Dulles petulantly declined to attend the first meetings of the final session of the Geneva conference on 10 July. He regarded the deal under discussion as representing a surrender comparably odious and craven to that of the 1930s to the fascists: it would likely prove a mere way-station towards a communist takeover of all Vietnam. This, after the US had expended $2.5 billion on funding the anti-communist war effort, more than France itself had received in economic aid since 1945. Meanwhile Mendès-France had not troubled to inform Bao Dai about the progress of negotiations. In Saigon the newly-installed prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem, still resisted partition, even when the US ambassador urged him to accept that half a country was preferable to none. Diem instructed his foreign minister in Geneva to pursue the fantasy of keeping Hanoi and Haiphong under Saigon’s rule – here was a foretaste of his later rejections of unwelcome realities. He insisted upon placing on record his government’s view, that partition ignored ‘the unanimous desire of the Vietnamese people for national unity’.
On 16 July deputy secretary of state Bedell Smith arrived in Geneva to lend a reluctant American presence. Under instructions, however, he took no part in the horse-trading now conducted through a tense round of bilateral and ad-hoc meetings. Two days later the foreign ministers agreed that the proposed ceasefire would be supervised by an international control commission composed of Indians, Canadians and Poles. On 20 July a partition was agreed between the French and the Vietminh close to the 17th Parallel, which gave the new South Vietnam a short, defensible border with the North. This partition ‘would be provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary’. All Vietnamese were granted a three-hundred-day grace period in which to decide under which regime they would henceforth live, with a guaranteed freedom of movement northward or southward. General elections would be held within two years. Both Vietnams would join Laos and Cambodia as avowed neutral states. The French would go home.
There were two main documents constituting the Geneva Accords. The Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities was signed on 21 July 1954 by the French and the North Vietnamese. The Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference was verbally endorsed by the French, the British, the Chinese and the Russians. Dulles issued a statement emphasising his nation’s special interest in the fate of the newborn twins: he warned that any violation of the deal’s terms would be ‘a matter of grave concern and seriously threaten international peace and security’. Everyone involved save the Americans gave credit to Anthony Eden for his performance as co-chairman, through many weeks when the talks seemed doomed to fail. An eyewitness wrote of his ‘almost inhuman good humour and patience’: this was the finest hour of the career as a statesman of the brilliant, unstable, absurdly handsome British foreign secretary.
The Geneva Accords, as they became known, merely settled terms of truce between the departing French colonialists and the communists who were to assume governance of the North. Therein lay the basis for the later insistence of both Washington and Saigon that refusal to conduct national elections within the specified two-year time frame was no breach of anything to which either had consented. Many people around the world quickly understood that though the outcome of Geneva was distasteful, nothing more palatable was on offer. The Spectator editorialised on 23 July: ‘This is a bad peace. It is almost certainly the best peace that could, in the circumstances, be obtained.’ The magazine went on to speculate that the communist bloc had curbed its demands because of fears roused by Washington’s sabre-rattling. ‘It would seem to follow that the United States, with its wild, ugly and undisciplined grimaces, has nevertheless indirectly contributed to the conclusion of peace.’
Eisenhower and Dulles thereafter invested the new semi-nation with a legitimacy and importance rooted in the need to calm their Republican constituency at home, and to restore the administration’s self-esteem after failing to save the North. South Vietnam, said the secretary of state, might yet prosper ‘free of the taint of French colonialism’, through the instrumentality of Ngo Dinh Diem, a figure whom Washington embraced with an enthusiasm that was somewhat startling, given that the Americans knew little of him. The British saw matters differently: they had consistently refused to associate themselves with engagement in Indochina, because they saw no vital interest at stake there. They believed the West had its hands full confronting the Soviets in Europe. Meanwhile the Russians and Chinese were reflexively willing to provide some assistance to North Vietnam, now a fellow-socialist state. They would be gratified if the Americans failed in an attempt to make South Vietnam a capitalist showcase, but had no appetite for making Indochina the scene of a high noon between East and West.
The Vietminh went home from Geneva convinced that Zhou Enlai had double-crossed them, yet Ho Chi Minh accepted that hegemony over all Vietnam must be deferred for a season. When North–South elections took place, he could be confident that unification would follow. For the present, he and his comrades addressed themselves with ruthless single-mindedness to building the socialist state of which they had dreamed for so long, into which the South would soon be subsumed. Although the Vietminh had displayed a tenacious appetite for armed struggle, by 1954 its leaders must have been grateful at last to sleep on beds under roofs with their families; to eat half-decent food; to live and work without fear of interruption by bombs or shells.
No Westerner regarded Geneva as a success story, instead it was seen merely as an exercise in damage limitation, as is most Big Power diplomacy: its achievement was to extricate an exhausted colonial power from an unwinnable war. Yet what was extraordinary about the Accords was that the new Saigon government got so much, the triumphant Vietminh so little. This was because the Russians and Chinese were far less interested in the fate of Indochina, and explicitly of Vietnam, than Washington’s Cold Warriors supposed. Mao Zedong had no wish to see an over-mighty communist Vietnam on his doorstep, and appears to have been anxious to draw Laos and Cambodia into his own sphere of influence, rather than that of Ho Chi Minh.
A general ceasefire took effect on 27 July, pending the temporary partition of Vietnam. After years living at COSVN’s secret headquarters in the Mekong delta, COSVN secretary Le Duan emerged to start his travels across the South on a hand-pumped railway trolley. In the North the communists assumed control. On 9 October the French Army left Hanoi, marking the occasion with a series of defiant, vainglorious military ceremonies which caused an American spectator to think of Don Quixote. Amid a roll of drums, boomph of brass and clash of cymbals, Gen. René Cogny, ringmaster for Dienbienphu, saluted the flags of regiments that had fought – paras, Legionnaires, Marines, Senegalese, North African, together with armoured columns that chewed the soft tarmac of Hanoi’s streets. France’s departure was characterised not by nobility and generosity, but instead by a spiteful scorched-earth policy: the colonials removed or destroyed everything that might be of value to the victors.
Ten-year-old Doan Phuong Hai thought the trumpets of the French quitting Hanoi ‘so sad that they seemed to be sobbing’. Their flag was lowered for the last time over the citadel on a cold, blustery, wet afternoon. Two NCOs folded the sodden tricolor, then presented it to the presiding general, who in turn passed it to the garrison commander. Rain masked the tears of many officers and men as the band played the Marseillaise. Then the garrison boarded its trucks and drove away towards the coast. It was just seventy-five years since the colonial power had assumed governance of the city.
The departing French were first replaced by representatives of the International Control Commission, ‘Indian Army officers with swagger sticks and bristling Guards mustaches, pale-faced Poles in their odd triangular caps, and beer-drinking Canadians speaking their own puzzling brand of French’. They in turn were followed by the victors, the first elements of Giap’s army. In Howard Simpson’s words: ‘They came forward in two files, one on each side of the street, small men in drab uniforms wearing leaf-woven, cloth-covered helmets fitted with camouflage nets. Loaded down with weapons and equipment, the Bo Doi of the