Word: minh
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...this is well understood by General Henri Navarre and his hardheaded lieutenants in the war theater. They hold that the best outcome of Geneva would be an agreement by Red China to stop supplying the Viet Minh. Then, they say, "Ho Chi Minh would wither on the vine, like the guerrilla leader Markos in Greece." But what price would the Moscow-Peking axis exact for such a boon? If the enemy offered it at all, the price would be high. To which Paris replies, hopefully, that they detect an "appetite for negotiations" and signs of inner tiredness among the Viet...
Wasted Season. Washington began to be suspicious of this when the French forces failed to take advantage of new U.S. supplies and good weather to launch a major offensive against Communist Leader Ho Chi Minh's forces. Recently the suspicions were confirmed when the French sent an S O S asking for a U.S. commander in Indo-China, along with U.S. air power and ground troops. Immediately the Indo-China problem flew to the top of the agenda of the National Security Council. Last week the President appointed an NSC subcommittee, consisting of Under Secretary of State Walter Bedell...