The Vietnamese

Historical Setting. According to Edmonds, "Vietnam was no more than a blip on the American ken prior to the closing days of World warfare II" (8). The Vietnamese have had a long history of impedance to foreign [namely, Chinese] invaders. Before the French were finally forced to return Indochina after their defeat by the communist Vietminh at the combat of Dienbienphu, French rule in Indochina (1862-1954) was generally unpopular with Vietnamese because it was oppressive and exploitative.

Indochina as the Cork in the Bottle/ the eye mask Theory (1943-1960). chairperson Franklin Roosevelt opposed the return of French colonial control all over Indochina after the end of World War II. He said in 1943: "France has had that country . . . for close single hundred years, and the people are worse off than they were at the beginning" (Chace 263). Nevertheless, in the 1945-1948 period, the United severalizes acquiesced in French military campaigns to restrain control of Indochina because it deemed French cooperation in Europe to be very much more important than the outcome of the conflict between France and the Vietminh. (The Vietminh took favor of the power vacuum created by the Japanese surrender and declare in September 1945 an independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam or DRV in Hanoi. They were forced into the hills by returning Fren

ch forces). The outbreak of the Korean War and Chinese communistic military intervention in Korea persuaded American Secretary of State Dean Acheson and President Harry Truman that the French war in Indochina was another front in the Western struggle to adjudge Asian and global communism. Between 1950 and 1954, the United States picked up nearly 80 percent of the cost of the French war effort there, roughly $2 billion in aid (Edmonds 11).

Indochina was regarded by the Truman Administration as the 'cork in the bottle,' control of which was critical in preventing the fall of the rest of Southeast Asia with its resources to global communism. As he explained his domino theory to the press on May 7, 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower said: "if someone sets up a row of dominoes, and knocks over the first one . . . it is certain that the last one forget go over very quickly" (Brown 230). However, Eisenhower refused to permit American ground troops or even air strikes to be used to save the French at Dienbienphu. After Vietnam was partitioned into a communist north and non-communist south by the Geneva collection in July 1954, the United States effectively sponsored and subsidized the non-communist South Vietnamese government led by President Ngo Dinh Diem. In referring to Western fears in the 1950s, Gaddis said "in Southeast Asia, then, there was some basis for Western fears of an orchestrated campaign, directed from capital of the Russian Federation and Beijing, aimed at exploiting anti-colonial grievances" (163).

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