Asian Policy After Korea 751Early in 1954 Ho Chi Minh’s troops trapped and
besieged a French army in the remote stronghold of
Dien Bien Phu. In May the garrison surrendered.
Several months later France, Great Britain, the Soviet
Union, and China signed an agreement dividing
Vietnam along the seventeenth parallel. France with-
drew from the area. The northern sector became the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam, controlled by Ho
Chi Minh; the southern sector remained in the hands
of the emperor, Bao Dai. An election to settle the
future of all Vietnam was scheduled for 1956.
When it seemed likely that the communists
would win that election, Ngo Dinh Diem, a conser-
vative anticommunist, overthrew Bao Dai and
became president of South Vietnam. The United
States supplied his government liberally with aid.
The planned election was never held, and Vietnam
remained divided.
Dulles responded to the diplomatic setback in
Vietnam by establishing the Southeast Asia Treaty
Organization (SEATO), but only three Asian
nations—the Philippine Republic (which the UnitedMassive retaliation succeeded in reducing the
defense budget by allowing Eisenhower to pare a half
million men from the armed forces. On balance, how-
ever, Dulles’s strategy was flawed, and many of his
schemes were preposterous. Above all, massive retali-
ation was an extremely dangerous policy when the
Soviet Union possessed nuclear weapons as powerful
as those of the United States.
McCarthy Self-Destructs
Although the State Department was now controlled
by Dulles, a Republican and hard-line anticommunist,
Senator McCarthy refused to moderate his attacks on
the department. In 1953 television newscaster Edwin
R. Murrow cast doubt on McCarthy’s methods; soon
he and McCarthy were verbally pummeling each
other on television.
But McCarthy finally overreached himself.
Early in 1954 he turned his guns on the army,
accusing Pentagon officials of trying to blackmail
his committee. The resulting Army-McCarthy hear-
ings, televised before the country, and Murrow’s
increasingly sharp criticisms, proved the senator’s
undoing. For weeks his dark scowl, his blind com-
bativeness, and his disregard for every human value
stood exposed for millions to see. When the hear-
ings ended in June 1954 after some million words
of testimony, his spell had been broken.
The Senate, with President Eisenhower (who
despised McCarthy but who considered it beneath his
dignity as president to “get into the gutter with that
guy”) applying pressure behind the scenes, at last
moved to censure him in December 1954. This
reproof completed the destruction of his influence.
Although he continued to issue statements and wild
charges, the country no longer listened. In 1957 he
died of cirrhosis of the liver.
Joseph P. McCarthy Speechat
http://www.myhistorylab.com
Asian Policy After Korea
Shortly after an armistice was finally arranged in
Korea in July 1953, new trouble erupted far to the
south in the former French colony of Indochina.
Nationalist rebels led by the communist Ho Chi
Minh had been harassing the French in Vietnam, one
of the three puppet kingdoms (the others were Laos
and Cambodia) fashioned by France in Indochina
after the defeat of the Japanese. When China recog-
nized the rebels, who were known as the Vietminh,
and supplied them with arms, President Truman
countered with economic and military assistance to
the French, and President Eisenhower continued and
expanded this assistance.
HeartheAudioSenator Joe McCarthy and his aide Roy Cohn (left) listen to testimony at
the Army-McCarthy hearings in April 1954. Cohn, a tough, young lawyer
who had made a reputation prosecuting suspected communists in
Manhattan, intimidated some people by threatening to make public
their homosexuality; yet he was himself a homosexual who steadfastly
denied it. In 1986 he died of AIDS. Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning
playAngels in America(1993) told Cohn’s story.