Nor did any of the participants expect elections to occur. The Geneva Conference was intended not to establish peace for all time through the ballot box but rather to create a partition of Vietnam similar to that of Korea. Partition was formally treated as a temporary expedient, but all major participants expected it to be permanent. Whatever their words about elections, their actions revealed their intent: They established two governments, allowed for two separate military forces, and arranged for the movement of refugees between the zones. It would have been senseless to go through all this trouble in 1954 only to turn around and undo it after elections in 1956.
The whole idea was wildly unrealistic in any case. Reunification was supposedly to be decided by free elections. Because elections would not be free in North Vietnam, South Vietnam could legitimately object to holding them. A stalemate was inevitable. North Vietnam understood this. After the conference, its delegate, Pham Van Dong, told a reporter, “You know as well as I do that there won’t be elections.”
When the time came to discuss elections in 1956, Diem refused to participate, and the United States supported him. We were not afraid of holding elections in Vietnam, provided they were held under the conditions of genuine freedom that the Geneva Declaration called for. But we knew that those conditions would exist only in South Vietnam, and this sentiment was bipartisan. Senator Kennedy said that neither the United States nor South Vietnam should be a party to an election “obviously subverted and stacked in advance.” After spending two years crushing every vestige of freedom in North Vietnam, Hanoi’s leaders would never have allowed internationally supervised free elections to decide their fate. Following later consultations, even the Soviet Union agreed that a plebiscite was unfeasible.
North Vietnam, with a cynicism appalling even for Ho, briefly pressed the issue. But balloting conducted in Viet Minh territory in 1946 revealed just what they had in mind for 1956. Ho never permitted any suspense about the outcome. In order to secure the participation of other political parties, he openly guaranteed the leaders of one party that they would win twenty parliamentary seats and those of another that they would take fifty. The returns themselves made Diem’s elections look like a model of good government. Ho received 169,222 votes in Hanoi, a city with a population of only 119,000. That amounted to 140 percent of the vote, if every person regardless of age cast a ballot.
Ho’s distaste for uncontrolled free elections had not abated by 1956. Pham Van Dong told a reporter how Ho expected the election to be run. There would have to be a multiparty contest in South Vietnam, but the ballot in North Vietnam, where the people had been “united,” would have only the Communist party on it. This would have made the election a sure thing for Hanoi, because North Vietnam contained 55 percent of the total Vietnamese population. An election that guaranteed victory was the only kind Ho ever would have accepted.
Many in the American antiwar movement claimed that Ho would have defeated Diem in a fair contest. They argued that even President Eisenhower conceded this point in his memoirs. The passage they always cited reads: “I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Bao Dai.” Those who conclude from this quotation that Ho would have won any elections overlook two facts. The Geneva-sponsored election was to be held not at the time of the fighting, by which Eisenhower meant 1954, but rather in 1956. And Ho’s opponent would have been not a hapless French puppet, Bao Dai, but a popular anti-French nationalist, President Diem.
Ho would not have fared well in a fair election. In 1954, one out of every thirteen North Vietnamese fled the country rather than live under his rule. His so-called land-reform program had convulsed the country, produced severe food shortages, and sparked major peasant revolts that began in Ho’s home province and spread into at least two others. General Giap later admitted that in putting down the unrest, his government killed 50,000 people. By 1956, Ho was hardly the man to head up a ticket. Diem, whose popularity was then peaking, would have won decisively. There was only one reason why North Vietnam’s leaders, like those of any other Communist country, never would have dared to hold genuinely free elections: They knew that they would lose.
For the United States to have forced South Vietnam to hold elections blatantly stacked to guarantee a Communist victory would have been legally absurd, strategically senseless, and morally ludicrous.
• • •
Ho never wavered in his determination to unite all of Vietnam under Communist rule. It was never a question of whether he would try to conquer South Vietnam, but only of when and by what means he would try to do it.
According to captured documents and the testimony of high-ranking Communist defectors, North Vietnam’s decision to conquer South Vietnam came shortly after the Geneva Conference. Ho waited several years before launching the assault. He needed to consolidate his power in North Vietnam, and he expected Diem’s government to succumb to the chaotic conditions immediately after the partition and fall of its own accord. His Communist network in southern Vietnam, though substantial, had never been as powerful as the one in the North, and Diem’s attacks on it had severely reduced its strength.
But his preparations for the offensive against the South began before the ink of his delegate’s signature dried on the cease-fire agreements in Geneva. He had pledged to freeze the size of his army, but within four months North Vietnam’s forces expanded from seven divisions to twenty. Meanwhile, South Vietnam demobilized 20,000 troops. In May 1959, at its Fifteenth Plenum, the North Vietnamese Communist party gave the order to begin the offensive. It resolved that “the basic path of development of the revolution in the South is to use violence, and that according to the specific situation and present requirements of the revolution the line of using violence is using the strength of the masses and relying principally on the political forces of the masses, in combination with armed forces to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the situation, in order to overthrow the rule of the imperialists and colonialists and set up a revolutionary regime of the people.”
By September, large-scale infiltration of Communist guerrillas into South Vietnam had started, the total topping 4,000 in less than two years. Most of these troops were southerners who had moved north in 1954. But the identity of the prime mover was never in doubt. As North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap declared in January 1960, “The North has become a large rear echelon for our army.” With the North serving as the rear, where else could the front be but in the South?
Thus, if wars begin in the minds of men, the Vietnam War began in the mind of Ho Chi Minh. For thirty years he had relentlessly pursued his goal of uniting Vietnam under his totalitarian rule. His undying dream was an unending nightmare for millions of Vietnamese. He had expected the French to turn Vietnam over to him through the March 6,1946, agreement. He had expected the Soviet Union and Communist China to deliver it to him over the conference table in Geneva in 1954. He had expected South Vietnam to fall into his hands after a brief interval under President Diem. He probably even hoped to win South Vietnam through an election on reunification that would have been a patent sham.
In 1959, after all these had failed, Hanoi went to war.
WHY AND HOW WE WENT INTO VIETNAM
Never in history has so much power been used so ineffectively as in the war in Vietnam.
Seldom has one country enjoyed a superiority in arms greater than the United States held over North Vietnam in 1959. The war pitted a nuclear superpower with a gross national product of $500 billion, armed forces numbering over 1 million, and a population of 180 million against a minor military power with a GNP of less than $2 billion, an army of 250,000, and a population of less than 16 million. On paper it looked like a hopeless mismatch. But wars—and particularly guerrilla wars—are not fought on paper.
North Vietnam hel
d one decisive advantage over the United States: Its leaders had a limitless capacity for barbarity and tenacity. They resorted to any tactics, no matter how cruel or immoral, and were willing to fight indefinitely, no matter how much suffering resulted. American leaders, quite properly, were constrained by morality, and the American people eventually would tire of the burdens of war. Our enemy could never defeat us; he could only make us quit.
Those who opposed our involvement in the war relentlessly pressed one question onto the national debate: Why are we in Vietnam? Of all the questions asked during those years, none had an answer more simple or apparent. The United States intervened in the Vietnam War to prevent North Vietnam from imposing its totalitarian government on South Vietnam through military conquest, both because a Communist victory would lead to massive human suffering for the people of Vietnam and because it would damage American strategic interests and pose a threat to our allies and friends in other non-Communist nations.
To understand what went wrong in Vietnam, the critical question is not why we were in Vietnam but how we got into Vietnam. In 1950, President Truman gave France $10 million in financial aid to support its war against the Communist Viet Minh. By 1960, President Eisenhower had stationed 685 noncombat advisers in South Vietnam and had given its government $2 billion in aid. But our commitment remained clearly limited, contingent on whether the South Vietnamese government undertook needed reforms and represented the true nationalist aspirations of its people.
President Kennedy made the first major escalation in our commitment. He raised the number of American military personnel in Vietnam to over 16,000 and permitted them to go into combat. In 1965, President Johnson ordered air strikes against North Vietnam and sent additional American combat troops to fight in South Vietnam. After four years of steadily deepening involvement, the number of American servicemen in Vietnam reached nearly 550,000. By the end of 1968, the war had cost the United States over 31,000 lives, and Americans were being killed at a rate of 300 a week. Yet we were no closer to victory than we had been a decade before.
Our critical error was to ignore one of the iron laws of war: Never go in without knowing how you are going to get out. Successive American administrations upped our commitment by increments—first in aid, then in noncombat advisers, and finally in combat soldiers—without having clearly in mind how these increases would achieve our goals. Policymakers based their decisions on what was needed to prevent defeat rather than what it would take to reach victory.
Several fatal flaws plagued American policy in Vietnam from 1960 through 1968. We failed to understand that the war was an invasion from North Vietnam, not an insurgency in South Vietnam. We failed to prevent North Vietnam from establishing a key supply route, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, through Laos and Cambodia. We failed to foresee the consequences of our backing the military coup that overthrew South Vietnam’s most capable leader, President Diem, and that ushered in years of debilitating political instability. We failed to tailor our military tactics to the political circumstances of the war. We failed to understand the determination of our enemy and what it would take to defeat him. We failed to explain the war to the American people and mobilize them behind it.
Our goals were noble in Vietnam. But a just cause is not a substitute for strategy. We were morally right in trying to help South Vietnam defend itself, but we made crucial errors in how we went about it.
• • •
The first rule of war is that one must know the enemy and understand his strategy and tactics. The second is that one must adopt strategy and tactics suited to the circumstances of the war. In the early years of the Vietnam War, North Vietnam conducted an invasion of South Vietnam that was cloaked as an indigenous insurgency. The United States mistook the nature of the war, choosing to fight against the insurgency instead of the invasion, and in the early 1960s compounded this error with three others. By the mid-1960s, American forces found themselves fighting the wrong kind of war with the wrong kinds of tactics.
The North Vietnamese invasion that began in late 1959 proved Hanoi’s leaders had learned a lesson from the Korean War. North Korea’s blatant invasion across the border had given the United States clear justification to intervene and had enabled President Truman to rally the American people and our United Nations allies to the defense of South Korea. North Vietnam therefore shrewdly camouflaged its invasion to look like a civil war. But in fact the Vietnam War was the Korean War with jungles.
Hanoi’s invasion came under and around the border instead of over it. By 1963, North Vietnam had infiltrated more than 15,000 troops or advisers into the South, most of them southerners trained by the Communists in the North. Subsequently, the infiltration became predominantly northern. North Vietnam sensed that victory might be at hand and consequently stepped up the attack. It sent 12,000 troops in 1964, 36,000 in 1965, 92,000 in 1966, and 101,000 in 1967. After the Tet Offensive in early 1968, the fighting was conducted almost exclusively by the North Vietnamese Army.
Hanoi also had a fifth column in South Vietnam. Ho had ordered thousands of Communist Viet Minh to stay in the South after the 1954 partition in anticipation of his push to conquer the whole of Vietnam. They organized the National Liberation Front, a coalition of political groups opposing the South Vietnamese government. These included idealistic youths, peasants in areas where land reform had failed, Saigon intellectuals, and victims of Diem’s anti-Communist campaign. It was a classic example of the Communist tactic of the united front. Though some non-Communist groups gathered under this umbrella organization, the Communists always dominated it. As distinguished from the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions, in which the Communists captured what were at the outset primarily non-Communist movements, the guerrilla insurgency in South Vietnam was started, controlled, and dominated by the Communists from the beginning. When the non-Communists were no longer useful to the Communist cause, they were eliminated.
The nature of the National Liberation Front became a central issue in the debate over the propriety of the American intervention in the Vietnam War. There were two critical questions: Was the front an indigenous political movement independent of North Vietnam? Did it represent the legitimate aspirations of the South Vietnamese? The answer to both questions was unequivocally no.
It was vitally important for North Vietnam to create the appearance that the National Liberation Front was an independent movement. Communist leaders went to elaborate lengths to maintain this illusion. But Hanoi’s hand was hidden only from those who chose not to see it.
North Vietnam decided to use armed force to unite Vietnam in January 1959 and sent out orders to that effect in May. By July, Communist infiltration into South Vietnam markedly increased. These agents organized a political and military revolt against the Saigon government. A few months later, the number of guerrilla attacks escalated dramatically. In September 1960, North Vietnam’s Communist party publicly called for “our people” in South Vietnam to “bring into being a broad National United Front against the United States and Diem.” In January 1961, the creation of the National Liberation Front was announced in Saigon. North Vietnam called for the formation of separate military and political organizations for South Vietnam’s Communists. By December 1962, both the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s Revolutionary party had appeared.
One Communist defector explained that North Vietnam could hardly permit the International Control Commission, which supervised compliance with the 1954 Geneva cease-fire agreements, to say that there was an invasion from the North, “so it was necessary to have some name . . . to clothe these forces with some political organization.” When two other defectors were shown American publications arguing that the National Liberation Front was independent of Hanoi, they remarked with amusement that North Vietnam had been more successful than expected in concealing its role.
There was direct evidence of North Vietnam’s role as well. In April 1960, North Vietnamese Communist Party First Secretary Le Duan said, “The liberatio
n of the South is not only a task for the southern people, but also of the entire people, of the South as well as of the North. The northern people will never neglect their task with regard to one half of their country, which is not yet liberated.” At the Geneva Conference on Laos in July 1962, a leading member of the North Vietnamese delegation divulged to journalists that the names of some members of the Central Committee of his country’s Communist party were being kept secret because “they are directing military operations in South Vietnam.”
A few simple calculations proved that the guerrillas in the South could not hold out for long without material support from North Vietnam. Until mid-1964, the National Liberation Front conducted low-level military assaults while it recruited members and organized and strengthened its structure. Then it was ready to step up the size of its attacks. In 1964, its main forces grew from 10,000 troops to 30,000, and its paramilitary forces increased from 30,000 to 80,000. These men needed weapons. Caches left behind before the 1954 partition contained 10,000 weapons. The National Liberation Front had captured 39,000 weapons and lost 25,000, producing a net gain of 14,000. But this would have left 86,000 troops unarmed. AK-47s did not grow on trees and could not be carved from bamboo shoots. The weapons had to come from North Vietnam.
If there was any doubt during the war that the National Liberation Front was merely a front, it was quickly dispelled after the war ended. North Vietnamese General Van Tien Dung, in his account of the final victory of his armies in 1975, barely mentions the role of South Vietnam’s Communists. In southern Vietnam, all key government positions were given to northerners, and the forces of the People’s Liberation Army were immediately absorbed into the North Vietnamese Army. In May 1975, Le Duan said, “Our Party is the unique and single leader that organized, controlled, and governed the entire struggle of the Vietnamese people from the first day of the revolution.”
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