Brink Adventures

When a retired statesman writes the story of his career, he almost invariably portrays a situation in which the author is seen as the hero and the other actors have only supporting roles. But last week, as excerpts from his memoirs began to appear in the London Times, it was clear that Britain's Sir Anthony Eden intended to break this familiar pattern by offering his readers a cautionary tale dominated by "the bad guy." With only six installments in print, Britain's onetime Tory Prime Minister was already cocking his arm for a Sunday punch at the late John Foster Dulles--the man Eden considers largely responsible for the 1956 Suez crisis, which brought Eden's long political career to a calamitous end.

The Unmailed Letter. Eden begins by coldly surveying Dulles' self-avowed 1954 "brinkmanship" during the last days of the Indo-China war. Dulles first raised the possibility of U.S. military intervention soon after the siege of Dienbienphu began. He was pessimistic about the French, says Eden, and saw them "inevitably ceasing to be a great power." The U.S. was considering sending air and naval units to help the French, provided that 1) France promised to give the Indo-Chinese states their independence, and 2) Britain and other U.S. allies would support the U.S. The British answer, says Eden, was no--unless the impending Geneva peace talks failed. Sir Winston Churchill "summed up the position by saying that what we were being asked to do was to assist in misleading Congress into approving a military operation, which would in itself be ineffective, and might well bring the world to the verge of a major war."

Eden describes a meeting in Paris shortly before the fall of Dienbienphu, when Dulles handed a letter offering U.S. armed aid in Indo-China to French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault. Dulles asked Bidault to read it and decide whether he wanted it sent to him officially. (The point: if Bidault said no, it would then be legitimate, by diplomatic standards, for all hands to deny that any such offer had been made.) Finally, says Eden, the U.S. considered a naval air strike at Dienbienphu on April 28, 1954, but was deterred by British objections. (Dulles, Eden says, later minimized the possibility of U.S. military involvement and attributed all the furor to Admiral Arthur W. Radford, "whom he was inclined to criticize.") But the fact that the 1954 Geneva Conference finally ended in the negotiated partition of Indo-China Eden clearly regards as his personal triumph, achieved against Dulles' will.

Whose Version? Unhappily aware that Eden's most controversial charges--those dealing with Dulles' role in the Suez crisis--were still to come, most U.S. and British officials last week tactfully avoided comment on the memoirs. A notable exception was Dwight Eisenhower who at his weekly press conference declared that "there was never any plan [for military intervention in Indo-China] developed to be put into execution." The President tempered his denial by adding that Eden was "not an irresponsible person" and undoubtedly was "writing the story as he believes it to be."

"And remember this," added Ike. "Secretary Dulles was a very forceful man. He could very well talk about possibilities and ask people about possibilities that might by them be considered as proposals, when they were not meant that at all."

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