of communist aggression and American commitments to halt aggression. Even members of Congress seem to have forgotten the original texts and the ratification testimony before this distinguished committee, or not to be aware of the very early American involvements which led us into the quagmire of Indochina. In these critical days it is perhaps useful and necessary to review the history of the case, to publicize it widely so that we might have informed debate and, hopefully, to learn from errors of the past so that we may be better prepared to avoid these errors in the future.

It is in that spirit of participating in a democratic, educational, nonpartisan search for the truth and for wisdom that this testimony is respectfully offered to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. I have long been a critic of western intervention in Indochina, but I would not accept to be qualified as a "dove". Nor would I call anyone who opposed my views a "hawk". These are fundamentally terms of contempt. I am no kind of a bird. I am a man, a citizen of the United States, possibly wrong-minded but completely sincere and highly patriotic in my opposition to a tragic policy that has long taken far too much of our blood and treasure. It is time to leave the aviary of politics and to work together as men above partisanship. It is in this spirit, too, that I thank you for the opportunity to submit this testimony.

Indochina is the name given to three countries linked together by cultural and political ties imposed by other powers. The countries are Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. They were called "Indochinese" because their languages, customs, food were deeply influenced by the Chinese, their neighbor to the north, while their religions, ethic, philosophy were deeply influenced by India, their neighbor to the west. Politically and administratively they were linked together by the imposition of force in the French Empire, which created the entity known as "French Indochina". What was generally forgotten in the centuries of cultural, political and military imperialism was that the peoples of these territories were not French, or Indian, or Chinese and that they did not want to be anything but themselves. Furthermore, they fought against their conquerors for two thousand years, and fought among themselves for centuries.

The indigenous peoples of Cambodia, the Khmers, were once themselves a powerful, if smaller-scale, imperium that conquered large areas of the present territory. They were defeated by the Vietnamese, a more vigorous, expanding people. As a result of these centuries of conflict there are deeply rooted ethnic and tribal rivalries, fears, even hatreds. They have long been dormant, but we have seen in April of this year how ready hate is to burst forth, in the massacre of hundreds of innocent Vietnamese villagers living in Cambodia. It is evil and dangerous to reignite the past as the regime of General Lon Nol has done, aided and abetted by South Vietnamese and American military penetrations of Cambodia. Even unwittingly we are guilty of contributing to these bloodlettings by our ignorance of the history, geography and anthropology of the area. As for Laos, one authority has said "It is more a notion than a nation." There never was a cohesive, viable, administered nation of Laos, but rather a collection of villages and peoples of many different ethnic strains, until the French Empire created the artificial state of Laos for imperial administrative convenience. American intervention, uninformed and overpowerful, cannot, should not assume the task of "nation-building" in that friction-ridden, unstable area. The French never succeeded in a century and more of efforts. The Chinese fought and failed for a thousand years. Indochina is a morass and the deeper we penetrate the deeper we will sink.

Our first, direct involvement, in that part of the world, came during World War II. The French imperial officials in Indochina rallied to the flag of the fascist State of Marshal Petain, refusing to rally to General de Gaulle and the Free French. Petain allied himself with Hitler and Tojo, so Indochina became enemy territory. Some Indochinese, notably the Vietnamese, the bravest, toughest fighters of the region, went into the underground to fight the French and the Japanese overlords. Most of them were not communists, but the most effective guerrilla forces were led by a veteran communist revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh. The circumstances of war had allied the United States with the Soviet Union and with communist-led nationalist forces around the world. We, therefore, sought and found cooperation with the partisans of Ho. General Gallagher, Major Patti, other American officers and agents of the Office of Strategic Services, made contact with Ho in his hideouts in the limestone caves of North Vietnam. They brought him communications equipment, and the American cigarettes that he chain-smoked. In return he furnished intelligence on American troop movements

and his men organized rescue teams for American pilots shot down over the area. Our agents told him about the Atlantic Charter and Roosevelt's goal of selfdetermination for all subject peoples. We made no secret of our belief that we were not fighting to restore the French and British Empires. Many men around the world, the Sultan of Morocco, David ben-Gurion in Palestine, Tito in the hills of Yugoslavia-Moslems, Arabs, Jews, Communists-all rallied to the American cause and believed the American promise of independence and liberation. I knew and interviewed all of these men, some during the war, others immediately afterwards, and I was struck by their faith in America and their hopes for the postwar world. It is a tragedy that we were unable, more accurately unwilling, to be the standard-bearer of all these peoples, their chief inspiration, as I believe we could have been. When I first met Ho Chi Minh in Paris in the early summer of 1946, one of the first things he asked me was whether I could induce Washington to give him a visa so that he could go to see Truman and ask for help in achieving independence.

I questioned the Paris Embassy about this and was told that it was out of the question, for we would appear to be interfering with French affairs. I recall today my dismay at this answer. Why should the affairs of Vietnam be considered a French zone of influence not to be entered by the United States?

The French had been technically allied with but actually dominated by Hitler in Europe and the Japanese in Vietnam. In March of 1945, the Japanese swept away even the fig-leaves of French control, interned the French, disarmed them, and took over Vietnam as their own colony. The so-called Emperor of Indochina, Bao Dai, a French puppet, immediately denounced his old masters and acclaimed his new lords, the Japanese. The French Empire and any legal or moral French claims to the territory came to an end in the alliance with the Axis and the conquest of the Japanese. The war aims of the United States encouraged the peoples to believe they would be free when their conquerors were defeated. Yet, in 1946, the State Department took the position that Vietnam was a French affair in which we should not interfere, despite all the intervening changes of war and defeat.

When the Japanese were defeated, and the French in Vietnam still disarmed and interned, Ho Chi Minh, leading the resistance forces of liberation, emerged from the underground, assumed power in Hanoi, in the name of the Vietnamese people, and read aloud to them, in September, 1945, a Declaration of Independence which states that "All men are created equal" and furthermore that “All men are born and remain equal." The first phrase was translated from our own Declaration of Independence and the second from the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man. By so doing, Ho was informing the Americans and the French that he expected them to live up to their own basic, founding principles. Also, as a communist, avoiding all marxist slogans, he was subtly informing the Russians that, although a communist, he was primarily a nationalist and that he meant to be completely independent. The Soviets apparently recognized the heresy, for they refused to send him any help and refused to recognize his newly proclaimed government. It was a moment of maximum opportunity for the United States to open up friendly relations with Ho Chi Minh. But we refused the opportunity, refused to give him a visa, refused to deal with him at all.

There was great confusion and many conflicting currents swirling around Vietnam in the immediate post-war period. The Allied Powers had agreed on temporary zones of responsibility, for the disarming and internment of the Japanese. The zones divided Vietnam into two, at the 16th Parallel, with the Chinese forces of Chiang kai-Shek charged with establishing allied order north of the Parallel and the British, under command of General Douglas Gracey south of the Parallel. Their orders were to occupy the territory, disarm and intern the Japanese. London specifically ordered Gracey not to interfere in the internal affairs of the country. A minimum of Allied Military Government was needed, both in the North and South, to maintain security and public order, until the issue of whose law was to govern was settled.

The situation in the North was quickly established by Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi. Chiang's troops had no interest in law and order. As the Chinese had done for millenia, they were busy looting and enriching themselves. Ho, as all Vietnamese, knew how to deal with the Chinese. It was simply a matter of raising enough money to buy off the commanding officers to get them to withdraw.

The situation in the South was different. It was the seedling of the present tragedy. One does not buy off a British Commanding Officer. General Gracey. like most military men, was most concerned with order, in the first instance, and, in the second, with protecting the lives and properties of the white, western

residents who came to him begging for aid, fearing the vengence of the Vietnamese. Gracey did not consider that Ho's partisans were freedom-fighters, but rather dangerous revolutionaries. But Gracey did not have enough British soldiers to maintain security and order over a broad territory. So, he released the interned colonial French and also released thousands of Japanese prisoners and, in violation of Allied directives, rearmed the enemy troops and used the colonial French and Japanese as police and security troops, in the name of law and order in an emergency.

This infuriated the Vietnamese but it also angered the Allied Commander-inChief, General Douglas MacArthur, who fired off a protest to Washington: "If there is anything that makes my blood boil, it is to see our Allies in Indochina and Java deploying Japanese troops to reconquer the little people we promised to liberate. It is the most ignoble kind of betrayal."

Much blood and treasure have been spilled as a result of that "ignoble betrayal", the first of many betrayals since then. Gracey's betrayal created, in embryo, the artificial rump State of South Vietnam, partitioning the country, against the wishes of the great majority of the people, and most of the leaders. There were, to be sure, some Vietnamese who had become rich as collaborators of the French and the Japanese, as well as military men who had fought in the ranks of the French and would fight again with the French against their own countrymen, against the independence of their own country, including men like Thieu and Ky. In any case, without any authority to do so. General Gracey put the French back in charge of Vietnam, south of the 16th Parallel and refused to recognize the validity of Ho Chi Minh's Declaration of Independence.

Ho consolidated his political power in the North but the Chinese occupiers remained in physical control of the territory. Ho knew he had to get the Chinese out before he could do anything about dealing with the situation in the South. He knew he did not have the strength to drive the French out. He would have to negotiate them out and the only way to do that was to be master in the North and then offer them an overall new deal for the whole country. He called for a "Gold Day", had his people turn over all their monies and valuables and concluded his deal with the Chinese generals, who began a withdrawal. He was helped by the fact that the Chinese had troubles of their own at home in a contest for power between Chiang and the forces of Mao.

In general elections, in the North, he was easily, almost unanimously elected President of Vietnam. It was no contest. Not that it was a rigged election but because he did not have to rig it. He was the leader of the independent forces, a kind of communist George Washington. I am sure that the phrase rings strangely in American ears, but any Englishman would understand it.

Meanwhile, in the South, the British and American Navies had helped transport expeditionary forces of de Gaulle's Provisional Government, our ally in Europe. Betraying Roosevelt's promise of liberation, we helped imperial forces reestablish themselves, not only in the south of Vietnam but in Cambodia and Laos. The Cambodians and Laotians, a weak, unwarrior-like people, had no great resistance leader of their own and were powerless to prevent the return of the French.

The French knew, however, that they could not easily move back into the north, where Ho's resistance fighters were entrenched. They, therefore, had good reason of their own to negotiate with Ho, just as he had reason to negotiate with them. These negotiations resulted in the Convention of March 6, 1946. It is a key document in the history of the case. In that Convention, the first clause stipulates that "the French Government recognizes the Republic of Vietnam as a free state, having its Government, its Parliament, its army and its finances, and forming part of the Indochinese Federation and the French Union." It should be noted that, at this time, there was no Indochinese Federation and no French Union. There was not even a valid, legal French Republic, for the French had not yet drafted and voted for their own new Constitution of a Fourth Republic. It was made clear that Ho could not be bound by an agreement to join a Federation or a Union not yet existent. It was a statement of intent to so join, dependent upon agreement with the rules, regulations and natures of the future entities. But there was no misunderstanding about the French recognition of the existence of the Republic of Vietnam. Note that it was not called "North" Vietnam. Simply Vietnam.

The future of the territories below the 16th Parallel, occupied by the French, was provided by a Convention clause which stated that a referendum would be

held to determine the wishes of the people living there. Note the phrase in the Convention: "the decisions of the people." There was no reference to another government or power. There was no South Vietnam. Ho was President of Vietnam. The only question concerned the extent of the territory of that Republic, according to the decisions of the people, in a referendum. Ho agreed to this without any fear of how the people would vote. The French agreed, for they had no intention of ever holding a referendum. They knew, and frankly admitted it to foreign correspondents in Saigon and in Paris, that the vote, if held, would be overwhelmingly for unification of all Vietnam. It was the first but not the last betrayal of western promises to hold referenda or elections for selfdetermination. The noble concept self-determination is a mockery in Vietnam after the betrayals of the Convention of 1946 and the Geneva Accords of 1954. Following the Convention, the French invited President Ho Chi Minh--and note that they referred to him as President, without challenge to his title or to the existence of the "free state"-to come to Paris to discuss the nature of the proposed Federation and Union. Ho came in June, 1946. General de Gaulle, in January of that year, had resigned as Premier of the Provisional Government. The French were still quarreling over the nature of their new Constitution. De Gaulle opposed the draft and called upon the French people to vote against it. Thus it could be said that Ho's Republic existed as a legal entity and France's did not. In any case, there was no Federation or Union of any kind.

In the course of the negotiations Ho soon discovered what the French had in mind. They wanted to be in charge of national defense, of the economy and world trade and diplomacy. In other words, as he put it to me after one angry session at Fontainebleau, where the conference was held: "They are willing to give me unconditional authority for streetcleaning, and little else." Weary and disillusioned by September, under mounting pressure from his own young resistance leaders, he broke off negotiations and left Paris, telling me, in an interview I did with him at the time, that the French were planning an imperial reconquest and that before I saw him again war would have broken out.

His prophecy was confirmed in November, 1946, when, in a clash at the customs-shed in Haiphong, the French Navy opened fire and killed tens of thousands of people. The French Admiral reported some 10,000 dead. Foreign observers claimed 40,000 massacred by naval guns. Whatever the true figure, it was a bloodbath by an imperial power. Ho began to reorganize for renewed guerrilla fighting. He was not strong enough to face the army of a white, western, industrial power in open, classic warfare, at least not in the winter of 46-47. His forces struck at French positions in Hanoi, in December, then he disappeared back into the underground and the caves where he had fought the Japanese, to prepare a new war of liberation and independence as the fateful year 1947 dawned.

The watershed year of modern history was 1947, the year the Cold War erupted, a year of crisis that laid down the pattern of all the major conflicts which were to tear the world apart, and still threaten World War III today almost a quarter-century later. Early in 1947, the war in Vietnam began in earnest. Early in 1947, General Marshall, denouncing both the communists and the corrupt Kuomintang", despaired of his mission and left China, and the Chinese civil war heated up to reach fever peak by June. Early in 1947 the British announced that they would give up their mandate in Palestine, a move that led to the terrible tragedy of the Middle East today because of what the great powers failed to do when the British pulled out. And early in 1947, the British informed Washington that the great blizzards had virtually paralyzed and bankrupted the nation, that Britain could no longer maintain her commitments to Greece and Turkey. The Moscow Conference of the Allied Powers on postwar Germany was deadlocked and breaking down. Greece, Turkey, Germany, the Middle East, China and Vietnam all bursting apart, with the former wartime allies Russia and America splitting irrevocably, that was the stark historic drama of the year 1947 in which began the war in Indochina that was to destroy the French Republic and so shake the Republic of the United States that we have not been so divided since the worst times of our history, the Civil War.

No one, hawk or dove, can sincerely dispute the fact that the war in Vietnam began in 1947 as a war of imperial conquest by a western power, France, with no moral or legal right to intervene in Asia. There was no government in Saigon that asked the French for help. French imperial pro-consuls ruled in Saigon without even the pretence of a government there. The Emperor, Ba. Dai, had first denounced the French in March 1945, to join the Japanese, then, as a revolv

ing puppet, he denounced the Japanese after their defeat, and abdicated his throne to join Ho Chi Minh as an advisor to the new independent government. Later he was to flee to Hong Kong, then to French Riviera, then back again as a puppet of the French once more. There was no legitimacy to Bao Dai after successive service to the French, the Japanese, Ho Chi Minh and the French again. There was only one indigenous Vietnamese authority and it was the independence movement of Ho Chi Minh. That he himself was a communist may be regrettable in American terms but it does not invalidate his claim to national leadership any more than it did in the case of Tito.

In many ways, Ho was the Tito of Southeast Asia. Like Tito, he had been a longtime international communist agent. Like Tito, he was also, foremost, a nationalist ready to fight for the independence of his country, even against communist powers if need be. Tito broke early with Moscow and the Eastern European bloc. Ho was never a member of any kind of a bloc. There was no Red China in 1945 when Ho created the Republic of Vietnam. Russia did not recognize Ho or give him any aid. Soviet strategists were concentrating on the subversion of western Europe and French Communists were in the French Government. Americans have forgotten, if any ever really were aware, that the French Communist Party, in 1945, under de Gaulle, supported France in its actions against Vietnam and continued to play a "patriotic" role, so-called, in 1946 as part of a campaign to win power in France. Ho and his people stood alone against a French aggression in their country. Our leaders talk always of communist aggression, and there have been many such cases, but Vietnam is a case not of communist aggression but of western aggression.

The French aggression in Vietnam was supported by the United States, so we must share the guilt. We broke our promises and abandoned our traditional principle of anti-colonialism, as we have occasionally done before in our history, in Central America, in the Philippines. In the distant past it was done in our own name, but this time in support of an imperial power, France. The reason seemed clear to me at the time. It is to be found in the context of the turning-point year, 1947, in the heart of the Truman Doctrine. We were so concerned, and rightly concerned, about the vacuum of power in Europe, and the threat to Greece and Turkey, and the growing strength to communist parties in Italy and France that we had to move fast to meet the challenge. But, as we have so often done in our pendulum-like ways, we over-reacted. After years of almost total isolationism we swung to almost total interventionism. From refusal of entangling alliances we leaped to global entanglements, from world spectator to world policemen, from 1947 to date.

I was one of those Americans who supported Truman's call to action in the Marshall Plan and NATO, that is the rebuilding of war-torn European economies, to support viable democratic regimes behind a military shield. I thought then, and I think now that this was an enlightened policy in western Europe. I thought then and I think now that it was the most tragic and absurd of errors to make a "Doctrine" out of a specific challenge, to think that what was right for western Europe would also be right and, indeed, workable in southeast Asia. I was deeply offended, as an American, when a fine man like Hubert Humphrey charged that we, who opposed his policies in Asia, but had supported them in Europe, were racists. One is not a racist simply by recognizing differences of context between western, christian, industrial Europe and eastern, nonchristian, rural and underdeveloped Asia.

Europeans, in the west particularly, share our general systems of thought and ethics; they equal our own skills and developments. We could work out a parnership with Europe and apply our western, technological systems and values there. But we could not and cannot do the same in Asia. SEATO never could be the equivalent of NATO and is not the equivalent, not even in its language. But we pretended that it was the equivalent. Our leaders deluded themselves and thus deluded their fellow citizens by the sweeping globalism that evolved out of the Truman Doctrine. All our leaders share in this bipartisan delusion: Truman, Acheson, Eisenhower, Nixon and Dulles, Johnson, Humphrey and McNamara, Nixon, Agnew and Laird, etc., etc. There have been many clear voices and minds in government and in Congress which saw through this delusion but many, too many, who did not. Not only among political leaders, but business, labor and, to a shocking extent, the academic world all contributed to the blunders that have cost us so much blood and treasure as we sought, basically, to draw upon our shoulders the mantle of the British and French Empires, perhaps not in an outdated colonialism but certainly in the projection of our influence and ideas upon the world, in a new kind of political imperialism.