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States would support his independence movement was entirely reasonable.
Historians view Roosevelt's ideals as unquestionably anticolonial, though
they note that he lacked a clear strategy for achieving these goals. To his
Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Roosevelt spoke frankly about Indochina.
"France has milked Indo-China for one hundred years," Roosevelt wrote
in a memo. "The people of Indo-China are entitled to something better
than that." Roosevelt's promise to grant independence to the Philippines
buoyed Ho Chi Minh, for the American president had also urged the
European colonial powers to grant independence to their own colonies.
After Roosevelt's death, however, America's diplomatic policy
changed sharply. Only a few months after Ho's declaration of indepen–
dence, the American State Department's Far Eastern Bureau declared that
the Uni ted States would respect French sovereignty in Indochina.
Roosevelt's anticolonialism was displaced by the Cold War's demands for
an anti-communist foreign policy. By 1946 all official American references
to Ho in Washington were prefixed with the word "Communist." Dean
Acheson, the Acting Secretary of State, branded Ho Chi Minh an "agent
of international communism." Though the American OSS officers in
Hanoi had liked and trusted Ho, even joining him in celebrating his
Vietnamese "Fourth ofJuly," by the end of the decade Ho had been trans–
formed into a COll1n1Unist enemy.
A State Department paper written in 1949, "The Position of the
United States with Respect to Indochina," announced that the new chal–
lenge facing the United States was to "prevent expansion of communist
aggression in that area." China's and Russia's recent recognition of Ho's
government worried the State Department. American analysts considered
it likely that Thailand and Burma would fall under communist domina–
tion if Indochina succumbed to communist control. The conclusion
reached in this paper came to be known as the "domino principle." "It is
important to the United States security interests," the paper ended, "that
all practical measures be taken to prevent further communist expansion in
Southeast Asia." The Truman government decided to back the French
effort to retain control over Vietnam, and in the early 1950s, the United
States contributed hefty sums to their military campaign to keep Indochina
a French colony.
But the French and their American supporters underestimated the
determination of the Viet Minh. The dramatic battle of Dien Bien Phu
was fought in a valley near the Laotian border. The French found them–
selves encircled by the revolutionary Vietnamese troops , "sitting ducks" for
their fire. The French defeat was humiliating and definitive. At long last Ho
Chi Minh's dream of a unified, independent Vietnam seemed within
reach. The Geneva Settlement in 1954 temporarily divided Vietnam along
