The Third Force in the Vietnam Wars The Elusive Search for Peace 1954-75 by Sophie Quinn-Judge (z-lib.org)

90 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Westmoreland. But by April the key decision had been made: ‘to give
American combat troops an independent part in the ground war’.30 Bu` i

Diễm concludes: ‘The record does not show either that the American

decision makers understood our perspective or that we understood
American intentions.’31

To summarize, by the summer of 1965, the United States was deeply

committed to a military intervention, ostensibly designed to protect the

people of southern Vietnam, but undertaken without any formal

consultation with the civilian South Vietnamese government. The US

policymakers overlooked the broad appeal of the South Vietnamese peace

movement, apparently because they could not understand what it

represented. There had to be something subversive about preferring a

negotiated peace to American protection, even if the latter came at the

price of loss of sovereignty and probable massive destruction.

The international reaction to US escalation was not enthusiastic or

supportive. The UN General Secretary U Thant, British Prime Minister

Harold Wilson, and the French all called for immediate negotiations.

The French government, not surprisingly, held the view that the

political troubles in Saigon justified their earlier calls for neutralism.

Following the August 1964 resignation of General Kha´nh, the Minister

of Information Alain Peyrefitte had remarked that ‘It is a development

that conforms to France’s predictions to such a degree that it would be in
poor taste to stress the point.’32

Prince Sihanouk, ever more troubled by violations of Cambodia’s

borders and airspace, convened an ‘Indochinese People’s Conference’ in

Phnom Penh in February 1965. Two Vietnamese neutralist groups were

represented, the best known being the Committee for Peace and

Renewal led by Trần Vta˘hneiHr ữcuomanmduNnigstuybễnretMhra˙ennh Ha` in Paris. On this
occasion they found from the NLF and

Hanoi’s Fatherland Front less pliant than in years past. It required the

intervention of the Cambodian Minister of Foreign Affairs to get them

admitted to the conference presidium. The communists questioned

whether, as residents of France, they were truly representative of the

Vietnamese people. Still, on his departure from Phnom Penh, Trần Va˘n

Hữu declared that ‘all doors are not yet closed to the search for a

negotiated solution, honourable for all’. He hoped that the ‘firm will and

solidarity’ demonstrated at the Phnom Penh conference would persuade
the USA of the need for a peaceful solution to the war.33 Yet in a

THE BUDDHISTS AND THE URBAN ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT 91

post-conference news briefing, Prince Sihanouk took a more pessimistic
tone, stating that ‘it is already too late for a negotiated solution’ to the
fighting, as ‘these gentlemen [the communists] are now expecting
nothing less than total victory’.34

The Qua´t government was responsible for renewing a 1964 Decree
Law that outlawed communist activity, as well as ‘all plots and actions
under the false name of peace and neutrality according to a Communist
policy’.35 But by June the civilian veneer of the government appeared
dispensable and Dr Phan Huy Qua´t was ousted by the military, to be
replaced by a ten-member National Leadership Committee, headed by
the 42-year-old General Nguyễn Va˘n Thiệu. Among the other leaders
were Lt General Nguyễn Cha´nh Thi and the 35-year-old Nguyễn Cao
Kỳ. This move dispelled the military’s fear that a civilian government
might open the door to negotiations with the NLF. Kỳ became the
effective prime minister as head of the Executive Council of the
Leadership Committee. He banned all newspapers (briefly) and declared
that communists, black marketeers and corrupt officials would all be
shot on sight.

The Social Revolution

At this stage in the evolution of the Saigon government, a number of
idealistic young Vietnamese transferred their energy from street protests
to social work. Faced with the fait accompli of the American entry into
the war, and the narrowing of options within civil society, they tried to
make themselves the vehicles of the social change they had been
dreaming of since the overthrow of Diệm. These efforts involved a broad
part of the political spectrum, including students and Buddhist and
Catholic activists. Most of these amateur social workers were from the
middle classes, educated young people who in another time would have
been preparing for entry into the government bureaucracy and the ranks
of teachers and professions.

Severe floods in Central Vietnam in the autumn of 1964 pulled many
students away from the streets and into volunteer groups, collecting and
transporting food and other emergency relief supplies. When this work
brought the youth into contact with communist-controlled villages,
some of them were temporarily arrested by the Saigon government,
under suspicion of carrying out liaison work. But at this stage it was still

92 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

fairly easy for their leaders to intervene on their behalf to get them
released from detention. Following his own arrest in late December
1964, student leader Nguyễn Hữu Tha´i was taken under the wing of a
US professor from the School of Pedagogy, who recruited him to work in
a summer social work programme for students. It did not take long,
however, for the students to become disillusioned with the role they had
been assigned. In his memoir Tha´i describes his disenchantment with
the US-sponsored ‘social revolution’:

That summer [1965], I had many opportunities to take part in
different social work camps around Saigon. The situation in the
An Phu´ Đoˆng refugee camp made me more pessimistic, and
I began to feel that social action clearly could have no effect in the
middle of this destructive war. We had built any number of
houses, made roads, dug latrine holes for the people from the
countryside who had been forced into these camps by American
bombs.

But it was the very work we were doing that enabled the US
military and Saigon to continue to kill and destroy. I wrote in my
diary at the time: ‘We can’t say that we are carrying out a social
revolution when we just sing some songs, give haircuts, distribute
candy to the children, conduct medical examinations, and pass out
medicines to a few people. City youth like us have not yet
progressed beyond charitable work.’

I saw in the refugees’ faces that they were still traumatized by
the bombing. They watched passively while we worked – some
of us in jeans and tight jerseys of the kind you would wear on a
picnic – as if we were strange and distant beings . . .36

Among the Buddhists, the ywoournkgerms toonskerTvhe´ıtchheNlehsấstaHdva˙annhtatgoeodk. the lead
in creating a cadre of social Born in

1926, Th´ıch Nhất Hanh was a Zen modernizer who believed in making
Buddhism relevant ˙to the suffering of the ordinary Vietnamese.

He entered the Từ Hiếu pagoda in Huế at age 16, then moved on to the

Ba´o Quốc Buddhist Academy, where Th´ıch Trı´ Quang also studied.

In 1956 he became the editor of Vietnamese Buddhism (Phaˆt Gia´o aVni˙eˆdt
Nam), the periodical of the Unified Vietnam Buddhist Ass˙ociation

the main Buddhist weekly in the South. He spent 1961 at Princeton

THE BUDDHISTS AND THE URBAN ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT 93

University, where he studied the philosophy of religion, and also spent

some time at Columbia University. After his return in 1963, he and Cao

Ngoc Phượng, then one of the few female professors (in biology) at
Saig˙on University, drew up the plans for the School of Buddhist Youth

for Social Service (BYSS).

In January 1964 he submitted his project for a Buddhist Institute,

what would soon become Van Hanh University, to the Buddhist
leadership. His plan incorpor˙ated ˙a social work school, which he

envisaged as a faculty where students could learn the techniques of non-

violent social change. The Buddhist university was soon functioning,

with a full curriculum for undergraduate and graduate studies, but

because of the leadership’s reluctance to commit money to the project,
the BYSS took longer to get off the ground.37 The older monks of the

Buddhist congregation treated Nhất Hanh as a ‘utopian poet’ and failed
to see how he could realize his gran˙d scheme without outside aid.

Officially, the BYSS did not open until September 1965, and by then

dNehvấetloHpma˙nehnthiandvaillrleaagdeys managed to create two pilot projects for rural
near Saigon. But by mid-1966 this experiment

in grass-roots work would be disowned by the Buddhist hierarchy. With

hindsight, we can note that perhaps the most significant action that he

took in 1965 was to write a letter to Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, to try to

convince him to publicly oppose the Vietnam War.

The search for a non-communist path to social revolution was not

restricted to students and Buddhists in 1964– 5. The young Catholic

intellectual, philosophy Professor Nguyễn Va˘n Trung, who first made

his name at the University of Huế, had moved south to head the

humanities faculty of the University of Saigon. Here he had popularized

the idea that the Diệm government had been a government for the rich,

and that the new leaders in Saigon must attack the problems of rural

and urban poverty. His short-lived journal Ha`nh Trı`nh (The Journey)

(1964– 5) presented thoughtful articles on the tensions between

Buddhists and Catholics, as well as reprints of articles by European

intellectuals, and discussions of the Algerian and Egyptian revolutions.

In 1965 a group of Catholic-educated men, strongly influenced by

changing ideas within the Vatican, organized an ambitious development

project in District 8 of Saigon, a poor neighbourhood full of refugees

from the First Indochina War that was beginning to receive a new wave.

These were Hồ Ngoc Nhuận, Dr Hồ Va˘n Minh and the lawyer Đoa`n
˙

94 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Thanh Lieˆm. Their goal was clear: to begin a non-communist social
revolution.38 Post-World War II Catholic social activism marked their
approach to community service; the Belgian priest Emmanuel Jacques
had also made a strong impression on them when he worked in Saigon.
At the time all three were still army officers, released from active duty.

As a young teacher, before being called for military duty, Hồ Ngoc
Nhuận had organized a movement to help poor children receive a˙n
education.39 He was serving in a remote military camp, when on the day
following the coup against Ngoˆ Đ`ınh Diệm, he was summoned to
Saigon to work in the newly established Youth Ministry. One of the
people who recommended him for this work was his former philosophy
professor, Father Bernard Pineau. He surmises that the new military
leaders were concerned to find a way to control the passions of the young
demonstrators who had come out into the streets to protest the excesses
of Diệm and Nhu. This assignment ended abruptly following the coup
led by Nguyễn Kha´nh in January 1964, when many of those military
men close to General Minh were sent out of Saigon. Instead of being
reassigned to the Central Highlands like some of his colleagues, Nhuận
managed to get an appointment with the Seventh Division in Mỹ Tho,
his hometown.40 The District 8 project gave him a chance to return to
youth and social work.

Đoa`n Thanh Lieˆm had spent a year in the United States, studying
constitutional law, observing community development projects and the
role of NGOs. He was influenced by the ideas of Dominican priest
Father Jean Lebret, who had established a movement known as Economy
and Humanism, based on his experiences in Africa. (Father Lebret would
be one of the authors of the 1967 Encyclical Progressio Populorum by Pope
Paul VI.)

‘We mobilized the young people, helped people build houses, and
started cooperatives and night schools for women’, Nhuận says.41 In
1966 they opened the first community high school for the District,
which is still in operation today. When Vice President Hubert
Humphrey visited District 8 in 1967, he joked that this was the
beginning of a socialist revolution in Saigon. Having the resources of the
Catholic Church and the Kỳ regime behind them certainly gave this
group an advantage that the Buddhists did not possess. (For the School
of Buddhist Youth for Social Service, the issue of outside funding would
bring painful consequences.)

THE BUDDHISTS AND THE URBAN ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT 95

The District 8 project was a model that could have been replicated in
the rural areas, had the war not intruded. In spite of its success, Saigon
intellectuals such as Professor Nguyễn Va˘n Trung began to question
whether a ‘social revolution’ was compatible with the American war
effort, which by the end of 1965 was spreading into the Việt Cộng-
controlled countryside. He began to believe that ‘the nation’s righteous
cause is with every day slipping into the arms of the NLF. To make a
social revolution with the Americans, or to take advantage of the
Americans to carry one out, is a utopian idea.’42 The District 8 team in
the end came to agree with him.

The Final Buddhist Crisis

Inevitably tensions arose among the members of the National Leadership
Committee that had come to power in June 1965. In March of the
following year, Nguyễn Cao Kỳ felt obliged to remove Lt General
Nguyễn Cha´nh Thi as administrator of the First Military Region, where
he had a strong following among the local Buddhists. This action gave
the Buddhists the pretext they needed to start another full-scale protest
movement. Bordering the DMZ, this region was most immediately
threatened by communist infiltration from the North. It was in these
central provinces, especially Quảng Nam, Quảng T´ın and Quảng Nga˜i,
that the communists had some of their most secure base areas and
strongest popular support, dating to the Việt Minh years. Unrest in the
major cities of I Corps was a frightening prospect for the Saigon rulers.

The students and Buddhists were now well organized and ready for
action, after their experience in opposition to Diệm and Kha´nh. They
took to the streets of Huế and Danang, gaining the support of dissident
army units who supported General Thi. By 26 March the opposition
controlled these two cities and had taken over the radio stations. New
organizations sprouted up, such as the Movement to Exterminate
Corruption and Reactionaries and the People’s Force to Defend the
HReuvếomluetdioincal(LsựtucdLeưnợtsn.gThNehaaˆinrliDftaiˆnngTorfấVn iTethnủamCea´scehRMana˙gnegr),baletdtalbioyntswtoo
Danang did not cow the opposition. On 10 April the Buddhists
launched their own political movement, which they termed ‘the
Vietnamese Buddhist Force’. This was a lay political party, in effect
something very close to a proverbial Third Force. The new force was

96 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

openly designed to bring down the military junta – its major demand
was the election of a Constituent Assembly. It did not exclude the
possibility of negotiations with the Việt Cộng; but this question would
only be decided once the people’s aspirations had been made clear by
elections, a press spokesman said.43

On 12 April Prime Minister Kỳ found ‘a face-saving formula’ that
enabled him to withdraw the Rangers from Danang to Saigon. Two days
later the military leadership gave the protestors a firm promise that
elections for a Constituent Assembly would be held within three to five
months, at which point the Buddhist leaders decided to end their
demonstrations.44 Th´ıch Trı´ Quang undertook to convince his followers
to call off their protests, a step that he later would bitterly regret. Fresh
demonstrations erupted in early May, however, when Kỳ unsettled the
protestors with an off-hand remark, saying that ‘we will try to hold
elections by October’. He also provoked suspicion by stating that ‘he
expected to remain in office for another year’.45 The result was that the
opposition forces, now known as ‘the Struggle Movement’, or ‘Struggle
Forces’, returned to the streets, as Huế and Danang again slipped out of
government control.

With quiet encouragement from Ambassador Lodge and the
Pentagon, Nguyễn Cao Kỳ moved decisively to end the revolt in
Danang on 15 May by flying in two battalions each of Marines and
paratroopers. On 21 May the loyal ARVN forces attacked the last three
pagodas where the Buddhists had taken refuge. Around 100 unarmed
monks, women and children died in this onslaught, including attacks
from the air.46

In Huế the Struggle Forces held out, as the generals cut off the food
supplies to the city. Students burned down the US Information Service’s
library on 26 May; the Buddhist nun Th´ıch Nữ Thanh Quang
immolated herself the following day, leaving a note to President
Johnson; her act inspired the immolation of eight more monks and nuns.
On 31 May a student mob burned the US Consulate, as well as the
consular residence. When the ARVN prepared to move into the city,
many of Huế’s inhabitants brought their family altars out into the
streets, to form roadblocks that the army could only destroy at their
peril. By this point, however, with his support from the dissident First
Division and the Mayor of Huế draining away, Th´ıch Tr´ı Quang again
intervened, to ask the people to remove their altars and to surrender in

THE BUDDHISTS AND THE URBAN ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT 97

peace. He was said to be deeply disturbed by the lack of support he had
received from the USA, when he had attempted to curb the ARVN’s
violent attack in Danang.47

The American Embassy, once again presided over by Henry Cabot
Lodge, had worked behind the scenes to coach the military leaders on
ways to avoid inflaming the opposition. Lodge was among those who
viewed the crisis as something being manipulated by communists.
He believed that ‘certain Buddhists were unwittingly taking
Communist-inspired advice, as were the students in Huế’.48

Thı´ch Tr´ı Quang had without doubt become adept at playing the
spoiler in southern politics, but his focus in the 1966 crisis had been
consistent: the convening of elections to end military rule. It seems
likely that he had contacts with the NLF, but that he was not sure where
exactly they stood in 1966. Both communist and NLF activists certainly
participated in the urban movement, but in the end their leadership
believed that it had been a mistake to allow the Buddhist leaders to
control events.49 However, one Vietnamese historian, himself a former
Buddhist activist, claims that underground communist students often
decided on the slogans for the Struggle Movement.50 For the student
population, the Buddhist movement would for many be a halfway house
on the way to joining the communist party, especially after arrests and
the draft made it too dangerous for them to remain in government-
controlled areas.

Other observers such as Takashi Oka believed that at the ‘riceroots’
level, there was intense competition between the Việt Cộng and the
Buddhists for control of the rural people. Communist propaganda
praised the Buddhist movement, as Oka says, but criticized particular
urban bonzes, who, they claimed, had been ‘bought’ by the Saigon
government and the Americans. At the same time, though, many of the
Buddhists and their followers were also anti-American, a fact that at a
certain level brought them closer to the ethos of the NLF. As Takashi
Oka summed up the problem, American help was viewed as essential for
the successful conduct of the war by many Buddhists. But in their view
the initiative should have rested with the Vietnamese – because if it did
not, the war was as good as lost.51

It appeared that the Buddhists and students in the Struggle
Movement had won a victory by holding out for something more than a
vague promise of elections. But by the time the elections for the

98 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Constituent Assembly were held, their success seemed less clear. For a
start, the military Directorate had set highly restrictive limits on both
candidates and voters: the election decree barred candidates who ‘have
been directly or indirectly working for the communists, or pro-
communist neutralists, or have been involved in activities advantageous
to the communists’.52 Moreover, the end of the ‘Struggle Movement’ had
been followed by widespread arrests. Those imprisoned included five or
six hundred military officers and non-commissioned officers, as well as
several thousand ordinary soldiers who had joined the dissidents.53
When the assembly met in early 1967 to draw up a new constitution, the
voices of those who had fought for it were largely missing. By this time
the solidarity that had grown out of the Buddhist’s earlier political
successes was dissipating, while the treatment of Buddhist candidates in
the 1967 presidential election would demonstrate that the government
could ride roughshod over their aspirations for political power.

The Splintering of the Buddhist Opposition

The political force wielded by the powerful monks of the Ấn Quang
pagoda and the Unified Buddhist congregation disintegrated after
the end of their protest movement in Central Vietnam in the spring
of 1966. While the government’s backers viewed the end of the
Buddhist Struggle Movement as the end of an ‘adolescent rebellion’,54
the participants saw the outcome as a time of betrayal. Many of the
Buddhists ended up boycotting the constituent assembly elections
because a number of their candidates, including army officers, had either
been arrested or refused permission to run. As the memoirs of the
Buddhist activist Cao Ngoc Phượng (now the nun Chaˆn Khoˆng) explain,
there was a belief in th˙e Buddhist community that only Buddhist
candidates from Central Vietnam (Huế, Danang, Quảng Nam and nine
other provinces) were being arrested, while monks originally from
northern Vietnam were free to contest the election.55

A serious split opened up within the Buddhist Struggle Movement
between the two leading monks: Thı´ch Taˆm Chaˆu, head of the Society
for the Propagation of the Dharma (Viện Hoa´ Đao) and Th´ıch Trı´
Quang. The allies of Trı´ Quang elected their own Viện˙ Hoa´ Đao with the
monk Th´ıch Thiện Hoa at its head.56 Taˆm Chau, who was tr˙avelling in
India at the time, ignored requests to intervene with the military to

THE BUDDHISTS AND THE URBAN ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT 99

demand the release of the arrested candidates. Shocked and betrayed, Trı´
Quang embarked on a hunger strike to demand their release, without
success. After 67 days he was hospitalized, but he continued to refuse
food for one hundred days. When he was finally convinced to end his
fast, he was confined to his pagoda under house arrest for the duration of
the war.

In the spring of 1966 Th´ıch Nhất Hanh took the Tr´ı Quang faction’s
message to the USA, on the invitation˙ of Cornell University and the
Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). His outspoken attitude to the war
only deepened the fissure opening up between the more cautious
Buddhist leaders and his own circle. He held a 1 June 1966 press
conference in Washington, DC, at which he issued a five-point peace
proposal highly critical of the status quo in the RVN. The proposal
listed the following points:

1. The United States must officially announce its willingness to aid the
Vietnamese people in acquiring a government that truly represents
their desires;

2. The United States must immediately declare a total bombing halt;
3. The US Army must limit its actions to a purely defensive role;
4. The USA must demonstrate in a convincing fashion their intention

to withdraw their troops at the end of a period to be determined;
5. The USA must offer aid for the reconstruction of Vietnam, free from

any ideological or political preconditions.57

That same day, Th´ıch Nhất Hanh was denounced as a traitor by Saigon
Radio and the government’s˙ spokesman. His Buddhist supporters
convinced him that it would be too dangerous for him to return to
Vietnam, so from that point on he remained in exile, an exile that would
not end until 2005.

One week after Nhất Hanh’s departure for America, the Dean of Van
Hanh University, Thı´ch M˙inh Chaˆu, dissolved the Student Union an˙d
en˙ded the university’s ties with the School of Buddhist Youth for Social
Service. Only later, in 1967, did Cao Ngoc Phượng discover that Minh
Chaˆu had come under pressure to declar˙e that the monk Th´ıch Nhất
Hanh had no connection with Van Hanh University. The pressure came
fro˙m a ‘private US cultural fo˙unda˙tion’ (almost certainly the Asia
Foundation) that had donated $100,000 for the construction of a library

100 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

at Van Hanh. A similar offer to the school of BYSS was turned down, as
the S˙choo˙l’s new director, the young monk Thı´ch Thanh Vaˆn, could not
bring himself to accept such a bargain.58 The school continued to
function with donations from Buddhist laypeople, as well as aid from
pacifist organizations around the world raised by FOR, and it played a
valuable role in organizing relief efforts during the Tết offensive. But it
never developed into the powerful advocate for the suffering civilian
population that the founders had envisaged. In 1967 several of its social
workers would be killed in a grenade attack on their village dormitory;
on another occasion four workers were kidnapped and assassinated.
At the time the Buddhists believed that there was ‘strong circumstantial
evidence pointing to the complicity of government agents’.59

Presidential Elections

By November 1966, Th´ıch Nhất Hanh wrote that ‘the government is
t˙o crush
leaning on the false V“cioệnmmHuona´ isĐt”a˙o. . . Young the Buddhists whom they
called “militant” and and active Buddhist monks

and laymen are being pursued and arrested or drafted.’60 These arrests and

the harassment of Buddhist activists did not prevent the September

elections for the Constituent Assembly from taking place with relative

success, however. Representatives of South Vietnam’s variety of sects,

religions and minority groups were all given places in the assembly. But

the barring of neutralists (and NLF members) from candidacy, combined

with the widespread arrests of those involved in the Struggle Movement,

denied this exercise the legitimacy that the Americans craved for their

anti-communist crusade. By this point, the ranks of those who believed

that a ‘Third Way’ still existed to bring peace to Vietnam were thinning

out. Student leader Nguyễn Hữu Tha´i, for one, would make up his mind
to try to join the NLF.61 A few outspoken critics of the leadership,

including two of the District 8 leaders, Hồ Ngoc Nhuận and Hồ Va˘n
Minh, were elected to represent their working-c˙lass constituents. Over

time they and a handful of other deputies would develop into an

opposition bloc that became a voice for the dispossessed. But the

distribution of power within the RVN would change surprisingly little in

spite of the two elections. In 1967 General Nguyễn Va˘n Thiệu would out-

manoeuvre Nguyễn Cao Kỳ to place himself on the ballot as the military

candidate for president, leaving Kỳ with the vice-presidential slot.

THE BUDDHISTS AND THE URBAN ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT 101

The 1967 elections proved important as a test of how far the USA
would go to preserve the pliant military leadership they relied on.
By using their power to guarantee a reasonably free election, they could
have helped to create a credible civilian government, one that could have
negotiated with the communists with popular support behind them.
But in the summer of 1967 the US military still believed that a military
victory was possible.

As the Pentagon Papers notes,

the Constituent Assembly conveniently approved a draft article
which permitted Thiệu and Kỳ to run without resigning from
the Armed Forces. They also approved a result allowing for a
mere plurality of votes, with no second round. By mid-July, the
Assembly had voted acceptance of the Thiệu-Kỳ ticket while
disallowing one headed by Big Minh [who was in exile in
Bangkok].62

The compilers of the Pentagon Papers pass over the voting itself with little
apparent awareness of how disillusioning the process was for the
Vietnamese middle classes. ‘With only a few hitches’, they report, ‘the
campaigning proceeded so as to satisfy American observers that it was
acceptably fair; and the resultant Thiệu – Kỳ victory was a surprise only
in its smaller-than-expected plurality’.63 The Thiệu– Kỳ ticket received
35 per cent of the votes, with a virtual unknown, lawyer Trương Đ`ınh
Dzu from the Mekong Delta town of Can Tho, coming second with 17
per cent. He waited until relatively close to election day to announce
that he was running on a peace platform. His symbol was the dove.
Altogether the three runners-up received 38 per cent, and this was with
the most popular candidates barred from the race. In fact, in Saigon,
where it was difficult to change the results, the Dzu ticket ran well ahead
of Thiệu– Kỳ. Revealingly, Trần Ngoc Chaˆu in his 2012 memoir reports
conversations in Kiến Hoa` and Bı`nh ˙Đinh provinces, in which provincial
officials admitted that they had chang˙ed the final tallies to give Thiệu
and Kỳ the victory over Trương Đ`ınh Dzu.64

In fact, there was much about this presidential election that was not
straightforward. The first sign that all was not well was the murder of
the private secretary of the head of the Central Election Council, also
president of the Saigon Bar Association. Then there was the barring of

102 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

the two best-qualified candidates from running: General Dương Va˘n
Minh and Dr Aˆ u Trường Thanh, an economist who had served in
Saigon governments since 1963, until resigning from Kỳ’s cabinet,
where he had served as General Commissioner for Economy and
Finance. Aˆ u Trường Thanh had started his campaign as a peace
candidate, promising if elected ‘to realize the aspirations of the whole
Vietnamese people, meaning: to end the war, which at present is
tearing apart our beloved country’.65 Thiệu and Kỳ decided to
eliminate his candidacy when they fixed the final slate on 19 July.
However, they permitted enough candidates to remain in the race to
assure that the popular vote was diluted.

A well-qualified election observer was sent to follow the process by a
consortium of peace groups: the Methodist Peace Division, SANE,
Friends Committee on National Legislation and the Unitarian
Universalists. Dr David Wurfel, a political scientist specializing in
South East Asia, had observed four Philippine elections and spent
considerable time in South Vietnam before 1967. ‘Even without
extensive documentary proof’, he wrote, ‘it is crucial that most
Vietnamese view the election as having involved widespread fraud –
while recognizing it as an improvement over the Diệm period – and
thus cannot regard the government which results from such an election
as legitimate’.66 Wurfel believed that ‘fraud on election day was
extensive – producing 300,000–500,000 votes and inflating the total
number of votes. The manipulation of returns took place between the
district and the province level, he reported. Trương Đı`nh Dzu
complained that his representatives were often prevented from seeing the
district returns. Slush funds were distributed to Hoa´ Hảo leaders by
Nguyễn Cao Kỳ. There was no control of the total number of ballots
issued, and some military units received two ballots per person. The
election for the 60-member Senate was viewed as particularly corrupt,
with a drawn-out counting process overseen personally by Thiệu and Kỳ.
On top of that, three senatorial slates supported by the Buddhists were
removed from the ballot.

Conclusion

By 1967 there had been two years of battle involving the US military
in the Vietnam War. The political life of South Vietnam had been

THE BUDDHISTS AND THE URBAN ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT 103

punctuated by crises, driven in part by a popular demand for a civilian

government that could begin talks with the ‘other side’ – the NLF, the

Việt Cộng, the communists, as they were variously known. The elections

meant to bring legitimacy to the US-backed government failed in this

aim and kept in power the same cast of generals. Given the near success

of the Struggle Movement in 1966, it should not be surprising that the

opponents of Generals Thiệu and Kỳ would try to develop and expand

their political forces. But from this time the communists would try to

bring the political opposition under their own guidance. With the fear

of neutralists and peace advocates as great as ever in Saigon, the role of

any ‘neutralist’ political opposition in South Vietnam became more

difficult to carry out. But the Politburo of the Workers Party still

understood that they needed this added weapon in their arsenal.

The memoirs of NLF activist Trương Như Tảng describe how he was

mobilized by communist organizers in 1965– 6. He received a summons

from Trần Bach Đằng, the Party Secretary for the Saigon –Chợ Lớn –
sGtriaateÐgy˙in. hThree˙ginoenw,
in June 1966, to discuss the Front’s new urban
policy, based on a decision known as ‘the 1966

Resolution’, underlined the importance of the armed struggle in the

countryside and the political struggle in the cities. ‘Specifically’, Tảng

writes, ‘we would be looking for new ways to use the city’s volatile and

often militant youth to heighten the political confrontation between the
regime and the urban population’.67 By this time, Tảng says, he was

‘working toward the development of a Third Force of independent

nationalists’, although this force would not take on a formal identity
until after the 1968 Tết offensive.68 The following chapter will take up

this theme of the communist-led political struggle.



CHAPTER 5

THE TURNING POINT:

THE TẾT OFFENSIVE

There is a tendency to assume that there is a sharp line dividing

the NLF and the non-NLF portions of the population, but it is

not so.

Th´ıch Nhất Hanh, December 19671
˙

Lately we have not been emphasizing the development of the Party
within the working, middle and poor peasant classes, and in places
some ‘complex elements’ as well as a number of people from the
exploiting class have been admitted to the Party.

Leˆ Dức Tho, December 19672
˙

Introduction

The 1968 Tết or New Year’s Offensive may appear a strange time to
think about peacemaking, but in fact it marked the major turning point
in Vietnamese efforts to find a political end to the war. The Johnson
administration, determined to show some progress by the election year
of 1968, had begun to think more seriously about peace talks in 1967.
Although their efforts to open talks were rebuffed in the fall of 1967,
their internal conversations on launching negotiations continued into
January 1968, before the start of the Offensive. These discussions took
on a new urgency in March, as President Johnson’s closest advisers
absorbed the massive shock that the first phase of the offensive had
administered to the American public.

106 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

The years 1967 – 8 saw major fissures open up within each party to
the conflict, a fact that made peacemaking more challenging than ever.
The least public of these internal debates was the flare-up of a second
wave of the ‘anti-revisionist’ campaign in the DRV. In the southern
resistance, tensions mirroring those in Hanoi began to be felt, as the
language of class struggle and prejudice against bourgeois NLF
members surfaced.

In Washington, doves in Lyndon Johnson’s administration were
becoming more outspoken; Robert McNamara had grown disillusioned
with the war and resigned as Secretary of Defense in late 1967. Those
who doubted the war’s prospects for success would finally win a victory
when President Johnson announced an unconditional halt to the
bombing of the DRV, above the 20th parallel. But it took the shock of
the Tết Offensive to make that concession possible. By May, the DRV
would agree to begin negotiations in Paris.

The RVN in the Lead-Up to Tết

In the Republic of Vietnam, as we saw in the previous chapter,

popular dissatisfaction with the war was not making the Thiệu – Kỳ

regime any more trusted or popular. The year 1967 had seen powerful

demonstrations of the popular desire for peace – in addition to the

strong showing by the unknown peace candidate Trương Ðı`nh Dzu in

the September elections, the self-immolation of a young Buddhist nun

in April had catalysed an outpouring of grief. Nhất Chi Mai, a

follower of Th´ıch Nhất Hanh’s philosophy of Engaged Buddhism, had
lit a match to set herself o˙n fire, as she sat before a statue of the Virgin
Mary and the Bodhisattva of compassion, Quan Aˆ m in Vietnamese.

She had left behind many letters and poems exhorting Buddhists and

Catholics to unite in the name of peace. Her friend CmaoanNy gpo˙ecoPphleượanngd
wrote that ‘Her act seems to have moved a great

helped the peace movement to swell like waves during a storm.’ Th´ıch

Tr´ı Quang disguised himself as a novice monk to escape from his

pagoda arrest and to come to pray before her body. He paid for the

publishing and recording of her poems and letters. Even friends who

had joined the armed combatants in the jungle contacted the

Buddhists to ask what they could do to realize Mai’s dream of peace
and reconciliation.3

THE TURNING POINT 107

In 1967– 8 the gulf between anti-war Buddhists and Catholic peace

advocates began to disappear. The Sorbonne-educated Catholic priest,

Nguyễn Ngoc Lan, agreed to write the introduction to Mai’s writings.
As philosoph˙y professor Ly´ Cha´nh Trung wrote in the journal Ða´ˆt Nước

(The Country), Nhất Chi Mai had ‘chosen her path’ in response to

the dehumanizing war. Professor Trung, a product of the Catholic

University of Louvain in Belgium, felt that each Vietnamese was being

forced to find some kind of response to the tragedy that was engulfing his

or her country – if not, they were in danger of ‘turning into two-legged
beasts’.4 (He personally had not yet found his own path, he confessed.)

He was in part responding to the publication of a report on civilian

casualties of the war put out by Senator Edward Kennedy’s

Subcommittee on Refugees in the fall of 1967. This report showed

that within the Saigon-controlled zones alone, from 100,000 to 150,000

civilians were being injured every year, with around one-quarter of these

counted as deaths. At a minimal count the war had left 35,000 civilians
as amputees.5 Yet worse was to come.

At the end of 1967, Th´ıch Nhất Hanh was still trying to educate
Western leaders about Vietnamese disaffe˙ction with the war. He had met

the Pope and Martin Luther King the preceding year, with significant

results. Nhất Hanh had an undoubted influence on Dr King’s Riverside
Drive speech of ˙April 1967, in which he laid out his opposition to the

war. Dr King had earlier nominated fNollhoấwt iHnga˙nDhefcoermtbheer Nobel Peace
Prize, in January of that year. The Nhất Hanh
addressed a group of opinion leaders, at the Center for the Study˙ of

Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California, at that time an

influential think tank. His presentation was titled, ‘The Third Solution’.

In his talk and question-and-answer session, he fleshed out his ideas of

how to establish peace and a coalition government in South Vietnam.

He made it clear that he saw little role for the Thiệu– Kỳ government,

‘because it has no effective popular support among any class of

Vietnamese’. Explaining that the ordinary Vietnamese did not tend to

distinguish between the NLF and what he called ‘the non-Front bloc’ of

nationalist proponents of peace, he said that:

It is therefore quite usual for peasants to sympathize with the
Front while at the same time supporting the leadership of the non-
Front bloc, which is committed to a peaceful solution instead of

108 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Figure 5.1 Martin Luther King and Th´ıch Nhaˆ´t Hanh at a press conference
˙
in June 1966.

the militant campaign of the NLF. Thus it is very hard for outside

observers to sort out the population into active supporters of the
Front and of the non-Front leadership.6

He did not believe that either side in the war could win a military
victory – as he explained,

escalation from the other side will increase as escalation on the
American side is increased . . . It is our belief that the United States
will not believe that it can afford such a defeat by such an
‘insignificant’ country. And we fear that the United States is going
to do everything necessary to prevent such a defeat, including the
use of the kind of weapons that might wipe out the whole country.

That is why we are afraid any time either side talks of victory.
Victory simply means the effective destruction of the whole
country. So the kind of solution we Buddhists envision in our
county is one that can help both sides not to lose face. We call this
the Third Solution.7

THE TURNING POINT 109

When asked whether Hanoi would support a neutral government, Th´ıch
Nhất Hanh showed confidence in the promises of the NLF:

˙

Well, Hồ Ch´ı Minh has declared that if South Vietnam wants to be
neutral, it should be neutral. We believe that Hồ is wise enough to
accept such a solution. We believe, too, Hanoi has no choice but to
accept the decision of the Front in South Vietnam not to press for
reunification right now. Guerilla warfare is not possible without
support from the local population; therefore North Vietnam is
impotent without the Front. Also, we do not believe that Hanoi is
a satellite of Peking in any real sense . . . They do not say so, of
course, but many Front leaders want to see North Vietnam join
South Vietnam in neutrality, becoming independent not only from
Western powers, but independent from China as well. That is an
aspiration shared historically by all Vietnamese.8

This observation that there might be leaders in Hanoi who would
prefer to leave the Chinese orbit is one that the Americans were unable
to grasp or refused to believe. By the end of December, however,
these leaders’ influence on DRV policy had been greatly weakened, as
we shall see. Interestingly, Th´ıch Nhất Hanh’s thinking seemed to
reflect the official policy of the NLF as of mid˙-1967. But by 1968 their
policy on coalition governments and peace was coming under fire
in Hanoi.

Organizational Problems

In January 1968, Thı´ch NprhoấfetssHora˙sntho’ssigfonllaowpeetritCioanodNemgao˙ncdiPnhgưtợhnagt
persuaded 70 of her fellow

the warring sides extend the Tết ceasefire. Among them was Father

Nguyễn Ngoc Lan. The communists had agreed to a truce of three days
for the holid˙ay, but within hours of the Tết ceasefire’s beginning, an

unprecedented communist offensive had broken out in the towns and

cities of the South. Phượng and two of her colleagues refused the

Ministry of Education’s demand that they withdraw their petition and

sign one condemning the communists, as they did not want to be seen to

be controlled by the Thiệu government. Again, Father Lan was one of

these colleagues, along with the US-educated agronomist, Chaˆu Taˆm

110 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Luaˆn. Both of these men would remain adherents to the cause of peace
and identify themselves with the Third Segment until the war’s end.

In the weeks following the Offensive, Cao Ngoc Phượng joined the
students, monks and nuns who set up first aid sta˙tions for the civilian
population and engaged in the gruesome work of disposing of the
cadavers decomposing on the city streets.9 This was not how the
‘General Offensive and General Uprising’, the communists’ term for
their action, was supposed to have developed. But not being a party
member, Cao Ngoc Phượng would not have been privy to the secret
scheme for the urb˙an uprising in Saigon.

The original communist plan was to climax in a series of student New
Year’s performances and celebrations with a massive gathering in the
Tao Dan Park opposite the President’s Independence Palace. At the
signal for ‘G hour’, the students were to move en masse into the palace,
along with a group of underground special forces, occupying it as the
Saigon government structures collapsed and armed liberation forces
appeared in the streets. These coordinated actions had been planned to
begin on the evening of 4 February and continue into the early morning
of 5 February. But when General Trần Va˘n Tra` returned from Hanoi in
early January, he brought the news that the offensive was now scheduled
for the first night of Tết, 30 January. This upset the plans for the student
gathering, which never reached its grand finale.10

Not much went according to plan during the offensive. The student
occupation of Independence Palace never came about, while the units in
the Mekong Delta and on the outskirts of Saigon received the order to
attack with only hours to spare. The propaganda unit to which Nguyễn
Thuy Nga, Leˆ Duẩn’s wife, was assigned was roasting a pig for a Tết feast
when˙ at 11 a.m. on 29 January they received the order to move to attack
at ‘top speed’.11 A major flaw in the planning had appeared: the opening
date for the offensive was 24 hours in advance in locales where Hanoi’s
main force units were in charge. In Huế the Tết Offensive began on
29 January; in the Delta and Saigon, the starting date was due to be
30 January. This difference in dates was attributed to a recent change in
the DRV Tết calendar, which depends on the phases of the moon – this
meant that the regions that had started the offensive later lost the
element of surprise and had to rush to catch up. The ARVN troops had
already been called back from their Tết leave when the attacks on Saigon
began. The communist forces were outnumbered by the US and South

THE TURNING POINT 111

Vietnamese forces stationed around the city, and without the weapon of
surprise, most of the forces attacking from outside could not break
through the city’s defences. One has to ask why the difference between
the Hanoi and Saigon calendars was overlooked or if there was, in fact,
some other reason for the last-minute change of schedule.

These unfolding events of January 1968 reflected a gap between the
communist planners in Hanoi and the people who were meant to organize
the attacks, as well as those expected to rise up to support them. One of
the puzzling questions about the Tết Offensive is why this gap existed.
The rest of this chapter looks at this and other questions about the Tết
turning point, including the hardening political climate in the DRV.
Throughout 1968, as the Hanoi government prepared to negotiate with
the United States in Paris, it continued to investigate a group of leaders
arrested in 1967, for the crime of supporting ‘revisionist’ ideas. Ironically,
among these ideas was support for peace negotiations. Finally, the chapter
examines the reactions of the Saigon government to the Tết events and the
opening of peace talks. One of the results would be widespread arrests of
political activists and a growing number of political prisoners. At the
same time, those southerners who had before felt sympathetic to the NLF
grew increasingly willing to form links with their intellectual peers on
‘the other side’, the side of the communist resistance.

Hanoi’s Purge of Revisionists and Plans for the Offensive

The full story of the Tết Offensive begins in the second half of 1967 in
Hanoi, where a wave of arrests of senior cadres dampened discussion of
issues linked to peace and negotiations. The debates and forces that
influenced this crackdown had already altered the political climate
in Hanoi in 1963, as was explained in Chapter 3. At that point the
Soviet Union had been advocating a peaceful resolution to the conflict
and focusing on repairing its tattered relationship with the United
States. The cooling of DRV relations with the Soviet Union was
not permanent, however. After the American escalation began,
Vietnamese – Soviet relations improved, as the post-Khrushchev ruling
troika worked to reclaim their leadership of the world revolution. The
warmth of this relationship would fluctuate in the coming years,
depending on how much aid the Russians were willing to provide and
how the Chinese were behaving.

112 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Figure 5.2 Author with Traˆ`n Bach Ða˘`ng, in 1968 responsible for the
NLF’s Saigon – Gia Ðinh zone, in h˙ is home in Hoˆ` Ch´ı Minh City, 2004.
He had recently had a˙ stroke. Photographer unknown.

After Khrushchev’s ousting in October 1964, the new prime
minister Alexei Kosygin made a visit to Vietnam in February of 1965.
This opened a new phase for the two countries – as the US bombing of
the DRV began, the Russians offered a steady supply of heavy weapons
and advisers. At the same time, the Chinese, who had been a reliable
source of food, consumer goods, military equipment and even foreign
currency during the early 1960s, became embroiled in their own
internal struggle, the Cultural Revolution. The PRC maintained
logistical support and anti-aircraft troops in the northern part of the
DRV until early 1969, as their share of total foreign aid going to Hanoi
gradually decreased. They began their withdrawal of support troops
in November 1968 and completed the withdrawal of antiaircraft
artillery units the following March.12 When speaking to counterparts
in Eastern Europe, Vietnamese diplomats often registered dismay at
the way the Cultural Revolution in China was turning a secure rear
logistical base into a scene of chaos.

The power of the Ninth Plenum Resolution decreeing Vietnam’s
ideological unity with the PRC seemed to be waning by 1966, as the
necessity of Soviet anti-aircraft technology to defend the DRV became

Figure 5.3 A double amputee in the Quảng Nga˜i Physical Rehabilitation
Center. Photo by Paul Quinn-Judge.

114 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

clear. The Vietnamese maintained an even-handed approach in public
towards their two socialist patrons, although one senior political adviser,
Trần Quỳnh, maintained that the majority in the Vietnamese Politburo
continued to favour China.13 However, the Soviet Charge´ in Washington
believed that there existed ‘forces of moderation in the DRV’ that wanted
to start negotiations with the USA, but that ‘they could not be active
while bombs were falling on Hanoi’.14

For reasons that are still not entirely clear, in mid-1967 Hanoi’s
relations with its two socialist patrons swung away from the Soviet Union
and entered a renewed phase of the campaign against ‘revisionism’.
This time around, the attack on those deemed to be ideologically out-
of-step led to arrests and imprisonment. The official Hanoi explanation
of these arrests portrays them as the reaction to one discreet event, a
supposed anti-government plot referred to as the ‘Anti-Party Affair’.
The controversy arose in part from fear that some Vietnamese leaders
close to the Soviet Union were encouraging negotiations to end the
war, an issue discussed at the June superpower summit in Glassboro,
New Jersey between President Lyndon Johnson and Kosygin. These
talks especially disturbed the Chinese leadership, who were becoming
more suspicious of Soviet intentions.

By 1967 China had slipped into chaos, as the Cultural Revolution
grew into pitched battles between rival factions. The growing
extremism began to effect foreign relations, as well as internal stability.
When Indonesia expelled the Chinese ambassador Yao Tengshan in
April, he returned to a hero’s welcome in Beijing and took control of the
Foreign Ministry from the Minister Chen Yi. The spillover from this
radicalization provoked crises in Hong Kong, Cambodia and Burma in
April and May. China’s diplomats were called home in the spring and
returned to their posts in June, when a major escalation in the export of
the Cultural Revolution began.15

The actions of Chinese diplomats in spreading Maoist propaganda in
Burma and Cambodia is well documented; in Vietnam we do not have a
clear idea of how active the Chinese were in promoting this new phase of
‘permanent revolution’. But there was certainly a raising of the political
temperature in Hanoi in the middle of the year, something that may
have been connected to the recall of Hanoi’s diplomatic corps in July.
The US State Department began to request reports on the movements of
Hanoi’s diplomats at the end of June. The Vietnamese representatives in

THE TURNING POINT 115

Paris, Beijing, Phnom Penh and Vientiane were known to have returned,
and there was reason to believe that the Ambassador in Jakarta had also
flown back to Hanoi.16 The British Consul in Hanoi could offer no real
information to his colleagues in London as to why this recall was taking
place. But it seems logical to assume that it was somehow related to what
was happening in Beijing.

At the same time, another event occurred in Hanoi that caused a
disturbance in communist party ranks. This was the 7 July death of the
chief military commissar in South Vietnam, Nguyễn Chı´ Thanh, of heart
failure in a Hanoi hospital. He was known as an aggressive proponent of
large-unit warfare in the South and was widely believed to be a rival of
General Vo˜ Nguyeˆn Gia´p. Whether or not his death had any bearing on
the events that followed in August and September is a mystery; it may
well have changed the delicate balance of forces within the Politburo.
Another unusual aspect of the situation in Hanoi was that Hồ Ch´ı
Minh had not been seen in the capital by any Western witnesses since
13 April, when he had been visited by two Swedish doctors. He had not
made a public appearance on May Day or on his official birthday,
19 May. (He was pictured in the press at an anti-aircraft site in winter
clothing, when the temperature in Hanoi was 100 degrees.)17 Hồ was
back in Hanoi to meet two French peace envoys, Raymond Aubrac and
Herbert Marcovitch, on 24 July, but then in September returned to
Beijing until December, for medical reasons.18 The succession to the
ailing Hồ Ch´ı Minh must have been in the minds of competing
factions in the leadership.

At the end of August 1967, as preparations for a new stage in the war,
the general offensive, were getting underway, a number of Lao Động
party members believed to be pro-Soviet began to be arrested. Among
these was a former personal secretary to Hồ Ch´ı Minh, Vu˜ Ð`ınh Huỳnh.
Another of the victims of this first wave of arrests was Hoa`ng Minh
Ch´ınh, until late 1963 head of the Institute of Philosophy in Hanoi.
Although he had been removed from this post, he was still known as one
of the Vietnamese proponents of ‘peaceful co-existence’. Another group
of people, not all members of the party, were arrested in October and
December. The arrests of these men and the subsequent accusation that
they were involved in a pro-Soviet plot against the Lao Động Party
became known as the ‘Hoa`ng Minh Chı´nh Affair’ or ‘The Anti-Party
Affair’.19 Around 30 high-level figures were arrested, and perhaps as

116 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

many as 300 altogether, including generals, theoreticians, professors,
writers and television journalists trained in Moscow. The memoirs of
Vu˜ Ðı`nh Huỳnh’s son, Vu˜ Thư Hieˆn, who was arrested just before
Christmas in 1967, have become a major source on this affair. Published
in Germany in 1997 as Dˆem Giữa Ban Nga`y (Darkness in the Daytime), his
account of his arrest and interrogation, has not been published in
Vietnam. But its basic themes are corroborated by the letters and
petitions for the restitution of civic rights from other victims of the
affair, in particular by Hoa`ng Minh Ch´ınh himself, who finally passed
away in 2008, after many years of prison, solitary confinement and house
arrest. His first imprisonment lasted until 1972; after that he was kept
under house arrest until 1978. When he petitioned for restitution of his
civic rights in 1981 he was rearrested for another six years, this time
followed by three years of house arrest.20

It has been difficult to determine the significance of these events in
late 1967 and 1968. The obvious conclusion is that Party members
considered as hostile to the escalation of the war and the Tết Offensive
were being incarcerated to quell any dissent within the regime.
In November, a decree from the Standing Committee of the National
Assembly, headed by Trường Chinh, prescribed ‘death sentences, life
prison terms and lesser penalties for a long list of “counterrevolutionary
crimes”, including espionage, sabotage, security violations and the crime
of opposing or hindering the execution of national defense plans’.21 The
British Consulate in Hanoi later reported on a Nhaˆn Daˆn editorial of
March 1968, discussing the revival of Law no. 63, which the analyst
described as a ‘vehicle for the legal disposal of any dissident members or
factions in the Party’.22 This editorial presumably was referring to the
November Decree.

The fact that these men were held in prison until 1972, and rearrested
if they made an effort to gain redress, leads one to believe that they were
considered a long-term threat by some faction of the leadership. Vu˜ Thư
Hieˆn, educated in Moscow, a non-Party member who was known in
Hanoi as a talented translator of Russian literature, offers his own
explanations for the wave of arrests. During his prison interrogation he
was closely questioned about his father’s relations with General Vo˜
Nguyeˆn Gia´p.23 He concludes that Leˆ Ðức Tho and Leˆ Duẩn viewed
Gia´p as a rival for power, and thus concocted the˙story of a coup plot to
discredit him, along with other influential, second-tier cadres who were

THE TURNING POINT 117

considered to be pro-Soviet. At another point in his narrative, Hieˆn
writes that Leˆ Đức Tho may have led Leˆ Duẩn astray with his story of a
Soviet plot.24 As Hieˆn˙points out, the only formal accusation against the
‘modern revisionists’ came four years later, at a Central Committee
plenum in January 1972, when Leˆ Đức Tho announced that there had
been a conspiracy to overthrow the Party˙ leadership.25 The Soviet
Ambassador Ilia Shcherbakov and his Second Secretary Rashid
Khamidulin were accused of links with the plotters.26

A further clarification of the charges was made in a document
titled, ‘The Activities of a Number of Enemy and Opposition Forces’,
circulated to party members in April 1994 by the Hanoi party
committee. This document explained that in July 1967, Hoa`ng Minh
Ch´ınh and others involved in the Anti-Party Affair got hold of the secret
transcript of a Vietnamese –Chinese consultation. They found a way to
send these minutes abroad, and for this reason the security organs
arrested Hoa`ng Minh Ch´ınh and three others. At the same time the
accused were said to be collecting documentation that amounted to an
opposition programme or theses in opposition to the party.27 If such a
transcript exists, it would tell us a lot about the Chinese attitude and
advice given to Hanoi regarding the Tết Offensive, advice proffered at
the peak of the Cultural Revolution.

Organizing the Offensive and General Uprising

From the various accounts of the Tết Offensive provided by Vietnamese
military historians since 1975, one can see that there is still controversy
surrounding its organization and aims. US scholar David Elliott has
pointed out many gaps and anomalies in the official record in his study of
the war in Mỹ Tho province. His description of the Tết decision as
‘incremental, contested and improvisational’ conveys the mood of the
times, especially the fact that the schedule was changed more than once to
push the offensive forward.28 From the American side, it seemed clear that
some leaders in Hanoi were supporting negotiations in 1967, since they
agreed to receive the peace envoys from Paris, Aubrac and Marcovitch.
(These two carried a proposal to Hanoi approved by President Johnson,
passed to them in Paris by Professor Henry Kissinger.)

But in late August and September the Vietnamese contacts involved
in this peace initiative, codenamed ‘Pennsylvania’ by the USA, went

118 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

dead. The French envoys received no reply to a second proposal sent on

25 August via the Vietnamese representative in Paris. They were not

invited back to Hanoi. One of the Vietnamese diplomats closest to these

negotiations, Lưu Ðoa`n Huynh, later revealed that he had had

responsibility for drawing up negotiating documents for talks with the

Americans in 1966 and 1967. Most of the files were ready by August

1967, ‘just in time’, as he put it. But at that point, ‘because of illness and
exhaustion’, he says, ‘I had to ask for a transfer to the China division’.29

This appears to be Huynh’s diplomatic way of hinting that the

negotiating process was cut short by the Vietnamese.

The fact that on 20 August American planes bombed targets around

Hanoi may have been linked to the breakdown in talks. The British

Consulate reported that the bombing of targets close to Hanoi,

including the power station and the main bridge over the Red River, was
inducing a ‘spy fever’ in Hanoi.30 At the same time, the decision to stage

an offensive had already been made and it would seem that, whatever

support for immediate peace talks had existed in July had collapsed by

late August. From 20 –4 October the Politburo met and decided that

they could carry out the offensive earlier than they had initially planned,

as the 1988 official history of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN)
states.31 This meeting was chaired by Trường Chinh and included Pham
Va˘n Đồng, Nguyễn Duy Trinh, Leˆ Thanh Nghi, Va˘n Tiến Du˜ ng, Tr˙ần
Quốc Hoa`n and Leˆ Đức Tho. A number of P˙olitburo members were
absent from Hanoi at the tim˙e, including Hồ Ch´ı Minh and Vo˜ Nguyeˆn
Gia´p, the latter having flown to Hungary for medical treatment.32 Leˆ

Duẩn was also absent, having already departed for the celebrations of the
50th anniversary of the October Revolution in Moscow.33 Although Leˆ

Duẩn is usually presented as the key proponent of the Tết Offensive,

the military planning was carried out by General Va˘n Tiến Du˜ ng,

possibly according to plans drawn up by Nguyễn Ch´ı Thanh before
his death.34

A recent history of the SpoiucttuhreernofRtehseisptalnanceniWngarf,orL_tihche Sử Nam Bộ
Kha´ng Chiến, reinforces the offensive as

rushed and overly ambitious.35 The People’s Liberation Armed Forces

(PLAF) General Trần Va˘n Tra` was the first to make this judgment

public, for example in a 1988 article for the Journal of Military History

(ATs_ahp eCehxı´pLl_aicihneSdử, Quaˆn Sự), later translated for publication in the USA.36
‘It was not until the end of October and the beginning

THE TURNING POINT 119

of November 1967 that the Party Central Office for the South

[COSVN], Regional Command (B2), and a number of key cadres at the

key fronts (Eastern area and Sanaidgobneg–aGnidaisÐcu˙insshi)ngwietrsegiennfeorraml dedireocftitvhees
Political Bureau’s Resolution,

and details.’37 Had it not been for earlier plans drawn up in 1964–5,

when the concept of a ‘general offensive, general uprising’ was first

designed, the task would have been too challenging, General Tra` says.

As it was, ‘the field command was caught somewhat by surprise and had
to hurriedly review the old plan and set out to complete it’.38

At the heart of the confusion over the Tết planning seems to be the

vexed question of what an appropriate revolutionary victory would

look like. Since 1964, there had been voices in the leadership that

claimed that ‘it is necessary to smash the reactionary administrative

machinery and the imperialists’ mercenary army. This Revolution can

and should be settled only by the use of revolutionary acts and the force

of the masses to defeat enemy force. It absolutely cannot be settled by
treaties and accords.’39 This insistence on a ‘violent military victory’

was also the clearly stated view of Chinese leader Mao Zedong, who

feared any signs of negotiation between the Vietnamese and the
Americans.40 The Chinese view was that until a violent military victory

was possible, the Vietnamese should not attempt to take over the cities.

The Chinese leadership, moreover, had by June 1966 accused ‘pro-

Kremlin revisionists’ of infiltrating the DRV leadership, ‘producing a

struggle between those who backed fighting until military victory . . .

and those who favored talks to end the war quickly’. Zhou Enlai referred

to Leˆ Duẩn as someone who had ‘changed course’. ‘Until now he had
been a leftist’, Zhou said.41

In 1967 – 8, Leˆ Duẩn justified Zhou’s critique. On his return from

Moscow, he called for a ‘decisive victory’, but at the same time made it

clear in his January 1968 speech to the Central Committee that his

plan, in 1968 as in 1963, was to fight for a coalition government and

negotiations. In his speech, the only one by a Politburo member

published among the documents from the Fourteenth Plenum, he

argues in support of the potential of the urban opposition. ‘From the

time that the Buddhist movement failed, the leadership belonged to

us’, he claimed. ‘Now we have done our research – the Saigon

movement, from beginning to end, is violent. The political struggle
movement in Saigon is violent.’42 In other words, Duẩn was making it

120 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

clear that these urban forces were not simply reformists who wanted to
take power in a military coup, as had occurred in 1963. They were
prepared to use both political and military means to bring the Thiệu
government to its knees. But in the same speech, he declares that the
goal of the ‘General Uprising’ will not be an outright communist
victory. I will say more about this below.

The plans made in October and November made ambitious demands
on the youth of Saigon. On 25 October, COSVN issued its Quang Trung
Resolution on the General Offensive and General Uprising.43 This
decision followed a visit earlier in October by General Nguyễn Va˘n Vı˜nh
to inform the COSVN leadership of the programme and timing for the
offensive. Around this time the concrete aims for Saigon and the plan to
develop the uprising were laid out. The eight objectives to be taken over
included the General Staff Headquarters, Chı´ Ho`a prison, the
government radio station, Independence Palace and the US Embassy.
For each of these targets an advance battalion was designated to move in
from outside the city; in each case, with the exception of the US
Embassy, a group of urban youth and students was to link up with the
regular forces on the spot. For the General Staff headquarters, the youth
group was to be 5,000 strong. At Ch´ı Hoa` prison, there were to be 1,000
youth on hand. The lowest number of youth projected to occupy an
objective was 200 (pp. 583– 4).

The youth were divided into three groups: the Youth Group armed
force (special forces), the armed political forces and the legal (coˆng khai)
political force. The role of the legal group was to ‘raise the flag for peace
and neutrality’ in order to gather various layers of the population such as
intellectuals, patriotic personalities and religious dignitaries’ (p. 585).
There were also underground party members within the city, including
325 ‘loyal families’ who were charged with finding 400 places to billet
troops. These families arranged the secret storage points located near
each of the targets, where weapons smuggled into Saigon were hidden
(p. 584).

In his January speech to the Central Committee, Leˆ Duẩn is full of
optimism as he describes the new front that will spring to life out of
the uprising. The new front will ‘gather together all the people who
have not joined the National Liberation Front, because they see it as
communist’. The imperialists would see that this is not a communist
government.

THE TURNING POINT 121

We will bring all the personalities close to the French into this
government; even those who have worked with the Americans for
a long time, if they are not dangerous – we can also include
them. We are strong, we will confuse the other side, we will
divide them. There will be a new front, with a new name and a
different flag . . . in the North there will be one government, in
the South there will be two governments: the Liberation Front
and the new front. There will be three, but one, like the earth
with the sky.44

Creating the Alliance of National, Democratic
and Peace Forces

The thinking of Leˆ Duẩn at this juncture seems to have been somewhat
out of touch with reality. He may have been clinging to the belief that
the popular uprising in Central Vietnam of 1966 could be replicated,
but this time controlled by underground communist cadres. It is unclear
how much he knew about the roundup of NLF political organizers in
Saigon that occurred in the middle of 1967. It had been a serious blow to
the organization of the neutral group of leaders who, according to Duản’s
plan, were to play a key role in setting up a new government in Saigon.
The Tết Offensive would aim to destroy the RVN government and
replace it with a coalition of respected citizens who could negotiate with
the NLF to form a new southern government. The citizens who would
emerge to lead this coalition were to come from the Alliance of National,
Democratic and Peace Forces, the Third Segment group that should have
been organized in Saigon by NLF activist Trương Như Tảng. The plan
went awry when Tảng and many of his Saigon comrades were arrested in
a sweep of urban activists in mid-1967.

Trương Như Tảng’s account of this episode provides a glimpse of the
measures the southern regime employed to crush their political
opposition. After he was driven to the Secret Police interrogation centre,
in a villa that had once been a casino run by the B`ınh Xuyeˆn mafia, he
was quickly informed that his role in the NLF urban underground had
been given away by one of his colleagues, a seemingly hard-line
communist named Ba Tra`. Although Tảng was not a communist party
member, to the Saigon government his NLF work made him as good as
one, meaning that he did not have any legal rights under the

122 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

constitution. As he was marched down the prison corridor to his cell, he

saw a sight that inspired him with horror. ‘Sprawled out on the floor the

whole length of the corridor were people chained together by the ankles.

Many of their faces were bloody and swollen; here and there, limbs jutted
out at unnatural angles.’45 This was the start of days of torture (by a local

variation on water boarding and electric shock). He recalls lying ‘in the

dark on the hard cement without eating or sleeping, listening to the

screaming night after night and day after day’. After one month, he was

longing for death, when his wife tracked him down and bribed the chief

interrogator with $6,000 to transfer him to the National Police prison.

There, she hoped, he would not disappear without a trace. The only

other price Tảng had to pay was to sign an admission that he was a

communist. At this point he was willing to make up a date on which he

supposedly joined the Party.

The National Police prison was not a torture centre, but the inmates

were locked in dark, solitary confinement, with no exercise other than a

weekly trip to the showers. This is where Tảng spent the Tết Offensive,

when an attack on the prison brought fleeting hope to the inmates. The

sounds of battle lasted only several days and the prison routine returned

to normal all too soon. In February, however, a prisoner exchange

organized by the chief of intellectual mobilization for the Saigon– Gia

Ðinh zone, Trần Bach Đằng, brought a sudden change of fortune for
Tả˙ng and a few ot˙her prisoners, including Đằng’s wife. They were

swapped for an American prisoner of the NLF and eventually wound up

at COSVN, the Politburo’s nerve centre for the southern battlefield, on

the Cambodian border.

In the spring, after the released prisoners had recuperated from their

ordeal, the Alliance of National, Democratic and Peace Forces was finally

launched, in a ceremony held in NLF headquarters, hidden in the jungle

of Taˆy Ninh province. The southerners who made their way to this

meeting were largely members of the Saigon elite: lawyers, teachers,

engineers, businessmen and the woman doctor, Dương Quynh Hoa, a
Ðı`˙nh
childhood friend of Tảng. The presidency went to lTear˙idnehr of the Thảo, a
well-known lawyer of 70; engineer Laˆm Vaˆn Tết, a civilian

council that had taken power after Diệm’s overthrow, was made a

vice president, together with the scholarly Buddhist monk, Th´ıch Ðoˆn

Hậu, who had pledged to join the Alliance during the communist

occupation of Huế. Professor Toˆn Tha´t Dương Ky, one of the three peace
˙

THE TURNING POINT 123

activists who had been expelled to the DRV in 1965, was chosen to be
secretary general.46

This new front was designed to unite the nationalist, non-communist

opposition in South Vietnam into a group that could be called on to

enter a coalition government with the NLF. Several of its members

would join the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) that

would be formed in June 1969 to take part in the Paris peace

negotiations. Trương Như Tảng would be named Minister of Justice.

As he explains, the NLF’s increased reliance on the DRV communists,

after the Americans sent their troops into Vietnam, had made their

independence suspect. The Alliance was to be formed of non-

communists (and at least one underground party member) who, it was

hoped, would inspire trust among the southern population. The

difficulty was that they were forced to remain in the communist zone, as

an affiliate of the NLF, once President Thiệu sentenced them all to death
in absentia and confiscated their property.47 Thus they could not carry

out any independent political activity and depended on Hanoi for their

access to the West. However, there were other Third Segment

nationalists who refused to join the Alliance, judging correctly that they

could be more useful if they remained in Saigon to act as an independent

opposition to President Thiệu. Some of this group, including Father

Nguyễn Ngoc Lan, the agronomist Chaˆu Taˆm Luaˆn and the lawyer, Mrs
Ngoˆ Ba´ Tha`˙nh,48 were invited after Tết to visit the Liberated Zone,

known simply as the ‘Khu’ or ‘zone’ among the activists, to hold

dmisacinutsasiionnsthweiirthsyTmrầpnatBhai˙ecsh Đằng. He possessed the political skill to
with the NLF and to keep channels of

communications open.49

The Long-Term Impact of Tết on the Political Opposition

The Tết Offensive was a collision of voluntarist faith with the reality of
an unfavourable balance of forces. The enthusiasm for the attacks among
the NLF and their supporters grew out of the belief that victory and
peace would finally be theirs.50 One former student activist described to
the author how she and her husband rode around Saigon on their Honda,
singing revolutionary songs in the days leading up to the offensive, as
though victory had already been achieved. A Buddhist activist from the
General Students’ Union cultural troupe describes the performances put

124 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

on at schools and university faculties around the city, to celebrate the
coming Tết holidays. Patriotic songs and dances representing historic
victories of the Vietnamese people were a fixture at these shows. At a
26 January performance, just days before the culmination of ‘Tết Quang
Trung’, the official name for the Offensive and Uprising, she describes
how the students from groups all over Saigon and neighbouring
provinces ended their show with a tableau accompanied by singing and
drumming. The words of the final song, ‘Before our country’s dishonor,
should we make peace or should we fight?’ provoked a roar from
performers and the thousands of spectators, who shouted, ‘We are
determined to fight!’ These student shows were a form of uprising, to
mobilize the people of Saigon for the General Offensive, she says.51 The
final performance never occurred, however, and many of the students
involved were arrested between the end of the first and start of the second
phases of the Offensive. Trần Tuyết Hoa, the student performer, ended
up in prison with the pregnant daughter of Professor Toˆn Tha´t Dương
Ky, Quynh Như. The police had taken her into custody because her
hu˙sband˙ had already gone into hiding when they came to arrest him.

The Tết Offensive in Huế ended with the near destruction of the city
by American bombing and a massacre of prisoners held by the
communists, carried out as they prepared to retreat. The discovery of the
bodies in mass graves, months after the offensive, led to the ‘bloodbath
theory’ – the belief that countless Vietnamese who worked in the RVN
infrastructure would be murdered if the communists won the war. This
became a persuasive argument against reducing the US commitment to
the Thiệu government. But in Saigon, most of the city remained under
government control; according to Trần Bach Đằng, there were no
reported incidents of mistreatment of the ordi˙nary people.52 Whether or
not that is accurate, many civilians died in the rocket attacks of the NLF
and the US bombing of areas taken over by the guerrillas, in particular in
District 8.

In both Huế and Saigon there were signs of popular support for the
offensive that we in the West rarely heard about. Two of the oldest
Buddhist temples in Saigon – Gia Ðinh, Đức Laˆm in Taˆn B`ınh district
and Gia´c Laˆm nearby, provided meeti˙ng places for the Tết organizers.53
In Huế, the surfacing of the Buddhist monk Th´ıch Ðoˆn Hậu as a
member of the non-communist opposition to President Thiệu, was a
sign that not all of the Buddhist leadership had dropped out of the

THE TURNING POINT 125

anti-war movement. He had been a long-time activist in Central
Vietnam, first associated with the Buddhist reform movement in the
1930s and later known as a supporter of the Việt Minh. Sentenced to be
shot by the French in 1947 in Huế, he was saved by the intervention of
the Emperor Bảo Ðai’s mother, Từ Cung.54 Thus he was a well-known
figure among the Bu˙ddhists of Central Vietnam, who seems to represent
the blurring of lines between the ‘Front and non-Front’ blocs of the
population, as defined by Th´ıch Nhất Hanh. Thı´ch Ðoˆn Hậu ended up
at NLF headquarters, along with Trương˙ Như Tảng.

When the first phase of the Tết attacks subsided in February, the
urban youth and other activists who had openly participated found
themselves in danger. Their acceptance of violence and co-optation into
the communist plan for a popular uprising may have happened without
their full awareness of Hanoi’s role. But once they had been arrested and
dumped into the growing South Vietnamese network of prisons, there
was little chance that they would meekly accept the rule of Nguyễn Va˘n
Thiệu. A total of 16,000 political prisoners were detained in 1968 alone,
according to an end-of-year report to Saigon’s National Assembly.
Prisoners regularly waited for as long as six or seven months before they
could be given a hearing. US sources estimated that at least 20,000
political prisoners were being held, some who had been in detention
since 1966. A leader of the Saigon Student Union claimed that it was
‘government suppression, not communist ideology, which causes the
students to join the NLF’.55 Nguyễn Hữu Tha´i, the leader of the Saigon
students in 1964– 5, had been in prison since the end of the 1966
movement and was not released until after the Tết Offensive – to be
drafted into the army.

Don Luce, from a small town in Vermont, was one of the most
dedicated of the young American volunteers who by 1968 –9 were
driven to bear witness to the consequences of the war. He had first
worked in Central Vietnam beginning in 1958, as an agricultural adviser
under the auspices of the International Voluntary Service (IVS). By 1968
he had resigned in protest against US policies and was working with the
World Council of Churches in Saigon. He learned from student friends
about what was happening in the prisons and began to carry out his own
investigations. The high numbers of people who passed through the
prison system made it difficult for the USA to claim ignorance of the
treatment meted out to men and women, young and old; US advisers

126 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

were in fact the source of information on numbers of prisoners.
In December 1968, Mr Luce wrote that he had seen in the office of the
USAID prison adviser a chart of the number of prisoners in Correction
Centres (32,689), of whom 20,050 were ‘civilian defendants’, that is,
‘people put in prison for political reasons’.56

As for the professional people who advocated peace, their legal
opposition to the war, if anything, expanded after the Tết Offensive. The
next chapter will deal with the opposition press in Saigon and its
increasingly active role in the 1970s. Among the politicians, Trương
Ð`ınh Dzu continued to make President Thieu anxious, even after the
election of Richard Nixon, a strong Thiệu sup˙porter, as US president in
November 1968. In May, Dzu had taken the impolitic step of calling
publicly for a coalition government and negotiations with the NLF,
earning himself a trial in military court and a sentence to five years of
hard labour, handed down on 26 July 1968. He was sent to the prison
island of Coˆn Sơn (Poulo Condore) to keep him away from delegations of
US dignitaries investigating the state of the war. His advantage over
Thiệu was his son, David Trương, a Stanford student who turned himself
into a full-time anti-war lobbyist in Washington, DC. David kept his
father’s case before the public, befriending Congressmen and -women, as
well as journalists. By 1969, pressure from the USA forced Saigon to
bring his father back to the mainland for medical treatment. But he
would not be released from prison before the end of the war.

Trương Ð`ınh Dzu’s lawyer, Trần Ngoc Liễng, became the leader of the
‘Progressive National Committee’, a gro˙up that in mid-1969 was calling
for a government of reconciliation for South Vietnam. In an interview
with the New York Times, lawyer Liễng stated that ‘the real salvation of
South Vietnamese freedom lies in “nationalist” forces that are not
Communist but that give no real support to Thiệu and his American-
sponsored regime’. He was already mentioning General Dương Va˘n Minh
as a figure who might lead such a government, a government that would
be ‘empowered to prepare and organize elections to determine the political
future of South Vietnam’.57 Trần Ngoc Liễng and his fellow committee
members now were convinced that ‘t˙he greatest political difficulty for
nationalist forces’ was the ‘adamant and overpowering American political,
military and economic support for the Thieu regime’.58

The Catholic intellectual community also began to think about the
political path to ending the war in late 1968. Lyndon Johnson’s

THE TURNING POINT 127

announcement on 31 October, that full peace talks in Paris would begin
in early November, with Hanoi, the Saigon government and the NLF all
at the table, forced those Catholic leaders to begin pondering the long-
term survival of the Catholic Church in a Vietnam where they would
have no foreign protectors. The Vatican under Pope Paul VI was
encouraging reconciliation and dialogue with Marxist governments and
parties in Europe, so such discussions in South Vietnam existed in
harmony with trends in the worldwide Church. Historian of the
Catholic peace movement, Trần Th˙i Lieˆn, explains that:

the option of a negotiated solution, which until then had been
considered as pro-communist, now appeared possible, as the
Americans had opened negotiations with North Vietnam in Paris in
May 1968 . . . The fact that this discussion of negotiating with the
enemy was taking place at all, even among progressive Catholics,
was revolutionary. To them, the longer the war continued, the more
the risk of a total communist victory grew.59

Professor Nguyễn Va˘n Trung, who had been one of the first Catholics in
South Vietnam to call for an examination of the injustices within
southern society, in October 1968 published a 117-page booklet titled
The Communists, My Brothers: Roman Catholicism and Communism in
Vietnam. This publication reviews the history of Catholic missionary
work and conversion in Vietnam, and also describes the post-Vatican II
dialogue that was beginning in Europe. He laments that the Church
lagged behind the communists in addressing the ‘sufferings and
struggles of the workers’ in the nineteenth century.

All the papal encyclicals on social problems, all actions of social

struggle movements originating from Christianity were too

late – about half a century after Marxism and the Communist
movement . . . Until now, almost everywhere, the Catholic
Church institutionally still sides with the rich, the master, and
still defends the oppressing and unjust orders.60

Finally, he develops the argument that ‘a policy based on a foreign
country to defend the religion until now has only resulted in failures and
it must push the Catholics to re-examine the effects which are more

128 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

harmful than advantageous, and harmful in the long range while
advantageous only in the short term’. Referring to the 1954 migration of
Catholics to the South, he then asks,

And if in the future, there will be another migration, certainly not
all Catholics in the South will be able to go and those remaining
will receive all consequences of the accomplices and connections
with imperialism. For that reason, the first thing to be reviewed is:
have the individuals and organizations that make anti-communist
politics by force, that connect with the foreign country and are
capable of going away in case of failure, the right to leave behind a
heritage of fiasco that the remaining Catholics must suffer?61

Professor Trung’s logic was powerful, yet the Republican party’s
policymakers, who would inherit the Vietnam conflict from the
Democrats after the 1968 election, remained focused on preserving the
government of Nguyẽn Va˘n Thiệu.

The Changing of the Guard in America

The year 1968 is now remembered in the United States as a time of
violence and discord. The April and June assassinations of two outspoken
opponents of the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy,
created a polarized climate for the November presidential election.
Chicago mayor Richard Daley’s police attacks on peaceful anti-war
demonstrators at the Democratic nominating convention strengthened
the sense of America’s descent into tribal civil war. Both the Republican
and Democratic Parties’ establishments were facing off against the young,
the pacifists and anti-war activists of all ages, and increasingly the African
American population. To help the campaign of Hubert Humphrey, his
vice president and the Democrat’s nominee, President Johnson on
31 October announced a total bombing halt over North Vietnam,
expanding the cessation north of the 20th parallel, announced in March.
This brought the breakthrough in the stalled Paris negotiations that
enabled Johnson to claim that constructive four-part talks on ending the
war would begin on 6 November, the day after the election.
Mr Humphrey’s poll numbers began to close in on Richard Nixon’s
lead immediately after this promise of peace.

THE TURNING POINT 129

Nixon’s reaction to this ‘October surprise’ was a blatant act of
interference in the conduct of US foreign policy. Using the Republican
operative Anna Chennault as his go-between, he passed the message to
President Thiệu that he should hold out for a Nixon victory, as the
Republicans would press for a better deal at the Paris negotiations.
When Thiệu accordingly declared that his government would not
participate in the Paris talks, the Nixon campaign was able to disparage
Johnson’s promise of peace and win the popular vote by a very thin
1 per cent margin. President Johnson’s now declassified White House
tapes reveal that he learned of Nixon’s role in orchestrating Thiệu’s
withdrawal by bugging the South Vietnamese Embassy in Washington.
However, the Democrats never revealed what they knew about Nixon’s
interference as they preferred not to reveal to their South Vietnamese
allies that the FBI had been listening to their phone calls. The BBC
account of this affair sums up its results bluntly:

Once in office he [Nixon] escalated the war into Laos and Cambodia,
with the loss of an additional 22,000 American lives – quite apart
from the lives of the Laotians, Cambodians and Vietnamese caught
up in the new offensive – before finally settling for a peace
agreement in 1973 that was within grasp in 1968.62

One can infer that another result of Nixon’s interference was that
Nguyễn Va˘n Thiệu remained the president of the RVN until the final
month of that government’s life.

The Post-Tết Policies of the DRV

The phenomenon known as ‘Tết ’68’ or ‘Tết Mậu Thaˆn’ (‘The New Year
of the Monkey’) to the Vietnamese, became a rolling series of attacks that
lasted from the end of January to October. In the third phase, from
August to the end of October, the NLF strongholds in the countryside
were badly weakened, as the villages had been left undefended while the
main force units battled on the outskirts of the towns and urban areas.63
The guerrilla forces withdrew across the Cambodian border to regain
their strength, but many lives of southern combatants had been
sacrificed to the Offensive. In the coming years these losses would be
offset by the arrival of more recruits from the North, as the NLF slowly

130 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

rebuilt its strength. By the next major offensive, the Easter Offensive

staged in the spring of 1972, the Vietnam War would become

predominantly a conflict fought by regular units, with Soviet tanks

appearing on the battlefield.

The final question to consider for the transformational year of 1968 is

how it affected the DRV. One thing that we know is that the victims of

the Anti-Party Affair were not released, even though Sino –Vietnamese

relations did not markedly improve over the course of 1968.

In November Mao finally admitted that the DRV had made a rational

choice to begin negotiations in Paris, a decision the Chinese had heavily

criticized earlier in the year. As Sino– Soviet relations deteriorated, the
Chinese began to feel less worried by Hanoi’s dealings with the USA.64

Yet a growing coolness was developing between the two communist

parties. This cooling off was happening during a time when the

Workers’ Party leadership was affirming its adherence to certain Maoist

doctrines, such as the need to maintain a ‘two-line struggle’ against

capitalism in the economy and to strengthen the working-class nature of

the party’s leadership. Leˆ Đức Tho, now more than ever the strongman of
the DRV, made these ideas clear˙ in a speech reprinted in Hộc Tập in

February 1968. As the man who controlled all appointments within the

pMaarrtxyisbtu–rLeeanuicnraiscty, WTohro˙k’sinvgi-ecwlasssonPa‘rCtyo’nsmtruuscttinbge a Strong New-style
seen as decisive for

future Workers’ Party policy.65

Although in his speech he rejected the idea that Vietnam would

follow one communist model or the other, he did not accentuate the

nationalist aspect of the revolution. Instead he emphasized the two-line

struggle: ‘we must constantly maintain the struggle between two paths

– the collective, socialist path and the path of individualistic capitalism

– in all aspects of politics, ideology, the economy, culture and our daily

life’. ‘We must constantly struggle against opportunism of left or right’,
he continued.66 When he spoke of Party development, he did not bother

to camouflage his opposition to the more nationalist wing of the Party.

‘We must choose Party members from the most basic segments of the
revolution: the poor peasantry’, he said.67 ‘Rightist deviations’ in the

construction of the Party still continue: ‘lately we have not been

emphasizing the development of the Party within the working, middle

and poor peasant classes, and in places some complex elements as well as

a number of people from the exploiting class have been admitted to the

THE TURNING POINT 131

Party’.68 ‘When we were correcting the errors of the Land Reform
campaign and of the Party Rectification, we made the rightist error of
restoring the membership of a number of people who should not have
been readmitted. This situation has had a negative influence on the
Party’s purity’, he claimed. He singled out the upper levels of the Party,
where he said the majority of members are ‘petty bourgeois
intellectuals’. The problem of cadres’ class origins is very important,
he emphasized.

This emphasis on class origins underlines the gap that existed
between the evolving communism of the DRV and the united front,
coalition style of organizing being carried out by the NLF below the
17th parallel. One has to ask what the thoughts of the DRV leadership
were regarding the future development of the People’s Revolutionary
Party, the southern branch of the Workers Party. Leˆ Duẩn had been
hoping that two compatible but separate governments could be set up in
the South, with the three Vietnamese governing entities eventually
merging to become one. Would the successful establishment of a
southern coalition government and national elections have obliged Leˆ
Đức Tho to moderate his tone? As Thı´ch Nhất Hanh and other observers
had note˙d, the northerners had to rely on the sou˙thern NLF to fight the
US forces in 1967– 8 and so had to respect their wishes. But what if this
relationship were to change, as it in fact did by 1972, as troops from the
DRV took over more of the fighting?

Later analysis of the terminology used in the Tết planning reveals
that there was a basic disagreement as to how the military and civilians
would coordinate activities. The final instructions issued by Pham Hu` ng
to the southern forces focused on the term dứt d¯iểm, meaning˙ ‘to take
over a target completely’.69 This emphasized the military aspect of the
Offensive and would seem to have de-emphasized the civilian uprising.
Such a policy did not leave any ‘wiggle room’ for local political activists,
for whom the need to maintain their legal status was important, as they
would remain in the areas being fought over, whether or not the
campaign led to victory.70 Carrying arms would have compromised their
position – in Huế many legal activists had to leave the city after they
revealed their communist links during the uprising. The contradictions
between the two different concepts of the Tết actions came to a head in
1974, when Trần Bach Đằng was removed from his post as the chief of
political mobilizatio˙n for the Saigon –Gia Ðı`nh region.71 A document

132 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

titled, Draft Review of the City Party Committee’s Guidance from Tet 1968
until 1974 stated that:

This was the period when petit bourgeois ideological concepts
grew to their highest level within our Party chapter, especially
among a number of comrades in key leadership positions. These
errors had existed previously, but now they grew increasingly clear.
They were exposed by the belief that the student movement was a
proletarian movement, while the workers’ movement was just
‘play acting’; in the tendency to evaluate the workers’ and
labourers’ movement in terms of union activities . . . In addition,
too much emphasis was placed on conducting overt legal
activities, and insufficient attention was paid to secret or semi-
legal transformational and underground operations.72

By 1974, when the party leadership was preparing for another offensive,

they were apparently less willing to rely on the support of the petty

bourgeois urban youth, who had been slated to play a major role in the

Tết uprising. On the other hand, a number of these bourgeois youth had

by 1974 served time in prison and joined the communist party. They

could presumably be trusted to follow the party’s orders. But the quiet

urermbaonvapleoofplTerầwnhBo a˙icdhenĐtiằfinegd from his post did not augur well for those
themselves with the ‘Third Segment’.

In August 1968 a shift in the balance within the socialist bloc

occurred when the Soviet Union sent troops into Czechoslovakia, to end

what had become known as the Prague Spring, a period of

experimentation with economic and political reform that was beginning

to threaten a weakening of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. This interference

in the affairs of a ‘fraternal communist party’ struck fear into the

Chinese, who believed they might suffer a similar fate some day. They

began to denounce the Soviet Union as a ‘hegemonic power’ that was

replacing the United States as the major threat to China. The

Vietnamese hard-liners, on the other hand, welcomed this demon-

stration that Moscow was at last supporting orthodox communist

policies and moving away from ‘revisionism’. After the Soviet invasion of

Czechoslovakia, a major speech by Trường Chinh was broadcast by

Hanoi and printed in the Party’s journal in September and October. The

Vietnamese now appeared to feel secure enough to publicize their

THE TURNING POINT 133

orthodox views on communist theory, without fearing that they would
appear too pro-Chinese. With the rise of Leonid Brezhnev to pre-
eminence in the Moscow leadership, the USSR would slide back to more
Stalinist economic and political positions.

Trường Chinh’s speech in part served as a warning to the southern
party not to take coalition politics too far. He made clear that the Party
must remain in:

undisputed control of the united front at all stages of the national
democratic revolution and on no account let it fall into the
hands of the ‘bourgeoisie’ – the Party must always preserve its
independent identity within the front – the sole purpose of the
front’s ‘minimum platform’ (independence and social reform) is to
facilitate the realisation of the Party’s maximum platform (the
creation of a communist state).

The Party ‘must absolutely not allow the national bourgeoisie to lead the

national united front’. In his statements of 1968 it is difficult to pick up

any hints that he wanted to reduce the DRV’s commitment to the South,

that he was a ‘North-firster’. What is notable here is his insistence that

the southern revolution must rely on ‘non-peaceful means’ to make the
transition to socialism.73 This seems to mean that a negotiated solution

leading to a coalition government in the South would not be an

acceptable outcome of the war. Possibly when Mao Zedong altered his

stance on negotiations, Trường Chinh also moderated his attitude to the

four-part talks that started in November in Paris. But there is no sign

that his overall ideological outlook changed.

As the Cultural Revolution subsided in China and the Soviet Union

moved back to more orthodox policies, the Vietnamese leaders were able

to re-establish some balance in their relations within the communist

bloc. But this balancing act remained a challenge, especially with the

outbreak of open Sino – Soviet warfare along the Ussuri River in

the spring of 1969. The tightened political control achieved by Leˆ Đức

Tmhoo˙reinMthaoeiastftemrmematbheorsf the ‘Anti-Party Affair’ meant, however, that the
of the leadership could retain their power in

Hanoi without direct Chinese backing. Although the DRV became

increasingly dependent on Soviet weapons, aid and training, this

dependence did not threaten the personal power of either Leˆ Đức Tho˙ or

134 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Trường Chinh. The place of Leˆ Duẩn in the hierarchy may have
weakened, however. He had advocated reformist policies on the economy
in 1966–7, under the influence of Alexei Kosygin in Moscow, and the
Hanoi economist Trần Phương.74 He had also lost out in a battle with
Trường Chinh on the issue of agricultural contracts within cooperatives
in 1968.75 As Kosygin’s star waned at the end of 1968, Leˆ Duẩn had to
bend to the collective will of a Politburo increasingly dominated by Leˆ
Đức Tho and Trường Chinh. The death of Hồ Ch´ı Minh in September of
1969 m˙ay also have affected Leˆ Duẩn’s status in a negative way, by
removing one moderate voice from the Politburo.

The combined effect of the Anti-Party Affair and the aborted urban
uprising in Saigon may have resulted in more reserve towards bourgeois
nationalists in the South. As the DRV struggled to bring the war to a
satisfactory end, this group continued to be given a role to play in the
search for peace, especially after the 1973 signing of the Paris Agreement.
But by late 1974, Hanoi was criticizing the leadership of the Saigon party
and planning for military victory, as the final chapters will show.

CHAPTER 6

VIETNAMIZATION AND
SAIGON'S POLITICAL
OPPOSITION

Richard Nixon’s pledge to bring the Vietnam War to a close, along with
his sabotage of Lyndon Johnson’s planned peace talks, had led to his
election victory in November 1968. What grew out of this pledge was
an accelerated programme to ‘Vietnamize’ the war – to replace US
ground troops with Vietnamese forces. This new policy was unveiled
in June 1969, when President Nixon announced an initial schedule
for troop withdrawals. Its political consequences in South Vietnam
disappointed the members of the urban anti-war movement, for instead
of bringing a loosening of controls on political activity, Vietnamization
resulted in President Thiệu’s adoption of more repressive mechanisms
for political control. Although Thiệu brought the aging civilian Trần
Va˘n Hương into his government as prime minister in 1968, as George
Herring observes, ‘the prospect of negotiations made Thiệu more
reluctant than ever to broaden the base of his government’.1 By August
1969 Hương had been removed by a no-confidence vote and Thiệu’s
trusted associate General Trần Thiện Khieˆm had taken over as prime
minister.

The Thiệu government did send official representation to the Paris
talks in January 1969, but the new US administration did not at first
make much use of the diplomatic arena for a resolution of the war. They
instead opted for an extension of US force into areas of Laos and
Cambodia that provided refuge for the Vietnamese communists.

136 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Bombing of communist Pathet Lao-controlled areas of Laos, mainly the
Plain of Jars, resulted in the destruction of the Plain’s civilian society,
but did little to curtail the movement of PAVN troops along the Hồ Chı´
Minh trail, which lay further south in the Lao panhandle.2 An ARVN
incursion into this area of Laos, staged in February 1971, also failed to
disrupt the Hồ Ch´ı Minh trail as intended. In fact it was a debacle for the
RVN’s army, as intelligence leaks to the NLF/PAVN enabled them to
ambush the invading troops as they landed by helicopter. The casualties
from this incursion rose to 45 per cent of the attacking soldiers.3

In March 1969, Nixon authorized bombing raids on Vietnamese base
camps inside the Cambodian border, including what the Pentagon
assumed was COSVN, the command centre for the war in the South.
Over a 14-month period extending to April 1970, this secret bombing,
code-named Operation Menu, dropped 110,000 tons of bombs.4 But
COSVN was in reality a decentralized, mobile headquarters which was
disrupted by the bombing but whose personnel largely survived.

The neutrality of Cambodian ruler Prince Sihanouk was also deemed
to be an obstacle to US progress in Vietnam; he was overthrown by his
Prime Minister Lon Nol in March 1970, while on a trip to Europe.
Although there was no overt US role in the coup, Sihanouk strongly
suspected CIA involvement.5 The final US operation to remove the NLF
bases in Cambodia was an incursion announced by Nixon on 30 April
1970. This public expansion of the war reignited the US peace
movement and campus protests, but, again, did not change the balance
of forces in favour of the Saigon government, much less of US ally Lon
Nol. The overthrow of Sihanouk turned out to be one of the most tragic
mistakes of the whole US involvement in Indochina. It pushed the
Prince and the Vietnamese communists into an alliance with the Khmers
Rouges communists, who with Vietnamese help were quickly able to
take control of the Cambodian countryside. With Sihanouk as their
figurehead in a united front, Pol Pot and his comrades gained the trust of
the Cambodian peasantry and many of the youth as well.

President Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger
did not entirely neglect the peace process underway in Paris. They sent
veteran Ambassador David Bruce to lead the US delegation there. But he
failed to engage with the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG)
and responded to the peace proposals of Nguyễn Thi Bı`nh, the head of
their delegation, by calling them ‘old wine in new bo˙ttles’.6 At the same

VIETNAMIZATION AND SAIGON'S POLITICAL OPPOSITION 137

time, much of Kissinger’s energy went into the creation of a new
relationship with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This was a
long-overdue step for American diplomacy, one that, among other
things, allowed China to take its seat at the UN, replacing the Taiwanese
delegation in 1971. For Nixon and Kissinger, this change in the
international strategic balance was a means to exit Vietnam without
exposing South East Asia to the dangers of the old ‘Domino Theory’.
With a friendly China to help guarantee the peace process, Hanoi would
have to fall into line, they reckoned. However, they failed to take into
account the Chinese alliance with the Khmers Rouges, a relationship
that was not complicated by any divided loyalties since the Soviets never
recognized this movement. As the left-wing Khmer coalition gained
control of the Cambodian countryside, Beijing was reluctant to pressure
the DRV or the Cambodian communists, now allied against the United
States, to halt their battles for victory.

The US – PRC rapprochement did not result in full normalization of
relations until 1978, but Nixon’s 1972 visit to China and the signing
of the Shanghai Communique´ would make explicit their common
strategic interests linked to curtailing Soviet power. The Nixon visit
would signal to the Hanoi leadership that they could no longer count
on unconditional support or continued largesse from their northern
neighbour.

The Thiệu Government vs Saigon’s Opposition
Press and Politicians

For anti-war forces in South Vietnam, the focus of peacemaking shifted
in 1969 to the negotiations in Paris. They had a reasonable foreboding
that their voices would not be heard at the peace conference – the non-
communist opposition doubted that either the Thiệu government
delegation or the United States would take the interests of the war-weary
Vietnamese people into account. The other preoccupation of the anti-war
movement in the early 1970s was to publicize and contest the Thiệu
government’s expanding repression of protest.

The excesses of the RVN’s prison system became better known in the
spring and summer of 1970. In April, Don Luce interviewed a group of
students who were recuperating from torture in a lab-turned-dispensary
at the College of Agriculture in Saigon. Among them was Cao Thi˙ Queˆ

138 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Figure 6.1 Father Chaˆn Tı´n, at Ky Dong Church in Saigon, 1974. Photo
by Paul Quinn-Judge.

Hương, a young teacher of philosophy from the Ðoa`n Thi Ðiểm High
School in Cần thơ. ‘Her knees are swollen three times thei˙r normal size

and black and blue welts cover her tiny arms’, he wrote. She had been

stripped naked and beaten with police clubs, as other policemen watched

and drank whiskey. Her husband, Nguyễn Ngoc Phương, another young
teacher, was brought into the room to watch, i˙n an attempt to force him

to sign a confession. He refused and later died in prison after days of

torture.

That year Lưu Hoằng Tha´o, Deputy Chairman of the Buddhist Van
After da˙ys
oHfa˙bnehatUinngisv,earsnidtyhSitsucdoennttinAusaslorceifautisoanl ,tospceonntfefisvsetwo eaenkyscirnimjaeils., the police

put pins under his fingernails, then attached electrodes to his ears,

tongue and penis and cranked their generators. They forced soapy water

into his mouth as he lay on his back, then trampled on his stomach

after it became bloated with the water. (Different variations on water

boarding were standard interrogation techniques in the Saigon prisons.)

VIETNAMIZATION AND SAIGON'S POLITICAL OPPOSITION 139

Figure 6.2 A demonstration with banner calling for Peace, Food and
Clothing, Saigon, 1974. Photo by Paul Quinn-Judge.

In the end they had to inject him with a drug, and take his hand to
sign the confession paper. All it stated was that he had ‘liaison with the
communists’.7 Some observers theorized that the authorities had released
the students as a warning to others, who continued to demonstrate in
protest at government repression.

Even more shocking was the revelation of conditions in the South’s
largest civilian prison, known to the French as Poulo Condore and to the
Vietnamese as Coˆn Sơn or Coˆn Dảo. In a ‘Fact Sheet’ put out by the US
government’s Public Safety Division, the Director Frank E. Walton
described Coˆ n Sơn as having ‘an enlightened and modern
administration’.8 But in fact, this island prison 140 miles southeast of
Saigon housed the Saigon government’s version of the ‘oubliettes’ in the
Bastille, where French prisoners had been left to rot in the days before
the Revolution. Don Luce, who had been receiving reports from ex-
prisoners on the island, accompanied a US congressional delegation to
Coˆn Sơn in July, along with Congressional aide Thomas Harkins, later
the US Senator from Iowa for many years; the Congressmen Augustus
Hawkins and William Anderson were the official members. With a map
drawn by a former prisoner, Luce was able to lead the group to Camp