While the U.S. warmed itself with news of Western propaganda victories at the Big Four Foreign Ministers' conference in Berlin last week, a chilling scene was quietly enacted in Indo-China. On direct orders from President Eisenhower, some 250 U.S. Air Force technicians landed in Indo-China from U.S. air bases in Japan. They were the vanguard of a major U.S. effort to save Indo-China from going down to defeat an evidence of the gravest crisis in U.S.-Asian policy since the out break of the war in Korea.
The crisis developed almost without warning. The press, which had overplayed a short-lived...