Many observers at the conference noted an attitude of bitterness within the DRV delegation over the alleged betrayal of Vietnamese interests by China and the Soviet Union. In his reminiscences, Chinese diplomat Wang Bingnan later remarked that some members of the delegation “hoped to unify the whole of Vietnam at one stroke.”41
That bitterness was apparently not limited to Vietnamese delegates at Geneva, but was reflected inside Vietnam as well. The mood was apparently serious enough to seize Ho Chi Minh’s attention. In a political report given to the VWP Central Committee a few days before the final signing of the Geneva Agreement, he pointed out that
some people, intoxicated with our repeated victories, want to fight on at all costs, to a finish; they see only the trees, not the whole forest; with their attention focused on the withdrawal of the French they fail to detect their schemes; they see the French but not the Americans; they are partial to military action and make light of diplomacy. They are unaware that we are struggling in international conferences as well as on the battlefields in order to attain our goal.
Such people, he contended, “want quick results, unaware that the struggle for peace is a hard and complex one.” What they fail to see is that the three countries have already made great advances in their struggle to obtain the complete independence of all countries of Indochina. Now, however, a new strategy was needed, because the United States was determined to sabotage the prospects for peace and justify its future intervention in the conflict in Indochina. Under the new circumstances, the old slogan of “Resistance to the end,” must be replaced by a new one: “Peace, unity, independence, democracy.” Such a policy would help to isolate the United States (which had now become the main and direct enemy of the Indochinese people) on the world’s stage and help to defeat its nefarious schemes.
Ho Chi Minh conceded that the price for peace was the division of Vietnam. But the establishment of regroupment zones, he insisted, did not mean partition of the country, but was a temporary measure only:
Owing to the delimitation and exchange of zones, some previously free areas will be temporarily occupied by the enemy; their inhabitants will be dissatisfied; some people might fall prey to discouragement and to enemy deception. We should make it clear to our compatriots that the trials they are going to endure for the sake of the interests of the whole country, for the sake of our long-range interests, will be a cause for glory and will earn them the gratitude of the whole nation.
With the correct leadership of the Party and the support of the peoples of the world, Ho Chi Minh promised, full independence and national unity would surely be fulfilled.42
In calling on his colleagues in the Party to accept a negotiated settlement of the war that was substantially less than total victory, Ho Chi Minh was undoubtedly deferring to the advice of Zhou Enlai, who had urged such a step during their summit meeting in Liuzhou a few days before. Yet his willingness to accept a compromise peace en route to his final objective is reminiscent of his views on previous occasions, notably at the end of the Pacific War. Ho Chi Minh recognized that national independence and unity for the Vietnamese nation could not be achieved in isolation, but must be achieved in the context of the complex changes taking place on the world’s stage.
XIV | BETWEEN TWO WARS
On October 9, 1954, French troops crossed the Paul Doumer Bridge, which stretched over the muddy waters of the Red River, and departed from the city of Hanoi. In a brief ceremony, Colonel Lefebre d’Argencé, commander of the last French detachment, turned the administration of the city over to Vo Nguyen Giap’s capital regiment. During the previous two weeks, the city had appeared virtually empty, as thousands of refugees streamed southward along Route 5 to the port city of Haiphong. The streets of Hanoi were especially dead at night, as most restaurants, bars, and shops downtown were closed.
The following day, the city came back to life, as the local population celebrated the arrival of their new rulers. It was a festive occasion. The streets were plastered with flags and slogans welcoming the Party and the government; organized processions, composed of children and delegations representing a variety of social groups and associations, took place before large and enthusiastic crowds of onlookers gathered in front of the Governor-General’s Palace and in the park next to the Northern Palace, which had once served as the administrative headquarters of the DRV. On October 11, Vietminh units bearing machine guns and light artillery pieces began to pour into the city, where they were greeted with shouts of “doc lap” (independence) from the assembled crowds. In their midst were members of the Ho Chi Minh’s government, many of whom were setting foot in the capital for the first time in nearly eight years.
Ho Chi Minh himself arrived in the city quietly sometime on or after October 12, but there was no triumphal entry or celebration to mark the occasion, and his first public appearance did not take place until the arrival of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, on the seventeenth. In an editorial appearing in a local newspaper the next day, Ho explained that he did not want to waste his countrymen’s time in a public welcome. “Our mutual love,” he remarked, “does not depend on appearance.” The development of the economy and progress toward the unification of the country, he explained, were more important than ceremony.
But Ho Chi Minh had already met with a small group of municipal Party officials at a small ceremony on October 16. In brief remarks on that occasion he noted that there would be many difficulties to overcome, but that they could be gradually resolved if everyone cooperated and obeyed the laws of the new authorities. That new government, he declared, represented the will of the people, and it would subject itself to popular criticism. So in fact it seemed. Cadres were carefully instructed to behave properly to the local population, while students and teachers were urged to continue to attend their classes, and merchants to continue selling their wares in the liberated city. Foreigners were encouraged to remain and to continue in their occupations. Ho himself checked into a hospital for medical treatment. After his release, he refused an offer by his colleagues to live in the Governor-General’s Palace, which he considered to be too pretentious for his tastes, and decided to take up residence in a small gardener’s house on the palace grounds. Still, the main building was renamed the Presidential Palace (Phu Chu tich), in honor of its new role.1
In his customary manner, Ho Chi Minh adopted a conciliatory demeanor in his dealings with the outside world. In discussions with Nehru, he subscribed to the five principles of peaceful coexistence that Nehru and Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai had recently affirmed at their meeting in June, and he assured his visitor that the new Vietnam would maintain correct relations with the royal governments in Laos and Cambodia. On October 18, he met with Jean Sainteny, recently returned to Hanoi at the request of Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France to represent French interests in the DRV. Sainteny reported to Paris that Ho had expressed a willingness to retain a French cultural and economic presence in North Vietnam and to establish diplomatic contacts with other non-Communist countries. Ho further insisted that he was not a slave to hard-line elements in his Party. In an interview with a journalist in early November, however, Ho emphasized that hereafter Franco-DRV relations must be on a basis of equality.2
Still, despite Ho Chi Minh’s reassurances, the small contingent of Europeans and Americans in Hanoi was closely watched, and their activities were severely restricted. In contrast to the generally relaxed and affable Ho, many of the cadres of the new regime were, in Jean Sainteny’s appraisal, “meddlesome busybodies, organizing meetings, patriotic chorales, processions, indoctrination sessions, early morning calisthenics, and so on.” Most closely watched was the small American community. The local press, now under firm Party control, was highly critical of the United States, and a statement by the local Vietminh committee that was running the government until the installation of a formal administration had announced that it did not recognize the legal status of the U.S. consulate in Hanoi. Anti-American attitudes among
the local population were fanned by Ho Chi Minh himself, who continued to write occasional articles critical of the United States that were published in local newspapers under the initials C.B. During the next few weeks, a variety of petty restrictions were placed on the U.S. consulate’s activities, and it was forced to close before the end of the year. Its last public event was a Thanksgiving party, attended by a handful of Western diplomats and members of the International Control Commission that had been established as the result of the Geneva Accords.3
On November 3, President Ho Chi Minh convened a meeting of his Council of Ministers to review government programs and appoint a new administrative committee for the capital region. The council faced some intimidating problems. What strategy should be adopted to help the northern provinces recover from eight years of war and several decades of foreign occupation? Should the DRV, under firm Party guidance, move rapidly to abolish the edifice of colonial authority and begin to lay the foundations of a future socialist society, or should it move forward slowly and gradually through a transitional phase in a bid to reassure moderates, spur economic growth, and raise the overall standard of living of the general population? Could the regime win the support of the rural and urban poor while at the same time placating affluent elements? Finally, how should it deal with the issue of reunification and the implementation of the Geneva Accords?
In a sense, the first question may have already been answered. For Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues, there was ample precedent for a policy of prudence. After the end of the Civil War in Soviet Russia in 1920, Lenin had encouraged a temporary continuation of private enterprise to promote rapid economic growth and technological modernization. That policy did not come to an end until 1928, when Stalin introduced a program calling for nationalization of industry and the collectivization of agriculture. China had followed a similar path after the rise to power of the CCP in 1949, launching its own program of “new democracy” to win the support of moderate elements and lay the economic basis for socialist transformation in the mid-1950s.
A few days prior to the signing of the Geneva Accords, the DRV from its liberated base in the Viet Bac had already published a decree elucidating its future strategy after the projected cease-fire. The announcement contained an eight-point program that was clearly designed to reassure merchants, professionals, bureaucrats, and foreigners that for the time being the new government would not attempt to interfere in their private activities. It called for a government takeover of business enterprises and public services previously owned and operated by the imperialists or by the “puppet authority” (i.e., the Bao Dai government). Private ownership of all other forms of property would be guaranteed. Civil servants employed by the previous regime would not be arrested unless they had taken up arms against the resistance or committed acts of sabotage against the people’s property. All civilian officials were instructed to remain at their posts and obey orders while awaiting the installation of the people’s authority. Former officers of the Vietnamese National Army were ordered to report to military committees established by the new revolutionary administration. Those who failed to do so would be “severely punished.” Freedom of religion was guaranteed, as was the security of the persons and property of foreign nationals.4
In an appeal to the Vietnamese people circulated in September, prior to the return of the government to Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh had set the tone of conciliation. “We are ready,” he said, “to unite with whomever from north to south approves peace, unity, independence and democracy, regardless of with whom they collaborated in the past.” The rights of domestic and foreign capitalists to carry out their legitimate business activities were to be retained, and all those who had once been employed by the enemy who now wished to work for the people and the nation were welcomed.5
Party leaders had good reason to conciliate their former adversaries. During the autumn, refugees continued to stream southward out of Hanoi by the thousands. Eventually a total of over 800,000 Vietnamese left the North, many of them Roman Catholics who were warned by their priests, “the Virgin Mary has moved to the South. Shouldn’t you?” A substantial number of Catholics had close ties with the French or the Bao Dai government, while those who did not feared that deep-seated suspicions of their loyalty on the part of DRV officials could result in persecution.
Although the exodus served to spare the new regime a potential source of opposition, it also deprived the northern provinces of a substantial proportion of their most affluent, creative, and industrious people, since Catholics made up a high percentage of the commercial, professional, and intellectual elite of the country. One observer estimated that in October 1954 the new government had within its ranks only fifty college graduates; no more than an additional two hundred possessed a high school diploma. Most factories were shut, and many of the owners had left the country. According to one report, twenty-nine of thirty factories owned by French in the port city of Haiphong had been closed. Transportation was a serious problem. Gasoline for motor vehicles was in short supply, and the railroads were not working.6
In addition, much of the irrigation network had been destroyed by the French, and nearly 10 percent of the cultivated land in the Red River delta had been abandoned because of the flight of the local population to urban areas in the closing months of the war (the French had declared much of the delta region to be a free fire zone, where their armed forces were authorized to shoot at anything in sight). Then, in December disastrous floods along the central coast raised the specter of a new famine, and the price of rice in the markets rapidly shot up.
As a result, when the DRV began to set up its central state apparatus in early November, it was compelled to fuse some of its existing departments and agencies while attempting to make use of remaining administrative personnel who had been employed by the Bao Dai regime. At the local level, the committees of resistance and administration that had been established during the Franco-Vietminh War continued to operate, although the reference to resistance in their title was dropped to conform to new conditions. Eventually, however, it was announced that elections for People’s Councils would soon be held at local levels to provide a firm legal basis for the establishment of popular power.7
In the first few months after returning to Hanoi, the Party leadership limited itself to adopting measures to install a new revolutionary administration, to broaden the popular base of support for the DRV, and to establish a firm basis from which to engage in postwar economic reconstruction. Behind the scenes, however, there were signs that Party leaders had already begun to focus on the future. In early September, the Politburo had met to draft long-range policy. Once power was consolidated in the North, it concluded, preparations would begin for the future advance to socialism. Ho Chi Minh had already caught the attention of prescient observers in a speech on September 2, when he remarked enigmatically that the new regime would be bourgeois democratic in form, but people’s democratic in content.8
One of the primary reasons for the decision to move slowly toward a socialist system in the North was the Party’s desire to bring about the reunification of the two zones envisioned in the political declaration drafted at Geneva. Many members of the Vietminh movement—notably in the South—had been sorely disappointed with the results of the peace conference. Party leaders undoubtedly shared the dismay that years of sacrifice had resulted in only a partial victory, but they were able to console themselves with the conviction that, because of the overall popularity of Ho Chi Minh and the general ineptitude of the Bao Dai government, the provisions for future national elections at the Geneva conference obviously operated to their advantage. One way to ensure that the elections would be successful would be for the government in the North to present a moderate face to the world through its domestic policies, in order to avoid alienating non-Communist elements in South Vietnam as well as interested observers around the world.
According to one of his confidants, Ho Chi Minh was optimistic that scheduled elections would take pla
ce, and he may have felt that the pressure of world public opinion would force the regime in the South to adhere to the terms of the agreement. Still, although official sources in Hanoi publicly declared their confidence that the provisions of the political declaration would eventually be upheld, in private some of Ho’s colleagues expressed their skepticism. Even Pham Van Dong, who had chaired the DRV delegation at Geneva and would be appointed prime minister in September 1955, reportedly remarked to an observer: “You know as well as I do that there won’t be elections.” If that should be the case, Hanoi would be forced to explore other options, including a possible return to the strategy of revolutionary war. In the meantime, Ho Chi Minh was compelled to use his formidable skills to persuade his colleagues to give the accords a chance to succeed.
For the time being, Party leaders attempted to prepare for either contingency. According to various estimates, somewhere between 50,000 and 90,000 Vietminh sympathizers (many of them sons and daughters of Party cadres living in the South) went north after the agreement, while approximately 10,000 to 15,000 others, mainly veterans of the revolutionary movement, remained in the South to take part in legal activities designed to promote the holding of national elections. Still others retreated underground to preserve and maintain the clandestine revolutionary apparatus, in the event that it needed to be reactivated.9
There were certainly many obstacles to holding elections, and among the most formidable was the attitude of the new government in the South. In June 1954, while the Geneva conference was still under way, Chief of State Bao Dai had named Ngo Dinh Diem, the veteran politician who had been briefly detained by Ho Chi Minh’s provisional government in the fall of 1945, as his new prime minister, (Fearing for his own safety back then, Diem had gone into hiding briefly at the Canadian Embassy in Hanoi.) Diem had settled in the United States in the early 1950s, where he tirelessly sought to win the support of the Eisenhower administration for an eventual return to politics. A devout Catholic, he spent several months at a Catholic seminary in New Jersey and appeared to have an almost messianic sense of his own mission to save his compatriots from the threat of godless communism.
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