Word: dienbienphu
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...kept us out of war." Few U.S. voters got the full impact of the words. Twice this year the general in the White House, in agonizingly difficult personal decisions, quite literally kept the U.S. out of a shooting war. In the final weeks before the fall of Dienbienphu and, again, when an invasion of Quemoy Island seemed imminent, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended that the U.S. roll back Communist pressure by bombing every worthwhile military target in Red China. Ike said no, and the course of U.S. policy was turned into other channels. Last week General Eisenhower was again...
...their colonial faults, were fighting an enemy that for all its anticolonial pretensions, was actually and determinedly Communist. By then the hour was late. "We have here a sort of cork in the bottle" said President Eisenhower, of Indo-China Said Vice President Nixon, amid the sullen thunder of Dienbienphu : "If, to avoid further Communist expansion in Asia, we must take the risk of putting our boys in, I think the executive branch has ... to do it." But though the U.S. was spending about $800 million a year in Indo-China by war's end, it kept...
...bound to come when Americans would realize they had been flummoxed, that they had been paying for a regime which had nothing but illusions to sell. Fortunately, it was the French people who reacted first. Last June, after the crushing defeat of Dienbienphu, the French themselves, disgusted by all the years of cowardice and mediocrity, broke with the old methods and brought into power a new man before our friends and allies abandoned...
...Viettri, the exchange point near the Red River. "Where is my staff?" said Christian de Castries. The unpleasant fact was that, in the bitterness of defeat, some senior French officers had refused to go to Viettri on the ground that De Castries' defense tactics at Dienbienphu had been faulty and that he was partly responsible for the fall of the fortress. To reporters, De Castries said that he had never run up a white flag, even when Dienbienphu was overrun. After his capture, he had no water during the first four days and was kept in isolation, guarded...
...Communist takeover. As he embraced Cogny, De Castries burst into tears. "Excuse me," he said. "It's foolish, but I cannot control my emotion." Then Cogny, also visibly moved, whisked the returned hero off to the villa that De Castries had lived in before he went to Dienbienphu...