Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965

by Asselin, Pierre

  In the wake of the purges, Nguyen Duy Trinh, Le Thanh Nghi, Pham Hung, and Hoang Van Hoan were promoted to the Politburo, and Le Duc Tho replaced Le Van Luong as head of the Organization Committee.181 Until a suitable candidate for the position could be found and vetted, Ho Chi Minh took over as acting general secretary. Overall, these outcomes boded well for VWP militants. Trinh, Hung, and Hoan were no fans of the current strategic line. Tho, Le Duan’s former deputy in the South and most trusted ally in the party, had joined the Politburo after his repatriation to the North in 1955. As Organization Committee head, he would become instrumental in facilitating the appointment of like-minded individuals to the Central Committee and the Politburo, setting the stage for the hijacking of party decision-making by militants in 1963–64.182 For the time being, however, Ho, Giap, and other supporters of strategic peace continued to hold sway over VWP policymaking.

  In assessing the latest Central Committee plenum, French diplomats concluded quite correctly that the tendency toward détente in the North and caution in the South had not ceased.183 Immediately following the reshuffling in the Politburo, northern society actually experienced its most “democratic” period. The new, more liberal atmosphere encouraged freedom of thought and expression in all realms, a consequential result of which was the appearance of two new periodicals, Nhan van (Humanities) and Tham hoa (Hundred Flowers, a title borrowed from the Chinese movement of the same name, which encouraged criticism of leftist deviations by CCP leaders and cadres). Both periodicals featured items critical of the DRVN leadership and calling for reformist change. To illustrate, in Nhan van, Tran Duc Thao, a university professor, denounced bureaucratism, cliques, and the personality cult in the North. Until the state withered away, Thao suggested, only individual liberty and the freedoms of press, speech, and association could ensure popular democracy.184 “Following in the footsteps of Soviet and Eastern European revisionist thinkers,” historian Peter Zinoman has written of this episode, Thao and other writers “contrasted the virtues of Leninism with the evils of Stalinism and advocated a fundamentalist return to the humanistic origins of Communist thought.” This criticism of the VWP actually represented a “relatively mild manifestation of [a] global phenomenon.”185

  As in China, it was not long before the criticism proved too much for party leaders. Under the supervision of To Huu, a dogmatic, rising member of the Central Committee who oversaw ideological conformity in cultural affairs, DRVN authorities suppressed the offending periodicals and jailed their contributors.186 Eventually, the Politburo reversed the entire democratization project. Possibly, the anticommunist revolt in Hungary in October and November influenced the about-face.187 Whatever its origins, the reversal underscored the pitfalls of flexible and conciliatory—essentially, moderate—policymaking, and put all its adherents, including Ho and Giap, on notice.

  LE DUAN AND SOUTHERNERS AGITATE

  That Hanoi refused to modify its revolutionary strategy after the July 1956 deadline passed validated the rather cynical belief of many below the seventeenth parallel that the primary function of the war against the French had been to further the hidden agenda of northern-based revolutionaries. That is, its real purpose all along had been to bring about the liberation of northern Vietnam only, and the fighting in the South was never more than “diversionary mischief for the French.”188 Whether this was ever in fact the view of southern revolutionary leaders, many of them were “less than happy with the strategy thrust upon them by the Hanoi leadership” after 1954.189 Few in the South were more disappointed and frustrated with Hanoi at this point than Le Duan.190 Since joining the revolution, he had committed himself to national—not zonal, sectional, or partial—liberation. He also believed not only that violence constituted the most effective tool for combatting imperialism and its lackeys, but that the bloodshed it caused sanctified the revolutionary process. Thus the Politburo majority’s decision to eschew armed struggle starting in July 1954 remained “inconceivable” to Le Duan, who had “made of the unity of the country” one of his reasons “to fight and to live.”191 He, in fact, drafted his own fourteen-point “action plan” outlining a forward strategy of revolutionary militancy to support political struggle in the South and produce national reunification without further delay. Other southern party leaders with whom he conferred and shared his plan endorsed it, but Hanoi rejected it.192

  Undeterred, Le Duan privately challenged Hanoi’s stance, telling other southern party leaders and members that “the enemy will not implement the Geneva Agreement,” and that they should all prepare to “wrest back power through violence.”193 According to historian Lien-Hang Nguyen, this member of the Politburo actually flouted the party’s strategic line by mobilizing troops in preparation for a resumption of hostilities. Though he never publicly denounced the party line, Le Duan “fanned the revolutionary flames” in the South to “force his reluctant comrades in the North to go to war” against Saigon, she writes.194 Unless Hanoi acted decisively and soon, Le Duan thought, the communist movement in the South would vanish. Southerners had taken the struggle as far as they could under Hanoi’s constraints. VWP membership in the South was now down to perhaps fifteen thousand and dwindling.195

  A few weeks before the next Central Committee plenum, scheduled for December, Le Duan sent a missive to Hanoi entitled De cuong cach mang mien Nam (Directions of the Southern Revolution).196 A revised version of his fourteen-point plan, the document proposed a reassessment of VWP strategy and a bold new course of action in the conduct of the revolution in the South. Its conclusions rested on Le Duan’s analysis as well as the substance of recent discussions with other southern revolutionaries. His proposals had been vetted and revised at a conference of Nam Bo communist leaders in Phnom Penh before he submitted them to the party leadership.197 Le Duan’s main hope was to “nudg[e] his comrades [in the North] to do more to support the revolution below the seventeenth parallel.”198

  In his missive, Le Duan made the case for abandoning the party’s current line and at once resuming armed struggle in the South, with comprehensive northern backing. Since he understood that key leaders in the North opposed this course of action, he worded his proposals carefully. He refrained from explicit denunciation of the passive response to Diem’s violent assault on communists and noncommunist former members of the Viet Minh. Similarly, he did not attack Khrushchev’s doctrine of peaceful coexistence, though he thought it deeply misguided and altogether unsuitable for Vietnam. Instead, Le Duan shared his thinking on revolutionary policy and the urgency of the situation in the South. “As long as the [global] capitalist economy survives, it will always scheme to provoke war, and there will still remain the danger of war,” he wrote. In Vietnam, the Americans had schemed to partition the nation politically and were now prepared to maintain the status quo with violence. The “fundamental” problem facing the party was “how to smash the U.S.–Diem scheme of division and war-provocation.” Economic competition, coexistence, and even negotiations were all well and good in certain settings, but none was viable in a situation in which the imperatives that drove the United States and Saigon defied the will of the South Vietnamese people. Those imperatives could not be accommodated without sacrificing the South and surrendering the aims of the revolution.

  In view of those circumstances, Le Duan affirmed his position that there was “no other path” but armed struggle for the party and the people of the South. The “line of the revolutionary movement must be in accord with the inclinations and aspirations of the people. Only in that way can a revolutionary movement be mobilized and succeed.” According to Le Duan, now was an “opportune moment” to unleash a wave of revolutionary violence because the Americans and their Saigon allies faced a window of vulnerability before the rising tide of U.S. military assistance became overwhelming. The “vile and brutal” character of the imperialists and their lackeys alienated southerners and isolated Washington internationally. Given the demonstrated willingness of the Vietnamese people properly led
and inspired to fight, victory would not take long and the human and material costs would be tolerable. “Any revolutionary movement has times when it falls and times when it rises,” he told Hanoi; “any revolutionary movement has times that are favorable for development and times that are unfavorable.” The French had tried for years to eradicate the communist movement in Vietnam, he claimed, and failed. “It was not the Communists but the French imperialists themselves and their feudal lackeys who were destroyed on our soil.” Now, the United States and its lackeys were trying to annihilate what was left of the revolutionary movement in the South. But communists could prevail again with a new strategy that incorporated a military component.

  Le Duan’s appeal struck a somewhat positive note in Hanoi. After lengthy deliberation, the Central Committee authorized southern communists to conduct targeted assassinations of “reactionary traitors” as well as terror bombings of institutions and locations associated with the Diem regime and the American presence.199 That fell far short of what Le Duan wanted, leading Ang Cheng Guan to conclude that after December 1956 Hanoi’s revolutionary strategy remained “essentially unchanged.”200 Still, the authorization to use violence, even on a very limited scale, represented a victory for Le Duan and other militants, as it constituted a tacit acknowledgment by Hanoi, the first of its kind, that political struggle alone was not working and armed struggle might be the answer to the party’s challenges in the South.

  2

  * * *

  Changing Course, 1957–1959

  It did not take long for Soviet-American relations to improve after Premier Khrushchev professed his commitment to peaceful coexistence in early 1956. Within months, Moscow and Washington began cultural exchanges. The concomitant growing militarization of the Cold War and lingering differences over the fate of Germany challenged superpower détente but did not derail it. In fact, in 1959 U.S. vice president Richard Nixon visited Moscow, and shortly thereafter, Khrushchev himself reciprocated with a goodwill tour of the United States during which he engaged in constructive dialogue with Eisenhower.

  Moscow’s overtures to Washington contributed to the precipitous decline of Sino-Soviet relations in the late 1950s. Committed to the eradication of capitalism and to “continuous revolution” in China, Mao and other CCP leaders could not reconcile themselves to peaceful coexistence, which they viewed as a form of revisionism, a heresy that threatened to undermine the unity of the socialist camp. Beijing leaders also objected to Soviet proposals for joint military and other ventures, intended, they thought, to humiliate China and undermine its sovereignty. Moscow’s decision of 1959 to withhold from Beijing prototypes and data for producing a nuclear bomb, thus reneging on an agreement signed two years earlier, plus a tense summit between Mao and Khrushchev in October, only widened the gap between the two countries.

  Sino-Soviet contentions and peaceful coexistence expanded Washington’s margin for action in Indochina. Impressed by Diem’s ability to defeat his enemies and consolidate his authority in the RVN, the Eisenhower administration increased the level of its aid to the Saigon regime even as it pursued détente with Moscow.

  In light of these circumstances, Hanoi began to contemplate revising its revolutionary strategy. Its reluctance to act more decisively in the South, in conjunction with emergent Sino-Soviet differences, exacerbated tensions between southern and northern supporters of the DRVN as well as between militants and moderates within the VWP. To alleviate these and other pressing problems, the Central Committee adopted Resolution 15 in January 1959. Calling for the beginning of a communist-led insurgency in the South, the resolution represented the first meaningful revision of the party’s revolutionary strategy in nearly five years. Fearful of American direct intervention and concerned about the reaction of Moscow and Beijing, both of which continued to oppose resumption of war in Vietnam, the Politburo mandated that the insurgency be restrained, and to that end provided only limited northern support.

  NEW AND OLD CHALLENGES

  In January 1957, during a meeting of the United Nations (UN) Special Political Committee, the United States introduced a draft resolution calling for the admission of “Vietnam”—not worded as the RVN, though that was implied—to the UN. Without consulting Hanoi, Moscow countered with a proposal recommending simultaneous admission of “the Democratic Republic of Vietnam” and “South Vietnam” as sovereign states in their respective territories. The proposal infuriated and alarmed DRVN leaders. They had unsuccessfully applied for DRVN membership in the UN in November 1948 and again in December 1951 to enhance their government’s legitimacy during the Indochina War. By now, however, they had no such aspiration, unless of course the DRVN was admitted as the sole legitimate government of all of Vietnam. This, they understood, the United States would never allow. Gaining admission along with the RVN, as the Soviets were now proposing, was also inconceivable, since the DRVN, like the RVN, claimed de jure sovereignty over all of Vietnam.1

  The Soviet proposal caused consternation in Hanoi not only because it contravened a core principle—that the DRVN was the only legitimate government in Vietnam—but also because it suggested that Moscow, the leader of the socialist camp and its most important ally, was willing to accept the permanent division of the country. Concerned about that prospect and fearful that others, including nonaligned and socialist states, might endorse the call for UN membership for both Vietnams, DRVN leaders suddenly became nervous, no longer certain that time was on their side.

  Thereafter, Hanoi’s foreign policy focused more self-consciously on reaffirming its loyalty to the socialist camp, the Third World, and national liberation movements, seeking thereby to enhance the legitimacy and prestige of the DRVN internationally, including among the nonaligned states, and continuing to advocate the reunification of Vietnam under the terms of the Geneva accords.2 At the time, the DRVN had formal diplomatic relations only with members or close friends of the socialist camp, some of which had no representation in Hanoi. Britain and India each had a consulate general in Hanoi and France a general delegation, but none of them officially recognized the DRVN government.3 Starting in 1957, Hanoi sought to establish ties with other countries, including newly decolonized states in Asia and Africa.

  DRVN leaders faced other serious challenges that year. Domestically, they confronted recurring waves of social and economic problems: food and housing shortages, rising inflation, and industrial unrest resulting from constant pressure on the part of government authorities for increased production.4 “There is little optimism that the economy of North Vietnam can be expected to develop quickly in the foreseeable future,” a Canadian diplomat reported, following a visit to the DRVN, since “the [economic] plans formulated by the North Vietnamese, in collaboration with the foreign advisers, have neglected the present in favour of the future.” The good news for Hanoi was that “there is little point in speaking of the possibilities of an economic collapse of North Vietnam,” the diplomat derisively concluded, “since there is no economic structure to collapse in the first place.”5

  Then, too, there were lingering problems from the botched land reform program. The party reclassified more than half the households it had recently labeled “landlord” and punished accordingly, relabeling them “peasant” and withdrawing the punishment, when possible.6 It also re-educated cadres responsible for these and other “errors.”7 According to a series of articles in Hoc tap, the party’s theoretical journal, the re-education program was necessary to deal with doubts, confusion, and lack of solidarity among cadres.8 At the same time, in the newly formed northwestern Thai-Meo Autonomous Zone, disaffected local cadres joined disgruntled members of the Hmong, Dao, and Khu Mu minority groups to instigate an “armed loyalist movement” against what they saw as an “unjust” local regime. This only compounded the challenges facing Hanoi.9

  Meanwhile, Diem continued to strengthen his rule in the South. In May he made a triumphant visit to the United States, where he was hailed as the “Miracle Man” of Asia and r
eceived assurances of continued American economic and military aid.10 As a result of the visit, in the words of Fredrik Logevall, the American commitment to South Vietnam was “personalized in a way it never was before,” partly because of the “fawning” press coverage Diem received.11 These developments coincided with the “darkest days” of the revolution in the South, as Diem’s military and security forces successfully intensified their efforts to kill or capture communists.12

  SUSTAINED CAUTION

  Confronted with these challenges, Hanoi maintained a cautious stance vis-à-vis the South. Key leaders seemed “reconciled for the time being to the de facto division of the country.”13 In the name of peaceful struggle, Hanoi continued to press Saigon for improving relations, to call on Diem to agree to consultative talks on national elections, and to play the role of irritant when Diem refused. Recognizing that the DRVN might have to eventually intervene directly below the seventeenth parallel, Hanoi introduced compulsory military service, experimentally in one province in August and nationally by the end of the year.14 In what would prove to be a fateful decision, DRVN leaders also called Le Duan to Hanoi and appointed him acting general secretary of the party.15 Portending a possible revision of the VWP’s revolutionary strategy, the move may have been engineered by moderates to appease disgruntled southern revolutionaries, including Le Duan himself, or to undermine southern militancy by relocating its loudest voice to the North.