The congress also addressed the lingering general weakness of the party, another major problem. In the North, that weakness had much to do with the rapid expansion of the VWP, whose membership had grown from five thousand to more than half a million since 1945. According to Le Duc Tho, head of the VWP Organization Committee, this expansion had brought into the party “undesirables,” mostly members from incorrect classes. In rural areas, to illustrate, a large percentage of the new members came from upper-middle and rich peasant backgrounds; some were even former landlords! Though all party members were expected to act as models for the masses, some of those from these classes failed to pay the mandatory rice tax or sell their surplus rice to the state. Similarly, of the approximately 110,000 national government cadres in the DRVN, many had never actually joined the party. These included holdovers from the French colonial era retained by the DRVN government after 1954, most of whom came from bourgeois backgrounds. By official account, only 34 percent of cadres were of poor peasant or working class origins, and overall, workers and poor peasants accounted for only 54 percent of party members. According to Tho, the membership generally did not understand core tenets of communism, and the practice of criticism and self-criticism was poorly developed and largely ineffective.81 Moreover, cadres in urban areas wasted too much time in holding meetings and disseminating political propaganda, and offered too little “effective assistance” to the masses.82
To solidify the party’s position in the DRVN and improve the quality and effectiveness of cadres and rank-and-file members who would be responsible for mobilizing the masses in support of the five-year plan, the congress adopted a new party statute. Among other provisions, the statute mandated a purge of members who “exploit” others, recruitment of new members only from “revolutionary elements” of the peasantry, shortening of the probationary period for new working class recruits from a year to nine months, and courses on theoretical communism for mid-rank and senior members of the party.83 According to historian Lien-Hang Nguyen, the statute did much more than that, expanding as it did the powers of security agencies and transforming the DRVN into a police state. Working closely with other agencies, including the PAVN’s own security forces (Bao ve), in the immediate aftermath of the congress the Ministry of Public Security under Tran Quoc Hoan created “a web of security and intelligence personnel who served as watchdogs.”84 Hoan became the “Beria of Vietnam,” and the DRVN thereafter took on the airs of a quintessential authoritarian and, at times, totalitarian state.85
The congress announced no substantive changes in policy regarding the struggle in the South. Given its commitment to reform the northern economy, the party could ill afford increased support for the insurgency there. “Without an adequate stock of necessary materials,” one VWP leader said of the plan to build socialism in the North, “we cannot meet the demands for development of production in good time.”86 The congress maintained that for the time being the party had to give highest priority to strengthening the North “on Communist lines” with a view to transforming the area above the seventeenth parallel into a “strong base” for the reunification of the country.87
Not only did the congress reaffirm Hanoi’s “North-first” policy, but it also decreed that building socialism in the North and carrying out the insurgency in the South would henceforth be pursued separately. That is, the one goal would be the responsibility of northerners and the other of southerners, under guidance from the party leadership in Hanoi. Fundamentally, this meant that the Vietnamese revolution would no longer be a unitary movement, but would consist of two parallel endeavors, which in turn suggested that southerners would in the future get even less material support from the North and have to learn to fend for themselves. “The two revolutionary tasks of the North and the South belong to two different strategies,” the congress announced, “each task aiming at satisfying the concrete requirements of each zone under the specific conditions of our divided country.”88 The people in each zone had to assume responsibility for accomplishing the tasks assigned to them and do so largely with their own resources. From now on, this division of revolutionary tasks would be “the compass for all our actions and thoughts,” at least until the DRVN completed its socialist transformation.89
The congress probably sanctioned the division of revolutionary tasks to impress upon southerners, and party militants specifically, that Hanoi had no intention of committing itself further to the insurgency below the seventeenth parallel, as well as to encourage southern self-sufficiency. The less Hanoi involved itself in the South, the easier it was to deny any involvement, and thus to rally world opinion, retain the constancy of allies, and keep Washington from attacking the North. The sanction was clearly the work of moderates within the VWP and indicated that their control over decision-making remained, for the time being at least, almost absolute. For militants, this was a major setback and a bigger disappointment.
During the congress, VWP leaders again confronted the “unwelcome and awkward problem” of the Sino-Soviet split. In their respective addresses to the assembled local and foreign delegates, Soviet and Chinese representatives attacked each other’s national leaders for pursuing misguided foreign policies and sowing discord in the socialist camp. First, the Soviet delegate denounced Chinese “dogmatists” and “sectarians” who sought to “discover isolated formulas in Marxist-Leninist classics to justify purely subjective conceptualizations.” Then, his Chinese counterpart criticized Soviet “revisionists” for misusing the works of communist luminaries to “distort and negate the living content of Marxist-Leninist theory.” Delegates from other communist states were supportive of the Soviets, though the North Korean delegate expressed no opinion on the split and the Albanian delegate sided with the Chinese. The North Vietnamese themselves “went a considerable way to satisfy the Soviet Union” on matters relating to the split, but ultimately “tried to be middle-men and reserved some points in regard to which they favored China’s views.”90 In his address, Pham Van Dong stuck to the party line on the Sino-Soviet dispute and praised both Moscow and Beijing for their contributions to world socialism, reiterated Hanoi’s support for peaceful coexistence, and pledged that the VWP would continue to “contribute to solidifying the friendship between socialist states and the unity of views among communist parties on the basis of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism.”91
To lead the party through the five-year plan and deal with the situation in the South, the congress named Le Duan first (no longer “general”) secretary of the party and thus head of the Politburo. In retrospect, this was arguably the congress’s most consequential act, for Le Duan’s imprint on party policy, especially on the conduct of the struggle in the South, would become increasingly evident in the coming months and years. Le Duan was selected as first secretary over Vo Nguyen Giap, a leading moderate and the victorious general at Dien Bien Phu, mainly because of his ties to the South. He had spent most of his adult life promoting the party agenda in central and southern Vietnam, and in fact led the party in Nam Bo more or less continuously between 1945 and 1957. He thus possessed the knowledge and experience necessary to preside over the effort to liberate the South if and when it came to that, and perhaps most importantly, the credibility among southern communists to reconcile them to the policies adopted at the congress, which Hanoi knew would dishearten them. His selection may thus have been part of an adroit effort by the moderates who still controlled the party to finesse the growing division that threatened to split the VWP over revolutionary strategy in the South. Whatever the validity of this line of reasoning, Le Duan’s qualifications to lead the party included his background as a committed revolutionary, a proven organizer and mobilizer, and an experienced tactician.
The 1960 congress also selected a new Politburo whose membership reflected the party’s growing internal divide for and against war. Its members included Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan, as well as Truong Chinh, Pham Van Dong, Pham Hung, Vo Nguyen Giap, Le Duc Tho, Nguyen Chi Thanh, Ng
uyen Duy Trinh, Le Thanh Nghi, and Hoang Van Hoan, as well as Tran Quoc Hoan and Van Tien Dung as alternate members. These thirteen men were also among the forty-seven members of the new Central Committee.92 Besides Le Duan, three others, namely, Le Duc Tho, Pham Hung, and Nguyen Chi Thanh, were from the South or closely tied to it, and harbored strong militant sympathies, as previously noted. Their reappointment, as historian William Duiker has surmised, attested to “the growing importance of the Southern revolution” in party concerns.93 Interestingly, though Le Duan, Hung, Tho, and Thanh were also appointed to the Secretariat, Ho and Giap were not. The rising fortunes of Nguyen Chi Thanh were especially telling. Until now, Vo Nguyen Giap had been the most notable military figure in the upper ranks of the VWP. Thanh’s reappointment to the Politburo had been preceded the year before by his promotion to full general (dai tuong) in the PAVN—a rank previously held only by Giap. The promotion, a French assessment noted, presaged the “fading of [Giap’s] star” and the rise of hard-line influence in Hanoi.94 Certainly Le Duan, Thanh, and other militants were increasing their numbers and influence at the top levels of party leadership, but their views remained for now those of a minority in Hanoi.
THE FOUNDING OF THE NLF
In the aftermath of the National Congress, in December 1960, Hanoi announced the formation of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF) and, soon thereafter, of the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF). The latter was the military arm of the former, but it was also in fact “part of the [PAVN], created, constructed, trained, and led by the party.”95 The NLF was to be a broad-based alliance of “all the patriots from all social strata, political parties, religions and nationalities” in the South, much like the Viet Minh had been. In its own words, the NLF called on the South Vietnamese people to “form a bloc to rise up as one man and struggle heroically in order to fulfill the plan aimed at overthrowing the camouflaged colonial regime of the U.S. imperialists and puppet administration” in Saigon.96 In Le Duan’s words, the NLF was a “broad united front” to fight imperialists and their reactionary allies.97 To Saigon, however, it was “nothing more than an extension of the machine of North Viet Nam, controlled by the [VWP],” its mission “to unify and reinforce VC [Viet Cong, i.e., indigenous communist] activities in the South.”98
According to its own manifesto, the NLF “undertakes to unite all sections of the people [in the South], all social classes, nationalities, political parties, organizations, religious communities and patriotic personalities, without distinction of their political tendencies, in order to struggle and overthrow the rule of the U.S. imperialists and their stooge—the Ngo Dinh Diem clique—and realize independence, democracy, peace and neutrality and advance toward peaceful reunification of the Fatherland.”99 Its program, officially adopted in February 1961, included ten points: to overthrow the colonial regime of U.S. “imperialists” disguised as the “dictatorial” administration of Ngo Dinh Diem and to form in place of that regime a coalition government of all “democratic” forces; to establish a democratic state in the South; to build an independent economy there to improve living standards; to carry out rent reduction and land reform for peasants; to build a national education system and a democratic culture; to build an army to defend the Fatherland and the people; to guarantee equal rights for all nationalities and both genders and to protect the rights of foreign residents in Vietnam and of Vietnamese living abroad; to implement a foreign policy of peace and neutrality; to establish normal relations between northern and southern Vietnam and then peacefully reunify the country; and to oppose aggressive war and actively defend world peace.100
The NLF’s establishment fulfilled the provision of Resolution 15 calling for a “people’s front for reunification and opposition to Diem and the Americans.” By late 1960, when Hanoi proclaimed the Front, southern communists needed an umbrella organization with wide appeal among southerners, especially in the cities, and the NLF, they hoped, would do that as well as facilitate the recruitment of partisans and fighters.101 It would draw to its ranks people of all classes and political persuasions opposed to the Diem regime and the American presence. If successful, it would enhance party control of the southern insurgency by bringing large segments of the southern population into a single organization under a leadership secretly beholden to Hanoi. Control over the anti-Diem, anti-American movement in the South had always been tenuous for Hanoi. As previously shown, it had even had trouble reining in its own subordinates there. Since 1954, the Nam Bo and Interzone V leaderships had continuously questioned its strategic priorities, albeit never openly. Southern communists’ dissatisfaction with Hanoi’s handling of the situation in the South had been increasingly problematic during 1959 and 1960. Though the NLF’s rank-and-file was always more nationalist and anti-Saigon or anti-American than communist, its leaders were for the most part committed communist revolutionaries selected by and answering to Hanoi. These circumstances and considerations may have been decisive in the party’s decision to shift to a united front strategy in the South.
According to a study based on classified files from Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, there may have been another significant consideration underlying the creation of the NLF, stemming from the way foreign powers and international groups were beginning to perceive the situation in the South. The author of that study, Tran Minh Truong of the Institute of International Relations in Hanoi, claims that VWP leaders created the NLF in late 1960 expressly to enhance the legitimacy of the southern revolutionary movement in the eyes of the international community generally, and of Beijing and Moscow specifically. “In reality, the creation of the [NLF]” as a “representative organization for all classes of nationalists in the South,” Truong writes, constituted “a flexible diplomatic tactic of the party and of Ho Chi Minh” to “win over wider consent and support from the world’s people for the cause of southern liberation.”
Specifically, Truong writes, Hanoi intended the tactic to serve two purposes, essentially the same as those behind the recent decree to divide revolutionary labor between northerners and southerners. The first purpose was to “give the USSR and China no reason to [continue to] oppose the armed struggle in the South” by showing that the revolutionary movement there was broad, inclusive, and indigenously southern. This would demonstrate to the socialist giants and the rest of the world that in endorsing Resolution 15 Hanoi had merely responded to the wishes of the people, and of southerners in particular. The second purpose was to “counterattack and defeat the propaganda theme” of Washington and Saigon that the insurgency below the seventeenth parallel was all Hanoi’s doing, a case of external “communist aggression” against freedom-loving people who supported their established government and wanted to be left alone.102 According to another Vietnamese source, with the formation of the NLF, “an important diplomatic offensive began with people’s diplomacy at its core.” The “banner of peace and neutrality proposed in the Front’s political programme achieved widespread approval from the freedom and justice loving people in the world, including Americans and those who disagree with communism.”103
After the Third National Congress came and went, Hanoi had to worry about the reaction of its partisans, especially in the South, to decisions to continue prioritizing the socialist project in the North and to separate northern and southern revolutionary tasks. In selecting Le Duan as first secretary and, specifically, forming the NLF, Hanoi may have been acting to pre-empt dissidence, which sometimes bordered on mutiny, over its strategic priorities. Though focused on transforming the North and, now, keeping a distance from the South, Hanoi still sought to control events—to the extent that it could—below the seventeenth parallel.
4
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Buying Time, 1961
The year 1961 witnessed a dramatic escalation of Cold War tensions. After severing relations with Havana following the Cuban revolution of 1959, the administration of U.S. president John F. Kennedy sanctioned a failed invasion of that coun
try, prompting Fidel Castro to declare himself a Marxist-Leninist and align with Moscow. Stern warnings from Washington against Soviet interference in Congo preceded an abortive Kennedy-Khrushchev summit in Vienna and the placement of U.S. nuclear-tipped missiles in Turkey, within striking distance of Moscow. Another crisis erupted over Berlin after Moscow issued a new ultimatum calling for the withdrawal of U.S. and allied armed forces from the western half of the city. This crisis led to the construction of the Berlin Wall, a telling symbol of the state of East-West relations at that point. It also produced a tense standoff between American and Soviet forces in the city, which Moscow followed up by resuming atmospheric nuclear testing, previously suspended.
As Beijing approached the Soviets to end their bitter feud, new cleavages within the socialist camp became manifest when Moscow severed diplomatic relations with Albania over Tirana’s refusal to end its tirades against Khrushchev and peaceful coexistence. Kennedy’s decision to send additional military personnel as well as helicopters to South Vietnam evinced the new president’s desire to thwart communist ambitions there and portended the onset of yet another major Cold War crisis.
Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 Page 15