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congressional approval before acting. When the administration tested the waters, it found significant opposition to the idea of another military involvement in Asia, especially so soon after the Korean War. Eisenhower concluded that he could bring the Congress along only if the United States acted in concert with its allies.
    The proposal for united action ran into a roadblock in Britain: Prime Minister Churchill refused to cooperate. Eisenhower sent Radford for consultations. Churchill bluntly told the American admiral that if the British would not fight to stay in India, he saw no reason why they should fight to help the French stay in Indochina. Eisenhower steadfastly opposed a unilateral American intervention. The French were therefore left to fend for themselves.
    On May 7, 1954, after fifty-five days of gallantly defending a territory that had been reduced to the size of a baseball field, the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu was overrun by human-wave assaults. The defeat signaled the beginning of a complete and rapid withdrawal of the French from all of Indochina and left the United States as the only power capable of blocking further Communist expansion in Southeast Asia.
    Our first critical mistake in Vietnam was not to have intervened in the battle of Dien Bien Phu. The military situation was tailor-made for the use of our air power. The Viet Minh’s siege required them to concentrate huge stores of matériel and hordes of soldiers in a relatively small area, and the terrain restricted them to only a few supply routes. The French air force in Indochina, which consisted of only 100 tactical bombers, was too weak to exploit this vulnerability. But if we had sent in fleets of heavy bombers to drop conventional explosives, we could have crippled the Viet Minh in a matter of days.
    The French were in a much stronger position in Indochinaas a whole than the plight of their isolated garrison indicated. In his memoirs, Nikita Khrushchev wrote that in 1954 the situation for the Viet Minh was “very grave” and that “the resistance movement in Vietnam was on the brink of collapse.” Khrushchev also reported that Zhou Enlai had said that unless the Geneva Conference concluded a cease-fire soon, the Viet Minh would not be able to hold out against the French. According to an official North Vietnamese history published in 1965, the Communists were seriously worried about the effect a possible American intervention would have on the balance of power in the war. Mao’s support of the Viet Minh had kept his friends’ hopes alive. We could have dashed them permanently if we had given our friends the support they needed at a pivotal moment.
    By standing aside as our ally went down to defeat, the United States lost its last chance to stop the expansion of communism in Southeast Asia at little cost to itself. We should have intervened alone if necessary to help the French because they were the strongest regional power fighting Communist aggression. If we had saved Dien Bien Phu, the French still probably would have withdrawn and finally given their colonies independence, as we had urged for so long, but they would have done so in a deliberate and responsible manner rather than in a headlong rush for the door.
    An obsessive fear of associating with European colonial powers blinded successive American administrations to a very simple fact: Communism, not colonialism, was the principal cause of the war in Indochina. Colonialism complicated the prosecution of the French phase of the war, because it allowed the Communists to obscure the issue, but the war itself originated in Ho Chi Minh’s willful push for total power and was sustained by Communist China’s massive support of the Viet Minh. Our mistake was failing to understand that the issue was not whether colonialism would succeed, but what would succeed colonialism.
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    The Geneva Conference of 1954 temporarily settled the