The seriousness of persisting problems was such that the VWP Secretariat convened a “special political conference” on 27–28 March to address them. The conference assembled 320 representatives of mass organizations, ethnic and religious minorities, and other groups.92 The evident purpose was to “demonstrate the complete unity of all elements of North Vietnamese society” behind the party’s decision to “upgrade the importance of supporting the war in the South.”93 According to another statement, the aim was to “bolster morale and to arouse enthusiasm for greater united effort to overcome chronic problems,” including “the apparent lack of collective drive” and “popular apathy in the face of continued hardships” along the new road to southern liberation.94 The conference may also have been prompted by concern that an American attack on the DRVN was imminent, suggested by the simultaneous decision to place air-defense units on wartime status.95
The conference showcased Ho Chi Minh and other luminaries who appealed for unity and ideological conformity, and called on the northern people to support Hanoi and its policies. The contents of Ho’s address are suggestive of the party’s problems.96 Instead of summarizing and praising the new strategy in the South, Ho dwelled on the party’s commitment to peaceful reunification of the country. Party and government leaders alike, Ho declared, supported the demands of the NLF that “an end be put to the U.S. imperialists’ intervention in South Viet-Nam, that U.S. troops and arms be withdrawn, and that the people of South Viet-Nam be left to solve by themselves their internal affairs.” Coming on the heels of Resolution 9, these formulations suggested that Ho dissented from the new strategic line more than he endorsed it.
But Ho did not stop here. “With regard to the peaceful reunification of Viet-Nam,” he continued, “our government has repeatedly made clear its views and attitude” and “unreservedly” supported the “urgent demand of our people throughout the country” to “reunify the Fatherland by peaceful means.” Pending national reunification, he said, DRVN authorities would “undertake not to spread propaganda to divide the people or in favor of war” and “not use military forces” against the South Vietnamese regime. Implicitly, Ho criticized the new militancy, which by one account was “remarkable against the backdrop of the official anti-revisionist stand of the December Central Committee plenum and the subsequent spate of documents attacking, indirectly but unmistakably, Soviet policy.” Possibly, Ho attempted through his speech to use his popularity inside and outside the party to “reassert more moderate policy lines.”97 According to an American assessment, Ho’s speech indicated that moderates might have been “fighting a rear guard action” against the militants now in charge of DRVN decision-making.98
Despite this slant, the Politburo did not censure Ho’s speech. Perhaps the militants who now controlled that organ hoped that the speech’s conciliatory tone would serve their purposes, including appeasement of those who continued to hope for a negotiated solution. Ho’s tone and sedateness may have reassured critics that the new revolutionary line had important continuities with the old one. Certainly that would have reverberated to the advantage of the new regime, and thereby of national unity in a time of uncertainty and transition, and may also have alerted the North Vietnamese people to the challenges that lay ahead. Interestingly, none of the leading militants addressed the Secretariat’s conference. “The most striking aspect of the conference,” one assessment noted, was its failure to address Resolution 9 and the “attendant internal antirevisionist campaign.”99 That was no doubt by design. The purposes of the conference were surely best served among doubters by featuring speakers such as Ho and Giap, who were widely respected for their judiciousness.
In the ensuing days and weeks, the addresses of Ho and other moderates were widely publicized in the North. The final resolution of the conference, which concluded that “our entire party, entire people, entire armed forces have united and must unite even more,” was similarly disseminated.100 “The special political conference and the Central Committee’s Resolution 9 are a bright torch for our people and a powerful source of encouragement for each [social] class to have fervent revolutionary momentum in the face of new important responsibilities,” a member of the National Assembly observed.101 An official assessment concluded that Ho’s pleas for unity had the potential to “establish big results” provided “ideological propaganda and education” continued to emphasize “close unity of consciousness.”102 Hanoi indeed stressed Ho’s themes that year, as well as hard work and sacrifice. “Each of us must work like two,” Ho Chi Minh had insisted.103 It did not hurt these efforts that the United States soon precipitated a series of incidents that authenticated the views of the leadership.
To muster support for the new revolutionary line in the armed forces, in May Hoc tap commemorated the tenth anniversary of Dien Bien Phu by highlighting the parallels between the party’s triumphant strategy then and that adopted at the Ninth Plenum. “The lesson of Dien Bien Phu” was that strategies and tactics like those outlined in Resolution 9 explained the 1954 victory. Back then, the commitment to ideological conformity—the “education given us by the party”—and the “sweeping struggle” against “rightist [i.e., moderate] negative thinking” had led to the defeat of an enemy “many times stronger in weapons and equipment.” The recent debate over strategy had echoed the deliberations that preceded the victory at Dien Bien Phu: whether merely to defend liberated areas or “assume an active, offensive posture.” In the earlier instance, cadres cowed by fear had favored defense, which would surely have led to annihilation. “Thanks to the skillful strategic leadership of the party Central Committee,” the revolution had instead followed an aggressive, bellicose course that led to the enemy’s “destruction.” A bold, forward strategy had saved the revolution in 1954; it would do the same now.104
Quelling popular dissent in the North was more problematic. Groups and individuals across the DRVN continued to engage in subversive activities, which the Politburo took seriously enough to counter.105 Among them were “counterrevolutionaries,” including spies and foreign agents, as well as corrupt civil servants and disloyal party members.106 Of greatest concern to the authorities, however, were religious and ethnic minorities. Catholics remained an especially problematic group. Despite the party’s every effort, relations with them remained strained. In early 1964, individual priests still engaged in seditious activities; entire parishes “had not yet participated directly in the struggle against imperialism”; and some party members and cadres still harbored prejudice against Catholics.107 Hanoi also worried about the subversive potential of the Buddhist clergy, whose 1963 protests in the South had played a meaningful role in the demise of the Diem regime. Those protests, the Central Committee feared, might have radicalized their counterparts in the North.108 Ethnic minorities also balked at following the new “mass line,” while some communities and individuals in the general population manifested “subjective tendencies” and “impatience.” That is, some displayed excessive eagerness to transform the North and liberate the South, while others were overcome by the “fear of difficulties” characteristic of “backward masses.” Finally, party leaders and security forces were fearful of disaffection in highland minority regions and prioritized the indoctrination, mobilization, and “pacification” of people there.109
Out of Politburo concerns about these and related problems, in April 1964 there emerged an “emulation” campaign under the slogan “Each Person Works Like Two, Strives to Build and Protect the North, and Actively Supports the Southern Liberation Revolution.” The aims of the campaign were to encourage unity by exhorting northerners to remind themselves of the sufferings of compatriots in the South, the need to sacrifice on the southerners’ behalf, and the need to steel themselves for war in the North. The Americans were for all intents and purposes waging war in the South, DRVN leaders thought, and sabotaging the North. In light of the Central Committee’s decision to dramatically escalate the insurgency in the South, Washington’s next move wou
ld likely involve aerial and naval bombardments of the DRVN itself, the leaders portentously noted.110
HEIGHTENING CONCERNS ABOUT AMERICAN INTERVENTION
On 19 April, “reactionary” elements in the Laotian armed forces staged a coup in Vientiane. Though Prince Souvanna Phouma continued as prime minister there, the new coalition he presided over was henceforth dominated by right-wingers.111 Hanoi immediately accused the United States of engineering the coup.112 For DRVN leaders, this recalled Diem’s overthrow by military counterrevolutionaries and reinforced militant convictions about the reach of American subversion in Indochina. Shortly thereafter, Laotian government forces with air support from the Americans and their Thai allies clashed with communist forces in various parts of Laos, heightening concerns in Hanoi about the situation across Indochina.113 DRVN leaders suspected, with good cause, that the successive coups in Saigon and Vientiane foreshadowed an overthrow of the neutralist government of Norodom Sihanouk and its replacement with one controlled by factions beholden to the United States.114
On 6 July, Hanoi placed its navy on wartime status in response to increasingly intrusive patrols in the Tonkin Gulf by American warships, some of which it believed had violated DRVN territorial waters.115 The warships, we now know, collected intelligence, intercepted North Vietnamese communications, and may have provided indirect support to South Vietnamese commando units engaged in subversion in the DRVN. By this time the latter program was spreading disinformation about widespread resistance to the DRVN government, flooding the country with counterfeit currency to create economic havoc, and encouraging dissidence among ethnic minorities.116 These operations contributed to Hanoi’s difficulties administering minority-dominated areas in the North.117
Concerns about American intentions in Vietnam and the rest of Indochina prompted Hanoi to place the rest of its armed forces on wartime alert.118 By the end of July 1964, as an official history of the PAVN puts it, “all preparations for combat by our armed forces” had “essentially been completed.”119 By that time DRVN leaders were also bracing civilians for imminent war, directing them to dig trenches in Hanoi and elsewhere, and testing alarm sirens, all of which helped persuade “skeptics and those indifferent of the reality of the danger” that war was indeed in the offing.120
Rising tensions with the United States were not happenstance; they resulted largely from the Central Committee’s decision to endorse a war to defeat Saigon and its backers in the South. This reality was not lost on DRVN leaders, who understood the implications of their decision so well that they anticipated Washington’s next move with relative accuracy and prepared accordingly. Hanoi declared itself ready to “cope with any situation” and braced the North for war a full month before the first attack. A similar scenario played out below the seventeenth parallel, where Hanoi prepared revolutionary forces for possible combat against American forces. Just as the militant Vietnamese version of Marxism-Leninism had conditioned the decision to endorse war, so it now informed Hanoi’s actions. The perception of Washington as capable of every transgression conditioned Le Duan and his close advisers to plan for the most unenviable contingencies, just as it convinced them that only war could “liberate” the South and that negotiations with the United States were pointless.121 After Resolution 9, they never gave the people in either half of Vietnam false hopes that a wider war could be averted, even though that remained their own hope. As committed ideologues, they accepted “worst-case beliefs” about Washington.122
Concerned about the mounting tensions in Vietnam, Beijing dispatched Zhou Enlai to Hanoi to discuss and assess the situation. Beijing’s policy was to help the Vietnamese materially and politically meet their current revolutionary objectives, while preparing the PRC to deal with American military intervention in Indochina. Zhou repeated Chen Yi’s pledge that should Washington invade the DRVN, Beijing would send armed forces to North Vietnam to resist the invaders.123 The apparent full commitment of Beijing to the liberation cause in Vietnam only reinforced the views of leftist ideologues in the VWP.
REJECTING NEGOTIATIONS
Confidence in their forces’ ability to expeditiously decimate the ARVN, support for that endeavor from China, and their own assessment of other “objective realities” prompted DRVN leaders to reject secret peace overtures that Washington advanced through the Canadians that summer. In May, the Johnson administration asked Ottawa to open a channel with Hanoi via its ICSC commissioner. The aim was to inform Hanoi that Washington held it “directly responsible” for ongoing hostilities in the South, and although “US public and official patience with North Vietnamese aggression is growing extremely thin,” the American president was “fundamentally a man of peace” still willing to consider a negotiated settlement of the crisis below the seventeenth parallel.124 By official account, Washington was “requesting Canadian good offices to ‘convey signals’ to Hanoi both so that the North Vietnamese leaders would understand the seriousness of the United States determination and also in order to learn something of North Vietnam’s intentions.”125
During an 18 June meeting, the Canadian ICSC commissioner, Blair Seaborn, apprised Pham Van Dong of Hanoi’s responsibility for the southern insurgency and Johnson’s desire for peace, adding that “the greatest devastation would of course result for the DRVN” should the conflict in the South continue to escalate. Dong “understood [the] importance and context” of the message and the “seriousness with which [the] USA views the situation in Southeast Asia,” Seaborn thought, but he rejected the American threat and expressed no desire to negotiate. Defiantly, in words that reflected the ruling clique’s belief that diplomacy was futile under current conditions, Dong told Seaborn that “if war was pushed to [the] North, we are a socialist country, one of the socialist countries, you know, and the people will rise”; the Vietnamese would “struggle regardless of sacrifice.”126 After the meeting, Seaborn told Ottawa he saw “no signs of war weariness in Hanoi” and “no indications of weakening resolve among the DRVN leadership.”127 Dong’s assertions “carried a good deal of conviction as if really believed,” he added. On the basis of his exchanges with Dong and other ranking North Vietnamese, Seaborn concluded that “DRVN leaders are completely convinced that military action at any level is not going to bring success” for Washington and its allies in Saigon.128 In other words, Hanoi saw no need to negotiate because it thought it could, and surely would, win the enhanced military effort it had just launched in the South.
At a second meeting with Dong in August, shortly after the Tonkin Gulf incident discussed below, Seaborn reiterated the American threat of escalation and Washington’s appeal for negotiations. Dong became “very angry” upon hearing the threat, provocatively stating that the “more [the] USA spreads war, [the] greater will be its ultimate defeat.”129 After this meeting, Seaborn told Ottawa that Dong again “gave no indication of being worried by [the] firmness of [the] USA [message] I delivered.” “I think he is genuinely convinced that things are bound to go his way in Indochina and that there is therefore no need to seek compromise.”130 Later that year, at Washington’s urging, Seaborn tried to arrange a third meeting with Dong, but the prime minister refused even to see him.131 While the previous regime in Hanoi had always been shy about the prospect of war with the United States, Le Duan’s team was clearly less so.
Like de Gaulle’s neutralization scheme of the year before, Washington’s initiative through the Canadians, backed as it was by a blustering threat that ignored Hanoi’s understanding of its situation and purposes, was too little too late. In fact, the chances for a diplomatic solution at that point were even slimmer than they had been the year before—that is, essentially nonexistent. Le Duan and his associates were firmly at the helm in Hanoi by now, and nothing short of American capitulation would constitute agreeable terms for a settlement. “What is the only solution?” a member of the DRVN National Assembly asked in reference to a diplomatic settlement during a July session. “It is that the Americans must respect and stri
ctly adhere to the 1954 Geneva accords; it is that the American imperialists withdraw their forces from Vietnam at once,” he answered—that they, in short, capitulate.132 Indeed, at this point a settlement acceptable to Hanoi would have to include not only immediate, unilateral, and unconditional American disengagement from Indochina but also replacement of the regime in Saigon with a provisional coalition dominated by neutralists and communists, and prompt unification of Vietnam under its aegis. No one in Washington could conceive of such demands by so puny a state as the DRVN, and certainly not as preconditions for negotiations. The two sides thus literally talked past each other. The impasse would have to be resolved on battlefields in Vietnam and in arenas of international politics, and that was just fine for Le Duan’s regime.
Some historians believe that even at this late date VWP leaders could have been coaxed into compromise—that Washington, not Hanoi, was the intransigent party. Short of capitulation, there is little Washington could now have offered that had any prospect of influencing Hanoi’s behavior. Thus the most that can be said of the view that compromise was still possible is that Hanoi may have agreed to talk but not to negotiate.133 Admittedly, the DRVN publicly and sometimes privately professed willingness to engage in “contacts” (tiep xuc), in its terminology, with its enemies or third parties to discuss the situation in the South, but it never intended to negotiate earnestly. Instead, it sought to probe American and South Vietnamese intentions while improving its international image.
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