25. Confucius, Analects, p. 168.
26. Paul Mus, “Cultural Backgrounds of Present Problems,” p. 13. In the Analects the Master recounts this story about one of the divine sages of the past.
27. Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh on Revolution, p. 145.
28. I Ching, p. 190.
29. John T. McAlister, Jr., Vietnam: The Origins of Revolution, pp. 186–188.
30. Jean Lacouture, Ho Chi Minh, p. 179.
31. In the Sino-Vietnamese world, dates were not reckoned from a single point (such as the birth of Jesus Christ) but from the beginning of each new dynasty or each new emperor's reign. Thus even the numbers of the years repeat themselves.
32. I Ching, p. 190.
33. Ibid., p. 189.
2: Nations and Empires
1. This secret society was the northern branch of the Dai Viet Party (see below for further details). Far from being an arm of the Lao Dong Party, it was the group that General Edward Lansdale used in some of his intelligence and sabotage missions in North Vietnam just after the French war. Cf. “Lansdale Team's Report on Covert Saigon Mission in '54 and '55,” in Neil Sheehan et al., The Pentagon Papers, pp. 53–66.
2. Ly Thuong Kiet, “The Principle of Identity,” in Patterns of Vietnamese Response to Foreign Intervention: 2858–1900, ed. Truong Buu Lam, p. 47.
3. Nguyen Trai, “A Great Proclamation upon the Pacification of Wu” (1428), in Patterns of Response, ed. Truong Buu Lam, p. 56.
4. Ho Chi Minh, “Speech Opening the First Theoretical Course of the Nguyen Ai Quoc School” (7 September 1957), in Ho Chi Minh on Revolution, ed. Bernard B. Fall, p. 321.
5. In 1945–1946 Ho Chi Minh had even courted American support. He quoted from the American Declaration of Independence in his own independence declaration and he wrote a series of letters to the American government asking for diplomatic aid.American scholars and scientists who visited the DRVN during the American war were always surprised by the interest and knowledge the North Vietnamese showed in the United States and their particular scholarly disciplines.The Vietnamese desire for outside contacts was not by any means confined to the non-Communist world.
6. Cynthia Frederick, “Cambodia: Operation Total Victory No. 43,” p. 9.
7. Paul Mus, Viêt-Nam: Sociologie d'une guerre. Chapter 1 is an extensive discussion of the role of the village in traditional Vietnamese life and in guerrilla warfare.
8. John T. McAlister, Jr., and Paul Mus, The Vietnamese and Their Revolution. This book is to a great extent a translation and condensation of Mus's earlier Sociologie d'une guerre. I have used citations from this rather than from the original because the translation is good and because it is more available to American readers.
Mus wrote: “In these plains of irrigated rice there are no natural sanctuaries in which one may hide: no woods, no marshland or moors. If a man wants to take cover and disappear, he can only do so behind man. Consequently, this type of disappearance is a solution only for those people native to the region. But with that reservation the populous masses are an effective shelter against any adversary of a different language, or more especially, of a different skin.
“When a man creeps in among his own people, how can he be found? In the last analysis it is the villages that have the answer.” (Mus, Viêt-Nam, pp. 51–52.)
9. Truong Buu Lam, Patterns of Response, p. 3.
10. Some of the colonizing villages were military or penal colonies sent out by the state, but they, too, tended to follow the same pattern of behavior.
11. Léopold Cadière, Croyances et pratiques religieuses des viêtnamiens, vol. 2, pp. 13–14.
12. Gerald C. Hickey, A Village in Vietnam, p. 82.
13. “Interviews Concerning the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam,” RAND Corporation File AG-533, PP. 22–23.
14. One of the main streets in Saigon was named after independence for the most brilliant of the Tay-Son commanders, Nguyen Hue.
15. Joseph Buttinger, The Smaller Dragon, p. 176.
16. A. B. Woodside, “Some Features of the Vietnamese Bureaucracy Under the Early Nguyen Dynasty,” p. 18.
17. The force consisted of 3,500 men.Le Thanh Khoi, Le Viêt-nam, p. 176. The number was small compared to that the Tay Son and the Nguyen fielded against each other.
18. For a more complete account of the French occupation of Vietnam, see Buttinger, Smaller Dragon, chapter 4 (“Missionaries, Merchants and Conquerors”) and chapter 6 (“The Conquest of French Indochina”).
19. The name “Indochina” was coined by a Danish geographer in 1852. The French adopted it, perhaps, as rhetorical consolation for having failed to conquer either India or China.
20. Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars in the Twentieth Century, p. 170.
21. Paul Mus, “Viet Nam: A Nation Off Balance,” and. Wolf, Peasant Wars, p. 167.
22. Bernard B. Fall, “The Political-Religious Sects of Viet-Nam,” pp. 235–239.
23. McAlister and Mus, Vietnamese and Their Revolution, pp. 90–92.
24. Fall, “Sects of Viet-Nam,” p. 243.
25. Ibid., pp. 245–247.
26. Ibid., p. 245. The Trotskyites made contact with So during his stay in Saigon and had some political influence on him. Neither the alliance nor the influence upon the Hoa Hao survived his death.
27. In certain areas the workmen customarily received one cent for an entire day's work. The average annual income of a peasant family of eleven was thirty-two piastres. Of that the French took six piastres in direct taxation alone. McAlister and Mus, Vietnamese and Their Revolution, p. 76.
28. Out of the 6,530 landowners in Indochina to own more than 125 acres of land by 1930, 6,300 were located in southern Vietnam. (John T. McAlister, Jr., Vietnam: The Origins of Revolution, p. 70.) And of the 8,600 Vietnamese who received an annual income of more than six thousand piastres in 1931 (or, the wealthy in Vietnam), eight thousand were residents of the south, whereas 45 percent of the middle-income receivers lived in the north. (Ibid., p. 72.)
29. Ibid., p. 80. In 1931 a little more than thirty-nine thousand Vietnamese had received five years of primary education. A little more than four thousand had received nine years of that education, and a few hundred had gone on to more advanced studies.
30. Ibid., pp. 87–91. In 1929 they undertook a militant campaign against the French with the assassination of one prominent labor recruiter and a small troop uprising at Yen Bay. The perpetrators of both attempts were eventually caught by the police.
31. It is said that Ho Chi Minh opposed the uprising, but he did not at the time have the power to stop it. Ibid., p. 94.
32. Ibid., p. 194. Ho Chi Minh's speech as quoted from the Documents of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
33. Paul Mus, Le Viêt-Nam chez lui, contains an account of his experience in the villages making his escape from Hanoi.
34. McAlister, Vietnam, pp. 191–192. The emperor himself then said: “You could understand even better if you were able to see what is happening here, if you were able to sense the desire for independence that has been smoldering in the bottom of all hearts and which no human force can any longer hold back. Even if you were to arrive to re-establish a French administration here, it would no longer be obeyed; each village would be a nest of resistance, every former friend an enemy, and your officials and colonials themselves would ask to depart from this unbreathable atmosphere.”
35. It was at this point that Ho Chi Minh sent a series of notes to the U.S. government asking for diplomatic support. The Truman administration did not reply. Sheehan, Pentagon Papers, pp. 4–5, 26–27.
36. McAlister, Vietnam, p. 300.
37. According to American and British information, the Viet Minh received no aid from the People's Republic of China until 1950, and very little the next year. Chinese deliveries of supplies of all sorts went from twenty tons a month in 1951 to four thousand tons a month in 1954. Dennis J. Duncanson, Government and Revolution in Vietnam, p. 177.
38. Jean Lacouture and Phi
lippe Devillers, La Fin d'une guerre, p. 278. See also George McTurnan Kahin and John W. Lewis, The United States in Vietnam, p. 34 (General Navarre's map).
39. Kahin and Lewis, United States in Vietnam, pp. 103–104.
40. Article 16 banned the introduction into Vietnam of “any troop reinforcements and additional military personnel” from the outside.
Article 17 banned the “introduction into Vietnam of any reinforcements in the form of all types of arms, munitions and other war matériel, such as combat aircraft, naval craft, pieces of ordnance, jet engines and jet weapons and armoured vehicles.
”Article 18 forbade “the establishment of new military bases.
”Article 19 stated: “[No] military base under the control of a foreign State may be established in the re-grouping zone of either party; the two parties shall ensure that the zones assigned to them do not adhere to any military alliance and are not used for the resumption of military hostilities or to further an aggressive policy.” (Kahin and Lewis, United States in Vietnam, p. 50.)
41. Lacouture and Devillers, Fin d'une guerre, pp. 103–104.
The United States did, however, make a statement promising to refrain from any threat or use of force that might undermine the Geneva Agreements. The statement also said that, ‘In the case of nations now divided against their will, we shall continue to seek to achieve unity through free elections supervised by the United Nations to insure that they are conducted fairly.” Sheehan, Pentagon Papers, p. 52.
42. Kahin and Lewis, United States in Vietnam, p. 32. The United States increased its aid to the French war effort from $150 million a year in 1950 to $1.33 billion in 1954.
43. Duncanson, Government and Revolution, p. 193.
44. See Lucien Bodard, The Quicksand War, for a colorful account of this period.
3: The Sovereign of Discord
1. Robert Scheer, How the United States Got Involved in Vietnam, pp. 38–40. Original quotations are from the New York Times and Life magazine.
Eisenhower met only one other man at the airport — King Saud of Saudi Arabia.
2. Neil Sheehan et al., The Pentagon Papers, p. 166–172.
3. Douglas Pike, Viet Cong, p. 73.
4. Philippe Devillers, Histoire du Viét-Nam de 1940 à 1952, p. 469.
5. Sheehan, Pentagon Papers, p. 52.
In its statement on the Geneva accords the U.S. delegation said that the United States would “view any renewal of aggression in violation of the aforesaid agreements with grave concern and as seriously threatening international peace and security.”
6. “Lansdale Team's Report on Covert Saigon Mission in '54 and '55,” in Sheehan, Pentagon Papers, pp. 53–'66. Many of Lansdale's Vietnamese agents who went north ended by defecting to the Viet Minh.
7. Robert Shaplen, The Lost Revolution, p. 104.
8. “Lansdale Team's Report,” in Sheehan, Pentagon Papers, pp. 53–66. Lansdale at first tried to approach Hinh through his mistress, whom the Lansdale team was carefully cultivating, along with the mistresses of several other important Vietnamese, by means of classes in English.
9. Ibid. Hinh was later to return to Vietnam to fight for a while with the sects. When the sects were defeated, he retired to France to become a general in the French air force — leaving the Vietnamese air command open to younger officers, such as Nguyen Cao Ky.
10. Lansdale personally persuaded one of the dissident Cao Dai generals, Trinh Minh The, to rally to Diem for only the price of his troops' salaries. This incident forms the basis for Graham Greene's excellent novel of Vietnam between the two wars, The Quiet American. General The was killed during the battle with the Binh Xuyen.
11. Shaplen, Lost Revolution, p. 124.
12. Ibid., p. 105.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., p. 108.
15. Ibid., pp. 109–112.
16. George McTurnan Kahin and John W. Lewis, The United States in Vietnam, p. 77.
17. Frank N. Trager, Why Vietnam?, pp. 110–111, quotes Kennedy.
18. Bernard B. Fall, The Two Vietnams, pp. 153–154. Also Scheer, How the United States Got Involved, p. 26, says that two hundred thousand — or almost all of the remainder — were dependents of the State of Vietnam's soldiers and officials based in the north.
19. Robert Scigliano, South Vietnam: Nation Under Stress, p. 112. This comparison continued to hold true throughout the war and for most statistics, including the tonnage of bombs dropped.
20. David Halberstam, The Making of a Quagmire, p. 42.
21. The one exception was the naturalized American citizen, Bernard B. Fall. Fall, a Frenchman by birth, had been in Indochina during the French war and had written a doctoral thesis on the government of the Viet Minh. Though Fall supported the American aims in Vietnam, he knew too much about Vietnam and the French official attitudes towards it to be taken in by the optimism of the local American officials.
22. Scheer, How the United States Got Involved, p. 39.
23. Nguyen Thai, “The Government of Men in the Republic of Vietnam,” pp. 100–118.
24. Bernard B. Fall, Last Reflections on a War, p. 167.
25. Dennis J. Duncanson, Government and Revolution in Vietnam, p. 227, and Scigliano, South Vietnam, p. 95. The remaining seats were held by montagnard deputies, selected by co-optation.
26. Transcript of Madame Nhu's televised speech at Fordham University, 11 October 1963.
27. Wesley R. Fishel, “Vietnam's Democratic One-Man Rule.”
28. Scigliano, South Vietnam, p. 168.
29. Duncanson, Government and Revolution, p. 257, and Scigliano, South Vietnam, p. 171. In any case, twenty thousand prisoners represented better than a thousandth of the population of the south.
30. Scheer, How the United States Got Involved, p. 41.
31. Fishel, “Vietnam's Democratic One-Man Rule.” Also “Problems of Democratic Growth” in Problems of Freedom, ed. Wesley R. Fishel, pp. 9–29.
32. Dennis Warner, The Last Confucian, p. 91.
33. The parallel is almost exact, for in China the Americans had to overlook the fact that Chiang was concentrating almost all of his attentions on defeating his own internal enemy, the Chinese Communists, instead of America's enemy, the Japanese.
34. Scigliano, South Vietnam, p. 49.
35. Ibid., p. 63.
36. Ibid., p. 35.
37. Duncanson, Government and Revolution, pp. 228–229.
38. Scigliano, South Vietnam, p. 58.
39. One was secretary of state at the presidency and the other the assistant secretary of state for national defense. Diem himself was the secretary of defense.
40. Duncanson, Government and Revolution, pp. 215–216.
41. Ibid., p. 217.
42. Scigliano, South Vietnam, p. 77.
43. Ibid., p. 173.
44. Duncanson, Government and Revolution, pp. 255–256.
45. Shaplen, Lost Revolution, p. 104.
46. Anthony T. Bouscaren, The Last of the Mandarins, p. 82.
47. Duncanson, Government and Revolution, p. 215.
48. Nguyen Thai, “Government of Men,” p. 213.
49. Ibid., pp. 228–235.
50. This Catholic law must have seemed very odd to most Vietnamese, for in this quasi-Buddhist country it was often the custom for men to take a second or third wife without the legal formality of a divorce.
51. A perfect example of this logic appears in an article by Chester Bowles:
In July, 1954, when the Geneva Agreements were signed, there was some basis for hope that a stable peace might be assured by the free elections which the agreements called for to determine the future governments of North and South Vietnam [sic]. But South Vietnam's President Ngo Dinh Diem, on one pretext or another, refused to cooperate, and, without connivance (the United States never actually signed the accords ), the elections were never held.
When the Ho Chi Minh Government in Hanoi, bitter over what it considered to be a deliberate violation of the Geneva election agreemen
t, launched a new campaign of terrorism against the Diem Government, Diem promptly sought our assistance.
In retrospect, this was a turning point. If we had learned our lessons from the failure of Chiang Kai Shek in China and the French in Indochina, and insisted as a condition for our economic assistance, on a sweeping program of domestic reform and development in South Vietnam — a more equitable tax system, increased rural credit, irrigation, schools and roads, and above all a sweeping land reform program that would have assured each rural family in South Vietnam ten or fifteen acres of their own — I believe the political and economic situation still might have been stabilized.
At first Diem demonstrated a heartening degree of courage and understanding, but gradually, like most recipients of American military aid in the underdeveloped world, he slipped under the control of the great landlords and the other right-wing elements who were determined at any cost of blood and suffering to maintain the political status quo.
Rejecting what he (correctly, I think) believed to be a half-hearted urging from the United States, Diem refused to place a ceiling on land holdings (as he had promised to do), to clear up corruption in the villages and cities and to grant even minimal local powers in a society long accustomed to strong political institutions in the villages.
(Chester Bowles, excerpts from testimony to the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, Boston Sunday Globe, 14 February 1971.)
52. Fall, Two Vietnams, pp. 294–295. Though, as the Americans pointed out, rice production had regained its prewar level, the country had half again as much population as it had in 1938.
53. Duncanson, Government and Revolution, p. 247.
54. See fuller discussion of land reform in the next chapter. The French government bought out its own nationals who owned rice land, and the Diem regime allowed those who owned rubber plantations or other industries to remain.
55. Milton C. Taylor, “South Viet-Nam: Lavish Aid, Limited Progress,” p. 243.
56. Shaplen, Lost Revolution, pp. 191–192.
57. Scigliano, South Vietnam, p. 171, cites the hawkish British historian, P. J. Honey.
58. J. J. Zasloff, “Origins of the Insurgency in South Vietnam, 1954–1960.” See also the RAND interviews cited elsewhere.
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