Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, East Asia and the Pacific, Volume VI

751G.00/8–1850

Memorandum by Mr. Charlton Ogburn, Jr.,¹ to the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Rusk)

secret

[Washington,] August 18, 1950.

Subject: Latest proposals for Indochina

From Embassy Paris’s 845² and 846³ (copies attached), it would appear that the French, who have been telling us every few days for many months that the French Army cannot be expected to fight for Vietnamese independence, have now decided that we should build up a Vietnamese Army to fight for the French Union. This, I grant, is at least a step forward, but it seems to me maddening that the French should remain so uninformed and irresponsible with regard to realities in the Far East. They seem scarcely to have progressed beyond the fatuous state of mind displayed four years ago by Premier Bidault, who, when asked if France were going to grant bases to the United States in the Pacific, retorted that France would in the future as in the past continue to guarantee alone the security of her Pacific possessions.

Over a year ago we drafted a long and carefully reasoned memorandum to the French Foreign Office⁴ patiently explaining that the best that could be expected in Southeast Asia in the future was a community of genuinely independent states which were non-Communist and that any efforts to preserve special French controls in Indochina would lead to just the sort of mess with which we are now confronted. This memorandum was killed by a triple play involving WE, Embassy Paris, and the Secretary, who was then in France, and, in the absence of anyone to express FE’s point of view, was at the mercy of Woodruff Wallner—an exceedingly talented officer but one accustomed to deriding any expressions of concern over the suppression of nationalist movements in Asia as being the result of a preoccupation with the “patter of naked brown feet” (a patter which I should think would by now have drummed its way into the hearing even of people in Paris).

Accepting Embassy Paris’s view that any major alteration in the organic relationships between France and the Indochinese states is impossible of realization within the immediate future and that any United States proposal to France along those lines would be at very least a waste of time, can we not at least make Embassy Paris understand that the French, through their folly (specifically through the failure of a dozen successive French Governments to make any effort to educate the French electorate in the realities of the situation in Indochina), have left us with the choice of the following two ghastly courses of action in Indochina?

1. To wash our hands of the country and allow the Communists to overrun it; or,

2. To continue to pour treasure (and perhaps eventually lives) into a hopeless cause in which the French have already expended about a billion and a half dollars and about fifty thousand lives—and this at a cost of alienating vital segments of Asian public opinion. (Cf, the suspiciousness of many Asians of our motives in Korea and the increasing coolness of the Indonesians to any American connection.)

Merely to point this out to Embassy Paris would of course be a negative accomplishment (though not a wasted one). However, could we not also begin to give the hostile Senators here in Washington an appreciation of the dilemma we have been thrust into, not through our own delinquencies, but through the perversities of the French? As I understand it (and I may well be mistaken) we have been giving the Congressional Foreign Relations Committees an impression that we are confronted with a clear case of Communist aggression in Indochina and that we are meeting it in a hard-hitting, two-fisted manner in a demonstration of positive policy. This is all right in the short run, but is it not sowing the whirlwind?—unless of course we intend when the time comes to commit American ground forces in Indochina and thus throw all Asia to the wolves along with the best chances the free world has.

In this connection—and also in connection with the possibility of our drawing the Asian representatives into closer consultation with us—could we not bring the Asian representatives here into association with our Congressmen? A suggestion was made some time ago that we bring the two sets together at periodic cocktail parties. Something along that line would seem to be an excellent idea. Our worse difficulties with Congress appear to arise from a lack of appreciation in Congress of actualities in Asia—especially with regard to China. I believe some of the abler Asians here could do a more effective job than we in educating Congressmen and relieve us of pressing burdens. We have already seen how effective the technique of the direct approach to Congress can be in the success of the Chinese Nationalists in getting the Generalissimo hung around our neck like an albatross and in the way in which the Indonesians (with remarkable perceptiveness considering their inexperience) aroused Congress to put the heat under us during the second Dutch military action; Senator Brewster⁵ himself proposed cutting off ECA to the Netherlands.

There is no reason why the Asians should not approach Congress in order to help us as well as to circumvent us. The non-Communist Asians are given to warning us that if we do not help them, their position will be undermined and extremists will take over. Could we not use the same argument with them and, even if we cannot provide cocktail parties as a background, encourage them to seek direct means of getting Congress on the right track?

1. Policy information officer, Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs.
2. August 17, p. 859.
3. August 17, p. 860.
4. The memorandum under reference was transmitted to Paris as the enclosure to instruction No. 289, June 6, 1949; for text, see Foreign Relations, 1949, vol. vii, Part 1, pp. 4 ff.
5. Senator Owen Brewster of Maine.