In the more direct language of a former Hanoi official, the coup “increased the danger of U.S. direct military intervention” in South Vietnam.125 The new leadership in Saigon existed, according to another source, for the express purpose of creating political conditions that would enable the Americans to step up the hostilities in the South to their fullest extent.126 In this reading, removing Diem eliminated the chief obstacle to Washington’s goal of sending its own combat forces into Vietnam. “The fact that the Americans had put people in power in Saigon who represented no one but themselves was a political factor of tremendous importance for the party,” one analyst noted.127 British diplomats in Hanoi were quick to discern “the bitterness of the DRV’s attitude towards the apparently more implacable military junta” that presided in Saigon thereafter.128
These concerns notwithstanding, some in the party believed the coup might be a blessing if it could be turned into “the first step towards the final disintegration of the American position” in the South.129 To those who thought this way, Diem had been “one of the strongest individuals resisting the people and Communism,” a leader who had done “everything that could be done in an attempt to crush the revolution,” and he had had success. Insofar as these things were true, the coup “will prove contrary to the calculations of the U.S. imperialists” and “will not be the last misjudgment by Washington.”130 Western observers agreed that Diem had been surprisingly resourceful in creating a strong political base for himself in the South while resisting Washington’s attempt to take control of the war effort there.131
The weight of these calculations is difficult to measure. There is no doubt that Diem had been a strong political leader who had some meaningful successes in resisting the communists. But his overthrow was “not an unmixed blessing” for Hanoi, as U.S. government analyst and historian George K. Tanham has noted, because it rid the South of “the greatest object of hate” among southerners and thus of “an important motivating element for some parts of the NLF.” Indeed, Tanham contends, membership in the NLF “dropped” shortly after the coup as many southern rebels considered their struggle for peace and justice to be over.132
THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE’S NINTH PLENUM
The coup in Saigon led to a period of reassessment in Hanoi, and eventually to a coup of sorts there as well.133 Immediately, it prompted an emergency session of the Central Committee to discuss, in the bland language of subsequent official accounts, “the international tasks of the party.”134 David Elliott has suggested that the session’s purpose was to decide whether to negotiate with the new leadership in Saigon with a view to creating a coalition administration there.135 Negotiations to that end would be consistent with earlier party initiatives and might allow southern revolutionary forces to consolidate their recent gains in the countryside. But any such agreement would likely mean an indefinite postponement of reunification, which militants could be expected to oppose, especially at this juncture.136
The plenum in fact addressed issues that went well beyond these concerns and produced irrevocable changes in the VWP’s revolutionary strategy and the party itself. Discussion involved not only the situation internationally and in the South, but also the growing division within the party and relations with the Chinese and the Soviets. According to a foreign observer at the time, the timing of the plenum represented “the most solid confirmation of disputes within the party.”137 Indeed, it was in this uncertain, troubling context that Diem’s overthrow and the resulting changes in the South brought the conflict between party moderates and militants to a head. Circumstances within the party leadership as well as below the seventeenth parallel and in the socialist camp generally had combined to force the party either to formally commit itself to the leftist stance on strategic as well as theoretical issues or to mute that and other criticism of peaceful coexistence and revisionism and resign itself to whatever happened below the seventeenth parallel.138 Failure to make a clear choice on these alternatives, to resolve the militant-moderate conflict once and for all, would confuse the party faithful as well as southern revolutionaries and the Vietnamese people, and would cloud, if not compromise, relations with Moscow and Beijing. The plenum therefore became the setting in which the VWP would address and resolve that conflict.
The plenum opened on 22 November.139 In early sessions, party notables reported on conditions in Vietnam and elsewhere to establish the correctness of their views and reinforce or sway the thinking of peers. The façade of party unity, the “infallibility” of Marxism-Leninism, as well as the conventions of Vietnamese propriety dictated that the reports and their presentation be tactful and formulaic. Vo Nguyen Giap, for example, discussed the ongoing modernization of the armed forces in language that stressed not only the progress being made but the continued need for caution in the South.
The deliberative discussions that followed were reportedly more contentious.140 Since the sessions were private and records of them—if they exist—are still unreleased, information about those discussions is limited. It appears, however, that formulaic congeniality disappeared as soon as the occasion for it passed. In view of the stakes, participants had every reason to state their views frankly, or if not frankly then calculatingly according to their sense of the way the ideological wind was blowing. Deep and long-standing cleavages within the party were thus exposed, and for the moment the party seemed to tear itself asunder. Ho Chi Minh reportedly offered in advance to moderate these debates, but militants prevented that lest his stature bend the plenum to his will.141 According to one of his biographers, Ho stormed out of the deliberations because of their contentiousness and excused himself from further participation.142 A document in the Russian archives suggests that on 25 December, while the plenum was still in session, Ho went to the Soviet Embassy and told the ambassador he was retiring from politics, presumably because of the intractability of the debates in the plenum and the challenges to his authority.143
The least circuitous and most significant contribution to the debate was the formal address by first secretary Le Duan, who asserted himself and his thinking as never before during the proceedings.144 Le Duan stated his hard-line views pointedly and with a view to rallying the committee behind them and securing endorsement for the strategic decisions those views dictated. Entitled “Some Questions concerning the International Tasks of Our Party,” his speech was spirited and full of specifics couched in the orthodoxies of Marxism-Leninism. It conveyed militants’ growing concern with what they saw as a world crisis and with the dangers and opportunities they believed that crisis presented to the larger cause of world revolution and the specific cause of the Vietnamese revolution.
Le Duan based his case concerning the need for the party to change course in the South less on the “objective” situation there than on a surprisingly positive analysis of the world situation. Formerly, when the Soviet Union was still weak, he said, “it was necessary at certain times to make concessions to the enemy in order to gain temporary relaxation and temporary peace, to gain time to consolidate and increase [the socialist camp’s] strength so as to cope with new clashes with imperialism.” Now, however, the tide had changed: “We are strong, while the enemy is weak.” “The forces of revolution, socialism, and peace have greatly surpassed the forces of reaction and war of imperialism,” he told the plenum. “Revolution is, therefore, not on the defensive, and the strategy of revolution should not be a defensive one.” In Vietnam as elsewhere in the colonial and semicolonial world, the “strategy of revolution” must be “an offensive strategy to smash one by one the war policies of imperialism headed by the United States until its war plans are completely smashed.” The time had come to “take the offensive against imperialist war policy and defeat it.”
The words and their thrust were indirect, but they clearly conveyed his meaning: the Vietnamese were entitled to follow the revolutionary strategy dictated by their own circumstances. The purpose of the debate at the plenum was to define the interests of Vietnam as a membe
r of the socialist camp facing a unique set of circumstances and to decide how best to act on those interests and address those circumstances. The first secretary left no doubt about where he stood on those issues. To liberate the South and reunify the country, the VWP could temporize no longer; it had to move to a strategy predicated on war below the seventeenth parallel.
In light of that necessity, Le Duan also boldly insisted that the party must combat the rightist opportunists and revisionists in its ranks. “The purposes of opposing modern revisionism,” he explained, were “to strengthen the struggle against imperialism, to vigorously promote the revolutionary cause of the people of the world, to safeguard the international communist movement and the socialist camp, and also to defend our party and the revolutionary cause of our party and people.” Le Duan’s speech thus called for war not only against Saigon and the Americans in the South, but also against moderate tendencies within the VWP.
RESOLUTION 9
By the time the plenum ended, Le Duan and the party’s militant wing had carried the day, and the balance of power within the VWP had shifted. The Central Committee’s final resolution acknowledged the legitimacy of the concerns raised by Le Duan and other militants as well as the correctness of the policies they recommended and had, in fact, been pushing for all along. Considering his authority as head of the party and the validation of his views by recent events, it seems certain that the first secretary was instrumental in bending the plenum and the party in that direction. “This resolution was the outcome of the struggle inside our party which had begun with Khrushchov’s [sic] public attack on China in 1960,” Hoang Van Hoan observed later.145
“Resolution 9,” as it came to be known (because this was the Central Committee’s ninth plenum since the National Congress of 1960), consisted of two separate documents: a public communiqué released on 20 January 1964, which listed the domestic and international tasks of the party, and a “secret” assessment of the situation in the South and the requirements for military struggle there.146 Both are remarkable for detailing the new revolutionary line and illuminating the nature and seriousness of the party’s commitment to an essentially Maoist interpretation of Marxism-Leninism and world revolution.
Entitled “On the World Situation and the International Tasks of Our Party,” the communiqué warned of the deceitfulness of Washington’s ostensible “peace strategy” and of the pitfalls of negotiating with imperialists.147 The Americans had relied on “modern revisionism” within the socialist bloc to “achieve ‘peaceful evolution’” as a model for relations between the socialist and capitalist blocs, hoping thereby to “cause a number of socialist countries to degenerate ideologically and politically and gradually restore capitalism.” Unfortunately, they were succeeding in that endeavor. Without pointing a finger at anyone, the document insisted that revisionists within the socialist bloc “have done their best to collaborate” with Washington’s effort, and consequently they “dare not encourage and support the revolutionary wars aimed at weakening” imperialism and capitalism. “On the contrary,” revisionists had “tried to hinder the world revolutionary movement,” criticized true communists as “dogmatic” and “warlike,” and discouraged wars of national liberation for fear they would lead to a world war.
Given Khrushchev’s widely known fear of a Soviet-American conflagration and public denunciations of Chinese “dogmatism,” these passages were a clear indictment of his views. Interestingly, until this time, party attacks on revisionism had always been directed at Yugoslavia. Now, however, the party was attacking other unnamed betrayers of Marxism-Leninism, who could only include Khrushchev. Revisionists “in a number of fraternal parties,” the communiqué continued, now espoused the “views of the Tito revisionist clique,” and like it were “undermining the international communist movement in the ideological field” even though, unlike Belgrade, they were not yet “lackeys of the imperialists.” These were remarkably bold contentions, to say the least.
The second document, the “secret” one, was entitled “Strive to Struggle, Rush Forward to Win New Victories in the South.” It specifically addressed the revolution in the South and insisted that pursuing peaceful coexistence there—offering to negotiate with “imperialists” and their “lackeys” and otherwise hoping for a diplomatic settlement of differences between the two sides—under current circumstances amounted to a demonstration of weakness so great as to be tantamount to capitulation. “The more we manifest our goodwill, the more exacting the imperialists will be,” the document noted. “The more concessions we make, the more insatiable they will be” in their demands.
Under current conditions at home and abroad, the document asserted, war alone could enable Vietnam to achieve national liberation, reunification, and complete sovereignty. The party therefore had to escalate the insurgency below the seventeenth parallel dramatically and without delay to defeat the Americans and their local allies once and for all. The successes of the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions demonstrated that “seizing power through violent means is correct and necessary.”
Unlike Resolution 15 of 1959, this document spelled out in explicit terms the guidelines for implementing the new strategy.148 Since the enemy used military power “as a principal tool to maintain his domination,” the people must “use revolutionary war to counter the enemy’s anti-revolutionary war” and “liberate” themselves. “Only in this way can the revolution win a decisive victory.” The prospect envisioned here included large-scale warfare for an unknown period of time: “This armed struggle must follow the rules of war” and involve “main forces.” It must also “attain its highest mission, which is to destroy the enemy’s forces,” to destroy “the enemy’s combat ability.” This would obviously require major increases in northern assistance to the southern insurgency, which the Central Committee also sanctioned. “It is time for the North to increase aid to the South,” to “bring into fuller play its role as the revolutionary base of the whole nation.” A “maximum effort to defeat the enemy” meant fully committing the DRVN to military victory in the South, including deploying PAVN units to assist the PLAF, if necessary.
To achieve victory, the war effort would pursue two primary, “essential” objectives. The first and most critical was “gradual annihilation,” leading to “complete disintegration” of ARVN forces. Communist-led troops “must adopt the tactic of annihilation attacks,” whether “killing one soldier, capturing one weapon,” or “destroying entire units of the enemy.” Conducted efficiently, these efforts would bring victory in a “not very long period.” The Central Committee was confident that revolutionary forces could win a decisive victory over ARVN forces before Washington introduced its own combat forces. American decision-makers “clearly understand that if they become bogged down in a large-scale protracted war, then they will fall into an extremely defensive position internationally.” If Washington did commit troops before revolutionary forces achieved a decisive victory, the committee estimated that their number would not exceed one hundred thousand. In that case, “the revolution in South Viet-Nam will meet more difficulties, the struggle will be stronger and harder” and the “transitional period” longer, but victory would come all the same.
The second “essential” objective of the military struggle, according to the document, was to destroy Saigon’s strategic hamlet program to ensure the revolutionary forces’ access to the South’s human and material resources. In place of the strategic hamlets they destroyed, revolutionary forces would organize “combat villages,” previously mandated by the party. Paralleling this effort would be a comprehensive political struggle to create “an anti-American alliance” between the NLF and other groups with “anti-American tendencies,” including ethnic minorities and religious sects. Indoctrination campaigns would convince people of their “sacred” duty to “stand up and save the country,” and would make soldiers in Saigon’s armed forces “realize that their own interests are identical to those of the people.” One way to en
courage the latter would be to show clemency to rank-and-file prisoners of war. Political struggle would henceforth “keep pace” with armed struggle, not the other way around.
As these efforts developed in the South, the VWP would intensify its diplomatic struggle to encourage sympathetic perceptions of the revolution internationally. “We must make every effort to motivate various peace organizations, labor unions, youths, women, lawyers, [and] other professional organizations of various peoples in the world” to “take stronger actions in asking the U.S. imperialists to end their aggressive war, withdraw their troops, military personnel, and weapons from South Vietnam, and let the South Vietnamese people settle their own problems.” The diplomatic struggle would also continue its efforts to win “the sympathy and support of the people of the nationalist and imperialist countries,” including the United States and France, thus “gaining the sympathy of antiwar groups in the United States and taking full advantage of the dissensions among the imperialists.”
Finally, to achieve absolute unity of thought and purpose within the party, vital to triumphing expeditiously under the new strategy, the document sanctioned a purge of party members “afraid of sacrifices,” who used socialist transformation in the North as an excuse to forgo liberation in the South or “failed to realize the relationship between the revolutionary tasks of our people in both zones.” In other words, it called for the demotion, dismissal, or marginalization of known influential moderates. The document also called upon party leaders to “pursue the systematic education of cadres and party members in Marxism-Leninism,” centralize their control over the southern insurgency, and disseminate Resolution 9 with explicit explanations of its meaning and instructions for its implementation.
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