Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 by James S. Olson, Randy W. Roberts Page B

Knowland and Lyndon Johnson and Congressmen Joseph Martin and John McCormack.
     
    Eisenhower was not asking for an immediate air strike. He was more cautious than that. What he wanted to know was whether the delegation would give him the discretionary authority to use American forces if a Vietminh victory at Dienbienphu would lead to the fall of Indochina. The legislators were skeptical. They worried about what would happen if the bombing failed. Would ground troops be committed? They also were concerned about Washington’s taking unilateral action. Why not coordinate an international effort to save Dienbienphu? The legislators did have one unequivocal answer for Ike: no more Koreas, where the United States had supplied 90 percent of the combat troops. John F. Kennedy added on the floor of the Senate: “No amount of military assistance in Indo-China can conquer an enemy that is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, 'an enemy of the people' which at the same time has the support of the people”
     
    The debate in the administration and the reservations within Congress persuaded Eisenhower that American intervention would have to be contingent on securing cooperation from other North Atlantic Treaty Organization powers, and getting France to make plans for granting independence for its Indochinese colonies. That was going to take some time, time Dienbienphu did not have. Convinced that Operation Vulture was the only way of saving Dienbienphu, the French asked Eisenhower for an immediate air strike, leaving the question of joint allied military operations for later discussions. He summarily rejected the request, chastising Radford for misleading the French but agreeing to explore the possibility of subsequent American intervention if European allies would cooperate. Eisenhower asked Dulles to go to Europe and secure NATO support. Dulles set out to achieve what he called “United Action”
     
    Dulles and Eisenhower made an odd couple. Compared to the warm, friendly president, the secretary of state seemed cold and distant. In fact, compared to almost anyone Dulles was cold and distant. The nation called Eisenhower “Ike,” but no one called Dulles “Jack” The historian Townsend Hoopes describes Dulles as a “solid tree trunk of a man gnarled and durable . . . a rectangular brow and aquiline nose, a thin and drooping mouth, a strong jaw, the whole creating an effect of ultimate seriousness and at the same time of ultimate plainness” Proud of the history of foreign service in his family—a grandfather as secretary of state for Benjamin Harrison and an uncle in the same position for Woodrow Wilson—Dulles had been part of the Versailles peace mission in 1919, a Wall Street lawyer with clients across the globe, a delegate to the United Nations, and a lifelong student of foreign relations. As Eisenhower told reporters, there is “only one man I know who has seen
more
of the world and talked with more people and
knows
more than Dulles does—and that’s me” Dulles, described as a “card carrying Christian,” equated communism with all the sins of atheism. Once on hearing Jiang Jieshi and Syngman Rhee spoken of in unflattering terms, Dulles responded heatedly, “No matter what you say about them, those two gentlemen are modern-day equivalents of the founders of the church. They are Christian gentlemen who have suffered for their faith”
     
    Travel was as much a part of John Foster Dulles’s life as diplomacy and breathing. He used airplanes as other men used cabs. Now he began a dizzying round of shuttle diplomacy, traveling back and forth between Europe and the United States trying to line up allies. Back home the president tried to drum up public support for intervention, using the domino theory in an April 7 press conference: “You have a row of dominoes set up and 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 loss of