Word: indo
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...Ministers of France gathered one morning last week in the President's Elysée Palace to hear a crucial report from the Minister of Defense, just back from the Indo-China battle fronts. The military situation is not critical, reported René Pleven, but it is discouraging. The French Union forces cannot win decisively over the Communists, but they can keep the Communists from winning. Pleven's recommendation: hold on and try to negotiate an honorable settlement of the Indo-China...
Defense Minister Rene Pleven, who has been heading a fact-finding mission in Indo-China, left Saigon for Paris this week, and the prospect was that his group would recommend cease-fire negotiations with the Viet Minh Communists. Pleven, generally helpful and sympathetic to U.S. strategic aims, warned that the outcome at Geneva is "unpredictable," and he also said that France would go to the meeting "as a great nation without fear and reproaches, which did not want this war but does not surrender to violence and does not abandon her friends...
What can be negotiated in Indo-China? In the U.S. view, little except an abject surrender to the Communists. The country cannot be divided, like Korea, for the Viet Minh forces cannot be shut off by a tourniquet: they are in the blood stream. Moreover, the French hold the two important rice deltas, but the Hanoi delta is in the north and the Mekong delta is in the south, and the French could not give up Hanoi, as they must in any north-south division...
...different sort of deal, if Ho Chi Minh were to get a share in the government, he would soon have all of Indo-China. The U.S. cannot confidently urge free elections in Viet Nam as it did in Korea, for it is not certain whom the Vietnamese would choose if confronted with a choice between Ho and Chief of State...
...press conference, St. Laurent told newsmen that Nehru had informed him in advance of his plan for an immediate cease-fire in Indo-China (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). Then St. Laurent declared, in what appeared to be a friendly, off-the-cuff gesture, that the plan had his complete approval. He would back Nehru's suggestion "without any hesitation or reservation whatsoever...