by Mary Grabar
Zinn himself was so ready to welcome that result that he pitched in to make it happen. Between 1967—when he published Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, and 1980, when his People’s History first came out—Zinn did his bit to help the Vietnamese Communists. In the celebrated “Pentagon Papers” episode of 1971, it was Zinn who hid top-secret documents stolen and leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst working for the RAND corporation. He also served as a witness for Ellsberg at his trial on charges under the Espionage Act.
What harm did the publication of these top-secret documents do to the American war effort in Vietnam? The worst damage came from the fact that the events covered ended in May 1968—just when the successful CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support) campaign “had begun its work,” according to William Colby, the CIA officer who headed up the effort. The Pentagon Papers obscured what had been accomplished between May 1968 and June 1971,31 giving the American public the false impression that the war was unwinnable. Left-wing journalists exploited the “revelations” in the Pentagon Papers and distorted the material in them, thus contributing to defeat in Vietnam. In doing so, they were following a line of propaganda that would successfully undermine the American public’s support for the war and thus prove instrumental to our defeat—and ultimately to the subjection of millions of East Asians to bloody Communist tyrannies. The American Left did everything they could to create the impression that our war against the North Vietnamese Communists was unwinnable—and also unjust. And in A People’s History, Zinn continues those distortions, quoting from the Pentagon Papers selectively to give the impression that government officials refused to help a democratic leader and then lied to the American public. Suggesting that there were nefarious secret plans behind America’s war in Vietnam, Zinn writes that according to the “secret memoranda of the National Security Council . . . there was talk in 1950 of . . . the ‘domino theory,’ ”—that is, the idea that the fall of one country to Communism would lead to the fall of others.32
Zinn does his best to obscure the honorable reasons for U.S. involvement in Vietnam—and to distract attention from the fact that the actual results of the Communist victory were exactly what the “domino theory” predicted. “Why was the United States doing this?” he asks, of the large amounts of aid we gave the French after Communist victories in China in 1949 and in Korea the following year. His answer? “To the public, the word was the United States was helping to stop Communism in Asia, but there was not much public discussion. In the secret memoranda of the National Security Council (which advised the President on foreign policy) there was talk in 1950 of what came to be known as the ‘domino theory’—that like a row of dominoes, if one country fell to Communism, the next one would do the same and so on. . . .”33
Contrary to Zinn’s suggestion, the domino theory was not discussed only in “secret memoranda.” The literal “domino” analogy was first used by President Eisenhower at a 1954 news conference when he replied to a reporter’s question about Indochina by referring to the “the ‘falling domino’ principle.”34 But, though not under that name, the principle had been part of the Truman Doctrine. In 1947, when President Truman asked Congress for aid to Greece and Turkey, he warned about the likelihood that Communism would spread south to Iran and east to India if those countries should fall.
And there is no better proof of the wisdom of the domino theory—or of the horrific consequences that were certain to be visited on millions once leftists like Zinn succeeded in persuading America to abandon it—than the results of the Communist victory in Vietnam, with neighboring Laos and Cambodia falling under Communist tyranny shortly thereafter. Zinn and his political allies bear a large measure of responsibility for the suffering of the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese “boat people” who risked drowning to escape the horrors of Communism in the 1970s—many of whom died. To anyone not seeing the Vietnamese Communists through rose-colored glasses, the tragic results were predictable from the beginning.
Beginning two decades before, Vietnamese in the hundreds of thousands had fled from the parts of their country where the Communists were taking over. A headline in the September 18, 1954 New York Times read “250,000 Vietnamese Flee Reds, Far Exceeding Expected Exodus.” On October 10, in a letter to the editor of the New York Times, Nguyen Duc Thanh, president of the American Vietnamese Foundation, pleaded for help for the Vietnamese who had left their homes in North Vietnam to relocate to the South. He stated, “The overwhelming majority of the Vietnamese, given proper support, would elect to stay on the side of freedom despite whatever hardships.” A November 7, 1954, article reported that a total of 479,431 persons had left North Vietnam.35 By May 1955, “over 900,000 refugees, most of them Roman Catholic,” had moved to the south. An estimated 50,000 to 90,000 Viet Minh moved north; about 10,000 Viet Minh, instructed “to engage in ‘political struggle,’ ” remained in South Vietnam.36 Ultimately, over a million Vietnamese fled the north.
In 1961, the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek were writing in support of the government’s fight against “Communist aggression” in Vietnam.37 And yet Zinn claims that in 1954—the very year in which the New York Times was reporting the flight of nearly half a million people from the Communist North Vietnam—“Vietnamese popular support . . . was overwhelmingly behind Ho Chi Minh and the revolutionary movement.”38
In Zinn’s telling, the Communists are the popular good guys. All the problems are caused by the evil, capitalist imperialists—especially the Americans. According to A People’s History, an “international assemblage at Geneva presided over the peace agreement between the French and the Vietminh” in 1954, in which “[i]t was agreed that the French would temporarily withdraw” to the south until two years later when an election would be held to “enable the Vietnamese to choose their own government.” But “the United States moved quickly to prevent the unification,” set up a puppet government under Ngo Dinh Diem, and persuaded him to prevent elections that were predicted to favor the Communists.39
But as Oscar Handlin pointed out in his review of A People’s History in the American Scholar, the 1954 Geneva assembly “did not agree on elections in a unified Vietnam; that was simply the hope expressed by the British chairman when the parties concerned could not agree.”40 And Zinn’s answer to Handlin, in a letter to that journal full of hysterical accusations—claiming, among other things, that Handlin had misled readers and created “historical facts by fiat”—proudly quoted the “ ‘Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference (July 21, 1954), in Great Britain Parliamentary Sessional Papers, XXXI, pp. 9-11:’ . . . general elections shall be held in July, 1956.” Patiently, Handlin acknowledged that Zinn was quoting from “the final declaration by the British chairman”—but pointed out that it was a statement “to which the Saigon government never agreed” and which “the United States, not a party in 1954, did not support.”41
Handlin’s point is supported by commentators and historians both Right and Left. As Norman Podhoretz explains in Why We Were in Vietnam, “since neither the United States nor South Vietnam had signed the Geneva agreements, they were under no legal obligation to carry them out.” Furthermore, “the Pentagon Papers reveal that the United States did not, as was often alleged in the subsequent debates over the war, ‘connive with Diem to ignore the elections. U.S. State Department records indicate that Diem’s refusal to be bound by the Geneva accords . . . were at his own initiative.’ ”42 Mark Moyar has described the tricky situation surrounding the Geneva agreement, which “lacked the endorsement of the new south Vietnamese government and the U.S. government”: “At a meeting of the National Security Council [Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles explained that the United States would not sanction the Geneva agreement because ‘we can’t get ourselves into the “Yalta business” of guaranteeing Soviet conquests.’ But at the same time, the Americans avoided criticizing the settlement, so as not to offend the Fre
nch, whom the Americans were attempting to entice into the European Defense Community.”43
Logevall too points to the challenges faced by the Eisenhower administration, including “congressional pressure to prevent any territorial loss to the Communists” and “to avoid ‘another Korea.’ ” He writes, “At a press conference in Washington [on July 21, 1954], President Eisenhower expressed satisfaction that an agreement had been reached to stop the bloodshed in Indochina. But he emphasized that the United States was not a party to the accords or bound by them. . . .” Eisenhower’s plan was to use the “two years before the elections . . . to build up the South Vietnamese government, free of the taint of French colonialism.”44
Even critics of America’s policy in Vietnam acknowledged that elections there would not be free and fair under the conditions. Theodore Draper, who, as Podhoretz explained, was “no friend either of Diem or of American foreign policy in Vietnam,” nevertheless pointed out that Ho Chi Minh “ ‘might have taken power democratically, but he would not have kept power democratically, which is far more important. In 1960 the “elections” in North Vietnam resulted in a 99.8 percent majority for the ruling Communist Party and its two small satellite groups, with one permitted to run on an opposition platform.’ ”45 But Zinn dishonestly suggests that America’s failure to support an election in these conditions was anti-democratic. The Diem regime in South Vietnam is cast as repeatedly blocking elections with the help of “American money and arms.”46
While in Zinn’s telling the Communists were frustrated democrats, the American-allied government of South Vietnam was “increasingly unpopular. Diem was a Catholic, and most Vietnamese were Buddhists; Diem was close to landlords, and this was a country of peasants. His pretenses at land reform left things basically as they were.” Diem “replaced locally selected provincial chiefs with his own men, appointed in Saigon” and “imprisoned more and more Vietnamese who criticized the regime for corruption, for lack of reform.”47 As Moyar points out, Diem’s “Denounce the Communists” campaign did result in some false accusations, but he was addressing real threats—such as assassination.48 As we shall see, some of Diem’s supposedly Buddhist opponents in the south were Communist imposters; others were real Buddhists dedicated also to Communism.49 Zinn, the proponent of redistributing property, does not mention the tens of thousands of landlords that were murdered by the Communists when they took over in the north in 1954.50 Nor does he mention the fact that the Communist “land reform,” or the redistribution of these lands to peasants, was followed by the standard Communist “ ‘second stage’ in which the land is taken back . . . and turned over to collective farms.”51 Zinn fails to mention such information, as he praises Communists as reformers. Diem, to be sure, was more authoritarian than a Western leader, but as Moyar points out, his culture and the chaotic conditions required a firm hand. Even so, “Diem did not stifle religion or kill tens of thousands in the process of redistributing land as Ho Chi Minh did, and he was more tolerant of dissent than his northern counterpart.”52 Stephen Morris has pointed out in the Weekly Standard that “South Vietnam was never even a fully authoritarian state.” It allowed “organized political opposition . . . including opposition newspapers.”53
Consider, in contrast, the description of Communist North Vietnam provided by Fredrik Logevall, who believes that Ho, with U.S. support, “might well have opted for an independent Communist course of the type Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito would follow.”54 Even so, Logevall admits that between 1946 and 1949, in Maoist fashion, the Viet Minh conducted indoctrination meetings in the villages. They also imposed taxes, or, more accurately, “cash extortions in the towns and rice levies in the villages.” And “when the situation demanded, the cadres reinforced education and propaganda with terror tactics, including assassination of village leaders.” Terror was “utilized selectively, not only in the military sense but in the sociological sense, targeting only those people who by virtue of their positions or their extensive landholdings weren’t very popular anyway.” Military General Giap kept the number of killings below a number that would provoke an insurrection.55 As Morris notes, Giap created a “secret police organization modeled on the Soviet and Chinese equivalents.” Ho Chi Minh’s ruthless adherence to Stalinism is illustrated by the fact that he and his comrades continued to celebrate Stalin’s “ideology and political practice,” “[l]ong after” the dictator’s death in 1953.56
Moyar, in contrast to Logevall, believes that Ho’s commitment to Communist internationalism meant that “he would not have sacrificed Communist solidarity for the sake of Vietnam’s narrow interests.” Diem, in contrast, “ultimately suffer[ed] death for refusing to yield to the demands of his American allies.”57 But Zinn’s picture of the Communist revolution as a spontaneous response to Diem’s authoritarian rule, to which Ho sent “aid” and “encouragement,” is accepted by historians neither of the Right or Left. This is Zinn’s fanciful take:
Opposition grew quickly in the countryside, where Diem’s apparatus could not reach well, and around 1958 guerrilla activities began against the regime. The Communist regime in Hanoi gave aid, encouragement, and sent people south—most of them southerners who had gone north after the Geneva accords—to support the guerrilla movement. In 1960, the National Liberation Front was formed in the South. It united the various strands of opposition to the regime; its strength came from South Vietnamese peasants, who saw it as a way of changing their daily lives.58
In support of this take, Zinn quotes the “U.S. government analyst Douglas Pike,” selecting—and that, as we shall see, is the operative word—from his book Viet Cong: The Organization and Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam: “In the 2,561 villages of South Vietnam, the National Liberation Front created a host of nation-wide socio-political organizations in a country where mass organizations . . . were virtually nonexistent. . . . aside from the NLF there had never been a truly mass-based political party in South Vietnam.”59 Zinn’s use of ellipses here is quite deceptive; it allows him to pretend that a network of Communist front organizations was some kind of indigenous political organization—and that U.S. government analysis recognized it as such. In fact, the parts of this passage that Zinn left out make it clear that the NLF was simply a particularly effective way for the North Vietnamese Communists to infiltrate the South. Pike’s purpose in Vietnam as a foreign service officer with the U.S. Information Agency was to become “knowledgeable in the field of communication of ideas in an insurgency,” as he wrote. As part of his work, since his arrival in 1960 he had come to understand the culture, for which the tightly knit villages were the center of life. Pike writes, “To the 2,561 villages of South Vietnam, where live two thirds of the people, came the Communists, openly or behind a front, determined to turn each village into an instrument for revolution, a drive aimed not at the people as individuals so much as at the village as a unit. The Southern village was weak and vulnerable to this kind of assault. . . .”60 In Pike’s analysis, there was a “Communist” “assault” being carried out in some cases by “a front” in order “to turn each village into an instrument for revolution.” The NLF wasn’t the indigenous and spontaneous political movement that Zinn suggests it is with his cleverly selective quotation of Pike. It was a Communist front organization, specially adapted to the conditions on the ground in Vietnam.
Pike, on the same page, also describes how the NLF fooled the Vietnamese and the Americans into believing that the NLF was “only a phantom edifice” by “ revers[ing] the usual order for front formation: Instead of beginning with the organizations and creating the front, it began with the front and created the organizations and then assigned them the task of engaging in revolution through the mechanism of the struggle movement.”61
Further selective quotation by Zinn promotes the idea that the Communists were benign political organizers, rather than bloody revolutionaries. Zinn quotes from Pike’s preface, p
age ix, saying in A People’s History, “Pike wrote: ‘The Communists have brought to the villages of South Vietnam significant social change and have done so largely by means of the communication process.’ That is, they were organizers much more than they were warriors.”62 A reader would get the idea that “Communists” were setting up town hall meetings something like the one depicted by Normal Rockwell in his painting of “The Freedom of Speech” in his “Four Freedoms” series. But on the same page, Pike also says that the NLF “threw a net of associations over the rural Vietnamese that could seduce him into voluntarily supporting the NLF or, failing that, bring the full weight of social pressure to bear on him, or, if both of these failed, could compel his support. It could subject him effectively to surveillance, indoctrination, and exploitation. It could order his life. It could artificially create grievances and develop voluntary support where logically such support ought not to have been forthcoming.”63 Even the reference to a “communication process” in the passage that Zinn did quote was not a reference to honest political persuasion. The “NLF communication process,” as Pike revealed, included “mass psychological techniques such as rallies, demonstrations, parades, movements, neighborhood and work meetings, and group criticism and individual denunciation campaigns”; “agit-prop work” directed at the masses; and pragmatic appeals “rooted in fundamental Communist doctrine.”64 This is Maoist indoctrination, not grassroots politics or townhall meetings.