Part III - Global Vietnam

24 International Radicalism and Antiwar Protest

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu

In 1966, Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara wrote an address to the newly formed Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAL). He was then based in Cuba, where he had served as a commander of the rebel army in the revolution of 1959 before becoming a government official under Fidel Castro. Che would eventually support and lead anti-imperialist, guerrilla movements in the Congo in Africa as well as other parts of Latin America, including Bolivia, where he was ultimately assassinated in November 1967. In April 1967, however, his message to OSPAAL was published in the organization’s magazine, Tricontinental. In what has become a movement classic, Che wondered, “How close we could look into a bright future should two, three or many Vietnams flourish throughout the world with their share of deaths and their immense tragedies, their everyday heroism and their repeated blows against imperialism.”¹ This call for “two, three, many Vietnams” became a popular slogan during the US wars in Southeast Asia. It conveyed how radical activists around the world understood Vietnam not as an isolated country or exceptional war. Instead, they interpreted the Vietnam War as a, and arguably the, primary example of US imperialism. The slogan also captured how the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front (NLF) served as heroic role models whose resistance could be replicated around the world.

Drawing upon the burgeoning scholarship on the global 1960s, this chapter argues that the Vietnam War was a key historic event that internationalized radical social movements. The war did so in three main ways. First, through the conflict, activists in different parts of the world formed a global public sphere. Through transnational circuits of travel and information exchange, critics of the war developed a common “international language of dissent.”² They nurtured a belief in the need for resistance against those with military, financial, and authoritarian political power and shared a repertoire of activist strategies. Individuals, organizations, and movement communities based in different locales and nation-states disagreed with one another in terms of political analysis, ideology, and resistance tactics. Nevertheless, there was a tendency toward creating a “global consciousness.” In the words of the editors of New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of a Global Consciousness, “one of the defining features of the political and cultural movements of the era was the feeling of acting simultaneously with others in a global sphere, the belief that people elsewhere were motivated by a common purpose.”³ This global public sphere helped to transcend Cold War and colonial divisions between the First, Second, and Third Worlds, terms and identifications embraced by historical actors of that era. However, these geopolitical formations as well as the uneven power relations within and across each world also shaped how activists understood and participated in internationalized antiwar movements against US imperialism.

Second, the resistance against the Vietnam War fostered internationalism by foregrounding the agency of the marginalized. The war featured a David-versus-Goliath competition between a presumably backward, peasant society against the mightiest military in the world. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) and the NLF did receive support from the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Nevertheless, it was the Vietnamese revolutionaries – male and female, young and old – and their dedication to fighting, organizing, sacrificing, and even “winning” that made them into global role models. Their status as the ultimate underdogs helped to bring attention to others who experienced systematic oppression due to race, class, gender, religion, political ideology, and so on. It became more conceivable to celebrate subaltern groups and individuals as makers of history, capable of what Che called “everyday heroism.”⁴ There were blind spots to this recognition of the subaltern, as the oppressed could easily be tokened as victims and iconized as one-dimensional heroes. Still, the idealization of Vietnamese revolutionaries facilitated a crossborder identification of shared oppression.

Third, the wars in Southeast Asia helped to internationalize antiwar resistance by illuminating the interconnectedness of various systems of inequality. Imperialism and colonization became part of the activist lexicon, utilized to interpret cultural, racial, class, gender, and other forms of exploitation everywhere. Vietnamese representatives and sources of publication played an important role in disseminating the political message about the interlocking nature of power as well as the idea that the “powerless” could perform meaningful forms of resistance. However, Vietnam also became a symbol that non-Vietnamese around the world could imbue with meaning. Vietnam served as a multivalent signifier of oppression and resistance. As such, the idea of “Vietnam” could be used to identify multiple manifestations of imperialism as well as the need to challenge these forms of inequality both abroad and at home.

This chapter will draw upon the increasingly rich scholarship on transnational protest movements, particularly those based outside the United States, during the “long 1960s.” These studies explore the uniqueness of periodization, historical events, and political actors in different locales, but they also point toward how these local, regional, and national movements reached beyond political borders and Cold War divisions. Regardless of the issues debated during the “long 1960s,” Vietnam was frequently invoked as part of these transnational cultures of dissent. There were significant points of political difference as well as misunderstanding within this global network of activists. This relatively brief overview of international antiwar activism will illuminate how the circulation of people and ideas facilitated the creation of a global public sphere, and the recognition of subaltern heroism, as well as the replication of Vietnam as a symbol of imperialism and resistance.

A Global Public Sphere

How did Vietnam, a relatively small country in Southeast Asia that most Americans could not locate on a map, become a familiar site of war and a source of global political inspiration? Martin Klimke, in his study of the transnational connections between student protests in the United States and Germany, argues that it was the antiwar movement in the United States that transformed the leading New Left organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), into an international phenomenon:

Starting in 1965, the growing antiwar movement in the United States influenced the style of protests on an international level … [The] movement was also able to gather a worldwide following of protestors by the late 1960s, all of whom had one thing in common – their opposition to the Vietnam War.⁵

This collective antiwar movement articulated similar critiques of the war as a US-led imperialist venture that utilized inhumane forms of warfare. The activists in different locales also utilized a common set of protest strategies, ranging from teach-ins and nonviolent direct action, to protest theater and even guerrilla-like forms of violent resistance. Both the recognized movement leaders and the rank-and-file activists shared ideas through travel and the circulation of activist literature. Through repetition, the underground activist media fostered a common political language and a sense of simultaneity for their readers. Together, they created a global public sphere, in which people and ideas traveled across borders to create a common protest language as well as a shared sense of community and responsibility.⁶ This global public sphere had the ability to bridge Cold War and colonial divisions. However, people of varying backgrounds, from different nations and regions of the world, and as members of the First, Second, and Third Worlds, also tended to perceive Vietnam and the conflicts there in diverse ways.

Activists in First World nations based in Western Europe, North America, Australia, and arguably Japan recognized the global reach of US political and military interests. By definition, as constituents of the “First World,” countries such as West Germany, France, Canada, and so on were political allies of the United States during the Cold War. Their collective participation in alliances such as NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), ANZUS (Australia, New Zealand and US Security Treaty), and other security agreements tethered the political interests of First World nations to that of the United States. The relationships with the United States and policies of each nation varied, and some were quite critical of US policy in Southeast Asia.⁷ Overall, these countries tended to receive reconstruction aid from the United States in the aftermath of World War II, serve as host countries for the expansion of US military bases during the Cold War, and be subjected to diplomatic pressures to support US policies globally, including in Southeast Asia. Many of these First World countries also experienced being on the frontlines of the Cold War. The political tensions between “East” and “West,” the militarization of their societies, and the possibility of nuclear annihilation were tangible threats.

In this context, the activists who opposed the US wars in Southeast Asia tended to frame their critiques in terms of both US aggression/imperialism and their own governments’ perceived collusion in these conflicts. Protests throughout the First World targeted symbols of American influence (e.g., America House in West Berlin) and US political leaders (Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s European tour in 1967) for protest. In his characterization of the British New Left, Holger Nehring argues that “some activists … framed … the United States … as a war-prone capitalist–imperialist power. They rejected American consumerism as potentially totalitarian and regarded the American intervention in Vietnam as a novel form of colonialism.”⁸ Bertrand Russell’s Tribunal on Vietnam, held in Sweden and Denmark in 1967, charged the United States with war crimes.⁹ In addition, antiwar activists in the First World also critiqued their own nation’s support of US policies. For example, members of the German SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund) targeted NATO “as the central offspring of global imperialism in Western Europe.”¹⁰ Rudi Dutschke, one of the key leaders in Germany’s New Left, called for both an “attack [against] American imperialism politically” and “the will to break with our own ruling apparatus.”¹¹ Antiwar activists in the First World condemned both existing policies that supported US militarism and their nations’ past colonial and ongoing militaristic endeavors, such as the UK’s policy of nuclear proliferation, France’s wars in Algeria and Vietnam, Germany’s Nazism, Australia’s settler colonialism, and Japan’s empire in Asia. The struggles in each locale were interpreted as part of a broader global pattern. At the February 1968 Vietnam Congress held in West Berlin, approximately 5,000 activists from across Europe, the United States, and other parts of the world were in attendance.¹² Participants, encouraged by US activists, understood their collective antiwar activism as forming “an international ‘second front’” in the Vietnam War.¹³ The war was being waged not just in Southeast Asia but in the First World as well.

The motivation and antiwar activism of those in the socialist Second World differed from those in the First World. Again, variations existed across nations and over time, but the Soviet Union and East European socialist nations tended to condemn the Vietnam War as part of their government- and party-endorsed policies. Having official diplomatic ties to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam facilitated the sponsorship of international anti-imperialist meetings and conferences in Eastern Europe and the circulation of political travel through the Soviet Union. The convenings in Eastern Europe attracted representatives from the East and the West, facilitating political dialogue and fostering a global public sphere. For example, members of US antiwar movement met with representatives of the NLF and DRVN in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, in 1967 and in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, in 1968. Tom Hayden of the US SDS attended the Bratislava meeting, along with thirty-seven other Americans as well as representatives from antiwar movements from other parts of the world. These meetings had a profound impact on antiwar activism globally. Vietnamese representatives discussed the possibility of releasing American POWs to US antiwar activists as acts of solidarity, which in fact occurred through followup discussions and travels to Southeast Asia.¹⁴ Bernadine Dohrn, who became a leader in the Weather Underground, recalled that the 1968 meeting in Ljubljana “was life-altering”; it “took place the same week as the Democratic National Convention demonstrations in Chicago, the same week that the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. This convening of New Left forces, who consciously came together after the spring 1968 uprisings in both the US and Europe, including Eastern Europe, was hugely transformative because it helped us locate where we were in history.”¹⁵ These meetings in the Second World were facilitated through state resources and Communist Party organizations such as the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) and the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY). The gatherings established contact and facilitated invitations for antiwar activists in the First World to visit Vietnam itself. These subsequent travels often went through the Soviet Union, particularly Moscow, before arriving in the DRVN.

Although the Second World helped facilitate political dialogue and travel across the First, Second, and Third Worlds, the motivation of activists also differed from those from the other geopolitical regions. Nick Rutter points out that activists from the West and those from the East might have shared a common vocabulary and critique of the Vietnam War; however, they had different understandings of politics.¹⁶ Dutschke, who defected to the West from East Germany, encountered cynicism when he traveled to a conference in Prague in 1968. Even prior to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that year, Dutschke had discovered a lack of understanding for his enthusiasm for Marxism; for Czechs who dialogued with Dutschke, “Marxism meant oppression.”¹⁷ Similarly, Polish activist Adam Michnik argued that he and his Warsaw comrades “fought for freedom,” while students from the First World “fought against capitalism.”¹⁸ Internationalist gatherings, like the 9th World Youth Festival, held in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1968, were not necessarily free, open arenas for political exchange. Instead, the speakers, performers, agenda, and attendees were carefully monitored by the socialist state to foster particular types of internationalist discussions.

Nevertheless, the cause of Vietnam held political appeal for those resisting Soviet and socialist political control. The DRVN, a relatively small country, and the NLF, based in South Vietnam, had to skillfully navigate political differences between the USSR and the PRC in order to chart their political and military paths.¹⁹ East European countries shared this position of having to negotiate Soviet control. As a result, Vietnam received both affective and political support as well as economic and material aid from East European countries and their citizens. In her study of the German Democratic Republic, Christina Schwenkel notes that “solidarity campaigns in East Germany, through voluntary and coerced mechanisms, garnered extensive humanitarian and other aid to Vietnam.”²⁰ While some scholars document that this officially mandated internationalism generated resentment among East Germans who felt obligated to donate, others point to the “depth of empathy felt by Eastern German citizens for those struggling against invasion, occupation, and racialized oppression, and the salience of a moralized sense of differentiation from the US-led bloc.”²¹

The political solidarity between the Second and Third Worlds revealed ambivalence regarding the role of race in socialist political ideology. While racial dialogue was officially banned in East Germany in the aftermath of World War II and tended to be minimized within the Second World, there nevertheless existed a tendency to represent Vietnam and other Third World countries and peoples through a practice that Quinn Slobodian describes as “socialist chromatism.”²² Socialist propaganda posters tend to feature “racial rainbow” motifs that “profile[d] nonwhite objects of solidarity,” oftentimes in stereotypical and caricatured ways, to proclaim internationalism and to attack imperialism.²³ These displays of socialist internationalism built upon Soviet representations of “a multiethnic territory under a single administration” and anti-imperialist political rhetoric.²⁴ These representations, which foregrounded race, helped to generate empathy and political solidarity. Although Schwenkel points out that East Germany contributed the most aid in comparison with other European socialist countries, the sense of socialist international solidarity as well as the desire to assist victims of and condemn US imperialism reverberated throughout the Second World.

Those in the decolonizing Third World tended to regard Vietnamese liberation fighters as “comrades of color” engaged in a shared global struggle against Western imperialism.²⁵ Although the term “Third World” originated with a French social scientist in 1952, it became a widely recognized political category and identity in the aftermath of the 1955 Afro-Asia Bandung Conference. Bandung sought to chart a third alternative for decolonizing nations, pressured to choose alliances between the First (noncommunist) and Second (communist) Worlds.²⁶ By the 1960s, particularly late in the decade, “Third World” described countries, movements, and peoples seeking decolonization in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (i.e., the Tricontinental) whether they were communist or capitalist. The term “Third World” was also used to characterize racialized people in the First World, particularly the United States, seeking to overthrow internal colonialism. Che Guevara presented this vision of tricontinental anticolonial solidarity in his statement calling for “two, three, many Vietnams.” He described this sense of anticolonial internationalism by asserting the interchangeability of Third World warfare:

the flag under which we fight would be the sacred cause of redeeming humanity. To die under the flag of Vietnam, of Venezuela, of Guatemala, of Laos, of Guinea, of Colombia, of Bolivia, of Brazil – to name only a few scenes of today’s armed struggle – would be equally glorious and desirable for an American, an Asian, an African, even a European.²⁷

Adding the phrase “even a European” suggested that the primary audience of Guevara’s appeal was for those in Latin America, Asia, or Africa or those who were descendants of these countries. Although there were racial and ethnic variations as well as political differences within and across these continents, Guevara’s statement nevertheless called for pancontinental solidarity across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Locales within the Third World did help foster a global antiwar movement. Political icons such as Che and important organizations such as the Black Panthers promoted resistance against US policies in Vietnam. Also, Third World countries such as Cuba, Algeria, the People’s Republic of China, North Korea, and so on offered meeting sites and facilitated political contacts for antiwar activists around the world.

Nevertheless, there were important distinctions to note about these Third World expressions of solidarity. Zachary Scarlett argues that China’s interest in Vietnam stemmed from national political priorities of countering Soviet leadership in the Third World and promoting support for Mao Zedong in the midst of the Cultural Revolution.²⁸ Strategic representations of Vietnamese fighters helped to project “Maoism across borders and promoted the idea that Mao was the leader of the global revolution.”²⁹ Samantha Christiansen and Scarlett also suggest that there were crucial distinctions within the Third World during the post–World War II era. They identify a “first wave” of Third World nations that up to the mid-1960s “focused on the anti-colonial struggle for national independence.”³⁰ The second wave, in contrast, “fought against neo-colonialism and the project of the nation-state, which tended to subvert progressive activism in favor of stability.”³¹ The Republic of Korea (ROK, i.e., South Korea) could be interpreted as a prime example of the neocolonial formation of the Third World nation-state. Characterized as a “subempire” of the United States, South Korea contributed more than 300,000 troops to fight with the United States and South Vietnam.³² The South Korean soldiers were reputed to be among the most vicious fighters during the war. In addition, the Republic of Korea received approximately $1 billion from the United States in exchange for its military contributions. The money in turn helped to fuel the economic modernization of South Korea. The differing positions of the PRC and the ROK reveal that there was no natural alliance between Third World countries; the former supported the DRVN and the NLF but the latter supported the Republic of Vietnam and the United States. Each made its choice based on calculated political self-interest as well as ideological solidarity.

Figure 24.1 A crowd gathers in Havana, Cuba, to celebrate the fourteenth anniversary of the beginning of the Cuban Revolution in 1953. A banner showing Che Guevara urges the people of the Third World to create “two, three, many Vietnams” (July 26, 1967).

Source: Keystone-France / Contributor / Gamma-Keystone / Getty Images.

This periodization of the first wave (decolonialization up to the mid-1960s) versus the second wave (neocolonialism after the mid-1960s) of Third World development does not quite match Vietnam’s lengthy chronology fighting against Japanese, French, and US imperialisms. Nevertheless, Vietnam’s anachronism may help explain why it became such an important political symbol. As a country that experienced almost continual warfare for national liberation between 1941 and 1975, through World War II as well as the French Indochina War and the Vietnam War, Vietnam had the romantic revolutionary appeal of a not yet fully realized nation-state. The heroes and heroines of Vietnam’s liberation struggle became iconic “Third World Guerrilla[s]” and political role models.³³ Only after the reunification in 1975 did Vietnam become a “country,” not a “cause,” a consolidated nation-state with messy policies.³⁴ In the midst of the struggle for decolonization, however, Vietnam could generate internationalist solidarity and political sympathy across the First, Second, and Third Worlds for those who sought to condemn US imperialism, capitalism, and militarism.

The Heroism of the Subaltern and the Ubiquity of Anti-Imperialism

Along with Che’s “Two, Three, Many Vietnams,” Tom Hayden’s pronouncement at the 1967 Bratislava conference that “We are the Viet Cong now” became another important mantra of the antiwar movement. Viet Cong or VC was the shorthand term used by the US military, political leaders, and media to identify the Vietnamese who engaged in warfare against the United States and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). Due to the nature of guerrilla warfare, the NLF were particularly denigrated for engaging in “sneak” attacks. “VC” more commonly described the fighters of the National Liberation Front rather than the regular troops of the DRVN, although the lines could be blurred. By claiming identification with the despised enemy of the United States, activists around the world declared their opposition to the US political and military establishment and those who supported their views. Instead, critics of US policies celebrated the heroism of the underdog, those with such unequal military power that they had to resort to guerrilla warfare. This identification facilitated the alliance with the VC of people experiencing oppression due to race, class, gender, religion, and/or political beliefs within their own societies. Like the Vietnamese, ostracized peoples around the world could be potentially capable of similar forms of heroism. The phrase “We are all the Viet Cong now” indicated that critics of US policies conceived of themselves as guerrilla fighters, too, engaging in a war against the war, opening an additional front behind enemy lines.

The dual meaning of the term “Third World” illuminates the connections that activists made between national liberation and racial liberation. The Third World referred to decolonizing nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as well as to people of color in the First World. While the former experienced colonialism on a global scale, the latter framed their oppression as a form of “internal colonialism.”³⁵ The connections between internal and global colonialism relied upon the intersections between race, economic exploitation, and political disfranchisement.

The Vietnam War, as argued by many activists, particularly those of Third World identification, was a racial war. The extensive bombing (triple the amount of tonnage used during all of World War II), the use of chemical weapons, the popular use of the term “gook,” and the dehumanization of the enemy all served to racialize the Vietnamese enemy as subhuman.³⁶ In addition, as a “working-class war,” US armed forces were composed disproportionately of the poor, the less well educated, and men of color.³⁷ As Martin Luther King, Jr., argued, the Vietnam War siphoned US economic resources away from the War on Poverty in the United States, thereby “devastating the hope of the poor at home”; furthermore, the conflict “was sending their sons, and their brothers, and their husbands to fight and die in extraordinarily high proportion relative to the rest of the population.”³⁸ In fact, the war ironically provided the US public with an opportunity to watch “Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same school room.”³⁹ In explaining why he resisted the draft, champion heavyweight boxer, Muhammad Ali, famously stated, “I ain’t got no quarrel with those Viet Cong.”⁴⁰ In a quote attributed to Ali and others, including the musical Hair, the draft represented “white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from the red people.”

African American troops, along with other racialized soldiers, stationed throughout the world and fighting in Southeast Asia, experienced racism through the US military, through the conditions of war, and in their host societies. In response, activists in Europe, Canada, Japan, and elsewhere connected Black liberation struggles with antiwar activism. In Germany, for example, organizers reached out to US GIs, “particularly black soldiers,” to encourage political discussions about the war and to support desertion; one German activist argued, “this war in Vietnam is dirty and so is the American Army and what it stands for. American soldiers should be told how things are and what they can do to get out of that army.”⁴¹ In fact, focusing on race in the US military merged the two most powerful movements of the 1960s, the antiwar and Black liberation movements. African American political leaders, including members of the Black Panthers, were popular if controversial speakers who traveled globally to speak to antiwar activists and US Black soldiers stationed around the world.

Antiwar activists also encouraged Chicano/Latino soldiers to think about the commonality between their status as colonized peoples in the United States and the status of the Vietnamese.⁴² Similar to African Americans, Mexican Americans tended to face systemic discrimination and hence had lower socioeconomic status as well as fewer opportunities for college admissions. Consequently, Chicanos tended to be overrepresented in the military.⁴³ Chicano/a activists encouraged members of their community to question why they were fighting in the war. In 1970, they formed the only “minority-based antiwar organization, called the National Chicano Moratorium Committee.”⁴⁴ The Moratorium, held in Los Angeles, attracted an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 protestors, including elderly and children, the “largest anti-war march by any specific ethnic or racial group in US history.”⁴⁵

The depiction of Vietnamese as a racial other was profoundly connected to the racialization of Asians in the United States as well. Asian American soldiers were presented to other members of the US military as examples of what the Vietnamese enemy looked like.⁴⁶ No distinction was made between an Asian person serving in the US military (who was unlikely to be Vietnamese, given the ethnic composition of the Asian American population), a soldier in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam that was allied with the United States, a Vietnamese civilian, and a “Viet Cong” guerrilla fighter.⁴⁷ This racial lumping of all Asians as the enemy was reinforced by the US military practice of counting all dead Asians as VC.⁴⁸ Doing so inflated the body count and helped to broadcast the success of the war.

Scholars of colonialism have pointed out that both race and gender are intertwined with imperial and military processes. Similarly, the Vietnam War raised global awareness about the gendered impact of war. As Asian American antiwar activist Evelyn Yoshimura pointed out in her 1971 essay “GIs and Racism,” the representation of Asian women played a central role in the racial education of US military personnel.⁴⁹ Through the systematic creation of red-light districts in Asian countries where US troops were stationed, in what sociologist Joane Nagel calls the “military sexual complex,” the US military institutionalized a culture of American GIs frequenting Asian prostitutes.⁵⁰ Not limited to individual excursions, these practices became integral to military culture and discourse through ritualized retellings of these experiences. An Asian American marine recalled of his boot camp experience,

We had these classes we had to go to taught by the drill instructors, and every instructor would tell a joke before he began class. It would always be a dirty joke usually having to do with prostitutes they had seen in Japan or in other parts of Asia while they were stationed overseas. The attitude of the Asian women being a doll, a useful toy, or something to play with usually came out in these jokes and how they were not quite as human as white women … how Asian women’s vaginas weren’t like a white woman’s, but rather they were slanted, like their eyes.⁵¹

Such racialized and sexualized depictions of Asian women, used to foster male bonding among US soldiers, shaped US military policies and practices in Southeast Asia – in the brothels and in the general prosecution of war.

Vietnamese women who suffered these practices helped to educate women around the world about the gendered impact of militarism as well as potential for women to combat the war. Vivian Rothstein, a member of the US SDS who had traveled to Bratislava in 1967, recalled that the Vietnamese women whom she met insisted on having women-only discussions with American representatives. This was unusual for Rothstein. She tended to work in mixed-gender settings as a student activist. Also, men and women both attended the Bratislava conference. However, the women from South Vietnam wanted to convey that the war had a unique impact on women. Rothstein recalled that they discussed how militarization fostered the growth of prostitution in South Vietnam. In addition, they provided examples of how American soldiers threatened and utilized rape as well as sexual mutilation as military tactics. Shaken and moved by these meetings, Rothstein requested an audiotape version of their presentation so that she might share their “appeal to the American women.”⁵²

These international dialogues between women of varying nationalities and racial backgrounds occurred throughout the war.⁵³ The Vietnam Women’s Unions (VWU) in the North and South reached out to women globally through women’s organizations, such as the Women’s International Democratic Federation, the Korean Democratic Women’s Union in the North, Women Strike for Peace in the United States, and the Voice of Women in Canada. The VWU also hosted visits to North Vietnam and sponsored meetings and conferences around the world.

Studies on global feminism and global sisterhood have noted the disproportionate power and the misperceptions of white middle-to-upper-class women from the “West” seeking to “rescue” oppressed Third World women.⁵⁴ This politics of rescue was not completely absent in the gendered political discourse of the war. For example, Gregory Witkowski points out that solidarity campaigns in East Germany, particularly in church-based campaigns, tended to portray “the deserving poor, primary women and children, who did not have the means to help themselves without external help.”⁵⁵ Quinn Slobodian coined the phrase “corpse polemics” to capture how West German activists increasingly showed “dead and mutilated” Third World bodies, thereby transforming “usually nameless and mute bodies into icons of mobilization.”⁵⁶

However, the agency of Vietnamese women in fighting the war and building a women’s global antiwar movement also reveals that these “Third World” women served as political mentors to women around the world. In fact, after Rothstein accepted an invitation to visit the DRVN after Bratislava, she observed how the VWU inspired and mobilized women to protect and transform their society. The VWU had chapters at various levels, ranging from local villages to the national level and operating in schools, workplaces, health clinics, and government units. In all of these settings, the unions trained women for political leadership and advocated for their collective interests. VWU representatives conveyed to Rothstein “how important it was to organize the women … and how powerful American women could be” as well.⁵⁷ When Rothstein returned to the United States, she went back to the “little women’s group” that she had participated in before she left. Inspired by her experiences in Czechoslovakia and North Vietnam, Rothstein proposed the formation of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, a group modeled on the VWU.

Vietnamese women not only inspired female activism around the world, but the political constructs of imperialism and colonialism were also utilized to characterize patriarchy and female oppression. Some feminist and lesbian organizations during the late 1960s and early 1970s argued that women constituted the original colonized subjects under male domination.⁵⁸ In fact, some called for a gendered liberation movement that was akin to the emergence of a “Fourth World.”⁵⁹ Just as the Third World asserted its autonomy from the United States and the Soviet Union, women, described as constituents of a Fourth World, sought self-determination and liberation.

The heroism of the subaltern had an appeal not only among racialized groups and women. The identification with the Viet Cong extended to individuals and groups who experienced marginalization due to a variety of factors. The French separatist movement in Canada, the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, and the alienated youth of the New Left and counterculture around the world all proclaimed identification with the revolutionary Vietnamese and their cause.⁶⁰ Treated as outsiders and self-identified as colonized subjects, they allied with the enemy of their enemies, the revolutionaries seeking self- and national liberation.

Two, Three, Many Vietnams

The Vietnam War appealed broadly to radical activists around the world. It resonated differently depending on the geopolitical context, but the Vietnam conflict and the Vietnamese people drew worldwide attention, support, and sympathy. The North Vietnamese and those based in the South who resisted the United States and the Republic of Vietnam consciously cultivated these internationalist affinities. They assigned personnel and allocated resources to engage in formal as well as citizen diplomacy.⁶¹ In addition to waging war on the battlefields and engaging in state-to-state negotiations, the NLF and the DRVN also prioritized a third front of mobilizing worldwide public opinion.

In addition to hosting diplomats and political visitors in North Vietnam, the DRVN and the NLF posted communication officers and sent diplomatic missions to Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, Australia, and Canada.⁶² These representatives communicated not only with heads of state but also with individuals and organizations seeking information about the war in Vietnam. Pham Van Chuong, for example, worked for the Liberation News Agency of the NLF. He was posted in East Berlin during the early to mid-1960s and was then sent to Prague in 1965. Because Czechoslovakia was relatively easy for those from the West to reach, Chuong met with religious and pacifist delegations both in Prague and in other European cities. He recalled meeting well-known antiwar activists Dave Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Staughton Lynd, and Stewart Meacham of the American Friends Service Committee, as well as entertainers Jane Fonda and Dick Gregory.⁶³ In both North and South Vietnam, organizations were established to foster these international relationships. The Vietnam–America Friendship Association was created in 1945, soon after the founding of the DRVN. During the Vietnam War, the organization became the Vietnam Committee for Solidarity with American People or the Viet-My Committee. The NLF created a similar organization. Other groups fostering Vietnamese friendship with various nations were also established.

These citizen diplomacy efforts were perceived as a crucial part of the war effort. Trịnh Ngọc Thái, a former delegate at the Paris Peace Talks and the former vice chair of the External Relations Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam, explained that the Vietnamese conceived of fighting the war on multiple fronts. He quoted Hồ Chí Minh, who identified two primary fronts: “the first front [is] against the US war in Vietnam, and the second one is inside the United States. The American people fight from inside, the Vietnamese fight from outside.”⁶⁴ Thái also quoted another Vietnamese leader who conceived of the war in three fronts: “one united front against the United States in Vietnam; one united front of Indochinese nations against the United States; and one front formed by the people in the world against US imperialism, for national independence, and peace.”⁶⁵ In either the two- or three-front formulation, the mobilization of US and worldwide public opinion was regarded as an important priority. As Thái notes, “the power of public opinions” could pressure US policy and military leaders. In addition, worldwide support served as “an enormous source of encouragement to the Vietnamese people and their armed forces in the battlefields. The world people’s support was very valuable both spiritually and materially to the Vietnamese people.”⁶⁶

Recognizing the impact of these global antiwar efforts, the US government and their allies also closely monitored the potential proliferation of two, three, many Vietnams.⁶⁷ Moshik Temkin points out how the French government surveilled American expats for their political activities and also attempted to control their travels.⁶⁸ Even Canada, formally neutral and a locale to which US draft resisters fled and where significant antiwar conferences were held, nevertheless engaged in covert military initiatives to support the US war effort and at times denied visas to Vietnamese spokespeople against the war.⁶⁹ During the period between the 1969 and 1971 conferences, a group of Vietnamese representatives were prevented the right of entry into Canada. They had planned to participate via closed-circuit television in the 1971 Winter Soldier Investigation, a three-day conference sponsored by Vietnam Veterans against the War in Detroit.⁷⁰ As a result of the denial of visas, the organizers of the 1971 Indochinese Women’s Conference had to balance their need to advertise these meetings to attract antiwar activists in North America and also prevent the Canadian government from excluding participants from Southeast Asia.

This concern about the proliferation of Vietnams stemmed from the ability of the war and the people engaged in fighting for national liberation to evoke political solidarity and sympathy across the First, Second, and Third Worlds. The Vietnam War graphically illustrated the militarized imperialism of the United States. The war also illuminated the ability of the subaltern to resist and even win against the most powerful country in the world. Vietnam gave those who experienced oppression and identified with the marginalized a sense of political hope and purpose. This belief in “everyday heroism” motivated activists around the world to read, think, protest, and organize. Through their collective efforts, they created a global public sphere that could broadcast critiques of the Cold War order, foster awareness of the interconnectedness of various forms of oppression, and possibly work toward creating a new and just world.

25 The Vietnam War and the Sino-Soviet Split

Sergey Radchenko

It hardly bears repeating that the danger of “falling dominoes” in Southeast Asia was not as acute as it seemed when the United States committed itself to a bloody conflict in Vietnam. What we know today of the relationship between North Vietnam (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, DRVN) and its two key allies and sponsors, China and the Soviet Union, is enough to put to rest uncritical assumptions about a global, Moscow-directed conspiracy aimed at turning all of Southeast Asia into a sea of red. Finding themselves at odds with the Chinese and the Soviets, the Vietnamese communist leaders worked to preserve their freedom of maneuver while assuring the continuation of political support and the supply of economic and military aid from both. Hanoi kept its eyes on the prize: the defeat of the United States on the battlefield, a task that was possible only with allied support. Moscow and Beijing recognized the importance of this goal but their prize was Vietnam itself, that is to say, its loyalties in the unfolding Sino-Soviet split.

What was it about Vietnam that proved so important to its communist allies? There was a range of issues, from the geopolitical and security rationales to ideological zeal and the fates of world revolution. Historians have explored these questions in depth.¹ Acknowledging the importance of their contributions, this chapter makes the case for interpreting Chinese and Soviet policies in light of the narratives of political legitimacy. Much as was the case with American involvement in Vietnam, Beijing and Moscow understood the war in terms of opportunities for asserting their own, and undermining each other’s, credibility as an ally. Credibility was central to the Chinese and Soviet bids for leadership in the socialist camp and the Third World, while the notion of leadership was closely related to self-perceptions of legitimacy of the ruling elites. Their costly, long-lasting commitment to Vietnam was, in a sense, not about Vietnam at all: it was about the Sino-Soviet rivalry for leadership.

In the end, Moscow won the contest. Its victory was as much a function of the Soviet material commitment to Hanoi’s war effort as it was a consequence of China’s domestic meltdown. But it was a very costly victory. The Soviets became a party to a distant war that they could neither adequately control nor even fully understand.

A Slide into Conflict, 1960–1964

At the turn of the 1960s, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and Chairman Mao Zedong of China were on parallel trajectories in Southeast Asia: both wanted to avoid conflict. In the late 1950s Khrushchev had his hands full with other problems. In 1958–9 he was preoccupied with the Berlin crisis, which he himself had started but was desperate to end, and with the unrest in the Middle East, which he did not start but hoped to turn to his advantage. In September 1959 Khrushchev traveled to the United States, meeting President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The positive spirit of their talks at Camp David imbued Khrushchev with hope that the Cold War itself could be quietly wound down, if only the Americans recognized Moscow’s legitimate interests. These did not include Southeast Asia in any meaningful way. By contrast, the Chinese were very interested in what transpired south of the border but primarily from the standpoint of national security rather than revolutionary strategy. China’s domestic difficulties – the failure of the Great Leap Forward – called for a cautious posture in foreign policy.

In the early 1960s North Vietnam drifted perceptibly in China’s direction. Those were the years of the Sino-Soviet polemics, when China openly challenged Moscow’s leadership in the international communist movement. Mao accused Khrushchev of betraying Marxism and colluding with the United States to sell out revolutionary movements around the world. This charge appeared all the more credible after Khrushchev’s capitulation in the Cuban Missile Crisis, in October 1962, when, under pressure from JFK, he had to remove nuclear-tipped missiles. If Khrushchev sold out Cuba, would he not sell out Vietnam as well? These were questions that the Chinese were now raising with the Vietnamese leaders, hoping to win their support.

Hồ Chí Minh was cautious. When Sino-Soviet relations came under strain because of Khrushchev’s falling out with Albania, he pleaded with the Soviet leader to forgive the Albanians. “If a tiger forgives the cat,” he told skeptical Khrushchev, “he will only become more glorious.”² Hồ Chí Minh was genuinely worried that the fracturing of the socialist camp would undercut Vietnam’s war in the South. Mao was unhappy. “Hồ Chí Minh,” he surmised in June 1962, “is afraid that, if N. Khrushchev expelled Albania today, he may tomorrow expel Vietnam too.” He went on: “In a meeting that Hồ Chí Minh had with me, I asked him, why are you afraid? In our country, in China, the grass is growing just fine even though N. Khrushchev is attacking and fighting us. If you do not believe this, go have a stroll around our mountains and see with your own eyes.”³ Two months later, Chairman Mao proclaimed the return to class struggle in China’s foreign policy. Because of this new militant posture, and due to growing concern with the increased American presence in South Vietnam, the Chinese upped their political and military commitment to Hanoi.⁴ Meanwhile, North Vietnamese requests for Soviet aid and cash went largely unanswered.⁵

Mao and other Chinese leaders repeatedly assured the Vietnamese that they would back them in the conflict with the United States, even as the Soviets carefully probed for the possibility of a peaceful settlement. Unsurprisingly, by late 1963 the ranks of “pro-Soviet” Vietnamese leaders grew thinner, while the Chinese gained influence by the day. For a time, Hồ kept up the pretense of friendship with the USSR, blaming rumors of Hanoi’s anti-Soviet tilt on “hooligans and reactionary elements.”⁶ But the Soviets knew that Hồ Chí Minh himself was “swimming between the currents” while others, including the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP) general secretary Lê Duẩn, already “stood on the Chinese bank.”⁷ “Pro-Soviet” players in the Vietnamese leadership reported feeling “complete isolation.”⁸

It was not so much a matter of picking and choosing between ideologies, between embracing China’s “class struggle” and renouncing Khrushchev’s “peaceful coexistence.” The question was simpler: the North Vietnamese sought to take advantage of the deteriorating political situation in the South by launching an armed uprising, a decision formalized by a party plenum in December 1963. They needed political support and weapons, which the Chinese were happy to provide, even as Khrushchev, his eyes on better relations with the West, continued to procrastinate. Under these circumstances, North Vietnam’s siding with China was a tactical move in the absence of better options. Khrushchev himself precipitated this shift by ignoring his client’s needs. But, characteristically blind to his own policy failures, he blamed the loss of North Vietnam on the imaginary machinations of “Chinese half-breeds” in the Vietnamese party leadership.⁹ For Khrushchev, the problem of Vietnam was only an aspect of his broader struggle with China, and a rather peripheral aspect at that. The Chinese worried about Vietnam much more, and for a good reason. The situation on the ground continued to deteriorate.

Figure 25.1 Premier Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Hồ Chí Minh, President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and Chairman of the Vietnam Workers’ Party, and Soong Ching-Ling, Vice Chairwoman of China (from left to right), dining together in Beijing (October 4, 1959).

Source: Keystone-France / Contributor / Gamma-Keystone / Getty Images.

The Struggle for Vietnam, 1964–1965

The rapid escalation of American involvement in Vietnam after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 meant that the war, which Mao and Khrushchev had so hoped to avert in the late 1950s, was now a brutal reality. Khrushchev witnessed the imbroglio from the political sidelines. In October 1964 his comrades-in-leadership overthrew him for reasons that had relatively little to do with foreign relations.¹⁰ Meanwhile, Mao was egging the Vietnamese on. The escalating Vietnam War developed into the core concern of China’s foreign policy, becoming entangled imperceptibly with a very different struggle that unfolded in China itself. The Soviets half-suspected that the Tonkin Gulf incident was a secret Chinese ploy to prod Vietnam toward an open war with the United States and so instill their allegiance to, and dependence on, China.¹¹ There is no evidence of such devious plotting on Mao’s part. But once the war began in earnest, he embraced it with relish. As Mao famously advised the North Vietnamese in October 1964:

If the Americans are determined to invade the inner land, you may allow them to do so … You must not engage your main force in a head-to-head confrontation with them, and must well maintain your main force. My opinion is that so long as the green mountain is there, how can you ever lack firewood?¹²

He preferred to keep the war confined to South Vietnam. But if it expanded to the North, that was fine, too, because the Americans would then find themselves knee-deep in a quagmire.

Three considerations underpinned Beijing’s approach to the deepening conflict. First, the Chinese believed that, for all the dangerous escalation, the chances of a broader regional (never mind a global) conflagration were minimal. The United States was already badly overextended. The more overextended it became, the lower its chances of winning. Speaking in the immediate aftermath of the Tonkin Gulf, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai outlined the stratagem in nearly poetic terms:

If there were just a few more Congos in Africa, a few more Vietnams in Asia, a few more Cubas in Latin America, then America would have to spread 10 fingers to 10 different places, spreading its power very thin … If we make America extend its 10 fingers to 10 different places, then we can chop them off one by one.¹³

It did not matter to the Chinese how long the struggle would take – a hundred years or more, perhaps – but it would end in victory. It was imperative that the United States leave Indochina – indeed, not just leave, but, as Mao put it, “leave with shame.”¹⁴ Mao valued the Vietnam War for the chance to “humiliate” the Americans, and so undermine their global influence.

Second, the struggle was a good thing because it helped mobilize the “people” – not just the Vietnamese but the Chinese too. The Vietnam War intersected with the trajectory of Chinese domestic politics. Mao’s leftward turn in domestic politics in mid-1962 stemmed from his dissatisfaction with the pace of his country’s revolutionary transformation. Mao now saw an opportunity to drum up support for more radical policies by invoking the threat of war. As he explained shortly after the Tonkin Gulf incident, “though the Americans cannot win in Vietnam, it is useful to have them there because ‘imperialism’ is necessary to unify revolutionary forces, and excesses of ‘imperialism’ are necessary to prove that socialism is the way of the future.”¹⁵

Millions of Chinese took to the streets in August 1964 to “angrily denounce US imperialist aggression.” The DRVN Embassy in Beijing became a pilgrimage site for expressing officially sanctioned outrage, and for handing in thousands of letters of support, including one by a “78-year-old professor with a long silvery beard” and by a “12-year-old Young Pioneer who, in his summer vacation, had collected signatures to a pledge of support from 11 classmates.”¹⁶ This outpouring of support was far from spontaneous. The massive demonstrations were organized by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in order to “raise vigilance among the army and the people,” and to “educate [the people] about the concepts of national defence.” The instructions even included the slogans for the demonstrators’ banners: “Resolutely oppose,” “Resolutely support,” and, of course, “Long Live World Peace!”¹⁷

Third, the war gave Mao an opportunity to assert leadership in the international communist movement amid the deepening conflict with the Soviet Union. The worse the fighting, the better were the grounds to claim that Khrushchev got it wrong: one could not have peaceful coexistence with the United States. By attempting to build bridges to the United States, Khrushchev had betrayed Vietnam’s hopes and the hopes of the entire revolutionary world. That was the message that the Chinese were now selling in Southeast Asia and further afield, and with some success. That said, the Chinese themselves were very careful to keep the war within certain bounds, and signaled to the United States that, as long as the Americans did not directly attack China, Beijing would not intervene. As Zhou Enlai put it in August 1964, “We do not provoke, but answer America’s provocation. As America takes one step, the people of China follow in taking one step … If America wants to expand the war, we will certainly resist.”¹⁸ The message was reiterated through multiple channels, and it gave China’s policy greater nuance than one could extract from loud proclamations of solidarity.

Moscow’s approach began to change after Khrushchev lost power. The new Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev (as First and, later, General Secretary) and Aleksey Kosygin (as prime minister) made an effort to prove that they were truly committed to supporting an ally in need. In late 1964, Brezhnev and Kosygin tried to improve relations with both the Chinese and the Vietnamese. Unlike the former, who remained steadfast in criticizing Soviet “revisionism,” the Vietnamese leaders were eager to rebuild bridges with Moscow. Prime Minister Phạm Vӑn Đồng visited the Soviet Union in November and was promised help. In February 1965 Kosygin traveled to Vietnam. He was in Hanoi when the Americans began their bombing campaign in retaliation for an attack on a US helicopter facility near Pleiku by the National Liberation Front (NLF). This only served to increase the Soviet resolve to aid Vietnam. The underlying rationale for Moscow’s increased interest was that the Soviet leadership faced a deficit of political legitimacy. Aiding Vietnam in a war against “imperialism” helped them to be recognized – by their people, their clients and allies, and the broader world – as the legitimate heirs to the leadership of the socialist camp. An effort to improve relations with China also served the same purpose.

Mao, however, was not inclined to reciprocate. This became clear during Kosygin’s February 1965 trip to Beijing. Kosygin, who passed through China on his way to and from Vietnam, spoke of the need for “united action” to help Hanoi’s war effort. Zhou Enlai initially appeared sympathetic, even enthusiastic. During their meeting on February 10, 1965, Zhou readily agreed that the US bombing campaign gave Moscow and Beijing the freedom to offer the Vietnamese the unconditional support they needed. When Kosygin spoke of sending artillery, tanks, and surface-to-air missiles to North Vietnam, Zhou urged him to supply the equipment more quickly and promised China’s cooperation in transporting these weapons by rail.¹⁹ If Zhou had actually been in charge of Chinese foreign policy, he and Kosygin could well have worked out a joint approach to North Vietnam, which was what the Vietnamese desperately wanted.

This was not to be. On February 12, 1965, Mao, responding to Soviet pleas with hostile sarcasm, told Kosygin that the Sino-Soviet struggle would last for 10,000 years. “The United States and the USSR are now deciding the world’s destiny,” Mao said acidly. “Well, go ahead and decide. But within the next 10–15 years you will not be able to decide the world’s destiny. It is in the hands of the nations of the world, and not in the hands of the imperialists, exploiters, or revisionists.” Mao appeared unconcerned by the new round of escalation in Vietnam – “So what? What is horrible about the fact that some number of people died?” – and countered Kosygin’s worries about the deepening conflict with optimistic calls for a “revolutionary war.”²⁰ Kosygin left Beijing disheartened and empty-handed. The tentative move toward Sino-Soviet rapprochement, of which Kosygin was a foremost advocate in the Soviet leadership, was peremptorily aborted.

The deepening crisis in Sino-Soviet relations made it more difficult for Moscow to supply military aid to North Vietnam. The Chinese flatly refused to establish air corridors for deliveries, held up trains, and rejected the Soviet proposal to cover the Sino-Vietnamese border against US air incursions as a hideous plot to put China under military control.²¹ Still, such obstructionism actually helped Soviet standing in Vietnam, because it made it easier to accuse Beijing of hypocrisy: on the one hand, the Chinese propaganda hammered the Soviets for “selling out” Vietnam; on the other, the Chinese were demonstrably obstructing the delivery of vital supplies to an ally on absurd pretexts. Brezhnev used every opportunity to alert the Vietnamese to this discrepancy between Beijing’s words and actions. “Don’t think that I am trying to cause a quarrel between you and the Chinese,” he told North Vietnamese deputy prime minister and Politburo member Lê Thanh Nghị, when the latter turned up in Moscow in June 1965. “We are surprised and saddened that the Chinese leaders are willing to pay this price to achieve some kind of selfish aims.”²²

The Chinese, meanwhile, did their best to downplay the extent and the quality of the Soviet aid. “The Soviet leaders are not sincere or serious about providing help to Vietnam,” Zhou Enlai told Lê Thanh Nghị. Zhou reasoned that the Soviets had given Egypt, India, and Indonesia more than they were now giving Vietnam, and this was allegedly “so that Vietnam will not be able to fight big battles, so that it will not be able to start a war.” On the whole, Lê Thanh Nghị suggested in his written report on the trip, the Chinese were “displeased with our attitude toward the Soviet Union.”²³ This was hardly surprising. As Moscow increased the quantity and the quality of their military aid, providing equipment that China did not have and could not match, the Vietnamese began to move away from their pro-Chinese orientation. Understanding this, the Chinese even attempted to slow down or prevent altogether transport of Soviet weapons by rail, leading to a massive backlog of Vietnam-bound railcars on the Sino-Soviet border.²⁴ Moscow then began sending arms by sea – a circuitous and dangerous route. That only helped Brezhnev’s standing in the eyes of the Vietnamese, a reminder that Vietnam’s friendship could be bought if the price was right. Khrushchev had been unwilling to pay but his successors understood that the brutal war unfolding in Southeast Asia was a test of their credibility as the leaders of the socialist world.

War and Diplomacy, 1966–1968

The war continued to escalate. US ground troops carried on conducting combat missions against the NLF, with mounting casualties (with more than 6,000 dead in 1966, the American losses were more than three times greater than the previous year). Meanwhile, with brief respites in May and December 1965, bombs continued to fall on North Vietnam. Operation Rolling Thunder aimed at dissuading Hanoi from supplying their war effort in the South. But it did not work, not even when, in the summer of 1966, the Americans expanded the list of targets by bombing petroleum, oil, and lubricants (POL) facilities. The POL campaign came to an end in September, after a CIA study concluded that it did not significantly diminish Hanoi’s ability to fight. The US president faced divided counsel: Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had lost faith in the war by late 1966. Others, including prominently National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, were upbeat about the prospects. “My feeling is that the pressures on the regime may be greater than most of us realize,” Rostow told LBJ in September.²⁵ Yet, two years after the Tonkin Gulf, LBJ was beginning to waver, looking for a way out.

In public, Hanoi presented an impregnable façade of resolve. Summed up in Phạm Vӑn Đồng’s “Four Points” of April 8, 1965, this position called for the unconditional US withdrawal from Vietnam, followed by the country’s unification on communist terms. Continued escalation was spun as evidence of the United States’ growing difficulties, not just in public but also internally, for the benefit of the war-weary audiences in the socialist camp. Records of North Vietnamese discussions with the Soviet leadership often read like propaganda: so many airplanes downed, so many enemies destroyed, and not a word of one’s own losses. As Lê Thanh Nghị explained to Brezhnev in December 1965, “The American imperialists are suffering new defeats … As the latest fighting, and our observations show, American soldiers are afraid of dying in Vietnam. They cannot stand the difficulties and the losses, and cannot spend more than 3–4 days in the swampy areas, in the jungles.”²⁶

Careful Soviet probes about potential peace talks were met with stubborn rebuff, presented in terms of: yes, we are in favor of peace talks, but not now. This was the argument Phạm Vӑn Đồng cited to Brezhnev in October 1965 (Brezhnev was amused that the argument was made through the interpreter who read from a prepared text). “The Americans cannot be trusted,” Đồng said. “We don’t want to end up in a trap.”²⁷ He did not decipher this reference to a “trap” but, given Hanoi’s bitter experience at the 1954 Geneva Conference, where the North Vietnamese were arm-twisted by their allies into dividing the country along the 17th parallel, it is not surprising that they would be more suspicious the second time around. “An old story,” Brezhnev noted in his diary with evident resignation.²⁸

It was an old story but there was new blood spilled every day. Economic losses from bombing were partly made up for by a steady stream of economic aid from the socialist camp, especially the Soviet Union. But there was no making up for the tens of thousands of dead, maimed, and deprived. Recalled Janusz Lewandowski, Poland’s representative at the International Control Commission and (at one point) a crucial interloper in a failed attempt at US–North Vietnamese peace negotiations: “Population was starved, the rations were very limited, you know, the people gathered grass, herbs, finding the crickets … For every American, I think, there were a hundred Vietnamese killed.”²⁹ Although an exaggeration, the claim accentuates the brutal reality of war and helps us understand why, from late 1966, the North Vietnamese began sending signals of interest in peace talks. However, the signals were too weak and too equivocal to provide sufficient impetus for serious negotiation. That would have to wait for another two years of carnage and casualties, two years of internal deliberation centered in no small part on the question of China.

The Chinese persisted in their opposition to peace talks. They were at first quite successful. The Sino-Vietnamese relationship seemed to grow ever closer as the war intensified. DRVN leaders were frequent visitors in Beijing, informing, listening, consulting. “At present all the world is depending on you to defeat imperialism,” Chinese foreign minister Chen Yi told Hồ Chí Minh in June 1965, while Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping warned him that Moscow would sell out Vietnam. Hồ Chí Minh played along but there was a perennial concern in Beijing that the Vietnamese might one day tilt the other way: toward the Soviets and toward peace talks. This helps explain the extraordinary lengths to which the Chinese went in trying to prevent the shipments of Soviet aid, and also in warning Hanoi not to take it. “Their help is not sincere,” Zhou cautioned Phạm Vӑn Đồng in October 1965. “The US likes this very much. I want to tell you my opinion. It will be better without the Soviet aid.”³⁰ Dong went on to Moscow, where, in talks with Brezhnev, he did exactly what Zhou hoped he would not – asked for aid – but also showed his loyalty by claiming commonality of views with the Chinese: “they have long been helping us.”³¹

The DRVN’s dependence on Chinese aid – light weapons, ammunition, and daily necessities – could partly explain North Vietnam’s opposition to peace talks. This was the preferred Soviet interpretation: Brezhnev and Kosygin were ever prone to see the Chinese hand behind the Vietnamese recalcitrance. But that was not the whole story. Hanoi’s struggle lined up with Mao’s theory of the “people’s war.” When the Vietnamese leaders spoke in well-rehearsed catchphrases that sounded like Chinese propaganda, it was because they believed that propaganda, and were open to Chinese methods of guerrilla warfare. “Fighting a war,” Mao instructed Phạm Vӑn Đồng in April 1967, “is like eating: you eat a bite at a time. It is not hard to understand.”³² The Vietnamese thanked Mao profusely for China’s help, and were invariably thanked in return: You are on the frontlines, Mao would say. You are waging the struggle against American imperialism.

In June 1966 Mao proposed to Hồ Chí Minh – half in jest, perhaps – that he would not mind heading down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail to carry on with the struggle. “We wouldn’t be able to vouch [for your safety],” Hồ Chí Minh replied in bemusement. Mao pressed on: “Isn’t this the same thing to die and to be buried in China as to die and be buried in Vietnam? It would be good to be killed by the Americans.”³³ Mao never went to Vietnam but hundreds of thousands of Chinese did. Between June 1965 and March 1968 a total of some 320,000 railroad, engineering, and minesweeping troops served in North Vietnam (the peak year was 1967, when the number reached 170,000).³⁴ One could say that the Vietnam War was organically linked to China in ways that it was not, and never could be, linked to the USSR. Even after the Vietnamese and the Chinese began to develop disagreements, it took years before they proved sufficiently serious to give the Soviets an opening in Vietnam.

Divergences did eventually spring up between Beijing and Hanoi, for two reasons. The first was China’s slide into the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Begun in earnest in mid-1966, this campaign thrust China into radical violence. Senior leaders were purged. Those in “positions of authority” were beaten and tortured by radicalized youngsters. Convulsing in a bacchanalia of rallies and struggle sessions, China turned inward. All ambassadors but one (Huang Hua in Egypt) were recalled from overseas, and diplomacy was downgraded to revolutionary propaganda. The chaos decreased Beijing’s credibility as the DRVN’s protector. Disorder bordering on a civil war, especially in the southern provinces, disrupted the flow of weapons and supplies to Vietnam. Most importantly, Hanoi resented China’s efforts to “export” the Cultural Revolution, especially by relying on the local Chinese community and the railroad troops. There was, as Lê Duẩn put it in 1967, a “crisis of trust” between yesterday’s comrades-in-arms. In an even more telling assessment by the deputy Politburo member Nguyễn Vӑn Vịnh, “as paradoxical as it sounds, we [the Vietnamese] do not fear the Americans but fear the Chinese comrades.”³⁵

The second reason was Hanoi’s decision to begin peace talks with the United States in Paris. The discussions began on May 14, 1968, in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive. A brainchild of General Secretary Lê Duẩn, Tet had aimed at overwhelming US forces in South Vietnam in a series of powerful conventional strikes. The idea did not go down well in Beijing and in Moscow but for different reasons. The Chinese were upset that their preference for protracted guerrilla warfare had been ditched in favor of large-scale battles.³⁶ The Soviets had long sought a negotiated solution to the war, and did not like further escalation. But the failure of the Tet Offensive prodded Hanoi toward the negotiating table. The Soviets were relieved, and the Chinese outraged.

The Endgame

The DRVN presently showed a little flexibility, agreeing, for instance, to Saigon’s representation at the peace talks. More by innuendo than by diktat, the Soviets continued to encourage their allies to make concessions. Brezhnev was worried by Richard Nixon’s arrival in the White House. “We’ve known Nixon for a long time,” Brezhnev told Phạm Vӑn Đồng in November 1968, days after the Republican presidential nominee clinched victory. “He is distinguished by extreme self-love and great irritability … This does not mean that we are afraid of him. But one must take into account that, in a situation when no solution has been reached, he will have only one policy – to continue the war.”³⁷

But the North Vietnamese were not in any great hurry. They interpreted LBJ’s October 31 announcement of ending the bombing of North Vietnam as a momentous victory for the communist forces. “This new victory of ours,” Đồng told Brezhnev in November, “bred the spirit of confusion and decay in the ranks of the enemy, the American and the Saigon armies.” The initiative was in the Vietnamese hands. They had to press on.³⁸

Hanoi’s optimism came through in the Vietnamese Workers’ Party Politburo discussions. The records demonstrate that six months into the Nixon administration, the North Vietnamese remained upbeat about the near-term prospects of the ongoing war. This was due to the perceived weakness of South Vietnam’s armed forces, which were supposedly “falling apart,” with three of four top military commanders secretly supportive of the Viet Cong. According to the VWP Central Committee secretary Lê Vӑn Lương (who reported on these developments to the Politburo in early July), Hanoi’s problem was not so much in beating the “puppet” army as in working out what to do with them once they defected: how to feed them and how to sort the good from the bad.³⁹ Not long after this Nixon announced his policy of “Vietnamization” of the war: a phase-out of the US military presence accompanied by considerable strengthening of the South Vietnamese forces. Hanoi remained confident of victory just around the corner.⁴⁰

As the 1970s dawned, the end of war was finally in sight. Much of Indochina was in ruins but the North Vietnamese leaders looked forward to their long-sought victory, which would herald Hanoi’s rise to ranks of the leader of, and the socialist bridgehead to, the Third World. These ambitions were compatible with being a Soviet client. As a midsize power, the DRVN desired deference even as it itself deferred to the Kremlin for guidance. Vietnam continued to rely heavily on Moscow’s economic and military aid. Fiercely independent Hanoi accepted this dependence on Soviet largesse, partly because the Vietnamese had little choice, and in part because the Soviets were not competitors for Vietnam’s regional hegemony. Nor, ironically, were the Americans. With the United States on the way out and the Soviets in a detached, advisory role, though generous in contributing weapons, the politics of Southeast Asia were reverting to more ancient rivalries.

Unhealthy tendencies in Sino-Vietnamese relations, present during the early years of the Cultural Revolution, continued to worsen. The feeling in Hanoi was that the Chinese “support our revolution only to the extent to which we support the Cultural Revolution.” Zhou was apologetic, blaming the difficult political situation inside China. “The situation inside our party is very complicated,” he confidentially told the Vietnamese. “These difficulties have reached such a degree that they cannot be resolved at present.”⁴¹ Externally China was also facing an unprecedented crisis. Following the Sino-Soviet border clashes in March 1969, it seemed that the Soviet Union would invade any moment.

Meanwhile, the Vietnamese were unhappy: not just with the collapse of Chinese aid, not just with meddling in Vietnam’s domestic politics, but with Beijing’s unwillingness to recognize the global importance of the Vietnamese revolution. China had long presented itself as the role model for revolutionary war. Mao instructed visiting revolutionaries – the Vietnamese among them – in the art of guerrilla warfare. The Chinese claimed leadership in the Third World partly by the right of their experience in the revolution and then the war with Korea, where China fought the Americans to a standstill. Now the Vietnamese were more than fighting the Americans to a standstill, emerging as yet another role model in Asia, another leader.

This rivalry was checked by continued Vietnamese obeisance and the decline of Chinese radicalism. In May 1970 Lê Duẩn found Mao more accepting of Hanoi’s conduct of the war and the peace talks in Paris. “You may negotiate,” he told Lê Duẩn. “I am not saying that you cannot negotiate.” “But,” Mao added, “your main energy should be put [into] fighting.” This was one of the last meetings between the Chinese and the Vietnamese leaders, when they still spoke from the same script. Mao was at his militant best: still berating the Americans and the Soviets, still upbeat about the prospects of the global revolution, still full of praise for the Vietnamese war effort. “Who fears whom? Is it you, the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and the people in Southeast Asia, who fear the US imperialists? Or is it the US imperialists who fear you? … It is a great power which fears a small country – when the grass bends as the wind blows, the great power will be in panic.” Lê Duẩn responded with deference and even requested “Chairman Mao’s instructions.”⁴² Yet, even as he encouraged the Vietnamese to continue fighting, the Chinese leader was also carefully exploring the idea of rapprochement with the United States. This led in July 1971 to the bombshell China visit of Nixon’s national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, and the announcement that Nixon himself would soon come to Beijing.

Hanoi was flabbergasted. The Chinese had not consulted them before Kissinger’s trip, and Zhou’s reassurances about how Nixon’s visit to China would be of great benefit to Vietnam, and Beijing’s readiness to increase the aid flow, could hardly make up for the injury, and the insult, of such mistreatment. It was clear that Beijing and Washington had been talking, noted Hanoi’s chief peace negotiator Lê Đức Thọ days after Kissinger’s visit. “But the Chinese invitation to Nixon to visit Beijing was completely unexpected for us.” In November 1971 Phạm Vӑn Đồng visited Beijing in a bid to persuade the Chinese to uninvite Nixon.⁴³ In the words of General Võ Nguyên Giáp, who briefed Brezhnev and Kosygin on the visit several days later, Đồng “concluded that the general strategy of the Chinese leaders is a compromise with American imperialism.” “At whose expense will this compromise be reached?” interjected Kosygin. “It’s hard to say,” uttered Giáp. “I think you and I can guess at whose expense.”⁴⁴

As the Vietnamese leaders whetted Brezhnev’s appetite by invoking the bright prospects of a Soviet–Vietnamese revolutionary partnership in Asia, Hanoi’s relationship with Beijing was on a steep downward trajectory. The differences were still carefully papered over: not just in public but also, for the time being, in private. Mao, looking (in Lê Duẩn’s words) “old and very sick,” praised the Vietnamese leaders in a mawkish sort of way when they met in June 1973. “The people of the world, including the Chinese people and the Chinese party, have you to thank,” he said. “You’ve defeated the United States.” He even went as far as to thank the Vietnamese for the Sino-American rapprochement: “Think about it, why did Nixon come to Beijing? If you hadn’t won the war, he wouldn’t have come.”⁴⁵ What struck Lê Duẩn was that this time there was no discussion of the Soviet Union, no scaremongering about the Soviet threat, no pressure to combat “revisionism.” This was a sign of a broader shift in Chinese foreign policy – away from ideology toward Realpolitik. But what role would Vietnam play in this overtly geopolitical game?

A few weeks later Lê Duẩn and Phạm Vӑn Đồng discussed Mao’s intentions with Brezhnev. They were worried about China’s growing ambition in Southeast Asia. Lê Duẩn confided to Brezhnev that since the mid-1960s he had been concerned about the concentration of Chinese troops in the five provinces of southern China. This measure, in theory aimed at securing the DRVN’s rear, was, in Lê Duẩn’s reading, but a part of Mao’s plan “to invade all of Indochina China and Southeast Asia if the circumstances were right.”⁴⁶ He pleaded with Brezhnev to help strengthen Vietnam’s defenses against China.⁴⁷ The Soviets obliged. Their involvement in Vietnam continued to intensify through the 1970s. By 1978 – when the two sides signed an alliance treaty – Vietnam had become one of Moscow’s most important clients, and a key player in its strategy of containing China.

Conclusion

Moscow’s involvement with Vietnam was Brezhnev’s project. Had Khrushchev not been ousted in October 1964, it is unlikely that the Soviet commitment would have been as strong or as lasting as it later became. Although Khrushchev pioneered the Soviet pivot to the Third World, he was in the end quite unconcerned about Vietnam. He even resented his Vietnamese allies. Hanoi’s decision to turn to armed struggle was an irritant in Soviet–American relations at a time when the Soviet leader was seeking rapprochement with Washington. But that was not the main problem. The spirit of “peaceful coexistence” did not prevent Khrushchev from aiding national liberation movements and revolutions around the world. What made the Vietnamese theater so problematic for Khrushchev was that Hanoi’s militancy served China’s interests. He did not think of Vietnam as an East–West problem so much as a Sino-Soviet problem, suspecting the Vietnamese of pro-Chinese leanings. “Winning” Vietnam in this case required him to tone down his disagreements with China and making a massive commitment to Hanoi’s war effort. Khrushchev was unwilling to do that, before or after Tonkin.

Brezhnev and his comrades-in-leadership were an altogether different lot. They faced a deficit of political legitimacy, and the related imperative of securing leadership in the socialist camp. Vietnam offered them an opportunity to demonstrate their revolutionary colors. Supporting Vietnam became a test of leadership that the Soviets were determined not to fail. Moscow’s shift resulted in the DRVN’s return to something of an equidistance between its two powerful patrons. This was an important early achievement of Moscow’s post-Khrushchev diplomacy that the Soviet leaders continued to build on as the war escalated in the late 1960s. This did not mean that the Soviets were prepared to back Vietnam to the hilt. The new Soviet leadership, like Khrushchev, had a broader agenda, which included the East–West détente. Brezhnev and Kosygin used every opportunity to prod their allies toward negotiations with the United States. But they were careful, all the same, not to overdo the prodding for fear of losing Vietnam to Chinese influence.

Supporting Vietnam’s war effort served two related purposes: the first was to advertise Soviet credibility to global revolutionary audiences, in particular would-be clients in the Third World. “Credibility” is an all-too-familiar notion to historians of the American war in Vietnam. Yet the notion of credibility was equally dear to the hearts of the Soviet decision-makers who came to regard Vietnam as a test of their reliability in the face of Chinese accusations of betrayal. Moscow’s (and, for that matter, Beijing’s) involvement in the Vietnam War is therefore best understood not in ideological but in psychological terms, in terms of a struggle for leadership, and not just an East–West struggle but also an East–East struggle.

Second, for the Soviet Union, what happened in the Vietnam War was closely tied to its desire to be recognized as the equal of the United States. “Recognition” was at the center of Brezhnev’s approach to détente. But better relations with the United States did not at all entail curbing Soviet support for revolutionary wars – rather, the opposite. Superpower “equality,” from the Soviet perspective, required a clientele. Clients were what made the Soviet Union a superpower. The same logic worked for China as well. The Chinese were not quite in the same category of “superpowers.” Even so, China’s relationship with Vietnam strengthened Mao’s hand when it came to mending fences with the United States. Mao was stating the obvious when he said the American defeat in Vietnam was what forced Nixon to come to Beijing. Yet the decision-makers in Washington were often under the false impression that recognizing a foe (be it the USSR, China, or anyone else) would in itself prompt the other side to be more “cooperative.” The term itself – “recognition” – entails a follow-up question: recognition as what? Recognition as an “equal” often precluded “cooperation” of the kind that Washington expected.

As the war escalated, commitment by both Beijing and Moscow grew. In the end, this tug-of-war for the DRVN’s loyalty was won by the Soviets. But Moscow’s effort to court Vietnam would not have been nearly as successful had it not been for China’s self-defeating policies. Mao Zedong’s insistence on military struggle was not in itself objectionable, certainly not from Lê Duẩn’s perspective. Like Mao, Lê Duẩn was bitterly opposed to peace talks with the enemy until a decisive victory had been achieved. Where they differed was in their assessment of how long that victory would take, and by what means it was to be achieved, which was why the Tet Offensive of 1968 upset Beijing. The Chinese preferred protracted warfare. Disagreements over military tactics aside, there was frustration in Hanoi with the absurdities of the Cultural Revolution, and fears that it might spill over to Vietnam, causing chaos and undermining the war effort. The Vietnamese leaders’ mounting unease about the political loyalties of the large ethnic Chinese minority was a pointer to deep-seated fears that would poison Sino-Vietnamese relations in the 1970s. But the biggest blow to this relationship of “lips and teeth” was Beijing’s decision to mend fences with the United States, a clear-cut case of “betrayal” that the Soviets tried their best to turn to their advantage – but they did not have to try all that hard.

The end of the Vietnam War occasioned not just Washington’s but also Beijing’s defeat. Moscow, by contrast, emerged as a clear winner. Yet it was a Pyrrhic victory. Once the fighting stopped, reconstruction began, and Brezhnev, having invested so much in Vietnam, had to continue investing. Lê Duẩn and Phạm Vӑn Đồng were quite straightforward with him about Hanoi’s expectations: a massive Soviet aid effort to help “industrialize” Vietnam, in order to show Southeast Asia the practical benefits of socialist orientation. “We have nothing,” Lê Duẩn told Brezhnev, suggesting that everything would have to come from the Soviet bloc, at least for the foreseeable ten to fifteen years.⁴⁸ Brezhnev agreed to cancel all of Hanoi’s debts. Credits kept coming, though, and by 1990 Vietnam had received 16.4 billion rubles in aid, most of which was never repaid. In addition, Soviet military aid to Vietnam in the 1980s alone amounted to more than 4 billion rubles.⁴⁹ Subsidizing Vietnam became a serious burden on the Soviet economy in the 1980s, contributing to Moscow’s financial insolvency. Such were the long-term fruits of the Soviet–Vietnamese “victory” in the war.

26 Western Europe and the Vietnam War

Christian F. Ostermann

In the 1940s and early 1950s, the Cold War conventions that undergirded the growing American involvement in Vietnam – essentially, that the containment of the global Soviet–communist threat to the West required building a noncommunist bulwark in (southern) Vietnam, with American support – were broadly shared, internalized, at times even fostered, by the United States’ European allies. That consensus broke down by the 1960s as successive US administrations, in particular that of President Lyndon B. Johnson, saw themselves locked ever more rigidly into the Cold War logic that seemed to require going to war to preserve a noncommunist South Vietnam: American officials feared that the credibility of American defense commitments in Europe and elsewhere around the world would be diminished should the Vietnamese communists take over the country. In fact, US efforts to demonstrate resolve in Vietnam hurt rather than enhanced the credibility of American power, commitments, and prestige in the eyes of many Europeans. The United States’ transatlantic allies and partners increasingly came to question the very rationale of the US intervention: that South Vietnam’s survival was vital to Western security, to winning the Cold War. With ever greater investment of American manpower and other resources in Vietnam, security interests on both sides of the Atlantic began to diverge. Washington’s Cold War intervention in Southeast Asia helped to catalyze new efforts in Western Europe to contain and transform the Cold War altogether, at home and abroad. At the same time, the Vietnam War tore at the very fabric of values and bonds imagined to constitute the West, and to a part of a generation of West Europeans American warfare in Southeast Asia came to represent systemic evil.

By 1964–5 there was a remarkable consensus among government officials across Western Europe about the futility of the central objective of the American intervention in Vietnam of defending and stabilizing a noncommunist (South) Vietnam. Similarly remarkable was the common European phalanx of obstinate refusal when it came to providing military support eagerly and increasingly desperately sought and expected by the Johnson administration: not one of Washington’s European allies would send troops to Vietnam. To be sure, West European governments differed considerably in the public attitude they displayed toward the United States in Vietnam: On one end of the spectrum stood France’s strategic opposition to (and Sweden’s principled and vocal criticism of) the Vietnam War. By contrast, the British and West German governments exhibited strong though not limitless public support for their US ally. Yet for their own historical, political, and geostrategic reasons they resolved not to make even a nominal troop commitment either. Across Western Europe, the Vietnam War cut deeply into West European domestic politics, aggravated political and societal tensions, and diminished the righteousness of the United States’ – and the West’s – cause in the eyes of many Europeans.¹

France: Strategic Opposition

Among the United States’ NATO allies, France emerged as the sharpest critic of the expanding American involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s. This was not without some irony, as the French political class of the Fourth Republic had just two decades earlier staked their nation’s credibility as a global power on its continued colonial hold on Indochina and to that end made an all-out effort to engage the United States in the region. Born of the humiliation that French national pride had suffered in defeat, occupation, and collaboration in World War II, this “unprecedented imperialist consensus” across the domestic political divide had induced an “unquestioning faith in imperial possessions” as a marker of global power.² With the French empire in Southeast Asia threatened by a wartime Japanese takeover and after war’s end by the revolutionary Việt Minh movement led by Hồ Chí Minh, French policymakers mobilized American support for colonial restoration, above all, as Mark Lawrence has persuasively argued, by “recasting the Vietnamese political situation” in the late 1940s as a Cold War conflict stemming “from the same causes and requiring the same solutions as anticommunist fights elsewhere.” France had in fact joined the Western side in the bipolar confrontation belatedly and reluctantly, for this relegated the country to second-class status. But the new global conflict offered a chance to attract Washington’s backing for a colonial project it had only recently opposed by selling the Americans on the idea of a Western-oriented Vietnamese nationalism led by former emperor Bảo Đại. By early 1950, the French government had successfully lobbied the administration of Harry Truman into supporting the French war effort against the Việt Minh.³

In the following years, French officials proved adept at manipulating American Cold War anxieties to retain US aid to French Indochina. They played on American fears of domestic instability in France and exploited Washington’s commitment to strengthening the transatlantic alliance. Most importantly, they leveraged keen American interest in securing French support for West German rearmament (considered critical to bolstering Western defenses in Europe) to extract US aid for French efforts in Indochina. The French government was able to successfully condition its support of the European Defence Community on, among other things, cuts to its military expenditures in Vietnam. By 1954, the United States had provided France with nearly as much aid in Vietnam as it had under the Marshall Plan.

At the same time, frictions developed between the two countries over the conduct of the French Indochina War. Franco-American disagreements climaxed over the Điện Biên Phủ crisis and during the Geneva Conference in 1954. In the following two years France retreated militarily from Vietnam in the face of “South Vietnamese and American determination to replace France at every level – whether political, military, economic, or cultural.” In May 1956 France formally relinquished its responsibility to enforce the Geneva Agreements. Through educational and commercial programs France fought to hold on to a degree of economic and especially cultural presence in Vietnam, with growing success by the late 1950s. Prompted in part by French support of South Vietnam’s bid to join the United Nations in 1957 and the Franco-Vietnamese accords of March 1960, by the beginning of the decade France had managed to stage a “miraculous comeback” and rebuild its cultural and economic footprint and behind-the-scenes political influence in the country.⁴

The loss of colonial empire in Southeast Asia fed into the growing sense of frustration in the late Fourth Republic with the country’s place in the world. General Charles de Gaulle tapped into this discontent and, once returned to power as president of the Fifth Republic, he sought to restore France’s “rank” in world affairs. De Gaulle set about to transform the Cold War system that had relegated France to a secondary role: by demanding a rebalance of power within the Atlantic alliance to give France greater weight and independence; by calling for greater autonomy for Western Europe vis-à-vis the United States; by recasting France as a mediator between East and West; by reaching out to the Third World and championing North–South cooperation.⁵ The growing American involvement in Vietnam epitomized to de Gaulle why it was necessary to reassert French leadership and independence: in his view, the Vietnam problem distracted US attention and resources from strengthening NATO’s defense capacity on which his country relied. In the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 it was not even entirely inconceivable that the brewing crisis in Vietnam might drag France into a full-scale conflict with Moscow. Staking out a contrarian approach to Vietnam also served as a perfect foil to challenge the United States and enhance his reputation as maverick global statesman.

The colonial experience in Indochina informed de Gaulle’s concern about American policy vis-à-vis Vietnam.⁶ At their first meeting at the Elysée Palace in May 1961 de Gaulle warned President John F. Kennedy against the more forceful intervention in Southeast Asia that was being considered by the latter. According to his memoirs, de Gaulle told JFK that “the more you become involved out there against the Communists, the more the Communists will appear as the champions of national independence, and the more support they will receive, if only from despair. We French have experience of it. You Americans want to take our place … I predict that you will sink step by step into a bottomless military and political quagmire, however much you spend in men and money.”⁷ The next year, de Gaulle, along with British prime minister Harold Macmillan, successfully prevailed on Kennedy to agree to a negotiated settlement rather than military intervention in neighboring Laos.

De Gaulle came to advocate a neutralization scheme in Vietnam similar to the solution reached for Laos which effectively removed the country from the Cold War agenda. The French leader contested the notion that a compliant, pro-Western nationalism could in fact be implanted in the South, one that would draw support away from the revolutionary nationalism represented by Hồ Chí Minh in the North. He became convinced that Western nation-building in Vietnam, even if reinforced by superior American military might, was a losing proposition, as he viewed the struggle in Vietnam as “fundamentally a political and not a military problem – a struggle for the minds and hearts of the people of South Vietnam.” Nor did de Gaulle fear that unification under communist control, which would likely result from a neutralization scheme, would strengthen global communism: Vietnamese nationalism, he ventured, would resist Chinese or Soviet control, much as it had eluded mastery by the West. Most importantly, neutralization would reduce American commitments, freeing up critical Western resources urgently needed on Cold War fronts de Gaulle deemed more important than Vietnam.⁸

When a full-blown political crisis in South Vietnam in the spring and summer of 1963 threw the deteriorating situation in the country into sharp relief, de Gaulle offered his sharpest public critique of US involvement in Vietnam yet and seized the moment to position himself as the leading European critic. Referring to the long relationship between the two countries that allowed the French people to “understand particularly well, and share sincerely, the hardships of the Vietnamese people,” de Gaulle declared in a major address in August that the French could see the positive role Vietnam could play “for its own progress and for the benefit of international understanding, once it is able to carry on its activity independent of outside influences, in internal peace and unity, and in concord with its neighbors.”⁹ France, de Gaulle implied, supported Vietnam’s reunification and independence and opposed both Soviet and Chinese as well as American involvement. His push for a diplomatic solution to the Indochina conflict also pursued geopolitical ambitions: it paved the way for the grand reentry of France into the politics of a region it had left in defeat: “Nous faison notre rentrée en Asie,” de Gaulle told a confidant after his August speech.¹⁰

With France’s cultural shadow and economic footprint still looming large in Vietnam, de Gaulle’s speech immediately produced widespread speculation in Vietnam about whether the general was suggesting a Laos-type neutralization to reunify the country. The vague nature of de Gaulle’s pronouncement facilitated its getting widespread traction. American policymakers were faced with the dilemma that de Gaulle’s initiative raised the possibility of a North–South peace precisely “at a time when US officials were working feverishly to strengthen the war effort.”¹¹ The general’s critique, moreover, came as the Kennedy administration sanctioned a coup d’état against the increasingly repressive and unpopular regime of Diệm and his brother Ngô Đình Nhu. Not only could de Gaulle’s announcement be seen as a shot in the arm for the faltering Diệm regime, but it also raised alarms in Washington that Diệm and Nhu might engage de Gaulle with a scheme for the neutralization of South Vietnam to thwart any action against them. Once a new military junta had been installed in a bloody, US-sanctioned coup against the Diệm regime in early December, paradoxically, US officials came to suspect rather quickly that it too harbored pro-French sympathies; according to one source the new government was “70 percent pro-French.”¹²

De Gaulle’s August speech outraged official Washington, which saw it as little more than grandstanding. But efforts to tone down French criticism only led French leaders to double down in their efforts to challenge American policy as the situation continued to deteriorate in South Vietnam. Anticipating a growing US military engagement in support of the new military junta under the leadership of General Dương Vӑn Minh, De Gaulle told US ambassador Charles E. Bohlen that “you will be blamed for the deaths of Diệm and Nhu” and warned of the disastrous consequences of greater American involvement. The very public French insistence that the American effort to bring about a noncommunist independent South Vietnam was doomed to fail, as Fredrik Logevall has pointed out, also created space for growing criticism within the US media, where influential voices increasingly echoed French demands for a negotiated settlement and questioned American strategy. De Gaulle’s statement became a frequent reference point for those in the United States who began to cast doubt on the thrust of American policy in Vietnam.¹³

Vietnam also played into de Gaulle’s formal recognition of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on January 27, 1964. The resumption of Sino-French diplomatic ties was part of his larger strategy to break the Anglo-American dominance in the West. The decision “to play the China card” seems to have been spurred in particular by the Limited Test Ban Treaty signed by the United States, the USSR, and the United Kingdom in August 1963, which he viewed as a threat to French global interests. The establishment of mutual relations reflected a partial alignment of French and PRC interests on a number of issues – including an end to the Algerian liberation struggle in the spring of 1962, but also a growing sense of China’s importance. At a news conference, de Gaulle announced that there was “no political reality in Asia” which did not affect China, and that it was “absolutely inconceivable that without her participation there can be any accord on the eventual neutrality of Southeast Asia.”¹⁴ But China’s diplomatic elevation by the French Republic further undercut the core rationale upon which the growing US commitment to South Vietnam rested: that the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) was to be a noncommunist bulwark against communist China’s expansion in the region. Not surprisingly, the French initiative fell on deaf ears in Washington, where another coup in South Vietnam, replacing the Minh junta with that of General Nguyễn Khánh, had given rise to new hopes for prevailing in the conflict.

The US–French rift over Vietnam continued after Lyndon B. Johnson succeeded his slain predecessor in the presidency. If anything, de Gaulle became more reluctant to give in to ever more desperate American pressure for some level of support from Paris. In early March 1964, French foreign minister Maurice Couve de Murville declined a request from Washington, conveyed through Bohlen, that the French government “clarify” publicly that it was opposed to neutralization and refrain from any statements on Vietnam. Later that month, de Gaulle refused a US request to state that the neutralization idea would not apply to the Government of Vietnam at this stage “in the face of the current communist aggression.” At the annual South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) meeting, Couve de Murville repeated his government’s conviction that the United States would not succeed in Vietnam, as France had failed there in 1954 and in Algeria in 1962, where in spite of France’s complete physical control of the country “we lost the battle.” China, Couve de Murville argued instead, would agree to a neutralization scheme. Underscoring its opposition to the American strategy, France chose to abstain from supporting a conference communiqué on the independence of South Vietnam.¹⁵ Another Johnson administration mission to Paris in early June, this time in the person of Under Secretary of State George Ball, equally failed to move the French president: Vietnam was a “rotten country,” he told the American, where the United States’ efforts to win by force were doomed to failure.¹⁶

As the LBJ administration embraced the US commitment to South Vietnam as a total one in the summer of 1964, de Gaulle strengthened his efforts to reconvene the Geneva Conference. In late June, he called for a new Geneva conference during a visit to Paris by Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, and in a major speech a month later announced that “since war cannot bring a solution, one must make peace” by a return to Geneva. Unlike his earlier pronouncements, de Gaulle proposed that the conference cover the entire region, not just, as he had argued earlier, the continued fighting in Laos. He also stipulated that, to be successful, the conference had to comprise the same participants and convene without preconditions. From Washington, President Johnson blasted the French initiative, telling reporters that “we do not believe in a conference called to ratify terror.”¹⁷

De Gaulle seemed to take the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam in February–March 1965 rather philosophically, suggesting that the United States would find itself bogged down militarily for a long time. In fact, de Gaulle continued to push for an early end to the conflict, at multiple levels. With Vietnam on the agenda during Soviet foreign minister Andrey Gromyko’s visit to Paris in the spring of 1965, de Gaulle signaled his eagerness to bring about a diplomatic solution, all the while casting himself in a central role. Paris also became a pivotal venue for secret negotiations exploring a potential path toward a negotiated solution, the so-called XYZ talks between the United States and North Vietnamese representatives. All of this required holding back on the criticism he leveled at the United States publicly. To be sure, there was little that could be done to turn French public opinion against the United States any further; by 1965, it was the most anti-American in Western Europe, with de Gaulle’s opposition to American hegemony boosting his electoral appeal.¹⁸

Figure 26.1 French president Charles de Gaulle at a press conference on Vietnam (October 28, 1966).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

With the failure of these efforts in the face of increased US military efforts in Vietnam, de Gaulle, by 1966, once again stepped up his vocal criticism of the United States. Perhaps the climax of these efforts was his September 1, 1966, speech in Phnom Penh, in which de Gaulle came out strongly in support of Cambodia’s neutrality and, more generally, the emancipation of subject peoples, attributing the collapsing situation in South Vietnam to the American presence. Later that year de Gaulle decried the war in Vietnam as unjust and blamed it on the armed intervention of the United States, a “despicable war since its leads a great nation to ravage a small one.”¹⁹ By 1968, de Gaulle’s foreign policy had turned into “an all-out crusade”²⁰ against US preponderance, with Vietnam as exhibit no. 1. Yet for all his exasperation with the American war, de Gaulle remained committed to furthering a diplomatic outcome. In 1967, the French Foreign Ministry endorsed French civil society initiatives to explore a negotiated settlement and conveyed the result of such efforts to American negotiators. It was a fitting recognition of France’s strenuous diplomatic efforts and intermediary role that the final peace negotiations took place in Paris.

Great Britain: Restrained Support

For Great Britain, too, hanging on to its imperial position “east of Suez,” in the Persian Gulf and Malaya–Singapore, had in the aftermath of World War II been vital to its self-image as a global power and a leading actor in the Asia–Pacific theater. Not surprisingly, British officials had been sympathetic to the restoration of French colonial rule in Indochina, as any challenges to French hold on its colonies, whether from China or the United States, had the potential to aggravate the difficulties of British colonial empire in Southeast Asia. More generally, British governments saw themselves as representing Western interests in stability in East Asia against communist upheavals, and they valued continued French rule in Indochina in these terms. Most importantly, they viewed France’s hold on Indochina as critical to resuscitating a psychologically, economically, and militarily weakened partner in Europe where British strategic outlook demanded French capacity to balance a potentially resurging Germany and growing Soviet power to its east.²¹

Working with their French counterparts, British policymakers tried to blunt American hostility toward colonialism of the French variety by advancing political and economic concessions that sought to temper the sharpest edges of colonial rule (including international control); and by appealing to US strategic and economic interests that would best be served by continued French control of Indochina. Britain hence played a key role in helping to bring about the Western partnership in support for the French war against the Việt Minh, feeding a vision of Vietnamese politics that could supposedly be shaped to accommodate both Western and Vietnamese interests. With American support accomplished by 1950, “London could at last settle into the position to which it had aspired, that of benevolent but low-profile support for its close ally,” France. From the mid-1940s to mid-1950s, British governments, whether Labour or Conservative, managed to maneuver the United States into the leading role in backing French colonial rule, into “assuming the burden” of the fight while lessening that on Britain itself. “Most impressive of all,” writes Mark Lawrence, “the British government achieved that aim while preserving a significant degree of political leadership in Southeast Asia.”²²

Early diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China in 1950 and cochairmanship of the Geneva Conference in 1954 reflected London’s efforts to preserve this leadership role during a period of escalating Cold War tensions caused by the Korean War. Thanks to long-standing ties to the region, British officials understood that Asian communism was too multifaceted to lend itself to simplistic zero-sum calculations for the global Cold War balance sheet that had become the predominant paradigm in Washington. Instead, they feared Cold War logic could pull the United States and its SEATO allies into a major military conflagration. As Washington’s closest partner in the region, Britain therefore also sought to exert a moderating influence on American policy during the Korean War in 1950–3, the Điện Biên Phủ crisis in 1954, and again during the Laos Crisis in 1961–2 (which led to a reconvening of the Geneva Conference). An unenthusiastic (though ultimately loyal) SEATO participant, London backed the division of Vietnam at Geneva and later the neutralization of Laos and Cambodia. This deescalatory approach was echoed in British opposition in 1963 to American plans to bomb North Vietnam and a series of peace initiatives following the American military intervention in the spring of 1965.²³

But this was only one side of the coin of British policy. Just as it had committed considerable resources to the French fight against the Việt Minh prior to 1950, in the second half of the 1950s London was eager to support the struggling Saigon regime, especially after the communist insurgency had organized itself as the National Liberation Front (NLF) in 1960. Convinced that British success in dealing with the “Malayan Emergency” had positioned them exquisitely to help the Americans and South Vietnamese deal with the growing NLF insurgency in the RVN, British officials felt the time had come to play a more active part in Vietnam. By the end of the 1950s London shared the basic American assumption that South Vietnam could be stabilized by strengthening the capacity of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) to deal with the insurgency. In 1960–1 the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan lobbied the Kennedy administration to allow it to send an advisory mission to Vietnam. The mission served not just to aid the growing number of American military advisors in South Vietnam to find the winning formula to turn around the situation in South Vietnam. It also demonstrated that the UK was willing to do its part in fighting the Cold War and strengthen the “special relationship” with the United States, which was fraying in East Asia from disagreements over Laos. The mission was also to assuage Australia, New Zealand, and Malaya, all British Commonwealth allies that strongly supported the American anticommunist campaign. This British commitment to a military victory in South Vietnam sharply curbed its efforts after Geneva to find a diplomatic solution: in fact, as one Foreign Office official noted in 1962, “the policy which we have agreed with the Americans is to avoid international discussion on Vietnam until the military situation has been restored.”²⁴

The South Vietnamese leadership and much of the American military establishment in the RVN was at first staunchly opposed to a British Advisory Mission (BRIAM). With support from the US State Department, London was finally, in the spring of 1961, able to gain the Kennedy administration’s approval for its new role in Vietnam. In September a five-man counterinsurgency mission under Robert Thompson, Malaya’s permanent undersecretary of defense, would give London an important observation post and new stakes in the conflict in Vietnam; in 1963 the British Advisory Mission was extended for another two years. While the American failure to stabilize the Saigon regime led some in the Foreign Office as early as 1961 to view Vietnam as “a more dangerous problem than Laos,” many British officials, including BRIAM leader Robert Thompson, were optimistic, well into 1963, about the possibility of creating a pro-Western South Vietnam.²⁵

While the Macmillan government was supportive of American policy, it did not consider Vietnam a “vital theater of the Cold War.” Shortly after de Gaulle’s August 1963 speech criticizing the failing American involvement, the prime minister noted that “with so many other troubles in the world we had better keep out of the Vietnam one.”²⁶ For officials in London, the Vietnam problem was soon overshadowed by the “Confrontation” with Indonesia, which brought the costs and fragility of the British position “east of Suez” into sharp relief. Triggered by the creation in September 1963 of the “Federation of Malaysia” (comprising Malaya, Singapore, and the island of Borneo, to whose northern half Indonesia laid claims), the low-intensity border conflict soon consumed British attention and resources. Amidst more frequent calls in Britain for giving up positions “east of Suez,” American officials worried about a dangerous power vacuum in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. In February 1964, Johnson and the Conservative prime minister Alec Douglas-Home, who had succeeded Macmillan after the latter’s resignation in October 1963, assured each other once more of their intention to oppose aggression and pledged their mutual political support for their Southeast Asia projects. Yet, as his predecessor had done, Douglas-Home evaded the Johnson administration’s mounting pressure for British troop support in Vietnam.

Prime Minister Harold Wilson, whose Labour Party narrowly won the October 1964 elections, continued British diplomatic support of Johnson’s determination to stave off defeat in Vietnam. A decade earlier, he had warned that “not a man, not a gun,” must be sent to Indochina. “We must not join with nor in any way encourage the anti-Communist crusade in Asia, whether it is under the leadership of the Americans or anyone else.”²⁷ Once settled in 10 Downing Street, though, Wilson muted his criticism of Washington, and in fact sought to make the “special relationship” with the United States the “cornerstone of his foreign policy.”²⁸ Under American pressure, the British government stymied French and Soviet efforts in November–December to convene another Geneva conference to discuss the neutralization of Cambodia (which would have raised the prospect of a similar diplomatic effort for South Vietnam – anathema to Washington). When he met with Lyndon Johnson in December 1964 on the heels of the latter’s landslide election victory, Wilson signaled his general support for the president’s Vietnam policy. Yet he refused to give in to American demands for a British military contribution in Vietnam, pushed ever more persistently by the administration as part of its “More Flags” campaign, which was to demonstrate symbolically international support for its Vietnam policy. Johnson is said to have told Wilson that “a platoon of bagpipers would be sufficient, it was the British flag that was needed.”²⁹

In evading Johnson’s request, Wilson pointed to Britain’s role as a cochair of the Geneva Conference, to the unpopularity at home of any British military contribution, and, above all, to the substantial deployment of British money and men – some 80 naval vessels in the area and (at the peak) some 50,000 troops deployed in Borneo – in fighting the Confrontation. With the Americans increasingly concerned about Britain maintaining a presence “east of Suez,” the latter argument was particularly powerful. Wilson would hold to this line – steadfast refusal to commit British troops to Vietnam while providing firm diplomatic support – throughout the American military escalation in 1965–6 when such US demands reached a fever pitch. Matthew Jones has argued that by “closing down the option of a more active British involvement in … Vietnam during 1964–1965, Indonesian policy … may have saved Britain from a far more costly exercise … in the jungles of Southeast Asia.”³⁰

Wilson’s initial positive encounter with Johnson may have led him to believe he had more sway that he in fact did. When he grew concerned by the dramatic escalation of the conflict in early 1965 in the aftermath of the Pleiku attack, Wilson called Johnson, offering to visit Washington for consultations. Concerned that the visit would lend publicity to his own growing military involvement in Vietnam, LBJ angrily rejected the proposal, telling Wilson that “I won’t tell you how to run Malaysia and you don’t tell us how to run Vietnam.”³¹ As Logevall has argued, Johnson was by then too committed to escalation and military victory to listen, not to speak of seriously engaging with British cautions.³² Wilson’s persistent refusal to send British troops to Vietnam notwithstanding, the British government continued to lend public support to the American war effort. This was not empty rhetoric, as John Young has pointed out: British support included considerable overt and covert assistance, ranging from educational, agricultural, and technical aid to Saigon to arms sales, the training of South Vietnamese troops, and the availability of ports and airfields in Hong Kong and Thailand for US military use, freeing up US military capacity to devote to the war effort. After the BRIAM was withdrawn in 1965, British police advisors supported the RVN’s civil police. The British government also provided human and signals intelligence through its consulate in Hanoi and the monitoring of military and diplomatic communications through Hong Kong. A number of British soldiers and Special Forces members joined the war privately (by serving in the Australian and New Zealand forces deployed in Vietnam).³³

Wilson’s balancing act in the Vietnam War took place against Britain’s shrinking economic wealth and growing dependence on the United States, a process at play since the end of World War II, now aggravated by the conflict in Southeast Asia. The Confrontation deepened a sense on the part of many Britons – foreign policy elites and public alike – that the country had been overextended as a global power.³⁴ Chronic balance-of-payments deficits (since the late 1950s) weakened the British pound, the second reserve currency for the international monetary system. Recurring “sterling crises” beginning in late 1964 would lead Wilson – much to the Americans’ consternation – to contemplate the devaluation of the pound and to seek substantial reductions in defense spending.

Perhaps the most controversial question regarding Wilson’s support for LBJ’s Vietnam policy is what Young has framed as the possibility of a “Hessian Option”: a deal in the summer of 1965 by which the Americans helped to stabilize sterling in return for the British government’s commitment to more stringent economic policies, to maintenance of its bases “east of Suez” and support in Vietnam. Such a “mercenary deal” might have been advocated by some within the Johnson administration, especially Johnson’s national security advisor McGeorge Bundy, as the administration went to rescue the pound through a large international credit. But, as Thomas Schwartz has argued, “although the Americans insinuated a general link between their support for sterling and British defense policies, they stayed away from any direct connection to Vietnam.”³⁵ In fact, after the Confrontation was called off in 1966, Wilson followed through on deliberations to plan for an accelerated military withdrawal from Malaysia and Singapore. Despite continued American reservations, Wilson also went through with his decision in 1967 to devalue the pound in an effort to strengthen Britain’s trade balance.

Despite his public support, privately Wilson grew more skeptical of the American war in Vietnam, eventually harboring grave doubts about US capacity to achieve military victory. Wilson worried that the war posed a “real danger of the moral authority of the United States diminishing very sharply.”³⁶ Even Wilson’s public support was not without limits: he had his foreign secretary Michael Stewart seek an apology after the Americans announced the use of poison gas in Vietnam in March 1965. A year later, in June 1966, Wilson officially “dissociated” himself from the broadening of the systematic bombing campaign to include oil installations around North Vietnam’s population centers in Hanoi and Hải Phòng, Wilson’s only public break with the Johnson administration over Vietnam.³⁷ The American escalation in Vietnam in early 1965 led Wilson to give greater thought and energy to various mediation efforts: the Commonwealth Peace Mission in June 1965, the Harold Davies Peace Mission, and the “Sunflower talks” initiative in 1967.³⁸ Not only would any successfully negotiated settlement in Vietnam lessen the risks of being dragged into a war with China, it would also allow the British prime minister to reassert British international leadership. Wilson’s repeated efforts to mediate peace talks as an “honest broker” fell flat, however, hampered either by his closeness to the Johnson administration or by a lack of coordination with Washington (even when, as was the case in late 1967, Johnson solicited Wilson’s help). The British prime minister seems to have continually overestimated his ability to serve as an effective go-between with the Soviet government. Wilson’s various peace feelers failed to produce an early, negotiated end to the war.

Scholars have debated to what extent domestic political calculations motivated Wilson’s mediation efforts: such efforts would appease the growing number of Vietnam critics on the backbenches of the Labour Party which, by the mid-1960s, still held on to the idea of an independent, even internationalist foreign policy, with sections of the party remaining wedded to the notion of the UK as a “third force” in the Cold War system.³⁹ William Warbey, Labour MP for Ashfield, had pressed Conservative ministers in the House of Commons on the Vietnam issue as early as March 1955. When, following Operation Flaming Dart, the retaliatory airstrikes in response to the Vietnamese attack on the American air base at Pleiku, Foreign Secretary Stewart rejected calls to reconvene the Geneva Conference, some fifty Labour MPs demanded that the British government secure a ceasefire and political settlement in Vietnam. Later that month Wilson issued a statement that his government had been “actively engaged in diplomatic consultations of a confidential nature,” the results of which would be prejudiced by any “premature public announcement.” Hints at secret diplomatic efforts “became one of Harold Wilson’s key pieces of armour against attack” by his critics, including those within his party and cabinet.⁴⁰

A substantial number of Britons supported the US war in Vietnam in the early 1960s, but public attitudes shifted in the wake of the US escalation: in April 1965, Gallup polls found that for the first time a majority of the public disapproved of American actions in Vietnam (though other polls suggested continued support). US escalation also catalyzed the rather scattered antiwar protests, many of which built on the activities of existing peace and disarmament groups, such as the communist-leaning British Vietnam Committee (BVC) and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), known for its nonviolent protest marches. In May 1965, leftwing activists launched the British Council for Peace in Vietnam (BCPV) which was to play a central role in transforming the protests into a coordinated movement. An umbrella organization for some twenty-nine religious, labor, and political anti–Vietnam War groups, the BCPV advocated for peace in Vietnam on the basis of the 1954 Geneva Agreements and called on the Wilson government to dissociate itself from the American war, focusing in particular on its growing humanitarian and moral costs. “Once BCPV members realised that the war was not going to end quickly, they adopted a formal constitution, a council with officers, held regular meetings, circulated a news bulletin, established working groups and local subgroups, and planned a range of fundraising and protest activities to ensure the British and American governments were aware of the growing dissent and to further encourage that dissent, including teach-ins, torchlight processions, an on-going vigil at the US Embassy, pageants, and a ‘knock on a million doors’ campaign to get protest signatures.”⁴¹ In July 1967 the BCPV organized a 7,000-strong rally in Trafalgar Square, indicating a level of mass discontent with Wilson’s Vietnam policy.

Dissatisfied with the more traditional BCPV campaigning, more radical activists founded a new and influential antiwar group in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) in January 1966. Partly sponsored by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and formed by the Trotskyist International Marxist Group, the VSC sought to mobilize support for an NLF victory. In its heyday, the VSC organized two major demonstrations in Grosvenor Square: Some 10,000–25,000 protestors gathered under its auspices on March 17, 1968. An even larger rally counting more than 100,000 demonstrators on October 27, 1968, seared itself into public memory with its dramatic television coverage of the ensuing violence. By now, British protests had become part of a transnational worldwide anti–Vietnam War movement: demonstrations in London, for example, had accompanied the October 1967 march on the Pentagon. The site of the first session of the International War Crimes Tribunal in November 1966, which had been established at the initiative of prominent polymath and pacifist Bertrand Russell, London came to be seen as a “major centre of global opposition” to the Vietnam War.⁴²

Despite widespread moral unease with US warfare in Vietnam, the British antiwar movement failed to shift public attitudes effectively against the war; polls of critical attitudes consistently peaked barely past the 50 percent mark and waned in the later years of the war. With public opinion on the war at an equilibrium, the most formidable opposition to Wilson’s policies arose within the cabinet and among Labour MPs. Labour MP Michael Foot later remembered the “blaze of anger” about Vietnam that “swept through the Parliamentary Labour Party” after the beginning of the sustained bombing of North Vietnam and early revelations of US napalm use. Labour and Liberal MPs soon became involved in the antiwar movement. Dissent about Wilson’s public support of the Johnson administration’s military intervention gained strength on Labour’s backbenches, especially after the party’s gain of some ninety-six seats in the March 1966 elections freed intra-party critics from risking government defeat in Parliament. More moderate Labour MPs joined the party’s left wing in pushing the government to actively pursue an end to the war. Vietnam featured prominently in foreign affairs debates in the House in June and July 1965; more than 300 questions were asked in the House over the course of the war.⁴³

Yet to what extent the intra-party opposition affected Wilson’s Vietnam policy, even the extent to which it dominated cabinet meetings, remains controversial. At no time did the majority of Labour MPs split with Wilson over his support of the US involvement in Vietnam, despite strong opposition within Labour’s traditional power base among trade unionists. According to Young, Vietnam did not play a major role in cabinet meetings either, and “few ministers were prepared to press their opposition very far.” While his critics at Labour’s annual party conventions in 1966 and 1967 voted down several of Wilson’s foreign policy stances, including Vietnam, these resolutions tended to affect the government only marginally. With “compromise and manipulation,” Wilson effectively managed his critics at the more important meetings of the Parliamentary Labour Party whose members, for all their criticism over Vietnam, did not want to see Wilson ousted.⁴⁴

Caught between alliance loyalties and economic dependencies, and increasingly critical attitudes within the Labour Party and the British public, Wilson charted a middle course on Vietnam – broad but not unlimited public support for Johnson while refusing to send British troops into the fight and pursuing a variety of peace initiatives. With Johnson’s March 31, 1968, announcement not to seek reelection and to limit Rolling Thunder bombing, Wilson’s active role on Vietnam came to an end. Traditionally more favorably disposed to United States involvement in Vietnam, the Conservative government of Edward Heath (1970–4) continued to lend verbal support to President Richard Nixon’s Vietnam policies, “cautioning against an early withdrawal from Vietnam.”⁴⁵

West Germany: Strategic Support

While British prime minister Wilson publicly supported Johnson’s Vietnam War out of broader alliance calculations, West German chancellor Ludwig Erhard embraced the American stake in Vietnam as intrinsically related to his country’s most vital security interests. “Viet-Nam was important to most Germans because they regarded it as a kind of testing ground as to how firmly the US honors its commitments. In that respect, there existed a parallel between Saigon and Berlin,” Erhard told Johnson in June 1965.⁴⁶ For Erhard the US intervention in support of South Vietnam was both imperative and reassuring: if Washington was ready to defend Saigon, it would do so for West Berlin, the strategically embattled Western outpost in Europe’s central Cold War battleground.⁴⁷ To many Germans Vietnam therefore initially stood as a symbol of American commitment to its allies. It would, however, not take long before Vietnam became a metaphor for the opposite: the weakening credibility of US defense commitments to Europe.

For Erhard, as for many Germans, the Saigon–Berlin analogy captured more deeply held convictions. As recent ideological arrivals in the “Free West,” Wilfried Mausbach has argued, Germans had “internalized the bipolar certainties of the East–West conflict” and viewed decolonization, including the developments in Indochina, through a Cold War lens. Unlike the French and British, who employed the Cold War frame to engage the United States in Indochina in the early 1950s, then came to question the extent to which Cold War analogies applied to the conflict, Germans embraced Vietnam within the dualistic framework of the Cold War. “No country was more closely attached to Vietnam than Germany,” Erhard told Johnson, “even if it lay far away geographically.”⁴⁸ In several interviews in the wake of his June 1965 meetings in Washington, the chancellor made clear that he had embraced as his own Washington’s “domino theory” arguments in favor of holding the South Vietnam “outpost”: otherwise “a communist bridge could reach from the Chinese mainland all the way to Australia.”⁴⁹

Beyond the Cold War optic, for Erhard support of the allies’ intervention in Vietnam was grounded in a “moral imperative”: in a letter to Johnson in May 1965, the West German leader reassured LBJ that it was simply impossible for the Federal Republic to refuse its moral support to the United States anywhere in the world. He particularly appreciated, Erhard confided to Johnson, that the American president’s stance was grounded in moral responsibility.⁵⁰ Despite growing objections at home to US escalation in Vietnam, Erhard avoided any public criticism of the Johnson administration, arguing that it did not behoove Germans to act as “teachers of morality in world affairs.” On the contrary, the chancellor continued to insist publicly on maintaining “solidarity in spirit” with the American effort in Vietnam.⁵¹

To be sure, there was also an instrumental nature to Erhard’s outspoken political support for Washington on Vietnam: it was part of his determined effort to restore close ties with the United States.⁵² His predecessor, Konrad Adenauer, who had steered the Federal Republic’s integration with the West under American leadership since 1949, had by the early 1960s become vocally skeptical of the US war in Vietnam (telling visitors “Vietnam was a disaster”)⁵³ and had come to support de Gaulle in his conflict with Washington. Once he succeeded Adenauer in October 1963, Erhard prioritized restoring close West German–American relations, convinced that the United States was vital to the Federal Republic’s security, national reunification, and identity: “Without the US,” Erhard told Secretary of State Rusk shortly after he took office, “Germany would be lost.” Reassuring the Americans of his support for their objectives in Vietnam was part of his goodwill offensive. Within days of his election to the chancellorship, Erhard stepped forward to recognize the newly installed military junta that had taken power in Saigon. In the volatile days after the bloody coup against Diệm that it had helped engineer, the Kennedy administration was eager to see Bonn spearhead efforts to shore up international support for the regime of General Dương Vӑn Minh. Internally, the German officials harbored reservations about the new South Vietnamese regime and misgivings about its long-term stability. Nonetheless, Bonn opted for immediate recognition and, in another sign of support, extended DM 15 million in credit to South Vietnam the following month.⁵⁴ Meeting Johnson in June 1964, Erhard assured LBJ that “Germany stood ready to do all that could be done economically, politically and financially.”⁵⁵

American demands for German military support in Vietnam increased as the Johnson administration set course for an all-out military intervention. In the context of the More Flags initiative, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara pressed the Erhard government in May 1964 to deploy a field hospital to Vietnam. In December 1965, Johnson confronted Erhard personally over the lagging German deployment, insisting that the chancellor could get “two battalions” to Vietnam: “If we are going to be partners, we better find out right now.”⁵⁶ (Later requests called for a German “construction battalion.”) For all his vocal support of US efforts to maintain South Vietnam as a bulwark of the “Free World” in Southeast Asia, deploying Bundeswehr soldiers of any kind was a bridge too far even for Erhard. The chancellor stated in May 1964 that it was “out of the question that a single German soldier will touch the ground there.”⁵⁷ The chancellor’s rejection of repeated US demands for German troop deployments in Vietnam reflected a basic consensus among West German leaders – and within the German public – that for historical reasons the Bundeswehr should not be deployed outside NATO. According to polls, some 88 percent of West Germans rejected sending German troops to Vietnam.⁵⁸

In addition, military aid of any kind had become a sensitive issue for West Germans. In early 1965 leaks about secret West German arms deliveries to Israel had led to a spectacular diplomatic defeat by the Federal Republic when in response to the revelations Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser invited East German leader Walter Ulbricht for a friendship visit, undermining West Germany’s long-standing diplomatic boycott of the East German regime, then threatened Bonn with a diplomatic break imposed by Arab countries, causing the federal cabinet to resolve to abstain from further arms deliveries in crisis regions. Faced with outrage from the Israelis and Americans, Erhard opted to recognize Israel, leading in turn to a break in relations with the Arab world. This abysmal experience led the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) parliamentary group, Rainer Barzel, to declare at a party convention in April 1965 that a German response to demands for military aid must derive “from the situation of our country, from our history with its burden, from our division with its repercussions and from our political goals, self-determination of all Germans.” In light of the debacle in the Middle East, German military aid to Vietnam seemed even less desirable.⁵⁹

With his strident use of the Saigon–Berlin analogy and verbal support of Johnson’s Vietnam policy, Erhard occupied a hardline position within the governing party. Many of his fellow party officials worried about weakened US leadership in Europe because of the Southeast Asian entanglements. A swelling number of foreign policy officials grew increasingly doubtful that the Americans would succeed militarily in Vietnam. Christian Social Union leader Franz Josef Strauss declared as early as November 1964 that he no longer considered a military victory in Vietnam possible, leaving a political solution as the only resort. Growing skepticism even within the Atlanticist faction of the CDU about the real situation in Vietnam was evident when no less than the German foreign minister Gerhard Schröder noted at a NATO meeting in the aftermath of the US intervention in the Dominican Republic in April 1965 that he trusted that the Johnson administration had solid information on the civil war there and that the measures taken were “justified by the actual circumstances.”⁶⁰

By contrast, by 1965 the oppositional Social Democratic Party (SPD) had shed its early ambivalence toward the United States to embrace close ties with Washington and therefore seemed bent on outdoing the Erhard government on Vietnam. Willy Brandt, West Berlin’s lord mayor who had become the SPD leader, was among the first to confront the issue when, during the Berlin Crisis in 1961, Rusk had queried him about parallels between Berlin and Southeast Asia (though the focus then was on Laos). For Brandt, criticizing the West’s foremost protective power in divided Berlin over its growing involvement in Vietnam was out of the question. For several years he remained silent on the Vietnam War. Like Erhard, Brandt felt that Germans could not claim to be “teachers of world politics.”⁶¹ He knew little about Vietnam, in what amounted to cognitive blinders – “an inner thought taboo,” as he put it in retrospect.⁶² Other leading SPD foreign policy lights such as Helmut Schmidt and Fritz Erler shared his attitude at the time. Schmidt held that “indirectly vital interests of the remaining NATO partners were at stake” in India, Southeast Asia, and the Far East; the Europeans had to show understanding of this larger context of US foreign policy. Beneath the surface of seemingly limitless verbal support for the United States’ Vietnam intervention, however, the SPD leaders harbored concerns about the growing escalation of the conflict and therefore welcomed Johnson’s “Peace without Conquest” speech in April 1965. After meeting with Johnson and Rusk later that month, Brandt and Erler publicly expressed their “moral support for President Johnson’s firmness and determination to bring about peace with freedom in Southeast Asia.”⁶³

Bonn’s only tangible “deployment” to Vietnam came in the spring and summer of 1966 when the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) finally authorized and dispatched a Red Cross (not Bundeswehr) hospital ship, the SS Helgoland, complete with crew, to aid the civilian population, calling port in Saigon and Đà Nẵng. Given growing doubts about the viability of the South Vietnamese regime, Bonn emphasized the humanitarian nature of its aid to the RVN. It also viewed “quiet” economic aid to South Vietnam as a more appropriate and effective contribution, part of a broader foreign policy strategy of leveraging the Federal Republic’s growing economic might.⁶⁴ FRG officials were thus far more receptive to American requests in 1965 for support for a Southeast Asian Development Bank, though they pledged far less than the Johnson administration had hoped for. West Germany did extend multimillion-dollar credits to the RVN (including for the delivery of a modern slaughterhouse), eventually supplying assistance averaging $7.5 million annually between 1967 and 1973.⁶⁵

Far more important than direct aid to Vietnam were German efforts to use its economic prowess to mitigate against the repercussions from the growing American military engagement in Southeast Asia for US troop presence in Germany. American demands for greater shares by its European allies in shouldering the burden of fighting the Cold War had beset transatlantic relations since US balance-of-payments deficits had opened up in the late 1950s. US military commitments in Europe had contributed significantly to ballooning deficits and the drain on US gold reserves, and both President Dwight D. Eisenhower and President Kennedy had been frustrated by what they viewed as lackluster contributions by their NATO allies. In 1961 the Federal Republic had agreed to offset US outlays for the American troop presence in Germany by procuring American-made weaponry, essentially recycling the troop dollars streaming into Germany. The “offset agreement” had helped to stabilize the US troop presence in Germany and spared the Federal Republic from initial US troop reductions implemented elsewhere in Europe.

As the deepening engagement in Vietnam aggravated the budgetary shortfalls for the Johnson administration, West German offset payments took on a more important role. Johnson had reminded Erhard of the significance of the West German defense procurement as early as the latter’s first visit to LBJ’s Texas ranch in December 1963. Erhard had assured the president in turn that Germany would continue the current practice through 1967. During the rapid expansion of the Bundeswehr, transatlantic agreement on these offset purchases had posed few problems. But, as the Bundeswehr buildup subsided by the early 1960s, the German side found placing military contracts in the United States more difficult, in part because US offerings were driven by the US defense industry’s export priorities, not German needs. Compounding the problem was the onset of the first major postwar recession in the Federal Republic in late 1964, forcing Erhard, the father of Germany’s postwar “economic miracle,” to cut government spending. Erhard assured the irritated US president in December 1965 that he would honor the commitments but would need to balance his budget first. By mid-1966, German purchases for the US military equipment lagged considerably behind schedule for the 1965–7 agreement. With LBJ questioning German alliance obligations, in May 1966 Defense Secretary McNamara insisted that the existing agreement be fulfilled and negotiations for a new agreement commence without delay, threatening the withdrawal of portions of 7th Army from Germany.⁶⁶

The Vietnam War aggravated other foreign policy dilemmas for Erhard as well. In the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Washington began to search for some kind of détente with the Soviet Union, worrying Bonn officials that German security interests would become less of a priority. The growing military involvement of the United States in Vietnam pushed American initiatives in Europe, including the Multilateral Force (MLF) agreement (envisioned as a way for Germany to participate in NATO’s nuclear decision-making)⁶⁷ and the German unity question, further to the political backburner. By heightening Franco-American tensions, the conflict in Vietnam also complicated the tightrope that Erhard was trying to walk between maintaining allegiance to Washington and preserving close relations with Paris. With China as a major factor in the war’s rationale, the Johnson administration quickly squelched efforts within the FRG’s Foreign Ministry to rethink its China policy in the months after the French recognition of the PRC. Bonn officials were intrigued by PRC foreign minister Chen Yi’s suggestion of a trade agreement that played to West German business interests and notably held out the formal inclusion of West Berlin in the pact, undermining Soviet “three-state policy” that claimed a special status for the Western half of the city. Confronted with unexpected opposition by Washington, Erhard quickly disavowed the initiative. More generally, Germany’s political class grew increasingly wary that with American focus fixed on Southeast Asia, US support for restoring Germany unity was waning, in particular that “the US at this time was ostensibly not prepared to put pressure on the Soviet Union.”⁶⁸ The United States’ Southeast Asian diversion created a “crisis of confidence” in West German–American relations but it also may have spurred new thinking among German leaders about pursuing national unity.⁶⁹

The challenge of balancing the American connection with that with France also reverberated into domestic politics, where Erhard found himself squeezed between the “Gaullist wing” of his party, led by the ever more stridently critical Adenauer, on the one hand, and the Social Democratic opposition on the other. The Johnson administration’s abandonment of the Multilateral Force project by the end of 1964 and the start of negotiations toward a nonproliferation treaty in early 1965 tended to undercut the “Atlanticist” supporters of the American alliance (and American involvement in Vietnam) within the CDU. McNamara’s “shockingly high-pressure sales techniques” in the discussion over the offset agreements created outrage within the CDU, further narrowing Erhard’s political base. In addition to supercharging key foreign policy challenges for Erhard, the Vietnam War also undermined a key pillar of his authority as he faced mounting domestic and international problems: the chancellor’s personal relationship with Johnson. A Washington trip by Erhard in September 1966, frustrated by the war’s impact on nearly every agenda item and widely panned in the German media, contributed to, and may have been the final straw in, the fall of Erhard’s government in October.⁷⁰

The Great Coalition government led by Chancellor Georg Kiesinger and Foreign Minister Willy Brandt (1966–9) and then the SPD-led government under Brandt after 1969 continued Bonn’s verbal support for US efforts in Vietnam, though more cautiously and quietly than Erhard’s, in what was internally framed as “solidarity evinced with restraint.” Attitudes within the SPD in particular were evolving: after Washington trips by Brandt and Erler in the spring of 1966 the SPD leaders – while still voicing support for Johnson – returned with a more nuanced sense of the conflict and began to reject simplistic analogies between Berlin and Vietnam. The party began to engage in a difficult balancing act to retain the US administration’s support (which was deemed to be critical for the party’s rise to power): avoiding a disavowal of its US ally while keeping the country at arm’s length. A case in point, the party leadership effectively sidelined discussion of the issue at the Dortmund Party Convention in June 1966 despite the growing resonance of the Vietnam topic among party youth and local chapters. It would take another two years before Brandt – now foreign minister of the Great Coalition – would convey his party’s concern over the war and urge the Johnson administration to seek peace. But even as chancellor (1969–74) Brandt continued to hold back public criticism of US actions. He supported US incursions into Cambodia in 1970 as a means to a “just peace,” even as he urged Washington to negotiate, and stayed silent when the Christmas bombings in December 1972 caused a new wave of criticism and protest around the globe. Much like his predecessors, Brandt justified his “painful” silence as prioritizing West German security interests, in particular the pursuit of Ostpolitik and disarmament in Europe. Only much later would Brandt concede that “in reality our loyalty to the West and our sense of the balance of power went so far that we remained silent on the Vietnamese tragedy, despite the fact that there was no lack of better knowledge and that such self-censorship came at the price of our credibility.”⁷¹

The Vietnam War increasingly permeated domestic discourse and politics in Germany. Public opinion in the Federal Republic began to shift, albeit slowly; in March 1966, polling showed that only 44 percent of West Germans still viewed the US struggle in Vietnam as defending freedom against communism, with just a quarter of those polled arguing that the United States had no right to be there. Two years later, some 60 percent of West Germans disapproved of the US military campaign in Vietnam, with some 42 percent believing that American soldiers were committing atrocities.⁷² Major antiwar demonstrations did not occur until fall of 1965. Building on the Easter March peace campaign against nuclear weapons, pacifist and humanitarian currents initially prevailed in the rather heterogeneous groups that comprised the early anti–Vietnam War protests: they focused on bringing about an early end to the fighting and a return to the 1954 Geneva Accords. By 1966, New Left groups led by the Socialist German Student League (SDS) had started to gain influence within the movement. For the SDS, the war in Vietnam became “one of the central mobilizing and radicalizing issues.”⁷³ The SDS and other more radical groups aimed not just at bringing about an end to the war (and the Federal Republic’s colluding role): many came to see themselves as part of a globally connected revolutionary alliance that viewed the Vietnam War as the product of Western cultural imperialism and considered the North Vietnamese struggle part of an international struggle against capitalism. At home, the antiwar struggle was linked to the broader agenda of the Extraparliamentary Opposition in which SDS came to play a leading role: opposition to the government’s plan to install emergency laws, a push for democratic university reforms, and a broader leftist critique of the Federal Republic’s political system.

West Berlin became the most notorious staging ground for anti–Vietnam War protests in Germany (competing with Frankfurt, home to the “Critical Theory” school that provided the intellectual foundation for New Left critique and activism). A frontline city in the Cold War, formally still under Allied rule, by the mid-1960s West Berlin pitted a fiercely anticommunist establishment and population, symbolized by the conservative Springer publishing house, against “draft dodgers seeking immunity from military conscription and radical instigators searching for an ideal stage on which to mock the pieties of Cold War anti-communism.”⁷⁴ This “extreme division of the social milieus” in West Berlin produced some of the most powerful early antiwar protests but also some of the most violent clashes. Led by the charismatic Rudi Duschke, a more radical “anti-authoritarian” faction within the SDS Berlin that would soon dominate the national SDS, it launched the so-called poster protest in February 1966, a “direct action” in the course of which they plastered some 5,000 anti–Vietnam War posters across Berlin. Posters attacked Erhard for supporting “murder through napalm bombs” and proclaimed that “taking up arms” was the only remaining option for oppressed people from Vietnam to Cuba and Congo. In Berlin as elsewhere, protests and demonstrations often aimed at United States military and cultural institutions, which were seen as representing “American imperialism.” In a pointed reversal of the Saigon–Berlin linkage employed by Erhard, the antiwar protestors now linked up in solidarity with North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front: “Every victory for the Viet Cong means a victory for our democracy.”⁷⁵ In a high point of the anti–Vietnam War activism in West Germany, the International Vietnam Congress, organized by the SDS at the Technical University of Berlin in February 1968, gathered 5,000 participants and concluded with 12,000 protestors marching through the streets of Berlin (facing a police force of 6,000 officers). The antiwar movement in the Federal Republic crested soon after. The ratification of the emergency laws in May and the beginning of the Paris Peace Talks on Vietnam, as well as incessant infighting, caused the SDS-led national movement to lose its luster as it disintegrated into various local and ideologically diverse splinter groups.

Conclusion

The United States’ European allies reacted to the Vietnam War in starkly different ways – and yet they came to agree on several fundamental assumptions: that the US intervention in Southeast Asia had the potential to endanger Western Europe’s security, that it could not be won on the battlefield, and that they would not be drawn into it militarily. In contrast to their American ally, they came to view it as a conflict that more and more defied Cold War definition. To them, the conflict increasingly risked “losing the Cold War on the domestic front”⁷⁶ as it exacerbated political tensions at home, as European publics and in particular a new generation turned against the war, and as leftist oppositions instrumentalized “Vietnam” for a more radical systemic critique. Did a growing transatlantic gap of what constituted the geopolitical and moral character of the “West” lurk behind the dissonance on Cold War logics, on the reliance on escalating military might, and on accepting the tragic humanitarian consequences of the war? In the short term, Cold War (and post–Cold War) realities in Europe, and the remarkable resiliency and transformation of the broader institutional framework of the transatlantic community, covered up, bridged, and possibly overcame the rift caused by the Vietnam War. Its long-term consequences for the transatlantic West have perhaps yet to play out.

27 International Peace Initiatives

James G. Hershberg

Could the Vietnam War have been avoided, or ended significantly earlier and at substantially lower cost, through international peace initiatives? And, aside from that question – the answer to which, of course, ultimately depended on the positions and perspectives of the American and North Vietnamese leaderships – what did the peace initiatives reveal about the Vietnam War’s interrelationship with other major aspects of the international scene at the time, such as the Sino-Soviet split, the Cold War, and US domestic politics?

This chapter centers on a crucial three-year span, from early 1965, when the administration of Lyndon Johnson massively escalated American military involvement in Vietnam, through both sustained aerial bombing and expanded ground operations, to the spring of 1968, when direct discussions (not formal “negotiations” but “talks about talks”) between Hanoi and Washington finally began in Paris. During that period, the two sides – which lacked normal diplomatic ties, successive US administrations having shunned the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) after Hồ Chí Minh announced its creation in September 1945 – refused to enter ongoing direct contacts. They remained divided by divergent positions about negotiations which neatly epitomized a “Catch-22,” after Joseph Heller’s eponymous novel: the DRVN declared that it steadfastly rejected talks until the United States unilaterally, unconditionally, and/or definitively stopped bombing North Vietnam; and Washington would stop bombing only after receiving assurances that North Vietnam would negotiate promptly and productively and/or commit to reducing or ending infiltration of South Vietnam – the exact formulation fluctuated, but it was a price Hanoi deemed a prior, unacceptable “condition.”

As fighting escalated, into this breach stepped a panoply of international actors (nations, institutions, individuals, groups) that – aside from crasser motives such as fame and glory – sought to stop or limit the carnage, or at least start direct US–North Vietnam talks. Most of these hundreds of efforts – some would say all – were doomed to failure, since the combatants remained far apart, their ultimate aims intrinsically incompatible. Hanoi and Washington (and Saigon) hawks insisted that only battlefield victories could ensure accomplishment of the ends for which so much had already been sacrificed; moreover, the antagonists deeply distrusted each other, raising a barrier to compromise beyond inherent ideological, cultural, linguistic, historical, and other chasms.

Still, disagreement persists about whether a breakthrough might have been possible – if not peace itself, then at least the opening of direct, substantive, continuing US–DRVN discussions much earlier than actually occurred. A closer look, enhanced by important communist evidence released since the Cold War’s end, can also improve understanding both of the war’s dynamics and intersections with the broader international context.

For many years, perceptions of these events relied exclusively on official US accounts supplemented by press leaks – particularly a revealing 1968 account by Los Angeles Times reporters David Kraslow and Stuart H. Loory, The Secret Search for Peace in Vietnam.¹ More detail came with the declassification of much of the American record in the four negotiating volumes of The Pentagon Papers – not leaked by Daniel Ellsberg to the press in 1971, but later released in sanitized form through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA); these records informed Wallace J. Thies’s scholarly analysis and were published in 1983 with commentary by George C. Herring.² Combined with more US releases, the gradual opening of international sources – and, after the Cold War, of former Soviet bloc and Chinese archives – has enabled deeper inquiries into these episodes. Alas, North Vietnamese evidence remains lamentably incomplete, although some useful data has seeped out through limited archival openings, internal publications, and oral history interviews.³

Before examining international initiatives from 1965 to 1968, reviewing earlier attempts involving third parties to limit or resolve the Southeast Asian conflict provides useful context. During the 1946–54 Franco-Việt Minh war, when Paris sought to restore colonial rule, outside mediation played relatively little part prior to the July 1954 Geneva Accord that ended the fighting and split Vietnam into “regrouping” zones north and south of the 17th parallel. However, shortly after fighting had erupted in 1946, Hồ Chí Minh sought to enlist one powerful potential mediator: the United States. The communist–nationalist revolutionary did so despite Harry Truman’s failure to respond to multiple pleas for recognition and firm US political-economic support for France in the dual causes of rebuilding Europe and forging an anti-Soviet Western bloc. In 1947 exchanges with American diplomats in Bangkok, DRVN representatives vainly proposed that the United States broker peace contacts with France. Washington not only ignored this idea, but went on, after the communist victory in China in 1949, to actively back France’s military effort.⁴ Yet, the episode underlined an important, recurrent feature of mediation diplomacy: to open communication channels, a party desiring talks, or even cautious probing of the enemy, sometimes resorted to using ideological adversaries, not fully trusting them but valuing their comparatively intimate ties with the foe.

Geneva’s Legacies: ICC Intrigues and More

Geneva had several vital legacies for later negotiation attempts. One concerned the DRVN leaders’ mindset. Despite scoring a decisive military blow at Điện Biên Phủ, the Vietnamese communists made significant concessions at Geneva, including a demarcation line farther north than they thought warranted, partly due to Soviet and Chinese pressure. Moscow desired better ties with Paris, hoping to impede a nascent (West) European military setup, the European Defence Community (EDC); Beijing, ratifying a Korean armistice, struck a moderate pose for Zhou Enlai’s diplomatic debut. Some commanders preferred to fight on, but the Vietnamese accepted a political path toward unification. Exhausted, wanting to consolidate control over the North, fearing a US military intervention were no deal struck, the DRVN rulers were reassured by their patrons that the division was merely temporary. Embittered when the Geneva settlement hardened, the North Vietnamese concluded that they could not trust even communist allies to resolutely defend their interests; and that diplomatic pitfalls could imperil hard-won military gains.⁵

In the next war, convinced that aims not already conquered in combat could not be won “at the baize table,” Hanoi would focus on attriting and ultimately vanquishing the enemy militarily and politically. It relegated diplomacy, for the most part, to a subsidiary front, not for serious bargaining (implying mutual compromise) but to ratify gains already won. Another legacy crucial for Vietnam War diplomacy was Geneva’s creation of a body, delicately balanced between East and West, to monitor the accords’ implementation. The three-nation International Commission for Supervision and Control (i.e., International Control Commission, or ICC) comprised communist Poland, Canada, and neutral India as chair. Despite modest early successes, the ICC soon predictably deadlocked. Yet, even as fighting resumed by the decade’s end, no one wanted to pull the plug on this unique residual potential conduit between the parties. Though eventually headquartered in Saigon for logistical reasons, the ICC kept offices in Phnom Penh, Vientiane, and Hanoi, and Indian, Canadian, and Polish personnel could shuttle between the rival Vietnamese capitals (via neutral Cambodia and Laos, on dilapidated DC-3 prop planes) – a rare capability. The presence of a senior Polish diplomat (plus hundreds of troops) in Saigon was another ICC anomaly, since communist regimes shunned the Republic of Vietnam as an American lackey, instead maintaining embassies in Hanoi and fraternal contacts with the Lao Động (Vietnam Workers’ Party, VWP).⁶

In the early 1960s, the ICC provided a mechanism for diplomatic bids to cool the Cold War’s flaring Southeast Asian hot spot. In Dwight D. Eisenhower’s last years and John F. Kennedy’s first months in the White House, Laos, not Vietnam, preoccupied US officials. In spring 1961, the Geneva cochairs, the Soviets and British, summoned major participants back to the Swiss city to tackle the simmering Laotian conflict between (DRVN-backed) communist and anticommunist forces. In a rare moment of amity at their testy June 1961 Vienna summit, JFK and Nikita Khrushchev agreed to neutralize Laos. In July 1962, after a year of negotiations, the local and superpower actors – again including the United States and PRC despite the two lacking diplomatic relations – hashed out a coalition scheme formula to avoid a major war over Laos. (Washington felt it made more military and political sense to take a Southeast Asian stand against communism in Vietnam.)⁷ Fleetingly, it seemed a precedent might be set for a broader accord. Neutral Burma’s delegate even arranged a clandestine meeting between W. Averell Harriman, then assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, and North Vietnamese foreign minister Ung Vӑn Khiêm. (Harriman insisted on tight secrecy, fearful of upsetting Saigon.) The encounter opened with pleasantries (recalling FDR’s support for Vietnamese independence from France, inquiring after Hồ Chí Minh’s health) but soon devolved to charges of DRVN and American interference in Laos and Vietnam. Though Hồ Chí Minh around this time indicated (to analyst Bernard Fall) interest in a dialogue with the United States, this July 1962 conversation ended up being the highest-level US–DRVN contact until the 1968 Paris talks: Washington and Hanoi squandered a chance for an ongoing dialogue before stumbling into war.⁸

Kennedy had hoped the ICC might offer a means to deal with Vietnam and that India, which favored elections or unification, might help. But that idea faded after a dour late 1961 summit with Jawaharlal Nehru: India’s leader mutely ignored JFK’s invitation to suggest a path forward (possibly even including neutrality). Still, New Delhi, in an anticommunist mood due to its border dispute with China, voted with Canada in 1962, despite Poland’s ire, to condemn Hanoi’s support for subversion in the South; though they balanced this charge with criticism of Saigon’s military alignment with Washington, the rare ICC majority bolstered US claims that North Vietnam had stimulated the violence.⁹

With Geneva seemingly revived, Poland – which regularly consulted DRVN leaders – cautiously explored using its ICC status to mediate. During a January 1963 visit to New Delhi, in separate talks with Nehru and US ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith, Foreign Minister Adam Rapacki and aide Jerzy Michałowski (an ex-ICC delegate) promoted a Laos-like scheme to replace President Ngô Đình Diệm, neutralize South Vietnam (removing foreign, i.e., US, forces), and kick-start Hanoi–Saigon unification talks. No fan of Diệm, Galbraith liked the idea. So did the Soviets, who sensed an American desire to escape the Vietnam morass and lacked the desire of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for armed struggle. However, Hanoi balked, Washington demurred, and the matter lapsed.¹⁰

Far better known are the autumn 1963 intrigues surrounding Polish ICC commissioner Mieczysław Maneli. In September, amid tensions between Kennedy and Diệm after the Catholic-led Saigon regime’s harsh crackdown on Buddhists, and swirling, well-founded coup rumors, columnist Joseph Alsop reported that Maneli was secretly conveying messages between Ngô Đình Nhu, Diệm’s powerful brother, and Hanoi. Reports of an unusual Nhu–Maneli conversation fanned American fears that, with France’s prodding and Poland’s help, Saigon might improve ties with Hanoi, go neutral, and evict US forces. Alarmed, Washington intensified coup plotting against Diệm and Nhu to evade the supposed peril that South Vietnam might swerve toward neutralism and, inexorably, communism. (Of course, the United States might have been spared untold agony if such a deal had been cut.) After the military ousted the Ngô brothers in November, a few weeks before JFK’s own murder, the mysterious “Maneli Affair” entered Vietnam War lore.

Decades later, Polish evidence revealed that Maneli’s activities were inflated by reporters, suspicious US aides, and, perhaps, Nhu himself. Poland’s ICC man had indeed conveyed Hanoi’s interest in minor improvements in cultural, postal, and trade ties with Saigon, presumably to lure Diệm from Washington’s orbit, but was not seriously mediating, nor had Warsaw even authorized him to see Nhu. Declassified American and Polish documents also expose hidden direct contacts in Saigon between Maneli and US officials (CIA operatives?) anxious to grasp his talks with Nhu and Hanoi and open a side channel to the only senior communist diplomat in South Vietnam’s capital.¹¹

The Maneli intrigue made no discernible progress toward peace, but suggested that ICC delegates, even if unable to fulfill their nominal mandate, might be critical communications links. Such channels remained vital, given the absence of normal US–DRVN relations and the communist insurgency’s intensification, but Washington believed there was nothing to negotiate: Hanoi had no right to meddle in South Vietnam and should mind its own business – or suffer harsh consequences.

To transmit this blunt message, the ICC served well. In June and mid-August 1964, after US briefings, Canadian commissioner J. Blair Seaborn visited Hanoi, carrying an implicit threat of force and vague promises of economic aid should it desist. The formulation avoided the word “ultimatum,” but the message was clear. Courteously receiving Seaborn, Premier Phạm Vӑn Đồng still insisted on a full US pullout from South Vietnam before any settlement; on Seaborn’s second visit, Dong, angry after the Tonkin Gulf incident, declared that “aggression” could not cow Hanoi, rejected the de facto ultimatum, and forecast a communist victory. As Washington expected, the rebuff portended a military showdown. Ottawa concluded sourly that Washington had used it to threaten Hanoi rather than seek negotiations; Seaborn felt queasy at being Henry Cabot Lodge’s “messenger boy.” Seeing the exercise as futile, the Canadians flirted with ditching the ICC altogether, but gritted their teeth and awaited a more auspicious moment for diplomacy.¹²

In mid-1964, a push to reconvene Geneva went nowhere, blocked by Chinese and DRVN opposition. Still, as Washington plunged into Vietnam, the conference cochairs, the Soviets and the British, tried to restrain the burgeoning conflict – using differing means but with equal futility. The United Nations also, warily, got into the act.

The first and most controversial UN effort originated in the office of Secretary General U Thant in the summer of 1964. After (separate) summits with Khrushchev and LBJ, amid fears that Tonkin Gulf signaled a major war, the Burmese statesman quietly probed the North Vietnamese to see whether they might talk directly with American officials at a neutral site. (To transmit an “oral message,” he used a Soviet aide, who passed it to Moscow.) Not belonging to the world body, the DRVN resisted direct UN involvement, but responded positively – in deepest secrecy – to Thant’s inquiry, through the Soviet Embassy in Hanoi, expressing readiness to meet US officials.

The Johnson administration, however, responded diffidently. US ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson strongly supported starting talks, but later said privately that higher-ups told him to defer the matter until after the 1964 election. When Thant raised the idea again after LBJ had trounced Barry Goldwater, Stevenson found, to his frustration, that Washington remained uninterested, afraid that talking with Hanoi would rile Saigon, and the proposal died. The matter remained secret, an unexploded landmine, but Thant publicly hinted at his vexation in February 1965. Americans would realize that peace in Vietnam was possible, through “discussions and negotiations,” he said, if they only knew the “true facts,” but, alas, truth was war’s “first casualty.” The comment infuriated LBJ.¹³

1965: The Diplomacy of Escalation

By then, Johnson had resolved to – in the words of the famous January 27, 1965, “fork in the road” memorandum expressing the views of McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara – “force a change of Communist policy.”¹⁴ As hostilities intensified in early 1965, diplomacy took a back seat. Ottawa asked whether Seaborn might aid in communicating with Hanoi, but Washington declined.¹⁵ In February, Johnson’s decisions to bomb North Vietnam and send troops alarmed UK prime minister Harold Wilson, who tried vainly to resuscitate Geneva – to curb the violence, ensure London’s involvement, and dampen discontent in his own Labour Party. Moscow briefly mused reprising its cochair role, but Beijing and Hanoi shot the notion down. Like his predecessor Clement Attlee, who had hurried across the Atlantic in December 1950 out of fear that Truman might use the atomic bomb in Korea to counter China’s intervention, Wilson volunteered to cross the pond to see LBJ – only to be told over the phone, “with some sharpness,” to mind his own business (“we ought not to run back and forth across the Atlantic with our shirttails hanging out”).¹⁶ Pressured domestically, Wilson promoted a British Commonwealth peace initiative, which included important nonaligned countries, but it fizzled, envisioning but never actually sending a mission to Hanoi.¹⁷

Separately, in the spring of 1965, seventeen nonaligned countries, including Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, India, and Yugoslavia – but not Sukarno’s Indonesia, which vocally backed Hanoi – proposed a ceasefire and negotiations. Outside the ICC purview, New Delhi suggested stopping the violence and sending Afro-Asian troops to patrol the demilitarized zone along the 17th parallel; visiting Moscow in May, Nehru’s successor as premier, Lal Bahadur Shastri, also urged a bombing halt, irking Washington (LBJ vainly hoped India, still hostile to China, would support him in Vietnam). These plans went nowhere, but reflected and exacerbated sharp divisions in the nonaligned movement between those prone to conciliate between East and West, and others, like Sukarno, inclined toward a more militant, Maoist-style stance against imperialism, colonialism, and US “neo-colonialism.” (In 1966–7, historian Robert Rakove recounts, Washington’s refusal to unilaterally stop bombing alienated even comparatively moderate nonaligned leaders such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito, and India’s Indira Gandhi.)¹⁸

China stridently backed the Vietnamese communist armed struggle, but was not eager to clash militarily with the United States again as it had in Korea – and in April–May 1965 quietly used international diplomacy to “signal” Washington. The PRC message, conveyed most effectively through Britain (Beijing also tried to use Pakistan, Tanzania, and Indonesia), was carefully calibrated: China did not seek war, but would fight, responding asymmetrically, if the United States expanded its bombing onto Chinese territory (or, implicitly, if it invaded North Vietnam). Told of the Chinese stand, LBJ limited US escalation accordingly, and the two countries avoided repeating the Korean disaster. The evasion of another major Sino-American war, despite Washington and Beijing strongly backing rivals and China’s geographical proximity, was a rare Vietnam-related diplomatic success, an essential precondition for the impending Sino-American opening, and a striking case of enemies learning from, rather than repeating, grim history.¹⁹

Amid the escalation, Washington and Hanoi engaged in a substantive secret direct dialogue in Paris in the summer of 1965, between DRVN diplomat Mai Vӑn Bộ and retired State Department official Edmund Gullion. But Hanoi mysteriously cut short these “XYZ” exchanges (as US officials code-named them), which The Pentagon Papers dubbed a “most serious mutual effort to resolve matters of substance.” After four talks, Bộ “did not show up for an arranged fifth meeting,” for unclear reasons.²⁰

As the United States entered the Vietnam maelstrom in late 1965, two controversies over international diplomatic failures embarrassed LBJ – and foreshadowed the “credibility gap” that would increasingly dog him. In November, the previously hidden abortive U Thant initiative surfaced, when a Look magazine article by CBS commentator Eric Sevareid revealed off-the-record comments Stevenson had made shortly before he died a few months earlier. Sevareid quoted him as saying, in his “final troubled hours,” that Washington had spurned Hanoi’s offer through Thant to open direct talks before and after the 1964 elections.²¹

Stevenson’s posthumous revelations, coinciding with the bloodiest combat yet (in the Ia Đrӑng Valley), rattled LBJ. Aides scrambled to deny that Washington had blithely ignored a real overture. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who groused privately that Sevareid had “probably received a very substantial fee” and Stevenson was a “scintillating conversationalist,” especially off the record, with “a touch of Hamlet,” acknowledged to Johnson that behind the tepid response to Thant was fear the South Vietnamese would be irked if it leaked that “the US was dickering for a settlement behind the[ir] backs.”²² Officials confirmed the story’s outlines but denied politics had interfered or that Hanoi had wanted “serious” talks.²³

Decades later, after the USSR expired, Russian archival evidence found by Norwegian scholar Mari Olsen confirmed that in August 1964 Hanoi had secretly agreed to rendezvous with a US representative in a neutral country.²⁴ Whether such contacts might have led anywhere is doubtful, but Washington had no real desire to find out: Seaborn’s vain missions had sated its curiosity. The incident further poisoned dealings between the UN head and LBJ’s administration: “Thant lied like a sailor,” Rusk fumed.²⁵

The Thant–Stevenson brouhaha had barely diminished when, in mid-December, a sequel erupted, involving Italy and a recent trip to Hanoi by Florentine ex-mayor Giorgio La Pira. A flamboyant, eccentric figure who did not inspire American confidence, La Pira told the Italian government that Hồ Chí Minh had said he was “prepared to go anywhere, to meet anyone,” to negotiate peace; Rome’s foreign minister, Amintore Fanfani, duly relayed the report to Washington. After Rusk skeptically demanded evidence of Hanoi’s “real willingness for unconditional negotiations,” Fanfani tried to clarify Hồ Chí Minh’s position – but before getting a reply Washington bombed a power plant near Hải Phòng (the first major DRVN industrial target hit since the war began) and, after a garbled newspaper account, released secret Rusk–Fanfani correspondence. When Hanoi denounced the “peace hoax” as “sheer, groundless fabrication,” US aides cited the comment as proof no opportunity was missed, but critics called it a predictable response to the bombing spike, perhaps gauged to reassure Beijing; Fanfani stewed.²⁶

LBJ’s 37-Day Bombing “Pause,” 1965–1966

On the defensive, pressured to show his earnestness in seeking negotiations, LBJ in late December suspended bombing North Vietnam – a “pause” that would last thirty-seven days, until January 31, 1966 – and dispatched emissaries around the globe to explain US peace conditions, which Rusk publicly defined in fourteen points (a Wilsonian touch). Johnson fully anticipated the North Vietnamese would reject those terms, thereby justifying more escalation – “knocking Hell out of ’em” after he had “walked the last mile” for peace. Kraslow and Loory likened the frenetic “peace offensive” to a Texas hill country “fandangle,” more boisterous entertainment than serious diplomacy.²⁷

Aside from a polite exchange of aides-mémoires between US and North Vietnamese diplomats in Rangoon (code-named PINTA), American officials took most seriously a covert endeavor to transmit US positions to Hanoi via communist Hungary. After Rusk spoke with Budapest’s top diplomat in Washington, Hungary, after duly consulting Moscow, promptly informed North Vietnam through its Hanoi embassy – but then delayed relaying the DRVN’s negative reply, received in early January, hoping to extend the US bombing “pause” as long as possible.²⁸

Though less appreciated at the time, communist sources disclose that a different Warsaw Pact nation, Poland, made a more senior, personal approach to Hanoi to relay US terms and even advocate, fraternally, entering direct negotiations. A late December stop in Warsaw by LBJ envoy Averell Harriman (who would then see Tito and Nasser, among others) prompted the Polish gambit. In a “stormy” encounter with Harriman, Poland’s communist leader, Władysław Gomułka, excoriated US conduct – “You are behaving like bandits” – but authorized cooperation. Secretly, his foreign minister, Rapacki, sent Michałowski to hand-carry the US proposals to Hanoi. His communist odyssey (which Warsaw code-named Operation Lumbago after the ailment Michałowski faked to explain his absence) illuminated complex connections between sharpening Sino-Soviet tensions and the Vietnam War. Stopping in Moscow, he obtained Soviet foreign minister Andrey Gromyko’s wary approval for his journey but, when the Pole reached Beijing, the Chinese blasted his mission (privately and even more nastily, though not by name, in public). Unimpressed by Michałowski’s contention that Poland’s “duty” was to relay the US message to Hanoi, the Chinese denounced anyone aiding Washington’s “debauched activities,” “lies and deceits,” and “blackmail.” Worse, they stalled Michałowski in south China (on the pretext of US bombing in northern North Vietnam) to leap-frog their own man to Hanoi to (the Pole recalled) “get ahead of my mission to prepare the grounds for its rejection.” “God damn those Chinese,” he grumbled on returning to Warsaw.²⁹

The North Vietnamese needed little convincing, having just secretly ratified a decision to press for military victory.³⁰ After enduring a stern, Chinese-style lecture from DRVN foreign minister Nguyễn Duy Trinh, Michałowski was warmly received by Phạm Vӑn Đồng, who nevertheless rejected the US proposal to talk even when the Pole said this would be a “political failure,” incomprehensible even to progressives and communists around the world. Yet Hồ Chí Minh himself – still DRVN president and symbol of Vietnam’s revolution, even as party head Lê Duẩn increasingly controlled day-to-day decisions in Hanoi – rebuffed the Pole’s appeals most stridently. “Ho growing old, obstinate, sermonizing, unrealistic,” Michałowski cabled Warsaw after their talk, contrasting Đồng’s thoughtfulness with the 75-year-old Hồ Chí Minh’s rigid insistence on inevitable military victory.³¹ Internal Vietnamese records confirm Hồ Chí Minh’s brusque dismissal of the Pole’s arguments and single-minded determination to evict the foreign invader:

Why must the Americans go sticking [their] nose in others’ business? The American government has sent their military forces here and now they must stop the invasion. That’s all they need to do to resolve the problem. The Americans must piss off [cút đi]! No matter what we may suffer, the Americans must piss off! They must stop the invasion. Johnson’s mouth says “peace” but his hand gives the order to mobilize troops. We are not rejecting anything. But our people must have peace and stability. We don’t want to become the victors; we just want the Americans to piss off! Goodbye! [Gút bai!]³²

The Soviets also sent a mission to Hanoi in January 1966, headed by ex-KGB head Aleksandr Shelepin, but, sensing the prevailing Beijing-friendly hard line, did not pressure the Vietnamese toward negotiations. As Gromyko explained secretly to his Polish and Hungarian counterparts in late January, “The American proposals have honest elements to them, and they are looking for a way out, but for us the last word is with our Vietnamese comrades.” Moscow likewise refused to deliver US messages when Soviet premier Aleksey Kosygin saw Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey in mid-January at Indian prime minister Shastri’s funeral in New Delhi.

The predictable failure of the ballyhooed “pause” augured ferocious military escalation in 1966. Washington doubled its troop deployment to almost 400,000 and, in June, loosened restrictions on bombing North Vietnamese targets, including near Hanoi; casualties, both US and Vietnamese, correspondingly soared. With the war dominating the global agenda, international diplomacy persisted. In March and June 1966, in the modestly code-named Operation Smallbridge, Canada sent a new emissary to Hanoi: former envoy to China and India Chester A. Ronning. Phạm Vӑn Đồng received the “old Asia hand” politely, and Ronning (and Ottawa’s ICC delegate, Victor C. Moore) reported hints of DRVN flexibility on talks, but Washington rebuffed Canada’s pleas to respond positively, reinforcing its cynicism and resentment. “I hope you Americans are not escalating to a new peace offensive,” Moore wryly told the US ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge.³³

Marigold, 1966: A Chance for Peace – Or at Least Direct Talks?

Lodge, the former Republican senator, UN ambassador, and vice presidential candidate who had also been JFK’s man in Saigon, soon became enmeshed in perhaps the war’s most serious, tantalizing, and controversial international peace initiative: the Polish–Italian channel that Washington dubbed “Marigold.” In late June 1966, Lodge received an excited urgent summons from his friend, Italian ambassador Giovanni D’Orlandi, to secretly rendezvous at his apartment with Polish ICC commissioner Janusz Lewandowski. Based on a recent trip to Hanoi (and talk with Phạm Vӑn Đồng), Lewandowski described surprisingly moderate DRVN stands, including a willingness to tolerate a separate, noncommunist South Vietnam for a prolonged period before eventual national unification, and an apparent readiness to negotiate. Hearing the report, LBJ called it “the most realistic, the most convincing, the most persuasive peace feeler I’ve had since I’ve been president.” On instructions, Lodge sent some probing queries northward in a meeting with the Pole (and Italian) on July 9 but, as it awaited Hanoi’s reply, Washington began bombing of “POL” (petroleum, oil, and lubricants) sites around Hanoi and Hải Phòng – and the North Vietnamese angrily told the Poles to sever the exchanges with the Americans, which Lewandowski did, to a deflated Lodge (and D’Orlandi), on July 24.³⁴

So ended Marigold’s first act; its second, more serious phase occurred in the fall amid intensifying fighting, and after initiatives involving Poland’s Warsaw Pact comrades Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary sputtered.³⁵ At Italian urging, US officials had Lodge give Lewandowski in mid-November slightly softened American terms, including the so-called Phase A/Phase B gimmick for starting negotiations (Washington would stop bombing North Vietnam, seemingly unconditionally, but actually in exchange for mutually pre-agreed DRVN compensation) and potential toleration of a neutral South Vietnam. The Pole then went to Hanoi, and returned a fortnight later with the stunning news, delivered to Lodge on December 1 in another tryst at D’Orlandi’s, that if the Americans really adhered to the stands Lewandowski described (reduced to ten discrete points) they could confirm them officially to Hanoi’s ambassador in Warsaw; implicitly, the Pole’s distillation of the US position could undergird peace talks.³⁶

For a few days, to the handful of informed US, Polish, and Italian officials, a breakthrough seemed imminent: the opening of direct US–North Vietnamese conversations as early as December 6, based on mutually accepted outlines of a settlement. Then, after a week or so of limbo (and near-daily maneuvering between Rapacki and the US ambassador in Warsaw, John A. Gronouski), the effort collapsed, for reasons the two sides would angrily dispute, first secretly to each other, then in mutual leaking (to the pope, U Thant, and various governments, then reporters), later in historical arguments. Warsaw would claim that Washington ruined an authentic, promising peace prospect by bombing the Hanoi area for the first time in five months, despite repeated Polish warnings, on December 2, 4, and 13–14, trying to coerce the North Vietnamese to the table. Conversely, Johnson administration officials would contend that no real chance of peace ever existed; there was no evidence Hanoi ever even authorized the Poles to arrange direct talks; and the whole business was communist disinformation, scripted by Poland or the KGB.³⁷

The dispute sank into history, unresolved. In 1983, commenting on the (sanitized) Pentagon Papers record of Marigold, the “most intriguing” and “most controversial” of all Vietnam peace efforts, Herring doubted the truth would ever be determined.³⁸ The Cold War’s end, however, offered an unprecedented opportunity to probe the story’s communist side. The present author investigated the case for more than a decade, using new Polish, Vietnamese, Soviet, Italian, Chinese, and other sources, culminating with the publication of Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam (2012).

Marigold conclusively resolved the initiative’s main mystery: did North Vietnam, in fact, authorize Poland to arrange direct US–DRVN exchanges in Warsaw, to confirm American adherence to the terms Lodge gave in Saigon to Lewandowski, which he then delivered to Hanoi? New Polish and Vietnamese evidence authoritatively established that Hanoi had done so (as Phạm Vӑn Đồng told Lewandowski on November 25 and 28 after reportedly stormy VWP Politburo meetings), and contrary to Johnson administration insinuations that Rapacki or Moscow had contrived the “breakthrough” as disinformation, to entice Washington into a bombing halt and expose its negotiating posture.³⁹ Moreover, evidently authentically interested, Hanoi secretly sent a courier to Warsaw bearing instructions for DRVN ambassador Đỗ Phát Quang and to interpret the talks with his US counterpart, Gronouski.⁴⁰

However, disagreement persists on the “so what?” question. If United States–DRVN discussions in Warsaw had started in December 1966, might they have helped end the war sooner? Did DRVN leaders take the initiative seriously? Scholarly reactions to Marigold’s evidence, and arguments that Hanoi was serious and the initiative a genuine “lost” chance for progress (direct talks, if not actual peace), have varied. Some experts seem convinced the initiative’s failure may have been a significant squandered opportunity; others, including several fluent in Vietnamese sources, remain skeptical, stressing that both Hanoi and Washington hawks remained intent on military victory.⁴¹ More conclusive answers await the opening of still-closed Vietnamese archival evidence, especially VWP Politburo records, DRVN Foreign Ministry–Warsaw embassy communications, and Foreign Minister Trinh’s report on the affair.

Whether or not Marigold could have yielded progress, its failure, worse than a nonevent, seriously damaged any slim prospects for real negotiations. Each side blamed the other for acting in bad faith. Even if some in Hanoi, such as Đồng, had flirted with direct talks to explore allowing US troops to leave Vietnam “on a red carpet” – the better to reduce the costs of ultimately unifying the country under Northern, communist control, a sort of DRVN analogue to the “decent interval” concept attributed later to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger – the US bombing of Hanoi on the eve of scheduled bilateral talks seemed to vindicate hardline opponents’ decision not to meet in Warsaw; they could now say “I told you so” and push for renewed stress on the military and political fronts in South Vietnam even while launching a “diplomatic offensive” within the “fighting while negotiating” framework (as refined in resolutions at the 13th VWP Central Committee Plenum in late January).⁴²

When Marigold collapsed, the Johnson administration turned, in January 1967, to another international actor to probe Hanoi: France. Since Charles de Gaulle condemned the US intervention in Vietnam, Washington hoped to enlist the help of former French Indochina colonial administrator Jean Sainteny, who was friendly with Vietnamese communist leaders. After his last visit to Hanoi, in July 1966, Sainteny had discreetly passed word that the DRVN would not try captured US pilots as war criminals, a prospect that had alarmed Washington. His potential utility as a conduit had been underlined in September when he told Kissinger, then a Harvard professor, that Phạm Vӑn Đồng had indicated that North Vietnam would pay “an important price” for a bombing halt; and that, as the “white man most trusted in Hanoi,” he, Sainteny, could undertake a “private” mission to discern more concretely the DRVN position. Harriman, who met Sainteny in Paris in early December, believed that the latter could be an excellent candidate to make a sondage, and with Rusk’s approval dispatched aide Chester L. Cooper to formally ask Sainteny to return to Hanoi. But de Gaulle, despite approving Sainteny’s prior trip, now vetoed any such mission – mostly because he doubted LBJ’s sincerity in seeking peace, a view reinforced by his awareness of Poland’s contention that US bombing had sabotaged a promising peace effort in December (unbeknownst to Washington, Warsaw’s version of Marigold had reached Paris via a secret leak to U Thant).⁴³

Moscow as Mediator?

Marigold’s failure, coinciding with Beijing’s reduced influence in Hanoi as China sank into the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and Sino-Soviet friction grew, produced an important shift in Vietnam peace diplomacy: Moscow, after earlier squeamishness, was finally willing to directly mediate between Washington and Hanoi. An overture the Americans code-named SUNFLOWER initially involved, in January, direct US–DRVN diplomatic encounters in Moscow to trade positions and messages, but the first real sign of the changed Soviet approach came during Kosygin’s February 1967 visit to Britain for a summit with Harold Wilson, which overlapped with a Tết holiday US bombing stoppage. To the surprise of Wilson and American diplomats in London liaising with him during the summit, the Soviet premier, “obsessed” by the frenzied Chinese hostility, seemed ready to pass to Hanoi the US stand conveyed by Wilson, including the so-called Phase A/Phase B formula to finesse the bombing negotiations Catch-22. “The British were first startled, then delighted, to find Kosygin eager to play [a]n active role as intermediary between the US and Hanoi,” The Pentagon Papers note.⁴⁴ Hopes briefly soared, then collapsed – after LBJ, influenced by Walt Rostow, hardened the US terms Wilson had given the Soviets, then resumed bombing North Vietnam hours after Kosygin left London. Feeling burned – and already furious at Washington for failing to inform him of Marigold when he sent his own foreign secretary, George Brown, to Moscow in late November 1966, thereby undermining his credibility with the Soviets – Wilson blamed the Americans for scuttling a genuine chance for a breakthrough: “I believe peace was almost within our grasp.”⁴⁵

With North Vietnam focused on military, not diplomatic, progress, the ever hopeful British leader undoubtedly overstated any opportunity that might have existed – yet the episode represented an important Soviet shift: Kosygin was also willing to convey to Hanoi US conditions for stopping the bombing received during his June 1967 encounter with LBJ in Glassboro, New Jersey.⁴⁶

Despite Kosygin’s cooperation, however, SUNFLOWER failed to elicit any reply from Hanoi, none Moscow considered worth reporting. Nineteen sixty-seven was a year for war in Vietnam: Washington further eased limits on Rolling Thunder bombing and upped troop levels from nearly 400,000 to almost half a million, and US casualties doubled. As peace hopes dimmed and global protests surged, international peace efforts yielded “little more than diplomatic shadowboxing,” Herring noted.⁴⁷ Those pushing peace included Thant, who repeatedly called for a bombing halt and in March met North Vietnamese representatives in Burma; India, which attained the code name but not state of NIRVANA in fitful contacts with a DRVN diplomat in New Delhi, and led together with Canada a futile effort to spark a new ICC initiative; Algeria, which after receiving a visit from Harriman tried vainly to arrange a US rendezvous with the local National Liberation Front representative; the Scandinavians, whom Washington enlisted to sound out the North Vietnamese through Swedish and Norwegian diplomats in Warsaw and Beijing (ASPEN and OHIO); a retired Mexican diplomat who met Hồ Chí Minh (AZTEC); and assorted activists, organizations (Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Pacem in Terris, et al.), and journalists (radical Australian Wilfred Burchett waltzed in MATILDA) able to secure visas to Hanoi or contacts with DRVN agents such as Mai Vӑn Bộ in Paris.⁴⁸

1967–1968: Approaching Tet – And Paris

However, from June to October 1967 the international diplomatic initiative that garnered the most sustained high-level attention from Washington (and later historians) involved France. This PENNSYLVANIA channel to Hanoi engaged not the de Gaulle government (he remained skeptical of LBJ but gave the initiative his “discreet approval”), but two French scientists, Raymond Aubrac and Herbert Marcovitch, with personal ties to Hồ Chí Minh, who agreed to mediate after meeting Kissinger at a Paris “Pugwash” session. Over several months, as Aubrac and Marcovitch visited Hanoi in late July, met Hồ Chí Minh and Đồng, and proposed further contacts aimed at a bombing halt and opening negotiations, the North Vietnamese seemed to dangle the prospect of a meeting in Paris between Kissinger and Mai Vӑn Bộ; the Frenchmen ferried messages between them. Within the Johnson administration, PENNSYLVANIA inspired more support from Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara (who was fast losing faith that military force, in particular bombing, could produce victory) than Secretary of State Rusk, who doubted diplomacy could move Hanoi to an acceptable stand.

PENNSYLVANIA was Kissinger’s most intense preview of his involvement in Vietnam diplomacy under Nixon, but contrary to his memoirs⁴⁹ it was not his Vietnam diplomatic debut: consulting for Johnson’s State Department, he had already furthered prior efforts to use Czechoslovakia and Sainteny as mediators. Dropping tantalizing hints but repeatedly deferring a Bộ–Kissinger meeting (which the latter avidly desired), the North Vietnamese strung Washington along but were not really yet interested in negotiations, secretly marshaling their energies for the military strike that would take the form of the January 1968 Tet Offensive.⁵⁰ A captured DRVN document, leaked to a US reporter in mid-1967, hinted at Hanoi’s disdain for diplomacy, quoting Lê Duẩn as telling Southern-based guerrillas that they should fight on even if North Vietnam agreed to talks with the United States. “We must foresee this so that we have a correct understanding and should not depend upon negotiations,” the VWP general secretary, a Southerner, explained. “The reason why we advocate negotiations is that we want to prove that we are always concerned about peace on a correct basis.”⁵¹

Ultimately, PENNSYLVANIA nudged the process forward only slightly, prodding LBJ to utter publicly, on September 29, the “San Antonio formula” in which he agreed to stop bombing North Vietnam once assured that step would “lead promptly to productive discussion” and assuming Hanoi would not “take advantage” of a bombing curb (for example, through stepped-up infiltration of the South).⁵²

In late 1967 diplomatic activities related to the war intensified, but Hanoi and Washington had divergent motives in pursuing them. The Americans still wondered whether Hanoi might enter talks under acceptable conditions, but the North Vietnamese were setting the stage for the Tet Offensive, laying the groundwork for diplomatic follow-up to the military and political gains they anticipated, particularly with LBJ under domestic political pressure facing a reelection (and Democratic renomination) campaign. To do so they tiptoed toward talks. In November, at the annual Bolshevik Revolution festivities in Moscow, they dallied with the Poles again: Lê Duẩn told Gomułka Hanoi would negotiate three weeks after a US bombing halt – but when Warsaw’s ambassador in Washington passed the news along Rusk was unimpressed with the rare DRVN commitment to a concrete date.⁵³ Hanoi went public with more forthcoming language in late December, when Foreign Minister Trinh clarified at a Mongolian reception that North Vietnam “will” – not “could” – talk with the United States once it “unconditionally” stopped bombing.⁵⁴

By then, as a new principal channel, Washington had turned to Romania, whose leader, Nicolae Ceauşescu, was acting as a self-styled communist “maverick” by refusing to back the Kremlin in the Sino-Soviet split and balking at breaking ties with Israel during the June 1967 Arab–Israeli War like the rest of the Warsaw Pact. Bucharest had quietly tried since early 1965 to prod the North Vietnamese to talk and in late 1966 had perhaps, like the Poles, exerted some slight fraternal influence on them.⁵⁵ In the winter of 1967–8, with Moscow again staying aloof, its dialogue with the US and DRVN leaderships came to the fore. In an initiative State Department aides optimistically tagged PACKERS (after the inaugural Super Bowl’s winners), Romania sent missions to Hanoi in December and January, conveying messages and seeking to reconcile the two sides’ ever-so-slowly-converging stands on a formula to stop the bombing and start talking.⁵⁶ The fencing fizzled, yet the Romanians’ careful, accurate, and discreet handling of the sensitive contacts impressed top US officials, who far preferred them to the Hungarians or Poles – so much so that LBJ, while vetoing Warsaw, would secretly approve Bucharest as a possible site for what became the Paris talks.⁵⁷ The exercise boosted Ceauşescu’s ambition to elevate his country’s (and his own) prestige: after he again defied Moscow by opposing the August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the incoming Nixon administration would choose Romania for another sensitive mediation mission, tapping it (along with Pakistan) to relay to Beijing US interest in normalizing Sino-American relations.⁵⁸

As PACKERS faded in February, Washington tracked another channel to the North Vietnamese: the Italians, who reported being approached by Hanoi’s ambassador to Czechoslovakia. What Fanfani did not tell Rusk was that Rome had assiduously pursued a dialogue with the DRVN in Prague since the previous summer, in contacts brokered by the Italian Communist Party and involving Marigold veteran Giovanni D’Orlandi, no longer Rome’s envoy in Saigon. The initial contacts proved fruitless, but Hanoi had reopened the channel in mid-January – hoping to integrate the diplomacy with the upcoming offensive. Though wary, the Americans favored the Italian-mediated dialogue, and gave it another positive sports-related code name: KILLY, after the gold medal–winning French alpine skier Jean-Claude Killy. Fanfani and D’Orlandi hosted a secret DRVN delegation in Rome, yet a bid to link a bombing halt and negotiations start remained frustratingly elusive.⁵⁹

Ultimately, not international diplomacy but military and political developments finally brought the United States and North Vietnam into direct talks. LBJ, facing a powerful challenge from antiwar Democrats, abruptly exited the presidential race and sharply limited US bombing of North Vietnam on March 31, 1968; three days later, Hanoi (having invested so much in Tet) agreed to begin direct discussions. After a month of wrangling over a site for the talks, they agreed to meet in Paris, and bilateral US–DRVN exchanges effectively replaced third-party international diplomacy as the principal arena to seek peace, or at least peace talks.

Conclusion

International diplomacy offered only limited opportunities to ameliorate the Vietnam War given incompatible US and DRVN objectives, military confidence, domestic politics, and willingness to endure pain. As recounted above, the July 1962 Harriman–Ung Vӑn Khiêm conversation and 1964–5 U Thant initiative were probably missed chances to launch an ongoing US–North Vietnamese dialogue – which would at least have broken the taboo on direct contacts and enabled Washington and Hanoi to understand each other better, though whether this would have lessened, shortened, or avoided the conflict seems doubtful. Of the myriad international diplomatic initiatives during the 1965–8 escalation, Marigold may have offered both Washington and Hanoi a de facto “decent interval” medium-term solution (withdrawal of US troops for a DRVN deferral of unification), or at least a chance to enter direct discussions roughly a year and a half earlier than in fact happened – but it is hard to extract much hope, aside from mutual maneuvering, probing, and seeking benefit in international public opinion, from the numerous other peace campaigns and conspiracies, especially as both sides intensified military operations seeking a decisive blow, in the buildup to 1968.

So, was it all sound, fury, intrigue, and paper-pushing, signifying very little? In terms of the war’s outcome, perhaps. Yet Vietnam diplomacy also both influenced and reflected wider developments in international affairs, especially the Sino-Soviet split and the Cold War – and offered clues to the move at the end of the 1960s toward both détente and Sino-American rapprochement.

On the communist side, international diplomacy offered a barometer to measure the Sino-Soviet split’s intensity. With Beijing angrily opposing negotiations and ardently favoring armed struggle, the willingness of Warsaw Pact nations such as Hungary and Poland to take whirls at persuading Hanoi to enter talks with the Americans in 1965–6 signaled Moscow’s cautious approval of that course. In 1967, the Soviets’ attempts to directly mediate, overcoming prior reticence, showed their exasperation with the Chinese and refusal to let Mao Zedong drag them into a war with the United States. Coming as the superpowers – despite differences over the Arab–Israeli War and other issues – finalized a nuclear nonproliferation treaty, the enhanced if still limited Soviet cooperation on Vietnam foreshadowed a broader US–Soviet détente and would persist, intermittently, on the Paris talks’ sidelines. As for Hanoi, its spring 1968 consent finally to talk directly with Washington revealed that it had moved to Moscow’s side of the communist quarrel, and aroused sharp protest from the Chinese – who even, bizarrely, blamed the DRVN’s announcement of its readiness to meet the Americans, on April 3, 1968, for the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the next day.⁶⁰ Sino-Vietnamese friction over negotiations hinted at sharper tensions to come – exacerbated by the 1971 Sino-US opening and climaxing, of course, in the 1979 border clash (the “Third Indochina War”).

The Vietnam War’s international diplomacy also had implications and complications for the West. Skeptical of Washington’s deepening involvement, crucial NATO allies criticized LBJ’s handling of peace overtures and, in the case of Ottawa, London, and Rome, felt burned by what they viewed as Washington’s botching of initiatives in which they were involved. The diplomatic debacles increased the tension already developing between Washington and the West European allies over the war, as the Europeans rebuffed LBJ’s entreaties to tangibly support South Vietnam and worried that their superpower patron had become grossly overcommitted and distracted in Southeast Asia.

Also tangible, if difficult to measure, was the failed international diplomacy’s impact on US domestic politics. The charge that LBJ had fumbled peace efforts through incompetence – or worse, given the repeated untimely bombing raids just as diplomacy seemed on the verge of progress, deliberately sabotaged them in the hawkish belief that military pressure on Hanoi could produce a better outcome – stirred opposition to the president among antiwar Democrats, including former supporters on Capitol Hill. Disgust over Johnson’s perceived mismanagement of Vietnam diplomacy helped inspire Senators Eugene McCarthy (D-Minnesota) and Robert F. Kennedy (D-New York) to challenge LBJ for the Democratic Party’s nomination in 1968 – a crucial part of the dynamic that prompted the president’s shocking March 31 departure from the race to focus on the search for peace. Conversely, though naturally it is impossible to know how counterfactual history would have gone, had one of the diplomatic initiatives noted above, such as Marigold, produced direct US–North Vietnam negotiations, even if they later broke down, it seems far less likely that a prominent Democrat would have challenged an incumbent. Another speculative yet plausible question is whether, had ongoing US–DRVN discussions started in 1967 – again, even if they withered – the Tet Offensive’s planning and hence timetable might have been delayed. Had it taken place months later, of course, the consequences for the US presidential campaign would have been immense.

28 Japan and the Vietnam War

Jennifer M. Miller

The Vietnam War was a turning point in modern Japanese history and in the US–Japanese relationship. It is not an overstatement to say that modern Japan was made, in part, by the war in Vietnam. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Satō Eisaku (1964–72), the Japanese government actively and openly supported the war through political, financial, and logistical assistance. Though such cooperation stopped short of sending troops due to limits set by Japan’s constitution, Japan provided extensive supplies and hosted military bases key to the US war effort. This support, in turn, allowed Satō to achieve one of Japan’s most significant geopolitical feats in the postwar era: the return of Japanese rule over the Ryukyu Islands, including Okinawa, which hosted major US military bases and had remained under US occupation since 1945. Japan was also a primary economic beneficiary of the war; though high-speed growth began in the late 1950s, extensive military procurement, a dramatic expansion in exports to the United States and elsewhere, and a growing economic presence in Southeast Asia helped Japan become one of the world’s richest countries, with far-reaching consequences for the United States–Japan alliance and the global economic and geopolitical order. Indeed, this economic boom allowed the Japanese government to weather protests from an extensive antiwar movement. This movement, which emphasized everyday citizen activism to challenge Japanese complicity in the war, sought to derail both the war effort and Japan’s alliance with the United States. Yet despite its consistent support for the US war in Vietnam, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) maintained a firm hold on Japan’s government.

This chapter traces the impact of the Vietnam War on Japan and the US–Japanese relationship in three sections. First, it examines the United States–Japan diplomatic and security relationship, with special focus on the relationship between Japan’s support of the Vietnam War and the negotiations to return the Ryukyu Islands, particularly Okinawa. This was a momentous event in Japanese history, fulfilling the desires of countless Japanese who were enraged by the islands’ continued occupation. Second, it will trace the ways that Japan economically benefited from the war, building close economic connections with South, North, and eventually unified Vietnam. It was during the Vietnam War that Japan began to build a trade surplus with the United States, leading US policymakers to denigrate Japan an economically threatening “freeloader” and to make radical changes to the post–World War II economic, financial, and geopolitical order. Finally, it examines the vibrant and active Japanese antiwar movement, which drew on memories of World War II and the 1960 protests against the renewal of the United States–Japan security treaty. Building ties to antiwar movements around the world, it encouraged Japanese citizens to hold the Japanese state and people accountable for their responsibility for the violence of Vietnam. Taken together, these three topics demonstrate the myriad ways that Japan shaped, and was shaped by, the war in Vietnam. They show how this conflict dramatically altered diplomacy, economics, politics, and notions of citizenship in a country that was ostensibly far removed from the bloodshed.

Vietnam and the United States–Japan Alliance

Japan’s ties to Vietnam long predated US military involvement. In September 1940, Japan invaded northern Indochina, then under the rule of the French empire, as part of its violent quest to conquer China and construct a Japanese-led imperial order in East Asia. Because Indochina was under the control of the French Vichy regime, a client state of Japan’s German ally, the Japanese government chose not to directly occupy it; Vichy officials ruled the colony in collaboration with Japan. In March 1945, however, with war prospects dramatically worsening, the Japanese military overthrew the French rulers. They harshly controlled the region until the end of the war in August 1945, when Japan’s defeat was followed by the repatriation of Japanese soldiers and French attempts to reimpose colonial rule despite Vietnamese declarations of independence. After a hiatus imposed by the US occupation of Japan (1945–52), when Japan did not have independent foreign relations, Japanese diplomatic relations with Vietnam quickly resumed. With US encouragement, Vietnam’s Bảo Đại government signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty in September 1951, a multilateral settlement that ended the US occupation of Japan and formally concluded the Pacific War; this treaty included provisions that Japan would negotiate reparations agreements with countries such as Vietnam. Upon the end of the occupation, Japan normalized relations with the Bảo Đại government; notably, the Hồ Chí Minh government was not included in these discussions over reparations or diplomatic normalization.

Hồ Chí Minh’s exclusion was not surprising. A key goal of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, from which the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China were also excluded, was to usher Japan into membership in the United States–led anticommunist “free world.” For many US policymakers, such as diplomat and later secretary of state John Foster Dulles, Japan was the foundation of anticommunist strategy in Asia and would showcase the wonders of capitalism and democracy (which US policymakers equated with anticommunism) to other Asian states.¹ Japan also had enormous strategic value. Alongside the peace treaty, the United States and Japan signed a bilateral security treaty that allowed the United States to maintain military bases in Japan and to use these bases in defense of “international peace and security in the Far East.”² By the early 1950s, the United States had built a large network of military bases in Japan and Okinawa, the largest of the still-occupied Ryukyu Islands. From the start of the US–Japanese security alliance, US bases in Japan and Okinawa were fundamental to waging the Cold War in Asia. The first US troops to land in Korea, for example, departed directly from occupation duty in Japan, and Japan served as the United States’ main logistical and staging area throughout the war. Indeed, the United States fought in Korea and later Vietnam in part to protect allies such as Japan, countries that political and military leaders believed were crucial to prevent “the vast Pacific” from becoming a “Red Sea.”³

For all its importance, the United States–Japan alliance was not always smooth. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, the United States’ continued military presence in Japan and Okinawa was the source of constant upheaval, including frequent antibase protests and large-scale nationwide protests against the renewal of the United States–Japan security treaty in 1960, which forced Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke (1957–60) to resign. US policymakers were also frustrated with Japan’s unwillingness to rebuild its military. Even though the United States–authored postwar constitution’s Article 9 prevented Japan from having offensive military forces and banned the “threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes,” throughout the 1950s US policymakers repeatedly harangued Japan to expand its Self-Defense Forces (SDF).⁴ However, Japanese leaders constantly cited the constitution and the unpopularity of rearmament after the devastation of World War II as reasons to prevent any large-scale increases.

Despite these disagreements, the United States–Japan alliance was largely supported by Japan’s conservative leaders, many of whom believed it allowed Japan to rebuild itself as a dynamic, anticommunist, and wealthy nation. Such goals marked the tenure of Satō Eisaku, who became prime minister in September 1964, only a few months after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. A member of a prominent conservative family (he was Kishi’s brother), Satō was firmly anticommunist and believed that the United States–Japan alliance was important and necessary. Following in the footsteps of mentor and former prime minister Yoshida Shigeru (1946–7, 1948–54), Satō believed that this alliance provided for Japan’s security, stabilized the Asian region, and in the process allowed Japan to focus on economic growth and development.⁵ This belief fundamentally shaped his approach to the US war in Vietnam. For example, after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Satō and Foreign Minister Shiina Etsusaburo declared that the United States was acting in self-defense. Similarly, over the opposition of some members of the Japanese Diet and the public, the government announced in 1965 that it would not ask the United States for prior consultation when US combat missions departed from bases in Okinawa, which were not under the jurisdiction of the security treaty. Indeed, Shiina later claimed, the bombing of North Vietnam was “proper” and Japan cooperated under the security treaty “because America is taking these military actions on behalf of the peace and security of the Far East.”⁶

Japan’s role in the US war in Vietnam, however, went far beyond rhetorical support; Japan and Okinawa were logistically crucial to the US ability to wage this sustained and lengthy conflict. After Germany, Japan hosted the second-largest US overseas base network, which was put to use to stage and support US combat efforts. For example, Tachikawa Air Force Base, outside Tokyo, was the supply headquarters for the US Air Force in the western Pacific and an important transit point for both material and personnel. Atsugi Naval Air Base in Kanagawa prefecture held the only military repair shop for jet engines west of Hawai’i. US combat troops often visited Japan for rest and recreation (R&R); many were processed for a five-day leave through Camp Zama, home to the US Army in Japan. The United States also launched combat missions from bases in Japan – though the orders had to be issued after the planes left Japanese territory – and Okinawa. Indeed, the first 15,000 combat troops to enter the war arrived from Okinawa, the start of more than 1 million military transport and combat flights that departed from the island between 1965 and 1973.⁷ During the siege of Khe Sanh in 1968, B-52s made the twelve-hour roundtrip flight from Okinawa to drop tens of thousands of pounds of explosives each week. What was true for troops was also true for materials; approximately 75 percent of the 400,000 tons of supplies used each month by US troops passed through Okinawa on their journey.⁸ As Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, commander of the Pacific Forces, acknowledged early in the conflict, “without Okinawa we couldn’t continue fighting the Vietnam War.”⁹

While Satō did believe in the stated mission of preventing the spread of communism, his support of the US war effort was also directed toward another goal: securing the return of Okinawa and the Ryukyu Islands. Japan had formally colonized the islands in the late nineteenth century, annexing them as Okinawa prefecture – administratively equivalent to the four main islands – in 1879. After World War II, the United States built a large base presence across occupied Okinawa; these bases and facilities controlled 10 percent of all land in the Ryukyus.¹⁰ Successive Japanese governments had pushed for Okinawa’s reversion after the end of the occupation of the four main Japanese islands in 1952; for Satō, returning the Ryukyu Islands to Japanese control would restore the country as a geopolitical whole and bolster Japanese honor, pride, and nationhood. In August 1965, Satō became the first Japanese prime minister to visit Okinawa. In an “emotionally charged” visit that received extensive press coverage, he declared that Japan’s postwar era would not end until the return of Okinawa.¹¹ US policymakers were well aware that many Japanese and Okinawans intensely opposed Okinawa’s ongoing occupation, which they saw as a humiliating vestige of American imperialism. In 1965, US ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer warned that such opposition was close to “boil[ing] over.”¹² However, the return (reversion) of Okinawa raised serious questions for US security planning, particularly the extent to which the United States would be able to use military bases on Okinawa and the future of the nuclear weapons stored on the island.

Satō sought to leverage Japan’s support for the war in Vietnam for the reversion of Okinawa. US leaders repeatedly made clear that they expected firm Japanese support in Vietnam. When Satō met with President Lyndon B. Johnson in January 1965, Johnson reminded Satō that if Japan “got in trouble, we would send our planes and bombs to defend her.” With the United States “in trouble in Vietnam … how can Japan help us?”¹³ Satō therefore paired visible gestures of support for US Vietnam policy – such as a controversial stop in Saigon on his 1967 tour of Southeast Asia, the only visit by a leader of a country that did not have troops in Vietnam – with the argument that reversion would not undermine the US military’s freedom of action on the island but instead increase United States–Japanese cooperation and Japan’s willingness to take responsibility for its own defense. Such arguments found purchase with US policymakers, who hoped to trade reversion for an expansion in Japan’s economic, political, and defensive participation in the United States–Japanese alliance in order to reduce US costs and responsibilities. Satō therefore arrived in Washington for a November 1967 summit determined to move forward on reversion. In meetings, Johnson pushed Satō hard to increase Japan’s financial support for development in Southeast Asia, to address a growing US balance-of-payments deficit with Japan, and even asked Japan to develop an educational television channel for rural south Vietnam. But ultimately, though Johnson declined to specify a potential date for the reversion, he publicly stated that the islands should be returned “within a few years.” In return, Satō reiterated that US bases in the islands “continue to play a vital role in assuring the security of Japan and other free nations in the Far East.”¹⁴

Because support for the United States’ investment in the Vietnam War crossed US party lines, Satō’s strategy proved successful even after Johnson left office. When Richard Nixon assumed the presidency in 1969, he and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger agreed that reversion would take place despite the opposition of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Nixon and Kissinger hoped to force Tokyo to contribute more to Japan’s defense and ensure the renewal of the security treaty in 1970. During a visit to Washington in November 1969, Satō promised to review the security treaty for a long period and asserted that Japan would now play a larger defensive role with Okinawa’s return. He also gave a mutually agreed-on speech at the National Press Club wherein he declared that Japan would allow the usage of bases in Okinawa to defend South Korea and Taiwan, and pledged Japanese assistance in postwar rebuilding and development in Vietnam.¹⁵ After such commitments, Satō announced upon his return to Japan that he had reached agreement on the reversion of Okinawa; nuclear weapons would be removed and US bases in Okinawa would operate under the same rules as in the rest of Japan. In reality, the final agreement was still being negotiated; though Satō hoped for a nuclear-free Okinawa, his personal envoy, Wakaizumi Kei, and Kissinger hammered out a backchannel agreement wherein the United States withdrew its nuclear weapons but retained the right to reintroduce them in an emergency. The final agreement stated that the United States could retain and utilize bases in Okinawa “without detriment to the security of the Far East,” and the same day Satō and Nixon signed a secret agreement allowing emergency nuclear use.¹⁶ The Ryukyu Islands formally reverted to Japanese authority on May 15, 1972, ending almost three decades of US control.

The return of Okinawa proved to be part of a broader rethinking of the US military presence in Asia in the wake of a costly war in Vietnam. During a trip to Guam in 1969, Nixon gave an off-the-cuff speech in which he articulated a future of reduced US commitments to the region. The United States, he declared, would no longer fight ground wars on the Asian mainland, and Asian allies would instead need to develop their own military power, with US support. This policy, which became known as the Nixon Doctrine, led not only to the reduction of US combat troops in Vietnam, with an emphasis on equipping South Vietnamese forces, but also to significant realignment of US forces in northeast Asia. In the summer of 1970, the United States withdrew 20,000 troops from South Korea and also announced a significant realignment of troops in Japan, withdrawing 12,000 US personnel and transferring some major bases and port facilities back to Japan; returned facilities would ultimately include major air bases such as Tachikawa, which had been integral to the US war efforts in Korea and Vietnam.¹⁷ Such policies coincided with Nixon’s decision to recognize the People’s Republic of China, a thunderbolt about which Japan was not prewarned. Nixon thus acknowledged that the regional alliance structures of the 1950s and 1960s, wherein the United States maintained expansive bases and facilities and fought costly ground wars, in large part to contain China and defend allies such as Japan, were no longer sustainable. “The biggest reason for staying on in Vietnam,” Nixon later claimed, “was Japan.”¹⁸ Japan’s supportive yet distant role in the Vietnam War – important enough to gain significant concessions, yet also a source of significant frustration to US leaders due to its noncombat role – helped alter crucial components of US regional strategy. Indeed, in the subsequent decades, discussions of “burden sharing” became common in the United States–Japan alliance. The United States continued to press for expanded military cooperation, while Japanese leaders passed new legislation allowing Japanese forces to join peacekeeping operations and even advocated revising Article 9. Vietnam thus expanded both US and Japanese leaders’ expectations of Japanese participation in its own defense by changing the security provisions – and geopolitical arrangements – of the United States–Japan alliance, part of a broader shift toward new notions of US security in East Asia.

Figure 28.1 An employee of Japan’s Hazama Corporation at a site in South Vietnam (March 1962).

Source: Michael Ochs Archives / Contributor / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images.

The Vietnam War and Japanese Economic Growth

The Vietnam War’s significance for Japan was not limited to security or territorial considerations. Just as important, the war accelerated the country’s economic boom, with far-reaching consequences for Japanese society, the United States–Japan relationship, and the global economy. This growth founds its origins in the Korean War (1950–3), which Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru famously described as a “gift from the gods.”¹⁹ US military procurement during the Korean War accounted for 60 percent of Japanese exports from 1950 to 1953 and kickstarted the recovery of an economically devastated postwar Japan.²⁰ Indeed, some scholars claim that the United States fought in Korea – and later Vietnam – in part to “keep the Asian periphery open to the Japanese economy,” and policymakers in the early 1950s did openly hope that Japan’s economic revitalization could come from new economic connections with Southeast Asia.²¹ More broadly, US warfighting in Cold War Asia coincided with and helped facilitate massive Japanese growth; Japan’s GNP expanded 250 percent between 1950 and 1955.²² By the early 1960s, it was clear that Japan was on a path of high-speed growth that would transform its economy, politics, and everyday life. Indeed, when Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato announced his income-doubling plan in 1960, he was drawing from existing predictions that Japan was entering a period of massive economic expansion; Japan’s GNP growth averaged 10 percent a year between 1960 and 1965, and Japan became the third-largest economy in the world in the early 1970s.²³

Japan’s postwar growth was driven in large part by exports, and a major focus of postwar Japanese economic policy was finding and expanding into overseas markets, especially with the dismantling of Japan’s prewar empire. With major imperial-era markets such as China blocked due to Cold War politics, Japan turned its attention to Southeast Asia as a key source of resources and consumers. After the end of the occupation, Japanese political and business leaders sought to expand trade relationships with this region. They used economic assistance and development programs to cushion Japan’s return after the violent aggression of World War II and to present Japan as a benevolent and technocratic regional leader that was eager to help other Asian states. To do so, Japan negotiated a series of reparations treaties with various Asian states throughout the 1950s, signing an agreement with South Vietnam in 1959; Laos and Cambodia forwent reparations in exchange for Japanese promises of economic and technical aid. Japan did not pay these reparations in cash but instead gave Vietnam $55.6 million in capital goods and services; for example, a $39 million grant went to the construction of Đa Nhim hydroelectric plant.²⁴ These commitments drew on expertise developed in Japan’s wartime empire. This plant was completed through work with the development consultancy Nippon Koei, whose founder, Kubota Yutaka, had overseen the construction of hydroelectric dams and railways in colonized China and Korea during the Pacific War; Kubota was later dubbed the “Shogun of the Mekong” for his efforts in the Mekong River Development Project.²⁵ Japanese policymakers believed that reparations in the form of capital goods and development infrastructure would not only rebuild Japanese credibility and encourage economic growth, but also expand commercial trade by increasing the demand for Japanese exports and machinery. Japanese companies and development experts also acquired first-hand knowledge about and contacts within Southeast Asia, and they used the economic demands of the US war effort in Vietnam to expand these connections.

Similar to the war in Korea, Japan – both the state and private companies – was the main economic beneficiary of the war in Vietnam. Throughout the war, military procurement averaged 7–8 percent of Japanese exports; while this paled in comparison to the Korean War, the Bank of Japan conservatively estimated that direct procurement – sales of goods and services to the United States and Vietnam for use in the combat zone – totaled $292 million in 1967 and $467 million in 1970.²⁶ These totals did not include profits from the 50,000 US soldiers who visited Japan annually on R&R, which Michael Schaller estimates brought Japan at least $25 million per year.²⁷ Military procurement in Japan ranged widely, from uniforms, rubber boots, sandbags, toilet paper, and tents, to beer, canned food, and chewing gum; even body bags came from Japan. As the war effort continued, procurement expanded to include resources such as cement, lumber, and sheet iron and equipment to construct and repair railways and transportation infrastructure, such as freight cars, roads, and harbors. Large industrial and trading companies, such as Mitsui Bussan and Sumitomo Shōji, established departments to handle the influx of military purchasing. Japanese shipbuilding firms repaired US naval vessels, while Japanese workers fixed damaged trucks, tanks, and vehicles. While Japanese companies were prohibited from arms sales, petrochemical companies sold the chemicals needed to manufacture explosives such as napalm and TNT; such sales totaled $150 million to $300 million per year in the late 1960s.²⁸

The materiel needs of the Vietnam War did not just expand economic connections between Japan and the US military; they also vastly expanded Japan’s economic footprint in East and Southeast Asia. A range of countries around Vietnam, such as Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, and Hong Kong, received procurement orders from the US military. These countries often bought from Japan to fulfill these orders, and the value of this spending exceeded direct US procurement in Japan. Exports from Japan to noncommunist Asia tripled – from $2 billion to $6 billion – between 1965 and 1972, and the Japanese government estimated that 20 percent of this was due to the war. This is one of the reasons that Japan’s trade grew twice as fast as world trade in the 1960s.²⁹ What is more, the dollars that other Asian countries earned through procurement led to expanded consumer purchasing from Japan; for example, light Honda motorcycles became a common aspect of Saigon’s urban landscape as Japanese consumer exports to South Vietnam increased from $35 million in 1965 to $223 million in 1969.³⁰ Even with such an eyepopping growth in exports, South Vietnam was only Japan’s seventh-largest regional trading partner.³¹ All told, between US military spending, indirect procurement in Asia, and expansions in exports, historians estimate that Japan made approximately $1 billion to $1.5 billion dollars a year from the Vietnam War (equivalent to $10 billion to $15 billion in 2021).³²

These deepening ties meant that, during the early 1970s, the Japanese government and private companies also planned to play a major role in Vietnam’s postwar reconstruction. Japanese economic aid to South Vietnam, which had been quite low in the second half of the 1960s after fulfilling the reparations agreement, increased in the early 1970s. As a response to US demands that Japan expand its economic assistance programs and to lay the foundation for Japanese participation in rebuilding projects, Japanese grants funded the reconstruction of Chợ Rẫy hospital, the restoration of the Đa Nhim power plant, and the building of Biên Hòa orphan vocational center, while other official survey missions assessed sites for major development projects.³³ Private Japanese firms also expanded their investments in South Vietnam, hoping to position themselves for future gains.

By the early 1970s, Japan’s economic ties to Vietnam increasingly transcended Cold War geopolitics. As it became evident that South Vietnam was unlikely to win the war, Japanese officials also reached out to the communist government in Hanoi in an effort to establish new trade relations. In November 1971, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Southeast Asia chief Kazusuke Miyake traveled to Paris for informal discussions with North Vietnam officials, urging a peace settlement and exploring prospects for trade relations with Japan; in 1972 and 1973, he visited Hanoi to continue these discussions. Trade in products such as coal and anthracite between Japan and North Vietnam expanded rapidly, and North Vietnam invited Japanese companies to build hotels and fertilizer plants. The day after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973, Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party hung a giant banner at its headquarters in Tokyo: “Congratulations, Vietnam cease-fire. Next let’s cooperate in reconstruction and development.”³⁴ The Japanese government soon earmarked $10.8 million for reconstruction across Vietnam and offered a $16.6 million loan for Vietnam’s economic rehabilitation in September 1976.³⁵ Indeed, Japan became one of the largest givers of aid to unified Vietnam and by 1976 was second only to the Soviet Union in trade with a unified Vietnam.³⁶ Ultimately, over the course of the Vietnam War, Japanese trade with Southeast Asia increased by 700 percent; by 1979, it was double the value of US trade with the region and 20 percent of Japan’s annual overseas investment went to Southeast Asia.³⁷ The Vietnam War, then, played a major role in enabling Japan to supplant American economic power in East Asia. In an ironic turn, the “coprosperity sphere” that Japan had dreamed of creating during World War II became a reality through US warmaking.

Japan’s economic rise transformed not only its role in Asia, but also its relationship with the United States. With US industry directing its efforts toward Vietnam, Japan seized the opportunity to expand its place in the US market. US purchases of a wide range of Japanese products, from machine tools, steel, and petrochemicals to consumer electronics, domestic appliances, and textiles, rose considerably over the course of the war. Japanese exports to the United States totaled $2.4 billion in 1965; by 1972, they had nearly quadrupled to more than $9 billion, in part due to product shortages in the United States. In 1965, the United States had a trade deficit of $334 million with Japan; by 1972, this had expanded to more than $3 billion.³⁸ Such a drastic shift could hardly go unnoticed by US policymakers or the US public, and Japan became a target of potent American frustration. In the late 1960s, the phrase “Japan, Inc.” became increasingly common in US newspapers and magazines, declaring that Japan’s economic success came from corrupt collusion between industry and the government, a single-minded obsession with exports, and an unfair unwillingness to open its market to imports. Press and policymakers alike reached back to racist imagery of World War II to describe the Japanese economic “invasion” as a nefarious threat; Nixon declared that Japan’s economic challenge was more serious than Pearl Harbor.³⁹ Such claims merged with gripes about Japan’s noncombat role in Vietnam – Alabama governor George Wallace complained that the “War in Vietnam would have been over a long time ago if Japanese troops had joined us” – to transform Japan from valued ally to dangerous, sneaky freeloader in the minds of some American leaders well before the economic conflicts of the 1980s.⁴⁰

Part of this shift stemmed from Nixon’s own determination to punish Japan for its economic success. One of the many American industries pleading for relief from Japanese imports was the textile industry; in 1968, Nixon pledged to impose import quotas on textiles as part of his appeal to Southern voters. Nixon incorporated textiles into the negotiations over Okinawa, and Satō agreed to try to impose textile limits in exchange for reversion. Yet Satō’s promise was extraordinarily difficult to implement, in part because the Japanese government and producers declared that there was no evidence that Japanese textiles hurt the US market. The two countries became embroiled in a dispute over textiles that did little to aid American producers and dramatically increased the rancor between the United States and Japan.

It was in the middle of these discussions that Nixon announced the “Nixon Shock” in 1971, which established a 10 percent surcharge on imports and sought to devalue the dollar by suspending its convertibility into gold. A major departure from the key precepts of Bretton Woods, which had guided the global economy since World War II, Nixon later described these policies as an attempt to “stick it to the Japanese.”⁴¹ The Vietnam War thus transformed not only Japan’s economic relationship with Southeast Asia but also its relationship with the United States; United States–Japanese trade relations were a major source of friction in subsequent decades, challenging American claims about the superiority of the so-called free market and leading US business leaders and politicians to declare that the global economy was “rigged” against the United States.⁴²

The Japanese Antiwar Movement

Despite the geopolitical and economic benefits that flowed from Japan’s participation in the war, Japanese involvement was far from uncontroversial at home. The United States’ escalation in 1965 sparked a vibrant and active antiwar movement in Japan. In part, this movement built on earlier experiences and protests, most notably Japan’s antinuclear movement, antibase movement, and the nationwide 1960 protests against the renewal of the United States–Japan security treaty. Led by a wide array of organizations including labor unions, peace organizations, the Socialist and Communist Parties, student groups, antinuclear groups, antibase organizations, and intellectual groups, these earlier movements criticized the United States and the US–Japanese security alliance for harming the Japanese people and placing Japan in the potential crosshairs of Cold War aggression. They also drew on still-fresh memories of the horrors and violence of World War II to argue that it was the responsibility of the Japanese people to hold the government accountable to the inherently peaceful desires of the Japanese public. In the aftermath of total war and defeat, then, many Japanese worked to build new cultures and practices of participatory democracy and protests across Japan.

Given the scope of popular opposition to Cold War militarism, it is unsurprising that members of the Japanese press and public, along with established leftist groups and parties, paid close attention to the developing war in Vietnam. On August 10, 1964, for example, three days after the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), the Japanese Socialist Party (JSP), Sōhyō (the General Council on Trade Unions, Japan’s largest labor federation), and other organizations rallied in opposition to US reprisals against North Vietnam. Socialist representatives in the Diet actively pressed the government about whether Vietnam was part of the “Far East” described in the United States–Japan security treaty, an explicit effort to limit US ability to use military bases in Japan and Okinawa. Sōhyō collaborated with the JCP, the JSP, and other groups to organize a nationwide antiwar demonstration on June 9, 1965, with 108,000 people in attendance. In 1967, Sōhyō started holding annual protests on October 21 for international antiwar day; police estimated that the first event drew 255,000 while Sōhyō counted 1.5 million participants.⁴³

The war in Vietnam also received regular coverage in the Japanese media. In contrast to World War II and the Korean War, this coverage was not censored by the Japanese government (during the Korean War, censorship was in part dictated and governed by US occupation regulations). Several hundred Japanese reporters and photographers were stationed in Vietnam throughout the war – some of whom were killed or missing in action – and newspaper reporters such as Mainichi Shimbun’s Tokuoka Takao and Asahi Shimbun’s Honda Katsuichi regularly filed dispatches from the country. In the 1960s, televisions, including color televisions, were increasingly widespread in Japan, becoming another source of regular information about the war. Prominent leftist magazines such as Sekai published special issues about the war, which often sold out, while the editorial pages of major newspapers regularly carried antiwar commentary; according to Thomas R. H. Havens, between 1963 and 1974, Asahi’s Maruyama Shizuo wrote 270 of 280 editorials about Vietnam, criticizing US involvement, describing the conflict as a civil war, and condemning the government in Saigon.⁴⁴ Indeed, the Johnson administration was so frustrated by public Japanese criticism that Under Secretary of State George Ball “explained” to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Japanese newspapers were full of communists.⁴⁵

Alongside activism by established parties and organizations, which relied on the disciplined and centralized mobilization of their members, Japanese opposition to the Vietnam War sparked the formation of new groups. Often called the New Left (to distinguish them from the Old Left of parties and unions), these groups called for nonhierarchical, individualistic, and decentralized activism. The most widespread and prominent Japanese antiwar organization was Beheiren (Peace for Vietnam! Committee), which was established in Tokyo in April 1965 by a group of scholars, students, lawyers, and former JCP activists who had participated in earlier protest movements and wanted to build an antiwar movement in Japan. Best-selling author and social critic Oda Makoto served as the group’s intellectual leader and main spokesperson. Beheiren was a loose coalition of local chapters, with more than 380 groups founded during its nine years of activity (1965 to 1974). To “join” Beheiren, individuals or groups simply had to agree with three objectives: peace in Vietnam, self-determination for the Vietnamese, and an end to Japanese government cooperation with the war. Through rallies, marches, speakers, newsletters, conferences, teach-ins, petitions, and other campaigns, Beheiren emphasized an ethic of individual autonomy, everyday activism, and self-consciousness and self-transformation as the basis of social change. As the invitation to Beheiren’s first rally, held on April 24, 1965, urged, “Raise your cry as an individual Japanese concerned about Vietnam, as an individual human being.”⁴⁶ Carrying flowers and white balloons, 1,500 demonstrators marched through Tokyo urging passersby to join them as “ordinary citizens.”⁴⁷

Beheiren’s activism coalesced around several key themes. The first was opposition to the war as a moral and humanitarian catastrophe. As one May 1965 statement proclaimed, “we strongly express our desire for peace, justice, and humanitarianism, and we keenly feel the obligation to work for these,” describing opposition to the war as a “manifestation of the conscience of the Japanese nation.”⁴⁸ Second was an emphasis on critical citizenship and maintaining cautious distance from a Japanese state that had committed itself to supporting violent American warmaking. Many of Beheiren’s leading members, such as Oda, drew on Japan’s experiences during World War II; speaking in 1966, he declared that the most important factor in his opposition to Vietnam was the “war experience of twenty-one years ago” and the “experience of being a victim.”⁴⁹ He drew direct connections between the Japanese people’s failure to question the state during World War II, the experience of mass death in US air raids on cities such as Osaka, and the violence in Vietnam. In doing so, Beheiren also emphasized that Japan – government, companies, and people – was an aggressor in Vietnam because it was tied to the United States, and US actions, through the security treaty. As Oda declared, “realistically speaking, we are all guilty of complicity in the Vietnam War. We must recognize that each of us is among the perpetrators.”⁵⁰ This equation of self-realization with mobilization against state violence was echoed by other participants. One student activist spoke bluntly in 1967: “When I consider how Japan’s economy benefits from US Vietnam War procurements, I realize I am feasting on the blood of the Vietnamese … The anti-war movement is the only way I can apologize to the Vietnamese people.”⁵¹

For many members of Beheiren, antiwar activism also stemmed from what Simon Andrew Avenell calls a “deep seated enthnoracial consciousness.” Inspired by anticolonial and antiracist movements, antiwar activists called on Japan to join a broader “Asian ethnic struggle” against US imperialism and racism.⁵² In a 1966 conference with American antiwar activists, for example, participants condemned US usage of carpet bombing and napalm in Vietnam, asserting, “The promotion and use of such weapons for the genocide of the Vietnamese people shows that the American government sees very little worth in the colored peoples of Asia.”⁵³ War correspondent Takeshi Kaikō similarly expressed a racial affinity with Vietnam’s struggles, concluding that the “defining experience of being Asian in the twentieth century” was experiencing US bombings.⁵⁴ Such declarations did not just stem from Japanese reflections on their own history but also from connections and inspiration from other antiwar and racial justice movements beyond Japan. Beheiren leaders attended antiwar conferences in the United States and Europe and hosted a wide array of foreign antiwar activists, from Howard Zinn to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. In particular, however, they drew from the US racial justice and Black Power movement. Antiwar and student groups hosted activists such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Ralph Featherstone and Black Panther party members Elbert Howard and Roberta Alexander, and increasingly conceived of their own movement as a racialized struggle for liberation from imperial domination.⁵⁵ Prominent activists such as Oda asserted that the Japanese people could shatter the vicious cycle of state aggression only when they had “recognized their true home in Asia and, more generally, among the colored people of the world,” allowing them to break from the Japanese state and its consistent support for “white imperial belligerence.”⁵⁶

Beiheiren activism was both small- and large-scale. The group emphasized repeated antiwar actions such as letter campaigns and scheduled demonstrations – the Tokyo branch held a protest on the first Saturday of each month from September 1965 to October 1973 – along with larger events such as conferences, rallies, and teach-ins. Beheiren held events in parks and cities, such as a 60,000–70,000 person rally in Hibiya Park, Tokyo, in June 1969 with the slogan “oppose the war, oppose the [security] treaty, return Okinawa.”⁵⁷ It also sought to bring together wide arrays of nonaffiliated citizens in longer events such as the 1968 June Action, a month of sustained demonstrations designed to attract attention in both the United States and Japan. On June 23, 1970, alongside other groups, Beheiren’s June Action committee organized more than 100 events and rallies against the renewal of the United States–Japan security treaty; Mainichi estimated there were 1.5 million participants nationwide.⁵⁸ Beiheiren targeted Japanese companies and businesses through practices such as shareholder activism, purchasing single shares of companies like Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in order to attend shareholders’ meetings, where they openly criticized wartime profiteering. Antiwar activism also regularly took place at US bases and facilities. For example, when the nuclear submarine the USS Enterprise made a port call at Sasebo naval base in January 1968, activists across the political spectrum mobilized to greet it, with a 50,000-person rally at a local baseball stadium and violent street confrontations between helmeted students, rightwing activists, and police forces armed with tear gas and batons. Finally, members of Beheiren actively aided US deserters, starting with the escape of four sailors from the USS Intrepid in October 1967; with Beheiren’s assistance, they traveled to the USSR and ultimately sought asylum in Sweden. Beheiren leaders such as Oda saw desertion as the “retrieval of personal freedom” and the ultimate act of resistance against the state.⁵⁹ Through the creation of a subgroup known as JATEC (Japan Technical Committee for Assistance to US Antiwar Deserters), Beheiren activists moved more than a dozen deserting soldiers from Japan to the Soviet Union through contacts in the Japanese Socialist Party, local politicians, and a fisherman who spied for Soviet intelligence.

By the late 1960s, students played a central role in the antiwar activities, which dovetailed and overlapped with an extensive movement on university campuses. Mobilized through groups such as Zengakuren (All-Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Associations), students had played a major role in the protest movements of the 1950s; after the 1960 protests failed to derail the renewal of the United States–Japan security treaty, however, this group broke down into different sects that often clashed with each other. By the late 1960s, however, the student movement benefited from a dramatic growth in higher education. Japan had 71 public and private universities in 1954; this had soared to 74 public and 258 private universities by 1968.⁶⁰ Like the student movements in France and the United States, Japanese students protested rising education fees, massive enrollments, and anonymous university campuses filled with concrete towers; such universities, they declared, did not care about learning but instead simply sought to transform students into “cogs in an industrial machine” in a nation single-mindedly obsessed with capitalist growth.⁶¹ Seeking to overcome existing divisions, in July 1968, students at Tokyo University and Nihon University founded a new organization called Zenkyōtō (All-Campus Joint Struggle Councils). A New Left organization created in a spirit similar to that of Beiheiren, Zenkyōtō called for a radically democratic, nonsectarian struggle that placed activist students and “ordinary students” in solidarity with each other.⁶² On many campuses, it was Zenkyōtō groups that led the massive and widespread student movement that peaked in 1968 and 1969 as students occupied and barricaded a wide array of university campuses (Zengakuren groups also participated); in January 1969, for example, Japanese riot police besieged student activists to end a six-month occupation of a portion of Tokyo University, Japan’s most prestigious university.

The Vietnam War gave the student movement even further urgency and intensity. Student activists condemned universities as complicit in an exploitative and militarized capitalism that facilitated violence and death in Vietnam in support of US economic and security demands. A key turning point came in October 8, 1967, when thousands of helmeted students marched at Haneda airport to protest Satō’s trip to South Vietnam. University of Kyoto student Yamazaki Hiroaki died in clashes with riot police; police declared that a fellow activist had commandeered a truck and run him over, but his death certificate, witnesses, and photographers told a very different story, one of police brutality, with Yamazaki dying from a blow to the head. This protest galvanized student activists and foretold the violence to come. On October 21, 1968, a massive protest – drawing students from Zenkyōtō and more radical groups – took place in Tokyo to commemorate international antiwar day, with students and police clashing around the city. In the evening protestors swarmed Shinjuku station, a major train station, and 1,000 helmeted students overran the railroad junction used to transport jet fuel to US military bases, while sympathetic bystanders joined in throwing stones at riot police. The police detained close to 1,000 people across Japan – 450 in Tokyo alone – the largest mass arrest in postwar Japan.⁶³ The violent unfolding of the so-called Shinjuku Riot, broadcast live on television, diminished public sympathy for the student movement. The Japanese authorities seized the opportunity to pass draconian new legislation in 1969 that gave the police more power to suppress campus protests.

Measured by its influence on formal policy, the antiwar movement was not successful. It did not force Japan’s government to break or diminish its ties to the United States, nor did Japanese companies reduce their economic investments in Southeast Asia. By the early 1970s, the student movement had been crushed on campuses or through violent clashes between groups, while Beheiren disbanded at the end of the war. Nevertheless, the antiwar movement helped build experiences and practices in activism that many Japanese utilized in other fights. From the battle to prevent the construction of Narita airport and the antipollution movement, to the improvement of local governance, protestors applied the call for conscientious citizenship to instrumental and localized goals.⁶⁴

Conclusion

In retrospect, the story of Japan’s role in the Vietnam War is one of multiple ironies and contradictions. For US leaders, Japan was a crucial logistical and strategic ally but also a supporting actor; the war was ostensibly waged in part to defend “weaker” allies, such as Japan, that depended on a US security guarantee from communist aggression. Yet the war made Japan a stronger, richer, and more autonomous geostrategic player, one that increasingly supplanted American economic power in East Asia despite not actually fighting in the war. By the end of the war in Vietnam, key American political and economic leaders believed that Japan – and not Vietnamese, Chinese, or Soviet communism – was the major threat to American geopolitical power and global hegemony. For Japanese leaders, the benefits of supporting US efforts in Vietnam – the return of Okinawa, the economic boost from military procurement, new access to Southeast Asian and American markets – were to strengthen national unity and prosperity. At the same time, however, Japan’s actions during the war also sparked mass protest and sowed the seeds for future economic conflicts with the United States. What is more, the major settlements achieved during the war – most notably the reversion of Okinawa in a form that assured the continued presence of extensive US military bases – did little to resolve or address consistent public resistance to the US base presence, which continues to be a major point of conflict on the island and throughout Japan. Finally, antiwar activists hoped to prevent Japan from profiting from violence in Vietnam and to break Japan’s ties to the United States. Yet US and Japanese policymakers utilized the war to enmesh Japan even more firmly in the network of US power. The 1970 renewal of the United States–Japan security treaty had no set end date, and it remains in place today, making the alliance one of the longest-lasting in history. Ultimately, in an ironic turn, the tragedy of Vietnam only strengthened and deepened the alliance that made the war logistically possible and ideologically necessary.

29 The Economics of the Vietnam War

Daniel Sargent

Like all wars, the Vietnam War joined economies, not just armies. The American War, as Vietnamese know it, pitted the world’s greatest industrial economy against a small agrarian society grasping for a postcolonial future. The United States in 1955 produced a quarter of the world’s economic output; Vietnam, around 0.3 percent.¹ If material capabilities determine the outcomes of wars, this one should have been inevitable.

It was not, and the scale of the mismatch only compounded American frustration. What the Vietnam War demonstrated, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., mulled, was not the omnipotence of American power but “the inability of the most powerful nation on earth to subdue bands of guerrillas in black pajamas.”² Conversely, for Vietnam’s communists the dismantling of South Vietnam constituted an asymmetric triumph, a victory that has enshrined Võ Nguyên Giáp, North Vietnam’s defense minister and military mastermind, among the twentieth century’s greatest military strategists.³ Few have won so much with so little.

And yet, narrating the Vietnam War as a David-and-Goliath encounter risks succumbing to an alternative overdetermination, in which the hubris and myopia of US elites make defeat inevitable. We should be mindful of the political constraints that inhibit the translation of economic capability into coercive military power. And verdicts may, in any case, be premature.

The United States fought in Indochina to secure the frontiers of containment, including for liberal globalization. Today, the United States is Vietnam’s largest trading partner, and Vietnam is a vital locus in an Asia–Pacific globalization system. The US Navy is back in Cam Ranh Bay, and surveys of Vietnamese opinion reveal stunning levels of enthusiasm for the United States. In the most recent Pew survey, 84 percent of Vietnamese affirmed a favorable view of the United States, which made them the world’s most pro-American respondents: even more enthusiastic than Israelis (81 percent) and almost as positive as Americans themselves (85 percent).⁴

None of this is to say that the long view reveals the United States to have been the war’s true victor, only that the adjudication of winners and losers may be a perilous task for historians. This chapter, for its part, undertakes three distinct tasks. It begins with an analysis of the war’s political economy. The war, it argues, showcased a distinctive model of Cold War imperialism that was not extractive, as European colonialism had been, but based upon the outward dissemination of resources. The chapter turns next to the war’s costs, benefits, and consequences for the United States. It turns, finally, to the war’s costs and consequences for its Asian protagonists, ending with Vietnam’s assumption into the market-capitalist system whose frontiers in Southeast Asia the United States squandered blood and treasure to defend.

The Political Economy of the War

In one important respect, the global economy that Vietnam rejoined at the end of the twentieth century resembled the world economy of the precolonial era. Then, as now, East Asia was central. Figure 29.1 sketches the panorama. What accounted for Asia’s fleeting eclipse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was of course the uneven diffusion of the Industrial Revolution. Fossil fuels and mechanical industry propelled the societies of the North Atlantic to a transient ascendancy. In 1960, Europe and its offshoots, including the United States, produced around 68 percent of the world’s output. This was the context in which the Vietnam War was fought: at the precise moment when the East–West developmental chasm was broadest.

Europeans at the dawn of the industrial era were familiar with Asia’s wealth: they had preyed on it for centuries. Since Vasco da Gama’s journey to the Indian Ocean in 1497–8, European mariners had improvised trading monopolies, created maritime protection rackets, and seized control of strategic ports, such as Malacca. But Europeans before the Industrial Revolution had not, for the most part, established colonies or territorial control over the interior hinterlands whose dense populations and artisanal production were the source of Asia’s wealth.⁵

To grasp the difference the Industrial Revolution made, contemplate the changes in Anglo-Chinese relations over half a century. When the diplomat George McCartney undertook his famous mission to the court of the Qianlong Emperor in 1793, China remained impenetrable. Fifty years later, the world had changed. Steam-powered gunships enabled Great Britain to defeat China, in Chinese waters, in the First Opium War. Thereafter, the British wrested significant concessions, including Hong Kong, in the Treaty of Nanking of 1842. These gains gave Great Britain significant advantages over the other European powers, which strived after 1842 to extract from China concessions of their own.

Figure 29.1 The balance of global production, 1820–2018.

Source: Created by author based on data from Jutta Bolt and Jan Luiten, Maddison Project Database, 2020, www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison.

France under the Second Empire of Louis Napoleon exemplified the dynamics of colonial envy. Conscious of how far French wealth and power lagged behind Britain’s, Louis Napoleon sought to expand French influence into Mexico, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. Mexico proved a fleeting preoccupation: here, French ambition ran up against an ascendant rival with imperial designs of its own. But in Southeast Asia France encountered an empire in the throes of decomposition. For sure, the Vietnamese state that had consolidated power under Gia Long in the early nineteenth century still paid formal tribute to China. But the independence that Vietnam had already achieved showcased the fragmentation of a Chinese order in Southeast Asia – and opened opportunities for outsiders. France acted, establishing in 1867 the colonial foothold of French Cochinchina, the first in a series of French encroachments into Southeast Asia.

During the 1880s, French officials mashed their conquered territories into a colony, the Indochinese Union, that would be integrated into a capitalist–industrial system centered on Europe. To this end, France invested, and France extracted.⁶ French firms built infrastructure, including canals, roads, and railroads, but such investments were intended to facilitate extraction, especially of agricultural commodities. Rice became a crucial export; between 1873 and 1920, the area devoted to its cultivation increased sixfold.⁷ Over time, French firms learned to extract other commodities, including coal and rubber. Such extraction served a core–periphery logic, in which Southeast Asia’s wealth would be harnessed to support development elsewhere.

France was not the only colonial latecomer to covet Asian resources. Japan’s quest for regional empire in East Asia resulted from a breakdown of liberal globalization in the era of the Great Depression. As the global economy fragmented after 1929, the great powers sought to forge regional zones of economic control and exploitation. Japan’s extractive project focused first on Manchuria. But in 1937 Japan launched an audacious bid to conquer the rest of China. The early successes were startling, but Chinese forces steeled themselves for resistance, and Japan’s offensive ground to a halt. Frustrated, Japan turned toward Southeast Asia in a maritime thrust, which Japanese strategists hoped would secure access to raw materials such as rubber and oil.

The Asian war became a world war in December 1941 as the result of an audacious Japanese move. Calculating that their empire of extraction would be secure only so long as the US Navy could be held at bay, Japanese leaders launched an aerial assault on the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawai’i alongside invasions of the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), the Philippines, Burma, Thailand, and Malaya. Unfortunately for Japan, the US Navy survived Pearl Harbor with sufficient capital ships intact to launch a slow fight-back across the Pacific.

Victory came in 1945. Over the next five years, US decision-makers grappled with the geopolitical stakes of France’s efforts to retake Indochina from a communist-tinged resistance movement. In June 1950, the United States acted, dispatching the first planeloads of materiel to French colonial forces in Vietnam. Over the next four years, Washington assumed financial responsibility for France’s effort to secure the Associated States of Indochina, a neocolonial construction, against the Việt Minh. By 1952, the United States was funding about 40 percent of France’s military campaigns in Indochina; by 1954, the American share approached 80 percent.⁸

How to explain the assumption of such burdens? US decision-makers grasped Indochina’s importance “as a source of raw materials” for the capitalist world, and they understood the region’s economic importance to Cold War allies.⁹ And, yet, the choice for intervention did not spring from the kind of acquisitive logic that had animated French and Japanese colonialism. France clung to empire after 1945 because its leaders adjudged Indochina a source of wealth, the access to which would determine France’s standing among the great powers. Only after military defeat at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954 confirmed that empire’s burdens now outweighed its benefits did French leaders decide to cut their losses and dissolve their empire’s sunk costs. American embroilment in Southeast Asia followed a quite different logic. Confident in their own geopolitical primacy, American decision-makers opted for embroilment not because they sought to exploit Indochina’s material resources but because they presumed that global responsibility was the destiny of the greatest of the powers.

The year 1954 was a fateful one. Điện Biên Phủ exploded the strategy of Harry Truman’s administration for securing Vietnam through France. In the battle’s aftermath, President Dwight Eisenhower adopted an alternative approach: to contain communism through collaboration with Vietnamese nationalism. The approach aligned with broader US approaches to the Cold War, in which Washington sought to defeat communism through the cultivation of modernizing nation-states under American tutelage and protection. This was not a colonial strategy, at least not in the extractive sense of nineteenth-century colonialism, but its implications were hierarchical and hegemonic. To contain communism in Indochina and elsewhere, the United States would foster leagues of anticommunist states, situated in subordinate relationships to American power. To these clients, the United States would offer military security, development assistance, and the aspirational model of its own modernity.

To these ends, the United States supported Ngô Đình Diệm’s consolidation of power in South Vietnam with abundant resources. The Department of Agriculture provided food aid; the International Cooperation Administration, development capital; the Defense Department, military support and materiel. To monitor these flows, Washington dispatched agronomists, economists, engineers, and military advisors. Their mission was to build a state capable of exercising control within borders, a state that could function, like West Berlin, Taiwan, and South Korea, as a Cold War bulwark. Unfortunately for Washington, the foundations for this fortress state on the Cold War’s fluid frontiers were being laid in quicksand.

As elsewhere, the Cold War in Southeast Asia was more a social war than an interstate conflict, especially at the outset.¹⁰ Communists and anticommunists alike waged brutal ideological war. The major difference was the sheer effectiveness of the communist campaign to undermine South Vietnam from within, a campaign that escalated sharply in 1959–60. The result was to transform South Vietnam from a bastion of containment into an area of struggle, into which both superpowers poured resources. US involvement was direct. Washington built South Vietnam while escalating a military crusade that spilled blood across Indochina. China and the Soviet Union opted for more indirect roles. Both aided the insurgency through North Vietnam, whose land border with China offered an easy conduit.

The flows of military and economic resources that resulted made South Vietnam the crucible of a cataclysmic form of globalization. Animated by fear and ambition, the superpowers channeled materiel from Michigan, Manchuria, and Magnitogorsk into South Vietnam, a territory smaller than the state of Oklahoma. The consequences for the Vietnamese people, and for other Indochinese peoples into whose lands the wars for South Vietnam spilled, were both predictable and near-apocalyptic. Whatever the underlying intentions, the impacts that the Cold War’s empires of dissemination produced were no more benign, and were in some ways even more atrocious, than those that nineteenth-century empires of colonial extraction had caused.

Vietnam and the Crisis of Pax Americana

The narrative of US intervention follows a familiar arc: escalation, frustration, retreat. President John F. Kennedy expanded the US military assistance mission to South Vietnam, but it was President Lyndon Johnson who took the most fateful steps: he intensified the air war against communist positions and supply lines; he launched the strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam; he dispatched the first US ground troops in March 1965, then ratcheted force levels upward.

Unlike in the Korean War, the United States could not persuade its European allies to share the burdens of containment in Vietnam. Great Britain refused to dispatch even a symbolic force. France offered only declarative statements about peace that undermined the US war effort. Allies in the Asia–Pacific region proved more responsive. New Zealand, Taiwan, and the Philippines sent token forces, Australia and Thailand more substantial contributions. But it was South Korea, itself a Cold War frontier state, that made the greatest contributions. South Korea suffered heavy military casualties, losing more men than any US state except California. But South Korea also reaped significant benefits from its role in Vietnam. Along with Japan, which did not participate in the warfighting, South Korea would emerge, in the war’s aftermath, as one of the key economic beneficiaries of the Vietnam War.¹¹

Having paid limited attention to the war’s escalation, Americans began in 1967–8 to interrogate the costs and benefits. Hereafter, the arc of US involvement bent toward deescalation. From 1969, President Richard Nixon worked to “Vietnamize” the war, an approach that combined US troop withdrawals with increased military and financial assistance to South Vietnam. Nixon’s strategy aimed to substitute guns and dollars for blood, but neither the flows of military assistance he directed to Saigon nor the ruthless tactical escalations he initiated made South Vietnam secure. Instead, Congress confirmed that retreat really meant defeat when it acted during 1973 to cut off remaining funds for war operations in Indochina. Thereafter, the predicament of South Vietnam resembled that of the French fortress at Điện Biên Phủ in the early months of 1954: the frontier state stood alone, ringed by enemy forces and dependent on a thread of supplies that was insufficient to break the siege. And then, predictably, it fell.

The slow-motion denouement of America’s Vietnam War contrasted with the brutal volte-face that France had enacted in 1954–5. The Americans had persisted for two decades in their effort to secure South Vietnam, and then they withdrew, divided and defeated. But what had the effort cost them, and what would be its economic consequences?

The Vietnam War claimed its most basic toll in human lives. This cost is readily calculable, at least for the American side. The names of the 58,221 Americans who perished are inscribed in the granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. More detail can be found in the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System.¹² This dataset tells us that the average US casualty was a man of approximately 23.1 years of age, most likely from California.

Parsing the statistics reveals an uneven age distribution. More than 5,500 Americans were over thirty when they died in Vietnam. The longevity of this cohort creates a statistical tail that obscures just how young the war’s typical American victim really was. Substitute a modal average for the mean, and the age of the representative fatality falls to just 20.44 years: the difference between a college sophomore and a college senior. Almost 11,500 American casualties were nineteen or younger. Nearly 12.5 percent were African American, compared to 11.1 percent of the US population.¹³ Contrary to popular impression, nearly 70 percent of the Americans who perished were volunteers, not conscripts. Virtually all were men; the military casualties included just eight women, all military nurses.

Another hundred thousand soldiers, sailors, and airmen suffered severe disabilities. Here, calculation of the war’s costs becomes murkier. Expenses associated with medical care for wounded veterans vary depending on the nature of the injuries and the lifespan of the survivor. The costs of caring for wounded veterans, moreover, situate with the Veterans’ Administration, not the Department of Defense, and are thus disentangled from the costs of waging war.

Accounting for veteran care also requires judgment calls. Some 8.8 million Americans served in Vietnam; almost all became eligible for free healthcare from the Veterans’ Administration system because of their service. Should estimates of the war’s costs include this entitlement? Given the perplexities, perhaps it will suffice to say that caring for veterans remains a major public obligation: allocations to the Department of Veterans Affairs claimed 2.4 percent of the federal budget in the 1990s, 2.7 percent in the 2000s, and 4 percent in the 2010s.¹⁴ (Compare this to the Department of Education, which received 2 percent in the 1990s, 2.6 percent in the 2000s, and 1.8 percent in the 2010s.) Even if the United States were to disengage from the world tomorrow, the costs of the nation’s twentieth-century wars would weigh upon the federal budget for decades.

Turn to other budgetary items, and calculation of the Vietnam War’s costs becomes even more vexing. Crudely, the expenditures the United States incurred in Vietnam can be divided into two categories: those associated with state-building and those associated with warfighting. Estimating the costs of state-building is relatively straightforward. Over two decades, economic assistance to South Vietnam flowed via three main channels. The first was the Commercial Import Program, which provided Saigon with dollars to purchase US-made goods. The second was the PL 480 or “Food for Peace” program. The third was Project Aid, a catchall that enveloped a multitude of initiatives, from infrastructural development to administrative reform. To these three channels, the economist Douglas Dacy has added a fourth, which was the “piaster support” that US agencies (and personnel) provided when they purchased the South Vietnamese currency at the official rate and thereby helped to sustain an overvalued exchange rate.¹⁵

To these expenditures should be added the weapons, supplies, and military training the United States provided to South Vietnam. Military assistance surged during the Kennedy years and continued at high levels through the mid-1960s, even as the United States deployed its own armed forces. As Table 29.1 shows, military assistance reached its highest levels under Nixon, who hoped to offset US troop drawdowns with sharp increases in aid. Table 29.1 shows the pattern.

Table 29.1 US assistance to South Vietnam

	Economic Aid ($ mln)	Military Aid ($ mln)	Total US Aid ($ mln)	% of US GDP	% of South Vietnam GDP
1955	322.4		322.4	0.08	35.43
1956	210.0	176.5	386.5	0.09	39.44
1957	282.2	119.8	402.0	0.08	41.88
1958	189.0	79.3	268.3	0.06	26.30
1959	207.4	52.4	259.8	0.05	22.79
1960	181.8	72.7	254.5	0.05	21.75
1961	152.0	71.0	223.0	0.04	18.43
1962	156.0	237.2	393.2	0.07	32.77
1963	195.9	275.9	471.8	0.07	36.57
1964	230.6	190.9	421.5	0.06	30.99
1965	290.3	318.6	608.9	0.08	39.54
1966	793.9	686.2	1,480.1	0.18	90.80
1967	666.6	662.5	1,329.1	0.15	70.32
1968	651.1	1,243.4	1,894.5	0.20	98.67
1969	560.5	1,534.0	2,094.5	0.21	85.84
1970	655.4	1,577.3	2,232.7	0.21	90.03
1971	778.0	1,945.6	2,723.6	0.23	107.65
1972	587.7	2,602.6	3,190.3	0.25	110.39
1973	531.2	3,349.4	3,880.6	0.27	132.90
1974	657.4	941.9	1,599.3	0.10	45.96
1975	240.9	625.1	866.0	0.06	N/A

Sources: Data on US assistance is adapted from Douglas C. Dacy, Foreign Aid, War, and Economic Development: South Vietnam, 1955–1975 (Cambridge, 1986), Table 10.2. Data on United States is from Bureau of Economic Analysis. Data on South Vietnam is from Dacy, Foreign Aid, War, and Economic Development, Table A3.5.

Table 29.1 prices US assistance in historical US dollars, but what was this assistance worth? How we answer may be a matter of perspective. Start by situating South Vietnam among the beneficiaries of US assistance worldwide. At the peak in the early 1970s, around one-third of the entire US foreign aid budget went to Saigon, an impressive total.¹⁶ But situate that aid in relation to the overall US economy, and the sums transmitted appear unimpressive. Only in 1973 did aid to South Vietnam surpass 0.25 percent of US GDP. Under LBJ, annual aid flows averaged just 0.13 percent of GDP. Adopt a South Vietnamese perspective, though, and the economic umbilical cord stretching across the Pacific explodes in significance. Between 1955 and 1965, US assistance approached one-third of South Vietnam’s GDP. During the 1971–3 phase, the value of US assistance surpassed South Vietnam’s entire economic output. This radical asymmetry reminds us that South Vietnam was an economic vassal: a Cold War frontier state whose GDP, averaged over the 1955–75 phase, was about 1/475th that of the United States. An insignificant trickle from a US standpoint, the transpacific flows of resources that Washington sustained from 1955 through 1975 were South Vietnam’s lifeblood.

More significant for the United States were direct expenditures associated with warfighting operations. Calculating these costs is more challenging. The technical obstacles include the difficulties of disentangling the costs of the Vietnam War from the overall Pentagon budget; the challenges of accounting for hardware purchased before the war; the unpredictability of public obligations to military veterans in the aftermath of war; and the unavailability of budgetary data from the CIA, which played a sizable role in the US military effort.

Methodological choices also bear upon our sense of the war’s costs. Pentagon data provides alternative costings of US war expenditures: one based on the war’s “incremental costs,” the other on a “full cost basis.” The first set of figures derives total war expenditures from a counterfactual projection of what the Pentagon’s budget would have been without the war. The second tallies all warfighting expenses. Pentagon estimates put the war’s price tag around $111 billion (nominal) on an incremental cost basis and $140 billion on a full cost basis.

Convert the Pentagon estimates into 2020 dollars, and the digits surge. Even the low-end estimate ranges from $527 billion to $1.4 trillion, depending upon what method of historical price conversion is favored. (The high-end estimate may be the most appropriate: it bases the conversion on the expenditure’s share of GDP to calculate the “economy cost” to society.) These are big numbers, but for a yardstick compare the Vietnam War’s costs to those of the Apollo Project. NASA admitted spending $21 billion on the moonshot; others have estimated $30 billion.¹⁷ Adopt the low-end estimates for both projects, and the Vietnam War cost the United States four times as much as the moon landing.

Thus far, our calculations have included only direct outlays. These are the most tangible expression of the war’s costs, but they are not the whole story. Comprehensive reckoning should include future budgetary costs: transfers to war veterans; extrabudgetary costs, such as the civilian earnings that soldiers and sailors forwent; and even the costs of macroeconomic setbacks associated with the war, such as recession or inflation.

Two book-length studies have attempted such comprehensive estimates. In one, the economist Robert Stevens put the war’s costs in the $882–925 billion range.¹⁸ In the other, the economist Anthony Campagna proposes a more conservative $515 billion.¹⁹ The lower-end estimate still yields startling conclusions. Convert Campagna’s estimate of the overall costs into 2020 prices on an economy-cost basis, and the United States spent around $6.55 trillion (2020) on the Vietnam War. This sum doubles Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz’s comprehensive estimate of the Iraq War’s costs.²⁰ Alternatively, the costs of the Vietnam War exceed the combined stock market capitalizations of Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon as of mid-2021. Such numbers confirm that the Vietnam War was a major fiscal undertaking, the macroeconomic implications of which warranted careful management.

Unfortunately, political leaders managed the war’s economic consequences carelessly. Responsibility attaches, once again, to LBJ and his closest advisors. Until the escalation of the war in 1965, the costs of US state-building efforts in South Vietnam were low enough to be inconsequential from a macroeconomic standpoint. The adverse economic effects began with the war’s Americanization in 1965.

To understand the war’s economic consequences, the context is vital. Unlike World War II, the escalation of the Vietnam War coincided with the apex phase in a long economic expansion, which the Democratic Party’s embrace of fiscal stimulus policies had bolstered. The zenith in this expansionary phase was the Revenue Act of 1964, a huge tax cut that aimed to put money back in pockets, expand aggregate demand, and promote economic growth. The law achieved all these purposes. Between 1964 and 1966, GDP growth averaged 6.3 percent per year, which made the mid-1960s the strongest three-year phase for the US economy since the Korean War. In 1966, the unemployment rate slipped below 4 percent.

Despite the general boom, the endurance of poverty amid plenty prompted new fiscal commitments in the mid-1960s: Johnson’s $1 billion War on Poverty, declared in 1964; the Medicare and Medicaid programs, enacted in 1965 and 1966; and a generous reform of the Social Security Act in 1967. These were worthy initiatives, befitting Johnson’s self-conception as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s political heir. But the difference was that LBJ did not pivot from nation-building at home to warfighting abroad, as FDR had done in the late 1930s; LBJ attempted to do both at the same time, which compounded the Vietnam War’s effects.

As the data in Table 29.2 indicates, federal spending on the war approached 3 percent of GDP in 1966, rose to 3.5 percent of GDP in 1967–8, and then receded in the early 1970s. By comparison with recent wars, these were not vast sums. During World War II, military spending had peaked at 37 percent of national GDP in 1944. During the Korean War, defense spending surged to almost 14 percent of GDP in 1952. During the Vietnam War, total US defense spending never surpassed 9.1 percent of GDP, of which barely a third was devoted to the war effort. Yet Vietnam War spending generated adverse economic effects that the Korean War had not because Vietnam coincided with a long secular expansion of the US economy.

Table 29.2 Vietnam War annual spending, 1964–1973

	US National Accounts				Vietnam War Expenditures
	US GDP ($ mln)	Federal Spending ($ mln)	Federal Spending as % GDP	Federal Surplus / Deficit (% GDP)	State-Building	Warfighting	Total	Total (% GDP)
1964	629,200	118,400	18.8	−0.3	421.50	0.10	421.60	0.07
1965	672,600	119,900	17.8	0.2	608.90	5,812.00	6,420.90	0.95
1966	739,000	134,300	18.2	0.0	1,480.10	20,133.00	21,613.10	2.92
1967	794,600	156,700	19.7	−1.1	1,329.10	26,547.00	27,876.10	3.51
1968	849,400	174,400	20.5	−1.4	1,894.50	28,805.00	30,699.50	3.61
1969	929,500	187,300	20.2	0.6	2,094.50	23,052.00	25,146.50	2.71
1970	990,200	198,700	20.1	−0.1	2,232.70	14,719.00	16,951.70	1.71
1971	1,055,900	216,800	20.5	−2.0	2,723.60	9,261.00	11,984.60	1.14
1972	1,153,100	237,100	20.6	−1.7	3,190.30	7,500.00	10,690.30	0.93
1973	1,281,400	260,400	20.3	−1.2	3,880.60	3,800.00	7,680.60	0.60

Sources: Data on budgetary costs is adapted from Robert Warren Stevens, Vain Hopes, Grim Realities: The Economic Consequences of the Vietnam War (New York, 1976), Table 8-6. Data on US GDP is from Bureau of Economic Analysis.

LBJ might have mitigated the consequences by seeking a tax hike to offset the war’s costs, much as President Truman had done during the Korean War. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara recommended that Johnson pursue a tax surcharge in July 1965; other advisors, including the economist Walter Heller, reiterated McNamara’s suggestion. But LBJ worried about how a tax hike might affect both the Great Society programs that he cherished and his party’s prospects in the 1966 midterms. He instead obfuscated, funding the war through supplemental appropriations.

McNamara, while he grasped the war’s real costs, played an infamous part in the Johnson administration’s fiscal subterfuge. The most notorious episode occurred in January 1966, when he presented to Congress a budgetary proposal for 1967 that predicated the Pentagon’s budget upon the dubious assumption that the Vietnam War would be over by June 30, 1967. This gambit enabled McNamara’s budget to meet (more or less) the president’s informal ceiling of $110 billion on US defense expenditures for the fiscal year. But the predictable consequence was a rapid return to Congress to pursue supplemental appropriations – and widening federal deficits in 1966 and 1967.

Specifying the economic effects of LBJ’s furtive escalation is a speculative exercise. The economist who has devoted the most careful attention to the question concludes that the war’s “ultimate economic consequences” will “never be known with any degree of precision.”²¹ But even contemporary analysts believed that spending on the war effort, which approached 3 percent of GDP during 1966, contributed to a widening federal deficit, an overheating US economy, and surging price inflation. Increasingly tangible during 1966, these downside costs nudged the Federal Reserve to tighten monetary conditions. The Fed’s efforts ended up precipitating a dramatic credit crunch in late 1966 that interrupted, but did not end, the postwar boom. But the episode portended challenges ahead.

During 1967, the Fed eased interest rates, and LBJ opted to pursue a temporary tax surcharge. “The spurt of demand that followed the step-up of our Vietnam effort in mid-1965,” Johnson conceded, “simply exceeded the speed limits on the economy’s ability to adjust.”²² Overdue, the president’s appeal for a tax hike did not win over fiscal hawks in Congress, who demanded spending cuts as a precondition for raising taxes. In Wilbur Mills, Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, the president found an implacable foe. Mills’s resistance forced Johnson to do what he had not previously done and redefine the Vietnam War as a solemn national obligation, in which all Americans should share. But LBJ would not accept cuts to his social programs, and a standoff with Mills persisted through 1967.

The conflict over war funding came to a head in the winter of 1967–8, as the costs of the Vietnam War weighed upon the US international balance of payments. A sterling crisis in November 1967 prefigured a wave of dollar sales in the winter of 1967–8. Investors swapped dollars for gold, gambling that the United States would be next to devalue. Committed to sustaining the dollar’s fixed exchange rate at $35 per gold ounce, LBJ doubled down on the prophylactic measures that he and his immediate predecessors had adopted to shore up the international balance of payments. New controls on overseas investments by US corporations were imposed, and overseas travel by US officials and even private citizens was restricted in a bid to stem the outflow of dollars.²³

The Tet Offensive at the end of January 1968 created new questions, including whether LBJ would send more troops to Vietnam. The uncertainty exploded the long-feared dollar crisis. In early March, the Treasury began to hemorrhage gold, as hordes of dollar-holders demanded conversion of paper dollars into gold. Rather than devalue the dollar, the Johnson administration opted to suspend gold–dollar conversions (except when requested by foreign central banks) and to accelerate preexisting plans to reform the international monetary system through the creation of an artificial reserve asset, the IMF-sponsored Special Drawing Rights. The crisis also proved a macroeconomic turning point. To bolster the dollar and curb inflation, the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates, which reached 8 percent at the year’s end. And Lyndon Johnson at last accepted Wilbur Mills’s position: to pay for the Vietnam War and to buttress the dollar, he would accept both a tax surcharge and cuts in federal spending.

The crises of early 1968 ended the long era of postwar growth and shattered what had in the 1960s become a working consensus within Washington around the desirability of fiscal stimulus. During 1968, macroeconomic policy turned toward retrenchment, a shift that Richard Nixon’s election confirmed. Vietnam was not the only cause of this economic reckoning, but the war’s costs and, more important, LBJ’s failure to plan for the war’s costs hastened the unraveling. Tragically, the war upended the grand ambition of LBJ’s Great Society and redirected resources toward a distant, misbegotten war. Martin Luther King, Jr., was right to lament the tradeoffs. “I knew,” King mulled, “that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in the rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.”²⁴

Vietnam hastened the demise not only of progressive domestic priorities but also of an international monetary order centered on the dollar. Johnson’s turn toward retrenchment in 1968 bought time, and high interest rates attracted an influx of dollars from overseas that buoyed the balance of payments. But the crisis of the dollar-centered monetary order could not be forestalled forever. The Fed’s turn toward a more expansionary monetary policy in 1971 precipitated another major dollar crisis, in response to which President Nixon in August 1971 severed the last connection between the dollar and gold. Nixon’s tactical goal in 1971 was to secure a dollar devaluation, but his strategic purpose was to reverse what he saw as national decline.

The Vietnam War was not the cause of the relative decline that Nixon hoped to reverse. But Vietnam had exposed the hubris of Lyndon Johnson’s gambit that the United States was so rich that it could afford to wage a major war without enacting policies to offset the war’s costs. By adding to the deficits and the inflationary pressures that roiled the US economy in the late 1960s, the Vietnam War hastened the reckoning. And what the war ultimately exposed, perhaps, was the underlying unfitness of American political institutions for sustaining the burdens of empire that successive presidents had assumed in Vietnam.

While the Vietnam War never cost more than a small fraction of the nation’s GDP, the war never commanded the kind of political consensus that had enabled the United States to sustain a vigorous national mobilization in World War II. Tolerated so long as it was fought offstage, the Vietnam War divided Americans as soon as it began to exact meaningful costs. The rancor that followed exposed the unwillingness of American politicians to shoulder the burdens of singular responsibility in a prolonged global struggle with Soviet communism. With the Vietnam War’s twilight, an era of Cold War optimism, in which presidents had presumed their nation’s capacity to “bear any burden” on the world’s behalf, ended, and an era of limits began.

The War and the Resurgence of East Asia

What, though, of the war’s costs for its Vietnamese protagonists? While the paucity of data precludes the kind of accounting this chapter has attempted for the American side, we can nonetheless ponder the differences between the American and Vietnamese experiences of war.

Start with the death tolls. The imprecision of even the most careful estimates indicates the Vietnam War’s appalling costs. Various authorities have compiled numbers: from the US Senate and Defense Department, which have generated separate estimates; to the government of Vietnam, which released its figures only in 1995; to demographers who have attempted to deduce war deaths from pre- and postwar population data.²⁵ Taken as a whole, these exercises have affirmed the contemporary assumption that the war’s Vietnamese death toll is situated in the 2–3 million range. Of these, up to 1 million deaths may be counted as combatant fatalities on the communist side, with maybe a quarter of a million combatant fatalities on the South Vietnamese side. The balance can be measured in civilian lives, although the distinction between combatant and civilian is no easier to comprehend today than it was for US soldiers during the war.

Nor can the war’s economic impacts be estimated with much precision. The Defense Department’s Theater History of Operations Records (THOR) dataset specifies the sheer quantities of ordnance the United States dropped on Vietnam: more than 7.5 million tons of bombs, double the quantity the United States deployed worldwide during World War II.²⁶ But this data does not indicate the damage that US ordnance caused, nor the destruction inflicted by mortars, napalm, and small arms. Once again, the contrast between the clinical precision of the American data and the abject imprecision of the war’s deadly effects upon the people of Vietnam offers further evidence, as if any were needed, of the war’s terrible asymmetries.

Comparisons may be more illuminating. North Vietnam, which suffered the brunt of the US bombing, experienced aerial bombardment akin to what Germany and Japan suffered in 1944–5. South Vietnam experienced the ravages of countrywide insurgency and counterinsurgency warfare. Contrasting the American and Vietnamese experiences involves comparison between an offshore military effort that never consumed more than 4 percent of GDP with a conflict that approached the intensity of total war, for both Vietnamese protagonists.

South Vietnam and North Vietnam waged different wars, but the economic mobilizations that the two Vietnamese states undertook reveal certain structural similarities. Both Vietnams were developmental states. Both strived to overcome the legacies of colonial exploitation, including through land reform. Both were Cold War frontier states that depended upon inflows of assistance from their superpower patrons.

Start with South Vietnam, a state whose creation resulted from the hope that US-sponsored economic and political development might forestall communism’s advance. Development aid was the principal form of US assistance to South Vietnam in the early years, and South Vietnam depended on it. Between 1955 and 1960, US assistance comprised more than 31 percent of South Vietnam’s GDP. Over the course of the 1960s, an expanding share of US aid flowed to military purposes. By the late 1960s, the annual value of US assistance was approaching 100 percent of South Vietnam’s GDP, the preponderance of which flowed toward the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), not the civilian economy. What all this meant, the economist Douglas Dacy surmises, is that South Vietnam “was foremost an aid economy,” dependent on US assistance, which functioned as “the glue used to hold the country together.”²⁷

Ironically, the vast scale of US assistance, coupled with the deleterious effects of the war, asphyxiated the economic growth that US policymakers hoped to cultivate. South Vietnam’s agricultural economy illustrates the point. Developed under French colonial rule, South Vietnam’s agricultural sector was at the war’s outset configured to produce regular surpluses for the world market. In 1963, South Vietnam had exported 323,000 metric tons of rice, which made the country the world’s fourth-largest exporter. But the war exerted a heavy toll on production, and what filled the gap was American aid. In 1967, South Vietnam imported more than 777,000 tons of rice.²⁸ The reversal showcases not only the war’s devastating economic effects but also how South Vietnam’s relationship to the world economy shifted in the era of the Vietnam War. Formerly an arena of extraction from which the French pulled commodities, South Vietnam became under US tutelage a receptacle for American economic inputs, an inversion of transnational flows that produced its own deleterious consequences.

The politics did not help. Perhaps a tight authoritarian grip or a robust democratic mandate would have empowered the enactment of effective economic reforms, but Ngô Đình Diệm commanded neither. Saigon thus lacked the political tools necessary to transform an unequal agrarian economy into a modern and productive industrial society. South Vietnam’s limited forays into land reform reveal the constraints. Concerned not to alienate landowners, Diệm at first reversed the land reforms that the Việt Minh had enacted during 1953–4, restoring titles to landlords. He then introduced a modest land reform of his own that left a sizable portion of South Vietnam’s peasants landless, to the consternation of American advisors who understood the catalytic role that land reforms had played in Japan’s and Taiwan’s postwar booms. But the preservation of political stability required the conciliation of social elites, and Diệm lacked the capacity, and perhaps the will, to ride roughshod over powerful domestic opponents.

Saigon’s preoccupation with the preservation of social peace outlived Diệm and led, over the course of the 1960s, to the diversion of significant US aid toward consumer subsidies. Cheaper goods gratified consumers, but subsidies squandered resources that might have sustained longer-range development goals. The regime’s fledgling legitimacy thus precluded, once again, the hard choices necessary to prioritize strategic purposes. Saigon, it turned out, could neither coerce nor persuade its citizens to sacrifice for a more prosperous future. The boldest reforms, ironically, came late. From 1970, the government of Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu enacted a land reform initiative that transferred holdings to almost 1 million landless peasants. Unfortunately for South Vietnam, the window of opportunity for boldness was already closing.

North Vietnam was a different story. Similar in size and population, the crucial distinction between the two Vietnamese states was the dominance in the North of a disciplined Communist Party whose cadres subscribed to a rigid ideology of modernization. For sure, Hanoi did not achieve socialism’s mooted breakthrough to modernity during the war decades. When the Americans ceased bombing, North Vietnam remained pitifully poor, much as it had been at the war’s beginning. Rather, what the party–state’s rigid grip provided was an authoritative basis for war mobilization that contrasted with the experiences of both South Vietnam and the United States.

The contrasting aptitude of the two Vietnams for economic coercion was evident well before Hanoi opted to channel assistance to the South’s communists. Land reform illustrates the differences: where Saigon dithered, Hanoi acted. Initiated before the eviction of the French, land reform efforts in the North intensified after Geneva. During 1956, the Communist Party completed an ambitious program that stripped land titles from wealthy peasants and redistributed land to tillers. Enacted by teams of party cadres, the campaign was violent and coercive; the death toll, historians estimate, numbered in the thousands.²⁹ Next came the campaign for agricultural collectivization, which strived to consolidate private holdings into state-owned enterprises. These two policy thrusts revealed the strengths and the weaknesses of communist methods. Land reform broadened individual property ownership, incentivized work, and boosted productivity: rice production in the North doubled between 1954 and 1959. Collectivization halted the progress: Vietnamese peasants were less eager to work for the state than for themselves; agricultural productivity plateaued after its implementation.³⁰

After land reform and collectivization, North Vietnam confronted a strategic dilemma: what should the goal of its economic development be? Moderates wanted to consolidate the party’s agricultural achievements through the pursuit of an industrial development strategy that would transform North Vietnam into an exemplary socialist economy. Militants, who grouped around Lê Duẩn, prioritized national reunification, which is to say war against South Vietnam.³¹ The dilemma resembled the old Stalinist/Trotskyite debate: having seized power, should Marxist-Leninists spread their revolution or strive to create a beacon of socialist progress? The difference was that North Vietnam after Geneva was half of a divided society, not a continental empire. This reality made the offensive irresistible, and the Politburo opted at the 3rd Congress of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) to wage war in the South.

What resulted was, in some ways, a synthesis of moderate and militant approaches. Conscious of the need to balance factions within the VCP, Hồ Chí Minh argued for socialist construction in the North to sustain the war in the South. Development would be harnessed for warfighting purposes. The whole project depended upon infusions of economic and military effort from the Soviet Union and China, whose grants, loans, and materiel sustained Hanoi’s war. Grasping North Vietnam’s dependence on its communist patrons, Hồ Chí Minh strived to balance between Beijing and Moscow. Hồ Chí Minh’s faltering health empowered the militant faction, but Lê Duẩn continued balancing between Beijing and Moscow to extract resources from both. The intensification of the US war, including the unleashing of Operation Rolling Thunder in 1965, only sharpened North Vietnam’s dependence on its Soviet and Chinese patrons. By 1965–7, North Vietnam depended on external assistance for as much as 60 percent of its annual budget.³² This made the North a Cold War welfare state not so different from the South.

The crucial difference was the unity of purpose the VCP was able to impose. Whereas Saigon squandered US aid on consumer subsidies, Hanoi was able to compress civilian consumption and impress civilians into military service. The differences showed. Much as the Russian and Chinese civil wars had done, the Vietnam War affirmed the utility of disciplined and ideological party cadres during times of severe trial. War communism, for all its cruelties, showed itself to be an effective system of social control and economic mobilization, and not for the first time in the twentieth century.

However, war communism proved less adept as a framework for peacetime development. Vietnam’s post-1945 struggle for postcolonial succession came to an overdue end in early 1975 when North Vietnam invaded and conquered the South, completing the coercive reintegration that the United States had fought to prevent. After 1975, the Communist Party exerted itself to impose upon South Vietnam the systems of control refined in the North during the war. Southerners, especially those of Chinese descent, suffered. And, yet, the conquered South’s relative prosperity contrasted with the austere poverty of the North, providing a window into capitalist modernity that would encourage economic reformers within the VCP.

Figure 29.2 A Vietnamese woman sells coconuts and waits for business outside an internet center in Hồ Chí Minh City (November 19, 2000).

Source: Paula Bronstein / Stringer / Hulton Archive / Getty Images.

Lê Duẩn’s death in 1986 created an opportunity, which reformers seized. Nguyễn Vӑn Linh, who had led the Communist Party in the South during the war, now emerged as the architect of a new economic strategy, known as đổi mới (renovation). Increasingly, a Southern perspective guided national strategy. Nguyễn Vӑn Linh’s reform agenda loosened controls on foreign direct investment, abandoned price controls in agriculture, and liberalized Vietnam’s financial sector. By the end of the 1980s, Vietnam was no longer a socialist economy in the Marxist-Leninist sense; rather, the choice for reform remade Vietnam’s economic order and its relationship to the larger global economy. Hanoi’s pragmatic choice benefited the Vietnamese people, whose per capita income quadrupled, in real terms, between 1990 and 2020.³³

Conclusion

Hanoi’s choice for globalization remade Vietnam’s relations with the larger world and with the United States, which normalized relations with Vietnam in the mid-1990s. Trade boomed: twenty years later, the United States was Vietnam’s largest export market, absorbing more Vietnamese exports than China and Japan combined.³⁴ By the 2010s, even the geopolitical relationship between Vietnam and the United States was tightening, a consequence, to some degree, of the fears that China engendered in both Hanoi and Washington. The result, half a century after the war, was a bilateral relationship more balanced and reciprocal than the one that had existed between Washington and Saigon, which had engaged only as patron and client.

But if the Vietnam War came to appear, as the decades passed, an awful detour in a longer, and increasingly productive, US engagement with Vietnam, the passage of time would not vindicate those American leaders who had escalated the war in the 1960s so much as it called into question their judgment, their patience, and their sense of history. Had the self-avowed champions of the “Free World” been more confident in the prospects of their own system, perhaps less blood would have been shed in Vietnam. In this sense, the long view and the rapprochement it envelops offer no exculpation; the irony merely compounds the tragedy.

30 Vietnam and the Global 1968

Adrienne Minh-Châu Lê

The year 1968 was a global phenomenon – an exceptional year in which people around the world mobilized to protest capitalism, imperialism, authoritarianism, and war. Feeling that they were part of a global revolution, galvanized by popular media and international networks, students and dissidents demanded their governments uphold their promises of freedom and democracy.¹ Nineteen sixty-eight has come to represent not just a year, but an era of social and political transformation. It marked the peak of popular resistance against the Cold War world order, and its meaning has been debated by scholars into the twenty-first century.

This chapter provides a brief look at two major events that challenged the Cold War status quo in 1968 – the Tet Offensive and the Prague Spring – and explores how Vietnam was both a rallying point for, and an active participant in, the global upheaval of 1968. While the North Vietnamese Communist Party and National Liberation Front (NLF) captured the imagination of the international militant left, South Vietnamese dissidents carried out massive protests that mirrored uprisings in other parts of the world. Vietnam was at the forefront of global consciousness in this special year, influencing people-powered movements all over the world as it was shaken by its own domestic turmoil.

At the close of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as competing hegemons, each pushing their own vision of modernization across the world. The race between American capitalism and Soviet communism went on for more than two decades, coinciding with the age of decolonization as people across Asia and Africa fought for independence from European powers. Seeking to bring newly independent nations into their spheres of influence, the Cold War superpowers intervened in wars across the Third World – escalating already violent conflicts with infusions of money, tanks, bombs, and soldiers. Fourteen million people died in these conflicts between 1945 and 1990, the majority of whom were civilians.²

As violent conflicts erupted across the decolonizing world, the post–World War II population boom and concurrent expansion of universities gave rise to a new, educated generation. Student enrollments more than doubled in the United States, West Germany, France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China between 1955 and 1965.³ This generation grew disillusioned with what they perceived as broken promises of democracy and freedom. Technological advances in television and radio and international exchanges in music, film, and material goods facilitated a global awareness of alternative ways of life as well as civil and personal rights.⁴ Millions of young people took to the streets as dramatic events unfolded in the world around them: the terror of the Cultural Revolution took over China, the Tet Offensive cast doubts on the legitimacy of the war in Vietnam, and the Prague Spring blossomed and met its demise in Czechoslovakia.

The struggle of the Third World was a topic of global concern in 1968, and the Vietnam War stood as its prime example. There, the richest and most powerful country in the world intervened in a civil war over the future of the Vietnamese nation. Across the United States, Latin America, Europe, and Asia, radical student movements opposed US involvement in Vietnam, seeing it as the embodiment of American imperialism. But Vietnam was much more than just a symbolic cause or rallying cry for the world’s activists. Vietnamese people themselves also took part in the global upheaval of 1968. While Vietnamese communist guerrillas became an international symbol of anti-imperial struggle, noncommunist citizens of South Vietnam took to the streets to protest authoritarianism and war.⁵ Vietnam provided both inspiration and ammunition for the student protests of 1968, and the movement against the Vietnam War created new infrastructures and methods for political protest in every region of the world.

Since the late 1990s, historians have sought to make sense of how the protests of 1968 changed societal norms and global politics. Earlier studies tended to focus on student protests in the United States and Europe, including their criticisms of consumer culture, demands for social and political freedoms, and solidarity with Third World liberation struggles.⁶ More recent works have focused on decolonizing nations and marginalized actors, tying local and regional events to global trends.⁷ While 1968 has been studied as a global phenomenon, scholars have noted important differences between Western movements and those in the Third World. The risks of popular dissent were much higher in the decolonizing world, where authorities – including Western powers in command in these places – more readily responded with violence, imprisonment, and execution. International media was also less influential in the Global South, where people were preoccupied with how neocolonialism, modernization, and nation-building played out in their immediate surroundings. Finally, the category of “youth” was more important in defining protests in the United States and Europe. In the Third World, other social factors such as political ideology, religion, and socioeconomic class played a bigger role in determining who participated in popular dissent.⁸

The long-term political consequences of 1968 are still debated. In most places, mass protests did not lead to systemic change or upend the status quo. Still, the events of that year changed the nature of political participation and social movement organizing for decades to come. Nineteen sixty-eight continues to be invoked in today’s struggles against the injustices of capitalism and imperialism. Vietnam and its people were central to the spirit of international solidarity and collective consciousness that defined this historic year.

Double Crisis of Hegemony: The Tet Offensive and the Prague Spring

Nineteen sixty-eight struck a significant blow to the reputation of the two major Cold War powers. The legitimacy of both the United States and Soviet Union were brought into question as crises erupted in their spheres of influence. The Tet Offensive broke the US government’s facade of impending victory in Vietnam while mass unrest continued over civil rights violations at home. The violent crackdown on Czechoslovakia’s peaceful “Prague Spring” revealed that the Soviet bloc had a tenuous hold on Eastern Europe, preserved solely by the threat of military force. These events marked the beginning of a fundamental shift in Cold War relations. The limits of both American and Soviet power were put to the test, and the seeds of détente were sown.

The Tet Offensive was the first phase of a major Vietnamese communist operation meant to break the stalemate of the war in South Vietnam. Devised by Lê Duẩn, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, it was launched during the 1968 Lunar New Year (Tết) holiday when it was suspected most of the South Vietnamese army would be on leave and unprepared. Starting on January 31 and going through September 23, People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) troops and National Liberation Front guerrillas targeted military bases and urban centers including Saigon, Nha Trang, Quảng Ngại, and Huế. The expectation was that these attacks would spark a general uprising among the southern people and turn the tide of war in favor of North Vietnam. However, the initial offensive resulted in nearly ten times as many casualties for the communist side compared to their enemies, and the anticipated massive general uprising never happened.⁹ It took three years for the North Vietnamese war effort to recover from Lê Duẩn’s failed strategy.¹⁰ At the same time, the Tet Offensive also dealt a heavy psychological blow to the other side as it brought unprecedented violence to South Vietnamese cities. American public support for the war fell dramatically, triggering a major change in US strategy in Vietnam and in the Cold War at large.

Images and media coverage of the Tet Offensive circulated around the world in 1968, igniting and feeding doubts about the US mission in Vietnam. One of the most infamous photos – by Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams – captured up close the moment South Vietnamese general Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executed a suspected communist officer at point-blank range on a Saigon street. It became one of the most reproduced images in history.¹¹ Photographs such as this highlighted the brutality of war and the fact that the United States was enabling and participating in human rights violations in Vietnam. For critics of American imperialism, the Tet Offensive was further proof of the disaster that followed Western attempts to develop the decolonizing world.¹²

Television news greatly influenced public opinion of the war. Walter Cronkite’s special report from Vietnam marked a significant turning point in perceptions of the war and of President Lyndon B. Johnson. The “Report from Vietnam,” which aired on CBS Evening News on February 27, 1968, showed Cronkite becoming increasingly skeptical of official accounts that claimed the war was nearly won. During his two-week trip, Cronkite lost faith in the US mission and concluded that the only path forward was to try to find an “honorable” way to withdraw. After watching the report himself, Johnson lamented, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”¹³ By March 1968, the president’s closest advisors also changed their tune and began pressing him to withdraw troops from Vietnam. Former secretary of state Dean Acheson counseled Johnson to negotiate for peace, holding that the United States could “no longer do the job we set out to do in the time we have left, and we must begin to … disengage.”¹⁴

On March 31, President Johnson shocked the nation when he announced in a forty-minute televised speech that he would not be running for reelection and would instead dedicate his remaining time in office to forging a diplomatic solution to the war in Vietnam.¹⁵ He ordered an immediate end to US bombing of North Vietnam above the 20th parallel and declared his willingness to open serious peace negotiations with Hanoi. Reeling from the aftermath of the disastrous Tet Offensive and from the effects of American bombing, North Vietnamese leaders were ready to accept Johnson’s invitation to come to the table.¹⁶

Four days after Johnson’s announcement, Americans were stunned yet again by the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1968. Exactly one year before his death, the civil rights icon had delivered a highly controversial sermon titled “Beyond Vietnam,” in which he sharply condemned the war and tied the Vietnamese struggle for peace and self-determination to the struggle for racial and economic equality in the United States. The US government, King said, was “taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.” By spending more money on the war than on domestic social programs, the United States was “approaching spiritual death.”¹⁷ In the weeks following the assassination of King, protests and riots exploded across the country, including in the nation’s capital. Eleven thousand troops were dispatched to Washington, DC, putting the city under military occupation and virtual martial law. Over the span of four chaotic days starting on April 6, police fired more than 8,000 canisters of tear gas; 1,190 people were injured; and 7,600 were arrested in clashes between citizens and law enforcement. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. – the foremost advocate of nonviolent resistance – followed by the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy only two months later served as proof to many activists that real social change required violent, armed struggle. As Jeremi Suri puts it, “A growing cohort of young Americans – black and white – believed that they could redress inequalities and end the war in Vietnam only through increased violence. Members of the Black Power movement and student radicals forged loose alliances during the tumultuous months of 1968.”¹⁸

As the United States struggled with domestic turmoil and began to change course in Vietnam, the Soviet Union faced its own crisis in Eastern Europe, starting with the liberalization of Czechoslovak politics in early 1968. The social and political reforms that came to be known as the Prague Spring were ushered in by Alexander Dubček after he unseated the unpopular head of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ), Antonín Novotný, in January 1968. Novotný had held the position of First Secretary for nearly fifteen years. Within weeks of taking power, Dubček enacted sweeping reforms, including effectively ending press censorship and accelerating the rehabilitation of victims of the political show trials of the 1950s. He also instigated a wave of personnel changes, triggering anxiety in Moscow as Leonid Brezhnev observed that many “good and sincere friends of the Soviet Union had been forced to step down.” New KSČ leaders believed that the liberalization and democratization of the social, political, and economic systems were needed to ensure the continued domination of the party in their country. They initiated these reforms while reaffirming their commitment to uphold all Warsaw Pact obligations to East European allies and the Soviet Union, including being the leading military supplier for the North Vietnamese communist struggle. But while KSČ leaders verbally affirmed their loyalty to the Soviet bloc, their reforms enabled dissident political activities that moved beyond their control and challenged Soviet hegemony by prioritizing Czechoslovak sovereignty over all else. The KSČ also adopted an antinuclear stance, overturning their previous agreement to store Soviet nuclear warheads on Czech soil.¹⁹

Moscow reacted to the Prague Spring with alarm. Brezhnev assessed that Czechoslovakia was “moving in an anti-communist direction,” and from March 1968 the “Czechoslovak question” was at the top of the Politburo’s agenda. The stability of the East European bloc would be at risk if these liberal reforms were to spill over to Poland, East Germany, and Ukraine. Dissidents within the Soviet Union itself were already taking note of Dubček’s reforms. Even after repeated warnings, the KSČ showed no sign of reversing or slowing down the liberalization program. By the middle of the year, there was no doubt among Soviet leadership that military intervention would be needed in Czechoslovakia. They prepared and launched their invasion at midnight on August 21, with Soviet forces supported by 80,000 soldiers from Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, and East Germany. Within hours, the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovak transportation and communications lines was complete and the KSČ leadership arrested. Soviet leaders had made a political miscalculation, however, as Politburo analysis after the invasion showed that “75 to 90 percent of the [Czechoslovak] population … regard the entry of Soviet troops as an act of occupation.” Not wanting to be seen as a blatant occupier, they reinstalled Dubček and other Prague Spring leaders while keeping a Soviet military presence in the country.²⁰

The long-term impacts of the invasion of Czechoslovakia were significant. Shortly after the beginning of the occupation, Brezhnev announced that the Soviet Union was prepared to intervene militarily anywhere in Eastern Europe to ensure that members of the Warsaw Pact adhered to Soviet-style communism – a policy that came to be known as the Brezhnev Doctrine. Albania protested by leaving the Warsaw Pact and aligning with China. West European communist parties, which had been inspired by the Prague Spring, also turned away from the Soviet Union after seeing its violent response to the peaceful, democratic reforms. With the Brezhnev Doctrine, ideological conformity became a requirement of the Warsaw Pact – a requirement that would be upheld by the threat of military invasion. The doctrine showed that the Soviet Union lacked a strong political coalition in Europe and that its allies were not capable of staying in power without Soviet military backing. In the words of Mark Kramer, “If Soviet leaders had once hoped that ‘stability’ in the Eastern bloc could be maintained by something other than coercion, the 1968 invasion put an end to those hopes.” The Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia also had an impact on relations between the major Cold War powers. China denounced the action and sent more troops to reinforce the Sino-Soviet border, setting the stage for Zhou Enlai’s announcement in March 1969 that the Soviet Union was China’s “main enemy.”²¹ An easing of relations between the United States and China soon followed.

Nineteen sixty-eight triggered a crisis of hegemony for both the United States and Soviet Union. After more than five years of stalemate war in Vietnam, the Tet Offensive and escalating turmoil at home forced American leaders to rethink their priorities and their approach to the Cold War. By late March, President Johnson had become obsessed with ending the war in Vietnam. By the end of October, he brought a full stop to the bombing of North Vietnam, initiated peace negotiations with Hanoi, and opened a pathway toward improved relations with China and the Soviet Union.²² The events of 1968 prompted the United States to begin making its way out of Vietnam and to ease tensions with its Cold War rivals. For the Soviet Union, the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the resulting fallout revealed the instability of the communist bloc in Eastern Europe. The reputation of the Soviet Union suffered, and China continued to rise as the new communist model for the Third World.²³

The Vietnamese Communist Struggle and the Third World

International support was essential to the survival of the Vietnamese communist revolution. North Vietnamese leadership performed a delicate balancing act to maintain support from both China and the Soviet Union throughout the Vietnam War.²⁴ Beyond relations with these communist giants, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) also looked to position itself as a leader of the Third World. Especially after the Tet Offensive in 1968, Vietnamese communists saw their struggle as the main driving force of anti-imperial struggle and world revolution.²⁵

While North Vietnam’s communist credentials were an asset in the socialist world, they were a liability when it came to the West and the Third World.²⁶ To understand the success of North Vietnamese diplomacy in the noncommunist world, we have to look at the revolution’s southern front: the nominally independent National Liberation Front. Founded by Northern communist leadership in 1960, the NLF was a self-proclaimed nonaligned group representing southern Vietnamese people and their desire for peace and national independence. The degree to which the NLF was controlled by Hanoi throughout the war is still debated, but there is no doubt that communist leaders orchestrated NLF diplomacy to serve their own ends, particularly as the United States escalated its military involvement in the 1960s.²⁷

In its recruitment and propaganda efforts, the National Liberation Front emphasized that it was fighting for freedom from American imperialism, not for communist revolution. This anti-imperial rhetoric helped to win over Western antiwar activists and the Third World, and Hanoi’s leadership used it to their advantage.²⁸ They sent NLF delegations to Western university campuses and conferences with nonaligned states and intergovernmental organizations. NLF representatives were present at 125 conventions in 1966 alone. By 1967 they had more than twenty representative offices abroad and sent seventy-nine delegations to twenty-nine countries that year.²⁹ NLF diplomacy served the North Vietnamese war effort by convincing foreign observers that the South Vietnamese government and its US ally were illegitimate and did not serve the interests of the Southern Vietnamese people.

Illustrative of the appeal of the NLF in the Third World is Madame Nguyễn Thị Bình, a woman whose reputation was established during the French Indochina War. Using the name Yên Sa, she organized Southern women in the revolution and eventually went north to train at the Nguyễn Ái Quốc party school in Hanoi. She was sent abroad as a delegate and proved to be an effective speaker. After the death of Hồ Chí Minh in September 1968, Bình took the helm of international diplomacy for the revolution. She traveled alongside North Vietnamese representatives, headed the NLF delegation at the 1968 Paris Peace Talks, and toured the world with other Southern Vietnamese women, including to the third Non-Alignment Movement conference in Lusaka, Zambia, in 1970.³⁰ Bình was an ideal representative in a time when women’s activism and internationalism were at a high point.³¹ While the North Vietnamese campaign focused on securing financial and material support from communist allies, NLF representatives like Nguyễn Thị Bình and her fellow “soldiers with long hair” won over Western antiwar activists and the Third World.³²

Protestors across the globe stood in solidarity with Vietnamese guerrilla fighters in large part because of diplomatic efforts by the National Liberation Front. On every continent, people took over campuses and city streets decrying the war in Vietnam as the foremost example of Western imperialism. Images and slogans of the radical left proliferated as students celebrated figures such as Mao Zedong, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and Fidel Castro, who seemingly offered a third way out of both US capitalist and Soviet communist domination.³³ Guevara’s call to “create two, three, many Vietnams” echoed across the Americas and the Third World.³⁴ In Mexico City, students saw themselves and Vietnamese people as fellow victims of the United States; they marched with banners and slogans supporting Hồ Chí Minh against American imperialism.³⁵

In Europe, students spoke out against Western hegemony and their governments’ complicity in the Vietnam War. Protestors in West Berlin found parallels between the suppression of democracy in Germany and US support for the authoritarian regime of South Vietnam. They predicted that Western military forces would soon be turned against them: “Today Vietnam, Tomorrow Us” read one protest pamphlet. Leading student organizer Rudolf Dutschke proclaimed that “Real solidarity with the Vietnamese revolution comes from the actual weakening and upheaval in the centers of imperialism.” When Vice President Hubert Humphrey visited West Berlin on April 6, 1967, more than 2,000 students took to the streets to protest US policies. In February 1968, 10,000 protestors from across Western Europe gathered at the Free University in West Berlin for a Vietnam Congress that called for revolutionary struggle against hegemony in the decolonizing world. Similar to their counterparts in Germany and following the style of protest that began at the University of California, Berkeley, students in Paris staged the first-ever sit-in protest in French history at Nanterre University on March 22, 1968. They demanded an end to militant state power and called for broader societal debate on capitalism, imperialism, and the struggle of students and workers worldwide. Other universities in and around Paris soon joined in, resulting in large protests that called for the “defeat of American imperialism in Vietnam” among other things.³⁶ In Eastern Europe – particularly in Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia – solidarity with Vietnam against fascistic capitalism was expressed by state governments and grassroots organizations alike.³⁷

In addition to the aforementioned cases, historians have identified radical student movements in Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, the Philippines, and Thailand that opposed US involvement in Vietnam.³⁸ There was a feeling of global connectedness across these movements, and international solidarity with the revolutionary Third World became a new measure of political radicalism in the late 1960s.

North Vietnamese leaders invested heavily in the National Liberation Front and its diplomatic campaign, knowing that winning the world’s sympathies was essential to winning the war against South Vietnam and its US ally. Vietnamese communist diplomacy largely succeeded because of the state’s strict control over speech and the press. Party leadership silenced dissent and carefully curated what foreigners were allowed to see, enabling them to maintain a consistent narrative.³⁹ Several purges – including the infamous “revisionist purge” in the leadup to the Tet Offensive in 1968 – took out party members believed to be pro-Soviet or in favor of peaceful coexistence between communists and noncommunists. The lack of political freedom in North Vietnam and its strong propaganda machine ensured that the revolution could portray a unified message about its identity and goals throughout the war.⁴⁰ The Vietnamese Communist Party created and fed the mythologized image of their guerrilla movement as the sole legitimate representative of the Vietnamese people, fighting a righteous war for peace and national independence.

Figure 30.1 The National Liberation Front flag hangs during a student demonstration at the Sorbonne in Paris, alongside a poster for the French Revolutionary Communist Youth Party (May 14, 1968).

Source: – / Stringer / AFP / Getty Images.

South Vietnam and the Global Upheaval of 1968

In contrast to the DRVN, South Vietnam had a diverse political scene and was plagued by civil unrest throughout the 1960s. As Heather Marie Stur argues, the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) was a fledgling democracy that was never able to take flight. An “ensemble cast” of activists from across the political spectrum animated Southern Vietnamese society, including Buddhists, Catholics, and – like the rest of the world – high school and university students.⁴¹ Popular movements did force some change in South Vietnam, the most prominent example being the Buddhist protests of 1963, which led to the ousting of President Ngô Đình Diệm.⁴² South Vietnamese citizens took to the streets as participants in the global upheaval of the 1960s. They put themselves at risk of imprisonment, torture, and death to challenge authoritarianism and demand civil freedoms and representative government.

The year 1968 specifically marked a shift in South Vietnamese popular protest for two reasons. First, a growing number of Catholics adopted an antiwar stance and began speaking out against the authoritarian practices of the government.⁴³ It is generally believed that Vietnamese Catholics were staunchly anticommunist and supportive of the Saigon regimes and US intervention in Vietnam. Studies on Ngô Đình Diệm and his administration have emphasized Catholicism as part of the glue that held the United States–RVN alliance together. This may have held true in the 1950s and early 1960s, but a combination of war-weariness and the growing influence of liberation theology led to a significant shift in the late 1960s. Following the global trend of the Catholic New Left, many Vietnamese Catholics – particularly those of the younger generation – joined the antiwar movement and started advocating social and economic justice.⁴⁴ They adopted radical ideas about the “spiritual obligation of religious leaders … to the struggles of the downtrodden.”⁴⁵ Additionally, under Pope Paul VI, the Vatican had begun encouraging Catholics to open dialogue with Marxist governments and parties in Europe, and in 1968 some South Vietnamese began to follow suit by abandoning strict anticommunism and opening up to socialist ideas.⁴⁶

The second big shift in South Vietnamese politics in 1968 was an escalation of antiwar dissent, which triggered a violent state response. The Tet Offensive brought the war to Vietnam’s Southern cities in a new way; before 1968, the cities suffered only from scattered terrorist attacks, while larger battles took place in the countryside. Five months into the offensive, by July 1968, more than 5,000 people had been killed in Saigon, 20,000 homes were destroyed, and the city’s already large refugee population had grown by 180,000. Thousands of civilians were massacred by the NLF in Huế, giving rise to fears of the potential bloodbath that would follow if the communists were to win the war. In the weeks following the offensive, young athletes and religious volunteers were recruited to distribute emergency aid and clean up debris around cities. Some stepped up to do the grisly work of collecting and burying bodies that had been left decaying in the streets.⁴⁷ It was a rude awakening for city dwellers who had, until then, been spared the greater part of the war.

Figure 30.2 Buddhist monks and nuns demonstrating for peace and independence in front of the government palace in Saigon (August 1968).

Source: FRANCOIS MAZURE / Contributor / AFP / Getty Images.

As violence and destruction came to their doorstep, antiwar sentiment grew among the urban population, and clashes between student protestors and police became more frequent. The government cracked down on free speech, seeing any opposition or public discussion about the war as a threat to be silenced. Some politicians began openly calling for negotiations with the NLF and the formation of a coalition government to bring the war to a diplomatic end. One such politician, Trương Đình Dzu, was subsequently sentenced to five years of hard prison labor on Côn Sơn island and was not released until the end of the war.⁴⁸

The paranoid crackdown of the Saigon government was not completely unfounded. They were, after all, fighting a war in which the enemy was making concerted efforts to destabilize them from within. The NLF actively recruited high school students and created several front organizations which blended in with genuinely independent, noncommunist groups active in the South.⁴⁹ The dilemma of Saigon’s leadership was balancing democracy and self-preservation, and they prioritized the latter. According to an official report for the South Vietnamese National Assembly, 16,000 political prisoners were detained in 1968 alone.⁵⁰ By 1972 the number had risen to an estimated 200,000.⁵¹ In choosing to crush dissenting voices through censorship, imprisonment, torture, and death, the RVN fueled further resentment among its citizens and reinforced its global image as an illegitimate, authoritarian government.

Despite repressive government measures, mass organizing continued in South Vietnam through the end of the war. Its people not only took to the streets, but also reached out to the rest of the world. Buddhist and Catholic groups brought international attention to abuses by the South Vietnamese government, countering the US–RVN narrative of a heroic war to save democracy. The most outspoken Buddhist leader on the international stage was Thích Nhất Hạnh, who toured nineteen countries in 1966–7 and met with prominent religious and government leaders including Robert McNamara, Pope Paul VI, and Martin Luther King, Jr.⁵² His meeting with the pope resulted in the sending of a papal delegation to South Vietnam, and King was so influenced by the Vietnamese monk that he later nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.⁵³ Exiled from South Vietnam for his antiwar activities, Thích Nhất Hạnh settled in France and established the Vietnamese Buddhist Peace Delegation, continuing his work of broadcasting the message of Vietnamese Buddhists to the rest of the world.⁵⁴ Catholic leaders, including Father Nguyễn Quang Lâm and Father Chân Tín, took on the work of documenting the imprisonment and torture of political dissidents by the South Vietnamese government. Father Chân Tín recorded testimonies of torture that occurred in Thủ Đức, Côn Đảo, and other prisons and published these accounts in a monthly magazine called Đối Diện (Face to Face). By the 1970s, political repression was so severe that even the more conservative Catholic newspapers were publishing students’ testimonies of torture.⁵⁵

The diversity of voices in the Republic of Vietnam, and constant turnover of leadership after the coup against Ngô Đình Diệm in 1963, meant that there was never one unified entity to speak for the young nation. Compared to their counterparts in North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front, the RVN’s public relations campaign was scattered and weak. Foreign press coverage of protests, as well as citizen diplomacy that alerted the world to government abuses, served as evidence that the RVN did not enjoy the support of many of its own citizens. It was apparent that South Vietnam had an authoritarian government that relied on force to maintain control. Against the backdrop of decolonization and the global movement against imperialism, the South Vietnamese government and its US ally seemed to play the role of the villain. The lively, chaotic, and at times violent political scene in South Vietnam stands as an example of what happens when citizens try to build a democracy amid war and under the influence of a hegemonic ally.

Conclusion

The idea of a “Global 1968” implies the presence of worldwide political, cultural, and social forces that shaped the events of that year. Vietnam held a unique position in this historical moment. Standing at the frontlines of the Global Cold War, Vietnamese dissidents and revolutionaries inspired people around the world to demand an end to US and Soviet domination. The National Liberation Front became an international symbol of anti-imperialism and Third World self-determination. But Vietnam’s relationship to the world in the 1960s was more complex than the communist propaganda that became so well known. Nonaligned dissidents in South Vietnam took to the streets and reached out to foreign allies, risking their lives to demand pluralism and democracy amidst war. Media coverage of Southern Vietnamese protests fueled antiwar sentiment and cast doubts on the legitimacy of the US mission there. The events of 1968 transformed how people on every continent understood their relationship to their fellow citizens, their nations, and the world. Vietnam and its people were at the forefront of global consciousness in this pivotal year, which set a new standard for mass political participation and international solidarity.