ABANDONING NEUTRALIZATION
In the end, nothing came of the effort to solve the South Vietnam imbroglio through neutralization. Prospects for a diplomatic settlement, even a temporary or imperfect one, faded almost as rapidly as they materialized. Within days after members of the DRVN National Assembly declared that the NLF had embraced “peace negotiations” to “bring about gradual reunification,” that “progress” was being made to “restore normal relations between the two zones,” and that that progress constituted “an important step toward achieving the peaceful reunification of our country,” the unraveling of the Geneva Agreement on Laos became obvious.150 The coalition government in Vientiane proved to be so weak and ineffective that neither Hanoi nor Washington suspended its activities in the small country. Hanoi refused to pull the remainder of its forces from Laos and continued to use supply lines running through the country, while Washington sustained its military and other aid to Laotian clients, which expedited the resumption of political strife. Hanoi justified its violations of the Laotian accords by pointing to those of Washington. “It is clear,” the DRVN Foreign Ministry noted in October, “that the United States and countries aligned with it still deliberately interfere in the internal affairs [and] the foreign policy of Laos, creating not insignificant difficulties for the coalition government.”151 As previously suggested, it is likely that DRVN leaders were initially willing to respect the spirit of the Laotian accords because they would benefit more than the Americans from mutual withdrawal. But it is equally likely that they never intended to duly follow the letter of the accords. The Pathet Lao was still too weak to survive on its own. Completely deprived of Vietnamese assistance, including the presence of North Vietnamese “volunteer” forces and advisers, it would have no way of protecting itself, to say nothing of consolidating its hold on those parts of the country it claimed to control. Moreover, “a truly neutral Laos would have been a disaster for the Vietnamese communists,” as Edwin Moïse has noted, “because it would have meant closing down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”152
Whoever was to blame for it, the failure of the Laotian “experiment” in neutrality dampened enthusiasm in the VWP for any diplomatic engagement of Saigon and Washington.153 Specifically, it discredited the idea of neutralizing the South and quickly prompted party militants to advocate for other approaches—namely, war—to achieve reunification. “With the outbreak of hostilities in Laos” that followed the collapse of the neutralization effort there, according to one contemporary assessment, “the vision of many Vietnamese, in both North and South, of a [South] Vietnam with a neutral coalition government on the Laotian model, with close economic and cultural links with North Vietnam, leading in course of time to reunification by mutual agreement, has been tarnished.”154 Earlier, in April 1962, Hanoi had warned that “if the American imperialists continue to destroy the [1954] Geneva accords and expand [their] colonial war in the South, continue to threaten the security of our North, then they will have to bear complete responsibility for the disastrous consequences they provoked.”155 The failure of the accords on Laos thus played into the hands of militants and other opponents of neutrality and diplomacy, legitimating their views while convincing many fence-sitters and even moderates in the party of the duplicity and intemperance of the Americans.
The outcome of the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 further underscored the risks and limitations of diplomacy for those in the VWP. It also shamed Khrushchev and peaceful coexistence with him. “The Russian call for peaceful co-existence has much less appeal” among Vietnamese, foreign diplomats in the DRVN capital reported shortly after the Cuban crisis.156 This, of course, also increased the allure of militant views concerning national liberation.157 In late October, prime minister Pham Van Dong, who usually sided with moderates on such issues, told a reporter from the French communist newspaper L’Humanité that his government “strongly supports national liberation movements in the world, against all forms of colonization.” Observers at the time thought those comments “put the DRV firmly into the eastern wing of the socialist camp.”158
The failure of the 1962 Geneva Agreement on Laos, acknowledged in the National Assembly in February 1963, and the outcome of the Cuban crisis, plus the concomitant collapse of the Sino-Soviet truce, may well have killed the last chance for a diplomatic compromise to avert precipitous expansion of the war in the South. For Le Duan, a committed militant who thought that some kind of settlement on the South could be reached that year, the collapse of the Laotian accords represented incontrovertible evidence of the deceitfulness of Washington and the reactionaries who were allied with it. It thus invalidated the little faith in negotiations he may have regained since the 1954 Geneva accords, while reinforcing his belief that only war could produce the liberation of the South. After the onset of war against the United States in 1965, Le Duan would obdurately refuse to even entertain the possibility of using negotiations to bring about the end of hostilities.
Tensions between moderates and militants in the VWP ran high in the aftermath of the events just described.159 During a January 1963 visit to Hanoi by a Soviet delegation, Ho Chi Minh confided to his guests that the outcome of the Cuban affair had alienated many VWP members, who felt that Moscow had abandoned Havana as it had abandoned them.160 Foreign observers noted a growing dissonance between Hanoi’s adherence to Soviet theses and an official attitude favoring a diplomatic solution in the South on the one hand, and the “fundamental identity of views” on national liberation held by “the mass of the party membership” with those of Beijing on the other.161
While Hanoi remained “loth to sacrifice” economic progress above the seventeenth parallel for a wider war in the South that carried with it many risks, increasing numbers on both sides of the seventeenth parallel clamored for an escalation of the southern insurgency and for greater DRVN involvement.162 “The policies of aggression and expansion of the war of the U.S.-Diem clique have made the situation in the South extremely dangerous,” Nguyen Van Hien of the NLF told the DRVN National Assembly in late 1962. “The war in the South is widening each day and directly threatening the security of the DRVN, directly threatening peace in Indochina and [the rest of] Southeast Asia.”163 Perhaps sensing the inevitability of a wider war, the National Assembly drew a parallel between the present plight of the DRVN and the recent agony of North Korea: “The Vietnamese people have deep fondness and profound sympathy for the Korean people” because both their countries had been “divided and invaded by the Americans.”164
By year’s end, foreign observers were noting “ominous indications” that “both the guerrilla warfare in the South and the active participation of the North in it may intensify.” In a joint statement, the DRVN and NLF insisted that “the 16 million North Vietnamese compatriots will support more actively the South Vietnamese compatriots’ liberation struggle.” The ICSC reported that during the last weeks of 1962 “a number of items” which it recognized as “conclusive evidence of subversion south of the seventeenth parallel by the Northern authorities”—namely, military hardware—had been transferred “quite openly” to the NLF and PLAF.165 “For the past few weeks,” French diplomats in Hanoi reported on the last day of the year, “the balance traditionally maintained by the DRV between China and the Soviet Union has been affected and the balance is now tilting, more obviously, in favor of the first.”166 Things were coming to a head in Hanoi and the rest of Vietnam.
6
* * *
Choosing War, 1963
Moscow’s decisions to withdraw its missiles from Cuba—over Castro’s strong objections—and to join Washington in banning aboveground nuclear testing a few months later roused opponents of peaceful coexistence and polarized the socialist camp in 1963. In China, these decisions contributed to a further radicalization of domestic and foreign policy. The same year, a Buddhist crisis punctuated by the self-immolation of monks and the assassinations of Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu in a military coup turned South Vietnam into a
flashpoint of the global Cold War. In the immediate aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, announced that the United States would stay the course in South Vietnam. At the time of Kennedy’s death, there were sixteen thousand U.S. military advisers there, and American determination to support Saigon became stronger than ever.
Events that year markedly impacted the VWP. They emboldened militants and amplified existing cleavages among leaders and rank-and-file members. The coup against Diem and Nhu was particularly consequential, occasioning as it did a special session of the Central Committee during which moderates and militants aired their differences and vigorously debated options in the South. By the time the session adjourned, the militants had won the debate and a decision had been made to dramatically escalate the armed struggle below the seventeenth parallel and provide comprehensive DRVN support for it. With their victory, militants led by Le Duan took over party decision-making, staging a coup of sorts of their own, and instituted a purge of those who disagreed with their views.
A PARTY DIVIDED
By 1963, the cumulative effects of the disappointments, frustrations, and stresses discussed in preceding chapters had combined to deepen and harden the division within the VWP into a schism. Party leaders continued to present “a façade of unanimity,” but western diplomats in Hanoi detected clear signs of internal strains between “a pro-Soviet and a pro-Chinese faction.”1 Though neither faction was actually beholden to a foreign ideological ally, as previously explained, moderates and militants in the party were thus identified, respectively, by foreign observers at the time, as they have been by many analysts since. The main point of dispute is by now familiar: how to balance military and political struggle in the South, whether to follow Soviet or Chinese revolutionary prescriptions in dealing with the situation there.
By this time leading “pro-Soviet” moderates—“rightists” or “revisionists” in militant parlance—included Ho Chi Minh and defense minister General Vo Nguyen Giap, the two most prominent figures in the party, whose ideological stances still carried great weight, as well as deputy prime minister Le Thanh Nghi, vice president Ton Duc Thang, and foreign minister Ung Van Khiem. The most ardent “pro-Chinese” militants—“leftists”—remained first secretary Le Duan, GPD chairman General Nguyen Chi Thanh, chairman of the Party Organization Committee Le Duc Tho, and deputy prime minister Pham Hung, plus a growing retinue of prominent figures, including chairman of the State Planning Committee Nguyen Duy Trinh, chairman of the National Assembly’s Standing Committee Truong Chinh, chairman of the Education and Propaganda Department and secretary of the Party Cultural and Ideological Committee To Huu, vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National Assembly Hoang Van Hoan, chief of the PAVN General Staff Van Tien Dung, and minister of public security Tran Quoc Hoan.2 Most of these men were also members of the Secretariat, which included none of the leading moderates. Le Duan, Le Duc Tho, and Pham Hung additionally served on the National Reunification Committee, a Politburo subcommittee in charge of dealing with southern affairs.3
Admittedly, signs of the intensity and divisiveness of the dispute within the party abounded by then.4 In January, the Indian commissioner on the ICSC reported that “a heightened tension had recently manifested itself” in Hanoi “between partisans of Moscow and partisans of Peking.” Ho Chi Minh seemed particularly “worried” about “the maneuvers of the Sinophile faction,” the commissioner added.5 In February, on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of the death of Karl Marx, the Secretariat had the party press, Truth Publisher (Nha xuat ban Su that), circulate materials by and about Marx, encouraging cadres and members to “rediscover” his teachings on the value of socialist unity and the dangers of contentiousness.6 A March editorial in Nhan dan called on Vietnamese and other communists to set aside their ideological differences and instead “exchange views and experiences in comradeship and in the spirit of proletarian internationalism” with a view to “strengthening unity and identity of mind among the Communist and Workers’ Parties.”7 At the Nguyen Ai Quoc School for training party cadres in Hanoi, the dispute was so intense that shouting matches and even fisticuffs became common between moderate and militant trainees, and the foreign minister had to intervene personally.8 “Is your squabbling necessary; does it serve the revolution?” he rhetorically asked students at the school. “Unite in the interests of the revolution,” he urged.9
Conflicting constructions of “objective realities” fueled the intraparty dispute at all levels. Militant constructions were largely informed by revolutionary orthodoxies, as well as admiration for the Chinese revolutionary model. Moderate positions derived from what adherents considered the pragmatic needs of the struggle against the United States and the lessons to be learned from the Soviet revolutionary example. The gist of the militant critique was that moderates were forswearing the core precepts of Marxism-Leninism, that they were opportunists guided by strictly nationalist and sometimes even bourgeois interests.
The ideological content of the dispute within the party in 1963 is well documented in that year’s issues of Hoc tap and other party publications, which became a forum for debating the merits of leftist and rightist ideas. Nguyen Chi Thanh, for example, wrote in Hoc tap that the roots of rightism lay in part in a psychological mindset “left by the former imperialist and feudalist regime.” To Thanh, rightism was characterized by “admiration for and fear of the imperialists; a complex state of national inferiority; the cult of the imperialist culture and technology; respect for an order of precedence for high and low classes; a concern with rank, honor, and position; a paternalistic, bureaucratic, and [authoritarian] attitude; and predilection to favor males over females.” Thus burdened, rightists failed to “understand the true nature of proletarian dictatorship.”10 Revisionism, “a euphemism for Soviet heresy” cherished by moderates, was no better in the eyes of its critics.11 Advocates of revisionism, which influenced the conduct of foreign relations, would suspend the international class struggle in favor of accommodation—peaceful coexistence—with imperialists, Le Duc Tho charged. Revisionism thus constituted, in Tho’s words, “a platform from which imperialism may sow disunity in the socialist camp and the international communist movement and sabotage the revolutionary cause of the working class and oppressed peoples in the world.”12
Revisionists, their detractors thought, wanted the working class to “abandon its mission of carrying out the world revolution,” which would “make permanent” the supremacy of capitalism and imperialism. Such a stance was “completely contrary” to the spirit of “the era of transition from capitalism to socialism.”13 To militants, revisionism and rightism were peas in the same pod. Rightism was a “hooked chain” that bound the “bourgeois thoughts” of gullible and unthinking party members to the bourgeois ideological system, thus providing, to mix metaphors, “fertile ground for revisionism.” It was therefore imperative for loyal and committed revolutionaries to oppose rightism in order to “deprive revisionism of a terrain to penetrate the healthy body of our party.”14 As this suggests, militants saw themselves as selfless devotees of revolution, espousing as they did a view that placed their own cause at the center of world revolution.
According to militants, the obvious flaw in rightist, moderate thought was its disregard for the fate of southern compatriots. Preoccupied by their own lives and personal enjoyment, moderate elements in the party, according to their critics, paid too little heed to the welfare of their brethren who were being victimized by reactionaries and imperialists in the South. Peace in the North encouraged among people of moderate inclination “a desire to enjoy an easy and comfortable life” and “a fear of difficulties and hardships.” These in turn caused susceptible “comrades” to “neglect in some measure the revolutionary ideal,” to “relax their struggle spirit,” to embrace one form or another of revisionism.15 The “duty” of loyal northerners and especially of party members among them was to “collaborate with the southern compatriots in undert
aking the vigorous struggle against the U.S. imperialists.”16 The parallel duty to build socialism in the North was no excuse for relaxing the struggle in the South. The northern situation required that “our cadres and party members [there] have an elevated sense of responsibility toward the struggle for national unification and the struggle against modern revisionism and rightist opportunism.”17 Vietnamese militants saw merit in what Mao called “continuous revolution,” in keeping the party and the masses constantly mobilized, and therefore vigilant. Their vehement condemnations of rightist and revisionist thinking evinced intense frustration at their inability to get Ho and Giap in particular to support increased DRVN aid for the southern insurgency even at this late date.
STAYING THE COURSE
In mid-January the British Consulate estimated that “militarily a rough equilibrium has been reached in the South” and “neither side . . . seems capable of achieving a decisive victory without committing itself further than it deems safe.” The consulate surmised that DRVN leaders “doubtless hesitate to commit themselves openly to active military support of the Vietcong as this might well result in North Vietnam becoming a battlefield between the Americans and the Chinese.” They thus accepted the impasse in the South as a “fact of life.”18 “It would be excessive to speak of a serious loss of equilibrium” in the balance Hanoi sought to maintain between political and military struggle in the South, French diplomats noted.19
For Hanoi, to the consternation of militants, the southern revolution still had to be accomplished by southerners, “self-sufficiently,” as decreed by the Third Party Congress, and in ways that avoided adventurous and dangerous maneuvering.20 In a Nhan dan editorial, foreign minister Ung Van Khiem insisted that the people and government of the DRVN still “approved and supported the policy of peace and peaceful coexistence between nations with different political regimes advocated by the USSR and other socialist countries.”21 The DRVN leadership’s position on these issues was unequivocal; it even launched a propaganda and education campaign in February to ensure compliance with its judgment.22 Ho Chi Minh remained especially concerned that a major war would needlessly sacrifice Vietnamese lives and threaten the revolution in the long run.23 The “last thing” he and other moderates wanted at that point was for the insurgency in the South to “escalate into a Korea-type war between the Americans and the Chinese,” foreign observers surmised.24 Nearly a decade after the Geneva accords, Ho, Giap, and other moderates still fretted over the prospect of “open and official” DRVN intervention in the South.25
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