Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 by James S. Olson, Randy W. Roberts Page A
Authors: James S. Olson, Randy W. Roberts
Tags: United States, Asia, History, European, Ebook, Politics & Social Sciences, Social Sciences, Military, 20th Century, Europe, Political Science, Vietnam War, Southeast Asia, International Relations, World, Asian, Politics & Government, Americas, International & World Politics, Modern (16th-21st Centuries), Humanities
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and economic assistance to Greece and Turkey in the fight against leftist-backed guerrillas. The fall of Greece and Turkey, Truman argued, would threaten all the eastern Mediterranean and the Mideast. To save Western Europe, Truman launched the Marshall Plan in 1948, a $12.6 billion program of American economic assistance.
Three events in 1949 elevated anticommunism in the United States from fear to paranoia. In 1948, hoping to starve West Berlin into surrender, the Soviet Union had blocked the highway from West Germany to West Berlin. Truman responded with the Berlin Airlift, an unprecedented daily resupply of a city of two million people. Tension escalated well into 1949 until Moscow backed down. When the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb in 1949, a wave of fear swept throughout the United States. Finally, at the end of 1949, Mao Zedong and the Chinese communists drove Jiang Jieshi and the Chinese nationalists off the mainland out to the island of Taiwan.
Many Americans were convinced that an international communist conspiracy was set to take over the world from Moscow. Whenever communists caused any trouble anywhere, the Truman administration blamed Moscow. Late in 1948 the Republican Congressman Richard M. Nixon of California accused Alger Hiss, a Democrat and former State Department official, of being a communist. The trial, which resulted in Hiss’s conviction for perjury, generated headlines throughout much of 1949. Early in 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, charged that 205 communists were working in the State Department. Congress passed the Internal Security Act in September 1950 requiring registration of communist and communist-front organizations. Communist subversives seemed to be everywhere.
Ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pronouncements on the inherent problems of French imperialism, prominent Americans had at least been able to recognize the existence of Vietnamese nationalism.
But as the fear of communism increased, they subsumed the country’s nationalism under Ho Chi Minh’s communism, which they believed tied him inextricably to the Soviet conspiracy. They had no idea of the extent of Ho’s political independence.
A few people expressed a different point of view. In Paris, General Leclerc repeated his conviction that “anti-communism will be a useless tool unless the problem of nationalism is resolved” Raymond Fosdick, a State Department expert on Asia, claimed that whether “the French like it or not, independence is coming to Indochina. Why, therefore, do we tie ourselves to the tail of their battered kite?” But Leclerc and Fosdick were lonely voices. Far more typical was Dean Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state. In 1949 Acheson remarked that whether “Ho Chi Minh is as much nationalist as Commie is irrelevant . . . . All Stalinists in colonial areas are nationalists”
Out of that fear of Indochinese communism emerged the “domino theory,” the belief that the fall of one country to communism would topple the next, as though in a row of dominos. For a time in the 1950s and early 1960s, it was central to the way Americans interpreted the world. It appeared as if the whole free world depended on the survival of French Indochina. If Ho Chi Minh succeeded in conquering Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin China, Laos and Cambodia would succumb; then Thailand and Burma, Pakistan and India. Afghanistan, Iran, and the rest of the Middle East were sure to follow. Next communism would infect North Africa and the entire Mediterranean.
The dominos could fall in either direction. On September 20, 1951, during a visit to Washington, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the commander in chief of French Indochina, described a chain of dominoes reaching from Tonkin to Europe: “Once Tonkging [sic] is lost, there is really no barrier before Suez . . . . The loss of Asia would mean the end of Islam, which has two-thirds of its faithful in
Three events in 1949 elevated anticommunism in the United States from fear to paranoia. In 1948, hoping to starve West Berlin into surrender, the Soviet Union had blocked the highway from West Germany to West Berlin. Truman responded with the Berlin Airlift, an unprecedented daily resupply of a city of two million people. Tension escalated well into 1949 until Moscow backed down. When the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb in 1949, a wave of fear swept throughout the United States. Finally, at the end of 1949, Mao Zedong and the Chinese communists drove Jiang Jieshi and the Chinese nationalists off the mainland out to the island of Taiwan.
Many Americans were convinced that an international communist conspiracy was set to take over the world from Moscow. Whenever communists caused any trouble anywhere, the Truman administration blamed Moscow. Late in 1948 the Republican Congressman Richard M. Nixon of California accused Alger Hiss, a Democrat and former State Department official, of being a communist. The trial, which resulted in Hiss’s conviction for perjury, generated headlines throughout much of 1949. Early in 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, charged that 205 communists were working in the State Department. Congress passed the Internal Security Act in September 1950 requiring registration of communist and communist-front organizations. Communist subversives seemed to be everywhere.
Ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pronouncements on the inherent problems of French imperialism, prominent Americans had at least been able to recognize the existence of Vietnamese nationalism.
But as the fear of communism increased, they subsumed the country’s nationalism under Ho Chi Minh’s communism, which they believed tied him inextricably to the Soviet conspiracy. They had no idea of the extent of Ho’s political independence.
A few people expressed a different point of view. In Paris, General Leclerc repeated his conviction that “anti-communism will be a useless tool unless the problem of nationalism is resolved” Raymond Fosdick, a State Department expert on Asia, claimed that whether “the French like it or not, independence is coming to Indochina. Why, therefore, do we tie ourselves to the tail of their battered kite?” But Leclerc and Fosdick were lonely voices. Far more typical was Dean Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state. In 1949 Acheson remarked that whether “Ho Chi Minh is as much nationalist as Commie is irrelevant . . . . All Stalinists in colonial areas are nationalists”
Out of that fear of Indochinese communism emerged the “domino theory,” the belief that the fall of one country to communism would topple the next, as though in a row of dominos. For a time in the 1950s and early 1960s, it was central to the way Americans interpreted the world. It appeared as if the whole free world depended on the survival of French Indochina. If Ho Chi Minh succeeded in conquering Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin China, Laos and Cambodia would succumb; then Thailand and Burma, Pakistan and India. Afghanistan, Iran, and the rest of the Middle East were sure to follow. Next communism would infect North Africa and the entire Mediterranean.
The dominos could fall in either direction. On September 20, 1951, during a visit to Washington, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the commander in chief of French Indochina, described a chain of dominoes reaching from Tonkin to Europe: “Once Tonkging [sic] is lost, there is really no barrier before Suez . . . . The loss of Asia would mean the end of Islam, which has two-thirds of its faithful in
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