273. Letter From the British Foreign Secretary (Macmillan) to the Secretary of State1
Dear Foster: Mr. Molotov called on me, at his own request, on November 4, and spoke about Vietnam, and particularly the message addressed to him and to myself by Mr. Chou En-lai on October 31. The text of this message has already been communicated to your Government, as well as to the remaining Members of the Geneva Conference and the three Supervisory Powers, but I enclose another copy for ease of reference.2 Mr. Molotov and I are to meet again on November 10, having agreed that we could not have any useful discussion before the Chinese message had been circulated.
Mr. Molotov and I discussed Vietnam in New York at the end of September and I then suggested that Mr. Diem must be allowed to consolidate his own internal position before he could be expected to move towards elections of the kind envisaged by the Geneva Agreements. On November 4 Mr. Molotov pointed out that Mr. Diem had still made no such move.
At our meeting on November 10, Mr. Molotov may bring up, in addition to Mr. Chou En-lai’s letter, the Fourth Interim Report of the International Supervisory Commission for Vietnam. Copies of this [Page 577] will eventually be communicated to your Government in the usual way, but I enclose one for your confidential advance information.3 It is severely critical of the Vietnamese attitude towards the Geneva Agreements and in paragraph 45 calls for action by the two Co-Chairmen. A similar suggestion, you will remember, was made some time ago by the Government of India. On top of all this, Vietminh and Chinese propaganda about the Vietnamese evasion of the Geneva Agreements has recently increased and sharpened, while Mr. Diem continues to refuse the least gesture towards compliance. It looks as though the Communists are not prepared to acquiesce in our stalling tactics for much longer.
I have certain suggestions for dealing with Mr. Molotov’s likely criticisms which I should like to discuss with you and Monsieur Pinay beforehand.4 I have it in mind to confine discussion to the Chinese message and the commission’s report. If I cannot persuade Mr. Molotov that discussion of Mr. Chou En-lai’s message should be deferred until all Members of the Conference have commented, I shall make use of such comment as I have received and point out for myself that the Chinese are wrong in suggesting that the Geneva Agreements require a consultative conference. Only “consultations” are specified and these can as well take place by exchange of messages as across a table. I might suggest that the Vietminh should respond to the recent Vietnamese message which reaffirmed their adherence to the principle of unification by elections, provided the elections are genuinely free and democratic;5 let the Vietminh now put forward concrete proposals to this end. As the Chinese message says, the object of the consultations specified by the Geneva Agreements is to reach agreement on this point.
On the Fourth Interim Report I should like to take the initiative, in the hope that my anodyne proposals may forestall—as in the case of the Vietminh message of August 17—Soviet pressure for more drastic and embarrassing action. For this purpose I would propose to Mr. Molotov that the two of us, as Co-Chairmen, should transmit the enclosed message to Members of the Geneva Conference and to [Page 578] the three Supervisory Powers.6 I do not know whether Mr. Molotov will let me get away with this, but, if he does, it may help with the Indian Government and British public opinion.
Of course, if Mr. Molotov presses me too hard on Vietnam, I shall tackle him on Laos and point out that his friends are even more in the wrong there than ours in Vietnam.
If there is anything in this that you do not agree with or if you can suggest anything else I might say to Mr. Molotov, I hope you will let me have your views as soon as possible.
I am sending a similar letter to Monsieur Pinay.
Yours,
- Source: Department of State, Central Files, 751G.00/11–955. Confidential. Both Dulles and Macmillan were at the Foreign Ministers Conference at Geneva.↩
- Not found attached. A text of Chou En-lai’s letter to the Geneva cochairmen is in Tosec 189 to Geneva, November 7. In this letter Chou stated that the DRV had made numerous efforts to implement the provisions of the Geneva Accords calling for free elections, but was rebuffed by Ngo Dinh Diem’s government’s refusal, openly supported by the United States, to hold consultations on the issue. Chou went on to charge that Diem was in fact bound by the Geneva Agreements as a successor government to the French who signed on behalf of South Vietnam. Finally, Chou argued that Diem’s statement that conditions in North Vietnam precluded consultations was untenable because those conditions were precisely what should be discussed at the consultative conference. (Ibid., FE/SEA Files: Lot 58 D 266, Vietnam—Geneva, Nov. 1955)↩
- Not found attached. For text, see Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers by Command, “Fourth Interim Report of the International Commission for Supervision and Control in Vietnam, April 11, 1955–August 10, 1955”. (London, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, Cmd. 9654, 1955)↩
- For a report of that discussion, see Secto 279, infra.↩
- The reference apparently is to a letter from South Vietnamese Foreign Minister Vu Van Mau, October 7, to Macmillan in which Mau reiterated the Republic of Vietnam position on consultations and elections as stated in its declarations of July 16 and August 9. (Telegram 1564, October 6; Department of State, Central Files, 751G.00/10–655; see also Cameron, Viet Nam Crisis, vol. I, p. 415, footnote 8)↩
- This proposed reply was attached to a copy of the Macmillan letter to Dulles in Department of State, FE/SEA Files: Lot 58 D 266, Vietnam—Geneva, Nov. 1955. In it the Geneva cochairmen “noted with concern” the references in the Fourth Interim Report of the ICC to inadequate cooperation received from authorities in both zones and expressed the hope that the authorities in the north and south would take steps to ensure full cooperation with the ICC in the future.↩