To mollify communists at home and abroad who might question the soundness and legitimacy of the new course endorsed by the Central Committee, the resolution stressed that waging military struggle in the South was not contrary or even a threat to world peace. Vietnam’s impending war of national liberation would actually constitute “an active contribution” to the goal of world peace, a noble effort to “thwart the U.S. imperialists’ plot of turning South Viet-Nam into a military base to oppose the socialist camp, rekindle the Indochinese war, and expand the war in Southeast Asia.” War was just or unjust; communists supported the former and opposed the latter. “Opposing war in general without distinction between just and unjust war is, in fact, opposing revolutionary wars too.”
Resolution 9 portended a consequential realignment of the party’s revolutionary strategy. It represented, in fact, the most significant party pronouncement on the situation in the South since the decision to accept the Geneva accords in 1954. It also set the DRVN on an irreversible collision course with the United States. The bold and ambitious program adopted by the Central Committee effectively gave DRVN decision-makers a blank check to wage war in the South. It sanctioned the first major revision of the party’s strategy vis-à-vis the South since Resolution 15 of January 1959 and, in retrospect, expedited the onset of the Vietnam War.149 In its tone and substance, Resolution 9 amounted to a declaration of war on the Saigon regime, and the United States by extension. With its adoption by the Central Committee, the earlier effort to separate the revolutionary processes in the North and South was abandoned. Henceforth, the DRVN would invest itself comprehensively in the liberation of the South by military struggle. The revolution would be, once again, a single national effort, with the party and the nation together “building the North peacefully while carrying out war against the Americans in the South.”150 Military officials at once set about bringing the PAVN to “wartime strength” in preparation for sending to the South “complete units at their full authorized strength of personnel and equipment.”151 Meanwhile, the DRVN substantially increased its material assistance to the NLF, and to the PLAF in particular. “Immediately,” as Ang Cheng Guan has written, “war preparations went into full swing in both North and South,” and the level and intensity of violence below the seventeenth parallel soon increased markedly.152 Thus, as historian Lien-Hang Nguyen has put it, “militant hawks achieved the categorical response in 1963 that they had wanted in 1959: mobilization of the entire country behind the war effort.” Military strategists “abandoned the idea of winning the southern struggle through protracted warfare and instead ordered a major buildup of conventional military force to bring the war to a speedy end,” she concluded.153
In the context of the time, adoption of the new strategy signaled Hanoi’s acceptance of Chinese revolutionary theses and its unequivocal rejection of Soviet ones. It was to avoid the impression of partiality to China in the Sino-Soviet dispute that Hanoi limited the distribution of the full text of Resolution 9 and classified as “secret” the part addressing the revolution in the South. The North Vietnamese “could not afford to [further] alienate the Soviet Union altogether” by widely disseminating a text so at odds with Soviet views.154 In substance if not in tone, Resolution 9 seemed to be pro-Chinese, but in fact it simply captured the aspiration of VWP militants, who espoused Chinese revolutionary prescriptions but never answered to Beijing nor openly supported Beijing in its dispute with Moscow.
Aware of the potentially ruinous implications for relations with Moscow of its decision to endorse Resolution 9, the Central Committee included in the “secret” document, which it understood Hanoi would eventually have to relay to Moscow, an insistent statement that the new revolutionary strategy was consistent with declarations on the responsibilities of national communist parties to the world revolution adopted in Moscow in 1957 and 1960. The document also emphasized that certain strategies of revolutionary struggle, including peaceful coexistence, which might be appropriate for members of the socialist camp such as the Soviet Union were not, just now, appropriate for Vietnam. Lastly, it stressed that the VWP attached great importance to its unity and friendship with the CPSU, that Moscow was then as always the head of the socialist camp, and that the Soviet Union remained Hanoi’s model and inspiration for achieving socialist modernity in the DRVN.
THE PURGE OF MODERATES
Adoption of Resolution 9 precipitated an important reshuffling of the DRVN leadership, as leftist militants seized the opportunity to stage—and win—a power play, a coup of a different kind, against moderates in the VWP. Within days after the plenum, militants set out to denounce and remove from top and other echelons those suspected of opposing or even questioning the new orthodoxy, irretrievably changing the balance of power in Hanoi. Without unity “among all party members on the basis of unanimity with the party’s line concerning the construction of socialism in North Vietnam and the struggle for national unification,” Nguyen Chi Thanh commented, “our party surely cannot lead all our people successfully in carrying out the revolution.”155
As head of the Party Organization Committee charged with keeping tabs on party members, Le Duc Tho—henceforth doubling as Le Duan’s second-in-command, a role he had previously assumed in COSVN during the Indochina War—justified the denunciations of party members and meted out their punishments.156 He insisted that dissidents be dismissed from leadership positions and otherwise ostracized to prevent them from using their offices and influence for “antiparty” purposes.157 “Each comrade must be thoroughly imbued with the resolution of the ninth party Central Committee conference,” Tho believed. The commitment of party leaders to the new revolutionary line, like that of cadres and members, had to be “unequivocal and definite”; otherwise “revisionism will develop and benefit class enemies.” To preserve party integrity, “each comrade must be forced to submit to the party’s iron discipline.” “We are determined not to tolerate the practice of expressing views in an unorganized manner on the party’s lines, policies, resolutions, and instructions,” Tho insisted.
Tho identified the targets of this latest “rectification campaign,” as the party called the effort to achieve conformity, as those who “separate themselves from the party,” who “refused to express their views at party meetings” but “gathered in small groups” after meetings and “spoke in terms that counter party resolutions.” Such behavior violated party discipline and undermined unity by creating dissension and schism, and it “must be stopped as soon as possible.” “The struggle against rightist thought and revisionist influences,” Tho claimed, “must spearhead the ideological struggle in our party at the present time.”158
Though the evidence is not definitive, militants appear to have planned their “silent” coup against moderates before the plenum, using ruse and indirection to pinpoint those in the party’s upper echelon who might criticize or reject the agenda Le Duan intended to lay before the Central Committee. Acting on the first secretary’s behalf a few days before the plenum, for example, party theoretician Truong Chinh, who was not only fully rehabilitated in 1963 but became a close collaborator of Le Duan, asked the head of the Institute of Philosophy, Hoang Minh Chinh, to prepare proposals for consideration at the upcoming meeting.159 A decorated hero of the war with France, Chinh had studied in Moscow from 1957 to 1960, and in 1963 was a staunch proponent of peaceful coexistence and economic competition rather than armed struggle. Predictably, the proposals he prepared reflected these convictions and alerted militants to his likely response to Le Duan’s agenda.
Those who supported Hoang Minh Chinh’s proposals during the plenum became marked individuals. Besides Chinh himself, they included such men as former foreign minister Ung Van Khiem, deputy chairman of the National Commission for Science and Technology Bui Cong Trung, vice president of the Vietnamese-Soviet Friendship Association Duong Bach Mai, deputy minister of culture Le Liem, former personal secretary to Ho Chi Minh Vu Dinh Huynh, and PAVN colonel Le Vinh Quoc.160 Quoc’s oppositi
on to violent struggle was notable for revealing a deep schism within the PAVN over military strategy in the South, including the deployment of PAVN units there. A number of PAVN officers were evidently “loathe” to intensify the armed struggle or dispatch their units to the South because they abided by Giap’s position that modernization of the PAVN had to be completed before the party shifted gears in the South.161 Besides, the goals of the southern military struggle identified in Resolution 9 were such, these officers understood, that their men, trained for conventional warfare to defend the North, would first have to be retrained in the guerilla tactics peculiar to a “people’s war” to fight with maximum efficiency, which would take time.
The purge of “rightist deviationists” extended beyond the leaders already named and even beyond the party and the PAVN. Within weeks after the plenum, Tran Quoc Hoan’s Ministry of Public Security was targeting civil servants, intellectuals, artists, and journalists suspected of sympathizing with Chinh’s views, supporting the party’s old line, or questioning the merits of dramatically escalating hostilities in the South. Tho’s Organization Committee also ordered all members and cadres to attend “re-education” classes to “absorb” the substance and party interpretations of Resolution 9.162 Soon, all party and state organs had proffered their commitment to revolutionary militancy, and a “repressive,” antimoderate atmosphere prevailed in Hanoi.163 Punishment for opponents or critics of the new orthodoxy ranged from demotion to dismissal from the party and the government, as well as other organizations, and from house arrest to death.164 Several unrepentant moderates in the Central Committee, including some who held high posts in the government, were demoted.165 DRVN nationals studying in countries whose governments supported peaceful coexistence, including the Soviet Union, were ordered home for re-education.166 A number of ambassadors may also have been recalled to be re-educated and otherwise apprised of the party’s new revolutionary line.167 “In sum,” as Lien-Hang Nguyen has concluded, all those “exposed to peaceful coexistence ideas were considered suspect and treated as such.”168
The most famous victim of Tho and the militants was none other than Ho Chi Minh. By the time of the 1963 plenum, Ho’s stubborn and ultimately misguided faith in peaceful struggle, in strategic moderation in the South—to say nothing of age and deteriorating health—had already cost him some of his power and influence in the party.169 In the plenum’s aftermath, he had little of either left. Since the signing of the 1954 Geneva accords, Ho had personified the moderate, conciliatory, risk-avoiding consensus within the VWP, the hope and purpose of which was to prevent another devastating war as long as conditions permitted.170 Khrushchev’s peaceful coexistence promised to meet that end, and Ho and many of his contemporaries had found it attractive. Le Duan and the party’s militant wing thus had to neutralize Ho’s influence. To justify sidelining him, they propagated among party members the “theory of two mistakes,” according to which Ho had twice made “fatal mistakes” due to misguided optimism and fear of war: the first was agreeing in 1946 to let French forces return to Vietnam unopposed; the second was consenting to a cease-fire and to the country’s partition in 1954.171
In view of Ho’s unique reputation at home and abroad, however, the militants could not—even if that had been their desire—completely exclude him from political and diplomatic processes in which his sheer stature was useful to the revolution. Without Ho, the regime in Hanoi would “lose much of its attraction” domestically and internationally, as foreign observers noted.172 Still the embodiment of the revolution in Vietnam and a symbol of revolutionary hope across the socialist world, the Third World, and beyond, Ho was a necessary asset, particularly for the diplomatic struggle. Despite their ideological differences, his personal relationship with Mao had been instrumental in securing Chinese support for the Vietnamese revolution.173 Now, in his declining years—he died in 1969—the new militant regime in Hanoi used him in a largely ceremonial, but nonetheless crucial, role as goodwill ambassador and “symbolic head of state.”174 He became the venerable face of the revolution, a moderating voice to the rest of the world for a coterie of ideologues lacking his poise, appeal, and sagacity. After the plenum, the militants actually relied on Ho to mend relations with Moscow and smooth over problems rising from the Sino-Soviet split.175 According William Duiker, Ho spent his time thereafter “fulfilling his growing image as the spiritual father of all Vietnamese people and the soul of the Vietnamese revolution.”176 He took on the persona of “Uncle Ho,” cultivating—compelled under the circumstances to cultivate—an image as affable father of the nation and “demi-God” of the revolution.177
Ho’s most prominent disciple and ideological ally, Vo Nguyen Giap, was also marginalized, though his postplenum role is more uncertain than Ho’s. After Ho, Giap was the most recognizable face of the Vietnamese revolution. Like Ho, he was a personable man whose views carried weight inside and outside the party. Ho had led the political and diplomatic struggles for independence; Giap had won the military victories. Many at home and abroad knew him as the architect of the spectacular triumph over the French at Dien Bien Phu, after which his military genius captivated observers of Vietnamese affairs. To the troops he commanded and the revolutionaries he inspired, Giap was a hero. Though his innermost thoughts on the matter are poorly documented, he seems to have agreed with the decision to cease hostilities after Dien Bien Phu in the summer of 1954. Certainly he thereafter unflinchingly supported Ho and advocated revolutionary caution, for he too believed that resumption of warfare in the South before the socialist project in the North and modernization of the armed forces were completed would be risky and counterproductive. What is more, Giap respected Soviet strategic thinking. He was thus a big problem for the new leadership, in the party and in the armed forces, especially as his opinions were so widely respected.178 It was therefore against great odds that militants were able to neutralize Giap’s influence, though one report suggests that even before the 1963 plenum his star had begun to fade and he was “being squeezed out” by a more “pro-Peking group” of younger generals.179
Most party members appear to have gone along with the purges and the new orthodoxy because they recognized that the old guard had been variously naive, negligent, or incompetent. The centerpieces of their revolutionary strategy in the South—political struggle, respect for the Geneva accords, and since 1959, limited armed struggle—had by 1963 largely failed to deliver positive results. The “temporary” partition of the country was now a decade old and widely regarded as a fact in international politics. The repatriation of Viet Minh troops to the North and the moratorium on military struggle initially imposed on those who stayed had had disastrous, near-fatal implications for the southern communist movement. Perhaps the most obvious acknowledgment of these errors had been Hanoi’s decision of 1959 to start redeploying to the South most troops it had ordered to regroup to the North in 1954–55. Yet even after its errors became obvious, the old guard’s response had been reluctant, timid, and limited, no more than marginally effective at best and widely unpopular among southern revolutionaries and their sympathizers. It also helped the militants that this old guard made no serious attempt to resist or organize a countercoup. Ho, Giap, and most of their allies seem by the time of the Ninth Plenum to have resigned themselves to the notion that the time had come for a new strategy in the South and, with that, a new balance of power in Hanoi. That may have averted the kind of dislocations communist states sometimes experienced after restructuring their leadership.
The thoroughness with which the militants acted may suggest cynicism or paranoia on their part. But in the context of Cold War Vietnam, it is more likely that these mostly parochial men, schooled in the limiting dogmas of Marxism-Leninism, believed that what they did was necessary and just. Growing tensions in the South and mounting difficulties in the North required concentration on vital issues; dissidence was intolerable. A leadership of “real” communists, of men who feared no sacrifice and no necessity, they tho
ught, had better odds of guiding the revolution to victory than one dominated by half-hearted temporizers who would minimize the loss of lives and property and put the interests of individuals above those of the party, the state, and the revolution. The latest rectification campaign, the purge of moderates, demonstrated the determination of militants to achieve total unity of thought and purpose within leadership circles and throughout the rest of the party. Le Duan’s regime wanted peers who agreed with it and underlings who obeyed unquestioningly and interpreted literally such slogans as “Independence or Death.”
Within weeks of Resolution 9’s adoption, militant thinking prevailed in the Politburo and the Central Committee. After Le Duan and Le Duc Tho, the most prominent members of the new ruling elite were Nguyen Chi Thanh and Pham Hung. These men would dominate party decision-making for years, with the exception of Thanh, who died in 1967.180 Until his death, Thanh was a special beneficiary of the new regime. Since Le Duan and other militants understood that Giap’s eclipse might elicit opposition in the PAVN, they ostentatiously praised Thanh, the only other full general in the North Vietnamese armed forces, citing the centrality of his role in the leadership. The praise seems to have appeased the armed forces and convinced military leaders and their men that the displacement of Giap was not a displacement of the PAVN or of its command structure in the ruling ranks of the party and the state.181
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