SOURCE: "Eisenhower, Dulles, and Dienbienphu: 'The Day We Didn't Go to War' Revisited," in Journal of American History, Vol. 71, No. 2, September, 1984, pp. 343-63.

In the following essay, Herring and Immerman suggest that Dulles and Eisenhower had offered "a massive air strike to relieve the Vietminh siege of the French fortress at Dienbienphu" in 1954, thus bringing the United States close to war in Southeast Asia a decade before large-scale U.S. military involvement in Vietnam began.

America's role in the Dienbienphu crisis of 1954 has been a source of persisting confusion and controversy. In a Washington Post story of June 7, 1954, subsequently expanded into a Reporter article provocatively entitled "The Day We Didn't Go to War," journalist Chalmers M.

Roberts divulged that the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration had committed itself to a massive air strike to relieve the Vietminh siege of the French fortress at Dienbienphu. The United States would have...