US Supported Ho Chi Minh

It's probably ASB. France was our ally. However, the world would be a much better place if we supported the man and his cause. He'd be remembered as the Vietnamese Gandhi, and revered in the Western world as a hero. The needless deaths of many Vietnamese and Americans would be prevented, though the Vietnamese community in the United States would be nowhere near as large.

Not entirely ASB.... take a look at the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence?

Name sound familiar? That's because it is supposed to.

France is a respected old American ally, but you know what they needed from us in the 50's? Marshall Plan Aid And you know what else we didn't come to the rescue of our "ally" on? The Suez Crisis (we actually told France, Britain, and Israel to back off so far they wouldn't be able to see Nasser laughing at them).

Now, fundamentally, this requires some major changes to how the US approached nationalist leaders in the developing world, a consistent error, across presidents, in American policy was that we had an inability to distinguish a nationalist leader who wanted what was best for his country and a puppet whose strings were pulled by Moscow or Beijing. Policymakers generally perceived Ho Chih Minh as the latter when he was, in reality, the former.

A reasonable potential change is averting McCarthyist purges of the State Department's experts on Southeast Asia, though I am almost of the impression that this is merely averting a symptom and not the disease itself.

Truman, a foreign policy pragmatist who wasn't always looking for the next tussle to get involved in (for example, he believed that the idea of getting involved in a plot to overthrow Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran was a bad idea), might have actually been the one to tell the French exactly where they could stick their notions of keeping Indochina.
 
It's plausible that the US would not support France. The United States did not want the Europeans to keep their colonial empires, and they were neutral at first due to their opposition to imperialism. Keep that opposition strong, combined with the sentiment that the powerful French military will easily overcome those commies (the US wasn't exactly fond of Ho Chi Minh either), and the US can just decide to sit back, relax, and watch what happens. Perhaps America strongly pressures France to enter the peace process that saw them leave and Vietnam divided early.

But support Communists? In the 1950s? No. Freaking. Way.
 
If anyone has read Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest—or a few history books on the era—there was a decent anti-colonial/pro-nationalist lobby both in the post-WW2 "instant reboot" State department as well as a handful of generals (Stilwell, for instance).

Once China was "lost" and the Korean War happened (and McCarthy and and and) then of course there couldn't be truck with commies. So telling the French in '45-6 (FDR lives slightly longer?) that the USA will not fund their war and that there will be a Vietnam settlement is possible but literally every year after that it gets more difficult.

China and Korea and McCarthy also ruined most State careers of the men who knew how bad Viet Nam was going to be (or who could have had the power to influence it) , strenghtened the European guys who moved into Asia and applied the European strategy without learning about Asia, made the Generals impossible to deal with, etc… and that's a rather hard thing to change even with different Presidents or whatever.
 
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