Hanoi's War

An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam

Lien-Hang T. Nguyen

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780807882696
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Guerra de Vietnam

While most historians of the Vietnam War focus on the origins of U.S. involvement and the Americanization of the conflict, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen examines the international context in which North Vietnamese leaders pursued the war and American intervention ended. This riveting narrative takes the reader from the marshy swamps of the Mekong Delta to the bomb-saturated Red River Delta, from the corridors of power in Hanoi and Saigon to the Nixon White House, and from the peace negotiations in Paris to high-level meetings in Beijing and Moscow, all to reveal that peace never had a chance in Vietnam.
Hanoi's War renders transparent the internal workings of America's most elusive enemy during the Cold War and shows that the war fought during the peace negotiations was bloodier and much more wide ranging than it had been previously. Using never-before-seen archival materials from the Vietnam Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as materials from other archives around the world, Nguyen explores the politics of war-making and peace-making not only from the North Vietnamese perspective but also from that of South Vietnam, the Soviet Union, China, and the United States, presenting a uniquely international portrait.

Part One
The Path to Revolutionary War

Chapter One
Le Duan’s Rise to Power and the Road to War

Revolution is offensive.

—Le Duan¹

Under the cover of darkness on 22 January 1955, Le Duan, Party secretary of the Southern Territorial Committee, bid a hasty farewell to his second-in-command, Le Duc Tho, at the mouth of the Ong Doc River off the tip of Ca Mau province in the deep south of Vietnam. While Le Duan secretly descended the river on a rickety canoe back to the heart of the Mekong Delta, Le Duc Tho stayed onboard the larger ship headed for North Vietnam.² Earlier that day, the two Party leaders had boarded the Hanoi-bound Polish vessel Kilinski amid great fanfare in front of international observers tasked with overseeing the 300-day period of free movement stipulated in the 1954 Geneva Accords.³ With the imminent closing of the border at the seventeenth parallel, Le Duan, otherwise known as “Comrade Three,” clandestinely remained in the South, leaving Le Duc Tho, or “Six Hammer,” to journey alone to Hanoi.

During the war against the French, the Party sent both men to operate in the Mekong Delta even though neither of them hailed from the region. Le Duan, a man with perennially sad eyes and protruding ears, was from Quang Tri province in the central region, while Le Duc Tho, with his high cheekbones and hair that would turn nearly all white decades later, came from Nam Dinh province in northern Vietnam. Their commitment to southern Vietnam, however, later earned them a reputation for being the “first to set foot in the South and the last to leave” during the struggle for decolonization.⁴

Their connection to the South would have a lasting impact on their leadership beyond the French-Indochina War. As the prospect of speedy reunification dimmed in 1956, “Ba” Duan and “Sau” Tho would find themselves occupying pivotal roles in Party history. As Hanoi’s man in the South, Le Duan was in charge of the increasingly difficult task of exerting Party direction over the revolution as local insurgents, under attack by Saigon forces, took matters into their own hands and demanded support from the North to move the resistance to armed struggle. Rather than temper insurgent ambitions in the South, however, Le Duan fanned the revolutionary flames in the region in an attempt to force his reluctant comrades in the North to go to war. If the Party did not support the local insurgency, he warned, then the southern resistance either would be wiped out or, just as troublesome, would slip out of Hanoi’s control.

His appeal, however, fell on deaf ears as the top-level leadership in Hanoi remained preoccupied with the travails of state building in the DRV in the mid-1950s; however, the opportunity for a policy shift emerged by the end of the decade. The fallout from the Party’s costly campaigns during peacetime greatly compromised the communist leadership’s standing as the North Vietnamese people stood up in defiance of the campaigns’ excesses. Placed in a key position to oversee the fallout, Le Duan’s deputy now in the North, Le Duc Tho, became the Party’s most powerful apparatchik. As rivals in the Politburo fell into disgrace, Tho’s authority allowed him to clean house in Hanoi, a crucial portfolio to possess on a fractious political scene. With the Party looking to rehabilitate its image by promoting a new leader and a cause that could rally the North Vietnamese people, Le Duan emerged as the obvious choice.

Thus, Le Duan and Le Duc Tho were the driving force behind Party policy during Vietnam’s pivotal half century that witnessed revolution, war, and reunification set against the backdrop of the Cold War. Before the United States made Indochina a hot spot in the East-West confrontation, there were driven leaders heading warring factions with local agendas in Vietnam that shaped events in the region and eventually the world.

This chapter examines the early careers of Le Duan and Le Duc Tho from colonial Indochina to postcolonial Vietnam, the lessons they learned along the way, the Party they built in Hanoi, and their policies that led to war not only with the Saigon regime but also ultimately with the United States. Offering a complex picture of the communist leadership in North Vietnam, one that perhaps leads to more questions than it answers, this chapter sheds new light on the inner workings of the one enemy America could not defeat.

THE REVOLUTIONARY EDUCATION OF LE DUAN AND LE DUC THO

Like those of many Vietnamese revolutionaries, Le Duan and Le Duc Tho’s careers were forged in the actual and metaphorical prisons of colonial Indochina under French rule. Born in 1907 in Hau Kien village of Quang Tri province in the French protectorate of Annam, Le Van Nhuan was the second youngest of five children in a poor family. In 1928, Nhuan married Le Thi Suong from his home village, departed for Hanoi to assume work at the Indochinese Railway Office, and shortly thereafter changed his name to Le Duan. Like many young Indochinese of the era, Le Duan was caught up in the anticolonial fervor. He immediately participated in political agitation in the center of the French protectorate of Tonkin by joining the Tan Viet (New Vietnam) Revolutionary Party and later the Hoi Viet Nam Cach Mang Thanh Nien (Vietnam Revolutionary Youth Association), overseeing the mobilization of railway workers. With the establishment in 1929 of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP), which would become the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) after its first plenum later in 1931, Le Duan’s anti-French resistance deepened as the Party leaders designated him a member of the Committee for Education and Training.

Le Duan’s second-in-command possessed a similar revolutionary résumé. Born on 10 October 1911 in what was known then as Dich Le village, My Loc hamlet of Nam Dinh province situated in Tonkin, Le Duc Tho entered the world as Phan Dinh Khai. He began his revolutionary career at the age of fifteen by taking part in school boycotts and other anticolonial activities organized by the famous patriot Phan Chu Trinh. In 1928, he moved closer to the communist faction of the resistance when he joined the Revolutionary Youth League in Nam Dinh province, and like Le Duan, he rose quickly through the ranks of the Party the following year.

For these two young men—and multitudes of other young nationalists—the excitement of anticolonial agitation of the 1920s gave way to the harsh realities of French colonial prisons in the 1930s. With the onset of the global depression and the upsurge in nationalist activity in Indochina, French colonial forces grew more repressive, exemplified by their severe crackdowns against the Yen Bai uprising and the Nghe Tinh revolt.⁵ During what historian Peter Zinoman describes as a period of mass incarceration with a deluge of “communists, nationalists, secret-society members, and radicalized workers and peasants” into the French prison system, Le Duc Tho was arrested in Nam Dinh in late 1930 and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment; a few months later in April 1931, Le Duan’s revolutionary career took a decisive turn when French secret agents arrested him in the port city of Hai Phong.⁶ Both men became not only prisoners of the French colonial regime but also, and more important, ardent communist revolutionaries by the end of their prison stints at Hoa Lo, Son La, and Con Dao.⁷

The advent of the Popular Front government in Paris in 1936 brought a relaxation in French colonial policies and amnesty for more than 1,500 prisoners, including Le Duan and Le Duc Tho, who were set free from the colonial gulags. Rather than give up revolutionary agitation after their grueling incarceration, they left the prisons even more ideologically and politically committed to the communist path to independence. Le Duan returned to the central region where he made contact with the Party organization and quickly rose to the top as secretary of the Party committee in Annam in March 1938 and a member of the Central Executive Committee (CEC) standing committee the following year. Likewise, Tho returned to his northern home province of Nam Dinh and reconnected with the local Party cell.

During the Second World War, the revolutionaries in Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina found themselves subject to two colonial masters: Vichy France and imperial Japan.⁸ In late 1939, soon after rising to the top of Party ranks in the middle region, Le Duan transferred his area of operations to Cochinchina, where he took up residence in the heart of French power in Indochina, Saigon. A few months later, in early 1940, Le Duan’s work for the revolution came to a stop once again when he was captured and imprisoned on Con Dao island. Meanwhile, Tho was also summarily arrested after his return to Nam Dinh and spent the war imprisoned in various jails in the North. During their incarceration, the ICP formed the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi (Vietnam Independence League), otherwise known as the Viet Minh, to fight both the French collaborators and the Japanese fascists.

It was not until nearly the end of the Second World War that Le Duan and Le Duc Tho were finally sprung from jail by their colleagues. Although they had missed out on most of the action during the war, their early involvement in the revolution and long prison records earned them high-ranking positions in the Party on their release.⁹ Freed in time to take part in the Viet Minh–led August Revolution of 1945 that brought government institutions into Vietnamese hands after the Japanese surrender but before the arrival of Allied forces, Le Duan and Le Duc Tho—along with the communist leadership—witnessed what they perceived as the Party’s organizational success in harnessing the seemingly limitless power of the masses to effect change.¹⁰ Although the revolutionaries were prepared for violence, there was relatively little bloodshed in the Viet Minh seizure of power. While Ho Chi Minh, using the Nguyen Ai Quoc pseudonym for the final time, called on his countrymen to “stand up and rely on our strength to free ourselves,” differing factions within the Party located in the three regions easily ensured that the August Revolution remained under communist guidance.

Although the desire for self-determination and liberation was strong in all of Vietnam, Party control over the revolutionary political scene varied; it dominated in Tonkin, operated adequately in Annam, but lacked strength in Cochinchina.¹¹ With Ho Chi Minh’s historic proclamation of the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 2 September 1945 in front of thousands gathered at Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi, the Party was in firm control of the new provisional government. While Ho assumed the presidency of the DRV, Truong Chinh held the reins of power in the ICP as the first secretary, a position he had occupied since 1941. Born Dang Xuan Khu in early 1907 in Nam Dinh province, Khu later changed his name to Truong Chinh, meaning “long march,” in honor of Mao Zedong’s ascent to power. A committed anticolonialist who participated in school boycotts in Nam Dinh city that called for the release of Phan Boi Chu in 1925 and that mourned the loss of Phan Chu Trinh in 1926, Khu eventually moved to Hanoi, where he helped establish the Communist Party in 1929. A year later, he was imprisoned by French authorities and sentenced to twelve years in Hoa Lo and Son La prisons. Freed halfway through his sentence in 1936, Khu—now a staunch revolutionary—was surveilled by the French colonial regime when he returned to Hanoi, where he worked openly as a newspaper editor and secretly as a leading member of the Tonkin Party Committee.

When the Second World War began, Khu rose to the top Party position of first secretary and officially became Truong Chinh. At the Eighth Plenum, held in a small hut in May 1941, Party leaders voted to shift their resources from land reform to national liberation. The historic plenum also witnessed the first meeting between Nguyen Ai Quoc, who would rise to greater fame as Ho Chi Minh, and Truong Chinh.¹² Hailing from two different factions within the Party that operated in different regions in the north during the Second World War—Ho along with Vo Nguyen Giap and Pham Van Dong were part of the Pac Bo contingent near the Chinese border, whereas Chinh led the Red River Delta group that boasted that they were never more than a bike ride away from Hanoi—the revolutionary leaders banded together to seize power in 1945.¹³ The latter would prove more powerful.

After his release from prison, Le Duc Tho returned to Hanoi, where he followed in Le Duan’s 1938 footsteps by being elected standing committee member of the CEC and being appointed head of the Party Organizational Committee. In this capacity, Tho’s primary responsibility was to ensure the smooth operation of the Party bureaucracy, a position that would become increasingly important in this next phase of the communist revolution.

At the time, however, the Party’s plans for state building would have to be put on hold as leaders in Hanoi dealt with two seemingly insurmountable obstacles to independence: occupying Chinese nationalist forces stationed in the northern half of the country and the return of French colonial forces, via the British, in the lower half. Although Franklin D. Roosevelt’s insistence on international trusteeship under the United Nations in Indochina had waned in the days before his death, Harry S. Truman was less ambivalent in his recognition of French sovereignty over the region. At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the United States agreed that the Guomindang would oversee the surrender of Japanese troops in northern Vietnam and allowed the British Southeast Asia Command, sympathetic to the French, to oversee the southern half.¹⁴ Although the ICP was in firm control of the political scene in Tonkin, the Guomindang forces pressured Ho Chi Minh to include their Vietnamese allies, non–Viet Minh officials from the Vietnamese Nationalist Party (Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang) and the Revolutionary League, into the new government. Holding out the northern region to the French, Chiang Kai-shek also negotiated economic concessions from France at the expense of the Vietnamese. Events in the southern half of the country posed even greater challenges for the Party. Through British General Douglas Gracey, whose troops oversaw the surrender of Japanese forces in the south, France was able to regain a foothold in Cochinchina, where it intended to reconquer its colony and protectorates. In an effort to thwart France’s attempts to restore its colonial empire, Ho needed to build a broad coalition of forces within the country and win support from countries abroad, particularly the United States.

In this situation fraught with difficulties and no clear solutions, Ho Chi Minh made two decisions that would compromise his position within the Party leadership. In November 1945, he dissolved the ICP into a Marxist-Leninist working group and replaced known communist members with leaders from other political parties in order to attract broad support for a united front and to garner foreign aid, particularly from the United States. At the same time, Ho undertook negotiations with French officials in Tonkin, including Jean Sainteny, who were cognizant of France’s limited military capabilities and opted to negotiate the France’s return peacefully. By signing the Preliminary Accord on 6 March 1946, Ho received French recognition of the DRV, which would form a part of the Indochina Federation under the French Union, in exchange for permitting 15,000 French soldiers to return to Indochina and for allowing the fate of Cochinchina to be determined by a popular referendum at a later date. Meanwhile, despite aid to the DRV cause from individual U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) officials, Washington remained deaf to Ho’s pleas for support. Nonetheless, despite his having no other viable alternatives in 1945–46, Ho’s decisions to dissolve the Party and shelve the issue of Cochinchina were deeply unpopular among certain factions within the communist leadership.¹⁵

Although the Ho-Sainteny agreement was meant to be a starting point for further negotiations...