Conclusion

The French consul in Da Nang, Jacques Boizet, took a trip to the DMZ late in the winter of 1962. An experienced Asia hand who had grown as cynical of the Kennedy administration’s war effort as most of his French colleagues by this point, Boizet often shared with Roger Lalouette blindingly simple observations, usually delivered with literary panache, in a format that no American Foreign Service officer would have dared submit to his superior. Boizet’s journey north to the frontier took him to an old colonial-era bridge on the Ben Hai River that served as a border crossing between the Vietnams. Different flags flew on opposite sides of the river, surrounded by obligatory signs denouncing the regime that controlled the other half of the country. Officials had gone so far as to mark every last centimeter of their territory by painting their zone of control on the bridge in the proper national color, red for the communist northern section and green for the southern noncommunist span, just as one would expect on the front line of a Cold War divide....

Making the Best of It

This chapter covers the period from the end of the Franco-American summit in June 1961 to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. During this juncture the policy dispute over Vietnam was neither the biggest stumbling block in the Franco-American relationship nor one that had come out into the open, but it certainly was a festering source of mutual dissatisfaction. The White House, increasingly annoyed with French “obstructionism” and unable to see beyond a perception that de Gaulle harbored wartime grudges with the “Anglo-Saxons” and was reflexively anti-American, expected little from another presidential tete-à-tete and constantly rebuffed French efforts to restore some civility. Voices in the American bureaucracy moderately sympathetic to French aims were either removed or marginalized and the American embassy in Saigon emerged as a particularly hostile voice against French policy in Vietnam. The hardening of American policy toward France grew to the point that Kennedy privately admitted in mid-1962 that he had completely given up on finding any common ground with de Gaulle. Distrustful of French motives, the administration dismissed evidence of growing French influence on both sides of the 17th parallel and signs that de Gaulle actually had the high-level connections necessary to begin negotiating a solution to the war.

Drinking Sour Wine

This chapter examines how the Kennedy-de Gaulle disagreement over Vietnam was exacerbated by fundamental disagreements over the nature of the Atlantic alliance and tolerance for neutral regimes outside the bloc system. Their dispute over Vietnam began at the spring 1961 summit as a clash of perception, but the Kennedy administration quickly retreated into clichéd views of de Gaulle to dismiss the French position rather than undertake the awkward, difficult task of questioning the assumptions that brought the United States to Vietnam. At the summit, Kennedy made a strong case that there were legitimate strategic concerns that focused his attention on South Vietnam and that a Western defeat there would do great damage to America’s global prestige. De Gaulle emphasized the region’s unsuitability for a military confrontation with the communists and its peripheral importance to the Cold War. What separated the two presidents at this point was de Gaulle’s preference for a low-risk diplomatic course of action that acknowledged the possibility—which he believed to be small—of strategic defeat, while Kennedy was willing to gamble on an idealistic, maximum effort campaign to forestall a communist victory.

Building the Perfect Candidate

This chapter explores Kennedy’s pre-presidential political career. By the end of World War II he had emerged as a well-connected Harvard graduate, author of a popular book, a decorated navy veteran of the Pacific War, and a budding young journalist with the Hearst chain. His political career began in 1946 when he was elected Representative for Massachusetts’s 11th Congressional District. In 1952 he was elected to the Senate, where he gained a reputation for sharp anti-colonial rhetoric that often targeted French policy. Throughout his pre-presidential political career, from 1946 to 1960, Kennedy’s most biting commentary was consistently reserved for the French in Vietnam and later Algeria. While Britain had negotiated its way out of India and later ran a successful counterinsurgency campaign against communist Malayan rebels, Kennedy worried openly that French colonial rule would drive the most rebellious of the Fourth Republic’s subjects toward the Sino-Soviet camp. Early postwar decolonization cemented Kennedy’s perception that the British were clear thinkers with long-term vision, while the French by contrast were characterized by a toxic mixture of short-sightedness, stubbornness, and indifference to the collective interests of the West.

Ignoring Nosey Charlie

This chapter surveys transformations in the international system from the summer of 1962 to Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963. In Vietnam, the Diem regime’s bloody repression of Buddhists and student protesters in mid-1963 sparked American revulsion and widespread distaste for the Kennedy administration’s wayward client state. As the situation in South Vietnam grew increasingly tumultuous, American embassy telegraphs out of Saigon revealed a profound distrust of French motives. The administration fixated on the notion that Roger Lalouette, the French ambassador, was plotting with the president’s brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, to arrange a cease-fire with the Viet Cong and potentially secure a reunification deal with the North in exchange for the removal of American forces. Lalouette was indeed working with Nhu, but he was trying to hammer out a deal that would give the Kennedy administration a “peace with honor” and an opportunity to exit the country before the situation spiraled out of control. The Kennedy administration was unable to accept that French efforts to foster North-South dialogue were the logical byproduct of a long-standing regional peace policy, interpreting Lalouette’s actions instead as part of a sinister Gaullist conspiracy to drive Americans out of Southeast Asia.