The Lincoln Plawg

Archives

Check out the main Lincoln Plawg

Monday, February 10, 2003 09:38 p.m.

The last time they stopped a crazy Republican war.....

Case very much in point: last September, in moderate dudgeon over some piece of unwarranted Euro-bashing (God knows there's enough potential for the other variety!), I mentioned the fateful meeting of Congressional leaders (including Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson) with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CJCS Admiral Arthur W Radford on Saturday, April 3 1954. (It's the date plus Johnson's name that compute only with my piece.)

What it was about (in the broadest of detail - a layman's treatment, of course) was this: the French were fighting a war in their colonies in Indo-China, largely financed by the US since the fall of Nationalist China in 1949, against the Viet Minh; the latest of a string of French commanders, General Henri Navarre, developed the Navarre Plan, the gem of which was that the Communists should be offered a target tempting enough to make them try a full-on assault. The fortress of Dien Bien Phu was accordingly set up in the middle of nowhere, to the strains (as it were) of Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough [1].

The Viet Minh, under the redoubtable General Giap, did, and were [2].

Amazingly, it appears that this plan had been endorsed by the US Joint Chiefs. And it was only natural that, when the French got into trouble, they should call on their patron's assistance.

By April 3 1954, it seems that both Dulles and Eisenhower were ready to sent carrier-based fighter-bombers to give close air support to the beleaguered DBP garrison. Radford was the only member of the JCS to concur with this intervention [3].

The meeting, as Roberts has it, turned on LBJ's eliciting from Dulles (who was after a Joint Resolution supporting the air support plan) that he'd made no approaches to allied governments for backing for the plan. (LBJ apparently quoted Korea as a cautionary example where the US had ended up carrying the vast preponderance of the burden in men and treasure.)

By the end, all the leaders had come to the conclusion that the Administration had better find some allies fast. And, naturally, it was to the UK that Dulles turned first, in the person of Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden.

Whose answer, in the vernacular, was I should coco. The inherent lunacy of the scheme may have had less to do with his refusal to go along than the fact that it placed in jeopardy his very own diplomatic finest hour, the Geneva Conference, which was to be (in Eden's overactive imagination) Locarno Redux.

Prime Minister Churchill (who evidently held Eden in great and long-standing contempt, though he'd long made known that the man was his chosen successor as Tory leader) failed this time to embarrass his sidekick. No meant no.

DBP fell, Geneva was fudged, and the US thereby given (in the fullness of time) another opportunity to intervene in Indo-China.

The staggering point (if, indeed, it's correct) is that the same pair who had extricated the US from the Korean quagmire; and who were (rightly) scathing about the lunatic Anglo-French plans to regain control of the Suez Canal two years later or so; were in April 1954 fully prepared to commit US servicemen to an Asian war that was 99% lost already.

Only the unlikely pairing of Johnson and Eden seems to have stood in their way. And yet they were effective in killing the nonsensical scheme stone dead.

(In comparison, during the slow build-up to large-scale deployments of combat troops (through 1964 and the early part of 1965), considerable Congressional misgivings, from senior men like Sen Richard Russell (D-GA) and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT), remained as ineffective grumblings (as recorded on LBJ's famous tapes, of course).)

One (albeit tentative and analogy-free) conclusion to be drawn from the events of April 3 1954 is that it's possible for events to conspire against war, as well as to bring war on; another is that help in aid of such a conspiracy may come from the most unlikely of places (I don't think that LBJ was held to be much of a foreign policy expert at the time).

A third is that a steady, reliable man of great expertise in his field may on occasion go completely doolally.

The same guy who gave the sane and sober military-industrial complex speech at the end of his final term in office, pleased to have survived nuclear confrontation with the USSR, and warning his country not to push its luck.

The Republican succeeded by the Democrat who pledged his people (without their permission) to pay any price to oppose any foe.......

1. An chant familiar to English soccer hooligans.

2. From the briefest of researches, there's less of substance online on the period than one might imagine: the first volume (or most of it) of the Pentagon Papers is available here (an intermediate directory - it's the large HTML 'pent' files you're looking for), which covers the period (at least) up to the early years of Ngo Dinh Diem.

   For April 3 itself, my source - no pretensions to authoritativeness! - is an article by September 1954 article by Chalmers M Roberts, reprinted in the 1965 Penguin Special Vietnam (pp103-112)

3. Was it his plan, or just one he'd adopted?