While resistance leaders were at work creating a new infrastructure for the insurgent movement in South Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh remained focused on the diplomatic front. With the Sino-Soviet dispute now out in the open, the question of bloc support for wars of national liberation became a major issue for debate at all gatherings of world Communist leaders. The first to take place after the close of the Third Congress of the VWP was the conference of 81 Communist and workers’ parties, held in Moscow in November 1960. Ho Chi Minh led a delegation that included Le Duan and General Nguyen Chi Thanh.
Nikita Khrushchev may have hoped to use the conference as a forum to compel the Chinese to conform to Soviet policies, but other delegations at the meeting intervened to avoid an irrevocable split. The Vietnamese said relativety little at the conference, but they were active behind the scenes in bringing about a settlement that reaffirmed the 1957 declaration on the different forms of transition of various countries from capitalism to socialism. The document declared that if the exploiting classes resorted to the use of force against the people, it was necessary to bear in mind the possibility of a nonpeaceful transition to socialism. Ho Chi Minh’s role was crucial. When PRC Vice Chairman Liu Shaoqi refused to attend one of the sessions where Soviet speakers were upbraiding their Chinese colleagues and returned angrily to his embassy, Khrushchev appealed to Ho to persuade Liu to return. Through Ho’s efforts, a public rupture was avoided. But according to intimates, Ho was deeply saddened by the Sino-Soviet dispute over global strategy, a split that, in his view, severely undermined the prestige of the socialist community in the Third World and played to the advantage of its imperialist adversaries. While many Vietnamese delegates favored the Chinese view, Ho Chi Minh harbored deep suspicions of Mao Zedong’s ambitions and his willingness to “stand on the mountaintop while the tigers fight” (presumably a reference to the relationship between Moscow and Washington). He therefore supported the Soviet position on key occasions at the conference. Because of the tradition of deferring to Uncle Ho’s views (“whatever Uncle says is okay”), Le Duan and Nguyen Chi Thanh kept their own counsel. But on their return to Hanoi, their grumbling to colleagues undoubtedly contributed to rising dissatisfaction within the Politburo about Ho Chi Minh’s refusal to take sides in the dispute.16
The debate was resumed at the Twenty-second Congress of the Soviet Party, held the following autumn. Once again, Ho Chi Minh led the DRV delegation at the meeting and sought to avoid the necessity of adopting controversial positions on the issues; but when Zhou Enlai walked out of the conference and returned to Beijing, the Vietnamese were forced to take a stand. Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan also left Moscow, but instead of returning immediately to Hanoi, they signaled their neutrality by embarking on a tour of the western regions of the Soviet Union.
The creation of the NLF and its military arm, the PLAF, gave a major boost to the fortunes of the anti-Diem resistance movement in South Vietnam. By the end of 1961, the PLAF had grown to about fifteen thousand troops, five times the size of the insurgent forces in the spring of 1959. Taking advantage of their increased size and mobility, Viet Cong units began to attack South Vietnamese military installations, convoys, and administrative offices; they also carved out a liberated base area in the Central Highlands, which they hoped to use as a launching pad for an eventual offensive against the densely populated lowlands.
One reason for the rapid growth of the Viet Cong was the steady increase in the numbers infiltrated down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, doubling between 1959 and 1961 and topping five thousand the following year. But the key factor was probably the expansion of the NLF, which benefited from growing popular hostility to the Diem regime and began to sink roots in villages and towns throughout the RVN. As the political apparatus grew in size and strength, the most enthusiastic and capable of the new members were recruited into the PLAF.
The growth in the insurgent movement caused anxiety in Washington. During the final months of the Eisenhower administration, concern among U.S. policy makers had centered on neighboring Laos, where Pathet Lao forces supported by Hanoi had reacted to the overthrow of the fragile coalition government by right-wing elements in Vientiane by intensifying their own military operations. But when Kennedy entered the White House in January 1961, he was greeted with a somber report that conditions were rapidly deteriorating in South Vietnam as well. The new president established an interagency task force to make recommendations for action, and at the end of the year approved an ambitious program to bring about a dramatic increase of the number of American advisers in the RVN. The objective was to train the South Vietnamese armed forces in counterinsurgency techniques in the hope that they could defend themselves without active U.S. intervention. At the same time, Kennedy decided to seek a negotiated settlement to the spreading conflict in Laos, where, because of its isolation and mountainous terrain, any American presence based on the defense of Free World security interests would be more difficult to justify.
The rising tempo of revolutionary violence in South Vietnam was a testimony to the validity of Ho Chi Minh’s judgment that the Diem regime had fatal flaws and would ultimately fall under the weight of its weaknesses. At the same time, Ho cautioned his colleagues against excessive optimism. Ngo Dinh Diem, for all his faults, was a determined leader with a core following, and prudent Party leaders knew that it would be a serious error to underestimate him or to predict the imminent collapse of his government. Hanoi also kept an eye on Washington, which now appeared convinced that South Vietnam was vital to U.S. national security and was fearful of the repercussions of a humiliating defeat in Southeast Asia. Party leaders debated their strategic options at a meeting of the Politburo held in October 1961. Ho Chi Minh pointed out that the United States was much stronger militarily than the French had been during the Franco-Vietminh conflict. Therefore, he warned, to apply force against force, “tit for tat,” would not succeed. The weakness of the imperialists, and the strength of the revolutionary forces, he argued, was in the realm of politics. Ho recommended a strategy based on guerrilla warfare, the mobilization of the support of the masses, and winning the battle of public opinion in the world arena. With conditions in South Vietnam evolving rapidly in favor of the revolution, Ho Chi Minh’s recommendations for caution and tactical flexibility were persuasive, and they were embodied in directives sent to the Southern leadership in succeeding months. There was as yet no revolutionary high tide, Party directives pointed out, and final victory could only be realized gradually, “bit by bit.”17
In July 1962, the Kennedy administration signed an agreement creating a neutralized Laos based on the formation of a national union government including neutralist, rightist, and Pathet Lao elements in a tripartite coalition regime. In letters to senior Party cadres in the South, Le Duan speculated that the United States might be willing to use this as a model for a similar agreement in South Vietnam. After all, he pointed out, Washington had previously pulled out of China and North Korea without a military victory. Such a solution was particularly appealing to Ho. In an interview with a reporter from the London Daily Express in March 1962, he had laid out conditions for a settlement of the conflict in South Vietnam on the basis of the Geneva Accords. Hanoi now began actively to approach neutralist elements in the RVN and in France to seek their private support in case a tripartite government was to be created in Saigon.18
Washington’s willingness to accept a neutralist coalition government in Laos was based on the assumption that the DRV, under Soviet pressure, would honor a provision in the agreement to cease infiltrating troops and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, key parts of which ran through Laos. But when it became clear from intelligence reports that Hanoi had no intention of honoring that provision, the White House lost interest in pursuing a similar settlement in South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh did not lose hope. At a meeting of the Politburo in February 1963, he argued the importance of intensifying political efforts in the South in order to promote a negotiated settlement and the formation of a neutral g
overnment, with strong participation by the NLF. Washington, he pointed out, was confused and was trying not to win, but to save face.19
Skeptical members of the Politburo might have begun to question President Ho’s confidence that reunification could be achieved without an escalation in the level of revolutionary violence. There were indeed ominous signs that Washington was still seeking victory in the South. One such indication was the strategic hamlet program. A modified version of the agrovilles established in the late 1950s, the strategic hamlets were designed to be self-defense communities established to enable the RVN to deprive the Viet Cong of access to recruits and provisions. The idea, successfully applied by British officials in Malaya a few years previously, attracted favorable attention in both Saigon and Washington; in 1962 President Diem gave his approval to apply the concept in South Vietnam. Within months, thousands of strategic hamlets were hastily constructed throughout the country.
Hanoi quickly recognized that the program represented a serious threat to the revolutionary movement. Urgent instructions were sent to southern commanders on how to infiltrate or destroy the hamlets. Ho Chi Minh weighed in with his own ideas, recommending that a combination of political and military tactics be adopted to defeat them, including the use of counterespionage, terrorism, and an expansion of guerrilla warfare. “We must figure out a way to destroy them,” he remarked at a Politburo meeting in November 1962. “If so, our victory is assured.” Although the strategic hamlets were initially a serious challenge to the movement’s control over the countryside, Saigon’s program was hampered by government inefficiency and bureaucratic meddling; in the end, more than one half of the hamlets were infiltrated or destroyed by the Viet Cong.20
In the meantime, Ho Chi Minh pleaded with his colleagues to make a maximum effort to maintain the sympathy and support of both Moscow and Beijing. During the early 1960s, Hanoi’s effort to balance relations with the Soviet Union and China came under increasing strain. Although Khrushchev was anxious not to offend the North Vietnamese by appearing unwilling to support the cause of wars of national liberation, he also hoped to avoid a direct confrontation with the United States and was increasingly uneasy at the trend toward violence in Southeast Asia. Khrushchev’s discomfort gladdened hearts in Beijing. While Chinese leaders were hardly eager for a confrontation of their own with Washington, they were determined to replace Moscow as the natural leader of the oppressed peoples of the world. To Chairman Mao, the increasing American military presence in South Vietnam would ultimately weaken its overall position in Asia, thus creating a “hangman’s noose” to strangle U.S. imperialism by its own overcommitment abroad.
It was undoubtedly with a view to gain an advantage over Moscow, as well as to ingratiate themselves with Hanoi, that Chinese leaders promised to increase military assistance to the DRV during the early 1960s. As Beijing had discovered during the Franco-Vietminh conflict, military aid as such ran little risk of provoking a direct conflict with the United States, while at the same time it enhanced Hanoi’s reliance on the PRC. When, in the summer of 1962, a Vietnamese delegation led by Ho Chi Minh and General Nguyen Chi Thanh visited Beijing to ask for increased support to balance the growing U.S. presence in the RVN, China was quick to oblige.21
Chinese leaders hoped that their generosity would earn plaudits in Hanoi, and in May 1963, Liu Shaoqi, now the head of state, visited the DRV to test the waters. In his remarks, Liu emphasized the historically close relations between the two countries and openly criticized “modern revisionists” (i.e., the USSR) by charging that on matters of principle a “middle course” was not appropriate. In talks with Ho Chi Minh, Liu promised that if the war in South Vietnam escalated, the DRV could count on China as its “strategic rear.” Nevertheless, Liu warned his hosts that the struggle for national reunification would be a long one, and that Chinese assistance would necessarily be limited in scope.
The Vietnamese, however, were not yet ready to place themselves firmly on the Chinese side in the Sino-Soviet dispute. Although their response to Liu was warm, Party leaders had given equal treatment to a Soviet trade delegation a few days earlier; speeches by DRV leaders carefully thanked both allies for their support, while adopting a neutral position. In his own speech at a banquet honoring Liu, Ho Chi Minh expressed gratitude for Chinese assistance, but took no position on key issues that divided the two Communist powers, emphasizing the importance of unity within the socialist camp.22
In the spring of 1963, the Diem regime entered its final period of crisis, as unrest within the Buddhist community at alleged favoritism to Vietnamese Catholics led to riots in cities throughout South Vietnam. On June 11, a Buddhist monk immolated himself on a downtown street in Saigon. The photograph of the incident, which appeared on television screens around the globe, electrified the world. When the Kennedy administration publicly criticized Saigon for crushing the demonstrations, Diem’s brother and political counselor Ngo Dinh Nhu angrily retorted that he was engaged in peace talks with representatives of the NLF on the imminent removal of U.S. advisers and the neutralization of South Vietnam. According to one report, sometime in late summer Ho Chi Minh sent a private letter to Ngo Dinh Diem offering to negotiate. Whether Diem responded is unknown, but when Mieczyslaw Maneli, Poland’s International Control Commission representative in the DRV, asked Pham Van Dong what Hanoi’s conditions for peace would be, the prime minister reportedly responded that “the Americans have to leave. On this political basis, we can negotiate about everything.” Asked whether a coalition government between North and South was feasible, Dong replied, “Everything is negotiable on the basis of the independence and sovereignty of Vietnam. The Geneva Accords supply the legal and political basis for this: no foreign bases or troops on our territory. We can come to an agreement with any Vietnamese.” According to Maneli, Ho Chi Minh had been present during his conversation with Pham Van Dong, but made no comment.23
Whether Ho was serious about his offer to negotiate with Diem, and on what terms, is uncertain. Hanoi had appeared sincere in its 1962 offer to engage in peace talks with the United States, but its conditions for peace—the total withdrawal of U.S. military forces and the formation of a tripartite coalition government in South Vietnam, which would tacitly be dominated by the NLF—were too stiff to win Washington’s acceptance. A year later, conditions in the South had measurably improved from Hanoi’s point of view; still, although Diem’s government was shaky, Ho Chi Minh recognized him as a formidable opponent who possessed a substantial constituency of fervent supporters in the RVN. Any settlement satisfactory to Party leaders would have left Diem with no semblance of authority and little room to maneuver. Ho urged that insurgent commanders in the South make every effort to win sympathy and support from all strata of the local population, while waiting for Washington to come to its senses. In an interview with a Japanese journalist in July, Ho noted that in his experience, despite the attitude of their leaders, the American people loved peace and justice. The only answer to the problem, he said, was for the United States to withdraw so that the Vietnamese people could resolve the issue in accordance with the Geneva Accords.
Ho Chi Minh’s cautious optimism over the prospects for a negotiated settlement, however, was not universally shared in Hanoi. At a Politburo meeting in December 1962, Party leaders had concluded that the struggle in the South had become an anti-imperialist war, a conflict that called for an intensification of both political and military struggle. A secret directive sent to the South shortly after stressed that the problem would inevitably have to be resolved by force, and would gradually escalate from a small-scale to a high-level military conflict. Although this document did not openly disparage the importance of political activities and specifically rejected a return to the military approach used against the French, it said that the revolutionary tide in the South had begun to crest, and the only immediate question was when and in what manner armed force should be applied. It predicted that the war would close with a combined general popular upr
ising and a counteroffensive launched by the PLAF—a synthesis of the August Revolution and the Maoist model of three-stage people’s war.
While the author of this directive is not identified, it appears to reflect the views of Le Duan, who had now clearly become the leading war strategist in Hanoi and whose predilection for a clear-cut military victory had grown increasingly pronounced since the escalation of the revolutionary movement. Le Duan, in fact, had ridiculed Ho Chi Minh for his reluctance to turn to the military option, and his reliance on diplomacy, which Duan apparently viewed as naïve. “Uncle [Ho] wavers,” he remarked on one occasion, “but when I left South Vietnam I had already prepared everything. I have only one goal—just final victory.”24
In early November 1963, a military coup launched with the quiet approval of the Kennedy administration overthrew the Diem regime. The White House quietly signaled to the plotters its support for the new leadership in Saigon. To Kennedy’s dismay, however, both Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu were executed after having surrendered to the leaders of the coup.
The creation of a new military government in Saigon substantially changed the perspective of Party strategists in North Vietnam. On the one hand, they could no longer count on the widespread unpopularity of Ngo Dinh Diem as a stimulant to recruitment for the NLF and the Viet Cong. In fact, the new ruling clique, under the popular southern General Duong Van “Big” Minh, had come to power on a wave of enthusiasm, especially in the cities, where hostility to Diem and his family had reached virulent proportions. On the other hand, policy makers in Hanoi anticipated correctly that the new regime would lack Diem’s single-mindedness and vigor in suppressing the resistance movement. Conscious of the endemic factionalism that had marked the Vietnamese nationalist movement since the colonial era, Party leaders anticipated a rapid weakening of the Saigon military government, thus opening the door to a revolutionary triumph. At a Politburo meeting in early December, Ho Chi Minh predicted—correctly, as it turned out—that it would probably not be the last coup in Saigon.
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