Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965
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NOTE ON DOCUMENTARY AND OTHER SOURCES
Vietnamese authorities closely guard their archives. The most revealing records—those of the party and of the Foreign and Defense Ministries—are essentially inaccessible. The end of the Cold War more than two decades ago has changed little in terms of how Vietnamese authorities treat documentary materials on the Vietnam War and the scholars who want access to them. Owing to the absence of the complete documentary record and the lack of transparency in Vietnamese communist policymaking in Vietnam today, as in the past, it is difficult to know precisely what went on behind closed doors when leaders met and what specific factors and circumstances informed their decisions. The resulting dearth of sources on party decision-making, and the proceedings of the Secretariat, Politburo, and Central Committee in particular, in the period of this study is a major impediment to understanding just what happened. For the period 1954–65, that impediment can be neutralized, to a degree at least.
In attempting to capture Hanoi’s perspective on domestic and international issues, I used an assortment of Vietnamese primary and secondary materials. I found valuable sources of information in the holdings of Vietnam National Archives Center 3 (Trung tam Luu tru Quoc gia 3) in Hanoi, a governmental archive, especially in the files (phong) of the Prime Minister’s Office (Phu Thu tuong) and the National Assembly (Quoc hoi). Though it had little power or influence, the National Assembly was a venue for debating domestic and foreign policies, and its records offer useful insights. Most relevant for my purposes were the party documents reproduced in Van kien Dang—Toan tap (Party Documents—Complete Series). Published by National Political Publishers (Nha xuat ban Chinh tri quoc gia), the series is organized chronologically, each volume typically encompassing a single year and including a wide array of documents on domestic and foreign affairs generated by the general/first secretary, the Secretariat, the Politburo, the Central Committee, and other prominent party leaders and organs. Especially useful are Central Committee resolutions, Politburo reports, various guidelines and directives, and Secretariat instructions. The documentary record in these volumes is incomplete, and the materials included have been vetted by party officials and the editors. Nonetheless, the series has much merit, providing as it does a sense of the evolving concerns of policymakers, like the Foreign Relations of the United States series does for our understanding of American decision-making. The Vietnam Center and Archive at Texas Tech University has an abundance of excellent Vietnamese communist documents in translation, many of which have been digitized and made available online through its Virtual Vietnam Archive. Other Vietnamese sources useful for my purposes include articles published at the time in Hoc tap, the party’s theoretical journal, as well as official histories, scholarly works, and personal memoirs.
To fill gaps in the story I pieced together from Vietnamese sources, I consulted British, French, and Canadian governmental archives. London maintained a consulate general in Hanoi after 1954 and played a role in Vietnamese affairs as cochair of the Geneva Conference on Indochina. France had a high commission in Indochina headquartered in Hanoi, which became a general delegation following the partition of Vietnam. DRVN leaders welcomed the French presence because they needed the collaboration of Paris to implement the Geneva accords. By the time the collapse of the accords became obvious, the French had proven their usefulness to Hanoi by advocating peaceful resolution of the crisis in the South and opposing or otherwise manifesting only lukewarm support for the regime in Saigon and American intervention in the region. Canada, for its part, kept a permanent mission in Hanoi to fulfill its obligations as a member of the International Commission for Supervision and Control in Vietnam, the organ set up after July 1954 to supervise implementation of the Geneva accords. The British, French, and Canadian missions were in a unique position to observe and analyze situations in the DRVN, and they produced illuminating reports on political and economic developments there, which are now available for scrutiny in London, Paris, and Ottawa, respectively. The diplomats assigned to the missions also learned revealing details about goings-on in Hanoi through regular contacts with North Vietnamese officials as well as with counterparts from socialist bloc countries, which they reported to their home governments. London’s Foreign Office, the Quai d’Orsay (France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs), and Ottawa’s Department of External Affairs similarly generated insightful reports on DRVN domestic and diplomatic developments, as did the British, French, and Canadian Embassies in Moscow and Beijing. To the extent possible, I have tried to let these and the Vietnamese documents tell the story of Hanoi’s struggle for national reunification in the decade after July 1954. Because the United States tended to rely on the British and the Canadians for information about Hanoi, my use of American documents is limited.
NOTE ON THE VWP’S POWER STRUCTURE
The head of the VWP (Dang Lao dong Viet Nam) was known as the general secretary (Tong Bi thu) until the September 1960 National Party Congress, and the first secretary (Bi thu Thu nhat) thereafter. He presided over the Secretariat (Ban Bi thu), which managed the day-to-day business of the party and monitored implementation of party polices. The Politburo (Bo Chinh tri), comprising approximately a dozen members, including the secretary who also ran it, decided “in the spirit of collective leadership” both party and state policies. The Central Executive Committee (Ban Chap hanh Trung uong), or Central Committee in this study, consisted of sixteen full and sixteen alternate, or “candidate” (nonvoting), members before the 1960 Congress, and forty-seven to forty-nine full and thirty-one alternate members thereafter, including all members of the Politburo. It debated issues and policies, made recommendations to the Politburo, and on occasion sanctioned policies.
The policies formulated and approved by these organs were disseminated downward to the rest of the party membership, usually by the Secretariat, or relayed to the government for implementation. Publicly opposing or even questioning the so-called party line was forbidden; “unity of thought” was essential to achieving revolutionary objectives. Party regulations required that “members should be obedient to the organization, lower echelons should be obedient to higher echelons, and the entire party should be obedient to the central committee” and to the Politburo in particular.15 Besides, the purported perfectionism and infallibility of Marxism-Leninism required that the VWP always appear confident in its decisions and abilities.16
Typically in a communist country, delegates representing the party membership convene every five years in a national congress, such as that of September 1960. The meetings of the congress are typically occasions for outlining plans for the next five years, formalizing policies, confirming a new Politburo and Central Committee (usually as nominated by the party’s Organization Committee), and announcing the reappointment or selection of a new party secretary. Due to circumstances, the various incarnations of the Communist Party in Vietnam held only three congresses before 1976, in 1935, 1951, and 1960. After each National Congress, the numbering of Central Committee meetings, or “plenums,” reverts to one. Thus, the famous Fifteenth Plenum of the Central Committee in 1959 was the fifteenth meeting of that organ since the 1951 Congress, and the seminal Ninth Plenum of 1963 was the ninth meeting of the Central Committee that was confirmed at the Third Party Congress of 1960.
NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS AND VIETNAMESE WORDS AND NAMES
Translations from French and Vietnamese are my own. Due to publishing constraints, Vietnamese diacritical marks have been omitted in the text and notes. As is standard in Vietnam, Vietnamese personal names are used where the entire name is not. In Vietnamese, the personal name comes last. For example, Pham Van Dong (surname “Pham”) is known as “Dong.” Exceptions to the rule include Ho Chi Minh, commonly called “Ho,” and Le Duan and Truong Chinh, who are typically referred to by their full names.
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Choosing Peace, 1954–1956
By the summer of 1954, the world seemed slightly safer than it had been just a
few months before, as a “hot” phase in the Cold War came to an end. The Korean and Indochina Wars had done much to increase tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union while marking the emergence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as an ardent opponent of American “neo-imperialism” and a dynamic player in global politics. But the death of Stalin, the cease-fire in Korea, and the Geneva accords on Indochina offered some reprieve. Specifically, they presented Washington and Moscow with an opportunity to ease tensions between them, for rapprochement.
As Moscow grappled with matters relating to Stalin’s succession, Beijing attended to domestic problems, and Washington warily watched events. There was much cause for concern in Washington, including the antics of Senator Joseph McCarthy at home, the French humiliation at Dien Bien Phu followed by the onset of the Algerian war of independence, the advent of the fiercely nationalist and purportedly neutralist regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Cairo, and starting in September, Beijing’s sustained bombardment of islands controlled by the pro-American regime of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) in the first Taiwan Strait crisis. Alarmed by developments in Guatemala that year, the administration of U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower resorted to methods employed the previous year in Iran—in removing prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh from power—to get rid of Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán’s leftist and “touchy” government. Shortly thereafter, the administration affirmed its commitment to the containment of communist influence in Southeast Asia by signing the Manila Pact, which provided for the creation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). Fatefully, it also began a comprehensive aid program, jointly with the French at first, to prop up the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon as a bulwark against communist expansion in Vietnam. Soon Americans were training Diem’s fledgling armed forces and becoming otherwise more directly involved in Indochina.
After signing the Geneva accords, the communist leaders of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) did their best to abide by their letter and spirit. The accords, they hoped, would allow them to achieve national reunification under their authority without further bloodshed following countrywide elections to take place within two years. In a September 1954 directive formalizing their intentions, the leaders ordered most of their troops in the South to repatriate to the North and explicitly prohibited those who stayed from resuming hostilities. Owing largely to Diem, the elections never took place. Although that dimmed the prospect for peaceful reunification, DRVN leaders refused to amend their stance on military struggle in the South. Instead, they rehabilitated and developed the economy in the North, to the dismay of communists who remained in the South and became targets of the Diem regime.
BEGINNINGS
On 2 September 1945, in the immediate aftermath of Japan’s surrender in World War II, Ho Chi Minh, a longtime communist and anticolonialist leader, proclaimed the independence of the DRVN from Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi. The proclamation culminated the relatively peaceful process known to Vietnamese as the August Revolution. In that revolution, communist and nationalist forces, who had been amalgamated into the Viet Minh united front in 1941 to resist the Japanese occupation of Indochina (that is, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos), wrested the reins of power from the defeated occupiers and forced the abdication of the last Nguyen emperor, a figurehead named Bao Dai, thus ending ten centuries of dynastic rule in Vietnam.1 During the war, the Japanese had effectively ended French colonial control on the peninsula, though France never forswore its mission civilisatrice there and was in fact working to reassert it even as Ho made his proclamation. Unwilling to accept the reimposition of colonial rule, Ho and the DRVN leadership remobilized the Viet Minh to resist it.
Following the gradual reoccupation of most of Indochina by French forces over the next year and a half, full-scale war broke out in December 1946. The conflict became an integral part of the Cold War after the newly formed PRC extended diplomatic recognition to the DRVN government in January 1950, followed by the Soviet Union and the rest of the socialist camp. Having consented to a revolutionary division of labor with Moscow, Beijing thereafter provided massive assistance to the Viet Minh, including hundreds of military advisers. Reeling from the “loss” of China and suddenly alarmed at the possibility of communist domination of Southeast Asia, Washington, until then largely uninvolved in Indochinese affairs, responded in kind, supplying ever increasing aid to the French and to the ostensibly autonomous regime France had established in Saigon and named the State of Vietnam (SOVN), under none other than Bao Dai.2 The outbreak of the Korean War in June solidified American resolve to prevent a Viet Minh victory.
The internationalization of the Indochina War markedly raised the stakes and intensified the hostilities in Vietnam but failed to tip the scale in favor of either side. Even the Viet Minh’s spectacular victory over French forces at Dien Bien Phu did not meaningfully change the balance of forces in the country. In the end, pervasive war weariness among the Vietnamese masses and Viet Minh, as well as the nagging concerns of their Soviet and Chinese allies about prolonging the war and, most importantly, the chilling prospect of American intervention, convinced DRVN decision-makers to suspend their military struggle and try to settle their differences with France diplomatically.
On 21 July 1954, after long and contentious negotiations, French and DRVN authorities agreed to a cease-fire, division of the country into two regroupment zones separated at the seventeenth parallel, mandatory regroupment of all French and SOVN military forces south of that line and all Viet Minh forces north of it, and voluntary migration of civilians between the two zones.3 Ho Chi Minh and the DRVN government received sanction to administer the northern regroupment zone while France—and by extension the SOVN—remained sovereign in the southern zone. As the division of the country was to be temporary, the “Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference” called for consultations between representatives of the two zonal governments to set terms for national elections to reunify the country under a single government.4 Ominously, Washington refused to endorse the declaration.5 Despite reservations of their own, DRVN leaders accepted the Geneva accords because they hoped their implementation would preclude American military intervention while delivering what war could not: reunification of Vietnam under their governance.
HOPING FOR THE BEST
After accepting the Geneva accords, DRVN leaders set out to convince their followers on both sides of the seventeenth parallel that suspending hostilities short of complete victory was strategically correct. To that end, they impressed upon their military forces and political operatives the need to respect the cease-fire and trust that national reunification would come in no more than two years, following general elections that their side would surely win. Unless otherwise instructed by the leadership, all troops in the South had to regroup to the North, and communists who stayed behind were to do nothing to undermine the new accords or precipitate hostilities. Violating the accords, DRVN authorities warned, would give the Americans and their allies an excuse to derail the reunification process and sabotage the promised elections. For the time being, the struggle for unification had to be carried out “according to a peaceful approach.” “Our people must continue their protracted and arduous struggle by peaceful methods in order to consolidate peace and achieve reunification.”6 It was not just that the leadership wished to preclude American intervention and thought everyone, including its troops, needed a respite from war; it was also that much of the area which fell under its jurisdiction after July 1954 was in ruins, and improving conditions there was imperative.7 A “North-first” policy was therefore in order.
To keep the reunification process on track in the South, DRVN leaders directed cadres—indoctrinated, “professional” communist revolutionaries responsible for mobilizing public support for DRVN policies—there to court groups friendly to western interests, including Catholics and those who had served in the colonial administration.8 The purpose of this “political struggle” was to win hearts and minds, to convince such groups and
the civilian population generally that DRVN authorities respected ideological, social, and political diversity as well as Vietnamese nationalism in all its guises, and to promote peaceful reunification of the country.9 Treating the sizeable minority of Catholics, former civil servants, and other civilians solicitously could have a “very big influence” on the result of the upcoming elections, the communist leadership remarked.10
Admittedly, DRVN leaders shared “a genuine apprehension” that Paris, Washington, and the SOVN regime in Saigon would not respect the terms of the accords. Early on, defense minister Vo Nguyen Giap warned the Canadian commissioner on the International Commission for Supervision and Control in Vietnam (ICSC) that Ngo Dinh Diem, who had become SOVN premier during the Geneva Conference and had no real hand in forging the accords, “had no intention” of “carrying out the agreement” and “it would be difficult for anyone to force him to do so.”11 Nonetheless, the man hailed as the architect of the victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu and other key DRVN leaders thought it in their best interests, for now, to honor the main provisions of the accords. If the accords were successfully implemented, they would secure the withdrawal of foreign forces and national reunification under their own aegis without further bloodshed and material destruction. DRVN leaders “accepted the Geneva compromise,” in the words of a French diplomat, “only because we made them realize that it presented them with a serious chance to achieve, by peaceful means, [their] wartime objectives.”12 For Vietnamese communist authorities, the Canadian commissioner told Ottawa, the outcome of the 1956 national elections on reunification mandated by the Geneva accords was “a foregone conclusion.” The only major obstacle to reunification under their auspices was “foreign support of the competing government in the South” and Diem himself.13 Under the circumstances, it seemed sensible to temporize. DRVN leaders, the Canadian commissioner believed, “expect the worst” but “hope for the best.”14