ABSTRACT
President Kennedy described South Vietnam as “our off spring.” From retirement, Eisenhower reassured Lyndon Johnson of the need to defend the Saigon government: “we are not going to be run out of a free country that we helped to establish.” 1 South Vietnam, however, was not an American invention. At the beginning of 1954, British and Chinese strategists envisaged a permanent territorial compromise that would end the war and create a strategic balance in Southeast Asia. Some southern Vietnamese nationalists, notably among the Cao Dai, also welcomed a new state with its capital in Saigon. The US and French governments initially opposed this arrangement. In early 1954, French policymakers worried that a “Korean solution” threatened to offend nationalist sentiment in Vietnam and erode the status of the French Union as a global bulwark for containment. Politically, “a new Korea” appeared as a dismal outcome in the United States—another diplomatic and military setback in Asia.
