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‘‘Six mois à Hanoi’’: Marcel Cadieux,

Canada, and the International
Commission for Supervision and
Control in Vietnam, 1954–5

Abstract: Drawing on an unpublished memoir by Marcel Cadieux entitled ‘‘Six

mois à Hanoi,’’ this article offers the ﬁrst biographical study of a Canadian diplomat
to serve on the International Commission for Supervision and Control in Vietnam.
It argues that Cadieux’s pioneering experience on that commission during its ﬁrst
months in 1954–5 shaped his pro-American views on the Vietnam War as under-
secretary of state for external affairs between 1964 and 1970. It also uses Cadieux’s
tenure in Hanoi as a lens through which to explore larger issues of both long-standing
and more recent interest to Canadian international historians, including the
bureaucratic culture of the Department of External Affairs, Canadian diplomacy’s
relationship with the decolonizing countries of the Third World, and the role of
race, culture, religion, and anti-communism in the making of Canadian foreign
Keywords: Marcel Cadieux, biography, Canada, Vietnam, diplomacy, Interna-
tional Commission for Supervision and Control, Department of External
Affairs, Cold War, Vietnam War, Third World, decolonization, communism,
race, culture, religion

Résumé : S’appuyant sur un mémoire inédit de Marcel Cadieux intitulé « Six mois à
Hanoi », l’auteur présente la première étude biographique d’un diplomate canadien
ayant siégé à la Commission internationale pour la surveillance et le contrôle au Viêt-
Nam. Selon lui, l’expérience pionnière de Cadieux durant les premiers mois d’existence
de cette commission, en 1954-1955, a façonné ses opinions proaméricaines au sujet de la
guerre du Viêt-Nam alors qu’il était sous-secrétaire d’État aux Affaires extérieures, de
1964 à 1970. L’auteur se sert également du mandat de Cadieux à Hanoi comme d’un
prisme pour aborder d’anciennes questions de fond ou d’intérêt récent pour les spécialistes
canadiens en histoire internationale telles que la culture bureaucratique au ministère des
Affaires extérieures, les relations des diplomates canadiens avec les pays du tiers monde
en voie de décolonisation, ainsi que le rôle de la race, de la culture, de la religion et de
l’anticommunisme dans l’élaboration de la politique étrangère du Canada.

The Canadian Historical Review 99, 3, September 2018

6 University of Toronto Press
doi: 10.3138/chr.4161
Marcel Cadieux, Canada, and the International Commission 395

Mots clés : Marcel Cadieux, biographie, Canada, Viêt-Nam, diplomatie,

Commission internationale pour la surveillance et le contrôle au Viêt-Nam,
ministère des Affaires extérieures, Guerre froide, guerre du Viêt-Nam, tiers
monde, décolonisation, communisme, race, culture, religion

In December 1973, nine months after the United States had withdrawn
its last combat troops from South Vietnam, columnist W.A. Wilson
of the Montreal Star observed, ‘‘Today the occasional all-out Canadian
defender of the American involvement in Vietnam sounds almost
Neanderthal, yet the government’s ﬁles still contain the memoranda
written by Marcel Cadieux, now Canadian ambassador in Washington
but then under-secretary of state for external affairs, warmly defending
the American position.’’1 As under-secretary between 1964 and 1970,
Cadieux laboured behind the scenes to discourage the Canadian govern-
ment from bowing to popular and political pressure to condemn
American military involvement in Vietnam. He counselled discretion
for three main reasons. First, he was convinced that public criticism
of us policy, far from altering it, would only damage Canadian-American
relations. Second, he wanted Canada to voice its concerns privately to
the United States through ‘‘quiet diplomacy,’’ a prudent but increas-
ingly maligned approach in the tumultuous 1960s. Third, he was
among the estimated 23 per cent of Canadian diplomats who by 1965
had served on the Canadian delegation to the International Commis-
sion for Supervision and Control (almost always abbreviated as icc)
in Vietnam, a tripartite body active from 1954 to 1973 whose original
purpose was to supervise the Geneva Accords that ended the First
Indochina War (1946–54).2 Most of these ofﬁcers had returned to
Ottawa critical of North Vietnam and sympathetic to American efforts
to bolster the South. While this response is known, less familiar is
how the individual experiences of these diplomats during their time
in Vietnam shaped their views. Drawing upon an unpublished memoir
by Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ this article examines how Cadieux’s
tenure on the commission during its crucial ﬁrst months (August 1954
to February 1955) shaped the under-secretary’s sympathies toward us

1 W.A. Wilson, ‘‘Government Still Hesitant: Timidity in US Relations,’’ Montreal

Star, 28 December 1973, A-7.
2 The 23 per cent statistic is from W.T. Delworth, ‘‘Vietnam Commission:
Canadian Foreign Service Personnel Commitment,’’ 30 August 1965, Records
of the Department of External Affairs (rg 25), ﬁle 21-13-VIET-ICSC-2, pt.1,
vol. 10122, Library and Archives Canada (lac).
396 The Canadian Historical Review

policy in Vietnam during the war’s most critical years.3 This article
does not engage in the debate over whether Canada’s actions on the
ICC made it ‘‘complicit’’ in America’s war, an interpretation that has
largely been rejected in favour of more nuanced understandings.4
Instead, it offers the ﬁrst biographical study of a Canadian diplomat

3 Marcel Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ Marcel Cadieux Fonds (mc), ﬁle 8, vol. 12,
lac. Most of the existing literature on Cadieux focuses on his role in the
Canada-Quebec-France triangle of the 1960s or on his difﬁcult relationship with
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. See the chapter on Cadieux in J.F. Bosher, The
Gaullist Attack on Canada, 1967–1997 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 1999), 87–104; Robin Gendron, ‘‘Advancing the National
Interest: Marcel Cadieux, Jules Léger, and Canadian Participation in the Franco-
phone Community, 1964–1972,’’ in In the National Interest: Canadian Foreign
Policy and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, 1909-2009,
edited by Greg Donaghy and Michael K. Carroll (Calgary: University of Calgary
Press, 2011), 121–35; Brendan Kelly, ‘‘The Politician and the Civil Servant:
Pierre Trudeau, Marcel Cadieux, and the Department of External Affairs, 1968–
1970,’’ International Journal 72, no. 1 (2017): 5–27. The best general study of
Cadieux’s career is Robert Bothwell, ‘‘Marcel Cadieux: The Ultimate Professional,’’
in Architects and Innovators: Building the Department of Foreign Affairs and Interna-
tional Trade, 1909–2009, edited by Greg Donaghy and Kim Richard Nossal
(Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), 207–22,
although it refers only in passing to how Cadieux’s time in Hanoi shaped his
views on the Vietnam War. While Cadieux’s pro-us sympathies on the Vietnam
War as under-secretary are referred to in Greg Donaghy, Grit: The Life and
Politics of Paul Martin Sr. (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2015), their origins are not
4 The ‘‘complicity thesis’’ was advanced in three main works: Charles Taylor, Snow
Job: Canada, the United States and Vietnam (1954 to 1973) (Toronto: Anansi,
1974); James Eayrs, In Defence of Canada, vol. 5: Indochina: Roots of Complicity
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983); Victor Levant, Quiet Complicity:
Canadian Involvement in the Vietnam War (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1986).
This view was directly challenged by Douglas Ross, who argued that Canada
used its position on the International Commission for Supervision and Control
(icc) not to aid and abet us policy in Vietnam but, rather, to try to moderate it.
See Douglas A. Ross, In the Interests of Peace: Canada and Vietnam, 1954–1973
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984). While also clearly rejecting the
complicity thesis, Ramesh Thakur emphasizes the importance that Canada
attached to good Canadian-American relations when it came to Vietnam. See
Ramesh Thakur, Peacekeeping in Vietnam: Canada, India, Poland, and the Inter-
national Commission (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1984). Subsequent
histories of Canada’s role on the icc have generally discarded the complicity
thesis in favour of more complex interpretations of Canadian policy that stress
both Canada’s undeniable support for the United States-led Western alliance as
well as genuine interest in preventing a wider war in Vietnam. See John Hilliker
and Donald Barry, ‘‘Uncomfortably in the Middle: The Department of External
Affairs and Canada’s Involvement in the International Control Commissions in
Vietnam, 1954–73,’’ in Creating the Peaceable Kingdom and Other Essays on
Marcel Cadieux, Canada, and the International Commission 397

on the commission.5 While the question of an individual’s inﬂuence

over government policy is central to political biography, the most effec-
tive biographies, political or otherwise, transcend their subjects to tell a
larger story about the times in which their subjects lived. As American
historian David Nasaw argues, ‘‘Historians are not interested in simply
charting the course of individual lives, but in examining those lives in a
dialectical relationship to the multiple social, political, and cultural
worlds they inhabit and give meaning to.’’6 Adele Perry and Brian
Lewis have convincingly called the ‘‘biographical (re)turn’’ in history
‘‘contextualized biography’’ and see it as an ‘‘entry-point to a study of
a broader world.’’7 This is especially true of the biographies of diplomats
who, by the very nature of their work, straddle national and transnational
environments and thus offer insights into both their country of origin
and the wider world. Therefore, in addition to analyzing Cadieux’s
personal experience in Hanoi, this article also considers what his gaze
reveals about larger issues of both long-standing and more recent
interest to Canadian international historians, including the bureaucratic
culture of the Department of External Affairs (dea), Canadian diplo-
macy’s relationship with the world beyond the familiar conﬁnes of the
North Atlantic (speciﬁcally the decolonizing countries of the Third
World), and the role of race, culture, religion, and anti-communism
in the making of Canadian foreign policy.8

Canada, edited by Victor Howard (East Lansing: Michigan State University

Press, 1998), 167–95; Robert Bothwell ‘‘The Further Shore: Canada and
Vietnam,’’ International Journal 56, no. 1 (2000–1): 89–114; Andrew Preston,
‘‘Balancing War and Peace: Canadian Foreign Policy and the Vietnam War,
1961–1965,’’ Diplomatic History 27, no. 1 (2003): 73–111.
5 A handful of Canadian diplomats who served on the icc, which included
separate commissions in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, have published their
reminiscences in Arthur E. Blanchette, ed., Canadian Peacekeepers in Indochina
1954–1973: Recollections (Ottawa: Golden Dog Press, 2002). These autobiographical
accounts were written mostly after the fact, and none of them covers the crucial
1954–5 period in Vietnam, the subject of this article.
6 David Nasaw, ‘‘AHR Roundtable Historians and Biography: Introduction,’’
American Historical Review 114, no. 3 (2009): 574.
7 Adele Perry and Brian Lewis, ‘‘Introductory Remarks: Special Issue on ‘The
Biographical (Re)Turn,’’’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 21, no. 2
(2010): 3.
8 In what represents a shift in emphasis from the hitherto strong historiographical
focus on Canada’s place in the North Atlantic world, especially vis-à-vis Britain
and the United States, a number of new works examine Canadian relations with
other regions and nations. This broadening of the traditional geographic scope
of Canadian international history has, in turn, facilitated greater engagement
398 The Canadian Historical Review

At eleven chapters and nearly 160 pages, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi’’ is the
most comprehensive and revealing ﬁrst-hand account by any Canadian
diplomat to serve on the icc.9 Likely written in 1955 during the month
Cadieux spent convalescing in Montreal following his return from
Vietnam, the memoir has immediacy. It also highlights the impor-
tance of using (generally overlooked) French-language material to
study Canadian diplomacy. But the account is not without its limita-
tions. Since Cadieux spent most of his time in North Vietnam, he
has comparatively little to say about the South, leading to a somewhat
skewed picture of the situation prevailing in the divided country. More
problematically, since it is the work of a single person, one might be
tempted to attach less signiﬁcance to ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi.’’ Yet Cadieux
was the most important of the ﬁrst wave of Canadian diplomats
to serve in Vietnam.10 Moreover, his opinions, as his frequent use

with the ‘‘new diplomatic history,’’ which originated in the United States in the
1980s and which is interested in how such factors as race, culture, and religion
have inﬂuenced international relations. For works on Canada and the non-
Western world that integrate one or more of these elements into their analysis,
see, for example, John D. Meehan, The Dominion and the Rising Sun: Canada
Encounters Japan, 1929–41 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2004); Patricia Roy and Greg
Donaghy, eds., Contradictory Impulses: Canada and Japan in the Twentieth
Century (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2008); Kevin A. Spooner, Canada, the Congo
Crisis, and un Peacekeeping, 1960–64 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2009); John Price,
Orienting Canada: Race, Empire, and the Transpaciﬁc (Vancouver: ubc Press,
2011); Ryan M. Touhey, Conﬂicting Visions: Canada and India in the Cold War
World, 1946–76 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2015); Laura Madokoro, Francine
McKenzie, and David Meren, eds., Dominion of Race: Rethinking Canada’s
International History (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2017). In addition to often shedding
new light on the bureaucratic culture of the Department of External Affairs (dea)
and the anti-communist underpinnings of Canadian foreign policy during the
Cold War, the increased attention given to non-Western parts of the globe has
also enhanced our understanding of Canada’s response to decolonization. See,
for example, David Webster, Fire and the Full Moon: Canada and Indonesia in a
Decolonizing World (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2009). For a discussion of these and
other recent Canadian works that engage with the new diplomatic history, see
David Meren, ‘‘The Tragedies of Canadian International History,’’ Canadian
Historical Review 96, no. 4 (2015): 561–6.
9 The only previous uses made of ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ which did not become
available for public consultation at Library and Archives Canada until 2008,
seem to have been brief references in Ryan M. Touhey, ‘‘Dealing in Black and
White: The Diefenbaker Government and the Cold War in South Asia 1957–
1963,’’ Canadian Historical Review 92, no. 3 (2011): 435; Touhey, Conﬂicting
Visions, 95.
10 While R.M. Macdonnell, an assistant under-secretary in the dea (and, thus,
more senior than Cadieux), served as Canadian acting commissioner on the icc
in Vietnam, he departed the country early in the autumn of 1954.
Marcel Cadieux, Canada, and the International Commission 399

of the collective personal pronoun ‘‘nous’’ makes clear, likely often

reﬂected the viewpoint of the Canadian delegation as a whole. Return-
ing to Ottawa, Cadieux became an iconic ﬁgure in the dea, playing a
major role ﬁrst as assistant under-secretary and legal adviser (1956–
60), then as deputy under-secretary (1960–4), and, ﬁnally, as under-
secretary. To many young francophone ofﬁcers struggling to succeed
in Canada’s unilingual civil service, he was undoubtedly a role model.
Finally, in writing ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ Cadieux, who had already
published books on the life of a Canadian diplomat, was operating
within an age-old, multinational tradition of diplomatic memoir and
diary, one practised in Canada by eminent ﬁgures such as Douglas
LePan, Escott Reid, Charles Ritchie, and Allan Gotlieb.11 When candid
and engaging, as ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi’’ is, such sources richly comple-
ment the dry ofﬁcial telegrams, dispatches, and memoranda that
form the usual grist to the diplomatic historian’s mill. Yet Cadieux’s
manuscript never received the attention it deserved, the author having
died shortly after he retired. Given its polished prose and striking
observations, had the document made its way into print, it likely
would have been heralded as one of the most important Canadian
diplomatic memoirs.
A francophone from Montreal, Marcel Cadieux (1915–81) joined the
dea in 1941. Posted ﬁrst to London and then to Brussels, he witnessed
the end of the Second World War and the start of European recon-
struction. By the time he returned to Canada in 1947, the Cold War
was underway. As a devout Roman Catholic from conservative Quebec,
where church authorities often equated communism with the anti-
christ, Cadieux was passionately anti-communist. Unsurprisingly,

11 See Douglas LePan, Bright Glass of Memory: A Set of Four Memoirs (Toronto:
McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1979); Escott Reid, Radical Mandarin: The Memoirs of
Escott Reid (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989); Charles Ritchie, The
Siren Years: Undiplomatic Diaries, 1937–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1974); Charles
Ritchie, Diplomatic Passport: More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1946–1962 (Toronto:
Macmillan, 1981); Charles Ritchie, Storm Signals: More Undiplomatic Diaries,
1962–1971 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1983); Allan Gotlieb, The Washington Diaries,
1981–1989 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006). For Cadieux’s books on
Canadian diplomatic life, see Marcel Cadieux, Le Ministère des Affaires Extérieures:
Conseils aux étudiants qui se destinent à la carrière (Montréal: Éditions Variétés,
1949); Marcel Cadieux, Premières Armes (Ottawa: Le Cercle du livre de France,
1951); Marcel Cadieux, Embruns (Ottawa: Le Cercle du livre de France, 1951).
Regrettably, few women, marginalized in the dea for much of the Cold War,
have written their memoirs. For their often-neglected contribution to Canadian
diplomacy, see Margaret K. Weiers, Envoys Extraordinary: Women of the Canadian
Foreign Service (Toronto: Dundurn, 1995).
400 The Canadian Historical Review

many others in the dea shared these views, given that Canada was
a liberal democracy with close (and growing) ties to its neighbour,
the United States, the undisputed leader of the emerging Western
alliance.12 Also deeply committed to President Harry Truman’s ‘‘con-
tainment’’ of communism, the Canadian government and the dea
played a key role in the 1949 formation of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (nato). After serving as the dea’s personnel ofﬁcer until
1951, Cadieux spent three years at nato headquarters in Paris, an
assignment that further bolstered his anti-communist outlook. As he
recalled, his views on the world situation at the time were widely
shared, from his colleagues on Canada’s nato delegation to the
broader Canadian public: ‘‘Avec la délégation, avec le Gouvernement,
avec le pays dans son ensemble j’avais certaines opinions au sujet de
la meilleure façon de faire face au péril communiste.’’13
Cadieux was in France in May 1954 when its forces were defeated
at Dien Bien Phu, in northwestern Vietnam. From the late nineteenth
century, Indochina – whose component countries included Vietnam,
Laos, and Cambodia – had been the jewel of the French empire. During
the Second World War, however, French supremacy over the region was
challenged by Japanese occupation and, more importantly in the long
term, by the formation of the Viet Minh, a communist-nationalist
coalition committed to Vietnamese independence. In September 1945,
its leader, Ho Chi Minh, quoting from the us Declaration of Indepen-
dence, proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (drv). Mean-
while, the French Far East Expeditionary Corps, made up of French,
colonial, and local troops, sought to re-establish French control over
Indochina. When the People’s Republic of China, founded in 1949
and whose territory straddled the northern border of Indochina, began
supplying its fellow communists in Vietnam with increasing military
and ﬁnancial aid, the United States did the same for French forces.
If the Korean War (1950–3) dramatized the extension of the Cold
War to Asia, the First Indochina War captured the degree to which
worldwide opposition to communism was sometimes bound up
in Western projects of empire and Third World struggles for de-
colonization. Dien Bien Phu, Cadieux recalled, shook France to the
core: ‘‘Je me souviens qu’à Paris, la ville en a ressenti comme un choc.
Les inconnus se parlent dans la rue, les gens se rendent à l’Etoile [now

12 On Canadian international relations in this period, see Greg Donaghy, ed.,

Canada and the Early Cold War, 1943–1957 (Ottawa: Department of Foreign
Affairs and International Trade, 1998).
13 Marcel Cadieux, Diary, 8 January 1974, ﬁle 6, vol. 13, mc, lac.
Marcel Cadieux, Canada, and the International Commission 401

Place Charles de Gaulle], se cherchent pour afﬁrmer leur solidarité

dans la grande épreuve qui secoue le pays.’’14 The loss signalled the
end of the French empire.
Defeated in Vietnam, France signed the Geneva Accords with the drv
in July 1954, capping a nearly three-month international conference on
the aftermath of the Korean War and the situation in Indochina. As
one of the belligerents in Korea, Canada was represented in Geneva
by a delegation led by Secretary of State for External Affairs Lester B.
Pearson, but it left when the discussion turned to Indochina, believing
it had no role to play in that matter. The Geneva Accords mandated a
ceaseﬁre in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Vietnam, in particular, was
temporarily divided along the seventeenth parallel pending nation-
wide reuniﬁcation elections – elections that, according to the Final
Declaration of the Geneva Conference, were to be held in July 1956.
The accords speciﬁed that France and the drv were to withdraw their
forces from the North and South respectively, no new military equip-
ment was to enter Vietnam, no foreign military alliances or bases were
to be established, no reprisals were to be exacted against people or
groups in either zone, democratic liberties were to be guaranteed,
and Vietnamese civilians were to be free to move either north or south
of the seventeenth parallel during the maximum 300 days scheduled
for the military withdrawals. To ‘‘supervise’’ and ‘‘control’’ the execu-
tion of the Geneva ceaseﬁre, an international commission (the icc)
was established in Vietnam (with separate ones in Laos and Cambodia)
that was endowed with both ﬁxed and mobile ‘‘inspection’’ teams.
Finally, three very different countries were chosen to serve on the icc:
Poland would represent the communist bloc, India (the chair) the
neutral nations, and Canada the Western alliance. The United States,
irked by Canada’s independent stand during inter-allied discussions in
Geneva on the thorny question of the machinery needed to ensure
free elections in Korea, preferred Belgium, but Belgium was a colonial
power and thus unacceptable to India and China.15 In the event,
neither the United States nor the southern State of Vietnam, each
suspecting that Ho Chi Minh would likely win the promised Vietnamese
elections, endorsed the Geneva Accords.16

14 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 128.

15 Robert Bothwell, Alliance and Illusion: Canada and the World, 1945–1984
(Vancouver: ubc Press, 2007), 197.
16 The Geneva Accords have largely been reproduced in Marvin E. Gettleman
et al., eds., Vietnam and America: A Documented History (New York: Grove Press,
1985), 70–7.
402 The Canadian Historical Review

When Cadieux returned to Canada in July 1954, the dea was in

administrative turmoil. The Canadian government had accepted the
invitation to serve on the icc reluctantly, knowing full well the
challenges such involvement posed, but it also recognized the need to
preserve the fragile peace in Indochina.17 In August, Cadieux learned
that he was being posted to Hanoi, the icc’s headquarters in Vietnam,
to serve as chief political adviser to the Canadian commissioner. For
Cadieux, as for most Canadians in 1954, Asia was foreign territory.
Notwithstanding the recent Chinese revolution and Korean War, the
region remained mysterious and a little ominous, pushing Cadieux to
fall back on cultural and racial stereotypes: jungles, straw huts, and
inscrutable faces. Indochina, for Canadian diplomats, was ‘‘un pays
inconnu’’; they knew little about such basic aspects there as accommo-
dation, the clothes required, or the living conditions.18 As a colleague
who had just been sent to Paris recalled, since there was no good map
of Indochina in Ottawa at the time of the Geneva Conference, his ﬁrst
assignment was to purchase one from the French and mail it home.19
These details capture the Eurocentric culture of the department, from
Pearson down to its predominantly white and Anglo ofﬁcers. Their
‘‘mental maps,’’ to use historian David Webster’s term for the racialized
ways in which Canadian policy-makers pictured and tried to understand
a complex world spatially, placed the comfortable milieu of the West,
especially the North Atlantic triangle of Canada, the United States,
and Britain, at the centre.20 Despite representing over half of the
world’s population, Asia was consigned to the periphery. Of the
approximately sixty diplomatic and consular posts Canada operated
abroad in 1954, only a handful were in Asia.21 Watching his parents
from the window of his plane at Dorval airport, Cadieux, who had
recently recovered from an inoculations-induced fever, only to be
diagnosed with pre-diabetes serious enough that he was almost forced
17 John Hilliker and Donald Barry, Canada’s Department of External Affairs, vol. 2:
Coming of Age, 1946–1968 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 1995), 115–16.
18 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 3–4.
19 Peter Stursberg, Lester Pearson and the American Dilemma (Toronto: Doubleday
Canada, 1980), 125n3.
20 Webster, Fire and the Full Moon, 7. See also David Webster, ‘‘‘Red Indians’ in
Geneva, ‘Papuan Headhunters’ in New York: Race, Mental Maps, and Two
Global Appeals in the 1920s and 1960s,’’ in Madokoro, McKenzie, and Meren,
Dominion of Race, 254–83.
21 Report of the Department of External Affairs 1954 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1954),
Marcel Cadieux, Canada, and the International Commission 403

to stay home, wondered if he would ever return.22 His mood captured

how forbidding Asia, and especially Southeast Asia, seemed to the
average Canadian diplomat of this period. That part of the world was
still, as Cadieux sometimes called it, the ‘‘Orient.’’
In hindsight, one wonders why Cadieux was sent to Asia, especially
since the dea’s ranks included several ‘‘mish kids’’ born to missionary
parents in China, who thus knew the region far better than he.23 In
1954, however, such ofﬁcials were already appointed to other impor-
tant assignments: Chester Ronning, who had previously suggested
hiring ofﬁcers of ‘‘non-Caucasian origin’’ to staff posts in Asia, had
just been made head of mission in Norway (he was of Norwegian
ancestry), though this appointment did not prevent him from attend-
ing the Geneva conference as a member of the Canadian delegation;24
Herbert Norman, dogged by us charges of communism, was Canadian
high commissioner to New Zealand; Arthur Menzies, recently returned
from Japan, was the head of the dea’s Far Eastern Division; and Ralph
Collins was in the middle of a posting to England. There were also good
reasons for sending Cadieux to Vietnam. By 1954, he was one of the
department’s rising stars, an assistant under-secretary in waiting, but
he needed to broaden his experience in the ﬁeld. Moreover, as a franco-
phone, he would have no trouble speaking to either the French or the
French-educated Vietnamese elite in Hanoi. Finally, he was still a
bachelor, making it easier for the dea to post him to an unfamiliar
locale than a married ofﬁcer, particularly one with a family.25
Cadieux’s itinerary reinforced the impression that he was travelling
to the ‘‘antipodes.’’ From Montreal, he ﬂew to London, from London
to Rome, from Rome to Beirut, from Beirut to Bahrain, from Bahrain
to Karachi, from Karachi to New Delhi, from New Delhi to Calcutta,
from Calcutta to Saigon, and, ﬁnally, from Saigon to Hanoi. The farther

22 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 6.

23 On the ‘‘mish kids,’’ see Alvyn Austin, ‘‘Missionaries, Scholars, and Diplomats:
China Missions and Canadian Public Life,’’ in Religion and Public Life in
Canada: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, edited by Marguerite Van Die
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 130–52.
24 On Ronning’s ‘‘non-Caucasian origin’’ suggestion, see Hilliker and Barry,
Coming of Age, 58.
25 As Canadian diplomat (and future dea under-secretary) J.H. Taylor, who served
in Vietnam in 1955–6, recalled, ‘‘From the moment the Canadian government
agreed in 1954 to serve on the three International Commissions for Supervision
and Control in Indochina . . . every young and healthy bachelor in the Depart-
ment of External Affairs knew his days were numbered . . . especially if he spoke
French.’’ See J.H. Taylor, ‘‘Vietnam: A Year with Uncle Ho, July 1955–July
1956,’’ in Blanchette, Canadian Peacekeepers in Indochina, 15.
404 The Canadian Historical Review

Cadieux moved from Europe’s familiar sights, the more disoriented he

became. In Bahrain, for instance, the air seemed to come out of an
oven. From his hotel room in Calcutta, he heard a strange music that
brought to mind that of a snake charmer, the epitome of the exotic
in Western cultural representations of Asia.26 The next morning,
Cadieux was shocked to ﬁnd the sidewalk in front of his hotel and
the surrounding streets blocked with the still-sleeping homeless. Every-
where he looked in Calcutta, he saw congestion and decay, an un-
imaginable ‘‘spectacle de misère’’ that beggared belief. Like other
Canadian diplomats who had never been posted anywhere but the
West, Cadieux was forced to confront certain grim Third World realities:
‘‘Je n’aurais pas cru qu’en certains coins du monde il fût possible de
vivre dans un dénuement aussi général et, semble-t-il, aussi absolu.’’27
His colleague Douglas LePan, who in 1950 had accompanied Pearson
to the Conference of Commonwealth Foreign Ministers in Colombo,
Sri Lanka, and then on a visit to New Delhi, recalled, ‘‘Nothing had
prepared me for the desperate poverty of Asia, the sight and smell
and endlessness of it.’’28 Cadieux felt more at home with Saigon’s
French façade, which created a ﬁrst impression of order and efﬁciency,
but he compared rue Catinat, a main thoroughfare swarming with
people, to a crushed anthill.29 He was not the ﬁrst to resort to insect
imagery when experiencing the culture shock of Asia’s teeming popu-
lations. During the Second World War, American soldiers in the
Paciﬁc theatre had done much the same.30
In August 1954, Hanoi was still under French occupation, but its
handover to the Viet Minh camped in the nearby countryside was
ofﬁcially scheduled for 10 October. In the meantime, the icc played a
constructive early role in facilitating negotiations between the two
sides over the exchange of prisoners of war and the transfer of civil
administration in Hanoi. Like Saigon, Hanoi, the capital of French
Indochina, was modern and unmistakably French. As the Eurocentric
Cadieux noted, ‘‘La France a donné à ce coin perdu une physionomie
claire et équilibrée.’’ Having expected what he called ‘‘une architecture
de pagode,’’ he was agreeably surprised by the city’s chic Parisian

26 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 6–13. Signiﬁcantly, Edward Said’s Orientalism

(1978), which so inﬂuentially analyzed Western depictions of the East, featured
on its cover French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1880 painting The Snake Charmer.
27 Ibid., 13–4.
28 LePan, Bright Glass of Memory, 147.
29 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 14–5.
30 Peter Schrijvers, The GI War against Japan: American Soldiers in Asia and the
Paciﬁc during World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 137.
Marcel Cadieux, Canada, and the International Commission 405

suburban look.31 His comments on Hanoi’s French allure were not

uncommon. According to one historian of postcolonial Vietnam,
‘‘Echoing the attitudes of other colonial powers, French scholars and
administrators admired the way that the city came to reﬂect the urban
aesthetics of modern France.’’32 To Cadieux, Hanoi’s train station,
opera house, apartment blocks, and many book stores and terrace
cafés all testiﬁed to over seventy years of French rule and inﬂuence,
an achievement he feared would crumble with the forced withdrawal
of ‘‘l’âme française’’ animating it.33 He and other Western diplomats
perhaps failed to appreciate the juxtaposition in Hanoi between French
culture and the city’s more popular, distinctly Vietnamese forms.
Travelling to Southeast Asia, Cadieux had hoped to see new land-
scapes and architecture, but the Viet Minh were so strict where the
movement of icc personnel was concerned, the tropical heat so great,
and the work on the commission so demanding that he experienced
little of Vietnam outside of Hanoi. It may have been for the best. As
Cadieux himself admitted, since he did not know the local language
or culture, his surroundings did not impress him. Possibly because he
was such a devout Catholic, Cadieux felt uneasy in Buddhist pagodas
with their different smells and textures. Nor did he enjoy visiting
temples: ‘‘Il me semblait que j’observais les marques d’une culture
incompréhensible et décadente.’’34 This dismissive statement betrayed
a racialized sense of Western cultural superiority, one that predisposed
Cadieux and likeminded colleagues to look more kindly on both the
French presence in Vietnam and its Westernizing impulses. That
said, Cadieux was not an uncritical observer. While he admired the
prosperous and modern nature of Vietnam’s cities, he speculated that
France had built up a structure, including banks, airports, and railways,
that favoured its own nationals. ‘‘Intellectuellement et moralement,’’
he opined, ‘‘la France a perdu contact avec les Vietnamiens[.]’’35
As Hanoi’s transfer to communist hands drew near, the tension
was palpable. Signs of the French evacuation were manifest: soldiers
were leaving, shops closing, goods loaded up, and the sky ﬁlled with
arriving and departing planes. One week before the handover, an
evening curfew was imposed. Two days before it occurred, residents
31 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 17.
32 Patricia M. Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past
(Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2002), 220.
33 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 21.
34 Ibid., 157–8.
35 Ibid., 136.
406 The Canadian Historical Review

were ordered to stay at home. Hanoi’s once-busy streets were now

completely deserted. Everyone, except for the rats that rummaged
insouciantly through the uncollected garbage, seemed to be awaiting
the Viet Minh.36
On the day of Hanoi’s transfer, which took place sector by sector,
crowds ﬂooded into the streets to greet the triumphant People’s Army
of Vietnam. The city was suddenly resplendent in gold and crimson,
with Viet Minh ﬂags and banners ﬂying from almost every building.
‘‘Une telle ﬂoraison,’’ Cadieux noted cynically, ‘‘suppose quelques
préparatifs.’’ The crowds cheered with an enthusiasm that seemed
genuine, but when Cadieux studied various demonstrators, he noticed
that their frozen smiles soon faded and their clapping trailed off.37 His
impressions of the arrival of the Viet Minh were echoed by the us
consul general in Hanoi, who observed that the ‘‘enthusiastic popular
participation’’ was informed by a ‘‘high degree of organization and
direction.’’ The People’s Army had been given a ‘‘warm welcome,’’
but ‘‘‘cheer leaders’ or agitators in [its] ranks and among [the] spectators
[had] kept [the] applause and cheers going.’’38 To Western observers,
such stage management was typical of communist regimes. Cadieux
and the other Canadians felt distinctly uneasy: ‘‘Les Français, nos
alliés, nos amis, sont partis. Même comme membres neutres de la
Commission, nous sommes un peu inquiets de nous trouver main-
tenant entre les mains du nouveau régime que nous ne connaissons
pas et qui a combattu la France si tenacement, si cruellement.’’39
Canadian diplomacy’s attitude toward Vietnam was heavily inﬂuenced
by Western solidarity, on the one hand, and disquiet over the Third
World’s often violent anti-colonial struggles, on the other. France was
one of Canada’s two ‘‘mother countries,’’ a nation Canadians had
either defended or liberated during two world wars and a key ally
in the Cold War. As a good Western ally in its own right, but one
that also believed itself untainted by colonialism, Canada hoped that
decolonization in Asia (a phenomenon made all the more explosive
by questions of race) would proceed peacefully through the gradual
transfer of power to moderate nationalists – by evolution rather

36 Ibid., 20–1, 30.

37 Ibid., 33–4.
38 [Thomas J.] Corcoran [to the Department of State], 10 October 1954, Foreign
Relations of the United States (frus), 1952–1954, vol. 13: Indochina, part 2
(Washington: United States Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1982), 2128; Corcoran
to the Department of State, 11 October 1954, frus, 1952–1954, vol. 13: Indochina,
part 2 (Washington: United States Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1982), 2132.
39 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 36.
Marcel Cadieux, Canada, and the International Commission 407

than revolution, not unlike its own path to independence.40 But, in

Vietnam, such dreams were dashed by French obstinacy and Viet
Minh determination.
With the Viet Minh’s arrival, the atmosphere in Hanoi changed
radically. Restaurants and cafés were closed. Bamboo arches bearing
political inscriptions and slogans were installed. Loudspeakers broad-
cast propaganda. Soldiers drilled right under Cadieux’s window. Party
meetings were ubiquitous. ‘‘Alors que les observateurs attendent des
Viet Minh l’afﬁrmation du caractère régional de leur mouvement,’’
Cadieux remarked, ‘‘ils ne peuvent que reconnaı̂tre l’aspect standardisé
du communisme de partout.’’41 Soldiers, patrols, and sentries were
everywhere in the otherwise empty streets at night. During the day,
citizens hurried to and fro with the same vacant expressions that
Cadieux had noticed on the faces of people in Poland and Czechoslo-
vakia during his brief trip behind the Iron Curtain in 1950: ‘‘Le régime
étend son emprise et s’assure aussi la domination des pensées, des
joies, de la vie entière de la population.’’42 To most Canadian diplomats
in this period, communists throughout the world were essentially the
same. Thus, Cadieux often referred to the Viet Minh simply as ‘‘les
communistes.’’ In the words of another senior ofﬁcer, ‘‘When I came
to Indo-China . . . I wondered from the books I read if North Viet-nam
was not more nationalist than anything else. Three days in Hanoi
have convinced me that they are not less Communist than in Moscow
or Peking. They have learned fast.’’43 While the world’s communist
regimes were similar in many respects, by focusing on what Cadieux
called ‘‘le communisme de partout,’’ Canadian diplomats tended to
downplay the key regional differences between North Vietnam and
the other communist powers, pre-eminent among them Vietnam’s
long history of foreign domination, an experience that gave Vietnamese
communism its distinctive nationalistic cast. For Cadieux, however,
communism was communism.
Nowhere was the totalitarian side of that system more evident to
him than in the problems arising from the issue of freedom of move-
ment in Vietnam. Article 14(d) of the Geneva Accords stipulated that

40 On this point, see David Webster, ‘‘Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, and Decoloniza-
tion,’’ in Canada and the Third World: Overlapping Histories, edited by Karen
Dubinsky, Sean Mills, and Scott Rutherford (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2016), 155–92.
41 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 39.
42 Ibid., 120. For Cadieux’s impressions of Poland and Czechoslovakia, see
Cadieux, Embruns, 73–104.
43 Léon Mayrand, quoted in Ross, In the Interests of Peace, 141.
408 The Canadian Historical Review

‘‘any civilians residing in a district controlled by one party who wish to

go and live in the zone assigned to the other party shall be permitted
and helped to do so by the authorities in that district,’’ but it proved
unenforceable. As acting commissioner of the Canadian delegation to
the icc and then as deputy to Canadian Commissioner Sherwood Lett,
Cadieux ultimately saw that the Viet Minh, who devised an inefﬁcient
and arbitrary exit permit system and resisted publicizing the rights of
civilians, were preventing people from leaving the North: ‘‘Dès les
premiers jours, il nous revient de tous les côtés que le système établi
par l’Accord de Genève ne tourne pas rond au Tonkin.’’44 As political
scientist Douglas A. Ross has observed of the freedom of movement
issue, ‘‘No other aspect of the Vietnam situation caused such serious
anxiety for the Canadians or raised such disturbing, ambiguous, and
ﬁnally insoluble moral difﬁculties.’’45
At the heart of the mobility problem was religion. Freedom of move-
ment was crucial to North Vietnam’s Catholic population, a minority
group dating from the European missionary activities of the sixteenth
century who were concentrated in certain key areas. Their leaders,
who had generally supported the French, remained stoutly opposed
to communism. An important source of Western information about
civilian difﬁculties were Canadian Redemptorist priests, a congrega-
tion of the Catholic Church that had been active in Vietnam since
1925.46 Cadieux was almost certainly already familiar with their work.
French-Canadian missionary activity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America
was widely publicized back home, whether through the writings or
speaking tours of the missionaries themselves or through the various
youth movements, organizations, and events that supported their
efforts. In the 1930s, Le Devoir (which Cadieux read avidly while a
student at the Université de Montréal) had devoted a regular page to
missionary endeavours.47 Moreover, the Redemptorists were well
known among French Canadians as the guardians of the Basilica of
Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, one of the oldest pilgrimage sites in North
44 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 43–4.
45 Ross, In the Interests of Peace, 94.
46 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 43. On the Canadian Redemptorists in Vietnam,
see Éric Vincent, ‘‘La mission des Rédemptoristes canadiens-français au
Vietnam entre 1925 et 1975’’ (ma thesis, Université du Québec à Montréal,
47 Sean Mills, A Place in the Sun: Haiti, Haitians, and the Remaking of Quebec
(Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016), 54–5. Cadieux
himself was even familiar with the activities of such non-French-Canadian
missionaries as the French White Fathers of Africa, whose periodical Grands
Lacs he knew. See Cadieux, Premières Armes, 141.
Marcel Cadieux, Canada, and the International Commission 409

America. Nor should it be forgotten that, for much of the ﬁrst half
of the twentieth century, missionaries like the Redemptorists were
almost the only Canadian presence in the non-Western world.
Immersed as they were in local languages and cultures, these non-
state actors had great inﬂuence upon Canadian diplomats who were
new to Asia. Indeed, one of the ﬁrst things Cadieux did after arriving
in Hanoi was to visit a Redemptorist mission in the area. It proved a
homecoming of sorts: ‘‘Quelle surprise, si loin du Canada, de pouvoir
causer à cœur ouvert avec des compatriotes et d’apercevoir dans le hall
d’entrée, par exemple, des photos de l’Oratoire St-Joseph.’’48 Thus,
when the Redemptorists and other Catholic priests sounded the alarm
about North Vietnamese restrictions on freedom of movement, Cadieux
The plight of North Vietnam’s Catholics not only evoked sympathy
from Canadian ofﬁcials, most of whom, like Cadieux, were Christian,
but also from Western civil society, more religious then than today.
As one historian has noted, ‘‘Newspapers, nongovernmental groups,
and religious charities on both sides of the Atlantic worked hard to
draw attention and money to the refugees’ plight.’’49 But what made
religion such a potent force was its central place in the Cold War,
which was seen by many at the time, in the words of another scholar,
as ‘‘a global conﬂict between the god-fearing and the godless.’’50 Since
religious freedom was constrained wherever communism held sway,
including in North Vietnam, it was easy to view the situation there
as part of the larger struggle between freedom and tyranny – indeed,
between good and evil. Revealingly, Thomas A. Dooley, a us Navy
doctor and devout Catholic serving in the northern city of Haiphong
(still under French control and where French and us ships were wait-
ing to transport refugees to South Vietnam), invoked the Lord’s Prayer
when he entitled his best-selling memoir of the evacuation Deliver Us
from Evil (1956).51 For many Westerners both inside and outside

48 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 22.

49 Kathryn C. Statler, Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in
Vietnam (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 149.
50 Dianne Kirby, ‘‘Religion and the Cold War: An Introduction,’’ in Religion and the
Cold War, edited by Dianne Kirby (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 1.
51 Thomas A. Dooley, Deliver Us from Evil: The Story of Viet Nam’s Flight to Freedom
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956). While the most evocative part
of Dooley’s memoir was undoubtedly his description of the atrocities he
claimed the Viet Minh had inﬂicted on North Vietnamese Catholics, the lack of
corroborating evidence has led scholars to conclude that he largely fabricated
such tales for propaganda purposes.
410 The Canadian Historical Review

of Vietnam at the time, the issue of freedom of movement in North

Vietnam brought to the fore powerful humanitarian, religious, and
ideological concerns.
Three events convinced the Catholic Cadieux that North Vietnam’s
approach to freedom of movement was a sham. The ﬁrst was the visit
in October of an icc mobile team to Nam Dinh, a Catholic stronghold
on the Gulf of Tonkin coast where the population was supposedly
being prevented from leaving. Once on site, however, the icc’s inves-
tigators were mobbed by crowds protesting alleged French atrocities.
The team returned to Hanoi with some 2,000 anti-French petitions.52
When Acting Commissioner Cadieux reported to Ottawa that no one
in Nam Dinh seemed to want to go south, he raised the possibility of
Viet Minh interference.53 That said, there was initially no hard evi-
dence of communist wrongdoing. By November, however, Cadieux
was sure something underhanded had occurred at Nam Dinh: while
nobody in the area had expressed the slightest interest in moving
to the icc’s mobile team, its ﬁxed team at Haiphong reported that,
during the same period, several thousand refugees from the Nam
Dinh area had reached the city, many of them accusing the North
Vietnamese authorities of having tried to block their exit.54
The second episode that exhibited what Cadieux later termed the
‘‘mauvaise foi’’ of the communists was the icc investigation in early
November of Phat Diem, another Catholic enclave near the coast
where a reported 10,000 people wished to go south. Upon their
arrival, however, icc personnel were once again surrounded by a
howling mob. No contact could be made with the Catholics, many of
whom had taken refuge in and around Phat Diem Cathedral, where
supplies were running low. After protracted discussions in Hanoi, the
commission split its team in two so that it could both collect petitions
and pursue its investigation. More problems developed, with the local
authorities accusing the Catholic clergy of trying to embarrass the
government. Under Canadian pressure, the icc dispatched a group

52 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 52.

53 Marcel Cadieux to Secretary of State for External Affairs (ssea), ‘‘Freedom of
Movement in North Vietnam: Catholic Population,’’ 19 October 1954, ﬁle 50052-
A-40 pt. 4, vol. 4629, rg 25, lac. This tentative conclusion was later phrased and
developed with absolute certainty in Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 52–3.
54 Marcel Cadieux to Sherwood Lett, ‘‘Memorandum for the Commissioner:
Reports from the Mobile Team which carried out an Investigation in the Nam
Dinh area,’’ 11 November 1954, ﬁle 5, vol. 3070, rg 25, lac. See also Sherwood
Lett to ssea, ‘‘Weekly Progress Report for Vietnam,’’ 12 November 1954,
ﬁle 50052-A-40 pt. 5, vol. 4630, rg 25, lac.
Marcel Cadieux, Canada, and the International Commission 411

of senior political advisers to Phat Diem to assess the situation. They

discovered that there were, in fact, thousands of people who wanted to
leave, their provisions dangerously low. Visa and evacuation facilities
had proven totally inadequate. Forced against their will to transport
nearly 8,000 people from Phat Diem to Haiphong, the Viet Minh
tried to save face by boasting that the South Vietnamese government
could learn a thing or two from them about honouring the Geneva
Accords.55 For the Canadian delegation to the icc, however, the ‘‘Phat
Diem operation’’ was one of its crowning achievements.56
Such triumphs were rare. More often than not, icc investigations
into alleged North Vietnamese violations of freedom of movement met
with frustration. On one occasion, for example, the French reported
that ‘‘thousands’’ of refugees had assembled on a sand island at the
mouth of the Tra Ly River.57 Alerting authorities that high tide was
expected in forty-eight hours, imperilling the refugees, the French
asked for permission to enter drv territorial waters and rescue them.
The Viet Minh refused. The icc sent a mobile team there, but repeated
delays by the Viet Minh, whose cooperation was needed to reach the
site, prevented the team from arriving at the island for several days.
Once there it found no sign of life. Perhaps, Cadieux conceded, the
island had never been occupied, or perhaps its alleged occupants had
returned to dry land, or perhaps the French had simply exploited
the incident for propaganda purposes. ‘‘Il n’en reste pas moins,’’ he
insisted, ‘‘que la Commission a été effectivement empêchée d’aller là
où elle voulait être, au moment décisif.’’58 Is it any surprise that, as
political scientist Ramesh Thakur notes, freedom of movement in North
Vietnam ‘‘was probably the single most decisive element in socializing
Canadian ofﬁcials [on the icc] into a lasting posture of determined anti-
communism’’?59 According to Ross, ‘‘Because the refugee issue engaged
the most elemental humanitarian and ideological values of Canadian
representatives in Indochina, it had a profound impact on ensuing

55 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 55–59.

56 Sherwood Lett to ssea, ‘‘The Phat Diem Operation,’’ 2 December 1954, ﬁle
50052-A-40 pt. 6, vol 4630, rg 25, lac.
57 Sherwood Lett to ssea, ‘‘Weekly Progress Report for Vietnam,’’ 12 November
1954, ﬁle 50052-A-40 pt. 5, vol 4630, rg 25, lac.
58 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 60–3. The recollections of this incident of an
unidentiﬁed Canadian diplomat on the icc who was both Catholic and conser-
vative (thus quite possibly Cadieux) are quoted in Ross, In the Interests of Peace,
59 Thakur, Peacekeeping in Vietnam, 135.
412 The Canadian Historical Review

Canadian bureaucratic perceptions of the nature of the Vietnam con-

ﬂict and the legitimacy of the eventual American intervention.’’60
In the end, 850,000 to 900,000 people emigrated from North
Vietnam during the 300 days afforded by the Geneva Accords.61 Most
were Catholic, prompting Cadieux to remark that, to leave their homes
and to risk their lives, either their faith was very strong or their terror
very great.62 His admiration extended to their priests, especially the
Canadian Redemptorists, two of whom, he later told his friend, fellow
Catholic and dea under-secretary Jules Léger (whose brother Paul-
Émile was the archbishop of Montreal and a cardinal), were to be
esteemed as highly as those famous sons of the Church who had
risked their lives to proclaim the Word of God.63 As Sherwood Lett
privately noted of Cadieux as the latter’s tenure on the icc drew to a
close, his religious faith and highly charged temperament made it
hard for him to be detached when Catholic interests were at stake:
‘‘Mr. Cadieux has been very much upset with things this week. We’ve
had another major occasion in which Catholics have been prevented
from moving south. He is a very devout Catholic and his sense of
frustration on these occasions, when one seems to be so helpless to
prevent them, [is such] that he gets terribly wrought up and nervous.
I will be most sorry to lose him as he has been a most valued adviser,
but for his own sake I am glad he is to be relieved soon. I don’t think
his temperament and religious faith would allow him to stand the
strain much longer.’’64
Yet, as we now know, the migration was about more than just reli-
gion. According to one scholar, it was a ‘‘complex phenomenon involving
a multitude of individual, family and community decisions,’’ choices
driven by such diverse factors as ‘‘the threat of famine over a disrupted
economy, land reform and taxation in Viet Minh areas, experiences of
collaboration with the French, the impact of war and the vast effort
of propaganda made by all sides in 1954.’’65 Where propaganda was
60 Ross, In the Interests of Peace, 95.
61 Neil L. Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993), 232.
62 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 50.
63 Marcel Cadieux, ‘‘Note pour le sous-secrétaire : la liberté religieuse dans le
Nord Vietnam,’’ ﬁle 21, vol. 36, mc, lac. Cadieux wanted the dea to share the
substance of a report by Father Thomas Côté on freedom of religion in North
Vietnam with Cardinal Léger.
64 Quoted in Reginald H. Roy, Sherwood Lett: His Life and Times (Vancouver: ubc
Alumni Association, 1991), 149–50.
65 Andrew Hardy, ‘‘Internal Transnationalism and the Formation of the Vietnamese
Diaspora,’’ in State/Nation/Transnation: Perspectives on Transnationalism in the Asia
Paciﬁc, edited by Katie Willis and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (London: Routledge, 2004),
Marcel Cadieux, Canada, and the International Commission 413

concerned, the Central Intelligence Agency, circulating slogans like

‘‘Christ has gone to the South’’ and ‘‘The Virgin Mary has departed
from the North,’’ engaged in a covert campaign to get Catholics to leave,
although recent scholarship has queried just how inﬂuential that
campaign was.66 As Edward Lansdale, the head of the us propaganda
effort, recalled, ‘‘People don’t just pull up their roots and transplant
themselves because of slogans. They honestly feared what might
happen to them, and their emotion was strong enough to overcome
their attachment to their land, their homes, and their ancestral
While Cadieux and other Canadian diplomats had ideological rea-
sons for agreeing with Lansdale that fear drove the migration, their
understanding of that migration was admittedly limited. Less so was
their growing awareness of Viet Minh obstructionism. How many
more civilians might have left North Vietnam if not for the govern-
ment? While the conduct of the Viet Minh was predictable since
the exodus from their regime was an embarrassment, nothing could
have prepared Cadieux for the impotence of the icc in handling it.
The commission created at Geneva was a supervisory body with no
enforcement powers whose major decisions required unanimity. In
August 1954, Lester Pearson had instructed the Canadian delegation
to the icc to approach its work with ‘‘objectivity, impartiality and
fairness.’’68 But what if India and Poland failed to do the same? By
the end of Cadieux’s time on the icc, he and other Canadian diplomats
began to chafe under Pearson’s orders. As one of them complained to
Cadieux, it was commendable to be perfectly neutral, but they had to
take into account the larger ideological struggle underway and the
methods of their counterparts on the commission: ‘‘Je suis convaincu
que le peuple canadien et les nations du monde libre en général, lors-
qu’il s’agira de rendre compte de notre mandat, se fouteront joliment
du fait que nous sommes demeurés ‘neutres’ s’il apparaı̂t en fait que
nous nous sommes fait rouler comme des gogos [suckers].’’69 The
Indian and Polish tactics that Cadieux witnessed during the ﬁrst six
months of the icc’s existence, together with the inevitable Canadian

66 See, for example, Peter Hansen, ‘‘Bă´c Ði Cú: Catholic Refugees from the North
of Vietnam, and Their Role in the Southern Republic, 1954–1959,’’ Journal of
Vietnamese Studies 4, no. 3 (2009): 173–211; Van Nguyen-Marshall, ‘‘Tools of
Empire? Vietnamese Catholics in South Vietnam,’’ Journal of the Canadian
Historical Association 20, no. 2 (2009): 138–59.
67 Quoted in Hansen, ‘‘Bă´c Ði Cú,’’ 183.
68 Quoted in Bothwell, ‘‘The Further Shore,’’ 93.
69 Raymond Crépault to Marcel Cadieux, 16 February 1955, ﬁle 14, vol. 35, mc, lac.
414 The Canadian Historical Review

reaction, set the tone on the commission for years to come. They
also shaped how he and other Canadian diplomats later viewed the
Vietnam War.
Although, in a comment that reﬂected the importance he attached
to such factors as religion, culture, and the Third World’s attitude to
colonialism, Cadieux hoped that India’s ‘‘hostilité’’ toward Christianity,
Western civilization, and especially the French had not unduly inﬂu-
enced its conduct on the icc, he had his doubts.70 Prior to his arrival
in Vietnam, he had assumed that Indian and Canadian diplomats, as
fellow members of the Commonwealth, would ﬁnd common ground
on the icc. This assumption was predicated on the belief that a shared
language and imperial heritage could transcend differences of race
and history. But what came to be called the ‘‘new’’ or ‘‘non-white’’
Commonwealth, including India, viewed British colonialism more
critically than did the ‘‘old’’ or ‘‘white’’ Commonwealth, including
Canada. Cadieux noticed that while the Indians on the commission
owned expensive Parker pens, drank whiskey, bought their suits from
good London tailors, and often spoke ﬂawless English, the similarities
ended there. Beneath the surface, the Indians remained faithful to
what Cadieux called their ‘‘ancienne culture,’’ a civilization he and
many Western observers found bewildering. The main difference
between the Indians and the Canadians was ideological: according to
Cadieux, the two sides fundamentally disagreed over the concept of
neutrality, which the West associated with the objectivity of countries
like Sweden and Switzerland. However, for India, which had not
gained its independence until 1947, its self-declared policy of ‘‘non-
alignment’’ in the Cold War did not preclude its taking a stand on
a given issue, pursuing its national interests, or even expressing
support for certain controversial causes. Cadieux also found the
Indian diplomats on the icc generally sympathetic toward the Viet
Minh, whom they tended to see as well-meaning nationalists who
were novices in the art of governance.71 While this benign interpreta-
tion struck Western cold warriors as preposterous, it was grounded in
the shared anti-colonial experiences of an entire generation of indigenous
leaders in the Third World. Of course, the Indian attitude was also
based on a realpolitik that Cadieux and his colleagues well under-
stood: if Ho Chi Minh reunited the two Vietnams, whether in the elec-
tions scheduled for July 1956 or by military conquest, it was in India’s
national interest to maintain good relations with North Vietnam’s

70 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 66.

71 Ibid., 68–9, 71.
Marcel Cadieux, Canada, and the International Commission 415

leadership.72 As historian Robert Bothwell observes, ‘‘The Canadians,

when they ﬁnished, could go home across a ﬁve thousand-mile ocean;
but Indochina, as some of the Indians reﬂected, was not called Indo-
china for nothing.’’73
The Indian position was understandable, but, from the Canadian
perspective, its effect on the functioning of the icc was disastrous.
The chairman, M.J. Desai, did not hesitate to condemn French violations
of the Geneva Accords but was reluctant to censure North Vietnam’s
breaches of the same. Inﬂuenced in part by racialized views of culture,
Cadieux invoked the stereotype of the ‘‘Oriental’’ as lethargic and slow
to act, categorizing the Indians as ‘‘asiatiques’’ for always being willing
to let time solve all problems (echoing Cadieux’s comments, Lett
wrote to his wife that ‘‘what we in Canada and the usa consider slow
and dilatory cooperation is by Oriental and Asian standards con-
sidered expeditious and wholehearted cooperation and assistance’’).74
On the freedom of movement issue, Cadieux noted the sharp contrast
between the Canadians and their Indian counterparts: ‘‘Alors que
nous tenons à élaborer un système logique et à vériﬁer son exécu-
tion les Indiens ne veulent jamais brusquer les choses et exiger des
comptes.’’75 Suspicious of the United States for meddling in Asia and
hostile toward France for its colonialism, the Indian delegation was far
from impartial. The ostensible middle ground it carved out between
the Polish and Canadian positions was largely opportunistic. As
Cadieux observed, far from bringing the two sides closer together, the
Indian strategy pushed them farther apart.76 His references to the
Indian ‘‘goût pour la manœuvre’’ and Desai’s being ‘‘calculateur’’ –
Cadieux would later inform his colleagues back in Ottawa of the Indians’
‘‘devious’’ moves on the icc – evoked the cultural trope of the cunning
His assessment of the commission’s Indian personnel, whom he
otherwise viewed as quite competent, was scathing: ‘‘Ils manifestent
en particulier à l’égard des Viet Minh une tolérance frisant la complicité
et, dans leurs réticences, ils font preuve d’un détachement excessif

72 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 70.

73 Bothwell, ‘‘The Further Shore,’’ 97.
74 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 70; Sherwood Lett, quoted in Roy, Sherwood Lett,
143. On this stereotype, see Anthony Pagden, ‘‘Europe: Conceptualizing a
Continent,’’ in The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, edited
by Anthony Pagden (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 36.
75 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 69–70.
76 Ibid., 74–5.
77 Ibid., 75, 130. On ‘‘devious’’ moves, see Touhey, Conﬂicting Visions, 96.
416 The Canadian Historical Review

à l’endroit du devoir de la Commission de rendre un compte exact

et complet. Leur attitude ne cadre certes pas avec les conceptions
occidentales de l’objectivité.’’78 While Cadieux may have been wrong
to judge the Indians by Western standards, he was the ﬁrst of many
Canadian diplomats on the icc who would do so. Nor should his
view, which reﬂected Canadian diplomacy’s uneasy relationship with
a Third World that did not ﬁt neatly into the bipolar Cold War, obscure
the fact that India, the neutral third of a supposedly neutral interna-
tional commission, had been anything but neutral. Back in Ottawa,
Cadieux made this known. As historian Ryan M. Touhey has demon-
strated, several months after returning from Vietnam, Cadieux penned
a devastating memorandum, based closely on his chapter on the
Indians in ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ attacking Canadian High Commis-
sioner to India Escott Reid’s proposals for a ‘‘special relationship’’
with that country.79 In a different study, Touhey notes that Cadieux’s
frustration over how India and its ofﬁcials differed far more than he
had imagined from the white Commonwealth and its own diplomats
‘‘provides a revealing glimpse at how cultural and racial assumptions
of Indians could profoundly inﬂuence the perspectives of both anglo-
phone and francophone ofﬁcials.’’80 Indeed, Cadieux’s views played a
major role in shaping the critical perception of India in the Canadian
foreign service. From the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, no issue did
more to poison Indian-Canadian diplomatic relations than the dea’s
vexing experience of Indian neutrality in Indochina. According to the
department’s Far Eastern Division in 1969, ‘‘Exposure to Indian policies
and practices has soured virtually every Canadian FSO [Foreign Service
Ofﬁcer] and military ofﬁcer who has served in Indochina,’’ a conclusion
Cadieux himself had reached a few years before as under-secretary and
bluntly shared in a meeting with the Indian high commissioner to
Canada.81 As with the freedom of movement issue, disillusionment
78 Ibid., 78.
79 Touhey, Conﬂicting Visions, 95–6.
80 Ryan M. Touhey, ‘‘Romanticism and Race: Escott Reid, the Department of
External Affairs, and the Sundering of Canada-India Relations, 1952–57,’’ in
Madokoro, McKenzie, and Meren, Dominion of Race, 197.
81 Far Eastern Division to Peacekeeping and Military Assistance Division,
‘‘Defence Review: Canadian-Indian Relations in the Indochina Commissions,’’
24 March 1969, ﬁle 27-1-1 pt. 8, vol. 10272, rg 25, lac. As Cadieux told the
Indian high commissioner to Canada, ‘‘A whole generation of Cdn ofﬁcials
had served in Commissions and . . . their experience had affected Cdn-Indian
relations. Their views on Indian policy had become much more concrete and
detailed and this process had had a very sobering effect. Quality of relationship
between Indian and Cdn ofﬁcials had changed as result of experience in
Indochina.’’ Quoted in Bothwell, ‘‘The Further Shore,’’ 112–13.
Marcel Cadieux, Canada, and the International Commission 417

with India’s role in Vietnam strongly inﬂuenced Canadian diplomacy’s

view of the war there when the ﬁghting eventually resumed.
While the conduct of the Indian diplomats on the icc surprised
Cadieux, that of the Poles did not. A Soviet satellite since its ‘‘liberation’’
by the Red Army in 1945, Poland was as obviously communist as
Canada was liberal democratic. There had never been any doubt about
either country’s sympathies. The difference was that, in Cadieux’s
view, the Poles were the ‘‘avocats,’’ ‘‘complices,’’ and ‘‘conseillers’’ of
the Viet Minh. Their methods were various: they delayed the departure
of mobile teams for sites in North Vietnam, paralyzed their ability to
act, weakened commission reports, and challenged the results of
investigations. At the same time, they strongly supported any and all
Viet Minh accusations and never missed a chance to propagandize.
When faced with an unfavourable decision by the icc, the Polish com-
missioner, Przemyslaw Ogrodziński (whom Lett described as ‘‘the
Polish version of Machiavelli’’ and a ‘‘formidable opponent’’), would
argue until he obtained certain concessions. Then, on one sub-
committee or another, one of his subordinates would raise new issues,
causing yet more delays that gave the Viet Minh time to change the
situation on the ground to their advantage.82 Even though Canadian
diplomats saw the collusion between the Poles and the Viet Minh as
typical communist behaviour, Cadieux was still infuriated by the egre-
gious nature of Polish bias. That partiality was sometimes glaringly
obvious. At Phat Diem, for example, the Indian representative had
asked a group of Catholics to raise their hands if they had had nothing
to eat. All of them did so. Back in Hanoi, the Polish delegate, who had
been present, disputed the evidence. A survivor of the Nazi concentra-
tion camps, he claimed that truly starving people could not possibly
lift their arms and that what had transpired at Phat Diem was just a
propaganda stunt.83 More disturbingly, in the icc’s Petitions Section,
presided over by the Polish Madame Ciechanowska (whose ﬁrst name
remains elusive), petitions critical of the Viet Minh had a way of
somehow disappearing, prompting the Canadians to fear for the safety

82 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 85–7; Sherwood Lett, quoted in Roy, Sherwood
Lett, 145. According to Ross, the Polish members of the mobile teams did ‘‘their
utmost to slow team movement by tardiness, by sickness (which may not have
been feigned), or most deviously, by demanding lengthy entries under the
‘nothing to report’ sections of team report memoranda, whenever designated
sites were found to be empty.’’ See Ross, In the Interests of Peace, 124.
83 Ibid., 88.
418 The Canadian Historical Review

of those who submitted them. Lengthy efforts ﬁnally succeeded in

curtailing her suspicious activities.84
In Cadieux’s view, the Canadians spent most of their time either
trying to rouse the Indians from their apathy or preventing the Poles
from making the icc an arm of the Viet Minh propaganda machine.85
He was not an unbiased observer, but his summary anticipated
Thakur’s later conclusion on the positions of the three countries:
‘‘Poland would agree with North Vietnam, Canada would seek to shape
the Commission into a forceful body willing to assert its authority, and
India would move away from an initial broad view to a position of
searching out the highest common factor, if necessary by compro-
mise.’’86 Because the Indians proved so unreliable and the Poles so
partisan, Cadieux deeply regretted Canadian Commissioner Sherwood
Lett’s lack of astuteness. A future chief justice of the Supreme Court
of British Columbia, Lett’s legalistic approach to his duties (Pearson
had instructed him to act with ‘‘judicial impartiality’’) left him vulner-
able to both Indian and Polish machinations. He also took a restrictive
view of the delegation’s relationship with journalists and allied diplo-
matic missions, insisting that it keep its distance from both. Although
Cadieux praised Lett for his commitment to the work at hand and for
his undeniable uprightness, he nonetheless found him a novice in
diplomacy. For example, in another example of the bonds linking the
Catholic authorities in Vietnam to certain Canadian diplomats on the
icc, when the apostolic delegate to Indochina offered the Canadian
delegation detailed accounts of how the Viet Minh were obstructing
population movements, Lett refused even to read the documents.
At commission meetings, Cadieux could only stand by and watch a
ﬂustered Lett be outmanoeuvred by his Indian and Polish counter-
parts.87 Since the dea was a close-knit department with a somewhat
insular institutional culture, Cadieux’s criticisms may have reﬂected
the fact that, as a (distinguished) army ofﬁcer and lawyer, Lett was a
‘‘non-career appointment’’ – in layperson’s terms, an outsider. Given
the complexity of the situation in Vietnam and what was at stake
there, Canadian diplomats on the icc may have resented the fact that
their government had chosen a commissioner from outside their ranks.

84 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 90–1. On Madame Ciechanowska, see Sherwood

Lett to ssea, ‘‘Polish Attitude: Petitions Section,’’ 21 January 1955, ﬁle 50052-A-
40 pt. 8, vol. 4630, rg 25, lac.
85 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 90.
86 Thakur, Peacekeeping in Vietnam, 69.
87 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 141–6. For a more favourable view of Lett in
Vietnam, see Roy, Sherwood Lett, 133–56.
Marcel Cadieux, Canada, and the International Commission 419

To Cadieux, the ineffectual icc stood in stark contrast to a resolute

Viet Minh leadership whom he viewed as fanatical, a ﬁrst impression
that stayed with him throughout his career and inﬂuenced his views
on the Vietnam War. He noted that, as with Asians generally (in a
not unfounded cultural assumption given the importance of the
concept of ‘‘face’’ to Asian societies), the Viet Minh also attached the
upmost signiﬁcance to questions of prestige.88 Their leaders fused com-
munism and nationalism, but Cadieux, like most Canadian diplomats,
focused almost exclusively on their hated ideology. First, there was Ho
Chi Minh, the avuncular North Vietnamese president who dressed
plainly and sported sandals. As Cadieux noted, however, ‘‘Uncle Ho’’
did everything with an eye to propaganda, a political weapon Western
observers associated with totalitarian states. Then there was Pham Van
Dong, the minister of foreign affairs whose speeches were passionately
pro-communist and virulently anti-American. Finally, there was
General Vo Nguyen Giap, the strategist behind the Viet Minh triumph
at Dien Bien Phu, who exuded a youthful vigour.89 As defence minister,
Giap was responsible for North Vietnam’s implementation of the
Geneva Accords. In January 1955, he and Cadieux had a conversation
about freedom of movement in Vietnam. When Giap told him that
Catholics were free to leave but should refrain from propagandizing
and using aggressive tactics, Cadieux expressed concern about whether
their exit really was guaranteed. Although vexed, Giap told Cadieux
the next night, ‘‘Je ferai tous les efforts pour régler ces incidents
comme vous le désirez.’’90 A few days later, Cadieux was surprised to
learn from the head of the Red Cross in North Vietnam that the North
Vietnamese vice-ministers of health and foreign affairs were refusing
to accept supplies from Canada on the grounds that it was not a
neutral country. In particular, they claimed, its deputy commissioner
on the icc had accused the Viet Minh of failing to meet their obliga-
tions and had publicly called General Giap a liar. Fearing for his

88 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 115. Although the concept of face is universal,
there is a crucial difference between its strong collective (family, group, and so
on) associations in Asian societies and its far more individualistic meaning in
Western cultures. On this question, see Stella Ting-Toomey’s pioneering article
‘‘Intercultural Conﬂict Styles: A Face-Negotiation Theory,’’ in Theories in Inter-
cultural Communication, edited by Young Yun Kim and William B. Gudykunst
(Newbury Park, ca: Sage, 1988), 213–35.
89 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 104–5.
90 The account of this conversation is based on Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’
105–7; Marcel Cadieux, ‘‘Memorandum for the Commissioner: Conversation
with General Giap,’’ 14 January 1955, ﬁle 4, vol. 39, mc, lac. There are slight
discrepancies between the two versions.
420 The Canadian Historical Review

safety, Cadieux drafted a memo for Lett in which he meticulously

detailed his conversation with Giap. Even then, he was far from re-
assured: he had never seen a Cabinet minister lie so brazenly and
then misrepresent the conversation. That said, by making them feel
watched, Cadieux believed the Viet Minh were forced to relent, if
only slightly, thus allowing more people to ﬂee south.91
All the same, Cadieux resented how the Viet Minh manipulated
the Canadian delegation and made a mockery of the icc’s work. For
example, the Canadians sometimes found themselves pressured to
attend dubious social events, including one celebrating the ﬁfth anni-
versary of Soviet diplomatic recognition of the drv, at which they were
asked to make a speech.92 On another occasion, the Viet Minh invited
icc members to tour Hanoi’s university. It soon became clear that the
expedition’s real purpose was to demonstrate that classes were now
open to everyone instead of just the privileged few, an indirect attack
on the French to which the commission’s presence was designed to
give legitimacy.93 The Viet Minh had other ways of making Canadian
lives unpleasant. Their servants, who wore the insignia of the party
and had been told that the Canadians were the least important
members of the commission, had been ordered to spy on them. Their
residence, moreover, for weeks on end, lacked a functioning water
heater and, only marginally less vital to their well-being, a sufﬁcient
number of liquor glasses. As Cadieux asked, ‘‘Pouvons-nous nous
plaindre sans avoir l’air ridicule? Les orientaux sont maı̂tres dans l’art
d’humilier et de jouer subtilement ceux qu’ils n’aiment pas,’’ a racialized
cultural trope that drew on the idea that Asians were naturally treach-
erous.94 Nevertheless, his speciﬁc criticisms of Viet Minh behaviour
were valid.
What frustrated Cadieux most, however, was the Viet Minh’s circum-
vention of the icc’s investigative system. Many of the incidents, both
large and small, that the Canadians learned of seemed to be part of a
larger campaign to obstruct efforts by the International Commission
for Supervision and Control to do what it had been created to do:
supervise and control. The icc was also helpless to prevent the introduc-
tion into North Vietnam (and South Vietnam) of military equipment.
While ﬁxed teams might guard various points along the Chinese border,

91 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 108.

92 Ibid., 108–9.
93 Ibid., 116.
94 Ibid., 117. On this stereotype, see Alan J. Levine, Race Relations within Western
Expansion (Westport, ct: Praeger, 1996), 87.
Marcel Cadieux, Canada, and the International Commission 421

there were alternate routes into the country. The icc was hard pressed to
supervise a regime that knew the lay of the land better than anybody.
Above all, there was the human tragedy of Viet Minh rule, one that
evoked for Canadian diplomats the situation behind the Iron Curtain.
Working at his desk one Sunday, Cadieux heard a commotion in the
hall outside. A Vietnamese man claiming to be a refugee had entered
Canadian headquarters seeking protection and transportation south.
Only after he had made a statement to the icc Secretariat was he
handed over to the local authorities. Several days later, the Viet Minh
Liaison Mission said that he was merely a mental patient who had
been allowed to wander around Hanoi. On another occasion, a family
alleged that relatives had been arrested upon leaving a cathedral. The
Viet Minh replied that the police had no knowledge of the situation.
Such responses exasperated Cadieux: ‘‘Le mensonge, le cynisme ne
peuvent être plus ﬂagrants. Les Viet Minh se moquent bien de la
Commission!’’ Near Haiphong, a group of refugees had tried and
failed to disarm Viet Minh sentries at a guard post, leading to deaths,
injuries, and the taking of prisoners. Those among the migrants who
managed to reach safety petitioned the icc to meet with the prisoners.
As Cadieux recounted, in prison the would-be refugees underwent a
sudden ‘‘conversion’’: they had come to see the light regarding the
Viet Minh regime and no longer wanted to leave it.95 The Canadians
were undeceived, but such tactics continued unabated.
Despite his contempt for the Viet Minh, Cadieux could not help but
admire how, virtually alone, they had defeated France and won the
right to govern their own country – or at least half of it. Their great
misfortune, as he saw it, was that their ideology denied them the
very liberty that they had achieved at so high a cost – communist rule
naturally entailing both a loss of national independence and military
dictatorship. As Marxists, the Viet Minh opposed religious freedom,
causing a mass exodus to South Vietnam that worked against the
prospective reuniﬁcation of the country. The result, as Cadieux
recognized, was incongruous: on the one hand, the drv upheld and
defended the Geneva Accords because they promised national elections;
on the other, it surreptitiously did everything it could to undermine
the agency created by the Geneva Accords, the icc. To Cadieux, the
bad faith of the Viet Minh was typically communist: ‘‘En somme, au
Vietnam, le communisme nous montre sa face haineuse, luisante
de méchanceté.’’96 The Viet Minh were certainly ruthless, like all

95 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 112–3.

96 Ibid., 121–2.
422 The Canadian Historical Review

totalitarian regimes, but their leaders, especially Ho Chi Minh, were

also genuinely popular with many Vietnamese, who saw them as
anti-colonial freedom ﬁghters. By ﬁxating on communism, Canadian
diplomacy underestimated the degree to which communism in the
Third World was leavened by nationalism. In equating communism
with a loss of national independence, an argument that became less
persuasive the farther one moved from Eastern Europe, Cadieux and
other Western diplomats failed to appreciate fully the ways in which a
recently decolonized country like North Vietnam, far from being a
puppet of the Soviet Union and China, could use its ideological kinship
with the larger communist powers to secure their support for its own
national aims. From the Vietnamese perspective, the Vietnam War
was really a civil war.
What of the other side in that civil war – South Vietnam? For the
icc, the most controversial issue there was Article 14(c) of the Geneva
Accords, which forbade ‘‘reprisals or discrimination against persons or
organizations on account of their activities during the [First Indochina
War]’’ and guaranteed ‘‘democratic liberties.’’ As Cadieux noted, the
Viet Minh, helped by the Poles, exploited this clause to discredit the
South Vietnamese government. Early on, for example, Hanoi charged
Saigon with harming and provoking people formerly under its rule.
There had certainly been local protests against the South Vietnamese
government and demonstrators shot. Although Cadieux conceded that
Saigon had been clumsy and its soldiers trigger happy, the Canadian
delegation to the icc insisted that the commission also consider why
force had been necessary in the ﬁrst place.97 Its interest in the ques-
tion seems justiﬁed in light of the fact that, in September 1954,
the North Vietnamese Politburo had ordered the military struggle for
Vietnam to be replaced by a political one, with propaganda represent-
ing the major communist thrust in the South.98
Soon Hanoi was accusing Saigon of terrorizing the population,
particularly its sympathizers. What Cadieux termed the second phase
in the communist propaganda campaign was less successful. The
South Vietnamese government was found guilty of scattered reprisals
but no reign of terror, though the icc still condemned Saigon’s lapses.
The Canadian willingness to do this deeply impressed the Polish legal
adviser on the commission: ‘‘It was a period when most of the cases
were against the Southern authorities; whenever there was justiﬁable

97 Ibid., 96.
98 Pierre Asselin, Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2013), 17.
Marcel Cadieux, Canada, and the International Commission 423

suspicion that the Southern authorities were treating their citizens

in an inhumane manner, the Canadian delegates never hesitated
in condemning the crimes. I always considered this to be extremely
signiﬁcant.’’99 Nevertheless, Cadieux regretted that the icc’s repeated
censure of the South gave the North the appearance of legality and
moderation.100 The Canadians were convinced (not wrongly), in an
issue that would loom increasingly large in the years ahead, that
much of the unrest in South Vietnam was being fomented by com-
munist subversion, putting Saigon’s repression in a different light.
They also believed that, compared to Hanoi, Saigon was the lesser of
two evils. Such thinking of course dominated the Western approach to
the Cold War, with the United States supporting reactionary regimes
in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, notably Syngman Rhee’s govern-
ment in South Korea, in an effort to check Soviet inﬂuence.
It was obvious to Cadieux that South Vietnam’s leaders felt ambiva-
lent about the Geneva Accords, which one recalls they had not signed.
While they wanted the icc to facilitate the departure of Catholics from
North Vietnam, they kept their distance from the commission for fear
that recognizing its authority would imply a tacit acceptance of the
election process. As Cadieux informed South Vietnamese foreign
minister Tran Van Do, by delaying the departure of the icc’s mobile
teams in the South, Saigon made it harder to protest when Hanoi did
the same.101 Such behaviour was all the more tragic since, from the
Canadian perspective, the situation was much worse in North Vietnam,
where the slightest delay could jeopardize the success of a mission.
Shortly after Lett’s arrival, Cadieux accompanied him on a courtesy
visit to Ngo Dinh Diem, the fervently Catholic and anti-communist
prime minister (soon president) of South Vietnam. ‘‘Je ne me souviens
pas d’avoir assisté à une entrevue plus pénible,’’ Cadieux recalled. For
long stretches of the visit, Diem remained silent. When he did speak,
it was only to point out that, if the communists ever dared to permit
real freedom of movement in the North, there would be a ﬂood of
people south. But when the Canadians stressed the need for coopera-
tion from both North and South Vietnam in implementing the
Geneva Accords, Diem’s face hardened, and he fell silent once more.
The only time he became animated was when Cadieux mentioned
that the Canadian priests in Hanoi, who in 1946 had sheltered Diem

99 Mieczyslaw Maneli, War of the Vanquished, translated by Maria de Görgey (New

York: Harper and Row, 1971), 35.
100 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 97–8.
101 Ibid., 123–4.
424 The Canadian Historical Review

from the Viet Minh, spoke highly of him. Demonstrating the religious
zeal that would make him such an appealing ﬁgure to conservative
Catholic elites in the West (though not to South Vietnam’s predomi-
nantly Buddhist population), Diem replied that in a very short time
the Canadian Redemptorists had performed a missionary miracle in
Indochina.102 Cadieux’s other impression of Diem, this one formed
from afar, was his reluctance to be cast as a stooge of the United
States, which, after some initial hesitation, gave him strong backing.103
As with Ho Chi Minh, Diem was no puppet, although the amount of
American assistance he was able to secure invariably created such an
image. Later, us policy in South Vietnam was summed up by a critical
journalist as ‘‘Sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem.’’104
Despite the icc’s difﬁculties with the South Vietnamese govern-
ment, Cadieux insisted that at least once a month the commission
visit Saigon, if only to escape the grim atmosphere of Hanoi and to
avoid appearing partial to the regime there. He had also hoped that
in the South the Indian chair of the icc would face tough questions
from a free press, but either the journalists were not persistent
enough or M.J. Desai deftly evaded their queries.105 Still, Cadieux
found Saigon a relief with the luxury boutiques on rue Catinat and
the ﬁne wines available at the Pointe des Blagueurs Café. And yet
he could not shake off the sense of foreboding inspired by its radi-
cally different atmosphere: ‘‘La ville donne une impression factice
d’abondance de vie qui séduit à l’arrivée du Nord. A la réﬂexion, il est
facile de s’aviser cependant que cette facilité, ces lumières, ce luxe,
fournissent la preuve du danger mortel qui menace le Sud. Au Nord,
tous les sacriﬁces sont exigés, tous les efforts sont tendus pour assurer
la victoire ultime. Au Sud, par contraste, chacun poursuit ses projets
personnels. Si, un jour, il faut en venir à la lutte, il est fatal que le
régime le plus austère mais le plus discipliné aura de grands avan-
tages.’’106 This comment was highly prophetic. Moreover, Cadieux’s
six months in Vietnam ensured that, when open war ﬁnally erupted

102 Ibid., 124. See also Sherwood Lett to ssea, ‘‘Call on M. Diem, Prime Minister
of the National Vietnamese Government,’’ 23 November 1954, ﬁle 50052-A-40
103 Marcel Cadieux, ‘‘A Canadian Looks at the USA’’ (Speech to the National
Defence College, Kingston, Ontario), 3 March 1980, ﬁle 9, vol. 37, mc, lac.
104 The New York Times journalist Homer Bigart, quoted in Seth Jacobs, Cold War
Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of America’s War in Vietnam, 1950–
1963 (Lanham, md: Rowman and Littleﬁeld, 2006), 129.
105 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 125.
106 Ibid., 125–6.
Marcel Cadieux, Canada, and the International Commission 425

between North and South Vietnam, his sympathies lay entirely with
the South and its American ally.
In February 1955, Cadieux, whose uncertain health had been steadily
deteriorating, left North Vietnam for Canada. On the day of his depar-
ture, the British consul general in Hanoi wrote of him, ‘‘He did not take
long to size up the political situation here. He arrived with the idea
that the Geneva agreement might be made to work, given a spirit of
reasonable compromise; he has however been disgusted with the
evasions and prevarications of the Vietminh, and by their 100% Com-
munist approach. He is somewhat impatient of the manoeuvrings
which still go on in the Commission to preserve a united front and
gloss over widely divergent views, and says he intends to speak his
mind when he goes to Ottawa.’’107 Cadieux did, indeed, speak his
mind. Many of the Canadian diplomats who succeeded him on the
icc spoke their minds as well. Their presence in key positions in
the dea during the 1960s had a major inﬂuence on Canadian policy
toward the Vietnam War. Nowhere was this more apparent than in
Cadieux’s pro-us sympathies on the issue as under-secretary of state
for external affairs. In 1966, after a meeting on Vietnam in Ottawa
with Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs Paul Martin Sr
and several of his ofﬁcials, including Cadieux, William P. Bundy, the
us Department of State’s assistant secretary for far eastern affairs and
a key architect of American policy on Vietnam, noted that Cadieux
had had ‘‘extensive experience in Indochina and [saw] the North
Vietnamese as yielding only to relentless pressure.’’108 While six
months was hardly ‘‘extensive experience,’’ they were enough for
Cadieux to form a lasting impression of the North Vietnamese.
In conclusion, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi’’ not only explains how Cadieux’s
assignment on the icc shaped his views on the Vietnam War, but it
also sheds new light on a host of broader themes in Canadian interna-
tional history. For example, Cadieux’s deep personal involvement in
the freedom of movement question and his admiration for the
Redemptorists suggests the inﬂuence of religion on Canadian diplo-
macy. Similarly, his impressions of Asia, Vietnam, and the Indians
on the icc offer new insights into the bureaucratic culture of the dea
and the inﬂuence on it of questions of race and culture. Finally, his
107 Geoffrey Baker to F.S. Tomlinson, 22 February 1955, ﬁle 371/117159, Foreign
Ofﬁce Records, United Kingdom National Archives.
108 William P. Bundy, ‘‘Memorandum for the Record: Dinner Meeting with Paul
Martin and Other Canadian Ofﬁcials, June 21, 1966,’’ 22 June 1966, ﬁle POL
CAN-US, box 1990, 1964–6, Department of State Subject Numeric Files,
National Archives and Records Administration.
426 The Canadian Historical Review

staunch anti-communism is a useful reminder of the extent to which

alliance considerations dominated Canada’s approach to the Cold War
from Europe to the Third World. As the last line of Cadieux’s memoir
reads, ‘‘Pour la première fois [dans ma carrière] . . . j’ai eu l’impression
que la diplomatie canadienne prenait un rôle actif et assumait des
tâches d’une certaine importance pour le compte de ses Alliés de
l’Occident.’’109 At ﬁrst glance, this seems like a strange comment.
After all, the members of the icc were supposed to be neutral. In
fact, Canada had deliberately been chosen to represent the West, India
the non-aligned, and Poland the communist bloc. From its inception,
a tension had been built into the icc between neutrality and the larger
geopolitical interests believed to be at stake in Vietnam. Nor was the
conduct of the Viet Minh, whether motivated primarily by communism
or by nationalism, easily forgotten. According to both his family and
a colleague, Cadieux arrived in Vietnam with dark hair and left it
with white.110 In part because it engaged so many different factors in
Canadian diplomatic thinking, service on the icc was an ordeal, espe-
cially before early 1958, when the commission’s headquarters were
moved to Saigon. In the words of Saul Rae, Cadieux’s replacement in
Hanoi, ‘‘Marcel was the ﬁrst of the Mohicans, and no comments from
me [are] necessary about the effort he put into this mission, and the
contribution he made.’’111

brendan kelly received his PhD in history from the University of Toronto
in 2016. He is currently a Junior Fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for
Contemporary International History at the University of Toronto and the
Book Reviews Editor of International Journal, Canada’s pre-eminent journal of
global policy analysis. His work on treaties between the Crown and Indigenous
peoples in Canada, the Canadian home front during the Second World War,
and Canadian international history has appeared in Prairie Forum, Great
Plains Quarterly, Urban History Review, International Journal, and the American
Review of Canadian Studies as well as in the edited collection Mike’s World:
Lester B. Pearson and Canadian External Affairs (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2017).
His biography of the Canadian diplomat Marcel Cadieux will be published by
ubc Press in 2019.

109 Cadieux, ‘‘Six mois à Hanoi,’’ 158.

110 François and René Cadieux, interview with the author, Montreal, 22 May 2012;
Touhey, Conﬂicting Visions, 95. The colleague in question was Arthur Menzies.
111 ‘‘Excerpt from personal and conﬁdential letter from Saul Rae, Hanoi to
L. Stephens, dated July 11/55,’’ Records of the Civil Service Commission, ﬁle 3–
6, vol. 104, lac.
Marcel Cadieux, Canada, and the International Commission 427

brendan kelly a obtenu son doctorat en histoire de l’Université de Toronto

en 2016. Il est actuellement boursier diplômé au Bill Graham Centre for
Contemporary International History de l’Université de Toronto et responsable
des comptes rendus à l’International Journal, l’éminente revue canadienne
d’analyse des politiques mondiales. Ses travaux sur les traités entre la
Couronne et les peuples autochtones du Canada, le front intérieur au Canada
durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale et l’histoire internationale du Canada
ont paru dans Prairie Forum, le Great Plains Quarterly, la Revue d’histoire
urbaine, l’International Journal et l’American Review of Canadian Studies ainsi
que dans un ouvrage collectif intitulé Mike’s World: Lester B. Pearson and
Canadian External Affairs (Vancouver, ubc Press, 2017). Sa biographie du
diplomate canadien Marcel Cadieux sera publiée par ubc Press en 2019.


The author would like to thank Robert Bothwell, the editors of The
Canadian Historical Review, and the three anonymous reviewers for
their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. The research
on which it is based was supported by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier
CGS Doctoral Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council.