COLD WAR: Black Days

If the Russians and Chinese want to settle at Geneva for half of Indo-China, there is a good chance that they can have it.

At Geneva this week, the West was preparing a partial surrender to the Communists. Some pleaded that it was only a small surrender, some that it was necessary to avert worse, some that they were helpless to do otherwise. But surrender it was. Under Geneva’s mild sun, the mood of the diplomats was dark; veteran newsmen likened it to Munich in 1938.

The first week of the conference had begun in confusion and concern, with the U.S.’s John Foster Dulles striving manfully to stiffen the backbone of the divided West. He made it clear that he. like Presi dent Eisenhower, viewed Indo-China as “the cork in the bottle,” to be held in place at all costs. Any such compromise settlement as partition of Indo-China, he argued, could only result in ultimate Communist capture of the whole country. Meanwhile, the Chinese Reds showed signs that the prospect of Western military action in Southeast Asia had them worried.

In seven black days, the West’s position totally collapsed. It was destroyed not by the Communists but by the West itself. ¶ Churchill publicly proclaimed that Britain would not lift a finger to save IndoChina until all possibility of making a deal at Geneva had been exhausted. By a deal, the British delegation made clear, they meant partition. ¶In Washington, President Eisenhower talked of a modus vivendi, told his press conference that the West was caught between the unattainable and the unacceptable. The most the U.S. could ask for in Indo-China, he said, was a practical basis for getting along one with the other, something like the U.S. has been doing with the Communists in Berlin and Germany. Whatever the President meant, Geneva read it only one way: Eisenhower was now willing to accept a deal in Indo-China; the U.S. had thrown in its hand.

Disorganized, confused, divided, Western delegations took to blaming their allies. The U.S. delegates bitterly complained that Churchill had let the West down, blamed the weakness of the French government for the crisis, complained about feckless, fun-loving Bao Dai. “It’s hard to say that the Vietnamese are struggling for their independence when their leader spends most of his time at Cannes with a bunch of blondes,” grumbled one.

Plots & Revolts. The British snapped that the U.S. seemed no more willing to intervene than they were, called the U.S.’s eleventh-hour rescue proposals hysterical and impractical, complained that the U.S. had talked tough one day and recoiled from action the next. Bidault was waspish-ly angry, resentful and deeply depressed. Though French opinion flinched at talk of

U.S. intervention as jeopardizing a Geneva peace, Bidault knew that the U.S.’s threat of military action had been the only club in the West’s locker. Now the U.S., like the British, and like the French long ago, had faltered.

Bidault had counted on strong support on either flank from the U.S. and Britain to help bolster his shaky position at home. Last week he brooded about reports that his government would be replaced by a “surrender” Cabinet eager for a settlement from which the French would ask and get nothing but a safe-conduct out of Indo-China. “A Kerensky government is being plotted behind my back,” he told an intimate darkly, “which is prepared to reverse France’s alliances.” He meant the alliance with the U.S., which he considers France’s most valuable asset.

At this unhappy juncture, the Russians sent Soviet Ambassador Sergei Vinogradov on a quiet trip back to Paris—officially to arrange for the visit of a Russian ballet company. Bidault suspected that his real mission was to assess the possibilities of a Cabinet revolt which would sweep stubborn, gallant little Georges Bidault and time-serving old Premier Lan-iel out of office.

The Bystander. The British, who could at least claim that they had urged partition of Indo-China all along, worked at a plan of their own. Once “zonalisa-tion” (as they called it) is achieved, the new frontiers could be guaranteed by a collective-security organization like that Dulles suggested—but with one difference. All or most of the Commonwealth nations in Asia would be included, in particular India, though Nehru was unlikely to agree to any guarantee worth having.

Hopefully, Anthony Eden dispatched messages asking the views of India, Pakistan and Ceylon on such an arrangement.

The U.S., caught in a total collapse of its own hastily laid plans, had no alternative to French-British suggestions; yet it did not want to associate itself with a surrender to the Communists. All the delegation could do was look on from the sidelines, try to give the illusion they were not at Geneva at all—an illusion that Dulles made part reality by flying back to the U.S. this week, after giving over his conference-table place to Under Secretary of State Walter Bedell Smith. “The U.S. is isolated here,” said a Chinese spokesman gleefully. It certainly was no longer in a position to act as the decisive spokesman or leader of the free nations.

The best that could be said for partition was that it might give the Western nations a chance to form a united front—at the price of a deliberate amputation of freedom.

All that could save the West from a humiliating surrender was the Communists themselves. At every sign of Western hesitancy, at every new bulletin from Dienbienphu, their price for peace went up. They no longer talked of partition; they were talking of a coalition government for all Viet Nam. If their demands become too arrogant, even the desperate French might balk. Then the Allies would have little alternative but to pitch in and help the French fight off the Communists to the bloody end.