Part III - The Two Vietnams

12 The Geneva Conference of 1954

Martin Thomas

I have concluded, as the Assembly knows, within the time limit I’d set myself and with only a few hours’ discrepancy, agreements for the cessation of hostilities in Indo-China. A few days from now – and, in the principal sectors, very rapidly – blood will have stopped flowing, and we will no longer have the heart-rending thought that our young men are being decimated out there every day. The nightmare is over.¹

So began Pierre Mendès France’s July 22, 1954, speech to a packed Chamber of Deputies in Paris. The French prime minister was only five weeks into his premiership at the time. Not only that, but Mendès France had replaced his predecessor Joseph Laniel on June 13 with a dramatic pledge. He would resign in turn should he fail to negotiate peace in Indochina within a month. He just about made good on his promise, the final agreements at Geneva having been secured just two days earlier. Yet there was no triumphalism in Mendès France’s parliamentary statement.² The war in Indochina had cost 92,797 French Union lives.³ For the first time almost 10,000 French Union troops had become prisoners of war of an anticolonial revolutionary regime.⁴ Visibly exhausted, he instead justified his signature of a ceasefire with Vietnam meticulously, almost line by line.

It was significant that Mendès France felt the need not just to explain his actions, but to defend them as well. His speech culminated with a eulogy to the French garrison lost in the battle of Điên Biên Phủ in northern Vietnam less than three months earlier. Eschewing any mention of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN), the state that had inflicted that spectactular defeat on French forces, he instead focused on the garrison’s defenders, a high proportion of them colonial troops, doomed, but willing, even so, to sacrifice their lives for something beyond salvation. Mendès France’s listeners were left wondering: What was this “something”? Was it the garrison itself? Or France’s position in Indochina as a whole? Whichever the case, the deeper meaning conveyed was inescapable. The fight could not be won; it was time for France to leave.

Ironically, the defensiveness that Mendès France displayed regarding the Geneva Accords was echoed in the words of his adversaries. Just days earlier, senior leaders of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP) – the organization that controlled the DRVN state – gathered for the party’s 6th Plenum. Many listened with considerable skepticism as party founder Hồ Chí Minh and General Secretary Trường Chinh explained the terms of the deal that the DRVN had endorsed at Geneva. Some party officials criticized the acceptance of a temporary line of partition at the 17th parallel – a major concession that would force the DRVN to abandon large swaths of territory in central and southern Vietnam that it had controlled since the beginning of the war.⁵ There was also dismay over the proposed neutralization of Cambodia, and likely also Laos. The communization of all of Indochina – a key VWP goal since its founding in the early 1930s – now seemed a more distant goal. The discontent with the Geneva Accords was also evident among the party’s rank and file. Lê Duẩn, the ranking VWP leader in southern Vietnam, faced difficult questions from cadres at a meeting in the Mekong Delta. Had the strategic advantage so hard-won at Điện Biên Phủ been squandered at Geneva? Why were elections on eventual Vietnamese unification postponed for fully two years? Why partition the country meanwhile at the 17th parallel when the DRVN controlled far more territory? Had the regime’s Chinese and Soviet patrons forced it to give so much away?⁶

Unloved in France and vilified in much of Vietnam, it is tempting to conclude that the agreements to emerge from the Geneva Conference in July 1954 were fatally flawed. The impression is, of course, strengthened by our knowledge of their outcome: promised unification elections that never took place, a massive refugee flight, and the eventual outbreak of the “Vietnam War.” But this is to spy the Geneva Conference through the looking glass of America’s subsequent immersion in Vietnam. Although the Geneva Accords prefigured the eclipse of French colonialism in Southeast Asia, their decolonizing qualities have been obscured by historians’ focus on the postcolonial violence of the following decades.

If we take the failure of the conference for granted, we may overlook what its participants managed to accomplish. Painstakingly negotiated over four months, the Geneva settlement had two core elements. An “Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities in Vietnam” concerned itself with immediate issues of stopping the fighting and enabling Vietnam’s people to move, either to places of safety in the short term or, in the longer term, to relocate permanently north or south of the partition line bisecting the country at the 17th parallel. The “Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference” addressed the country’s political future. It made provisions for national elections to be held two years hence, the victors of which would lead a national government in a unified and sovereign Vietnamese state.⁷ Together these two settlements put an end to eight years of war between the French imperial state and their DRVN opponents.⁸

Much has been written about the Geneva talks (Figure 12.1), the agreements reached, and the ways they played out in practice. We now know a good deal more about those most directly involved in the negotiations, thanks to more extensive scholarship in Vietnamese sources, the release of additional Chinese and Soviet accounts of the conference, and continuing reflection on French, American, and other Western power reactions.⁹ Diplomatic and social historians have also explored far beyond the conference hall to consider how Vietnam’s peoples, those most imminently affected by the Geneva arrangements, responded to war’s aftermath, whether as supporters of the victorious DRVN, as its opponents in the army and government of the French-backed State of Vietnam (SVN), as members of other militias and movements neither consulted nor reconciled to the conference outcome, or as refugees seeking sanctuary across the partition line.¹⁰

Figure 12.1 Peace talks that led to the signing of the Geneva Accords (July 1954).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

Embedded in this scholarship are attempts to explain why the Geneva settlement did not stick. However sensitive one is to the danger of reading history backward, it is difficult to evaluate the 1954 negotiations and their consequences contingently. It remains hard to capture the sense of expectancy for some, as well as the feelings of dread experienced by others. Yet it is only by grappling with the contingency and uncertainty that surrounded the events of 1954–5 that we can begin to understand the conference as something more than just an abject failure to head off the calamities that lay ahead. The significance of Geneva lay not only in what it portended about the future, but also in what it revealed about past patterns and practices.

Vietnamese and French Standpoints

Why did DRVN leaders agree to negotiate at Geneva, and why would they even consider a settlement that delivered neither total victory nor immediate unification of Vietnam under VWP rule? As Pierre Asselin has shown, the Hanoi regime doubted its capacity to impose terms without, in the process, provoking US intervention or forfeiting Chinese and Soviet goodwill.¹¹ Asselin’s astute analysis of the DRVN approach to the Geneva negotiations undermines the “standard total view” that Hồ Chí Minh and his comrades were compromised by dependency on their communist allies. Their Chinese partners, according to this view, were eager to consolidate Zhou Enlai’s success in breaking down the international isolation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). And Beijing remained anxious at the prospect of VWP domination of the Indochinese peninsula. The Soviets, meanwhile, needed to build bridges to Paris to help ensure that France would reject the European Defence Community (EDC) project, at the heart of which stood a possible rearmament of West Germany.¹² These external pressures were real enough, Asselin shows, but the DRVN state faced other constraints much closer to home. Domestically, popular pressure for an end to the war was mounting, with calls for negotiations having become more insistent during late 1953. The DRVN regime was also internally divided between military supporters of an expanded war and civilian proponents of a compromise peace that would free the DRVN to enact socialist reforms.¹³

As DRVN leaders estimated the optimal balance between domestic and diplomatic priorities, their rivals in the Saigon-based SVN were making their own calculations. On May 7, 1954, Bảo Đại, the former-emperor-turned-SVN-chief-of-state, signed off on a “National Salvation Front” aligning noncommunist nationalist parties with the Cao Đài, Bình Xuyên, and Hòa Hảo sects and their militias. Demonstrations in Saigon supporting a unified, noncommunist Vietnam sought to sway French and US opinion away from acceptance of partition.¹⁴ It was to no avail. The delegation representing the SVN – soon to be rebranded the Republic of Vietnam under its newly appointed prime minister, Ngô Đình Diệm – found itself marginalized at Geneva. Never privy to the closed-session meetings between the conference’s principal international players, the SVN delegation at Geneva harbored no illusions about the proceedings. Above all, the settlement enabled France to withdraw, perhaps without even consulting SVN officials. Viewed from Saigon’s perspective, the accords left a vacuum that would be filled violently as Vietnam’s two regimes – and the rival political and religious movements and paramilitary groups within each of them – competed over the ideological complexion of a unified state.¹⁵ Partition at the 17th parallel merely inscribed the initial battle line for an impending struggle: first, over unification; and second, over the nature of the social system to be constructed. The Republic of Vietnam, in other words, would have to live with the consequences of Geneva, but it accepted no responsibility for the settlement itself.¹⁶

The fault lay, in part, with Geneva’s great-power players, but in larger measure with two other culprits. Between May and July 1954, Ngô Đình Diệm, both in his preparatory meetings with US diplomats in Paris and in his first public statements as SVN premier, was scathing in his criticism of the French. For Diệm, the half-baked Geneva accords were the logical outcome of France’s indecent haste to be rid of its obligations in Vietnam. In private, Diệm complained that the SVN’s inability to influence the negotiation process was the logical culmination of Bảo Đại’s decision to collude with French colonialism, thereby compromising Vietnamese national interests.¹⁷

Pierre Mendès France shared Diệm’s low opinion of the so-called “Bảo Đại solution” of limited Vietnamese political autonomy, but he could hardly concede that the French war effort was entirely futile. Equally difficult to admit, Bảo Đại notwithstanding, was that Franco-SVN forces had almost broken the communist resistance in Vietnam’s far south. Only on the eve of withdrawal did France finally abandon its nationalist paramilitary partners, the Cao Đài, Hòa Hảo, and the Bình Xuyên.¹⁸ If there was a studied ambiguity in his July 22 parliamentary comments about the value of a Franco-Vietnamese connection, there was more assertiveness in his portrayal of the Geneva Conference Accords. Here, Mendès France had placed himself at the heart of the drama. The text of the accords was “cruel” because the arrangements they consecrated were devastating, namely the division of Vietnam. But facts were facts: there was no alternative. The French Expeditionary Corps in northern Vietnam faced mounting losses. Negotiating a ceasefire, while, at the same time, rushing out the required additional troops, was not just the rational choice, it was the ethical one. Only now, with the diplomacy done, could Mendès France reveal how desperate the French military position had been.¹⁹

During military talks in early June with DRVN commanders over prisoner-of-war exchanges, it had become apparent that Hồ Chí Minh’s government was receptive to a more general peace agreement. Jean Chauvel, personal envoy to Mendès France, was immediately instructed to seek clarification from the DRVN’s lead negotiator, Phạm Vӑn Đồng. In Mendès France’s retelling, it was then a matter of standing firm against excessive Việt Minh demands. Identical agreements, not just for Vietnam, but for Laos and Cambodia as well, were rejected. Such an arrangement would have seen all three countries temporarily partitioned, their northern sectors placed under Việt Minh or pro-Việt Minh administrations, an obvious precursor to communization of all of Indochina. Proposals for an immediate French evacuation followed by national elections only six months after a ceasefire were also turned down. In their place, Mendès France’s team secured a manageable 300-day deadline for reciprocal troop evacuations and a two-year timetable for Vietnam-wide elections.

The result was a workable peace accord and a symmetrical one. For every Franco-South Vietnamese concession, there was a DRVN quid pro quo. The embodiment of this reciprocity was the free movement for all Vietnamese across the partition line. French negotiators, Mendès France suggested, had dug in hard over matters of genuine human consequence. France could depart Vietnam with a clear conscience, focusing instead on matters of more proximate interest: the EDC talks and, above all, the export drive needed to secure future French prosperity.²⁰ Mendès France’s underlying message was obvious. He had salvaged meaningful concessions from a weak military position. He had saved France from a crippling economic and military burden. And he had ensured that noncommunist Vietnamese living in the North could escape direct rule by Hanoi. It was a judgment echoed by René Moreau, French envoy to Saigon, who declared that Mendès France’s Geneva diplomacy had “saved the Expeditionary Force from complete disaster.”²¹ Another month of fighting and Hanoi might have fallen, triggering civil war among southern anticommunist forces.²² By implication, Phạm Vӑn Đồng’s team had frittered away their strategic advantage.

Heralded by some signatories as a remarkable peace negotiation, the Geneva Conference Accords remained highly provisional. Their fulfillment remained a matter of doubt, uncertain in the turbulent local and international climates of July 1954. Implementation of everything, from French military evacuation and refugee resettlement in the first instance, to peaceful elections and eventual Vietnamese reunification in the second, hinged on the American response, whether that be reluctant acquiescence or active sabotage. Walter Bedell Smith, Under-Secretary of State and official US delegate at Geneva, signaled that Washington “took note” of the accords, but most recognized even this as merely contingent. Much would rest on the complexion of Ngô Đình Diệm’s regime, still more on its effectiveness in channeling American anticommunism.²³ This is neither to impose a crude model of US hegemony on the Southeast Asian situation nor to deny agency or signal importance to the actions of the Vietnamese and others. It is simply to state the obvious: of all the conference participants, it was Eisenhower’s administration that was the most poorly reconciled to the outcome.

Certainly, French negotiators had extracted more than they thought possible when the conference opened in late April.²⁴ At that point the Điện Biên Phủ garrison, ravaged by successive DRVN assaults since March 13, was close to surrender. Daily media coverage, punctuated by stirring accounts of heroism and sacrifice in the press, increased the pressure on Mendès France’s negotiating team to secure an honorable peace – but a peace nonetheless. The domestic public was tired of the war. Some were traumatized by it; many more were bored with it. The French Union seemed set to disappear anyway, so why persist with the fiction that it might yet endure in Vietnam? A protracted conflict as manifestly colonial as it was remote, the French Indochina War failed to stir the public passions of the looming confrontation in Algeria. Settlers to Vietnam were few in number, too few to constitute a discrete political constituency or a powerful cultural symbol.²⁵ Their ability to sway distant compatriots, whether through literary and other artistic production or by direct political appeal, was commensurately limited. Conscripts and celebrated Metropolitan Army regiments played no part in the fighting, much of which fell to colonial and, increasingly, to SVN forces.²⁶ But the anxiety persisted that an unending war might yet require the blood of national servicemen.

Among the major French political parties, the Gaullist Rassemblement du Peuple Francais (RPF) had argued most fervently for a greater military effort. But even de Gaulle’s fervent supporters stopped short of suggesting the use of conscripts. De Gaulle himself made no secret of his contempt for Bảo Đại’s administration, a fading regime that, in Gaullist eyes, mirrored the ineffectiveness of the Fourth Republic.²⁷ Other senior RPF figures viewed any additional military commitment as a diplomatic lever, as a means to negotiate from strength. Indeed, the eponymous military plan of General Henri Navarre, commander of French forces in Indochina, had by 1954 been reinvented as a tool of defensive attrition that would ensure the DRVN paid the highest price possible for any strategic gains.²⁸

It had all been rather different four years earlier, when US aid deliveries began to flow over the spring of 1950. At that point, French policymakers concluded that there was simply no alternative to fighting on with the United States’ backing. The recently signed Hạ Long Bay Accords committed France to do so. Many Vietnamese would feel justifiably betrayed should France abandon them. And Southeast Asia would be left so chronically exposed to communist incursion that a wider conflagration was probable. The conclusion reached was peculiar. France, it was argued, should prosecute its limited war in Vietnam to prevent a bigger one.²⁹

By late 1953 every element in this bizarre logic had been reversed. Both the Fourth Republic’s most virulent internal critics and its senior strategic planners were, by then, convinced that peace talks made sense.³⁰ During a National Assembly debate on Indochina in late October, Socialist Party figures baited Joseph Laniel’s center-right coalition with the accusation that the government had surrendered France’s strategic independence to the United States. With the Korean War now concluded, what was to stop Washington from demanding a larger French commitment in Vietnam? If, as Laniel insisted, the war was still worth fighting, then surely more soldiers would be required? For what? Ostensibly, the French war effort was meant to induce the DRVN to seek terms – in which case the French would probably negotiate much the same peace arrangements as if they had sought negotiations first. Laniel’s refusal to parley with the DRVN was not the result of careful strategic evaluation; it was partisan stubbornness. For the socialists there was no reason to disbar Vietnamese independence anyway, as long as fair elections were held after a ceasefire.³¹

The calculus of French lives at stake formed part of a broader equation in which monetary investments had also depreciated.³² French business owners and investors began transferring south or relocating offices and funds to other, safer francophone territories long before the Geneva talks began.³³ Ironically, the gathering perception that, ultimately, the war in Indochina was not essential to France was, if anything, reinforced by the depth of the United States’ pockets. Washington’s commitment to provide money and materiel for the expeditionary force added to the impression of a war dislocated from other, more proximate French concerns. An important side-effect of France’s loss of unilateral control over the war’s direction was to relegate the conflict from the stature of a national emergency to that of a peripheral conflict: devastating certainly, but not above the fray of interparty dispute and the vitriolic debate over the Fourth Republic’s system of coalition government. The war in Indochina, in other words, was something it was okay to question, to criticize, and, ironically, to ignore.

But even if the war was increasingly something that metropolitan French politicians were prepared to set aside, the peace agreement negotiated at Geneva was something else entirely. For the French officials who still wielded considerable power over Indochinese affairs, as well as for their Vietnamese counterparts, the difficulties associated with making peace in Indochina would be at least as daunting as those associated with waging war. The most immediate challenges lay in securing and monitoring the proposed ceasefire, as well as the authorized movements of military personnel and civilians in both directions across the 17th parallel. Following suggestions from Soviet and Chinese officials, the negotiators had assigned these crucial duties to a tripartite International Control Commission (ICC) headed by India in partnership with Canada and Poland.³⁴ Everyone expected that the new commission had its work cut out for it. But almost no one anticipated the controversy that would almost instantly envelop the ICC – or how the implementation of the accords would provide new opportunities for critics to attack it.

Monitoring Geneva: The International Control Commission and Refugees

Among the many issues left hanging by the Geneva Accords, the means to enable the promised free movement of people across the partition line aroused the fiercest international criticism. This was especially true in the United States, where the plight of more than 800,000 Vietnamese refugees seeking to leave the Việt Minh-controlled North became emblematic of all that was allegedly wrong with the settlement. The fact that most of these northern refugees were Roman Catholics, plus the apparent need for US naval and air transport to ensure their safe passage, lent weight to the image of an American mission of mercy to save the largest postwar tide of refugee humanity in Southeast Asia from death or persecution at the hands of a ruthless and godless communist regime. Garish, sensationalist accounts in the American Catholic press of Catholic villages destroyed and defenseless refugees mown down by communist machine-guns were, in turn, encouraged by a CIA campaign of misinformation and propaganda. In the hands of Colonel Edward Lansdale’s notorious psychological warfare operation designed to delegitimize the Hanoi regime ahead of the planned elections on Vietnamese unification in July 1956, the Vietnamese refugee crisis was instrumentalized to confirm the moral bankruptcy of the Geneva settlement.³⁵

Less well known to Western publics were the DRVN regime’s persistent accusations that the departing French authorities were forcing populations to move southward whether through direct coercion, forcible transfer, or intense psychological pressure. Central to this last were misleading threats about the VWP’s elimination of alleged traitors and dire warnings of imminent US atomic bombing of North Vietnam.³⁶ The DRVN government also accused the French government of complicity in the US propaganda campaign, notably in regard to systematic killings of Catholic villagers and their priests. One such case was that of Ba Làng, a fishing community in Hải Thanh district, where initial accounts of a massacre in March 1955 were soon exposed as a fabrication.³⁷

The doomsaying may have been overblown but there is no disputing the fact that the bulk of refugees’ petitions submitted to the ICC came from practicing Catholics, Buddhists, and other minority groups who faced victimization under the communist regime.³⁸ In addition to reports of village massacres, police shootings, and mass arrests were more prosaic but no less revealing accounts of punitive DRVN taxation and regime discrimination against smallholders fearful of imminent collectivization.³⁹

Logically enough, the ICC remit was extended to cover supervision of refugee exchanges. Here, though, we get to the nub of things. For the ICC was not armed with any peace enforcement powers. Aside from adverse publicity and moral sanction, it had no means to ensure compliance with the Geneva Accords.⁴⁰ ICC monitors quickly became embroiled in investigating, not just minor ceasefire breaches but alleged massacres of civilians and other major human rights violations.⁴¹ ICC personnel were also intimately involved in evacuation arrangements, including the final French withdrawal from Hanoi.⁴² For all that, the effectiveness of this oversight regime rested on the self-restraint of the major parties involved rather than any threat of sanction were the Geneva Accords to be violated.⁴³ There were some promising signs. The departing French and the victorious Việt Minh seemed genuinely eager to mend fences. Talks on prisoner of war releases and other war-related disputes were well underway by September 1954.⁴⁴

Remarkably, on November 5 General Giáp told France’s ICC liaison that the two countries shared equal responsibility for the violence of the preceding war.⁴⁵ Hồ Chí Minh echoed the sentiment, albeit in less mathematical terms, in an interview with Agence France Presse five days later. Eager to bury the hatchet, the Vietnamese leader spoke effusively about a rapid resumption of Franco-Vietnamese commerce, deeper cultural exchanges, and the normalization of diplomatic relations, all of which, he admitted, would help offset domineering Chinese influence in northern Vietnam.⁴⁶ Phạm Vӑn Đồng told French envoy Jean Sainteny much the same on November 13, focusing in particular on the need for French economic aid.⁴⁷ This soothing rhetoric also had substance. The DRVN’s nationalization of key French industrial assets notwithstanding, there was a reciprocal willingness to see economic activity resumed, ambassadors exchanged, and other transitional arrangements made.⁴⁸ Unfortunately, this bilateral reconciliation was soon overshadowed by the deepening animosity between the two Vietnamese states.⁴⁹

Here was the ICC’s Achilles heel. The peacekeeping apparatus of the Geneva Conference was stretched beyond its tensile capacity because Vietnam’s two competing regimes viewed the ceasefire accords and consequent monitoring arrangements as functional preludes to the resumption of conflict over the country’s unification. This struggle might be pursued politically at first, but the readiness to use force was obvious. Indeed, Diệm’s SVN government pointedly refused to endorse the Geneva Accords at all.

Central to Diệm’s eagerness to transform the erstwhile SVN into a postcolonial republic was the desire to break any vestigial ties with France, clearing a path to closer strategic alignment with Washington.⁵⁰ Noncooperation in Saigon might have been less damaging had there been stronger unity among Geneva’s external sponsors. But the Geneva powers lacked both the unity and the political volition to see the accords through to their conclusion. The Soviets and British had other European and imperial priorities. And the French, as we have seen, were desperate to focus their strategic efforts and budgetary spending closer to home. Conscious of Washington’s frustration at France’s recent definitive rejection of the EDC, no government in Paris was likely to insist on by-the-letter adherence to the Geneva Accords. The Chinese seemed more committed. Their 200-strong delegation to Geneva that took up residence at Versoix’s Grand Mont-Fleury estate in late April 1954 underlined the PRC’s commitment to an agreement on Indochina.⁵¹ Yet, for all its advocacy of “peaceful coexistence,” the Chinese government still sought to exploit division between the United States and its Western allies.⁵² The resulting double-edged strategy would be evidenced in 1954–5 by confrontation over Taiwan versus conciliation at Bandung.⁵³ Next to this, ensuring that the Geneva terms were upheld was a secondary concern. Meanwhile, closer US strategic alignment with Chiang Kai-shek’s regime in Taipei further reified the Washington orthodoxy that Geneva was a rotten deal.⁵⁴ In simple terms, from London to Beijing consensus was lacking over enforcement of the Geneva Accords – and over the making of peace.⁵⁵

A Failed Settlement?

From this lack of consensus, historians have deduced two underlying reasons for the ultimate collapse of the Geneva settlement: Cold War friction and US hostility. Analytically, however, neither of these takes us very far. The East–West divisions were present before the conference as well as after it. Geneva, if anything, is usually depicted as a brief moment when dialogue trumped confrontation. Numerous studies highlight the effective working relationships nurtured across ideological lines during the conference. Admittedly, much of this bonhomie concealed ulterior motives, such as Soviet efforts to ensure French rejection of the EDC or Chinese attempts to secure wider diplomatic recognition. But so what? Conference diplomacy, whether stimulated by crisis as in Geneva’s case or part of a cycle of transactional foreign policy, enables nation-states to pursue their interests alongside more lofty goals of peacemaking or norm-setting.⁵⁶ The formal agreements that such conferences produce may thus be only a part of the multiple diplomatic purposes served.

The peculiar circumstances of spring 1954 were indisputably conducive to diplomatic bargaining. Moscow’s leaders seemed anxious to build bridges to the West in the aftermath of Stalin’s death a year earlier.⁵⁷ Meanwhile, Geneva offered Beijing the opportunity to cement its putative, if conflicted, role as both the leading power in Asia and an authentic voice of radical anticolonialism.⁵⁸ More generally, multiple participants were anxious for the meetings to conclude on a positive note. The Geneva Conference, it should be remembered, began months before the matter of peace in Indochina took center stage. And it had not been going well. The absence of any definitive agreement over Korea’s long-term political future created pressure to achieve something definitive over Indochina. The British, the Soviets, and the Americans, albeit for different reasons, did not want France to leave the conference humiliated and resentful. Indeed, in the short term at least, resentment was perhaps most keenly felt in Washington, not Paris or Hanoi.

Turning to US hostility: here we must consider the agreement’s normative implications in the mid-1950s. The principal victors of World War II, each represented at Geneva, had by 1954 arrived at a form of political peace that, in the aftermath of the Korean Armistice, looked more stable than previously. While certainly not predicated on mutual affinity or lasting geopolitical stability, this fragile peace had thus far prevented another global conflagration. In place of devastating and potentially atomic direct confrontation, proxy conflict was becoming the norm.⁵⁹ Such wars would be fought mostly in what Mao Zedong identified as the vast “intermediate zones” of Asia and Africa, amidst the remnants of European colonial collapse.⁶⁰ The PRC, according to Mao, should play a decisive role in this decolonizing world.⁶¹ But the normative standard intrinsic to proxy war was that rival sponsors should not directly come to blows.⁶² In this respect, Korea had been a near miss. It is worth remembering that most of Korea’s war dead were civilians, counted in the hundreds of thousands. A large portion of these were the victims of US aerial bombardment.⁶³ And yet, barely a year later, elements within the Eisenhower administration seemed ready to do it all again, to intervene not just as proxy backers but as direct combatants in Indochina. John Foster Dulles, Admiral Arthur Radford, and their fellow hardliners, in other words, were prepared to contemplate conflict escalation.⁶⁴ This was a potential normative breach of what would become the unwritten code, not just of Cold War peacemaking but of war-making in the Global South as well.⁶⁵ From this perspective, the fact that the agreements were concluded and that Washington felt obliged to stand down and “take note” of the results can be counted a significant success, even in hindsight.

Decolonization and Geneva

Instead of treating the conference solely as an event in East–West relations (or as an episode in US Cold War foreign policy) we would do better to place it within broader transnational currents. The Geneva Conference laid bare influential markers of North–South divisions including racial discrimination, Western incomprehension of the cultural economies of peasant society, and insensitivity to the acute economic hardships that nurtured support for the Việt Minh. Mention of these structural forces places the Geneva settlement in a subtler light as part of a larger Asian decolonization.⁶⁶ Viewed from this perspective, the motivations of key actors seem rather different. The DRVN’s burning desire to be rid of their colonial occupiers mirrored the sentiments uppermost among rural cultivators desperate to see meaningful land redistribution enacted.⁶⁷ The resultant compromises made at Geneva also evoked the regime’s readiness eight years earlier to do all that was necessary to hasten the evacuation of Chinese Nationalist occupation forces from northern Vietnam.⁶⁸ The close attention paid to the conference proceedings among other decolonizing Asian nations and India’s pivotal arbitral role at Geneva also prefigured the articulation of the doctrine of nonalignment by these same countries one year hence at the May 1955 Bandung conference.⁶⁹ The Five Pancha shila Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, a statement of the core ideas of nonaligned international politics enunciated by Jawaharlal Nehru and endorsed by Zhou Enlai on April 29, 1954, lent force to what the Indian premier had previously described as the two “strongest urges” in the new diplomacy of South and East Asia: a nationalist rejection of foreign intervention and an anticolonial loathing of racial discrimination.⁷⁰ In Jason Parker’s tidy formulation, during 1954–5 the interrelatedness between decolonization and Cold War altered fundamentally. Decades of race repression gave way to a new era, post–Geneva and post–Bandung, of race liberation.⁷¹ The United States’ determination to build a broader Southeast Asian anticommunist alliance, although crowned by the creation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in September 1954, exposed its deeper ideational divide from Asia’s anticolonial, nonaligned states.⁷²

Perhaps, then, it was little wonder that French and British representatives at Geneva proved more willing than their American ally to parley deals with the Chinese, Soviet, and, ultimately, the DRVN delegations. If the Eisenhower administration was struggling to adjust to the nonaligned, anticolonial turns of Asian geopolitics, its Western partners were confronted with a different transition of power. Although reluctant to acknowledge matters in these terms, the old European colonialists had already ceded regional hegemonic imperial power to the United States.⁷³ Geneva, in other words, was a facet of a longer-term process of European decolonization in Asia.

For France, leaving Vietnam was the culmination of a phased withdrawal that began in earnest with the Hạ Long Bay Accords. These arrangements conceded limited sovereign rights to Indochina’s Associated States, albeit within the confines of the French Union. The ministry set up in July 1950 to handle relations with the Associated States anticipated an eventual transfer of institutional control. Arguably, the ministry had other purposes entirely. For one thing, it was guided by Jean Letourneau, a colonial hardliner determined to maintain the connection between the Associated States and their French political masters. His ministry pursued this objective both as an end in itself and as a means to sustain the wider French Union project. If Indochina’s Associated States severed ties with France, then why shouldn’t Morocco, Tunisia, even Algeria, follow suit? The Ministry also aimed to improve civil–military coordination over the war’s conduct in the aftermath of the 1950 French defeat at Cao Bằng.⁷⁴ Nevertheless, it was inarguable that France, whether by accident or design, was loosening its grip on Indochina. Indeed, when framed as instruments of French decolonization and a device for colonial extrication, the Geneva Accords emerge not as a failure but as a striking success.

Geneva, then, was part of a decolonization process that would take decades more to complete. The totality of that decolonization is not our primary concern here, but the nature of the process profoundly impacted Vietnam’s transition from one conflict to another. Two points bear emphasis. The first is that Indochina’s colonial constitutional architecture, formally dismantled after Geneva, was a hybrid construction. It was, in part, a semiautonomous confederation with the two outlying polities of Laos and Cambodia uncomfortably welded to a warring Vietnamese colonial center. Yet it was also a more instrumental device, colonially designed with a specific ulterior motive: to block Vietnamese communist domination of the Indochinese peninsula. Hardly surprising, then, that separate peace agreements would be signed at Geneva for Laos and Cambodia, the relative straightforwardness of which underlined the artificiality of their juridical connections with Vietnam. The Indochina Federation, its constitutional sophistry notwithstanding, was also a classic late colonial state, one whose eventual demise was anticipated, even planned for, by its architects.⁷⁵ Yet, this point requires further nuance. There is a big difference between anticipating decolonization and hoping that Indochina’s Associated States would still agree to remain affiliated with the French Union. Here, French planners would be quickly disappointed, as Geneva ushered in full independence for Cambodia and Laos and a postcolonial republic in South Vietnam.

The second point has to do with the politics of imperial exit. A negotiated settlement to end a colonial conflict, to permit a more or less orderly imperial withdrawal, and to impose a partition supposedly as a temporary expedient, but potentially as a lasting barrier to peace, was far from unusual. The British had done something similar in Ireland, securing a partial peace in 1921 that facilitated their withdrawal, but hardened the Ulster partition and left the messy details of a final treaty settlement to unravel amidst an Irish civil war. The violence and displacement of partition serving as a prelude to wider war was an unhappy sequence that was repeated twice in the late 1940s, first in the Indian subcontinent, months later in Mandate Palestine.

Taking a longer historical view, other premonitions and echoes of Geneva might be found. Dwell for an instant on the conditional arrangements made at Potsdam for transitional military administrations within a partitioned Vietnam. Recall the United States’ decisive influence, first in promoting decolonization talks in Indonesia, then in turning against the Dutch hardliners who resisted Washington’s preferred outcome. Or telescope twenty years forward to the pullouts from Lusophone Africa negotiated by Portugal amidst its Carnation Revolution of April 1974. A sclerotic Lisbon regime overwhelmed by Cold War internationalization of its contested decolonization was replaced by an infant democracy desperate to be rid of colonial conflicts that were spiraling into calamitous civil wars in Angola and Mozambique. Each of these cases was circumstantially contingent and historically unique. But certain familiar features – a febrile metropolitan regime, decisive external pressure, and proxy war – can be glimpsed in each.

Digging a little into the defining characteristics of late colonial states helps unearth the colonial dynamics played to their conclusion at Geneva in 1954. Founded on the notion of a phased French withdrawal and political, economic, and cultural partnerships with the metropole, the Associated States of Indochina were, in French parlance at least, no longer a colonial domain but rather a field of experimentation. In simple terms, the late colonial state would no longer be required once its political offspring were deemed capable of surviving alone. French forces were fighting to clear a path for Indochina’s component polities to build their independence on the foundations laid by the late colonial state: limited monarchy, gradual democratization, the embrace of French values and administrative practices. Herein lay the essential contradiction at the heart of such arrangements. For the judgments involved were entirely subjective: a reflection of abiding imperialist thinking about societies at differing developmental stages rather than any definitive recognition that empire had had its day. In this conceptual schema – perhaps more like an absurd parallel universe to those living through the everyday violence of the Indochina conflict – the war was being fought, not to prolong the French presence but for a new politics to keep Southeast Asia within a Western orbit, free of communist influence. Intrinsic to this worldview was an insistence upon the unrepresentative nature and consequent illegitimacy of the Hanoi regime. Coming to terms at Geneva thereby marked a fundamental ideational departure for France. The country’s rulers at last acknowledged the DRVN as the authentic voice, not just of Vietnamese socialism, but of Vietnamese national aspirations as well.⁷⁶

Conclusion

Seen from the vantage point of decolonization, Geneva was of a piece with adaptations made by late colonial states unable to mitigate their declining position. Although determined to cling on in Algeria and elsewhere, few French decision-makers could dispute the logic of Mendès France’s pursuit of negotiated withdrawal from Vietnam. In these more fluid circumstances multilateral diplomacy provided the necessary cover for exhausted imperial powers to quit. For all that, the Geneva Conference could be viewed very differently: as a logical compromise for a DRVN regime anxious to rebuild at home, as a victory of pragmatism for French negotiators playing a losing hand, and, more broadly, as a curtain-raiser for radical nonalignment and the rejection of rigid Cold War loyalties by the decolonizing Global South.

In hindsight, France’s generals were proved right: seizing Điện Biên Phủ was a superlative achievement for the DRVN, but it was still less than outright victory. This returns us to the question of why DRVN leaders chose to negotiate at Geneva in the first place. In part, the conference heralded the emergence of a new type of diplomacy, one in which the transnational mobilization of anticolonialist sentiment would cut across the neat dividing lines of Cold War ideology. But in other respects, the Geneva settlement was more familiar: a classic holding action in which the dominant external actors agreed to disagree in an effort to contain the regional fallout from another contested decolonization. In this respect, the Geneva Accords accomplished their short-term task. Few doubted that the settlement was unsustainable in the longer term. But that was a tragedy yet to unfold.

13 Eisenhower and Vietnam

David L. Anderson

Introduction: Vietnam as a Cold War Domino

For “the big picture” boys in Washington, Vietnam in the 1950s was primarily a piece on a global game board. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had inherited from his predecessor the grand strategy of containment, which had set the rules of the game. The explicit objective of this strategy was to limit the expansion of Soviet power and influence everywhere in the world, including in the faraway country of Vietnam. By 1954, however, Eisenhower had begun to grasp that Vietnam was no ordinary pawn. Although he famously characterized the Southeast Asian country as a domino – literally a game piece that might topple over and set off a chain reaction involving other nations – the outcome of the Geneva Conference that summer showed that Vietnamese actors were important international players in their own right. In the aftermath of the conference, Eisenhower confronted the problem of a pawn that seemed not to be following the rules.

In November 1954, Eisenhower dispatched his trusted friend and World War II colleague, General J. Lawton Collins, to South Vietnam. Significantly, Collins was given status equivalent to an ambassador, but was officially designated the president’s special representative. Colonel Edward Lansdale, an American who had arrived in Saigon a few months ahead of Collins, quickly concluded that the general’s understanding of Vietnam was lacking:

Collins was from the world of “the big picture,” the top management circles of Washington with their necessarily simplistic view of the complex problems of the world … To apply this picture to what then existed in South Vietnam, where a small group of [American] bureaucrats in Saigon … issued orders mostly to one another in tragic ignorance of what was happening beyond the suburbs, could only lead to faulty judgments.¹

For Lansdale, Collins’ insistence on viewing Vietnam in geopolitical terms was flawed because it overlooked the importance of mobilizing local support for US policies among Southeast Asian anticommunist nationalists. Lansdale, a former advertising agent who now worked for the CIA, considered himself an expert on how to carry out such mobilizations at the “rice roots” level in countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines.

But the differences between Collins and Lansdale should not be overdrawn. After all, both men had been sent by the Eisenhower administration to try to “save” South Vietnam from communism, and both were equally ignorant of Vietnamese history, politics, and culture. Instead of understanding Collins and Lansdale as polar opposites, they are more usefully understood as exemplars of the two primary themes underpinning Eisenhower’s approach to Vietnam. On the one hand, US officials situated Vietnam explicitly within the grand strategy of containment. On the other, American perceptions of Vietnamese actors – both allies and adversaries – were steeped in racist and patronizing assumptions about Washington’s ability to uplift and transform the country to conform with American objectives. These assumptions reflected the persistent influence of colonial-era ideas about identity and difference in Southeast Asia.

This pair of themes – which were the two sides of the same ideological coin – shaped the Eisenhower administration’s approach to Vietnam as it went through three phases: first collaboration, then unilateralism, and finally self-congratulation and complacency. Working with the French and other allies marked the initial phase. With France’s final withdrawal of its forces in 1956, Washington embarked upon the second phase, structured around the United States’ singular relationship with Ngô Đình Diệm’s Republic of Vietnam. In the final phase, during Eisenhower’s second term, the White House considered Vietnam a problem largely under control and shifted its attention elsewhere.

Throughout Eisenhower’s presidency, Washington’s perception of Vietnam as a piece on the containment gameboard obscured Vietnamese desires to define their nation’s postcolonial identity. US leaders’ insistence on viewing American security through the lens of containment exaggerated the strategic importance of Vietnam, and effectively precluded any consideration of how best to align US interests with Vietnamese political aspirations. When Eisenhower passed leadership to John F. Kennedy in 1961, he had committed the United States to the defense of a state and a president in South Vietnam whose leadership and legitimacy seemed increasingly in doubt.

Containment: The Blinders of Grand Strategy

If there had not been a Cold War, there almost certainly would not have been an American war in Vietnam. One of the most enduring explanations for the US decision to intervene in Vietnam’s internal conflict and to persist for so long and at such great cost is the concept of flawed containment. Put simply, this argument is that the Truman administration’s grand strategy of containment in response to a perceived Soviet political and military threat to Europe was wrongly adapted to Asia following the Chinese communists’ civil war victory in 1949 and the Korean communists’ invasion of South Korea in 1950.²

The errors of applying the containment paradigm to Asia are evident in hindsight. There was no Soviet Army poised on the borders of Southeast Asia, and the historical trajectories of the various Asian nations, many subjected to Western imperialism, were significantly different from those of European nations. Moreover, doctrinaire policy formulas are invariably expressions of sweeping generalizations. American leaders have loved doctrines: the Monroe Doctrine, the Open Door in China, Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and Franklin Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter. Truman continued this tradition with his Truman Doctrine, declaring in 1947 with thinly veiled reference to the Soviet Union that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities and outside pressures.” He added that “we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way” – a prescription that was appealing in abstract form but almost never followed by US leaders in practice.³

Strategic doctrines can be quite useful to national leaders making decisions under extreme pressures in a chaotic world environment. Such cognitive shorthand is easy to communicate to domestic and international audiences, especially in comparison to subtle and intricate calculations about local agendas and interests. But the formulation of grand strategy and doctrines can also create problems. Indeed, “the ritual of crafting strategy encourages participants to spin a narrative that magnifies the scope of the national interest and exaggerates global threats … Strategizing turns possible threats into all-too-real ones.”⁴

Eisenhower’s famous “falling dominoes” press conference held on April 7, 1954, illustrates how strategic doctrines are formulated and the unintended consequences that can ensue. The president’s immediate objective during this regularly scheduled press event was actually not the presentation of a doctrine, but the transmission of a message: He wanted to signal Vietnam’s strategic importance to Washington at a moment when the military forces of Hồ Chí Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) were laying siege to the French garrison at Điên Biện Phủ. But in response to a question about “the strategic importance of Indochina to the free world,” Eisenhower invoked what he called the “falling domino principle.” “You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and … the last one … will go over very quickly,” he declared. “So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influence.” With hindsight, it is clear that Eisenhower’s statement was aimed at enlisting France, Britain, and a few Asian and Pacific nations to commit to a US-led plan for “united action” in Indochina. He did not actually believe that the line of containment would hinge on the defense of Điện Biên Phủ. However, to many of those who heard or read the president’s comments, the binary nature of his logic seemed clear and indisputable: Either the United States would prevent the fall of the region to communism, or disaster would ensue. The domino analogy would go on to serve as the touchstone of US policy in Vietnam for the next four presidential administrations.⁵

The focus on falling dominoes obscured the fact that there was actually much more in the president’s answer. Eisenhower first noted Southeast Asia’s “production of materials that the world needs.” After the domino sentences, he returned to raw materials – specifically tin, tungsten, and rubber. The region’s markets were also important to Japan, he explained, because Japan must have this trading area to prevent its turning “toward the communist areas in order to live.”⁶ He declared that “the loss of Indochina, of Burma, of Thailand, of the Peninsula, and Indonesia … [would] not only multiply the disadvantages that you would suffer through loss of … sources of materials, but now you are talking really about millions and millions and millions of people.” His concern for the population was that it would “pass under a dictatorship that is inimical to the free world.”⁷ He called for “a concert of readiness” but cautioned that “no outside country can come in and be really helpful unless it is doing something that the local people want.” “The aspirations of those people must be met,” he reiterated, adding that “I can’t say that the associated states [of Indochina] want independence in the sense that the United States is independent. I do not know what they want.”⁸

In the long run, however, Eisenhower’s interest in what the people of Indochina might want would be eclipsed by the imperatives of containment. In a 1959 speech, the president reaffirmed his famous image: “The loss of South Vietnam would set in motion a crumbling process that could, as it progressed, have grave consequences for us and for freedom.”⁹ As he prepared to leave office in 1961, Eisenhower issued his Farewell Address, which would become famous for its warning against the military–industrial complex. Yet he opened that speech with a stern warning that the United States continued to face “a hostile ideology – global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method.”¹⁰ For Eisenhower and American strategists, communists anywhere in the world – including in Vietnam – were enemies of the United States. Like it or not, the people and populations who were threatened by those communists had to be protected, lest the dominoes fall.

Legacies of Colonialism and Empire

As Eisenhower had frankly admitted in his 1954 press conference, he and his advisors had scant knowledge of the views and aspirations of the Southeast Asian populations that US policies in the region were intended to support. The president and his advisors did not understand “those people,” and administration leaders often invoked racist and stereotyped images. A State Department planning document from June 1950, for example, described Asians as peasants “steeped in Medieval ignorance, poverty and localism … [and] insensitive to … democratic ideology … or the desirability of preserving Western civilization.”¹¹ This notion of Asians as indolent and incompetent pervaded American opinions of Chinese as well as Vietnamese until the Korean War forced US leaders to acknowledge at least the military prowess of Chinese communist soldiers and commanders. But that experience did not translate into appreciation of the Vietnamese abilities. Lưu Đoàn Huynh, an intelligence analyst in Hanoi’s ministry of foreign affairs, later observed that, unlike Washington’s view of China as a force to be respected, Vietnam was always seen as small, weak, and dependent upon others.¹²

The Eisenhower administration’s uncertainty over how to proceed in Vietnam became apparent in the aftermath of the Geneva Conference. At a National Security Council (NSC) meeting in August 1954, US officials struggled to craft new strategic guidance for US policy. Parts of it fell readily into place: the United States would create a regional defensive alliance (the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, or SEATO) and provide economic and military aid through the French to the State of Vietnam (SVN), the Saigon-based anticommunist entity headed by the former emperor, Bảo Đại. When the council reached the paragraph entitled “Action in the Event of Local Subversion,” however, the discussion abruptly halted. This section sought to articulate policy in the event of communist subversion that was not “external armed attack.” When the president declared that he was “frankly puzzled” on this issue, the council tabled discussion until the next meeting.¹³

A few days later, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles presented several options for the unfinished paragraph. The president impatiently announced that he was not interested in “strictly local” subversion unless it was motivated by Chinese communists. Vice President Richard Nixon offered that the Indochinese communist leader Hồ Chí Minh might actually be a Soviet agent. Eisenhower ended the discussion asserting that “of course if the Soviet Union were the motivating source of subversion, it would mean general war.”¹⁴ No one seems to have considered the possibility that the Vietnamese, who had defeated the French at Điện Biên Phủ and negotiated a compromise peace at Geneva, might be acting on their own initiative.

Some of Eisenhower’s biographers credit the president with acting cautiously in Indochina in 1954. But this alleged caution is belied by his confidential remarks, which reveal a determination not to countenance Soviet communist success anywhere.¹⁵ In 1953 and 1954, the president secretly authorized CIA-backed coups against elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, believing those governments were Soviet proxies.¹⁶ Eisenhower and his advisors were not oblivious to the depth of anticolonial feeling in the Global South and they routinely stated their willingness to accommodate nationalist sensibilities in Indochina. Yet they also frequently displayed a profound inability to reconcile global containment with the indigenous cultural and historical identity of the Vietnamese.

Although US leaders denied having any colonial ambitions in Indochina, the policies they fashioned routinely undermined Vietnamese national sovereignty. Indeed, portraying the communist threat in Vietnam as an absolute danger to the United States required Washington to fashion a Vietnamese solution to such a dire threat. Like the French before them, the Americans had their own views about the future of Vietnam, and they were prepared to employ unilateral and even coercive tactics to achieve those views. The United States had its own civilizing mission, and after the French departure, Washington worked to convince the South Vietnamese to comply with America’s objectives. Although those efforts were often stymied – especially after Ngô Đình Diệm came to power in Saigon – US officials, diplomats, aid experts, and military advisors still persisted in their efforts to fashion South Vietnamese state and society according to American prescriptions.¹⁷

Collaboration, 1953–5

The first phase of Eisenhower’s stewardship of US interests in Southeast Asia was a collaborative approach that began with Washington’s decision to provide France with material support in its war against Hồ’s DRVN. Eisenhower was uneasy with France’s evident colonial motives, but the Cold War seemed to require a united front with European allies against the Soviet Union. In 1954, France’s commitment to that venture was abruptly thrown into question by the compromise peace agreement reached with the DRVN at Geneva, prompting US officials to promote SEATO as an alternative arrangement.

Although Eisenhower came to office dedicated to global containment, he was also committed to reducing US government spending. As part of this commitment, he introduced the New Look strategy that promised economical ways to protect American security. In public statements, Secretary of State Dulles emphasized the reliance on the United States on nuclear deterrence (or what became known as “massive retaliation”) as a way to counter Soviet threats without stationing US conventional ground forces overseas. However, the New Look also included greater reliance on military alliances, negotiation with adversaries, and covert operations.¹⁸ Not surprisingly, Eisenhower and Dulles applied elements of the New Look in Indochina. But such cost-cutting concerns, combined with the heavy focus on the US–Soviet confrontation, left little room for attention to Vietnamese nationalism or local Indochinese agendas.

Initially, the United States connected its collaboration with France in Indochina to the building of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Europe. Although many US leaders were skeptical about supporting a French colonial war in Indochina, Dulles told US Senators that “the divided spirit” of the world and containment objectives in Europe required Washington to continue to tolerate colonialism in Indochina a little longer. Dulles also sought French acceptance of a rearmed West Germany as part of an American-backed plan for NATO called the European Defence Community (EDC). To keep the French fighting for containment in Asia and cooperating in Europe, the Eisenhower administration expanded US aid to almost 80 percent of French military expenditures in Indochina by January 1954.¹⁹

In the early weeks of 1954, as the decisive events at Điện Biên Phủ began to unfold and the French public turned increasingly against the Indochina War, Eisenhower and his aides weighed their options. The president remarked that “while no one was more anxious … to keep our men out of these jungles, we could nevertheless not forget our vital interest in Indochina.”²⁰ The decision for the moment was to stay with France, and that option included reluctant agreement to attend the proposed conference at Geneva to seek a negotiated end to the fighting. Meanwhile, the Pentagon examined possible US air and ground operations in support of the French, and the CIA explored clandestine assistance to Bảo Đại’s SVN, including dispatching Lansdale to Saigon.²¹

By March 20, the French position at Điện Biên Phủ had become desperate. General Paul Ely, the French chief of staff, traveled to Washington for consultations. Eisenhower’s advisors considered a tactical US airstrike, an option favored by Vice President Nixon. There is little evidence that the president seriously considered use of nuclear weapons, but massive conventional bombing was a genuine possibility. Eisenhower never ruled out air bombardment, but the president ultimately decided against direct US military intervention, in contrast to later chief executives who deployed US troops and planes to Vietnam. On the weekend of April 3–4, Dulles met first with congressional leaders – Senate Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson among them – who expressed opposition to unilateral American intervention. In response, Eisenhower decided that US military intervention was possible as long as it was multinational, included France, and predicated on eventual independence for Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. In a personal letter to British prime minister Winston Churchill, Eisenhower joined Dulles in pursuing a multilateral demarche. This effort was quietly underway when Eisenhower employed the domino analogy at his April 7 press conference. By the time the Geneva Conference opened on April 26, Dulles had already finished meetings in London and Paris and reported to Washington that there was no time left to arrange the political understanding necessary for joint action. The French garrison at Điện Biên Phủ fell on May 7, ceasefire negotiations plodded along at Geneva, and Eisenhower’s team continued to seek ways to internationalize security arrangements for Southeast Asia.²²

At Geneva, the Eisenhower administration took a passive role to avoid any responsibility for a settlement that validated communist success in Vietnam. Ironically in view of later US policy, Eisenhower expressed firm opposition in late April to military intervention in Vietnam because “in the eyes of many Asian people [the United States would] merely replace French colonialism with American colonialism.”²³ The president’s focus remained on the Soviet Union and China and the risk of general war. He disdained “brushfire wars” that “frittered away our resources in local engagements.”²⁴ Yet he envisioned the United States taking leadership of an allied defense of Southeast Asia against communist expansion.

American leaders considered the outcome at Geneva a tactical defeat and concluded that two elements of the New Look – negotiation and the threat of bombardment – had proven ineffective. Washington publicly acknowledged but did not formally endorse the Geneva ceasefire terms that included the temporary partition of Vietnam at the 17th parallel. Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Allen Dulles, using Lansdale as point man in Vietnam, deployed New Look-style covert psychological measures aimed at weakening the DRVN in North Vietnam and strengthening the new administration of Prime Minister Ngô Đình Diệm in the South. Meanwhile, the DCI’s brother, the secretary of state, took the lead on making the 17th parallel the new containment line in Asia. Discussions within the NSC briefly examined the idea of doing basically nothing in Vietnam to avoid becoming trapped in defense of a rump state in the South, but the president himself ended the talk declaring that “some time we must face up to it: we can’t go on losing areas of the free world forever.”²⁵

On September 8, 1954, staying with a collaborative and alliance-focused approach, Secretary Dulles presided over the signing in Manila of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty. Also known as the Manila Pact, Dulles described it as a “no trespassing” sign warning Moscow and Beijing to keep hands off the region. It was intended as a psychological deterrent and as a mechanism for making joint military action palatable to Congress – something that had been unavailable to Washington during the siege of Điện Biên Phủ. The authors of this agreement purposefully modeled the acronym SEATO on NATO. But the similarity of the two alliances ended there. Unlike the NATO treaty, the Manila Pact did not require an automatic response in the event that one member came under attack. The Geneva ceasefire prohibited South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from joining any military alliances, but an addendum designated them as being within the treaty area and allowed SEATO members (the United States, Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan) to take action on their behalf with their consent. Despite efforts to recruit India, Burma, and Indonesia, those governments declined to join in order to preserve their political neutrality.

Despite its less-than-auspicious launch, the creation of SEATO had lasting implications. Johnson’s 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution cited the SEATO treaty as a US “obligation” in defense of freedom in the region.²⁶ The pact was a step toward converting the 17th parallel into another 38th parallel, the line separating North and South Korea – a new segment of the Asian containment line. SEATO also forged new links in the so-called ring of alliances envisioned by the New Look with acronyms such as CENTO and ANZUS, as well as bilateral defense arrangements with Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.²⁷

SEATO was a line of credit upon which South Vietnam might draw some future allied assistance. By itself, however, the pact could not breathe life into the fragile SVN government in Saigon. In June, with the Geneva talks still ongoing, Bảo Đại made Diệm SVN prime minister, anticipating that this anticommunist nationalist known to some prominent Americans would attract US backing.²⁸ But Washington’s interest in Diệm threatened the collaborative approach with Paris because French officials knew Diệm to be an anti-French nationalist.

Lansdale arrived in Saigon as Allen Dulles’s “own representative” just in time to witness what he described as Diệm’s inauspicious arrival in the city.²⁹ Lansdale invented the Saigon Military Mission (SMM), a team tasked with manipulating information and misinformation, conducting espionage, and covertly advising Diệm. Lansdale’s self-described purpose was “to help the Vietnamese help themselves.”³⁰ Many years later Lansdale acknowledged that “I was backed by the CIA” and “I had CIA people.”³¹ The degree of credit the SMM deserves for Diệm’s survival in those early days is difficult to measure, but the efforts of the SMM, other American agents, and some able Vietnamese officials, such as Trần Vӑn Đỗ who had represented the SVN at Geneva, helped resettle Vietnamese Catholics from the North to the South to provide Diệm a small public base of fellow Catholics in the predominately Buddhist country. Lansdale also claimed to have helped Diệm avoid a seizure of power by Nguyễn Vӑn Hinh, the head of the French-created Vietnamese National Army.³² Despite these accomplishments, Eisenhower viewed Diệm as a weak figure around whom to fashion a Cold War battlefront. The president decided to send General J. Lawton Collins with broad authority to try to fashion joint US–French assistance to Diệm but also to evaluate honestly Diệm’s survivability and, if necessary, to identify leaders who might be more effective allies.

The Collins Mission was part of a White House “crash program” to invigorate Diệm’s government before, in the president’s words, it “went down the drain.” Washington wanted direct US military aid and training for a South Vietnamese army without going through the French Expeditionary Corps, which was the occupying force designated in the Geneva Accords. Eisenhower thought it was time to “lay down the law to the French.” “We have to cajole the French in regard to the European area, but we certainly didn’t have to in Indochina,” the president instructed the NSC.³³

Working together, Collins and Ely improved military training and bureaucratic processes in the South, but the fate of the SVN remained uncertain. French officials believed Diệm was an unreliable leader, but Lansdale insisted that Diệm had the potential to be “highly popular.”³⁴ Tasked to make an assessment, Collins voiced doubts about Diệm’s leadership almost as soon as he arrived in November 1954, and finally on March 31, 1955, he cabled Washington that Diệm was “operating practically one-man government” and could not last much longer.³⁵ He advised that Trần Vӑn Đỗ or Phan Huy Quát, a veteran of several Bảo Đại cabinets, had the experience and political connections to best leverage American support for the South.³⁶

An eruption of open warfare in the streets of Saigon and its suburb Chơ lớn – what became known as the Sect Crisis – prompted this urgent message. Diệm had many domestic opponents, including the Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo religious sects outside Saigon and the Bình Xuyên crime syndicate in the city. Whether Diệm’s forces or the Bình Xuyên gangsters fired first, public order had collapsed. French General Ely blamed Diệm for losing control, and Lansdale believed the Bình Xuyên provoked the clash. Washington instructed Collins to try to gain time because Eisenhower and Dulles were not prepared simply to cut off the prime minister. Notably, Diệm had gained the sympathy of significant members of Congress, including senators Mike Mansfield, Hubert Humphrey, and John Kennedy. Likely because of Lansdale’s favorable reports about Diệm through CIA channels, Secretary Dulles encouraged Collins to stick with Diệm. On April 7, however, the general finally determined that “Diệm does not have the capacity to achieve the necessary purpose and action from his people … essential to prevent this country from falling under communist control.” He deemed Diệm to be a patriot but concluded that Diệm was not “the indispensable man.”³⁷

With Eisenhower’s permission, Dulles summoned Collins to Washington to try to resolve the differences over Diệm. The president respected both men and left the prime minister’s fate in their hands – until Diệm decided to wrest it back. In Washington, Collins stood his ground and appeared to have prevailed, when suddenly word arrived that Diệm’s forces had engaged the Bình Xuyên gang in renewed fighting on April 27. Lansdale flashed the news to the Dulles brothers and reiterated his argument for continued support of Diệm. Collins later recalled: “I [was] getting instructions from the president of the United States, and this guy Lansdale, who had no authority so far as I was concerned, [was] getting instructions from the CIA. It was a mistake.”³⁸ As Collins hurried back to his post in Saigon, Secretary Dulles with the concurrence of the State Department’s Asian specialists decided the violent outbreak was an inopportune time to tamper with the Saigon regime’s leadership. Dulles made the fateful decision to stick with Diệm and extend him America’s “wholehearted backing.”³⁹

The Eisenhower administration tried to convince France to accept the course it had chosen with Diệm. After several tense sessions in early May 1955, Foreign Minister Edgar Faure yielded to Dulles’ insistence. French forces agreed to depart Vietnam and leave the fate of the southern portion of the country to Diệm and his American backers. The FEC was formally dissolved in April 1956, and Paris with Washington’s blessing put its military efforts into the worsening anticolonial war in Algeria, seeking to avoid “another Indochina.”⁴⁰ SEATO provided a semblance of collaborative sanction for US efforts to sustain South Vietnam, but the weakness of the pact and the departure of the French meant that the security and development of the South would be a unilateral US program. The Eisenhower administration had entered a new and perilous policy phase.

Unilateralism, 1956–7

At least for the moment, Washington had cast its lot in Vietnam with Diệm. Although Diệm strove to refute communist allegations that his government was a mere American puppet, he ruefully admitted that many Vietnamese had adopted the disparaging term Mỹ–Diệm (America–Diệm) to refer to the Saigon regime. As Diệm moved to consolidate power, Eisenhower and Dulles left it to others to shape the large flows of assistance now programmed for South Vietnam. A heart attack in 1955 slowed Eisenhower for a while, Dulles received a diagnosis of abdominal cancer the next year, and crises emerged elsewhere in the world. American diplomats, military officers, and various development experts set to work on the effort to build an effective state in South Vietnam around Diệm and his family.⁴¹

This experiment in state-building faced enormous obstacles. The State of Vietnam had a small army of 150,000 with an inexperienced officer corps. Its civil bureaucracy consisted of fonctionnaires trained by the French to take orders, not make decisions. The South had less heavy industry than North Vietnam, and its largely rural population of farmers and fishermen were impoverished from decades of exploitation by Vietnamese and French landlords and colonial taxes. Even before tackling these deficiencies, however, the Saigon government needed to create its own popular legitimacy. Diệm was not a prince of royal lineage, as was Norodom Sihanouk, the head of state of neighboring Cambodia, nor was he a patriotic hero of the war against France, as was Hồ Chí Minh. Any claim to popular authority would have to come from some form of democratic endorsement, presumably an election.⁴²

The final declaration of the Geneva Conference had called nationwide elections in 1956 to determine Vietnam’s political future. But most participants recognized that the chances of actually conducting elections were “definitely poor.”⁴³ The Geneva documents outlined no voting procedures, nor did they specify which offices or legislative bodies were to be filled by the balloting. One Canadian officer on the staff of the International Supervisory Commission (ISC) later recalled that Hanoi had the atmosphere of a “police state.”⁴⁴ That same officer described the ISC – created by the Geneva conferees to supervise the ceasefire and possibly an election – as “very inactive,”⁴⁵ and scholars have described it as “procedurally defective,”⁴⁶ especially on political matters. The French forces that could have helped implement an election in the South had departed by the spring of 1956. Moreover, neither Bảo Đại’s representatives nor those of the United States or even those of the DRVN had formally endorsed the final declaration at Geneva, including the national elections provision.⁴⁷

The State Department officer in charge of Philippine and Southeast Asian affairs, Kenneth Young, was keenly aware that the legitimacy of Bảo Đại’s State of Vietnam was fragile. Diệm owed his appointment to an ex-emperor tainted by his self-serving associations over the years with the Japanese, the French, and the Bình Xuyên. In the wake of the Sect Crisis, Young feared that elections in the South would invite anarchy.

While Washington officials exhibited little trust in democracy in Vietnam, Diệm acted unilaterally. In October 1955, he staged a referendum that deposed Bảo Đại. He then declared himself president of the newly proclaimed Republic of Vietnam (RVN). A few months later, he and his brothers ran an election that produced a constituent assembly, heavily stacked in their favor, to draft a constitution. These were not exercises in pluralistic democracy – evidence of ballot manipulation was widespread – but they provided a means for the regime to advance its own claims to sovereignty and legitimacy.⁴⁸

By the time the July 1956 deadline for the Geneva-mandated elections arrived, the United States had strengthened South Vietnam through economic aid and a vague warning to Hanoi in the form of SEATO. Moreover, the major powers appeared content to see partition continue, rather than risk a crisis or hostilities in Indochina. Britain and France were more concerned with Europe than Asia. The Soviet Union was developing its post–Stalin “peaceful coexistence” line toward the West and even suggested it might accept the admission of both Vietnams to the United Nations. Beijing seemed similarly content with a divided Vietnam. In the summer of 1955, the Soviet Union and PRC both declined to press the election issue in separate meetings with US officials in Geneva and Warsaw.⁴⁹

Largely ignorant of Vietnamese history and culture, American leaders understood politics and strategy well enough to recognize the advantages of a divided Vietnam and handled the issue of the 1956 elections with finesse. Neither Hồ Chí Minh’s DRVN nor Diệm’s RVN could claim to represent all Vietnamese, and both faced the task of building a political community.⁵⁰ Although US officials did not want the elections to take place, they nevertheless pressed Diệm to open consultations with Hanoi so as to appear supportive of the Geneva stipulation that the elections would serve as a “free expression of the national will.”⁵¹ But Diệm had no interest in parleying with Hanoi. In July 1955 he declared that no consultations could take place unless and until the DRVN was willing to “renounce terrorism and totalitarian methods.” By the spring of 1956, despite complaints made by Hanoi and its allies, it was clear that the elections would not take place. Washington thus reaped the benefits of Diệm’s intransigence while still asserting their support in principle for free elections as a means of achieving national unity.⁵²

In the long run, the nonelections of 1956 greatly contributed to an increased US presence in South Vietnam. Although Hanoi did not immediately abandon its hopes for peaceful reunification, it would eventually turn to armed insurgency to achieve its goals.⁵³ The muted international response to the nonelections also showed that Britain and France would henceforth defer to Washington on policy in Indochina. At the same time, South Vietnam had been transformed in the eyes of US leaders. During 1954–5 they viewed South Vietnam as a potential major setback for American containment strategy, but two years later they congratulated themselves for having “saved” the country from communism. This narrative of rescue and salvation would later help pave the way for a massive new unilateral American military intervention in the 1960s. For the moment, however, Washington believed it had successfully bought more time to achieve its objective of a strong, anticommunist state in South Vietnam.

Self-Satisfaction and Complacency, 1957–61

The Eisenhower administration chose to declare Diệm’s political survival a great success, despite the RVN’s considerable weaknesses. On May 7, 1957, Eisenhower endured the heat of Washington National Airport’s parking apron to welcome Diệm for a highly publicized state visit (Figure 13.1). The public pageantry included an address to Congress and was part of an outreach to Third World leaders in the wake of the Suez Crisis the previous fall. Diệm was only a circumstantial beneficiary of this attention, but the American public rhetoric was effusive. Eisenhower accepted his aides’ now-optimistic assessment of Diệm and joined the chorus that hailed the “tough miracle man” and the “savior” of South Vietnam.⁵⁴ In private meetings, budget-conscious Republicans rebuffed Diệm’s appeals for increased aid, but the public show reconfirmed the strategic importance of Vietnam to the United States.⁵⁵

Figure 13.1 Dwight D. Eisenhower shaking hands with Ngô Đình Diệm (1957).

Source: Courtesy Dwight D. Eisenhower Library.

This celebrated success, however, was tenuous. The Saigon regime’s narrow political base and lack of economic development left the RVN increasingly vulnerable to instability, including armed insurrection. Leland Barrows, who directed the US assistance program in Vietnam, recalled that “Diem had no desire to reduce his dependency on us. Aid creates dependence no matter how good it is.”⁵⁶ Under American tutelage, the RVN remained dependent on the United States and its legitimacy remained very much in question.

American civil and military officers in Saigon and the Diệm government waged a three-way tussle over how to direct US aid. As the DRVN-backed insurgency grew in the South after 1959, Diệm and his influential brother Ngô Đình Nhu moved to protect their authority through suppression of anticommunist critics within South Vietnam. They also demanded US financing for a larger army. Pentagon officials argued that meeting the RVN’s security needs had to precede political reforms, and US diplomats countered that military assistance should be withheld as leverage to prompt Diệm and Nhu to implement reforms.⁵⁷ US Ambassador Elbridge Durbrow in Saigon observed, however, that the “somewhat authoritarian government of President Diem is compatible with our interest in Vietnam” primarily because of “its strongly anti-communist external stance.” Lest anyone in Washington get the wrong idea, Durbrow warned that “democracy in the Western sense of the term may never come to exist in Viet-Nam.”⁵⁸

As Sputnik, Cuba, Taiwan, and other Cold War issues captured Eisenhower’s time, the US country team in Saigon wrestled with the task of state-building. The president remained focused on Soviet intentions in the world, and, as his second term ended, Moscow was supplying communist forces in Laos against an American-recognized government. He briefed John Kennedy in January 1961 immediately before the new president’s inauguration that Laos was the most serious American problem in Southeast Asia. Eisenhower made no mention of Vietnam, where the situation still seemed manageable.⁵⁹

The debate among Americans revealed that US state-building had evolved in ways reminiscent of the French colonial regime. Although Washington had no desire to colonize the RVN and claimed to abhor imperialism, the Washington–Saigon axis was not one of equals. To protect the global security of the United States, the administration had defined South Vietnam as a domino – a piece in the containment puzzle – that like Iran and Guatemala must not be allowed to fall to communism. In backing Diệm, the Eisenhower administration showed how far it was willing to go for the sake of containment in Southeast Asia. The Kennedy administration would go even farther – both in its support for Diệm and in its eventual withdrawal of that support. The logic of containment dictated that South Vietnam had to be defended, even if that came at the cost of compromising the legitimacy and sovereignty of the Saigon government.⁶⁰

Conclusion: Commitment without Creativity

Eisenhower’s management of Vietnam as a national security issue began as a collaboration with the French and then morphed into a unilateral intervention before ending with self-congratulations. As the French war in Indochina raged, the White House focused attention on Vietnam because France was a valuable Cold War ally and communism seemed to be on the rise in Asia. By the time Eisenhower left office, Vietnam remained strategically important but had a lower priority among world trouble spots. Washington believed for a time that the alliance with Diệm protected American interests, but eventually US leaders lost confidence in the abilities of Saigon’s leaders.

In October 1960, on the fifth anniversary of Diệm’s establishment of the RVN, Eisenhower praised “its successful struggle to become an independent Republic.”⁶¹ Once France had acceded to American designs for Vietnam, the administration assumed that Saigon was free from the colonial stigma. Washington underestimated the dangers of aligning US interests with those of Diệm and his family. The United States did not exploit Vietnam’s economy for profit; indeed, it spent vast sums there. But the massive flows of aid and the showy displays of diplomatic support failed to stem the decline in Diệm’s popularity and legitimacy, especially after 1960. These would prove costly failures – more costly than Eisenhower or his advisors ever could have imagined, especially during the halcyon days of the late 1950s, when South Vietnam seemed to be an irresistible story of the United States’ Cold War success.

14 Ngô Đình Diệm and the Birth of the Republic of Vietnam

Phi-Vân Nguyen

Introduction

On June 24, 1954, Ngô Đình Diệm landed in Saigon, ending nearly four years of foreign exile. He had returned to begin his tenure as the newly appointed prime minister of the State of Vietnam (SVN). American accounts of his arrival gave the impression of a political leader who was reluctant to mingle with the crowd and only shook a few hands before leaving in a car.¹ This led many to question why this man, who was supposed to lead noncommunist Vietnam at such a crucial time, seemed indifferent to popular support, and showed no interest in engaging the people he would soon govern. Recent research shows, however, that Diệm’s hasty departure from the airport was in fact carefully planned. He headed straight to Gia Long Palace in downtown Saigon, where a large crowd, including several political leaders and representatives of ethnic minorities and other groups, had gathered to cheer his arrival as the new prime minister.²

Many historians have cited the story of Diệm’s 1954 arrival as a way of raising important questions about him and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN), the state that he would go on to establish in 1955.³ Was Ngô Đình Diệm the right man to lead “Free Vietnam”? What were American expectations for South Vietnam and its new political leader? When Diệm returned from exile in 1954, was he an unknown political outsider or was he representative of Vietnamese nationalism? Did the republic he founded ever offer a viable anticommunist alternative to Hồ Chí Minh and the communist-led Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN)?

The Republic of Vietnam occupies a crucial place in Vietnam War scholarship because Diệm’s attempt to build a strong nation-state in South Vietnam was the last and most sustained effort to counter communist expansion in Vietnam through peaceful means. Because the eventual failure of Diệm’s nation-building project created the preconditions for the intervention of US armed forces in Vietnam, the political legacy of his “first” Republic of Vietnam has generated polarized interpretations. To his admirers, Ngô Đình Diệm was a forward-thinking hero who was betrayed by his American allies; to his critics, he was a creature invented by US foreign policy.⁴ Scholars in the former group have depicted Diệm and the republic he founded in tragic terms as a “triumph forsaken” or a “lost victory.”⁵ Meanwhile, those in the latter camp sarcastically reproduce the sensational 1950s American media portrayals of Diệm as “America’s Miracle Man” in Vietnam.⁶ In both cases, the interpretations of Diệm and the RVN are framed within larger arguments about the causes and eventual outcome of the Vietnam War – even though that conflict only began during the last years of Diệm’s rule and was not transformed into a major international conflict until after his death in 1963.

Since the 1990s, improved access to Vietnamese archives has opened new possibilities for moving beyond the old binary debates between “revisionist” and “orthodox” positions. The newer scholarship, which incorporates Vietnamese and European sources as well as American archival materials, has questioned the older arguments in three important ways. First, the incorporation of Vietnamese archives and perspectives challenges the idea that US Cold War foreign policy unfolded across the globe unhindered by local circumstances. By taking Vietnamese agency seriously, the recent work shows how American power was mediated on the ground in Vietnam.⁷ Contrary to what some defenders of the orthodoxy have alleged, these new studies do not simply replace American agency with Vietnamese autonomy.⁸ Instead, they analyze how the two both reinforced and undermined each other.

Second, the adoption of global approaches to the history of the Vietnam Wars has enabled a new focus on multidimensional, multi-institutional, and longue durée connections. The history of the US–South Vietnam alliance was not defined exclusively by relations between the two states and their official representatives. It was also profoundly shaped by the transnational mobilization of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), think tanks, and religious organizations that joined the struggle against communist expansion in Vietnam.⁹ By highlighting these mobilizations, scholars have shown that the Cold War was much more than the sum of rivalries and relations among states. It was also deeply shaped by global economic, social, and cultural networks that transcended political boundaries.

Finally, this new scholarship incorporates a fundamental insight of empire studies: the notion of circularity and the idea that the imperial center is always being transformed by its domination of the peripheries. No matter how great American power might have been in comparison to that of the Republic of Vietnam, no American decision or initiative could be implemented without Vietnamese and other local partners, who in turn influenced their powerful allies.¹⁰ Understanding American and Vietnamese partnership as a dialectical relationship, rather than one of straightforward subordination, helps us understand how local developments influenced American foreign policy. In this respect, Ngô Đình Diệm’s ascent from the position of SVN prime minister to the presidency of the newly created Republic of Vietnam during 1954–6 allows us to unpack the most common misconceptions about South Vietnamese politics, and understand better the RVN’s complex and ambiguous role in the history of noncommunist Vietnamese nationalism.

Ngô Đình Diệm: A Coalition Leader

Perhaps even more than the founders of other twentieth-century states, Ngô Đình Diệm was the central figure in the First Republic of Vietnam. Born in 1901 into a family with deep connections to one of central Vietnam’s oldest Catholic communities, Diệm grew up in a family defined by literacy, faith in God, and a career in the public service.¹¹ He served in the colonial administration, rose to the position of province chief in 1930, and then interior minister three years later, before resigning, due to French reluctance to restore a measure of autonomy to the Vietnamese court. By sacrificing his career for the sake of independence, Diệm became known as an uncompromising opponent of colonialism. Meanwhile, his repression of communist revolts in central Vietnam in the 1930s and the assassination of his oldest brother by cadres in 1945 secured his image as a fierce anticommunist.

But a closer look at Diệm’s career during the 1930s and 1940s reveals a figure who was more politically flexible than his reputation suggested. After his departure from colonial service, Diệm emerged as the potential leader of large political coalitions. During Vichy’s wartime rule of Indochina (1940–5), he was the presumed leader of the Vietnam Restoration League, an organization that aimed to gather Hòa Hảo, Cao Đài, Đại Việt, and Catholics in support of the return of Prince Cường Để from his exile in Japan.¹² But at the decisive moment in the spring of 1945, Japanese military leaders opted to stick with Emperor Bảo Đại as the head of the newly created Empire of Vietnam.¹³ A few months later, during the August Revolution, Hồ Chí Minh asked Diệm to serve in the newly created Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Diệm refused, not because of his opposition to communism, but because he was not given the ministry of interior.¹⁴

After 1945, Ngô Đình Diệm repeatedly tried to revive the idea of a nationalist coalition made of Hòa Hảo, Cao Đài, and Đại Việt followers as an alternative to Hồ Chí Minh’s DRVN. Such a coalition, he hoped, might gain recognition from the United Nations and support from the United States. These attempts ultimately foundered due to the creation of a separate anticommunist political solution, the French-backed Associated States of Vietnam headed by the now ex-emperor Bảo Đại.¹⁵ But even after the launch of the SVN, Diệm continued to explore collaboration with the French or with Bảo Đại. He traveled to Hong Kong and advised the former monarch to refuse any proposition from the French unless they granted dominion status to Vietnam, similar to what India had obtained from the British empire. At the same time, he remained in contact with senior communist leaders. Thus, despite his reputation for intransigence, Diệm assiduously kept open the possibility of collaboration with all of the key actors in Indochinese politics.¹⁶

Diệm finally broke publicly with the communists and the DRVN in a political essay published in June 1949. But even as he did so, he offered two distinctive propositions. First, instead of merely declaring his opposition to communism, he promised a new political vision for Vietnam and declared his respect for the Việt Minh’s contribution to the independence struggle. Second, he called for a different kind of social revolution.¹⁷ Vietnam’s independence could not be reduced to a political and administrative autonomy from French rule. The social inequalities created by colonial exploitation had to be eliminated. Moreover, the nature of the armed conflict was changing. From a war of decolonization, it was evolving into a civil war in which rival nationalist visions were colliding with the international Cold War.

Diệm’s hopes for leveraging the 1949 manifesto into a new surge of political support were quickly dashed. After the Việt Minh ordered his assassination, he left Indochina on a long overseas trip with his brother, Bishop Ngô Đình Thục. They started in Japan, then visited Catholic contacts in Rome, France, and Belgium, before Diệm opted to settle in for a longer stay in the United States.¹⁸ While the brothers were traveling in Belgium, two articles published in a Catholic periodical analyzed the political crisis in Vietnam. Commenting on the recent creation of the SVN, the author, who remained anonymous for fear of reprisal from French authorities, concluded that this political solution would not succeed unless it elaborated its own ideology. Because the survival of the nation was threatened by both communist materialism and colonialism, a common opposition to communism was insufficient. Only a spiritually minded doctrine could unleash the potential of the Vietnamese people and support the historical mission of the nation.¹⁹

In their zeal to denounce the “family rule” (gia đình trị) of the Ngô, historians have depicted Diệm as relying on a closed circle of confidants. But the regime’s nepotism should not lead us to conclude that the Ngô brothers were isolated from the broader currents of Vietnamese society. In reality, Diệm and his brothers engaged extensively with mainstream Vietnamese political trends and actors during the 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, Diệm’s rise to the premiership and the survival of his government after 1954 depended on the family’s political acumen.

Ngô Đình Khôi, the eldest of the six Ngô brothers, was assassinated by the Việt Minh in 1945.²⁰ Ngô Đình Luyện, the youngest brother, stayed overseas and was relatively uninvolved in Vietnamese politics after 1954. Ngô Đình Cẩn, another brother junior to Diệm, is often depicted as a lord ruling over his fiefdom in central Vietnam, where his clique controlled much of the political and economic activity. Historical evidence suggests, however, that Cẩn was no traditionalist. He promoted constitutional monarchism in central Vietnam in the 1940s and later headed the central branch of the pro-regime Cần Lao Party, which sometimes clashed with the southern branch.²¹ But Cẩn’s influence was ultimately eclipsed by that of Ngô Đình Thục and Ngô Đình Nhu, who represented larger and broader political and cultural movements.

Ngô Đình Thục was a pioneer member of a new generation of Vietnamese Catholic clergy. Unlike his father, Thục studied religion not in seminaries in Southeast Asia but in Rome, where he traveled for the first time in 1919. Emboldened by new programs and empowered by his direct connection to the Vatican, he was emblematic of a Vietnamese church that aimed for a double decolonization: the creation of a Church free from the control of foreign missionaries, and the establishment of a Vietnamese state independent from colonial rule. His 1938 ordination as bishop of Vĩnh Long diocese reflected his efforts to help other Vietnamese priests gain training in Europe, as well as his mobilization of the Catholic laity in youth and workers associations.²² Thục had a keen appreciation of lay Catholics’ interest in the cause of independence, and he understood their conflicted feelings about whether to lend support to the Việt Minh.²³ This transformation of the Catholic faith was not an isolated event in Vietnam. Buddhist revivalism also gave rise to a religious form of Vietnamese nationalism, and many Buddhists also wrestled with the question of whether to support, oppose, or remain neutral on the question of communism.

While Thục epitomized the emancipation of the Vietnamese Church, Ngô Đình Nhu personified the emergence of a noncommunist intelligentsia, one that was primarily but not exclusively composed of lay Catholics, and deeply concerned about the crises threatening Vietnam. Politically, these intellectuals worried that the communists planned to use the Việt Minh front to take over the country. Socially, they were committed to find a solution to poverty and social inequalities resulting from decades of colonial exploitation. Many of these intellectuals embraced personalism, a doctrine elaborated by the French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier during the 1930s.²⁴ Contrary to later portrayals, Mounier did not depict personalism as standing midway between capitalism and communism. Indeed, the doctrine was similar to communism in its criticism of capitalist modes of production and in its determination to overturn existing labor practices. At the same time, personalism denounced the emphasis on materialism shared by capitalism and communism. It asserted instead that the person (as opposed to the individual) was a spiritual being whose freedom was circumscribed within the frame of the community. Personalism thus advocated for a revolution that would overthrow existing forms of economic or social relationships. It also rejected what Mounier saw as illusory forms of democracy based on individual liberties, rule of law, and parliamentary rule.²⁵

Ngô Đình Nhu spent much of the 1930s in Paris, where he participated in the Action Sociale Indochinoise, a lay Catholic organization that grappled with social and political issues related to colonial rule in French Indochina.²⁶ Nhu was only one of several students who brought his interest in personalism back to Vietnam from France. Upon his return, he discovered that many of his fellow intellectuals in Vietnam shared his interest in reconciling Western and Eastern philosophical thought. The work of Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev and the existentialist writings of French intellectual Jacques Maritain were already circulating in Indochina during the early 1940s. These came via the teachings of missionaries who introduced Western philosophical thought using Asian references, such as Confucian writings or the annals of the Vietnamese imperial dynasties. Discussion of these ideas took place in student associations such as the Dominican missionaries’ Cercle de la Renaissance, which organized conferences at the University of Hanoi, open to both Catholic and non-Catholics.²⁷ This “East meets West” framing helps explain why Vietnamese personalism explicitly incorporated Confucian values, as well as Ngô Đình Diệm’s deep admiration for Confucianists such as Phan Bội Châu.²⁸

Another emerging social movement with Christian intellectual overtones was the one focused on labor activism in Indochina. This movement was born of a collaboration between a French border agent named Gilbert Jouan and Trần Quốc Bửu, a labor activist who had previously been imprisoned in Poulo Condore. In 1951, the pair launched the Vietnamese Catholic Confederation of Labor, the country’s first labor union. They also forged connections to the international Christian labor movement through ties to Gaston Tessier in France, and Gaston Ciceron in the French Caribbean.²⁹ As staunch anticommunists, Jouan and Bửu were determined that the Communist Party would not be the only organization seeking to advocate for the rights and well-being of Vietnamese workers.

Ngô Đình Nhu was an important figure in these emerging movements. While his lack of an official role in the First Republic has often led observers to see him as a gray eminence controlling a secret organization, his political reputation in Vietnam was first forged in intellectual and labor circles.³⁰ Beginning in the late 1940s, Nhu collaborated with French missionary Fernand Parrel to organize a series of conferences on rethinking the political, social, and cultural roles of the Church in Indochina. The events held in Hanoi, Huế, Đà Nẵng, and Saigon, in addition to the main seminar in Dalat, included discussions of personalism, Christian social doctrine, and the need to rethink labor and social relations. The gatherings were attended by ordained and lay Catholics, as well as non-Catholic intellectuals, and activists, such as Buddhist labor leaders.³¹ The appeal of these conferences rested precisely on the growing interest of noncommunist Vietnamese in the possibility of developing an alternative national doctrine. Nhu presented personalism as a new political solution that could rally support around the twin goals of ending colonial economic exploitation and establishing a genuinely democratic state.

Although Diệm had remained overseas for almost four years, he was well known and admired by many Catholic nationalists, noncommunist intellectuals, and labor activists. Still, he was only one among several Vietnamese political leaders who was viewed as a prospective leader of a postcolonial anticommunist state. It was only after the exposure of the State of Vietnam’s political weaknesses that Diệm emerged as the political frontrunner.

In May 1953, Paris’ unilateral devaluation of the piaster accelerated the rupture between France and Vietnam. By acting alone to change the value of the piaster, Paris violated a central principle of the Pau Agreements that had established Indochina as a federation of Associated States: Any decision regarding economic affairs must involve the French, the Vietnamese, the Laotian, and the Cambodians in a quadripartite agreement.³² Following the devaluation, even the most ardent Vietnamese defenders of the French Union could no longer believe that Paris would honor its commitments. At that moment, France lost the credibility it had gained with the creation of the State of Vietnam, the reunification of Cochinchina with the rest of the country, and the development of the Vietnamese Nationalist Army. In the aftermath of the French move, Diệm’s call to exit the French Union gained more traction.

Unlike King Sihanouk of Cambodia, who successfully launched a diplomatic crusade to gain rapid independence from France, Bảo Đại did not demand the SVN’s departure from the French Union. Instead, the cause was taken up by a coalition of anticommunists known as the Đại Đoàn Kết (Greater Union). Comprised of groups such as the Catholics from the Phát Diệm and Bùi Chu dioceses, the Cao Đài and the Hòa Hảo who controlled important parts of the Mekong Delta in the South, the Bình Xuyên, as well as the southern branch of the Đại Việt, the Union demanded elections for the creation of a national parliament as a prelude to total independence from the French Union.³³ The emergence of this coalition was neither new nor coincidental or temporary. Many of the key leaders had previously backed the Vietnam Restoration League and the leadership of Diệm as far back as the early 1940s. For these anticommunists, the time Diệm spent in foreign exile did not disqualify him from leadership. On the contrary, Bảo Đại and many other leaders hoped that Diệm’s stay in the United States could translate into direct support from Washington to the SVN. Thanks to the support of the Greater Union, in tandem with the nationalist vision he espoused, Ngô Đình Diệm was officially selected by Bảo Đại to become SVN prime minister on June 26, 1954. He was, in Bảo Đại’s judgment, “truly the right man for the situation” – an assessment that the former monarch stood by even several decades later.

Breaking Free from International Constraints

Ngô Đình Diệm had gained the SVN premiership largely through a combination of luck and his own political activism. But to stay in power, he would need the support of foreign governments – or at least gain their agreement not to interfere with his plans. At first, Diệm’s chances of staying in office seemed poor. But by May 1955, circumstances had shifted to his advantage. By securing the political and financial support of anticommunist powers, as well as promises from France and other countries to refrain from forcing Saigon to implement the ceasefire agreements, Diệm found the means to move ahead with the realization of his political goals.

Some historians attribute Diệm’s rise to power to the contacts he made in the United States during his exile, combined with the advocacy of the American Friends of Vietnam (AFV), an anticommunist lobbying group.³⁴ The AFV undoubtedly helped raise awareness within the United States about the strategic importance of South Vietnam. But US support for a Vietnamese nation-state and US backing of Ngô Đình Diệm were two very different commitments. During the negotiations of the Geneva ceasefire agreements, US officials signaled that they were prepared to provide aid and support directly to the SVN, without using France as an intermediary.³⁵ Yet, as David L. Anderson shows, it was not until Diệm overcame his domestic rivals months later that the Eisenhower administration finally agreed to back him unequivocally as the leader of “Free Vietnam.”³⁶ Indeed, the trigger for the decision on direct aid to the SVN had nothing to do with Diệm. It was a response to the French military’s unilateral and surprise decision in late June 1954 to withdraw from the southern part of the Red River Delta, including the Catholic dioceses of Bùi Chu and Phát Diệm.³⁷ The French pullback changed perceptions in the West of the situation on the ground. US dailies covered the story of Vietnamese civilians – whom they depicted as both Christian and ardent nationalists – now faced with the stark choice of evacuation or enduring communist rule. An American news correspondent declared that the French withdrawal “was a far bigger victory for Ho Chi Minh’s forces than their capture of Dien Bien Phu.”³⁸ This idea that population displacement reflected a global threat and an opportunity to back a local political solution persisted even after the Geneva Conference concluded. When Diệm called on all the nations of the “Free World” to assist in the ongoing evacuations from the North, the United States deployed its Navy in “Operation Passage to Freedom.”³⁹

International organizations and NGOs also converged on South Vietnam. Although some historians depict this private mobilization as an unofficial extension of US official policy, it was in keeping with the mobilization of transnational civil society that had first emerged between the two world wars. Anticommunist NGOs did not need the prompting of the White House to create emergency relief programs for refugees fleeing communist rule. In fact, less than 48 hours after the signature of the ceasefire agreement, CARE International had already opened its Indochina fundraising efforts.⁴⁰ Although their interventions in Vietnam aligned with the interests of the United States’ foreign policy, these transnational organizations became involved in Vietnam for their own reasons. Michigan State University’s Vietnam Group saw an opportunity to put theories of development and public administration into practice.⁴¹ CARE intervened to fulfill its mission of humanitarian relief and poverty alleviation.⁴² The International Refugee Committee continued its work of rescuing victims of Nazism and communism.⁴³ The Catholic Relief Service and other Christian organizations generously donated money and material in support of Catholic solidarity against communism.⁴⁴ This transnational support helped transform South Vietnam into a new stronghold against communist expansion. It also helped elevate Ngô Đình Diệm to the status of Cold War hero.

Yet Diệm still faced formidable international constraints. If the French had wanted to oust him by force, they certainly had the means to do so. Although the total number of French Union troops in Indochina had decreased from its peak of around 177,000 in June 1954, there were still approximately 60,000 soldiers under French command in South Vietnam as late as June 1955.⁴⁵ Moreover, French commanders were not lacking for opportunities to hamper, pressure, or eliminate Ngô Đình Diệm. Virtually all of his noncommunist political opponents asked the French for a helping hand during his first year in power – or at least for a promise not to interfere if Diệm was overthrown.⁴⁶ Yet the French never moved against Diệm nor sanctioned his removal, even though their leaders complained bitterly about his anti-French stance.

Although some commentators attributed France’s unwillingness to oust Diệm to Paris’ weaknesses vis-à-vis Washington, the French position was in fact more complicated. Indeed, France had been quietly rethinking its involvement in Indochina ever since it agreed to create the State of Vietnam in 1949. As the May 1953 devaluation of the piaster made clear, Paris no longer had any realistic hope of keeping Vietnam within the French Union. On June 4, 1954, French and SVN representatives signed a treaty recognizing Vietnam’s independence and compelling Vietnam to respect any international agreement France would conclude on its behalf.⁴⁷ After Diệm and other political leaders strongly protested against the ceasefire agreements, France accelerated the transfer of postal, police, customs, and other administrative authority to the SVN.

Some historians have portrayed the conflicts between Diệm and hostile factions within the SVN military during late 1954 and early 1955 as a Franco-American conflict by proxy.⁴⁸ This interpretation discounts the depth of Diệm’s antipathy for the French, as well as the fact that the Americans had not yet made up their minds to support Diệm. In fact, US officials often asked their French counterparts about which Vietnamese political leaders might replace the premier. In addition to the Đại Việt leader Phan Huy Quát, the French also put forward Bửu Hội, a well-known Vietnamese scientist, who was the subject of a fawning profile in the French magazine L’Express.⁴⁹

In the end, France’s reluctance to move against Diệm had less to do with concerns about the Americans than with anxieties about the rest of the French empire. The violent removal of Diệm would have jeopardized their hopes to earn the confidence of other French territories and mandates, such as Morocco, whose role in the French Union was deemed more strategically and economically important.⁵⁰ Thus, the decision to allow Diệm to denounce and defy France’s lingering presence in Indochina was not the result of Paris’ goodwill. It was for France a necessary evil to better protect her interests in northern Africa. As a consequence, Paris completed Vietnam’s separation from France by concluding a treaty in December 1954, ending the economic union created by treaty less than four years earlier.⁵¹ Paris also agreed to delegate to the United States the responsibility of providing military training to the SVN Army. The last troops of the CEFEO departed Vietnam in 1956.

After securing France’s agreement to complete its military withdrawal from South Vietnam, Diệm still faced one major threat to his plans to remain in power. Under the terms of the Geneva Accords, the partition of Vietnam into northern and southern zones was a temporary measure that would last only until nationwide elections could be held in 1956. Diệm had pointedly refused to endorse the agreements, in large measure because of his opposition to the elections provision. But this did not mean that he would ignore the agreements altogether. As the Geneva-facilitated exodus of civilians from North Vietnam to the South unfolded during late 1954 and early 1955, Diệm saw an opportunity. The sheer scale of the migration allowed Saigon to claim that Northerners were “voting with their feet” in favor of Free Vietnam. It also raised the possibility that DRVN officials might take steps to prevent more civilians from heading South. In other words, Diệm sought to promote certain aspects of the agreements, while at the same time suggesting that the DRVN was violating its legal commitments under the accords, thus justifying Saigon’s refusal to participate in the elections.⁵²

Very quickly, Diệm realized that the International Control Commission, composed of one representative each of the Western bloc, the Soviet bloc, and neutral countries, could not enforce the ceasefire provisions regarding the right of civilians to join the zone of their choice. In October 1954, the Indian chair rejected a request to allow northern civilians to wait in camps pending their transportation to the South.⁵³ The Commission would not serve as an acting agency capable of sheltering civilians or granting temporary asylum. As northern civilians discovered that moving to the South would be more difficult than anticipated, the number of confrontations between Việt Minh cadres, the People’s Army, and the local population, especially in northern Catholic parishes, increased sharply. The International Control Commission (ICC) sent field teams to investigate allegations that the DRVN was preventing civilians from leaving; they also followed up on reports that SVN officials were pressuring some Northerners to move to the South.⁵⁴ After months of debate, the members of the ICC finally voted to condemn the DRVN for hampering the right of civilians to join the zone of their choice.⁵⁵ Despite this decision, neither France nor the United Kingdom, the two main Western signatories of the agreements, imposed any sanctions or retaliatory measures on the DRVN. Nor did the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China call the DRVN to account for its failure to respect the ceasefire. This international paralysis was bad news for the northern civilians who were still trying to reach the South. Yet for Ngô Đình Diệm, it showed that the ceasefire agreement had no teeth.

By the time that the 300-day period of free travel between the two Vietnams expired in May of 1955, the fragile consensus reached in Geneva had been shattered. The ICC’s authority was under fire from both the DRVN and France, and the major powers that had endorsed the agreements no longer seemed willing to enforce the provisions.⁵⁶ For DRVN leaders in Hanoi, this turn of events was dismaying, if not entirely unexpected. But for Ngô Đình Diệm, all the stars had aligned. He had defeated his anticommunist rivals and neutralized the French threat to his government. In addition, he now enjoyed the strong support of the United States, which now provided aid directly to his government and also claimed the legal right to defend South Vietnam’s territory under the terms of the 1954 Manila Pact. In this new context, Diệm could easily refuse to participate in the 1956 elections or even to consult with the DRVN. In the meantime, Diệm was free to turn to his next objective: discarding the SVN and the last remnants of “association” with France by creating an entirely new state, the Republic of Vietnam.

From a Decentralized State to a Strong Republic

As demonstrated above, Diệm’s unexpected triumphs in late 1954 and early 1955 had hinged in no small measure on his ability to assemble and maintain a diverse coalition of supporters. In the eighteen months following the battle of Saigon, Diệm moved decisively toward the creation of a centralized state. But as he did so, many of his former supporters resisted his efforts to strengthen Saigon’s authority – even though they remained in favor of a united front to oppose the DRVN and communist expansion in South Vietnam. Why did South Vietnam’s anticommunist nationalists abandon the one leader who seemed capable of unifying them around the shared goal of opposition to Hanoi? Did the later ruptures between Diệm and South Vietnamese society emerge out of these early conflicts with his former allies?

Historians have long debated the compatibility of Diệm’s political vision with Vietnamese nationalism. Revisionist accounts depict Diệm’s views as the most authentic expression of such nationalism. These accounts contrast Diệm with Hồ Chí Minh, who is represented as a nationalist imposter.⁵⁷ Orthodox interpretations, on the other hand, suggest that Diệm was an outsider who espoused alien ideas, and whose repression of groups such as the Cao Đài and the Hòa Hảo resulted in the elimination of genuine Southern Vietnamese nationalism.⁵⁸

Both interpretations are flawed in supposing the existence of an idealized “true” Vietnamese nationalism. In a country whose long, S-shaped territory had only been ruled as a united entity for a few decades in the nineteenth century and a few weeks during 1945, there were many competing notions of what the nation could or should be, encompassing various geographical spaces and cultural identities. In South Vietnam, these rival nationalist projects struggled over the same questions: What would be Saigon’s position toward Hanoi or the Geneva Accords? Should the Army have a political role in the State of Vietnam? Should the state be a federation of regions or a highly centralized republic?

From the outset, Ngô Đình Diệm knew that despite the large coalition he headed, many parts of South Vietnamese society did not support his leadership or share his opposition to Hanoi and to the ceasefire. Factions of the Đại Việt and VNQDĐ parties signaled their opposition by regrouping into the central provinces of Quảng Nam and Quảng Trị, where they formed a maquis. Diệm’s army repressed them, but only with great difficulty.⁵⁹ In Saigon and elsewhere, many intellectuals disagreed with Diệm’s criticism of the Geneva Accords and advocated for peace and for recognition of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as a legitimate political authority.⁶⁰

The fiercest resistance came when Diệm sought to transform the State of Vietnam into a strong and centralized government. Much more than a clash of rival leaders, these conflicts emerged from the difficult and violent process of determining which nationalist vision would prevail. The first major challenge to Ngô Đình Diệm came from the SVN military, after radio broadcasts in September 1954 announced a potential showdown between the prime minister and General Nguyễn Vӑn Hinh, the commander of the Vietnamese National Army. At stake in this confrontation was the question of whether the army would play a political role in postcolonial Vietnam.⁶¹ Should noncommunist Vietnam be ruled by a military or a civilian government? Like Thailand, Burma, Indonesia, and many other newly independent countries in Southeast Asia faced with communist expansion, the relative authority of the military and the state was up for grabs. In South Vietnam, Diệm won this battle. But he prevailed only because Bảo Đại intervened to solve the matter. The chief of state recalled General Hinh to report on a mission to France in November 1954, fearing that the end of Diệm’s leadership would also terminate American support to Vietnam.⁶²

Yet the question of defining the role of the army was not confined to the military’s influence in politics. It was also a matter of establishing the independence of the military vis-à-vis the state. What provoked Hinh’s open confrontation with Diệm was the interior minister’s arrest of a military officer, a disciplinary measure that normally belonged to military jurisdiction. The state’s interference in army affairs also materialized in the promotion of young officers loyal to Diệm, the dispatching of older generals overseas, and the infiltration of the army by pro-Diệm partisans.⁶³

Beyond the subordination of the army, Diệm also achieved a massive overhaul of the State of Vietnam, transforming the decentralized amalgam of religious and political groups into a unitary republic with a strong political center. Whether or how this centralization was consistent with Vietnamese personalism’s celebration of the precolonial commune as the locus of democracy remains unclear.⁶⁴ What is very clear is that Diệm moved decisively to crush the local autonomy of his rivals.

The Bình Xuyên in Saigon were the first to experience this brutal transition. Historians have often represented the Bình Xuyên as depraved criminals, since they trafficked drugs and ran brothels while also controlling the Saigon police force. But recent research has stressed the fact that they, too, had a political vision, and that they participated in or funded several nationalist initiatives.⁶⁵ Yet Diệm and his supporters castigated the Bình Xuyên as gangsters and launched a military offensive, the battle of Saigon, in April 1955, which inflicted heavy damage on the corridor between Saigon and Chợ Lớn. Diệm’s victory not only confirmed his command of the reshuffled army officer corps, but also restored government authority over the police apparatus.

The Hòa Hảo and Cao Đài also lost out due to Diệm’s concentration of power. Many of them had initially backed Diệm and served in his first cabinets. But after 1955, Diệm categorically refused to allow the administrative and political autonomy they previously enjoyed in territories scattered across the Mekong Delta. He had no interest in continuing the French practice of permitting states within a state. While many historians have underlined the fact that Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo leaders were divided over the question of support for Diệm, it seems more accurate to say that they disagreed over how best to preserve their political and military autonomy. Some commanders calculated that Diệm would accommodate them, while others – such as Hòa Hảo general Ba Cụt – fiercely refused to cooperate with Saigon. The confrontation between Saigon and the rebellious factions peaked during the spring and summer of 1955, and ended with most Hòa Hảo and Cao Đài leaders condemned to retirement, imprisonment, execution, or exile.⁶⁶ Ngô Đình Diệm had built his coalition on his hostility to communism and colonialism, on the appeal of his political and social vision, and on his connections to Washington. But as his coalition partners discovered, an alliance with Diệm was no guarantee of a future share of power.

Even those allies who agreed with Diệm’s religious and ideological convictions discovered that their autonomy would be sharply limited under the new republic. American journalists and other observers often assumed that the hundreds of thousands of northern evacuees who arrived in the South – most of whom were Catholic, anticommunist, or both – supported all of Diệm’s policies without question.⁶⁷ But tensions emerged quickly between these communities and the government. Although some Northerners advocated forming a large Catholic bulwark just below the 17th parallel in anticipation of an assault on the North, Diệm preferred to disperse the migrants across more than three hundred resettlement villages.⁶⁸ The previous military and administrative autonomy these had enjoyed was also eliminated. For example, members of the Nung ethnic minority group, who had previously administered an autonomous commune in the mountains of Tonkin, were resettled near Phan Thiết, only to watch helplessly as the government undercut the power of their communal council.⁶⁹ Something similar happened to Catholic migrants from the Bùi Chu and Phát Diệm dioceses, many of whom had previously served in Christian militia units. Despite sharing Diệm’s faith and anticommunist outlook, they were not allowed to integrate their units into the South Vietnamese army, and the members of their dioceses in exile were eventually dispersed. Under Diệm, everyone in the South was required to embrace citizenship in the Republic, and Saigon would be the only source of political and administrative authority.

Although the centralization of the regime’s authority was largely carried out via top-down reforms, the Ngô combined these with bottom-up efforts at mass mobilization. The infamous Cần Lao Party (The Labour Party) eventually became a secret institution to which everybody in the civil service, the army, or the police had to pay allegiance. But the party initially functioned in a very different way. At the time of its creation in the early 1950s, most of Cần Lao members were drawn from the intellectual circles and labor organizations.⁷⁰ It was only in the years after 1954 that Cần Lao leaders began to mimic the Việt Minh’s practice of building mass organizations that organized social groups by profession, gender, and age.⁷¹

One of the first and most important of these mass organizations was the National Revolutionary Movement (NRM), founded by Ngô Đình Nhu in October 1954. During July 1955, the NRM launched a daily newspaper called National Revolution (Cách mạng Quốc gia), which would become one of the regime’s primary media mouthpieces. The NRM also formed an auxiliary league for South Vietnamese civil servants and distributed propaganda denouncing the “three enemies” of feudalism, colonialism, and communism.⁷²

None of this is to suggest that the regime’s centralization agenda was implemented easily, or without opposition. In late April and early May 1955, as Diệm’s forces were battling to oust the Bình Xuyên from Saigon, a self-styled “People’s Revolutionary Council” was created during a series of government-sponsored meetings in Saigon. Although the council included some Ngô family loyalists, its leadership was dominated by Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo military commanders who had sided with Diệm against the Bình Xuyên but who still expected to play leading political roles in South Vietnam. The independence of the council was evident in its demands for the immediate ousting of Bảo Đại as SVN chief of state – a move that the Ngô viewed as premature. The regime eventually succeeded in marginalizing the council, but doing so took several months.⁷³

In the summer and fall of 1955, the NRM took the lead in formulating the next steps in the consolidation of the regime’s authority. Instead of simply ousting Bảo Đại by decree, the Ngô brothers used the NRM to organize a popular referendum. South Vietnamese voters would be obliged to choose between Bảo Đại, whom the government portrayed as a dissolute and corrupt playboy, and Diệm, who was presented as a champion of both anticolonialism and anticommunism. In the balloting held on October 23, 1955, Diệm received an overwhelming 98% of the vote tally. Although the referendum had not been presented as a proposal to change the structure of the state, Diệm nevertheless took advantage of the moment to proclaim that the SVN had been dissolved to make way for a new entity, the Republic of Vietnam. He also announced his own elevation to the position of president, an office that had not previously existed under the SVN (Figure 14.1).⁷⁴

Figure 14.1 Ngô Đình Diệm proclaiming the establishment of the Republic of Vietnam with himself as its first president. Diệm spoke three days after the referendum in which he defeated the ex-emperor Bảo Đại (October 26, 1955).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

In the year following the proclamation of the republic, the government undertook two more major state-building initiatives: the creation of a legislature and the writing of a constitution. In early March 1956, elections were held for a 123-member RVN National Assembly. This body was charged with reviewing and approving a draft constitution furnished by the president himself. Since a large majority of the elected deputies were affiliated with four pro-government parties, Diệm was free to shape the document according to his own lights. The final version, as promulgated in October 1956, endorsed the principle of executive supremacy: “The president is vested with the leadership of the nation.” In addition, Article 7 declared that communism was incompatible with the basic principles of the state. Meanwhile, Article 98 empowered the president to suspend the freedoms granted in the constitution “to meet the legitimate demands of public security and order and of national defense.” Along with its explicit endorsement of personalism, the 1956 constitution perfectly embodied all elements of Diệm’s political vision, including his anticommunism and his commitment to centralized power. What remained to be seen was how the charter would fare in practice, especially if the RVN found itself confronting a Communist-led insurrection in South Vietnam.⁷⁵

Conclusion

Ngô Đình Diệm’s journey from exile to SVN prime minister and eventually to the presidency of a newly created republic was shaped by good fortune and by Diệm’s own ambitions and decisions. Although Diệm clearly benefited from the unexpectedly favorable circumstances created by the Geneva Accords, his success also derived from his past collaborations with other Vietnamese groups, the appeal of his ideas about political and social change, and his ability to transform the weak and decentralized State of Vietnam into a centralized republic – and to do so in a surprisingly short period of time.

Even with hindsight, it is impossible to determine historically if Diệm was the “right” person to build an anticommunist nation in South Vietnam. Diệm was neither the craven puppet that his critics reviled nor the heroic savior of Vietnam celebrated by his admirers. Beyond his staunch commitments to anticommunism and anticolonialism, our examination of Diệm’s early tenure in power reveals three additional conclusions.

First, it is no longer possible to sustain the view of Ngô Đình Diệm as the handpicked candidate of US officials, or as a leader whose tenure was defined by subordination to Washington. Bảo Đại nominated Diệm because of his political experience and his appeal to Vietnam nationalists, not because of US pressure. Diệm’s diplomatic policies, which included outreach to neutralist and nonaligned states, showed that he was not a mere satellite of US foreign policy.⁷⁶ Although French and American actors influenced the course of events in South Vietnam during 1954–6, they did not define the political and social vision Diệm advocated, nor did they drive the transformation of the SVN into a republic.

Second, Diệm’s emergence in 1954 and the subsequent consolidation of his power cannot be reduced to the influence of a family, a loyal clique, or a Catholic circle. The presence of so many Đại Việt, Hòa Hảo, Cao Đài, and Buddhists in the ranks of Diệm’s supporters stemmed from his insistence that the republic would be neither a Catholic theocracy nor a banana republic serving his family interests nor a regime in which northern and central Vietnamese would dominate Southerners. Although Diệm would go on to face many accusations of religious, regional, and familial favoritism, his initial rise to power was founded squarely on his efforts to rally support for his vision of Vietnamese postcolonial identity and transformation.

Finally, the broad-based nature of Diệm’s political vision was not sufficient by itself to win wide popular support within South Vietnam or to ensure the success of his policies. In this regard, he underestimated the depth of resentment that his centralization efforts would provoke, and the bitterness that resulted from his crushing of the autonomy that other groups had previously enjoyed. The destruction of rival centers of power did not mean that these groups disappeared altogether, or that the opposition to Diệm’s actions ceased to exist. Diệm’s intolerance of alternative views foreshadowed the authoritarian abuses of the republic that would be revealed in the latter years of Diệm’s rule, when he confronted a new communist insurgency in the South Vietnamese countryside, as well as new criticisms from his former supporters.

15 Nation-Building in South Vietnam after Geneva

Van Nguyen-Marshall

Nation-building is a daunting task. In the period after World War II, decolonizing nations struggled not only to secure political and military control over their territories but also to forge national unity.¹ In many cases, this task involved multiple ethnic and linguistic groups whose members did not perceive each other as compatriots.

For anticommunists in South Vietnam after 1954, nation-building was daunting in distinctive ways. The challenges of building state power and national unity were exacerbated by the unique circumstances surrounding the country’s creation, the complex external political and military context in which the state operated, and the quality of the domestic leadership. This chapter will examine the South Vietnamese government’s nation-building endeavors in the areas of social integration, economic development, and political allegiance after 1954. But the state was not the only aspiring nation-builder in South Vietnam. Private Vietnamese individuals and organizations also sought to contribute to nation-building. While the contributions of nonstate Vietnamese actors have often been overlooked, their work shows that nation-building in South Vietnam was not an exclusively top-down, state-led affair. Like their political leaders, many ordinary South Vietnamese perceived that they had a stake in the new nation.

By emphasizing the role of South Vietnamese political leaders and social activists, this chapter follows recent scholarly trends, which give due weight to the actions and ideas of Vietnamese people rather than focusing mainly or exclusively on the role of the United States. Nation-building in Vietnam after 1954 was an arena of diverse and at times competing activities, and it was not solely the purview of big powers. The work of nation-building was carried out on the ground by local actors. Still, as the evidence presented here suggests, the United States played a prominent role. American ambitions and plans for South Vietnam had a considerable bearing on the fate of the country.

Diversity and Division

Following the signing of the Geneva Accords and the division of Vietnam in July 1954, the prime minister of the Associated State of Vietnam, Ngô Đình Diệm, set about extricating South Vietnam from the last vestiges of French colonial control and building an independent, centralized state based in Saigon. Diệm officially disassociated Vietnam from the French Union. He took control of South Vietnam’s borders, immigration, and customs, and called for the removal of French military forces from Vietnam.² After the fall 1955 referendum that was widely believed to have been rigged, Diệm established a republic with a powerful presidency, a position he occupied until 1963. As explained by Phi-Vân Nguyen in Chapter 14, the work of state-building was arduous, since it involved adept political maneuvering, diplomacy, and sometimes the use of force. The United States played a vital role in providing financial, military, and technical aid to build South Vietnam’s military, police, and state infrastructure. In the first few years after the creation of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN), the United States spent $1.5 billion, which went mainly to bolster South Vietnam’s economy and armed forces.³ Thanks in part to this immense American aid, Diệm was able to defeat a formidable array of political and military rivals during 1954–6, and to consolidate control over the state apparatus he had inherited.

Even as he was establishing political and military control, Diệm worried about the lack of national unity and the state’s tenuous connection with the people. This concern was articulated in Diệm’s frequent pronouncements that Vietnam’s main enemies were communism, underdevelopment, and disunity.⁴ Social integration – or the lack thereof – had been a long-standing issue for Vietnamese nationalists. The French colonial divide-and-conquer policy, in place since the mid-nineteenth century, carved Vietnam into three pays (countries). French officials also often deliberately exacerbated ethnic and sectarian divisions. This had contributed to making the quest for sociopolitical community an important theme throughout the colonial period.⁵

The search for cohesion was particularly poignant in Vietnam’s south. Centuries before French colonial rule, the southern realm of the Việt kingdom was remarkably heterogeneous in its population.⁶ When Đại Việt’s Nguyễn lords extended their control southward toward Saigon and the Mekong Delta in the seventeenth century, they had to contend with the diverse populations, which included Chӑm, Khmer, Chinese, and various Highland communities. While the Nguyễn rulers were eventually able to claim political control of the South, the region remained culturally, socially, and ethnically diverse even after the French arrived. It is not surprising that the issue of unity remained an imperative and a source of anxiety during the mid-twentieth century.

On a philosophical level, social unity was particularly significant for Diệm and his brother, Ngô Đình Nhu. Both brothers, but especially Nhu, were believers in personalism, a philosophy developed by European Christian thinkers of the left who were grappling with the ravages of the Great Depression.⁷ Humanist and holistic, personalism attended to people’s spiritual life as well as their material needs. Personalists sought to protect the human person and spirit from the dehumanization and brutality of both Stalinist-style communism and unbridled capitalism. Additionally, the philosophy emphasized the importance of community and people’s relationship within it. According to this philosophy, individuals’ full potential could be achieved only when they became aware of their role in the community and worked toward its betterment. Personalism’s focus on community, social responsibility, and self-reliance attracted the attention of many noncommunist Vietnamese who perceived the philosophy as a counterpoint to communism in its emphasis on the common good, but with the potential for deeper revolutionary changes within the person. By 1954, personalist ideas circulated widely in Vietnam, especially among military, political, and educated elites.⁸ Hoping to build on the philosophy’s popularity, the Ngôs based many on their nation-building projects on personalism.

The first nation-building task was settling and integrating the nearly 900,000 refugees who arrived in South Vietnam during 1954–5. With the division of the country at the 17th parallel, the Geneva Accords permitted free movement between the zones for 300 days. Accommodating this massive influx of northern refugees was an enormous undertaking for Ngô Đình Diệm’s government. At the peak migration period, some 5,000 people arrived daily in South Vietnam.⁹ The United States, France, and Britain provided transportation while the United States, along with many Western nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), provided resettlement aid.¹⁰ In addition to humanitarian reasons, there were political and strategic motivations behind the American government’s generous support for refugee resettlement. From the US perspective, the mass migration from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) was invaluable propaganda against communism. By moving to the South, the refugees were deemed to have rejected communism. While it was true that many left because of political convictions and fear of life under communism, there were other reasons for leaving, such as economic hardship.¹¹

After a period in temporary shelters, the refugees were moved to permanent residences. About half a million people were settled in farming and fishing villages throughout South Vietnam.¹² Another 100,000 refugees were directed to the government’s Cái Sắn land reclamation and settlement project in the western Mekong Delta. The rest settled on their own in cities and towns. The government provided houses for some settlers, while others had to build their own with some state funding. From the government’s perspective, the refugees had been successfully resettled by the summer of 1955.¹³

While Northern refugees were relocated to permanent living areas, they were not integrated into southern society as Diệm and American officials had hoped. Even though most of the refugees were ethnic Vietnamese, their northern accents and cultural practices often hindered communication and fostered feelings of distrust among native Southerners. Migrants’ memoirs relate how southern manners of speech, dress, and behavior appeared strange to them.¹⁴ Adding to the difficulties of forging social cohesion, more than 75 percent of the refugees were Catholics. The population of Catholics in South Vietnam had doubled, reaching 1.7 million with the newcomers.¹⁵ Because of differences in regional ecclesiastic cultures, northern Catholics did not always find community with their southern coreligionists.¹⁶

Refugee assimilation was also hindered by Southerners’ perception that the government favored Northerners, particularly Catholics. The financial support that refugees received, such as housing and daily stipends, created resentment among some Southerners, especially the poor.¹⁷ Moreover, many Catholic refugees were given desirable jobs in the state bureaucracy, enterprises, and institutions, triggering accusations of government favoritism. One possible reason for the imbalance was that many refugees shared the government’s anticommunist stance. Furthermore, there were many educated refugees who had administrative experiences, gained from working with either the French or various semi-independent Vietnamese governments. In any case, the perceptions of favoritism made it more difficult for Catholic migrants to integrate into southern society. At times tension rose to the level of open conflict between locals and refugee communities (Figure 15.1).¹⁸

Figure 15.1 Aerial view of a tent city set up for refugees from North Vietnam in Saigon (October 16, 1954).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

Another obstacle to national unity from the South Vietnamese authorities’ perspective was the semiautonomous ethnic Chinese communities. Numbering approximately 1 million, the ethnic Chinese, or Hoa people, were the largest ethnic group after the Việt (Kinh).¹⁹ Many overseas Chinese had settled in Vietnam since the seventeenth century but had managed to maintain a distinct cultural identity. In the eighteenth century, officials in the southern part of the Nguyễn realm organized the Hoa population into congregations (bang) according to dialect and place of origin within China.²⁰ French colonial administrators preserved this system, which allowed them a measure of control over the Hoa community, but also gave congregation leaders some administrative responsibilities. The congregations collected taxes on behalf of the colonial state, oversaw health care, and provided education for the Hoa community.²¹ The congregation system thus limited Hoa people’s direct contact with the French and later Vietnamese authorities.

In keeping with the ideals of a modern nation-state, Diệm saw the imperative of integrating the Hoa community into the nation and administering its members directly. In the first year of the republic, Diệm compelled all Hoa living in Vietnam to become citizens of Vietnam.²² To coerce compliance, the government barred noncitizens from participating in eleven occupations that were typically occupied by Hoa people.²³ Along with these new policies was the requirement for Hoa people to transliterate their names to the Vietnamese equivalents, rendering them more legible to Vietnamese ears. Many Hoa residents found these new requirements oppressive.

Reaching further, the RVN state took control of Chinese-run schools from the congregations in 1957. The several hundred Chinese schools were now under the supervision of the department of national education and were directed to use Vietnamese language in class, to follow a government-approved curriculum, to adopt Vietnamese-style school uniforms, and to start the school day with the singing of the South Vietnamese national anthem.²⁴ In 1960, the congregations were officially dismantled and their collective properties, such as hospitals and community halls, were scheduled to be handed over to the government.

Essentially, these changes aimed to Vietnamize the Hoa, to erode the power of congregation leaders, and to compel the Hoa people to be more reliant on the government. Not surprisingly, the Hoa resented what they saw as assimilationist policies and resisted by organizing strikes and boycotts.²⁵ Their passive and active resistance forced the government to compromise. The RVN state extended deadlines and worked with the Republic of China to allow those who rejected Vietnamese citizenship to migrate to Taiwan. Eventually, the majority of Hoa people became Vietnamese citizens. The congregations, however, resisted giving up their properties. By the early 1960s, Hoa people re-established their community organizations under the guise of mutual-aid societies.²⁶ Moreover, many schools disregarded the government’s directives on language and curriculum.²⁷ Diệm managed to make the Hoa citizens of Vietnam, but he could not make them Vietnamese.

Similar policies were promulgated for other ethnic minority peoples, such as the Highland minority groups, Khmer, and Chӑm. As of the mid-1960s, there were more than 700,000 Highlanders belonging to forty different ethnic groups, many of which practiced some form of swidden agriculture.²⁸ As in the case of the Hoa, the main thrust of the government’s policy was to incorporate Highlanders into the new Việt-dominated nation. The government began administering the Highland peoples directly, doing away with the semiautonomous status that the French had granted. The Highlanders’ schools also had to follow a national curriculum and use the Vietnamese language.

In addition, Diệm’s government was keen to introduce Highland groups to new agrarian practices, particularly sedentary methods of farming, which officials saw as more productive and more likely to raise household incomes. State agencies were established to promote more intensive forms of cultivation, advanced farming methods, and new types of crops. These programs, along with the settlement projects in the Highland areas, were open to other ethnic groups, including Northern refugees and Southerners. Nevertheless, Highlanders felt targeted and resented the assimilationist undercurrent of the projects.²⁹

While the RVN government wanted to boost economic productivity in the Highland areas, political and strategic considerations were also important. Officials feared that communist infiltration into the Highlands would erode RVN authority in the region. The government’s concern was not baseless, for various Highland groups had previously sided with either the French or anticolonial forces. The Tai, for instance, contributed significantly to the victory of the Việt Minh at the battle of Điện Biên Phủ.³⁰ Following the formation of the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF) in 1960 under the direction of Hanoi, communist cadres began working in the Central Highlands. The NLF recruited Highlanders, giving some leadership roles, and criticized the Saigon government’s assimilationist policies.³¹ In response, the Diệm government was keen to avoid alienating the Highlanders. The government ordered officials to avoid using coercion and to be flexible when addressing the Highlanders’ concerns.³² Despite these directives, local officials and cadres did not show enough sensitivity and patience. Many programs were consequently implemented in rushed and heavy-handed fashion, causing resistance.

By 1961, another external influence was at work in the Central Highlands: the US military. The CIA and US Special Forces units began recruiting Highlanders for intelligence and counterinsurgency activities.³³ To win local cooperation, American volunteers with the International Voluntary Service were deployed to build schools, roads, and wells.³⁴ While American efforts to eradicate communist influence in the Highlands were welcomed by the RVN state, these activities were often counterproductive to Diệm’s other nation-building aims. In their attempt to win the hearts and minds of Highlanders, Americans and NGOs provided aid and services directly to Highlanders, often without the participation of RVN representatives. As such, American activities competed not only with communists but also the RVN for Highlanders’ cooperation and loyalty.

Like the Hoa, Highlanders also resisted the state’s attempt to absorb them into the national body. Highlanders resisted first by forming the Liberation Front of the Highland People, followed by the Bajarka Movement in 1958. These organizations, which comprised many Highlander groups such as Bahnar, Jarai, Rhade, and Khơho, fought for autonomy from the central state, freedom to practice their culture, and an end to Việt migration into the Highlands. Threatened by the Bajarka Movement, the government imprisoned many of its leaders.³⁵

Other minority groups also experienced similar state attempts to incorporate them into the new nation. Khmer and Chӑm communities were forced to use Vietnamese language and their schools were closed down. Like other minority groups, the Khmer and Chӑm resisted these impositions. In 1964, this resistance became more organized with the formation of the United Front for the Struggle of Oppressed Races (known by its French acronym, FULRO). This encompassed not only the Khmer and Chӑm, but also some Highland groups.³⁶

Integrating different religious and social groups was a priority for the RVN’s nation-building process. Diệm and his administrators set out to build an independent and modern republic in which citizens identified with the nation-state and with each other. However, in the course of pursuing this unity, RVN officials pursued overzealous policies that were coercive and assimilationist, and alienated the very groups that the authorities wanted to draw into the national family. Other policies for nation-building, such as education reform and rural development, were directed at the general population of ethnic Vietnamese. These endeavors sought to strengthen national unity, socioeconomic development, and national security.

Nation-Building through National Education

For RVN officials, as for the leaders of many other postcolonial states, national compulsory education was appealing as a means to forge ties between the state and its citizens. It provided a mechanism to indoctrinate the masses with a set of state-approved values and mores – and to do so in a common language.³⁷ This shared curriculum and experience contributed to the process of imagining community, of creating a national identity.³⁸ The potential of education to forge a bond between the state and its people was thus particularly important to the South Vietnamese government, as Diệm sought desperately to bridge the large gap between him and the rural population.

In 1954 the State of Vietnam inherited the French colonial education system, which Diệm quickly sought to nationalize and Vietnamize. Indeed, the work of Vietnamizing education had already begun well before Diệm took power. During his brief tenure as prime minister of the empire of Vietnam (March–August 1945), Trần Trọng Kim sought to reform and develop the Indochinese educational curriculum, expanding technical training and making Vietnamese – rather than French – the language of instruction.³⁹ Under Diệm, the government reiterated the imperative to use Vietnamese language in all schools. With American aid, Diệm invested in education and built more schools and higher institutions of training. The curriculum was likewise Vietnamized to include Vietnamese history and literature.⁴⁰

The RVN’s communist rivals also recognized the importance of education as a means of mass mobilization. During the French Indochina War, the Việt Minh offered literacy classes and schooling in areas they controlled. The RVN state thus had to compete not only in offering education but also with the messages being transmitted in the schools. The RVN school curriculum promoted a sense of national unity, identity, and pride. In 1958 the ministry of education identified the “Foundational Principles” of RVN education as humanism, nation, and liberalism.⁴¹ Guided by these principles, which epitomize the fundamental ideas of personalism, the school elementary curriculum was dominated by subjects in the humanities. By the last two years of elementary school, close to 50 percent of the classroom time was spent on history, geography, civic and moral education, and Vietnamese language.⁴² RVN authorities were betting on the efficacy of these subjects to nurture people’s patriotism and loyalty to the anticommunist nation-state.

While the political message of nationalism in the RVN curriculum was more nuanced and muted than that of the DRVN, where children were taught about class warfare,⁴³ it was pervasive and clear. The state-approved narrative maintained that the RVN, which encompassed the entire territory of Vietnam, was a modern democracy built on Việt ethnic traditions, Confucian morality, and patriotism. This message was found in seminal historical treatments of Vietnam’s past by nationalist scholars, particularly the work of the aforementioned former prime minister, Trần Trọng Kim. His highly influential A Brief History of Vietnam popularized the description of the Việt people as the “race of the dragon and the fairy” (nòi giống tiên rồng). Although published in 1920, Kim’s racialized narrative continued to be the standard textbook for schools in the First and Second Republic.⁴⁴ It was included in the national curriculum for all children, including non-Việt ethnicities.

On the question of education, there was some agreement between the RVN and its US ally. Both governments recognized the importance of education in nation-building. But where Vietnamese educators emphasized national solidarity and history, Americans valued education for its modernizing potential. According to the US perspective, education had the power to transform South Vietnam from its traditional and “backward” state into a modern society.⁴⁵ By the mid-1950s, the movement that would become known as modernization theory was gaining influence in American policy and social scientific circles. Armed with this ideology, American nation-builders were increasingly convinced that the path to modernity was linear and universal. They assumed that the desired endpoint for developing societies was one that resembled the United States itself. Once South Vietnam became a modern and developed society, they reasoned, it would no longer be an easy recruiting ground for communism; people would be prosperous and would not be enticed by revolutionary promises. In this way, modernization was deemed an antidote against insurgency.⁴⁶

Convinced of education’s modernizing potential, the United States funneled substantial aid into this sector. Between 1955 and 1966, the United States contributed a total of $17 million for education needs.⁴⁷ The US Operation Mission and Michigan State University led the US effort in education development. Using American monetary aid and technical advice, South Vietnamese officials expanded educational services, reorganized the RVN library system, and advocated reform of higher educational institutions. Some results included the re-establishment of the National School of Administration for training administrators and civil servants. Primary and secondary education opportunities were also increased. From 1955 to 1960, the number of primary school pupils doubled while the number of secondary students more than tripled.⁴⁸ American education reformers emphasized the need for technical and vocational training, which they perceived as critical for an emerging industrial economy. To them, a technical education was more useful than a humanist curriculum focused on history and literature. However, despite the enormous investment, there was still demand for more educational opportunities. As shown below, private Vietnamese initiatives would help make up the shortfall.

Development and Community in the Villages

In the South Vietnamese countryside, Diệm pursued a shifting array of programs to forge ties with the people, stimulate economic development, and secure the villages from communist infiltration. These rural programs were conceived to fight the aforementioned three enemies of the RVN: underdevelopment, communism, and disunity. With these rural nation-building programs, Diệm and Nhu’s belief in personalism was especially evident. While there were earlier pursuits, such as land reform, land settlement, and Civic Action rural extension work, the highlights were the Agroville and Strategic Hamlet Programs.⁴⁹

The Agroville Program was established in 1959 during a period of increasing insecurity in the countryside. In response to Diệm’s repression, particularly his Denounce Communists Campaign, launched in 1955, insurgents struck back, targeting local officials and other supporters of the government.⁵⁰ To mitigate this violence and also to restrict insurgents’ access to villagers, households were relocated to new fortified villages. In theory, the agroville would keep residents safe from insurgents while enabling them to improve their economic and social lives. Each agroville would be comprised of around 400 families, and would include a hospital, school, and market. These would be largely self-sufficient communities that would depend on their members to contribute to the defense, building, and maintenance of the settlement. For the Ngô brothers, the self-reliance aspect of the agrovilles was essential. According to personalism, it was only by working together that one could achieve independence, humanity, and community. Consequently, Diệm did not want to provide much government aid to the agrovilles. The residents were tasked with finding their own solutions and resources. They were expected to build their own schools and hospitals, and to arm themselves with weapons confiscated from communist insurgents. Last of all, agroville residents were not to receive material aid from the United States or associated NGOs, despite the latters’ willingness to provide generously.

It soon became clear that the Agroville Program was based on flawed assumptions. The Ngô brothers discounted the strong connections that rural residents had to their homes and land, and especially to their ancestors’ graves. Peasants resisted being relocated to a new living space where they were expected to contribute labor and time on top of their regular farming work. Moreover, after moving to an agroville, many people had to travel further to get to their fields to tend to their crops. Meanwhile, the ideals underpinning the advocacy for self-reliance was not adequately explained. As a result, local officials resorted to coercion to ensure villagers’ compliance. By August 1960, only thirteen agrovilles had been built, about a quarter of what had been planned. The program was suspended in the following month.⁵¹

In late 1961, RVN officials were pursuing a new idea for rural development. It was not a coincidence that the Strategic Hamlet Program (SHP) came about during a time of rising anti-government activities. By 1960, the insurgency was organized and led by the NLF, which absorbed many disenchanted noncommunist nationalists. The NLF and its military wing spearheaded protests, infiltrated the RVN military and bureaucracy, carried out assassinations, and conducted guerrilla attacks. These activities made rural areas unsafe, especially for government agents and RVN community leaders.

While resembling the Agroville Program, the idea for the SHP originated from experiments in several provinces – Tây Ninh, Quảng Ngãi, and Vĩnh Long – where local leaders spearheaded efforts to build self-defense capability at the hamlet level.⁵² Inspired by these successful experiments and also by the writing of French military theorist Roger Trinquier, who advocated the incorporation of civilians into counterinsurgency activities, the Ngô brothers encouraged other provincial authorities to build fortified hamlets in late 1961.⁵³ Rather than creating new settlements to aggregate the population as in the Agroville Program, the new approach allowed people to remain in their homes as walls and other defenses were constructed around them. In comparison to the Agroville Program, the SHP was more successful. By early 1962, about 500 hamlets had been built and many more were under construction.⁵⁴ As with the agrovilles, Diệm saw in the SHP opportunities to encourage economic development, cultivate people’s self-reliance, and foster communal solidarity. Gains in these areas would strengthen rural security against communist infiltration.

On the potential of the strategic hamlets, many US officials and experts shared Diệm and Nhu’s enthusiasm. However, Diệm and Nhu considered US aid in this instance a detriment. As with the Agroville Program, the two allies had different outlooks regarding the benefits of material and financial aid. The Ngô brothers wanted to foster in the people a sense of self-reliance and cooperation rather than dependence on state handouts. This disagreement was rooted in a more fundamental difference between the Ngôs and their American advisors. Unlike their US allies who emphasized the economic and military goals of the Strategic Hamlet Program, Diệm and Nhu conceived the program as a way to ignite social and political revolution in addition to achieving economic and security aims.⁵⁵

On the issue of security, the strategic hamlets had a perceptible impact in the beginning. The NLF found it difficult to gain access to the villagers in the hamlets, making it challenging for them to conduct political work, acquire food and resources, and intimidate uncooperative villagers. In response to the program, the NLF increased its infiltration activities and concentrated on destroying these fortified hamlets by late 1962. The rise in NFL insurgency made life more precarious for residents of the strategic hamlets.⁵⁶

Like security, the social and spiritual goals of the SHP were also difficult to achieve. According to Nhu, many provincial officials focused most of their attention on the actual fortification and security issues, rather than promoting personal and social transformation. Moreover, provincial officials felt rushed, not only by pressure to show results but also by the surge of NLF activities. As a result, the program included extensive forced relocation of people and households, despite Diệm and Nhu’s directive to avoid repeating this mistake.⁵⁷

Adding to people’s resentment was the program’s requirement for people to contribute labour and to participate in security patrols. The latter was not only time-consuming but also dangerous, especially when the NLF stepped up its activities. In the end, Diệm’s hope for unifying the nation through collective work widened rather than narrowed the gulf between the state and ordinary rural residents.

Civil Society and Nation-Building

During the First Republic, the South Vietnamese government, the United States, and many Western NGOs worked to integrate migrants and minority groups, expand education, and pursue socioeconomic development. Many Vietnamese nonstate actors also took up the mantel of nation-building. Individuals and groups voluntarily pursued a range of social, cultural, and intellectual activities with the expressed goal of contributing in some small way to nation-building. Founding members of the Vietnam Research Association (established in 1957), for example, claimed that their research on socioeconomic conditions contributed to nation-building.⁵⁸ Similarly the Library Association (1956) asserted that its members’ activities contributed to the nation by increasing its cultural and intellectual development. A writer in the first issue of the association’s bulletin declared that because libraries contributed to raising the cultural level of a nation, librarians and technicians were working side by side with the government to build an ideal society in a period when the “nation’s revolutionary endeavor was in its most ardent phase.”⁵⁹

These participants might have been overstating their contributions to society. Their perceptions and activities nevertheless reveal that there were many RVN residents – especially urban anticommunist elites – who wanted a role in nation-building. While not all participants agreed with Diệm’s vision for the country, many wanted Vietnam to be democratic, independent, and modern, and were willing at least initially to cooperate with government efforts.

During Diệm’s early years in power, many lively debates about nation-building coursed through South Vietnam’s public sphere. Emboldened by the slight easing of press restrictions in 1956, RVN newspapers assumed the role of loyal opposition. Groups such as the Democratic Opposition Bloc (Khối Dân Chủ Đối Lập) and its mouthpiece, the Current Commentary Daily (Thời Luận), called on people to participate in national politics, offered critiques of government policies, and advocated for democratic reforms.⁶⁰ The legislative elections of 1959 saw prominent opposition candidates winning seats, despite Diệm’s electoral interference. In April 1960, disenchanted anticommunist nationalists joined forces to draft the so-called Caravelle Manifesto to protest against state repression and the lack of democracy in the RVN.⁶¹ Diệm responded to these challenges, as well as the attempted coup of November 1960, with more suppression and censorship. In this atmosphere, South Vietnamese civil society came to be dominated by pro-state activities or groups that focused strictly on cultural and educational issues.

While organizations such as the Research Association and the Library Association were occupied with generating and disseminating information and research, there were groups that concentrated on foregrounding Vietnamese culture and history. One of these was the Confucian Studies Association, formed in 1957. The group proposed that since Confucianism formed the foundation of Vietnamese society, promoting this ideology would help unify different social sectors and act as a stabilizing influence. The group intended to “make morality prevail” and to “support the national cause.”⁶² Capitalizing on the fact that Diệm drew inspiration from Confucianism, among other philosophies, the association’s periodical focused extensively on Diệm’s support of Confucianism.⁶³ By the late 1960s, this group had grown to include many local chapters that operated throughout South Vietnam.

Other cultural groups promoted Vietnamese historical and legendary heroes in an effort to boost national pride and unity. An important example was the grassroots effort to commemorate the legendary Hùng kings of the Hồng Bàng Dynasty (c. 2879–258 BCE).⁶⁴ The members of this mythical ruling house were widely viewed as the ancient founders of the Vietnamese nation. Even though Diệm mobilized Vietnam’s historical heroes, such as the two Trưng Sisters, for incorporation into his national unity campaigns, he did not see the usefulness of the Hùng kings as a rallying point for support and ordered the annual Hùng Kings’ memorial day delisted as a national holiday. In response, private individuals took it upon themselves to organize the celebrations. These activities show that many in South Vietnam considered Vietnamese historical and legendary heroes central to their national identity – a view that notably excluded other ethnic groups.

Besides promoting cultural pride based on Việt history, grassroots groups also participated in education. One such group was the Vietnam Women’s Association. Established in 1952 by Tô Thị Thân (but known by her husband’s penname, Bút Trà), this association focused on helping poor working women. Its stated aims were to unify women in the struggle for women’s rights, improve the women’s livelihood, and defend the rights of working women.⁶⁵ Mrs. Bút Trà and her husband published a series of popular dailies in Saigon, which she used to promote the activities of her women’s group.⁶⁶ In addition to organizing visits to hospitals, prisons, and orphanages, the Women’s Association promoted literacy among working women. The group established the Literacy Society, which provided free literacy classes. With the newspaper’s promotional help, the Women’s Association grew and, by 1960, it had many local branches.⁶⁷

Though wealthy, Mrs. Bút Trà was not a member of the cultural elite. Her first husband was ethnic Chinese and she experienced discrimination and hostility for her marriage choice. She claimed proudly that her newspapers were produced for the masses. But the group’s efforts among poor women backfired when government officials became suspicious that communists had infiltrated the group. The association’s secretary was subsequently arrested on charges of being a communist. After this event, Mrs. Bút Trà tried to avoid further state scrutiny by enlisting prominent anticommunist women, such as the wives of military and civil officials, into the association.⁶⁸ This event demonstrates that voluntary contribution to nation-building needed to be compatible with the dominant national vision backed by the government, in which any association with communism was anathema.

One of the longest-lasting educational and cultural projects launched under the First Republic was the Popular Polytechnic Institute (PPI), operated by the Popular Culture Association (PCA). Founded in 1954, the PPI offered free night courses to adults who wanted to learn a skill, language, or an academic subject.⁶⁹ In 1962, the school began adult literacy and secondary school equivalency programs for a minimum charge. The PCA also opened public reading rooms and sponsored cultural events. One of its most significant contributions was the publication of Bách Khoa [Encyclopedia], an influential periodical that hosted rigorous discussions on philosophy, literature, culture, and social issues.⁷⁰

The PCA was founded by young, Western-educated professionals who had been invited by the Ngô brothers to return to Vietnam in 1954 to help with nation-building and were assigned to important government positions. One founding member was Huỳnh Vӑn Lang, who worked in the Ministry of Finance and later became the Director of the Foreign Exchange. Lang was also a key member of Nhu’s Cần Lao Party, a powerful organization that acted to extend the Ngô brothers’ influence and to keep tabs on civil servants and military personnel.⁷¹ Another important PCA figure was Đỗ Trọng Chu, who served in the Office of the General Commissioner for Refugees. Chu’s wife, Trần Thị Mầu, director of the PPI in Gia Định, was a member of the Constituent Assembly. From their positions of influence, these members funneled their energies into sociocultural development.

According to the founding members of these groups, the long decades of colonialism and warfare had deprived Vietnamese people of a general education. The PCA therefore aimed to rectify this problem by offering accessible courses in academic and applied subjects. Their goals were to provide students with an intellectual foundation, a moral education, and physical training. Apart from knowledge, there were other benefits that came with bringing people of different classes together. Association founders averred that the institute had the potential to create bonds among people, providing them with a sense of community. Armed with this new sensibility, citizens would be better able to serve the nation.⁷²

As expected, the political complexion of this institute and association was staunchly anticommunist. The founders leveraged their reputations and connections to attract state and foreign aid to support the school and cultural programs. Their donors included the International Rescue Committee (IRC), Asia Foundation, and UNESCO, which provided technical support, funding, and advice. These organizations supported the PCA’s education and cultural development agenda. The IRC and Asia Foundation were especially enthusiastic about the association’s potential to stem the spread of communist influence. Both these organizations were closely linked to the US government and shared its goals of building an anticommunist, American-friendly South Vietnam.⁷³ Operating with a political agenda, the Asia Foundation and the IRC saw an ally in the PCA.

In addition to funding, the PCA’s institute also attracted many students. In the first session, 8,000 people applied but only 1,500 could be accommodated. In the second session, the institute was able to accept close to 1,900 students. Many enrolled in English classes, while ethnic Chinese took Vietnamese language courses to comply with the state’s Vietnamization policy. From 1954 until 1967, the PPIs in the Saigon–Chợ Lớn area offered twenty-five sessions and had a total enrolment of 43,329 students. The literacy and school equivalency programs graduated 84,065 students for the period of 1955–67.⁷⁴ Propelled by demands from students, the PCA opened chapters and PPIs outside of Saigon. In 1967 there were sixteen chapters throughout South Vietnam, each operating its own PPI. The popularity for the PPI reveals the considerable desire for education; it also indicates that many volunteers were willing to contribute to nation-building.

These are only a few examples of civil society’s effort to contribute to building a strong and united nation in South Vietnam. Participants expressed support for a variety of foundational ideals for the nation. Some emphasized Confucian morality and Vietnamese traditions, while others focused on economic justice and modern education. While endeavors were initiated by people with means and government connections, these projects mobilized support from ordinary volunteers who carried out the work on the ground, such as promoting events, canvasing donations, and teaching literacy classes. Despite their labor, South Vietnam remained fractious, vulnerable to political subversion and instability.

Conclusion

Diệm came to power inspired by nationalist desires to build an independent, modern, and unified noncommunist nation-state. Diệm’s own failings as a leader – his autocratic tendencies, nepotistic practices, inability to compromise, and unwillingness to share power – led eventually to the unraveling of his nation-building endeavors. While Diệm’s willingness to resort to coercion and repression was already evident in the early years of his rule (for example in the Denounce Communists Campaign), this habit became more pronounced following the launch of the DRVN-sponsored rural insurgency during 1959–60. Especially after the establishment of the National Liberation Front in 1960, Diệm targeted not only communists but also noncommunist intellectuals, students, and Buddhists.

Nation-building efforts were also complicated and frequently undermined by the involvement of the United States. While American government agencies and NGOs supplied much-needed funds, material aid, and technical support for Diệm’s nation-building programs, their presence and participation was controversial and often counterproductive. The sheer scale of US aid and the growing presence of American advisors in South Vietnam made it difficult to portray nation-building as a genuinely Vietnamese endeavor. The US presence also seemed to validate the DRVN claim that theirs was the authentic Vietnamese nation-state, and that the southern republic was merely Washington’s creation.

Since Diệm was eventually overthrown and assassinated in 1963 by a group of generals who concluded that he had become a liability in the efforts to build a viable anticommunist South Vietnamese state, most scholars have concluded that his nation-building efforts were an abject failure. In hindsight, it is clear that Diệm did not achieve many of his own nation-building goals. But while his nation-building programs frequently faltered, both his state-building measures and his attempts to forge unity had lasting consequences. Moreover, his death did not mark the end of anticommunist nation-building in South Vietnam. Groups such as the Popular Culture Association survived and even thrived in South Vietnam after 1963. Meanwhile, a host of new groups launched their own initiatives to improve living standards, expand access to education, and promote community-building.

After 1965, the intensifying war in South Vietnam produced new civil society needs, such as caring for those orphaned, wounded, or displaced by violence. At the same time, the RVN state launched a host of new nation-building efforts, many of them based in part on the experience gained during the Diệm years. Although the history of nation-building in republican South Vietnam includes plenty of failed projects and seemingly wasted efforts, that history is not merely a chronicle of ineptitude, nor is it a tale of a venture that was doomed to failure from the outset. It is also part of the larger history of nation-building during the era of decolonization, a time when aspirations for national unity collided with both the daunting legacies of colonialism and the geopolitical imperatives of the Cold War. In South Vietnam, as in North Vietnam and in most of the rest of the Global South, translating nation-building dreams into material realities was hard to do.

16 Building Socialism in North Vietnam after Geneva

Alec Holcombe

Introduction

With the signing of the Geneva Accords in July of 1954, the French Indochina War came to a close. Leaders of Vietnam’s Communist Party, officially the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP), were now the masters of an internationally recognized entity named the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN, or North Vietnam).¹ They also gained exclusive administrative authority over all Vietnamese territory north of the 17th parallel. Yet the DRVN’s revolutionary leaders had founded their state in September 1945 as a political entity comprising the entirety of Vietnam, not just the northern half. Scholars continue to debate basic questions related to North Vietnamese politics and strategy during the years from 1954 to 1963, the critical period when the fragile post–Geneva peace transitioned into the Vietnam War. Did some VWP leaders ever come to see the partition of the country as a regrettable but acceptable long-term solution? Or did they always plan and expect to use armed force to overthrow the rival regime in the South and unify the country under their party’s control?²

The answers to these questions are intertwined with some of the more immediate policy choices that Hồ Chí Minh and the rest of the VWP Politburo faced after Geneva. Having negotiated and endorsed the Geneva Accords, how did DRVN leaders intend to implement their provisions?³ What would be the fate of the Maoist-inspired “land reform” campaign, which the party leaders had begun on a limited basis in DRVN-controlled areas of northern and central Vietnam in the spring of 1953? More fundamentally, what type of state would be constructed in the North? During the war, many DRVN intellectuals and at least some segments of the Northern population seem to have accepted that prosecuting a war required a state with broad-reaching powers. But now that the war had ended, would the party leaders relax their authoritarian approach and allow more scope for individual initiative and expression? The answers to these and other policy questions facing North Vietnam’s leaders in 1954 would profoundly impact the course and outcome of the Vietnam War.

For most of the French Indochina War, the DRVN regime had governed primarily in the countryside. With the signing of the Geneva Accords, the regime could now return to the major cities in the northern half of the country.⁴ The most important was Hanoi, which lay in the middle of the Red River Delta and had served as the capital of ancient Vietnamese kingdoms dating back to 1010. Another was Hải Phòng. It was the largest port in the North and served as Hanoi’s connection to the sea. During the war, these cities and a few strategically important provincial capitals had been controlled by the French and their allied Vietnamese regime, the State of Vietnam (SVN). Now these urban centers would be administered by the DRVN. The same was true of a modestly sized but densely populated portion of the Red River Delta.

Since the most destructive fighting during the war had occurred in the northern half of the country, the DRVN faced many material challenges. These included securing adequate food for the population, fixing damaged infrastructure (roads, bridges, railways, dikes, etc.), and activating important economic assets left behind in poor condition by the departing French. Another challenge for the North was its economic separation from the South. In normal years, the rice-deficit North would import thousands of tons of rice from the rice-surplus South. Now that the two halves of the country were locked in Cold War economic and political competition, the North would have to depend on its own agricultural resources and on the largesse of communist-bloc allies.⁵

Historians have faced difficulties in determining the economic performance of the DRVN during the 1950s and 1960s. Until 1986, Vietnam’s party leaders considered yearly economic statistics to be “classified material” and restricted their distribution to “an extremely limited number of targets in Government offices.”⁶ In more recent years, the country’s economists have gained access to DRVN statistics dating back to the post–1954 period. Here, though, these researchers have encountered another obstacle: the questionable accuracy of the economic numbers. For example, official statistics on agricultural production during the latter half of the 1950s indicate that, by 1959, rice production in the North had soared to a level 93% greater than that recorded in 1939, the last peaceful year of French colonialism. Moreover, the statistics indicate that the productivity of the North’s rice fields in 1959 was the highest in Southeast Asia. Was that true?

One of Vietnam’s most respected economic historians, Đặng Phong (1937–2010), discusses these extraordinary statistics in his pathbreaking book, Economic History of Vietnam: 1945–2000. According to Phong, two theories have emerged among Vietnamese economists to explain these figures from 1959. The first holds that they are largely accurate and resulted from sensible state policies, good weather, peasant enthusiasm, and unusually high soil-fertility levels.

The second theory holds that the 1959 numbers are simply inaccurate. As Phong explains, “This is absolutely possible given the limited means available for collecting accurate statistics at that time and the tendency of officials to exaggerate their results in order to score points with superiors …”⁷ In 1959, that tendency toward exaggeration may have been especially strong because North Vietnam was in the middle of agricultural collectivization. Seeking justification for this controversial reorganization of economic life, party leaders likely signaled to local officials that low productivity numbers would be interpreted as a sign of poor job performance. Moreover, collectivization occurred against the backdrop of the regime’s ever-present desire to cast the North as prosperous compared to the rival South. In Phong’s view, another factor potentially leading to exaggeration was Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward happening next door at the time.⁸ During those years, China was North Vietnam’s most important ally and thus influenced events in the DRVN.

The impressions of foreign diplomats in Hanoi during the post–Geneva period provide an imperfect but important alternative view of the country’s overall economic situation. Even foreign diplomats from the communist bloc could not travel freely in North Vietnam. Thus, for most of their information they depended on their Vietnamese hosts, who were eager to provide narratives that would lead to more aid. Still, diplomats could observe slices of daily life in Hanoi and compare notes with counterparts in other embassies. Generally, the impressions of these foreigners support the second of the two theories (inflated productivity numbers). For example, members of the Hungarian Embassy saw a range of problems in the DRVN during this time: high unemployment, escalating inflation, low wages, economic mismanagement, scarcity of consumer goods, and widespread political discontent. During the spring of 1957, a Polish diplomat opined (in the words of one scholar) that “economic conditions were worse in the DRVN than in South Vietnam” and that the “northern economy showed signs of a continuing decline.”⁹

All in all, it seems safe to conclude that the DRVN regime, with help from China and the Soviet Union, did well to survive a variety of economic challenges facing it after the Geneva Armistice. The most important was a dire food shortage during 1954 and 1955.¹⁰ However, it is one thing to survive an economic challenge and another to overcome it. (Food scarcity and periodic hunger would remain realities of everyday life for most Northerners until the late 1980s.) As we will see, attempts by North Vietnam’s leaders to overcome challenges almost always involved a strengthening of the state and a broadening of its reach into society (Figure 16.1).

Figure 16.1 Three People’s Army of Vietnam soldiers supervise women carrying yokes after the French turned control of Hanoi over to the DRVN in accordance with the peace agreement reached at Geneva (1954).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

The Geneva Accords and the Land Reform Campaign

The DRVN’s leaders were especially concerned about three provisions of the Geneva Accords. The first, of course, was the Final Declaration’s seventh point stating that national elections were to be held in July 1956 to unify the country. At a minimum, this declaration affirmed in an internationally recognized document the principle of Vietnamese unification. It also helped the party leaders present the Geneva Accords to the Vietnamese people as a victory for the DRVN side and as proof that the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), who had played important roles in the negotiations, had been good advocates of the DRVN cause. This narrative mattered. With the United States emerging as a powerful ally of the rival SVN regime, the domestic prestige of the DRVN leaders was increasingly tied to the reputations of their communist-bloc allies.

But the 1956 elections were not the only provision of the agreements that mattered to DRVN leaders. As revealed in the internal DRVN and VWP sources to which scholars now have access, senior leaders also ascribed special importance to articles 14c and 14d of the cessation of hostilities with France. The first provision stated that all sides (the French and SVN in the South and the DRVN regime in the North) would “refrain from any reprisals or discrimination against persons or organizations on account of their activities during the hostilities and [would] guarantee their democratic liberties.” The second promised that, during a period of three hundred days, from July 1954 to May 1955, “any civilians residing in a district controlled by one party who wish to go and live in the zone assigned to the other party shall be permitted and helped to do so by the authorities in that district.”¹¹

The “no reprisals” and “freedom of movement” provisions of the Geneva Accords had important implications for the DRVN regime’s most controversial policy, the Mass Mobilization through Rent Reduction and Land Reform, usually referred to by Vietnamese and foreigners alike as simply “the land reform.” The party leaders had decided upon this policy of radical social and economic transformation in November of 1952, a time of stalemate and difficulty in the French Indochina War. Based on Maoist models and planned with the help of Chinese Communist Party advisors, the land reform involved sending thousands of cadres into the northern Vietnamese countryside to divide communities into social classes, teach villagers about class struggle, organize public trials of alleged class enemies (followed in many cases by public executions), and oversee the redistribution of land and personal belongings confiscated from alleged “landlords.” The campaign also involved a large purge of the party’s apparatus in the countryside.¹²

The battle of Điện Biên Phủ and the subsequent Geneva Armistice interrupted the land reform campaign and transformed the conditions of war that had been part of the policy’s justification. Hồ Chí Minh and other party leaders had promoted this “land-to-the-tiller” campaign, both internally and externally, as a necessary means of inspiring and “mobilizing” an exhausted North Vietnamese peasantry to fight harder in the war.¹³ Moreover, the no-reprisals article of the Geneva Accords directly contradicted the spirit of the land reform campaign, which was largely about ferreting out and ruthlessly punishing alleged “class exploiters” and “traitors” in rural communities.

After Geneva, DRVN leaders wanted to continue the land reform campaign but worried about being accused of violating the no-reprisals provision of the accords. Such accusations would undermine the regime’s public message of earnest implementation to facilitate the national elections scheduled for mid-1956. In early November of 1954, the party’s general secretary, Trường Chinh, released an internal memo describing changes to the way that the land reform would be carried out. The adjustments involved streamlining the campaign’s punishment process, stressing the campaign’s (minimal) judicial bona fides, and changing some of its official language so that the regime did not appear to be targeting political opponents.¹⁴

Party leaders also worried that the Geneva Accords’ freedom-of-movement provision would disrupt the land reform campaign. According to Article 14(d), any person who feared becoming a target of the land reform should have been able to leave the North and thus avoid public denunciation, imprisonment, and possible execution. By the autumn of 1954, DRVN leaders realized that hundreds of thousands of Northerners might leave for the South. To avoid the loss of land-reform struggle targets and to reduce departures in general, Hồ Chí Minh and his lieutenants delayed implementing the campaign in areas where residents had the easiest access to routes to the South.

Especially concerning to the party leaders were the activities of the ad hoc international organization formed at Geneva to monitor implementation of the accords. Referred to as the International Control Commission (ICC), this body was comprised of Canadian, Polish, and Indian members. ICC monitoring groups were supposed to be able to travel freely in both North and South Vietnam to ensure compliance with the accords. A September 26, 1954, directive from the Party Secretariat discussed how local cadres in the North should prepare in the event of an ICC visit. The passage reflects the regime’s siege mentality and its determination to control any interactions between locals and foreign outsiders:

Frequently the Control Commission will visit locations to inspect and investigate. Aside from investigating specific issues, they will try to find a way to figure out all aspects of our general situation. They could go to a place and start asking the locals questions, etc. Therefore, we need to prepare and let those local people know how to respond cleverly to the International Control Commission’s questions; we cannot just let them say whatever they want.¹⁵

By November 1954, DRVN leaders were furious with local party officials for taking an allegedly passive approach to the emigration. Cadres working in provinces south of Hanoi estimated that about one quarter of the region’s large Catholic population had already departed and that an “important part” of the remainder was preparing to leave. In response, Trường Chinh suggested three tactics for suppressing emigration to the South. First, cadres were to infiltrate the Catholic Church and try to sow divisions among priests. Second, on the propaganda front, the regime was to try harder to convince Catholics that the DRVN state would respect religious freedom. Third, cadres were to use trials and punishments as a means of intimidating priests into stopping their calls for Catholics to go south. The contradictory and deceptive nature of these tactics reflected the desire of party leaders to make the DRVN appear to be upholding the no-reprisals and freedom-of-movement articles rather than undermining them:

[Cadres] need to collect enough evidence and then punish some of the reactionary ringleaders, accusing them before the masses in order to warn others. [Cadres] need to make sure that, when accusing [these ringleaders], they must be convicted of violating the ceasefire agreement and violating the people’s democratic freedoms, such as catching the people, confining them in one place, and sending them away without asking the permission of our government, etc.

A few weeks after goading cadres into being more aggressive in their efforts to prevent Northerners from emigrating, the party leaders organized a “public meeting” in Hanoi’s opera house to stage an official protest against violations of the Geneva Accords by Ngô Đình Diệm and his American backers in the South. A subsequent Politburo directive outlined plans for “resisting our opponents’ blatant violations of the Geneva Accords.”

The internal directives of the party leaders show increasing frustration at their inability to slow the emigration and a growing willingness to take bolder measures to achieve this goal. A February 1955 Politburo directive warned that large numbers of people were still preparing to go south. To prevent this outcome, the authors proposed an elaborate plan of deception:

Choose a few model places where we will organize to help people emigrate (after choosing the place, check it with the Central Committee). We should invite the International Control Commission to come and witness what we do there. These model places must be areas where we have a mass base so that when we organize to help people leave, only a few people actually ask to go. This is the only way that helps our cause. This work must be carefully planned so that it can be implemented rapidly.

We must have a plan to crush reactionaries, to increase vigilance, to tighten our control, and to prevent the enemy from exploiting this opportunity to speed up concentration of the masses and create more troubles for us.

A month later, VWP leaders Phạm Vӑn Đồng and Võ Nguyên Giáp delivered long reports to the DRVN National Assembly touting Hanoi’s “absolute” (triệt để) adherence to the Geneva Accords and condemning the many violations committed by the “opposition” regime in Saigon.¹⁶

In hindsight, the statements and orders issued by VWP leaders during 1954–5 indicate a cynical approach to the Geneva Accords. What emerges from these materials is the determination of DRVN leaders to defend and promote the reputations of their party and state at any cost. The DRVN state had to be portrayed as scrupulously upholding the terms of the accords while also enjoying the overwhelming support of the population. Party leaders would not tolerate dissent, no matter its source. This applied to the voices of that segment of the population most likely to resist being stage-managed: DRVN intellectuals.

Destalinization and Intellectual Protest: 1956

DRVN writers, scholars, painters, and musicians, though loyal to the regime, had long been frustrated by the party’s tight and sometimes corrupt management of cultural life.¹⁷ The extraordinary conditions of war, the noble cause of national independence, and the military brilliance of the DRVN leaders had led most of the regime’s intellectuals to tolerate party control over their artistic production. With the end of the war, though, many intellectuals now believed that their sacrifices over the past eight years had earned them a reprieve from this stifling treatment. These men and women were also frustrated by the poor quality of DRVN intellectual production. It was obvious that party control had produced works of propaganda with an expiration date, not works of literature and art with lasting value. Under party guidance, late colonial cultural luminaries such as Xuân Diệu, Nguyên Hồng, and Nguyễn Tuân had been unable to produce anything that matched the quality of their prerevolutionary works – this was despite having witnessed one of the most remarkable and tumultuous periods in Vietnamese history.

In mid-1956, many intellectuals were also upset by the violence and injustices of the recently concluded land reform. When the Geneva Accords’ 300-day period of free movement ended in the summer of 1955, Party leaders in Hanoi sealed the borders and ramped up the land reform again. Since the Geneva Accords caused disruptions and delays, the party leaders further streamlined the campaign to ensure completion by July 1956. For most of the North’s remaining rural communities, this meant missing the preparatory “rent reduction” phase of the campaign and being thrust directly into the most radical “land reform” phase. This was the phase when the “entire landlord class” was to be “overthrown.” During the first half of 1956, more than half of the North’s rural population underwent the reform. At the time, the regime’s land reform apparatus comprised about 30,000 cadres (men and women, usually of educated background) divided into hundreds of “work teams” and dispersed throughout rural North Vietnam. By mid-1956, most DRVN intellectuals had served as land reform cadres at some point over the last three years and were, therefore, well aware of the campaign’s destructive character.¹⁸

The death toll from the land reform remains one of the Vietnamese Communist Party’s tightly kept secrets. Fragments of circumstantial evidence suggest that the three-year campaign probably resulted in the deaths of 20,000–30,000 people. Thousands were shot in dramatic public executions. However, it is possible that an even greater number of the campaign’s deaths came from less spectacular circumstances such as the widespread use of torture to elicit false confessions, the brutal conditions of imprisonment, and the deprivation of food resulting from the regime’s policy of isolating community members labeled as landlords or traitors. So feared was the experience of public denunciation, trial, and execution that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Northerners committed suicide after learning that they had been selected as targets of “struggle.”

The violence of the land reform combined with another factor in mid-1956 to unsettle DRVN intellectuals in Hanoi. In late February of that year, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had delivered his “secret speech” at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Speaking late into the evening, he described in lurid detail many of Stalin’s crimes, vanities, and leadership shortcomings during his long reign as Soviet ruler (1924–53). Khrushchev titled his speech “On the Personality Cult and its Consequences” and stressed three reform initiatives for the communist bloc: “party democracy,” “socialist legality,” and the “fight against the personality cult.” The Soviet leader had copies of the secret speech distributed to CPSU branches throughout the Soviet Union and to representatives of fraternal communist parties, including the VWP. By early June, the US CIA (via Israeli intelligence) had secured a complete copy of the speech. A few days later, it was circulating widely in Western and other noncommunist countries, including South Vietnam.¹⁹

Like other Communist Party leaders around the world who had promoted Stalin enthusiastically and who had created their own personality cult on the model of Stalin’s, Hồ Chí Minh was compromised by the secret speech. He and other top VWP leaders understandably dragged their feet when confronted with the prospect of having to transmit to rank-and-file party members the awkward new messages coming from Moscow. As a result, it was not until April that many DRVN intellectuals learned about the secret speech and Moscow’s shocking change in attitude toward the once-venerated Stalin. In hindsight, Hồ Chí Minh’s caution was warranted. Khrushchev’s denunciation set off a chain of events that would prove severely damaging to the DRVN’s four most prominent leaders: Hồ Chí Minh, Trường Chinh, Phạm Vӑn Đồng, and Võ Nguyên Giáp. In the three years following the speech, two other party leaders, Lê Duẩn and Lê Đức Thọ, would rise to the top of the party and remain the DRVN’s most powerful men for the next twenty-five years.

In denouncing Stalin’s brutal methods, Khrushchev indirectly criticized many of the same methods employed in the DRVN’s land reform campaign. These included the use of torture to extract false confessions, the disregard for legal process, and the arbitrary insistence that enemies and traitors lurked in every corner. Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinist narrative emboldened DRVN intellectuals to voice similar calls for reform in the DRVN. That seemed safe to do since Vietnam’s party leaders had always promoted Moscow as the infallible leader of the world revolution. In August 1956, disgruntled DRVN intellectuals in Hanoi received another boost when they learned of Mao’s “Hundred Flowers” movement encouraging Chinese intellectuals to publicly criticize the PRC regime.²⁰

Convinced that they were acting in accordance with reformist trends in Moscow and Beijing, intellectuals in Hanoi launched a handful of independent publications – that is, print media that circulated without the approval of the party’s cultural authorities. The most famous of these short-lived publications were a newspaper titled Humanity (Nhân vӑn) and a literary journal titled Masterworks (Giai phẩm). The movement that emerged during the latter months of 1956 soon came to be known as “Nhân vӑn–Giai phẩm.”

The Nhân vӑn–Giai phẩm movement seemed to revolve around a single question: What type of state would the DRVN be? One of Nhân vӑn–Giai phẩm’s most charismatic leaders, a 43-year-old party member named Nguyễn Hữu Đang, called for the DRVN to move away from party dictatorship and establish a law-governed society:

During the Land Reform, the arrest, imprisonment, and investigation (using brutal torture) of people followed by sentences of imprisonment, execution, and property confiscation were done in an extremely sloppy manner. The same was the case with the policy of putting landlord families (or, in many cases, peasant families that had been incorrectly labeled) under siege to the point of making their innocent children starve to death. These were not entirely the result of poor leadership—they were also the result of not having a proper legal regime.²¹

In the following issue of Humanity, Đang published a front-page article titled, “How Do the Vietnamese Constitution of 1946 and the Chinese Constitution Guarantee Democratic Freedoms?” From the DRVN Constitution, he quoted Article 10, which stated that “Vietnamese citizens have the right to freedom of expression, freedom of publication, and freedom of organization and assembly, and freedom of movement inside and outside the country.” Đang pointed out that the failure to give citizens these rights promised in the 1946 Constitution could lead to troubles for the DRVN similar to those recently experienced by the communist regimes in Poland and Hungary, which had faced large popular protests.²²

That December, Hồ Chí Minh and the Politburo shut down the Nhân vӑn–Giai phẩm publications and disciplined the movement’s participants. Most were forced to write (untrue) self-criticisms and sent to labor in the countryside. Those deemed to be leaders of the movement faced tougher punishments, including police harassment, official stigmatization, and, in some cases, imprisonment. In January of 1960, long after the movement had been crushed, Lê Duẩn (now the most powerful person in the DRVN) put Nguyễn Hữu Đang on trial along with four other people tangentially related to the movement.²³ The motivations behind this macabre publicity stunt remain mysterious. Duẩn may have hoped that the trial would cow DRVN intellectuals suspected of questioning his recent escalation of the war in the South.

The 1959 Constitution

As we have seen, during the height of the Nhân vӑn–Giai phẩm movement, an important cause for reform-minded DRVN intellectuals was better adherence to the principles and laws of the DRVN Constitution. This may have played a role in convincing Hồ Chí Minh and other party leaders that the time for a new constitution had arrived. Another motivating factor may have been the rival South Vietnamese government’s promulgation of a constitution in 1956.

The new DRVN Constitution was to be drafted by a twenty-nine-person Committee to Amend the Constitution (Ủy ban sửa đổi Hiến pháp).²⁴ It was chaired by Hồ Chí Minh and included three other Politburo members – Phạm Vӑn Đồng, Võ Nguyên Giáp, and Hoàng Vӑn Hoan (ambassador to China) – along with several other powerful DRVN officials.²⁵ All twenty-nine committee members had been elected, at least in theory, to the DRVN National Assembly eleven years earlier during the controversial elections of January 1946.²⁶ Meeting twenty-eight times over a span of two and a half years, the committee completed the new constitution in late December of 1959. It would serve as the DRVN Constitution throughout the Second Indochina War. The committee’s discussions were recorded by notetakers, and these notes provide a window into how the regime’s party leaders viewed the relationship between state and citizen.

One important question related to the new constitution was whether it should state that people had the right to demonstrate. According to committee member Hà Vӑn Tính, “From the perspective of principle, the people have the right to protest and express their aspirations. But, the reality of our regime is that the State and people are of one mind (nhất trí).” Tính worried that, if the constitution were to include the right to demonstrate, it would be “disadvantageous because people would not see the unanimity of our regime. Naturally, under our regime, it could happen only rarely (and nobody would want it) that the people would demonstrate against the State.”²⁷

Responding to this, committee member Nguyễn Tạo stressed the important role that demonstrations played in “opposing the enemy and expressing support for our Government.” According to him, “Demonstrations by the people to oppose the enemy must be led by us. If we only think of demonstrations as geared toward opposing our regime, then we consider only one aspect.” Continuing, Tạo explained that, because the DRVN regime was a “people’s democratic dictatorship, it must recognize the rights of the people. This not only has an impact here in the North but also in the South. Therefore, we need to put the right to protest in the Constitution.” As usual, the Politburo member Hoàng Vӑn Hoan, the highest-ranking Party member in attendance during that meeting, ultimately decided the issue:

I think that the terms “protest” and “demonstrate,” from the past up to today, but especially under the colonial regime, have always carried the meaning of something that is opposed to the feudalists, opposed to the ruling power. Therefore, people still tend to have that old view of the terms. If we hold the view that protests and demonstrations are meant to allow the people to express their ideas, not just to oppose but even to support, then it does no harm to put it in the Constitution. In fact, it helps to show that our regime is very strong, that it carries out to the highest level the people’s democratic freedoms, that it enjoys the faith of the people. If there are reactionaries who exploit that right to demonstrate, we can mobilize the forces of the people and crush those protesters. With respect to the South, putting it in the Constitution also is advantageous. All in all, I think we need to put it in the Constitution.²⁸

The Committee to Amend the Constitution did, after some discussion, concede that the new constitution needed to guarantee the right of people to demonstrate. However, the reasoning behind this had nothing to do with guaranteeing the democratic freedoms of DRVN citizens. The reasoning was based entirely on the party leadership’s political agenda, namely the need to support Southern demonstrations against the Ngô Đình Diệm regime and to stage among the Northern population mass demonstrations in support of the party’s political causes. As the comments by Nguyễn Tạo reveal, any sort of popular demonstration in the North not stemming from party initiative and not under party control was unacceptable. As for a popular protest aimed at the DRVN regime, the comments from the Politburo member Hoàng Vӑn Hoan (“crush those protestors”) make clear that the new constitution’s guarantee of democratic freedoms (“to the highest level”) would in fact offer no protection whatsoever.

Agricultural Collectivization: 1958–60

The Constitution Committee’s nervousness about popular protest may have been partly inspired by the imminent prospect of imposing a system of collectivized agriculture on the Northern countryside.²⁹ This was the centerpiece of the party’s plan to nationalize all significant economic activity in the DRVN, including fishing, mining, forestry, factory production, media production, and foreign trade. Agricultural collectivization had been a dream of the DRVN’s party leaders since the 1930s. In those days, before communist revolutionaries had seized power and carried out a war, collectivization probably appealed because it seemed morally superior and more modern than the small-farmer system. Also, since the 1930s, collectivized agriculture had been the rural economic system of the Soviet Union, which held a mythic position in the minds of many Vietnamese communists.³⁰ In 1957, those original, idealistic motivations for collectivization were surely supplemented by two practical ones that stemmed from the experiences of the French Indochina War.

First, the DRVN regime’s existence still depended on extracting a huge material contribution from an extremely unproductive rural economy. The difficulty of this task had tormented party leaders throughout the French Indochina War, sometimes jeopardizing the military effort. The reality was that most peasants, during prolonged periods of hardship, would not voluntarily boost production just to serve the war effort or build socialism. The party had redistributed land in many of the provinces and districts it controlled throughout the eight years of war. But this had done nothing to stem the decline in production. Thus, there was no practical basis on which to conclude that land reform would solve this problem of productivity. Collectivization, as the next stage in the Marxist–Leninist model of economic transformation, was the only remaining card to be played.

Second, the regime still had no means of earning the money needed to fund its ambitious economic and political goals: industrialization of the economy and military defeat of the rival regime in Saigon. Therefore, the DRVN remained heavily dependent on communist bloc aid. Because that aid could only be demanded in the name of proletarian internationalism, the DRVN leaders needed to project an image of themselves as enthusiastic students of the Soviet Union and China. This meant dutifully following in Moscow’s and Beijing’s footsteps. To not undergo collectivization would have been to challenge the wisdom of Soviet and Chinese leaders and to question the correctness of the Soviet system.³¹

In December 1957, the Politburo explained that “Consolidating the North and gradually constructing socialism” was one of the regime’s three essential tasks. The meaning of “gradually” was not explained. At the end of 1955, though, the DRVN leaders had invested in six “large” and ten “small” collective farms – a sign that the move to collectivized agriculture was likely to be rapid, not gradual. These test collective farms were supposed to be carefully nurtured and generously supported so that they would succeed and generate popular excitement about collectivization. In March 1957, party leaders held a conference devoted to assessing the results of these sixteen collective farms. In typical fashion, the leaders of the conference produced a lengthy report (forty pages), which was probably read to attendees and sent to various party officials. The report reveals what the DRVN’s leaders had learned about collective farming in Vietnam before pushing forward aggressively with the policy in late 1958.³²

The ministry of agriculture had invested 60 percent of its development budget into these sixteen collective farms, which employed a total of 8,500 “cadres and workers.” And yet, after a year of operation, despite being supplied with the latest Soviet-bloc agricultural equipment, fourteen of the sixteen farms were operating at a loss. The most discouraging news involved the production of rice, the staple of the North Vietnamese diet. The writer of the report calculated that inefficiencies in rice production accounted for over half the total debt accumulated by the sixteen farms. “Generally speaking, the collective farm work generated many losses for the Nation.”

The report writer also discussed the effect of the collective farms on their workers and on residents of the surrounding area. Locals found the farms intriguing. However, the report acknowledged that “we have not yet served as a model for the people in our organization of production and in our farming technique.” In some places, “our sloppy way of working has generated concern among our compatriots, who find our mistakes and weaknesses painful (for example, the waste of chemical fertilizer at the Thạch Ngọc farm).”

These were signs of the troubles that would plague the productivity of these and subsequent DRVN collective farms for the next thirty years. Though the report described in exhaustive detail the waste that accompanied the misuse and abuse of expensive farm equipment and supplies, it still concluded that the “biggest waste was in manpower.” According to the report, “serious waste and corruption” characterized the work regimen of the farms:

Extremely common is wasted work, with people arriving late and leaving early. And we have used 3 million days’ worth of pay on labor mobilized from people outside the collective farm. On an ordinary work day, losing only one hour of work would be unusually little. Therefore, the amount of wasted work amounts to 380,000 work days, the equivalent of nearly 450 million Vietnamese đồng. Also, the number of people in the farm who do not work is high, perhaps as much as 1,200 people during the last three months of the year. The amount of waste from this is over 100 million Vietnamese dong during this three-month period.³³

The writer of the report expressed grave concern about the extensive use of “mobilized manpower” (nhân lực huy động), which referred to non-farm members who lived in the surrounding area. In parentheses next to the term “mobilized manpower,” the report writer had typed the French word “CORVÉE.” (In the Vietnamese context, “corvée” usually referred to the unpaid labor that the French colonial state had required of Vietnamese for various construction projects.) The extensive use of outside labor showed that the farms were not self-sufficient, despite having been abundantly supplied. The outside laborers “did not just help the collective farm with a particular job for one day but instead worked for the farm on a daily basis.”

Despite the worrying results of the ministry’s experiment, Lê Duẩn and the Politburo decided to push forward with collectivization in December 1958. Uneasy about the optics of imposing this radical transformation on their rural population, party leaders depicted coercion from above as a democratic response to voices from below. Thus, a directive from the VWP Secretariat stated that the “masses in many places are demanding that they be organized into agricultural collectives” and that the party had to “give special attention to the consolidation and development of the collectivization movement in order to satisfy the demands of the masses …”³⁴ By the end of 1960, the party had placed roughly 85 percent of the DRVN’s rural population into thousands of collective farms.

How would peasants gain access to the food produced by the collective farm? After the DRVN state had taken its required amount, the farm’s remaining produce was distributed among members according to the principle of “work days.” Collective farm managers calculated a work day by assigning “points” to the different tasks carried out on the farm. Ten points equaled a work day. Each task, such as plowing, planting, and harvesting the collective crop, had criteria for measuring its completeness. If the manager of the collective farm determined that a member had completed a task according to standard, the member would receive a predetermined number of points. Indeed, the collective farm officials held all the power in a village. They allotted themselves work points for attending meetings, studying, or visiting fields. According to a historian of collectivization:

Laboring members of the collective lost the right to ownership and independence in production. Meanwhile, the power of cadres who held official positions in the collective was tremendous. They determined how many “work points” members earned and decided how each grain of rice would be divided among the community. Without the signature of a local official, regular members of the collective and their children could not enter the party, mass organizations, schools, or educational institutions. Without the collective farm official’s signature, members could not leave the village to carry out work. And this was a weakness of these farms that cadres of poor character used to pressure and exploit the people.³⁵

During the period from 1961 to 1965, DRVN collective farms opened up about 200,000 hectares of new land, but overall agricultural productivity still fell due to plummeting efficiency. The costs of production began to rise, and returns on state investments steadily declined. According to statistics gathered by one scholar, the average amount of rice distributed each month to families on collective farms in 1961 was twenty-four kilograms. By 1964, that amount had fallen to fourteen kilograms.³⁶ Mobilization for war played a role but cannot explain the sheer magnitude of the drop.

Despite the collapse of the DRVN agricultural sector, Lê Duẩn refused to abandon collectivization. A directive released by the Party Secretariat in February 1960 suggests that officials were well aware of the resentments generated by the new policies:

The process of carrying out a socialist revolution and building socialism is, at the same time, a complicated, tense, and decisive process of class warfare. We want to protect our revolutionary accomplishments and guarantee the effectiveness of our socialist reform and socialist construction. Therefore, the revolutionary regime led by the working class absolutely must severely repress any action of resistance carried out by counterrevolutionary forces. That is an essential responsibility of any country’s working class carrying out a revolution.³⁷

Ideology was not the only motivation behind the push to collectivize. Pride was also a factor. The party leaders had staked their reputations on the superiority of the socialist system. To acknowledge that the collectivized economy was a failure was to acknowledge that three decades of revolutionary activism, often expressed in a tone of shrill contempt for alternative views, had been misguided. Of course, officials were also motivated by the desperate need to secure Soviet and Chinese support and especially by the leverage that these collective farms afforded the DRVN state over the rural population. The virtual elimination of private property in the countryside weakened the position of the rural masses vis-à-vis the state, making resistance to government policies (such as the recruitment of soldiers) more difficult.

Conclusion

Looking at the period from 1954 to 1963, we can discern three major stages in DRVN state construction. The first was the land reform carried out from 1953 to 1956. It targeted the most influential members of rural communities, including thousands of loyal party members, and paved the way for collectivization. The second phase occurred primarily from 1956 to 1957 and targeted the DRVN intellectual community. Those of their ranks who challenged the party to reform were suppressed – those who remained compliant and quiet were rewarded with stable professional positions, often regardless of talent. The third phase was the collectivization of agriculture (and the nationalization of the economy), carried out from 1958 to 1960. This removed the means of production (land) from the rural population’s hands and made peasants dependent on the state for survival.

It could be argued that a new phase in state construction began in late 1963, after Lê Duẩn decided to commit the DRVN to a more aggressive, all-out military strategy in the South. At that time, he and his supporters attacked and purged high-ranking party members suspected of questioning the new strategy. Thus began the VWP’s “Anti-Party Affair,” which extended into 1964 and would be reactivated in 1967 and 1968. In aiming these waves of repression at the upper ranks of the party (even the legendary general, Võ Nguyên Giáp, was suppressed into quiet passivity), Lê Duẩn completed the work begun by Hồ Chí Minh and his lieutenants back in 1945. The DRVN state, from bottom to top, had been molded into a compliant instrument of the party leader’s power.³⁸

The discussion presented here describes only part of the story of state construction in the DRVN during 1954–63. Many new (or substantially overhauled) state institutions of control profoundly affected the everyday lives of North Vietnamese citizens. Notable examples include the personal dossier system (lý lịch), the Party Committee system (Đảng đoàn), the family register system (hộ khẩu), the court system, and the education system. Other instruments of social control were the ministry of public security and the Hồ Chí Minh personality cult, which persisted despite Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and his cult.³⁹

In his classic three-volume study of Marxism’s origins, development, and breakdown, Leszek Kolakowski includes multiple discussions of totalitarianism. One of his clearest definitions of the concept appears in a chapter that covers “The Beginnings of Russian Marxism”:

[Totalitarianism refers to] the principle that the whole life of society, especially economic and cultural activity, must not only be supervised by the state but must be absolutely subordinated to its needs … It follows from this principle that the state is the only legitimate source of any social initiative, and that any organization or crystallization of social life that is not imposed by the state is contrary to its needs and interests. It also follows that the citizen is the property of the state, and that all his acts are either directed by the state or are a challenge to its authority.⁴⁰

Kolakowski accurately describes the mindset of the DRVN leaders and the spirit behind the political and economic system that they constructed in North Vietnam in the decade after Geneva.⁴¹ Of course, they never achieved total control over society – no state has ever succeeded in eradicating the spaces in which individual initiative endures. But the party leaders, often invoking Marxist–Leninist theory as their justification, worked hard to minimize those spaces so that most of the North Vietnamese population could be mobilized for war indefinitely.

17 North Vietnam’s Road to War

Tuong Vu

The road to war in South Vietnam taken by the leadership of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) between 1954 and 1963 was a gradual process. Although the DRVN’s long-term strategic goals did not change during this period, its leaders constantly recalibrated their forces and adjusted their plans in response to changing conditions in Vietnam and abroad. This chapter traces this process through four distinct phases during the post–Geneva decade, culminating with Hanoi’s decision to commit its own regular military forces to the southern battlefield in 1963.

Hồ Chí Minh and his fellow leaders of the DRVN and the Vietnam Worker’s Party (VWP) embraced an ambitious vision of developing a communist society and considered themselves the only legitimate rulers of all Vietnam.¹ But the Geneva Accords in 1954 left them in control of only the northern half of the country. It also left them with two somewhat contradictory goals: promoting revolution in South Vietnam while creating a socialist system in North Vietnam modeled on the Soviet and Chinese systems. The agenda for the North included the nationalization of industry and trade, collectivization of agriculture, and economic development through central planning. This socialist-building agenda required substantial foreign aid as well as a massive commitment of government resources and manpower. It also dovetailed with the new policies of Soviet leader Khrushchev, who declared that the communist and capitalist camps could peacefully coexist and the struggle between them would be determined by economic productivity and technological achievements. Hanoi’s other agenda – fomenting revolution in the South – did not sit well with Moscow or Beijing, both of which specifically discouraged Hanoi from resuming the hostilities in the South that could provoke US intervention.

North Vietnamese leaders, all loyal followers of Marxism–Leninism, were committed to coordinate their policy with that of the Soviet camp out of deference to their patrons and a sincere desire for and belief in socialist solidarity. Yet they also did not want to abandon revolution in South Vietnam, where they intentionally left behind thousands of cadres. Many top leaders were from the South or had spent their whole revolutionary careers there. There were also more than 100,000 rank-and file Southern cadres who had regrouped to the North after 1954 and who yearned to return. Like Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and Kim Il Sung, many top leaders of the VWP disagreed with Khrushchev’s policy and had few qualms about confronting the United States if necessary. It was these leaders who eventually led North Vietnam to war, drawing China, the Soviet Union, and the United States into the conflict. In 1959, with the VWP on the verge of being wiped out in the South, Hanoi took its first tentative steps toward escalating its efforts to overthrow the Saigon government of Ngô Đình Diệm by force. By 1963, the party was leading a growing insurgency in the southern countryside. When Diệm was overthrown in a US-backed coup, VWP leaders committed themselves to a plan that aimed to conquer the South in the shortest time possible. Soon after, US leaders responded with their own escalation. This process transformed the Vietnam War from a rural insurgency into a major conflict of global significance.

Challenges and Setbacks in the Aftermath of Geneva

At the Geneva Conference in 1954, France and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) agreed to the cessation of war and to the breakup of French Indochina. Laos and Cambodia became independent states, while Vietnam was divided along the 17th parallel to facilitate the regrouping of communist forces to the North and anticommunist forces to the South. The Geneva Accords were the result of politics in France, the balance of forces on the battlefield in Indochina, and the international trend of East–West compromise following Stalin’s death and the end of the Korean War. Although the DRVN endorsed the accords, the results were not what Hanoi hoped.²

During the negotiations at Geneva, the French found the communist side to be open to compromises. Even with the communists’ victory in Điện Biên Phủ, the military balance of power was not clearly in the DRVN’s favor. After nine years of war, communist forces were as exhausted as their enemies. The time was also right for dealmaking, as the Soviet Union and China, the main patrons of the DRVN, did not want the war to continue for fear of American intervention. In the aftermath of the Korean War and the death of Stalin, neither Moscow nor Beijing wished to have another war with the United States over Indochina.³

Following both Soviet and Chinese advice, as well as their own instincts, DRVN leaders accepted the ceasefire and temporary division of the country despite the fact that the United States and the State of Vietnam (SVN) led by ex-emperor Bảo Đại and Premier Ngô Đình Diệm refused to sign the accords.⁴ Available documents do not reveal whether DRVN leaders truly expected that the 1956 national elections promised in the “Final Declaration” would actually take place. It is evident that they believed that the accords were the best deal they could get at the time. They also fully trusted their Soviet and Chinese brothers to look after their interests and to support the implementation of the accords. They also likely anticipated that the Diệm government would quickly collapse, paving the way for them to take power in the South.

The Geneva Accords effectively ended war between French and communist forces but not between the two internationally recognized Vietnamese parties – the DRVN and the SVN.⁵ Both states immediately sought to position themselves diplomatically and militarily to be ready for the continuing struggle. While the DRVN held up the accords as a victory and pledged to abide by their terms (but in fact violated them), the SVN denounced the accords and then proceeded to comply with most stipulations (except for the 1956 election mandate). The rivalry between the states was intensified by the violent contests for power that took place within both North and South Vietnam after Geneva. Both states took over new territories that needed to be consolidated. The VWP’s control of the DRVN state was firm, but the recently appointed Ngô Đình Diệm had to win the trust of the United States while also establishing his state’s authority over its territory and its own armed forces. DRVN leaders were in a more favorable position but not an ideal situation, given their ambition to establish communist rule throughout Vietnam.⁶

On the surface, the DRVN appeared truly committed to the implementation of the Geneva Accords. Their forces from south of the 17th parallel were ordered to regroup to the North and the areas under DRVN control in the South were transferred to the SVN. Ships provided by socialist allies transported about 130,000 communist cadres and other supporters from the South to the North. DRVN Premier Phạm Vӑn Đồng wrote to Diệm, asking to resume trade and mail links between the two regions in preparation for eventual reunification. At the same time, the DRVN secretly prepared to undermine Diệm’s fledgling government. Lê Duẩn, the senior VWP leader in the South, opted to remain in the South and to operate clandestinely.⁷ At least 50,000 Communist Party members and soldiers and secret weapon caches sufficient to equip 6,000 troops were deliberately left behind in the South.⁸ Lê Duẩn held meetings with rivals and opponents of Diệm in the South, including leaders of the Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo religious groups, laying the groundwork for an armed alliance.⁹

The accords allowed 300 days (until May 18, 1955) for migration between the two zones to take place, and this period was later extended for two more months. As Alec Holcombe has demonstrated, the DRVN government sought to prevent many Northerners from leaving for the South despite the guarantees provided in the agreements. In internal documents, the leaders blamed enemy propaganda for enticing many to leave, and voiced their fear that too many Northerners leaving would cast a negative image of their regime in world opinion.¹⁰ Despite such obstructionism, nearly 1 million Northerners moved to the South. Many of the migrants were Catholics and landlords who feared communist persecution.

After taking control of Hanoi, DRVN leaders faced massive problems: a looming famine and a rural economy exhausted after nine years of destruction by and mobilization for war.¹¹ As famine relief and economic aid from fraternal socialist countries poured in, planning began for the long-term development of the North. The leadership was united on the importance of developing the Northern economy, consolidating communist rule, and creating a strong foundation for socialism in the North as a means to promote revolution in the South. Since the 1930s, Hồ Chí Minh and his comrades had dreamed of the day when they could implement a socialist system in Vietnam based on the Stalinist model that they observed and admired. Now that they had control over half the country’s territory and people, it would have been hard to wait any longer. Since the DRVN had already launched its land reform campaign in some areas under its control in 1953, the continuation and expansion of land reform throughout North Vietnam was a logical next step.¹²

Senior party leaders were also increasingly paranoid about enemy infiltration into their ranks.¹³ The party ordered land reform teams to entice peasants to stand up not only against landlords or rich farmers but also against local VWP cadres, many of whom had been loyal party members but were now viewed as potential enemy agents. During the last phase of the land reform campaign from 1955 to 1956, thousands of those cadres were falsely accused of being undercover spies, and some were subjected to torture and execution. It is not known how many of those who had actually collaborated with the French or worked for the SVN were persecuted, in violation of Geneva terms. By hunting down alleged enemy sympathizers and spies, and by unleashing peasant violence on landlords, the party in effect continued the war in Northern villages during 1955–6.

While DRVN leaders tried to keep the outside world from knowing about the violence in North Vietnamese villages, they still called on the Southern government to hold elections to reunify the country peacefully as promised in the Geneva Accords’ Final Declaration.¹⁴ Ngô Đình Diệm rejected these calls on the grounds that free elections in the North were impossible under the communist government. Although the winner of the never-held elections remains an unknowable counterfactual, the growing backlash against the DRVN land reform debacle in the North suggests that a communist victory may not have been a foregone conclusion. What is clear in hindsight is that Ngô Đình Diệm surprised everyone with his ability to stay in power. Thanks in part to the organizing efforts of his brother Ngô Đình Nhu and to his impeccable reputation as a dedicated nationalist, Diệm went on to defeat a host of challengers, including his own rebellious military commanders. In late 1955, he organized a referendum that deposed Bảo Đại and made him the founder and first president of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN).¹⁵

Diệm’s unexpected triumph disrupted Lê Duẩn’s plans to build an anti-Diệm alliance in the South. By late 1955, with the help of many defectors from Hồ Chí Minh’s government such as Trần Chánh Thành, Diệm launched the “Denounce Communism” campaign to uncover and arrest communist cadres left behind in the South. With the passing of the Geneva-mandated deadline for national elections in mid-1956, the revolutionary tide in the South appeared to be ebbing.

Meanwhile, North Vietnam was thrown into turmoil by a series of events that sent shockwaves throughout the communist bloc. In February, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev read a report at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, denouncing Stalin for his many crimes and his cult of personality. Khrushchev’s daring move unnerved leaders in client communist states in Asia and Eastern Europe who had revered Stalin and built their own personality cults.¹⁶ Many of them also viewed Khrushchev’s new policy of peaceful coexistence with the capitalist bloc as naive and dangerous. But since Moscow remained the sun of the communist solar system, the change of direction forced the satellites to adjust, if not enthusiastically follow.

Khrushchev’s speech triggered a wave of upheaval and internal criticism across the Soviet bloc. In May 1956, three months after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, Mao Zedong called on Chinese to criticize their government. In June, Polish workers in Poznan protested and stormed government offices. By fall, the turmoil had reached North Vietnam, as party leaders were forced to apologize for the excessive use of violence as well as for the paranoia about enemy spies. At a party plenum in October 1956, General Secretary Trường Chinh resigned from his position while three other high-ranking officials involved in directing the land reform were demoted. At this meeting, the party also discussed the report by Lê Duẩn on the rapidly deteriorating situation in the South and endorsed his call for changing revolutionary strategy, given the success of Ngô Đình Diệm.¹⁷ Lê Duẩn’s allies Lê Đức Thọ and Phạm Hùng would soon be brought into the Politburo, while Lê Duẩn himself took over Trường Chinh’s position.

The liberal moment in the communist bloc did not last long. In November 1956, Warsaw Pact nations sent tanks into Hungary to crush a student-led revolt that had toppled the government the previous month. In North Vietnam, thousands of peasants in Nghệ An demonstrated against the government in November but were crushed by the military.¹⁸ In December the government cracked down on the Nhân vӑn–Giai phẩm intellectual movement protesting against abuses of power and demanding greater creative freedom.¹⁹ In hindsight, the events of 1956 likely helped the DRVN leadership in Hanoi close ranks and move forward even more resolutely with their socialist revolutionary agenda in both North and South Vietnam.

By mid-1957, communist forces in the South had begun to fight back against the Ngô Đình Diệm government rather than surrendering. Lê Duẩn and the Regional Party Committee in the South had given their rank and file the order to organize small-scale armed assaults on military posts and to conduct terrorist activities such as assassinations and abductions of local government officials and sympathizers. From May 1957 to May 1958, one estimate put the number of communist assassinations of local officials at 700.²⁰ When the Soviet Union floated a proposal to admit both North and South Vietnam to the United Nations, DRVN leaders immediately rejected it.²¹ The path to revolution in the South was unclear, but Hanoi would not countenance any step that might help turn the 17th parallel into a permanent boundary. Unification of the country under VWP aegis remained the party’s ultimate goal.

Waging Revolution on Two Fronts, 1958–60

During the late 1950s, DRVN leaders remained preoccupied with the changes and tensions that continued to ripple through the communist world. In China, Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward in 1958 with the goal of overtaking Great Britain in industrial production in fifteen years. Mao also sought to turn the entire countryside into large-scale collective farms in the shortest time possible. Mao had misgivings about Khrushchev’s policies of de-Stalinization and détente, and his clash with Khrushchev over various issues led Moscow to reduce Soviet aid to China. Despite Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful coexistence, East–West relations remained tense, with confrontations in West Berlin and in the Taiwan Strait. In the latter episode, China bombarded islands controlled by Taiwan for several weeks, leading to a formal US promise to defend Taiwan and the Eisenhower administration’s threat to use nuclear weapons against China.

Following Mao’s lead in China, North Vietnam enthusiastically launched campaigns to collectivize its agriculture and nationalize trade and industry (and would achieve these goals by 1960).²² Both campaigns would prove to be economically disastrous, but they helped the government have better, if not absolute, control over food and manpower in the countryside. They also strengthened the state’s control over families and individuals as the government became the only source of employment and livelihood for most urban and rural North Vietnamese.

In early 1959, amid these economic and political changes, the party met and approved Resolution 15, which laid out a new strategy for the Southern Revolution involving both political and military struggles. Based on social class analysis and noting that support for peace and neutrality had increased among Southern intellectuals and “national capitalists,” the party ordered the preparations for creating a united front tasked with assembling the largest possible class coalition to lead the political struggle for peace, neutrality, and national unity. Under the party’s close but secret supervision, the ultimate goal of this front was to socially isolate and politically challenge the Saigon government. Militarily, the party authorized offensive operations by small units within local areas. The Politburo also approved sending Southern regroupees back to the South, and dispatching supplies and funds to accelerate the Southern revolution.²³ A separate measure provided stepped-up military support for the Pathet Lao to engage the Royal Lao Government’s forces.²⁴ As with the 1956 decision, the party endorsed a graduated escalation of the war in the South within certain limits while continuing the ambitious economic agenda in the North. The limits were mostly imposed by the Soviet Union and China, but both gradually came around to endorse or acquiesce in Hanoi’s policy of escalation by 1960.²⁵

Hanoi’s decision in early 1959 gave the Southern Revolution a great boost, intensifying violence in many parts of the South.²⁶ The revolution now received much greater attention from Hanoi. Over the next two years, Southern communist forces were joined by more than four thousand fresh fighters as well as commanders trained in conventional warfare who infiltrated from the North.²⁷ The number of assassinations and abductions nearly doubled to 1,200 between May 1958 and May 1959 from 700 the year before, and doubled again to 2,500 by May 1960.²⁸ In response, the Saigon government enacted the harsh Law of 10/1959 to allow the trials of accused communists by special military tribunals. The Army of the RVN (ARVN) also stepped up military operations to crush the emergent insurgency.²⁹

The conflict in South Vietnam further accelerated in 1960, with the communist side seizing the initiative. In late January 1960, the insurgents launched a successful attack against a South Vietnamese military base in Tây Ninh province. In the same month, communist operatives launched a series of “Concerted Uprisings” (protests backed by armed assaults) in the Mekong Delta. A wave of assassinations swept Long An province, resulting in 26 deaths and terrorizing local officials to the extent that nearly all hamlet chiefs resigned subsequently.³⁰ In response, the Saigon government launched a “Rural Consolidation” campaign, sending cadres to villages in the provinces surrounding Saigon to win farmers’ support through propaganda and civic action programs.³¹ The government also expanded the Republican Youth Movement to recruit and train young members for rural development and security.

From the perspective of Hanoi leaders, several trends began to come together in 1960. The campaigns to collectivize North Vietnam’s agriculture and nationalize trade and industry were drawing to an end with most rural villages now being members of collective farms while all significant urban businesses and enterprises were now under some form of government ownership. Preparations for the 3rd Party Congress were well underway; the congress would meet in September, affirming Lê Duẩn’s leadership and his militant policy as the official party line.³² The congress also approved an ambitious plan to transform North Vietnam’s economy into a “socialist economy” in five years through an emphasis on heavy industry and larger-scale collective farms.

Meanwhile, Ngô Đình Diệm’s government in the South seemed less invincible than before. On April 26, on the very day that South Korea’s President Rhee Syngman resigned in the face of massive street protests, a group of South Vietnam’s prominent political dissidents and opposition politicians made public their manifesto calling on Ngô Đình Diệm to enact political reforms to curb corruption and abuses of power and to restore public trust and military effectiveness. The government ignored this manifesto (called the Caravelle Manifesto for the hotel in downtown Saigon where the group met), but later arrested a few who were suspected of being involved in a failed coup by several military units in November that year.³³

Hanoi’s decisions about how to proceed in the South during 1960 took place amid increased bickering within the Soviet bloc, and the escalation of the Sino-Soviet dispute.³⁴ Leaders of China and Albania disagreed with Soviet policies of peaceful coexistence, and conflict broke out into the open after Khrushchev cut off Soviet assistance to both. North Vietnamese leaders were internally critical of Khrushchev but did not support the split of the bloc into opposing camps.³⁵ Hồ Chí Minh sought to mediate between the two “elder brothers,” impressing on them the need for socialist solidarity to confront imperialism. At the same time, North Vietnam began to quietly distance itself from the Soviet Union while moving closer to China. Beijing’s stand on strategy for world revolution was more appealing to Hanoi even though at that point China still advised North Vietnam to maintain the status quo in the South.³⁶

As DRVN leaders struggled to preserve brotherly relations with both communist giants, the Sino-Soviet conflict became a blessing in disguise for them by creating fierce competition between Beijing and Moscow for the allegiance of other communist parties around the world. This competition was to benefit Hanoi: Even though neither Beijing nor Moscow by themselves would have favored the escalation of war in South Vietnam, aid would continue to stream into North Vietnam from both powers in service of Hanoi’s war goals.

In approving Resolution 15 in early 1959, the party planned to create a multiclass united front to lead the political struggle in the South. That plan was carefully developed throughout 1959 and 1960. Applying class analysis to study the unfolding revolutions in Iraq (1958) and Cuba (1959), the party believed that their bourgeois leadership explained why imperialist powers did not intervene to save the Hashemite monarchy or the Batista dictatorship.³⁷ Given the current military balance still favoring imperialist forces worldwide and in Southeast Asia, party leaders reasoned, a bourgeoisie-led revolution in South Vietnam would help avoid their intervention, increasing its chance of success. When it was proclaimed in December 1960, the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF) was in fact led by lawyers, doctors, engineers, and teachers rather than by workers and peasants. It championed neutralism so as not to pose a direct threat to the regional allies of imperialist forces. Directed from within by Hanoi-appointed leaders, the NLF assumed the cover of an independent entity to help the DRVN maintain the fiction that it still upheld the Geneva Accords and avoid open defiance of the Soviet Union.³⁸

The Revolution at a Crossroads, 1961–2

With regular supply and close supervision by Hanoi, the Southern insurgency grew rapidly after mid-1959. It is estimated that about 5,000 troops (mostly former regroupees) from the North were sent South secretly during 1959–60, equipped with modern weapons. During 1961–2, that number quadrupled to nearly 20,000.³⁹ By the end of 1963, more than 40,000 soldiers, including over 2,000 mid-ranking and higher-level cadres and technical personnel, had been sent South from the North. The fresh troops made up 50 percent of insurgent forces and 80 percent of their commanding officers. During 1961–3, 165,000 weapons had been shipped to the South via Laos, including artillery pieces, mortars, and anti-aircraft guns, but not including other kinds of military equipment.⁴⁰ Roads were not the only venues for North Vietnam to infiltrate the South. After two trial shipments in 1960, a special operation was established to open a sea route for more large-scale transportation of weapons from North to South Vietnam. The first such shipment was successfully made in late 1962. By the end of 1963, twenty-five shiploads of weapons had been delivered to insurgents deep in the Mekong Delta, totaling 1,430 tons of weapons, including many heavy pieces.⁴¹

The insurgency was also quite successful in recruiting new soldiers and cadres by tapping into rural resentment against the Saigon government. By 1961 insurgents had become increasingly bold, deploying battalion-sized units to attack district capitals and ambush government troops. In the first half of the year, clashes with insurgents caused the ARVN to suffer 1,500 casualties, while communists assassinated or abducted more than 2,000 officials and government supporters.⁴² The ARVN scored many victories but they were spread thin in defensive positions while the communist forces were growing rapidly.⁴³ The trend was alarming for Saigon but even Hanoi did not expect any victory soon as insurgent forces were still much weaker than the ARVN.

From Hanoi’s perspective, the undeclared war was going well and the initiative was on their side as the insurgency continued to expand and the government became more isolated. By October 1961 Hanoi announced the formation of the People’s Revolutionary Party as a member of the NLF in the South – ostensibly an independent southern communist party but in reality merely the southern office of the Vietnam Workers’ Party, set up so that Hanoi could more easily recruit members for the party among southern activists and guerrillas while allowing the Southern command greater tactical flexibility in directing the revolution. In captured documents of the Southern office at the time, there were talks of a “general uprising” and a “high tide” of revolution in the near future in the South, indicating a new, higher level of confidence in late 1961.⁴⁴ For the moment, VWP leaders seemed unwilling to deploy regular units of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) to the South. Such a move risked provoking Chinese and Soviet objections, as well as the possibility of a US invasion of the North.

VWP leaders also intervened in Laos to support their Pathet Lao client there while upgrading the mountainous route for the faster transportation of men and materiel from North to South Vietnam.⁴⁵ The situation in Laos had become increasingly favorable for the communist camp, with the neutralist Prince Souvanna Phouma collaborating with the communist Pathet Lao backed by North Vietnam.⁴⁶ Moscow and Beijing joined Hanoi in Laos, supporting communist and neutralist forces. Since 1959 the United States and Thailand had provided aid to the right-wing forces under Phoumi Nosavan that controlled the Vientiane government. But this government remained unable to stop the communist advance. US President John Kennedy, after taking office in January 1961, briefly considered sending American troops to Laos. But he soon decided to cut a deal with Khrushchev under which Laos would be “neutralized.” At the same time, Kennedy stepped up military aid and advice to the Diệm government’s counterinsurgency efforts.

A nationalist to his core, Ngô Đình Diệm was not keen on permitting American combat troops to enter his country. While he stalled on American recommendations for political reforms and reorganizing the ARVN chain of command, his government welcomed US expansion of military aid to Vietnam, including more American advisors to the ARVN, funding for training ARVN Special Forces and for the expansion of South Vietnam’s Civil Guard, support for the just-inaugurated Strategic Hamlet Program, and new weapons systems for the ARVN such as aircrafts, boats, helicopters, and armored personnel carriers (M-113s).⁴⁷ The Strategic Hamlet Program played a key role in Saigon’s strategy of pacification. It had evolved from the thinking of RVN leaders about rural security and governance. Earlier rural development schemes, including land reform, self-defense corps, and “agrovilles,” either did not go far enough, were poorly funded, or took a top-down approach that ended up alienating farmers. By mid-1961, province-level experiments with “combat hamlets” based on self-government and self-defense convinced the government to take the program to the national level.

As Washington and Saigon worked out a fresh approach to counterinsurgency, Hanoi leaders sought to maintain their ties to both Moscow and Beijing. The need for economic aid was especially pressing. Phạm Vӑn Đồng traveled to multiple communist bloc countries in the summer of 1961 to request aid for North Vietnam’s first Five-Year Plan, which included provisions for building eighty new factories with foreign support. This ambitious plan seemed oblivious to the precarious economic situation in North Vietnam in 1961 when bad weather created a severe shortage of food.⁴⁸ Collectivization and nationalization of industry and trade brought neither higher labor productivity nor actual economic growth. Economic hardships were generating widespread social dissatisfaction, according to Western diplomats based in Hanoi.⁴⁹ While DRVN leaders had no intention of backing away from their plans to build socialism in the North, the continued internal turmoil would increasingly impact their calculations about what to do in the South.

During 1962, the economic crisis in the North intensified while the tide of battle in the South shifted against communist forces. By early 1962, new weapons, training, and the assistance of US advisors greatly boosted the performance of the now much larger ARVN and Civil Guard. Insurgent units were terrified by the United States-supplied M-113 armored vehicles and helicopters that offered the ARVN much greater mobility across the Mekong Delta. Within months the trend of communist advance since 1959 had been reversed, with government forces able to rapidly extend their control over the countryside at the expense of the communists.⁵⁰

The Saigon government attributed its success not only to military victories but also to its Strategic Hamlet Program. With advice and aid from the United States, Saigon made the Strategic Hamlet Program a top priority of national policy in early 1962, planning to establish tens of thousands of such hamlets throughout the country within a few years. By September 1962, the government reported that more than 3,200 such hamlets had been created, with thousands more under construction. As a nation-building measure that aimed to foster popular backing for the Diệm government’s “Personalist Revolution,” the Strategic Hamlet Program had yet to demonstrate its viability as a long-term nation-building initiative. But insofar as the hamlets enabled the government to separate the population from the insurgents, the program created significant problems for communist forces. Although the rapid expansion of the program would eventually expose its weaknesses, its initial effects helped the government to regain the initiative during 1962.⁵¹ In Long An province, for example, under the capable ARVN officer Nguyễn Viết Thanh, the tide turned spectacularly as the number of surrenders increased from fourteen in 1961 to 332 in 1963.⁵²

For Hanoi, the setbacks encountered in the South were at least partly offset by gains in Laos. After a year of negotiation while fighting, the Geneva Conference on Laos convened in mid-1962 and produced the Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos, which was signed by all international participants, including the Soviet Union, China, the United States, the two Vietnams, Cambodia, Thailand, and a few others. While foreign powers agreed not to intervene in Laos and to respect its neutrality, the three fighting Laotian factions, including neutralists, communists, and anticommunists, agreed to form a coalition government under Phouma.

The main foreign signatory parties to the Declaration came to the agreement from different standpoints.⁵³ On the US side, Kennedy was reluctant to send ground troops into mountainous Laos. He also calculated that Moscow would honor the agreement.⁵⁴ Khrushchev and Mao, on the other hand, did not want to push Washington into direct intervention in Laos, possibly precipitating another Korean War-style conflict or the use of nuclear weapons. In contrast, Saigon staunchly opposed the agreement, both because of its distrust of Hanoi and its fear that a deal on Laos would pave the way for the neutralization of South Vietnam. Ngô Đình Diệm’s government only signed the Declaration after Kennedy provided personal assurances of unwavering US support for South Vietnam as well as its rejection of neutrality for his country.

For Hanoi, the promotion of neutrality was perfectly in keeping with their overall strategic objectives. Hồ Chí Minh, Lê Duẩn, and their comrades had earlier realized that their Lao client, the Pathet Lao, did not have the military strength to take control of the whole country, even with the assistance of the 12,000 North Vietnamese troops already there in 1961. Within the framework of the agreement, DRVN leaders certainly hoped the Pathet Lao would over time be able to dominate the coalition government. In the meantime, they planned to continue to use Lao territory to send men and supplies to South Vietnam. As the military situation and revolutionary prospects in South Vietnam seemed to dim, and as the United States continued to deepen its commitments, the idea of a neutral South Vietnam became increasingly attractive. Such an arrangement could offer a solution to the recent setbacks in the South: if the United States could be removed from the scene, the path would be clear for the NLF to prevail in a political–military struggle against anticommunist forces.⁵⁵

Hanoi leaders also viewed alternatives to a negotiated agreement at Geneva as less appealing. If the conflict in Laos continued, it could lead to direct American intervention there. As the chief patron of the Pathet Lao, North Vietnam might be blamed for overturning the Soviet policy of peaceful coexistence. Hanoi leaders also feared that the deployment of US troops to Laos would heighten the chances of an American attack on North Vietnam. In contrast, the Geneva agreement would prevent the United States from legally intervening in Laos in the future, while the DRVN’s continuing illegal operations in Laos would be easy to cover up. For Hanoi, the deal struck at Geneva lowered the risks and also offered a potential path out of the stalemate.

The 1962 agreement did not end the military conflict in Laos. Within months, the coalition government collapsed when it tried to integrate the forces of the three factions. While the United States withdrew most of its personnel in Laos, it continued to provide training and assistance to ethnic minority groups in southern Laos to help protect the western flank of South Vietnam. Hanoi continued to support its Pathet Lao client, which launched several military campaigns to seize full control of eastern Laos and provide protection for the dispatch of supply and manpower to South Vietnam (Figure 17.1). North Vietnam’s documents suggest that Lê Duẩn might have read Kennedy’s decisions on Laos as a sign of his determination to limit US involvement in Indochina.⁵⁶ This perception was critical, insofar as it led Lê Duẩn to conclude that the danger of a US invasion of North Vietnam was waning, despite Kennedy’s tough talk.

Figure 17.1 Lao and Vietnamese porters carrying supplies south along the Hồ Chí Minh Trail to resupply the insurgency in the South (c. 1963).

Source: Pictures from History / Contributor / Universal Images Group / Getty Images.

“Gifts from Heaven” for the Revolution

In early January 1963, communist forces claimed a high-profile victory at Ấp Bắc in the Mekong Delta, when two NLF battalions inflicted heavy losses on a much larger ARVN force backed by US-supplied helicopters and M-113s.⁵⁷ This was the first battle in which the insurgents exploited the government’s shortcomings in intelligence collection, equipment design (including the lack of a shield for gunners on the M-113), and tactical mistakes in the deployment of armored vehicles and helicopters. As tension was increasing between the Diệm and Kennedy governments, the small clash at Ấp Bắc came to play an outsized role in the course of the war.⁵⁸ Following a year of defeats at the hands of the ARVN, Ấp Bắc boosted the sagging morale of communist soldiers. It also created serious public relations problems for Saigon as some American advisors and reporters cited the defeat as evidence of deeper weaknesses within Ngô Đình Diệm’s regime.

While the security situation in South Vietnam in 1963 was largely unchanged from the previous year, international events and political developments in Saigon contributed to Hanoi leaders’ decision to launch an all-out war in the South late in the year. In hindsight, the decision was the result of three interlocking trends. The first was a sharp intensification of Sino-Soviet tensions after a lull in 1962.⁵⁹ This was the result of the Soviet Union’s withholding support for China in the Sino-Indian border war, Khrushchev’s decision to withdraw nuclear missiles from Cuba over the objection of Cuban leaders, and the signing of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union – all of which took place in 1962. China denounced all three Soviet policies as attempts to appease the imperialist camp and as acts of betrayal to the interests of world revolution. As Beijing’s rhetoric escalated, China became more supportive of radical movements around the world, including Hanoi’s war in South Vietnam.⁶⁰ In May 1963, Vice Chairman Liu Shaoqi visited North Vietnam and promised that China would defend the North in the case of an American invasion. Even though Hanoi did not accept Beijing’s invitation to join a new communist camp led by China, China was prepared to back North Vietnam’s request for greater support of the Southern revolution.

The second trend was the ascendancy of a pro-China militant line in Hanoi.⁶¹ Within the North Vietnamese leadership, Lê Duẩn and Nguyễn Chí Thanh had expressed their disapproval of Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful coexistence since 1960. Encouraged by Chinese denunciations of Soviet policies during 1962 and Beijing’s promise to support Hanoi’s war in the South, they continued to pressure their VWP comrades to adopt the Chinese position. But other party leaders continued to trust the Soviet Union as the leader of world revolution. The conflict between the militants and their opponents concerned not only the question of strategy in the South but also the plans for economic development in the North. The militants sought an autarkic economy relying on the mobilization of labor in the Maoist style of the Great Leap Forward. Their critics, in contrast, wanted North Vietnam to develop its economy in close coordination with the Soviet Union and the more technologically advanced members of the communist bloc.

The third trend was the rising political dissent and disenchantment with Ngô Đình Diệm’s government among Saigon elites and within the South Vietnamese military.⁶² The government had become increasingly authoritarian since 1960, which created even greater resentment. In the summer of 1963, an incident in Huế in which government security forces killed eight Buddhist protestors led to massive protests in Southern cities against Ngô Đình Diệm’s rule. This led to the resignation of many high-ranking officials and encouraged ambitious military officers to organize coups. The protests raised the pressure on the Kennedy administration to demand that Saigon carry out political reforms. When Ngô Đình Diệm refused, top American officials through the CIA lent their support to the disloyal generals in Saigon to stage a coup against Ngô Đình Diệm. The coup took place on November 1, 1963, and Ngô Đình Diệm and his brother Ngô Đình Nhu were assassinated the next day.⁶³

Lê Duẩn believed that a new window of opportunity had opened with the fall of the Diệm regime. At a central party plenum in December 1963, he called for a new and risky strategy for the South. After fierce debate, the plenum endorsed a resolution in favor of the new approach. Known simply as “Resolution 9,” the measure acknowledged that the coup was an American attempt to find a more pliable South Vietnamese leader.⁶⁴ It also acknowledged the possibility that the United States might deploy its own ground troops to Vietnam in the near future.⁶⁵ Yet the resolution considered such a scenario unlikely, since the United States was also concerned about the risk of being sucked into a protracted large-scale war in Vietnam, which could weaken US ability to intervene elsewhere in the world.⁶⁶ In light of this, the party called for a wave of attacks throughout the South to demonstrate communist resolve and to raise American fears of being drawn into a quagmire. Even if the United States was not deterred, the offensive would prepare the Southern Revolution to face the American military. The resolution’s authors also calculated that their forces might quickly overwhelm the South Vietnamese army, preempting an American intervention.

Hanoi lost little time in putting its new strategy into action. In South Vietnam, communist forces adopted a three-pronged strategy that included attacks on strategic hamlets; military campaigns at the regiment level in the Central Highlands, coastal central Vietnam, and western Saigon, with the goal of destroying large units of the Saigon military; and strikes on prominent targets in Southern cities designed to generate profound psychological shock and fear. Those targets included both people (especially Americans) and key facilities (airports, ships, depots, and military bases). In support of these goals, efforts were made to speed up the transfer of soldiers and weapons to the South to aid Southern communists. During 1964, nearly 9,000 Northern troops marched south. In late 1964 alone, more than 4,000 tons of weapons in eighty-eight shiploads were transported to South Vietnam, an increase of nearly three times the entire amount of shipment from 1961 to 1963.⁶⁷ Hanoi also sent General Nguyễn Chí Thanh and a number of high-ranking military commanders to the South to take direct command of the NLF and the growing numbers of PAVN forces operating there. Having opted for a strategy designed to win an early military victory, Lê Duẩn and his comrades did not expect to win by half measures, or by waging protracted warfare of the guerrilla variety. They were going for broke, and the stakes for their state and party could not have been higher.

Conclusion

The Geneva Conference in mid-1954 ended France’s war in Indochina but did not resolve the conflict between the two Vietnamese states with rival claims for sovereignty over all of Vietnam. In the North, class warfare proceeded as leaders of the DRVN extended their land revolution to the newly gained territory to consolidate their power. In the South, forces loyal to the newly appointed Premier Ngô Đình Diệm fought street battles against the militias of religious sects that were secretly supported by communist forces. Diệm’s early success set into motion a dynamic process that eventually led to the escalations of the early 1960s and ultimately to the American phase of the war (1965–73).

In hindsight, the dominant theme that shaped the DRVN’s path to renewed war during 1954–63 was its leaders’ refusal to give up their dream of a single communist state that would rule all of Vietnam. They maintained this aspiration even when their superpower patrons seemed willing to compromise or abandon it; they also persisted despite continued hardship and setbacks in their efforts to build socialism in the North. In the long run, Hanoi’s actions would draw three of the world’s most powerful nations – the United States, China, and the Soviet Union – into the escalating conflict. This is not to say that the interventions of foreign powers in the Vietnam War were an automatic or inevitable response to the DRVN’s decision for war in South Vietnam. The transformation of the Vietnam War into a major global conflict in the mid-1960s was also profoundly shaped by the domestic and global agendas of American, Chinese, and Soviet leaders. Nevertheless, Hanoi’s decisions for war still loom large. For the leaders of the Vietnam Workers’ Party, the Vietnam War was ultimately a war of choice, waged in the service of their political ambitions.

18 Laos between Two Wars

Vatthana Pholsena

Introduction

During the early years of the French Indochina War, it appeared that the country and people of Laos might escape the worst of the violence that engulfed other parts of French Indochina. Prince Phetsarath, a central figure in the emergence of Lao nationalism, proclaimed the independence of Laos on September 15, 1945, less than two weeks after Hồ Chí Minh had done the same for Vietnam. But as Hồ’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) and France drifted toward full-scale war during 1946, Laos appeared to take a different path. After colonial forces reoccupied Laos in the spring of 1946, Lao leaders opted to negotiate with France to gain a measure of self-government. A constitution was promulgated on May 11, 1947, paving the way for Laos to become a constitutional monarchy and an Associated State within the French Union in July 1949. King Sisavang Vong’s proclamation in 1948 of an amnesty for nationalists who had fled the country led to the dissolution of the government-in-exile of the Lao Issara (the Lao independence movement) in October 1949 and the return of most of its members to Laos. A formal transfer of powers to the Royal Lao Government (RLG) was signed on February 6, 1950, although the French retained key prerogatives, including control over internal security and extraterritorial jurisdiction. The RLG’s first government was formed in the same month. The United States and Britain swiftly accorded diplomatic recognition to the Kingdom of Laos the day following the transfer of powers.

In the end, however, the war did not spare Laos. In April 1953, the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) invaded northeastern Laos in April 1953 in support of their Lao allies, the Pathet Lao (the generic term for the Lao revolutionary movement). Under the able command of General Võ Nguyên Giáp, Hồ’s forces captured the entire province of Huaphan and occupied areas of Phongsaly and Xieng Khuang – a territory of more than 1,500 square miles (4,000 square kilometers). For the Pathet Lao, these moves provided direct access to DRVN territory and resources and consolidated their control over a revolutionary base area isolated from the rest of Laos by mountainous terrain.

These base areas were equally important to the DRVN. The creation of a “liberated zone” in northern and eastern Laos along the highly permeable Vietnamese frontier allowed the PAVN to link its main base areas in the far north of Vietnam to other DRVN-controlled areas in the central region of the country, thus creating what Christopher Goscha aptly describes as a vast “sickle-shaped” crescent of contiguous territory wrapped around the Tonkin Delta. The Spring 1953 invasion thus revealed the enormous strategic importance of eastern Laos for DRVN leaders and military commanders.¹

Through their own prisms, French and American officials also perceived the strategic significance of Laos. It was in part to defend the northern region of Laos (with whom the French government had recently signed a mutual defense treaty in October 1953) that General Navarre, the penultimate French commander-in-chief of the armed forces in Indochina, decided to confront the DRVN on the Vietnamese side of the Lao border. He did so by concentrating French forces at the outpost of Điện Biên Phủ, located nearly 200 miles (320 kilometers) northwest of Hanoi. The PAVN siege of the French garrison there began on March 13, 1954. It lasted for nearly two months and ended with the surrender of the French troops on May 7. The following day, the Geneva Conference opened, leading to a ceasefire and the ostensibly temporary partition of Vietnam, as well as confirmation of the independence of the kingdoms of Laos and Cambodia.

In the aftermath of Geneva, the United States sought to transform both Laos and the Saigon-based Republic of Vietnam (RVN) into anticommunist “bastions.” Such a policy, American leaders hoped, could save Thailand, if not the whole of Southeast Asia, from a communist takeover. The salience of the “domino theory,” along with geographical realities, competing Lao nationalist forces, the Vietnamese communists’ transnational military planning, superpower Cold War politics, and other aspects of US policy in Southeast Asia, are essential to the understanding of Laos’ civil war and its long descent into a vortex of political instability and violence beginning in the late 1950s. Nevertheless, this story is more than just a tragic tale of an underdeveloped country engulfed in a conflict over which it had little control. During the crucial decade of 1954–64, between the end of the French Indochina War and the escalation of the Vietnam War, Lao groups and leaders played key roles in Indochinese politics. In these years, Laos was the focus of international negotiations that briefly raised hopes for peace; it was also the site of the construction of new states and its citizens experienced unprecedented social, cultural, and economic changes. Laos and the Lao people thus helped to write the fate of all of Indochina, even as they also shaped the interventions of the United States and other foreign powers in the conflict that became known as the Vietnam War.

The Geneva Accords and the Road to a Coalition Government

At the beginning of the Geneva Conference on May 8, 1954, two Lao parties claimed national sovereignty: the French-backed RLG and the Pathet Lao resistance government, which had been created with DRVN support. The latter were led by Prince Souphanouvong, a member of the Luang Phrabang royal family and a French-trained engineer later known as “the Red Prince.” In 1949, Souphanouvong’s faction of the Lao Issara chose to continue the armed struggle against the French in alliance with the Việt Minh. On August 13, 1950, the prince convened a congress in northern Vietnam that proceeded, with the encouragement of the DRVN, to elect a new resistance government with Souphanouvong as its leader. A subsequent meeting held in November 1950 provided the Pathet Lao with a new political movement, the Neo Lao Issara (the Free Laos Front), modeled on the Việt Minh.

The DRVN failed in its quest to have separate delegations for the resistance governments in Laos and Cambodia represented in Geneva. Instead, the RLG was recognized as the legitimate government of the country, and the kingdom’s independence and territorial integrity were affirmed. Nevertheless, the powers that endorsed the accords – the Soviet Union, France, the United Kingdom, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) – agreed that the Pathet Lao should continue to occupy the two eastern provinces of Phongsaly and Huaphan and should be allowed to regroup troops in those areas pending a negotiated agreement on their political, administrative, and military integration into the RLG system. In allowing the administration of these two provinces by the Pathet Lao, the Geneva Accords implicitly endorsed the group’s transition from a localized guerrilla force to a national political movement, thus conferring a measure of legitimacy, despite the lack of official recognition as a government.

The Geneva Accords also stated that Laos should neither participate in a military alliance nor allow foreign powers to establish bases on its territory unless it came under direct foreign threat. Foreign military forces – that is, French troops and pro-DRVN Vietnamese “volunteers” – were to withdraw from the country within four months, although up to 1,500 French soldiers were allowed to stay for the purpose of training the Royal Lao Army (RLA). But in practice, these provisions of the accords remained hollow. Enforcement mechanisms were nonexistent, nor were there sufficient personnel on the ground to verify and control foreign military interference, particularly in the remote areas of eastern Laos. Consequently, in the following years, both the RLG and the Pathet Lao continued to strengthen their military forces with the disguised support of the United States and the DRVN, respectively.

Souvanna Phouma’s Reconciliation Policy

The Geneva-mandated division of Laos was similar to that imposed on Vietnam: a territorial partition that ended the fighting but failed to establish the conditions for lasting peace. Vietnam’s division into nearly equal-sized northern and southern “regoupment zones” reflected the new balance of power in Indochina – the United States’ determination to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam mirrored the DRVN’s commanding military and political position in the North. The envisioned process of reunification of both Laos and Vietnam was vaguely defined in the Final Declaration at Geneva. But while the Ngô Đình Diệm government rejected consultations with the DRVN as proposed in the Geneva Accords (the State of Vietnam, led by Bảo Đại and Diệm, had refused to sign the accords) the leadership of the RLG took a different approach. For the moderates within the RLG, the integration of the Pathet Lao into the national body was critical to restoring the kingdom’s territorial and political unity. Prince Souvanna Phouma, the RLG’s most important leader and a cosmopolitan member of the Luang Phrabang royal family, embodied the reconciliation policy.² As prime minister, he advocated for the integration of the Pathet Lao leaders and soldiers into the RLG’s political system. Souvanna Phouma believed that his policy would pull the Pathet Lao away from the DRVN and boost the prospect of a neutral, nonaligned Laos. He was also convinced that Souphanouvong (who happened to be his half-brother) was not a communist and that all Pathet Lao leaders and supporters should be treated as fellow nationalists. Unbeknownst to Souvanna Phouma and to most Lao, Souphanouvong was in fact one of the earliest members of the Lao Communist Party. Ideology mattered more to the Red Prince than his half-brother believed.

In Souvanna Phouma’s view, Laos could not afford to openly take sides in the Global Cold War. He deemed neutralism the best policy to ensure minimal interference from outside powers and thereby the country’s peace and stability. More specifically, his foreign policy aimed to reduce DRVN and PRC involvement in Lao affairs as a means of defusing the threat posed by the Pathet Lao. The prince’s visits to Beijing and Hanoi in August 1956 reflected this strategy. Mao Zedong reassured Souvanna Phouma of China’s support for his neutralist line and policy of reconciliation with the Pathet Lao. In fact, what mattered most to Chinese (and Vietnamese) leaders was the particular form of Laos’ neutrality – or, as Zhou Enlai put it to Souvanna Phouma, “[not allowing] the United States to enter [Lao] territory.”³ Still, the second half of the 1950s seemed to offer favorable conditions for pursuing a neutralist course. In the wake of the Bandung Conference in April 1955, leaders of newly postcolonial states (including India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Burma, and Sri Lanka) envisioned an alternative international order that leaned neither to the Soviet nor to the American side and rejected Cold War ideological binaries.

Negotiations between the RLG and the Pathet Lao dragged on, however, hampered by suspicions on both sides. A government headed by Katay Don Sasorith, a prominent conservative nationalist, led the country between November 1954 and March 1956 and took a harder line toward the Pathet Lao. PL leaders demanded treatment as an equal partner and assurances that their armed forces and political representation would not be dissolved once they had been reintegrated into the national fold. The irony was that as Souvanna Phouma strove for the admission of Souphanouvong and his cohorts into the Kingdom of Laos’ national community, the Pathet Lao worked to strengthen its separate ideological foundations and political structures. The organization’s political growth reached a milestone on March 22, 1955, when the Lao People’s Party (LPP) was created in total secrecy. Kaysone Phomvihane became its first General Secretary. With the formation of a new (and clandestine) Communist Party in Laos, the Pathet Lao completed its conversion to a fully orthodox communist-dominated organization in the image of the existing Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP).

Nevertheless, Souvanna Phouma’s reconciliation policy found an unexpected ally in the DRVN. Vietnamese communist leaders encouraged the Pathet Lao to accept Souvanna Phouma’s proposals after the latter regained the position of prime minister in August 1957.⁴ There were several reasons for the DRVN’s conciliatory attitude. First, Hanoi, preoccupied by its own problems with agrarian reform in North Vietnam, was advocating for “peaceful political struggle” in the South to achieve the reunification of Vietnam. Second, the DRVN’s covert support to the Pathet Lao continued, including the maintenance of a significant presence in northeastern Laos in the form of hundreds of “advisors” who stayed behind rather than withdrawing as required by the Geneva Accords. By late 1956, therefore, the DRVN was sufficiently confident in the political and military viability of their Lao allies to believe that they could stand their ground in a coalition government with the RLG and expand their influence more effectively through peaceful negotiations. Last and most important, Hanoi attentively watched the negotiations between the two Lao parties in the hope that the Lao neutralization example might be transferable to the Republic of Vietnam.⁵ For a short while, the threat of military conflict receded in Laos.

The Vientiane Agreements – the first of three coalition agreements during the life of the RLG – were endorsed in a joint communiqué by Souvanna Phouma and Souphanouvong on November 2, 1957. Demobilization of the Pathet Lao forces began soon after. Some 6,000 fighters returned to their villages, while the 1,500 Pathet Lao officers and soldiers chosen for integration into the Royal Army were grouped into two battalions. On November 18, Prince Souphanouvong handed over the two northern provinces of Huaphan and Phongsaly to Crown Prince Savang Vatthana, representing the king. Twelve years after Prince Phetsarath’s declaration of independence, Lao unity appeared within reach. Despite weakening its initial demands, the Pathet Lao had reason to be satisfied since the accords enhanced its political standing. It had two ministers in the coalition government – Souphanouvong as minister for planning, reconstruction, and urbanization, and Phoumi Vongvichit as minister for religion and fine arts. In addition, the Neo Lao Hak Xat (Lao Patriotic Front), the LPP’s overt political arm founded in January 1956, was entitled to campaign as a nationally recognized party across the country in general elections.

American Opposition to Reconciliation and the RLG’s Shift to the Right

The Government of National Union headed by Souvanna Phouma was a setback for the United States, which by the mid-1950s was replacing France as the dominant Western power in Laos. Eisenhower administration officials were deeply skeptical of Souvanna Phouma, whom they believed was naive about Pathet Lao intentions. Washington was thus determined to keep the communists out of the RLG governing system by all means short of direct military intervention. American officials were convinced that the “loss” of Laos would seriously damage the United States’ credibility in Southeast Asia among its allies vis-à-vis its containment policy against the DRVN and, above all, the PRC, which the United States saw as the main threat to the “Free World” in Asia.

US efforts to undermine the unity government began almost as soon as it was created. The partial success of leftist candidates in the supplementary parliamentary elections of May 1958 in the provinces of Huaphan and Phongsaly provoked a shift to the right within the RLG and in Lao politics in general – a shift that American officials actively encouraged. Washington suspended all economic aid to Laos following the election results, forcing Souvanna Phouma’s resignation and the collapse of the coalition government. The rift deepened in July 1959 when Prince Souphanouvong and fifteen of his comrades were charged with treason and imprisoned in Vientiane. The arrests came after the Pathet Lao’s 2nd Battalion had failed to comply with the RLG’s May order to integrate into the Royal Army and instead had swiftly fled to the DRVN; later in the summer, elements of the 1st Battalion of the Pathet Lao forces also made their escape. The newly appointed US-backed government, headed by General Phoui Sananikone, a rightist leader from Vientiane, declared the Pathet Lao move an act of rebellion for which there could be only a military solution.⁶ As prime minister, Phoui developed closer ties with the United States and Thailand, resulting in an increase of Western economic and military aid.

The American intrigues in Laos coincided with new moves by the DRVN. In January 1959, the DRVN party leadership authorized the use of armed force on a limited scale in the Republic of Vietnam. The new rebellion would subsequently be led by the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF), formally established the following year. In May, PAVN leaders began preparing the Hồ Chí Minh Trail (a complex network of tracks, roads, and rivers that ran through eastern Laos, the Central Highlands of Vietnam, and eastern Cambodia) to supply men, weapons, and other materials to the war effort in South Vietnam.

In July 1959, the United States sent its first counterguerrilla specialists (Army Special Forces units known as “Green Berets”) to organize, train, and equip Lao forces, including Hmong paramilitary units in Xieng Khuang province. These activities were run out of the embassy’s “Program Evaluation Office” – a military mission operating under cover as a civilian aid program. War had not yet returned to Laos, but peace seemed an increasingly doubtful proposition.

Two Competing Nation-State-Building Projects

To fully comprehend the transformational impacts of the Vietnam and Cold Wars in Laos it is critical to broaden the analysis and look beyond the power plays of political elites in Vientiane. In the aftermath of the Geneva Conference, the two governments rushed to consolidate their authority within their respective zones of control. As neither the Pathet Lao nor the RLG had sufficient resources to build new physical and human infrastructure, both entities relied heavily on the support of their foreign allies. The RLG set about constructing the new state, initially with substantial French assistance, then with the massive financial support of the United States.

Although France had formally transferred governing authority to the RLG in February 1950, the state’s sovereignty remained incomplete. Although ministries such as health, education, agriculture and industry, and foreign trade were placed under Lao direction, the French maintained significant control over finance, justice, and defense. Moreover, French personnel (e.g., teachers, doctors, technicians, military instructors) continued to serve in government posts for years after independence, due to the failure of the colonial education system to produce a well-educated workforce in Laos. In the late 1940s, only 400 civil servants and 700 technical cadres were employed by the government; more than 200 French teachers were still teaching in Lao secondary schools in 1965.⁷

The RLG passed a law in 1951 instituting compulsory, free, three-year primary education for all children. More than 95,000 pupils were enrolled in 1,463 primary schools (grades 1–6) by 1958, though this corresponded to only about one-third of the estimated 300,000 students eligible for primary education at the time.⁸ Only Vientiane had a lycée (up to grade 13), and that one school had only been upgraded from a lower-level collège in 1947. Health infrastructure was rudimentary and included just six hospitals (all located in major towns) in 1950.⁹ Transport and communication infrastructure was lacking; in the mid-1950s barely 3,500 miles (5,600 kilometers) of roads (85% of which were unsurfaced) crossed the country.¹⁰ Large-scale industries or commercial agriculture were virtually nonexistent. Most consumer goods were imported from neighbouring Thailand and then sold mainly or exclusively in urban areas, which remained mostly isolated from the rest of the country. Improvements in air transportation put the capital on the regional airline map (though services only included allied nations). By 1959, four international commercial airlines operated flights from Vientiane to Phnom Penh, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Saigon. Royal Lao Air was founded in 1962, serving both domestic and regional destinations.

The country was underdeveloped by the standards of a modern economy, though in the minds of most inhabitants such a yardstick probably meant little. The overwhelming majority of the population were peasants whose livelihood relied on subsistence farming and, in some areas, on small-scale trade. The state in the nominally RLG-controlled regions barely existed in peasants’ daily lives, except through the presence of a teacher and, very occasionally, a nurse staffing a rural dispensary.

In the absence of substantial revenue streams – the taxation system was notably ineffective – and facing rising expenditures, the RLG constantly ran chronic budget deficits and required foreign aid for its economic survival. By the mid-1950s, the United States was by far the largest source of development assistance to Laos. The United States Operations Mission (USOM), the American economic aid program in the country, was launched in January 1955 in Vientiane. It expanded to include a “civilian” military assistance program headed by a Programs Evaluation Office (PEO) set up in December of that year, which operated as a quasi-Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) comparable to that operating in South Vietnam. An actual MAAG would be officially established in Laos in 1961. Between 1955 and 1963 Laos received a higher amount of aid per capita than either the Republic of Vietnam or Cambodia.¹¹ Three-quarters of US aid was used to fund the army and the police. In 1955, the United States provided the entire military and police budgets and oversaw the expansion of the RLA from 15,000 to 25,000 soldiers a year later. Other state institutions received a much smaller share of the funding: aid for development projects (education, rural development) accounted for only about 10% of the total US assistance between 1955 and 1957.¹² These funds were often misdirected, resulting in wasteful and counterproductive projects.

In late 1957, in the run-up to the parliamentary elections, J. Graham Parsons, the US Ambassador to Laos, launched Operation Booster Shot as part of the battle of “winning hearts and minds” in the rural areas. Parsons, who aggressively opposed Souvanna Phouma’s efforts to build a coalition government, believed that “neutralism was synonymous with anti-Americanism.”¹³ He was also fearful that Pathet Lao gains in the elections would hand them the control of rural areas. Parsons’ program lavished more than $3 million on highly visible economic aid projects to villages. But such opportunistic initiatives often backfired, reinforcing in the minds of Lao villagers the reality of their country’s dependence on foreign aid and the United States’ unsubtle influence in Laos. This resentment was readily exploited by the Pathet Lao in its propaganda. The leftist camp’s electoral gains in May 1958 actually reflected a de facto reality: the country was effectively divided between the Vientiane-based RLG backed by the United States, and the Pathet Lao supported by the DRVN. The politicization of the Lao countryside was bluntly described by French officials as a state of pourriture (rot), with zones pourries (contaminated zones) that were Pathet Lao-controlled.¹⁴ No longer an open military conflict, the struggle between the Vientiane regime and the Pathet Lao government morphed into a political contest and, on the ground, a hide-and-seek pursuit of Pathet Lao activists, who remained elusive by blending into the population.

The massive influx of American dollars into a newly independent country with nascent political institutions and basic socioeconomic infrastructure had a corrosive effect. Generous salaries paid to soldiers and police officers (real or on a fictitious payroll) were spent on imported goods that flooded the markets, creating a novel consumer and entertainment economy. There was a surge in the construction of new offices, schools, hotels, movie theaters, embassies, apartments, and houses in Vientiane (often to accommodate newly arrived foreigners). The overall effects were rising inflation and a growing trade deficit. The considerably overvalued Kip, the national currency, was manipulated through exploitation of the black-market exchange rate and import licenses by well-connected businessmen (mostly Chinese, but also including members of the Lao political leadership). This contributed to the expansion of an affluent urban elite in an overwhelmingly materially poor country by the late 1950s.

The impacts of US aid were not limited to the social and economic realms. The influx of dollars also heightened ambitions and deepened divisions among the Lao political elite. In particular, anticommunist politicians and army officers, and others who opportunistically echoed the United States’ Cold War rhetoric, were able to consolidate their power, wealth, and influence by channeling US funding to their networks of clients.

Phoumi Nosavan was one such phu nyai (literally, “big man”). A major general of the RLA from southern Laos, he was a leading member of a staunchly anticommunist and pro-American political organization, the Committee for the Defence of the National Interest (CDNI). Phoumi was firmly backed by the Pentagon and the CIA who saw him as “their man” and the best challenger to Souvanna Phouma’s neutralist line at the end of the 1950s. The United States, with its mighty finances and political maneuvers, helped the army to carve out a central place in Lao politics.

Nevertheless, the interwar period was characterized by a certain optimism born of a sense of living at the beginning of a new era. In the words of a former senior Lao civil servant: “We were so optimistic. Everything was in front of us. The country was peaceful and we felt we could create the world anew.”¹⁵ Public works began on government buildings, roads, and schools. The construction of the National Assembly started in late 1952. A school of public administration, a school of medicine, and a teacher-training school (later to become the National University of Laos) were opened in the late 1950s. Key emblems and institutions of national sovereignty were created in the early 1950s, including the National Police (1951), the National Treasury (1952), the Customs Department (1952), and the National Postal Service (the first Lao stamps were issued in November 1951). In the same period, a Literature Committee – later the Royal Lao Academy – was established. Under its auspices, a Lao-language dictionary by the prominent historian, Maha Sila Viravong, was published, as well as many pieces of traditional Lao literature and books on Lao grammar, religion, and culture. The Kingdom of Laos entered the young community of independent Southeast Asian nation-states eager to bolster their national identities. Laos’ National Games – initiated by Phoumi Nosavan and first organized in 1961 – offered a spectacular and unique stage for the display and performance of national unity (samakki) and progress (charoen) from all the kingdom’s provinces and their athletes.¹⁶ Phoumi was by then the strongman of Laos, wielding power through patronage and the threat of physical violence, but also by crafting images and discourses – however staged and short-lived – of a national leader ruling over a bounded territory and a united people.

The Building of a Party-State and the Making of a “New People”

In addition to military and political training, the Vietnamese communists supported the Pathet Lao forces by means of considerable financial and material assistance. The LPP in the late 1950s had only a few hundred members and limited combat forces; the early growth of the Pathet Lao military and political apparatus was sustained only through the extensive support of the DRVN. After the signing of the Geneva Accords, the Vietnamese left hundreds of “advisors” behind in Phongsaly and Huaphan provinces. They were part of a special military advisory group to aid the Pathet Lao Army known as Đoàn 100 (Group 100) created on July 16, 1954, less than a week before the conclusion of the Geneva negotiations. Đoàn 100 oversaw the transformation of the Pathet Lao into a military and political force strong enough to withstand outside pressure by the late 1950s. The Vietnamese communists never envisaged the Lao Revolution as anything other than a Vietnamese-led effort, since they viewed Indochina as a single battlefield. From Hanoi’s perspective, their Lao and Cambodian comrades had to be guided and led by the Vietnamese if they were to carry out their share of a genuine Indochinese revolution.¹⁷

Đoàn 100 oversaw the creation of infantry, technical, and logistical battalions and the recruitment and training of thousands of Pathet Lao soldiers operating at all levels, from the province down to the village. Basic health infrastructure (i.e., training of medical personnel and construction of provincial hospitals) was developed in the mid-1950s for cadres, military officers, and soldiers, with the assistance of the DRVN. These foundations were expanded in the 1960s and 1970s to provide health services (health facilities, medical schools, village-based basic health care, and so on) for combatants and civilians alike in the “liberated zones” across the country.

Alongside its military forces, the Pathet Lao needed a political apparatus. Between late 1954 and 1957, Đoàn 100 selected and taught hundreds of cadres and military officers via intensive courses in political propaganda, administration, mobilization techniques, and ideological indoctrination in newly built schools in Phongsaly and Huaphan. Some Pathet Lao recruits studied in Vietnamese military and political institutions (albeit in more limited numbers). The top-ranking members of the LPP – Souphanouvong, Kaysone Phomvihane, Nouhak Phoumsavanh, and Sisavath Keobounphanh, among others – all had close ties with the Vietnamese communists that dated back more than a decade. In contrast to the vexed relations between the Vietnamese Workers’ Party and the Communist Party of Kampuchea, no serious divergence seems to have disturbed this partnership.

The return of a hard-line pro-American government in Vientiane in 1959 temporarily marked the end of the “legal [political] struggle” in Laos for the Vietnamese and Lao communist leaders. Pathet Lao leaders – chief among them Kaysone, who was also the commander-in-chief of the Pathet Lao Army – exhorted their troops to strengthen their minds and bodies in order to withstand a protracted armed struggle.¹⁸ Meanwhile, the DRVN upgraded Đoàn 100 to form a new Vietnamese advisory unit, known as Đoàn 959. Based at Na Kay, inside the border of Huaphan, it directed the reinforcement of Pathet Lao political and military structures across eastern Laos.

The communist revolution began in the eastern regions of the country and slowly spread westward, only moving into the lowland and urban zones of the Mekong Valley at the end of the war in the 1970s. The LPP strove to build a new society in the mostly mountainous and less populated areas it controlled, with the construction of a future socialist state forming its leadership’s vision. The communists used appeals, propaganda, and coercion to mobilize and organize civilians to contribute to the war effort as farmers, taxpayers, porters, teachers, and soldiers. In this way they succeeded – albeit slowly and painfully – in building a society that not only fit their wartime needs but could also be incorporated into the future postwar socialist state. After the Geneva Conference, thousands of Pathet Lao recruits traveled to Phongsaly and Huaphan provinces to be trained as students, soldiers, or cadres. The majority of these men and women had humble and ethnic-minority origins, and they were marked by the depth of their devotion to the revolutionary struggle against the Americans and their RLG allies.

In the districts (muang), subdistricts (tasseng), and villages (ban) that lay inside the Pathet Lao “liberated zones,” old officials and elders were abruptly removed and replaced by the “correct” leadership. Revolutionary cadres were determined to stamp out – by violence if necessary – the customs, attitudes, and “superstitious” religious practices of villagers that were deemed to be obstructing the foundation of a socialist society. On the other hand, the Lao revolutionary movement attempted as early as the 1950s to assert its political legitimacy among the population by attracting the support of the Buddhist Sangha (or at least some of its members) for its ideological cause and political and social programs. Prince Souphanouvong and Phoumi Vongvichit were very aware of the political potential of the Sangha and the use of Buddhist symbols. They strove to bring Buddhist and Marxist ideologies together discursively as, in their view, they shared identical principles, including that of intrinsic equality among all individuals.

Education was a high priority for the Pathet Lao. The resistance government of 1950 had included a ministry of education. Contrary to the RLG’s notion of “neutral education,” in the words of Kaysone Phomvihane, education “always aimed to serve the political duties of the Party” by supporting indoctrination and management training, as well as serving as an instrument of class struggle.¹⁹ The education campaign was focused on the spread of basic adult literacy and primary teaching. It was estimated that 10 percent of the adult population was enrolled in the “people’s education” (pasaseuksa) program – teaching both academic and political subjects – in the communist-administered zones in 1969.²⁰ In tandem with the nationalist appeal to fight against the “American imperialists,” the Pathet Lao employed the positive appeal of the promise of education for the young recruits. Makeshift primary schools were built in the liberated districts and provinces wherever possible. Teachers were rapidly trained and sent to the more remote villages to educate an overwhelmingly illiterate population. By the late 1950s, several secondary schools with dormitories had been built and supplied with textbooks. The most promising students were also sent to the DRVN, where they studied in boarding schools (some of which, in the vicinity of Hanoi, were reserved exclusively for hosting Lao children).²¹

The mentality of Pathet Lao recruits, especially the younger ones, was forged by their shared experience with this educational apparatus, as well as by the everyday experience and strains of the liberation struggle. Mayoury Ngaosyvathn, a Lao academic, recalled: “A woman was simultaneously a worker, a member of the militia, a vegetable farmer, and a student or a teacher attending classes, in conformity with the motto, ‘study well and teach well.’”²² Learning together in adversity provided at times the best environment for forging a new community in which Lao individuals of varied ethnic and regional origins felt united around the same cause as never before. Collective education certainly did not produce the same effects on all young students (resentment and evasion were common). Nevertheless, war and revolution in the countryside of eastern Laos offered social mobility to people of diverse ethnic origins and often humble socioeconomic backgrounds, and thereby contributed to their integration into society after the seizure of power by the communists in 1975. From the mid-1950s, a revolutionary Laos was built through the creation of political institutions and military structures, territorial consolidation, and mass mobilization. It also took shape in the minds and imaginations of its followers.

Renewed Civil War and the Crisis of 1959–62

On August 9, 1960, a coup d’état led by Captain Kong Le of the RLA exploded onto the Lao political landscape. The objectives of the young commander of the 2nd Paratroop Battalion were simple, yet daunting: stopping the fighting among the Lao and restoring neutrality and peace to the country. The coup that nobody expected brought Souvanna Phouma back to power after Kong Le called for him to be reinstated as prime minister.

This was not an ordinary putsch. Kong Le was celebrated by Vientiane residents, especially the youth and civil servants, as a savior who stood up to foreign interference and against the greed and corruption that enriched a minority (including army officers, much to the captain’s disgust). Kong Le, for his audacious and idealistic action, entered Lao historical folklore. But his coup left unresolved the perennial frailty of Souvanna Phouma’s government. The Lao statesman’s military power base was never strong, and Phoumi Nosavan (who was defense minister in the deposed cabinet) continued to enjoy the support of most of the military regions’ commanders and had the financial backing of the CIA. Thus, despite Souvanna Phouma’s attempts to accommodate right-wing leaders, none of them joined the new government. The rift between the neutralists and the rightists further worsened after a blockade was imposed on Vientiane by Marshall Sarit Thanarat, Thailand’s prime minister and strongman. The blockade prompted Souvanna Phouma to call on the Soviet Union to airlift fuel and rice supplies to the capital. The Lao government and Moscow established diplomatic relations on October 5, 1960.

A countercoup headed by Phoumi on December 13, 1960, recaptured Vientiane after fierce fighting, resulting in hundreds of casualties and wrecking large parts of the city. Phoumi’s attack forced Kong Le and his soldiers to retreat northward where they established a base on the Plain of Jars. Souvanna Phouma went into exile in Phnom Penh. The United States, United Kingdom, France, and Thailand immediately recognized the new Lao government headed by Prince Boun Oum, from the royal family of Champassak (southern Laos), with Phoumi as his deputy and defense minister. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, China, and the DRVN refused to recognize the new regime and continued to treat Souvanna Phouma as the legitimate leader of Laos. Both the Soviet Union and China – already battling for the leadership of the global communist bloc – strongly protested the right-wing faction’s coup. In late December, a meeting between Kaysone Phomvihane and Kong Le forged a coalition between the neutralists and Pathet Lao troops against Phoumi’s army.²³ Large amounts of Soviet military aid channeled via the DRVN to assist Kong Le’s neutralist troops were, in fact, diverted to support the Pathet Lao armed forces and were soon augmented by supplies from the PRC. Laos had moved to the center of Cold War tensions and attention.

The Great Powers and the Search for a Neutral Laos

The Pathet Lao’s forces and Kong Le’s neutralist troops were far superior combatants to Phoumi’s RLA. In the first few months following the battle of Vientiane, the former seized control of the territories and population of most of northern and eastern Laos. RLA troops fought back, but were unable to stop the Pathet Lao forces, which had been transformed into a powerful regular army by the infusion of Chinese and Soviet weapons and ammunition (Figure 18.1).

Figure 18.1 Royal Lao soldiers prepare a mortar gun to try to stop the advance of communist forces (April 1961).

Source: Rolls Press / Popperfoto / Contributor / Popperfoto / Getty Images.

By contrast, the dismal performance of Phoumi’s RLA (as well as difficult terrain that would have presented a major challenge to US regular forces had they become involved) compelled US President John F. Kennedy, in power since January 1961, to consider diplomatic alternatives to military intervention. The disaster of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 made him even less inclined to engage United States forces in a distant foreign land. Moreover, Washington could not rely on its allies’ support, as the United Kingdom and France rejected the military option. Kennedy was also fearful of provoking Chinese military intervention. Although he had run for office on the promise of a more robust foreign policy that would bolster the United States’ credibility among its allies around the world, Kennedy showed unorthodox flexibility on the diplomatic front. In a dramatic shift from his predecessor’s policy in Laos, he chose the neutralist path out of the crisis and recognized that Souvanna Phouma, ever the man of conciliation, could be part of the political solution.

This is not to deny that Cold War ideological thinking influenced the young president’s strategy in Laos. The Kennedy administration was particularly hostile toward China. By supporting a more neutral Laos, Kennedy hoped to contain China’s – perceived or real – hegemonic ambitions over the whole of Southeast Asia. The US president also continued to fund covert counterinsurgency operations in Laos. In 1959, the CIA had begun to recruit Hmong people who inhabited the highly strategic Plain of Jars in Xieng Khuang province (as well as men from other upland populations, such as the Mien and the Khmu). These fighters would become the nucleus of a new anticommunist army, born of the realization that the RLA would never be an efficient and reliable instrument despite the huge sums of money spent on it.

Kennedy’s diplomacy was encouraged by the Soviet Union’s involvement in Laos in favor of the country’s neutrality. The Soviets’ conciliatory attitude was motivated by their more pressing priority (as well as Kennedy’s) at the time: the status of West Berlin in Europe. The political leadership in both the United States and the Soviet Union were therefore determined to remove Laos as a source of tensions and a potential trigger of armed conflict between the East and the West. On April 24, 1961, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom – the two co-chairs of the 1954 Geneva Conference – issued a joint appeal for a ceasefire and invitations to twelve countries to attend an “International Conference on the Laotian Question” (known as the “Second Geneva Conference”). The conference in Geneva was convened on May 16, 1961, following a provisional ceasefire.

It was one thing, however, for the two superpowers to pledge to be responsible for their respective allies’ cooperation in acquiescing to a coalition government in Laos, but quite another for the DRVN, China, the Pathet Lao, Thailand, and the Lao rightists to actually provide such cooperation. In consequence, negotiations in Geneva dragged on. Washington, through the travails of the US ambassador to Laos and chief negotiator at the conference, W. Averell Harriman, laboriously coerced Phoumi Nosavan – still benefiting from the CIA’s (now unsanctioned) backing – into entering the neutralist government.

Moscow’s limited leverage over the Pathet Lao and the Vietnamese communist forces was evident in the events during the battle of Namtha in May 1962, when the communist troops inflicted a crushing defeat on Phoumi’s 5,000-man army. During his earlier visit to Beijing, Souphanouvong had been urged by Chinese leaders to go on the attack before joining a coalition government because “the final settlement on Laos would be decided by force.”²⁴ In contrast, Moscow, irritated by China’s influence over the Pathet Lao, tried to dissuade Souphanouvong from attacking the town of Namtha. This disagreement reflected the developing Sino-Soviet rift (Mao disapproved of Krushchev’s policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the United States) that grew wider after the end of the Second Geneva Conference. In helping the Pathet Lao, Beijing aimed to roll back the United States’ containment policy against China and to increase its own influence in Southeast Asia. Beijing’s objective – shared with Hanoi – at the Geneva Conference on Laos was to buy time. By using neutralization to help their Lao ally to expand and consolidate its position, PRC and DRVN leaders aimed also to prevent the United States’ use of the territory of Laos as a military base for intervention in Vietnam and Cambodia.

An agreement on a Provisional Government of National Union between princes Souvanna Phouma, Boun Oum, and Souphanouvong was finalized on June 12, 1962. Ministry portfolios were distributed among neutralist, rightist, and leftist leaders. A ceasefire in Laos followed on June 24. On July 2, participating member states reconvened in Geneva, with the prominent neutralist political figure, Quinim Pholsena, heading the Lao delegation representing the new government of national union. Three weeks later, on July 23, the fourteen nations attending the Geneva Conference signed the Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos. The Geneva Accords established Laos as a neutral state and created a tripartite government representing the three Lao factions. The possibility of peace through unity, compromise, and neutralism once again appeared to be within grasp. But this opportunity, like the others before it, would go begging.

Conclusion: The Demise of the Neutralists and the Road to War

The signing of the Geneva Accords of 1962 heralded a brief period of optimism during which the expansion of the Lao neutralization model to the Republic of Vietnam was envisaged by the Pathet Lao and its Chinese, Soviet, and Vietnamese allies, as well as by France.²⁵ That tantalizing prospect was short-lived, however. The end of the Diệm regime was Hanoi’s priority, and Washington was not prepared to negotiate with the DRVN, which it distrusted and considered to be Beijing’s disciple. In any case, the Provisional Government of National Union lasted less than two years. The fundamental flaw of the second coalition government was that the party that wanted (and needed) it most – the neutralists – was the weakest of all. Souvanna Phouma hoped to be able to build up a strong centrist party and army by attracting members from the right and the left. Jean Deuve, a former member of the French secret services, summed up Souvanna Phouma’s thinking:

He estimated that it would take two years, through developing little by little the influence of each ministry in each zone, by technical decisions, in the areas of health, post and telecommunications, etcetera; through multiplying personal contacts with civil servants and officers; and through bringing the King into the game. It was necessary to proceed by very small steps, and to dispel mistrust. Once the military merger was achieved – that was the key to success – the neutralist party would have to win the elections by grabbing as many adherents as possible from each wing, right and left.²⁶

Unfortunately for Souvanna Phouma – and for many of his compatriots – the situation developed in precisely the opposite direction. The neutralists, lacking their own resources and strong external backing, rapidly lost most of their supporters to defections either to the rightist side or to the Pathet Lao. Most critically, the neutralists’ military power base, Kong Le’s forces, split over the acceptance of US military aid, and many of them entered into an alliance with the Pathet Lao. Souvanna Phouma’s retreat from his neutralist stance was confirmed in October 1962 when he authorized the United States to maintain its (illegal) military presence in Laos and to continue to supply the Hmong irregular troops in Huaphan and Xieng Khuang provinces. The prime minister became more stridently anticommunist, openly denouncing the DRVN’s involvement in the civil war.

This political polarization that tore the neutralists apart suited both the United States and the DRVN. Each government was able to pursue its respective military strategies in Laos behind the facade of Laos’ Geneva-sanctioned – and increasingly farcical – neutralization. The DRVN continued to expand the use of the Hồ Chí Minh Trail running through eastern Laos. During 1962, Hanoi sent almost 10,000 fighters and, for the first time, heavy artillery down the Trail.²⁷ The CIA greatly expanded covert and illegal operations in Laos (infamously known as the Secret War). Armed, equipped, trained, and paid out of a special CIA budget, Hmong irregular forces in Huaphan and Xieng Khuang provinces were better supplied in every respect and also paid better than the RLA troops. Both covert US operations and DRVN military activities in Laos were in direct violation of the 1962 Geneva Accords. By late 1963, the Second Coalition had faded away and full-scale civil warfare had resumed.

Meanwhile, Vietnamese communist hardliners emerged victorious in tense policy debates in Hanoi, with direct consequences for Laos. For Lê Duẩn (the VWP’s General Secretary) and his allies, the time had come to intervene directly in the South via the deployment of PAVN regular forces down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail. By mid-1964, the Lyndon B. Johnson administration was convinced that sustained bombing attacks, directed first against the Trail in Laos and then against key targets in the DRVN, might force the communists to cease their support for the southern insurgency and thus give Saigon time to stabilize politically and gradually gain control of its provinces. In December 1964, with Souvanna Phouma’s consent, the US Air Force launched airstrikes against fixed targets and infiltration routes throughout Laos, which soon expanded in April 1965 into a round-the-clock air campaign that would last more than three years. The fate of Laos was now linked to the outcome of the Vietnam War.

19 The Origins of the Insurgency in South Vietnam

David W. P. Elliott

No aspect of the Vietnam War (or, to be more precise, the Second Indochina Conflict) is more clouded with controversy than the question of how and why it started. One reason for this is that the answer to this deceptively straightforward question is largely dependent on the perspective from which it is posed. The indigenous parties to the conflict will naturally base their answers on different assumptions and experiences than the external parties, and the contending Vietnamese sides will themselves come at the question from fundamentally different vantage points. Some of the essential documentary records needed to clarify key issues are still inaccessible. More than half a century after the events, it is still difficult to find a satisfactory answer to this simple but fundamental question about one of the twentieth century’s most complex conflicts.

This chapter examines the three main interpretations of how and why the Vietnam War began, and discusses their respective strengths and weaknesses. It also analyzes the evolution of the policies of the Vietnamese Communist Party in the years after the Geneva Conference of 1954. The picture that emerges does not suggest that the insurgency that inaugurated the Vietnam War was bound to happen, or that responsibility for the conflict can be pinned on any single state or group of actors. Instead, the interplay among multiple actors and agendas eventually led particular groups of Southerners to take up arms against the Ngô Đình Diệm government during 1959–60. Historians may not yet have definitive answers to questions about the roles played by particular leaders and groups in bringing about the initial uprising against Diệm. But the available evidence suggests that the onset of war was rather more contingent and less foreordained than many previous accounts have suggested. They also show that the senior leadership of the Vietnamese Communist Party, far from directing or guiding the insurgency in its initial phases, consistently failed to steer events in the South in the party’s desired direction.

Terms of Debate: Three Interpretations

In the voluminous scholarship on the origins of the Vietnam War, the debate over how the insurgency began in South Vietnam revolves around three main interpretations. The first of these is aptly summed up in the title of a 1965 US State Department white paper: “Aggression from the North: The Record of North Vietnam’s Campaign to Conquer South Vietnam.” The authors of this paper declared that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) was stepping up its years-long effort “to conquer a sovereign people in a neighboring state.” This campaign, the authors argued, involved both subversive activities inside South Vietnam and the infiltration of North Vietnamese military forces into the South from the North. Although the State Department clearly considered Hanoi to be the primary perpetrator of this aggressive strategy, they also depicted the DRVN assault on South Vietnam (known officially as the Republic of Vietnam, or RVN) to be merely one front in the global struggle against an international communist movement led by the Soviet Union and China.¹

At first glance, the “aggression from the North” interpretation of the origins of the Vietnam War appears plausible. In 1965, the year that the white paper was published, approximately 50,000 People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) troops traveled down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail from North to South Vietnam. Those troops were participants in a large-scale escalation of the PAVN military effort in the South launched the previous year. As it happened, the PAVN offensive of 1964–5 did not produce the quick military triumph that Hanoi hoped to achieve. Nevertheless, DRVN leaders continued to seek victory over South Vietnam by force of arms. In the Tet Offensive of 1968 and again in the Spring Offensive of 1972, PAVN units and their Southern supporters launched widespread attacks aimed at bringing down the RVN state. The notion that these escalatory moves were proof of Hanoi’s “aggression” is seemingly reinforced by the circumstances surrounding the PAVN’s final offensive of the war in the spring of 1975, and especially by the famous image of the North Vietnamese tank that crashed through the gates of Saigon’s Independence Palace on April 30, 1975. If the war eventually ended as a straightforward military conquest of South Vietnam by North Vietnam, it might seem reasonable to suppose that it began in the same way.

This supposition is too clever by half, however. North Vietnam’s escalatory moves did not take place in a strategic vacuum; the US military was also escalating its involvement in the conflict as early as 1961 and it continued to do so throughout the decade of the 1960s. Moreover, even if it is true that DRVN leaders were seeking to win the war via outright military conquest after 1964, it does not necessarily follow that Hanoi was perpetrating “aggression from the North” prior to that date. In fact, the available historical evidence suggests that DRVN strategy toward South Vietnam during the late 1950s and early 1960s was far less aggressive than it later became. By endorsing the Geneva Accords of 1954, Hanoi formally committed itself to seeking Vietnamese reunification through peaceful means – a policy very much in keeping with the “peaceful coexistence” promulgated by Soviet and PRC leaders during the mid-1950s. As the evidence presented in this chapter will show, not all DRVN leaders agreed with this approach. Nevertheless, recent scholarly analyses of DRVN and Communist Party archives demonstrate that Hanoi’s willingness to seek victory in the South via military means remained highly qualified for years after Geneva. One scholar concludes that DRVN leaders eventually adopted a de facto “declaration of war” against South Vietnam and the United States – but that this fateful step was not taken until late 1963.²

In lieu of the lack of convincing evidence for the “aggression from the North” thesis, some scholars have argued that the origins of the insurgency must be found in the South. More specifically, many commentators have pointed to the violent and repressive actions undertaken by the Diệm government in rural areas of South Vietnam, beginning with its Denounce Communists Campaign in 1955. According to this view, Diệm’s crackdown on the communists provoked widespread fear and resentment among ordinary Vietnamese, even as his security forces were rounding up large numbers of the “stay behind” cadres who had remained in the South after Geneva. The rising rural backlash against the Saigon government worried noncommunist Southern nationalists, who feared that Diệm might be inadvertently paving the way for an eventual communist takeover. In the view of some scholars, these noncommunist nationalists had concluded by 1960 that “if nothing were done to put an end to the absolute power of Diệm, then Communism would end up by gaining power with the aid, or at least with the consent, of the population.”³ From this perspective, the insurgency that erupted in South Vietnam during 1959–60 was not a communist-directed movement, but a rebellion led by an ad hoc coalition of Southern nationalists who came together under the banner of the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF), the anti-Diệmist coalition of insurgent forces proclaimed in December 1960.

This second interpretation of the insurgency – what we might call the “Southern Rebellion” thesis – also has a certain plausibility. It fits well with the NLF’s founding manifesto, which portrayed the front as comprised of “representatives of all social classes, of all nationalities, of various political parties, [and] of all religions.”⁴ The idea that the insurgency began as an impromptu “Southern Rebellion” is also reinforced by postwar accounts written by some of the noncommunists who were active in the NLF during the war. The most influential of these accounts was A Vietcong Memoir, published in 1985 by Trương Như Tảng, the former minister of justice for the NLF. Tảng depicted both the NLF and the insurgency of 1959–60 as having been led initially by a small group of Saigon-based critics of Diệm.⁵ Tảng’s claims about the front’s nonpartisan origins were subsequently undermined by the publication of Communist Party documents showing that the NLF was in fact secretly controlled by senior communist leaders from the moment of its founding. Nevertheless, some authors continue to argue for a modified version of the “Southern Rebellion” thesis. For example, the historian David Hunt argues that the insurgency was launched and led by rural peasant activists who embraced a form of “revolutionary modernism” that was distinct from Vietnamese communism.⁶

Its persistence in the scholarship notwithstanding, the “Southern Rebellion” thesis sidesteps important questions about how the insurgency was organized and sustained. It is evident that the Diệm government’s draconian policies provoked widespread anger and fear in the South Vietnamese countryside during the late 1950s. This was especially true of Diệm’s infamous 10/59 law, which established mobile military tribunals with the power to investigate and summarily execute anyone accused of being a Communist Party member or supporter. “Thanks to the 10/59 decree,” remembered one farmer in Đình Tương province, “new life was blown into the political movement, and a patriotic appeal was made to overthrow the government of Mr. Diệm.”⁷ Nevertheless, the mere fact that rural residents were resentful and fearful of local officials is insufficient to explain why they joined the fight against the government. Terrorized communities sometimes erupt in rebellion, but no insurgency can long endure without a means of mobilizing and maintaining at least a measure of popular support. How was the fear sowed by Diệmist repression transposed into an actual insurgency, and who were the primary transposers?

For some authors, the most plausible answer to these questions lies in what can be described as the “green light” thesis. In some respects, this third interpretation seeks to split the difference between the first two by introducing another group of actors: the local Communist Party cadres who operated secretly at the provincial, district, and village levels in South Vietnam. As the Diệm government ramped up its oppression during the late 1950s, these southern cadres appealed to their Communist Party superiors to permit them to resume revolutionary warfare against the Saigon regime. Although initially reluctant, senior party leaders eventually granted their Southern comrades’ request. In these accounts, the “green light” from Hanoi became official in early 1959, when the Politburo approved a measure known as Resolution 15, which authorized small-scale insurrectionary activities in the South. The cadres then responded with a wave of uprisings that exploded across the Mekong Delta and other parts of South Vietnam during the fall and winter of 1959–60.

The “green light” thesis is the interpretation preferred by most Vietnamese Communist Party historians. Early versions of this thesis can be glimpsed in some of the party-endorsed narratives published during the war. For example, in her 1966 memoir No Other Road to Take, the Communist Party activist Nguyễn Thị Định recalled her joy when the news about Resolution 15 arrived in her home province of Bến Tre in late 1959. In Định’s telling, she and her comrades proceeded to carry out the first in a series of “concerted uprisings” that spread across the Mekong Delta during 1960.⁸ The same sequence of events – in which the Southern cadres first received authorization from Hanoi and then acted on it – appears repeatedly in party-sponsored histories published after the end of the war in 1975. A study published in 2010 by a Vietnamese military historian concluded that “the impact of Resolution 15 was direct, rapid, and clear, and opened a new direction for armed struggle in the South.” These and other accounts cite the discussion of the text of the resolution at a November 1959 meeting of the Nam Bo Party Committee (the senior Communist Party organization in Southern Vietnam) as the key moment when many Southern cadres learned that the long-awaited “green light” had finally been given.⁹

The “green light” thesis improves in certain respects on both the “aggression from the North” and the “Southern Rebellion” interpretations. It does not seek to explain the emergence of the insurgency either as a Hanoi-directed plot or as an improvised response to Diệmist repression. Instead, it emphasizes the interplay among the actions and policies of both the North and South Vietnamese governments, as well as the critical roles played by Southern communist cadres in organizing the insurgency and mobilizing popular support for it. At the same time, however, the “green light” interpretation still aims to affirm the authority and wisdom of senior Communist Party leaders, as reflected in its insistence that the insurgency did not begin until after Hanoi had authorized it.

As the following discussion will demonstrate, the actual sequence of events was not as cut-and-dried as the “green light” interpretation suggests. In the years following the Geneva Conference of 1954, questions about violence and rebellion were fiercely debated in both North and South Vietnam. When war finally came, it did not begin in a single place or moment, but instead unfolded in fits and starts across different regions and provinces of the South. In this regard, the beginning of the Vietnam War during 1959–60 was shrouded in ambiguity and obscurity – a striking contrast from the way that the war would eventually end at the gates of Saigon’s Independence Palace in 1975. To uncover these shadowy origins of the conflict, we must therefore begin by examining the evolution of DRVN strategy for South Vietnam in the aftermath of Geneva.

Hanoi’s Strategy for the South after Geneva

In the immediate aftermath of the Geneva Conference, Hanoi’s policy for South Vietnam seemed clear: strict adherence to the terms of the compromise peace that the DRVN had negotiated with France. During the talks at Geneva, the DRVN agreed to withdraw from all territory it controlled south of the 17th parallel, including its strongholds in South-central Vietnam and in the southern and western provinces of the Mekong Delta. In addition, all DRVN military forces in South Vietnam were required either to disband or to regroup to North Vietnam. For many DRVN partisans, these were painful concessions. However, senior leaders of the Communist Party – known officially since 1951 as the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP) – sought to reassure their followers that the division of the country would be only temporary, and that other provisions of the Geneva Accords offered a path to the reunification of the country under VWP leadership. The leadership focuses especially on the conference’s Final Declaration, which specified that nationwide general elections would be held in July 1956, under the supervision of an international commission. In keeping with this strategy, several tens of thousands of cadres and soldiers regrouped to the North, while many more remained behind in the South. The “stay behind” operatives were ordered to eschew armed struggle against the Saigon government in favor of nonviolent political activism and preparations for the elections that party leaders hoped and expected to win.

The decision to cede control of all Southern territory to Diệm’s government – even on a temporary basis – did not sit well with some DRVN supporters. The dismay was especially acute among those who had been fighting in the South. General Trần Vӑn Trà, the deputy commander of all DRVN forces in the South, was deeply upset when he was ordered to regroup to the North. “I was angry and distracted for a week,” he later wrote. “But at the time there was a concern that it would be a violation of the Geneva agreement.”¹⁰ Trà also recalled his fighters asking, “Why did we stop attacking? Did we really win? We still had the strength to surge forward and achieve complete liberation. … Why didn’t we seize this favorable opportunity instead of stopping half-way?”¹¹ Similar questions were also being asked in the North. Nguyễn Thị Thập, a Southerner from the Mekong Delta who had risen to a senior leadership post in the party-sponsored Women’s Association, was in the North when the news of the ceasefire broke. “The northern cadres sat in silent reflection,” she remembered. “Everyone was sad. The southern brothers shed tears, and some cried, ‘We struggled for unification but now have this division … it’s not clear that it can be overcome in five or ten years.’”¹²

Hanoi’s adoption of a policy of peaceful struggle in the South was driven in no small part by its agenda in the North. After Geneva, senior DRVN leaders declared their intent to focus on “building socialism in the North.” They reasoned that the revolution’s chances for success in the South would be enhanced if they could consolidate the party’s gains and base of support north of the 17th parallel. In mid-1954, the DRVN was expanding a sweeping and harsh land reform campaign that it had launched across several Northern and North-central Vietnamese provinces a year earlier. Although VWP leaders were careful to emphasize that they still intended to contest and win the promised 1956 elections, the party’s heavy emphasis on state-building and advancing socialism in the North caused many of its supporters to wonder if the objectives of the revolution in the South had been deprioritized.

Although DRVN leaders repeatedly stated their expectation that the 1956 elections would be held as scheduled, both they and their supporters realized that the balloting could not be taken for granted – especially since the South Vietnamese and US governments had both refused to endorse the accords. This recognition prompted the revolutionaries to take secret steps to prepare for an eventual return to armed resistance, should the circumstances demand it. The VWP organization in the South was split in two, with an overt branch dedicated to open political agitation and a clandestine branch comprised of an underground nucleus of leaders and operatives. Meanwhile, even though all DRVN military units in the South had been officially disbanded or regrouped to the North, party leaders ordered small caches of weapons to be secretly buried to ensure their availability for possible future use. In addition, small bands of veteran fighters took refuge in remote swamps and jungle hideouts with orders to await further instructions.

The uncertainty over the fate of the revolution below the 17th parallel, combined with the DRVN’s emphasis on “building socialism in the North,” provoked considerable anxiety among the party faithful who remained in the South. Nguyễn Thị Thập, the leader of the Women’s Association, returned to the South shortly after the Geneva Conference as a member of a senior VWP delegation. The group’s public mission was to explain to skeptical Southerners that the peace settlement represented a great victory for the revolutionary forces. But Thập also received secret instructions that seemed to contradict this message. Before leaving the North, her southbound group received the order “Don’t let the French take your picture!” The reason was that the party was “afraid that if the photos were printed in the newspapers, we would be compromised, and afterwards [if we] remained in the south, the secrecy and security of the comrades could not be guaranteed.”¹³

During her travels around the Mekong Delta, Thập heard from many DRVN supporters who were worried about the decision to regroup tens of thousands of revolutionary fighters to the North. “After the indoctrination and the discussion, the morale of the cadres, especially the mothers, was very troubled,” Thập later recalled. “The cease fire has already taken place, and now we are moving the troops,” some cadres complained to her. “If [our troops] all go, the brothers who remain behind will not have weapons. … If, after two years, [the South Vietnamese government] treacherously refuses to carry out the Agreements to hold the general election, and engage in terror and repression, where will the weapons to resist come from?” Thập admitted that she was at a loss to respond to these questions. She pleaded with her superiors to be allowed to stay in her native region but, like Trần Vӑn Trà, she eventually followed orders to regroup to the north.¹⁴

It did not take long for the Southern cadres’ worst fears to be realized. By mid-1955, Diệm had signaled that he did not intend to participate in the Geneva-mandated elections – or even to enter into consultations with North Vietnamese leaders. At the same time, Diệm was enjoying unexpected success in consolidating his government’s authority in the South. After inflicting a series of military defeats on his noncommunist rivals, he announced the creation of a new state known as the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) in October 1955. He also launched the Denounce Communists Campaign and ordered his security forces to begin hunting down suspected communists and their sympathizers. Even before the Geneva deadline of July 1956 arrived, it was evident that the VWP’s hopes for gaining power in the South via elections had vanished.

The passing of the election deadline in 1956 raised doubts and discontent in the minds of many party supporters – both the “stay behind” cadres in the South and others – about the wisdom of the decisions made by DRVN leaders at Geneva. This dissatisfaction was explicitly acknowledged in a lengthy article in the party’s mouthpiece newspaper Nhân Dân in mid-July 1956. However, the tone of the article was far from sympathetic toward the party’s internal critics. The article noted that there had also been doubters and pessimists during the War of Resistance against the French. The current criticisms, the author suggested, were equally misguided:

People who are “simple in their thoughts” were sure in their minds that national elections would be held and they became disappointed and pessimistic when elections did not take place. Others are “reluctant to carry on a long and hard struggle” and search for a quick unification by abandoning peaceful methods. They fail to realize that the best means of achieving quick unification of the country is “to positively build up the North, positively to unite and struggle with perseverance and patience in the South, and not to be afraid of difficulties and hardships.”¹⁵

The message for the VWP’s Southern cadres and supporters seemed clear: a return to armed struggle in the South would have to wait. But for the Southern cadres who were facing new “difficulties and hardships” and whose very survival seemed increasingly precarious, the idea of waiting appeared increasingly untenable.

Lê Duẩn and the Path to Revolution in the South

Even before the 1956 election deadline had arrived, some senior VWP leaders were seeking a new strategy for the changing circumstances that the party was facing in South Vietnam. The key figure in this strategic reformulation was Lê Duẩn, who hailed from the province of Quảng Trị (located just below the 17th parallel) and who had served as the head of the party’s Central Office of South Vietnam (COSVN) since the early 1950s. As a veteran revolutionary who had fought for decades against French colonial rule in Indochina, Lê Duẩn sympathized deeply with those of his Southern comrades who wanted to return to a policy of armed struggle. Yet he was also a dedicated Marxist–Leninist who believed strongly in the authority of the party and in the paramount importance of ensuring that Hanoi’s policies and directives were carried out. The challenge that Lê Duẩn now faced was figuring out how to reconcile his desire for a more militant line in the South with his loyalty to the party.

Lê Duẩn’s struggles to resolve this dilemma were evident in “The Path to Revolution in the South” (Đề cương cách mạng miền nam), a secret assessment of party policy and strategy in South Vietnam that he completed in 1956. He had begun this project in the fall of 1955, while living under cover in Saigon and the Mekong Delta province of Bến Tre. Additional parts of the document were written during a stay in party-controlled areas of the Cà Mau peninsula. After completing the report sometime in the summer or early fall of 1956, Lê Duẩn presented it first at a meeting of party leaders from the Mekong Delta and subsequently at a meeting of the VWP’s Committee for the South held in Phnom Penh in December 1956.¹⁶

The tone and language used in “Path to Revolution” conveyed Lê Duẩn’s conviction that the VWP needed to adopt a confrontational stance vis-à-vis the Diệm government and its American allies. “With the cruel repression and exploitation of the US–Diệm regime [Mỹ-Diệm], the people’s revolutionary movement definitely will rise up,” he wrote. “The people of the South have known the blood and fire of nine years of resistance war, but the cruelty of US-Diệm cannot extinguish the struggle spirit of the people.”¹⁷ Since the end of the Vietnam War, VWP historians have highlighted the aggressive elements of Lê Duẩn’s prose. According to these party-sanctioned narratives, Lê Duẩn’s main goal in writing the document was to signal his conviction that Diệm could only be removed from power by force of arms. One 1981 account claimed that the document “clearly laid out the mission, targets, and direction of the revolution in the South, and [showed] that the path to liberate the South was the path of violence.”¹⁸

This reading of “The Path to Revolution in the South” as a full-throated call for insurgency and violence is reinforced by the retrospective accounts of some of Lê Duần’s fellow Southern revolutionaries. These party activists evidently preferred to treat the document as providing party authorization for waging armed struggle – a position that was at odds with VWP Central Committee directives, which explicitly restricted the use of violence to cases of self-defense. Trần Kiên, a party leader in central Vietnam, later recalled reading “Path to Revolution” in 1957, when he and his comrades “were thrashing around and had not yet found an appropriate form of struggle.” They quickly adopted Lê Duẩn’s document as a kind of “handbook to continue the revolution in the South during that tense and violent period.” In 1958, the party’s regional committee for central Vietnam would cite “Path to Revolution” as they devised plans “to shift the revolutionary movement in Region V [central Vietnam] to a new stage.”¹⁹

But to read “The Path to Revolution in the South” as an unambiguous call for a return to arms is to overlook most of its contents. Lê Duẩn drafted the document in the months following the landmark 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, held in Moscow during February 1956. At that event, Soviet leaders affirmed their commitment to peaceful coexistence with capitalist countries. Lê Duẩn explicitly acknowledged the 20th Congress in his report, noting its conclusions that all world conflicts “can be resolved by means of peaceful negotiations” and that “the revolutionary movement in many countries can develop peacefully.” From this, Lê Duẩn deduced that “the revolutionary movement in the South can also develop following a peaceful line.” Much of the rest of the document was devoted to explaining what “following a peaceful line” actually meant. Lê Duẩn declared that the “ardent aspiration of the Southern people is to maintain peace and achieve national unification” and that the “revolutionary movement in the South can mobilize and advance to success on the basis of grasping the flag of peace.” He concluded that “the people’s movement, generally speaking, now has a temporarily peaceful character,” and that its commitment to peace would enable it to “rebuild in order to then advance.”²⁰

Instead of marking a decisive return to a policy of armed struggle, “The Path to Revolution in the South” was an ambiguous and ambivalent document. Historian William Turley describes it as “a temporizing decision that papered over intractable differences concerning the priority and means of reunification.”²¹ Lê Duẩn’s emphasis on the oppressive and brutally violent qualities of the Diệm government seemed to imply that the party would need to resume armed struggle at some future date. But he also made a point of demonstrating conformity with the Soviet call for peaceful coexistence. Thus, even as some Southern cadres might choose to see the document as granting them leeway to push back against oppression, senior DRVN leaders cast it in a different light. When the report was discussed at a VWP Central Committee meeting in Hanoi in late 1956, the body duly approved it while declaring that “we must not allow the winning over of the South to detract from the requirements of consolidating the North.”²²

Resolution 15 and the Launch of the Insurgency

If Lê Duẩn’s “The Path to Revolution in the South” did not include the authorization for violent struggle that VWP cadres hoped to receive, when did Hanoi finally consent to lend its support to a strategy of armed insurgency in South Vietnam? Many authors, both in Vietnam and elsewhere, have pointed to the year 1959 as the moment at which the proverbial “green light” was finally given. According to this view, the launch of the insurgency during the last months of 1959 and the first half of 1960 reflected a decisive shift in the thinking of DRVN leaders in favor of armed struggle. However, a careful assessment of the available evidence suggests that Hanoi’s decisions to back the insurgency were made grudgingly, and often only as half measures. The reluctance of senior leaders to endorse a change of course in the South created an opening for southern cadres to take matters into their own hands, and to present the emerging rebellion as a fait accompli. At the same time, the course of events in the South during 1959 was also shaped by a dramatic intensification of the repressive policies of the Diệm government.

Diệm’s efforts to crush the insurgency before it began included the aforementioned 10/59 law, promulgated in May 1959, which provided the machinery for summary trials and executions of suspected communists. Yet the 10/59 decree was only one component of Saigon’s new crackdown. Another was a program to construct “agrovilles” in various locations across the Mekong Delta. This population regroupment scheme involved large-scale forced labor under appalling conditions. It quickly ignited widespread resentment among the peasants who were dragooned into this task.²³ The agrovilles exacerbated the dissatisfaction with Diệm’s earlier land reform program, which had mostly failed to transform the delta’s large population of tenant farmers into landowners. Resentment was also generated by efforts to coerce young men in rural areas to join the state-sponsored Republican Youth Movement. In addition to being forced to participate in government initiatives without pay, Republican Youth members were easy targets for communist operatives, who pressured them to quit or even to join the ranks of revolutionary fighters.²⁴

The rising tide of Diệmist repression formed the backdrop against which DRVN policy for the South began to shift. It is not clear if there was a pivotal moment at which the policy decisively changed. The evidence points toward an incremental process, which was less a proactive and considered decision, or series of decisions, and more a progressive ratification of increasingly militant activities in the South based on a realization that the central party leadership in Hanoi could no longer contain the momentum toward armed struggle among the Southern revolutionaries.

“Resolution 15” refers to the decisions taken at the 15th Plenum, or full central committee meeting, of the Communist Party of Vietnam in 1959. Given the prolonged debate and multiple revisions of the resolution, it is unclear whether there is a comprehensive document that encompasses everything that was decided during the span of time that the 15th Plenum met. The gathering was evidently a prolonged affair, with sessions in both January and July; some sources indicate that the January decisions were not transmitted to the South until May.²⁵ It is clear that the debate over revolutionary strategy in the South was intense, and the Southern point of view favoring more militant action was reinforced by the presence of Southern party leaders who had come to Hanoi to attend the “expanded session” (e.g., with more than the normal complement of members) of the Central Committee meeting that launched the discussion. One VWP military historian reports that much of the actual work on the text of the resolution was performed by a “small group” appointed by the Politburo for that purpose.²⁶

In some accounts of the tortuous progress of Resolution 15, Lê Duẩn was initially successful in persuading his colleagues to adopt the view that “Since the Diem regime refused to carry out nationwide elections for unification, the replacement revolutionary government would have to be imposed by force.”²⁷ By March 1959, the General Military Committee of the Party was discussing how to implement the January decisions. Lê Duẩn reportedly told them, “We won’t use war to unify the country, but if the US and puppets use war then we have to use war, and the war that the enemy has initiated will be an opportunity for us to unify the country.”²⁸ In May 1959, when a version of Resolution 15 was announced (there were at least twenty-two different drafts of the document), it was also decided to establish a unit designated Đoàn 559 (Group 559, named after the May 1959 date at which it was authorized), to prepare a logistics route to the South that would become known as the Hồ Chí Minh Trail.²⁹

Although the precise contents of the myriad drafts of Resolution 15 remain obscure, one feature of it is clear: the changes it prescribed in the proposed balance between political struggle and armed struggle in the Southern Revolution were intended to be incremental and limited, rather than sweeping and transformative. But for growing numbers of VWP cadres in South Vietnam, the time for incremental adjustments to party policies and strategies was long passed. As the debate dragged on in Hanoi, preparations for rebellion were being made in the South. In this regard, Resolution 15 may have been obsolete from the moment it was first drafted.

From Isolated Attacks to “Concerted Uprisings”

Most VWP histories of the Southern insurgency have identified two specific regions of South Vietnam that were the first to rise in revolt. In central Vietnam, the earliest military attacks on RVN targets took place in the mountainous provinces of what was designated as “Interzone V” on VWP maps. Meanwhile, several other early uprisings took place in scattered locations across the Mekong Delta. “Although the struggle movement in this period was still essentially a political struggle,” the authors of a 1981 study wrote, “there were places where the masses had emphasized building up armed forces and reinforcing bases, and in some places there were armed actions to eliminate the repressive local authorities and spies.”³⁰ The “masses” (quần chúng) is a VWP term used to indicate nonparty people or ordinary civilians. This party account was thus suggesting that VWP cadres and leaders were not responsible for instigating these actions. However, other evidence – including accounts published since the 1980s – shows that this is highly unlikely. Attributing aggressive actions to “the masses” is better understood as a way for party historians to avoid the uncomfortable fact that local VWP actors undertook rogue actions in violation of party policy at the time.

“Armed struggle” in South Vietnam during 1959–60 covered a diverse range of violent activities. It included what RVN and US officials described as “terrorist attacks” – usually assassinations of government-affiliated individuals – as well as operations against RVN police and militia posts. VWP cadres often described the assassinations as “defensive measures” even though the targets were often people such as schoolteachers who were not participating in government repression. Although these targeted killings did not take place on a large scale until 1960, they were often carried out in gruesome fashion for maximum effect. The primary purpose of assassinating RVN-linked individuals was to create a rough “balance of terror” in which the paralyzing fear generated by government repression could be counterbalanced by fear of reprisals against those who declined to support the revolution.

In central Vietnam, the VWP’s Interzone V leadership committee concluded as early as 1957 that the post–Geneva policy of peaceful struggle in the South had failed. However, they drew inspiration from Lê Duẩn’s “The Path to Revolution in the South” as they set about devising new methods of struggle. On June 20, 1958, the Quảng Ngãi province committee held a meeting near Trà Bồng that was attended by 80 VWP representatives.³¹ The purpose was to implement the provincial leadership’s decision to set up a military affairs committee – a step that clearly anticipated organizing and deploying military units. That meeting came a month after Interzone V leaders had advised the provincial committee “to build a base in the western area and strongly step up political struggle combined with armed struggle to advance to an uprising to seize power in the mountain areas.”³² Later in the year, provincial authorities followed through on these instructions by setting up a military base in the southern villages of Trà Bồng; they also organized a detachment of fighters. This small force was armed with 42 weapons that had been buried in 1954 in anticipation of the resumption of armed struggle.³³ Significantly, these activities were sited in areas in which the party had retained a measure of unofficial control, even after the 1954 Geneva ceasefire.³⁴

Some Vietnamese historians consider the first “insurrection” of the war to be the one that took place in Trà Bồng on August 28, 1959. “This was not just unorganized spontaneous struggles breaking out, with no leadership, but unfolded in accordance with the common line of the Party,” claims one postwar account.³⁵ The assertion that this attack was in conformity with existing party policy is not supported by the actual historical record, but this account leaves little doubt that the Trà Bồng uprising was in fact the product of meticulous planning by local VWP authorities.

The timing of both the preparations for the Trà Bồng Rebellion and the actual attack raises questions about responsibility for this first instance of “armed struggle” in South Vietnam. One party source reports that the text of Resolution 15 had reached Quảng Ngãi by June 1959, before the uprising took place.³⁶ But given the fact that Quảng Ngãi party leaders had begun mustering military forces in the province the previous year – that is, even before the Politburo had adopted Resolution 15 – it hardly seems like they were waiting for a “green light” from the party center in Hanoi.³⁷

In the Mekong Delta, the first large-scale armed encounter between a large revolutionary military unit and the Saigon forces took place in Kiến Phong province in September 1959. In the battle of Gò Quản Cung, the rebels claimed to have killed 100 soldiers of the South Vietnamese army and captured another 100. Remarkably, however, this success was excluded from VWP official accounts for many years after the end of the war, evidently because it was a violation of party policy at the time. The first published account appeared only in 1991 in the memoir of Lê Quốc Sản, a Southerner who had regrouped to the North in 1954 but then returned to command the party’s military forces in the central Mekong Delta for most of the duration of the war. Sản based his narrative on an after-the-fact study of the battle he was asked to conduct in 1961, shortly after his return to the South.

Even allowing for the customary inflated claims of revolutionary propaganda and historiography, the battle of Gò Quản Cung was clearly a large-scale clash that differed from the scattered small-unit incursions in remote villages conducted in earlier years. Although the figures may be inflated, there was no doubt that the level of military conflict was escalating. The later claim that by 1959 there were 130 concentrated armed platoons operating in the base areas and “hundreds” of “secret action cells” (tổ đội hành động) operating across the delta may also be a retroactive inflation of the reality, but communist military capabilities were obviously growing.³⁸

Despite the apparent success of the Trà Bồng and Gò Quản Cung operations in the late summer of 1959, senior VWP leaders remained wary of the idea of military escalation in the South. During the 1958–60 period, debate within the party focused on the relative balance between political struggle and armed struggle. Even though armed struggle was taking place, it officially remained an adjunct element to political struggle rather than a coequal component of strategy. Trần Vӑn Trà, the former deputy commander in the South, discovered this in mid-1959, when he asked Lê Duẩn (who by that point had been recalled to Hanoi and was serving on the VWP Politburo) for permission to lead a group of 100 regrouped Southern fighters back to the South. After mulling the proposal, Lê Duẩn told Trà that he could go, but that he could only take twenty-five men with him, because a larger group might provoke criticism from other Politburo members.³⁹

In January 1960, in what amounted to a bid to call the question, the VWP Party Committee of the South – the senior Communist Party organization in the South, soon to be renamed the Central Office for South Vietnam – sent a secret report to the Central Committee in Hanoi. The report bluntly asserted that “political struggle combined with armed propaganda is no longer sufficient to protect the revolutionary bases” in the South. The authors proposed a new policy: “Political struggle and armed struggle will receive equal weight, and they both hold a critical and decisive role in the movement.”⁴⁰ Despite this request, armed struggle was not officially placed on a par with political struggle until a year later. As later accounts by party military historians pointed out, that directive coincided with a sharp increase in North-to-South infiltration, with more than 40,000 cadres and soldiers traveling down the Trường Sơn Trail by the end of 1963.⁴¹

During 1960, before the bulk of the Southern regroupees had begun to travel down the Trail, the primary form of insurgency in the South was what cadres came to call the “concerted uprising” (chiến dịch đồng khởi). Although these “uprisings” involved the deployment of military force, they relied primarily on mass popular demonstrations aimed at overthrowing or humiliating local RVN authorities. Insofar as the party used military tactics at all during 1960, most of its operations were best described as exercises in “armed intimidation” rather than direct clashes with RVN military units. Indeed, insurgent forces during 1960 were sometimes armed with little more than wooden rifles and machetes. Nevertheless, these forces succeeded in eroding Saigon’s control in many rural districts as the serial “waves” of concerted uprisings washed across the region. This helped clear the way for operations by larger insurgent military units, which started to pose a more serious threat to RVN forces in terms of numbers and firepower during 1961.

The impact of the “concerted uprisings” was reinforced by another episode that took place in early 1960. On the night of January 25, insurgent forces attacked and overran the “Tua Hai” (Watch Tower Number Two) military base a few miles outside the provincial capital of Tây Ninh. The base, located in the settlement of Trang Sụp, was occupied by the ARVN’s 32nd Division, and its defenses featured bunkers and a 1,000 yards-long perimeter wall. But according to American sources, the attacking force of around 200 insurgents were able to penetrate the facility, inflict more than 60 casualties on the defenders, destroy two barracks, and make off with hundreds of captured weapons. The Trang Sup/Tua Hai incident stunned South Vietnamese and American officials, some of whom had dismissed previous insurgent attacks as the desperate actions of rebels on the brink of defeat. General Samuel Williams, the commanding general of the US military advisory group, described the battle as a “severe blow to the prestige of the Vietnamese army and [an] indication of the VC [Việt Cộng] ability to stage large-size, well planned attacks.”⁴² Meanwhile, VWP leaders celebrated the windfall of captured weapons that would subsequently be used in additional “concerted uprisings” across the delta.⁴³ More than any other prior episode, the insurgents’ triumph at Trang Sup suggested that the revolution’s capabilities in South Vietnam with respect to armed struggle had been underestimated – a realization that would reverberate not only in Saigon but also in Hanoi.

The Southern Revolution Triumphant

By mid-1960, the insurgency was spreading rapidly across much of South Vietnam. As RVN leaders scrambled to respond, their DRVN counterparts also raced to catch up to the rapidly changing revolutionary realities in the South. In September 1960, the VWP convened its 3rd Party Congress in Hanoi. In a landmark resolution, the congress indicated that the progress of the Southern Revolution would proceed on its own track and would no longer be subordinate to the goal of building socialism in the North. “The Vietnamese Revolution has two strategic tasks,” the congress declared. “The first is to push forward with the socialist revolution in the North. The second is to liberate the South from the yoke of the American imperialists and their lackeys and achieve unification of our country and complete independence and democracy in the entire country.” Lest anyone miss the implications of this, the congress added that “these two strategic missions have a close relationship with each other and are mutually supporting.”⁴⁴

In another important decision, the 3rd Congress also called for the creation of “a worker-peasant-soldier alliance” in the South for the purpose of “bringing about a broad unified national front to oppose Mỹ-Diệm.” The resolution went on to describe how this front would unite groups and individuals across multiple classes and social groups. “The mission of this front is to unite with all forces that can be united with, to win over all forces that can be won over, to neutralize all forces that can be neutralized, and to attract a large number of the masses into the struggle against Mỹ-Diệm in order to liberate the South and peacefully unify the country.”⁴⁵

These decisions, which came several months before the formal unveiling of the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF), confirm an important historical fact about the NLF: from the moment of its founding, the front functioned as the disguised face of the real force that controlled it, the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP). By promoting the myth of the NLF as an independent force, the VWP created substantial confusion over the origins of the front and the insurgency that it ostensibly led. For many years, proponents of the “Southern Rebellion” thesis insisted that the NLF was an indigenous southern creation that had emerged spontaneously in response to Diệmist repression. Meanwhile, those who favored the “aggression from the North” thesis argued just as ardently that the front was merely a stratagem designed to conceal the culmination of Hanoi’s years-long efforts to bring about the overthrow of the Saigon government by force. Although the latter argument turned out to be a more accurate representation of the relationship between the NLF and Hanoi after 1960, its advocates did not grasp the extent to which senior VWP leaders had resisted a return to armed struggle prior to that date.

Following the official creation and proclamation of the NLF in December 1960, the VWP finally adopted a formal stance of support for the strategy of all-out armed struggle in the South. In January 1961, the party’s Committee for the South was formally renamed the Central Office of South Vietnam (Trung Ương Cục Miền Nam or COSVN).⁴⁶ COSVN and its Military Affairs Committee were placed in overall command of the South Vietnam Liberation Army (also formally created in early 1961); at the same time, COSVN was under the direct authority of both the VWP Central Committee and the senior command of the DRVN military, the People’s Army of Vietnam.⁴⁷ The supreme authority of party and military leaders in Hanoi over the Southern insurgency was confirmed six months later, when COSVN’s responsibilities were divided along regional lines. For the remainder of the war, COSVN directed all military forces operating in southern Vietnam (the provinces around Saigon and those in the Mekong Delta). Responsibility for waging war in central Vietnam was transferred to an entity known as “Region 5,” a restructured version of the old Interzone V organization. Henceforth, the territory administered by Region 5 would be known as the B1 Front while the territory under COSVN’s command became known as the B2 Front. Senior leaders in both regions reported to and took orders directly from their superiors in Hanoi.⁴⁸

The elaboration of the new command structure for South Vietnam coincided with another important change. At the same moment it created COSVN in early 1961, the senior leadership of the VWP adopted a new strategic slogan: “Even more strongly push forward the political struggle, at the same time pushing forward the armed struggle to the same level as the political struggle, and attack the enemy on two fronts, political and military.”⁴⁹ The awkward syntax obscured a conceptual shift of great significance – one that had been several years in the making. For the first time since 1954, senior party leaders embraced the notion that political struggle and armed struggle would play coequal roles in the Southern revolution. This would remain the party’s official stance for the remainder of the war. In point of fact, the embrace of armed struggle opened the door to a rapid expansion of the VWP’s war effort in the South and the sheer size of the Southern insurgency. By the mid-1960s, the military personnel serving in the DRVN war effort in South Vietnam and adjacent areas of Laos and Cambodia numbered in the hundreds of thousands (Figure 19.1).

Figure 19.1 Fighters serving in the armed wing of the National Liberation Front (NLF) on patrol in South Vietnam in March 1966.

Source: Keystone / Stringer / Hulton Archive / Getty Images.

As the war expanded, the goal of liberating the South quickly took on paramount importance, and the objective of “building socialism in the North” faded into the background. In 1964, at a special political conference presided over by Hồ Chí Minh, the lead resolution exhorted “everyone do the work of two for our kith and kin in the South.” Around the same time, party propagandists resurrected a slogan that had originally been coined for the battle of Điện Biên Phủ: “Everything for the front line.” This latest version, however, was enhanced with the additional words “Everything to defeat the American aggressors.”⁵⁰ By this point, the debate over the place of South Vietnam in revolutionary strategy had effectively ended. And yet the tensions between the party’s dream of socialist transformation and its members’ desire for national unity had not been resolved. In the years after 1975, these tensions would re-emerge when the party embarked on a ruthless attempt to impose socialist institutions on the newly conquered South, only to find itself reversing course and embracing the “Southernization of the North” a decade later.⁵¹ In this regard, the emergence of the South Vietnamese insurgency in the years after 1954 suggests the complex ways in which the entire history of the Vietnamese Revolution has been defined by the interplay among socialist ideals, aspirations for national liberation, and regional identities.

20 Kennedy and Vietnam

Marc J. Selverstone

Between 1961 and 1963, US President John F. Kennedy strengthened and transformed the American commitment to the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, better known as “South Vietnam”). Building upon the program he inherited from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Kennedy provided Saigon with economic aid, military assistance, and political support – and increasing numbers of US troops – in quantities that underscored the perceived importance of South Vietnam to US national security. He did so to help the RVN stanch a communist insurgency south of the 17th parallel that was receiving increasing amounts of support from fellow communists living north of that line. At no time did he fundamentally revisit that commitment, nor did he evaluate it in the context of a more searching review of American grand strategy. In short, Kennedy sustained and enhanced the US commitment to South Vietnam largely because Washington had already made it.

The durability of that commitment, as well as its meaning for Kennedy, remains contested. Much as JFK has eluded the grasp of biographers in search of his core convictions, scholars, journalists, and pundits continue to debate his approach to Vietnam, endowing his public and private pronouncements with extraordinary import. They could hardly do otherwise, given the course of the war following his death. Early, favorable treatments qualified his role in the conflict, drawing a distinction between his actions and the more expansive measures adopted by his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson. Subsequent work, more critical of Kennedy writ large, faulted JFK for narrowing Johnson’s options.¹ Still later accounts emphasized Kennedy’s reservations about the war and even the likelihood of him extricating the United States from the looming tragedy – a virtual history that is, ultimately, unknowable.²

More evident is Kennedy’s inability to escape the tensions at work in his approach to Vietnam. By the end of his administration, he had become frustrated with and discouraged by the actions of his ally in the conflict, South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm. Yet even as he sanctioned the withdrawal of American soldiers from Vietnam and expressed his concerns about the war, Kennedy was still invested in winning it. Those conflicting imperatives shaped his program in ways he was unable to reconcile. In the end, Kennedy’s Vietnam policy was defined by his failure to align US objectives with Washington’s means for achieving them, and by the resulting drift toward deeper engagement.

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Kennedy entered the presidency without a well-formed national security strategy. He was highly conscious of flashpoints likely to pose problems in the years ahead, but he never calibrated ends and means in ways that prioritized and resourced the matters that came before him. Nor did he establish a systematic process to assess those challenges, having replaced the bureaucratized Eisenhower machinery with an ad hoc, task-force approach to policy formation. Berlin, Laos, Cuba, the balance of payments, nuclear weapons – all received concerted attention, but often as discrete challenges disaggregated from a conceptual whole. As a result, his engagement with these concerns, including his eventual absorption with Vietnam, would remain episodic and, to a large extent, improvised.³

Kennedy’s approach to national security flowed from that reactive stance. In fact, it amounted to a posture more than a strategy. “Flexible response,” a concept that aimed to shift the country’s emphasis away from nuclear weapons and massive retaliation, sought to grant Kennedy greater latitude to address a range of military contingencies. Offering a slate of options of graduated intensity, flexible response allowed him to meet all levels of provocation, from the brushfire wars of the developing world to the conventional and nuclear exchanges of state-based conflict. While Kennedy expanded the United States’ strategic arsenal by procuring more nuclear warheads and augmenting their delivery systems, he greatly enhanced the nation’s conventional and unconventional warfare capabilities – necessities, as he put it, for defending freedom in its “hour of maximum danger.”⁴

Kennedy’s alarming rhetoric, which he delivered repeatedly during his first year in office, reflected a consensus, shared broadly in the United States, about the malign intentions of international communism. While those fears had grown following World War II, and especially as the Cold War enveloped both Asia and Europe, they encompassed new worries that communism was on the march and setting its sights on the postcolonial world. Of particular concern was the speech on “wars of national liberation” that Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev delivered two weeks before Kennedy’s inaugural in January 1961. Although Khrushchev’s primary audience was a socialist camp embroiled in an ever-widening Sino-Soviet split, his focus on developing nations alarmed JFK, who made it required reading for his national security team. The prospect of a newly energized Cold War on the periphery thus created threats and opportunities for an administration that was younger and more activist than its predecessor.

Those threats, whether perceived or real, challenged the credibility of Kennedy officials as responsible stewards of the national interest. Though populated in key posts by nominal Republicans, the Kennedy administration and the Democrats who ran it recognized the burden of governing as the party that “lost” both China and the US atomic monopoly during the late 1940s. Comprising a self-professed New Generation of Americans, those officials signaled a willingness to experiment in the international field, particularly in areas where they found the previous administration wanting. Kennedy was determined to engage the decade’s brushfire wars to prevent the further erosion, as he saw it, of the West’s position in the Cold War. Failure to do so would result in blowback for both party and nation, and especially for Kennedy, who sought to convey an image of strength in foreign affairs. The dictates of credibility spoke to the dangers of appearing weak and of accommodating communist gains in a seemingly zero-sum battle between East and West.⁵

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While international developments shaped the contours of US policy toward Vietnam, a series of political, institutional, and intellectual currents shaped the nature of Kennedy’s commitment. Several of them transcended the Kennedy administration, taking root prior to the 1960s and persisting well beyond it. Their influence during the Kennedy years was nevertheless acute and greatly affected the nature of the US project in Vietnam.

For Kennedy, Vietnam’s problems were part and parcel of the broader challenges facing countries in the Global South. JFK had been more finely attuned to these issues than most elected officials in Washington. Visiting Southeast Asia during a 1951 trip designed to enhance his stature for a Senate run the following year – he had been elected to the House in 1946 – Kennedy witnessed the strength of nationalism coursing through Indochina during the Franco-Việt Minh War. That experience informed his critique of French policy and Washington’s support of it, as well as positions he later took as a US senator. His subsequent criticism of the French in Algeria reflected an awareness of the changing tides of history, and his interest in Africa and Asia highlighted the need to engage the developing world more proactively than was currently the case. His appraisal of those dynamics remained couched within a Cold War framework, however – and a partisan one at that – especially as he burnished a national reputation and made a run at the presidency in 1960. Those impulses collided in Kennedy’s approach to Vietnam. Championing Ngô Đình Diệm and the fledgling state he was building, Kennedy regarded South Vietnam as “the keystone to the arch, the finger in the dike” in the “Free World”’s struggle against communism in Southeast Asia.⁶ Success in Vietnam was thus crucial and depended largely on American aid if the West were to win the “hearts and minds” of the postcolonial world.

That battle took shape alongside prevailing assumptions about societies emerging from colonial rule. Theories about modernization, which traced those transitions from their preindustrial roots to economic maturity, gained traction in the postwar years in conjunction with a reverence for social science and its insights about national development. Incubating at universities and think tanks such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and RAND, modernization offered explanations for the social, economic, and political conditions at work in developing societies. But it also sought to channel those communities toward progressively greater productivity, democracy, and stability. Kennedy initiatives such as the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress, as well as the Agency for International Development (AID) and the Foreign Assistance Act that created it, reflected the modernizing impulse at work in the postwar era, as well as the more deeply seated missionary impulse animating it. Those initiatives and institutions spoke to the dangers of the modernizing process and the fear that communists would exploit its frictions and instabilities. In South Vietnam, those dynamics informed a raft of civic action and rural affairs projects following Diệm’s ascendance in the mid-1950s. By the early 1960s, they would lead US officials to embrace the thrust of the Strategic Hamlet Program, which Saigon devised to build self-sufficient enclaves loyal to the RVN and hostile to the communists. Each of these efforts signaled a belief in the malleability of societies and a commitment on the part of US officials to bend them to their will.⁷

That reflex to impose allegedly universal concepts upon the developing world dovetailed with an activist posture that Kennedy adopted and radiated. He had vowed to “get the country moving again” during the 1960 presidential campaign and his frustration with the perceived torpor and drift of the Eisenhower years was central to his electoral appeal. Kennedy and his band of “action intellectuals” pledged to usher the United States into the New Frontier of the 1960s, challenging Americans to accept risk and sacrifice in their promotion of liberty and prosperity. His was an administration that vowed to do hard things, whether expanding the welfare state and going to the Moon or bearing the burden of its international demands and obligations. Although Kennedy described himself as a pragmatic realist – an “idealist without illusions” – his policies projected an ethos of romantic daring, of exuberant energy, and set the country on course that promised greater engagement in national life and greater activism in world affairs.⁸

That sense of boldness expressed itself as a quasi-cult of toughness – an assertive posture that informed Kennedy-era policymaking. Cultivating a hypermasculine ethic, the administration sought to enact hard-headed solutions to a series of problems at home and abroad. Whether redressing the humiliation at the Bay of Pigs, preserving Western rights in a divided Berlin, or contesting the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba, Kennedy sought to validate his inaugural pledge to “pay any price” and “bear any burden” to “assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Informed by their collective upbringing in an “imperial brotherhood” of elite institutions, Kennedy officials would apply brains and brawn to the management of national problems, and the hothouse environment in which they worked informed elements of both the Kennedy style and Kennedy policy.⁹

Yet for all the macho talk emanating from the White House, Kennedy displayed a more subtle appreciation of power and its uses than did many of his aides. Rather than double down on his vow to “oppose any foe” in the twilight struggle of the Cold War, Kennedy showed a willingness to absorb potentially damaging political hits, to parry communist provocations, and to respond creatively to international challenges.¹⁰ In several cases, it would be his capacity for empathy, rather than an impulse toward confrontation, that marked his pursuit of the national interest. Whether neutralizing Laos, accommodating to the Berlin Wall, or negotiating a resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy demonstrated a reflex toward restraint and reflection that also marked his approach toward Vietnam.

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His engagement with Vietnam was, and would remain, intermittent, as it was one of numerous challenges Kennedy faced when he assumed the presidency. Berlin, Cuba, Laos, the strategic balance – these and other demands, foreign and domestic, would absorb his attention and crowd out time to work on Vietnamese matters that were challenging to begin with and growing progressively worse. Between Kennedy’s election and his inauguration, antipathy toward Diệm had risen to such levels that elements of the South Vietnamese military had sought to overthrow his government; weeks later, Southern Vietnamese communists, with support and direction from the North, formed the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF) to guide the revolt against the Ngôs. The implications of those developments would soon become clear. Although Kennedy’s two transition meetings with outgoing president Dwight D. Eisenhower failed to touch on Vietnam directly, JFK received a briefing on the RVN’s prospects at the end of his first week in office. It came from Air Force Colonel Edward Lansdale, whose experience in the country dated to the earliest days of the Diệm regime. The picture Lansdale painted was a damning one, leading Kennedy to frame it as the “worst” problem the administration now faced.¹¹

But it was not the most immediate, as Kennedy was confronting impending crises near and far, including those of his own making. Tensions in Laos threatened to erupt into superpower proxy war as competing communist, neutralist, and royalist factions vied for control after the collapse of a power-sharing arrangement. National security officials considered the deployment of ground troops and even nuclear weapons to forestall a communist triumph before Kennedy bluffed all sides with a show of force. Washington’s reluctance to Americanize the conflict and further militarize it, combined with Moscow’s unwillingness to do the same, ultimately led Kennedy and Khrushchev to neutralize the kingdom, a lone, encouraging result from their otherwise frank and chilly meeting that June in Vienna. Negotiations over the fate of Laos would ensue against the backdrop of political intrigue and the occasional battlefield flare-up, but by July 1962, diplomats from 14 nations had fashioned a deal, albeit shaky, to remove the country from the chessboard of Cold War competition. Still, the failure of North Vietnamese forces to vacate Laos, in accordance with the agreement hammered out at Geneva, facilitated the continued infiltration of communist forces into South Vietnam, further complicating efforts to secure its independence.

Kennedy’s initial decisions on Laos, and ultimately on Vietnam, also took shape in the context of the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation of mid-April 1961. Planning to unseat Cuban strongman Fidel Castro had begun in March 1960 and had continued throughout the year, even as presidential candidate Kennedy chastised the ruling Republicans for allowing Castro to consolidate power on their watch. By the time of Kennedy’s inauguration, the covert operation had evolved from a guerrilla infiltration into an amphibious invasion. It soon became clear that Kennedy had failed to ask the right questions and review key particulars. Ultimately, he took responsibility for the ensuing debacle, though not without his own press leaks distributing blame. Still, he saw a silver lining in the episode: If it wasn’t for the Bay of Pigs, he remarked on more than one occasion, “we’d be in Laos by now – and that would be a hundred times worse.”¹² His skepticism about the “expert” advice he received, from intelligence as well as from military officials, remained throughout his time in office and conditioned his assessment of recommendations on Vietnam.

In fact, the Cuban fiasco affected Kennedy’s decision-making for the rest of his presidency. For starters, it left him more inclined to trust his own judgment on national security matters. But it also led him to centralize planning and policy more fully within the White House. National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy moved formally into its West Wing and established a Situation Room in the basement, improving the flow of critical information to and from the president’s staff. Retired general Maxwell Taylor, the epitome of the action-intellectual soldier-statesman, became Kennedy’s personal military advisor, mediating between the Oval Office and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And both Special Counsel Ted Sorensen and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy – men whose portfolios bore little relation to foreign policy but whose loyalty and judgment the president valued – became increasingly engaged on a range of international problems.¹³

Given his absorption in the Caribbean and Laotian troubles, Kennedy turned his attention to Saigon only after the end of the Cuban operation. The day after its ignominious conclusion, the president empaneled an interagency task force, chaired by Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell L. Gilpatric, to evaluate the situation in Vietnam. By mid-May, JFK had implemented its recommendations: an increase in economic aid; the use of psychological and covert operations; an expansion of the South Vietnamese army; and the dispatch of US Special Forces to train the South Vietnamese military. Those measures coincided with the visit to Saigon of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who sought to convey the depth of the United States’ commitment to the RVN. Collectively, those actions, along with the continued use of the task force approach, comprised an effort to assist the South Vietnamese in waging their war against the Vietnamese communists. Although control of the “Presidential Program” would migrate nominally to the State Department, real power flowed through the Pentagon, which controlled most of the program’s resources, decision-making, and direction.

Kennedy’s interest in Vietnam also reflected his fascination with counterinsurgency and his determination to enhance the nation’s unconventional capabilities. Tailored to the military demands of the era, which were likely to feature sublimited guerrilla engagements more than the set-piece battles of conventional conflict, counterinsurgency appealed to JFK’s activist agenda and willingness to confront communism on the global periphery. Kennedy thus took steps to develop the tools for meeting the communists on every front. He called for the creation of a special school for counterinsurgency; directed the Pentagon to inventory American paramilitary assets; asked AID to consider further support for local forces; enhanced the federal machinery to promote and support such forces; augmented and expanded existing means for improving counterinsurgency techniques and operations; created a senior-level special group as a clearing house on counterinsurgency (staffing it with some of his most trusted aides, including his brother Robert); and established a national counterinsurgency doctrine to guide all federal agencies involved in such efforts. In short, Kennedy embraced counterinsurgency wholeheartedly and recalibrated the machinery of government to further its development.¹⁴

South Vietnam was a proving ground for this type of warfare. As much as its defense stemmed from concerns about US credibility and the activation of “domino” dynamics – the fear that Saigon’s fall would lead neighboring and otherwise vulnerable states to collapse as well – its security became equally compelling because of the challenge itself. Incorporating elements of nation-building, special operations, covert warfare, and military assistance, the counterinsurgency program in South Vietnam was emblematic of the challenges of the New Frontier, demanding a response from the “best and the brightest” that Kennedy had assembled for that very purpose. The opportunity to experiment with an array of newly designed tools appealed to senior officials, including Kennedy and McNamara, who likened Vietnam to a laboratory for their efforts. In all, the program to aid the RVN in its war against the NLF and its military arm, the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF), was one that Kennedy embraced and continued to expand throughout his time in office.

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The most critical moment for doing so came in the fall of 1961. An increase in PLAF operations, the infiltration of additional forces from North Vietnam into South Vietnam, and the collapse of RVN defenses in several provinces presented Saigon with an increasingly parlous situation. Diệm requested further American assistance and Kennedy responded by sending a fact-finding team, headed by Taylor and the National Security Council’s Walt Rostow, to assess Saigon’s needs. The report they submitted reflected their anxiety about the war and proposed a more sweeping effort to stanch the communist onslaught. In addition to recommending that the United States increase South Vietnam’s capacity to provide for its own defense, Taylor called for the insertion of up to 8,000 American combat troops, ostensibly to provide flood relief following catastrophic rains, as a means of stiffening Saigon’s morale and stopping the infiltration of soldiers and supplies.

Kennedy, however, rejected the use of US combat troops. Dubious of the merits of a deeper commitment, he stood virtually alone among senior national security officials in calling for a more deliberate and restrained response. Much preferring the provision of aid and assistance so that South Vietnam could manage its own affairs, Kennedy sent additional military advisors rather than combat units to assist the RVN. Although he remained steadfast in opposing the introduction of combat troops, he placed no ceiling on the insertion of military advisors. Their numbers would expand exponentially – from less than 700 to more than 16,700 – during his time in office.

Indeed, Kennedy’s aversion to a combat-troop deployment failed to prevent his program from assuming a militarized cast. Following discussion of the Taylor Report, Kennedy consented to a range of measures intended to improve Saigon’s fighting capacity, as well as its ability to win the political struggle against the NLF. Beyond the deployment of military advisors, the provision of economic aid, and renewed attention to civil affairs, Kennedy authorized the introduction of fixed-wing aircraft and greater use of helicopter squadrons and seaborne units, and expanded intelligence operations. In time, he would support the use of herbicides to deny the PLAF the cover of foliage and the availability of foodstuffs in the countryside. He also elevated the profile of both the US–RVN relationship and the US military mission in South Vietnam (Figure 20.1). To signal their heightened importance and direction of an increasingly complex and wide-ranging operation, Kennedy sanctioned the establishment of a “limited partnership” between Washington and Saigon, as well as the creation of MACV – the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – with a four-star general at the helm. In time, MACV would not only direct the assistance effort but assume the functions of the US Military Assistance Advisory Group – headed by a three-star general – that in one form or another had been operating in Vietnam since 1950.

Figure 20.1 John F. Kennedy meeting with Nguyễn Đình Thuận, Chief Cabinet Minister to President Ngô Đình Diệm of South Vietnam. Thuận delivered a letter from Diệm regarding the communist threat to his country (June 14, 1961).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

While MACV sought to improve the capabilities of the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF), the counterinsurgency revolved around initiatives designed to protect the population and isolate the communists. Those efforts took shape through the Strategic Hamlet Program, conceived of and administered by Saigon, but supported by US and British officials. In seeking to create an archipelago of self-sufficient, noncommunist villages loyal to the government, Saigon, Washington, and London all borrowed from the recent past. Prior attempts to create model villages or agrovilles had met with mixed success throughout Southeast Asia, but planners hoped a more targeted and systematic program would guide the social revolution in a favorable direction. That transformation, which sought to counter the maladies of “communism, underdevelopment, and disunity,” required the mass mobilization of society but on a local level. Entire villages were uprooted and forced to secure their own provisions, often without compensation. Ultimately, the program failed to provide its promised benefits, alienating many of those swept up in the experiment and providing valuable grist for communist propaganda. But it was indicative of the era. As much as its implementation collapsed under its own weight and mismanagement, its focus on progress, nation-building, and “rational engineering” reflected a belief in social science and the possibility of translating concepts about modernization and development from theory into practice.¹⁵

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While American and Vietnamese officials continued to tout reports of progress throughout 1962, troubling signs were apparent. In early January 1963, a military engagement at Ấp Bắc, 35 miles (55 kilometers) southwest of Saigon, seemed to indicate growing confidence among the communists and a willingness to stand and fight rather than hit and run; three Americans died in the skirmish, which resulted in the downing of five US helicopters. Military officials put a positive spin on the battle, but Kennedy was troubled by critical reporting of it. Likely more disturbing was the about-face of Senator Mike Mansfield (D-Montana), whose long-standing support of Diệm was eroding, as was his confidence in the prospect of victory. His gloomy, private report to Kennedy in December 1962, following an extended trip to the region, became public the following February, contributing to a more widely shared sense of concern in the early months of 1963. Those worries were as palpable in South Vietnam as they were in the United States. RVN displeasure with US officials, the US media, and especially with the growing number of US personnel in-country – a challenge to the Ngôs’ control of the populace and their stance as nationalists – led Diệm and Nhu to lobby for sending some of them home.

By then, the NLF was controlling ever larger swaths of the South Vietnamese countryside. Reports from the field indicated that the number of fulltime communist guerrillas had expanded from 4,000 in early 1960 to 23,000 in 1963, with upward of 100,000 part-time fighters joining the hard-core PLAF.¹⁶ Their control of the countryside likewise expanded over the course of Kennedy’s presidency. By the fall of 1962, the NLF could claim roughly 20 percent of South Vietnamese villages and 9 percent of its rural population and exercised varying degrees of control over another 47 percent of the villages.¹⁷ Those numbers would continue to grow throughout 1963, with the PLAF in the ascendance. By the fall of that year, communist forces were also enjoying a downward trend in casualties, weapons losses, and defections, while engaging more readily in armed attacks and violent incidents.¹⁸

Political developments had by then turned concern into crisis. In early May, an armed attack by RVN forces on Buddhist celebrants in Huế sparked a protracted confrontation between South Vietnam’s largest religious group and the Saigon government, casting further doubt on Diệm’s ability to unify his country in its fight against the communists. Following the incident, US officials caucused on how best to resolve the tensions. But the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk one month later – a martyrdom photographed and published in media outlets around the world – heightened unease in Saigon and Washington. Kennedy groused at advisors who failed to alert him to the Buddhists as a political force and called on them to impose more effective leverage against the Diệm government.¹⁹

They hoped to do so through a change in representation. Ambassador Frederick E. Nolting, Jr., who had tried to mollify Diệm since his posting to Saigon in early 1961, had fallen out with officials at the State Department and the White House who thought him ineffectual. The administration thus turned to Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a choice with bipartisan appeal, to manage relations with Diệm. Kennedy had a history with Lodge, besting him in their Massachusetts Senate race of 1952 and then again in 1960, when Lodge ran as vice president on the Republican (also known as the “Grand Old Party” or GOP) ticket. Lodge’s fluency in French, as well as his personality and stature – he had been ambassador to the United Nations during the Eisenhower administration, and had a long family pedigree of government service – made him an attractive candidate for the challenging post.

But it was the political cover Lodge offered that made him so valuable. The administration was taking increasing fire for its handling of Diệm, heightening the stakes of its escalating commitment. Partisan battles over Vietnam had emerged after the creation of MACV and the expansion of the Presidential Program in 1962; the sniping continued as GOP figures charged JFK with fighting an undeclared war, especially with reports of American casualties and managed news appearing in the press. The difficulties of 1963 – Ap Bac, the Mansfield Report, the “Buddhist Crisis” – only heightened the likelihood that Vietnam would emerge as a campaign issue the following year. Although a Harris poll indicated popular support for Kennedy’s policy by margins of two to one, the presence of Lodge on the Kennedy team was meant to insulate the administration from partisan attack. His selection as ambassador, therefore, was a shrewd but fateful decision. Fully convinced of his own rectitude, Lodge approached his mission with an imperious and unilateral bearing that, combined with his deep skepticism about Diệm, left him favorably disposed toward supporting a coup.

*

Recent events in South Vietnam gave Lodge little reason to think otherwise. On the eve of his arrival – and likely because of it – Nhu’s forces launched raids on the pagodas and jailed thousands of protestors, many of them students. Diệm instituted martial law, raising the stakes in his showdown with the Buddhists and his standoff with the Americans. Days later, on August 24, the State Department’s George Ball, Averell Harriman, and Roger Hilsman, along with Michael Forrestal at the White House – officials who had been deeply critical of the Ngôs – cabled Lodge, acknowledging that Diệm’s ability to “rid himself” of Nhu would likely determine the future of US support for the RVN president. More senior officials at State, the Pentagon, and the CIA, who were not party to the wire, railed against the freewheeling of their subordinates. Kennedy, too, snapped at aides who circumvented a more deliberative policy process. But his failure to institute a more rigorous system of policymaking, as well as profound fissures on Vietnam policy itself, shaped an environment that allowed for improvisation and indiscipline.

The August 24 missive – Cable 243 – touched off a mini-crisis within the administration. For the first time since the fall of 1961, senior US officials held sustained discussions about the direction of American policy. In fact, for the first time in his presidency, Kennedy engaged in daily, high-level meetings on South Vietnam. They lasted the better part of a week, as the White House struggled to keep abreast of developments, including talk of coup plotting, and what the United States should do about it. Significantly, the administration never reversed the thrust of Cable 243, an implicit acknowledgment of its willingness to drop Diệm. But the coup fizzled; Nhu sniffed it out and divided the generals, who themselves were unsure of American support. The United States was thus in no better position after those events than before they occurred. In fact, given the rancor between pro- and anti-Diệm factions on Kennedy’s team and Diệm’s knowledge of Washington’s scheming, the administration was much worse off.

Searching for firmer footing, Kennedy launched several initiatives – public as well as private – to provide him with better information about the war and better leverage against the RVN. In appearances on US television news programs, JFK discussed the challenges facing Vietnam and the nature of US assistance. Speaking with CBS anchor Walter Cronkite on September 2, Kennedy emphasized the need for changes in RVN policy and personnel to gain the allegiance of the Vietnamese people – a thinly veiled suggestion to lessen Nhu’s influence. Washington could provide assistance and advice, Kennedy said, but the war was South Vietnam’s to win or lose. The United States would nevertheless remain in Vietnam, a mantra Kennedy had long voiced and which he repeated in a subsequent interview with NBC’s David Brinkley and Chet Huntley. At several points in that latter conversation, he warned against American impatience and affirmed his belief in the domino theory, referencing the dangers of China’s regional ambitions – a key concern to US officials – and the risk of American withdrawal. While he likely overstated his belief in domino dynamics, he still subscribed to a worldview, grounded in the importance of credibility and the dangers of appearing weak, that argued for staying engaged.²⁰

All the while, Kennedy remained disheartened by Diệm’s leadership, confounded by brother Nhu and the irresponsible pronouncements of his wife, Trần Lệ Xuân, and increasingly alarmed by the trajectory of events. As summer turned to fall, Kennedy’s frustrations boiled over and contributed to his worry that Diệm might ultimately lose the war – a concern clearly evident on the recordings he secretly made of White House conversations that September.²¹ These sources reinforce the argument that Kennedy’s primary focus was on progress in the counterinsurgency, and that related developments in Vietnam – Diệm’s failure to broaden his political base, his crackdown on protestors, his mistreatments of the Buddhists – mattered only insofar as they affected the war effort.

Kennedy’s resolve to continue the fight also reflected his aversion to a compromise solution that would have removed Vietnam as a site of Cold War competition. Responding to an August 29 appeal from French president Charles de Gaulle to explore the possibility of neutralizing Vietnam, Kennedy dismissed the gambit outright. With Laos continuing to teeter politically, JFK had little interest in pursuing a similar solution across the shared border; it was a position the administration had long held. Kennedy’s rejection of neutralization also stemmed, in part, from friction with Paris over alliance matters in Europe and de Gaulle’s lack of full support for American efforts in Southeast Asia. In fact, suspicions that the French were engaged in back-channel meddling with Nhu, leading toward possible talks with Hanoi and the ouster of American advisors, worried Kennedy aides who feared that events were slipping out of their control.²²

To regain the administration’s balance, Kennedy dispatched a series of fact-finding teams to South Vietnam. Their purpose, ostensibly, was to collect better information about the military and political situations so the president and his aides might devise an effective response. Yet Kennedy was also reacting to reports of disarray within his administration; the search for better policy, therefore, reflected his need to project an air of competence and a sense of unity. Nevertheless, a joint mission from the State and Defense departments, headed by Joseph Mendenhall and Lieutenant General Victor Krulak, delivered a report so incongruous in its findings that Kennedy jokingly wondered whether the two had visited the same country. Seeking clarity, JFK sent the more senior team of Defense Secretary McNamara and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Taylor for a week-long visit to assess the state of the war, as well as actions Washington might take to improve Diệm’s chances of victory.

The report they delivered in October unified the administration around measures they hoped would ensure better performance from Diệm’s government. Tying together policies that had been percolating for months and preserving the pragmatic thrust of Kennedy’s program – supporting those activities that helped the counterinsurgency and opposing those that hindered it – the report called for economic sanctions on South Vietnamese infrastructure projects, import programs, and security forces.²³ Acknowledging the tenacity of the Diệm regime and the likelihood of having to live with it, Kennedy harbored faint hope that the sanctions would leverage Diệm into better performance. But he also recognized that they might reinvigorate planning for a coup – a development he was prepared to accept.

The McNamara-Taylor report also recommended the gradual withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam. Planning for their removal had begun informally in May 1962, when McNamara first asked Harkins about a calendar for their departure. Two months later, he directed Harkins to initiate formal planning for a reduction in force, part of a comprehensive effort to harmonize all elements of the counterinsurgency. That planning continued over the next fifteen months and landed on Kennedy’s desk in early October 1963. Although JFK had long been open to drawing down troops if the opportunity arose, the documentary record is virtually silent on his connection to such planning. On the other hand, the record shows clearly that McNamara was the prime advocate for withdrawing almost all US troops by 1965.²⁴

That timetable signified more than simple frustration with the war, as it was central to McNamara’s vision of a more coordinated approach to Vietnam and a more systematized method for devising and implementing defense policy. Indeed, the impetus to change the nature of the counterinsurgency program in Vietnam from one of ad hoc, makeshift responses to that of a sustained, comprehensive approach took shape alongside a similar effort to conceive of the entire Pentagon budget according to more long-range, coordinated estimates. As McNamara made clear upon taking command at the Pentagon, he intended to rationalize its budget process, rein in wasteful spending and duplication, and impose the strictures of sound business practices upon Department of Defense operations.²⁵

Those measures heightened the value of relying on indigenous forces for local defense. The cost of stationing troops overseas had been increasing dollar expenditures abroad and the outward flow of gold, leaving Kennedy greatly worried about a ballooning balance of payments deficit. Lowering the nation’s military profile in Europe, where the majority of its overseas forces were stationed, thus became a major administration initiative, with implications for the United States’ force structure and the health of its finances. To address the diminution of deployments abroad, McNamara emphasized the need for greater air and sealift capacity, measures that addressed both military and economic concerns.

That desire to limit the number of troops abroad sparked a similar urge to bring some of them home. In addition to considering a reduction of force in Europe, McNamara worried about conditions in Korea, where thousands of US troops reinforced efforts to preserve the peace along the 38th parallel. He was troubled by the amount of assistance flowing to Seoul and the ballooning budget for arming and equipping its forces. Korea thus stood as a cautionary tale about making long-term, open-ended commitments to the developing world. McNamara made clear to Kennedy his interest in scaling down that commitment and the danger of letting a similar situation develop in Vietnam.²⁶

Those fiscal concerns dovetailed with Kennedy’s preferred approach to Vietnam, which held that the United States should provide local forces with the tools to manage their own defense. The president thus seems to have endorsed McNamara’s planning for withdrawal, but not without reservation. At key points in 1963, following meetings with senior officials on Vietnam, McNamara briefed the president on the scope and progress of withdrawal planning. At each juncture, which included one-on-one encounters as well as sessions with other officials present, Kennedy voiced his skepticism about the merits and context of a US troop withdrawal. In both May and October of 1963, in remarks captured on his White House taping system, the president stressed his reluctance to remove those troops in the face of adverse military conditions. Having shared those sentiments in private as well as in widely attended meetings, those comments most likely represented Kennedy’s genuine concern about the circumstances of an American withdrawal.²⁷

To be sure, Kennedy’s private reservations reinforced as well as clashed with his public statements about the virtues of the American presence in Vietnam. In press conferences and televised interviews, JFK maintained that the United States would stay in Vietnam to help Saigon confront the communist challenge. At the same time, he also expressed – repeatedly and consistently – his belief that the war was Saigon’s to win or lose. The tension between those conflicting positions, which Kennedy was never able to reconcile, had been present in his approach to Vietnam since the earliest days of his administration. Still, his reluctance to accept a South Vietnamese defeat, reflected in his apparent willingness to delay a US withdrawal, continued to drive policy and lay at the heart of his thinking about Vietnam.

With the presentation of the McNamara-Taylor Report on October 2, withdrawal planning had reached maturity. Its two strands – the removal of 1,000 troops by the end of that year and practically all the rest by the end of 1965 – developed separately but came together in a White House statement following a day of high-level meetings. Both strands worked to counter headwinds the administration was facing in Washington as well as in Saigon. At home, Kennedy sought to mollify congressmen frustrated not only with Diệm’s behavior but with the disbursement of foreign aid; JFK had been facing a bipartisan backlash against American largesse for the better part of eighteen months and hoped that a firmer and more unified approach to Saigon might rescue his broader aid package. Abroad, the withdrawal plan functioned as both bait and leverage. While it acknowledged the adverse impact that US troops were having on RVN politics – Diệm feared the increasing contact between Americans and South Vietnamese – it also began the countdown on a US departure. As both a carrot and a stick, the planned withdrawal offered multiple means to wrest better performance out of Saigon.²⁸

That performance was essential, as earlier optimism about the war was fading. While McNamara and Taylor described the military effort as unaffected by the “Buddhist Crisis,” privately the defense secretary was deeply worried about the course of events. Additional study by the State Department, which used the Pentagon’s own figures on the war, suggested that momentum now lay with the PLAF.²⁹ It would swing even further in their direction following the early November coup against Diệm and Nhu – an operation the United States ultimately sanctioned and supported – as the communists took advantage of the chaos and disorganization following the fall of the Ngôs.³⁰

Kennedy’s appraisal of those developments remains somewhat shrouded. While he expressed shock upon learning that Diệm and Nhu had been murdered, his assessment of the war itself is difficult to discern. He had long received a steady stream of conflicting reports, leaving him none the wiser about its progress. Most likely, his frustrations with Diệm and his skeptical bearing left him more bearish than bullish about its prospects, even after Diệm’s demise. But they also left him no less committed to a successful outcome.³¹

*

Given the war’s subsequent trajectory, Kennedy’s own assassination, just weeks after the killing of Diệm and Nhu, has generated endless speculation about the meaning and direction of his Vietnam policy. Several aides later argued that JFK was fully intent on withdrawing from Vietnam. Their testimonies have appeared in memoirs, biographies, oral histories, and scholarly works, and have been joined by the reflections of friends and journalists, as well as military and public officials. From the observations of assistants Kenneth O’Donnell and Dave Powers to the pained reflections of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, many of these accounts state flatly that Kennedy was determined to reduce the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. At the very least, they maintain, he would not have escalated in the fashion of LBJ.³² Most of these claims appeared after US prospects in the war had dimmed or after the fighting had ended altogether. Several were infused with more than a wisp of Camelot nostalgia. New sources, such as Kennedy’s White House tapes, continue to stir debate about the president’s ultimate aims, with a consensus acknowledging the reality of withdrawal planning, if not his definitive commitment to seeing it through.

In the end, Kennedy sought to have it both ways. While loath to deploy combat troops in support of Saigon, JFK appeared equally committed to winning the war against the communists. While open to reducing those troops already in-country, he wavered on the timing of their possible withdrawal. And while publicly hawkish about the need to remain in Vietnam, he privately questioned the virtues of an extended commitment. He was a conflicted Cold Warrior, especially on Vietnam, and the tensions in his policies grew ever sharper as he sought greater room to enact them.

Ultimately, Kennedy’s commitment to Saigon, which escalated throughout his time in office, was less than iron clad. For all the rhetoric about South Vietnam as an outpost of freedom, Kennedy never defined its preservation as a vital American interest – not when his 1961 task force highlighted the dangers of Saigon’s collapse; not when he entered into a “limited partnership” with the RVN later that year; not when economic and military aid began to flow more freely in 1962; and not when a host of military and political troubles arose in 1963, demanding more of his public and private attention. The “survival and the success of liberty,” as Kennedy noted in his inaugural, was an important American concern, but its realization in Southeast Asia was not an essential one.

The commitment to Ngô Đình Diệm was equally instrumental. Kennedy genuinely admired the South Vietnamese president but backed Diệm only so long as he was able to prosecute the counterinsurgency effectively. When Diệm proved wanting, Kennedy indicated his disapproval, setting in motion a series of events that led to Diệm’s downfall. The November 1963 coup failed to calm the upheaval in Saigon; in fact, it generated lasting turmoil in South Vietnamese politics, endowing the RVN state with a pervasive instability it was never able to overcome. Hanoi’s own escalatory measures would render Saigon’s position increasingly dire, and it would fall to Kennedy’s successor to manage the deteriorating state of affairs. Still, the rhetoric of Kennedy’s commitment, and the policies that flowed from it, diminished LBJ’s room for maneuver as surely as they were designed to preserve that flexibility for JFK himself. In the end, that may have been the most consequential legacy of Kennedy’s policy toward Vietnam.

21 The Crisis of 1963 and the Origins of the Vietnam War

Edward Miller

In most histories of the Vietnam War, the year 1963 is depicted as a moment of contingency, missed opportunities, and tragedy. The reason for this is not hard to fathom: both at the time and in hindsight, 1963 appears as a year full of dramatic and consequential events in Vietnam. The year began with the stunning victory of communist-led insurgents over a much larger South Vietnamese army detachment in the battle of Ấp Bắc in early January. Following the battle, tensions rose between the South Vietnamese government of Ngô Đình Diệm and the United States, its most important foreign ally. Then, in May and June, Saigon and other South Vietnamese cities were rocked by anti-government protests led by Buddhist monks and nuns. Those protests garnered worldwide attention after a bonze named Thích Quảng Đức burned himself to death on a Saigon streetcorner on June 11. In August, after Diệm used government security forces to crack down on the movement, senior officers in the South Vietnamese Army began plotting a coup against the South Vietnamese president. On November 1, the generals launched their uprising. Rebel soldiers killed Diệm and his brother Ngô Đình Nhu the next day. The coup had received the qualified approval of US President John F. Kennedy, who was destined to meet his own fate just three weeks later. In the aftermath of these events, senior leaders of the Vietnamese Workers Party (VWP) met secretly in Hanoi. At the urging of VWP General Secretary Lê Duẩn, they endorsed plans for a major escalation of North Vietnam’s war effort in South Vietnam. That escalation, combined with the post–coup turmoil in Saigon, would bring the South Vietnamese government to the brink of collapse by late 1964. In response, Lyndon B. Johnson opted to send US military forces into combat in both North and South Vietnam during the first half of 1965.

Given this chronology of turmoil and momentous decisions, the notion that 1963 was a year of crisis in Vietnam seems indisputable. But what, exactly, were the origins and nature of this crisis? Many authors have struggled to make sense of the confusing welter of rivalries and violent events that unfolded over the course of the year. Vietnamese Communist Party accounts emphasize military developments in the war between Diệm’s forces and the communist-led National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF). In these accounts, the communist victory at Ấp Bắc was merely the first move in a broadly successful insurgent offensive that by year’s end had plunged the Saigon government “into a state of continual crisis from which it could not recover.”¹ In contrast, many Anglophone authors treat the 1963 crisis as a product of the authoritarian policies of the Diệm government. In the memorable phrase of the journalist Frances FitzGerald, Diệm was the “Sovereign of Discord” whose fate was sealed by his atavistic desire to restore a lost premodern social order.² More recent accounts by historians have eschewed Fitzgerald’s Orientalist framing but still emphasize Diệm’s missteps as the key factors that precipitated the crisis.³ Others, however, have blamed the crisis on Diệm’s South Vietnamese political opponents, or on certain US government officials and American journalists.⁴

In this chapter, I offer a broader view. Instead of revisiting the debate over responsibility for Diệm’s overthrow and murder, I reinterpret the crisis of 1963 as emerging from an intertwined set of conflicts over sovereignty in Vietnam. These sovereignty conflicts involved multiple states and nonstate groups. Although some of them pitted Vietnamese actors against other Vietnamese, others involved confrontations between Vietnamese and “external” actors. I will emphasize three sets of sovereignty conflicts in particular: (1) the rivalry between Diệm’s anticommunist Republic of Vietnam (RVN) and the communist-led Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN); (2) the growing tensions between the two Vietnamese states and their respective superpower allies (China, the Soviet Union, and the United States); and (3) the clashes between Diệm’s government and other anticommunist nationalist groups in South Vietnam.

None of these conflicts over sovereignty in Vietnam was new in 1963. Each could be traced back to the uneasy peace that emerged after the Geneva Conference of 1954. At Geneva, diplomats successfully ended the French Indochina War and paved the way for the final dismantling of French colonial sovereignty in Vietnam. But the Geneva Conference did not address the question of how sovereignty in postcolonial Vietnam would be wielded, or the equally critical question of who would wield it. As a result, in the years after 1954, conflicts over sovereignty in Vietnam gradually intensified in all three of the arenas identified above. At first, however, these conflicts remained mostly separate from each other. It was only in 1963 that these three strands of conflict over sovereignty became deeply intertwined.

The crisis that erupted in 1963 had consequences that went far beyond the demise of the Diệm government. Instead of resolving the conflicts over sovereignty, Diệm’s downfall prompted all the other actors in the drama – both Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese – to double down on their sovereignty claims. Those responses, in turn, led directly to the escalation of the military struggle in Vietnam during 1964–5, and to the massively more violent war that emerged thereafter. By placing clashes over sovereignty at the center of analysis, we can better understand not only the roots of the 1963 crisis, but also how and why the events of that fateful year transformed the Vietnam War into one of the twentieth century’s most destructive and bloody wars.

National and Imperial Sovereignties in the Indochina Wars

My reframing of the events of 1963 draws on recent scholarly efforts to historicize sovereignty in imperial and postcolonial contexts. For centuries, political theorists in Europe and elsewhere have theorized states as autonomous, territorially bounded units. From this perspective, sovereignty inheres in a state’s exercise of political authority over spaces, populations, and institutions, and in its efforts to secure recognition of that authority. Since the 1990s, however, some international relations theorists and political geographers have questioned whether sovereignty is always exercised on a territorial basis.⁵ At the same time, historians have challenged the traditional practice of portraying sovereignty in all-or-nothing terms – that is, as an absolute and indivisible status that a state or ruler either possesses or lacks. Not content merely to show that sovereignty can be contested, scholars now explore the many ways in which sovereignty has been shared, graduated, layered, or fragmented.⁶

The emphasis on the divisibility of sovereignty has been particularly evident in the study of modern empires and postcolonial societies. Instead of treating empires and nation-states as organized around uniform models of either colonial or national sovereignties, historians increasingly view imperial sovereignty as contingent and improvised.⁷ This approach is reflected in Ann Stoler’s discussion of contemporary empires as “imperial formations.” According to Stoler, imperial formations are not necessarily organized around colonial forms of rule, nor are they always defined by clear borders and boundaries. Instead, they are “macropolities” that function as cobbled-together patchworks of territories, laws, rights, and forms of citizenship. In these formations, Stoler argues, political authority is defined by varying “degrees of imperial sovereignty” rather than by hard-and-fast distinctions between imperial rulers and colonial subjects.⁸

Several historians have begun to apply these alternative approaches to sovereignty to the study of colonial Indochina and the French Indochina War. Instead of framing the war of 1945–54 as a straightforward clash between French colonialism and Vietnamese nationalism, Christopher Goscha describes it as a “savage war of sovereignties.” This multisided conflict featured “embattled embryonic states, colonial, national and hybrid ones, each of which was determined to contest or indeed suppress the other’s sovereignty.”⁹ Similarly, Brett Reilly argues that the history of the State of Vietnam (the immediate ancestor of the RVN) shows that sovereignty in late colonial Indochina was “a malleable and divisible set of practices.”¹⁰ Reilly also shows that the French Indochina War was, among other things, a civil war – an important historical fact long neglected by scholars.¹¹

Following Goscha and Reilly, I contend that a more contingent approach to sovereignty can be usefully applied to the study of the Indochina Wars in general and to the origins of the Vietnam War in particular. Such an approach allows examination of the complex interactions among multiple national and imperial sovereignties in Vietnam. The contest over national sovereignties was most obvious in the rivalry between the DRVN and the RVN, nationalist states that both claimed sovereignty over all of Vietnam’s territory and population. However, even as the Hanoi and Saigon regimes attacked the other’s nationalist legitimacy, they also faced legitimacy challenges from various nonstate actors. The massive migration of nearly a million Vietnamese from North to South Vietnam during 1954–5 – an exodus enabled by a provision in the Geneva Accords – was deeply worrisome for DRVN officials, who recognized that it undermined their claims to wield sovereign authority over the entire Vietnamese population. At the same time, the newly established Diệm government faced armed resistance from various sectarian groups and militias, as well as from the leaders of the South Vietnamese Army. Although both the DRVN and RVN states survived these early challenges, the episodes underlined the unstable and fragmented qualities of national sovereignty in Vietnam after Geneva.

These pitched contests over national sovereignty in Vietnam were heavily impacted by foreign actors. Although the list of states that deployed military forces to Indochina during the Vietnam War runs to more than a dozen, the most consequential interventions were those of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). All three states justified their actions in Indochina as efforts to defend the sovereignty of a legitimate Vietnamese state (with Washington backing the RVN and Moscow and Beijing supporting the DRVN). Yet these interventions were also deeply connected to the Global Cold War and to each state’s interest in shaping the future development of the decolonizing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. From this perspective, each of these “superpowers” was an imperial formation that sought a measure of sovereign authority in Indochina, even though its leaders disavowed any colonial aspirations.

From the early 1950s, the US intervention in Indochina was framed as part of Washington’s global strategy to contain Soviet expansion. But American sovereign claims in Indochina were not born of anticommunism alone. Recent scholarship on US empire has linked Washington’s post–1945 engagement with the “Third World” to older ideas about American capacities to bestow liberty and guidance on backward nations and peoples. The salience of these racialized uplift narratives was especially evident in Washington’s increasing interest in modernization and development in the Global South.¹²

This does not mean, however, that American development policies for Vietnam and other countries was merely an updated form of colonialism. Instead of building American neocolonies, US leaders envisioned a “Free World” of allied states committed to both anticommunism and American-style capitalist modernity. Yet this US-conceived world was also a heavily militarized one that included a sprawling global network of American military bases and military advisors – what one scholar aptly describes as a “pointillist” American empire.¹³ The integration of “Free Vietnam” into this American empire of development aid and bases began in 1950 when Washington established both a Military Advisory and Assistance Group (MAAG) and a US Operations Mission (USOM) in Saigon. By the late 1950s, South Vietnam received more US military and economic aid than almost any other country in the world. During 1961–2, as the communist-led insurgency spread across South Vietnam, Washington expanded its aid commitments to the RVN and upgraded its military presence through the creation of Military Assistance Command-Vietnam (MACV).

While Washington tried to pull Vietnam into the “Free World,” leaders in Moscow and Beijing envisioned a different kind of postcolonial destiny for Indochina. As Marxist–Leninists, Soviet and Chinese leaders agreed that post–1945 international relations would be defined by the global rivalry between the socialist (or “democratic”) nations and the capitalist (“imperialist”) bloc. They also believed the eventual triumph of the socialist camp was assured. As a result, both Moscow and Beijing recognized the DRVN in 1950 and strongly backed its war effort against France. After 1954, the two communist “older brothers” continued to supply economic and military aid to Hanoi, along with advisors and development expertise.

But the shared commitment to the “two-camp” worldview actually concealed significant ideological differences between the Soviet Union and the PRC. As Jeremy Friedman has argued, Soviet leaders emphasized the importance of anticapitalist revolution, a position that made them suspicious of nationalists and nationalism. In contrast, Mao Zedong and other leaders of the Chinese Communist Party stressed anti-imperialism and China’s struggle to overturn a century of subordination to foreign powers. Although these positions were not absolutely incompatible, the differences between them became more pronounced during the late 1950s, resulting in the rift that would become known as the Sino-Soviet split. In this situation, Moscow and Beijing each sought to recast their support for the DRVN as proof of their claims to be the sole legitimate leader of the global communist movement.¹⁴

By the early 1960s, the conflicts over sovereignty in Indochina appeared to be intensifying. The rise of the DRVN-backed insurgency against Diệm’s RVN state showed that tensions over national sovereignty in Vietnam were becoming more acute. At the same time, the region was increasingly viewed as a potential new hotspot in the Global Cold War. This elevated risk was evident not only in the Kennedy administration’s increased aid to South Vietnam but also in the eruption of a new civil war in Laos – a conflict in which the United States and Soviet, PRC, RVN, and DRVN states were all engaged as sponsors of one or other of the warring parties. The tensions were further exacerbated by the emerging rivalry between Moscow and Beijing, each of which now publicly accused the other of betraying the cause of international socialist revolution.

Nevertheless, as the year 1963 began, it was far from certain that Indochina was about to be plunged into a new “savage war of sovereignties.” Even though the multiple conflicts among the claimants to national and imperial sovereignty were escalating, those conflicts were still fairly distinct and separate from one another. But that was about to change. Over the following year, the multiple rivalries over sovereignty in Indochina began to intersect and collide with each other in new and more dangerous ways. As it happened, the first signs of the impending collision would be glimpsed not in Saigon, Hanoi, or any foreign capital, but in a rural village in the heart of the Mekong Delta.

The DRVN, the RVN, and the Battle of Ấp Bắc

The battle of Ấp Bắc took place in two hamlets in Định Tường province on January 2, 1963. During the daylong battle, elements of two NLF battalions – fewer than 400 guerrilla fighters – mauled an attacking force of more than 1,500 RVN troops backed by helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and armored vehicles. The rebels shot down or damaged fourteen of the American-piloted helicopters and killed or wounded nearly two hundred of the enemy, while suffering comparatively light casualties in their own ranks. At the end of the battle, the insurgents successfully withdrew from the area, evading the units deployed to block their retreat.

Communist propagandists during and after the Vietnam War celebrated Ấp Bắc as a major breakthrough that showed the NLF had devised new tactics to overcome the South Vietnamese Army’s superior firepower and resources. In contrast, US military advisors and American journalists attributed the insurgent victory to mistakes and flawed leadership on the government side. While some Americans accused Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) officers of incompetence and cowardice during the battle, others blamed senior political officials, especially Ngô Đình Diệm. In his influential postwar account of the battle, American journalist Neil Sheehan claimed that Diệm had ordered his commanders to avoid battlefield losses at all costs because he was more worried about a military coup than about defeating the insurgency, thus leading to hesitation and defeat at Ấp Bắc.¹⁵

Recent scholarship confirms the importance of communist tactical innovations at Ấp Bắc, including a new “stand and fight” doctrine. By using strict fire discipline and by placing their forces in well-concealed and well-protected positions, the insurgents neutralized the mobility and firepower advantages conferred by the US-supplied aircraft and armored vehicles. Confronted with these new tactics, South Vietnamese officers failed to devise an effective response. Communist commanders quickly recognized that the Ấp Bắc model could be incorporated into a strategy to paralyze the enemy’s operational capabilities across broader geographical areas.¹⁶

This does not prove, however, that the ARVN defeat at Ấp Bắc was due to cowardice or to a reluctance to take the fight to the enemy. Diệm’s alleged intolerance for casualties is uncorroborated by any evidence other than rumors and hearsay among US military advisors. It is true that Diệm and his brother Ngô Dình Nhu were concerned about the danger of a coup; it is also true that they staffed key military command positions with loyal officers. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the Ngô brothers still expected the ARVN to fight and defeat the NLF. In fact, by early 1963 the Ngôs were firmly convinced that they were winning the war and that victory was within reach – a belief they sustained even after Ấp Bắc.

For Diệm and Nhu, the battle of Ấp Bắc was merely a minor episode in their long-running struggle to defend the sovereignty of the RVN state. During the first years of Diệm’s rule, the Ngôs appeared to have the upper hand in that struggle. Per the Geneva Accords, the DRVN transferred control of large swaths of territory in central Vietnam and the Mekong Delta to the RVN. These DRVN withdrawals, combined with Diệm’s military victories over the Bình Xuyên cartel and other noncommunist militia forces, left his government in effective control over most of South Vietnam’s territory – a feat that the Bảo Đại-led State of Vietnam had never come close to achieving. Diệm also moved to bolster his legitimacy by organizing a head-to-head referendum against Bảo Đại in October 1955, followed by elections for a National Assembly and the promulgation of a new RVN constitution in 1956. Although the government staged these events in ways calculated to marginalize or exclude its critics, Diệm could still plausibly cite these measures as evidence of his commitment to republicanism and popular sovereignty. Diệm’s sovereignty claims were further enhanced by the withdrawal of the last French colonial troops from South Vietnam in 1956, and by the diplomatic recognition of the RVN by dozens of foreign states.¹⁷ Meanwhile, within South Vietnam, RVN state authority was consolidated via an indoctrination and security program known as the Denounce Communists Campaign. While this campaign did little to build Diệm’s popularity with rural Vietnamese, it still increased the government’s power and authority over the population. The campaign also severely damaged the party’s network of “stay behind” cadres and operatives, large numbers of whom had been arrested or killed by 1958.¹⁸

Communist Party leaders were not content to allow Diệm to win the contest for sovereignty in South Vietnam without a fight. As early as 1956, Lê Duẩn – who had remained in the South after Geneva – was laying the groundwork for a response. In his essay “The Path to Revolution in the South,” written when the party’s fortunes in the South were near their nadir, Lê Duẩn argued that the party could and should challenge Diệm’s claims to sovereignty at the local level, even while “struggling according to a peaceful line.” “All accomplishments in every country are due to the people,” he declared. “That is a definite law; it cannot be otherwise.” Significantly, Lê Duẩn did not call for the immediate rebuilding of the DRVN state apparatus in the South. Instead, he exhorted party cadres “to mingle with the masses, to protect and serve the interests of the masses and to pursue correctly the mass line.”¹⁹ In these words lay the kernel of a new strategy: By fostering a new mass resistance movement, the party would cast the resistance in the South not as a clash between two rival Vietnamese states, but as a conflict between the RVN state and “the Southern people.” While the communists’ ultimate goal remained the same – establishing DRVN sovereignty over all of Vietnam – Lê Duẩn now argued that Diệm would have to be delegitimized and overthrown before Hanoi could reclaim the South.

By 1959, Lê Duẩn had secured the VWP Politburo’s authorization for his strategy of localized resistance operations. During 1960, cadres organized a series of “concerted uprisings” across the Mekong Delta. Although these included some small-scale military operations, they were focused mainly on the mobilization of the rural population through demonstrations and other “political struggle” actions designed to weaken RVN legitimacy. The insurgents also sought to degrade the Diệm administrative apparatus via assassinations and kidnappings of local government officials and supporters. Meanwhile, DRVN material support for the rebels began flowing from North Vietnam to the South via the network of paths and roads that would become known as the Hồ Chí Minh Trail. While the volume of weapons and supplies remained limited prior to 1965, the Trail delivered another crucial resource: thousands of Southern-born communist cadres who had “regrouped” to the North in 1954. These returning Southerners played key roles in the establishment and expansion of the NLF, the ostensibly noncommunist and independent insurgent organization set up in 1960. By seeding the NLF apparatus with Southerners, DRVN leaders could credibly represent the insurgency as a popular rebellion, even as they maintained close control over it.

Diệm and his supporters were badly shaken by the VWP comeback and the rapid expansion of the insurgency during 1960 and 1961. In the Mekong Delta, the insurgents overwhelmed the government’s Agroville Program, an agrarian development initiative designed to modernize and control the rural population by concentrating them in town-like settlements. The government’s increasingly draconian security measures – such as the infamous 10/59 decree, which created military tribunals with the power to execute suspected communists – seemed ineffective against the onslaught. By mid-1961, the insurgents wielded effective control over roughly half of South Vietnam’s territory.

But Diệm was preparing a comeback of his own. To bolster the RVN military effort, he turned to US President John F. Kennedy. In late 1961, Kennedy agreed to a large expansion of military aid for South Vietnam, including helicopters, armored personnel carriers, and other offensive weapons systems that the ARVN had previously lacked. He also sharply increased the number of US military advisors in South Vietnam. Diệm viewed these US advisors warily, since their presence seemed to confirm communist claims that his government was an American puppet regime. On the other hand, the military impact of the aid appeared to be extraordinarily positive for the RVN – at least in the short term. During 1962, the ARVN’s battlefield fortunes improved dramatically, thanks to the increased mobility and firepower conferred by the new equipment.²⁰

For Diệm, the influx of American aid was not the only reason for the shift in the tide of the war during 1962. In his view, the key to the turnaround was the launch of a new RVN counterinsurgency initiative, the Strategic Hamlet Program (SHP). Designed and overseen by Ngô Dình Nhu, Diệm’s younger brother and closest advisor, the SHP was the most ambitious and grandiose of all of Diệm’s nation-building schemes. Nhu proposed to gather all rural residents into government-fortified hamlets as a means of separating them from the NLF. But the SHP was not merely about ensuring the security of the population. According to Nhu, the program also aimed to enlist the population in the fight against the NLF. This goal was supposed to be achieved via the indoctrination of hamlet residents in the principles of personalism, the abstruse form of communitarianism that the Ngôs trumpeted as the official philosophy of their regime. In Nhu’s imagination, each strategic hamlet would be both “a defense system in miniature” and a self-sufficient community of RVN citizen-farmers.²¹

Most retrospective assessments of the SHP have emphasized the gap between Nhu’s theories and the actual implementation of the program. Even Diệm’s supporters admitted that many of the thousands of hamlets built by the government were constructed in an overly hasty manner by officials who were corrupt, incompetent, or both. There is precious little evidence that hamlet residents ever understood what personalism was, or how they were supposed to apply it in their daily lives. But in the heady days of 1962, both US and RVN officials often discounted evidence of the program’s ideological and practical shortcomings.

Nhu’s faith in the program was especially fervent. In November 1962, he ordered the RVN civic action ministry to begin preparations for the liberation of North Vietnam from communist rule. According to Nhu, the news of the success of the hamlet program in the South would soon inspire the ordinary people of the North to begin building their own strategic hamlets, ideally with covert assistance provided by the RVN.²²

Diệm and Nhu’s ebullient optimism about their prospects for victory was the lens through which they viewed the battle of Ấp Bắc. For the Ngôs, the outcome of the battle was disappointing. But it was not cause for alarm. In the aftermath of the battle, Nhu insisted that the clash had been a “partial victory” for the government since the NLF forces eventually departed from the battlefield. He also believed the ARVN would continue to “wear down the enemy through envelopment.”²³ Neither Nhu nor senior ARVN commanders seemed to take note of the new “stand and fight” tactics that the NLF celebrated as the main reason for their triumph.

The Ngô brothers also discounted another important reason for the insurgents’ success at Ấp Bắc: the weapons that they used. Prior to 1962, the rebels had fought mainly with small arms, many of them antiquated. At Ấp Bắc, however, the NLF forces had deployed up-to-date recoilless rifles and anti-aircraft machine guns against the enemy’s helicopters and armored vehicles. Without these heavy weapons, the new “stand and fight” tactics would have been useless. How had the insurgents acquired these big guns?

Although most American observers mistakenly believed that the rebels had captured them from South Vietnamese armories, postwar Vietnamese accounts show that the new weapons actually came from North Vietnam.²⁴ Moreover, they had been brought to the South not via the Hồ Chí Minh Trail through Laos and Cambodia, but by sea. In the spring of 1962, a small fleet of four North Vietnamese junks disguised as fishing vessels began smuggling weapons and other supplies across the South China Sea, making clandestine deliveries along the South Vietnamese coast. The opening of the “Hồ Chí Minh Sea Trail” (Đường Hồ Chí Minh trên biển) proved to be a major strategic breakthrough. Between late 1962 and early 1965, North Vietnamese ships smuggled nearly 5,000 tons of weapons and supplies into South Vietnam by sea. While Ấp Bắc was probably not the first time that insurgents had used these seaborne weapons against ARVN forces, it was certainly the first time they had deployed them to such dramatic effect.²⁵

The opening of the sea trail puts the battle of Ấp Bắc in a different light. The NLF’s victory resulted not only from the tactical innovations devised by its commanders, but also from the opening of transportation links between North Vietnam and the battlefields of the Mekong Delta. Those links would eventually transform the intensifying struggle over sovereignty in South Vietnam. During the French Indochina War, as Chris Goscha has shown, VWP leaders relied on sea-based networks to keep the party’s isolated Mekong Delta base areas connected with the rest of the DRVN’s territorial “archipelago.” The re-establishment of these connections to the delta during 1962–3, coupled with the spectacular victory at Ấp Bắc, led Lê Duẩn and other communist leaders to conclude that they had found the elements of a new strategy for victory in the South. The Ngô brothers may not have realized it, but the struggle for sovereignty in the Southern countryside had entered a new phase.

The Ngôs and the United States

In early April 1963, the US ambassador to South Vietnam met with Ngô Đình Diệm at the latter’s office. The session did not go well. Although Fredrick Nolting had enjoyed close working relations with Diệm since his arrival in Saigon in 1961, he found the president in an intransigent mood. Diệm had previously informed the embassy that he intended to end the involvement of US military and civilian advisors in the Strategic Hamlet Program. Nolting now implored him to reconsider, arguing that Americans had played crucial roles in implementing the program. Diệm countered that the US advisors’ increased presence and visibility in the provinces had become a threat to RVN sovereignty by perpetuating a “colonial mentality” among South Vietnamese. When Nolting remarked that rural residents seemed more friendly to Americans than before, Diệm replied that this was precisely what worried him. “The people believe that the Americans are now the government and disregard the authority of my local officials,” he complained.²⁶

Ngô Đình Diệm viewed his alliance with the United States as both essential and problematic. A staunch anticommunist, Diệm sought US support even before he became leader of South Vietnam in 1954. Once he assumed power, his government relied on US aid not only to train and maintain the RVN’s armed forces, but also to fund his ambitious array of nation-building programs. Diệm also benefited from US recognition and support in the diplomatic realm – not least when Washington backed his opposition to the Geneva-mandated 1956 reunification elections, over Hanoi’s strenuous complaints.

Nevertheless, Diệm knew that US support for him was far from unconditional. In the spring of 1955, the senior US envoy to South Vietnam recommended that Diệm be replaced, on the grounds that he was refusing to follow American advice. US President Eisenhower briefly endorsed that proposal, reversing himself only after Diệm unexpectedly defeated the Bình Xuyên in the battle of Saigon. Although Eisenhower and other US leaders subsequently heaped praise on Diệm – especially during his 1957 state visit to the United States – the memory of his near-abandonment by Washington lingered. During the late 1950s, Diệm sparred frequently with US officials over the form and content of his nation-building programs. Tensions between the allies worsened during 1960, as the communist-led insurgency gathered momentum and strength in the countryside. Diệm was annoyed in October 1960, when US Ambassador Elbridge Durbrow forcefully pressed him to implement reforms and to reduce his brother Nhu’s influence in the government. Annoyance turned to anger the following month, when an attempted coup by ARVN paratrooper units nearly toppled Diệm from power. The Ngôs were incensed that US Embassy officers had been in contact with some of the coup leaders during the uprising, and that they smuggled one of the plotters out of the country after the rebellion collapsed.²⁷

Relations between the allies remained fraught following the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in early 1961. The Ngôs were encouraged by the replacement of Ambassador Durbrow with the more pliable Nolting, and by the official visit of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to Saigon in May 1961. However, tensions resurfaced later in the year when Washington proposed to expand US–RVN military cooperation against the communist insurgency, which was continuing to make gains in the countryside. Diệm was happy to accept more American advisors and more advanced weapon systems for the ARVN. But he balked at US attempts to link the new partnership to administrative reforms. After a moment of hesitation, Kennedy withdrew the reform demands. In the short run, this decision seemed to pay off handsomely, as ARVN troops inflicted significant losses on the insurgents throughout 1962.

In early 1963, following the ARVN debacle at Ấp Bắc, relations between the two governments once again slipped into crisis – though not because either side viewed the battle as a breakthrough for the communists. Indeed, Diệm and Nhu seemed less upset by the outcome on the battlefield than by the comments of US military advisors, who claimed that the Ngôs were deliberately preventing the ARVN from defeating the enemy. The brothers were also irritated by the publication of a report by US Senator Mike Mansfield, who had visited South Vietnam in late 1962. A former staunch supporter of Diệm’s, Mansfield now expressed dismay over the RVN’s lack of progress toward “popularly responsible and responsive government.”²⁸

In response to these criticisms, the Ngôs decided to press for changes in the terms of their relationship with Washington. They began to speak both privately and publicly of a “revisionist” approach to American aid under which the RVN would exercise more exclusive control over the military and economic assistance they received from Washington. This approach was evident in Diệm’s declaration of his intent to end American participation in the implementation of the Strategic Hamlet Program, despite Ambassador Nolting’s strident objections. In early May, Nhu told a Washington Post interviewer that the number of US military advisors in Vietnam had grown too large and should be reduced by 50 percent or more; he also declared that some of the advisors were “daredevils” who lacked the patience needed to defeat the enemy. Nhu’s complaints seemed to echo prior comments by his wife Trần Lệ Xuân (better known as “Madam Nhu”). She had warned of “false brothers” who were undermining Vietnam’s right to self-determination even as they professed support for the RVN.²⁹

In the end, the Ngôs were unable to secure their desired “revisions” to the US–RVN alliance. Nhu’s comments in the Post generated controversy and speculation that the brothers might be preparing to sever their ties to Washington altogether. In fact, Diệm and Nhu had no desire for an outright rupture in relations. By late May, they had backpedaled and worked out a face-saving deal with the embassy that allowed the American role in the Strategic Hamlet Program to continue. The brothers also quietly shelved their demands for a drawdown in US advisors.

Nevertheless, the mere fact that the Ngôs had sought to reduce the overall scope and scale of the US role in South Vietnam would have far-reaching consequences. By explicitly casting the American presence as a threat to Vietnamese sovereignty, the regime was challenging a key feature of Kennedy’s approach for defending the “Free World” in Southeast Asia. This clash did not necessarily mean that the nearly decade-old alliance between Diệm and the United States was unraveling. But it did raise that possibility in both Vietnamese and American minds. With the onset of a new crisis in South Vietnam during the summer of 1963, the doubts about the durability of the US–Diệm alliance would become more pressing.

The “Buddhist Crisis” and the Making of the November Coup

Despite the growing tensions between Washington and Saigon, there seemed little reason to believe that the fall of the Ngô Đình Diệm government was imminent in the spring of 1963. Despite controlling many rural districts, NLF insurgents had not demonstrated an ability to threaten Saigon or other centers of RVN power. Meanwhile, the US government remained officially committed to its alliance with Diệm, and American military and economic aid continued to flow into South Vietnam. Although Diệm had faced rebellions led by disgruntled ARVN officers in both 1960 and 1962, those short-lived uprisings had notably failed to attract the support of senior army commanders.

But the situation changed dramatically during May and June 1963 with the emergence of a new challenge to Diệm’s political authority: a protest movement led by Buddhist monks. The Buddhist movement began in the central Vietnamese city of Huế, where government security forces killed eight people during a demonstration on May 8. After protests spread to Saigon and other cities, Diệm government officials and Buddhist leaders struck a deal in early June that addressed most of the latter’s demands. But the agreement was upended by Madame Nhu, who publicly denounced Buddhist leaders for making “false utterances” about RVN officials. On June 11, a monk named Thích Quảng Đức sat down on a Saigon streetcorner and burned himself to death in protest. Because the self-immolation was captured in a series of stunning photographs by an American journalist, it garnered global attention and marked a dramatic escalation of the political crisis. In mid-August, after weeks of unrest and additional self-immolations, the Ngôs ordered police and other security units to crush the movement. Thousands of monks, nuns, and other movement supporters were arrested during midnight raids on the pagodas that served as the movement’s headquarters. The crackdown came despite the staunch objections of US Embassy officials, who had warned Diệm not to use violence against the movement.

Many accounts of the “Buddhist Crisis” of 1963 depict it as a struggle for religious freedom.³⁰ Religion was indeed a defining feature of the Buddhist movement, but so too were concerns about nationalism and sovereignty. The monks who led the demonstrations were proponents of the Buddhist Revival (Chấn hưng Phật giáo), a revitalization movement that dated back to the early twentieth century. In addition to advocating for the rehabilitation of Buddhist institutions and practices, the revival was also self-consciously modernist and nationalist. Both clerical and lay Buddhists called on their fellow Vietnamese to cultivate “national Buddhism” and to embrace Vietnam’s identity as a Buddhist country.³¹

In the early years of Diệm’s rule, this Buddhist brand of nationalism appeared compatible with the government’s official nation-building agenda. Diệm allowed the leading Buddhist organization in South Vietnam to stage a national congress and even funded the construction of its Saigon headquarters. But by the early 1960s, many Buddhist leaders complained of anti-Buddhist discrimination by Catholic government officials. They also came to view the government’s official philosophy of personalism – a doctrine first elaborated by European Catholic philosophers – as a stalking horse for a plot to Christianize the South Vietnamese population. Diệm, for his part, viewed the Buddhist accusations as an attempt to undermine RVN state sovereignty. He noted that the initial protests in Huế had been triggered by a government ban on the public display of religious flags. While the Buddhists denounced this measure as blatantly discriminatory toward their faith, Diệm insisted that it aimed to compel respect for the RVN national flag.³²

In the immediate aftermath of the May 8 incident, several leaders in both the government and Buddhist organizations advocated negotiations to defuse the crisis. But the chances for a deal became remote following Madame Nhu’s public broadside and the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức. In addition to turning the protests into a major international news story, Quảng Đức’s death rekindled old debates about the legitimacy and effectiveness of Diệm’s rule. The skeptics included John F. Kennedy who, despite his personal admiration for Diệm, now wondered if the RVN president could be counted on to end the crisis and win the war against the communists. As a replacement for Ambassador Nolting, who was due to rotate to another post, Kennedy nominated Henry Cabot Lodge, a patrician Republican with a reputation for high-handedness in diplomatic affairs. In an August meeting at the White House prior to Lodge’s departure for Saigon, the president indicated he would rely on the ambassador’s judgment about Diệm. “I don’t know whether we’d be better off [without Diệm],” Kennedy said. But “if so, then we have to move in that direction.”³³

The escalating crisis also impacted the calculations of senior leaders of the ARVN. General Dương Vӑn Minh, known as “Big Minh” to the Americans and affectionally called “Fatty” by his own soldiers, had earned praise from Diệm for leading the successful 1955 operations against the Bình Xuyên. But Minh subsequently fell out of favor with the palace and lost his field command position. He was incensed when the Ngôs investigated his suspected involvement in the failed November 1960 coup against Diệm. Although he was cleared, Minh began to discuss the possibility of a new coup with Trần Vӑn Đôn and Lê Vӑn Kim, two fellow generals who had also been sidelined. But the three officers only began plotting in earnest after Quảng Đức’s fiery death prompted a new wave of international condemnation of Diệm’s policies. Their determination to act was sealed in late August when Ngô Đình Nhu accused them of masterminding the government’s brutal crackdown on the Buddhists – a false claim designed to conceal Nhu’s own responsibility for the raids.³⁴

The generals initially planned to launch their coup in late August. But Nhu discovered the plot and disrupted it by raising doubts in the generals’ minds about whether Washington was prepared to support Diệm’s overthrow. What neither Nhu nor the generals knew was that Kennedy and his administration had already shifted to a policy of qualified support for regime change. On August 24, shortly before the generals put their coup plans on hold, the US State Department transmitted a cable to Ambassador Lodge, authorizing him to contact ARVN commanders and assure them that they would have Washington’s support in the event of a successful coup. The cable was drafted by Roger Hilsman, a senior official who had long been skeptical of the Ngôs’ ability to win the war against the NLF. Although Hilsman’s move was backed by several of his State Department colleagues, it was opposed by some of Kennedy’s more senior advisors, including Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and other top Pentagon officials. Kennedy was angry that Hilsman had secured approval for the cable over a weekend when the president and most of his cabinet had been out of town. Yet Kennedy was also dismayed about Diệm’s hardline response to the Buddhists and worried about his ability to lead the RVN to victory in the war against the communists. As a result, he made no effort to recall Hilsman’s cable or to revert to a policy of untrammeled support for Diệm’s rule. Although his administration was more divided than ever over what to do about Diệm, Kennedy had decided to keep open the option of US support for a coup.³⁵

The debates in Washington and the intrigue in Saigon continued for two months after the non-coup of late August. On November 1, 1963, the generals finally made their move. Diệm and Nhu knew that another plot was in the works but allowed it to go forward, expecting that loyalist officers would crush the uprising after it began. But the coup leaders took steps to prevent pro-Diệm units from reaching Saigon; they also recruited the commander of the capital military region to join the putsch. Realizing that they had misjudged their opponents, the Ngô brothers slipped out of their besieged palace and made their way to a safe house in Saigon’s Chợ lớn district. Although Nhu wanted to flee the city, Diệm made the fateful decision to contact the coup plotters and surrender, evidently expecting that he would be able to negotiate an accommodation with the generals.³⁶ While the brothers were being transported to the coup leaders’ headquarters, rebel soldiers shot them dead and then repeatedly stabbed their bodies. Although the generals made a clumsy attempt to portray the deaths as suicides, the testimony of ARVN insiders suggested that the executions had been ordered by General Minh.³⁷

Viewed in hindsight, the downfall of the Ngô Đình Diệm government in 1963 was a highly contingent event. The expanding NLF insurgency in the countryside formed the backdrop for the events in Saigon. But communist actions did not precipitate the Buddhists’ revolt or the November coup. Instead, the more consequential steps were those taken by (1) the Buddhist protestors who publicly challenged Diệm’s authority; (2) the US officials who concluded that his tarnished legitimacy made him expendable; and (3) the ARVN generals who resented being sidelined.

Yet the most fateful moves of all were those made by the Ngô brothers themselves. It is telling that the key players in the coup drama – the Buddhist leaders, the Americans, and the generals – had all previously supported Diệm’s efforts to build an anticommunist state in South Vietnam. By steadily alienating these and other former allies, Diệm and Nhu became the unwitting authors of their own demise. The consequences of the Ngôs’ miscalculations would be far-reaching – not only for themselves, but for all the other states and leaders who aspired to wield sovereignty in Vietnam. That included the leaders of the Vietnamese Communist Party, who now sensed an opportunity to bring down the RVN state once and for all.

The DRVN, China, and the 9th Plenum

For nearly a decade prior to 1963, the leaders of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had consistently supported the Soviet Union’s policy of “peaceful coexistence” in the Cold War. At Geneva in 1954, the communists effectively agreed to transfer the competition over sovereignty in Vietnam from the military arena into the political realm. They maintained this commitment during Diệm’s crackdown on “stay behind” communist cadres in South Vietnam in the late 1950s, and even after the emergence of the NLF insurgency. Although the VWP Politburo endorsed small-scale insurrectionary activities in 1959, its carefully worded directives still downplayed the importance of armed resistance in comparison to nonviolent political struggle.³⁸ In its founding manifesto, the NLF called for the establishment of a neutralist government in Saigon – one that would promote “universal peace” and negotiations on the reunification with the North.³⁹ Hanoi affirmed its interest in neutralism in 1962, when it backed a Soviet-led effort to negotiate the neutralization of Laos. Although the DRVN continued to use Lao territory to infiltrate men and supplies into South Vietnam, its leaders still viewed neutralization as a viable long-term strategy for taking over the South without waging a large-scale war.⁴⁰

It was only in 1963 that Hanoi decisively rejected “peaceful coexistence” as a strategic principle. Over the course of the year, DRVN leaders adopted a strategy aimed at securing their sovereignty objectives through the rapid escalation of the war in the South. This shift in strategy was enabled by three developments. First, the opening of the Hồ Chí Minh Sea Trail in late 1962, coupled with sharp increases in the size of the NLF’s armed forces, provided communist military commanders with the means to wage a much larger and more lethal war effort in the South. Second, the intensification of the Sino-Soviet split helped DRVN leaders to secure Chinese promises of support for a more aggressive strategy in the South – including pledges to help defend North Vietnam from US attacks. Finally, the ouster and death of Diệm in November 1963 seem to confirm that the opportune moment to escalate the armed struggle in the South had finally arrived.

As we have already seen, the opening of the Hồ Chí Minh Sea Trail during 1962 significantly enhanced communist military capabilities in South Vietnam. The insurgents’ growing firepower coincided with another important change: a dramatic increase in the overall size of communist military forces in the South. According to postwar Vietnamese publications, a total of around 25,000 soldiers served on a fulltime basis in NLF military units during 1961. During 1962, the numbers serving in such units rose to more than 40,000; the trend continued in 1963, rising to a total of more than 70,000.⁴¹ Most of this increase resulted not from land-based infiltration of cadres and soldiers from North Vietnam (which remained relatively low prior to 1965) but from stepped-up recruitment efforts in the South. Party accounts show that the NLF inducted around 10,000 Southern recruits into its military forces in 1962, and a whopping 24,000 in 1963 – the single highest annual total for the entire war.⁴² Thus, by 1963, communist forces in South Vietnam were better armed, more capable, and much more numerous than they had been just two years earlier.

The NLF’s growing military strength provided DRVN leaders with the option to escalate their war effort in the South, should they choose to do so. But escalation would imply abandonment of “peaceful coexistence” and would undoubtedly anger their Soviet allies. Hanoi also worried about another potential consequence of escalation: US military strikes against North Vietnam.

For DRVN leaders, the possibility of direct US attacks on North Vietnam was not to be taken lightly. In 1954, DRVN leaders had decided to make peace at Geneva in part because of fears that Washington might send US combat forces to Indochina.⁴³ Those fears resurfaced during 1959–60, as the Southern insurgency gathered momentum. A January 1961 VWP Politburo directive warned that the United States might conduct “armed provocations” against North Vietnam if the Saigon government was close to collapse.⁴⁴ The dangers were elaborated in a June 1962 “draft strategic evaluation” prepared by the PAVN General Staff. The report sketched several scenarios in which US regular combat forces might be deployed to Indochina – including some in which the United States attacked North Vietnam with air, naval, and ground units.⁴⁵

Despite these risks, however, DRVN leaders still wanted to explore the possibility of escalating the war in the South. Although the prospect of US attacks on North Vietnam was daunting, PAVN planners believed their forces could successfully resist and even repel such attacks. To do so would require careful planning and the mobilization of the entire North Vietnamese population. It would also depend on receiving external aid and support from Hanoi’s communist allies. DRVN leaders knew the chances of gaining Moscow’s approval for an escalatory strategy were virtually nil. But the prospects of winning Chinese support for such a plan appeared much better. Indeed, during 1962–3, PRC leaders appeared not just willing but downright eager to support a more aggressive strategy in the South – even if that would require China to help defend North Vietnam.

Ever since the Sino-Soviet split had erupted into public view in 1960, PRC leaders had openly derided Moscow’s “revisionist” policies and proclaimed their readiness to face off against the United States. In 1962, following the creation of the US Military Assistance Command-Vietnam (MACV) in Saigon, Beijing signaled its support for the liberation of South Vietnam through stepped-up military struggle.⁴⁶ That summer, Hồ Chí Minh visited Beijing to ask PRC leaders for increased military aid. His hosts responded positively, promising to deliver 90,000 rifles and small arms – enough weapons to equip 230 battalions.⁴⁷

An even more important agreement was reached in October, when DRVN Defense Minister Võ Nguyên Giáp led a high-level military delegation for talks with the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). During the talks, the Vietnamese presented their scenarios for the deployment of US combat forces to Indochina. The two sides agreed that China would provide military equipment and supplies to support DRVN efforts to defeat any US-led “limited war” inside South Vietnam. They also agreed that Hanoi would request PLA air and naval support if US forces invaded North Vietnam. PLA ground troops would not be sent to North Vietnam unless it became “truly necessary.” Over the next year, the two militaries held extensive planning sessions, including surveys of defensive positions in the panhandle region of North Vietnam. These contacts culminated in August 1963 in a pair of detailed agreements on military aid and “coordinated combat operations” between the PLA and the PAVN.⁴⁸

By mid-1963, North Vietnam and China had agreed on a plan to escalate the communist-led war in South Vietnam. Although the existence of this plan remained a closely guarded secret, its impact would be far-reaching. For DRVN leaders, the Chinese pledges of support would allow them to launch and sustain a more aggressive war effort in the South – even if the Soviet Union refused to back Hanoi. Meanwhile, Beijing’s promises to help defend North Vietnam from US attacks enabled the PAVN to send more soldiers and resources to fight in the South. In June 1963, the VWP’s Central Military Committee proposed to raise the rate of North-to-South infiltration “to increase the operations of our fulltime troops on the battlefields of South Vietnam.”⁴⁹

The formal endorsement of the new escalation strategy came during the last weeks of the year, at a plenary meeting of the VWP’s Central Committee in Hanoi. The conclave began in late November, shortly after Diệm’s ouster and death in Saigon, and ran for several weeks. The outcome of the committee’s deliberations can be inferred from two documents approved by its members. The first, a public communiqué, was an unprecedently strident denunciation of the “revisionists” within the communist bloc who advocated negotiations with the United States. Although the statement did not mention the Soviet Union or its leaders by name, the language used (including references to those in “a number of fraternal parties” who were “undermining” international communism) left little doubt as to the target of the critique.⁵⁰

The second document endorsed at the plenum was a secret resolution. Entitled “Strive to Struggle, Rush Forward to Win New Victories in the South,” it presented a resounding call to arms. Asserting that “seizing power through violent means is correct and necessary,” the resolution proclaimed that the time had come for revolutionary forces to escalate the war in the South. This military escalation was aimed at achieving two primary goals: the “annihilation” of the RVN’s military forces, and the destruction of the Strategic Hamlet Program. The resolution’s authors boldly declared that both goals could be achieved quickly, before Washington deployed US combat forces to Indochina. But even if US leaders did intervene, the authors predicted, the number of American troops sent to Vietnam would not exceed 100,000. In that case, the eventual triumph of the revolutionary forces would merely be delayed, not derailed.⁵¹

Although the full proceedings of the 1963 plenary meeting have never been made public, unofficial accounts suggest that some participants opposed the escalatory strategy presented in Resolution 9. Some historians believe that the “moderate” critics of escalation included senior VWP leaders such as Hồ Chí Minh and Võ Nguyên Giáp.⁵² The extent to which Hồ Chí Minh and Giáp were moderates on questions of war and peace in 1963 may be debated. Yet there is no debate about the identity of the prime mover behind Resolution 9: VWP General Secretary Lê Duẩn. Seven years earlier, when the party’s fortunes in the South were at their lowest ebb and Hanoi’s commitment to “peaceful coexistence” seemed non-negotiable, Lê Duẩn had insisted that the mobilization of the Southern population might yet pave the way for the party to reassert its claims to sovereignty over the South. Now, in 1963, he and other VWP leaders calculated that a rapid military escalation would lead to the revolutionary triumph they had long dreamed of achieving. It was a colossal gamble of lives, resources, and prestige, but it was a wager that Lê Duẩn and his comrades were willing to make in the service of the DRVN’s sovereignty objectives in the South. They would eventually achieve those objectives, but victory would take far longer and prove far more costly than they ever imagined.

Conclusion: Sovereignty and the Escalation of the Vietnam War

On November 6, 1963, US Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge sent a cable to Washington in which he analyzed the effects of the recent coup and overthrow of Ngô Đình Diệm – an outcome that Lodge himself had done a great deal to encourage. In the ambassador’s judgment, the coup had unfolded mostly according to plan, and its leaders had demonstrated unexpected mettle. Based on this assessment, Lodge offered an optimistic prediction: “The prospects now are for a shorter war.”⁵³

Lodge was wrong – spectacularly so. But he was far from unusual in his capacity for mistaken judgments about matters of war and peace in Indochina in 1963. In both Hanoi and in Saigon, no less than in other capitals across the world, political leaders recognized that the crisis of 1963 marked an inflection point in the long-running struggle over sovereignty in Indochina. Most also acknowledged that the risks that the war in South Vietnam would be transformed into a larger conflict could not be ignored. Yet almost none of them seemed able to imagine how much larger and bloodier the conflict would become, or how long it would last. For Vietnamese leaders, no less than for their American, Chinese, and Soviet counterparts, sovereignty in Indochina seemed worth fighting for in 1963.