Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975

The entire landlord class suffered institutionalised humiliation, designed to boost the self-regard of the peasantry as much as to abase owners of property. Even an ardent communist such as Dr Nguyen Thi Ngoc Toan admitted later: ‘Many things happened that I thought didn’t make sense.’ For years she herself was denied promotion, despite her devotion to the Party: ‘everything required the right family background’. By this she meant that those of peasant origins were favoured over people such as herself, from educated and allegedly ‘privileged’ backgrounds. Dissent, diversity, freedom of information were alike abolished. North Vietnam adopted the Stalinist approach to truth, which became whatever the politburo decreed that it should be.

Truong Nhu Tang, later a secret cadre, acknowledged that many of the executed ‘enemies of the people … so-called landlords … had simply been poor peasants who happened to own slightly larger plots than their neighbours, all the holdings being minuscule to begin with’. He also notes that the Party has never expressed remorse for its 1956 campaign to suppress ‘intellectuals’: even those who escaped imprisonment were condemned to house arrest, incommunicado. In November 1956 there were violent rebellions, which two army divisions were deployed to suppress. One such episode took place in Nghe An province, which a later communist history attributed to three ‘reactionary Catholic priests’, named as Fathers Can, Don and Cat, who barricaded villages, seized weapons, captured cadres and organised demonstrations against land reform.

A communist narrative acknowledges: ‘We were obliged to use military forces … All leaders and their key lackeys were arrested.’ In addition to hundreds who died in hot blood, up to two thousand executions followed, and many more prison sentences. Between 1956 and 1959 there were further disturbances in Lai Chau province. Hanoi professed to blame these on agitation by Chinese Nationalist agents, but the revolts created ‘many difficult political situations … creating fear and worry among the population about socialism and diminishing the people’s confidence in the Party and Government’.

Lan, brother of Nguyen Thi Chinh who had fled south in 1954, was frustrated in his attempt to join the Vietminh, who instead imprisoned him for six years. Thereafter, denied a ration card, he was reduced to selling his blood to hospitals, and became a street porter. Their father’s fate was worse: even when released from imprisonment he was unable to secure a ration card or access to employment, and eventually succumbed to beggary. One night, cold and starving, he knocked at the door of an old friend and novelist named Ngoc Giao. Giao’s wife, on opening the door, took one look at the visitor and implored him to go away: her husband was himself in bad odour with the regime. But Giao came down from the roof where he had been hiding, in expectation that the night visitor was a policeman. He insisted on admitting Cuu, feeding him and allowing him a shower. They talked all night, until the writer said regretfully, ‘I’m afraid you can’t stay here.’ Before Cuu left, he said to Giao, ‘If you ever hear anything of my daughter, please tell her how much I love her.’ Then he vanished into the street. Giao and his wife thereafter provided the only assistance they dared, placing a bag of rice in the back alley early each morning. This was collected for a fortnight or so, then one night was left untaken. Cuu vanished from their lives and from that of Vietnam, dying at a time and place unknown. Chinh secured this glimpse of her father’s latter days only long after the war ended.

North Vietnam became known in Western intelligence parlance as a ‘denied area’. Yet thanks to the prestige of its leader, a figure of unimpeachable anti-imperialist credentials, embodiment of a triumphant revolutionary struggle, his country stood well in the world. Its status as a closed society invited shrugs from most Westerners, that this was merely the communist norm. A Northern intellectual suggested later that Ho’s career should be seen in three distinguishable phases – first as a simple patriot; then as a communist; finally as an apparent nationalist who was in reality pursuing the interests of the Communist International. In the view of a compatriot, he profited greatly from his cosmopolitan experience and ideological ties with China and the USSR, whereas his nationalist rivals knew little of the world outside Indochina. He conducted an extraordinarily skilful balancing act between the two great communist powers, especially after their own relationship turned glacial in the late 1950s.

Hanoi’s politburo was stunned by Nikita Khrushchev’s February 1956 speech to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, denouncing the cult of personality even as Vietnam’s leader was being promoted as a near-deity. Most of Ho’s senior comrades were Stalinists, who had mourned their hero’s 1953 death ‘with tears streaming down our cheeks’, in the words of a Party functionary. Now they were disgusted by Moscow’s renunciation of a military showdown with the West, in favour of a mere economic and ideological contest. The 1956 Hungarian uprising confirmed North Vietnam’s leadership in its view that any indulgence of dissent risked unleashing challenges to its authority.

A Canadian diplomat reported from Hanoi: ‘There is little point in speaking of the possibilities of an economic collapse of North Vietnam, since there is no economic structure.’ At independence, among a population of thirteen million people, there were only thirty qualified engineers and a handful of factories: the country’s rulers were too preoccupied with their domestic predicament to have any stomach for aggressive action in the South. Eighty thousand troops were demobilised and dispatched to swell the rural labour force. Both China and the Soviet Union made it plain that they opposed any armed provocation which might alarm the Americans.

Evidence remains meagre about Hanoi’s 1954–57 Party power struggles. It seems nonetheless plain that Ho Chi Minh and Giap wanted no new war: they believed they could secure a unified communist Vietnam without fighting for it. Their oft-rehearsed commitment to achieving this peacefully was – at that stage – sincere. Other rising men, however, thought differently. As they watched the evolution of Diem’s government in Saigon, they saw scant hope of securing their just inheritance of a unified Vietnam, other than through armed struggle.

2 ‘THE ONLY BOY WE GOT’

The 1954 exodus from North Vietnam was matched by a lesser one from the South. Communist troops marched away, often after emotional send-offs from the communities in which they had been based. In 1954–55, a total of 173,900 Vietminh fighters and 86,000 of their dependants ‘regrouped’ to the North. One veteran revolutionary paid a farewell visit to the Mekong delta before reluctantly obeying the order to join the migration. She told comrades who were staying behind, ‘See you in two years’ – meaning when the country was reunited after the communists’ assured election victory. It became a familiar gesture for Vietminh veterans to hold up two fingers, signifying the time lapse before inevitable fulfilment of their dream. COSVN secretary Le Duan’s wife Nga was pregnant with their second child when her husband dispatched her north on a Polish ship, along with the family of his close comrade Le Duc Tho. He himself stayed. To the end of his days, Le Duan argued that Ho Chi Minh’s two historic mistakes were to acquiesce first in the 1945 return of the French, then in the 1954 partition. He and other hardliners believed that a unified, communist Vietnam would be achieved only by fighting for it. His parting words to Nga were, ‘Tell Ho it will be twenty years before we see each other again.’

In violation of the Geneva Accords, Hanoi ordered ten thousand Vietminh to remain undercover in the South, insurance against a resumption of the armed struggle. Most of the guerrillas who marched North were bewildered and indeed enraged by partition, and became no less so after crossing the new ‘Demilitarized Zone’ – the ‘DMZ’. They experienced hardships greater than they had known in the relatively well-fed South, and many were also gnawed by family separations. Le Duan’s wife found herself living with two small children in a room above a Hanoi garage, writing a column called ‘Vietnamese Women’ for the Party newspaper, and knowing nothing of the fate of her husband at COSVN. Some Southerners proved defiant of Northern authority, and almost all harboured a single ambition: to return whence they had come. Some cadres’ children were meanwhile dispatched to further education in Russia or China.

The new South Vietnam and its government enjoyed considerable advantages: the Mekong delta was the most productive rice-growing area in South-East Asia; the countryside was relatively unscarred; while the Vietminh had commanded widespread support as independence fighters, there was much less enthusiasm for communism; and the Americans were eager that the country should become a showcase for what they called ‘the free world’. A South Vietnamese army officer later reflected on those days: ‘We took our lives for granted. We were not rich, but we were comfortable and had some freedoms. We were soft, as South Vietnamese have always been soft, because they live on rich land. Northerners are tough, because they come from a tough, poor place.’ An exile from the North who rose high in the Saigon civil service wrote: ‘For many of us … the years 1956–60 were among the best of our lives – we were full of expectation and promise.’ Peasant girl Phung Thi Ly, born in 1949, recalled her rustic childhood as ‘a paradise, full of tropical birds and buffalo; dogs and chickens and pigs that we called our pets; rushing rivers to swim in; and wide fields where we could run and laugh’.

Ho Chi Minh had secured mastery of the North after an ordeal by fire. Ngo Dinh Diem, by contrast, was merely the arbitrary nominee of playboy head of state Bao Dai, accorded grudging nods first by the French, then by the Americans. He had some of the qualities that make great leaders: courage, honesty, fluency, passionate commitment to his country. Unfortunately he was also a Catholic religious zealot; blindly devoted to a greedy and unscrupulous family; imbued with messianic faith in his own rightness; nostalgic for a non-existent past; insensitive to the needs and aspirations of his people.

Life under Diem seemed to most Vietnamese a mere continuation of colonialism. The big Americans who pervaded his life – and death – emphasised his own physical slightness. Born in 1901, for a time he favoured a career in the priesthood like that of his brother Ngo Dinh Thuc, whom he persuaded the Vatican to make archbishop of Hue. Instead, however, he entered the civil service and by twenty-five was a provincial governor. In 1933 the French caused Bao Dai to make him minister of the interior, a role in which he lasted only three months, because the colonial power would not invest any Vietnamese with real authority such as he demanded. It was then that he made a remark later hailed as prophetic: ‘The communists will defeat us, not by virtue of their strength, but because of our weakness.’ For a time during World War II he was held prisoner by the Vietminh, who also murdered one of his brothers and a nephew. Diem met Ho Chi Minh, who sought his cooperation, only to be rebuffed. ‘You are a criminal who has burned and destroyed the country,’ Diem claimed that he told Ho. ‘My brother and his son are only two of the hundreds you have killed.’ The communists later lamented Ho’s folly in freeing him.

Following a Vietminh assassination attempt, in 1950 Diem left Vietnam. He spent his first two years of exile as an inmate of Maryknoll Seminary in Lakewood, New Jersey, often performing the humblest domestic chores, but also gaining introductions to such influential fellow-Catholics as Cardinal Spellman, Supreme Court justice William Douglas, together with Senators Mike Mansfield and John F. Kennedy, whom he impressed with the fervour of his hatred for both colonialism and communism. In 1953 he moved to a Benedictine monastery in Belgium, where he made important French connections, and somehow also won the trust of Bao Dai, in exile outside Cannes. Diem’s astute younger brother Nhu, later notorious as his grey eminence, played an important role in steering him towards power.

Diem’s appointment as prime minister, followed by a low-key return to Saigon on 26 June 1954, neither corrupted his asceticism nor diminished his wildly exaggerated self-belief. Religious faith and moral conceit convinced him that he ruled by a divine right as assured as that professed by King Charles I three centuries earlier on the throne of England. Diem viewed South Vietnam’s security entirely as a military problem: his response to it was the 1955 introduction of conscription. He showed no interest in either cultivation of new friends or reconciliation with old foes. He pronounced decisions and demanded fulfilment of them, himself working sixteen hours a day. Obsessed with detail, he might lecture a visiting ambassador or foreign journalist for four hours without a comfort break; he sometimes signed exit visas personally. Whereas Ho Chi Minh was a notably witty conversationalist, Diem was devoid of humour, especially about himself. As for money – national income for his new country – on 12 August 1954 the US National Security Council decided that the domino theory was valid, that it was thus essential to restore the prestige of the West in Indochina, grievously injured by French defeat. A week later Eisenhower approved NSC5429/2, which caused the US to become South Vietnam’s paymaster.

The gravest handicap burdening the Saigon regime was that scarcely any of its standard-bearers and officials had participated in the independence struggle: many, indeed, were former servants of the French. Diem broke an early promise to grant amnesty to Vietminh activists, whom he began to imprison. In Paris, prime minister Edgar Faure asserted that the little zealot was ‘not only incapable but mad’, and the US government increasingly inclined to agree. Yet who else was there? Not until 1961 did Vice-President Lyndon Johnson deliver his memorable apologia for Diem: ‘Shit, man, he’s the only boy we got out there.’ But from 1954 onwards, though Americans doubted the prime minister’s survivability, within the tiny circle of Saigon’s educated elite they could identify no more plausible non-communist candidate to rule.

Among early American players in South Vietnam was air force colonel Edward Lansdale, forty-eight-year-old head of the Military Mission, a covert operations group that launched ineffectual sabotage sorties into the North, which cost the liberties or lives of virtually all the locals ill-starred enough to be recruited for them. In the course of the ensuing two decades, Washington impresarios would introduce onto the Vietnamese stage a succession of actors auditioning for the role of ‘Lawrence of Indochina’, of whom Lansdale may be deemed the first. A former advertising executive of notable persuasive charm, he established a relationship with Diem that seemed likely to give Washington leverage. The colonel had made his reputation advising Philippines president Ramon Magsaysay on suppression of the Huk guerrillas, and was now mandated by Dulles to repeat this achievement. He enjoyed a mixed press among his fellow-countrymen in Saigon. Some regarded him as an unguided missile, but one colleague said later: ‘What I respected was that with both Americans and Vietnamese, he was a good listener and a shrewd calculator. He displayed a very good understanding of what was possible, and what was not.’ Lansdale repeatedly warned Diem that he must win hearts and minds.

The colonel’s intrigues were more controversial. He is alleged to have been responsible for thwarting an October 1954 generals’ coup. He paid the leaders of the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao sects several million dollars of CIA money to stick with Diem. He sought also to cut a deal with Bay Vien, boss of Saigon’s mighty armed mafia the Binh Xuyen. Its empire of brothels and opium dens centred upon the Dai The Gioi – Great World casino – located behind high walls in Cholon, and composed of fifty tin-roofed wooden buildings, housing two hundred tables. Vien was protected by a green-bereted private army, forty thousand strong – and by the French.

In those days the dispossessed colonial rulers were competing for influence with the Americans, new kids on the block, which produced some black-comic clashes. Lansdale liked to tell a story of how the US embassy secretaries were alarmed by the discovery of grenades in the vestibule of their quarters, which the CIA identified as a gesture of menace by its Gallic rivals. That evening the Military Mission’s rough games specialist, Lou Conein, marched into L’Amiral, Saigon’s most popular French rendezvous, produced a grenade from which he extracted the pin, and brandished it while he addressed the clientele in their own language: ‘I know how distressed you all are that the American community, and especially our secretaries, should feel threatened. If anything unpleasant or unworthy should take place, we would have common cause for regret.’ He then replaced the pin in the grenade and strode out, justly confident that the mission staff would be exposed to no further French frights.

When Lansdale failed in his attempt to buy off Bay Vien, however, the Americans became alarmed that French support might enable the gangster to prevail over the prime minister. British observers were equally pessimistic: a Foreign Office review concluded: ‘M. Diem has many of the qualities required by a national revolutionary leader dedicated to saving his country – courage, integrity, persistence, faith and an implacable hostility to communism.’ Unfortunately, added the British diplomat, he was also ‘incapable of compromise’ and had ‘little administrative capacity’. When Gen. Joseph ‘Lightning Joe’ Collins, a bustling, short-fused 1944–45 corps commander under Eisenhower, visited Vietnam as the president’s personal envoy, he returned home to report that the US was backing a loser. Collins said later: ‘I liked Diem, but I became convinced he did not have the strength of character to manage this bizarre collection of characters.’ At 6.10 p.m. on 27 April 1955, Dulles sent a cable from Washington to Saigon authorising the prime minister’s removal, much as he might have ordered the sacking of an unsatisfactory parlourmaid.

Yet Diem confounded the sceptics. That very evening, and probably by coincidence, though it is possible that Lansdale played a role, a Saigon street battle erupted between the South Vietnamese army and the Binh Xuyen. Six hours after Dulles demanded that Diem should be put down, he hastily rescinded his cable: the issue remained in abeyance through a miniature civil war in which five hundred Vietnamese died. At the end of May the government’s forces emerged victorious: Bay Vien was obliged to flee into exile, becoming a permanent guest of his French sponsors. The Americans decided that Diem had more about him than previously thought, and clasped him in a mawkishly warm embrace. Senator Hubert Humphrey, a prime mover in the influential lobby group American Friends of Vietnam, declared that the South’s leader was ‘honest, wholesome and honourable’. Henry Luce wrote in Life: ‘Every son, daughter or even distant admirer of the American Revolution should be overjoyed [by the defeat of the Binh Xuyen] and learn to shout “Hurray for Ngo Dinh Diem!”’

In October 1956 Diem, unwilling to hold elections that the communists would almost certainly win, instead staged a referendum which deposed Bao Dai and installed himself as South Vietnam’s president and head of state. Lansdale claimed credit for a characteristic stunt – printing Diem’s ballots in red, a lucky colour in Vietnamese eyes, and those of Bao Dai in green, a colour of misfortune. Diem secured a mandate with a preposterous 98.2 per cent of the vote, a majority that even a Soviet candidate might have thought excessive. In Washington, Dulles said: ‘[South] Vietnam is now a free nation. It is not a puppet.’ Yet Diem’s state depended for its existence upon dumper-truckloads of dollars. If there was no viable North Vietnamese economy, nor was there much of a Southern one – instead, a massive trade deficit and a flood of imports funded by the Americans. Vietnamese began to quote the cynical old French saying: ‘Turn Catholic and have rice to eat.’ Nguyen Van Thieu, later president, was among those who heeded this advice, converting from Buddhism in 1958. Aid soared from just $US1 million in 1954 to $322 million a year later, and continued to rise thereafter – more cash per capita than Washington provided to any other nation in the world except Korea and Laos. Paul Kattenberg of the State Department made the imaginative proposal that the US should offer North Vietnam a bribe of $500 million to ‘repair war damage’ – in truth, to leave the South alone. Such a payment, urged Kattenberg, offered a cheaper alternative to funding Diem.

Nobody in Washington was interested, however. Cash poured into Saigon’s coffers, to be spent at the almost absolute discretion of the president’s generals and officials, a formula for waste and corruption. Securing a government import permit opened the tap to a fortune. Some of the urban middle-class prospered mightily from the inflow of cash and commodities: many of the new rich were former Northern exiles who made good – or, perhaps, made bad – in the South. Under the capitalist system, it seemed that only peasants need commit to honest toil: Saigon experienced a surge of bubble prosperity.

3 BOOM TIME

In the late 1950s, the Southern capital still possessed a colonial elegance tinged with Oriental decadence that delighted Westerners. New arrivals were moved to ecstasies by glimpsing Vietnamese girls in ao dai gowns – or better still, out of them. Literate foreigners recalled a Graham Greene line: ‘To take an Annamite to bed with you is like taking a bird: they twitter and sing on your pillow.’ Most Westerners’ sexual couplings were conducted with professionals, while middle-class Vietnamese sustained notably innocent social lives, in which few advanced beyond hand-holding in advance of their arranged marriages. Nguyen Cao Ky, who later became well-known for the range of his wives and lovers, asserted that when he travelled to France as a twenty-one-year-old pilot trainee, like almost all his contemporaries he was a virgin.

Respectable Vietnamese called girls who associated with round-eyes ‘Me My’, a term only marginally less contemptuous than branding them as hookers. Families exercised rigorous social discipline over their offspring of both sexes. Truong Nhu Tang’s father directed his six sons towards appointed careers as doctor, pharmacist, banker, engineer, engineer, engineer. Tang indeed pursued pharmacological studies until he decided that instead he wished to be a revolutionary: ‘Each Sunday we would gather at my grandfather’s house to listen as he taught us the precepts of Confucian ethics. He would remind us of our duty to live virtuous lives, of personal rectitude and filial piety. And he would talk about the cardinal ethical principles: nhon, nghia le, tri, tin – benevolence, duty, propriety, conscience and fidelity … For boys especially, he would tell us, there are two unshakable necessities: protection of family honour and loyalty to the country. We would sing together the morality verses that we all knew by heart: “Cong cha nhu nui Thai Son” – “Your father’s sacrifice in raising you climbs as high as Thai Son Mountain/Your mother’s love and care are ever-flowing streams.”’

The young Hanoi exile Nguyen Thi Chinh’s life took a new twist one day in 1956, when this beautiful young woman met Joseph Mankiewicz, who was in Saigon to shoot the movie of The Quiet American. He asked her to test for the role of Phuong, the Vietnamese girl who is the lover first of Fowler, a British journalist, then of the CIA man Alden Pyle. Chinh was thrilled: her new husband, an army officer, was training in the US. In his absence, propriety obliged her instead to seek consent from her mother-in-law, who rejected with horror the notion of an actress in the family. Only in the following year did Chinh’s movie career get started, when she took a role in a Vietnamese movie which secured the approval of her husband’s family – as a Buddhist nun.

Thereafter, she found herself starring in successive films, twenty-two in all, with such titles as A Yank in Vietnam and Operation CIA. She filmed all over South-East Asia and became a famous and indeed worshipped woman in her own country. For all her success, however, the tragedy of her family’s split, absolute ignorance of the fate of those in the North, never faded from her consciousness: ‘War is my enemy. Without it, what a wonderful life I could have had.’ As for Mankiewicz’s film, Col. Lansdale – who was wrongly supposed to be the original of Greene’s anti-hero, attended a gala screening in Washington and praised the movie to the sky. Nobody else did: Audie Murphy played the quiet American as a wholesome good guy, and the author deplored the sanitisation of his cynical novel.

Though much American money was stolen or wasted, some of the huge aid infusion, together with a respite from war, brought happy times to the Mekong delta in the later 1950s. A peasant said, ‘I regarded this period as something from a fairy tale; I was carefree and enjoyed my youth.’ Communist Party membership declined dramatically. There was rice in the fields, fruit in the orchards, pigs snuffling around the yards, fish in village ponds. Wooden houses increasingly replaced huts. Some peasants acquired a little furniture; many bought bicycles and radios; children attended schools. The first motorised sampans and water pumps began to modernise agriculture.

Yet those at the bottom of the heap failed to benefit. There was an absence of generosity about the Southern political system, mirroring that in the North, though at first less tinged with blood. Landowners returned to claim their rights in villages from which they had been expelled by the Vietminh, and even tried to collect back rent. Diem became progressively more authoritarian: Tran Kim Tuyen, chief of his intelligence service SEPES, stood less than five feet tall and weighed only a hundred pounds, but was notorious as one of the most ruthless killers in Asia. The president never wavered in rejecting any liability to conduct elections. On this, he could make a fair case: his government had never been party to the Geneva Accords, and no matching poll held in the North would be free or fair.

Moreover, Americans and some Europeans viewed South Vietnam in the context of other US client nations. Regimes survived, and even prospered, that were notably more unpleasant than Diem’s. The brutality and corruption of South Korean dictator Syngman Rhee had proved no impediment to his continuing rule. President Ramon Magsaysay of the Philippines employed ruthless methods to triumph over the Huks. The communist threat to Greece had finally been crushed, with shocking savageries by both sides. Few of Latin America’s dictators ran their countries with any pretence of honesty, justice or humanity, yet they continued to enjoy Washington’s favour.

Thus, in the late 1950s, Americans saw no reason to suppose that the incompetence, corruption and repressive policies of Diem’s regime need undo him, so long as they continued to pay the bills. He survived unscathed a February 1957 communist assassination attempt. Col. Lansdale boomed the little president to his bosses, and some were impressed: there were few Western correspondents in Saigon to gainsay Washington’s claims of progress. When Diem paid a May 1957 visit to the US he received a personal welcome from President Eisenhower, and a quarter of a million New Yorkers turned out for his tickertape parade. The New York Times described him euphorically as ‘an Asian liberator, a man of tenacity of purpose’; the Boston Globe dubbed him ‘Vietnam’s Man of Steel’. Life magazine published an article headed ‘The Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam: Diem, America’s Newly Arrived Visitor, has Roused His Country and Routed the Reds’. It would have been hard to crowd more fantasies into a sentence.

Back in Saigon, American advisers persuaded Diem that he should show himself more often before his people: when he did so, they orchestrated enthusiastic crowds. Diem’s monomania was fuelled by these tours, which he believed to reflect genuine adulation. He sought to make a virtue of stubbornness, once musing to journalist Marguerite Higgins that if the US controlled the Saigon government ‘like a puppet on a string … how will it be different from the French?’ The USIA’s Ev Bumgardner said that Diem regarded the Americans as ‘great big children – well-intentioned, powerful, with a lot of technical know-how, but not very sophisticated in dealing with him or his race’.

Diem was indeed his own man, as the South Vietnamese leaders who succeeded him were not. Unfortunately, however, the advice he rejected was that which might have secured his survival and even success: to curb the excesses of his own family; renounce favouritism towards Catholics; select subordinates for competence rather than loyalty; check corruption; abandon the persecution of critics; impose radical land reform.

Saigon people liked to think themselves nguoi Viet – true Vietnamese – while they looked down on Northerners, Bac Ky. Yet Catholic Northern exiles were conspicuous in their dominance of Diem’s court circle, and of his Can Lao political party. Duong Van Mai, who had herself fled from Hanoi, wrote later: ‘the Diem regime increasingly took on the look of a carpetbagger government’. The most disastrous influence on the president was his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, the clever, sinuous, brutal security supremo, whose ‘dragon lady’ wife Madame Nhu might have been chosen by Central Casting to play Wicked Witch of the East. The North Vietnamese politburo employed plenty of executioners and torturers, but the names and faces of such people were unknown outside their own prisons. The Nhus, by contrast, became globally notorious, doing untold harm to the image of the Saigon government.

Likewise, Diem’s generals affected heavy, brassbound military caps worn above sunglasses, a combination that seemed worldwide hallmarks of the servants of tyrants. Some top men went further, affecting tuxedos – Western formal garb – at banquets. Any South Vietnamese peasant who saw photographs of his leaders thus attired beheld a chasm between ‘them’ and ‘us’. A Vietnamese UPI reporter watching Diem arrive at the National Assembly in Saigon observed to a colleague, ‘The people in Hanoi may be absolute bastards, but they would never be so stupid as to appear before the people in a Mercedes-Benz.’ Here was a glaring contrast with Ho Chi Minh, who rejected the former Hanoi governor-general’s palace as a personal residence in favour of a gardener’s cottage in its grounds. An American reporter said: ‘The people upon whom we were relying to build a nation had no relationship with their own people.’

As late as 1960, 75 per cent of all the South’s farmland was owned by 15 per cent of the population, almost all absentees, because terror made them so. The communists urged peasants not to pay their rents, because defiance made them supporters of the revolution: should landlords and their government protectors regain control of a village, debts would have to be redeemed. There was widespread resentment at Saigon’s reintroduction of the old colonial system of forced labour, whereby people were obliged to give five days’ free service a year to government projects. When the CIA’s William Colby pressed Diem for a radical redistribution of farmland, the president replied: ‘You don’t understand. I cannot eliminate my middle class.’ Government-appointed village officials became petty tyrants, with absolute power to decree the guilt or innocence of those beneath their sway – and, indeed, to pass death sentences. The nurse running the local dispensary took bribes; so did the policeman counting families for tax; village council members arbitrating disputes. Fearful villagers felt obliged to invite their oppressors to become guests at weddings and funerals; to offer them choice cuts of the cats and dogs killed for food. Not all officials were bad, but the general run were incompetent, brutal or corrupt, sometimes all three.

Thus, when assassinations became widespread in 1960–61, many villagers applauded, because the terrorists were skilful in targeting as victims the most unpopular officials. Diem also introduced ‘agrovilles’, fortified hamlets into which peasants were compulsorily relocated. The objective was to isolate them from the communists, but the consequence was to alienate those who resented displacement. How brutal was Diem? The communists advanced a claim, to which they still adhere, that between 1954 and 1959 he killed sixty-eight thousand real or supposed enemies, and carried out 466,000 arrests. These figures seem fantastically exaggerated, just as Southerners inflate numbers killed during the North’s land redistribution. What can be stated with confidence is that the Saigon government rashly promoted the interests of Catholics and persecuted former Vietminh. Whereas the Northern communists created a highly efficient police state, its workings veiled from the world, Diem and his family built a ramshackle one, its cruelties conspicuous. This achieved some success in inspiring fear, almost none in securing respect.

The regime’s failure was not inevitable. Had the president governed in a moderately enlightened fashion, the communist revival could have been averted. Fredrik Logevall has written that, granted the indifference of both China and the Soviet Union to non-fulfilment of the terms of the Geneva Accords, ‘it is not impossible to imagine a scenario in which Diem’s South Vietnam survives, South Korea-style … Diem was the only major non-communist political figure to emerge in Vietnam from 1945 to 1975.’ But he became an architect of countless follies: in the three years from 1957 the Saigon regime presided over construction of half a million square yards of high-rental apartment and villa space, fifty-six thousand square yards of dance halls; and just a hundred thousand square yards of school classrooms, 5,300 square yards of hospital building.

The regime’s domestic excesses and shortcomings, rather than its failure to hold reunification elections, provided communists with the tinder to rekindle the war in the South. Both among his own people and on the world stage Ho Chi Minh was a towering victor in the contest for legitimacy as the voice of the Vietnamese people. Ten-year-old Truong Mealy’s communist teacher in the Mekong delta said: ‘Do you know why Ngo Dinh Diem came to Vietnam? He was sent by the US. Now his whole family has power and all the poor people must work to feed them. Who should run Vietnam – Diem or Ho Chi Minh?’ Five years later, Truong Mealy was a courier for the Vietcong, as the South’s resurgent communist guerrilla movement will hereafter be called.

4 A RECALL TO ARMS

The last French soldiers left Saigon on 28 April 1956. To the dismay of Hanoi, the principal Western signatory to the Geneva Accords thus washed its hands of Indochina, and of any responsibility to promote elections. The revival of warfare in the South thereafter was not, at the outset, prompted by a policy decision in Hanoi, but resulted instead from spontaneous anger among local opponents of the Diem regime. A peasant told American researcher James Trullinger that he and his village attributed the communists’ temporary dormancy to cunning – a calculation that if Hanoi waited until Southerners had experienced a few years of Diem, they would be ripe for revolution. Southern fighters began to launch attacks on government troops and installations, without authorisation from any higher authority.

The first communist call to arms was an impassioned December 1956 missive to the Northern politburo from Le Duan, still presiding over COSVN in the Mekong delta. He described the persecution of comrades, the snuffing out of Party cells, the tightening military grip of Saigon, especially in the Central Highlands. In response, Hanoi reluctantly agreed that Southern fighters should be authorised to shoot in self-defence. It also endorsed some assassinations of ‘reactionary traitors’, and terror bombings of ‘Diem institutions’. A small contingent of intelligence officers and elite sappers – what Westerners would call commandos – was dispatched southwards. Thereafter, in the course of 1957 Southern communists claimed that 452 South Vietnamese government appointees, mostly village chiefs, were killed, kidnapped or suborned. Terrorism resumed: seventeen people died in an attack on a bar in Chau Doc on 17 July; thirteen were wounded in a Saigon café on 10 October; thirteen American servicemen were injured by three further bombings in the capital.

The next important development was the recall of Le Duan to the North. In the summer of 1957, when he reached Hanoi with a comrade, for a time the two were held in a guest house under guard. This was a precaution presumably rooted in the power struggle then taking place, precipitated by the ongoing economic crisis. The new arrivals nonetheless sneaked out in the evenings to amuse themselves, finding standing room at the Hong Ha theatre and suchlike, until guards deflated their bicycle tyres to keep the visitors at home. Le Duan is alleged to have complained savagely that the politburo sought only a quiet life: ‘They have abandoned us.’

The longer he spent in Hanoi, the better he understood how little support for a new war would be forthcoming from either Moscow or Beijing. Yet fierce energy enabled him, during the months that followed, to shoulder past Northern rivals and become a major influence upon the politburo, supported by his close ally Le Duc Tho, whom a senior cadre characterised as ‘taciturn and chilly’, and who later became Henry Kissinger’s interlocutor at the 1972–73 Paris peace talks. Le Duan’s record, as a veteran who had suffered more for the revolution than almost any other comrade, conferred immense prestige. He famously said: ‘You can’t get anywhere reasoning with the imperialist gang, you have to take a hammer and bash their heads.’ North Vietnam’s Party secretary had been sacked for his role in the shambles of land collectivisation. Giap seemed the natural candidate to succeed him. Instead, however, in December 1957 it was Le Duan who got the job.

He was born Le Van Nhuan fifty years earlier in northern South Vietnam, a carpenter’s son who became a committed revolutionary long before Ho returned from exile. His force of personality was indisputable, but a coarseness of tone and language grated on more fastidious colleagues. Lacking social graces, he despised weakness, either ideological or human, which from an early stage he identified in Giap and probably also – though he would never have dared to say as much – in the ageing Ho Chi Minh. His personal life remained an enigma until long after his death. Only in the twenty-first century did his second wife, former Vietminh courier Nguyen Thuy Nga, reveal her tragic story.

At Tet 1956 – the Vietnamese New Year – while Le Duan was still in the South, Nga travelled outside Hanoi to visit his father, bearing gifts of honey, ginseng roots and a few yards of Ha Dong silk. She found at his house her husband’s first wife, who collapsed in sobs on being confronted with Nga’s existence. A few months later, Party officials descended on Nga: a senior cadre, they said, could have only one wife, and in Le Duan’s case it could not be her. As the mother of his two children she was stunned, and said she could agree nothing until her husband himself came to Hanoi – as he did soon afterwards. He offered no sympathy, merely impregnating her for a third time before handing her over to the Party’s Central Women’s Association, under whose auspices she was dispatched to China to ‘study’.

In her exile Le Duan began to write Nga letters, sometimes passionate, including one which said, ‘I love you, I love you so much. Don’t let a few outward actions or a few unfortunate happenings give rise to any misunderstanding. My darling, love triumphs over all obstacles. If you love me then you can solve all of your problems and difficulties.’ They saw each other occasionally when he visited Beijing on state business, and once she met Ho Chi Minh. Le Duan took custody of their three children, and Nga sobbed desperately when she learned that they were thereafter reared by his other wife. After some years she was granted permission briefly to visit Vietnam and see the children. She spent three days with Le Duan, who seemed ‘uncomfortable and unhappy’, as well he might be. In 1964 she was dispatched to the Mekong delta to work as a propaganda cadre, and did not again see her children until 1975. Here was a glimpse through a dark window of the man and the Party to which he devoted his life.

Radicalism in Hanoi was prompted by rising conviction that peaceful reunification would not come. This precipitated the Party’s November 1958 Resolution 14, advancing the Northern revolution another dramatic step with agricultural collectivisation. The following month, a large number of detainees in South Vietnam, including communists, died of food poisoning in a Diem detention camp. Early in the following year the politburo received emotional plaints and pleas from Southern villages, such as this one obviously drafted by local cadres: ‘Uncle Ho! The Americans and Diem have been wicked too much already – we ask your permission to cut off their heads.’ Weeks of debate followed, at the end of which the Party central committee promulgated Resolution 15, an important step towards escalation. It authorised more aggressive action, in the familiar language of Party exhortations: ‘Only the triumph of the revolution can assuage the plight of the poor and wretched people of the South, confound the evil policies of the American imperialists and their puppets who divide the nation and provoke war.’ Resolution 15 opened the way for ‘volunteers’ – as the Chinese had earlier dubbed their troops who fought in Korea – to set forth for the war zone. During the months that followed, some 4,600 political cadres, technicians and engineers headed into Diem’s territory, most of them Southern natives, former ‘regroupers’. Authorisation was given to open ‘Strategic Route 559’, a secret path to the battlefield that ran through neutral Laos and evolved into the Ho Chi Minh Trail; three-year military conscription had already been reintroduced. One of those who approved Resolution 15 said later, ‘Only [in 1959] did we finally acknowledge that there would be no general elections; that Diem was massacring our people. There were signs that the US would continue to strengthen its presence [and therefore that] the only path to the unification of our country must lie through violence.’