to considering its guidance in
the course of an increasingly problematic war. Based on extensive research in U.S. and French
archives, it provides a new international framework for understanding why the Vietnam War
lasted as long as it did. It advances not only scholarship on the Vietnam War, U.S. foreign
policy, and U.S.-French relations but also contributes in new ways to the study of the global
Cold War.
“The Indochina Syndrome” begins its analysis in August 1963, when French president
Charles de Gaulle called for the neutralization of Vietnam, and concludes with the January 1973
Paris Peace Accords. Throughout this time, each side clung to different understandings of the
French defeat by Vietnamese anticolonial nationalists. Although a handful of U.S. and French
officials looked past their differences to pursue potential opportunities for peace, most U.S.
leaders dismissed comparisons to the earlier war as the French offered suggestions to
demonstrate the challenges facing the current American military effort. Competing ideas about
the nature of the Cold War world and antagonistic perceptions of the other nation infused each
iii
country’s perspective on the relevance of the French example. These ideas and perceptions in
turn limited the potential for significant breakthroughs to communicate more effectively about
the broader assumptions driving U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
iv
Acknowledgments
I have been fortunate to receive the support of a number of funding sources and a wide
variety of people while completing this dissertation. I am grateful for the financial assistance
from the following groups, without which the research and writing of this dissertation would not
have possible: the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson foundations; the Pacific Coast
Branch of the American Historical Association; the Society for Historians of American Foreign
Relations; and the Center for Humanities and the Arts, the College of Arts and Sciences, the
Department of History, and the Graduate School of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
My deepest professional thanks go to my two advisors, Bob Schulzinger and Tom Zeiler.
Both offered much to emulate during my time at CU. Bob brought me to Boulder and provided
help, encouragement, and a keen wit during the stages of this project prior his retirement. Tom
served as an amazing resource even before I became his advisee, assisting me on matters big and
small from the beginning. This thesis benefited enormously from his support, feedback, and
patience once he took the reins formally. Tom also serves as a reminder that we could all
probably get by on a little less sleep.
The other members of my dissertation committee, David Bearce, Martha Hanna, and Ken
Osgood, each offered helpful advice, probing questions, and useful guidance for how to improve
this project in its next incarnation. Ken has been particularly supportive of me since he relocated
to the Colorado Schools of Mines. Nate Citino encouraged me throughout my time at Diplomatic
History. It was a pleasure to work with him at the journal. Andy DeRoche of Front Range
Committee College provided me with employment and good cheer. During my coursework, I
especially benefitted from the guidance of Mark Pittenger and Tim Weston. Scott Miller, the
v
Graduate Secretary of the Department of History, performed small miracles on my behalf on a
regular basis and humored me in our many conversations about golf.
This dissertation is much stronger because of the assistance of several historians and
archivists away from Colorado. I received excellent direction and feedback from Fred Logevall,
Jeremi Suri, and the cohort of the 2009 Summer Institute of the Society for Historians of
American Foreign Relations as this project began to take form. Carolyne Davidson, Hope
Harrison, and Jim Hershberg also provided encouragement at that time through my participation
in the Summer Institute on Conducting Archival Research at George Washington University. I
had the good fortune of meeting Mark Lawrence on a research trip to the John F. Kennedy
Library. He has been kind enough to continue to offer encouragement and advice ever since.
Portions of this dissertation received helpful comments at conferences from Mark, Frank Gavin,
Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, Hang Nguyen, Simon Rofe, and Kathryn Statler. Frank Costigliola,
Mario Del Pero, Ryan Irwin, Andrew Preston, and Kelly Shannon offered advice in less formal
settings. My M.A. advisor, Mel Small, sparked my burgeoning interest in the history of
American foreign relations while I studied at Wayne State University. Doug Mackaman
provoked my curiosity in France as he led The Abbey study abroad program for the University of
Southern Mississippi. I am forever grateful to the helpful archivists at the John F. Kennedy,
Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon presidential libraries, the Massachusetts Historical Society,
and the National Archives II in the United States and the Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs and the Contemporary History Archives at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in
France.
I have been lucky to make many wonderful friends in Colorado. I thank especially Bun
and Maura Chhun, Dan Cottell, Gerrit Dirkmaat, Dan and Melissa DuBois, Chris Foss, Kassi
vi
Klinefelter, Eric Morgan, Rob Morrison, Mike Ortiz, Doug Sheflin and Ingrid Getzan (and
Lou!), Marshall Smith and Risako Doi, Nick Stachokus, Gene and Jasmine Tesdahl, Dave Varel,
and my first friend in Boulder, Brandon Kirk Williams. Sarah Gavison generously put me up in
her mother’s apartment during my research in Paris. Outside academia, I appreciated the endless
support of my friends from the University of Michigan Evans Scholars, among them: Bob
Bossler, Dan and Meghan Cousino, Neil and Katie Majeski, Cory Nikkila, Adam Surma, and
Matt Wolterstorff. I continue to enjoy the camaraderie of friends from even earlier days,
including Steve Bauer, Kevin Guralewski, Adam Mantay, Eric Richardville, and Bryan Sternfels.
Lastly, I thank my family. The extended Hodges and Snyder clans have been constant
sources of encouragement. My brother Phil and sister Sarah have been the most supportive
siblings possible. And my parents Rick and Kathy Snyder have sustained me through this entire
process. I can never thank them enough.
vii
Contents
Abstract
iii
Acknowledgements
v
Contents
viii
Introduction
1
PART I: CERTAIN IDEAS
Chapter One – The United States and the Cold War World
17
Chapter Two – France, the United States, and Vietnam
35
PART II: PERCEPTIONS DURING WARTIME
Chapter Three – A Dialogue of the Deaf: American and French Opinions
of One Another
52
Chapter Four – A Third Paragraph in Each Story? The Memory of the French
Indochina War in U.S. Vietnam War Policymaking, 1963-1968
86
PART III: PLODDING TOWARD PEACE
Chapter Five – Secret U.S.-French-Vietnamese Initiatives to Resolve the War
115
Chapter Six – Ending the “Brutish Quarrel” but Not the War: Franco-American
Relations and Vietnam in the Nixon Years
136
Conclusion
174
Bibliography
180
viii
“Maybe it was all over for us in Indochina when Alden Pyle’s body washed up under the bridge
at Dakao, his lungs all full of mud; maybe it caved in with Dien Bien Phu. But the first happened
in a novel, and while the second happened on the ground it happened to the French, and
Washington gave it no more substance than if Graham Greene had made it up too.”
– Michael Herr, Dispatches1
INTRODUCTION
When the groundbreaking PBS documentary Vietnam: A Television History was
converted from VHS to DVD in 2004, viewers lost two episodes from the original 1983 series in
the process.2 Episode Two, “The First Vietnam War (1945-1954)” and Episode Thirteen,
“Legacies,” found themselves on the cutting room floor. Portions of Episode Two were added to
the first episode, “Roots of a War,” but the producers eliminated Episode Thirteen entirely. The
gutting of Episode Two was hardly the first time the French war in Indochina received short
shrift in American memory. In the 1960s and early 1970s, U.S. policymakers frequently
refrained from scrutinizing the French experience in Southeast Asia of the previous decade while
they first contemplated and then waged war in the same place. Similarly, the absence of
“Legacies” from the DVD set reflected a longstanding American tradition suggesting that the
United States need not seriously evaluate the past. This dissertation examines how and why U.S.
Cold War officials avoided careful consideration of the history of the First Indochina War and
French reflections on its defeat in the conflict during their decision-making throughout the
American war in Vietnam.
1
Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Knopf, 1977; reprint, New York: Vintage International
Books, 1991), 49 (page citation is to the reprint edition).
2
Vietnam: A Television History, co-produced by WGBH Boston, Central Independent
Television/UK, and Antenne-2, France (1983; Boston: WGBH Boston Video, 2004), DVD.
1
This thesis explores the many occasions during the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon
administrations when U.S. policymakers “dodg[ed] bothersome analogies,” as the scholars
Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest May have argued, about French and American involvement in
Vietnam.3 It begins its analysis in August 1963, late in John F. Kennedy’s presidency, when
French president Charles de Gaulle proposed neutralizing Vietnam, an inchoate plan based partly
on the 1962 neutralization of Laos that sought to create the conditions for an independent
Vietnam free from U.S., Chinese, or Soviet interference. It then covers the entire period in which
American ground troops fought in Vietnam and concludes with the January 1973 signing of the
Paris Peace Accords. The thesis seeks most fundamentally to determine why American
policymakers rejected advice about Vietnam from France—the Western ally with a unique
connection to Vietnam—and why exactly the United States was so averse to considering its
guidance in the course of an increasingly problematic war.
One answer, as the dissertation argues, lies in the perceptions of the foreign policy elite
of both nations about the other country; the Franco-American relationship gave rise to varying
viewpoints among leaders that influenced developments in the critical years of the Second
Indochina War. This thesis attempts to show how the different approaches and memories of the
end of French colonial rule and great power status created significant disagreement between U.S.
and French policymakers about how the United States should execute – or find a way out of – the
war. Based on extensive research in U.S. and French government archives and personal
collections, this dissertation provides a critical new international context for understanding why
the Vietnam War lasted as long as it did. It advances not only scholarship on the Vietnam War,
U.S. foreign policy, and U.S.-French relations but also contributes in new ways to the study of
3
Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision
Makers (New York: The Free Press, 1986), 75.
2
the global Cold War by engaging the divergent U.S. and French perspectives in the context of
one of the deadliest international conflicts of the post-World War II era.
In short, each side clung to starkly different understandings of the French experience with
anticolonial nationalists in France’s First Vietnam War and its relevance to the American war in
Vietnam. (To avoid redundancy, I use First Vietnam War, First Indochina War, French
Indochina War, and Franco-Vietminh War interchangeably.) U.S. leaders routinely dismissed
comparisons between the two wars as the French offered analogies, warnings, and suggestions
based on its defeat in Indochina and its disentanglement from Algeria in the late 1950s and early
1960s. The French exposed the pitfalls of engaging in Vietnam to demonstrate the challenges
facing the American effort to sustain an anti-communist Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam),
whose government did not appear to express the will of the people. The French highlighted that,
whatever their motives, the United States needed to understand the difficulties of guerilla warfare
in a jungle climate and the resiliency they would encounter from their opponent, perhaps best
exhibited by the Viet Minh in its raid at Dien Bien Phu. The French considered the re-ignited
conflict in Vietnam best resolved through a political solution, done by bringing all sides to the
table through an international forum akin to the Geneva Conferences of 1954 and 1961-1962 that
had ended the Franco Vietminh War and neutralized Laos, respectively.
By contrast, in the eyes of the Americans, theirs was fundamentally an altruistic effort to
oppose communist aggression from the North, strengthened by overwhelming American military
might. The French, in American minds, had sought to re-impose colonialism under inept military
leadership, neither of which the United States believed applied to its effort. The United States
believed a political solution could come only after military force had shored up the legitimacy of
the friendly government in Saigon and that the Geneva Conference of 1954 had simply been a
3
ruse for the Communists to buy time. For years, the United States thought an international
conference or negotiations would solely aid the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North
Vietnam) and the National Liberation Front (NLF, or, in the American vernacular, the Vietcong)
and undermine the likelihood of an independent, sustainable South Vietnam. They further
believed French advice was influenced by their bitterness of defeat in Indochina and earlier in
World War II.
This study stresses the challenges that France’s critique of the Vietnam War posed to
America’s understanding of its role in the Cold War world, particularly because France’s
criticism stemmed, unlike other international censure of the time, from direct experience in the
region. It argues that American and French officials in the Johnson years of 1963 to 1968
especially held antagonistic views about the other country and its presidents as well as differing
opinions about the Cold War system more generally that further pushed their conversations about
Vietnam in unconstructive directions. U.S. officials commonly believed de Gaulle’s ideas
stemmed from a bygone era, while French officials saw the United States as an overstretched and
overconfident superpower pursuing a goal in Vietnam at odds with its national interest and the
best interests of the international community. These ideas shaped their conversations about the
relevance of the French experience in Vietnam to America’s support of an unstable government
in the south.
Such opinions, in effect, limited the chances for significant breakthroughs in discussions
of the more specific situation in Vietnam. To be sure, a handful of U.S. and French officials
looked past these differences, and some even joined with non-state actors to pursue opportunities
to end the war through a series of secret peace initiatives based in Paris. Franco-American
bilateral relations improved significantly early during the first Nixon term that began in January
4
1969 while Vietnam simultaneously because less of a divisive issue in its diplomatic exchanges
due to the ostensible, albeit inconsistently applied, de-Americanization of the war. Yet for the
most part even in these years the two nations remained unable to communicate effectively about
the assumptions behind the conflict in Southeast Asia or the speed with which the United States
should disengage from the conflict. The combination of factors above resulted in what I call
“The Indochina Syndrome,” a malady from which U.S. foreign policymaking suffered greatly
during the entire Vietnam War.
Historiography
This dissertation builds upon the recent effort by scholars of American foreign relations
to produce work deeply informed by multiarchival research.4 More specifically, it seeks to add to
the scholarship produced by historians over the past fifteen years that has sought to provide a
fuller international context for understanding developments in the Vietnam War.5 Rather than
simply looking at decisions made in the Washington, this scholarship has incorporated the voices
of those in London, Moscow, Beijing, Hanoi, and Saigon, among other locales.6 More so than
4
See Thomas W. Zeiler, “The Diplomatic History Bandwagon: A State of the Field,” Journal of
American History 95, no. 4 (March 2009), 1060-65 for a survey of influential works in the field
that skillfully employ international research.
5
Fredrik Logevall, “Bringing in the ‘Other Side’: New Scholarship on the Vietnam War,”
Journal of Cold War Studies 3, no. 3 (Fall 2001), 77-93. In addition to serving as a clarion call
for more international work in Vietnam War research, this piece reviews Mark Bradley’s book
(and others) discussed below.
6
This historiographical section focuses on those works with a U.S-French-Vietnamese
dimension. Nonetheless, important work on the British, Soviet, and Chinese perspectives should
be acknowledged. For London’s point of view, see Sylvia Ellis, Britain, America, and the
Vietnam War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004). For the Soviet Union, see Ilya Gaiduk, The Soviet
Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1996) and Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy
Toward the Indochina Conflict (Washington: Wilson Center Press; Stanford: Stanford University
5
other works thus far, my dissertation will take this approach to highlight the French perspective
on Vietnam, its impact (or lack thereof) on American thinking, the contested understanding of
the French Indochina War between the United States and France, and secret French collaboration
with the United States to attempt to initiate peace talks during the American war years.
Fredrik Logevall’s landmark 1999 book, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace in
Vietnam and the Escalation of War in Vietnam in many ways inspired this project. Logevall used
the British and French diplomatic sources available at the time to augment his research in the
United States to show just how little international prestige the United States would lose in the
eyes of its European allies, including Charles de Gaulle, if the United States disengaged from
Vietnam during “The Long 1964.” But Logevall did not have access to the trove of documents
that have been declassified in the United States and in France since the publication of his book.
This dissertation expands his findings to carry the Franco-American aspect of the story forward
from mid-1965 through the end of the U.S. military commitment in Vietnam in early 1973, with
greater attention than Choosing War provided to the memory of the French war throughout this
time.7
Press, 2003). On Beijing, see Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2000) and Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
7
Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in
Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). In Choosing War
Logevall built upon his discussion of de Gaulle from an earlier article. See Fredrik Logevall, “De
Gaulle, Neutralization, and American Involvement in Vietnam, 1963-1964,” Pacific Historical
Review 161, no. 1 (Feb. 1992), 69-102. Although Choosing War does not examine in detail the
French war, Logevall has since written the authoritative account of the French war in Indochina.
See Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s
Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012).
6
Mark Philip Bradley pushed the international angle of Vietnam War studies further with
his own groundbreaking work, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial
Vietnam, 1919-1950. Bradley’s book, published in 2000, was among the earliest works of U.S.
diplomatic history to consult Vietnamese archives to explore Vietnamese perceptions of the
United States and vice-versa during the late colonial period in French Indochina. It portrays the
high hopes the Vietnamese placed in American values and American anticolonial discourse, and
illuminates the negative characteristics that the United States ascribed to the Vietnamese such as
naiveté, passivity, and incompetence. The United States, therefore, viewed the prospects for
Vietnamese independence skeptically and the Vietnamese grew disillusioned when the
Americans they encountered and the policies the United States implemented did not live up to
their expectations. Although more principally interested in U.S.-Vietnamese relations, Bradley’s
attention to antagonistic cultural perceptions has influenced this dissertation to focus on the role
of perceptions in U.S.-French discussions of the Vietnam War.8
8
Mark Philip Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam,
1919-1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). A select number of scholars
have followed Bradley’s lead by using Vietnamese sources to construct a fuller understanding of
the international history of the war. They have used their language skills to examine published
primary sources and the archives in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, limited in their transparency
as they may be, to produce excellent studies on decision-making by the leaders of North and
South Vietnam during the American war. For analysis of North Vietnamese thinking, see LienHang T. Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012) and Pierre Asselin’s Hanoi’s Road
to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2013); “‘We Don’t Want A Munich’: Hanoi’s Diplomatic Struggle during the American War,
1965-1968,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 3 (June 2012), 547-81; and A Bitter Peace: Washington,
Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement (Chapel Hill: NC: University of North Carolina
Press, 2002). For perspectives that provide agency to the Vietnamese in South Vietnam during
the 1950s and early 1960s, see Jessica Chapman, Cauldron of Resistance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the
United States, and 1950s Southern Vietnam (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013) and
Edward Miller, Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
7
The historians Mark Atwood Lawrence and Kathryn C. Statler have also contributed to
the internationalization of Vietnam War scholarship with projects that consider the U.S.-French
dimension in the late 1940s and 1950s. Lawrence’s 2006 work, Assuming the Burden: Europe
and the American Commitment to Vietnam, provides a model of the international history
approach in his portrayal of how officials in France, Great Britain, and the United States
interacted to cast Vietnam in Cold War terms. In the process, the officials assuaged any nagging
concerns about the issue of colonialism as the nations joined to support French military action
there in 1950.9 Statler’s book Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in
Vietnam presents the first transnational look at the intra-alliance politics between France and the
United States in Vietnam during the 1950s. She shows that as the French sought to retain
influence, particularly cultural influence, in the region, the United States tried just as forcefully
to remove all remnants of the French colonial period in order to establish itself as the primary
Western power in Vietnam. My dissertation in some ways most closely mirrors Statler’s book for
a later period.10
A small number of scholars have handled portions of the nexus of U.S.-French relations
and the Vietnam War under review in my dissertation. Each, however, has its own shortcomings
that this dissertation tries to rectify. Eugenie Blang’s Allies at Odds: America, Europe, and
9
Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War
in Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006). In 2007 Lawrence
and Logevall collaborated to edit a volume highlighting the transformation of Vietnam in ways
similar to Lawrence’s monograph. Mark Atwood Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall, eds., The First
Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2007).
10
Kathryn C. Statler, Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam
(Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2007). Statler contributed a chapter to The First
Vietnam War that condensed the arguments of her book. Kathryn C. Statler, “After Geneva: The
French Presence in Vietnam, 1954-1963,” in Lawrence and Logevall, eds., The First Vietnam
War, 263-81.
8
Vietnam, 1961-1968 covers British, West German, and French responses to the Vietnam War,
but ends its discussion focused on France in 1966, but does not draw from the U.S. presidential
or Department of State archives, and fails to cite a single French published documentary source
in the two chapters devoted to France’s criticism of the war. Similarly, the political scientist
Marianna Sullivan’s France Vietnam Policy: A Study in French-American Relations has few
references to the archival record. Published in 1978, it necessarily needed to rely on interviews,
journalistic sources, and the earliest sliver of documents released by the John F. Kennedy
Library. Sullivan places de Gaulle’s criticism of Vietnam within his larger foreign policy
strategy of independence for France, an approach that this dissertation endorses. Nonetheless, the
study’s findings need re-examination in light of the massive numbers of archival material
released domestically and abroad since its publication over thirty years ago. Furthermore, her
study does not examine at much length the memory of the French experience, nor does it factor
in the perceptions and prejudices that U.S. and French policymakers held toward the other
country in much detail. The French historian Pierre Journoud has also written an account of the
long, contradictory relationship Charles de Gaulle developed with Vietnam from 1945 to 1969
that uses an impressive array of French sources. It is not available in English, however, nor does
it engage at length with the role its memory played during the U.S. war. Additionally, given that
Journoud’s focus is de Gaulle, his account stops before the shift in direction about Vietnam that
occurred under de Gaulle’s successor Georges Pompidou during his conversations with Richard
Nixon. Likewise, an article-length explanation of de Gaulle’s efforts toward peace in the mid1960s by Japanese scholar Yuko Torikata does not consider the French experience of the 1950s
and has no material on the Pompidou years. Lastly, Max Paul Friedman looks at how the United
States dismissed French criticism of the Vietnam War as driven solely by anti-Americanism in
9
his broader study on the topic of anti-Americanism, and suggests the United States should have
listened more closely to the French.11 This dissertation examines a larger constellation of factors
for U.S. dismissiveness, but concurs with his conclusion that the “erroneous conviction that antiAmericanism was the engine of French policy prevented Americans from listening to the bestinformed officials in the West on an issue of vital national interest. This error would be
compounded as Americans escalated the war.”12
Many of even the most well-respected studies on Vietnam only briefly mention the
French during the years 1963 to 1973. The general treatments of the Vietnam War offer only
limited discussion of how the war played out in Franco-American relations and the role of the
French defeat in American thinking. When they do, they largely do so when mentioning the de
Gaulle’s neutralization proposal or, less frequently, a quick mention of his most critical
denunciation of American military involvement during a speech in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in
September 1966.13 Two works, though, do partially raise the French experience. 1992’s
11
Eugenie Blang, Allies at Odds: America, Europe, and Vietnam, 1961-1968 (Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2011); Marianna P. Sullivan, France’s Vietnam Policy: A Study in FrenchAmerican Relations (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1978); Pierre Journoud, De Gaulle et le
Vietnam (Tallandier: Paris, 2011); Yuko Torikata, “Reexamining de Gaulle’s Peace Initiative on
the Vietnam War,” Diplomatic History 32, no. 5 (Nov. 2007), 909-38; Yuko Torikata, “The U.S.
Esclation in Vietnam and de Gaulle’s Secret Search for Peace, 1964-1966,” in Christian
Nuenlist, Anna Locher, and Garret Martin, eds., Globalizing de Gaulle: International
Perspectives on French Foreign Policies, 1958-1969 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010)
covers similar albeit truncated ground as her Diplomatic History article; Max Paul Friedman, Rethinking Anti-Americanism: The History of an Exceptional Concept in American Foreign
Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 157-189.
12
13
Friedman, Re-thinking Anti-Americanism, 189.
George Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, 4th ed.
(Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002); Mark Atwood Lawrence, The Vietnam War: A Concise
International History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Robert D.
Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975 (Oxford and New
10
Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 by
political scientist Yuen Foong Khong, examines the private dismissal of comparisons to Dien
Bien Phu by Johnson officials when discussing the escalation of 1965, but only in the context of
that debate.14 Although his sophisticated framework of “analogical reasoning” is helpful, further
examination of the debates that took place before and after 1965 is necessary to understand the
French experience’s relevance to American and French policymakers. Similarly, the brief
discussion about the analogies used comparing the French experience and Vietnam in 1965
offered by the experts on the “lessons of history,” Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May needs
elaboration and an international context.15
Two recent collections on the Vietnam War provide chapter-length coverage of the
French factor. One volume on the efforts toward peace during the Johnson years offers two short
chapters on de Gaulle’s criticisms, one on French-German-American discussions about Vietnam,
and one by esteemed diplomatic historians George Herring and Robert Brigham on the French
role in the mysterious PENNSYLVANIA peace initiative involving then-private citizen Henry
Kissinger that receives extended treatment in Chapter Five of this dissertation using newlydeclassified documents.16 The second collection, on Europe and the war, includes a chapter by
York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (New
York: HarperCollins, 1991).
15
Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam
Decisions of 1965 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992); Richard E. Neustadt and
Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (New York: The
Free Press, 1986), 75-90;
16
Robert K. Brigham and George C. Herring, “The PENNSYLVANIA Peace Initiative, JuneOctober 1967,” in Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted Gittinger, eds., The Search for Peace in Vietnam,
1964-1968 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 59-72; Charles G. Cogan,
“How Fuzzy Can One Be?: The American Reaction to De Gaulle’s Proposal for the
Neutralization of (South) Vietnam” in The Search for Peace in Vietnam, 1964-1968, 144-61;
11
Journoud on the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs’ efforts for peace and a slanted
interpretation of the French role in bringing peace by an official in the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam government. Still, helpful as these are, they are brief and use relatively few primary
sources. My work adds more depth to each of these elements.17
Although principally a story about the Vietnam War, this dissertation also speaks to
scholarship on U.S.-French relations, where the war has, perhaps surprisingly, been largely
absent from the extant literature. Foreign relations historian Frank Costigliola’s The United
States and France: The Cold Alliance since 1940, contains the most prominent episodes – such
as the Phnom Penh speech – and offers several intriguing anecdotes, but as a survey, does not
rely on much archival material and is somewhat dated. Richard F. Kuisel’s study of
Americanization in France during this period offers even less coverage. A more recent study by
the historian Thomas A. Schwartz on U.S.-European relations during the Johnson years
deliberately avoids the issue of Vietnam.18 Even the works of two of the most respected French
historians on the United States and France during the Gaullist era, Frederic Bozo and Maurice
Maurice Vaïsse, “De Gaulle and the Vietnam War,” in The Search for Peace in Vietnam, 19641968, 162-65; Wilfried Mausbach, “Triangle of Discord: The United States, Germany, and
French Peace Initiatives for Vietnam,” in The Search for Peace in Vietnam, 1964-1968, 166-182.
17
Maurice Vaïsse, “De Gaulle et la guerre du Vietnam: de la difficulté d’etre Cassandre,” in
Christopher Goscha and Maurice Vaïsse, eds., La Guerre du Vietnam et L’Europe, 1963-1973,
(Paris: Bruylant, 2003), 139-78; Journoud, “Le Quai d’Orsay et le processus de paix, 19631973,” in La Guerre du Vietnam et L’Europe, 1963-1973, 385-400; Vo Son Thuy, “The French
Role in Finding a Peaceful Solution to the Vietnam War,” in La Guerre du Vietnam et L’Europe,
1963-1973, 415-28.
18
Frank Costigliola, France and the United States: The Cold Alliance Since World War II (New
York: Twayne Publishers, 1992); Richard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of
Americanization (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); Thomas A.
Schwartz, Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 2003).
12
Vaïsse, give scant attention to Vietnam.19 Moreover, a 2009 collection of essays in French and
English on Franco-American relations since the 1940s fails to include discussion of Vietnam.20
Structure
This dissertation consists of three parts, each two chapters in length. Part I, “Certain
Ideas,” includes chapters that contrast American policymakers’ assumptions about the U.S. role
as a global superpower in the postwar world with the ways the French dealt with their declining
status after the Second World War and within the emerging Cold War. Chapter One examines
the U.S. side, while Chapter Two tackles the French perspective. Chapter Two also offers
background on the history of U.S-French relations and Vietnam from World War II until late1963 when this dissertation begins its examination in earnest. Together, the chapters provide
overviews of how leaders in the United States and France, particularly de Gaulle, sought to
influence the new international order according to their own perspectives on foreign affairs.
Part II, “Perceptions during Wartime,” first explores how key American and French
policymakers of the 1960 viewed the other nation generally and its presidents specifically.
Chapter Three explains how cultural and personal antagonisms would color both the Americans’
chilly reception of French advice about Indochina and the manner in which French officials
sometimes delivered their warnings. Chapter Four builds from the cultural conflict established in
Chapter Three to explore specific moments when the United States and France clashed over
19
Frédéric Bozo, Two Strategies for Europe: De Gaulle, the United States, and the Atlantic
Alliance (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).; Maurice Vaïsse, La Grandeur: Politique
Étrangère du Général de Gaulle, 1958-1959 (Paris: Fayard, 1998); Maurice Vaïsse, La
Puissance ou L’Influence? La France dans le Monde depuis 1958 (Paris: Fayard, 2009).
20
Renéo Lukic, ed., Conflit et Coopération dans Les Relations Franco-Américaines (Quebec:
Les Presses de L’Université Laval, 2009).
13
Vietnam policy from the last months of the Kennedy administration to the end of the Lyndon
Johnson administration. It shows that American policymakers believed France’s colonialist
justification, inferior military power and leadership, and general national weakness were to
blame for the French defeat in the First Indochina War, while the chastened French officials
viewed the outcome of the war as a result of the formidable challenge of suppressing guerilla
fighters, the region’s difficult terrain and climate, and the Viet Minh’s firm commitment to
establishing an independent nation. From this understanding, France’s leadership believed only a
negotiated political solution, in line with the Geneva Accords of 1954, could resolve any
situation in Indochina. The chapter demonstrates that these conflicting memories of the French
Indochina War shaped the fate of the U.S. war as well.
Part III, “Plodding toward Peace,” uses newly declassified documents in Chapter Five to
explore the lesser-known efforts of French and American private citizens and mid-level officials
to bring about negotiations. In each case, France’s historic relationship with Vietnam enabled the
French to arrange connections between the United States and North Vietnamese, but high-level
American perspectives on the war remained largely unchanged as they sought ways to end it on
their terms. The U.S. perspective even included the approval of new bombing raids that ruined
the chances for potential breakthroughs to move forward.
This limited cooperation, and the greater respect given to the much-maligned de Gaulle
and his successor Georges Pompidou by the Nixon administration, failed to trump the blinders
that constrained U.S. decision makers from working toward a more speedy resolution to the war.
Nixon met with both de Gaulle and Pompidou in presidential summits, but nothing resulted from
these meeting. Pompidou took a softer approach toward Vietnam with Nixon than the
cantankerous de Gaulle, but had no better luck and eventually shelved his suggestions. Indeed,
14
Chapter Six demonstrates that Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger still viewed
French reflections on the First Indochina War, the local dynamics at work in Vietnam, and the
Algerian War as misguided and unworthy of serious consideration as they sustained the U.S. war
effort for four more years.
In sum, this dissertation rethinks the history of the Vietnam War by demonstrating how
different ideas about the Cold War world and competing beliefs about the relevance of France’s
defeat in Southeast Asia between the United States and France shaped deliberations over the war.
The Indochina Syndrome created consequences in the short-term and longer-term that continued
to resonate throughout Southeast Asia, U.S.-French relations, and U.S. foreign policy for decades
to come. Methodologically, this thesis engages newer trends in the field of U.S. diplomatic
history by exploring culture, decolonization, and transnational contacts—all in a multiarchival,
international research context. Finally, broadly speaking, it offers a cautionary tale for readers
about the costs of ignoring the past and discrediting foreign perspectives on U.S. engagement
with the world, no matter how bothersome or how discouraging the lessons may be.
15
PART I: CERTAIN IDEAS
CHAPTER ONE – THE UNITED STATES AND THE COLD WAR WORLD
The United States and France emerged from the Second World War in starkly different
positions. The United States possessed the world’s strongest economy, with two-thirds of the
world’s gold reserves, three-quarters of its invested capital, half of its manufacturing capacity, a
Gross National Product (GNP) three times its nearest competitor the Soviet Union, and a
monopoly on the atomic bomb.1 It lost over 400,000 troops as its military played a vital role in
the Allied victory against the Axis powers in Europe and Asia, but its physical infrastructure,
Pearl Harbor notwithstanding, remained unmarred by U.S. involvement in the war. 2 Indeed, the
historian George Herring has argued that the war “produced a redistribution of power more
sweeping than in any previous period in history.”3 American claims for a significant voice in
shaping the structure of the postwar world, then, seemed warranted.
France, by contrast, had the stain of wartime collaboration with Nazi Germany by its
Vichy government to live down and was crushed by the war.4 Even in the brief opposition that
1
Melyvn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold
War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 41.
2
See Thomas W. Zeiler, Annihilation: A Global Military History of World War II (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) for a history that places U.S. participation in the war
in a global context. For America’s World War II diplomacy, see George C. Herring, From
Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 538-594 and Robert D. Schulzinger, U.S. Diplomacy since 1900, 6th ed.
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 127-61.
3
Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 596.
4
For a highly-readable account of the Fall of France in 1940, see Ernest R. May, Strange
Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000) and for an excellent
scholarly look at life in Vichy from 1940 to liberation in 1944, see Julian Jackson, France: The
Dark Years, 1940-1944 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
17
the Third Republic had put up against Germany before its defeat in June 1940, France lost more
than 250,000 soldiers. Another 270,000 civilians perished over the course of the war, including
approximately 90,000 French Jews that the Vichy regime led by Marshal Philippe Pétain helped
assemble and transport to Nazi concentration camps.5 Much of northern France especially was
destroyed from Anglo-American bombing and the march to liberate Paris from occupation after
the Allied landing on D-Day in June 1944. When the Free French forces who had set up a
government-in-exile in London and the resistance partisans who had stayed in country
determined how to re-organize France’s political structure at the end of the war, its economy and
society writ large were in shambles and its status as a great power finished.
Both countries, however, recognized that the pre-1939 world would never again exist.
The leader of the Free French, Charles De Gaulle, concluded for his nation: “During the
catastrophe, beneath the burden of defeat, a great changed had occurred in men’s minds. To
many, the disaster of 1940 seemed like the failure of the ruling class and system in every
realm.”6 For the United States, many government officials and elites sought to seize the
opportunity to usher in an era of active U.S. leadership in the world most famously characterized
by Time and Life publisher Henry Luce in 1941, even before the United States had entered the
war, as “The American Century.”7 The American Century’s goals to reshape the world in its
5
Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 (New York: Knopf,
1972, revised edition New York: Columbia University Press, 2011) presented an early case that
the Vichy government played an active, not passive, role in collaborating with Nazi Germany,
even in regard to helping round up its Jewish population. The statistics on French deaths are
from Zeiler, Annihilation, 413.
6
De Gaulle quoted in Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin
Books, 2005), 63.
7
Henry Luce, “The American Century,” reprinted in Diplomatic History 23 no. 2, 159-171.
18
image, while not new in all quarters, were ambitious: they ranged from religious and cultural
conversion to political and economic transformation.
The question of how the United States should deal with the postwar emergence of the
Soviet Union as the other world power, though certainly not equal to the United States in the fall
of 1945 (the Soviet Union, it should be remembered, lost over 20 million people in the war), also
preoccupied U.S. officials in the Harry Truman administration.8 The two countries had
maintained an alliance in the war despite their opposing ideological views about capitalism and
communism. Yet shortly after World War II concluded, many U.S. officials began interpreting
the remarks and actions of Soviet leader Josef Stalin as increasingly confrontational toward the
United States, the West, and the Soviet Union’s neighbors in Eastern Europe. Over the course of
the next four years, the United States established a series of unprecedented economic and
security measures internationally to ensure “a preponderance of power,” as the diplomatic
historian Melvyn Leffler has called it, in opposition to the Soviet Union in the newlycommenced Cold War.9 This chapter seeks to outline briefly a selection of events and broader
8
9
Zeiler, Annihilation, 413.
Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration,
and the Cold War (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). The literature on the origins
on the Cold War is enormous. For a sampling of important works see, in addition to Leffler, John
Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security
Policy during the Cold War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982; revised and
expanded addition, 2005) and John Lewis Gaddis, We Know Now: Rethinking Cold War History
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Gaddis’s books are largely sympathetic
to U.S. foreign policymaking and promote the “orthodox” interpretation that the Soviet Union
was most responsible for starting the Cold War. For the most well-known and controversial
account of the “revisionist” interpretation that places blame on the United States for initiating the
Cold War, see William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland
and New York: World Publishing Company, 1959; 50th Anniversary Edition, New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 2009). See Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World
Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2005) for a study that moves beyond the orthodox-revisionist debate and instead offers an
19
currents in U.S. foreign policy from the early Cold War period through the John F. Kennedy era.
In doing so, it offers context for how the assertive anti-communist milieu of the first fifteen years
of the Cold War influenced their support for U.S. intervention in Vietnam and their opposition to
French advice on the Vietnam War during the years this study examines in more detail after
1963.
Early Cold War Events and Outlook
Even before World War II ended or the Cold War began in earnest in 1947, the United
States pushed for the creation of a group of international institutions that would promote its
interests. First, at the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire in July 1944, the United
States, represented by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, endorsed the principals of
free trade and open markets to prevent a repeat of the protectionism of the 1930s and create an
accommodating global environment for American business. The Bretton Woods system, as the
conference’s results became known, established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for
short-term loans to help other nations in need of foreign exchange reserves, created the
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, or, more commonly, the World
Bank) for longer-term loans, created controls on speculative capital, and set up a fixed exchange
rate system that tied the dollar to gold at a rate of $35 per ounce and pegged all other currencies
international history approach to argue that the Cold War resulted from the ideological
competition between the U.S. “empire of liberty” and the Soviet Union’s “empire of justice” for
primacy not just in Europe but also in the Third World. See Frank Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost
Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2011) for the argument that if Franklin Roosevelt had lived, the Cold War may
not have happened at all. Finally, see the impressive recent collection of essays compiled in
Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. I:
Origins (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
20
to the dollar—a clear sign of heightened American power. In a move that later enraged American
officials, de Gaulle would cash in France’s dollars for gold in the balance-of-payments crisis of
the 1960s, but for the time being, the United States benefited from the Bretton Woods
arrangements and the related General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) established in
1947.10
Secondly, the United States encouraged the formation of the United Nations (UN) at the
San Francisco Conference of September 1945. Despite its non-participation in the League of
Nations during the interwar years, the United States endorsed a new international organization
that could promote collective security and function as a forum for settling international disputes.
The fact that the UN’s new headquarters would eventually be situated along the East River in
Manhattan reinforced the prominent role the United States, in addition to serving as one of the
five permanent members of the UN Security Council, expected to play in world affairs in the
postwar period.
As the Truman administration grew more suspicious of Stalin’s motives, it implemented
a new series of initiatives unprecedented in U.S. history to “contain” communism. Influenced by
the explanation about Soviet behavior that the diplomat George F. Kennan put forth in the “Long
Telegram” sent to Washington from Moscow in February 1946, Truman and several of his aides
saw aggression in Stalin’s approach toward Eastern Europe.11 Truman subscribed to the ideas
Kennan advanced further in “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” also known as the “X Article,”
10
Francis J. Gavin, Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations,
1958-1971 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 120-27.
11
Kennan has been the subject of several scholarly biographies by diplomatic historians. See, for
example, John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Books,
2010.)
21
from the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, in which Kennan advocated “long-term, patient but
firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”12 Truman pursued this
containment first in the form of $400 million in economic aid to the government of Greece,
which was fighting a leftist insurrection the United States believed to be closely tied to the Soviet
Union, and Turkey, involved at the time in a dispute over access to the Turkish Straits with the
Soviets. Truman sought and received the money from the U.S. Congress in March 1947,
proclaiming what would be called the “Truman Doctrine” to support anti-communist
governments and “free peoples” against left-wing militants. Although initially focused on
Europe, the Truman Doctrine still marked a departure for U.S. foreign policy in that provided a
precedent for large-scale economic aid for internal conflicts if they had a leftist component,
regardless of whether they were actually closely connected to Moscow or, after 1949, Beijing.
Successful in the short-term, George Herring captures the different effect that U.S. support
would have on American thinking in the future. He writes: “Here, as in similar cases, local
circumstances were decisive. The United States thus achieved its primary goal in this first Cold
War military intervention but at high cost for the people involved and for reasons more complex
than it conceded or perhaps recognized. Greece offered a dubious precedent for future
interventions.”13
The United States then turned its focus to the instability still persistent in Western
Europe. Concerned about the genuine appeal that local communist parties could have in places
such as France and Italy due to the lack of food, coal for heat, and because of the dismal
12
Kennan’s line about containment can be found quoted in many surveys, textbooks, and
document readers. For the original passage, see X, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign
Affairs 25, no. 4 (July 1947), 575.
13
Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 617.
22
prospects for recovery generally available to them in 1947, the United States embarked on an
enormous recovery initiative named after Secretary of State George Marshall. Marshall
announced the idea to the world in a commencement address at Harvard University in June. The
Economic Recovery Program, also known as the Marshall Plan, poured 13 billion dollars in the
form of grants and loans into Western Europe between 1948 and 1952, opened up these markets
for American consumer goods, boosted European morale, partly curtailed the appeal of
communist parties, and played a crucial, but not solely determinative role in facilitating the
economic recovery of the Western half of the continent. That said, the United States achieved
less success in promoting its brand of market capitalism to the nations of Western Europe. The
turnaround also provided the United States with a public relations victory over the Soviet Union
since no countries in Eastern Europe with closer ties to the USSR (which were becoming
increasingly close by the day) accepted Marshall Plan aid and their economies struggled to
recover as quickly as many in Western Europe did.14
The United States further increased its role in world affairs through the formation of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The North Atlantic Treaty, signed by the United
States, France, and ten other European nations in April 1949, marked the first binding
commitment for military intervention by the United States since its alliance with France in the
14
Tony Judt estimates that as an equal share of U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the
Marshall Plan would have cost roughly 200 billion in dollars at the start of the twenty-first
century. Judt, Postwar, 91. On the Marshall Plan generally, see Judt, Postwar, 86-99 and
Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western
Europe, 1947-1952 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For the
Marshall Plan in France, see Richard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of
Americanization (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 70-102 and,
for its specific impact on the French hotel industry, see Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays:
American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 8199.
23
American Revolutionary War in 1778. NATO especially hoped to protect the newly-created, proWest Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) from falling under the influence of the
Soviet Union. The United States then began re-structuring it government with the National
Security Act of 1947, which created what has become known as the national security state. It
established a civilian-led Department of Defense with a Joint Chiefs of Staff composed of heads
of each of the branches of the military. It revitalized the wartime Office of Strategic Services
(OSS) into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and created a National Security Council
(NSC) based in the White House to coordinate policy. Initially weak, the NSC would have
greater influence by the time of the Kennedy-Johnson era and played a large part in Vietnam
policymaking. Altogether, these changes and the significant growth in each agency that would
follow helped promote the sustained involvement of the United States in the bipolar international
system of the Cold War. They even led the Secretary of State at the time, Dean Acheson, to boast
that he had been “present at the creation.”15
The Communist victory by Mao Zedong’s forces in the Chinese Civil War over Chiang
Kai-shek’s Nationalists expanded the Cold War focus beyond Europe to Asia as well.
Republicans immediately accused Truman, Acheson, and other Democrats of “losing” China,
despite the fact that it had been a civil war and the fact that State Department experts, the socalled “China Hands,” had long recognized how hapless the Nationalists had been in their
execution of the war. Remarkably, that accurate analysis would result in a purging of the State
Department of Asia specialists as the fallout from the establishment of the People’s Republic of
15
Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 1969). Two recent biographies that explore Acheson’s role in this
transformation are Robert L. Beisner, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2006) and Robert J. McMahon, Dean Acheson and the Creation
of an American World Order (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2009).
24
China (PRC) and the Red Scare led by Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) enveloped the
United States in the early 1950s.
This result also had a harmful impact on the United States’ ability to understand local
circumstances in Southeast Asia. Most U.S. policymakers, convinced of the insatiable desire for
world domination by a monolithic communist bloc led by the USSR and China, had no
knowledge of the centuries-long fight the Vietnamese had waged against the Chinese prior to the
establishment of French colonialism in the mid-1800s. Thus, they did not discern that Ho Chi
Minh and the Vietnamese nationalists, many of whom also subscribed to communism as the path
forward for developing an independent Vietnam, did not seek a close alliance with China beyond
its support for their independence. They surely would not have recognized the sentiments, if
somewhat crudely expressed, behind Ho’s statement to inspire his fellow Vietnamese nationalists
while France sought to restore its colonial domination post-World War II. According to the
journalist and Vietnam War specialist Stanley Karnow, Ho said:
You fools! Don’t you realize what it means if the Chinese remain? The last time the
Chinese came, they stayed a thousand years. The French are foreigners. They are weak.
Colonialism is dying. The white man is finished in Asia. But if the Chinese stay now,
they will never go. As for me, I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than eat Chinese
shit for the rest of my life.16
The potential advance of communism fueled enormous concern to the United States when
war broke out south of the Chinese border on the Korean peninsula in June 1950. Korea had been
divided in two zones after World War II, a Soviet-administered zone north of the 38th parallel
and a U.S.-administered one south of the line chosen by the Allies. Each side had a local
government sympathetic to the ideas of their occupying power; each, however, also wanted to
16
Ho Chi Minh quoted in Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking Books, 1983;
paperback, New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 153 (page citation is to the paperback edition).
25
unify Korea on its terms. North Korea’s leader Kim Il-Sung invaded South Korea in June after
finally receiving the frequently-requested approval of Stalin that April. The United States
responded by supporting a United Nations “police action” (the resolution avoided a Soviet veto
on the Security Council because the Soviets were not present at the UN at the time) that lasted
three years. It eventually prompted Chinese intervention after General Douglas MacArthur, head
of the UN’s military command, exceeded his initial instructions of restoring the status quo
antebellum to try to unify all of Korea for the South. The final outcome of the war, which
dragged on a stalemate from 1951 to 1953, was a divided Korea much as it had been before the
war.17 General Omar Bradley called Korea “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong
time, and with the wrong enemy.”18 Even still, the Korean War became the favorite analogy,
along with the comparison to the Munich agreement of the 1930s, evoked in debates about U.S.
escalation in Vietnam in the mid-1960s by Lyndon Johnson and his Secretary of State Dean
Rusk to support their beliefs about the chances for successful military intervention.19
The Korean War increased Cold War tensions between the United States, the Soviet
Union, which now possessed its own atomic bomb, and China. It broadened the map that the
17
On the Korean War, see William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); James I. Matray, The Reluctant Crusade:
American Foreign Policy in Korea, 1941-1950 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1985);
and, for harsh critiques of U.S. involvement, Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War,
Vol. 1: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-1947 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1981) and The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 2: The Roaring of a Cataract,
1947-1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
18
Bradley quoted in Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 644.
19
Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam
Decisions of 1965 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 97-147. On the continued
pervasiveness of the Munich analogy in U.S. foreign policymaking, see, for example, Fredrik
Logevell and Kenneth Osgood, “The Ghost of Munich: America’s Appeasement Complex,”
World Affairs 173, no. 2 (July/August 2010), 13-26.
26
United States deemed necessary to protect from communism. As such, it enabled the
implementation of a previously-shelved measure, National Security Council Report 68 (NSC68). NSC-68 vastly increased U.S. military spending, amplified support in Europe, and expanded
the geographical scope for possible U.S. intervention. Truman’s defense budget, for example,
proposed for 1953 was four times what it had been even in 1949.20 Initial U.S. concerns about
communism in Europe were, therefore, globalized, and the containment perspective now
included Asia. Most relevant for this dissertation, the outbreak of the Korean War and
implementation of NSC-68 encouraged the Truman administration to view France’s war against
the communist-led Viet Minh in Indochina as a vital Cold War contest in need of American
financial and military support. U.S. assistance to France in Vietnam, which will be discussed in
detail in Chapter Two, began under this justification in 1950.21
The Eisenhower Administration
Dwight Eisenhower won the presidential election in 1952 in part because of his pledge to
end the Korean War. Eisenhower and his Republican colleagues also accused the Democrats of
being “soft” on communism, a charge that achieved success at the ballot box and haunted
Democratic politicians – LBJ especially – for decades, regardless of all the efforts mentioned
above and the fact that the Korean War stemmed from Cold War assumptions. During
Eisenhower’s presidency the Cold War mentality, albeit removed of its most extreme
manifestation in McCarthyism after 1954, continued to flourish. As the historian Kenneth
20
Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 649.
21
Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to
War in Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006).
27
Osgood writes, by the 1950s “virtually every aspect of the American way of life—from political
organizations and philosophical ideals, to cultural products and scientific achievements, to
economic practices and social relationships—was exposed to scrutiny in this total contest for the
hearts and minds of the world’s peoples.”22
Eisenhower fought the Cold War with the help of his ardent anti-communist Secretary of
State, John Foster Dulles. Eisenhower endorsed the “New Look” foreign policy that would
achieve “more bang for the buck,” according to his Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson. It
sought to lower expenditures put in place by NSC-68 and instead shifted from conventional
forces to “massive retaliation” that relied on the growing U.S. nuclear arsenal as a deterrent.
Although Eisenhower did not think war was likely between the United States and Soviet Union,
he also promoted the use of covert operations, psychological warfare, and propaganda campaigns
to prevent the expansion of Soviet influence, particularly in the newly independent nations in
what became called the Third World.23 Eisenhower articulated the “domino theory” that
suggested that the fall of any one nation to communism would lead to the inevitable spread of
communism to neighboring countries. During Eisenhower’s presidency, the CIA supported
assassination attempts on unfriendly world leaders and coups to overthrow left-leaning, but
democratically-elected governments in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954.24
22
Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and
Abroad (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 2.
23
On Eisenhower’s enthusiasm for psychological warfare, see Osgood, Total Cold War. For a
sample of the “revisionist” scholarship that views Eisenhower’s role in shaping foreign policy in
a generally positive light, see Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace: How
Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997).
24
For more on the lead-up to the Iran coup, see Mary Ann Heiss, Empire and Nationhood: The
United States, Great Britain, and Iranian Oil, 1950-1954 (New York: Columbia University
28
The Eisenhower administration also sought to lower its commitment by expanding on the
use of alliances initiated with NATO. During the eight years Eisenhower was in office, he and
his foreign policy team created a series of bilateral and regional alliances to share costs, contain
communism, ensure collective defense in case of conflict, and maintain U.S. influence abroad.
The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), established with the Manila Pact of
September 1954 and institutionalized in 1955, is of most relevance to this dissertation. SEATO
consisted of the United States, France, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, and only
two countries located in the region, the Philippines and Thailand. Notably, South Vietnam, Laos
and Cambodia were not signatories to the treaty due to restrictions in the Geneva Accords that
had just ended the First Indochina War in July 1954, but received protection as “protocol states”
all the same.25
Secretary of State Dean Rusk would repeatedly refer to SEATO as the justification for
American intervention in South Vietnam in the mid-1960s. In fact, despite the lack of enthusiasm
for the alliance displayed by other members (including France), by fellow U.S. policymakers,
and his own critical reaction to its birth in the 1950s, Rusk clung to SEATO as a primary reason
for why the United States needed to stay the course in South Vietnam. Otherwise, the United
States would be going back on its word, which, in his mind, America simply did not do. In his
Press, 1994); For the overthrow itself, see Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men: An American
Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003). See,
among others, Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operations in
Guatemala, 1952-1954 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999) and Stephen Schlesinger
and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, revised and
expanded ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) on events in Guatemala.
25
David L. Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 19531961 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 65-90.
29
memoirs, he recalled his suspicion when the Eisenhower administration and Congress approved
SEATO without significant debate. He wrote:
Although I was out of government and watching only from the sidelines, I thought the
SEATO Treaty was a mistake. Of course, we in the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations made our decisions on Vietnam, and events of the 1960s remain our
responsibility, but I think the die for American commitment to Southeast Asia was cast in
1955. When the United States signed that treaty, SEATO became the law of the land and
linked South Vietnam to the general structure of collective security.26
Further, Rusk expressed concern that “no one really stopped to think what an American
commitment to collective security on the Asian mainland might mean,” because he believed
SEATO’s provisions required U.S. support for South Vietnam and retaliation in the case of any
hostile action by North Vietnam. SEATO entailed a “comprehensive pledge, accepting
responsibility for the security of the protocol states, even though they didn’t sit at the conference
table or have a vote on matters affecting SEATO.”27 He thought “with massive retaliation
backing up our treaty obligations, we may have entered SEATO ‘on the cheap,’ without fully
recognizing the price we might have to pay to back up our treaty pledges.” A less legalistic mind
or less principled man than Rusk might have discarded a treaty signed by his predecessor not to
his liking, but Rusk argued that “the United States must not try to bluff its ways through the
obligations of a mutual security treaty. If the United States entered a treaty, it must make good
on its promise.”28 To Rusk, the United States was, therefore, committed. Herein lies a major
contributing factor in Rusk’s intolerance toward French suggestions for a negotiated political
settlement for Vietnam in the mid-1960s.
26
Richard Rusk and Dean Rusk, As I Saw It (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990), 427.
27
Rusk and Rusk, As I Saw It, 427.
28
Rusk and Rusk, As I Saw It, 428.
30
The United States avoided direct confrontation with the Soviet Union during the
Eisenhower administration. Eisenhower met with Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, at three
international conferences in an attempt to bring together the two superpowers for some form of
direct communication. Even still, a number of Cold War-driven crises broke out during these
years in places as diverse as Berlin, the Taiwan Straits, the Suez Canal, and Lebanon. Moreover,
Eisenhower, like his successors, failed to recognize the power of nationalism in the decolonizing
world, a shortcoming that would continue to plague the United States in its assessment of the
situation in Vietnam.
Kennedy and the “Best and the Brightest”
Since John F. Kennedy’s death from an assassin’s bullet in November 1963 and the
disaster in U.S. foreign policy that followed in Southeast Asia, speculation existed about how
committed the young president truly was to the Cold War. This question has, not surprisingly,
focused on Vietnam. It is, of course, impossible to know exactly how Kennedy would have
handled the developments and travails that faced his successor Lyndon Johnson.29 For the
purposes of this chapter, it is more important to consider how Kennedy and his advisers viewed
the broader strokes of the Cold War, especially since JFK’s foreign policy counselors continued
to serve under LBJ. I agree with the assessment of one of the deans of U.S. diplomatic history,
George Herring, that Kennedy and his team “accepted without question the basic assumptions of
the containment policy. They perceived the tensions between Moscow and Beijing, but still
viewed Communism as monolithic and a mortal threat to the United States.” Kennedy
29
For a recent take on the subject, see James G. Blight, janet M. lang, and David A. Welch, eds.,
Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived (Latham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).
31
administration officials subscribed to JFK’s statement that the United States must “move forward
to meet Communism rather than waiting for it to come to us and then reacting to it.”30 The “Best
and the Brightest,” as the journalist David Halberstam ironically dubbed the Kennedy
policymakers for their extreme confidence and intelligence, then, held an activist approach to the
Cold War. Kennedy drew several members of his team from outside government to bring in the
sharpest minds available to him. He chose two Republicans in Ford Motor Company president
Robert McNamara as Secretary of Defense and Harvard University dean McGeorge Bundy for
National Security Adviser, a position that would have greater influence under Kennedy and
Johnson. Kennedy, McNamara, Bundy, Rusk and the rest planned to handle Vietnam assertively
and wanted to maintain preponderant American influence over world affairs.31 They thus
considered Kennedy’s inaugural address pledge to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any
hardship, support any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty” to be more than
simple political posturing.
Under Kennedy’s watch, the United States faced a potential confrontation with the Soviet
Union over the building of the Berlin Wall that separated West Berlin from East Berlin in August
1961. The superpowers avoided a showdown in the crisis, but the question of German unification
remained unresolved until the end of the Cold War. The United States and Soviets also came
closest to nuclear war in the Cold War over the installation of offensive missiles in Fidel Castro’s
communist Cuba in October 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred less than two years after
30
Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 704.
31
David Halberstam, The Best and The Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972).
32
the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs by U.S.-supported Cuban exiles.32 Kennedy took
from his experience in the Cuban Missile Crisis a desire for détente with the Soviets, and
Kennedy supporters point to his work toward the first ban on nuclear testing in 1963 with the
Limited Test Ban Treaty as further evidence of his commitment to improve relations with the
Soviet Union.
These cases notwithstanding, Kennedy and his team went on the Cold War offensive in
other areas, notably in promoting new strategies in the Third World. Kennedy himself took a
liking to counterinsurgency strategy and believed the newly-established Special Forces, or
“Green Berets,” could have a major impact on controlling guerilla warfare in conflicts in the
decolonized world. The Kennedy administration’s favored method to win the hearts and minds of
the Third World, Modernization Theory, was emblematic of its more intellectual approach to the
world. State Department Policy Planning Staff chief Walt Rostow, an economist by training,
promoted modernization most fervently, and would continue do so after he became Johnson’s
National Security Adviser following Bundy’s resignation in 1966. Modernization Theory
promised rapid economic growth if the new nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America followed
a series of steps based on economic development models successful in the West. Kennedy
established the Peace Corps to send young idealistic Americans to the Third World as
ambassadors of free market, U.S.-style development to counter Soviet-style planned economies.
He also began an ambitious aid program for Latin America, the Alliance for Progress, to shore
up support for the United States in the Western Hemisphere. The results for each program proved
32
The Cuban Missile Crisis has received extensive treatment from scholars. For one of the most
up-to-date accounts that examines several perspectives on the crisis, see Alexsandr Fursenko and
Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964 – The
Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997).
33
mixed, but faith in exporting American economic principles through modernization was a
hallmark of the confidence of Kennedy foreign policymaking.33
Conclusion
When Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency on November 22, 1963, the United States
had two decades of experience playing a leading role on the world stage. From the privileged
position the United States held after the Second World War to the vigor with which it pursued its
early anti-communist programs to its effort to extend the American umbrella of influence against
the Communist bloc under Eisenhower, the Cold War mentality, however flawed, was firmly
entrenched in the thinking of the Kennedy administration policymakers that Johnson inherited.
During the Kennedy years, they had survived the Cuban Missile Crisis and experimented with
new approaches to the Third World through modernization theory. Vietnam remained an
unresolved and tricky issue for the new administration, but confidence was high that the United
States could continue to play an assertive role in supporting South Vietnam. It was thus all the
more difficult for Johnson and his advisers to accept France’s advice against military
intervention, despite the French defeat in Indochina chronicled in the next chapter, in what
Johnson once purportedly called a “damn little pissant country.”34
33
Modernization Theory has been topic of increased interest in U.S. diplomatic history the last
several years. For the Kennedy administration, see Michael E. Latham, Modernization as
Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 2000). On the Peace Corps, see Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman,
All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s (Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 2000.); For the Alliance for Progress, see Jeffrey Taffet, Foreign Aid as
Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Latin America (London: Routledge, 2011).
34
Johnson quoted in Brian VanDeMark, Into the Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation
of the Vietnam War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 95.
34
CHAPTER TWO – FRANCE, THE UNITED STATES, AND VIETNAM
“All my life I have thought of France in a certain way [une idée certaine de la France],”
began Charles de Gaulle in his memoirs of World War II.1 De Gaulle believed on an emotional
level that France should be “dedicated to an exalted and exceptional destiny…either for complete
success or for exemplary misfortunes.” When France has acted in a mediocre fashion, it was, in
de Gaulle’s eyes, the fault of the French people rather than “the genius of the land.” He
continued: “But the positive side of my mind also assures me that France is not really herself
unless in the front rank; that only vast enterprises are capable of counterbalancing the ferments
of dispersal which are inherent in her people; that our country, as it is, surrounded by the others,
as they are, must aim high and hold itself straight, on pain of mortal danger.” He concluded,
making his point abundantly clear: “In short, to my mind, France cannot be France without
greatness.”2
In addition to explaining the roots of de Gaulle’s devotion to his country as leader of the
Free French in the trying times of the Second World War, this carefully-crafted passage
encapsulates de Gaulle’s vision for the future of France. He would seek to implement this vision
as president from 1958 to 1969, having stepped down from power in the immediate postwar
1
Charles de Gaulle, The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle, 1940-1946, Volume I:
The Call to Honour, 1940-1942, trans. Jonathan Griffin (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1964),
3; See Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre – L’Appel: 1940-1942 (Tome I) (Paris: Plon,
1954), Mémoires de guerre – L’Unité: 1942-1944 (Tome II) (Paris: Plon, 1956), and Mémoires
de guerre – Le Salut: 1944-1946 (Tome III) (Paris : Plon, 1959) for the original versions of the
three volumes in French. The phrase “une idée certaine de la France” has become closely tied to
de Gaulle and has been translated into English in various ways, including the version quoted
above and the more literal, more frequently quoted “All my life I have had a certain idea of
France.”
2
Charles de Gaulle, The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle, 1940-1946, Volume I:
The Call to Honour, 1940-1942, 3.
35
period due to his frustration with the vagaries of parliamentary politics under the Fourth
Republic. He strove for this greatness, or grandeur, in a variety of ways, including pursuing as
independent a foreign policy as possible, resisting American pressure in the bipolar Cold War
world, and acting to restrain and critique U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, where de Gaulle’s
predecessors unsuccessfully attempted to restore the gloire of greater France against Indochinese
nationalists. This chapter seeks to provide background on de Gaulle’s foreign policy from 1958
to the mid-1960s, and intends to show how much de Gaulle’s perspective and actions rankled the
United States foreign policy establishment. It also offers a condensed overview of U.S-French
relations regarding Vietnam from 1945, through the First Indochina War that ended in 1954 and
up to 1963, by which time the United States had firmly supplanted France as the Western power
meddling in South Vietnam.
A Gaullist Foreign Policy, 1958-1969
De Gaulle’s Challenge to the United States
After de Gaulle returned to power as the war in Algeria reached a crisis point in 1958, he
made several decisions that aggravated the American government. Still convinced that France
needed to re-establish French grandeur in the aftermath of its embarrassing defeat in World War
II in 1940 and in the new Cold War world that emerged in its aftermath, de Gaulle challenged
what he saw as the harmful impact of American hegemony throughout the world. He believed
that over the 1940s and 1950s, the United States had simply grown too powerful, and that,
regardless of its intent, could not be relied upon to act in the best interest of France. He therefore
asserted the primacy of the French national interest over the internationalist concerns of the Cold
War. Anti-communist himself, he nevertheless viewed the world outside of the bipolar
36
framework of the Cold War. Although he did not oppose American foreign policy out of hand—
he supported the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, for instance—he did so
when he believed it went against France’s best interests.3 Determined to control France’s destiny
in the uncertain atomic age, he developed France’s own nuclear arsenal, the force de frappe, first
successfully tested in 1960. The French scholar Frédéric Bozo has recently characterized de
Gaulle’s overall approach to the Cold War, or Gaullism, as “a distinctive approach to East-West
relations that resulted from a complex and, at times, paradoxical combination of accommodation
and dissatisfaction with the status quo.”4
Especially after the end of the Algerian War in 1962, de Gaulle grew more assertive in
his efforts for French autonomy.5 Among other issues, he resisted European integration, an idea
with backers in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, by vetoing British entry into the
3
The literature on de Gaulle’s foreign policy is large. The most helpful sources are Maurice
Vaïsse, La Grandeur: Politique Étrangère du Général de Gaulle, 1958-1959 (Paris: Fayard,
1998) and Frédéric Bozo, “France, ‘Gaullism,’ and the Cold War,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd
Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. II: Crises and Détente
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 158-78. On de Gaulle and the United States,
consult Sebastian Reyn, Atlantis Lost: The American Experience with De Gaulle, 1958-1969
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010). A recent edited collection offers a variety of
examples of de Gaulle’s engagement with the world, including with Asia, Africa, and Latin
America. See Christian Nuenlist, Anna Locher, and Garret Martin, eds., Globalizing de Gaulle:
International Perspectives on French Foreign Policies, 1958-1969 (Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books, 2010).
4
Bozo, “France, ‘Gaullism,’ and the Cold War,” in Leffler and Westad, eds., The Cambridge
History of the Cold War, Vol. II: Crises and Détente, 159.
5
The most recent account of the Algerian War is Martin Evans, Algeria: France’s Undeclared
War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). For a study that explores the
Algerian War’s global ramifications, see Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s
Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002). See Jeffrey James Byrne, “‘Je ne vous ai pas compris’: De
Gaulle’s Decade of Negotiation with the Algerian FLN, 1958-1969,” in Nuenlist, Locher, and
Martin, eds., Globalizing de Gaulle, 225-250 for a critique of de Gaulle’s handling of talks with
the Algerian nationalists.
37
European Economic Community (EEC) in 1963. He stalled negotiations and helped keep
agriculture off the table during what was called the Kennedy Round of the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations. He challenged the American dollar and the Bretton
Woods international monetary system by calling for a return to the gold standard. He rejected the
American-proposed Multilateral Force in 1963, which would have provided for a nuclear arsenal
controlled by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and placated West Germany’s
desire for its own. He refused to sign on to the Limited Test Ban Treaty supported by the
Kennedy administration, which outlawed atmospheric nuclear testing. He recognized the
People’s Republic of China in January 1964 and pursued détente with the Soviet Union. He
supported the Arab states, particularly after the Six-Day War in 1967, and agitated in favor of the
Quebec separatist movement.
De Gaulle’s decision to withdraw from the integrated military command of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in early 1966, however, most frustrated American officials
and the American public. De Gaulle withdrew France from the military structure and demanded
foreign troops leave French soil by April 1967. Lyndon Johnson, to his credit, reacted with
restraint, famously commenting, “When a man asks you to leave his house, you don’t argue; you
get your hat and go.”6 Many Americans, convinced that de Gaulle wanted to have his cake and
eat it too regarding the Western alliance, related more to the sentiment behind a cartoon that
portrayed the General standing in front of rows of white crosses in an Allied cemetery. The
caption read, “Why do you Americans stay where you’re not wanted?”7
6
Quoted in Thomas A. Schwartz, “Lyndon Johnson and Europe: Alliance Politics, Political
Economy and ‘Growing Out of the Cold War’” in The Foreign Policies of Lyndon Johnson:
Beyond Vietnam, ed. H.W. Brands (College Station, TX: Texas A & M Press, 1999), 49.
7
Randall Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (New York: Free Press, 2006), 705.
38
The U.S. Response
American governmental officers held several preconceptions about Charles de Gaulle’s
foreign policy during the 1960s. First, much of the reason that so much of the focus on French
foreign policy—and hence, this dissertation—revolves around Charles de Gaulle stems from the
fact that American policymakers viewed him as the sole architect of French foreign policy at this
time. Although it is often the case that politicians, journalists, and, later, historians credit (or
discredit) a president with many foreign policy initiatives that originated from key aides, the
foreign policy bureaucracy, or even prominent individuals in the private sector, in de Gaulle’s
case, they believed he controlled strategizing, in the form of his politics of grandeur, himself. In
this case, they were not wrong, of course, because the Fifth Republic’s constitution gave the
executive enormous power and latitude in matters of foreign policy. De Gaulle’s hand in French
foreign policy was hard to overstate. Still, they fixated on this issue to discredit de Gaulle’s take
on a variety of measure.
Shortly after de Gaulle formally announced the French withdrawal from NATO’s
integrated military command, Charles E. “Chip” Bohlen, the ambassador to France from October
1962 until February 1968, reported that this issue and others seemed to “largely reflect personal
policies of General de Gaulle which in many cases are opposed, largely ineffectively, by his own
officials.”8 Bohlen, the American who had by far the most interaction with de Gaulle during the
1960s (he saw de Gaulle approximately 35 times) reinforced this impression in 1967, when what
8
“Telegram From the Embassy in France to the Department of State,” 11 March 1965, Foreign
Relations of the United States, 1964-1968 (hereafter FRUS), Vol. 12—Western Europe,
Document 45. This document and all the sources cited from the FRUS collections throughout
this dissertation can be found online at http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments. First, click
on the hyperlink for the appropriate presidential administration and then choose the
corresponding volume and document number.
39
he saw as de Gaulle’s increasingly erratic behavior began troubling him considerably. 9 He
stated: “According to our information, de Gaulle conducts completely single-handedly French
foreign policy and is more and more neglecting other aspects of government activities. His
statements on Vietnam, which have tended more and more to free himself from the normal
restraints, his action on the Common Market, and finally, the recent and most incredible of all,
his behavior in Canada, have all reflected this tendency.”10
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reinforced the impression of de Gaulle as a oneman foreign policy team in October 1966, shortly before Secretary of State Dean Rusk was to
meet with French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maurice Couve de Murville. It explained that
Couve was the “the subordinate who executes without question the policy his superior devises,”
and went on to inform the president that Couve’s political opponents “describe him as the ‘best
messenger boy in the government.’” It continued, “Couve’s de Murville’s role in policy
formation is minimal. De Gaulle alone determines the major directions in which France will
move,” before concluding that Couve could in no significant way act independently of “Le
Grand Charles.”11
With such ideas floating around about de Gaulle’s hold on foreign policy, many
governmental elites believed that the best approach to dealing with de Gaulle and France was
simply to ride out his tenure in office. In his memoirs, Bohlen wrote that he believed he had
9
Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929-1969 (New York: Norton, 1973), 519.
10
“Telegram From the Embassy in France to the Department of State,” 27 July 1967 FRUS Vol.
12, Document 76.
11
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) memorandum on Maurice Couve de Murville, 22
September 1966, Volume IX, Box 172, Country File (hereafter CF), France, National Security
File (hereafter NSF), Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas (hereafter LBJL).
40
personally convinced Kennedy and Johnson that nothing could be done to improve relations with
de Gaulle, and it was best not to provoke him.12 Johnson himself counseled Canadian Prime
Minister Lester Pearson on the General: “I get out of the box when he starts winding up. I’m
betting on outliving him.”13 He did by two years, but not politically. A State Department
telegram cleared by Secretary Rusk reviewing American policy toward France after de Gaulle’s
re-election in December 1965 gave little hope to improving relations while de Gaulle was still in
office. It argued that his “strongly held, personal views…are unlikely to change. They are
largely based on his messianic belief in the glory and importance of France, and thus are not
subject to reasoned argument.”14 Trying to accommodate or work with de Gaulle in any way
would prove too costly to American goals. Since Washington viewed de Gaulle as the lone
decision-maker on foreign policy, however, it would prove very tricky trying to distinguish
effectively French views from de Gaulle’s initiatives. His continued defiance of U.S.-supported
efforts only complicated matters further. In any case, it concluded: “In arriving at decisions on
overall US policy, little weight should be given to Gaullist views.”15
The discussion above hints at another belief that some American voices echoed about de
Gaulle and the French. Johnson, Bohlen, and others believed that de Gaulle did not represent the
true wishes of the French people. Their explanation, however, often came in the form of vapid
niceties about the French rather than from hard evidence. This approach allowed them to focus
12
Bohlen, Witness to History, 503.
13
“Memorandum of Conversation,” 21 August 1966, FRUS, 1964-1968—Western Europe
Region Vol. 13, Document 196.
14
“Circular Telegram from the Department of State to All NATO Missions,” 2 March 1966,
FRUS Vol. 12, Document 55.
15
FRUS Vol. 12, Document 55.
41
their criticism toward the leader of the country, and, in the process discredit his suggestions,
while holding out hope that the French people would support the Atlantic alliance and, more
importantly, subscribe to the American worldview. They rationalized away the stirrings of the
decline of the American Century. Johnson explained, in his most statesman-like voice, “Nothing
[de Gaulle] could say, would, in my judgment, divert the French people from their friendship
with the American people, a friendship firmly rooted in history.”16 Bohlen hypothesized that the
warm greetings he received from French citizens as he traveled the country grew out of a desire
to go out of their way to show the French were still far more pro-American than their president
was. He also reported in 1964 and 1965 that the French people were almost entirely friendly to
the United States and detected very little anti-Americanism on their part. Moreover, he estimated
that ninety percent of French government officials, minister, and civil servants opposed de
Gaulle’s policies and were sympathetic to American views. The State Department’s assessment
of how to deal with de Gaulle’s re-election likewise put great stock in the idea that the goodwill
of the French people would help improve Franco-American relations once the General was out of
office.17 Even in 1968, Bohlen’s replacement, Sargent Shriver, continued the trend. He argued
that the French people were tired of poor relations with the United States, and the “‘way-out’
16
Lyndon B. Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives on the Presidency, 1963-1969 (New
York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971), 23-24.
17
Bohlen, Witness to History, 519; “Paper Prepared by the Ambassador to France,” undated
[early 1964], FRUS Vol. 12, Document 27; “Telegram from the Embassy in France to the
Department of State,” 11 March 1965 FRUS Vol. 12, Document 45; FRUS Vol. 12, Document
55.
42
anti-U.S. rhetoric.” He forwarded an anecdote about one embassy staffer who hoped the U.S.
troops would return to offer “some security.”18
In fact, opinion polls showed de Gaulle’s foreign policy to be quite popular with the
French. In October 1966, two-thirds of French citizens surveyed reported being “satisfied” with
de Gaulle’s performance, ten percent more than had voted for him the previous year. This
interim period had included both the French withdrawal from NATO and de Gaulle’s Phnom
Penh speech on Vietnam. The Vietnam War, on the other hand, was not popular in France, or
elsewhere in much of Europe. Although the French Left tried to attack de Gaulle’s stance on
Vietnam in the 1965 election campaign as grandstanding done simply to “flatter the little
sleeping rooster at the heart of a certain number of Frenchmen,” a large portion of the French
public supported de Gaulle’s position whatever their reasons.19 One report argued that the
continuation of the Vietnam War helped shore up support for de Gaulle in France.20 Another poll
taken around the same time indicated that sixty-eight percent of those asked thought the United
States should start withdrawing its troops from Vietnam. The number rose to seventy-two
percent in 1967. Seventy-three percent approved of de Gaulle’s September 1966 Phnom Penh
address criticizing the U.S. presence in Vietnam. The French disapproved of American bombing
near Hanoi eighty-one percent to eight percent, and American policy in Vietnam generally
seventy-one percent to eight percent. Johnson lost a vote for the world leader who was the
18
“Telegram From the Embassy in France to the Department of State,” 28 May 1968 FRUS Vol.
12, Document 79; “Telegram From the Embassy in France to the Department of State,” 10
October 1968, FRUS Vol. 12, Document 84.
19
Bethany S. Keenan, “‘Flattering the Little Sleeping Rooster’: The French Left, de Gaulle, and
the Vietnam War in 1965,” Historical Reflections 37, no. 1 (Spring 2011), 93.
20
Richard E. Mooney, “At Home, De Gaulle Stands Tall,” New York Times, 9 October 1966, p.
E3.
43
greatest threat to world peace to Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong by only two
percent.21 The French press, including the state-run television networks, also widely opposed the
war, although they sometimes disagreed with the public manner in which he did so. If not
necessarily as representative of the French population, the protests that accompanied VicePresident Hubert H. Humphrey’s visit to Paris in April 1967 drove home the amount of
opposition to the war most dramatically. He faced demonstrations almost everywhere he visited.
At one stop, protesters lobbed eggs, paint, and rocks at him; at another point, a demonstrator
burned an American flag. The criticism de Gaulle leveled at the United States about Vietnam
thus found a far more supportive audience domestically in France than American officials
wanted to believe.22
The United States and France in Southeast Asia, 1945-1963
The United States and France, of course, had a longer history regarding Vietnam. This
section will quickly trace the evolution of Vietnam’s connection to the Franco-American
relationship from the end of World War II until 1963 to provide necessary context for the
remainder of this thesis.23
Vietnamese nationalists, led by the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) and Ho Chi
Minh, first attempted to revolt against the French colonial rule in Southeast Asia in the 1930s,
21
Marianna P. Sullivan, France’s Vietnam Policy: A Study in French-American Relations
(Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1978), 78; Frank Costigliola, France and the United States:
The Cold Alliance since World War II (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), 142-43.
22
23
Sullivan, France’s Vietnam Policy, 75-79, 95.
See Mark Atwood Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall, “Introduction,” in Mark Atwood Lawrence
and Fredrik Logevall, eds., The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 6-13 for useful background information on
the events of the 1930s through mid-1950s.
44
but were brutally put down by French authorities. When France fell to Nazi Germany in June
1940 in World War II, the Nazis’ ally, the Japanese empire, seized Indochina for its own use as a
landing base and for its access to raw materials. Japan let the French colonial elites administer
the region much as they had before until March 1945, when the Japanese grew concerned about
losing the war and took any control of Indochina from the French. Once the Japanese did indeed
lose the war, the Viet Minh (translated as the “League for Vietnam’s Independence”), who had
continue to attack the French in the war years, emerged to try to take over and proclaim a new
government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in northern Vietnam in September 1945. Ho
Chi Minh famously modeled the DRV’s Declaration of Independence on the U.S. version from
1776.
In the aftermath of World War II, France was desperate to take back control of Indochina
as a sign of its continued status as a great power despite its defeat to Germany and the wartime
collaboration of the Vichy government. When an Allied plan to occupy Indochina stationed
Chinese Nationalist troops in the north and British troops in the South, the French found their
opening, as the British, also concerned about their postwar international prestige and claims to
their farflung colonies, were sympathetic to the French imperial concerns. They rearmed French
troops who had been imprisoned by the Japanese and allowed new ones to arrive. Much has been
made of whether U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt would have allowed the re-imposition of
colonial rule in Indochina because of wartime comments about opposing a restoration of French
rule – he certainly did not want to do Free French leader de Gaulle any favors – and the need for
an international trusteeship to administer Southeast Asia after the fighting concluded. Although
Indochina was far from Roosevelt’s highest priority in postwar planning and he rarely made any
decisions before he had to do so, the newest scholarship seems to support the hypothesis that
45
FDR had not given up on the plan at the time of his death in April 1945. 24 Truman, influenced as
he often was by underlings in ways Roosevelt might not have been, acquiesced to their
suggestions to allow the French takeover. Ho Chi Minh agreed to the French demand that
Vietnam would become an autonomous part of an association of states called the French Union,
but negotiations between Ho and the French diplomat Jean Sainteny foundered at Fountainebleau
in 1946 over whether the southern part of Vietnam would remain in the hands of the French. No
agreement came, and Ho braced himself for war, which came in December 1946 when a French
boat fired on the northern coast of Vietnam.
French political elites, including de Gaulle from outside government, supported the war
for re-colonization. The politicians and French military leadership, like the American military
later, believed victory would come quickly over the Vietnamese rebels. France soon took Hanoi
and other cities with their massive firepower and pushed the Viet Minh to the countryside, where
it recruited more and more troops and engaged in guerilla warfare tactics against the French.
Before long, the First Indochina War, however, ground to a stalemate. To counter the popular
appeal of the Viet Minh and the high morale it sustained, the French promoted a half-measure of
Vietnamese autonomy in 1948. France created the State of Vietnam and granted its Frenchchosen leader, the former emperor and playboy Bao Dai, status as an “associated state” in the
French Union in 1949 that could eventually transition into independence. Dai, like the
Americans’ chosen client Ngo Dinh Diem, did not receive the support of most Vietnamese, even
those opposed to the Viet Minh.
After the Chinese communists led by Mao Zedong won the Chinese Civil War in 1949,
they offered the Viet Minh weapons and training. The United States also took a keener interest in
24
Stein Tonnesson, “Franklin Roosevelt, Trusteeship, and Indochina: A Reassessment,” in
Lawrence and Logevall, eds., The First Vietnam War, 56-73.
46
events in Vietnam by February 1950, recognizing Bao Dai’s government and pledging support
for France’s war. The outbreak of the Korean War, as discussed in Chapter One, further
increased U.S. interest in the war. To paraphrase the title of a recent edited collection on the war,
the First Indochina War was now both a “colonial crisis and Cold War conflict.” 25 From 1950 to
the war’s conclusion in 1954, the United States provided roughly three billion dollars in aid and
war materiel to France. By the final months of the conflict, the United States was contributing at
least two-thirds of the money spent on the war. 26
The French continued to make little progress on the battlefield. In 1953 French military
leader Henri Navarre put forward his eponymous plan for a “general counter-offensive” to please
his American backers, but he was privately doubtful of its prospects for success. In France, some
politicians grew anxious to wind down the war, as it began to sap the morale of the French
public, though others supported the war and the outside booster the United States wanted total
victory. In 1953 Radical Party Minister Pierre Mendès France spoke for the skeptics. He offered
the following assessment a year before he would form a government that would make peace with
the Viet Minh at Geneva. Mendès France noted: “The facts long ago led us to concede that a
military victory was not possible. The only solution therefore lies in negotiation. Our negotiating
position was better two years ago than it was last year; better last year than it is now; and is
probably not as bad now as it will be next year.”27 By early 1954, de Gaulle, still out of politics,
concurred and reversed his earlier position of supporting the effort to restore French grandeur
25
Lawrence and Logevall, The First Vietnam War.
26
Lawrence and Logevall, The First Vietnam War, 10.
27
Mendès France quoted in Michael Creswell, A Question of Balance: How France and the
United States Created Cold War Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006),
124.
47
via re-colonization in Southeast Asia. He said: “We have no real direct interest in Indochina.
That is a reality. What is taking place there now is merely a merely a prestige war. Not even the
prestige of France is involved anymore. Indochina is of international interest more and more and
of French interest less and less…We will regret [leaving] greatly, but we must go.”28
The climax of the French war occurred at Dien Bien Phu deep in northwest Vietnam that
began in March 1954. The leader of the Viet Minh forces, Vo Nguyen Giap, attacked the wellprotected French outpost and took the high ground. The battle raged on, with the French
dropping in paratroopers for reinforcements. The French were desperate for American assistance.
They requested American air support, which the Eisenhower administration debated, up to and
including the potential for using tactical nuclear weapons. Although the Eisenhower
administration believed the French war to be of enormous importance to the Cold War –
Eisenhower’s use of the term “domino theory” originates in the discussion about the
consequences of not helping the French at Dien Bien Phu – Eisenhower did not intervene, with
nuclear weapons or otherwise. The Eisenhower administration failed to win the support of
Congress, some of whom stymied the effort in part for partisan political gain led by Senate
Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson, or American allies, notably the British. Unable to push back
the Viet Minh fighters any longer, the French garrison fell on May 7, 1954. The decisive victory
provided the Viet Minh with a trump card to play at the negotiations set to begin between France,
the Viet Minh, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and the
United States as “observers” to resolve the First Indochina War.29
28
De Gaulle quoted in Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making
of America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012), 434.
29
On Dien Bien Phu, see Bernard Fall, Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu
(New York: Pall Mall Press, 1966); Logevall, Embers of War, 510-46; Ted Morgan, Valley of
48
The Geneva Accords that followed in July did not deliver for the Viet Minh. Instead,
their Chinese and Soviet allies leaned on them to make concessions that would aid them in their
own goals. The results of the accords ended French rule in Indochina and provided for the
temporary division of Vietnam into a northern half led by the Viet Minh and a southern half
governed by the State of Vietnam and Bao Dai. Elections to unify the country were set to take
place in July 1956.30
By that point, the United States had “replaced” France in Vietnam in a clear effort to
possess sole influence over the future of the South.31 It had, moreover, discouraged the elections
promised in the Geneva Accords from occurring, and the South never took any initiative to
encourage a vote that surely would have gone overwhelmingly in Ho Chi Minh’s favor.
Throughout the rest of the 1950s, the United States sought to buttress support for its favored
leader, the newly-installed “miracle man,” Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam. It did so through
substantial economic aid and the growing presence of military advisors. De Gaulle met with
President Kennedy in May 1961 and urged him to avoid repeating France’s mistake of getting
Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu that Led America into the Vietnam War (New York:
Random House, 2010); John Prados, The Sky Would Fall: Operation Vulture: The U.S. Bombing
Mission in Indochina, 1954 (New York: Dial Press, 1983); Howard Simpson, Dien Bien Phu:
The Epic Battle America Forgot (Washington: Brassey’s, 1994); and Martin Windrow, The Last
Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press,
2004).
30
For Geneva, see James Cable, The Geneva Conference of 1954 on Indochina (New York: St.
Martins, 1986); Philippe Devillers and Jean Lacouture, End of a War: Indochina, 1954 (New
York: Praeger, 1969); Logevall, Embers of War, 549-581; Robert Randle, Geneva 1954: The
Settlement of the Indochinese War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969); and Kathryn C.
Statler, Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam (Lexington, KY:
The University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 85-115.
31
For an excellent, thorough study of this process throughout the post-Geneva 1950s, see Statler,
Replacing France.
49
overly involved in the “rotten country” of Vietnam. At the time of JFK’s death in November
1963, however, Kennedy had 16,000 advisors stationed in South Vietnam.32
32
On Diem, see Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion,
Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004);
Jessica M. Chapman, Cauldron of Resistance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and 1950s
Southern Vietnam (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); and Edward Miller, Misalliance:
Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2013).
50
PART II: PERCEPTIONS DURING WARTIME
CHAPTER THREE – A DIALOGUE OF THE DEAF: AMERICAN AND FRENCH
OPINIONS OF ONE ANOTHER
“Foreigners,” President Lyndon Johnson once said, “are not like the folks I’m used to.”1
The French seemed especially different from Johnson’s hill country Texans and Washington,
D.C. insiders and appeared suspicious, if not outright hostile to the United States, to LBJ and
many in his foreign policy team. U.S. Ambassador to France, Charles Bohlen, for example, told
National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy that French president Charles de Gaulle was
“distinctly a product of that half of France (or less than one-half) which has been, since 1789,
and still is, conservative, hierarchical, religious and military.” As such, Bohlen concluded, “His
ignorance of the operation of other countries is, I would say, very great, and this is particularly
true of the United States. I am sure he has no understanding or indeed interest in the
constitutional structure of the United States and its bearing on foreign affairs.”2 For their part, de
Gaulle, his aides, and some figures in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs held negative
opinions of the United States and the crude and, in their eyes, narrow-minded Lyndon Johnson in
particular.3 Comparing Johnson to his more glamorous and cosmopolitan predecessor, John F.
Kennedy, the French president used the opportunity to reflect broadly about the character of the
1
Johnson quoted in Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 79.
2
Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929-1969 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
1973), 502.
3
For an article that refutes in part Johnson’s reputation as insular, ignorant, and uninterested in
the affairs of the rest of the world, see Mitchell Lerner, “‘A Big Tree of Peace and Justice’: The
Vice Presidential Travels of Lyndon Johnson,” Diplomatic History 34, no. 2 (April 2010), 357393.
52
American people by saying: “Kennedy was a mask on the face of America while Lyndon
Johnson was America [italics in original].”4
Indeed, dismissive thinking and mutual misperceptions of the other nation and its colorful
presidents persisted throughout late 1963 to 1968, the key years of increased American
involvement in Vietnam.5 To be sure, these often-antagonistic perspectives about the other
nation, which the historian Charles G. Cogan and others have rooted in the long-standing
competition over the universal values espoused by the revolutions of the two republics, did not
develop for the first time in the 1960s.6 Yet they played a particularly strong role in influencing
the outcome of discussions about the Vietnam War during this time. This chapter will examine in
detail the different beliefs that three important officials of the period on each side held about the
other, looking first at U.S. beliefs and then at French points of view. Although these beliefs were
far from monolithic or fixed – in fact, they shifted in a somewhat more positive direction during
the Nixon-Pompidou era – they remained a crucial factor in explaining why American and
French leaders could not communicate more effectively about the failing policies of the United
States in Vietnam throughout the entire war.
4
Erv S. Duggan quoted in Merle Miller, Lyndon: An Oral Biography (New York: G.P. Putnam’s
Sons, 1980), 344.
5
The most influential study of the impact of misperceptions on foreign affairs remains Robert
Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press), 1976.
6
See, for example, Charles G. Cogan, Oldest Allies, Guarded Friends: The United States and
France since 1940 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994).
53
U.S. Officials’ Assessments of France and “Good King Charles de Gaulle”7
One of the largest challenges of looking at American views of France during the Johnson
years is that it can be difficult to determine what beliefs policymakers held about the French
generally, or as a transferrable stereotype across time, and what views they ascribed to France or
the French through their more specific ideas about its towering and at times combative president
from 1958 to 1969, Charles de Gaulle. At many points in the documentary record and in their
memoirs, U.S. officials used “French” when they in fact meant “de Gaulle,” as de Gaulle did
indeed handle much French foreign policymaking on his own. Conversely, they also attributed
some collective decisions or collective, popular perspectives solely to the French president. I
have attempted throughout to address the distinction between their broader thoughts on the
French nation and their more narrow beliefs about or reactions toward de Gaulle’s foreign policy
as best possible. This section will focus on those members of the Johnson administration whose
input influenced Vietnam policy directly or those who translated, literally and figuratively,
French opinions on international relations to the president and the rest of his national security
team.
Charles “Chip” Bohlen
The first of these figures in question is Charles Bohlen, who served as ambassador to
France from 1962 until early 1968. During this time, Bohlen met with French officials on a
weekly basis and with de Gaulle every few months (a total of 35 times), often conversing in
7
“Good King Charles de Gaulle” was the title given to de Gaulle by Drew Middleton, the Paris
bureau chief for the New York Times in the mid-1960s, in his memoirs. Although none of the
U.S. figures examined below used the name explicitly, it seems to fit their descriptions of de
Gaulle as well. Drew Middleton, Where Has Last July Gone?: Memoirs (New York:
Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1973), 211.
54
fluent French. A Foreign Service Officer since the 1920s, Bohlen had gained a strong reputation
for his understanding of diplomacy, Soviet affairs, and the Cold War even before his
appointment to Paris through his role as interpreter to President Franklin Roosevelt at the Tehran
and Yalta conferences in the Second World War and as Ambassador to the Soviet Union during
the Dwight Eisenhower administration. Bohlen accepted his post in France with enthusiasm, as,
he recalled, “France had always held a special place in my affections” and because he knew it
would be a “big job” due to de Gaulle’s efforts to re-engage France in world events.8 Even as he
tried to uphold a sober perspective on the French people and U.S.-French relations during this
time, Bohlen maintained a constellation of views about de Gaulle especially that colored his
reports on French foreign policy and, as seen elsewhere in this study, his understanding of
French assessments of the evolving situation in Southeast Asia.
For instance, while explaining that World War II had humiliated France significantly
more than those in the United States and the rest of the world realized, Bohlen also remarked that
“it did not take long for the French to regain their feeling of superiority.”9 He credited de
Gaulle’s efforts to re-establish French gloire and grandeur as partly responsible for this renewed
arrogance. Still, he found the French people to have been supportive toward the United States in
the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 and polite to him whenever he
travelled the country, in part because he believed they considered de Gaulle’s actions “a slur on
French good manners.”10
8
Bohlen, Witness to History, 488.
9
Bohlen, Witness to History, 515.
10
Message from the Ambassador in France (Bohlen) to Secretary of State (Rusk), 13 December
1963, #125a, Memos [1 of 3], Vol. I, Box 169, France, Country File, National Security File
55
Bohlen’s positions on de Gaulle, however, were typically less generous. In an effort to share his
understanding of French foreign policy decision-making, which he and many others rightly
believed stemmed almost entirely from General de Gaulle, with President Johnson shortly after
he assumed office, Bohlen noted that de Gaulle’s character was formed by his education,
experience, and “his own characteristics, which are highly egocentric and with touches indeed of
megalomania.” He told Johnson and his secretary of state, Dean Rusk, who already had three
years of experience with de Gaulle, that he did not believe relations with de Gaulle could
improve, nor did he believe de Gaulle’s basic views, particularly on the primacy of the nationstate in international relations, could be changed through concessions, favors, or conversations.11
As he put it after he left his office aside the Place de la Concorde, Bohlen believed “De Gaulle’s
attitude had been fixed since God knows when, but he never changed it. He really believed that
foreign affairs are sort of like the relationship between planets, big planets have big gravitational
pull, and medium size planets had bloody well stay out of it.”12
Bohlen also took up these themes in his 1973 memoirs, classifying de Gaulle as a
“product of French military training pre-World War I and II in that he tends to approach a given
problem from a highly analytical and rather simple point of view.”13 Returning to the idea that de
(hereafter NSF CF, France), Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas (hereafter LBJL);
Bohlen, Witness to History, 519.
11
Bohlen to Rusk, 13 December 1963, #125a, Memos [1 of 3], Vol. I, Box 169, NSF CF, France,
LBJL.
12
Charles E. Bohlen, interview by Paige E. Mulhollan, 20 November 1968, Oral History Project
Interview, Transcript, p. 19, LBJL.
13
Bohlen, Witness to History, 502.
56
Gaulle did not understand the United States, Bohlen noted that de Gaulle’s lack of respect – or
interest in learning more about the United States – came from the following reasons:
We [the United States] lacked most of the attributes which de Gaulle felt were essential
for a stable country. We had not established a military tradition; our armies were
essentially civilian. We had no unifying religious heritage. We were immigrants from
dozens of countries—in his eyes, a somewhat messy collection of tribes that had come
together to exploit a continent. He felt we were materialistic without the solid, civilizing
tradition of, say, France.14
In Bohlen’s eyes, then, de Gaulle was a nineteenth-century European man out of touch
with the problems of international affairs in the twentieth. Most pertinent to the question of the
role of the United States in the post-World War II world, Bohlen recalled de Gaulle’s assessment
that the United States was “too powerful for our own good. He frequently remarked to me that
American policy was based on an excess of power in relation to the rest of the world.” De Gaulle
scolded U.S. foreign policy for its faith in “the false belief that power can solve everything.”15
However accurately Bohlen described de Gaulle’s view of the world (especially as it related to
his understanding of Europe) and U.S. foreign policy to Johnson, Rusk, and the historical record,
it may have been wise for him to believe de Gaulle could also assess the twentieth-century
phenomenon of decolonization and national independence movements, regardless of the level of
U.S. power put forward to squash one in what Bohlen himself called “this damned Vietnamese
thing.”16
14
Bohlen, Witness to History, 510-511.
15
Bohlen, Witness to History, 511.
16
Bohlen, Oral History Project Interview, Transcript, p. 26, LBJL. Reiterating the idea that de
Gaulle clung to outdated ideas of the world while U.S. leaders looked to the future, Bohlen noted
that even de Gaulle recognized John F. Kennedy as an “essentially twentieth century man.”
57
Dean Rusk
For Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Charles de Gaulle’s outlook stretched back even
further than Bohlen’s long nineteenth century. He accused “Le Grand Charles” of “living in an
anachronistic dream world of the France of Joan of Arc and Louis XIV.”17 Although Rusk
considered de Gaulle “a most extraordinary man” and fascinating, he found dealing with de
Gaulle extremely frustrating. He did not believe their encounters to be genuine discussions.
Grateful for de Gaulle’s service in World War II and the immediate postwar period, he believed
de Gaulle’s experience in the Second World War led him to consider the U.S. leaders of the
1960s as “mere boys.”18 Rusk had very limited patience for de Gaulle’s condescending attitude,
his positions generally and especially what he saw as his intransigence on all U.S. interests in
Europe, if not the wider world. The usually stoic Georgian once left a NATO meeting and told
New York Times columnist C.L. Sulzberger: “You have found me in a bad mood. I’m so
goddamned sore at de Gaulle.”19 Rusk cleared a memorandum reviewing American policy
toward France after de Gaulle’s re-election in December 1965, also discussed in Chapter Two,
that asserted his “strongly held, personal views…are unlikely to change. They are largely based
on his messianic belief in the glory and importance of France, and thus are not subject to
Charles E. Bohlen, interview by Arthur M. Schlesinger, 21 May 1964, Oral History Interview –
JFK #1, p. 26, John F. Kennedy Library (hereafter JFKL), Boston, Massachusetts.
17
Rusk quoted in Thomas W. Zeiler, Dean Rusk: Defending the American Mission Abroad
(Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources Books, 2000), 54.
18
Richard Rusk and Dean Rusk, As I Saw It (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990), 26869.
19
Rusk quoted in Fredrik Logevall, “De Gaulle, Neutralization, and American Involvement in
Vietnam, 1963-64,” Pacific Historical Review 61, no. 1 (February 1992), 90, n. 37.
58
reasoned argument.”20 It explained that the United States should remember de Gaulle’s
leadership was temporary, that the succeeding government in France was more likely to be
responsive to public opinion and, they believed, more amenable to the United States. The
preferred policy to adopt in the short-term was to keep in mind France’s long-term interests and
views, not de Gaulle’s “personal predilections.” Clearly ruling out a plan for keeping an open
mind, the telegram suggested: “In arriving at decisions on overall U.S. policy, little weight
should be given to Gaullist views.”21 Such comments, while entertaining and certainly warranted
at times, did little to create a receptive atmosphere for alternative approaches to Vietnam from
the leader of the former colonial power there.
Aside from Bohlen, Rusk, who had far more direct say on Vietnam matters than Bohlen,
had the most frequent contact with de Gaulle and Rusk’s counterpart, French Foreign Minister
Maurice Couve de Murville, of the Johnson team. (LBJ and de Gaulle only saw each other in
person at funerals, once for JFK’s and the other for West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer
in 1967.) Rusk found little to enjoy in his meetings with de Gaulle, commenting that they were
“a little bit like climbing on your knees up a mountainside to talk to the oracle.”22 Although Rusk
followed the policy of the Johnson administration (inherited from the Kennedy years) of being
scrupulously polite in its public comments about de Gaulle, the General and his subordinates
clearly got under his skin. Moreover, Rusk was especially averse among his colleagues to ceding
any ground to de Gaulle and the French about their interpretations of the situation in Vietnam.
20
Circular Telegram from the Department of State to All NATO Missions, 2 March 1966,
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968 (hereafter FRUS), Vol. XII, Western Europe,
Document 55.
21
FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. 12, Document 55.
22
Rusk quoted in Zeiler, Dean Rusk, 51.
59
Rusk, more so than some others in the Johnson administration, considered the United States’
membership in the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) as a binding commitment to
guarantee collective security in the region that the United States was required to uphold, even at
the cost of continued warfare in Vietnam. Rusk believed that if the United States pulled out of
Vietnam, “President de Gaulle would have been the first one in Europe to say, ‘Ah, you see, you
cannot rely upon the Americans under a security treaty.’” This statement illustrates both Rusk’s
perspective that de Gaulle’s critiques of American policy in Vietnam were insincere and brings
up de Gaulle’s accusations that the United States would not meet its security commitments in
Europe.23
A December 1964 meeting between Rusk, Bohlen, Foreign Minister Couve, the French
Foreign Ministry’s Political Affairs Chief Charles Lucet, and French Ambassador to the U.S.
Hervé Alphand further demonstrates Rusk’s persistence on Vietnam vis-à-vis the French. In the
meeting, Rusk disagreed with Couve on every aspect discussed: whether the United States or
National Liberation Front had re-ignited hostilities in South Vietnam; the possibility for
negotiations based on U.S. and NLF withdrawal from South Vietnam; the potentially fruitful role
the People’s Republic of China might play in resolving the conflict; the conditions and execution
of the 1962 Geneva Accords on Laos; and, finally, whether de Gaulle wanted peace in Southeast
Asia even at the cost of a communist Vietnam.24 Given that this conversation and others like it
took place prior to the American commitment to the sustained bombing of North and South
Vietnam through Operation Rolling Thunder, Rusk’s reluctance to give much weight to the
23
Transcript, Dean Rusk Oral History Interview IV, 8 March 1970, p. 22, by Paige E. Mulhollan,
Internet Copy, LBJ Library. Online at:
http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/oralhistory.hom/rusk/rusk04.pdf
24
Memorandum of Conversation, Department of State, 17 December 1964, #134, Memos, Vol.
5, Box 170, NSF CF, France, LBJL.
60
French views on a negotiated settlement brokered with the help of the Chinese, predicated on
mutual troop withdrawal, and guaranteed at least in theory through an internationally-monitored
commission seems especially unfortunate.
The frustration evident in Rusk’s December 1964 meeting with the French boiled over
after a statement by French Minister of Information Alain Peyrefitte critical of U.S. escalation in
Vietnam in March 1965. Rusk rattled off a telegram to Bohlen that asked him to meet with
Couve to air his grievances about the statement. Rusk thought it “worthwhile to bring home to
the French government that we find objectionable both its public needling regarding Viet-Nam
and its public posture of concerting with the Soviet Union on this problem.” Beyond the Vietnam
question, this quotation highlights another element of French foreign policy that irked Rusk and
turned him further against the French, de Gaulle’s courtship of the Soviet Union in the mid1960s. Rusk further believed that Peyrefitte and others’ statements on Vietnam were “anything
but helpful to US-French relations and go well beyond the practice normally followed between
close allies.”25 Rusk sent his message the day before the first U.S. marines landed at Da Nang.
Perhaps this timing reinforced in his mind to a greater degree than normal the lack of support the
haughty French provided and their insensitivity to U.S. credibility, both of which Rusk believed
were done simply for the sake of public point-scoring.
McGeorge Bundy
While National Security Adviser from January 1961 to February 1966, McGeorge Bundy
did not criticize Charles de Gaulle as often as many of his colleagues. His more measured
25
Telegram from the Secretary of State (Rusk) to the Ambassador in France (Bohlen), 7 March
1965, #196, Cables [2 of 2], Vol. VI, Box 171, NSF CF, France, LBJL.
61
approach to de Gaulle even earned him the unflattering label of “Gaullist” by Undersecretary of
State George Ball. Dutch scholar Sebastian Reyn notes that this derisive tag from Ball, who
favored European integration and, thus, opposed to de Gaulle’s approach to Europe that favored
national sovereignty or at least a Europe led by a resurgent France, was “overdrawn,” and instead
characterizes Bundy as more pragmatic and less “condemnatory” in his approach to France under
de Gaulle. 26 Unlike Ball and the Europeanist “theologians” in the State Department who had
long focused on issues related to integration, Bundy came to his position in the White House
with his expertise more focused on nuclear matters, having established his reputation on the
subject in between helping former Secretary of War and Secretary of State Henry Stimson write
his memoirs and navigating the bitter terrain of academia as the youngest Dean of Faculty of
Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.27
Bundy, however, was not immune to outbursts against de Gaulle, calling him “nosey
Charlie” immediately after his initial August 1963 proposal for the neutralization of Vietnam.
Usually, however, he only aired frustration in response to events rather than as off-the-cuff
asides or unrelated jabs.28 Out of office, he was freer in his assessment of France’s role in the
world, offering both frank criticism and some qualifying reminders when he testified to Senator
J. William Fulbright’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee in June 1966. Bundy told Fulbright
26
Sebastian Reyn, Atlantis Lost: The American Experience with De Gaulle, 1958-1969
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 355.
27
For an explanation of Stimson’s influence on Bundy’s foreign policy outlook and the most
convincing study of Bundy in the Kennedy-Johnson years, see Andrew Preston, The War
Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2006), 11-35.
28
Memorandum from Bundy to Clifton and Salinger for the President, the White House, 1
September 1963, Vietnam - General, Box 199, CF, Vietnam, NSF, JFKL.
62
and the committee: “The present foreign policy of France is disappointing in its manners, costly
in its pride, wasteful in its lost opportunities, irrelevant in much of its dramatics…The plot is
often thin, and often behind the great curtain there is no play at all, with the press the only
playwright.” He continued to explain that de Gaulle’s desire for complete independence in
foreign affairs was unrealistic, as impractical as expecting that same goal for the United States,
even as one of the two global superpowers. He closed: “But in spite of all this, the fundamentals
of French foreign policy are endurable. France has not unleashed a new spirit of nationalism
beyond her own. She has not deserted the Alliance at any moment of crisis” and reminded the
senators and press at the hearing that France “remains our ally. Very few Frenchmen are antiAmerican, and it remains the part of wisdom and sentiment alike that no Americans should be
anti-French.”29 In an era when politicians demanded the repatriation of the bodies of American
soldiers in cemeteries in France and labeled de Gaulle “the most ungrateful man since Judas
Iscariot betrayed his Christ,” this restraint is notable.30
Nearly twenty years later, Bundy portrayed de Gaulle as an imposing, impressive world
figure to the historian Robert Dallek, relaying how de Gaulle outmaneuvered Bundy’s former
boss Johnson during their meeting after Kennedy’s funeral. While explaining that LBJ thought
he had convinced de Gaulle to make an official visit to Washington, which de Gaulle quickly
distanced himself from and which became a source of contention in the early months of the
Johnson years, Bundy noted: “Anybody who thinks he can second-guess de Gaulle on the
29
“‘I Think We Have Done Damned Well,’” Newsweek, 17 July 1966, p. 17, found in Henry
Cabot Lodge, Jr. Papers II (hereafter Lodge Papers II), Reel 19, Vietnam Papers A-DO,
Massachusetts Historical Society (hereafter MHS).
30
L. Mendel Rivers (D-South Carolina) quoted in Reyn, Atlantis Lost, 356.
63
contents of a mano a mano conversation on the first day out is overstretching, even Lyndon.” 31
Although one might argue this comment comes after years of reflection, it seems likely that
Bundy held this opinion of de Gaulle even at the height of his power in the mid-1960s.
Still, Bundy was not without his moments of anger toward de Gaulle and negative
characterizations of the French. As de Gaulle’s neutralization ideas for Vietnam continued to be
bandied about by pundits and a small group of senators throughout early 1964, Bundy lashed out
at his friend, the esteemed columnist Walter Lippmann, who advocated taking the neutralization
idea seriously in his articles of the time despite the fact that de Gaulle refused to clarify precisely
what he meant by his suggestions.32 He told Lippmann: “Well, what’s the French plan? I can’t
seem to find out, and you presumably know, so tell me.” Bundy then told Lippmann that the
French plan seemed to be simply a path toward communist takeover, which Lippmann dismissed
as “cliché” and even seemingly directed a May 19, 1964 column at Bundy’s flippancy toward the
vague French ideas. Lippmann wrote: “We are missing the main point and we are stultifying our
influence when we dismiss the French policies as not really serious, as expressions of personal
pique…as inspired by ‘anti-Americanism.’” Lippmann conceded that the French plan was
unclear, but argued that the Johnson administration itself had “no credible policy for winning the
31
McGeorge Bundy Oral History Special Interview II, 10 November 1993, by Robert
Dallek, Transcript, Internet Copy, p. 5, LBJL.
32
For more on Lippmann’s engagement with the French neutralization proposal, see Logevall,
Choosing War, 105-106. American frustration with de Gaulle’s unwillingness to provide a fully
fleshed out vision for neutralization is captured in an unknown official’s marginal comments of
the important meeting between George Ball and de Gaulle about Vietnam June 1964: “How
fuzzy can one be!” This marginalia in fact serves as the inspiration for the title of Charles
Cogan’s chapter on U.S. responses to neutralization. See Charles G. Cogan, “‘How Fuzzy Can
One Be? The American Reaction to De Gaulle’s Proposal for the Neutralization of (South)
Vietnam,” in Lloyd Gardner and Ted Gittenger, eds. The Secret Search for Peace in Vietnam,
1964-1968, 144-61. Quote from p. 155.
64
war or for ending it.”33 Whether or not Bundy characterized the neutralization proposals as
personal pique or anti-American, Lippmann certainly shot back at his unwillingness to mull over
its possibilities.
In a conversation with President Johnson, Bundy reveled in providing the details of the
French recognition of the People’s Republic of China in January 1964 to a columnist less
generous to de Gaulle, Joseph Alsop. He spoke approvingly of Alsop’s efforts to characterize de
Gaulle as an “amateur Machiavelli” for his rapprochement with the Chinese communists. Bundy
believed that the information he had supplied Alsop would “make a hell of a column” and
thought Alsop was “going to give it a blast tomorrow” and hoped “that’ll catch up a bit.”34
Indeed, Alsop offered his readers a scathing – one might call it inflammatory – take on the
French decision. Alsop told his audience that “open mendacity—active, intentional, persistent
untruth—is a significant characteristic of Gaullist diplomacy.”35 It is worth noting that the
British had not received similar treatment when they too acknowledged the status quo on the
Asian mainland a full fourteen years earlier and that many scholars and analysts even at that time
believed that de Gaulle’s cozying up with the Chinese was in part done to help resolve the
Indochina crisis. Although it might be possible that Bundy was playing to his presidential
33
Bundy and Lippman quoted in Gordon M. Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy
and the Path to War in Vietnam (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2008), 111-12.
34
Telephone Conversation, Lyndon Johnson from McGeorge Bundy, 12:20 pm, Tuesday, 11
February 1964 in Robert David Johnson and Kent Germany, eds., The Presidential Recordings:
Lyndon B. Johnson: Toward the Great Society, Vol. 4 (February 1, 1964- March 8, 1965) (New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 462.
35
Joseph Alsop, “Matter of Fact: The Amateur Machiavelli,” New York Times, 12 February
1964.
65
audience here, because this tack does not appear to be his standard mode of operation, we might
also conclude that it reflects a moment of genuine frustration or anger toward the French action.
Surprisingly, on Vietnam matters, Bundy typically tied French criticisms of U.S. policy
more tightly between de Gaulle and the French foreign policy apparatus and public than others
who viewed them simply as evidence of de Gaulle’s malicie toward the United States. He
thought the French wanted American failure in Southeast Asia to help live down their own defeat
and to inflict a similar predicament upon the Americans. In preparing LBJ for a meeting with
Foreign Minister Couve de Murville at the important juncture in escalation in mid-February
1965, Bundy remarked about Couve:
My conclusion is that Couve honestly does not think we can avoid defeat in South
Vietnam. This is of course a comforting conclusion for a Frenchman for obvious reasons.
He is not troubled by the shifting of the power balance in Southeast Asia because France
has no ambitions there, and he is a Frenchman through and through. He does think there
is real danger in any “escalation,” and since this danger might affect Europe and France,
his worry is not pretense. [italics added]36
In this comment, Bundy highlighted the depths of Couve’s Frenchness, rather than
suggesting he simply functioned as a mouthpiece for de Gaulle, or as “the best messenger boy in
the government,” to use the words of Couve’s political opponents in France.37 At this same
meeting between Johnson and Couve, Bundy came away with the conclusion that the “difference
was that France seems to think that there can be no solution to the problem of stable government
in South Vietnam while the United States remains there, while we think that there can be no
36
Memorandum from President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy) to
President Johnson, the White House, 19 February 1965, p. 1, #1, Couve de Murville Visit [1 of
2], Box 175, NSF CF, France, LBJL.
37
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Memorandum on Maurice Couve de Murville, 22
September 1966, Memos, Volume IX, Box 172, CF, France, NSF, LBJL.
66
solution if we leave.” A few weeks later, Bundy communicated his exasperation with the French
by telling Johnson, “at some point we may wish to indicate that the road to a settlement does not
run through Paris.”38 And, even if a settlement did not pass through the French capital, Bundy
would also only admit “superficial similarities” between France’s experience in Southeast Asia
during 1954 and the United States’s position there in mid-1965, seen in most detail in his
“France in 1954, the United States in 1965—A Useful Analogy?” memorandum discussed in
Chapter Four of this study.39
French Opinions of the United States and its Presidents
Hervé Alphand
Several important French officials held their own views of the United States and the
French relationship with the American superpower. The first of these players, Hervé Alphand,
served as French ambassador to the United States from the mid-Eisenhower years until 1965
during the Johnson presidency, when he became Secretary General of the French Ministry of
Foreign Affairs. Asked by John F. Kennedy shortly before the president’s assassination if he
believed de Gaulle intentionally kept relations between France and the United States tense,
Alphand replied, “Certainly not, Mr. President. The key words of French policy were ‘alliance’
and ‘independence,’ because a free and responsible ally is much more useful, even if it is more
38
Both Bundy quotes from Andrew Preston, The War Council, 183.
39
Memorandum from the President's Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy) to
President Johnson, 30 June 1965, FRUS, 1964–1968-Vietnam June-December 1965, Vol. 3:
Document 33.
67
difficult than an obedient servant or an obedient protégé.”40 Alphand’s reference to French
freedom, independence, and the unequal relationship between the two countries shapes much of
the French officials’ explanations of their views of the United States. Alphand and others also
made clear that they held Kennedy in much higher esteem, though perhaps in light of his tragic
death, than they did his successor, Lyndon Johnson. Aside from whatever beliefs they held about
the United States writ large or these American presidents at the time, they often tied these
attitudes very closely to how the French nation could maneuver with regard to the United States
in the bipolar Cold War world.
Moreover, Alphand rejected a common accusation applied to French foreign policy of the
era, the label that it was reflexively anti-American. Rather, he categorized de Gaulle’s approach
as one driven by cold national self-interest dependant on the developments at hand. On the
question of anti-Americanism, he said: “I have observed nothing of the kind. Rejection of any
kind of subjection, demand for equality, irritation sometimes, but nothing that could be defined
as systematic hostility. On the contrary, it is situations and circumstances that create agreements,
not feelings or wishes.”41
Even if he tied French interests and pride inextricably to his views of the United States,
what did Alphand think about his time in the land where he spent close to a decade representing
the French? Alphand noted that his position was often not easy, despite the fact that the French
40
Hervé Alphand, interview by Adalbert de Segonzac, 14 October 1964, Oral History Interview,
p. 10, JFKL. Even in 1956 upon Alphand’s appointment to the post of U.S. ambassador, de
Gaulle, yet to return to power, stressed to Alphand to “always defend independence, it is this
alone that counts.” Quoted in Maurice Vaïsse, La Grandeur: Politique Étrangère du Général de
Gaulle, 1958-1969 (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 35.
41
Quoted in Jean Lacouture, De Gaulle: The Ruler, 1945-1970, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), 363.
68
embassy had a reputation for lavish, well-attended parties hosted by his popular wife, Nicole.42
He recalled that in early 1963, at one of the lowest points in Franco-Americans relations during
this time because of the U.S.-British agreement over Polaris missiles, the French rejection of
British entry into the Common Market, and the Franco-German treaty, de Gaulle was frequently
compared to Napoleon (which Alphand thought de Gaulle liked) and Hitler (which Alphand
believed he did not). He noted in his journal: “Public Enemy #1 in the United States some days is
not Khrushchev but de Gaulle.”43 De Gaulle recognized the pain his actions caused his loyal
ambassador, once remarking that it could not be very “pleasant, given the weather” to hold
Alphand’s job in Washington. Alphand demurred, replying that de Gaulle’s actions made his
post “interesting.”44
Perhaps more to the point, although Alphand professed hyperbolically that “it would be
difficult to make a brief summary of the extraordinary qualities” of President Kennedy, he found
Johnson less remarkable.45 After a car ride with LBJ in March 1964, he recorded the following
42
“Diplomacy: The Party Line,” Time, 22 November 1963. Nicole Alphand graced the cover of
this issue of Time, which likely did not receive as wide a readership as it otherwise would have
due to its publication date.
43
Herve Alphand, L’étonnement d’être: Journal, 1939-1973 (Paris: Fayard, 1977), Entry for 6
March 1963, Palm Beach, FL, 393.
44
45
Jean Lacouture, De Gaulle: The Ruler, 382.
Alphand, interview by Adalbert de Segonzac, 14 October 1964, Oral History Interview, pp. 45, JFKL. Alphand’s reflections on Kennedy, recorded less than a year after his death, already
painted a rosier picture of Franco-American relations from the JFK administration than existed in
reality. Alphand remarked that “President Kennedy had a great admiration for General de Gaulle,
and this was a reciprocal feeling.” (p. 5) He also reminisced: “Very often President Kennedy
used to tell me, ‘If I were the President of the French Republic, I should probably act like
General de Gaulle.’ I hope that these two remarks of our great leaders will help French and
American opinions to better understand our positions, sometimes different. The differences are
real, they are not dramatic, and it was the will of President Kennedy to try to reduce them to a
minimum to emphasize the fundamental agreement existing on the really vital issues.” (p. 10)
69
description of the new commander-in-chief: “big, sluggish, irascible, uneducated, with an
excellent flair, capable perhaps, however, of making a sound decision at an important moment.”
He also noted that Johnson, who had been surrounded by Senators and local politicians before
heading to a diplomatic reception, preferred to keep conversation focused on domestic politics
and seemed to have no desire to discuss the issues separating France and the United States at the
time. Although hardly a ringing endorsement of the new president, Alphand marveled at the fact
that LBJ, Lady Bird Johnson, he, and his wife could still be cordial with one another and in the
same place just days after he had delivered the news to the Johnson administration about the
French decision to recognize the People Republic of China that upset the president and his
foreign policy team so deeply.46 He would recall another meeting soon thereafter with the
president in which he found him to be very friendly and familiar.47
Yet on the escalation of the Vietnam conflict, Alphand’s different opinions of the
presidents mattered little. Alphand had no better luck convincing Johnson and his advisers of the
French position favoring a new Geneva Conference than he and de Gaulle had had in urging
Kennedy and his inner circle of the importance of neutralizing Vietnam, a position discussed
privately as early as their Paris summit in late May and early June 1961. Throughout 1964,
Alphand expressed his frustration with the unwillingness of Dean Rusk especially to listen to his
suggestions for a reconvened international conference to settle the Vietnam issue. On 3 July
1964, during a nearly two-hour discussion about Southeast Asia, Rusk got under the typically
unflappable Alphand’s skin. His journal notes from this meeting are far more animated than the
46
Alphand, L’étonnement d’être, Entry for 15 March 1964, Washington, DC, 424.
47
Alphand, L’étonnement d’être, Entry for 28 March 1964, Palm Beach, FL, 426.
70
usual entry. He complained that Rusk would “not hear anything” about a conference idea,
believing it instead to be a major concession, one with psychological consequences that would
reverberate not only in Asia but as far as Berlin and a concession that would undermine future
American credibility.48
Rusk further countered Alphand by asking the ambassador what his “plan” would be to
bring about such a conference and end the war, a common American reaction to the French
critique at the time meant to cut off discussion of the half-formed idea entirely. Alphand
explained to Rusk that de Gaulle’s plans for withdrawing the French from Algeria were initially
somewhat haphazard, but in the end he avoided the worst possible outcome (in his mind, civil
war in France) and strongly urged Rusk not to confuse strategy with tactics.49 Simply because the
logistics and specific criteria had not yet been determined, it did not mean the idea was without
merit. In an early 1965 discussion about Vietnam between several high-level players on both the
American and French sides, Alphand rebuked Rusk and the others for dismissing the possibility
of a neutralized Vietnam by reminding them that Titoist Yugoslavia, the exemplar for the
neutralization idea, was indeed not controlled by Moscow.50 Regardless of his efforts or
analogies, Alphand would never win Rusk over to his side of the negotiating table.
48
Alphand, L’étonnement d’être, Entry for 3 July 1964, Flight to Newport, 432.
49
Alphand, L’étonnement d’être, Entry for 3 July 1964, Flight to Newport, 432.
50
Entretien à la Maison Blanche entre le Président des Etats-Unis et M. Couve de Murville, p. 9,
19 Fevrier 1965, Vol. 24 (Fevrier 1965 – Mai 1965), Secrétariat Général, Entretiens et Messages,
1956-1966 (hereafter EM), Reel 11924, Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères (hereafter
MAE), La Courveuve, France.
71
Maurice Couve de Murville
Like Alphand, French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville contrasted John F.
Kennedy with Lyndon Johnson, often doing so with a nostalgic tenor for the former’s
presidency. Returning to the tense days of early 1963 mentioned above about the nuclear
question and independence for Europe, Couve de Murville, who was foreign minister from 1958
to 1968 had noted: “One cannot underestimate the nature and depth of the crisis that thus marked
Franco-American relations during the first half of 1963. It was, in my opinion, the most serious
of all the crises that occurred during the years 1961-1967, although others were just as
spectacular or even more so.”51 When assessing the Kennedy presidency as a whole in his
memoirs, however, Couve concluded that “when all is said and done and in spite of everything,
the presidency of John Kennedy will remain, in the minds of the French people, associated with
the idea that they have always had of their relations with America.”52 He believed JFK was
“fully aware of the enormous responsibility he had accepted” and had been impressed by his
understanding of the “complexity of problems...probably more than any normal statesman
because he was at the same time a very keen politician – he was what you call an intellectual – I
mean a man who reads, who thinks, and who believes that life is more complicated than it
generally appears.”53
51
Quoted in Lacouture, De Gaulle: The Ruler, 377.
52
Maurice Couve de Murville, Une Politique Étrangère, 1958-1969 (Paris: Plon, 1971), 119.
53
Interview with M. Couve de Murville, 20 May 1964, p. 3, Dossier 20 mai 1964, Interview par
A. Schlesinger, Carton CM1, Discours 1958-1964, Fonds de Maurice Couve de Murville
(hereafter Fonds de Couve), Centre d’Histoire, Archives d’Histoire Contemporaine, Institut
d'Etudes Politiques, Paris, France (hereafter AHC, SP).
72
Johnson, in Couve’s estimation, was as “secretive and enigmatic as his predecessor was
open and inclined to discussion.”54 Furthermore, Couve characterized Johnson in terms that
many of his domestic opponents might have seconded: an old-fashioned Southern politician
virtually unknown abroad and unprepared to handle U.S. foreign affairs. He believed Johnson
wanted to share power with no one and preferred to handle decisions on his own, traits not unlike
his own supervisor. Although he considered the president “unimaginably sensitive,” Couve
conceded that Johnson could also be imposing, authoritative, and intelligent.
Couve believed, like other American and French officials and observers of the time, that
the Johnson-de Gaulle presidential relationship got off to a poor start as soon as it began. As
Johnson met foreign heads of state attending the Kennedy funeral ceremonies, he had believed
he had wrangled de Gaulle into a commitment to visit Washington. In de Gaulle’s eyes, he had
simply been polite and had not given a firm “non.” LBJ tried to get out in front of the story by
telling the press the two had agreed to meet in the United States. De Gaulle considered this move
not only a breach of protocol, which he took very seriously, but also untrue and then dug in his
heels about refusing even to visit the United States, as had been tentatively discussed as
reciprocity for JFK’s 1961 official visit. Even before Johnson assumed the presidency, in fact, de
Gaulle had upset him when, during a vice-presidential trip to Paris, de Gaulle asked the Texan,
“What are you here to learn?”55 Following the kerfuffle at JFK’s funeral, LBJ refused to bite on a
French suggestion lingering throughout much of early 1964 that he come to Martinique for a
forum while de Gaulle visited the French department in the Caribbean. The bilateral meeting
54
Couve de Murville, Une Politique Étrangère, 121.
55
Quoted in Frank Costigliola, France and the United States: The Cold Alliance since World
War II (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), 137.
73
never happened during the Johnson administration, despite occasional suggestions from LBJ
aides to reconsider the idea.56 Beyond his opinion that Johnson had been unable to get the
relationship with his government off the ground, Couve felt snubbed by Johnson’s increased
focus on Vietnam at the expense of European matters. He believed that “it was during Johnson’s
presidency that the United States began gradually, but overtly, to show less direct interest in
European affairs. Vietnam became Johnson’s almost exclusive preoccupation. What he wanted
from Europe was not to have to think about it, so that he could concentrate on what was
becoming more and more the most important thing.”57 Johnson did not want to hear from the
Europeans about his obsession, Vietnam, either.
Like Alphand, Couve would deny the popular belief in the United States that France took
an anti-American line in its foreign policy generally and on the Vietnam conflict in particular.
Couve did so often, especially about Vietnam, and one such occasion occurred when he appeared
on the CBS television program “Face the Nation” in February 1965 while visiting the United
States just as the Operation Rolling Thunder bombing campaign began. CBS news correspondent
George Herman asked Couve: “When the average American looks at France he’s puzzled, he
thinks to himself, ‘What has our country done wrong? Why don’t the French like us anymore?
....Why are they coming up with unorthodox solutions for Vietnam?’” Couve acknowledged that
he was not surprised to hear the question but believed that such a characterization was “a hasty
56
For a concise summary and analysis of the issues related to a Johnson-de Gaulle meeting from
Kennedy’s funeral through the end of the Johnson presidency, see Lloyd Gardner, “Lyndon
Johnson and de Gaulle,” in Robert O. Paxton and Nicholas Wahl, eds., De Gaulle and the United
States: A Centennial Appraisal (Oxford and Providence: Berg, 1994), 257-59; Couve de
Murville, Une Politique Étrangère, 121-22.
57
Quoted in Lacouture, De Gaulle: The Ruler, 379.
74
generalization and probably not a fair judgment.”58 He responded at length to several questions
about France’s stance on Vietnam. He did so in measured terms and discussed the French
experience with guerilla fighters in Indochina when pressed on the war by New York Times
diplomatic correspondent Max Frankel. Frankel asked Couve: “I gather that the French believe
that we cannot win militarily the kind of war that the United States is now involved in in South
Vietnam. Your country has long experience out there. Is it that you are convinced we must lose?
If so, why?” Couve responded as follows:
Well, as you say, we – it’s true that we have had a long and painful experience in
Vietnam a number of years ago. Now we are out, and now the responsibilities are no
longer ours. To a large extent, they are American responsibilities.
So, I think it’s good and fair on our side, when we discuss with you, to try to explain
what is our judgment on this situation – on the situation – and the reasons why we think
that one course of action would be better than another one.
I don’t – I wouldn’t say at all that you are bound to fail. That’s not the question. What
happens in Vietnam – in South Vietnam – is something very special which is called the
guerilla war.
Our experience is that this is a war that is very difficult to win by military means, and we
think that the origin of a guerilla war being political problems inside the country, mainly,
it is normal that we should try and find a solution by political means rather than by
military means.59
Couve would also tell Marvin Kalb of CBS News that he believed the political instability in
South Vietnam that had followed the coup of Ngo Dinh Diem for the previous fifteen months
was really symptomatic of the larger problem of dealing with insurgency. He said “This political
58
Text of the Interview of M. Maurice Couve de Murville, French Minister of Foreign Affairs on
the CBS TV Network Program Face the Nation on Sunday, February 21, From 12:30 to 1:00
PM, Embassy of France, Press and Information Service, 21 February 1965, p. 1, Dossier
Interview New York, C.B.S., dimanche 21 fevrier 65, Carton CM2, Discours 1965–Juillet 1968,
Fonds de Couve, AHC, SP.
59
Couve “Face the Nation” Interview, 21 February 1965, p. 2, CM2, Fonds de Couve, AHC, SP.
75
instability is just a manifestation of the fact that what is happening in Vietnam is not just a war in
the classical sense of the word, but a guerrilla war, which is something quite different.”60 He
stressed the United States needed to find a way to bring together all Vietnamese parties – not just
those supportive of the U.S. presence – to figure out their future government.
Couve further responded by encouraging negotiations as soon as possible, adding that in
the eyes of the French government “a long time has already been lost” and that as more time
passed, the situation would worsen and an acceptable settlement achieved through an
international conference akin to the Geneva Conferences of 1954 and 1961-1962 would become
more elusive. Pushed on the possibility of a pro-communist Vietnam and North Vietnam’s
interest in negotiations, Couve did not profess to have answers, but speculated that it was in the
interest of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to do so because “peace will have to come one
day, and the sooner, the better.”61 Despite Couve’s level-headed replies to the reporters, Frankel
continued to prod him on the intention behind France’s “almost dramatic” differences of opinion
with the United States on Vietnam and other matters. In his reply Couve elaborated on his
opening comment. He disagreed with Frankel’s estimation of the situation and countered:
We are saying openly, publicly – what we think the course of action should be in regards
to the South Vietnamese problem. That has nothing to do with the idea of being
unpleasant or disagreeable to the United States or of trying to make things more difficult.
60
Couve “Face the Nation” Interview, 21 February 1965, p. 2, CM2, Fonds de Couve, AHC, SP.
61
Couve “Face the Nation” Interview, 21 February 1965, p. 3-4, CM2, Fonds de Couve, AHC,
Sciences Po. For two recent studies incorporating Vietnamese sources that stress the reluctance
of the DRV leadership – particularly the hardliners Le Duan and Le Duc Tho – to seek
negotiations, see Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for
Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012) and Pierre Asselin,
Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2013). As powerful as Nguyen and Asselin’s conclusions are, the broader point
remains that the United States did not genuinely seek to determine North Vietnam’s intentions at
this point or offer terms it might have found appealing.
76
On the contrary, we believe that by taking publicly that position on the Western side, it
helps further developments in this situation. And we think that we are usefully using our
relations with you when we tell you quite frankly, quite openly, and even publicly, what
we believe. I think it’s not what friends should do between themselves to hesitate to say
the truth.62
Denying that France held any special interests in Southeast Asia since 1954 or in U.S. prospects
there in 1965, he concluded that France’s interest was “of a more general kind, and that is called
the peace of the world.”63
Couve echoed the themes found in his public “Face the Nation” responses behind closed
doors to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. In his last meeting with JFK, Couve stressed
that de Gaulle’s statement on the neutralization of Vietnam in August 1963 should not be taken
as criticism of U.S. policy, but rather was simply his “objective opinion” and “nothing against
American policy, but that it was really our feeling.”64 However vague those remarks ring, Couve
provided more substance to them in later discussions with the LBJ team. During his
aforementioned February 1965 visit to the United States, Couve stressed the political, not
military, nature of the problem in South Vietnam during a meeting with the key American
figures in U.S.-French diplomatic conversations about Vietnam at the time: President Johnson,
Under Secretary of State George Ball, Ambassador to France Charles Bohlen, and National
Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. In response to a comment by Johnson about the instability in
Saigon, Couve told the president and his advisers that he was not at all surprised by the
frequency with which the South Vietnamese governments fell given that a wide-ranging political
62
Couve “Face the Nation” Interview, 21 February 1965, p. 5, CM2, Fonds de Couve, AHC, SP.
63
Couve “Face the Nation” Interview, 21 February, p. 5, CM2, Fonds de Couve, AHC, SP.
64
Interview with M. Couve de Murville, 20 May 1964, p. 19, CM1, Fonds de Couve, AHC, SP.
77
solution was the necessary remedy. The bulk of their conversation dealt with the differences the
United States and France held over possible negotiations. Couve told the Americans that France
believed the United States should go back to the Geneva agreements of 1954 as the basis for
talks and should be willing to call a cease-fire and then meet without preconditions. Bundy
challenged this idea by asking the French Foreign Minister if this approach meant that the U.S.
military needed to withdraw prior to negotiating, to which Couve said negotiations should come
first, with withdrawal only as the ultimate goal.65
The other point of contention in this conversation revolved around the two nations’
perceptions of the willingness of the North Vietnamese and Chinese to come to the negotiating
table. Couve repeatedly stated that the French believed North Vietnam was more willing to
negotiate than its public statements seemingly demonstrated it to be, as those comments were
made in Couve’s mind for propaganda purposes and contrary to their true intentions according to
French intelligence. The Americans argued that their sources told them otherwise. Similarly,
though the Chinese appeared to hold a harder line toward negotiations than the DRV did in
French eyes, Couve suggested that if a cease-fire began and Geneva-style discussions resumed, it
would be harder for the Chinese, whose participation the French viewed as essential for peace in
the region and in fact more important in an international agreement than the North Vietnamese
themselves, to back out. Bohlen suggested that the United States thought any such negotiations
would dissolve quickly while he believed the French were more confident in their sustainability.
Ball argued that the United States and France held different views of Chinese intentions.
Normally one to stress the indigenous nature of the Vietnam conflict, here Ball estimated that
65
Memorandum of Conversation, 19 February 1965, Foreign Relations of the United States,
1964-1968 (hereafter FRUS), Vol. XII, Western Europe, Document 43; Entretien à La Maison
Blanche le 19 février 1965 entre le Président des Etats-Unis et M. Couve de Murville, Vol. 24,
EM, MAE.
78
France thought China was focused on internal issues (the Cultural Revolution would indeed
begin soon) but the United States considered the People’s Republic of China to be “aggressive
and land hungry.”66
Lastly, Couve disputed his American counterparts’ critique of France’s hope for a
“political solution” as unclear and opening the door to communist domination in Vietnam. He
agreed that no one could predict exactly what shape a genuinely Vietnamese-chosen government
would take, but said that “this was a risk which one would probably have to take.” Bundy
asserted that France thought no stable government could exist with the United States in country,
which directly contrasted the American perspective that a solution could not exist if the United
States left. Couve retorted that the French government believed stability could not come during a
period of hostilities. All the more reason, then, for a cease-fire, at which point, Couve thought,
improvements in South Vietnam might begin.67
Charles de Gaulle
The final French figure to assess is its imposing president, Charles de Gaulle. His
opinions about the United States receive attention here, in addition to Chapter Two, because they
deserve separation from his broader foreign policy views and because he made so many of his
foreign policy decisions unilaterally. Many observers believe that de Gaulle’s perspectives on the
United States were fundamentally shaped by the poor treatment he received from President
66
Memorandum of Conversation, 19 February 1965, FRUS, Vol. XII, Western Europe,
Document 43.
67
Memorandum of Conversation, 19 February 1965, FRUS, Vol. XII, Western Europe,
Document 43; Entretien à La Maison Blanche le 19 février 1965 entre le Président des EtatsUnis et M. Couve de Murville, Vol. 24, EM, MAE.
79
Franklin Roosevelt as leader of France Libre in the Second World War, when the two leaders
eventually became, in the words of an early work on the relationship, “hostile allies.”68 One of
Lyndon Johnson’s most trusted advisers on foreign affairs, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia,
informed the president as much. In January 1964, Russell explained to Johnson: “He’s….a
peculiar fellow, and he resents very much the treatment he got at the hands of Roosevelt and
[British prime minister Winston] Churchill down at Casablanca. In 1941 [sic, actually 1943],
they did insult him. He probably ought not to have tried to get into the meeting, but they insulted
him, and he never has got over that.” Russell told LBJ that de Gaulle disliked Churchill even
more than FDR, but insisted his lingering feelings about the World War II era were the reasons
“he’s been very … hard to deal with.” As such, according to Russell, “you have to deal with him
a bit differently….This fellow you have to sort of beat around the bush with him.”69
Others, however, believe this assessment of WWII’s influence on de Gaulle’s views of the
United States to be overblown. One of de Gaulle’s wartime compatriots in London
(contemporaries said de Gaulle had no true friends), Étienne Burin des Roziers, argued that de
Gaulle had been unaware of most of Roosevelt’s negative feelings toward him. In fact, according
to Burin des Roziers, de Gaulle held the Rooseveltian idea that all their misunderstandings could
have been resolved through a “man to man” conversation.70 However he felt about his wartime
68
Milton Viorst’s 1965 book title quoted in Kim Munhollond, “The United States and the Free
French,” in Paxton and Wahl, eds., De Gaulle and the United States, 61.
69
Telephone Conversation, Lyndon Johnson to Richard Russell, 6:05 pm, 8 January 1964 in
Robert David Johnson and Kent Germany, eds., The Presidential Recordings: Lyndon B.
Johnson: Toward the Great Society, Vol. 3 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 31314.
70
Étienne Burin des Roziers, “Witness,” in Paxton and Wahl, eds., De Gaulle and the United
States, 99. For a middle-ground assessment of the Roosevelt-de Gaulle relationship, see Robert
80
experience, de Gaulle’s views of the United States in the postwar world largely stemmed from
his belief that the United States possessed too much power in the international system and used it
inappropriately; from his desire for France to regain some of its past prominence particularly in
light of World War II and the shame of the Vichy government’s collaboration with Nazi
Germany; from his concern about “Anglo-Saxon” domination of Europe; and from the fact that
he disliked any effort that would limit France from maintaining maximum flexibility in its own
foreign policy decision-making.71
Although certainly intransigent, conceited, and uncooperative at times during his
presidency, De Gaulle, like his foreign policy aides, would push back against accusations that
this set of ideas made him “anti-American.” He spoke at length regarding this accusation
specifically in light of his realist critique of American difficulties in Vietnam. In December 1965,
he told a French television audience:
I am called anti-American. In fact, who has been the ally of the Americans through and
through if not the France of de Gaulle? There has been no other, and if necessary, if
misfortune were to occur and if the freedom of the world were in doubt, who would
automatically be the best allies if not France and the United States, as they have often
been in such cases?... I am not saying that the Americans are anti-French, because they
have not always gone along with us. I don’t always go along with the Americans, for
example in the policy that they are carrying out in Asia.72
Dallek, “Roosevelt and de Gaulle,” in Paxton and Wahl, eds., De Gaulle and the United States,
49-60.
71
For a favorable but authoritative assessment of de Gaulle’s foreign policy approach to the
United States, consult Maurice Vaïsse, La Grandeur: Politique étrangère du général de Gaulle
1958-1969 (Paris: Fayard, 1998). See Christian Nuenlist, Anna Locher, and Garret Martin, eds.,
Globalizing de Gaulle: International Perspectives on French Foreign Policies, 1958-1969
(Latham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010) for updated accounts of de Gaulle’s approach to the
world and the U.S. role internationally.
72
Quoted in Lacouture, The Ruler, 383.
81
Outside of the Vietnam issue, de Gaulle had most famously supported the United States
during the Cuban Missile Crisis. That support came, though, after the notorious comment he
made to former secretary of state, Dean Acheson: “Have you come from the President to inform
me of some decision taken by your President – or have you come to consult with me about a
decision which he should take?”73 Still, this remark was as much about pride as anything else, as
de Gaulle had pledged his commitment to the United States to former U.S. ambassador to France
James Gavin even in the earlier Berlin crisis of 1961. He had told Gavin that “If the state of
affairs turns from bad to worse we will enter a catastrophe. If such a catastrophe occurs, France
will enter it together with the United States…I say this on behalf of France, and I can vouch for
France.”74
On Vietnam, he had angered the Kennedy-Johnson team by making his neutralization
idea public (after two years of private prodding) and through a relatively innocuous reference to
the United States in part of that statement. His proposal, read to the press by Minister of
Information Alain Peyrefitte, stated that “France’s knowledge of the merits of this people [the
Vietnamese] makes her appreciate the role they would be capable of playing in the current
situation in Asia for their own progress and to further international understanding, once they
could go ahead with their activities independently of the outside, in internal peace and unity and
in harmony with their neighbors.”75 By referring to the United States as an outside force in South
Vietnam, de Gaulle angered the United States. When this statement and others like it continued
73
Reyn, Atlantis Lost, 72.
74
Reyn, Atlantis Lost, 72.
75
Memorandum of Conversation, 30 August 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. IV-Vietnam, AugustDecember 1963, Document 26, note 7.
82
to be bandied about in early 1964, LBJ responded by saying that France “just want[s] to create
problems,” adding, “So I think old man de Gaulle’s puffing through his hat.”76
De Gaulle would later crank up his rhetoric, angering Johnson further in June 1965 by
attacking the U.S. role in the world when he called the United States “the greatest danger in the
world today to the peace.”77 De Gaulle would certainly claim he was objectively assessing the
facts about the U.S. intervention in Vietnam, but it is quite easy to see how this distinction would
have been lost on Johnson and his team. It seems to present an increasingly antagonistic view of
the United States. Indeed, the Johnson administration fundamentally disagreed with the
assessment, as it did when de Gaulle called upon the United States to initiate a unilateral
withdrawal from South Vietnam in his 1 September 1966 speech in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. In
this speech, which will receive greater attention in Chapter Four, de Gaulle suggested the United
States could bring about peace talks with North Vietnam if it decided to make “the commitment
which America would have wanted to take beforehand to repatriate its forces within a suitable
and determined period of time.” In the Phnom Penh speech, De Gaulle also tried to inspire the
United States to follow the French example in its withdrawal from Algeria since France had
“deliberately [put] an end to sterile fighting on a ground that, nonetheless, her forces
unquestionably dominated, that she had directly administered for one hundred and thirty-two
years and where more than a million of her children were settled.”78 In his eyes, France withdrew
76
Telephone Conversation, Lyndon Johnson to John Knight, 5:45 pm, Monday, February 3,
1964 in Johnson and Germany, eds., The Presidential Recordings: Lyndon B. Johnson, Vol. 4,
98-99.
77
78
Quoted in Costigliola, France and the United States, 142.
Charles de Gaulle, Discours et Messages, t. 5: Vers le Terme, Janvier 1966 – Avril 1969
(Paris: Plon, 1970), 74-78. “Text of de Gaulle’s Speech in Cambodia,” New York Times, 2
September 1966, p. 13 provides an English translation.
83
from a position of strength from a place it controlled for so long and for which it had once staked
its international reputation on preserving. If France could do so without dire consequences to its
carefully protected image throughout the world, de Gaulle thought the global hegemon the
United States could so as well. Given the way the French president had been characterizing the
United States in the previous three years, however, the LBJ team was not in a receptive mood.
Indeed, it would only be after de Gaulle’s remark that President Johnson’s 31 March 1968
speech had been an “act of reason and political courage” that the wounds would begin to heal.79
Conclusion
The opinions of key American and French officials about the other country and its leaders
during the escalation of the Vietnam War helped prevent genuine collaboration and productive
discussion about Southeast Asia between the two, centuries-old allies. U.S. Ambassador Bohlen
and Secretary of State Rusk viewed President de Gaulle as living in a dream world out of date
with the realities of the Cold War status quo. Thus, they avoided his critiques about the logistical
military challenges apparent in Vietnam and the influence of anticolonial nationalism there.
McGeorge Bundy tended to view de Gaulle in somewhat more favorable terms, but nevertheless
bought into others’ dismissal of the French at key times and could not effectively think outside
the American foreign-policy box. Johnson tried to avoid public conflict with “old man de
Gaulle” but failed to let down his guard in private when conversations could have encouraged
new ways of thinking about the increasingly problematic war raging under his watch.
79
Marianna P. Sullivan, France’s Vietnam Policy: A Study in French-American Relations
(Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1978), 115.
84
For their part, the crucial French communicators to the United States during the Johnson
years, Alphand and Couve de Murville, seemed stuck pining for a nostalgic era of cooperation
under John F. Kennedy that had not existed in reality. They both viewed Johnson as a more
boorish and less enlightened leader, though they had reason to be frustrated by the lack of
interest his administration gave French views on the Vietnam problem. Couve, in particular, took
the French case public about the need for a political solution to resolve guerilla conflict, but
raised these points prudently in private as well. In neither case did he make much of a dent in
American thinking. “Public Enemy #1” de Gaulle criticized American involvement, at first
privately and tamely and later on increasingly large public stages in steadily more provocative
language. However he may have felt about the United States due to his second-class status with
the Allies in World War II, however LBJ may have interpreted rumors of such feelings, and
however much he denied charges of anti-Americanism as simply objective observations, he
made it difficult for the stubborn Americans to engage with the substance of his remarks. In light
of all these factors, through early 1968 Franco-American conversations about the Vietnam War
remained a “dialogue of the deaf.”80
80
Cogan, “How Fuzzy Can One Be?” in Gardner and Gittenger, eds., The Search for Peace in
Vietnam, 1964-1968, 158.
85
CHAPTER FOUR – A THIRD PARAGRAPH IN EACH STORY? THE MEMORY OF
THE FRENCH INDOCHINA WAR IN U.S. VIETNAM WAR POLICYMAKING, 19631968
David Halberstam, one of the most influential American journalists of the Vietnam War,
once voiced his frustration over covering the U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia, and
particularly with the American government’s failure to consider the prior French involvement in
the region, as follows:
The problem was trying to cover something every day as news when in fact the real key
was that it was all derivative of the French Indochina war, which is history. So you really
should have had a third paragraph in each story which should have said, ‘All of this is
shit and none of this means anything because we are in the same footsteps as the French
and we are prisoners of their experience.1
Lyndon Johnson, the U.S. president responsible for escalating the American military
commitment to over 500,000 troops, however, believed the United States had far less to gain
from examining the resonances of the French Indochina War. When prodded by his biographer
Doris Kearns Goodwin about the U.S. war, Johnson dismissed not only the opinions of the
American press corps and academics who looked to the French war, but also aimed pointed
commentary at the French journalist, Jean Lacouture, who reported on international affairs at the
time for Le Monde. Johnson purportedly told Kearns Goodwin: “Just recognize the stake that La
Couture [sic], a Frenchman, has in seeing it that way….you see, we just read different histories,
that’s all.”2
1
Quoted in Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of
America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012), xxi.
2
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1991), 328-31.
86
Indeed, the former president and nearly all of his staff avoided grappling with the history
of the French experience in Vietnam during the First Indochina War on its own terms. (To avoid
redundancy, I use First Indochina War, First Vietnam War, French Indochina War, and FrancoVietminh War interchangeably.) The in-house dove George Ball aside, the U.S. national security
apparatus regularly dismissed the warnings that the French offered about their war in Southeast
Asia in the 1940s and the 1950s. Rather, the John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard
Nixon administrations’ understandings of the French experience were, as Robert McMahon has
summarized about historical memory, “constructed to meet present needs.”3 On the occasions
that the French failure was discussed privately, the Americans usually remembered the French
war as one to maintain colonial order, seemingly forgetting the Cold War imperatives the
Americans had helped give it, and that they had supported financially from 1950 to its
conclusion after the battle of Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva conference in 1954.4 They thought
the French effort to cling to its colonies was a far cry from current American Cold War goals and
failed to remember the local circumstances that hampered the French military effort,
circumstances that continued to have significance throughout the American war in the 1960s and
early 1970s.
This chapter focuses on Johnson and other U.S. officials’ engagement, or lack thereof,
with the history of the French war in Indochina while U.S. involvement progressed. It aims to
examine the American insistence on ignoring the French government’s recollections of their
3
Robert McMahon, “Contested Memory: The Vietnam War and American Society, 1975-2000,”
Diplomatic History 26, no. 2 (Spring 2004), 163.
4
For a nuanced explanation of how the United States, France, and Great Britain negotiated
greater American support for the French effort in Southeast Asia, see Mark Atwood Lawrence,
Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005).
87
experiences about the war. Important scholarship has examined the memory of the Vietnam War
by policymakers and the public after the Second Indochina War ended, but this chapter builds
upon the earlier work by scholars such as Marianna P. Sullivan, Richard Neustadt and Ernest
May, Yuen Foong Khong, Fred Logevall, and Pierre Journoud about the French example to
demonstrate more fully that even during the war, starkly different memories of and conclusions
about the history of foreign intervention in Vietnam – in this case, that of the French – haunted
the decision-making process.5
The focus is on the American perspective during the JFK and LBJ administrations and a
select number of cases when the United States reacted to French memories during official
discussions. Briefly, however, the French governmental position on its experience can be
characterized in the following ways (which, even if not surprising, is borne out by the archival
records of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs): First, the French believed that the
5
On the American memory of the Vietnam War after the fall of Saigon, see, among others,
McMahon, “Contested Memory,” 159-84; Robert D. Schulzinger, “Memory and Understanding
U.S. Foreign Relations,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, eds. Michael
J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 33652; Robert D. Schulzinger, A Time for Peace: The Legacy of the Vietnam War (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006); Michael J. Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs,
MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009);
Patrick Hagopian, The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the
Politics of Healing (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009); Scott Laderman and
Edwin A. Martini, eds., Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the
Second Indochina War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). For earlier work, see Marianna
P. Sullivan, France’s Vietnam Policy: A Study in French-American Relations (Westport, Conn:
Greenwood Press, 1978); Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien
Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 148173; Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for
Decision Makers (New York: The Free Press, 1986), 75-87; Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War:
The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press); Fredrik Logevall, “De Gaulle, Neutralization and American Involvement in Vietnam,
1963-64,” Pacific Historical Review 61, no. 1 (February 1992), 69-102; Pierre Journoud, De
Gaulle et le Vietnam, 1945-1969 (Paris: Tallandier, 2011).
88
anticolonial national independence movement in Vietnam warranted serious respect for its
commitment to its cause, its military acumen, and its willingness to suffer huge losses to remove
an external authority; second, the Vietnamese fighters exhibited considerable patience in their
effort to do so; third, the Vietnamese landscape and climate made it a terrible place to fight any
type of war, especially one against an oftentimes guerrilla force; fourth, even vastly superior
military might, such as that which the United States possessed in comparison to the French
forces in 1954, would not have made a sufficient difference; and hence, fifth, only a political
solution, ideally resolved through an international conference in the vein of the 1954 and 19611962 Geneva Conferences, could end the fighting with a minimum of suffering and on terms
either the French or Americans would find acceptable.
A Precedent Passed from Kennedy to Johnson
From the earliest days of the JFK administration, French president Charles de Gaulle
voiced his concerns over increased American involvement in Vietnam. When Kennedy and the
First Lady, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, visited Paris for a high-level bilateral summit in May
1961, de Gaulle, a one-time supporter of the First Indochina War who later saw its futility and
who likewise felt chastened by the messy experience extricating the French from Algeria, told
the American president not to escalate in Vietnam. Using a word so often later associated with
Vietnam, he predicted the United States would fall into a “bottomless military and political
quagmire,” no matter its intentions or the level of resources it threw behind the effort. That same
month, de Gaulle drew upon the French experience with its client-emperor Bao Dai during the
French Indochina War when he warned the U.S. ambassador to France at the time, James Gavin,
89
against American support of its “miracle man” in Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem.6 Suggesting that
Diem did not possess the support of the majority of those living in South Vietnam, de Gaulle told
Gavin that “men who hold power by virtue of foreign intervention will fail…I fear you are
getting bogged down in a vain enterprise from which it will be more and more difficult to extract
yourselves.”7
De Gaulle also began privately nudging the Kennedy administration toward the idea of
the neutralization of Vietnam through an international conference in line with the Geneva
Conference of 1954, an idea which gained much more notoriety and scorn from the Kennedy
administration once French Minister of Information Alain Peyrefitte leaked a vague proposal for
neutralization to the press in late August 1963. While Kennedy had believed de Gaulle’s earlier
summit advice merited some attention in regard to Laos in 1962, on Vietnam he aligned himself
with his National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy’s dismissive response to the neutralization
proposal.8 Bundy, whose posthumously published reflections on the Vietnam War were titled
Lessons in Disaster, argued at the time that the United States did “best when it ignores nosey
6
For a study that highlights the religious and cultural influences underpinning the U.S.
relationship with Diem, see Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem,
Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004). For two recent examinations of Diem that draw heavily from Vietnamese sources, see
Jessica M. Chapman, Cauldron of Resistance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and 1950s
Southern Vietnam (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013) and Edward Miller, Misalliance:
Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2013).
7
Quoted in Max Paul Friedman, Rethinking Anti-Americanism: The History of an Exceptional
Concept in American Foreign Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 17475.
8
On Kennedy and Laos, see Timothy N. Castle, At War in the Shadow of Vietnam: U.S. Military
Aid to the Royal Lao Government, 1955-1975 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) and
Seth Jacobs, The Universe Unraveling: American Foreign Policy in Cold War Laos (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2012). Castle provides a more traditional diplomatic history approach,
while Jacobs again highlights the role of culture in U.S. decision-making.
90
Charlie,” no matter his understanding of the region and the French history there.9 Kennedy
echoed Bundy’s point in more diplomatic language to Walter Cronkite and a national television
audience just days after the neutralization proposal surfaced. Cronkite requested Kennedy’s
opinion on “what President de Gaulle was up to” in his statement. JFK said, “I guess it was an
expression of his general view but he doesn’t have any forces there or any program of economic
assistance, so that while these expressions are welcome the burden is carried as it usually is by
the U.S. and the people there. But I think anything General de Gaulle says should be listened to
and we listen.” He continued: “What of course makes Americans somewhat impatient is that
after carrying this load for 18 years we are glad to get counsel, but we would like a little more
assistance—real assistance. But we are going to meet our responsibility anyway. It doesn’t do us
any good to say, ‘Well why don’t we all just go home and leave the world to those who are our
enemies.’” Although he called de Gaulle “a candid friend,” he ultimately characterized his
statement in this public response as one that encouraged U.S. capitulation and a shirking of its
global responsibilities. This limited his administration from real, constructive engagement with
the idea from the start.10
The same dismissive line of thinking persisted about the French example in the Johnson
foreign policy team after Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963. Most of LBJ’s advisers
were, in fact, holdovers from the Kennedy presidency. Although one can see American efforts at
creating memories of this experience that differ from these French maxims throughout the entire
9
Memorandum from Bundy to Clifton and Salinger for the President, the White House, 1
September 1963, Vietnam - General, Box 199, Country File, Vietnam (hereafter CF, Vietnam),
National Security File (hereafter NSF), John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA (hereafter JFKL);
Gordon M. Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2008),
10
Telegram from Department of State (Rusk) to Ambassador in France (Bohlen), 2 September
1963, p. 4, Box 199, CF, Vietnam, NSF, JFKL.
91
Johnson years, four particular flashpoints found the LBJ team looking back at history with an eye
toward greater American involvement. These are: (1) the continued discussion over de Gaulle’s
initially vague call to neutralize South Vietnam in l963 and 1964; (2) the debate over escalation
up through the summer of 1965; (3) the controversy surrounding de Gaulle’s speech against the
U.S. war in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in September 1966; and (4) the lead-up to the Tet Offensive
in 1968 and the subsequent decision to hold talks to reach a negotiated settlement in Paris that
spring. I will look at each of these below.
The Johnson Administration Begins
No to Neutralization
The first of these flashpoints was the continued conversation over de Gaulle’s initially
vague call to neutralize South Vietnam in late 1963 and 1964.11 Six months into the sporadic
process in which the United States occasionally attempted to get more information from the
French about neutralization and then, more importantly to the United States, win the French over
to their side, the new ambassador to France, Charles “Chip” Bohlen, met with de Gaulle about
the war. The French experience came up during the conversation. In fact, the French experience
arose more frequently between 1963 and 1965 than in later years because the French had yet to
tire of repeating themselves and because, as both the Japanese scholar Yuko Torikata and the
French historian Pierre Journoud have noted, de Gaulle saw his greatest chance for brokering a
11
For a full chronological overview on the neutralization question in this period, see Logevall,
“De Gaulle, Neutralization and American Involvement in Vietnam, 1963-64” and Logevall,
Choosing War, 1-16, 103-113.
92
settlement during this time.12 Bohlen and de Gaulle disagreed over the nature of the current
conflict and the French president drew a clear distinction between the will of the North and NLF
and the current South Vietnamese client state. Bohlen noted:
He [de Gaulle] said the war in essence was the same one that the French had been
fighting since the end of World War II; that the [South] Vietnamese had no taste for this
war and that the anti-Communist forces in Vietnam were not up to the task. I interrupted
him to tell him this was quite contrary to our analysis of the situation. We felt it was quite
different, one was a colonial war which came out as colonial wars always do and the
other was a war against aggression directed and maintained from without.13
Although Bohlen surely believed it was his ambassadorial duty to defend the United
States’ interpretation of the war – however flawed that Cold War understanding – in doing so, he
neglected the chance to look at the nuances offered by the French. Even more, by dismissing the
First Vietnam War simply for ending “as colonial wars always do,” he missed the specifics about
the weak morale among the South Vietnamese and the broader point that the Americans might
also be viewed as colonialists. Bohlen would later lose faith in the war, but only after years of the
United States’ prestige suffering and not because he eventually noticed similarities to the French
war. Higher in the echelons of American power, Johnson, too, objected to the French example
because he believed greater military force and the United States’ altruistic motives rendered the
French example obsolete. Moreover, the ambassador to South Vietnam in 1964, Henry Cabot
Lodge, Jr., a self-described Francophile who rarely spoke favorably about the French, concluded
12
Yuko Torikata, “Reexamining de Gaulle’s Peace Initiative on the Vietnam War,” Diplomatic
History 31, no. 5 (Nov. 2007), 909-38; Journoud, De Gaulle et le Vietnam, 117-216.
13
Message from the Ambassador in France (Bohlen) to the President, 2 April 1964, U.S.
Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), 1964–1968—
Vietnam, 1964, Vol. 1, Document 105.
93
about the French prescriptions to avoid a full-scale war that he “would prefer [French] opposition
to their support in fighting against the V.C.”14
Escalation
The second instance when we see the Johnson administration belittling an examination of
the French experience comes during the discussions over the escalation of the war from mid1964 until the final decision to continue expanding the number of American ground troops in
July 1965. As the administration inched toward escalation, it continued to avoid serious
consideration of the French example and certainly took care not to mention the French
experience in its public statements about the war, lest it encourage the American public to
associate Vietnam with military defeat. The scholar Yuen Foong Khong has calculated that the
French example was never once used publically during 1964 and 1965, while it did surface at
least superficially in private among policymakers 19 times over this same span of time.15 The
impetus for looking back at the French defeat came almost always from the one member of the
Johnson foreign policy team who did grapple with the First Indochina War seriously,
Undersecretary of State George Ball. Ball later recalled that his meeting with de Gaulle on
Southeast Asia in June 1964, particularly the General’s designation of Vietnam as “rotten
country,” stuck with him throughout the debates over the war. Lest de Gaulle look too
benevolent here or elsewhere, it is worth noting that he seems to have held fairly condescending
14
Telegram from Saigon Embassy (Lodge) to Department of State, 19 January 1964, French
Recognition of Communist China, Vol. I, Box 176, Country File, France, National Security File,
Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, TX (hereafter LBJL).
15
Khong, Analogies at War, 60-61.
94
and racist beliefs about the Vietnamese people, his begrudging respect for the Viet Minh’s war
effort from 1946 to 1954 notwithstanding.16
To be sure, Ball does offer an exception to this chapter’s argument by drawing upon the
French war frequently. This is particularly intriguing given that Ball had a reputation as the most
fiercely anti-Gaullist member of the Johnson administration because of de Gaulle’s intransigence
on European integration, a cause that Ball and his mentor Jean Monnet, the architect of what is
now the European Union, firmly believed necessary for the future of Europe. Ball was, however,
able to set aside his grievances against de Gaulle, something his colleagues could not do, to
consider his advice on an area in which his country held unparalleled expertise, no matter that
the advice arrived dripping with ethnocentrism. More so than the June 1964 discussion with de
Gaulle, Ball’s memory of the First Indochina War was shaped by his friendship with Monnet and
his French colleagues as a lawyer for the European Coal and Steel Community beginning in
1953—precisely when the war was going poorly for the French colonialists. As the historian
Robert Dean explains, Ball “saw firsthand the ‘self-deception’ of leaders ‘seduced by selfserving arguments’ while engaged in la guerre sale against a Viet Minh enemy with an
‘irrational willingness’ to ‘take staggering losses.’ Over the course of years of transatlantic
shuttling, Ball saw the futility of each in a series of new French ‘tactical schemes—the Navarre
16
George Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern: Memoirs (New York: Norton, 1982), 378. De
Gaulle made similarly negative comments about Vietnam to Bohlen in their April 1964
discussion, as outlined in Bohlen to the President, 2 April 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968—Vietnam,
1964, Vol. 1, Document 105 and to John F. Kennedy during their presidential summit in Paris in
May 1961.
95
Plan, the Salan Plan, the LeClerc Plan, and the de Lattre de Tassigny Plan—that would magically
assure victory in a short period.’”17
These memories encouraged Ball to present a sixty-seven page memorandum to his
superior, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, as well as to National Security Adviser McGeorge
Bundy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, in October 1964. Among other goals, he
hoped to push back against the excessive reliance on the Korean War analogy he saw being put
forth and to propose a fuller examination of the French period. Ball argued: “Our situation would
in the world’s eyes approach that of France in the 1950s. We would incur the opposition of
elements in Viet-Nam otherwise friendly to us. Finally, we would find ourselves in la guerre
sale with consequent heavy loss of American lives in the rice paddies and jungles.”18 The others,
however, did not see the merit in looking at the French experience and never passed along the
memorandum to Johnson. According to Ball, McNamara, who decades later called American
policy in Vietnam “a failure of imagination,” was “‘absolutely horrified’ and treated the memo
like ‘a poisonous snake.’”19 For his part, Ball thought McNamara’s reliance on numbers and
statistics looked much like the overconfidence the French generals possessed in justifying their
various war plans. Five months later, however, Johnson caught wind of the piece, having
received a copy from his aide Bill Moyers, and reportedly was impressed, even though he
disagreed with the material on the French war. This development, along with the continued push
17
Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 230.
18
James Bill, George Ball: Behind the Scenes in U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, Yale
University Press, 1997), 161.
19
Robert S. McNamara, James G. Blight, and Robert K. Brigham, eds., Argument Without End:
In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy (New York: PublicAffairs, 1999), 102; Bill,
George Ball, 160.
96
toward a greater U.S. commitment that Ball viewed with dismay, prompted Ball to write a series
of memoranda in June 1965 that deployed the French experience frequently and at length.
Ball’s “memoranda campaign” failed to have the desired effect, both in terms of more serious
analysis of the Franco-Vietminh War and in halting the war’s escalation. His colleagues grew
impatient with his repetitive comments and “roll[ed] their eyes” whenever Ball brought up the
French experience or his time with the Strategic Bombing Survey in World War II, a position
which directly informed his skepticism of the efficacy of aerial bombing in North Vietnam.
Indeed, Ball would resign from the Johnson administration by September 1966 in large measure
because of his frustration with its Vietnam policy and its failure to consider the French
experience and the example of Dien Bien Phu.
In late June 1965, the National Security Council put together a memorandum entitled
“France in Vietnam, 1954 and the US in 1965—A Useful Analogy?” in which they found
essentially no similarities and some legitimate differences.20 In it, Bundy (or, as Bundy believes,
an underling who compiled the document and sent it out in his name) wrote: “France in 1954
was a colonial power seeking to impose its overseas rule, out of tune with Vietnamese
nationalism…The U.S. in 1965 is responding to the call of a people under Communist assault, a
people undergoing a non-Communist national revolution; neither our power nor that of our
adversaries has been fully engaged as yet.”21 The explanation certainly brought up the
differences in the two situations. It was also correct that the war was still, and would remain,
20
The memorandum is reprinted in full as Memorandum from the President's Special Assistant
for National Security Affairs (Bundy) to President Johnson, 30 June 1965, FRUS, 1964–1968Vietnam June-December 1965, Vol. 3, Document 33.
21
Quoted in Charles Cogan, ‘“How Fuzzy Can One Be?” in The Secret Search for Peace in
Vietnam (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2004), eds. Lloyd Gardner and Ted Gittenger, 154.
97
limited. Yet it put forward an interpretation of the situation in Vietnam that drew skepticism both
domestically and internationally at this juncture, and by historians of the war since. Moreover,
this possibly fruitful memorandum was not as rigorously argued as many other documents from
this important period, which led Ernest May and Richard Neustadt to conclude that the note
“almost surely responded to a request from LBJ for something to wave at Ball or at some senator
or newsman needling him with what [Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern and Pacific
Affairs] William Bundy called the ‘like the French’ argument.”22 Here, too, then, memory
followed present needs, with this sort of expediency continuing as escalation proceeded apace for
the next two-and-a-half years.
De Gaulle’s Phnom Penh Speech
The third contentious moment regarding the French experience came in September 1966
after de Gaulle spoke to an audience of 100,000 listeners in Phnom Penh, Cambodia about the
U.S. military effort underway in Vietnam. The speech has come to be seen as de Gaulle’s pièce
de résistance on the Vietnam War and, in some regards, on U.S. foreign policy writ large. (In
fact, the cover of Maurice Vaïsse’s influential study of de Gaulle’s foreign relations, La
Grandeur, which does not actually spend much time on the speech, still features a photograph of
de Gaulle giving it.23) During the address, de Gaulle spoke of Franco-Cambodian friendship,
discussed the historical ties between the two countries, and praised the neutralist stance taken by
Cambodia in the Cold War. The second part of de Gaulle’s address, however, focused on the
U.S. involvement, and did so in less-friendly terms. De Gaulle called the United States’
22
23
Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, 83.
Maurice Vaïsse, La Grandeur: Politique Étrangère du Général de Gaulle, 1958-1969 (Paris:
Fayard, 1998).
98
heightened presence and military escalation in Southeast Asia “increasingly menacing for the
peace of the world.” He went on, “Yes, France’s stand is taken. It is taken by the condemnation
that she harbors for the present events,” and continued:
France considers that the fighting that is ravaging Indochina, by and of itself, offers no
end. In France’s view, if it unthinkable that the American war apparatus will be
annihilated on the spot, there is, on the other hand, no chance that the peoples of Asia will
subject themselves to the law of the foreigner who comes from the other shores of the
Pacific, whatever his intentions, however powerful his weapons. In short, as long and
cruel as the ordeal must be, France holds for certain that it will have no military solution.
Still, de Gaulle believed there was “time for hope” provided that the United States began
withdrawing its troops. He argued that a political solution like the Geneva Accords of 1954 could
guarantee the neutrality of Southeast Asia. He referred to France’s experience in Algeria to
buttress his authority and his case about the U.S. war effort. As in Vietnam at that point, in
Algeria the “fighting committed neither her honor nor her independence, and since at that time it
could result in nothing but losses, hatred and ever mounting destruction, she decided to leave,
without thereby damaging—quite to the contrary—her prestige, her power and her prosperity.”
He further noted: “France is saying this out of her experience and disinterestedness. She is saying
this by reason of the task she once accomplished in this region of Asia, the ties she has
maintained there, the interest she continues to have for the peoples living there and which she
knows they return to her.”24 He said he made this comments out of solidarity and respect for the
two-centuries-old friendship between the United States and France, believing that until this
violation by the United States, France and America had both been champions of selfdetermination. De Gaulle aired his ideas on such a large stage, he said, only because the United
24
Charles de Gaulle, Discours et Messages, t. 5: Vers le Terme, janvier 1966 – avril 1969 (Paris:
Plon, 1970), 74-78. “Text of de Gaulle’s Speech in Cambodia,” New York Times, 2 September
1966, p. 13 provides an English translation.
99
States had ignored his warnings “when nothing irreparable had yet been done.” By the late
summer of 1966, he would not propose French mediation to end the war, but hoped the United
States would at least recognize it could stop the fighting without loss to its credibility or prestige.
He advised:
[France] is saying this, lastly, with the conviction that, in view of the power, wealth and
influence at present attained by the United States, the act of renouncing, in its turn, a
distant expedition once it appears unprofitable and unjustifiable and of substituting for it
an international arrangement organizing the peace and development of an important
region, will not, in the final analysis, involve anything that could injure its pride, interfere
with its ideals and jeopardize its interests.
In his assessment of the speech, Bohlen concluded that “De Gaulle appears to heap all the
blame for the situation, its origins and development in Indochina, on the U.S. explicitly.”25 De
Gaulle’s address in Phnom Penh was certainly his most critical—and public—commentary on
Vietnam to date. As had now been his stance privately for some time, de Gaulle believed that
only a guarantee of a withdrawal of at least some American troops would bring the North
Vietnamese to the peace table. For the first time, though, de Gaulle also proposed the necessity
of a timetable for such a withdrawal. His speech left unclear whether the North Vietnamese
should be held to a similar timetable, or who exactly would classify as a “foreign power” in
South Vietnam. As seen above, the French president believed his experience disentangling the
French from Algeria earlier in the decade provided another analogous situation to Vietnam and
gave him a privileged position to comment on how the United States could end the war. Bohlen
attempted to shut down consideration of the French experience with decolonization by stating:
“[de Gaulle] makes no mention of Communism as a factor and consequently his comparison with
25
Telegram from the Embassy in France to the Department of State, 1 September 1966, U.S.
Department of State, FRUS, 1964-1968—Western Europe, Vol. 12, Document 66.
100
the French in Algeria is erroneous and misleading.”26 Most aggravating of all to Bohlen and
other American officials, de Gaulle had suggested that the United States was responsible for
reigniting the war, arguing it had inspired a new uprising of “national resistance” when it began
aiding the South Vietnamese—a far different interpretation from the one held by the Johnson
administration.27 Frustrated by the speech, Bohlen suggested either Johnson or Rusk make a
public statement refuting the information put forward by the General, which was a departure
from the administration’s strategy of ignoring de Gaulle’s comments or being scrupulously
diplomatic in its responses. He noted, “I realize how unwise it is to answer de Gaulle publicly,”
but he worried that if the speech went unchallenged, “the de Gaulle version of events will have a
high degree of acceptance not only here in France but in other countries of the world.” He further
pushed aside the idea the French president might be drawing upon his knowledge of the French
failure when he remarked that “It seems to me that de Gaulle’s speech in Phnom Penh is a further
example of his ignoring facts in favor of his favorite position.”28
Bohlen was not the only member of the Johnson team to recoil at the Phnom Penh
speech. The Phnom Penh speech particularly enraged Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. in Saigon. Piqued
by the speech’s suggestion that the United States committed aggression in South Vietnam and
encouraged a nationalist uprising, Lodge quickly channeled the rapid French military defeat in
1940. Here, Lodge does indeed use history in an effort to promote his perspective, but still does
not think the history of the French experience held value. In a 2 September telegram to the State
Department, he argued against the Phnom Penh speech as “a total untruth and de Gaulle must
26
FRUS, 1964-1968—Western Europe, Vol. 12, Document 66.
27
“Text of de Gaulle’s Speech in Cambodia,” p. 13.
28
FRUS, 1964-1968—Western Europe, Vol. 12, Document 66.
101
know that it is. The aggression here is crystal clear – as clear as was the German aggression
against France in 1940. De Gaulle was glad to have American help in repelling that aggression
then and he should at least not be making our work harder now.”29 He acknowledged that the
United States believed de Gaulle’s “favorite old saw” that no military solution was possible, but
pushed aside the possibility of mining this paradox further by attacking another part of the
speech, on the Algerian analogy. He quipped, “The attempt to compare our position in Vietnam
with the French position in Algeria also verges on fantasy. When the French came back to
impose colonialism in Vietnam in 1945 why did they not apply their so-called Algerian
policy?”30 In at best a half-hearted attempt at self-discipline, Lodge closed his report by using a
favorite tactic of the American government when criticized by the French, casting the criticism
as motivated by anti-Americanism. He said: “I shall resist the temptation to attribute motives
and to say that his statement is due to anti-Americanism or a desire to have us fail where they
failed or his extraordinary tendency to try to equate a nation of 40 million with a nation of 200
million.”31 Although he explicitly references the French experience in Southeast Asia in this
quote and draws an accurate contrast in population statistics, the larger aim of Lodge’s use of the
cloak of anti-Americanism and American superiority again served to shut down the value of
serious critical thinking about the First Indochina War for the United States.
29
Text of Cable from Ambassador Lodge to Department of State, 2 September 1966, retrieved
through Digital Declassification Reference Service (hereafter DDRS). Online at:
http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/DDRS?vrsn=1.0&locID=coloboulder&ste=2.
30
Text of Cable from Ambassador Lodge, 2 September 1966.
31
Text of Cable from Ambassador Lodge to Department of State, 2 September 1966.
102
1968: The Tet Offensive and the Paris Peace Talks
The last period during the Johnson years when the French war cropped up most
frequently was in early 1968, in both the days leading up to the Tet Offensive and as Johnson
sought peace talks after the psychological defeat of Tet and the dismal prospect of sending more
troops to Vietnam. In fact, this appears to be the one time Lyndon Johnson himself
acknowledged the defeat of the French as a possibility really worth examining. When the United
States noticed the beginnings of a buildup around the military installation at Khe Sanh in
northwest South Vietnam, General William Westmoreland and others became convinced that the
NLF and North Vietnam wanted, in the words of Johnson’s second National Security Adviser
Walt Rostow, to “re-enact a new Dien Bien Phu.” LBJ grew concerned about the possibility of a
climactic battle that might fulfill his worst fear of becoming the first U.S. president to lose a war.
He exclaimed “I don’t want any damn Dinbinphoo!” and flew every living French general who
had been at Dien Bien Phu to Saigon to consult with the American brass.32 Ultimately, Khe Sanh
was simply a diversion by the NLF for its attack on the south’s cities in the Tet Offensive.
Massive American firepower and the contained fighting zone eventually enabled the United
States to come out victorious in ways the French had not been able to at the isolated Dien Bien
Phu. This example makes the completely valid and self-evident point that the American war was
never simply going to be a replay of the Franco-Vietnminh war; the fact that Johnson only
sought to acknowledge the merits of remembering it on its own terms after he had firmly
committed the country to war, after so many Vietnamese and Americans had already died, and
because he believed his political legacy was on the ropes, nonetheless does not diminish the
32
Khong, Analogies at War, 170-72. The Rostow quotation can be found on page 171 and the
Johnson quotation comes from page 172.
103
possibility that a clearer memory about the French experience years earlier could have better
informed Johnson and his team.
Finally, we also see the memory of French colonialism surfacing as the United States and
North Vietnam attempted to find an appropriate location to hold their official peace talks. Paris,
of course, was ultimately chosen, though much to the chagrin of the president and most of his
team, and only after exhausting dozens of other options. Although tensions over the war had
simmered somewhat after de Gaulle reversed course by calling President Johnson’s March 31,
1968 speech announcing a desire to begin talks, a partial bombing halt, and his shocking decision
not to seek re-election an “act of reason and political courage,” the French capital still remained
a controversial choice, not least because of the heightened possibility of re-igniting debates and
generating unsolicited advice about the French experience in Vietnam.33 Senior Johnson aide
Harry McPherson put the concerns so: “Hell, you know, the atmosphere in Paris was heavily
pro-V.C. [A]ll those awful, psychological hang-ups that the French have about Indo-China and
about us as the power out there now replacing them and all that – it’s terrible.”34 One French
citizen explained to the New York Times the slight satisfaction the nation, whose public opposed
the war just as fervently as its government, felt over being chosen to host the talks after its own
difficulties there in a different, if equally intriguing, light: “the French feel a little like a man who
is told that his first wife is having husband trouble. It is sort of sad, but it makes him smile a little
too.”35
33
Sullivan, France’s Vietnam Policy, 115.
34
Harry C. McPherson, Jr., interview by T.H. Baker, March 24, 1969, Oral History Project
Interview IV, Transcript, Internet Copy, LBJ Library.
http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/oralhistory.hom/mcpherson/mcpher04.pdf.
35
“‘De Gaulle Has Won,’” New York Times, 12 May 1968, p. E1.
104
The actual process of choosing Paris, however, was not without its efforts to discredit the
French and their understanding of the war in Southeast Asia. Paris did not appear on the first
several lists of possible sites for the peace talks, but it had its supporters in the international
community and within the government. The head of the American delegation, W. Averell
Harriman, for one, remarked, “If Hanoi indicates a willingness to go to Paris, I cannot think of a
‘credible’ reason for our not accepting.”36 He also argued that if the talks were held in France,
American contacts there who had been involved in prior secret peace initiatives (the subject of
Chapter Five), especially the director of Asian affairs at the French Foreign Ministry, Étienne
Manac’h, would be immensely helpful in overcoming potential negotiating impasses.37
The city had its opponents, most notably President Johnson. Bundy’s replacement as
National Security Adviser, Walt Rostow, had also purportedly exclaimed earlier in the year, “We
will never go to Paris.”38 In the short-term, then, Washington intentionally left it off its lists, at
least partly because it believed the DRV would reject it simply because the Americans suggested
it. Recently-appointed Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, the driving force behind the decision
to de-escalate and one of the advisers most determined to move the talks forward, hoped that if
the United States kept Paris off the table long enough, the North Vietnamese eventually would
36
Harriman quoted in Kent Gerard Sieg, “‘A Straw in the Wind’: The Johnson Administration
and the Paris Talks on Vietnam, 1968-1969,” (PhD diss., University of Colorado, 1993), 70.
37
Telegram From the Department of State to the Embassy in Laos, 18 April 1968, U.S.
Department of State, FRUS, 1964-1968—Vietnam, January – August, 1968 Volume 6, Document
200.
38
Transcript, John Gunther Dean Oral History Interview Part II, 9/6/2000, by Charles Stuart
Kennedy, Internet Copy, Jimmy Carter Library. Online at:
http://www.jimmycarterlibrary.org/library/oralhistory/clohproject/Initial%20Interview%20Part%
20Two.pdf.
105
suggest it, which they ultimately did.39 They also made sure no prominent Americans outside the
administration proposed Paris either, as Senator Robert Kennedy (D-NY) had been considering.
Harriman told Kennedy adviser Theodore Sorenson that “If he wants to kill it, that’s a good way
to do it.” Furthermore, Johnson would not accept the proposal if it came from Robert Kennedy,
whom the president loathed.40
The administration relied on third-party channels to determine the prospects of Paris.
The North Vietnamese had informally suggested that Paris could be a possibility since April 10.
On April 18, French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville commented that if the United
States and North Vietnam agreed on Paris, the French “certainly have no objection. We would,
on the contrary, be happy to make our contribution to the solution of a difficult problem.”41 This
statement, although not a direct initiative for peace by the French, put Paris on the table. It also
seemed to indicate that de Gaulle’s government believed conditions for negotiations looked far
more promising than they had in the past, when it refused to serve as a mediator.
Arthur Goldberg, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, then asked UN Secretary
General U Thant to use his contacts to determine how North Vietnam viewed the possible sites,
as well as how seriously they would look at Paris. He found that China had been angry over
North Vietnam’s Phnom Penh suggestion, and that the North Vietnamese preferred Paris or
Geneva to the Asian capitals suggested, in order to avoid another negative reaction from the
39
Sieg, “‘A Straw in the Wind,’” 72-73; Dean Rusk, Richard Rusk, and Daniel S. Pap, As I Saw
It (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1990), 485; Rusk Oral History Interview II, LBJ Library;
Clark Clifford, with Richard Holbrook, Counsel to the President: A Memoir (New York:
Random House, 1991), 536.
40
Quoted in Sieg, “‘A Straw in the Wind,’” 73.
41
Quoted in Sullivan, France’s Vietnam Policy, 108.
106
Chinese. Thant publicly suggested both sides consider Paris on 24 April. As these developments
took place, deliberations for other sites continued between the United States and North Vietnam
with no resolution. The North Vietnamese accused the Americans of constantly changing its
conditions and did not believe any of its ten cities proposed on April 18 were truly neutral.42
As the press speculated about Paris and the “diplomatic plum” about to fall into de
Gaulle’s lap, those amenable to the site within the administration had yet to win over Johnson.43
He neither wanted to give de Gaulle the pleasure of gaining prestige as the host to the talks nor
risk having the General meddle in the negotiations. As president, Johnson had scrupulously
refrained from making negative comments about de Gaulle, despite having had many chances
since late 1963. He once commented, “Every time de Gaulle throws a fast ball I’m just going to
lean back from the plate and let it pass.”44 On another occasion, he quipped, “I’m betting on
outliving him.”45 In his memoirs, Johnson explained, in his most magnanimous prose, “I had
long since decided that the only way to deal with De Gaulle’s fervent nationalism was by
restraint and patience. He would not remain in power forever, and I felt sure that the fundamental
common interests of our nations would survive. To have attacked De Gaulle would only have
further enflamed French nationalism and offended French pride.”46 Less statesman-like, he also
42
Sieg, “‘A Straw in the Wind,’” 71-74.
43
Don Cook, “French Intent on Having Vietnam Talks in Paris,” Los Angeles Times, 18 April
1968, p. 23.
44
Drew Pearson, “Johnson Easy with De Gaulle,” Los Angeles Times, 28 May 1968, p. A5.
45
Memorandum of Conversation, 21 August 1966, FRUS, 1964-1968—Western Europe Region
Volume 13, Document 196.
46
Lyndon B. Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives on the Presidency, 1963-1969 (New
York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971), 305.
107
declared he refused to get into a “pissing match” with the French president. 47 De Gaulle
nonetheless still bothered Johnson. He privately believed him to be a “proud, egotistical man
who closely identifies himself with France.”48 Rusk believed Johnson was “afraid that General
de Gaulle would have a negative influence on the talks—given General de Gaulle’s attitude
toward our role in Vietnam.”49 George Ball thought the president resisted Paris because he
“didn’t want to give the French the triumph of having Paris chosen, and furthermore he thought
de Gaulle might double-cross him.”50 Harry McPherson chimed in, “He had been very good
toward de Gaulle…but he sure as hell didn’t want to go sit down in his home town and talk with
the North Vietnamese.”51
As early as April 18, Johnson told his aides and U.S. diplomats to “put Paris to rest.” He
considered the site selection “a matter of substance and test of will which could foreshadow [the]
character of negotiations” and did not like the message Paris would send.52 Still, Johnson’s staff
kept Paris on the table, although some had reservations of their own. In a memorandum to Rusk
about the location for talks, Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy discussed the positives
and negatives of Paris, a possible site “in several minds.” He noted: “De Gaulle’s vitriolic
criticism of the war, the overwhelmingly hostile French press, and unlimited press access can all
47
Randall Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (New York: Free Press, 2006), 704.
48
Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition, 705.
49
Rusk Oral History Interview II, LBJ Library.
50
Transcript, George Ball Oral History Interview II, 7/9/71, by Paige E. Mulhollan, Internet
Copy, LBJ Library. Online at:
http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/oralhistory.hom/Ball-G/Ball-g2.pdf
51
Transcript, Harry McPherson Oral History Interview IV.
52
Sieg, “‘A Straw in the Wind,’” 73-74.
108
be considered drawbacks.” On the other hand, he thought Paris would be far more acceptable to
both the United States’ allies and to South Vietnam than another option under consideration,
Bucharest, the capital of communist Romania. Additionally, South Vietnam had a diplomatic
presence in Paris, in the form of consular representation.53 By the end of April, still with no site
yet chosen, Bundy again stressed the advantages Paris held regarding access to U.S. allies and as
the preferred choice of Saigon out of those likely to be accepted by the North Vietnam. He
concluded that Paris seemed “by all odds the least worst site.”54
Students, workers, and activists would begin to fill the streets of the Latin Quarter and
occupy factories the following month to air their dissatisfaction with Gaullist France. Here, many
protesters criticized the tight hold on decision-making that de Gaulle possessed as well as his
inattention to domestic issues such as education reform and fair pay. The historian Jeremi Suri
has argued the “Events of May” and other protests in the United States, across Western Europe,
Czechoslovakia, and in China during 1968 created greater incentive for world leaders to
cooperate and pursue détente in order to restore international and domestic order.55 At this time,
53
Memorandum from the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs (Bundy)
to Secretary of State Rusk, 22 April 1968, FRUS Volume 6, Document 203.
54
Memorandum from the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs (Bundy)
to Secretary of State Rusk, 30 April 1968 FRUS Volume 6, Document 214.
55
Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2003). For accounts of 1968 for popular audiences, see David Caute,
Year of the Barricades: A Journey Through 1968 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988) and Mark
Kurlansky, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003). Kristin
Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) provides an
academic treatment of the legacies of May 1968 in France, while Alain Touraine, The May
Movement, Revolt and Reform: May 1968—the Student Rebellion and Workers’ Strikes—the
Birth of a Social Movement, trans. Leonard F.X. Mayhew (New York: Random House, 1971)
offers a theoretical perspective from a prominent French sociologist shortly after the protests
occurred.
109
however, this dynamic had not influenced the Johnson administration’s decisions or created any
newfound sympathy for de Gaulle.
John Gunther Dean, a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, also weighed in on
the possibility of Paris. On April 23, he echoed many of Johnson’s concerns by warning it
“would be tantamount to rewarding DeGaulle for his past unfriendly position on Vietnam” and
that France had adopted a policy of “benevolent neutrality” toward North Vietnam, which could
result in the French taking action favoring Hanoi. He further cautioned that the French media and
Vietnamese exiles in Paris would put a lot of pressure and criticism on the American delegation.
On the other hand, Dean commended the city’s accessibility, its communications facilities,
diplomatic representation for all parties, space for discreet meetings, and the potential for the
French to help report on the North Vietnamese delegation and for a role for the French in
postwar Vietnam. Another embassy officer, however, advised Washington that the disadvantages
“far outweigh the obvious material and technical advantages.”56 Despite these discouraging
assessments from the embassy in France, Paris remained an option, even if Johnson still worried
in his unique brand of English about “getting drug in by Paris.”57 As late as the day of the
agreement, the president remarked he would “rather go to almost any place than Paris.”58
In the end, Paris proved to be an accommodating place for the talks, even though
Johnson’s successor Richard Nixon soon scuttled the official negotiations for backchannel talks
between his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart,
56
FRUS Volume 6, Document 203, n. 6.
57
Telephone Conversation between President Johnson and Secretary of State Rusk, 30 April
1968, FRUS Volume 6, Document 215.
58
Memorandum from the President's Special Assistant (Rostow) to President Johnson, 3 May
1968, FRUS Volume 6, Document 221, n. 2.
110
Le Duc Tho. The admiration that Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, and his National Security
Adviser Henry Kissinger held for the realpolitik of Charles de Gaulle further helped bilateral
relations from the onset of the Nixon presidency. In fact, this American adulation encouraged the
first formal presidential-level meetings between the two countries since 1961 in the winter of
1969. Still, these discussions and Nixon and Kissinger’s respect for de Gaulle did not result in
serious engagement with either de Gaulle’s thoughts on Vietnam or the French example. During
talks on Vietnam in February and March 1969, for example, de Gaulle told Nixon that he should
follow France’s Algeria precedent and begin withdrawing more consistently from Vietnam. At
this point, Nixon recalled that de Gaulle “was convinced that the power and prestige of the
United States could be greatly increased and confidence in it throughout the world would be
renewed once we brought the war to an end.” Although Nixon considered de Gaulle “one whose
counsel I valued immensely,” he nonetheless continued to expand the air and ground war across
Southeast Asia and orchestrated the most severe bombing campaigns of the entire U.S. war in
Vietnam.59
Conclusion
Throughout the Johnson years in Vietnam, when the United States looked back at the
French experience in Vietnam, it did so with a Cold War-colored memory. From dismissing the
elements that drew upon the difficulties of supporting unpopular leaders evident in de Gaulle’s
early neutralization ideas to shelving the warnings about the difficulty of defeating anticolonial
nationalism from George Ball to arguing that French memories stemmed from anti-Americanism
59
Richard Nixon, Leaders: Profiles and Reminiscences of Men Who Have Shaped the Modern
World (New York: Warner Books, 1982), 76, 41.
111
in the Phnom Penh speech to resisting the site of Paris for peace talks over concerns about
French meddling, the United States consistently failed to look at the French experience at face
value. They believed de Gaulle and France represented defeat, both in Indochina and the Second
World War, which was unacceptable to the youthful, overconfident Cold Warriors. French
advice was thus blemished in this way as well. Perhaps a less containment- or credibility-driven
mindset would have enabled a closer understanding of the French precedent and complicated
these men’s views about the possibilities of success. Or it might have caused them to reconsider
more honestly what U.S. intervention and support of South Vietnam looked like to those outside
Saigon’s governmental elites and to those who had already faced defeat in Southeast Asia.
Yet even the leading academic on the Franco-Vietminh War in the United States during the
1960s, Bernard Fall, could not escape having his analyses dismissed and his motives questioned
because of his French citizenship. The FBI labeled Fall a member of the French intelligence
community and considered him a mouthpiece for the French government. His purpose, the FBI
surmised, was that he could “write and lecture giving French views as though they were coming
from a recognized American authority.”60 More concisely, an American diplomat warned:
“You’ve got to watch Bernard Fall. Remember, he’s French.”
Perhaps more prudent, and less biased, advice came from Senator Mike Mansfield, a onetime professor of Asian history, who suggested: “If there is any hope of a satisfactory solution in
Viet Nam and, indeed, throughout Indochina it rests very heavily on France.…We should be
prepared to listen most intently and with an open ear and mind to whatever the French may have
to say on Vietnam.” As Fall had noted even before U.S. escalation, the “French preoccupation
60
Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation report, “Bernard Berthold Fall,” 26
February 1964, France Vol. 1, Box 169, CF, France, NSF, LBJL.
112
with Vietnam stems from reasons that are more realistic than the desire to nettle the young men
in Washington.”61
61
Friedman, Rethinking Anti-Americanism, 179, 184, 177.
113
PART III: PLODDING TOWARD PEACE
CHAPTER FIVE – SECRET U.S.-FRENCH-VIETNAMESE INITIATIVES TO
RESOLVE THE WAR
In his recent book, Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam, about the secret
Polish-Italian plan to bring United States and North Vietnamese representatives together for
direct talks in late 1966, historian James G. Hershberg reminds readers that “historians often rush
past the period between 1965 (when Washington spiked its military role) and 1968 (when the Tet
Offensive forced LBJ to seek an exit), summing it up with a single word: escalation. Yet…this
period bulged with fascinating events vital to understanding the conflict’s later course and
eventual outcome.”1 Although the MARIGOLD initiative counts among the more promising of
third-party efforts to mediate an end to the war, it was indeed one of many attempts to resolve
the war during this important, if sometimes passed-over, phase of 1965 to 1968.2 This chapter
aims to explore three episodes in these years between the United States, France, and North
Vietnam to reach a level of understanding that would begin peace negotiations rather than simply
continue the Vietnam War militarily. These are: Franco-American contacts with the chief North
Vietnamese diplomat in Paris, Mai Van Bo, from 1965 to 1966 known as the XYZ mission;
1
James G. Hershberg, Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam (Washington, DC and
Stanford, California: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2012), xvxvi.
2
For other attempts, see Bernard J. Firestone, “Failed Mediation: U Thant, the Johnson
Administration, and the Vietnam War,” Diplomatic History 37, no. 5 (November 2013), 10661089; John Dumbrell and Sylvia Ellis, “British Involvement in Vietnam Peace Initiatives, 19661967: Marigolds, Sunflowers, and ‘Kosygin Week,’” Diplomatic History 27, no. 1 (January
2003), 113-149; several chapters within Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted Gittinger, eds., The Search
for Peace in Vietnam, 1964-1968 (College Station, Texas: Texas A&M Press, 2004); David
Kraslow and Stuart H. Loory, The Secret Search for Peace in Vietnam (New York: Random
House, 1968); and, for a collection of published documents on the peace efforts with
introductory essays about each initiative, George C. Herring, ed., The Secret Diplomacy of the
Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the Pentagon Papers (Austin, Texas: University of
Texas Press, 1983.)
115
Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s talks with France’s Vietnam experts while visiting Paris in early
1967; and the PENNSLYVANIA initiative in 1967 involving then-private citizen Henry
Kissinger and two French intermediaries, Hubert Marcovich and Raymond Aubrac, the latter of
whom had long-standing ties to Ho Chi Minh. It seeks to complicate the picture already
presented in this study by demonstrating that even while the United States and France failed to
see eye-to-eye about the necessity of fighting the Second Indochina War and often squabbled
over their understandings of the war, mid-level and some high-level players within the two
nations still sought to collaborate to find ways to end the war.
This chapter brings together in one succinct place for the first time in English
scholarship these three efforts and uses newly available or previously untapped archival material
from the United States and France to supplement those works that have examined these
initiatives individually.3 Taken together, these intriguing cases demonstrate that France’s historic
3
French scholar Pierre Journoud tackles these efforts sporadically in De Gaulle et le Vietnam,
1945-1969 (Paris: Tallandier, 2011) and focuses on the role of the French Foreign Ministry in the
XYZ and PENNSLYVANIA efforts in “Le Quai d’Orsay et le processus de paix, 1963-1973,” in
Christopher Goscha and Maurice Vaisse, eds., La Guerre du Vietnam et L’Europe, 1963-1973
(Brussels: Bruylant, 2003), 385-400. Vietnamese official Vu Son Thuy briefly provides the
government’s perspective on PENNSLYVLANIA in his contribution to La Guerre du Vietnam et
L’Europe, 1963-1973, “The French Role in Finding a Peaceful Solution to the Vietnam War,”
420-21. Robert K. Brigham and George C. Herring look at Kissinger, Marcovich, and Aubrac in
“The PENNSLVANIA Peace Initiative, June-October 1967,” in Gardner and Gittinger, eds. The
Secret Search for Peace, 1964-1968, 59-72, but without the most recently available archival
material. Marianna P. Sullivan’s France’s Vietnam Policy: A Study in French-American
Relations (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978), the earliest work on U.S.-French
discussion of the war, does not explore these secret initiatives, nor, curiously, does a new look at
Western European perspectives on the Vietnam War, Eugenie M. Blang, Allies at Odds:
America, Europe, and Vietnam, 1961-1968 (Latham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield), 2011.
Both Blang and Yuko Torikata, who quickly explores XYZ and even more curtly
PENNSYVLANIA, direct the bulk of their attention to Charles de Gaulle’s proclamations and
efforts at the expense of the backchannel negotiations. See Yuko Torikata, “Reexamining de
Gaulle’s Peace Initiative on the Vietnam War,” Diplomatic History 31, no. 5 (November 2007),
909-938 and the similar “The U.S. Escalation in Vietnam and de Gaulle’s Secret Search for
Peace, 1964-1966,” in Christian Nuenlist, Anna Locher, and Garret Martin, eds., Globalizing de
116
relationship with Vietnam enabled Paris to arrange such connections or provide unparalleled
information. But the talks also make clear that the Lyndon Johnson administration and North
Vietnamese perspectives remained too incongruous, with each seeking ways to end the war
strictly on its own terms, to foster any genuine breakthroughs. Accordingly, the XYZ, RFK, and
PENNSYLVANIA efforts highlight a surprising level of cooperation between the French and
Americans during the tense time over the Vietnam War and each highlights a certain potential
for a diplomatic triumph. Yet they also confirm, in the case of the Vietnam War at least, what the
political scientist Bernard F. Firestone characterizes in his study of United Nations Secretary
General U Thant’s Vietnam peace efforts as the “limitations of third-party mediation in
international conflict” prior to the official peace negotiations that began at the former Hôtel
Majestic in May 1968.4
XYZ, May 1965 to January 1966
As the United States unleashed the Operation Rolling Thunder bombing campaign on
North Vietnam and Johnson, de Gaulle, and their aides debated the political nature of the
Vietnam conflict in mid-1965, the first secret effort to establish peace feelers between French,
American, and North Vietnamese diplomats began in Paris. The operation was dubbed XYZ as
an ironic nod to the diplomatic skirmish between the United States and France over the affair in
which French officials sought bribes before negotiating with the Americans in the 1790s. De
Gaulle himself had started to believe a peace settlement was impossible at this time, saying in
Gaulle: International Perspectives on French Foreign Policies, 1958-1969 (Latham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 155-180.
4
Firestone, “Failed Mediation: U Thant, the Johnson Administration, and the Vietnam War,”
1060.
117
April 1965 that if the United States did not withdraw soon, the war would go on for ten years.5
Still, his recent independence from the United States in foreign affairs, his recognition of the
People’s Republic of China in January 1964, and France’s continued connections with its former
imperial possession put the nation in a privileged position to serve as a go-between at this early
stage in American escalation. French director of the Asia-Oceania desk at the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, Étienne Manac’h, would go forward as the point person for the attempt to seek
out some sort of mediation in what the historian George Herring has called “one of the most
fascinating and least known” and the “best kept secret” of the Vietnam peace efforts.6
In charge of the Quai’s Southeast Asia and China portfolios, Manac’h had already
become someone the United States embassy in Paris frequently turned to in its discussions of
Vietnam. He also had a reputation for being more favorable to the United States than others in
the French government. Indeed, the State Department believed that “Manac’h genuinely wishes
to be helpful. He is certainly an intelligent and knowledgeable student of the Vietnamese
scene…he does as much for us as his instructions can be stretched and perhaps even a bit more.”7
John Gunther Dean, junior Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. embassy in Paris who met
Manac’h regularly and who would play a large role in RFK’s visit, characterized him as “far
from being anti-American,” with fond memories of U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s arrival in
5
Max Paul Friedman, Rethinking Anti-Americanism: The History of an Exceptional Concept in
American Foreign Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 297, n. 138.
6
Herring, ed., The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the
Pentagon Papers, 74.
7
Friedman, Rethinking Anti-Americanism, 178.
118
France in 1918.8 Dean believed Manac’h was “all his life a friend of America” who “represented
the best of postcolonial France.”9 Just as importantly as his credibility among the Americans,
Manac’h possessed a relationship with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s highest ranking
official in Paris, its commercial representative, Mai Van Bo. The DRV did not have diplomatic
relations with France at the time; thus it had no official embassy or ambassador in country. Bo
began the twentieth-century XYZ affair when he reached out to Étienne Manac’h in a “fairly
pressing approach” at almost the exact end of a six-day bombing pause by the United States in
May 1965.10
Manac’h, in turn, consulted with U.S. ambassador to France Charles Bohlen with what he
had been told by Mai Van Bo. (Bo was referred to, strangely, as “Rupert” or “R”, in
correspondence about the secret diplomacy even though other participants received code-letters
“X” and “Y” in accord with the “XYZ” theme and no one ever garnered the “Z” appellation.)
North Vietnam had wanted the United States to understand that DRV Premier Pham Van Dong’s
“Four Points” ought only to be considered “working principles” rather than firm preconditions
for discussions. First laid out on April 8, 1965, the North Vietnamese “Four Points” remained the
basis for a negotiated settlement until official talks eventually began in 1968. The Four Points
were as follows: (1) unilateral withdrawal of U.S. military forces from South Vietnam; (2) an
8
John Gunther Dean, Danger Zones: A Diplomat’s Fight for America’s Interests (Washington,
DC: New Academia Publishing, 2009), 49. See Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: SelfDetermination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2007) for the initial euphoria that swept across France and other
parts of the world during Wilson’s first trip to Paris.
9
Friedman, Rethinking Anti-Americanism, 178; Dean, Danger Zones, 49.
10
Herring, ed., The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the
Pentagon Papers, 77.
119
end to all attacks against the North and in the South; (3) settlement of political issues in the
South only by those in South Vietnam and the establishment of a provisional government
initially led by the National Liberation Front; and (4) peaceful reunification of Vietnam settled
by the Vietnamese in the North and South without any outside interference, in accordance with
the Geneva Accords of 1954.11 Put more succinctly, the Johnson administration abbreviated the
DRV’s four terms to (1) “Withdrawal of ‘foreign’ forces”; (2) “Non-interference”; (3) “Selfdetermination for SVN”; and (4) “Peaceful reunification.”12 Bo also requested French Foreign
Ministry Director of Political Affairs Charles Lucet rely a message on May 20, 1965 that
“Recognition [of] these ‘principles’ would create favorable conditions for solution [to the]
problem and would ‘open’ possibility of convocation conference like Geneva, 1954,” with the
apparent concession that U.S. troop withdrawal be dependent only on the “conclusion of a
negotiation.” The United States did not inquire further into these initial comments, even though
Bo had inquired of the French about a U.S. response in early June. Either way, Manac’h and
Lucet had introduced to the Americans potential points of discussion should they wish to inquire
into Bo’s claims.13
The proposals nonetheless might have died had it not been for what the authors of the
Negotiating Volumes of the Department of Defense’s “United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-
11
“The Record of Vietnam Peace Bids,” April 1968, #2, p. 4, Box 94 [2 of 2], Folder Vietnam
6C: Peace Initiatives - General International Initiatives (Retrospective Accounts), 1961-1968 [1
of 3], National Security Files, Country Files, Vietnam (hereafter NSF CF, Vietnam), Lyndon
Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas (hereafter LBJL).
12
Herring, ed., The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the
Pentagon Papers, 82-84.
13
Herring, ed., The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the
Pentagon Papers, 78.
120
1967” (commonly referred to as “The Pentagon Papers”) labeled “private enterprise and
American ingenuity.”14 In July 1965, an American businessman, Uras Arkas-Duntov of the
Dreyfus Fund investment firm, approached the journalist Paul Parisot at France Soir to see if he
could arrange a meeting with the well-known Bo. The journalist successfully did so through the
help of another reporter, Eli Maissi, and Arkas-Duntov tipped off the State Department on July
29 that Bo continued to argue that North Vietnam wanted to negotiate based on the Geneva
Accords of 1954 and the Four Points. Arkas-Duntov’s report suggested that Bo had struck a
conciliatory enough tone to be worth pursuing further.15
To do so, however, the United States needed to handle the issue carefully. President
Johnson, sensitive to criticism that the United States was not even making a half-hearted effort
for a diplomatic solution, asked Undersecretary of State George Ball to lead the project. Ball, an
opponent of escalation and therefore an aide more likely to handle the job delicately, chose as the
U.S. emissary Edmund Guillion (“X”). Guillion was a retired diplomat then serving as dean of
the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University who was fluent in French and had
served as the Deputy Chief of Mission in Saigon in the 1950s. As a private citizen, Guillion was
to be considered an “authorized but ‘unofficial’ U.S. representative,” thus providing the
administration with the ability to disavow itself from anything that came from Guillion’s
activities should they become public.16 The United States planned to send “X” to France to seek
14
Herring, ed., The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the
Pentagon Papers, 78.
15
Herring, ed., The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the
Pentagon Papers, 90-91.
16
Herring, ed., The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the
Pentagon Papers, 77.
121
peace from a position of strength and gave him the following instructions, which Guillion took
seriously: “show a desire for ending the conflict along lines ‘compatible with the Four Points,
but…also to say the prolongation of the war’ is bound to lead to progressively larger U.S.
pressures and long-term China control of North Vietnam. X was to convey that pressures in the
U.S. to widen the war were growing and that ‘it would be increasingly harder to exercise
restraint.’”17
Guillon and Bo first met on August 6, 1965, in which Bo drove home the idea that
“discussions” were different from a “settlement,” which were both distinct from “talks.”
Diplomatic hairsplitting notwithstanding, the talks proved productive enough in determining
what North Vietnam had in mind with its Four Points to meet twice more in Paris in August and
once more in early September, when the bombing of the North was discussed. The Americans
continued to feel satisfied with the progress of the talks going into the scheduled fifth meeting on
7 September 1965. Yet it was never to occur because Bo was “sick.”18 The mysterious “Mr. Y,”
described only as “ex-FSO” by the compilers of the Pentagon Papers and elsewhere only as a
“white-haired gentleman” saw Bo once in November 1965, but, “nothing was said.”19 “Y” was in
17
Herring, ed., The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the
Pentagon Papers, 79.
18
Herring, ed., The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the
Pentagon Papers, 79-81, 107; Memorandum of Conversation, NODIS – XYZ, Literally Eyes
Only for Ball, 18 August 1965, Box 22, Formerly Top Secret Central Policy Files, 1964-1966,
POL – VN, Folder POL 27-14 VIET/XYZ 11-1-65, Record Group 59, General Records of the
Department of State (hereafter RG 59), National Archives and Records Administration II,
College Park, Maryland (hereafter NARA II); Memorandum of Conversation, NODIS - XYZ,
Literally Eyes Only for Secretary, 1 September 1965, Box 22, Formerly Top Secret Central
Policy Files, 1964-1966, POL – VN, Folder POL 27-14 VIET/XYZ 11-1-65, RG 59, NARA II.
19
Herring, ed., The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the
Pentagon Papers, 78; Hershberg, Marigold, 524.
122
fact a retired Foreign Service Officer named Paul Jones Sturm who, like his predecessor Guillion
was fluent in French and had served in Vietnam, and had even been one of the U.S. observers at
the 1954 Geneva negotiations.20 Sturm would meet Vo Van Sung, another very high ranking
member of the North Vietnamese delegation in Paris given the code-name “Jean,” twice in
January 1966, when the DRV representative said the Four Points “must be basis of solution,”
countered Y’s assurances that the United States sought truly peace, questioned the legitimacy of
the South Vietnamese government, and pushed for recognition of the wishes of the National
Liberation Front in South Vietnam.21 Adding to this more confrontational line, Bo would twice
meet with the French press to disavow American claims that it had made progress in meeting the
Four Points – disputing especially the question of NLF representation in the South – early in
May 1966.
All of these developments led the Defense Department’s secret history of the contacts to
conclude that because “the R and X exchanges were so responsive and productive and because
these exchanges were severed so abruptly, no explanation is really satisfying. It seems that this
dialogue between Americans and Vietnamese was as mysterious in its ending as it was fruitful
and suggestive in its beginning.”22 Other estimations include the fact that the United States
continued to increase military pressure in South Vietnam in early September 1966 and that the
North Vietnamese had gotten what they hoped for out of the discussions by that point. That is, it
20
George Springsteen to Robert McBride, 1 November 1965, Box 22, Formerly Top Secret
Central Policy Files, 1964-1966, POL – VN, Folder POL 27-14 VIET/XYZ 11-1-65, RG 59,
NARA II.
21
Herring, ed., The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the
Pentagon Papers, 78; Telegram from McBride to Secretary of State, 3 January 1966.
22
Herring, ed., The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the
Pentagon Papers, 87.
123
looked like it was making an honest effort toward peace and it heard more clearly what the
United States had in mind, all the while building up its own military capabilities. In any case, this
“mysterious” engagement would not have taken place were it not for the early efforts by the
well-liked Manac’h, as well as Lucet and the French journalists Parisot and Maissi, to serve as
conduits to the United States for Mai Van Bo’s initial messages.
Robert Kennedy’s Trip to Paris, January to February 1967
The second possible occasion for backchannel Franco-American cooperation toward
peace in Vietnam stems from much different circumstances than the official, albeit very
secretive, XYZ mission. In fact, even at the time, what exactly Senator Robert Kennedy of New
York discussed with the French during his visit to Paris in late January and early February 1967
became the subject of much public scrutiny and, eventually, renunciation from the Johnson
administration all the way up to the president, RFK’s bitter rival. Edward Weintal, Newsweek’s
diplomatic correspondent, claimed that a leaked State Department document provided evidence
that Kennedy had received a “significant peace signal” during a meeting in Paris with Manac’h.
The report was written by U.S. embassy Asia expert and admirer of Manac’h, John Gunther
Dean, but was, according to Dean, leaked by Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs, Douglas
MacArthur II.23 RFK also met with de Gaulle, Jean Chauvel, the chief French negotiator at the
1954 Geneva Conference, and other top French officials, but the peace feeler from North
Vietnam, Weintal suggested, came during his meeting with Manac’h, “unveiled for the benefit of
23
Dean, Danger Zones, 50.
124
Robert F. Kennedy for reasons best known to the French.” 24 The Senator flatly denied any such
prospects and the issue eventually faded. In some respects, though, it has remained unclear what
exactly transpired during Kennedy’s trip.
This section aims to rectify that confusion, doing so especially through the French record
of the Kennedy-Manac’h meetings. In short, did Kennedy receive a never-pursued opportunity
for peace, one potentially squashed because of LBJ’s disdain for Kennedy? The purported peace
feeler, it seems, was inflated media hype, overzealousness by Dean, and the personal
assessments of Manac’h about what he believed would be needed to bring the North Vietnamese
to the table—even though Mai Van Bo later reportedly agreed with Manac’h’s presentation.
Thus, although no peace feeler seems to have been extended, the conversation offered fruitful
information potentially lost as a result of the controversy surrounding it and the American
personalities involved.
Even prior to Kennedy’s meetings with de Gaulle and the two French experts on
Vietnam, rumors buzzed that Kennedy might try to meet with Mai Van Bo while he visited
Europe for a tour d’horizon of the global issues of the day. 25 By 1967 Bo was Hanoi’s General
Delegate in Paris (France increased North Vietnam’s diplomatic standing to a legation in the
24
Weintal quoted in Joseph A. Palermo, In His Own Right: The Political Odyssey of Senator
Robert F. Kennedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 41. See “Hanoi Said to Give
Kennedy A Signal It’s Ready to Talk,” New York Times, 6 February 1967, p.1 for The New York
Times cover story on Weintal’s Newsweek piece.
25
For a record of the conversation between Kennedy and de Gaulle, see Compte Rendu:
Entretien entre le général de Gaulle et le sénateur Robert Kennedy, le 31 janvier 1967, de 15 h.
30 à 16 h. 35, #55, Documents Diplomatiques Français (hereafter DDF), 1967, Tome I (1er
Janvier – 1er Juillet) (Brussels : Peter Lang, 2008), 187-190.
125
summer of 1966) and, hence, the DRV’s highest-ranking diplomat in the West.26 Kennedy did in
fact ask Manac’h in their 31 January meeting what he thought about a secret meeting with Bo,
but he decided against such a meeting, a decision, according to Manac’h, that disappointed the
North Vietnam diplomat.27
The French transcript of the conversation suggests that some elements of the Newsweek
article and accompanying New York Times story did come up during Kennedy’s meeting with
Manac’h. The press suggested that the “peace signal” came in the form of the idea that the North
Vietnamese would accept a three-step process to negotiate a settlement to the war after the U.S.
bombing of the North ended. In fact, Manac’h had said he thought the North Vietnamese wanted
a formula divided into steps, gave the disclaimer “That is obviously my personal interpretation
and the ‘divide into sections’ formula is my invention,” while still adding the tantalizing phrase
“but this interpretation seems to me supported, not only in the statements of Mr. Trinh [DRV
Foreign Minister Nguyen Duy Trinh] and Mr. Bo, but with the knowledge of information we
have from other sources.” Furthermore, Manac’h potentially put words in the North Vietnamese
mouths when he said: “Quite simply, it seems that they are seeking to define certain elements in
a complex problem. They tell us in substance this: ‘if the Americans really want to enter into
talks with the DRVN, it is sufficient that they stop permanently and unconditionally the bombing
of the North: then talks would be possible between the United States and North Vietnam.’”28
26
Ronald Koven, “R.F. Kennedy Sees French Role in Peace,” New York Herald Tribune, 31
January 1967, found in Box 4, Robert F. Kennedy File, Folder Trips: 1967, Europe: France:
Clippings, Papers of William vanden Heuvel, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts
(hereafter JFKL).
27
Compte Rendu: Entretien entre le séneteur Robert Kennedy et M. Manac’h, directeur d’AsieOceanie, le 31 Janvier 1967, DDF, 1967, Tome I (1er Janvier – 1er Juillet),197, n. 1.
28
Entretien entre le séneteur Robert Kennedy et M. Manac’h, 194.
126
When pressed by Kennedy on how the United States could expect to negotiate fruitfully if it
eventually began to withdraw its troops based on a timetable, Manac’h again gave his “personal
ideas,” suggesting that it could happen in three phases: first, a declaration of non-intervention
announcing the decision to withdraw; second, the opening of a conference to secure the
necessary guarantees from both parties; and third, the implementation of withdrawal as a result
of the agreement.29
The idea of dividing the process of negotiations into stages greatly interested Dean, who
was serving as translator for RFK. Dean injected himself into the conversation – he later recalled
he was unsure if Kennedy “grasped what Manac’h was telling him” – to bring Kennedy’s
attention to the approach, which he called “very new and very interesting,” but sought
clarification from Manac’h as to whether the thinking came from him or the North Vietnamese.
Here Manac’h clarified that it was his personal perspective, though Mai Van Bo later told him
that he did support the thinking.30 In his memoirs, Dean argues that Manac’h’s response to his
question about whether the North Vietnamese wanted to sit down and negotiate an end to the war
was “Yes, absolutely.”31 The record, as seen above, provides a bit more nuance.
In any case, Dean then fired off a series of reports to the State Department on the meeting,
thinking even then it had been a revelation. Once his assessment of the meeting was leaked in
Foggy Bottom, the media frenzy over the “peace signal” ensued. When Johnson caught wind of
the situation, he grew furious and immediately blamed Kennedy for the leak (this seemed
29
Entretien entre le séneteur Robert Kennedy et M. Manac’h, 194-196.
30
Dean, Danger Zones, 49; Entretien entre le séneteur Robert Kennedy et M. Manac’h, 194.
31
Dean, Danger Zones, 49.
127
especially plausaible in LBJ’s eyes because the State Department could not find the misfiled
cable) and the chance, legitimate or not, to explore the ideas presented by Manac’h further
disappeared. Dean also felt the wrath of Johnson’s monumental temper, asking “Who is John
Dean? Fire him!”32 Dean was not fired, but grew to distrust even those working on his side, and
believed presidential politics had squashed a sensitive diplomatic initiative in its early stages. He
insisted:
This dismissal of a real proposal—peace talks for a bombing halts—was mistaken. It was
a genuine overture, something that could have worked. Peace only has a chance when
two sides decide to give in a little to get something in return. Etienne Manac’h was not
dreaming, or making anything up. He had direct confirmation that the North Vietnamese
were willing to negotiate to end a war. Who knew where those negotiations would have
gone without such a strong denunciation? But because of domestic politics—the bitter
rivalry between LBJ and RFK—the possibilities were scotched before they had a chance
to develop.33
Former Undersecretary of State Nicholas deB. Katzenbach remains more skeptical of the
legitimacy of the “peace feeler” idea and argues that Kennedy did not believe, or was at least
unaware of, any peace signal on Vietnam in his conversation with Manac’h. Katzenbach, in fact,
witnessed firsthand the exchange between LBJ and RFK over the issue. After Johnson accused
Kennedy of leaking the story, RFK countered that it most likely came from Johnson’s State
Department. “It’s not my State Department. It’s your goddamn State Department,” Johnson
retorted in perhaps a thinly-veiled stab at the Kennedys and the Eastern Establishment he so
despised and distrusted. The two argued longer, with Katzenbach recalling “there was no
calming the president….I had never seen him like this, almost totally out of control, and it was
not a pleasant sight.” As RFK pushed for an end to the bombing and a negotiated settlement,
32
Dean, Danger Zones, 51.
33
Dean, Danger Zones, 50.
128
Johnson accused Kennedy and his anti-war critics of prolonging the war and endangering the
lives of American soldiers. Johnson concluded by telling Kennedy he had “blood on [his] hands”
prior to the Senator storming out of the Oval Office to a sea of reporters to whom he again
denied knowing of any peace signal.34
As this encounter makes clear, it was, to be sure, entirely unlikely that any new thinking
from the North Vietnamese could be passed onto Johnson from his reviled enemy Robert F.
Kennedy whether Manac’h tried to do so or not in this case of Franco-American not-so-secret
Vietnam diplomacy. All that said, even if nothing official developed from – or was supposed to
develop from – the meetings in early 1967, the French historian Pierre Journoud convincingly
argues that Kennedy’s talk with Manac’h did alter RFK’s personal perspective on the war,
nudging him to take an even more anti-war stand as he became more optimistic about the
prospects of the North Vietnamese engaging in peace talks.35
PENNSYLVANIA, July 1967 to October 1967
In contrast to the lack of momentum from the RFK visit, diplomatic historians have
viewed the final effort involving French and American contacts in the years of escalation, the
PENNSLYVANIA initiative, as the biggest “missed opportunity” for peace (at least prior to the
publication of James Hershberg’s exhaustive work on the 1966 MARIGOLD initiative) during
the Johnson years.36 Some interest in the mission surely stems from the fact that its primary
34
Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ (New York:
W.W. Norton &Company, 2008), 262-263.
35
36
Journoud, De Gaulle et Le Vietnam, 281-288.
Lloyd C. Gardner, “Introduction,” in Gardner and Gittinger, eds., The Secret Search for Peace
in Vietnam, 1964-1968, 5.
129
American players held and would hold such high-level positions. The impetus for
PENNSYLVANIA came from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who had increasingly
come to doubt the war’s efficacy by the summer of 1967.37 It also involved future National
Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger serving in an unofficial but sanctioned
role as the primary U.S. liaison with the French. As George Herring notes, Kissinger’s role
“marked [his] debut in global shuttle diplomacy.”38 Despite a strong start, French direct contacts
with the North Vietnamese leadership in Hanoi, and an eventual adjustment of the U.S.
negotiating position, PENNSYLVANIA would, like MARIGOLD and perhaps XYZ, meet its
end at least in part because of poorly-timed military movements decided upon by Johnson and a
lack of genuine desire to negotiate by the DRV.
Mai Van Bo continued to play a role in Paris in the PENNSLYVANIA channel. This
time, however, his French intermediaries were not current governmental officials like Manac’h
and Lucet. Rather, they were leftist acquaintances of Kissinger, molecular biologist Herbert
Marcovich and the former French resistance fighter and United Nations food administrator
Raymond Aubrac, who had been friends with North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh since he
and his wife housed Ho as he sought to attain Vietnamese independence through the
Fontainebleau Agreements in the aftermath of World War II. In fact, Marcovich and Aubrac had
their most influential contacts outside of Paris, though they used the city as their homebase.
37
The tag PENNSLYVANIA came from State Department Executive Secretary Benjamin Read,
who was in charge of naming each peace initiative. He chose PENNSLYVLANIA in this case to
honor his home state. Read named another effort PACKERS after the reigning Super Bowl
champions because the initiative seemed like a “winner.” Read quoted in Herring, ed., The Secret
Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the Pentagon Papers, 523.
38
Herring, ed., The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the
Pentagon Papers, 521.
130
At a Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs in June 1967, Marcovich sold
the idea to Harvard professor Kissinger that Aubrac could use his unique connection to serve as a
secret intermediary with the North Vietnamese, going directly to Hanoi to meet with Ho and
Pham Van Dong. Kissinger, already courting the powers-that-be, took the idea to Secretary of
State Dean Rusk, whereupon McNamara discovered the proposal and pitched it to Johnson. Rusk
and LBJ were skeptical, considering the Kissinger plan “just another of those blind alleys that
lead nowhere. We’ve been down there before. Forget it.”39 McNamara eventually won the
president and secretary of state over, and the two Frenchmen made their first trip to North
Vietnam in late July. They pitched what was called the Phase A, Phase B plan for the Americans.
In it, the United States promised to stop bombing in exchange for private assurances that the
DRV would end infiltration of South Vietnam in a certain amount of time, at which point the
U.S. force levels would freeze and peace negotiations ensue. Pham Van Dong, making the
decisions for the two elderly Vietnamese revolutionaries, pushed for a bombing halt, but did not
demand a public announcement of one. He also agreed to a delay between the bombing halt and
negotiations and that initial talks would not need to involve the NLF or South Vietnam, with the
reassurance he would see Aubrac and Marcovich again.
Encouraged by their findings, the two French scholars reported the news to Kissinger in
Paris, who then told Johnson administration officials. McNamara found the development
especially promising, considering it “the most interesting message on the matter of negotiations
we have ever had” and became its biggest cheerleader in Washington.40 By August, the
39
Brigham and Herring, “The PENNSLVANIA Peace Initiative, June-October 1967,” in
Gardner and Gittenger, eds., The Secret Search for Peace in Vietnam, 1964-1968, 61.
40
Brigham and Herring, “The PENNSLVANIA Peace Initiative, June-October 1967,” in
Gardner and Gittenger, eds., The Secret Search for Peace in Vietnam, 1964-1968, 61-62.
131
administration altered its negotiating stance away from one of mutual de-escalation, having
Kissinger rely through Aubrac and Marcovich that the United States would stop the bombing if
North Vietnam gave private assurances that it would lead “promptly to productive discussions”
based “on the assumption” that the DRV not take “military advantage” of the halt by increasing
the flow of troops and materiel to South Vietnam.41 This negotiating stance became known as the
“San Antonio Formula” after a speech Johnson gave in the Texas city on 29 September 1967 and
remained official U.S. policy for the next several months.
McNamara hoped to avoid any mixed signals, such as those that had plagued earlier
peace missions, when the Frenchmen presented the new U.S. position by calling for a bombing
halt while Marcovich and Aubrac delivered the revised terms that August. Not only was this halt
not sustained, but the United States flew more sorties over Hanoi on a single day, 20 August
1967, that the French mediators were in the North Vietnamese capital than during any previous
day of the war. McNamara faulted the lack of diplomatic and military coordination for sinking
the mission, but historians Robert Brigham and George Herring believe that the North
Vietnamese silence on the offer stemmed more from the bombing executed prior to the
scheduled halt. They write that the U.S. government “failed to see what now appears all too
obvious: an apparent escalation of the bombing on the eve of a possible peace mission was not a
formula for success.”42 Mai Van Bo formally rejected the offer on 10 September 1967.
Kissinger attempted to smooth things over with Bo over the definition of “conditions” and
41
Herring, ed., The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the
Pentagon Papers, 522.
42
Brigham and Herring, “The PENNSLVANIA Peace Initiative, June-October 1967,” in
Gardner and Gittenger, eds., The Secret Search for Peace in Vietnam, 1964-1968, 64.
132
“assumptions” for the next month, but the initiative was effectively finished. Johnson believed
that tying the continuation of PENNSLYVANIA to a bombing halt only benefited North
Vietnam, venting that “It hasn’t cost [Ho Chi Minh] a bit. The net of it is that he has a sanctuary
in Hanoi in return for having his consul talk with two scientists who talked with an American
citizen.”43
How did Kissinger’s French scientist-partners explain the failure? They told him that
“We think, and we must say so quite plainly, that your authorities committed the greatest error,
perhaps the one that caused our entire endeavor to be fruitless, by bombing on August 15 and
successively on August 21, 22, and 23 the bridge and the city of Hanoi, when they were asking
us, through you, on August 17, to transmit the message drafted after our return from our trip.”
They continued: “It was not possible for us to make the Vietnamese understand the coincidences
of the two steps, that is, the new and serious escalation of the bombings, which hit their capital
this time, and the sending of a message seeking the path to negotiation, was accidental. And
frankly, dear Henri, it was difficult to believe that these two ‘deliveries’ came from the same
‘sender’—if you will permit us to refer in this manner to the President of your country.”44 Even
taking a different approach of using an ambitious American professor and two supportive French
private citizens with a sympathetic ear in high Vietnamese places could not alter the reality that
neither the Americans nor the North Vietnamese were particularly eager to back down from
military confrontation on terms not its own.
43
Johnson quoted in Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1992), 123.
44
Raymond Aubrac and Herbert Marcovich to Henry Kissinger, 25 October 1967, pp. 2-3, Box
2740 POL 27-14 VIETOH to POL27-14 VIET/PENNSLVANIA, Folder POL 27-14
VIET/PENNSLYVANIA 1967, RG 59, NARA II.
133
Conclusion
Beyond the disagreements at the highest levels of government between Lyndon Johnson
and Charles de Gaulle over the Vietnam War, other participants in the Franco-American
conversation about the fate of Southeast Asia sought to find more collaborative means to bring
an end to U.S. engagement in Vietnam in the busy years of escalation. French foreign ministry
Asia specialist Etienne Manac’h used his positive reputation among American officials in France
and his contacts with the North Vietnamese, especially with Mai Van Bo, to facilitate one of the
earliest efforts to bring about greater understanding between the United States and France
through the mysterious XYZ campaign. Manac’h also seized the opportunity of Robert
Kennedy’s visit in the winter of 1967 to explain North Vietnam’s changing if also enigmatic
thoughts on negotiation. Although it is probably an exaggeration to say this discussion resulted
in a lost chance for earlier peace talks given the acrimonious relationship between RFK and the
U.S. commander-in-chief, Manac’h and Kennedy exchanged ideas on the war that pushed RFK
to later become a more fervent supporter of negotiations and critical of official American
positions about the importance of the Vietnam War. In the case of the PENNSYLVANIA
initiative, non-state actors (in the form of academics and scientists) played the leading role in
using Raymond Aubrac’s decades-old relationship with Ho Chi Minh to attempt to convey the
subtly shifting American position toward negotiating terms. The French and Americans, it should
be remembered, were only two voices in the multi-sided debate over the future of Vietnam’s
struggle for self-determination. While the Americans played a disproportionate and I would
argue unnecessary part in preventing this goal, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, especially,
also played its role in maintaining tensions through its effort for complete military victory and
134
frequent unwillingness to negotiate in good faith.45 At least in their initiatives toward peace in
Southeast Asia, the U.S. and French cast examined above strove toward a common – though
ultimately unattained – goal.
45
On this point, see Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War
for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012) and Pierre
Asselin, “‘We Don’t Want A Munich’: Hanoi’s Diplomatic Struggle during the American War,
1965-1968,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 3 (June 2012), 547-81.
135
CHAPTER SIX – ENDING THE “BRUTISH QUARREL” BUT NOT THE WAR:
FRANCO-AMERICAN RELATIONS AND VIETNAM IN THE NIXON YEARS
Years after leaving the White House in shame following the Watergate scandal, Richard
Nixon wrote Leaders: Profiles and Reminiscences of Men Who Have Shaped the Modern
World.1 As part of his effort to rehabilitate his image and shape his legacy as a great statesman
rather than a “crook,” Nixon shared his assessments of several of the twentieth century’s most
powerful figures. His subjects ranged from British prime minister Winston Churchill to
American general Douglas MacArthur to Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. None, however, received
the level of praise in the volume as did Charles de Gaulle.2 Extolling de Gaulle’s “leadership
mystique,” Nixon argued proudly that the French president was “one whose counsel I valued
immensely, even when I disagreed with him.”3 These and other flattering words found
throughout the chapter on de Gaulle were a far cry from the assessments of him typically offered
by members of the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson foreign policy teams. Moreover,
Nixon’s admiration was echoed by his principal foreign policy collaborator during his
presidency, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. Even during the nadir of FrancoAmerican relations in the mid-1960s, Kissinger had offered in the 1965 academic treatment, The
Troubled Partnership: A Re-Appraisal of the Atlantic Alliance, a sympathetic take on de Gaulle’s
efforts toward French independence and his embrace of realpolitik. Kissinger suggested then that
the United States ought to treat NATO and its relations with the nation-states of Western Europe
1
Richard Nixon, Leaders: Profiles and Reminiscences of Men Who Have Shaped the Modern
World (New York: Warner Books, 1982).
2
Nixon, Leaders, 40-80.
3
Nixon, Leaders, 41.
136
more as actual partnerships, with each side having a choice, rather than serving as passive
accomplices who ought to approve the American view on any given topic. He thought this
approach especially applied to U.S. relations with France and its president.4
While in office, Nixon and Kissinger aimed to improve the strained situation between
France and the United States. They bore the label “Gaullist” willingly and intended to approach
international affairs in ways similar to de Gaulle.5 Nixon went so far as to tell his aides he
wanted to emulate de Gaulle’s behavior and hoped to act more “aloof,” “inaccessible,” and
“mysterious” because he believed “overexposure detracts from impact.”6 (One may quibble with
whether these traits make a strong leader, but the point remains that Nixon believed so.) Such
sympathy toward de Gaulle created an environment in which a presidential bilateral summit, the
4
For the efforts by Nixon and Kissinger to concentrate foreign policymaking in their hands
during these years, see William Bundy, A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the
Nixon Presidency (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998) and Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger:
Partners in Power (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007). Several biographers of Henry
Kissinger also explore this dynamic. For a critical view of Kissinger and his distortion of
realpolitik, see Mario Del Pero, The Eccentric Realist: Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of
American Foreign Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). For a more positive
account, refer to Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2007). Mixed reviews come from Jussi Hanhimäki, The Flawed
Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004) and Robert D. Schulzinger, Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1989). Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston, eds., Nixon in
the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969-1977 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 2008) provides a survey of the many applications of Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy
globally. For a concise view of Kissinger’s thoughts on de Gaulle, see Henry Kissinger, White
House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 104-111; Henry A. Kissinger, The Troubled
Partnership: A Re-Appraisal of the Atlantic Alliance (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965).
5
Marc Trachtenberg, “The French Factor in U.S. Foreign Policy during the Nixon-Pompidou
Period, 1969-1974,” Journal of Cold War Studies 13, no. 1 (Winter 2011), 4-59. Trachtenberg’s
article is the most recent account of U.S-French relations during the Nixon presidency. Although
invaluable in many respects, its focus is primarily on international monetary policy, nuclear
issues, and the French response to Kissinger’s 1973 “Year of Europe” proposals.
6
H.R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (New York: G.P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1994), Entry for 18 May 1969, 59.
137
first since Kennedy went to France in May 1961, was quickly set up between Nixon and the
French president. The consultations took place in Paris six weeks into Nixon’s presidency at the
end of February and beginning of March 1969. This set of meetings softened the ground for a
reciprocal visit to the United States by de Gaulle’s successor, Georges Pompidou, in February
1970. Although Nixon and Kissinger did not view Pompidou in the same heroic light as they had
de Gaulle, they also appreciated the new French president, who practiced his own, less
egocentric version of Gaullism in foreign affairs. Nixon would consult with Pompidou again in
November 1970 at de Gaulle’s funeral.7
These meetings and more cooperative diplomatic discussions between the U.S. and
French foreign policymakers throughout the first Nixon term successfully ended the “brutish
quarrel,” as Kissinger dubbed it, in Franco-American relations that had lasted over a decade.8
During this time, the war in Vietnam raged on, regardless of Nixon’s “Vietnamization” policy
that meant to turn over more of the fighting to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN)
and, as a result, intended to allow for U.S. troop withdrawals.9 The increased sympathy that
7
On the Pompidou-de Gaulle relationship, see Philippe Alexandre, The Duel: De Gaulle and
Pompidou, trans. Elaine P. Halperin (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1972).
8
Kissinger quoted in Trachtenberg, “The French Factor in U.S. Foreign Policy during the NixonPompidou Period, 1969-1974,” 5.
9
For treatments of the Vietnam War and the negotiations underway during the Nixon era, see
Pierre Asselin, A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Larry Berman, No Peace, No Honor:
Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 2001); George Herring,
America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, 4d ed. (Boston: McGrawHill, 2002), 271-322; Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War (Lawrence, KS: University Press of
Kansas, 1998); Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for
Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Robert D.
Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975 (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 274-304. Andrew Johns, Vietnam’s Second Front:
138
Nixon and Kissinger held for de Gaulle’s counsel, however, failed to encourage the two men to
absorb de Gaulle’s critique of the war during the 1969 meetings. Although an opponent of the
war, Pompidou valued the improved bilateral relations and therefore refrained from airing his
thoughts in the confrontational way his predecessor sometimes had.10 For Pompidou,
maintaining the new state of U.S.-French relations and the friendship he developed with Nixon
trumped any desire to speak out against the continued American military involvement to such an
extent that he would only offer the faintest of objections when a French diplomat was killed in
Hanoi by a U.S. bombing raid in late 1972.
To be sure, this instance aside, the war had long since diminished as a divisive issue
between the two nations, with the first high-level sign of improvement coming when de Gaulle
called Johnson’s March 31, 1968 decision to seek negotiations and declare a partial bombing halt
of North Vietnam “an act of reason and political courage.”11 The fact that the French served as
accommodating hosts for the peace negotiations – eventually helping Kissinger meet with his
North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho in secret – also removed the war as a hot-button
issue. Pompidou further understood it would be a challenge to wind down the American military
commitment. Nor did he and others in the French government have all the answers. Yet it would
be a far cry to say that the French interpretation of the potential for the war’s success had
Domestic Politics, the Republican Party, and the War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
2010), 237-324, explores the connections between Nixon’s war policy and domestic politics.
10
For a French-language summary of Pompidou’s perspectives on Vietnam, see Laurent Cesari,
“Le président Georges Pompidou et la guerre du Vietnam (1969-1974),” in Christopher Goscha
and Maurice Vaïsse, eds., La Guerre du Vietnam et L’Europe, 1963-1973 (Brussels: Bruylant,
2003), 179-92. Cesari’s article is helpful on many accounts, but does not cover the U.S.-French
presidential conversations about Vietnam that this chapter examines in detail.
11
Quoted in Marianna P. Sullivan, France’s Vietnam Policy: A Study in French-American
Relations (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1978), 115.
139
changed or, as Kissinger would write in his memoirs, that “[d]uring the entire period of the war I
recall no criticism by a European leader in even the most private conversation.”12 This chapter
will explore the aforementioned high-level gatherings and other flashpoints from 1969 to the
signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973. It will show that for all the new goodwill
that developed over these years, Nixon and Kissinger were still not listening when it came to
Vietnam.
The Nixon-de Gaulle Meetings, February-March 1969
A month after assuming the presidency in January 1969, Richard Nixon made his first
trip abroad. He chose a week-long tour of Europe as a way to “establish the principle that we
would consult with our allies before negotiating with our potential adversaries.” He hoped to
show the rest of the world that he would not be “completely obsessed” with Vietnam and to
shore up domestic political support by demonstrating that for whatever opposition he faced at
home, European leaders would receive him “with respect and even enthusiasm.” Along the way,
Nixon visited dignitaries and politicians in London, Bonn, Brussels, Berlin, and Rome. His stay
in Paris from February 28 to March 2, 1969, however, turned out, as he hoped, to be the “high
point personally and substantively” of the trip. Even before the set of meetings he held with
Charles de Gaulle, Nixon considered it crucial to win over “Le General.” He wanted to use Paris
as the base for opening secret communications with China and North Vietnam and knew this
goal would impossible without better relations with de Gaulle. Writing in his memoirs, he
recalled: “Most important, I felt that President de Gaulle’s cooperation would be vital to ending
12
Kissinger, White House Years, 424.
140
the Vietnam war and to my plans for beginning a new relationship with Communist China.”13
Over the course of ten hours of discussion across three days, Nixon and de Gaulle indeed tackled
Vietnam, U.S. rapprochement with China, and a host of other important international topics such
as the intentions of the Soviet Union, nuclear weapons, international economic issues, and the
U.S. role in Western Europe.14
Nixon had earlier conversed with de Gaulle about Vietnam as a private citizen while
travelling through Europe in 1967 to boost his foreign policy profile prior to the 1968 election.
At this point, de Gaulle encouraged Nixon to “advocate an early end to the war on the best
possible terms.” Decades before the opening of Eastern bloc archives confirmed Soviet
ambivalence about the Vietnam War, de Gaulle told candidate Nixon that the conflict caused the
Soviets considerable economic trouble and, thus, they had little interest in its prolongation. On
this insight, Nixon believed de Gaulle’s “usually keen judgment was faulty.” 15 Now successfully
in office, Nixon’s conversations with de Gaulle possessed the genuine potential to influence the
direction of the war effort. Nixon served as a captive, appreciative audience for the French
president in 1969 too, but their exchange of ideas about Vietnam did not produce any significant
changes in Nixon’s approach to his Southeast Asia policy. As will be seen below, Nixon
continued to excuse de Gaulle’s thoughts on Vietnam as aberrations from his otherwise sound
analysis.
13
Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978),
370-71.
14
15
Nixon, Leaders, 72.
Nixon, Leaders, 75; Ilya Gaiduk, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan Dee,
1996) and Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy Toward the Indochina Conflict (Washington:
Wilson Center Press; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
141
The Initial Contact, February 28, 1969
Nixon hoped to impress his idol, whose role leading the Free French in World War II also
impressed the former U.S. naval officer, as soon as he arrived in Paris. Seeing de Gaulle standing
on the runway coatless while exposed to the cold winter air, Nixon removed his overcoat before
he departed Air Force One. De Gaulle greeted the president in English, a rare gesture, which
encouraged Nixon to think the visit was off to a successful start.16 The two men held their first
private conversation, with only their interpreters present, on the afternoon of February 28 at the
Elysée Palace, the presidential residence and headquarters. De Gaulle told Nixon he was willing
to discuss any topic his visitor wished. They spoke first about Western policy toward the Soviet
Union, particular in light of its preoccupation with China. De Gaulle spoke at length about
Russian history and stressed the need for détente with the Soviets. They then discussed the
catastrophic impact the use of tactical nuclear weapons would have on Europe and the world in
the event of a conventional attack, however unlikely, by the Soviet Union. The two men
exchanged pessimistic views on the state of Middle East peace talks. 17 Vietnam only came up in
a brief comment made by Nixon in which he expressed his desire for Soviet cooperation in
16
Nixon, RN, 371.
17
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, De Gaulle, et al., 28 February 1969, Memcons
– Europe (Feb 23 1969 – Mar 2, 1969), Box 447, President’s Trip Files, National Security
Council Files (hereafter NSC), Richard Nixon Presidential Library (hereafter RNL), Yorba
Linda, CA; Premier Entretien en Tête-à-Tête entre Le Général de Gaulle et M. Nixon, Vendredi
28 février 1969 – 15h45 – 17h55, Vol. 36, Secrétariat Général (hereafter SG), Entretiens et
Messages (hereafter EM), Reel P17462, Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères (hereafter
MAE), La Courveuve, France. Comparing the American and French records provides the fullest
account possible of these conversations. While the U.S. Memoranda of Conversations are in
report form (prepared by Nixon’s translator General Vernon Walters), the French records are in
transcript style. Studying the French versions helps clarify and add to the more concise U.S.
documents.
142
pressuring the North Vietnamese to solve the “Vietnamese problem.” De Gaulle tied this hope to
the wider benefit that détente with the Soviet Union could bring for international affairs.18
Nixon returned from the meeting “in great spirits.” Although this first discussion did not
tackle Southeast Asia in any detail, the meeting set the tone for further cooperative exchange,
particularly after an elaborate state dinner hosted by de Gaulle that evening at the Elysée.
Nixon’s Chief of Staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman believed Nixon’s performance at the dinner to be
the “finest hour” of his young presidency. He thought de Gaulle’s toast went “way beyond the
need of protocol” and believed it marked the beginnings of improved presidential relations
between the United States and France. He concluded that “it would appear that at least a giant
step has been taken toward the principal goal of this trip.”19 Kissinger, who did not attend the
first Nixon-de Gaulle meeting, told the press earlier that day that he hoped the visit would also
allow other European countries to no longer feel torn between the United States and France. He
noted: “It is the conviction of the President that it serves no purpose, it serves nobody’s purpose
for the United States and France to have avoidable bad relations….I think we are making it
possible for every country to make their decision on the merits of the issues, if we are not in an
organic conflict with France.”20 Regardless of this development, Kissinger got an unwanted
earful on Vietnam during his first interaction with the imposing de Gaulle at the state dinner that
evening. The French president did not view Kissinger as Nixon’s partner, how Kissinger often
18
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, De Gaulle, et al., 28 February 1969, p. 4,
Memcons – Europe (Feb 23 1969 – Mar 2 1969), Box 447, President’s Trip Files, NSC, RNL;
Premier Entretien en Tête-à-Tête entre Le Général de Gaulle et M. Nixon, 28 février 1969, pp. 910, Vol. 36, SG, EM, Reel P17462, MAE.
19
Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries, Entry for 28 February 1969, 35.
20
Kissinger, White House Years, 107.
143
saw himself, but rather simply as his subordinate. According to Kissinger, the disappointing
meeting unfolded as follows:
Without the slightest attempt at small talk, de Gaulle greeted me with the query: “Why
don’t you get out of Vietnam?”
“Because,” I replied, “a sudden withdrawal might give us a credibility problem.”
“Where?” the General wanted to know. I mentioned the Middle East.
“How very odd,” said the General from a foot above me. “It is precisely in the Middle
East that I thought your enemies had the credibility problem.”21
Historians would be wise not to take this conversation as a verbatim record because it is drawn
from Kissinger’s memoirs, but it does illustrate a larger point. Even someone whom Kissinger
respected as much as de Gaulle could not shake him from his view (common among the LBJ
administration as well) that American credibility in the world would be damaged by a more rapid
disengagement from the war than the slow and unsteady one then underway.
Meeting at Versailles, March 1, 1969
In the afterglow of the previous night’s otherwise joyous festivities, Nixon and de Gaulle
met again the next morning. This time they convened in the Grand Trianon Palace at Versailles.
Nixon asked de Gaulle if they might speak about Vietnam during these one-on-one
conversations, but de Gaulle demurred, declaring instead that he would speak at length about
Vietnam during the final meeting on the following day. Instead, the talks focused on de Gaulle’s
survey of the European scene, the future of NATO, and his perspective of China’s future
intentions for itself, its interpretation of the Sino-Soviet split, and its wider place in the world.22
21
22
Kissinger, White House Years, 110.
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, De Gaulle, et al., 1 March 1969, Memcons –
Europe (Feb 23 1969 – Mar 2 1969), Box 447, President’s Trip Files, NSC, RNL ; Entretien en
144
Still, de Gaulle did address Vietnam at one point and used the private setting to provide
secret information to Nixon that he believed Nixon might find helpful. Here, unlike in the peace
initiatives of 1965 to 1967 discussed in Chapter Five, de Gaulle played a direct role in passing
along information that could potentially move forward the negotiations then under way. In this
case, too, France’s relationship with the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front
played a role, particularly as the negotiations were taking place in the French capital. De Gaulle
explained to Nixon that the Chief of the NLF delegation in Paris, Tran Buu Kiem, had come to
the Quai d’Orsay earlier that week because he knew Nixon and de Gaulle would speak about
Vietnam during their meetings. De Gaulle thought it important that he communicate what the
NLF diplomat had to say before Nixon saw his newly-appointed lead negotiator in Paris, none
other than Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Nixon gave him any further instructions.23 De Gaulle
relayed to Nixon that Tran Buu Kiem said “if there was a renewed offensive by the North
Vietnamese and the NLF in the South and against Saigon, it was because the Paris negotiations
were not going well and therefore they had been obliged to step up their military action, but that
if the Paris negotiations began moving they might act differently on the terrain in Vietnam.”24
Nixon did not directly acknowledge this information. Rather, he took the time to explain
his views on the negotiations, which he said would “make every effort” to bring the war to an
Tête-à-Tête entre Le Général de Gaulle et Le President Nixon, Trianon, Samedi 1er mars 1969 –
10h à 11h55, Vol. 36, SG, EM, Reel P17462, MAE.
23
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, De Gaulle, et al., 1 March 1969, Memcons –
Europe (Feb 23 1969 – Mar 2 1969), Box 447, President’s Trip Files, NSC, RNL, pp. 6-7;
Entretien en Tête-à-Tête entre Le Général de Gaulle et Le President Nixon, Trianon, Samedi 1er
mars 1969 – 10h à 11h55, Vol. 36, SG, EM, Reel P17462, MAE, pp. 11-12.
24
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, De Gaulle, et al., 1 March 1969, Memcons –
Europe (Feb 23 1969 – Mar 2 1969), Box 447, President’s Trip Files, NSC, RNL, p. 6.
145
end on terms conducive to both North and South Vietnam. Instead of exploring the connection
between the negotiating progress and the signaling that the NLF diplomat revealed would come
from renewed military action, Nixon blustered that “he was not one to react lightly to such
attacks.” To be sure, Nixon and others could rightfully be tired of the propaganda tirades at the
official talks. But in a line right out of the Johnson-era playbook, he added: “But if we ran into a
stone wall in the negotiations then another road might be appropriate. It took two as the General
well knew to make peace.”25 Either way, Nixon thought the best way to move negotiations
forward would be to have private talks. He closed by seeking de Gaulle’s opinion on whether he
thought the Soviet Union wanted peace in Vietnam (it did) and whether France would help with
private negotiations (it would).26
Shortly before lunch Nixon and De Gaulle’s national security principals joined the two
men and their translators. De Gaulle brought in Maurice Couve de Murville, who was at that
point Prime Minister, Foreign Minister Michel Debré, Quai d’Orsay Secretary General Hervé
Alphand, French ambassador to the United States Charles Lucet, and three other foreign policy
aides. Kissinger accompanied Nixon and his translator General Vernon Walters during this
conversation, as did Secretary of State William Rogers, U.S. ambassador to France Sargent
Shriver, and four members of Kissinger’s NSC staff. Nixon asked de Gaulle to recount to his
staff their earlier conversation about the future of the Atlantic Alliance and European unity. The
25
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, De Gaulle, et al., 1 March 1969, Memcons –
Europe (Feb 23 1969 – Mar 2 1969), Box 447, President’s Trip Files, NSC, RNL, p. 7.
26
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, De Gaulle, et al., 1 March 1969, Memcons –
Europe (Feb 23 1969 – Mar 2 1969), Box 447, President’s Trip Files, NSC, RNL, pp. 7;
Entretien en Tête-à-Tête entre Le Général de Gaulle et Le President Nixon, Trianon, samedi 1er
mars 1969 – 10h à 11h55, Vol. 36, SG, EM, Reel P17462, MAE, pp. 12 ; Nixon, RN, 374.
146
war did not come up during this brief expanded session, regrettable perhaps because it limited
the diversity of perspectives that could weigh in on the war. 27
In the afternoon, Nixon and de Gaulle met again, with only their translators and Couve
present. The conversation focused on the merits of an Anti-Ballistic Missile system, increasing
Franco-American understanding in the most general sense, international monetary policy, and
Nixon’s interest in whether de Gaulle thought Pope Paul VI, whom Nixon would see after
leaving France, could influence the Italian electorate away from leftist politics.28 The U.S. and
French delegations returned to Paris in the evening, where Shriver and his wife Eunice hosted a
state dinner for de Gaulle at the U.S. embassy residence. This dinner, too, went smoothly, with
de Gaulle proclaiming in his toast that the visit had “increased his admiration for [Nixon]—if
that were possible.” Kissinger believed the day’s talks went “extremely well and that our mission
is accomplished.”29
Vietnam Conversation on March 2, 1969
The final meeting between the two presidents occurred mid-day on 2 March 1969 at de
Gaulle’s office in the Elysée. Although only an hour long, it contained the most substantive talks
on Vietnam, with de Gaulle returning to the topic as promised the day before. Before beginning
discussion of the war, Nixon and de Gaulle agreed that de Gaulle would make a reciprocal visit
27
Entretien, Séance Plénière du Samedi 1e Mars 1969, 11h45 – 13h, Vol. 36, SG, EM, Reel
P17462, MAE.
28
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, De Gaulle, et al., Afternoon Conversation, 1
March 1969, Memcons – Europe (Feb 23 1969 – Mar 2 1969), President’s Trip Files, Box 447,
NSC, RNL ; Entretien en Tête-à-Tête entre Le Général de Gaulle et Monsieur Nixon, Trianon,
samedi 1er mars – 15h à 16h25, Vol. 36, SG, EM, Reel P17462, MAE.
29
Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries, Entry for 1 March 1969, 35.
147
to the United States at some point in early 1970. Nixon then put forward a set of arrangements
that would represent the hallmark of Nixon-Kissinger diplomacy: secrecy. The two leaders
agreed, at Nixon’s suggestion, to circumvent the usual diplomatic channels and communicate
directly through Kissinger. Nixon also proposed to de Gaulle that they might use backchannels to
discuss international monetary policy, to which de Gaulle asked if Nixon had a comparable deal
with the British and Germans. Nixon said no, although he did not disclose that Kissinger had
recently begun meeting with Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin in
similar fashion.30 Nixon told de Gaulle that he did not think “one could make much progress
when one was working in a goldfish bowl.”31
Next, Nixon turned to Vietnam. Nixon told de Gaulle that he wanted to develop a plan
that would avoid another similar war in Southeast Asia if possible and asked the General’s
opinion on how he would solve the problem. After telling Nixon he was not in his position, de
Gaulle proceeded to say he “knew what he thought would be best for all, especially the US.” He
believed the United States could “get rid of this bad affair and make peace” if, and only if, it
conducted political negotiations at the same time it conducted military negotiations by
establishing a calendar for the departure of American troops. De Gaulle’s faith in the necessity of
a troop withdrawal calendar stemmed as far back as his Phnom Penh speech in September 1966.
30
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, De Gaulle, et al., 2 March 1969, Memcons –
Europe (Feb 23 1969 – Mar 2 1969), Box 447, President’s Trip Files, NSC, RNL ; Dernier
Entretien Entre Le Général de Gaulle et Le President Nixon, Paris, Dimanche 2 Mars 1969 –
12h45 à 13h45, Vol. 36, SG, EM, Reel P17462, MAE. For two fascinating collections of primary
documents on the Kissinger-Dobrynin backchannel, see David C. Geyer and Douglas E. Selvage,
eds., Soviet-American Relations: The Détente Years, 1969–1972 (Washington, DC: Government
Printing, 2007) and William Burr, ed., The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top-Secret Talks with
Beijing and Moscow (New York: The New Press, 1998).
31
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, De Gaulle, et al., 2 March 1969, p. 2, Memcons
– Europe (Feb 23 1969 – Mar 2 1969), Box 447, President’s Trip Files, NSC, RNL.
148
De Gaulle argued that a settlement to the political negotiations would not come if the United
States did not have an established plan for military departure and vice-versa. Moreover, de
Gaulle proposed using the terms of the 1954 Geneva Accords, which were still legally valid, as
the basis for a political settlement. De Gaulle reminded Nixon, who had been vice president
when the Eisenhower administration began the fifteen-year U.S. tradition of ignoring the Geneva
agreements since it claimed the North Vietnamese violated them first, that the Accords had
garnered the approval of the North and South Vietnamese as well as the international signatories,
including China. He believed that Nixon could genuinely end the conflict by saying the United
States would withdraw its troops if all sides agreed to the validity of the 1954 agreements and set
a calendar for military withdrawal. De Gaulle did not think the United States should leave
precipitously, or “with undue haste (en catastrophe),” but thought this approach was “the basis
on which an arrangement could be found would be acceptable and natural.”32 He anticipated that
both North and South Vietnam would agree to the proposal and suggested that the complexion of
the International Control Commission that had been put in place to oversee the accords could
even be changed to please all sides.
De Gaulle acknowledged that what would happen to South Vietnam “would not be very
bright” or “good.” He assured Nixon, however, as he had earlier officials in the Kennedy and
Johnson teams, that he did not think North Vietnam would absorb the South, “at least not
initially.” Perhaps it would in a few years, but – echoing in part the “decent interval”
interpretation of Nixinger policy that the historian Jeffrey Kimball and other Vietnam War
32
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, De Gaulle, et al., 2 March 1969, p. 3, Memcons
– Europe (Feb 23 1969 – Mar 2 1969), Box 447, President’s Trip Files, NSC, RNL.
149
scholars have put forth – by that point it would not be the responsibility of the United States.33
De Gaulle expected that a coalition government would be elected in the South and that the
people would not want to be under the rule of the northern “Tonkinese,” be it under Ho Chi
Minh or anyone else. He argued that historic differences between the people in Cochinchina
(southern Vietnam), Annam (central Vietnam) and Tonkin (northern Vietnam) would persist. De
Gaulle used names the colonialist French had given to the regions of Vietnam, but he was right
to suggest regional differences existed. He further reassured Nixon that he did not think nonCommunists in the south would be murdered. At this point Nixon interrupted to ask whether de
Gaulle believed elections would then take place in North Vietnam. De Gaulle predicted they
“would be a swindle run by the Communists.” Even still, he reminded Nixon that all of Vietnam,
especially North Vietnam, was decimated and that if the United States followed this approach it
would be easier to have influence to improve the postwar situation.34
De Gaulle continued his comments by assuring Nixon he knew the “extraordinary
difficulty” of the situation he was in based on his experience ending the Algerian War. “If he
spoke frankly,” de Gaulle remarked, “it was because he had been in a similar situation himself. It
was not a parallel situation but a similar one. He had to take cruel decisions when he decided to
evacuate Algeria. French troops had been in control of the terrain, but he could not solve the
political solutions with the Arabs in Algeria and elsewhere, and that was why he had taken the
33
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, De Gaulle, et al., 2 March 1969, p. 4, Memcons
– Europe (Feb 23 1969 – Mar 2 1969), Box 447, President’s Trip Files, NSC, RNL. Kimball,
Nixon’s Vietnam War makes the most forceful case for Kissinger’s embrace of the “decent
interval” approach.
34
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, De Gaulle, et al., 2 March 1969, p. 4, Memcons
– Europe (Feb 23 1969 – Mar 2 1969), Box 447, President’s Trip Files, NSC, RNL.
150
decision to go.”35 He took two years – hardly a sudden withdrawal, especially to the Algerian
nationalists – to withdraw the troops, but he still believed he had made the right choice. He
acknowledged the differences between Vietnam and Algeria, but in ways that actually made it
look easier for the United States to withdraw than it had been for France. The United States, for
instance, did not have any settlers, a 130-year history in Vietnam, and Vietnam was not on the
U.S. “doorstep.” He told Nixon that he would face criticism for ending the war, but that it would
be preferable to the alternative of perpetuating the fight without any way possible to win. He
encouraged Nixon to think in geopolitical terms, for ending the war would allow him to more
easily pursue détente with the Soviet Union. De Gaulle acknowledged France’s role in
strengthening the appeal of communism in Vietnam through its efforts to maintain the colonial
system. This oppression allowed Communists to seize the broader call for independence. All
told, de Gaulle advised Nixon, the United States “could make such a settlement because its
power and wealth was so great that it could do this with dignity. It would better to let go than to
try and stay.”36
Nixon’s foreign policy hero had just placed before him a thorough case for ending the
war and a fairly specific plan to do so at that. He even sympathized with Nixon, which was a
rarity for the “aloof” French president; accepted some of the blame on behalf of the French,
another uncommon act for de Gaulle; and appealed to Nixon’s desire to get past the war and
move onto the more historic opportunity of bringing about U.S.-Soviet cooperation. Yet Nixon
barely budged. He parroted the talking points that the United States needed to end the war “in a
35
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, De Gaulle, et al., 2 March 1969, p. 5, Memcons
– Europe (Feb 23 1969 – Mar 2 1969), Box 447, President’s Trip Files, NSC, RNL.
36
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, De Gaulle, et al., 2 March 1969, p. 5, Memcons
– Europe (Feb 23 1969 – Mar 2 1969), Box 447, President’s Trip Files, NSC, RNL.
151
responsible way” and “could not rush out in a panic.” He insisted U.S. credibility would “suffer
badly.” Nixon later dismissed the approach as a “simple pullout,” even though nothing de Gaulle
said, especially his reference to the two years it took him to extricate France from Algeria,
indicated he expected the United States to rush out irresponsibly. Undoubtedly, de Gaulle’s
international credibility was enhanced following the end of the Algerian war. A timetable tied to
political negotiations need not be immediate, but it was a plan. Years later, Kissinger would try
to discredit and distort the substance of the conversation as well, writing in his memoirs that de
Gaulle “suggest[ed] that we use a time limit on our withdrawal as a means of obtaining a
political accommodation—though having sketched the objective, he supplied no clue as to how
to achieve it.”37
Nixon at least paid lip service to one clue de Gaulle offered, the use of the 1954 Geneva
agreements. He called it “one method that could be studied.” It was not. He tried to win de
Gaulle over with another version of his “secret plan to end the war” campaign promises, telling
him vaguely, for his “private information,” that “we are going to try to explore with the other
side all possible avenues to achieve a responsible settlement. This would require hard bargaining
and take some time,” but “we needed some time in terms of public opinion.” He repeated his
belief that private talks would prove more fruitful than public meetings in doing so, as it would
help all sides save face.38 De Gaulle agreed about the wisdom of private meetings. He told Nixon
that because of the French connections with the Vietnamese and because the talks were going on
37
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, De Gaulle, et al., 2 March 1969, p. 5, Memcons
– Europe (Feb 23 1969 – Mar 2 1969), Box 447, President’s Trip Files, NSC, RNL; Nixon,
Leaders, 75; Kissinger, White House Years, 107.
38
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, De Gaulle, et al., 2 March 1969, p. 5, Memcons
– Europe (Feb 23 1969 – Mar 2 1969), Box 447, President’s Trip Files, NSC, RNL.
152
in Paris, he knew it “to be a fact” the North Vietnamese and NLF truly wanted peace. He stressed
to Nixon that political negotiations would decrease their military activity and “change the
atmosphere” in South Vietnam. In response to a question from Nixon about whether the North
Vietnamese thought the United States wanted peace, de Gaulle described the DRV’s leadership’s
concerns over whether the United States could truly make peace as a capitalist democracy. Nixon
asked de Gaulle to reassure any North Vietnamese contacts he had that the United States did
want peace. He further asked de Gaulle to relay that if the United States reduced its forces, a
reciprocal move, “perhaps in terms of prisoners, would be well-received by public opinion.”
Nixon’s peace plan in many ways always depended on public opinion. De Gaulle ended the three
days of conversation by saying that he felt the most effective way to achieve results was direct
contact between the United States and North Vietnamese without any third-party mediation. This
suggestion sparked “great interest” from Nixon. If he left Paris without taking any of de Gaulle’s
other advice about ending the war in Vietnam, Nixon found something he wanted to hear in the
prospect of secret, direct talks. He felt confident that de Gaulle would help initiate them. Under
the Pompidou government, France would indeed provide the logistics to facilitate these talks
between Kissinger and Le Duc Tho.39
Successful Trip?
The Nixon administration returned to the United States rightly convinced the trip had
been a success in improving Franco-American relations. Although hoping to improve diplomatic
relations on all issues, Nixon had achieved his broader goal of “overcome[ing] the estrangement
39
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, De Gaulle, et al., 2 March 1969, p. 6, Memcons
– Europe (Feb 23 1969 – Mar 2 1969), Box 447, President’s Trip Files, NSC, RNL; Nixon, RN,
374.
153
that had grown between us and to establish a relationship of trust and confidence with de
Gaulle.”40 In fact, Nixon believed “a new period of communication was opening…that would
reduce our differences…and eliminate all angry rhetoric.” When Jacques Chaban-Delmas, the
president of the French National Assembly, came to the United States three weeks later to
accompany a group of French businessmen touring the country, he told Nixon that de Gaulle had
mentioned how satisfied he had been with their meetings. According to de Gaulle, these first
steps would “greatly facilitate the concerting of French and U.S. efforts. The future of U.S.French relations looked bright.” De Gaulle had been particularly encouraged by the rapport and
mutual trust established between the two men and with the “complete confidence he felt in
him.”41
On the Vietnam War, de Gaulle’s confidence proved to be misplaced. Nixon could
henceforth count on Paris as a base for his secret negotiations with Hanoi and Beijing. But it
would be a mistake to claim any real change had taken place in Nixon or Kissinger’s thinking on
the Vietnam War. Yes, the United States would now be able to negotiate outside public scrutiny,
but the terms and underlying assumptions behind their negotiating positions remained
unchanged. Nixon and Kissinger had no interest in putting forth proposals in line with the
Geneva Accords. They continued to fear the impact of withdrawal on American credibility
throughout the world and, at least for Nixon, its impact on his popularity with voters. They
insisted that they were genuinely undertaking an orderly, planned, and gradual de-escalation, but
failed to re-think their stance on political conditions, particularly, at this time at least, about the
40
41
Nixon, RN, 370.
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, Chaban-Delmas, et al., 20 March 1969, p. 2,
Country Files, France, Vol. I (20 Jan – 11 Apr 1969), Box 674, Country Files – Europe, France,
NSC, RNL.
154
future of the South Vietnamese government. They periodically ratcheted up U.S. military
involvement through intensive bombing strikes as the ground war became de-Americanized. In
fact, Nixon and Kissinger discussed expanding the air war into Cambodia and Laos even while
on the European trip. “Operation Menu,” as the bombing campaign became known, was called
off at that time because the State Department opposed it and because the “risk otherwise is too
great.” This decision made Kissinger “very disappointed” in Paris.42 He and Nixon ensured the
campaign began in earnest in mid-March 1969, however. Such a provocative decision could
hardly be considered engagement with the suggestions put forth by de Gaulle, someone Nixon
about whom once pontificated: “No leader I met could surpass his remarkable ability to discuss
any subject on any part of the world with such competence, intelligence, and at times profound
insight.”43
Nixon and Pompidou
The “slow thaw” in Franco-American relations, as the historian Frank Costigliola has
labeled it, was underway by the time Georges Pompidou became president in June 1969.44
Pompidou won a special election after de Gaulle resigned in April following the failure of a
referendum he supported about changes to the French Senate and plans to provide greater
regional autonomy within France. De Gaulle believed the outcome of the referendum also
represented a vote on his continued legitimacy to govern and stepped down after it did not
42
Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries, Entry for 1 March 1969, 36.
43
Nixon, Leaders, 76.
44
Frank Costigliola, France and the United States: The Cold Alliance Since World War II (New
York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), 160.
155
receive the support of the French public. Nixon, for one, was disappointed by de Gaulle’s
decision. He wrote de Gaulle a personal letter, one that could “convey adequately [his] deep
sense of personal loss,” in addition to the official message sent on behalf of the U.S. government.
He told de Gaulle: “I believe that history will record that your resignation was a great loss to
France to the cause of freedom and decency in the world….Putting it in blunt terms—in an age
of mediocre leaders in most of the world—America’s spirit needs your presence.”45 De Gaulle
himself believed Pompidou would destroy Gaullism as president. 46 His concerns, however,
proved misplaced. Pompidou intended to use the powers granted to the executive in the Fifth
Republic to “hold the line” on the foreign policies established by his larger-than-life
predecessor—even if he would “stare back with daggers in his eyes” when de Gaulle’s name was
brought up by world leaders.47 He sought to continue the same goal of independence for France
in the world enabled by its status as a nuclear power and, especially, in its dealings with the
United States and the Soviet Union. The French historians Serge Berstein and Jean-Pierre Rioux
write, “the line that Pompidou followed did not differ substantially from that pursued by de
Gaulle, though the new president’s temperament and the view of his minister for foreign affairs
[Maurice Schumann] (who did not always see eye to eye with Pompidou) helped to soften its
implementation and to avoid either crises or sensational outbursts.”48
45
Nixon, RN, 385.
46
Intelligence Information Cable, 18 April 1969, Foreign Relations of the United States 1969–
1976, (hereafter FRUS), Volume XLI, Western Europe; NATO, 1969–1972, Document 122.
47
Serge Berstein and Jean-Pierre Rioux, The Pompidou Years, 1969-1974. trans. Christopher
Woodall (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 21; Costigliola,
France and the United States, 162.
48
Berstein and Rioux, The Pompidou Years, 1969-1974, 22. Berstein and Rioux’s monograph
serves as the best overview of foreign and domestic policy during the Pompidou presidency.
156
Pompidou subscribed to de Gaulle’s perspective, if not his approach, about the Vietnam
War as well. While avoiding “outbursts” about the war, Pompidou believed Vietnam had become
less important in the hierarchy of French foreign policy concerns, had doubts about what France
could accomplish by intervening directly, and did not want to reverse the improved state of
relations with the United States.49 During conversations with U.S. officials in 1969 and with
Nixon in February and November 1970, Pompidou raised concerns about the war, but did not
push the U.S. president. After the accidental – but deadly – bombing of the French delegation
general in Hanoi in October 1972, Pompidou also privileged maintaining U.S.-French bilateral
relations over drawing attention to the tragedy in ways that certainly would have played well
among the French domestic audience and for the international community largely opposed to the
war by this time. The French government under Pompidou also provided logistical support for
the secret peace talks between Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho in addition to hosting the
stagnated official talks.
The French foreign policy apparatus did not believe it had betrayed its earlier critical
stance on the war in helping privately or by reining in its public criticism. Henri FromentMeurice, who succeeded Étienne Manac’h as head of the Quai d’Orsay’s Asia-Oceania division
after Manac’h became French ambassador to the People’s Republic of China in 1969, argued that
Pompidou’s approach to Vietnam “didn’t sacrifice our character, our personality, our interests.”50
Nixon and Kissinger appreciated the restraint the Pompidou team exercised, but dismissed
content about the war in conversations as largely supportive. Even with this change in tone,
50
Froment-Meurice quoted in Marianna P. Sullivan, France’s Vietnam Policy: A Study in
French-American Relations (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), 121.
157
presentation, and willingness to help with the secret negotiations, some American diplomats
believed France still slanted far in favor of the North Vietnamese. According to the political
scientist Marianna P. Sullivan, who interviewed nearly sixty U.S. and French policymakers,
aides, and journalists focused on Vietnam War, the United States continued to doubt the French
perspective on the war, with one source telling Sullivan: “The French think they are neutral.”51
Pompidou, Vietnam, and the United States, 1969
Because of the success of Nixon’s visit to Paris in the winter of 1969, the U.S. and
French governments agreed to a reciprocal visit by de Gaulle the following year.52 Kissinger and
U.S. Ambassador to France Sargent Shriver believed it appropriate to extend the offer to
Pompidou as well, and did so shortly after he became president in June 1969. They believed an
early offer that simply substituted Pompidou for de Gaulle was a wise move in order to begin the
discussion and perhaps in part as a way to limit complications similar to those that had developed
surrounding a Lyndon Johnson-de Gaulle summit, however unlikely, in the United States. The
French government accepted the proposed dates for late February by early September.53
Even before his arrival in February, Pompidou discussed Vietnam with high-ranking U.S.
officials. He spoke to Kissinger about Vietnam in August 1969 and to Senator Jacob Javits (R-
51
Sullivan, France’s Vietnam Policy, 121.
52
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, De Gaulle, et al., 2 March 1969, Memcons –
Europe (Feb 23 1969 – Mar 2 1969), Box 447, President’s Trip Files, NSC, RNL ; Dernier
Entretien Entre Le Général de Gaulle et Le President Nixon, Paris, Dimanche 2 Mars 1969 –
12h45 à 13h45, Vol. 36, SG, EM, Reel P17462, MAE.
53
Memorandum of Conversation, Shriver, Kissinger, et al., 27 June 1969, FRUS Volume XLI,
Document 131; Memorandum, Sonnenfeldt to Kissinger, 2 September 1969, Box 675, Country
Files (hereafter CF), Europe – France, Vol. III [Jan. 69 – Oct. 69], Folder 3 of 4, NSC, RNL.
158
NY) in October 1969, when Javits visited Paris while in Europe as a delegate for the North
Atlantic Assembly now in Brussels. On August 4, 1969 Kissinger, Shriver, and National Security
Council staffer Helmut Sonnenfeldt met with Pompidou, his Ministry of Foreign Affairs Officer
Jean-Bernard Raimondi, and French Ambassador to the United States Charles Lucet. The visit
was initially kept secret, even from Shriver and the State Department, because the White House
did not want Kissinger to be pressured to meet with other European leaders and because it
wanted to protect “the special character of Mr. Kissinger’s mission,” a reference to Kissinger’s
initial meeting with Tho in France.54 In addition to the war, the men spoke about China, EastWest relations, Nixon’s trip to Romania to meet President Nicholae Ceausescu, the Middle East,
and Biafra. Pompidou opened conversation by asking Kissinger the extent to which the United
States had reached “a precise and detailed position on Vietnam,” for information that would
provide more detail than the generalities put forth publically.55
Kissinger responded by saying that Vietnam was a very complex issue, but the U.S.
government still had several clear points in mind. First, the United States would not continue to
see up to 200 Americans killed per week in Vietnam while the Paris peace talks made no real
progress. Second, he said he and Nixon were “very much struck” by the fact that several Asian
countries Nixon had recently visited encouraged the United States to avoid disengaging too
rapidly and advised against making any concessions to North Vietnam or the National Liberation
54
Memorandum for the Record, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, 18 July 1969, Box 675, CF, Europe –
France, Vol. III, Folder 3 of 4, NSC, RNL.
55
Memorandum of Conversation, Kissinger, Shriver, et al., 4 August 1969, Box 675, CF, Europe
– France, Vol. III, Folder 3 of 4, NSC, RNL, p. 1; Entretien entre Le President de la Republique
et M. Kissinger, le 4 Aout 1969 SG, EM, Volume 38, Reel P17463, MAE.
159
Front (NLF).56 He singled out Indonesia in particular, curious perhaps given that its military had
murdered upwards of one million alleged Communists and ethnic minorities in recent years.57 He
stressed that in addition to the bombing halt under way since the previous November, the United
States had not sent any new troops to Vietnam; it had begun withdrawing American troops and
would withdraw more in the near future; it had offered to help free elections take place; had
addressed negotiating specifics about the Demilitarized Zone; and sought to adhere to the
Geneva Accords of 1962 even though the United States had begun bombing Laos in March 1969.
Kissinger told Pompidou and his aides that the North Vietnamese and NLF had not budged on
any of these issues, had claimed its negotiating points inviolable, and instead believed that U.S.
public opinion would eventually force Nixon to give in to these points. Before proceeding to the
other topics mentioned above, he closed his characterization of the Nixon administration’s policy
by saying it had “reached the decision that we will not make any other compromises until Hanoi
reveals its willingness to negotiate substantively and in good faith.”58
Pompidou referred to the French experience in Algeria to make his case for continued
withdrawal and negotiations. He suggested that “once a process of disengagement has begun it is
exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to stop.” He also believed that a political settlement
needed to occur regardless of the strength of the non-Communists in South Vietnam. He believed
it was “a question exclusively of the desire of others to get political power and that issue is
56
Memorandum of Conversation, Kissinger, Shriver, et al., 4 August 1969, Box 675, CF, Europe
– France, Vol. III, Folder 3 of 4, NSC, RNL, p. 2.
57
On this point, see Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development
and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008).
58
Memorandum of Conversation, Kissinger, Shriver, et al., 4 August 1969, Box 675, CF, Europe
– France, Vol. III, Folder 3 of 4, NSC, RNL, p. 2.
160
always decided in the country itself.” Kissinger rebutted that the United States could not support
any political solution that would allow North Vietnam and the NLF to work with unorganized
non-Communists, a goal espoused by the NLF, and throw the current regime in Saigon out of
power. It may take three to five years for the political process to evolve in Vietnam, he said, but
the United States would not support that proposed scenario.59
After Kissinger and the French president expressed their optimism about Pompidou’s
upcoming visit to the United States, Pompidou brought Vietnam up again. Here, he offered
French help. He noted a “climate of obscurity and mistrust” between the negotiating parties and
said that if it seemed helpful, France would do “whatever [the United States] asked them to do to
help.” He noted his belief that the problems were political in nature, that it would be wise to
consider the North Vietnamese and NLF as two entities, and thought that France was “well
placed” to help with the negotiations.60
The second round of conversation on Vietnam distinguishes Pompidou’s approach from
de Gaulle’s usual tactics. Both men would lay out their criticisms of the U.S. positions. Both, in
retrospect, understood the reality on the ground better than their American counterparts. Both
had Algeria on their minds. Both recognized the situation for the United States was not an easy
one. Yet de Gaulle often – though not always – seemed content to diagnose the problems,
perhaps bring up the French example in Indochina as well, propose a list of solutions, pass along
potentially useful information, and then resign himself to the likelihood that the United States
59
Memorandum of Conversation, Kissinger, Shriver, et al., 4 August 1969, Box 675, CF, Europe
– France, Vol. III, Folder 3 of 4, NSC, RNL, pp. 3-4; Entretien entre Le President de la
Republique et M. Kissinger, le 4 Aout 1969 SG, EM, Reel P17463, MAE, pp. 7-8.
60
Memorandum of Conversation, Kissinger, Shriver, et al., 4 August 1969, Box 675, CF, Europe
– France, Vol. III, Folder 3 of 4, NSC, RNL, p. 7.
161
would not change course or learn from the French experiences. Indeed, in the spring of 1965, he
predicted the U.S. war would last ten years and dishonor the United States if it did not soon
reverse course, viewing the imminent escalation with what U.S. Ambassador to France
described, in the patronizing parlance of the times, as “oriental fatalism.”61
Pompidou, however, wanted to go one step further than de Gaulle. He volunteered French
help and wanted to use its connections to end the war. He further hoped this willingness to help
would foster improved bilateral relations, and wanted to make sure his opinions on the war did
not create an impasse that would block fruitful discussions on other issues. The United States
took Pompidou up on the offer; he would play a crucial role in facilitating the secret talks
between Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho.62 The bulk of his
proposals about the Vietnam War in 1969, though, did not take with Kissinger.
Pompidou’s meeting with Senator Javits in October further demonstrates his approach to
engaging U.S. officials about the war. Javits hoped to hear Pompidou’s opinions on European
unity and Vietnam and contribute to improving further U.S.-French relations even before
Pompidou’s visit to the United States. Pompidou happily obliged. Clearly, less was at stake for
Pompidou in this discussion, since the Nixon administration sought to avoid Congress at all costs
in its execution of the war. Moreover, Javits opposed the war by the time of the conversation, so
he served as a more sympathetic audience than Kissinger or Nixon. Even as he spoke longer and
more critically than he had with the more powerful albeit unelected Kissinger, Pompidou still
61
Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s
Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012), 713.
62
For more on Pompidou’s role in the secret talks, see Sullivan, France’s Vietnam Policy, 11926 and Pierre Journoud, “La France, cinquième partie aux négociations?” in Pierre Journoud and
Cécile Menétrey-Monchau, eds. Vietnam, 1968-1976: La sortie de guerre (Brussels : Peter Lang,
2011), 187-205.
162
exhibited a level of graciousness toward the United States not found in many of de Gaulle’s
conversations with American officials.63
Pompidou began his comments on Vietnam by explaining he did “not wish to review
unnecessarily the history of Viet Nam,” eschewing the French experience in Southeast Asia. He
said he understood that the United States did not want the role of the world’s policeman and “the
biggest problem now…is for the US to leave Viet Nam with the least damage,” recognizing that
it was “extremely difficult problem” for the United States. He emphasized that he
had always spoken with sympathy of the US predicament even when France was
criticizing the US policy. But, even though he thought that the policy in Vietnam had
been bad for the US and for our allies in Europe and for all of the free world, he had
always been sympathetic to the difficulties that [the United States] [was] facing. His
sympathy could be shown now by the fact that despite all of France’s contacts with North
Vietnam, China, and with Russia, France still supports the US. If the US does in fact take
some clear-cut action to end the conflict, [the United States] can be sure that France
would support her.64
He added that he understood the pressures of public opinion, particularly in light of France’s
Algerian War. He closed somewhat philosophically, by suggesting that in Vietnam, as in
Algeria, “victory…should be looked upon as a victory over oneself, over one’s natural
temptation to try to maintain oneself by military power.”65 Nixon would struggle to overcome
this temptation, as he bombed North Vietnam heavily as late as the Operation Linebacker II
campaign (the so-called “Christmas Bombings”) in late 1972. Either way, Pompidou’s humbler
63
Telegram, Shriver to Department of State, 22 October 1969, Box 674, CF, France – Vol. II
[4/15/69 – 10/23/69], Folder 1 of 1, NSC, RNL.
64
Telegram, Shriver to Department of State, 22 October 1969, Box 674, CF, France – Vol. II
[4/15/69 – 10/23/69], Folder 1 of 1, NSC, RNL, pp. 3-5.
65
Telegram, Shriver to Department of State, 22 October 1969, Box 674, CF, France – Vol. II
[4/15/69 – 10/23/69], Folder 1 of 1, NSC, RNL, p. 5.
163
tone impressed Javits after their hour-long meeting. He believed that Pompidou was “an
extremely impressive, intelligent and shrewd man.”66 In this meeting, Shriver, who also attended,
recognized in Pompidou’s approach one holdover from de Gaulle’s foreign policy-making.
Because Javits also met with now Prime Minister Chaban-Delmas, who was “virtually nonresponsive” about the same topics, Shriver noted that Pompidou “seems completely uninhibited
in speaking for France in foreign relations and leaves his Prime Minister to standard, nonsubstantive reactions.” 67 Thus, it would still be conversations with the French president, even if
far different in tenor and delivery, that would continue to hold the greatest weight in assessing
the true direction of France’s relations with the world.
Pompidou Visits the United States, February–March 1970
When Pompidou’s state visit occurred in late February and early March 1970, he found
himself mired in controversy with the American public and with many U.S. politicians. France
had recently sold over 100 fighter jets to Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, continued to supply
weapons to Algeria and Iraq, and maintained its arms embargo on Israel after its territorial gains
in the Six-Day War of 1967. The U.S. government opposed all of these actions, but Nixon and
Kissinger were determined not to let the disagreement ruin the French president’s visit. Jewish
groups wrote letters to the French government and planned protests in every city on Pompidou’s
itinerary. Pro-Israeli Congressmen and Senators, many still angry with de Gaulle generally and
with his tilt toward the Arab world more specifically, planned to boycott Pompidou’s speech in
66
Telegram, Shriver to Department of State, 22 October 1969, Box 674, CF, France – Vol. II
[4/15/69 – 10/23/69], Folder 1 of 1, NSC, RNL, p. 1.
67
Memorandum for Mr. Kissinger from Arthur Downey, 23 October 1969, Box 674, CF, France
– Vol. II [4/15/69 – 10/23/69], Folder 1 of 1, NSC, RNL, p. 2.
164
the U.S. Capitol. Even Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who had purportedly shouted an antiSemitic remark at Congressman Abraham Ribicoff during the Democratic National Convention
less than two years earlier, sought to score political points by claiming he had promised to eat
dinner with his family the evening of Pompidou’s visit to Chicago. He would later renege on this
pledge, but in another reversal of his 1968 behavior did little to control the protesters who
gathered to confront Pompidou.
Tensions built so high that Pompidou decided to leave the country before the final stop of
his trip, New York City (incidentally, the only American city he had ever visited before). Nixon
“really raged against United States Jews” over the treatment Pompidou received. He decided to
postpone the delivery of jets to Israel and, according to Haldeman, grew “as mad as he’s been”
since his presidency began.68 He convinced Pompidou to stay in the United States and flew to
New York City to attend the dinner boycotted by New York Mayor John Lindsay and Governor
Nelson Rockefeller. In his memoirs, Nixon wrote that his “appearance at the dinner came as a
dramatic surprise, and nothing I said in our many talks over the years on substantive matters did
as much to win Pompidou’s friendship and cooperation as this gesture.”69 Haldeman recorded
that his boss’s gesture “deeply touched and impressed” the French president.70 Be that as it may,
Pompidou vowed never to return to the United States after this experience.
In this tense atmosphere, Nixon and Pompidou did discuss substantive matters in
Washington twice, on February 24 and February 26, 1970. During the morning of February 24,
68
Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries, Entry for 26 February 1970, 132.
69
Nixon, RN, 480; For more on the protests surrounding Pompidou’s visit, see Costigliola,
France and the United States, 166-67.
70
Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries, Entry for 2 March 1970, 133.
165
the two men met with only their interpreters present. They both agreed that smaller meetings
allowed them to speak more freely and avoided the tendency for participants to speak simply for
the record. Echoing de Gaulle’s approach in Paris, Nixon told Pompidou he hoped to speak about
any topic and that he hoped their conversation would further his administration’s goal for U.SFrench relations of “respect for different points of view and of not insisting that both pursue the
same road to arrive at their common goals.” Pompidou agreed, stressing the need to be frank and
clear to work together, and “to avoid opposing one another, without necessarily having identical
views.” In this spirit, they discussed NATO, Franco-American military cooperation, the Soviet
Union, China, French independence in its foreign affairs, and a teletype circuit between the
White House and the Élysee Palace, a gesture of improved Franco-American relations. But they
did not discuss Vietnam.71
On February 26, the two men met again in private. They talked about Vietnam at this
point, in addition to the Arab-Israeli situation and economic and monetary matters. 72 Nixon
expressed confidence that the Vietnamization program would work, but said the United States
would increase the fighting if the North Vietnamese launched an offensive, a line Kissinger
hoped might make its way to Hanoi given the French channels of communication with the North
Vietnamese.73 Nixon told Pompidou that de Gaulle had told him in February 1969 that the
71
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, President Pompidou, et al., 24 February 1970,
FRUS Volume XLI, Document 141.
72
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, President Pompidou, et al., 26 February 1970,
Box 1023, Presidential/HAK MemCons, Folder MemCon – The President, Pompidou, and
General Walters, February 26, 1970, NSC, RNL; Entretien entre Le President de la Republique
et M. Nixon, 26 fevrier 1970, SG, EM, Vol. 41, Reel P17465, MAE.
73
Memorandum for the President from Henry Kissinger, 26 February 1970, Box 916, VIP Visits,
France – Pompidou Visit Feb 70 (1 of 3) [Jan – Jun 70], NSC, RNL, p. 2.
166
United States “ought to get out of a bad deal at once,” like he had in Algeria, even though de
Gaulle had stressed a gradual but planned withdrawal. He greatly respected the advice, but could
not accept it. Nixon played up American credibility by saying it cannot leave Vietnam “in any
way where we would appear humiliated or defeated.” He thought such a move would have major
consequences throughout the world, from encouraging “adventurism” in the Communist world to
discrediting U.S. promises to allies. Most important in his mind, Nixon said, if the war were
ended in any way that could be interpreted as a humiliation, it would usher in an era of American
isolationism and threaten its ability to play a role in all other parts of the world. Thus, he said, he
had to “see this matter through” and he would not accept “a peace of humiliation.” He hoped
Pompidou understood.74
Pompidou praised Nixon’s reversal of the war and said it showed the peaceful aims of the
United States. Still, he thought, these recent actions could not be interpreted as weakness or
humiliation. In fact, Pompidou suggested that Nixon’s personal actions about the war had now
placed the United States in a position of moral strength. This shift, he believed, would not allow
anyone to interpret a peaceful end to the war as imposed or forced upon Nixon.75 Although
clearly sympathetic to the United States, a careful reading of the French president’s brief
comments, which he did not push any further, does counter words Kissinger put in Pompidou’s
mouth about the war in February 1970. Kissinger later wrote that “Pompidou stressed that as
long as America demonstrated its desire to liquidate the war – which in his view we were doing –
74
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, President Pompidou, et al., 26 February 1970,
Box 1023, Presidential/HAK MemCons, Folder MemCon – The President, Pompidou, and
General Walters, February 26, 1970, NSC, RNL, pp. 7-8.
75
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, President Pompidou, et al., 26 February 1970,
Box 1023, Presidential/HAK MemCons, Folder MemCon – The President, Pompidou, and
General Walters, February 26, 1970, NSC, RNL, pp. 7-8.
167
he would not second-guess our tactics. He knew how arduous and time-consuming the process of
disengagement had been for France in Algeria.”76 Kissinger and Nixon both believed that “no
serious problems” with the French existed over Vietnam by this point.77 They were right, but,
again, no more change in policy came from Pompidou’s subtler suggestion about withdrawing
from the position of the moral high ground than from de Gaulle’s proposals inspired more
directly from his Algerian experience.
De Gaulle’s Funeral, November 1970
On November 9, 1970, Charles de Gaulle died at the age of 79. De Gaulle’s last will and
testament expressly forbade a state funeral in favor of a simple service at the parish in his
adopted hometown of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. Nevertheless, a massive memorial service at
the Notre Dame Cathedral took place at the same time as the funeral, allowing foreign leaders to
pay their final respects. De Gaulle’s long-time admirer Nixon was among those to make the trip
to Paris. He told Kissinger that “I rather think the French cynicism will be moved” by his
attendance and efforts to honor the French president.78 Nixon recalled that at the end of the
service, upon hearing the French national anthem “La Marseillaise” playing from Notre Dame’s
organ, he stopped, turned toward the altar, and placed his hand over his heart. His gesture was
76
Kissinger, White House Years, 424.
77
Memorandum for the President from Henry Kissinger, 26 February 1970, Box 916, VIP Visits,
France – Pompidou Visit Feb 70 (1 of 3) [Jan – Jun 70], NSC, RNL, p. 2.
78
Telephone Conversation, The President and Henry Kissinger, 11:00 am, 10 November 1970,
Box 7, Henry Kissinger Telcons, Chronological File, Telephone Conversations 1970, 10-16 Nov,
Folder 6, NSC, RNL.
168
interrupted, however, when another foreign dignitary reached out to greet Nixon, inspiring him
to write that “what might have been a supremely dramatic moment was abruptly lost.”79
Beyond Nixon’s tributes, the spectacle of the service, and the outpouring of solemn emotion seen
in France for de Gaulle, the memorial service offered Nixon and Pompidou their second
opportunity, under difficult circumstances, to discuss the status of the Vietnam War. In preparing
Nixon for his meeting with Pompidou, Kissinger offered a few small points for the president
about the status of peace talks and the slightly improved situation on the ground in Vietnam, but
discouraged the president from raising Vietnam at all if Pompidou did not. Not only did he
believe Pompidou would be preoccupied with the funeral, he also did not think the French had
much to contribute about Vietnam at that moment. Moreover, he did not think it wise to imply
the United States sought French help, noting “The French cannot do anything for us at the time
and we do not want to encourage them to think that we are asking for their help.”80
When Nixon and Pompidou met on November 12, 1970, their conversation began, not
surprisingly, with reflections on de Gaulle and Pompidou’s appreciation on behalf of the French
people for Nixon’s attendance. They spoke at length about Pompidou’s recent trip to the Soviet
Union, which interested Nixon considerably, and discussed the German question briefly.
Contrary to Kissinger’s advice, Nixon did bring up Vietnam, but the topic comprised only a few
sentences of their conversation. Nixon spoke about strengthening South Vietnam while the
79
Nixon, Leaders, 80. Nixon’s appearance at Pompidou’s funeral in April 1974, amidst the
Watergate scandal, did not provide another such inspired moment. Nor did it seem to generate
much appreciation from France. One French official then accused Nixon of having “shamelessly
substituted a publicity campaign for the mourning of an entire nation.” Quoted in David
Greenberg, “Nixon as Statesman: The Failed Campaign,” in Logevall and Preston, eds., Nixon in
the World, 62.
80
Memorandum for the President from Henry Kissinger, 11 November 1970, Box 946, VIP
Visits, Folder De Gaulle Funeral [2 of 2], NSC, RNL, p. 4.
169
United States withdrew and expressed doubts that much would be forthcoming from the public
peace talks. Pompidou’s only contribution to the conversation was to state that he thought the
South Vietnamese elections to be held in the fall of 1971 would be the “really decisive moment,”
to which Nixon concurred. (Ultimately, the incumbent Nguyen Van Thieu would run unopposed,
further enshrining his power in the Republic of Vietnam.) Although the context of their dialogue
did not encourage heated exchange on the war, the tepidity of the conversation, especially in
comparison to the discussion about the Soviet Union, does seem to suggest how far from a
contested topic Vietnam had become, at the presidential-level at least, for the United States and
France by the end of 1970.81
The Susini Incident, October 1972
Throughout 1971 and 1972, Pompidou practiced what the French historian Laurent
Cesari calls “a policy of abstention” toward U.S. policy in Vietnam.82 No event demonstrates this
disengagement more clearly than the President’s response to the death of one of France’s
diplomats in Hanoi from an American bombing raid. On October 11, 1972, four U.S. bombs
inadvertently hit the French Delegation General building in the center of the North Vietnamese
capital as American aircraft aimed for authorized military targets three miles away. Just over a
week later, on October 20, the Delegate General Pierre Susini died as a result of the wounds he
81
Memorandum of Conversation, The President, President Pompidou et al., 12 November 1970,
FRUS Volume XLI, Document 147.
82
Cesari, “Le président Georges Pompidou et la guerre du Vietnam (1969-1974),” in Goscha and
Vaïsse, eds., La Guerre du Vietnam et L’Europe, 1963-1973, 192.
170
sustained from the bombing, as did at least four Vietnamese employees of the French mission.83
Susini was the highest-ranking French representative in North Vietnam and had connections with
important North Vietnamese officials.
Nixon quickly offered his “deep personal regrets” to Pompidou for the injuries and
damages sustained in the bombing and U.S. Ambassador to France Arthur Watson and Secretary
of State William Rogers also provided “regrets” to their counterparts.84 The French government
officially protested the bombing to Watson while Pompidou expressed concern “in the face of
this deplorable act.”85 This comment, made on the day of the bombing, would be Pompidou’s
sole public statement about the Susini incident, however. The Christian Science Monitor
recognized Pompidou’s timidity, writing “It was an accident, of course, that the French legation
got it this time, along with wounds to the person of the French envoy. The President of France
calls the event deplorable. M. Pompidou is charitable to his ally. It is a stupidity – that any
83
Telegram, Department of State to Paris and Saigon, 20 October 1972, Box 2280, POL FRUSSR to POL GABON, Folder POL FR-VIET S 2-4-71, Record Group 59, General Records of
the Department of State (hereafter RG 59), National Archives and Records Administration II,
College Park, Maryland (hereafter NARA II); Telegram, Vientiene to Department of State, 14
October 1972, Box 2280, Folder POL FR-VIET S 2-4-71, RG 59, NARA II; Telegram, Paris to
Department of State 19244, 11 October 1972, Box 2280, Folder POL FR-VIET S 2-4-71, RG 59,
NARA II.
84
Telegram, Department of State to Paris 185196, 11 October 1972, Box 2280, Folder POL FRVIET S 2-4-71, RG 59, NARA II; Telegram, Paris to Department of State 19312, 11 October
1972, Box 2280, Folder POL FR-VIET S 2-4-71, RG 59, NARA II.
85
Telegram, Paris to Department of State 19275, 11 October 1972, Box 2280, Folder POL FRVIET S 2-4-71, RG 59, NARA II; Telegram, Paris to Department of State 19246, 11 October
1972, Box 2280, Folder POL FR-VIET S 2-4-71, RG 59, NARA II.
171
American plan was allowed to drop a bomb on or anywhere near to Hanoi, particularly now that
the city has been largely evacuated and peace talks are at an obviously serious stage.”86
The U.S. embassy in Paris believed that aside from the “sharp protest” lodged with Watson,
French politicians and Foreign Ministry officials mostly took the “general attitude that while
[the] incident is sad, deeply regrettable, and diplomatically embarrassing, it is one of the
accidents of war.”87 Perhaps this is so, and Pompidou wanted to protect his relationship with
Nixon. By the time of Susini’s death, however, other French officials and the French press had
noted the distinction between the “regret” frequently offered by U.S. officials and the “apology”
not forthcoming. 88 And given all the issues that the death of a friendly diplomat in an urban
center could potentially raise about the U.S. war, the question remains: What would de Gaulle
circa 1966 have done?
Conclusion
From 1969 to 1973, the tone of U.S.-French discussions of the Vietnam War changed
dramatically from the earlier tensions of the Johnson administration. Richard Nixon entered the
White House eager to reset Franco-American relations and ready to learn from his foreign policy
hero, Charles de Gaulle. Nixon and Henry Kissinger helped soothe the transatlantic tensions of
the previous decade from their first days in office. Nixon legitimately impressed de Gaulle
86
“The Stupidest Bombs,” Christian Science Monitor, 13 October 1972. Found in Dossier 754,
Rélations avec l’Asie, le proche Orient, et l’Océanie, guerre du Vietnam, Sept. 1972 – Mai 1973,
Série Amerique, 1971-1975, Sous-Série, États-Unis, MAE.
87
Telegram, Paris to Department of State 19498, 13 October 1972, Box 2280, Folder POL FRVIET S 2-4-71, RG 59, NARA II.
88
Telegram, Paris to Department of State 20089, Box 679, CF, Europe – France, Vol. X [Aug 72
– Apr 73], NSC, RNL.
172
during his trip to Paris in the winter of 1969. On Vietnam, however, the increased interest in de
Gaulle’s thinking proved to be a moot point. Neither side budged. De Gaulle suggested a gradual
withdrawal tied to political negotiations, like in Algeria, but Nixon and Kissinger only heard
what they wanted to hear. After Georges Pompidou assumed the presidency in June 1969, the
two men encountered a subtler critic of the war, one who would sympathize with the challenges
facing the United States, appreciated the efforts underway to wind down the war, and who was
willing to help the United States in ways de Gaulle had not been. Yet Pompidou would also
initially question the war’s status, as when Pompidou challenged the straw man Nixon put forth
about “a peace of humiliation.” Over time, Pompidou favored protecting the broader state of
Franco-American relations above all else and nearly stopped pushing back against the United
States about Vietnam entirely, even when one of his own died as a result of the continued
execution of the war.
173
CONCLUSION
On January 27, 1973, the United States, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the
Republic of Vietnam, and the Provisional Revolutionary Government (the PRG represented the
NLF and other southern groups) signed the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace
in Vietnam.1 The Paris Peace Accords, as the agreement is more commonly known, ended direct
U.S. military intervention and initiated a cease-fire, later broken, between North and South
Vietnam. From the time in mid-1950 when President Harry Truman provided the first economic
aid and military advisors to France for its war in Indochina to the signing of the peace accords in
January 1973, over 58,000 American troops and more than a million Vietnamese soldiers and
civilians died as a result of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. From 1950 to 1954, the United
States prompted by its Cold War concerns in Asia supported the unsuccessful French effort to reimpose colonialism in Indochina against a national independence movement led by the Viet
Minh. In July 1954, the Geneva Accords officially ended the First Indochina War and, with it,
French colonial rule. The United States, of course, did not leave Vietnam. From 1954 to 1965,
the United States increased its advisers and aid to South Vietnam to prop up the anti-communist
leader in Saigon, Ngo Dinh Diem, who governed until his assassination by the South Vietnamese
military in a U.S.-supported coup in November 1963. By the spring of 1965, the United States
committed to a sustained bombing campaign of North Vietnam and sent its Marines to the shores
of South Vietnam. Only after six-plus years in country with a force that eventually reached over
1
The full agreement can be found as Appendix C in Pierre Asselin, A Bitter Peace: Washington,
Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press, 2002), 215-16.
174
500,000 troops and a failure to achieve its imprecise goals did the United States end what had
become at the time the longest war in its history.
The question of how to deal with Vietnam created considerable disagreement between the
United States and French governments dating as far back as World War II. This dissertation has
examined the debate during the peak years of American commitment in Vietnam of 1963 to
1973. During this time, Vietnam became the focal point for Charles de Gaulle’s assertion of
France’s independence as a middle power in the bipolar ideological struggle of the Cold War
between the United States and the Soviet Union. De Gaulle’s importance to understanding the
American effort cannot be exaggerated. He had sought to maintain maximum flexibility in
France’s foreign relations and aimed to restore French grandeur through actions such as
developing a French nuclear arsenal, obstructing European integration, recognizing the People’s
Republic of China, and removing France from the integrated military command of NATO. On
Vietnam, he believed he could best enhance France’s standing in the world by serving as a voice
of reason. He saw the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam as an unnecessary and risky venture
that could potentially drag its allies into a larger war that offered no benefit and only danger to
the world. Thus, unlike other American allies such as Great Britain and West Germany, he
refused to endorse the American position that maintaining a non-communist government in
South Vietnam was of vital international importance.
Yet his position was not simply for public consumption. His stance on Vietnam,
moreover, held increased weight due to the French connection with Southeast Asia and its
military defeat there in 1954. Although initially a supporter of the French effort to reclaim
Indochina from international control after the defeat of Japan in 1945, over the following years
de Gaulle, like much of the rest of the world, grew to see colonialism anywhere as an illegitimate
175
venture. In 1958, he became president of the Fifth Republic and ended the French war with
nationalists in its prized possession of Algeria in his first years in office. Through the Algerian
and Indochina experiences he recognized that anticolonial fighters could not be defeated through
military means, no matter the strength of the military. He believed ideology, to him unpersuasive
in explaining international affairs in comparison to the power of nationalism, tainted U.S.
perceptions of the situation in Southeast Asia to such a degree that it could not accurately assess
the factors at play in the region. He did not believe the U.S. national interest was in any way
threatened by a withdrawal of its support for South Vietnam, whatever might occur in its
aftermath. He stressed the dangers of fighting a war to the Americans, sometimes in a
condescending or confrontational manner, in such a “rotten country” as Vietnam. He did so in
earlier private conversations with John F. Kennedy, his discussions with members of Lyndon
Johnson’s foreign policy team, his public statements surrounding escalation in the mid-1960s,
and in his meetings with Richard Nixon near the end of his presidency in 1969. He and his aides
such as Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville called for a political solution to the war,
best pursued through an international gathering much like the Geneva Conference of 1954. De
Gaulle’s most famous commentary on the war, his Phnom Penh speech from September 1966,
laid plain his belief that the United States deserved more blame for the continuation of the
conflict raging in Vietnam than any of the other actors involved. He likewise argued that the
United States held most of the keys to end it.
U.S. officials in the Johnson administration found such accusations offensive, even from
this towering and decisive figure. They talked among themselves about just how far off-base
they believed de Gaulle’s interpretations of the war and, more broadly, the world to be. They
discredited his faith in balance of power politics as one that could not grasp the new realities of
176
the Cold War world and its need for America’s global leadership. He did not understand the
importance of preventing South Vietnam from falling to the Communists. To American
policymakers, de Gaulle’s was a worldview frozen “before the creation,” to paraphrase former
Secretary of State Dean Acheson. They believed his criticisms stemmed from a desire to place
France in a position on the world stage it no longer deserved and often thought that he made his
remarks on Vietnam out of a sense of bitterness for France’s past defeats in Indochina and
elsewhere. They did not take his advice about France’s experience at face value. Undersecretary
of State George Ball tried to combat those who dismissed the relevance of the French example
through their arguments about American military might and the seemingly more altruistic
justification for helping the government in the South. Ball, however, became tired of his ideas
falling on the deaf ears and blind eyes of the likes of Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk
and eventually resigned.
Nonetheless, some Americans broke away from this narrow thinking to work with
sympathetic French officials for secret peace initiatives that aimed to open up broader official
negotiations. The United States used former Foreign Service Officers who had once been
stationed in Saigon to meet the highest-level North Vietnamese diplomat in the West, Mai Van
Bo, then working in Paris. The meetings were only possible because of the efforts of Quai
d’Orsay Asia chief Étienne Manac’h who acted independently of de Gaulle in the XYZ initiative.
In the PENNSYLVANIA initiative, private-citizen Henry Kissinger worked with two French
leftists with connections to Ho Chi Minh to determine more clearly North Vietnamese
convictions about its terms for negotiations. On the U.S. side, the “San Antonio Formula” for
establishing negotiations, which proposed that talks could begin if the North Vietnamese did not
take advantage of any bombing halt enacted, arose from this series of meetings in 1967. Still, the
177
North Vietnamese jettisoned continued conversation after a failure to coordinate military and
diplomatic efforts by the United States resulted in intensive bombings at the same time as the
DRV showed potential interest in pursuing further discussions.
De Gaulle’s understanding of the world found a more receptive audience when selfprofessed Gaullists Nixon and Kissinger took over the White House in 1969. The United States
had by this point begun official negotiations with the North Vietnamese – in Paris, no less – and
planned to wind down the war in the aftermath of the psychological defeat of the Tet Offensive
and the war’s strain on the U.S. economy. Yet on Vietnam, Nixon did not heed de Gaulle’s
advice to create a steady but systematic plan to end the U.S. war effort, as de Gaulle had in
Algeria. De Gaulle stressed that such an approach would not lose Nixon any credibility in the
eyes of the world and would in fact enable him to focus on his desired goal of détente with the
Soviet Union and China. At the same time that Nixon met with de Gaulle in Paris in the winter of
1969, he and Kissinger had been busy planning to expand the war through a secret bombing
campaign of Cambodia and Laos. Nixon and Kissinger brushed aside de Gaulle’s measured
suggestions on Vietnam as ones that called for a hasty, unplanned withdrawal with enormous
consequences for U.S. prestige.
The presidents’ shared views of the world in a more abstract sense did, however, generate
sympathy for one another and executive-level relations improved after the summit. De Gaulle’s
successor Georges Pompidou strived to maintain this more cordial tone in Franco-American
relations after he came to office that June. A critic of the war himself, he nonetheless made
suggestions about the war in ways that seemed supportive and did not ruffle feathers or
jeopardize his effort to collaborate more closely on other issues with the United States. He
prioritized his relationship with Nixon so highly that he avoided confrontation with the president
178
when U.S. bombing destroyed the French diplomatic mission in Hanoi in October 1972 and
killed France’s delegate general stationed there. It is, to be sure, difficult to imagine that Nixon
and Kissinger would have attached much value to a louder protest by Pompidou, whether he
would have done so privately to them or publically to the international community. For even this
late in the war’s supposed de-escalation, the heaviest bombing of North Vietnam of the entire
war still lie ahead in the Operation Linebacker II campaign around Christmas of that year—only
a month before the United States signed the final peace accords.
179
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Unpublished Material
Archival Material – United States
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston, MA
National Security Files
Oral Histories
Papers of William vanden Heuvel
Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, TX
National Security Files
Oral Histories
Richard Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, CA
National Security Council Files
Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA
Papers of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.
National Archives and Records Administration II, College Park, MD
RG 59, General Records of the Department of State
Archival Material – France
Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, La Courveuve, France
Secrétariat Général, Entretiens et Messages
Série Amerique
Centre d’Histoire, Archives d’Histoire Contemporaine, Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Paris, France
Fonds de Maurice Couve de Murville
Published Material
Primary Sources
Documents Diplomatiques Français, 1967, Tome I (1er janvier – 1er juillet). Brussels: Peter
Lang, 2008.
Foreign Relations of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office)
FRUS, 1961-1963
Vol. 4 – Vietnam, August-December 1963
FRUS, 1964-1968
Vol. 1 – Vietnam, 1964
Vol. 3 – Vietnam, June-December 1965
Vol. 6 – Vietnam, January-August 1968
Vol. 12 – Western Europe
Vol. 13 – Western Europe Region
FRUS, 1969-1976
Vol. 41 – Western Europe; NATO, 1969-1972
De Gaulle, Charles. Discours et Messages, t. 5: Vers le Terme, janvier 1966 – avril 1969. Paris:
Plon, 1970.
Herring, George C., ed. The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of
the Pentagon Papers. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1983.
Johnson, Robert David and Kent Germany, eds. The Presidential Recordings: Lyndon B.
Johnson: Toward the Great Society, Vol. 3. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007.
______. eds. The Presidential Recordings: Lyndon B. Johnson: Toward the Great Society, Vol.
4. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007.
Newspapers and Periodicals
Christian Science Monitor
Los Angeles Times
New York Herald Tribune
New York Times
Newsweek
Time
Memoirs
Alphand, Hervé. L’étonnement d’être. Paris: Fayard, 1977.
Ball, George W. The Past Has Another Pattern: Memoirs. New York: Norton, 1982.
Bohlen, Charles E. Witness to History, 1929-1969. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 1973.
Clifford, Clark with Richard Holbrook. Counsel to the President: A Memoir. New York:
Random House, 1991.
Couve de Murville, Maurice. Une Politique Étrangère, 1958-1969. Paris: Plon, 1971.
181
De Gaulle, Charles. The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle, 1940-1946. trans.
Jonathan Griffin. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1964.
______. Memoirs of Hope: Renewal and Endeavor. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971.
Dean, John Gunther. Danger Zones: A Diplomat’s Fight for America’s Interests. Washington,
DC: New Academia Publishing, 2009.
Haldeman, H.R. The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House. New York: G.P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1994.
Johnson, Lyndon B. The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963-1969. 1st ed. New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971.
Katzenbach, Nicholas deB. Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ. New York: W.W.
Norton &Company, 2008.
Kissinger, Henry. White House Years. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979.
Middleton, Drew. Where Has Last July Gone?: Memoirs. New York: Quadrangle/The New York
Times Book Co., 1973.
Nixon, Richard. Leaders: Profiles and Reminiscences of Men Who Have Shaped the Modern
World. New York: Warner Books, 1982.
______. RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978.
Rusk, Dean, Richard Rusk, and Daniel S. Papp. As I Saw it. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990.
Monographs and Edited Collections
Alexandre, Philippe. The Duel: De Gaulle and Pompidou. Boston. Houghton-Mifflin, 1972.
Allen, Michael J. Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam
War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Anderson, David L. Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 19531961. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Asselin, Pierre. A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement
Chapel Hill: NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
______. Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2013.
182
Beisner, Robert L. Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War. Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006.
Berman, Larry. No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam. New York:
Free Press, 2001.
Berstein, Serge and Jean-Pierre Rioux. The Pompidou Years, 1969-1974. trans. Christopher
Woodall. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Bill, James A. George Ball: Behind the Scenes in U.S. Foreign Policy. New Haven Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1997.
Blang, Eugenie. Allies at Odds: America, Europe, and Vietnam, 1961-1968. Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2011).
Blight, James G., janet M. lang, and David A. Welch, eds..Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had
Lived. Latham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010.
Bowie, Robert R. and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an
Enduring Cold War Strategy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Bozo, Frédéric. Two Strategies for Europe: De Gaulle, the United States,and the Atlantic
Alliance. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.
Bradley, Mark Philip. Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam,
1919-1950. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Brands, H. W, ed. The Foreign Policies of Lyndon Johnson: Beyond Vietnam. College Station,
Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 1999.
Bundy, William. A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency. New
York: Hill and Wang, 1998.
Cable, James. The Geneva Conference of 1954 on Indochina. New York: St. Martins, 1986.
Castle, Timothy N. At War in the Shadow of Vietnam: U.S. Military Aid to the Royal Lao
Government, 1955-1975. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Caute, David. Year of the Barricades: A Journey Through 1968. New York: Harper and Row,
1988.
Chapman, Jessica. Cauldron of Resistance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and 1950s
Southern Vietnam. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013.
Cogan, Charles G. Oldest Allies, Guarded Friends: The United States and France since 1940.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994.
183
Cohen, Warren I. and Nancy Bernkopf Tucker. eds. Lyndon Johnson Confronts the World:
American Foreign Policy, 1963-1968. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Connelly, Matthew James. A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the
Origins of the Post-Cold War Era. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Costigliola, Frank. France and the United States: The Cold Alliance since World War II. New
York: Twayne Publishers, 1992.
Creswell, Michael. A Question of Balance: How France and the United States Created Cold War
Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
______. Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Cumings, Bruce. The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 1: Liberation and the Emergence of
Separate Regimes, 1945-1947. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.
______. The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 2: The Roaring of a Cataract, 1947-1950.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Daum, Andreas W., Lloyd C. Gardner, and Wilfried Mausbach, eds. America, the Vietnam War,
and the World :Comparative and International Perspectives. Washington, D.C.: German
Historical Institute, 2003.
Dallek, Robert. Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998.
______. Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007.
Dean, Robert D. Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.
Del Pero, Mario. The Eccentric Realist: Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of American Foreign
Policy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.
Devillers, Philippe, and Jean Lacouture, End of a War: Indochina, 1954. New York: Praeger,
1969.
Ellis, Slyvia. Britain, America, and the Vietnam War. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.
Endy, Christopher. Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France.. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Evans, Martin. Algeria: France’s Undeclared War. Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 2012.
184
Fall, Bernard. Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu. New York: Pall Mall
Press, 1966.
Friedman, Max Paul. Re-thinking Anti-Americanism: The History of an Exceptional Concept in
American Foreign Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Fursenko Alexsandr and Timothy Naftali. “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and
Kennedy, 1958-1964 – The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 1997.
Gaddis, John Lewis. George F. Kennan: An American Life. New York: Penguin Books, 2010.
______. Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy
during the Cold War. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982; revised and
expanded addition, 2005.
______. We Know Now: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997.
Gaiduk, Ilya. The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War. Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1996.
______. Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy Toward the Indochina Conflict. Washington:
Wilson Center Press; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Gardner, Lloyd C. and Ted Gittinger, eds. The Search for Peace in Vietnam, 1964-1968. College
Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004.
______. International Perspectives on Vietnam. College Station: Texas A&M University Press,
1999.
Gavin, Francis J. Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations,
1958-1971. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Goldstein, Gordon M. Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam.
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2008.
Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. 1st ed. New York: Harper &
Row, 1976.
Goscha, Christopher and Maurice Vaïsse, eds. La Guerre du Vietnam et L’Europe, 1963-1973,
Paris: Bruylant, 2003.
Hagopian, Patrick. The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the
Politics of Healing. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009.
Halberstam, David. The Best and The Brightest. New York: Random House, 1972.
185
Hanhimäki, Jussi. The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy. Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Herring, George C. America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975. 4th ed.
Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2002.
______. From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776. Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Hershberg, James G. Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam. Washington, DC and
Stanford, California: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2012.
Hoffman, Elizabeth Cobbs. All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s.
Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Hogan, Michael J. The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western
Europe, 1947-1952. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989
Hogan, Michael J. and Thomas G. Paterson, eds. Explaining the History of American Foreign
Relations. 2nd ed. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Isaacson, Walter. Kissinger: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
Isaacson, Walter and Evan Thomas. The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.
Jackson, Julian. France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944. Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001.
Jacobs, Seth. America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S.
Intervention in Southeast Asia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
______. The Universe Unraveling: American Foreign Policy in Cold War Laos. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2012.
Jervis, Robert. Perception and Misperception in International Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1976.
Jian, Chan. Mao’s China and the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2001.
Johns, Andrew. Vietnam’s Second Front: Domestic Politics, the Republican Party, and the War
Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010.
Journoud, Pierre. De Gaulle et le Vietnam. Tallandier: Paris, 2011.
186
Journoud, Pierre and Cécile Menétrey-Monchau, eds. Vietnam, 1968-1976: La sortie de guerre.
Brussels: Peter Lang, 2011.
Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. New York: Viking Books, 1983; paperback, New York:
Penguin Books, 1984.
Khong, Yuen Foong. Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam
Decisions of 1965. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Kimball, Jeffrey. Nixon’s Vietnam War. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998.
Kissinger, Henry A. The Troubled Partnership: A Re-Appraisal of the Atlantic Alliance. New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1965.
Kraslow, David and Stuart H. Loory. The Secret Search for Peace in Vietnam. New York:
Random House, 1968.
Kurlansky, Mark. 1968: The Year that Rocked the World. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003.
Kuisel, Richard F. Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization. Berkeley, California:
University of California Press, 1993.
Lacouture, Jean. De Gaulle: The Ruler 1945-1970. New York and London: Norton, 1993
Laderman, Scott and Edwin A. Martini, eds. Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and
the Legacies of the Second Indochina War. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.
Latham, Michael E. Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation
Building” in the Kennedy Era. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Lawrence, Mark Atwood. Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War
in Vietnam. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006.
______. The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008.
Lawrence, Mark Atwood and Fredrik Logevall, eds., The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict
and Cold War Crisis .Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Leffler, Melvyn P. For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold
War. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007.
______. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the
Cold War. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992.
187
Leffler Melvyn P. and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, 3 vols.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Logevall, Fredrik. Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in
Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
______. Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New
York: Random House, 2012.
Logevall, Fredrik and Andrew Preston, eds. Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations,
1969-1977. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Lukic, Renéo ed., Conflit et Coopération dans Les Relations Franco-Américaines. Quebec: Les
Presses de L’Université Laval, 2009.
Mahan, Erin R. Kennedy, De Gaulle, and Western Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2002.
Matray, James I. The Reluctant Crusade: American Foreign Policy in Korea, 1941-1950.
Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1985.
May, Ernest R. Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000.
McMahon, Robert J. Dean Acheson and the Creation of an American World Order (Washington,
D.C.: Potomac Books, 2009.
McNamara, Robert S., James G. Blight, and Robert K. Brigham, eds. Argument Without End: In
Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy. New York: PublicAffairs, 1999.
Miller, Edward. Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
Miller, Merle. Lyndon: An Oral Biography. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980.
Morgan, Ted. Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu that Led America into the Vietnam
War. New York: Random House, 2010.
Neustadt, Richard E. and Ernest R. May. Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision
Makers. New York: The Free Press, 1986.
Nguyen, Hang T. Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
Nuenlist, Christian, Anna Locher, and Garret Martin, eds., Globalizing de Gaulle: International
Perspectives on French Foreign Policies, 1958-1969. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,
2010.
188
Osgood, Kenneth. Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and
Abroad. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006.
Palermo, Joseph A. In His Own Right: The Political Odyssey of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Paxton, Robert. Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944. New York: Knopf, 1972,
revised edition New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Paxton, Robert O. and Nicholas Wahl, eds. De Gaulle and the United States: A Centennial
Reappraisal. Oxford; Providence, R.I.: Berg, 1994.
Prados, John. The Sky Would Fall: Operation Vulture: The U.S. Bombing Mission in Indochina,
1954. New York: Dial Press, 1983.
Preston, Andrew. The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Randle, Robert. Geneva 1954: The Settlement of the Indochinese War. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1969.
Reyn, Sebastian. Atlantis Lost: The American Experience with De Gaulle, 1958-1969.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010.
Roger, Philippe. The American Enemy: A Story of French Anti-Americanism. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Ross, Andrew and Kristin Ross, eds. Anti-Americanism. New York: New York University Press,
2004.
Ross, Kristin. May ’68 and Its Afterlives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Roussel, Eric. Charles de Gaulle. Gallimard, 2002.
Schalk, David L. War and the Ivory Tower: Algeria and Vietnam. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991.
Schulzinger, Robert D. A Time for Peace: The Legacy of the Vietnam War. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006.
______. A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997.
______. Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
189
______. U.S. Diplomacy since 1900, 6th ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2008.
Schwartz, Thomas Alan. Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Simpson, Howard. Dien Bien Phu: The Epic Battle America Forgot. Washington: Brassey’s,
1994.
Statler Kathryn C. Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam
Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2007.
Strauss, David. Menace in the West: The Rise of French Anti-Americanism in Modern Times.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978.
Stueck, William. The Korean War: An International History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1995.
Sullivan, Marianna P. France’s Vietnam Policy: A Study in French-American Relations.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978.
Suri, Jeremi. Henry Kissinger and the American Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2007.
______. Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2003.
Tomes, Robert. Apocalypse Then: American Intellectuals and the Vietnam War, 1954-1975. New
York: New York University Press, 1998.
Touraine, Alain. The May Movement, Revolt and Reform: May 1968—the Student Rebellion and
Workers’ Strikes—the Birth of a Social Movement, trans. Leonard F.X. Mayhew. New York:
Random House, 1971.
Vaïsse, Maurice. La Grandeur: Politique Etrangère du Général de Gaulle, 1958-1959. Fayard,
1998.
______. La Puissance ou L’Influence? La France dans le Monde depuis 1958. Paris: Fayard,
2009.
VanDeMark, Brian. Into the Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Vogelgesang, Sandy. The Long Dark Night of the Soul: The American Intellectual Left and the
Vietnam War. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
190
Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our
Times. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. Cleveland and New York:
World Publishing Company, 1959; 50th Anniversary Edition, New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2009.
Windrow, Martin. The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam
(Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004.
Woods, Randall Bennett. LBJ: Architect of American Ambition. New York: Free Press, 2006.
Young, Marilyn B. The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
Zeiler, Thomas W. Dean Rusk: Defending the American Mission Abroad. Wilmington, Del.: SR
Books, 2000.
______. Annihilation: A Global Military History of World War II. Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011.
Zhai, Qiang, China and the Vietnam Wars. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2000.
Articles
Asselin, Pierre. “‘We Don’t Want A Munich’: Hanoi’s Diplomatic Struggle during the American
War, 1965-1968.” Diplomatic History 36, no. 3 (June 2012), 547-81.
Dumbrell, John and Sylvia Ellis. “British Involvement in Vietnam Peace Initiatives, 1966-1967:
Marigolds, Sunflowers, and ‘Kosygin Week.’” Diplomatic History 27, no. 1 (January 2003),
113-149.
Firestone, Bernard J. “Failed Mediation: U Thant, the Johnson Administration, and the Vietnam
War.” Diplomatic History 37, no. 5 (November 2013), 1066-1089.
Keenan, Bethany S. “‘Flattering the Little Sleeping Rooster’: The French Left, de Gaulle, and the
Vietnam War in 1965.” Historical Reflections 37, no. 1 (Spring 2011), 91-106.
Lerner, Mitchell. “‘A Big Tree of Peace and Justice’: The Vice Presidential Travels of Lyndon
Johnson.” Diplomatic History 34, no. 2 (April 2010), 357-393.
Logevall, Fredrik. “Bringing in the ‘Other Side’: New Scholarship on the Vietnam War.”
Journal of Cold War Studies 3, no. 3 (Fall 2001), 77-93.
191
______. “De Gaulle, Neutralization, and American Involvement in Vietnam, 1963-1964.”
Pacific Historical Review 161, no. 1 (Feb. 1992), 69-102.
Logevell, Fredrik and Kenneth Osgood. “The Ghost of Munich: America’s Appeasement
Complex.” World Affairs 173, no. 2 (July/August 2010), 13-26.
Luce, Henry. “The American Century.” reprinted in Diplomatic History 23 no. 2, 159-171.
McMahon, Robert J. “Contested Memory: The Vietnam War and American Society, 19752000.” Diplomatic History 26, no. 2 (Spring 2004), 159-84.
Torikata, Yuko. “Reexamining de Gaulle’s Peace Initiative on the Vietnam War.” Diplomatic
History 32, no. 5 (Nov. 2007), 909-38.
Trachtenberg, Marc. “The French Factor in U.S. Foreign Policy during the NixonPompidou Period, 1969-1974.” Journal of Cold War Studies 13, no. 1 (Winter 2011), 4-59.
Zeiler, Thomas W. “The Diplomatic History Bandwagon: A State of the Field.” Journal of
American History 95, no. 4 (March 2009), 1053-73.
192