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¶ Membership in the Communist empire and expert guidance. Red China officers swarm, and Red China goods are turning up in Hanoi. Seven of eleven top Viet Minh leaders were trained in Moscow. Ho Chi Minh, according to the best evidence, reports direct to Moscow, not through Peking.
And the Viet Minh, unlike its Western adversaries, has no impreciseness of purpose. "The party recognizes that the Viet Nam revolution is an integral part of the world revolution led by the Soviet Union," the Viet Minh proclaims.
Privilege & Presence. South Viet Nam, by contrast, which remains within the French Union, is demoralized and divided. Bao Dai, the porcine Chief of State, lives in France with his mistresses, his Ferrari and his Jaguar XK 120. Bao Dai's Premier in Saigon is Ngo Dinh Diem, 53, a high-minded patriot but an ineffective leader, who is more or less locked up inside his palace by Vietnamese generals who want to grab power for themselves. In many of the villages that the Viet Minh infiltrators do not control,* local sects and gangsters rule with private armies.
The French colonials make their own contribution to chaos. Some, hoping to maintain privileges in the rubber-rich South, are encouraging the Vietnamese generals to intrigue against Diem; other Frenchmen want to replace Diem with Buu Hoi, 39, a left-wing leprosy expert who has not lived in Indo-China for 20 years. In the Communist North, a 20-man French mission hopes to keep "the French presence" in the Viet Minh state, and do business there; there is even talk of French help to rebuild the vital strategic railroad from Hanoi to Langson on the Red China frontier.
In Saigon, some of the French are nonchalant. "Of course the whole country is gone," said a French journalist. Others are bitter. "These people have no appreciation, no understanding of all we have done for them," said a Frenchwoman on a terrace, sipping lemonade. Commissioner General Paul Ely is faithfully working with the U.S. to strengthen South Viet Nam, but others are not. "They treat Indo-China," complained an American, "like a Frenchman treats a mistress in whom he's losing interest. He doesn't want her for himself, but he gets sore if anyone else shows interest."
"Cork in the Bottle." The U.S. was certainly late in getting interested. In the closing days of World War II, President Roosevelt denounced the "shocking record" of French colonialism, and the U.S. later stipulated that its aid to France must not be used in the colonial war in Indo-China. It took Americans some time to realize that the French, for all their colonial faults, were fighting an enemy that for all its anticolonial pretensions, was actually and determinedly Communist. By then the hour was late. "We have here a sort of cork in the bottle" said President Eisenhower, of Indo-China Said Vice President Nixon, amid the sullen thunder of Dienbienphu : "If, to avoid further Communist expansion in Asia, we must take the risk of putting our boys in, I think the executive branch has ... to do it." But though the U.S. was spending about $800 million a year in Indo-China by war's end, it kept out of the shooting.