Word: dienbienphu
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Helluva Thing. If the U.S. got into a war under such conditions, asked one Southeast Asian official with bitter memories of Dienbienphu, "would the marines be prepared to stay in the jungles five, six or ten years?" Admitting that "this is a helluva thing for a military man to say," one of the U.S.'s top soldiers declared himself in favor of "political adjustment" rather than a showdown...
...Khrushchev to propose revival of the international control commission (India, Poland, Canada) that was set up to patrol Laos at the end of the Indo-China war. Khrushchev piously declared he was for it, and added that even better, the Geneva conference (which originally partitioned French Indo-China after Dienbienphu) should be reconvened to consider the whole problem...
...Unmailed Letter. Eden begins by coldly surveying Dulles' self-avowed 1954 "brinkmanship" during the last days of the Indo-China war. Dulles first raised the possibility of U.S. military intervention soon after the siege of Dienbienphu began. He was pessimistic about the French, says Eden, and saw them "inevitably ceasing to be a great power." The U.S. was considering sending air and naval units to help the French, provided that 1) France promised to give the Indo-Chinese states their independence, and 2) Britain and other U.S. allies would support the U.S. The British answer, says Eden...
Eden describes a meeting in Paris shortly before the fall of Dienbienphu, when Dulles handed a letter offering U.S. armed aid in Indo-China to French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault. Dulles asked Bidault to read it and decide whether he wanted it sent to him officially. (The point: if Bidault said no, it would then be legitimate, by diplomatic standards, for all hands to deny that any such offer had been made.) Finally, says Eden, the U.S. considered a naval air strike at Dienbienphu on April 28, 1954, but was deterred by British objections. (Dulles, Eden says, later minimized...
After about an hour of this, the scene shifts to the French Riviera, where the unattended wife meets a tall, straightforward French soldier (Cesare Danova). In his wallet is a seminude picture of her, clipped from a fan magazine; he has carried it from the 38th Parallel to Dienbienphu. He shows it to her and confesses his secret love. She bares her arid heart. They bolt to his clifftop villa...