Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia (1882-1893), Hammer said Vietnamese nationalists "fought for independence from France as their ancestors had fought to oust the Chinese" (55). After initially opposing French colonial policy in Indochina, the United States government became convinced after the communist victory in China in 1949 and especially after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 that American vital interests required that communist expansion in Vietnam be resisted. The Truman administration thereafter financed most of the French war effort in Indochina.
Eisenhower refused to commit American military power to save the doomed French defenders at Dienbienphu in the spring of 1954. His administration acquiesced in the division of Vietnam along the 17th parallel between a communist north and a non-communist south produced by the Geneva Agreement of July 1954. The Eisenhower administration provided strong support to the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon, including more than $7 billion in military and economic aid between 1955 and 1961 (McNamara 31). According to Anderson, Eisenhower believed that "the survival of an independent, noncommunist government in southern Vietnam was a vital strategic imperative for the United States" (43). This was rooted in the 'domino' theory which held that if South Vietnam fell to the communists, so would the rest of Southeast Asia. As Ike put it at his press conference on April 7, 1954: "if someone sets up a row of dominoes, and knocks over the first one . . . it is certain that the last one will go over very quickly" (Brown 230). Eisenhower later acknowledged that the United States supported Diem's refusal to participate in countrywide elections in 1956, as envisaged by the Geneva accords, because he believed that it would have led to a communist victory (372).
Intensely nationalistic and uncorrupted by association with French rule, Diem initially attracted considerable support in South Vietnam and suc...