Free American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity by Christian G. Appy

United States in a last-ditch effort to save the French in Indochina. At the time, French forces were desperately under siege at Dien Bien Phu. America was already paying 78 percent of the cost of France’s failing war, but the Communist-led Viet Minh were winning their anticolonial struggle nonetheless. Eisenhower was thinking of ordering air strikes against the Viet Minh—but he wanted Churchill’s support. In a letter to the prime minister, he suggested that standing by while France lost Indochina would be akin to sleeping while Fascism advanced: “ We failed to halt Hirohito , Mussolini and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time. That marked the beginning of many years of stark tragedy and desperate peril. May it not be that our nations have learned something from that lesson?”
    One might have expected Churchill to buy the Hitler–Viet Minh connection. After all, in 1946, at a Missouri college, Churchill had famously denounced the Soviet Union for expanding its control into Eastern Europe and sealing it off with an “iron curtain.” Communism, he warned, presented the same threat of conquest posed by Hitler: “ We must not let it happen again .” But to Churchill in 1954, the peace talks in Geneva were not like the 1938 talks in Munich. Global security did not require saving a French colony, even to the Communists. The Viet Minh were not a Hitler-like threat.
    A few days after Eisenhower’s failed attempt to persuade Churchill, the president explained the domino theory to journalists. A loss of Indochina to Communist rebels, he claimed, would inevitably lead to the loss of all of Southeast Asia: “ You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.” The domino theory grew directly out of the “Munich analogy.” Aggressors like Hitler want to conquer the world and unless that aggression is opposed, one country after another will fall under their sway.
    Congress wasn’t buying it any more than Churchill, at least not as a convincing justification to escalate U.S. support for France in a war many believed was doomed. On April 6, 1954, for example, Senator John Kennedy spoke against U.S. military intervention:
    The time has come for the American people to be told the blunt truth about Indochina. . . . [T]o pour money, materiel, and men into the jungles of Indochina without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile and self-destructive. . . . I am frankly of the belief that no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere . . . [and] which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.
    And the American people weren’t buying it. A Gallup poll in April 1954 found that 68 percent opposed direct U.S. military intervention to support the French. In Illinois, an American Legion division with 78,000 members passed a resolution demanding that the government “refrain from dispatching any of its Armed Forces to participate as combatants in the fighting in Indochina.”
    American resistance stemmed in large part from the recent experience of the Korean War. That stalemated and costly war had just ended the previous fall, leaving 33,000 Americans dead. There was little public protest against the Korean War, but opinion polls indicated widespread disillusionment. Throughout most of the war, 40–50 percent of Americans said their country had made a mistake “going into war in Korea.” That level of opposition is especially remarkable since it coincided with the heyday of McCarthyism—an era in which all forms of dissent were routinely branded “un-American.”
    The Korean War was disillusioning even to the military brass. Although the initial goal of containing North Korea at the 38th parallel was achieved, the United States soon embarked on a much more ambitious mission. A few months into the war