This was not an unpromising approach. The South was admittedly “deeply splintered” at the time, so much so that the Diem regime teetered on the brink of collapse.53 The SOVN premier did not control the army, lacked a competent administration, and had little or no authority over sizeable portions of the South, including areas controlled by the powerful Hoa Hao and Cao Dai religious sects. His regime also had to deal with the logistical nightmare of welcoming, housing, feeding, and finding land or jobs for hundreds of thousands of refugees from the North.54 With sufficient political pressure, Hanoi thought, Diem might be ousted and replaced by someone who “cared relatively little about the Americans.”55 “M. Diem has many of the qualities required by a Nationalist revolutionary leader dedicated to saving his country—courage, integrity, persistence, faith and an implacable hostility to communism,” a western assessment noted about this time. He was, however, “incapable of compromise” and had “little administrative capacity.”56
SOUTHERN SKEPTICISM
Southern party leaders—those instructed to stay—did their best to follow Hanoi’s prescriptions, repeatedly praising them in pamphlets and public meetings, and ordering cadres under their command to abide by the letter of those prescriptions. Privately, however, meaningful numbers of them and their subordinates shared Le Duan and Nguyen Chi Thanh’s sentiments and disapproved of the prescriptions as well as the reasoning behind them. They questioned the leadership’s acceptance of the Geneva accords; they could not reconcile themselves to the suspension of military struggle and the turn to political struggle only. Considering the duplicitous history of French colonialism and the mindset of American cold warriors in the mid-1950s, to say nothing of the grim determination of Diem himself, they thought it naive to assume that the other side would permit peaceful reunification under any circumstances.57 Most upsetting to them was Hanoi’s insistence that troops regroup to the North and that those who stayed forswear violence despite the vulnerability of the Diem regime. Vo Chi Cong, a prominent southern communist leader, admitted in a later memoir that he and many other southern party members always felt that regrouping troops and renouncing violence effectively nullified the gains revolutionary forces had theretofore made below the seventeenth parallel, that it crippled the communist movement there and proved detrimental to the long-term prospects for reunification.58
Following discussion of the Politburo policy pronouncement of September, the party’s Executive Committee of Interzone IV, which straddled the seventeenth parallel, told Hanoi that the new policy violated the best interests of the revolution since it left southern communists unprotected, at the complete mercy of enemy violence. Suddenly sustaining a purely political struggle, the committee explained, was “extremely difficult and complex.” While pledging to do the will of the party, the committee made certain that superiors in Hanoi understood the depth of its concern.59 A month later, the Executive Committee of Interzone V, which encompassed northern South Vietnam and the Central Highlands, voiced similar concerns in even more explicit language. Following a three-day discussion in October, this committee sent Hanoi a lengthy critique detailing the negative effects the party’s new strategy had already had.60 Most notably, the regroupment of Viet Minh troops to the North was decimating southern communist ranks. As a result, reactionary and foreign forces suddenly “enjoy military and political supremacy” in the South, which was sure to create “many difficulties in the task to lead the reunification effort.”
In language intimating a sense of betrayal, the committee’s report captured the widespread pessimism enveloping southern revolutionaries, who were convinced that the “imperialists” and their local clients would never give up southern Vietnam without a fight. The Americans were a particularly significant threat, the committee warned, as they clearly intended to “carry out the destruction of peace in Indochina.” With Washington’s help, Paris and Saigon “will not allow us to achieve peace and national reunification through free general elections.” As a result of such circumstances, the committee told Hanoi to prepare for “the subversion of the general elections” and “the resumption of war.”
Hanoi ignored these warnings. On the contrary, it directed that the regroupment of forces from the South to the North continue, and that southern communist outfits restructure themselves with local recruits and otherwise adhere to Hanoi’s policies and the terms of the Geneva accords.61 “We must overcome subjective [and] remorseful” as well as “pessimistic” and “faltering” thoughts, the VWP Central Committee decreed. Supporters of the revolution in the South in particular had to overcome their “lack of belief in the triumph of the political struggle.” Concerned about the consequences of a possible resort to violence by disgruntled southern elements, the committee repeated its earlier admonitions about the necessity of respecting the cease-fire. “We must give all our attention to protecting the foundation [laid by the accords], avoiding provocations, [and] avoiding manifestations of force,” it intoned. Cadres in the South must promote peace actively through the use of such slogans as “Vietnamese Do Not Kill Vietnamese.”62
But Hanoi had a difficult time persuading southern communists and particularly the militants among them of the merits of its strategy. By its own admission, “the campaign to carry out the [Geneva] agreement” experienced “many shortcomings,” most occasioned by organizational problems. Its effort to implement the accords was poorly coordinated, it thought, because local party branches in the South were ineffectively connected to it. As a result, policies and directives were slow to reach lower levels and, when they did, were imperfectly understood. Implementation was thus “oftentimes belated and passive.”63 Such problems were indeed real, symptomatic of the party’s chronic weakness in southern Vietnam. Throughout the Indochina War, the party had struggled to develop a solid base there. The number of members and cadres was persistently low, and their training poor. The pitiful state of the party in the South may have been another reason Le Duan and other militants rejected peace and pressed for immediate resumption of hostilities; war would compel Hanoi to suspend the repatriation of troops to the North and allocate more resources to the South, bringing the southern communist movement back from the brink of imminent extinction.64
To appease militants whose ideas on reunification imperiled party unity, Hanoi eventually professed that war in the South would resume, if necessary, as soon as the North had been consolidated. The DRVN was a brand-new polity created in fact by the Geneva accords, it maintained, and as such it had to be built economically and otherwise before it could guarantee victory in the coming elections, to say nothing of victory in an extended armed struggle in the South. “Our strength resides in the entire nation,” Truong Chinh said in March, but the need for investing resources in the North was “most essential” for the time being.65 “However much the South might demand the attention of the [DRVN] Government, consolidation of the North was not to take second place,” the British Consulate General in Hanoi wrote of this stance.66 In a public address, Ho Chi Minh maintained that the principal tasks of the party just then included not only implementing the Geneva accords and developing stronger leadership at all levels, but consolidating the North while intensifying political struggle in the South.67 The militants were unmoved.
THE DRVN AND THE UNITED STATES
Progress in jump-starting the war-ravaged northern economy was slow. Basic transportation facilities—roads, bridges, and rail lines—had been damaged or destroyed during the war with France, and the production and distribution of food severely disrupted. “In many areas,” historian Fredrik Logevall has written of this situation, Hanoi was “starting essentially from scratch,” not least because in abandoning the North the French had cannibalized factories, post offices, and even hospitals.68 In April 1955 rice rations had to be cut from 15 to 13½ kilos (from approximately 33.1 to 29.7 pounds) per household per month. This decline was due partly to domestic problems in the DRVN, but also to the fact that Saigon suspended all economic exchanges with the N
orth, which had traditionally relied on the South’s surplus production for a significant portion of its rice.69 As a result of this suspension, many people in the DRVN now lived a precarious hand-to-mouth existence.70 Foreign observers reported that the economic situation there deteriorated so much after July 1954 that “the population were not giving the regime full support.”71 Government spokesmen acknowledged that unspecified regions in the North actually experienced famine that year.72
The land reform program contributed in no insignificant degree to this situation, meeting as it did with considerable opposition from the rural masses and hindering production. Meanwhile, cadres were “constantly chided” by Hanoi for failing to “unmask the landlords’ plots” that encouraged the rice shortages, and for not proceeding “ruthlessly enough” with tax collection. Some cadres had even been charged with “right-wing deviationism”—essentially, weakness and hesitation in enforcing party policies.73 Nhan dan, the party daily, editorially exhorted those responsible for carrying out land reform to “banish selfish and pacifist doctrines,” to be “careful but determined in action,” and to “firmly believe in our own forces and resolutely lead the peasantry to crush the whole landlord class.”74 On the basis of these initiatives and priorities, the Indian commissioner on the ICSC wrote of the “indisputably communist character” of Hanoi leaders, whose methods, he suggested, conformed to communist, not nationalist, tradition.75 In the more cynical view of French cabinet chief Claude Cheysson, the DRVN was clearly “committing itself to the infernal circle of the communist world.”76
An important factor influencing Hanoi’s choice of priorities was fear that the Eisenhower administration might exploit the vulnerability of the DRVN and attempt to “roll back” socialism there. “If our northern region is not consolidated, then not only will unification be impossible,” Truong Chinh told the VWP Central Committee, but Washington and its allies “might use the South as a springboard to encroach upon the North.”77 Hanoi was sufficiently concerned about the American threat to fear an attack on the DRVN itself, a potentially devastating scenario that solidified its resolve to abide by the Geneva accords. It was perhaps the feeling that they were dealing with this danger that led party leaders to decide that only after they made the DRVN a viable economic entity would they reconsider their revolutionary strategy, and then only if circumstances dictated. For the time being, the North’s need for peace was as absolute as the perils facing it were daunting. As a precautionary measure, in April 1955 Hanoi ordered the creation of local militias throughout the DRVN.78
By this time, DRVN leaders unanimously agreed that Washington represented the chief obstacle to Vietnamese reunification. In March the Central Committee determined that the United States was now “the primary and most dangerous enemy” of the Vietnamese people.79 American “imperialists” were “the number one enemy of the people of the world” as well as the “number one and immediate enemy of the Indochinese people,” Ho Chi Minh iterated in a public pronouncement.80 Washington was compelling Paris to betray the Geneva accords, the Central Committee claimed, and was also determined to “rely on feudalists and the most reactionary bourgeois collaborators headed by Ngo Dinh Diem” to preclude peaceful national reunification.81 American aid to the French and the Saigon regime, the DRVN National Assembly lamented, was “proof of the deliberate desire of the U.S. ruling circles to deepen their intervention in the internal affairs of Vietnam, prevent the implementation of the Geneva Agreement, and prepare for a definite partition of Vietnam.”82
The American commitment to Diem’s regime was indeed rapidly expanding. The previous October, Washington had instructed its Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) in Vietnam, created in 1950 to marshal U.S. aid to French and allied forces there, to develop a training program for SOVN troops. Immediately thereafter, Eisenhower had informed Diem that he intended to assist the SOVN “in developing and maintaining a strong, viable state, capable of resisting attempted subversion or aggression through military means,” and to that end would provide “an intelligent program of American aid given directly to your Government.”83 According to Fredrik Logevall, that pledge marked the actual beginning of the American commitment to South Vietnam.84 In January 1955 the Americans had begun channeling aid directly to Saigon, bypassing the French, and a month later the U.S. Senate approved the creation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). That approval, in Hanoi’s eyes, formalized America’s commitment to preserving a noncommunist South Vietnam and constituted proof of Washington’s intent to replace the French in Indochina and ignore the Geneva accords.85 Ominously in Hanoi’s view, by the end of spring, the United States had taken over the training of SOVN troops from France. American strategic concerns were turning Vietnam into a crucible of the Cold War.
In May, acting chairman of the DRVN National Assembly’s Standing Committee Ton Duc Thang publicly stated that “our main task now is to oppose the U.S. imperialists’ preparations for the resumption of hostilities in Indo-China and to attain free general elections in order to bring about national unification.”86 Meanwhile, the Politburo referred in the same vein to the Americans as “neo-fascists,” and concluded that the United States hoped to keep Vietnam permanently divided, like Korea and Germany. Washington’s decision to allow West Germany to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and begin to rearm that year, which Moscow answered by creating the Warsaw Pact, informed such thinking. Vietnamese communist policymakers, we now know, were keen observers of international affairs, and the so-called world situation as they saw it conditioned their ruminations on strategic matters to no insignificant degree. They understood that Cold War developments in Europe and elsewhere invariably ratcheted up the international stakes on the Indochinese peninsula. While there is no doubt that Hanoi was genuinely worried about Washington’s intentions, its demonization of the United States also created a “useful adversary” that facilitated “gaining and maintaining public support for the core grand strategy,” and thus for advancing the Vietnamese revolution.87
THE DIPLOMATIC STRUGGLE
In line with the substance of the September 1954 policy statement, DRVN authorities devised a plan to contain American ambitions in Vietnam by rallying world opinion against Washington. Diplomatically isolated, the Eisenhower administration would be hard-pressed to increase U.S. involvement in the country, they thought, or to interfere in the reunification process. To that end, the authorities instructed diplomats abroad to publicize Hanoi’s commitment to peaceful reunification and the obstacles the Americans were raising to the achievement of that goal. The Foreign Ministry generally had to “make . . . the people of the world understand clearly that we have always strongly advocated peace,” that “the opponents of the [Geneva] agreement are the American imperialists and their puppets.”88 This “diplomatic struggle” essentially amounted to an internationalization of the political struggle for hearts and minds in the South.89 Like the masses there, the rest of the world had to recognize the “noble” aspirations of Hanoi and the “wicked intentions” of Washington and be made to “feel resentment” toward the latter, the Politburo insisted.90 Everyone had to accept the slogan “Oppose the Americans, Oppose Diem, for Peace, for Unification.”91
To meet the aims of that effort, Hanoi intensified its public denunciations of the United States as an “imperialist aggressor.” It even introduced and publicized a kind of “domino theory” of its own according to which the Americans, if unchecked, would “oust the French from Indo-China and turn Indo-China into an American colony, seize the economy and resources of Indo-China, suppress the national and democratic movement of the people of Indo-China, turn Indo-China into a springboard for the conquest of the [other] countries of South East Asia, [and] make out of Indo-China an American military base.”92 A few weeks later, DRVN authorities ordered the American Consulate in Hanoi to close down its diplomatic wireless, a move intended to pressure the United States into abandoning its official presence there and to signal Hanoi�
�s conviction that its differences with Washington were irreconcilable.93 The move had the desired effect, and by the end of the year Washington had closed the consulate.94
Meanwhile, Hanoi solicited political, moral, and other forms of support from the international community. This “line of conduct” was geared toward increasing cooperation with communist countries and strengthening “friendship ties” with neutralist states in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.95 In the context of the Cold War, the Vietnamese crisis had global ramifications that its leaders clearly understood and exploited to their advantage. This involved them in a systematic effort to use diplomacy to get others to see their situation as they saw it themselves. Besides generating pressure on the Americans to limit their involvement in the South, favorable world opinion would help Hanoi garner material as well as political support. The opposition may have been better equipped, DRVN leaders reasoned, but it had no inherent advantage diplomatically. In fact, Cold War Washington had many enemies and even more critics, and Hanoi’s chances of winning the battle for world opinion were far better than those of winning an actual war against American forces in the South.
As the leader of the moderate wing of the party, Ho Chi Minh assumed a central role in the diplomatic struggle. Most notably, he used his worldwide notoriety to cultivate an image of the Vietnamese revolution as a necessity prompted by tragic circumstances over which the Vietnamese had little or no control, and of himself as “Ho the conciliator,” who sought merely to satiate the desire for peace of the people of Indochina and elsewhere.96 The stratagem would pay valuable short- and long-term dividends. After a meeting with him in October, the Indian commissioner on the ICSC reported that Ho was a “patient and tolerant man” bent upon respecting the Geneva accords and “resist[ing] all attempts by Western Powers to draw him into their global conflicts.”97 Over time, Ho’s travails helped promote the idea—the myth, it turned out—that all Vietnamese revolutionaries were in fact peace-loving nationalists compelled by “dark forces” to pick up a gun and fight. British diplomats in Hanoi immediately saw through the stratagem and attendant endeavors. DRVN authorities “attribute to their adversaries—the government of Monsieur Diem and his American backers—a desire to avoid elections and to perpetuate the present de facto partition of the country” with all that entailed, they reported of these endeavors. “They know that they must appeal to world opinion, and especially to the Geneva powers, if they are to succeed in getting their point of view accepted in Saigon” and elsewhere. They were thus “careful to phrase their official pronouncements in moderate and restrained language and to hang their desiderata upon the pegs provided in the Geneva agreement and Final Declaration.”98
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