The anti-communist Vietnamese representatives, led by their own new prime minister Ngo Dinh Diem, whimsically chosen by Bao Dai, remained implacably hostile. Yet only one dissenter mattered: would Washington impose a veto? Churchill wrote to Eisenhower: ‘I think Mendès-France has made up his mind to clear out on the best terms available. If that is so, I think he is right.’ On 24 June, Dulles told congressional leaders that the US would adopt a new policy: to defend southern Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia from communist takeovers – ‘Hold this area and fight subversion with all the strength we have.’ His statement implicitly acknowledged loss of the north.
Meanwhile, Chinese and Vietminh leaders reviewed their position, in advance of the crucial next round in Geneva. At a 3–5 July meeting in the southern Chinese city of Liuzhou, premier Zhou Enlai recalled the reversal of the communist invasion of South Korea in the summer of 1950. Zhou told Ho Chi Minh and his delegation: ‘The key to the Korea issue lay in US intervention … It was completely beyond our expectation that [MacArthur’s] reinforcements would arrive so quickly … If there had not been US intervention, the Korean People’s Army would have been able to drive Syngman Rhee’s [forces] into the ocean.’ Here was an expression of fears that mirrored those of the Americans: the Chinese were apprehensive that if the Vietminh overplayed their hand, as had North Korea’s Kim Il-sung, a geostrategic disaster could unfold.
In 1954 Mao Zedong’s civil war triumph, together with the perceived humiliation of the US and its Nationalist clients, were only five years in the past. Some American conservatives still cherished hopes, however fanciful, of reversing the ‘loss of China’. Four years earlier, the Chinese had entered the Korean war because they felt unable to tolerate MacArthur’s victorious army on their Yalu River border. At the time of Geneva, Mao felt far less secure than his regime’s subsequent longevity might suggest. Zhou Enlai’s priority was Chinese security. This seemed best advanced by appeasing American sensitivities: he could live with a non-communist South Vietnam, if this would calm Dulles and Eisenhower.
Thus the Liuzhou conference took its course. If the Indochina war continued inconclusively – as well it might, with the French still deploying some 470,000 troops against 310,000 Vietminh – and wider East–West tensions worsened, Washington might yet lash out. Everything gained in a decade of struggle might be forfeit. Giap acknowledged that, without a political settlement, it could take two to five years to achieve absolute military victory, a view shared by his Chinese advisers. The French were then proposing a far northern partition at the 18th Parallel, just south of Vinh. The initial Vietminh offer was for a boundary at the 13th Parallel, in the midst of the Central Highlands of Annam. The Chinese suggested a compromise at the 16th, from which Ho Chi Minh appears not to have demurred. When Zhou reported to Mao on 7 July, the chairman accepted the need for concessions and a swift settlement. The Russians agreed, for similar geopolitical reasons.
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