It was summer in Paris, but the mood inside 11 Darthe Street on the outskirts of town was tense.1 On July 19, 1972, American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and his team were conducting six and a half hours of negotiations with Le Duan’s right-hand man, the inveterate ideologue Le Duc Tho. In familiar fashion, Le Duc Tho offered up a historical lecture on Vietnam’s great tradition of repelling foreign armies. Hoping to bring the conversation to meaningful discussions, Kissinger presented a five-point plan, which he referred to as America’s last effort at peace, but the Vietnamese viewed it as simply more of the same old American proposals. Two days earlier, Hanoi had cabled its Paris delegation that the upcoming U.S. presidential election boded well for North Vietnam.2 If George McGovern could win, American concessions would be even more favorable than what Nixon and Kissinger were offering. It was a remarkable assertion, given that President Nixon was far ahead in the national polls and widely expected to trounce McGovern, which he did in a landslide. Nonetheless, Hanoi believed it would be beneficial to hold out for a McGovern victory. For the time being, the talks were at an impasse. But then a curious incident occurred when the two teams broke for tea.
In a reflective moment, Kissinger allegedly remarked to his Vietnamese interlocutors that if the Vietnamese possessed merely courage, then the United States would already have crushed them on the battlefield. The problem, Kissinger opined, was that the Vietnamese were both courageous and intelligent. As a result, America was in danger of losing the war.
The room fell silent. Was this a Kissinger trap, one Vietnamese staff member recalled thinking. The staffers waited for their leader to respond. After some thought, Le Duc Tho asked Kissinger if this meant that he believed that the Vietnamese were more intelligent than the Americans. Le Duc Tho observed that the United States was far more advanced than Vietnam in science and technology, possessed high levels of education among its citizens, and contained more numbers of talented people than any other nation. Vietnam, he observed, was clearly the underdog. It was a small, economically backward, primitive agricultural state. Kissinger then asked, if America were so intelligent, why had it not defeated Vietnam? Le Duc Tho replied that twenty-four hours a day, every day, America must confront countless issues. As a result, its intelligence is dissipated. Vietnam, in contrast, had no choice but to concentrate its efforts on a single issue. “. . . We Vietnamese all just think about one thing 24 hours a day: How can we defeat the Americans?” Kissinger agreed that the issue was not which people were smarter but rather which was better able to apply its intelligence: “. . . I have to say that Vietnam uses its intelligence more skillfully than does the United States.”3
This story was recounted by a member of Hanoi’s negotiating team, and whether or not it is fully accurate, it highlights two important facts about the war. First, underdogs must concentrate their energies on a single aim—in this case, how to beat America. Overdogs, in contrast, with global commitments, have their energies dispersed. Second, underdogs must know their enemies better than their enemies know them. Without that knowledge, the underdog’s chances of success are slim.
It has almost become a cliché to opine that America simply did not understand its enemy throughout the Vietnam War. If only the United States had possessed a deeper grasp of the Vietnamese people—their history, language, and culture—so the argument goes, the war might have gone much differently.4 But such lamentations leave us wondering just how well the North Vietnamese leaders actually understood America. Does the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s (DRV) victory in 1975 stem from the fact that its leaders somehow knew their enemy better than the enemy knew them? How did they view America’s strengths and weaknesses, and how did they use this knowledge to best effect?
Hanoi’s victory in the Second Indochina War has fostered a mystique of shrewdness on the part of its leadership—an image that has been preserved in part by the restricted access to key records about its decision-making. Scholars are still at an embryonic stage in determining how the North Vietnamese leadership functioned, thought, processed intelligence, and reached decisions. Because the most crucial archives—the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense, and the Central Executive Committee Office—all remain largely closed, historians are limited in what they can assert. But thanks to the release of voluminous party records (Van Kien Dang 5) and numerous Vietnamese official histories of the war,6 along with burgeoning scholarship on internal Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP) dynamics, we are gaining new insights into what the Party leaders actually thought about their principal foe.
This chapter and the next concentrate on the person who became the driving force within the Party and a key shaper of communist Vietnam’s protracted war strategy. Much has been written on the person and policies of Ho Chi Minh, but Le Duan’s powerful influence on strategy has been underinvestigated.7 Though other Party leaders influenced wartime strategy, First Secretary Le Duan carried the greatest weight within the Politburo. He exerted the strongest influence over the southern communists, who were pivotal in fighting both U.S. and South Vietnam’s forces. It was in this role as head of southern communists that Le Duan initially devised his strategies for defeating the Americans—concepts he developed and executed as his power grew. We therefore need to spotlight several recurrent themes in his thinking: the nature of a protracted war, the role of casualties, and America’s global standing. Each of these subjects influenced how Hanoi intended to defeat the United States over the long term and offers insights into how Hanoi understood its enemy. In short, by excavating how Le Duan thought, we can better grasp how much strategic empathy the Party leader possessed for America.
When it came to recognizing the enemy’s constraints, Le Duan’s strategic empathy for America was strong. He saw that America was highly vulnerable in a protracted war, and he shaped Hanoi’s behavior in ways that would exploit those weaknesses. With respect to America’s key drivers, Le Duan never fully grasped the motivations of President Johnson and his top advisors. In spite of this failing, he nonetheless recognized a break in the pattern of American behavior at a critical juncture in the conflict. He understood that the Tonkin Gulf episode represented a highly provocative act, one that presaged an American escalation.
Le Duan’s strategic empathy for America stemmed from a careful consideration of enemy behavior and the context within which the Americans had to function. Although he was known for his strong ideological convictions, ideology did not cloud his conduct of strategy. As a new wave of scholarship on Vietnam has been evolving since the 1990s, researchers have been breaking with old preconceptions about the Indochina wars. One of the more prominent assertions has involved the ideological nature of Hanoi’s thinking. Tuong Vu, for example, has elucidated the depth to which Marxist attitudes infused decision-making from the 1920s onward.8 Others, such as Martin Grossheim,9 have reinforced this notion. These authors have informed our understanding of the dogmatic (and often dangerous) world of domestic politics within the VWP.10 There is evidence to suggest that many Party leaders were committed, true believers in communism. That faith helped galvanize their determination. It convinced them of the wisdom of collectivization, the merits of a centrally planned economy, and that their ultimate victory was historically inevitable. Yet in formulating particular strategies, Party leaders naturally could not be guided entirely by dogma. When assessing the Americans, rhetorical pronouncements of neo-imperialist plots were frequently balanced by sober calculations of America’s key strengths and vulnerabilities. Ideology, therefore, could not always be paramount when it came to strategy. What Hanoi required for victory was not ideological fervor but strategic empathy, and it needed a leader who possessed it.
The noted Vietnam historian Christopher Goscha has called Le Duan and Le Duc Tho the two most powerful Party leaders during the Vietnam War.11 The historian Lien-Hang T. Nguyen placed both men at center stage in her recent study of DRV domestic politics and struggle for peace.12 This belated attention is necessary, for while Le Duc Tho gained global prominence through his negotiations with Henry Kissinger and subsequent Nobel Peace Prize, Le Duan has long been thought of as a shadowy figure about whom little is known. Because it is now evident that his role atop the Party also enabled him to profoundly shape Hanoi’s wartime course, we need to take a much closer look at Le Duan’s sense of the American enemy. Scholars have yet to explore the roots and development of his strategic thinking, especially as it relates to the United States. In fact, Le Duan’s notions of how to defeat the Americans are inseparable from the story of his rise.
Born in 1908 in Quang Tri Province, part of the central region of Vietnam, Le Duan traversed the country as a young man while working for the railways. Attracted to communism at an early age, he became a founding member of the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930. In 1931, he was arrested by the French for revolutionary activity and was later released in 1936 as part of a general amnesty offered by the new Popular Front government in France. Undeterred and more committed to the cause than ever, Le Duan established a Communist Party branch in central Vietnam and was once again imprisoned from 1940 to 1945. During this incarceration, Le Duan used his time to indoctrinate other inmates in Marxist ideology. Upon his second release, Ho Chi Minh appointed him to the Central Committee. Together with Le Duc Tho, he served as the Party’s chief for South Vietnam. Le Duc Tho had initially been tasked in 1948 by the Central Committee to head the Party organization in the South, but for unknown reasons he decided to serve as Le Duan’s deputy. Their collaboration continued into the 1980s. Le Duan’s rise through Party ranks culminated in 1960, when he became the Party’s General Secretary, serving in that post longer than any other party chair, relinquishing it only upon his death in 1986.
Part of the reason that he shunned the spotlight of world politics (in contrast to his better-known colleagues) may have been related to aspects of his personal life, which he strove to keep secret. Le Duan had two wives and children with each woman, though he managed to keep the existence of the second family quiet. He had married his first wife, a northerner, in the 1930s, prior to his imprisonment by the French. In 1948, while organizing the Party in South Vietnam, he married Nguyen Thuy Nga, a southerner. This second marriage was arranged by none other than Le Duan’s close friend, deputy, and future Politburo colleague, Le Duc Tho. Although Politburo members were forbidden to have more than one wife, Le Duan flouted that requirement. In order to keep the second wife secret, he sent her to China to study and work in the late 1950s and early 1960s and subsequently dispatched her to South Vietnam to perform Party tasks. Despite their long separations and unorthodox arrangement, his private letters to Nga reveal a softer side to the dogmatic Marxist-Leninist who would erect and orchestrate a brutal police state.
In 2006, a Hanoi-based newspaper ran a five-part series on the late First Secretary’s secret wife. Through these extended interviews with Nguyen Thuy Nga (now in her eighties), along with excerpts from her diaries and love letters she received from Le Duan, we see evidence of a devout revolutionary and passionate husband, as well as a man with something to hide.13 On December 25, 1960, he professed his love and pleaded with her to trust him: “Do not let a few outward actions or a few unfortunate things that happened give rise to any misunderstandings that you might have about me.” His letters reveal that his love for this woman was inextricably tied to the revolutionary cause:
The deep love I have for you, the deep love that we have for our children, the deep love that we have for our revolutionary cause will let us live together and die together and leave behind us an inheritance for future generations—the inheritance that is our children and the inheritance that is our cause in which we were bound together, as if we were one person!14
Around this same time, the late 1950s and early 1960s, Le Duan was also building relationships with cadres throughout the South. Part of Le Duan’s rise within the Party was linked to his development of a wartime strategy against the Americans. Even prior to the French defeat in 1954, it had become clear to Party leaders that the United States would supplant France as a neocolonial adversary. As the United States was already paying roughly 80 percent of French war costs and had been supplying the French with war materiel since the Truman administration, VWP leaders understood that they were indirectly at war with America. At the Party’s eighth plenum in 1955, this recognition took concrete form when the Party designated the United States as its principal adversary.15
Le Duan’s most impactful early strategic assessment of America came in August 1956. Having risen to the post of Cochin China Party Secretary, essentially serving as the Party’s chief representative in the South, he completed an analysis of America’s intentions in South Vietnam. Working with Party members in each province of the Mekong Delta, Eastern Cochin China, and in Saigon-Cho Lon, Le Duan drafted a document that would serve as the political basis for future action. Noting that President Eisenhower’s reelection campaign called for peace, Le Duan argued that even the war-mongering, imperialist nations have publics that desire peace.16 Internal Party statements such as these belie its official proclamations in its newspaper, The People (Nhan Dan). That same year, the paper published a series of articles defending the DRV’s democratic nature in the wake of the violent measures enacted during the land reform. Contained within these pieces, the Party denounced America as a false democracy whose news media were controlled by its capitalist elite.17 Le Duan’s comments reveal that Party leaders in fact believed that American politicians were beholden to the public, constrained at least in part by democratic processes. This recognition would serve Party leaders well in later years when they hoped that domestic opposition to the war would weaken American resolve.
Le Duan’s thesis, “Tenets of the Policies of the Vietnamese Revolution in South Vietnam” (sometimes translated as “The Path to Revolution in the South”), advocated a period of peace, but it held out the possibility of war if conditions demanded it: “However, the fact that we firmly hold the banner of peace does not mean that the question of conducting armed insurrection as well as a war against foreign aggression will not be raised if the situation has completely changed.”18 This was the pacific note struck by his thesis. It tempered the more bellicose tones within the document: “The mission of the South Vietnamese revolution is to topple the dictatorial, fascist, American imperialist puppet Ngo Dinh Diem government and to liberate the South Vietnamese people from the yoke of imperialism and feudalism.” And later, “Our people in South Vietnam have only one road to take, and that is to rise up against the Americans and Diem to save the nation and to save themselves. That is the path of the revolution. Other than that path, there is no other path that we can take.”19
We cannot read these documents and the contradictions they embody without considering the context within which they were written. The mid-1950s marked an exceedingly turbulent period in the Party’s history, for the North as well as the South. Almost immediately upon taking power, Hanoi experienced a mass exodus of Vietnamese from North to South Vietnam. We still do not know how many Vietnamese were executed during this period, though some estimates range in the tens of thousands.20 The Party’s disastrous land reform program resulted in the demotion of First Secretary Truong Chinh, paving the way for Le Duan’s elevation. In addition, Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful coexistence with the West greatly concerned the VWP leaders. At the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev had boldly declared that nations could only choose between peaceful coexistence or the most destructive war in history. There was no middle ground. Consequently, in its thinking about waging a war against the South, Hanoi had to consider the Soviet Union’s attitudes with care.21 Meanwhile, in South Vietnam, the Diem regime was rounding up and executing Communist Party members, severely weakening its potential. Many of its leaders were forced underground, some having relocated to the Plain of Reeds. Under such circumstances, Le Duan, who had been ordered by Ho to direct the revolution in the South, was compelled to speak of peace while preparing for war.
A palpable tension existed between the southern communists’ belief that armed struggle against the South was necessary on the one hand and the Central Committee’s policy of peaceful political struggle under the framework of the Geneva accords on the other. As the official military command history of the Central Office of South Vietnam (COSVN) reveals, its armed squads were restricted from engaging in military operations in order to comply with Hanoi’s instructions.22 In December of 1956, the Cochin China Party Committee convened an enlarged session to discuss its strategy. Le Duan, as a Politburo member, presided, along with Nguyen Van Linh, the acting committee secretary. The group resolved that the time was not yet right to launch guerilla warfare. Instead, it would pursue armed propaganda. The purpose of propaganda units would be to encourage hatred of the enemy, suppress spies, win over the masses to their cause, and avoid combat that could reveal their forces to the enemy.23 In other words, the Cochin China branch of the Party, under Le Duan’s direction, determined to further the revolution by all means short of outright guerilla war.24
Militancy alone could not account for Le Duan’s rapid rise within the Party. His elevation is a testament to his shrewd political skills and his manipulation of factional rivalries. By 1951 he was already a leading figure among the southern communists. In late 1956, Le Duan was reassigned to the North, signifying his rising status within the Party leadership. Following his journey with the delegation to the Moscow conference of communist parties in November 1957, he publicly emerged as the most important Party official after Ho Chi Minh. During these years, he continued to agitate for an armed struggle in the South, while his prominence within the Party grew.
In 1960, Le Duan ascended to the post of Party First Secretary, placing him in a powerful, though not unchallenged, position of influence over the Vietnamese Communist movement, both in the North and the South. As Le Duan’s power base expanded, he applied increasingly harsh tactics to ensure that his own policies would be adopted and his opponents sidelined. On September 15, he succeeded in passing a Party statute that dramatically expanded the authority of the Secretariat, the government organ of which he was the head. Subsequently, Le Duan wielded enormous influence over government branches as varied as foreign affairs, finance, science, agriculture, propaganda, and beyond. More than this, Le Duan controlled the Ministry of Public Security, through which he could employ the harshest tactics of a modern state against his presumed opponents. It was a weapon he did not hesitate to use. DRV citizens, from Party intellectuals to political rivals, all felt the brunt of police state rule.25
Le Duan’s opponents had good reason to fear his extensive reach, for in the wake of the Sino–Soviet split, the Party fractured along the lines of those partial to the Soviet Union (adhering to Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful coexistence with the West) and those who favored closer ties to China (backing Chairman Mao’s wish to support armed struggles against perceived neocolonialism). Le Duan and Le Duc Tho belonged to the pro-China faction. Those Vietnamese who had studied in the Soviet Union and now supported revisionism were especially vulnerable to Le Duan’s and Le Duc Tho’s attacks. A second, related rift emerged between those like Le Duan and Le Duc Tho, who advocated a south-first policy of war, and those who preferred a north-first approach focused on economic development of the DRV. Still a third important fissure developed within Party circles, with those who favored guerilla warfare in the South opposing those who advocated larger, conventional units being sent to fight alongside the southerners. Each of these swirling currents buffeted wartime strategy and policy, and Le Duan stood at the maelstrom’s center.
In December of 1963, for example, subsequent to the Diem assassination, Le Duan pressed the Politburo to increase infiltration of the South and attempt to overthrow the southern regime, against the wishes of both Khrushchev and others within the DRV. Some of those opposed to his plans were arrested and removed from positions of influence.26 In 1964, he moved to exert greater control over the southern communist forces by placing his own man, General Nguyen Chi Thanh, as head of the Central Office of the South Vietnamese Communist Party. By elevating General Thanh, Le Duan hoped to undercut the influence of the revered General Võ Nguyên Giáp, hero of the war against the French. Nguyen Chi Thanh was himself a Politburo member and seemed poised to rise even higher, but he died in 1967 under mysterious circumstances.27 Some believe he was murdered by those loyal to General Giáp. Others claim he had a heart attack after a night of heavy drinking.28 Whatever the case, Le Duan’s appointment of Nguyen Chi Thanh to oversee COSVN reflects the First Secretary’s intention to control the southern revolution. As for Le Duan’s more heavy-handed efforts to influence events, Sophie Quinn-Judge has argued that during a Party purge in 1967 (the so-called anti-Party affair), Le Duan was again responsible for having opponents arrested and removed from power.29
Judging Le Duan’s character is not as simple as it may seem. The evidence suggests a man driven to achieve his ends regardless of the costs to others. On the other hand, as a revolutionary leader, he clearly inspired many, whether as a teacher of Marxism-Leninism to other prison inmates or through his speeches and letters to the Party faithful.30 Yet many of his contemporaries viewed him as deceptive and manipulative. According to Pierre Asselin, the General Secretary “found enemies almost everywhere.” His paranoia and deceitfulness, Asselin observed, alienated many supporters of the revolution. More recently some of Le Duan’s colleagues have sought to defend his reputation through their reminiscences, though this has not shifted opinion in Western historiography.31 His complex character aside, there is no doubt that as First Secretary of the VWP, Le Duan wielded enormous power over all organs of the state, including the military.32 From such a formidable position, he was able to influence Hanoi’s wartime strategy against America.
Le Duan steadily advocated a dual approach: large conventional warfare when possible and protracted guerilla war when necessary. By bogging the Americans down in a war involving high numbers of casualties, Le Duan believed that domestic opposition within the United States would force Washington to withdraw from Vietnam if face-saving measures could be provided. Naturally, he would have been eager to achieve a quick victory if it had been possible, but even the general offensives of 1968 and 1972 did not produce a rapid triumph. Both methods—large-scale military offensives and long-term guerilla warfare—were employed to sap the Americans’ will. While some scholars have highlighted Le Duan’s interest in a rapid victory, this is only half of the story.33 Le Duan frequently spoke and wrote, both in public pronouncements and private correspondence, of the need to wear the enemy down over a prolonged period. From his writings, we can see that he did not simply apply the same strategy against America that had been successful against the French. Instead, we find careful reasoning about the range of American strengths and weaknesses, from its nuclear capacity to its costly global commitments, particularly in Europe and the Middle East. In short, Le Duan thought in geostrategic terms, fully aware of the underdog’s necessities and the overdog’s constraints.
The First Secretary articulated the policy of protracted war to the southern communists in numerous letters. In April 1961, for example, he outlined Hanoi’s guidance on southern strategy and tactics, along with a spirited urging to steep all Party members and the masses in the notion of a protracted war. Only by stressing the need for a long, arduous fight, he insisted, could they be certain of victory. President Kennedy, he claimed, had said that the United States would need ten years to snuff out the revolution in Vietnam. If the enemy was planning on a long war, then how could they fail to meet the challenge by doing the same, Le Duan asked rhetorically.34
Despite his reputation for militancy and advocacy of armed resistance, the Party First Secretary remained sensitive to strategic necessities. In a letter to COSVN in July 1962, Le Duan cautioned his comrades not to attack the cities at that time. Even though there were vulnerable areas, an attack would not be advantageous because it could incite the Americans to increase their intervention and expand the war.35 Admonitions such as these demonstrated that Le Duan understood that provoking the Americans while COSVN forces were still weak was strategically unwise and potentially counterproductive. That recognition stemmed from an understanding of the balance of forces at the time. His critical assessment led to caution. This raises the question of why communist forces provoked America in 1964 at Tonkin and again in 1965 at Pleiku—a question to which we will soon return. Overall, the First Secretary observed that protracted wars must be fought in both the political and military arenas, and he pointed to the recent experiences of Laotians and Algerians in defeating their adversaries on the political front.
In this same letter, Le Duan clearly enunciated how he viewed America’s greatest weakness and how Hanoi intended to exploit it. The movement, Le Duan explained, could not at that time destroy American forces. The enemy was too strong, both in military and financial resources. Instead, the aim was to attack portions of the Diem regime’s forces, the “puppet army,” and thereby cause the Americans to “sink deeper and deeper into the mire of a protracted war with no way out.” This in turn would cause the Americans to become increasingly isolated domestically and globally, which would impel them to negotiate with Hanoi.36 Hanoi would then call for the formation of a neutral South Vietnamese regime. Le Duan believed that the Americans would be willing to accept defeat provided that Hanoi advanced limited demands at a level that would not cause the enemy to lose too much face.37 The overall plan was to weaken the Americans in phases, gradually pushing back the perceived expansion of neo-imperialist aims.
By 1963, the South Vietnamese regime was in deep turmoil. President Ngo Dinh Diem had pushed through turbulent land reform policies of his own, engendering resentment over forced resettlement programs. Diem’s repressive policies fomented conflicts with communist units as well as with Buddhist and other religious minorities. Dissatisfaction with Diem’s rule culminated in a coup on November 2, 1963, in which President Diem was assassinated.38 Resentment at Diem’s harsh rule had been brewing for several years, and although Hanoi recognized Saigon’s instability as an opportunity, it was unable to capitalize on the situation. Following the coup, the key question facing Party leaders was whether the United States would increase its counterrevolutionary efforts in Vietnam. Would it expand the war? The month following the Diem coup, Hanoi analyzed the situation in a lengthy document.
In December of 1963, the VWP’s Central Committee issued its Resolution from the Ninth Plenum. One section of this resolution covered issues surrounding America’s intentions and capabilities. Hanoi’s strategy seemed contradictory. It called for both a quick victory over the South and a protracted war. We know that Hanoi’s leaders were flexible insofar as they were willing to adopt measures that worked. In this respect they were opportunistic, adapting their methods as circumstances dictated. But the apparent policy contradiction also likely reflected a compromise between competing factions within the Party. Internal Party disagreements were never aired openly, yet we know that various factions existed over time. One notable split existed between a more dovish branch favoring compromise and negotiation with the Americans and a more hawkish group, led by Le Duan, favoring all-out war.
The Resolution of December 1963 articulated some key elements in Hanoi’s thinking about America. Given Le Duan’s position atop the Party, it is certain that he influenced the resolution’s final form and its treatment of the United States. The document was intended to spell out the likely prospects for the South Vietnamese revolutionary movement as well as outlining guidelines and responsibilities for victory. It asserted the standard and consistent line that the world revolutionary movement was in the ascendance and the global situation was increasingly unfavorable for the imperialists. It declared that Marxism-Leninism afforded the Party “a scientific foundation for our policy guidelines, formulas, and procedures for fighting the Americans” and that this could give the Party members great confidence in the Party leadership.39
Sandwiched between layers of Marxist historical analysis lay Hanoi’s assessment of several specific challenges facing America. The first of these, a recurrent subtheme throughout the Van Kien Dang, involved the dispersal of U.S. forces. The Resolution observed that America’s strength was spread around the world, making it difficult for the U.S. to concentrate sufficient force on any one region and allowing an opening for insurgencies to capitalize on this weakness. It argued that America had launched ten wars of aggression in the previous eighteen years but that it continued to be defeated, specifically in China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba. Naturally, such comments might merely represent Hanoi’s wishful thinking—attempts to spin its situation in a positive light. But since at other times Party leaders pointed to America’s strengths and counseled caution, it is entirely possible that at least some Party leaders believed the above assessment of America. It suggests that they viewed the United States as weaker than its military and economic power would indicate.
Immediately thereafter, the Resolution broached the question of nuclear weapons. We do not have sufficient records to explain why Hanoi felt confident (if indeed it did) that America would not use its nuclear weapons against the North. We can surmise that Hanoi believed it fell under the Soviet Union’s nuclear umbrella and that the United States would not want to risk widening the Vietnam War into a world war, its rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding.
The Resolution’s authors claimed that the United States had previously relied on its monopoly and superiority in nuclear weapons to influence world affairs. The Resolution called the Eisenhower administration’s nuclear policy of “massive retaliation” one of brinksmanship. But the policy had failed, according to the authors, because of the Soviet Union’s development of nuclear weapons as well as the rising strength of the socialist camp. As a result, the Americans were forced to adopt a new nuclear policy of “flexible response,” in which they would launch special and limited wars while simultaneously preparing for a world war. The authors declared that although the imperialists, led by the United States, were still making feverish preparations for a world war, the odds of it occurring were diminishing. “If the imperialists are insane enough to start a new world war, the people of the world will bury them.”40
Surprisingly, there is no mention in the Resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis or other flashpoints such as Taiwan in 1958 or the Korean War, when the danger of an American nuclear strike was highest. Le Duan did, however, reference these episodes in May 1965, in a letter to COSVN. There he argued that the United States had shown it would not dare to use nuclear weapons, even when that meant defeat. Le Duan cited America’s failure to stop China’s revolution, despite being allied with Chiang Kai-shek’s 5 million troops. Le Duan interpreted this reluctance to use nuclear weapons as a sign of weakness. The same was true, he argued, in the Korean War as well as in the First Indochina War, when the United States backed the French. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, America showed some strength but failed “to intimidate a heroic nation with seven million inhabitants.” America’s willingness to accept a coalition government in Laos in 1962 only further demonstrated its impotence, he asserted.41 Presumably, Le Duan, and probably all other Politburo members, had concluded that the United States would not introduce nuclear weapons into the Vietnam conflict based on its past unwillingness to deploy them.42 In short, Hanoi was hoping that America’s future behavior would resemble its past actions. Fortunately for Hanoi, its assumption turned out to be correct, though there were no guarantees that America would resist employing its nuclear option if conditions changed. VWP leaders did not know that President Nixon and Henry Kissinger would later consider using tactical nuclear strikes against them.
Turning to America’s formation of the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), which Hanoi dubbed the Southeast Asian Aggression Bloc, the Resolution explained that the treaty was necessary because South Vietnam was the place of greatest revolutionary activity. Thus, U.S. military forces needed to be concentrated there in order to preserve American interests while propping up the supposedly crumbling capitalist system. The Resolution summarized America’s three primary objectives as follows. First, it aimed to suppress the national revolutionary movement while implementing neocolonialism; second, it intended to construct military bases from which it would attack the socialist camp; and third, and most crucially, it sought to halt the spread of socialism throughout Southeast Asia. All of these points about SEATO suggest that VWP leaders accepted standard Marxist-Leninist dogma in this regard.
Trained to seek out internal contradictions within capitalist behavior, the authors observed that America was facing growing internal disagreements about its strong anticommunist policies in Vietnam, namely from the intellectual class. Hanoi followed the American media closely and frequently noted growing domestic opposition to the war.43 Party leaders cited everything from public pronouncements against the war by U.S. Senator Wayne Morse,44 to the 1960s’ civil rights protests across the American South, to global opposition to American foreign policies. The Van Kien Dang reveal clearly that Hanoi fully intended to exploit those differences to its advantage. Ideological convictions may have led Party leaders to exaggerate the degree of internal dissention within America. Nonetheless, the Party’s attention to those growing notes of discord would later, after 1968, prove useful.
The political scientist Carlyle Thayer has argued that Hanoi’s decision-making must be understood as a complex interplay of individual leaders’ aims, Party rivalries, and domestic constraints, along with the changing role of foreign powers, particularly China and the Soviet Union.45 This is, however, precisely how VWP leaders tried to read Washington’s decision-making. They considered the individual inclinations of Johnson and Nixon (as well as the plans advanced by figures such as General Maxwell Taylor and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara). They followed America’s antiwar protests and other domestic issues to see how those movements might constrain Washington’s actions. They examined the effects of the war on America’s freedom of action globally. From this analysis, they sought to foresee how events would unfold.
The Van Kien Dang and other records demonstrate that Hanoi actively strove to understand its American adversary, partly by monitoring American news media and partly through espionage. Though more than thirty-five years have passed since the war’s end, we still know remarkably little about the DRV’s intelligence services. We know that Party leaders read summaries of foreign news and developments prepared by the Foreign Ministry. The military’s intelligence branch also prepared reports on espionage activities and the interrogation of prisoners. It monitored foreign broadcasts and intercepted enemy communications.46 The Ministry of Public Security also played a role, one similar to that of the Soviet KGB. In addition, the Party itself naturally operated its own External Affairs Department, which handled contact with other nations’ communist and socialist parties. Hanoi’s intelligence services cooperated with both their Soviet and Chinese counterparts, but the full extent of this collaboration is unknown.47 Regardless of their sources, Party leaders arrived in 1963 at seemingly incompatible conclusions about America’s intentions.
Did Hanoi believe that America would escalate the war, or did it instead think that the United States could be deterred? In order to predict the war’s course, the Central Committee’s December 1963 resolution differentiated between three types of wars that America could wage in Vietnam. Hanoi called the first type “special war,” which Americans might have called a counterinsurgency war. In special war, which Hanoi considered to be the current type in 1963, the United States supplied puppet forces within Vietnam, providing them with military advisors and equipment. A transformation to the second type, or “limited war,” would occur when U.S. forces became the primary combat forces within Vietnam. A “general war” would be one expanded to the North.48 Hanoi anticipated that the current special war could transform into a limited war if the Americans held any of three beliefs:
1. American victory could only be guaranteed if it intervened in a massive way.
2. North Vietnam would not react strongly to greater U.S. intervention in South Vietnam.
3. Greater U.S. intervention would not spark strong opposition within the United States or around the world.
The resolution concluded that it was unlikely that America would expand to a limited war because of the risks: “They clearly realize that if they become bogged down in a protracted large-scale war, they will fall into an extremely defensive and reactive posture around the world.”49 Demonstrating that at least some in the Politburo feared a wider war despite these pronouncements, the authors quickly added that they should be prepared for the possibility of American escalation nonetheless. By bolstering the strength of southern units, Hanoi hoped it could cripple the southern regime and thereby dissuade America from expanding its commitment.
For several years Le Duan had been gradually increasing the flow of soldiers south to join the fighting. Throughout 1964, preparations intensified as nearly 9,000 soldiers and cadres, including two full-strength battalions, were sent south. Additionally, the DRV’s Navy enhanced the frequency and tonnage of weapons shipments south via sea routes, employing steel-hulled vessels, which also served to transport mid- and high-level military as well as Party officials. During the 1963–1964 dry season, engineering units modernized the roads south, enabling the transportation of supplies to the battlefields to quadruple that of the previous year.50 According to the official DRV history of the People’s Navy, by late June the Navy had placed all of its forces on a war footing.51 In the wake of these ongoing military preparations, Ho Chi Minh declared in a speech on March 27, 1964, that the DRV’s aim was to see the Americans withdraw their forces as well as their weapons and support from South Vietnam.52
What then would have been the purpose of outlining the reasons America would not escalate if preparations for American escalation were considered necessary? One reason was to bolster morale among communist forces. Much of the resolution reads like a calculated effort by Hanoi to reassure its supporters that victory against the Americans was not only possible but in fact certain. Another explanation for this double-speak is that it reflects the internal contradictions within Party circles. Some may have believed that American expansion was unlikely, while others, Le Duan probably among them, insisted that a wider war was coming. If Le Duan believed any of the anti-American rhetoric he regularly expressed, namely that the United States was intent on expanding the war to impose neocolonial rule over Vietnam, then he would have seen an American escalation as inevitable and probably coming soon. Yet it did not require an ideological conviction to surmise that escalation was a strong possibility. By mid-summer of 1964, President Johnson had announced an increase of military advisors from 16,000 to nearly 22,000.53 That wider war, it turned out, was close at hand. Though it would prove immensely costly to all concerned, it also offered some tangible advantages.