Negotiating Partition of Vietnam

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 718-719:

The president had indicated he would not order unilateral intervention, certainly not without the backing of a Congress that showed scant enthusiasm for going in alone. Dulles therefore continued the Franco-American negotiations over intervention, continued to apply pressure on Australia and New Zealand, continued to warn the British and French against agreeing to partition. The latter task became more difficult on May 25, for in restricted session on that day, Pham Van Dong explicitly endorsed the concept—or as explicitly as was possible without uttering the word. Each side would have complete administrative and economic control over its territory, he said in his characteristically staccato French, and would withdraw its military forces from the other zone. A similar arrangement would be implemented in Laos and Cambodia, with one zone for the royal governments of the Associated States and one for the Viet Minh–supported Pathet Lao and Khmer Issarak. Pham Van Dong stressed that his proposal did not represent a violation of the national unity of each country; the division in each case would be temporary and would lead to elections for reunification.

Pham Van Dong knew the general concept he was outlining would find favor in the British delegation and among many in the press corps. More important, he knew partition had growing support in the French camp. Georges Bidault, anxious to assuage the fears of the South Vietnamese government, remained hostile, but several officials—Claude Cheysson and Raymond Offroy, both of them Indochina specialists, as well as Jean Chauvel and Colonel de Brébisson—were convinced of the wisdom of attempting some kind of division of Vietnam, one that would give each side one of the deltas. A week earlier de Brébisson had commenced a series of face-to-face sessions with the Viet Minh’s Colonel Ha Van Lau, the first such Franco–Viet Minh meeting of the conference. Their initial charge was to discuss the evacuation of the wounded from Dien Bien Phu (it will be recalled that several hundred had been too ill to march to Viet Minh prison camps and had been left behind) as well as a possible exchange of prisoners, but in the days thereafter, they also considered other issues of contention, including the mechanics of a cease-fire and how to achieve the regroupment of the two sides. In the weeks to come, these two colonels, who had fought on opposite sides since the outbreak of the struggle—de Brébisson had been among the first French troops to disembark in Saigon, in November 1945, and Ha, a former clerk in the French colonial administration, had been political commissar in the 320th Division—would contribute as much as anyone to the final work of the conference.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Smith seemed to be coming around to the need for some kind of division of the country. At a press conference on May 27, he admitted that one could not ignore Ho Chi Minh’s well-disciplined and formidable fighting force, which controlled a significant proportion of the territory. This Viet Minh position of strength on the battlefield could not be wished out of existence. What the Eisenhower administration sought, Smith continued, was some means of reconciling this reality with American principles, leading to a “termination of hostilities on an honorable basis.”