Today marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indochina, which brought to an end more than seven years of war between France and Ho Chi Minh’s Communist Viet Minh Front. It produced a ceasefire agreement (signed by France and the Viet Minh) and an unsigned “Final Declaration that most participants verbally embraced. However, the United States and South Vietnam explicitly rejected it.
In speeches and debates during the Vietnam War, critics regularly misrepresented the documents and their legal status, something many Americans still misunderstand. This seems like an appropriate time to clarify the matter.
I wrote about the Geneva Conference in 1966 in my 450-page undergraduate honors thesis and in a 1972 monograph based largely on documents in the so-called Pentagon Papers. (Unless otherwise cited, the following material is documented in that monograph.)
Image: The plenary session of the 1954 Geneva Conference. Public domain.
Although presented as temporary, the documents’ legal effect, like the postwar partitions of Korea and Germany, was to establish separate de jure and de facto legal entities possessing the rights of all sovereign nations. Thus, in June 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea, seeking a forced reunification, the UN Security Council denounced the aggression and authorized the United States to lead a coalition force under the UN flag to drive out the invaders—an event we know today as the Korean War.
While many assert that no one expected the partition to last more than a couple of years, Article 14(d) of the cease-fire treaty provided:
From the date of entry into force of the present Agreement until the movement of troops is completed, any civilians residing in a district controlled by one party who wish to go and live in the zone assigned to the other party shall be permitted and helped to do so by the authorities in that district.
Roughly 860,000 people from North Vietnam fled south at the time—a strong indication that, as in Germany and Korea, people expected a more prolonged partition. The Pentagon Papers noted that the number of refugees fleeing communist rule might have been much greater had the communists not impeded their escape.
The Soviet Union and Great Britain co-chaired the conference. In addition to France, the Viet Minh, and the three “Associated States” of [South] Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the participants were communist China and the United States (which emphasized it was only there as an “observer”).
In May, the head of the Viet Minh delegation, Pham Van Dong—who would later serve as Communist Vietnam’s Prime Minister from 1955 until 1987—proposed that “Vietnam be divided into two zones” with “supervision of [unification] elections by local commissions.” The Pentagon Papers documented that Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov “expressly rejected the American plan, supported by the Indochinese delegation and Great Britain, to have the United Nations supervise a cease-fire.”
The Pentagon Papers noted that Dr. Tran Van Do, the head of the South Vietnamese delegation (with whom I met and discussed these issues in Saigon in 1968), proposed “a cease-fire on present positions” and “control by the United Nations...of the cease-fire...of the administration of the entire country [and] of the general elections, when the United Nations believes that order and security will have been everywhere truly restored.”
The same papers reveal that “the United States believed the UN should have two separate functions—overseeing not only the cease-fire but the elections as well. Both these points in [Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell] Smith’s remarks were to remain cardinal elements of American policy throughout the negotiations despite French (and Communist) efforts to induce their alteration.”
According to the Pentagon Papers, the South Vietnamese nationalists rejected the inadequately supervised elections that the communists proposed because they were “convinced that Hanoi would not permit ‘free general elections by secret ballot,’ and that the ICC [International Control Commission—which included communist Poland and required unanimity for substantive decisions] would be impotent in supervising the elections in any case.” The Pentagon study observed that South Vietnam’s “rationale for keeping the country united was, as matters developed, eminently clearsighted.”
To make certain there was no misunderstanding, when the conference ended, Under Secretary Smith announced that “the United States is not prepared to join in a declaration by the conference such as is submitted.” He unilaterally declared, “In the case of nations now divided against their will, we shall continue to seek to achieve unity through free elections supervised by the United Nations to ensure that they are conducted fairly.” [My emphasis.]
South Vietnam was equally clear in disassociating itself from the conference documents. In subsequent years, communist North Vietnam repeatedly acknowledged that it had reached an agreement with France at Geneva. However, long before any agreements at Geneva, France had formally granted South Vietnam all the rights of sovereignty, including the power to conduct its own foreign policy. Thus, France had no legal authority to commit South Vietnam to anything in July 1954.
It is important to remember that the partition gave the communists a substantially larger portion of the population than in the South. And, as I documented in my 1975 book Vietnamese Communism, in the bogus “elections” that occurred in North Vietnam thereafter, Ho Chi Minh and his senior Politburo colleagues never received less the 98.75% of the vote.
Perhaps the most important controversy involving the issue of reunification “elections” was that war critics routinely charged that the United States “violated the Geneva Accords” by blocking free reunification elections—usually reinforcing their point by alleging that even President Eisenhower admitted Ho would have won by at least 80% of the vote.
This myth is easy to dispel by simply reading Ike’s full quotation from Mandate for Change:
I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly eighty percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai. Indeed, the lack of leadership and drive on the part of Bao Dai was a factor in the feeling prevalent among Vietnamese that they had nothing to fight for. [My emphasis.]
Thus, Ike was not talking about an election in July 1956, but one before the end of fighting two years earlier—and he was clearly not saying that Ho Chi Minh was popular with the Vietnamese people. The Pentagon Papers noted:
It is almost certain that by 1956 the proportion which might have voted for Ho—in a free election against Diem—would have been much smaller than eighty percent. Diem’s success in the South had been far greater than anyone could have foreseen, while the North Vietnamese regime had been suffering from food scarcity, and low public morale stemming from inept imitation of Chinese communism.
I wrote former president Eisenhower in 1966 asking whether he was being misquoted, and the response assured me that was the case.
Far more importantly, Ike’s comparison was not between Ho Chi Minh and Ngo Dinh Diem but between Ho and the notorious French puppet Bao Dai, who lived on the French Riviera, drove a Ferrari, and owned a casino in return for signing whatever the French government put in front of him. It is akin to predicting the outcome of an election between George Washington and Benedict Arnold in 1789.
In reality, as the Pentagon Papers acknowledge, Diem was among the most respected Vietnamese nationalists whom the communists had not killed. Even French scholars praised him for his competence and integrity. Because of Diem’s popularity with the people of Vietnam, Bao Dai and the Japanese imperialists who occupied Indochina during World War II tried to persuade Diem to serve as a puppet Prime Minister. Indeed, Ho Chi Minh himself sought to recruit Diem for a figurehead position in his government.
In 1971, I was driving back to Saigon from the Mekong Delta with arguably the most important Vietcong defector in the entire war, Bui Cong Tuong. I asked him what he thought about Diem. He said that when they heard Diem had been murdered in a coup, they thought it must be “some sort of a trick” because surely the Americans “could not be so foolish” as to allow anything to happen to Ngo Dinh Diem. He explained that because Diem would not follow the Party’s orders, they had to use their propaganda apparatus to portray him as a corrupt “American puppet.” In reality, he said, senior Party leaders held Diem in the highest esteem as a great Vietnamese patriot—“in the same league as Ho Chi Minh.”
Professor Turner served extensively in Vietnam, including tours as an Army Lieutenant and Captain. The U.S. Embassy created a special position for him as an expert on Vietnamese Communism.
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