MISSED OPPORTUNITIES FOR PEACE?
Some authors have argued with varying degrees of persuasiveness that there was still hope for a negotiated solution after 1962, that Hanoi and Saigon were in fact moving toward a diplomatic settlement of their differences in or around the summer of 1963. The tenor of their argument suggests that leftist influence in Hanoi remained negligible at this point or at least too weak to preclude such an accommodation.75 “The period from early 1962 to mid-1963 witnessed a more forthcoming North Vietnamese position on the subject of diplomacy than had been seen previously,” historian Fredrik Logevall has written of this view, intimating “the possibility in the middle of 1963 for fashioning some kind of political solution to the Indochina conflict, whether by way of a bilateral North-South deal or a multipower conference.”76 In an influential book, Ellen Hammer similarly posited that “contacts between the two sides,” possibly initiated in 1962 and facilitated by the Polish representative on the ICSC, Mieczyslaw Maneli, were “going well” in mid-1963, bringing Hanoi and Saigon close to an agreement. “The talks were not about a detailed agreement; it was too soon for that,” she wrote. “They dealt with parallel actions each side might take, such as lessening guerilla activities and limiting military initiatives.” “Northerners saw advantages in dealing with Ngo Dinh Diem at this stage,” Hammer believed, because of food shortages in the North, the vulnerability of Hanoi to “unwelcome pressures” from the Chinese due to the Sino-Soviet split, and fear of American military intervention.77
It is indeed true that thanks to Polish as well as French intercession, Hanoi had established and was using a secret channel to communicate with Saigon by mid-1963.78 French records confirm that secret “contacts” at a “high level” between Saigon and Hanoi existed in May, and meetings between the two sides had taken place in the South Vietnamese capital. None other than Ngo Dinh Nhu, Diem’s brother and chief adviser, represented the RVN in the meetings, and it was said that he actually “controls these relations” on the RVN side; his opposite on the DRVN side, however, remains unknown.79 But Hanoi never intended to use these contacts to resolve political or military matters, or to negotiate the differences between northern and southern authorities diplomatically unless, of course, Saigon was ready to capitulate. It used them instead to address trade and cultural issues—namely, resumption of the exchange of goods and postal services between the two halves of the country, raised on at least two occasions previously, as well as the staging of soccer matches between teams from the two Vietnams.80 The goods to be exchanged included coal, which the DRVN had in abundance, for rice, which it pressingly needed and which the agricultural South produced in surplus amounts.
Hanoi’s diplomatic démarches thus aimed not to restore peace in Vietnam but to advance its political agenda while easing a pressing economic concern. They cannot be taken as preliminaries to serious probing for peace or as evidence that a substantive effort was made and missed by anyone in the spring and summer of 1963. As historian Margaret Gnoinska has demonstrated on the basis of Polish documentary evidence, Warsaw “did not launch any secret peace initiative in Vietnam” during 1963. Rather, Hanoi asked ICSC commissioner Maneli to convey to “those interested” in Saigon that it wanted to begin cultural exchanges and trade, namely, coal for rice, with the South before any diplomatic settlement could be considered, and Warsaw obliged. “The North Vietnamese did not ask Maneli to relay to the South Vietnamese any specific questions or suggestions of a political nature,” Gnoinska notes, and she found no evidence that Hanoi “made serious attempts to sway the Saigon regime to its side through the Polish channel.”81
As Hanoi explored the possibility of low-level commercial and cultural exchanges with the South, French president Charles de Gaulle issued a sudden call for neutralizing South Vietnam and creating an unaligned but inclusive coalition government there.82 By one account the call was “virtually [for] a return to the main principles of the [1954] Geneva Conference,” including “the need for unity, independence and good neighbourliness.” It was also at least somewhat “anti-American” and “Delphic.”83 Though Hanoi refused to comment on the call, a North Vietnamese diplomat in Algiers confided to a French counterpart that some DRVN leaders found it “positive.”84 Unfortunately for them, nothing came of de Gaulle’s proposal.85
Gareth Porter has noted that soon after de Gaulle made his call, individuals in Washington, Saigon, and Hanoi began talking up plans to neutralize South Vietnam and end hostilities. The plans, Porter believes, failed to materialize due to the machinations of hawks in the Kennedy administration.86 By this time, we now know, no plan for neutralizing the South stood a real chance of adoption or of producing a workable peace if it were adopted. Through most of 1963 Hanoi was in the throes of a divisive debate over strategic policy, and by the time de Gaulle made his proposal, militants were winning that debate. As that occurred, calls for neutralization and peace were too little too late, coming as they did after the collapse of Laotian neutrality had shown the “worthlessness” of international agreements negotiated from a position of relative weakness and with no adequate mechanisms of enforcement.87 According to historian Edward Miller, even if Hanoi had wanted to negotiate, peace would still not have materialized because Diem and Nhu thought they were winning the war against southern insurgents, and thus viewed peace talks merely as a “prelude to Hanoi’s capitulation.”88
THE PARTY BEGINS TO CRACK
In view of both the provocations and the opportunities it believed it faced, the militant faction in the VWP demonstrated patience and restraint. There is no evidence the faction tried to force events by openly attacking key moderate leaders in Hanoi, disheartened though it was by their obdurateness. The integrity of the party, like that of the socialist camp, was as sacrosanct to militants as it was to moderates. Although the Sino-Soviet dispute had long been a source of contention within the party, the leadership had always remained publicly united in responding to it. Throughout that ordeal, in the words of Douglas Pike, the VWP “demonstrated remarkable consistency in dealing with the dispute, by evaluating it and basing responses to each unfolding development” on its own revolutionary objectives.89 A coup or some other premature bid for power by militants was an option, but it risked alienating fence-sitters and the party base, and could tarnish if not altogether discredit the leftist cause. Militants therefore bided their time, waiting for circumstances to change to their advantage even as they nudged those circumstances along.
By summer, party decision-makers were under pressure to accept Chinese revolutionary prescriptions not only from within but also from foreign allies. In June a delegation of visiting North Koreans made a “strenuous” effort to push Vietnamese leaders “from [their] perch on the fence definitively into the Peking camp” or at least to “produce some pro-Chinese statements.” The leaders resisted the effort, fearing that they would be going too far by supporting a North Korean and Chinese line that was openly defiant of Moscow.90 Shortly thereafter, the Chinese Embassy launched a “paper war” in Hanoi, distributing “tracts” in Vietnamese that were actually translations of items from Beijing’s People’s Daily denouncing peaceful coexistence and revisionism. The embassy circulated the tracts to those who visited its reading room and to the thirty thousand PRC nationals then residing in the capital.91 To avoid complicating its relationship with Moscow, Hanoi politely asked the embassy to refrain from distributing such tracts, and the practice ceased without incident.
The ever observant British Consulate had come to believe by then that despite such initiatives the “natural sympathies” of most VWP members were now “largely with the Chinese,” and wondered how much longer it would be before that became more manifest.92 Not long, it turned out. That same month, the party organ Hoc tap began featuring a series of articles showcasing leftist thinking on various issues.93 The first of the articles was a virulent condemnation of revisionism in the form of an attack on Yugoslavia but in language that only thinly veiled criticism of those in t
he party who supported peaceful coexistence and the strategic status quo below the seventeenth parallel, and through them the Soviet Union. “The main road, the main way for the proletariat to seize power,” that article read, “is to use revolutionary violence to throw off the yoke of the bourgeoisie, smash the old State apparatus and set up the proletarian dictatorship.”94
Two other equally revealing articles appeared in September. The first implicitly condemned the CPSU’s embrace of peaceful coexistence and its criticism of China and others in the socialist camp who questioned that embrace. “Treating class brothers as enemies on account of ideological differences,” it read, “trying in a thousand and one ways to create difficulties for the fraternal countries in the matter of their economic development and strengthening their ability to defend themselves, at the same time considering enemies as friends, doing a cosmetic job on them, even helping the bourgeois reactionaries of other countries in their expansionist moves, in attacking and provoking the fraternal countries, are the most important visible manifestations of the communists who have completely departed from Marxist-Leninist socialism.”95
The second Hoc tap article, “Peace or Violence,” was highly theoretical and underscored the importance some party members, namely militants, accorded to Marxist-Leninist determinism and the merits they placed in revolutionary violence. “Modern revisionist and rightist opportunists are distorting Marxist-Leninist theories on the historical role of violence and giving great publicity to pacifism,” it noted. Such people “know nothing about the law of social evolution.” Renouncing violent revolution or timidly pursuing military struggle reduced “proletarian revolution and proletarian dictatorship to empty words.” Similarly, pursuing revolutionary goals by political rather than violent means “will leave the working class without adequate preparation for overcoming difficulties, for defeating the exploiting classes, and for establishing its dictatorship.” Violence was the “midwife” of revolutionary change; victims of exploitation and domination “must resort to revolutionary violence to smash counterrevolutionary violence” and “win their own emancipation so that society may advance according to the law of historical development.” The history of the Vietnamese revolution “proves that to overthrow the exploiters who use violence to dominate the people,” there was no other path than “the path of violence,” as Le Duan had advanced in 1956.96 That article subsequently received “Chinese acclaim” for its “uncompromising denunciation of the embourgeoisement of certain sectors of communist ideology.”97
There were other signs of the new preponderance of leftist sympathies in party ranks. Arguably the most notable was Hanoi’s decision to join Beijing in condemning the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty negotiated by Washington and Moscow in August on grounds that the treaty amounted to a surrender of socialist interests to capitalist imperial ambitions.98 “The position of the Chinese government is absolutely correct and reasonable and completely reflects the desires and aspirations of peace-loving people worldwide,” a Hoc tap item noted.99 “Socialist countries other than the Soviet Union must not be denied the means of defense,” a Vietnamese observer said of the treaty.100 Since not all nuclear weapons were to be destroyed, a Nhan dan editorial boldly charged, a partial ban served only imperialist and Soviet interests.101 The treaty “will hamper the fraternal socialist countries from helping one another so as to raise the defense capability of our camp to the level of the requirements of modern military science,” another editorial noted.102
In this and other editorials and official commentaries, implicit denunciations of Moscow “went as far as possible.”103 “It was clear,” read a western assessment, “that sooner or later [the DRVN] would have to stand up and be counted on one side or the other [of the Sino-Soviet dispute], and this time came when she had to decide whether or not to [endorse] the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.”104 The French Delegation similarly surmised that the stance on the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty “in fact constituted a declaration, the clearest so far, of alignment with Chinese theses.”105 Hanoi’s position on the treaty reportedly made the Soviets “more discontented” with Hanoi than they had ever been, and they made “no secret of it.”106 The Soviet ambassador confirmed that when, clearly frustrated, he told a French diplomat that he put little stock in the declarations or actions of the DRVN because it was a “weak and small country.”107
In an equally bold move reflecting the shifting political currents in the VWP, Hanoi at this time dispatched a large retinue of PAVN military advisers to the South to “militarize the looser, more self-contained guerrilla units” of the PLAF, convert those units “into more traditional armed forces,” and prepare them for “more orthodox military assignments.”108 The advisers’ dispatch did not go unnoticed by RVN authorities, who complained to the ICSC about Hanoi’s growing involvement in the southern insurgency.109 Indeed, that year 7,850 additional troops and political and military advisers infiltrated the South from the North, fewer than the year before but only because of the earlier exhaustion of the pool of southern regroupees.110 For a Canadian observer, the continuing infiltration and other “provocations” were clear indications of the preponderance of militant influence in Hanoi.111 By this time it allegedly took “the full weight” of Ho Chi Minh’s authority to prevent the party from openly and fully committing the DRVN to war in the South.112
In October, on the anniversary of the 1938 Munich accords, Nhan dan ran a revealing editorial indicative of the militant mood now prevailing in Hanoi. According to the editorial, there were two ways of responding to aggressive imperialism. One consisted of “preserving the unity of the socialist camp,” “rallying the peoples of the world behind a large united front and launching a powerful mass movement,” and “attacking resolutely and continuously to keep in check warmongering imperialists.” The other way, the “bad” way, entailed following the approach of politicians at Munich, allowing oneself to be duped by the professed goodwill of the enemy and making “concession after concession” to the enemy. “The lesson of Munich,” the editorial concluded, “has demonstrated that the policy of defeatism is extremely dangerous since it creates, for the imperialists, favorable conditions for the pursuit of their aggressive designs.”113 To western analysts, the editorial was “a pretext to evoke the current international situation and vigorously condemn all policies of appeasement,” “an apology for Chinese theses,” and a “barely veiled critique” of Moscow’s peaceful coexistence policy.114 “The DRVN espousal of the Peking line continues, although it is by no means so extreme as to include direct criticism of the Moscow position,” the Canadian representative inferred from the contents of that and other recent articles and editorials.115
THE COUP AGAINST DIEM
The climatic episode that would push Hanoi into a definitively militant strategy in the South came in the fall, when the political landscape there changed suddenly and radically. On 2 November 1963, Diem and his brother Nhu were killed in a coup by ARVN officers. General Duong Van Minh thereafter became head of the Saigon government. Publicly, DRVN leaders dismissed Diem’s overthrow as a mere change of personnel, further proof of the bankruptcy of Washington’s policies in the South. Privately, however, they were alarmed. Specifically, they feared that the new leadership might rally popular support for its policies, setting back the revolution in the South. “Signs of this fear are the constant warnings in the North Vietnamese press and on the South Vietnamese Liberation Radio to the people of South Vietnam not to be duped by the new Government’s talk of ‘democracy and freedom,’” western observers noted.116
DRVN leaders believed then and Vietnamese scholars believe now that Washington engineered the coup.117 In Hoc tap, Ha Van Lau of the Foreign Ministry immediately postulated that the Kennedy administration, bent on precipitating a wider war, had sanctioned the coup because Diem had failed to “satisfy” Washington’s requirements of “saving” the South and “crushing the Viet Cong rebellion.”118 By most Vietnamese accounts, the Kennedy administration enginee
red the overthrow to gain greater freedom of action in the South.119 Diem had behaved too independently, according to these sources, and Washington replaced him with a more pliable leader.120 Luu Doan Huynh, a late Vietnamese diplomat, noted that as early as 1962 Hanoi began noticing “increasing contradictions” between Diem’s regime and Washington and felt some trepidation, not knowing what this might presage.121 For many in Hanoi, the coup confirmed what they suspected all along: that the United States had from the beginning intended to assume the colonial mantle from the French in Indochina.
To many in the VWP, the coup was tantamount to revolution, marking as it did the transition from a bourgeois reactionary to a military counterrevolutionary regime in Saigon.122 Reprehensible as the former had been, it was preferable to the latter because it had included civilian and nationalist elements. Leaders of the new regime were nothing but lackeys handpicked by Washington for their eagerness to benefit from America’s neocolonial project. In the words of historian Le Cuong, the Kennedy administration had replaced a nepotistic regime with a “most submissive” one.123 The French historian Philippe Franchini has drawn a parallel conclusion. “The arrival to power of a junta suggested the reinforcement of [Saigon’s] ties to the United States,” Franchini has written, the “expected effect” of which for Hanoi was “an increased American engagement that threatened to imperil the southern liberation movement.”124
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