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

40 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Vietnamese opposition. According to the news report in France

Observateur, this congress was due to confer on him the mandate to
negotiate with the DRV.24 Hữu apparently felt that he did not have

enough international support to undertake this mission, so in the end he

did not travel to India or Cambodia. The French Embassy in Phnom

Penh may have played a part in cutting short Hữu’s mission, as by 1956

they could see that Diệm was firmly established with American backing.

But Hữu himself remained committed to the neutralist idea and by

1962–3 he would once again be cast in the role of a third-way leader.

A third figure who was promoting neutralism in 1956 was the leader

or ‘Superior’ of the Cao Đa`i religious sect, Pham Coˆng Tắc, the most
important remaining originator of the sec˙t’s doctrine. He had

spent World War II in forced exile in Madagascar, due to his pro-

Japanese sympathies. In an effort to centralize state control, the Diệm

government managed to break the temporal power of the Cao Đa`i in

1955–6, by taking over their mountainous headquarters near the

Cambodian border, known for more than a decade as an impregnable

base. From the time of the South Vietnamese army’s offensive to occupy

the Cao Đa`i Holy See in Taˆy Ninh, Pham Coˆng Tắc, alienated by the
central government’s victory, had taken ˙refuge in Phnom Penh. By the

end of April 1956, he had developed a programme (cương lı˜nh)

promoting the peaceful reunification of Vietnam. According to reports

received by Diệm’s secretariat, Tắc had sent his peace programme to the

UN and both governments of Vietnam. It raised the possibility of

neutralization, along the lines followed in India and Burma, which he
referred to as ‘peaceful co-existence’ (hoa` b`ınh soˆ´ng chung). Tắc advocated

supervision by the United Nations of any Vietnamese peace settlement.

He sent one of his lieutenants, Nhi-Lang, to Saigon to call on the Cao
Đa`i dignitaries to join him in Phno˙m Penh. At the same time, Cao Đa`i

activists in the Central Highlands and central coastal provinces were

tphreomVoiệtitnCg ộPnhga˙’m. SComoˆnegoTf ắtch’sesme ocvademreesnhtaodf ‘Peaceful Co-existence with
been arrested in Đồng Nai

province. Even though the Cambodian government claimed that they

were not supporting the Cao Đa`i, Tắc and his followers were able to
establish a temple 4 km outside of Phnom Penh, on the road to Saigon.25

Initially these peace initiatives received French support and were

promoted by go-betweens such as Jean Sainteny, de Gaulle’s

representative in Hanoi in 1945– 6, and once again the French envoy

GIVING PEACE A CHANCE 41

in 1954. The French had given only lukewarm backing to the Diệm
government in 1954– 5 and almost succeeded in convincing the USA to
drop him in 1955, before his army tamed the sects. The French did not
appreciate the way their power in South Vietnam had been undercut by
the Americans in 1954 –6, in part because it meant a loss of economic
influence, but also because it decreased their international influence by
preventing them from playing the diplomatic role outlined in the
Geneva Agreements. France had pledged at Geneva to ‘guarantee all-
Vietnam elections in 1956, guarantee execution of the armistice
agreement, and guarantee Vietnamese sovereignty, unity and territorial
integrity’, as well as to maintain their Expeditionary Corps in place until
Vietnam requested its removal.26 The DRV, or at least Hồ Ch´ı Minh and
his closest collaborators, had trusted that France would fulfil its role
and encouraged any moves towards reconciliation that would decrease
their own international isolation. Instead, due to their dependence on
American funds, the French were obliged to agree to withdraw their
forces, which had decreased to around 5,000 by the end of March 1956.
This weakening of the French role, and their eventual rapprochement
with Diệm, left the Vietnamese proponents of a neutral solution without
a Western sponsor.

The Republic of Vietnam took a jaundiced view of the activities of
such neutralists as Nguyễn Manh Ha`. Their representative in Phnom
Penh considered that the ne˙utralist project was the work of the
communists and he outlined what he believed were its five major goals:

1. To make the number of those who fear communism diminish; to
reduce the number of enemies of the communist side;

2. To pull these people away from the influence of South Vietnam;
3. To reduce the prestige of President Diệm;
4. To grab the reputation of the side calling for negotiations and unity,

to create a bloc of intellectuals and the uncommitted, of the religious
sects who have lost power to the president, in order to oppose the
government of freedom;
5. In Phnom Penh, to join with Ea-Sichau, the former Issarak leader;
with the Cambodian youth; with the Khmer in Vietnam; and with
the support of India and Poland, to establish a government of unity
with the groups of Hữu and Hinh;27 and to unify Vietnam under the
leadership of North Vietnam.28

42 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

This critique was reasonably accurate; however, it could be said that by
failing to discuss the issue of negotiations and national reunification, the
Diệm government itself did much to undermine its prestige among its
own people.

The Southern Communists and Neutralism

The part of this puzzle that is most difficult to put together is the role of

the southern communists. Were the southern Việt Minh linked to or

responsible in any way for the appearance of these neutralist programmes

in 1956? If so, what role did they play in their implementation? The

southerners are usually portrayed, convincingly, as being hostile to the

Geneva division of Vietnam, yet there is evidence that they were

prepared to take part in a peaceful competition for power, at least in the

months immediately following the peace settlement. Their major

challenge was to maintain their armed force, as the Việt Minh were

forbidden by the Geneva Agreement from keeping any troops south of

the 17th parallel. The role of Politburo member Leˆ Duẩn in the post-

Geneva period demonstrates that they were making contingency plans

for both peace and war. Leˆ Duẩn was a native of Quảng iTnr˙iSpairgoovninacned, jtuhset
south of the demilitarized zone, but he had been active

far south since the late 1930s. According to the diary of Vo˜ Va˘n Kiệt,

a future prime minister who worked closely with Leˆ Duẩn in 1954,

Immediately after the ceasefire, Anh Ba [Leˆ Duẩn] sent anyone
who had connections with the Bı`nh Xuyeˆn and the religious
sects to join them. He directed the Regional Committee to go to
Hậu Giang to lead the people in their support of the dissident
forces of the Hoa` Hảo, Cao Đa`i and B`ınh Xuyeˆn in opposing the
family dictatorship of Diệm. He directed the military propaganda
group to get control of an enemy unit, so that when the conditions
presented themselves, they could separate from the army as
Republican forces who opposed the family dictatorship of Diệm.
At the same time, he sent the youth forces and guerrillas, whose
identity had not been given away, to join the [Diệm] government
self-defense forces and Republican guards, so they could defend
our units and the revolutionary masses, especially in the old base
areas.29

GIVING PEACE A CHANCE 43

Leˆ Duẩn also took charge of developing a programme for future action

under the auspices of the nationwide Fatherland Front. South

Vietnamese (RVN) intelligence picked up indications that by the

summer of 1956 the communists were trying to revive their activities

south of the 17th parallel and that they were finding ways to benefit

from Diệm’s crackdown on the sects. The authors of the Pentagon Papers

concurred with this intelligence, noting that Diệm’s triumph over the

sects in 1955–6 was more illusory or fleeting than was acknowledged at

the time. As they admitted, Diệm’s policy ‘invited a Viet Cong-sect

alliance against him’, which would lead to Việt Cộng victories against
the ARVN in 1959 and 1960.30

Southern intelligence captured a long communist report or Directive

(Chỉ-thi) ‘On the situation of the Cao Đa`i from Tết to the present’, dated
16 Apri˙l 1956. The author of this document expresses the belief that the

movement to oppose the Americans and Diệm is growing stronger by

the day among the Cao Đa`i believers, thanks to both the invasion of the

Holy See and the ‘light’ shed by the programme of the Fatherland Front.

The policy of ‘armed repression, and coercion’ of the Cao Đa`i has had no

results (for Diệm), because it is seen as unjust by the believers, the
document explains.31 This directive may reflect the views of Leˆ Duẩn –

the South Vietnamese had also picked up reports that he had been

delegated by the Central Office for South Vietnam to travel to different

localities to ‘officially enrol’ new branches of the Fatherland Front (Mặt
Trận Tổ Quốc) established by various parties and blocs.32 An official

history of the Resistance in Saigon – Chợ Lớn – GPiaathÐo˙ifnRh e(v1o9lu4t5io–n75in)
confirms that Leˆ Duẩn prepared his ‘Theses on the

South Vietnam’ (‘Đề cương dường lối ca´ch mang miền nam’) in 1956, as
he travelled around the South, and that they w˙ere discussed by a meeting

of the Southern Regional Committee held in Phnom Penh in December

1956. This programme was in full accord with the Hanoi Politburo

directive of June 1956, which maintained that the struggle in South

Vietnam must remain essentially political, with the use of violence
restricted to self-defence.33

By 1958 the southern communists were becoming impatient with

Hanoi’s willingness to follow Soviet and Chinese advice, to continue to

pursue unification by peaceful means. (It would not be until January

1959 that the Politburo would change course, when the 15th party
plenum in Hanoi accepted a revised policy for the South.)34

44 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Figure 2.1 Leˆ Duẩn.
But according to the Theses on the Path of Revolution, in 1956 the southern
leadership still believed that the world situation and the strength of
opposition to the Diệm government made it possible to limit their
struggle to political means. Both the version of this document captured
in South Vietnam’s Long An province in 1957 and the copy printed in
Va˘n Kiˆen Ðảng (Documents of Party History) in 2002 are unequivocal on
this po˙int.35 The Theses drawn up by Leˆ Duẩn reflect the spirit of the
Bandung Conference and awareness of the policies enunciated by the
Soviet Union’s Twentieth Party Congress. ‘The forces of peace and
democracy in the world have tipped the balance toward the camp of
peace and democracy’, the Theses state. ‘Based on the above world
situation, the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union produced two important judgments: 1) All conflicts in the world
at present can be resolved by means of peaceful negotiations; 2) The
revolutionary movement in many countries at present can develop
peacefully.’ This second point is strongly qualified, however: ‘Naturally
in the countries in which the ruling class has a powerful military-police

GIVING PEACE A CHANCE 45

apparatus and is using fascist policies to repress the movement, the
revolution in those countries must look clearly at their concrete situation
to have the appropriate methods of struggle’ (Porter, p. 27).

‘In order to resist the US –Diệm regime, the Southern people
have only one way to save the country and themselves, and that is
the Revolutionary path’, his Theses stated (p. 25). The struggle
could remain peaceful, so long as ‘Those who lead the revolutionary
movement are determined to mingle with the masses, to protect and
serve the interests of the masses and to pursue correctly the mass
line. Between the masses and the Communists there is no distinction
any more’ (p. 29). The Theses take on a biblical tone when the author
states, ‘Using love and righteousness to triumph over force is a
tradition of the Vietnamese nation. The aspiration for peace is an
aspiration of the world’s people in general and in our own country,
including the people of the South, so our struggle line cannot be apart
from the peaceful line’ (p. 29).

To implement this policy of peaceful revolution, from the start of
1957 student activists and labour unions led by the Fatherland Front
organized meetings and demonstrations in a number of places, but
mainly in the Saigon– Chợ Lớn urban area. They demanded
improvements in the educational system, ranging from higher salaries
for teachers to lower fees for students and the expansion of teaching of
the Vietnamese language.36 The workers at the Saigon port went on
strike to demand higher wages, paralysing the port until they received a
15 per cent increase. At Tết (the Vietnamese New Year) the residents of
Saigon– Chợ Lớn, including northern refugees, flooded the post office
with greeting cards to send to the North. During the May First Labour
Day demonstration, over 200,000 people marched to demand democracy
and peaceful reunification of the nation; other demonstrations, large and
small, continued into July and August.

But in November 1957 the government went on the attack: it
disbanded thirty labour unions, to rid them of communists.37 For the
opposition it became more dangerous to engage in open political activity
as the Diệm government intensified its search for hidden communists.
The passage of Diệm’s 1959 anti-communist law finally pushed the
Workers’ Party Secretariat to pass a resolution permitting the
southerners to kill ‘cruel enemy elements’, as well as to begin organizing
base areas and armed forces.38

46 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Growth of Opposition to Ngoˆ Đ`ınh Diệm

Two strands of opposition to the Diệm government began to take shape
in 1960, both of which were nationalist. One of these looked to the
Americans, in the hope that they would distance themselves from
Diệm, as they had from the South Korean regime of Syngman Rhee.
The creation of a ‘Committee for Progress and Liberty’ in April 1960
by 18 Saigon intellectuals reflected the belief that the State
Department might be ready to revise its relationships with ‘friendly’
Asian states in favour of less repressive regimes. This was an anti-
communist opposition that was calling for more effective democratic
institutions. At a press conference in June 1960 a leader of this
movement, Trần Va˘n Đo, denounced the regime’s illegal arrests, harsh
treatment of prisoners and ‘concentration camps’. He also called for
freedom of the press and opinion.39

A November coup attempt organized by two colonels from the
Saigon Military Academy and a civilian critic of Diệm’s rural policies,
Dr Phan Quang Đa´n, was widely believed (probably inaccurately) to
have received some American backing. The coup’s failure resulted in a
hardening of Diệm’s attitude towards the liberal opposition, however.
In a statement that could describe many later political crises in South
Vietnam, the French ambassador wrote that ‘the repressive measures
taken against the nationalist opposition have resulted in the
elimination of elements which provided a screen between the regime
and communism’.40

The other formal opposition that surfaced in September 1960 was the
National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam. Its ten-point
programme called for the replacement of the Saigon government by a
‘broad national democratic coalition administration’ and the election of a
national assembly. This development was of course the outgrowth of a
decision of the Vietnam Workers’ Party’s Third Congress held in
September 1960; its programme was a typical example of a communist
programme for bourgeois democratic revolution. But many of the
southern Vietnamese who signed on with this force may have viewed the
Front’s programme as an end in itself, not as a pause on the way to
communism. At this stage the NLF apparently had little more substance
than a loose political organization; it included many non-communist
members. Yet it also absorbed all the activists who in the 1950s

GIVING PEACE A CHANCE 47

Figure 2.2 Ngoˆ Ðı`nh Diệm.

organized under the umbrella of the national Fatherland Front,

including an experienced student movement. The strength of the NLF

was the appeal of its programme to the large numbers of South

Vietnamese who feared an escalation of the American role in the South

and who were disturbed by the failure of the international community to

enforce the Geneva Agreement. The NLF programme undoubtedly

influenced the strategies of other groups, in particular the Buddhists,

who later militated for a negotiated end to the war and the opening of

negotiations with the DRV.

By the end of 1961, following Kennedy’s inauguration, there was

still enough of an opposition to Diệm’s government to merit an

extensive analysis in one of Ambassador Lalouette’s cables to Paris.

He now divided the southern opposition groups into two main streams:

the neutralist tendency and the liberal, anti-communist tendency.

In the former group he included Trần Va˘n Hữu, still the leader of a

neutralist group in Paris. In the latter group he placed members of the

tĐha˙ei Việt party, adherents of the Hoa´ Hảo and Cao Đa`i religious sects, and
majority of the 800,000 Catholic refugees from the North. But as he

explained, ‘the programmes of the two factions coincide on the following

48 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

points: 1) negotiations with the North; 2) political disengagement vis-a`-
vis the Americans; 3) re-establishment of friendly relations with
Cambodia and Laos; and 4) the strengthening of political, economic and
cultural ties with the countries of South East Asia’.41 The need for any
southern state to distance itself from the Americans in order to attain
legitimacy was thus becoming widely recognized (and may have been
somewhat gleefully pounced on by the former colonial masters, the
French).

A Diplomatic Brush with Neutralization

Kennedy’s Under Secretary of State for East Asia, Averell Harriman, was
not ignorant of this situation. In November 1961, along with Chester
Bowles, another State Department official, he put his weight behind the
idea of a ‘negotiated solution via a “strengthened and modernized”
version of the Geneva Accords of 1954’.42 Bowles became a backer of the
neutralization of all South East Asia (minus North Vietnam), as an
extension of the neutralization of Laos.43 John Kenneth Galbraith,
Kennedy’s ambassador to New Delhi, also wrote a memo backing a non-
military solution to the conflict, urging the establishment of a UN role
in South Vietnam.44 Hanoi did not remain unresponsive to this climate,
and may have been doing much to promote these ideas via contacts in
Paris and Saigon. In early 1962 the Hanoi Politburo instructed its cadres
in the South to ‘win the sympathy of neutralist and “progressive forces”
in the RVN, so that they could be relied upon to adopt a sympathetic
attitude in case a negotiated settlement resulted in the formation of a
coalition government’.45 This tactic was both a repetition of Hanoi’s
efforts to encourage a neutralist government in the South in 1954 and an
early sign of how the communists would approach the idea of a ‘Third
Segment’ in the years to come.

Trần Va˘n Hữu, now the leader of a group for ‘Peace and Renovation’,
was approached by the DRV in Geneva in August 1962, and asked if he
would lead the neutralist group in a coalition government, taking on the
role played by Souvanna Phouma in Laos. He was given assurances that
the issue of reunification could wait ‘fifteen or twenty years’.46 Mr Hữu
appears to have endorsed the approach of the NLF at this point, as his
group was present at a meeting in Paris in January 1963, when the
Vietnam–France Association repeated the call for an international

GIVING PEACE A CHANCE 49

conference to neutralize South Vietnam, on the pattern of Laos. At the
time, the RVN ambassador in Paris characterized Hữu’s programme as
‘taking a stance that was almost the same as that of the NLF’. In his
dispatch the ambassador described the people who attended this meeting
as ‘close to the communists’ and ‘leftist intellectuals’.47

The second Geneva conference announced an accord on the
neutralization of Laos in July 1962, which the DRV immediately
published in its party newspaper, Nhaˆn Daˆn. US negotiator Averell
Harriman agreed to a Burmese proposal to meet the North Vietnamese
Foreign Minister Ung Va˘n Khieˆm on 23 July, as the conference on Laos
was winding up. However, the record of this conversation depicts the
two negotiators as each clinging to their public accusations of the other
side. The US participants viewed the problem of South Vietnam as a case
of North Vietnamese aggression and apparently had little interest in
Hanoi’s view of the illegality of the Diệm government.48 (The USA at
that point would have found it difficult to believe that within a few
months Foreign Minister Khieˆm would undergo harsh criticism for
preparing a communique´ between Hồ Ch´ı Minh and Czech President
Antonin Novotny expressing support for ‘peaceful co-existence’.) In
Geneva Khieˆm’s failure to raise the issue of neutralization for South
Vietnam was read by Harriman’s aides as a rebuff. Yet as someone who
was possibly already being accused of ‘revisionism’, he was undoubtedly
playing it safe and waiting for a cue from Hanoi. By mid-1962, the
political climate in the DRV was growing less receptive to Khrushchev’s
support of peaceful co-existence, and those supporting such policies
came under increasing pressure, as the following chapter will explain.
Harriman, too, had to watch his back, as his advocacy of the settlement
for Laos was seen as dangerously na¨ıve by most of the US military and
political advisers to Diệm. In any case, the State Department was not
trying terribly hard to find a solution if they made no subsequent effort
to communicate with Hanoi. In fact, the documentary record shows that
the Pentagon believed that the communist insurgency in South Vietnam
was being brought under control in 1962 and that they were not feeling
much pressure to find a political solution to the Vietnam crisis.49

Soon after the declarations at Geneva, differences among the Soviets,
Chinese and Vietnamese on policy towards war and negotiation in
Indochina began to surface. But the Vietnamese party favouring
negotiations was still strong enough to continue floating suggestions

50 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

about a neutral solution. The NLF made a 14-point proposal, announced
in Nhaˆn Daˆn on 19 August 1962, the anniversary of the 1945 August
Revolution, which advocated an independent and neutral South
Vietnam. They declared themselves ready to meet with all patriotic
forces in South Vietnam to exchange opinions on issues of peace and
neutrality. Their proposal stated that a southern peace government
would accept foreign aid from any nation, so long as no political
conditions were attached. The late Hanoi diplomat Lưu Đoa`n
Huynh believed that the major initiative for this policy came from
Leˆ Duẩn, now the First Secretary of the Workers’ Party and the man
who in 1959 had taken the initiative to push Hanoi towards a
more combative policy in the South.50 It is clear, however, that the
Vietnamese leadership was not optimistic or perhaps not united
regarding the potential of neutralization.

By 23 August, just four days later, Nhaˆn Daˆn carried an article
stating that, ‘the US is plotting to destroy the Geneva Agreement on
Laos’. The USA also fairly quickly became disillusioned by Hanoi’s
lack of compliance with the neutralization pact on Laos. On either side
of this Cold War divide, those willing to wager on peace were overruled
by more hawkish decision-makers. Moreover, each side had a different
image of what could be achieved via the neutralization process. For the
Vietnamese communists the neutralization of Laos would only work if
it were rapidly extended to South Vietnam. That would have made
access to Laos less important to their strategy for reunification. For
the Americans, the neutralization of Laos was seen as a way to protect
an independent, anti-communist South Vietnam, which they were
determined to defend.

The Buddhist Spring of 1963

In the spring of 1963 a new force in southern Vietnamese politics made
itself heard. The Buddhists, although they composed the dominant
religious group in South Vietnam, had until then not wielded enough
power to influence the political scene. They did not control a geographic
fiefdom as did the newer religious sects, the Cao Đa`i and the Hoa´ Hảo;
nor did they possess an army. Since the founding of the Nguyễn dynasty
in 1802 they had settled into a pattern of decentralization, with each
temple taking care of its own management. During the years of the

GIVING PEACE A CHANCE 51

Buddhist Renovation movement in the 1930s, their efforts to create a
modern religious organization had not come to fruition. Yet as they
discovered in 1963, they had the power to mobilize a latent popular
force that had been waiting for leadership. The number of practising
Buddhists may have been around nine out of twenty million people in
the South, but if one takes into account the cultural reach of the
intertwined ‘three religions’ (Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism)
within Vietnamese society, one can conclude that most non-Christians,
around 80 per cent of the population, would have had strong affinities
and sympathies with Buddhism.51

From 1951 a national congress held at Huế began the work of
unifying Buddhist groups from north to south into a Tổng Hội Phật
Gia´o (General Association of Buddhists). The association received
government recognition in 1953. One of the movers behind this
centralization was the monk Thı´ch Trı´ Quang, a Buddhist scholar born
in 1923 in the north-central province of Quảng Bı`nh, the home province
of both General Vo˜ Nguyeˆn Gia´p and Ngoˆ Đı`nh Diệm. At the age of 16
he began his studies to enter the monkhood, moving to the Buddhist
Studies Institute in Huế in 1937. After Hồ Chı´ Minh’s 1945 declaration
of Vietnamese independence, he journeyed to Hanoi with his religious
master, Th´ıch Trı´ Độ, to help establish a Buddhist Studies Centre. Thı´ch
Trı´ Độ stayed on in Hanoi for the rest of his life, while Tr´ı Quang
returned to Quảng Bı`nh to join the resistance. But within a few months
he had to return home to care for his ailing mother, as his older brothers
were far away, all with the anti-French resistance. In 1949 he first went
to Saigon, where he became involved in efforts to form an all-Vietnam
Buddhist organization; in 1955 he was named head of the Buddhist
Studies Association, which established its headquarters there. He soon
gave up this position to return to Huế, but resumed his role in 1963.52
In the meantime, in 1957 he had established a Buddhist Association of
Central Vietnam based at Từ Đa`m Pagoda in Huế. The regulations
of this association stated that this was a religious organization that did
not participate in politics.53 Indeed, as one French diplomat noted
in August 1961, ‘the reformed Buddhists refuse any engagement with
the established power’.54 This aloofness could not help but attract
government disapproval.

The birth of the Buddhist movement against Diệm is usually
linked to the government decree which forbade them to fly their

52 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Buddhist flag for the celebration of their major religious holiday,

Buddha’s Birthday, which in 1963 fell on 7 May. In Huế, the centre of

Vietnamese Buddhism, the festivities were usually marked by the

hanging of flags along the main highway. In retrospect, Th´ıch Trı´

Quang believed that Diệm’s brother Ngoˆ Đ`ınh Thuc, the Archbishop
of Huế, was envious of the Buddhists’ power in ˙his archbishopric,

where there were comparatively few Catholics. (Just a week earlier Huế

had been decorated with Vatican flags to mark the anniversary of

Tprhou˙hci’bs itcioonnsewcarsatnioont as a Bishop.) For the Buddhists, however, this
the start of their unhappiness; it was the last straw.

As soon as the decree was announced, Tr´ı Quang sent a dispatch to the

UN General Secretary, detailing the violations of the Buddhists’

human rights and the religious discrimination practised by the
government of Ngoˆ Đı`nh Diệm.55

This was the start of a crisis that would grow steadily until the day

Diệm was overthrown. On 8 May, thousands of Buddhists gathered

outside the radio station in Huế to hear a broadcast of a speech by Th´ıch

Trı´ Quang. As the crowd gathered, the government sent a sound truck to

the station, announcing that a Việt Cộng attack was expected for that

night and asking the people to disperse. When the crowd refused, a fire

truck started to spray them with water; then armoured cars arrived and

began firing into the crowd. Nine people were killed, some crushed by
the tracks of the armoured vehicles; another 14 were wounded.56

Diệm was loath to admit any responsibility for this tragedy, even

though there were hundreds of witnesses. It took the arm-twisting of the

US Embassy to convince him to offer compensation to the families of the

dead and wounded. The Buddhists drew up a five-point list of demands

for the government, including the end of arbitrary arrests and full

equality for Buddhism with Catholicism. At this point they were not

contesting the government’s policy on war and peace. But in spite of

some promising talks between the two sides, the government never

accepted the fact that they had been guilty of religious discrimination.

They also made no effort to halt the public accusations of Nhu’s powerful

wife, Mme Nhu or Trần Leˆ Xuaˆn, that the Buddhists were controlled by

the communists. The Buddhists continued to demonstrate in massive

numbers in Saigon and Huế.

The 11 June immolation of the 73-year-old monk Th´ıch Quảng Đức

became the image of this summer of crisis that seared its way into the

GIVING PEACE A CHANCE 53

consciousness of the West. After this shocking spectacle, carried out at a
busy crossroads in Saigon, the Americans began to increase their pressure
on the Ngoˆ family to bring about democratic reforms. The American
Ambassador, Frederick Nolting, considered too sympathetic to Diệm,
was withdrawn from Saigon, to be replaced by Henry Cabot Lodge.
Lodge maintained distant relations with President Diệm as he saw no
sign that the president was getting the message about American
unhappiness with his regime, in particular the demand that ‘the
Councillor’, Ngoˆ Đı`nh Nhu, be removed from his position of power.

Nhu’s visibility, if anything, had increased in the last years of the Diệm
government. One thing that burnished his reputation with Western
backers was his enthusiasm for the Strategic Hamlet Programme,
developed in imitation of the successful British counter-insurgency policy
in Malaya, which grouped farmers into defended settlements.57 Under
Nhu’s direction the RVN had constructed 5,000 of these settlements by
April 1964, with 2,000 more under construction.58 These were viewed as
the solution to the growing communist insurgency – optimism regarding
their success was one reason that US experts believed in 1963 that they
were on the verge of ending the NLF threat. Nhu, meanwhile, continued
to present himself as the theoretician of government policy: in a three-
hour impromptu discourse to university lecturers from Huế, attending
an obligatory government retreat in mid-1963, Nhu emphasized the
philosophical basis of the Strategic Hamlets. The foundation of this
programme was the philosophy of personalism, he declared.59 Among
the moral changes that the construction of the defensive hamlets was
meant to inculcate in the peasantry was a ‘spirit of self-sufficiency’.60
Most of the peasants failed to find anything that was humanitarian or
useful in these settlements, however. They resented the order to leave
their own rice fields and gardens, and the fact that they had to construct
these hastily organized hamlets (which they called concentration camps)
with their own labour.

Instead of yielding to US pressure to withdraw from his high-profile
role, if only temporarily, Nhu organized simultaneous raids on pagodas
in Saigon and Huế on the night of 18 August, sending the secret police
to force their way through the pagoda gates. At Xa´ Lợi pagoda, Trı´
Quang’s headquarters in Saigon, the police used automatic weapons and
grenades to terrorize the monks and nuns. An unknown number of
monks was wounded or arrested. At dawn the next morning, Diệm

54 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

declared martial law and a curfew from 9.00 p.m. to 5.00 a.m., making
it illegal to be on the streets during those hours. Trı´ Quang himself was
hauled off to a detention centre, but as the police failed to identify him,
the next morning his fellow monks helped him to slip out. Later he took
a taxi to the US Embassy, where he was given protection from the police.

This was the moment when even members of Diệm’s own
administration began to move away from him. The Buddhist Foreign
Minister, Vu˜ Va˘n Mẫu, asked for leave and flew off to India with his
family.

But Diệm and Nhu were readying another tactic to maintain
their freedom of action. They opted to join the movement towards a
negotiated solution in their late bid to hang on to power. Their
government had by the summer become estranged from the Kennedy
administration over its treatment of the Buddhist population; in May
1963 Nhu had already announced that he wanted half of the 12,000 US
military personnel to leave the country.61 In August the Ngoˆs agreed
to the French Ambassador’s plan to set up a channel for negotiations
with the North, using the International Control Commission’s
representative, the Polish professor Mieczyslaw Maneli, as their go-
between. A first meeting between Nhu and Maneli took place on 25
August. Then on 29 August, French president Charles de Gaulle
arranged an announcement that France was ready to help in creating a
Vietnam that would be ‘independent . . . from the outside, in internal
peace and unity and in harmony with [its] neighbors’.62

It is not clear whether de Gaulle’s action was coordinated with the
initiative taken by Roger Lalouette – the general may have been asked to
become involved by Bửu Hội, Diệm’s science attache´ in Paris, as well as
his ambassador to several African states. Although a member of the royal
family and considered to be close to Nhu, Bửu Hội was alarmed by the
treatment of the Buddhists, as his own mother had become a Buddhist
nun, with ties to the Ấn Quang Pagoda. She had at one point threatened
to immolate herself, following the example of Th´ıch Quảng Đức and
several other monks who had copied his suicide.63 Bửu Hội was given
the task of organizing a fact-finding UN mission to report on the
Buddhist situation in Vietnam.

Before any face-to-face negotiations could take place between
representatives of North and South (which were allegedly being planned
for New Delhi), Diệm and Nhu were both dead.64

GIVING PEACE A CHANCE 55

Evaluations of the seriousness of the Ngoˆ Đ`ınh Nhu – DRV
negotiations differ. To anyone aware of the popular bitterness of the
southern population towards the Ngoˆ brothers, it seems doubtful that
they would have trusted their chances of survival without American
protection. South Vietnamese who opposed Diệm tend to view this as a
case of Nhu blackmailing the USA into easing their pressure for his
departure from the southern government. They note that Nhu was
quite public about the fact that he was negotiating with the northern
government, assuring that the Americans would hear about this
gambit.65 He even spoke directly to Ambassador Lodge about his
contacts with the NLF, according to the report of this conversation that
Cabot Lodge gave to his colleague, Roger Lalouette. But Lalouette’s
description of this contact makes it clear that Nhu’s aim was not peaceful
reconciliation with the communists, but rather to buy time for the
elimination of the communist threat. ‘Cabot Lodge told me that during
their conversation, M. Nhu told him briefly about his contacts with
certain elements of the Liberation Front and of his hope that, thanks to
the Strategic Hamlet Programme, he would succeed in pacifying
the guerrillas bit by bit, in a relatively short time period (three
months).’66 At this moment in early September, Ambassador Lodge
seemed willing to countenance renewed cooperation with Nhu, if he and
his wife would agree to leave the country for a number of months,
enough time to allow US public opinion to cool down. The French-
backed talks would have been a way to avoid a further build-up of US
forces in Vietnam, according to Lalouette’s account; but the goal was to
restore the pre-1960 situation in South Vietnam, ‘leaving the way open
to political, economic and social development’ and ‘without attacking
American prestige’.67

On the other hand, when the question of negotiations with the Diệm
government is raised in Hanoi, government spokesmen, official and
unofficial, will aver that there were negotiations going on even before
1963. One of these moments is said to have occurred in April 1961,
when Hồ Ch´ı Minh sent the head of the Foreign Trade department,
Hoa`ng Manh Thu, to meet Diệm’s representative in Hong Kong.68

˙
Another source even claims that Nhu sent his own children to Hanoi to
open negotiations in 1960, but that southern mistakes cut short the
exchange.69 Maneli claimed that the Vietnamese liaison to the ICC,
Ha` Va˘n Laˆu, strongly encouraged his role as a go-between in 1963.

56 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Whatever the goal of such contacts, it is difficult to imagine that any
agreement involving the Ngoˆ family would have led to a stable or long-
lasting peace.

The Dương Va˘n Minh Interregnum

The military junta that took power in November 1963, headed by
General Dương Va˘n Minh, was greeted with vast optimism in Saigon.
The more articulate opponents of Diệm were calling for a ‘social
revolution’ in the South, which would attack the root causes of the
communist insurgency – poverty, indebtedness and peasant alienation
from the autocratic bureaucracy. General Minh, known to the Americans
as ‘Big Minh’ for his unusual height, inspired confidence, thanks to his
lack of interest in personal power. A French-trained military man, he had
stood by Diệm in his 1955 battle against the sects. But he was not a
hard-liner – a Buddhist from the southern province of Mỹ Tho, he had
fought with the Việt Minh briefly during the French Indochina War and
had a younger brother who regrouped to the North with the Việt Minh
army in 1954. The challenges he faced were almost insurmountable, and
he would be given only three months to begin the social changes that the
southern intellectuals and students were demanding. At the same time,
the Americans were expecting him to take a firm role in curbing the
growing insurgency in the countryside. After President de Gaulle’s
endorsement of a neutralist South Vietnam, General Minh had to take
care not to arouse US suspicion that he might encourage such a course.

Diệm’s former vice-president, Nguyễn Ngoc Thơ, was entrusted with
executive power as the prime minister of the c˙ivilian cabinet. One of his
tasks was to oversee a purge of Cần Lao party members serving in the
government. However, a report of a cabinet meeting of 10 December
1963 shows that the ministries were resisting this effort – by that point
some ministries had failed to suggest anyone to be removed or had let it
be known that they did not know of any civil servants in their ranks who
deserved to be removed from their posts.70

An investigation into the affairs of ‘the secret financial organization
of the Ngoˆ Đ`ınh Diệm family’ was also underway.71 George Kahin
suggests that some military men who were the objects of corruption
investigations became early enemies of the military group led by
Minh.72 But overall this period was marked by political stalemate.

GIVING PEACE A CHANCE 57

Figure 2.3 Dương Va˘n Minh.

An editorial in the Buddhist student paper [Loˆ˙naˆ-phoTa`r]uờrnegvo(lSuttaionndp”oi–nta)
described the situation as ‘“middle-of-the-road

true contradiction’. The government of Nguyễn Ngoc Thơ had had to
work with some people from the old system, ‘who w˙ere afraid to do or
say anything . . . or to propose anything at all’, their editorial said.73

In November Minh had made clear his exasperation with the highly

charged political situation: he sent an urgent request to Prime Minister

Thơ to issue a declaration that ‘extremist banners’ be forbidden.

He singled out slogans such as ‘Chop off the heads of the Vietnamese

traitors and Communists’. Minh requested that all posters and slogans

praising Mr Ngoˆ Đ`ınh Diệm and Mr Ngoˆ Đ`ınh Nhu be removed.

He also wanted to limit demonstrations supporting the new Revolutionary

Military Council. Minh asked that the bureaucratic style of government

pronouncements be transformed by the use of a more ‘revolutionary’

vocabulary, but wanted to ensure that all communications would

demonstrate propriety and politeness. His final request was to instruct

58 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

the ministries and civil servants to change their way of approaching
the people, to show a ‘truly revolutionary spirit’ by adopting a polite
attitude.74

Minh’s attempts to create better relations with ordinary Vietnamese
created a problem with his US advisers – the General made clear his
government’s desire that the USA play a less obtrusive role in advising
the RVN. At a meeting on 10 January 1964 with Ambassador Lodge,
the Military Council leaders asked that the Americans refrain from
working at the district and village level, as that would play into the
hands of the communists. Minh pointed out that the Vietnamese teams
working for the Americans were ‘considered the same as the Vietnamese
who worked for the Japanese’.75 Minh’s request that no advisers work
below the regimental level in the military was seen as ‘an unacceptable
rearward step’ by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.76

The Minh government had its own ideas about rural development,
however – for one thing, they were prepared to let the unpopular
strategic hamlet programme die. George Kahin’s interviews with both
General Minh and Nguyễn Ngoc Thơ show that they hoped ‘to shift
the contest for power from th˙e military to the political level’, by
attracting those non-communist elements who had been alienated by
Diệm, including the Hoa´ Hảo and Cao Đa`i sects.77 The other cause for
American disappointment with the new leadership was their attitude
towards the bombing of North Vietnam. General Minh objected to
US proposals for bombing on two counts: first, he believed that it
would cause more harm to innocent civilians than to the military;
and two, he believed that this aggression would take away ‘the just
cause’ from the South, which until then had claimed to be fighting a
defensive war.78

By late January, Minh was being suspected of favouring a negotiated
settlement to the conflict instead of a tougher military response.
On 29 January rival General Nguyễn Kha´nh complained to a US
adviser that Minh and other generals were discussing a ‘pro-neutralist
coup’ with the French.79 The truth of this accusation has never been
proven or confirmed by any witness. Rumours about Minh’s brother on
‘the other side’ have floated around for years, but only in 2009 has the
communist government begun to talk about his role in influencing
Minh’s policies. In late 1960, it is now claimed, the Central Office for
South Vietnam (COSVN) mobilized Colonel Dương Thanh Nhựt,

GIVING PEACE A CHANCE 59

under the nom de guerre Mười Ty, to make contact with his brother.
It was not until the late summer of 1962 that Mười Ty was able to
contact members of his family, including the youngest brother, ARVN
military officer Dương Thanh Sơn. After the coup against Diệm, he
spent ten days in the home of younger brother Sơn and was able to meet
Minh himself many times. According to one account, he managed to
convince Minh that the USA was an invading force, but Minh remained
a believer in the need for US assistance. However, he did agree to
dismantle the strategic hamlets, so that peasants could return to their
gardens and ancestral tombs.80

This account credits Minh for his ‘progressive’ policies without
actually claiming that these were the result of contacts with his brother.
In addition to allowing the strategic hamlets to disappear, Minh refused
to approve the bombing of North Vietnam or the beginning of what
became known as Oplan 34A – raids and spy missions against the
DRV. The General also expressed willingness to hold talks with the NLF
on the issue of free elections, to create a coalition or reconciliation
government. There is no mention of a French role in this version of
events.81 If General Minh was thinking in terms of a political solution to
the war, he was thinking of an independent South Vietnam, with its own
army. At this point we have no hard evidence that Minh actually started
negotiations with the NLF; in the later stages of his political career,
when he became an open exponent of the Third Segment, his indirect
links with the NLF would become clear.

Certainly, in late 1963 moves towards negotiations were being made
on several fronts. Just one week after coming to power, General Minh’s
Military Revolutionary Council received a manifesto from the NLF,
which called for free general elections to form a coalition government
and reunification on a step-by-step basis.82 From Cambodia, Prince
Sihanouk was calling on the chairmen of the Geneva Conference to take
steps to guarantee Cambodia’s neutrality, as well as floating the idea that
a neutralized South Vietnam could join Cambodia in a free-trade
confederation.83 On the US side Senator Mike Mansfield, originally a
strong backer of Diệm, voiced support for moves towards a neutral
solution. In a December memo to President Johnson, he wrote that
‘there may be a truce that could be won now in Vietnam alone and
eventually a peace which might be won throughout South East Asia at a
price commensurate with American interests’. Peace in South Vietnam

60 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

‘would involve an astute diplomatic offensive which would seek to
enlist France, Britain, India and, perhaps, even Russia and all other
sources of potential use in a bona fide effort to bring about an end to the
North–South Vietnamese conflict’. He added, ‘A settlement might be
on terms which reduced our influence (and costs) provided it also
inhibited Chinese political domination. France is the key country.’84 But
President Johnson and his advisers were by this time convinced that it
was too late to negotiate: the Republic of Vietnam was too weak to do
anything but accept the NLF’s terms, they believed. Ambassador
Lodge in Saigon requested that President Johnson ask de Gaulle to
retract his proposal for a neutral South Vietnam. ‘How can so-called
“neutralization” be attained if the aggressor is determined not to be
neutralized, as is obviously the case as regards North Vietnam?’ he
asked.85 But clearly there were many South Vietnamese, including the
Buddhist leadership, who were attracted by the NLF programme:
they felt confident that if the Vietnamese from the different sides could
get together, they could eventually find solutions to the confrontation.
This was, after all, the basic formula outlined for the political settlement
at Geneva in 1954. As the next chapters will show, many southern
Vietnamese were becoming increasingly aware that this was a conflict
being thrust upon them by outside forces and that it would not serve
their own interests.

Conclusion

Following the cataclysms of 1963 – the deaths of the Ngoˆ brothers, then
President Kennedy – the pressure for war in South Vietnam increased.
The succession of southern leaderships proved powerless when it came to
curbing the communist insurgency or to changing the American view of
the need for head-on military confrontation. When, on 30 January 1964,
General Nguyễn Kha´nh replaced General Minh as head of the Saigon
Military Council in another coup, he claimed that this was a ‘necessary
step to halt the movement toward neutralism that General Minh had
been unable to control’.86 But as we shall see, the wellspring of support
for neutralism would not run dry.

CHAPTER 3

HANOI:BETWEEN MAO AND
KHRUSHCHEV, 1956—65

Although the Hanoi leadership had hoped since 1954 that the
reunification of Vietnam could take place by mainly peaceful means, this
began to appear more and more unlikely. By January 1959, at the
Fifteenth Plenum, a resolution was drawn up that defined the future
path of the revolution in South Vietnam as ‘that of violent struggle’.1
But it was ‘only with reluctance’, as William Duiker says, that Hanoi
was forced to accept this change of strategy.2 The Hanoi leaders were
restrained by their patrons in the communist bloc, who did not
encourage the idea of a military crusade to reunify Vietnam. The Chinese
and Soviet leaderships were not eager for another land war in Asia, as
they were just emerging from the devastation of the 1940s and the
costs of the Korean War. The Soviet Union of Nikita Khrushchev was
trying to move beyond the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 by opening
a dialogue with the United States. For their part, until 1962 the
Chinese continued to advise their Vietnamese allies against provoking a
full-scale war with the USA. But by the middle of that year the PRC
attitude had changed, leading to a more aggressive DRV stance to the
simmering conflict in South Vietnam.

At that point Mao Zedong began to re-establish his primacy, which
had been weakened by the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward.
In line with the change in Beijing, and in response to increasing US
involvement in the southern struggle, Hanoi’s attitude also became
more focused on war. In late 1963, Hanoi made a strong lurch to the left.

62 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

This change in the complexion of the political establishment in the

Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), made official at the Ninth

Plenum in December, occurred just as Dương Va˘n Minh was attempting

to establish a more conciliatory state in the South. The timing was

unfortunate for those in the new southern ruling council who were

intent on finding a political solution to the war. The Ninth Plenum

amounted to a denunciation of ideas that had been popular in Asia in

1954–8, including peaceful co-existence between the two blocs of East

and West. Hanoi’s political shift was strongly influenced by the growing

strength of radicalism in China and resulted in months of strained

relations between the DRV and the Soviet bloc, most of whose ruling

parties were classified by Beijing as ‘revisionist’. Not until the overthrow

of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in late 1964 did relations between

Hanoi and Moscow begin to improve once again. By then the decisions

leading to war had already been made in Washington.

Starting from a position of careful neutrality in the growing polemics

dividing the Soviet Union and China, the DRV over the course of 1963

took an increasingly public stance against the revisionist policies of

Nikita Khrushchev. We do now know that this change in the political

climate involved more than an acceleration of preparations for war in the

South – descriptions of the tension surrounding the Ninth Plenum in

December 1963 have appeared in several Vietnamese memoirs, while

documents from the archives of the former German Democratic

Republic (GDR) provide ample evidence of the far-reaching impact of
the decisions taken that month.3 The evidence that Hồ Chı´ Minh was

one of the losers in an internal power struggle has become clearer, with

the revelation from the Soviet Foreign Ministry archives that he retired
from day-to-day political affairs at the end of the year.4 German scholar

Martin Grossheim has found extensive documentation that shows how

‘pro-Soviet elements’ in the Vietnam Workers’ (Lao Động) Party were
‘systematically isolated’ as early as August 1963.5

One explanation for the ideological change in Hanoi is provided by

the rise to power of Party First Secretary Leˆ Duẩn, who after moving

from the South to join the Hanoi leadership in 1957, was officially

confirmed as the Workers’ Party First Secretary in 1960 at the Third

Party Congress. Leˆ Duẩn, from the central province of oQf utảhnegsoTuri˙thjeursnt
below the 17th parallel, became known as the voice

revolution within the Hanoi Politburo. His move to the North is usually

HANOI:BETWEEN MAO AND KHRUSHCHEV 63

viewed as the opportunity for him to apply more pressure on the
political establishment there to give active support to the guerrillas
fighting the Diệm government. Yet in 1962 he had followed a nuanced
line, calling for mixed political and military struggle that would lead to
a negotiated settlement and a US withdrawal.6 The need to defend the
gains made by the communist-backed revolutionaries during their
‘uprisings’ in 1959– 60 could well have been the motivation for Leˆ Duẩn
to join a new, far-left majority within the Vietnamese Politburo.
He would continue to advocate political struggle within the urban areas,
but by 1963 he could have few illusions about American intentions to
eliminate the communist insurgency in the South.

The Soviet Union would stand aside from the Vietnam conflict until
1965, following Khrushchev’s overthrow. But the Chinese took the
build-up of American forces in South Vietnam under President Kennedy
as a threat to their own security – in the summer of 1962, the Chinese
had decided to send Hanoi enough weapons for 230 infantry battalions,
with no repayment required.7 High-level exchanges with Chinese
leaders continued in early 1963, with a visit by PLA Chief of Staff Luo
Ruiqing to Hanoi in March, followed by President Liu Shaoqi in May.
But the discussions held by Liu Shaoqi in Hanoi involved more than
promises of military hardware. The final communique´ from this visit
‘denounced “revisionism” and “rightist opportunism” as the main threat
to the international communist movement and emphasized that the
DRV should mainly rely on its own strength when building up socialism
and carrying out the revolution in South Vietnam’.8

By this point, it was becoming clear that the price for gaining Chinese
military aid was to be Hanoi’s open support for the PRC in the Sino–
Soviet split. The end of Vietnam’s neutrality in these debates was not
absolute or unchanging, as it turned out. But these months in 1963 when
the pro-Chinese line was gaining political momentum caused long-term
frictions within the DRV leadership to become more bitter and open.
These frictions preceded Leˆ Duẩn’s move to Hanoi and his assumption of
the Party’s leading role in 1960. According to the philosopher Hoa`ng
Minh Chı´nh, one of the protagonists and losers in the DRV’s ideological
warfare, the debates over ideology started in the mid-1950s and continued
long after the Vietnam War ended.9 For this reason, we need to look more
closely at how the debates over Soviet ‘revisionism’ began in order to fully
appreciate the factional strife in Hanoi.

64 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

The Background to the Ninth Plenum

From the Second Party Congress, held in the resistance zone of the Việt
Bắc in 1951, until 1956, the Vietnamese communists put themselves
under the tutelage of their Chinese comrades. (It was at this congress
that the Indochinese Communist Party was dissolved, and the Vietnamese
communists took the name ‘The Workers’ Party’.) This was an
arrangement that Stalin had approved, as he felt that the Chinese
experience of building communism would be more appropriate for the
Vietnamese than Soviet advice. The Land Reform, which began in earnest
in 1953, was carried out with Chinese advisers, while the financial system
and cultural life in the Resistance Zone of the DRV were constructed with
Chinese support. Defining aspects of the Land Reform, including the use
of quotas to decide how many peasants should be classified as large
landowners, and even how many would need to be executed as enemies of
the Revolution, were rigidly copied from the Chinese model. In tandem
with the Land Reform, a ‘rectification’ or purge of communist party
organizations was carried out by a small group in the leadership. This
campaign to verify the loyalty of party members and leaders of Việt Minh
committees, at the local, district and province levels, turned into a witch
hunt for enemies of the people by 1956. Old organizations became
suspect, so that in Bắc Ninh province near Hanoi, for example, only
26 out of 76 hamlets were able to retain any veteran members on their
party executive committees.10 As General Vo˜ Nguyễn Gia´p stated in his
apology for the excesses of the Land Reform,

we often slighted or denied accomplishments in the Resistance and
only attached importance, in a distorted fashion, to accomplishments
in the anti-landlord struggle . . . the deeper our attacks on the
enemy went, the more they were misdirected; when we attacked the
landlord despots and saboteurs, we attacked within our own ranks at
the same time . . . The errors in the rectification of organizations
were the most serious errors in the whole Land Reform.11

The leaders of the Land Reform and Rectification campaigns were the
Party General Secretary, Trường Chinh, and veteran leader and ex-political
prisoner, Leˆ Va˘n Lương. Trường Chinh’s biography in the party paper
Nhaˆn Daˆn billed him as ‘the builder and commander of the revolution’ in

HANOI:BETWEEN MAO AND KHRUSHCHEV 65

1951, when the communist party resurfaced from the underground, at the
Second Party Congress.12 Leˆ Va˘n Lương seems to have been one of the
party’s ´eminences grises – from 1949 to 1956 the first head of the Institute
of Marxism–Leninism, Secretariat member and head of the Party’s
Organization Committee, as well as Deputy Minister of the Interior. Both
of these men were demoted in October 1956, after the Land Reform
apparatus finally was stripped of its power and those who had been
unjustly accused of crimes began to be released from prison. Trường Chinh
had to resign the post of party General Secretary, but was able to remain a
full member of the Politburo. Leˆ Va˘n Lương was removed from his posts
and demoted to candidate member of the Central Committee. The third
major leader demoted was Hồ Viết Thắng, the immediate leader of the
Land Reform committee, who was made an ordinary party member.

At the same time, the power of Hồ Ch´ı Minh and Vo˜ Nguyễn
Gia´p, the man who was perhaps Hồ’s most trusted lieutenant dating
from the World War II years in exile, was augmented when they both
joined the Secretariat in October 1956.13 Hồ Ch´ı Minh acquired
Trường Chinh’s title of General Secretary, and retained the more
honorific title of Party Chairman. This added power enabled Hồ Ch´ı
Minh to carry out a reasonably thorough correction of errors, by
restoring the civil rights of those who had been unjustly accused of
crimes against the people and by changing the inaccurate classifications
of middle and rich peasants. Of course, it was too late to help the
estimated 7,000 to 15,000 peasants who had been executed, following
rapid show trials by people’s tribunals.

Many Western analysts assumed over the years that the demotions
within the leadership were merely cosmetic and that the Vietnamese
communists were simply responding to the general discontent and
instability within the communist world when they carried out these
personnel changes. The Hungarian uprising was well underway as the
Tenth Plenum carried out its extended deliberations that launched the
‘correction of errors’; the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November
would be followed by an end to Hanoi’s experiments in artistic freedom
that had flourished briefly in 1956. The view that these personnel
changes were cosmetic could be justified by the rapid return to power
and influence of both Trường Chinh and Leˆ Va˘n Lương. Trường Chinh
retained a strong influence on ideology, as the Head of the Party’s
Institute of Marxism –Leninism, and also became the Chairman of the

66 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

National Assembly’s Standing Committee in 1960. Leˆ Va˘n Lương

returned to the Party Secretariat – his role is a puzzle that is rarely

discussed by students of Vietnamese communism. But by 1963 he was

signing many important decrees on Party policy, between Party

plenums, as the printed Documents of Party History demonstrate.

However, the signs that the ‘correction of errors’ and the Tenth

Plenum personnel changes in October 1956 were more than cosmetic

would accumulate with time, as the large issues that divided the

leadership became clearer. The first of these was the question of class

struggle and the role that class warfare should play within Vietnam’s

revolution. In his 1956 speech of apology to the Vietnamese people,

General Gia´p emphasized that one of the greatest errors made during the

Land Reform and Party Rectification was the importance accorded to

class background. He took exception to the fact that when the Việt Minh

committees were examined for ‘enemies of the people’, even Việt Minh

veterans of good standing in the Party were held to be unreliable

elements if they came from the wrong class background. In 1953 the

leadership of the Party Rectification began to replace these committees

with members with the correct class origins, regardless of whether they

had served the French or proved their patriotism by joining up with the

Việt Minh. If this policy had been allowed to continue, it would have

become a wedge that could have destroyed the DRV altogether.

Another question is whether one faction within the Party was aiming

this purge of the Việt Minh at Hồ Ch´ı Minh and General Gia´p, the two

leaders iwdehnotifialeodnwg itwhitthhePVriiệmt eMMinihncisotaelritiPohna˙,mas Va˘n Đồng were most
closely opposed to the old ICP

hierarchy. The elimination of their lower-ranking supporters would have

been one way of restricting their power. (Hồ and Gia´p would be targeted

again by the policies adopted at the Ninth Plenum of the Third Party

Congress, in December 1963.)

The self-destructive nature of these campaigns of the early 1950s

might eventually have led them to burn themselves out. But the thaw in

the communist world brought about by Khrushchev’s denunciation of

Stalin’s crimes in February 1956, at the Twentieth Party Congress of

the Soviet CP, clearly played a role in the turn-around. While the

Vietnamese are diffident about drawing a link between the two events, it

is clear that the themes raised by Khrushchev gradually became known

among the Vietnamese intelligentsia and party rank and file. When the

HANOI:BETWEEN MAO AND KHRUSHCHEV 67

Chinese party removed references to ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ from its
constitution in September 1956 at its Eighth Party Congress, this must
have sent strong signals to the Vietnamese that the trend away from
Stalinist cults was real.14 One of the issues arising from the Twentieth
Congress was ‘socialist legality’, which Khrushchev called on his
party to reinstate, after the years of terror and abuse of power under
Stalin. A respected non-Party lawyer and professor, Nguyễn Manh
Tường, led the call in the Vietnamese National Assembly for an end˙ to
sentencing by decree.15 Another of Khrushchev’s policies was ‘peaceful
co-existence’, one to which the Chinese had subscribed in 1954 and
1955, demonstrating their capacity for peacemaking to the world at
conferences in Geneva and Bandung. But in late 1962 Mao would reject
the idea of making peace with the capitalist world.

In 1961, another innovation in Marxist theory sponsored by
Khrushchev particularly annoyed the Chinese and probably those
Vietnamese in their sphere of influence: this was the announcement that
the Soviet party had become a ‘party of the whole people’ as opposed to
the party of the working class. This change was based on the premise
that there were no longer any class contradictions among the people of
the USSR, since capitalism had been eliminated. This was, in Mao’s
view, a sign that the Soviet Union was denying the principle of class
struggle and that it could no longer represent the ‘revolutionary interest
of the proletarian class’.16 These ideas condoning peaceful co-existence
with the capitalist West and an end to class struggle became known
under the label of ‘revisionism’. In Vietnam in 1956, these revisionist
ideas brought about a badly needed respite from political campaigns
that were destroying the popular unity created by the Việt Minh
front. But Mao Zedong viewed ‘revisionism’ as a severe threat to his
revolution. His Vietnamese acolytes would come to agree with him by
1963. Revisionism came to be seen as the Trojan horse of the West in
the communist bastion.

Although the DRV had backed away from extreme class conflict in
1956, the example of China continued to be a potent force. As Mao led
China into the Great Leap Forward in 1958, word filtered to Vietnam
of the amazing results that Chinese peasants were claiming on their
super-sized communes. ‘Leˆ Duẩn and other national leaders marvelled
at the extraordinary high yields collectivized peasants in China
had reportedly achieved.’17 By the end of 1959, the VWP was itself

68 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

discussing a campaign to form cooperative farms. Significantly, Party
history shows that in November 1958 three new members were added
to the Secretariat: Pham Hu` ng, a southern leader known for his radical
views; Tố Hữu, a poe˙t and leader of the crackdown on artistic freedom;
and Hoa`ng Anh, a less easily pigeonholed leader who may have been
close to Leˆ Duẩn.

Hoa`ng Minh Ch´ınh, who was in the first DRV group sent to
Moscow to study Marxism – Leninism, confirmed in an interview that
the Chinese model had made him a convinced Maoist, until the truth
about the actual state of the communes became known to him in 1960.
He claimed that a group of military leaders, including Vo˜ Nguyễn
Gia´p, stopped in China to visit the communes on their way to Moscow
for a study tour. ‘We heard about the difficulties from their group’, he
explained. After that he became a strong proponent of Khrushchev’s
policy of peaceful co-existence and other revisionist ideas. On his
return to Hanoi, he was made vice chairman of the Nguyễn A´ i Quốc
School under Trường Chinh.

At the Third Party Congress in September 1960, Leˆ Duẩn was
confirmed in his post as First Party Secretary, the title of General
Secretary having been retired in the process of de-Stalinization. At this
point the leadership reached a compromise on the tasks of the
Vietnamese revolution. In the North, above the 17th parallel, the Party
would continue the task of constructing socialism; in the South the
mission was to continue the national liberation struggle, or in Marxist –
Leninist terms, to complete ‘the national democratic revolution’. This
meant that the communists in the South could continue to cooperate
with ‘patriotic nationalists’ or ‘the patriotic bourgeoisie’. The formation
of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam at the close of 1960
was a manifestation of the decisions taken at the Party Congress.

The Ninth Plenum and its Meaning

In Hanoi, ideological views remained mixed throughout the first part of
1963. The January communique´ praising peaceful co-existence ‘as the
most correct policy’, signed by the visiting Czech president Antonin
Novotny and Hồ Ch´ı Minh, demonstrated that the DRV was still
sympathetic to the Soviet position in the polemics dividing the
Soviet bloc and the Chinese. Yet, a report from a German newspaper

HANOI:BETWEEN MAO AND KHRUSHCHEV 69

correspondent based in Hanoi underlined the tension that existed among
Party members at that moment: ‘they were not allowed to discuss
“problems within the international workers’ movement”’, he noted. This
same report said that Tố Hữu, now head of the Party’s Propaganda
and Education Committee, believed that if the VWP wanted to preserve
the purity of Marxism– Leninism, it had to openly attack revisionist
tendencies.18 A clearer sign of the direction the Party was moving in
came in March, when Leˆ Duẩn gave a speech at the Nguyễn A´ i Quốc
Party school to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of Karl Marx’s
death. In this speech he emphasized the Chinese struggle as the model
for the VWP to follow and made the point that ‘the revolutionary war in
the South promoted, rather than undermined, the defense of world peace
because it weakened American imperialism’.19 Before Liu Shaoqi’s visit
in May, a number of mainly middle-ranking cadres working in the DRV
press were replaced, in particular a number who wrote on foreign
policy issues. The Foreign Minister Ung Va˘n Khieˆm, a long-time Party
member from the South, was made to bear the responsibility for the
Novotny-Hồ Ch´ı Minh communique´ and would be replaced at the end
of the year by, first, Xuaˆn Thủy, and then by Nguyễn Duy Trinh.20

The signing of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on 5 August
1963 by the USA, Great Britain and the Soviet Union pushed the
Chinese to a new level of invective against revisionism. The treaty was
rightly viewed as an attempt to prevent China from joining the nuclear
club. (France, at that time engaged in normalizing relations with China,
was the only nuclear state that refused to sign the treaty.) Beijing
responded quickly to the news that the treaty had been initialled in
Moscow in late July; the Hanoi media followed suit. On 31 July Beijing
accused Moscow of ‘surrendering to US imperialism’ and proposed a
conference to discuss the complete elimination of nuclear weapons.21
The Vietnamese defended the Chinese view, stating that ‘socialist
countries other than the Soviet Union must not be denied the means
of defense’.22

Hanoi’s own campaign against revisionists in the Party’s ranks
gathered pace in the summer and fall, and was institutionalized by a
November decree issued by the Secretariat, signed by Leˆ Đức Tho.
According to GDR sources, two of the targets of the building pressur˙e
were Vo˜ Nguyễn Gia´p and Hồ Chı´ Minh. General Gia´p was put under
house arrest in June, the GDR diplomats reported. Prime Minister

70 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

cPohna˙fimdeVna˘tniaĐl iồnnfgo’rsmpartivioantetsoecthreetaSroyvwieatseamrrbeasstseyd,,aonndtĐheồnchgawrgaes of passing
powerless

to intervene on his behalf. The director of the Party’s Sự Thật press was

removed from his post and returned to his home province to spend the
next 12 years in isolation.23 The GDR charge´ d’affaires passed on the

information that Hồ Chı´ Minh was being subjected to criticism for his

past policies, in the form of a ‘theory of two mistakes’. According to this

theory, Hồ’s first mistake was to have compromised with the French in

1945–6, to allow them to return to Vietnam; the second mistake was to
have accepted the partition of the country in 1954.24 (The fact that the

Chinese had advised accepting the Geneva arrangement and that Trường

Chinh had given it his backing was forgotten, apparently.) Leˆ Đức Tho’s
decree announced a new campaign to ‘protect the Party’ by investigatin˙g

questions regarding members’ pasts, as the pressure to conform was

ratcheted up. It is not surprising that Hồ Ch´ı Minh was politically
neutralized at this point, as Hoa`ng Minh Ch´ınh later maintained.25

Secretariat decree number 68 was issued on 19 November 1963,

apparently just before the Ninth Plenum; its long title was for

convenience shortened to ‘Campaign to Defend the Party’. The text

refers to ‘the enemy’s plot and tricks to destroy the inner core [noˆi boˆ] of
the Party, from the time that peace was re-established to the pre˙sen˙t’.26

While emphasizing the need for constant education of members, the

decree laments that a few cadres and members have ‘political problems

that they have not yet sincerely reported to the Party; a number of cadres

and members know of others who have problems in their political

histories or current question marks that have not yet been exposed to the
Party’.27 One resulting problem is that a ‘small number of members

speak out in a way that is without principle, without organization, to
express mistaken viewpoints regarding the Party’s policy’.28 These

comments could harm the Party’s solidarity and unity; they create

‘weaknesses that the enemy can take advantage of to attack the Party’s
core’.29 The remedy was to be a campaign that would not end until

December 1965, to investigate any cadre with an ‘unclear political

background’, paying special attention to cadres in ‘leading positions who
work in essential or secret functions’.30 Overall, Decree 68 seemed to be

a warning that debate at the Ninth Plenum would be restricted. The

‘mistaken viewpoints’ criticized in the decree were clearly linked to

‘revisionism’.

HANOI:BETWEEN MAO AND KHRUSHCHEV 71

Held in December 1963, just after the upheavals in Saigon seemed to
open a door to political contacts between North and South, the
Vietnamese party’s Ninth Plenum may well have shut the door to real
negotiations, at least for a time. Many aspects of what happened at this
plenum are unclear, including the number of party members present and
the extent to which Hồ Ch´ı Minh was excluded from its deliberations.31
But the decisions taken at this meeting changed the DRV’s foreign
policy and ‘line’ from support of Khrushchev’s policy of ‘peaceful co-
existence’ to a full alignment with the PRC’s line.

Hoa`ng Minh Ch´ınh, until the end of 1963 the head of the Institute
of Philosophy in Hanoi, who would in 1967 be imprisoned for his
‘revisionist’ views, described the announcement of the Ninth Plenum
decisions in an open letter to the Vietnamese National Assembly written
in 1993. He explained that at a meeting of 400 top cadres in January
1964, Trường Chinh made the following announcement:

due to the complicated situation within the international
communist movement, we cannot write out all the points
included in Resolution 9. You must pay attention to the fact the
real nature of Resolution 9 must be made known only by word of
mouth, that is: the external and internal policy of our Party and
government is in fundamental agreement with the policies of the
Party and government of China.32

Soviet-style ‘revisionism’ became a political crime within the DRV at
this time and ideas of ‘peaceful co-existence’ went out of style. Hoa`ng
Minh Chı´nh credited Leˆ Đức Tho, head of the powerful Party Control
Commission, and Trường Chinh w˙ ith spearheading this realignment of
the DRV’s policy.

Party First Secretary Leˆ Duẩn is also assumed to have supported it, in
part because he led a delegation to Moscow in January 1964, where he
delivered the long-winded speech detailing all the points on which
the Vietnamese were in disagreement with their Soviet comrades.33 But
the assumption made by recent histories of Hanoi politics during the
Vietnam War, that Leˆ Duẩn was single-handedly making Hanoi policy
in these years, is very unlikely to be accurate.34 For a start, there is no
guarantee that Leˆ Duẩn, a native of central Quảng Tri province, could
arrive in Hanoi from the South, and in the course of a f˙ew years come to

72 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

dominate the entrenched power structures there. These views seem to
reflect the current narrative in Hanoi, which is a reflection of the
configuration of power since 2006. This version of events tends to
downplay Trường Chinh’s role as an ideological extremist, or even as a
powerful leader. In any case, the available documents of Party history do
not support such an interpretation.

One of the results of the Ninth Plenum, as Nguyễn Va˘n Trấn writes,
was to create a climate of fear within the VWP. A Politburo committee
led by Leˆ Đức Tho and Interior Minister Trần Quốc Hoa`n, was
established to judg˙e and sentence party members for political
mistakes.35 From this time until Khrushchev’s ouster, relations between
the DRV and Russia remained cold. In 1964 students in the USSR were
sent home – a number of Vietnamese received asylum there at this time.
The overthrow of Nikita Khrushchev in October of that year began a
slow return to a closer Soviet– Vietnamese relationship. The visit of
Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin to Hanoi in February 1965, where he
witnessed an American bombing raid, led to a Soviet commitment to
supply heavy weaponry and military trainers to the DRV. As Hanoi’s
dependence on Soviet-supplied anti-aircraft guns increased, their
relations with their two communist patrons once again became more
balanced. By this point the official DRV policy on peace and
negotiations had become more hard-line. But well into 1964, the issue
of whether and when to negotiate with the USA seems to have remained
a contentious issue.

The political turn of 1963 in Hanoi would be repeated more brutally
in the summer of 1967. At that time, as plans were being made for
the Tết Offensive, party members accused of revisionism were arrested
in two waves, first in August and then in October– December 1967.36
Again, as we shall see in Chapter 5, one of the main points of
disagreement within the communist leadership would be the issue of
when to negotiate for peace.

The Ninth Plenum and the War in the South

How was this political turmoil in Hanoi connected to events in the
South? Did the changes in Hanoi immediately affect the chances for a
neutral South Vietnam or the prosecution of the liberation war? One
possibility to consider is that, in Hanoi’s eyes, after 1963 the role of a

HANOI:BETWEEN MAO AND KHRUSHCHEV 73

potential Third Segment in South Vietnam could be no more than part
of a propaganda campaign. But, over the years, it appears that a diversity
of opinions in the Politburo kept different options for reunification alive,
including the search for a negotiated solution that would leave the
Vietnamese the freedom to settle their own affairs.

The nuances of Leˆ Duẩn’s political thinking would certainly have an
impact on the revolution in South Vietnam. Some members of the
Politburo believed that the move towards China required that the
southern revolution become more radical in its policies towards
agriculture, for example, or the united front among various classes in
society. Recent sources on the southern resistance underline the refusal of
the southern leadership to promote a more radical land policy, as they
were encouraged to do by certain cadres in 1964– 5. The western
Mekong Delta, where Leˆ Duẩn had served as secretary and had built up
his political network, had avoided outright confiscation of the land of
most supporters of the revolution.37 Between 1961 and 1963 they had
distributed 916,467 hectares of land to 1.8 million peasants, of which
204,824 hectares was vacant or deserted land needing to be cleared. They
relied on persuasion to convince large landowners, some of whom
supported the resistance, to contribute land for the poorer peasants. This
was supplemented by land formerly owned by the French or deserted
by landowners who had fled the countryside. But after the Ninth
Plenum there was more talk of radical measures in this region, while in
An Giang there were examples of cadres organizing the poorest peasants
to ‘speak bitterness’, to begin the denunciation of cruel and oppressive
landlords as had happened in the North after 1953. In other provinces,
such as Mỹ Tho, Bac Lieˆu and Bến Tre, attempts to start the campaign
fizzled out when t˙he poorer peasants failed to respond. Nguyễn Chı´
Thanh, by then the head political commissar in the South, held a
meeting with the leaders of agriculture committees to persuade them to
begin the radical land reform. But by then, according to this account,
they had secured a telegram from Hồ Chı´ Minh, who encouraged Thanh
to give up the plan.38

Leˆ Duẩn had followed a policy, from the Geneva Conference onwards,
that encouraged solidarity with non-communists who opposed the Diệm
government, including the anti-Diệm Cao Ða`i and Hoa` Hảo fractions.
The idea that the resistance in the South should be governed by its own
political goals, those of the ‘national democratic revolution’, had been

74 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

firmly fixed in 1960.39 There is no evidence that he personally was ready
to renounce this policy in 1963 or 1964. On the contrary, until l965,
there is reason to believe that Leˆ Duẩn tried to balance the use of violence
in the South with continued emphasis on the NLF’s political platform
calling for a coalition government and a neutral South Vietnam.

He explains this policy at length in his July 1962 letter to Nguyễn
Va˘n Linh (Mười Cu´ c), at that time First Secretary of the Central Office
for the South.40 Using the recent Geneva negotiations on neutralizing
Laos as his point of departure, he explains that with a determined and
powerful enemy such as the United States, the southern guerrillas need
to be careful not to provoke them to increase their troop strength or
escalate the conflict. ‘The task of the world revolution’, he writes,

is to preserve the peace, to prevent the imperialists from provoking
war, to guarantee the security of people of all nations, but at
the same time, to push our struggle forcefully, to push back
imperialism step-by-step . . . The art of leading a revolution is to
promote the development of these two aspects to the necessary or
appropriate levels . . . Based on the balance of forces in Vietnam, in
South East Asia and the world, we have defined our needs – to
fight back against American imperialism, to make their policy of
invading South Vietnam fail by means of defeating their puppet
government and establishing an independent and neutral
government in South Vietnam. (pp. 53, 56)

With the US and Diệm governments becoming increasingly isolated,
both within Vietnam and worldwide, he claims, ‘we can force the enemy
to negotiate’. ‘Within these negotiations, if we put forth a demand that
is reasonable (on the right level), the enemy will see that although they
are defeated, they have lost to a degree that is bearable, that does not
place them in danger; and then we can also agree to lose’ (p. 64). At this
point, then, Leˆ Duẩn believed that by means of both military and
political pressure on Diệm, the communists could convince the USA to
settle for a coalition government in South Vietnam. After March of
1965, with the deployment of US forces in Vietnam, this stance would
be overtaken by the new reality.

There is more evidence that in spite of the changing winds in Hanoi
in 1963, the southern resistance was still hoping to establish a neutral

HANOI:BETWEEN MAO AND KHRUSHCHEV 75

South Vietnam throughout 1964. Perhaps they even hoped that
eventually they would receive US aid. This is demonstrated in an
interview that Trần Bach Đằng, the Party’s political organizer for the
Saigon– Chợ Lớn –Gia˙ Ðinh zone, gave to Wilfred Burchett at some
point during the chaotic r˙eign of Nguyễn Kha´nh.41 He stated that ‘we
will fight as long as necessary until peace, independence, neutrality and
democracy. The leaders not only of the Front (NLF), but of the Party
support these four points. This is not a propaganda trick. [They are]
based on scientific analysis of the situation; we find the policy of
neutrality just and realist.’

The idea of a ‘neutral’ South Vietnam, to be created by a coalition
government, has long been dismissed as a communist ploy to get the
Americans out of Vietnam. This may well be what lay at the heart of
this peace platform. David Elliott puts it this way: ‘The form of power
in such a coalition would be an alliance of revolutionary forces with
various urban elements with no countrywide power base, thus
ensuring the dominance of the Party from its rural base – assuming
that external support was denied to its rivals, which was the point of the
neutralization solution.’42 From the American point of view it was
equivalent to handing power directly to the communists. The problem
for historians to grapple with is that this solution appears to have had
considerable appeal in South Vietnam, not just in rural areas but also
among the urban population that had passively or actively supported the
Việt Minh during the anti-French war. As we saw in the preceding
chapter, the idea of a neutral South Vietnam continued to pop up during
the short interregnum of General Dương Va˘n Minh, as it would in the
last months of Nguyễn Kha´nh’s time in power. After all, with so many
families divided between the two sides, the possibility that they could
find a way to co-exist and reconcile their differences did not seem
outlandish or unrealistic.

Although it is unlikely that General Minh and his closest
collaborators shared the NLF’s concept of neutrality, they did share
with southern leaders on the ‘other side’ the desire to find a political
solution to the war. The United States, in acquiescing to the coup that
overthrew President Diệm and his brother, appears to have had little
understanding of the political outlook of the military men who put the
coup plan into operation. William Bundy described the situation as a
‘fantastic vacuum of information’.43

76 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Conclusion

The official NLF programme continued to call for a neutral South

Vietnam in 1964. As they continued a build-up of their own military

force in the South, they also kept the door open to a political solution

that would have allowed the Americans to save face and the Vietnamese

to find their own way out of the conflict. As late as February 1965,

Leˆ Duẩn continued to elaborate methods to make this happen in his

communications with his comrades in the South.

Leˆ Duẩn’s letter of February 1965 to Nguyễn Ch´ı Thanh was written

at a moment when he believed that the South Vietnamese army was
losing faith in American military tactics and even disintegrating.44

US advisers in southern Vietnam tended to share this opinion. He also

considered that the USA would not want to get bogged down in

Vietnam (p. 72). For these reasons, he advised that the southern leaders

should aim to bring about the collapse of the ARVN, but at the same

time find a shrewd way of facilitating an American departure without a

loss of face (p. 73). He was convinced that the political and armed

opposition movements in the South were stronger than they had been at

the end of the French– Việt Minh war (p. 74).

By this time, however, Douglas Pike, the US government expert on

the southern communist movement, had picked up what he believed

were signs of a division between the NLF leadership and the Central

Committee on the issue of a negotiated peace vs a full-scale war. He cited

a July 1964 article in the Party journal H˙oˆc T˙aˆ p that makes the hard-line
viewpoint unequivocally:

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 treatises and accords . . . It is impossible . . . to count on ‘talks’
and ‘negotiations’ with [the imperialists] as advocated by the
modern revisionists . . . The liberation of South Vietnam can be
settled only by force.45

These conflicting viewpoints on how to reunify Vietnam show that
there was a window of opportunity to avoid a US war in Vietnam in

HANOI:BETWEEN MAO AND KHRUSHCHEV 77

1963, one that had not yet closed by the start of early 1965. But after
the Ninth Plenum and the beginning of the campaign against
revisionism, it would become more difficult to find Vietnamese
interlocutors in the DRV willing to engage in talk of a negotiated
peace. Where the fault lines lay on this particular issue is difficult to
determine, but it appears that the differences among the communist
leadership were more than tactical.



CHAPTER 4

THE BUDDHISTS AND THE
URBAN ANTI-WAR
MOVEMENT, 1964—7

One attitude that almost all points of the political spectrum seem
to share, from extremist Catholics to the most pliable Buddhist,
is a fear that the Great Powers will both conduct the war and
negotiate a settlement without paying much consideration to the
needs and desires of the Vietnamese people, north and south.1

David Marr

The year 1964 was a time of chaotic political struggle in South Vietnam.
In the end, the United States’ determination to make a stand against
communism on its territory overwhelmed all the other forces swirling
about in this political maelstrom. By March of 1965, when the first
US combat forces arrived on the beaches of Central Vietnam, it was
clear that the Americans were not leaving and that only a government
willing to wage war against North Vietnam could survive under
their sponsorship. The Buddhists, intellectuals and anti-war students
improvised an impressive counter-attack against the US-approved
military government, and forced the generals to hold an election for,
first, a constituent assembly, and then in 1967, a civilian presidential
government. The anger over the rigged results, however, would lead to a
new level of political polarization by 1968. By that time many activists
had renounced their commitment to non-violence and the Buddhist
movement had splintered.

80 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

The USA Chooses Nguyễn Kha´nh

A new face dominated southern politics in 1964 – General Nguyễn
Kha´nh, a Buddhist from a southern landowning family, with a goatee
that failed to convey the air of gravitas his position required. Trained in
both French and US military colleges, he was promoted to Major
General in 1960. The Americans did their best to transform him into a
popular saviour of the South, but even he ended up flirting with
neutralism and thus losing their trust.

He staged a coup in the early morning hours of 30 January 1964,
with American approbation and support. He announced that he had
taken power because the Minh government was ‘paving the way for
neutralism and thus selling out the country’.2 Kha´nh’s tough stand
against the communists would do little to halt their advances in South
Vietnam, however. A US Defense Department report stated in March
1964 that the Việt Cộng controlled 40 per cent of the territory and up to
90 per cent in several Mekong Delta provinces.3 The communists were
able to raise taxes in a much larger area than their village control
indicated. General Kha´nh’s response to this dire position was to promote
the idea of attacks on North Vietnam. On 19 July, in a major address to
the nation, he announced his support for the policy of ‘Bắc tiến’ or
‘advancing on the North’. His Air Force commander from northern
Vietnam, the boyish Air Vice Marshall Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, supported this
declaration. Kỳ let it be known that his forces were training for bombing
attacks on the North, and on 23 July announced that ‘South Vietnamese
commando teams had already been engaged in sabotage missions inside
North Vietnam, “by air, sea and land”’.4 In view of this admission, it is
surprising how few observers linked these South Vietnamese actions to
the skirmish with an American destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin, which
occurred only nine days later.

The student and Buddhist opponents of Diệm were shocked to see
what they hoped would become a social revolution change course so
abruptly. After the success of their anti-Diệm campaign, they were not
about to stand by passively as General Kha´nh steered South Vietnam
back onto the path to war. His early actions appeared to be a repudiation
of the Minh junta’s goal of bringing the regime closer to the people; he
removed from power the main figures of the coup against Diệm and
promoted younger, American-trained officers and civilian members of

THE BUDDHISTS AND THE URBAN ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT 81

tHheeadcoonfseSrtvaateti,vwehĐila˙eihVisiệctloPseasrttyc.olGlaebnoerraatlorMs iwnehrewaarsremsteaddeona powerless
charges of

plotting a pro-neutralist coup.

Kha´nh was known to court pro-Diệm Catholics and anti-communist

Buddhists as well. His government appeared to the anti-Diệm forces as

a restoration of the Cần Lao party, Ngoˆ Đ`ınh Nhu’s tool of political

control. A CIA report of August 1964 admitted that there was some merit

to this accusation: ‘much of Kha´nh’s real power within the Military

Revolutionary Council (MRC) and over key armed forces units is
dependent upon officers objectionable to the Buddhists’, it stated.5 Kha´nh

made some gestures to appease the anti-Diệmists, including the execution

of Ngoˆ Đı`nh Cần, the Ngoˆ brother who had wielded power in Central

Vietnam before the 1963 coup. But the junta’s civilian opponents did not

let this distract them from their preparations for future political battles.

This preparation involved, first of all, building stronger organizations.

The Saigon students had held a congress soon after Diệm’s fall to

set up a new Student Association, to replace the police-controlled

organization of the Diệm years. The MRC gave them the complex at

4 Duy Taˆn near the Saigon cathedral, to serve as their headquarters.

Nguyễn Hữu Tha´i, a student from a Catholic family studying at the

School of Architecture, was elected president of the new association one

month after the anti-Diệm coup. At the end of January 1964 this new

body held a demonstration to let General Kha´nh know where they stood.

The speech that Tha´i delivered on the steps of the Saigon opera house

hammered home the point:

We students will stand by our dedication to the ideals of the
struggle against the dictator Ngoˆ Đı`nh Diệm. We warn everyone
who would attempt to restore that old arbitrary rule that they
themselves will receive the same tragic fate of dictators hated by
their own people. We solemnly promise to our compatriots that
we will never yield to violence and oppression.6

They set up a steering committee to coordinate the fight against General
Kha´nh, as Tha´i explains in his memoirs. Although the first student

demonstrations were orderly marches, the relationship with the military
junta devolved into one of open warfare, as unknown forces stirred up
trouble between the Catholic refugees and the students and Buddhists.7

82 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

The Buddhists also took advantage of their victory in 1963 to
strengthen their organization. There is little doubt that one of their
aims was to increase their influence on South Vietnam’s political
future. At a conference held in Saigon’s Xa´-Lợi Pagoda in early January
1964, they adopted the name, the ‘Unified Buddhist Association of
Vietnam’. This grouping combined the members of the former General
Association of Vietnamese Buddhism and the ‘Inter-sect Committee
for the Defense of Buddhism’. This latter group had been formed after
the May 1963 incidents in Huế, to group the more numerous
Mahayana Buddhists with those from the Theravada sect, mainly of
Cambodian origin, and a few other independent groups of Buddhist
practitioners. A 14 May decree recognized the Unified Buddhist
Association as a religious organization, giving them the status and
advantages that both the colonial regime and the Diệm government had
reserved for Catholicism.8 They nominated their own Buddhist chaplain
to the Army, Th´ıch Taˆm Gia´c, and not a day passed without the
announcement of ‘the laying of a cornerstone for a school, a kindergarten, a
rest house or a medical dispensary’ sponsored by the Buddhists.9

The French consul in Danang reported that the Buddhist hierarchy
had been both ‘surprised and intrigued’ by General de Gaulle’s August
1963 intervention in the debate on South Vietnam’s future.
An influential member of the Buddhist community there (not named
in the Consul’s report) believed that de Gaulle’s statement ‘coincided
exactly with the ambitions of the Buddhist hierarchy, which since
the fall of the Ngoˆ Đ`ınh Diệm regime had been working towards
reunification of the country, within a neutralist framework’.10 Although
the Buddhists saw this as a distant goal, they were ready to begin
spreading the idea of neutrality and passive resistance to the war
among their followers. The monk Thı´ch Tr´ı Quang was, in the French
Consul’s words, ‘presiding over this vast propaganda operation’, with the
authority he had gained during the previous summer. Taking advantage
of the favourable situation at the end of 1963, Tr´ı Quang was overseeing
the creation of new Buddhist-sponsored organizations, from kindergar-
tens to sports associations, Buddhist boy and girl scout groups, student
associations, women’s groups and trade associations for carpenters,
masons and pedicab drivers. Most of this organizing took place in
Central Vietnam, where the role of Catholicism during the Diệm years
had been particularly offensive to the Buddhists.

THE BUDDHISTS AND THE URBAN ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT 83

By 1966, American-Japanese journalist Takashi Oka would write that
the Buddhist organization in the old capital of Huế had been ‘for years
a superbly disciplined and all-encompassing body’.11 Tr´ı Quang, the
heart of this movement, was often described as a political monk.
According to Oka, many people believed that his ambition was the
‘renaissance of Buddhism in all fields – religious, cultural and social as
well as political’. As a young man he had led a movement to reform the
Buddhist clergy, which aimed to raise intellectual standards and enforce
the rule of poverty for all bonzes.12 No one, to this day, has ever accused
Trı´ Quang, who was still living in a Saigon pagoda in 2015, of breaking
his vows of poverty. Over the years, many Americans and Saigon leaders
suspected that he was a communist, in part because his Zen master at
Huế’s Ba´o Quốc pagoda, Th´ıch Tr´ı Độ, had remained in the North after a
trip to Hanoi in 1946, to head the government-controlled ‘Unified
Buddhist Association’ (Hội Phật Gia´o Thống Nhất) in the DRV.13
However, that suspicion would never be confirmed and other Americans
were convinced by Tr´ı Quang’s own protestations of anti-communism.14
After 1975 Trı´ Quang was held under house arrest in Ấn Quang Pagoda
by the communist regime; at some time after 2000, he moved to another
pagoda in the Phu´ Nhuận district, where his contacts were believed to be
closely monitored.

General Kha´nh’s leadership was gradually undermined by the growing
strength of the NLF in the countryside and the outbreak of hostilities
between the Buddhists and Catholics. During the Diệm years the
Catholics had shown a ‘proselytizing zeal that was often maladroit and
excessive’, the French Charge´ in Saigon wrote to his Foreign Minister in
July 1964.15 After the November 1963 coup, the Buddhists in some cases
found ways to take revenge and settle scores: Catholic administrators from
the previous regime had been removed from office, while there were cases
of churches being sacked and some hated administrators being murdered.
After some of the Diệm-era Catholic civil servants were returned to power
by General Kha´nh, the Buddhists continued to make their ambitions
clear: on the anniversary of Buddha’s Birthday in May 1964, one of their
senior leaders, Th´ıch Tinh Khiết, declared pointedly that the work of
‘defending the faith and˙ building a national religion’ had not yet been
completed’. By July and August, one Western observer commented, ‘there
are now fanatics in both camps and any ill-considered gesture could lead
Vietnam to the brink of a war of religion’.16

84 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

The announcement on 7 August by General Kha´nh, that he would
assume broad emergency powers as Chief of State, turned out to be just
such an ‘ill-considered gesture’. This declaration and the hurriedly
written constitution that followed on 16 August came after the
‘incidents’ in the Gulf of Tonkin, which led the US Congress to pass the
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, also on 7 August. This resolution gave the
US president the power to determine when US military action would
be necessary to assist any member of the South East Asia Treaty
Organization, including South Vietnam. Thus General Kha´nh’s step to
take on war-making powers was an echo of the policy being set in
Washington to prepare for war. There is now compelling evidence,
including the testimony of witnesses, that the second incident on
4 August never occurred.17 Yet this supposed act of aggression by the
DRV provided the basis for the resolution that would serve as the US
declaration of war against the Hanoi government.

General’s Khanh’s declaration provoked more days of demon-
strations led by both student and Buddhist activists, who since January
had been fighting to preserve their civil liberties. Although the
organizers intended these to be orderly expressions of popular
discontent, the large numbers of protesters inevitably allowed some
violent activists to penetrate their ranks. Whether these were communist-
organized thugs as the Americans claimed, or Cần Lao provocateurs as
the Buddhists maintained, or both, is now impossible to establish. But
the large numbers of people gathered in the streets were often
described in the Western press, including the New York Times, as
constituting ‘violent mobs’. This, of course, made it easy to misrepresent
the goal of the protests, which was to defend the democratic rights of the
RVN’s citizens.

After one student demonstration the Saigon radio announced that the
students were ready to accept Kha´nh’s need for emergency powers. The
students became so enraged by this distortion of their position that they
attacked the radio station, forcing the director to flee. The following day,
a mob attacked and burned the inside of the student headquarters on
Duy Taˆn St. The New York Times identified the attackers as ‘a band of
teenagers, led by men said to be their teachers’, while the students
described them as ‘bands of extremist Catholics’ transported by military
trucks from the Hố Nai refugee settlement outside of Saigon.18 This
attack provoked more students to join the following demonstration,

THE BUDDHISTS AND THE URBAN ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT 85

prepared during ‘teach-ins and sleepless nights in pagodas and schools’
around the city.19

The Buddhist and student leaders felt vindicated when on 25 August a
crowd of demonstrators stretching two miles through the city converged
outside General Kha´nh’s office near the Saigon zoo, provoking him to come
out and declare to the sea of people that he would revoke the charter giving
him emergency powers. This was a clear capitulation, one that increased
the Buddhists’ political leverage and determination considerably. But it
was accompanied by more religious violence, including street fighting in
Danang between Buddhist and Catholic students, and the reported
burning of a Catholic village near Danang by a Buddhist mob. This
communal violence, not seen in Vietnam since the early days of French
encroachment, continued until 27 August, when the MRC appointed a
new caretaker government, a triumvirate composed of generals Kha´nh,
Minh and Trần Thien Khieˆm. As Robert Topmiller explains it, this
combination brought˙together the major power groups: ‘Minh, favored by
the Buddhists due to his support for neutrality; Khieˆm, the Catholic leader
of the Đai Việt faction in the army; and Kha´nh, supported by the United
States bu˙t temporarily aligned with the Buddhists’.20

The Unified Buddhists issued a communique´ on 31 August to
explain their position in the face of this outbreak of religious warfare.
They described 27 August as a ‘day of sorrowful events’. ‘After so many
incidents which occurred in so many places in the country’, they wrote,
‘the Unified Buddhist Association believes it necessary to make public
the following points’:

We praise the goodwill of the official Catholic leaders and hope to
be able to collaborate with them to attain our goal of solidarity, as
we have put it into practice these past few days.

Our method has been, is, and will be based on the spirit of non-
violence, patience and tenacity . . . [T]his method cannot be the
cause of the recent incidents. The Buddhists and those who love
liberty, justice and the nation have been provoked in an insane
manner and the most savage acts have succeeded one another,
especially on August 27.

All these barbaric acts have been fomented by the servants of
the Cần Lao party, who have abused religion to disorient the
people’s struggle . . .

86 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

If by 27 October [within two months] the promises made [to
establish a civilian government] have been betrayed . . . we
envisage the following steps:

1. Direct liaison with the government to solve urgent problems.
2. Pupils and students will boycott their classes and the markets

will close.
3. We will not cooperate with the government, if after October

27 1964, the calumny and propaganda and vengeance against
Buddhism is carried on, under a regime that is not truly
revolutionary and democratic, as promised . . .
4. There must be a declaration that all those who took part in the
Buddhist actions of the past year are innocent.
5. . . .
6. . . . The most urgent task now is to resolve the persecution of
Buddhists and compatriots committed in zones near to Saigon
prefecture. This persecution is at this moment being tolerated
by local authorities, as it was on August 27 . . .
7. . . .
8. We are advising our fellow Buddhists to support General
Nguyễn Kha´nh. But the condition for our recommendation . . .
must be a true revolution and democracy . . . we repeat this
because this is the main aspiration of the population, the basis
on which to resolve all problems . . .21

This communique´ was signed by Thı´ch Taˆm Chaˆu, a monk native to
North Vietnam and head of the Association for the Propagation of the
Faith (Viện Hoa´ Đao, the executive arm of Buddhism). He was seen as a
potential rival to Tr˙´ı Quang. At this moment, however, the two appeared
to be of one mind.

The CIA viewed the unstable political situation as

particularly vulnerable to both Việt Cộng exploitation and to
French exploitation in furtherance of a negotiated settlement in
Vietnam. The professional character of the agitation may in fact
reflect some Communist or French hand in the events. Overtones
of anti-American sentiment have occasionally appeared during the
demonstrations along with other real or fancied grievances . . .

THE BUDDHISTS AND THE URBAN ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT 87

A Saigon University official recently told US Embassy officers that
the attraction of a neutralist solution is now very strong in both
student and intellectual circles . . .22

In fact, even some Americans could see the virtues of neutralism. A CIA

‘think piece’ was leaked to journalists around this time, a paper that set

out the advantages of a neutral solution to the war. Written by a member

of the agency’s Board of National Estimates, Willard Matthias, the paper

raised the ‘serious doubt that victory can be won’. The author believed

that ‘There is also a chance that political evolution within the country

and developments upon the world scene could lead to some kind of

negotiated settlement based upon neutralization.’ According to the New

York Times, the author’s views on a negotiated settlement to the war,

while not officially endorsed, ‘were widely held in the Government and
the subject of recurrent official discussions’.23

The autumn of 1964 proved inauspicious for all the new governing

combinations tested in Saigon. Pressure from the right led tdoeaflĐeca˙tieVd iệbty-
inspired coup attempt in September, which was easily

younger officers, chiefly Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, who remained, for the time

being, loyal to General Kha´nh. After that, attempts to create civilian

cabinets proved to be fleeting – the former Saigon mayor, Trần Va˘n

Hương, installed as prime minister on 24 October, lasted three months,

but was opposed by the Buddhists from the beginning. He worsened his

position by declaring martial law and imprisoning large numbers of

student protesters. By late December he had become a figurehead, as

another coup, this time led by Kha´nh, established a new Armed Forces

Council that held the actual power. With General Nguyễn Cha´nh Thi,

the commander of I Corps in Central Vietnam, and Nguyễn Cao Kỳ as

the council’s other leaders, this combination gained the favour of the

Buddhist power structure. Ironically, the civilian leader Hương now

received the backing of the American Embassy, which won him few

friends among the opposition. Ambassador Maxwell Taylor’s urging that

Hương resist Kha´nh’s coup elicited a new wave of anti-Americanism,

now expressed by Kha´nh himself. In public statements Kha´nh criticized

Ambassador Taylor, implying that American policy ‘had imposed a new

colonialism on South Vietnam’, as the New York Times reported. The

same Times story quoted a Vietnamese officer as complaining, ‘There’s an
American looking over my shoulder every time I turn around.’24

88 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

The political base of the Buddhists continued to grow, as they
wielded their forces to oppose US policy. Intellectuals, students and
professionals also joined what was becoming a single-issue movement
focused on peace. With the impetus coming from organizers in the NLF,
middle-class Saigonese formed a Movement for Self-Determination
(Phong Tra`o Daˆn Tộc Tự Quyết) in late 1964, out of which grew a
Committee to Defend the Peace, in the early days of 1965. The Self-
Determination Movement’s manifesto called for ‘America for
Americans, South Vietnam for South Vietnamese. We demand that
the NLF and the government negotiate peace between the two
brothers. South Vietnam must have the right to determine its own
future.’25 The Director General of the National Sugar Company,
Trương Như Tảng, was one of the instigators of these developments.
He was also one of the founding members of the National Liberation
Front, one who would never join the communist party. Tảng’s memoirs
describe the alacrity with which his friends among Saigon’s elite
responded to his invitation to campaign for peace.

The leading figure in the Committee to Defend the Peace was
Dr Pham Va˘n Huyền, a northerner who had worked as Diệm’s
Commi˙ssioner for Refugees in 1954. The other leaders included Toˆn
Thất Dương Ky, a professor of history originally from Huế, and an
offshoot of Vietn˙am’s royal family; the journalist Cao Minh Chiếm and
the artist Đặng Va˘n Kỳ. Their window for action was a narrow one – the
Committee’s first press conference on 1 February 1965 was broken up by
the police. Dr Huyền was arrested on the spot, while the other leaders
were rounded up a few days later.26 Dr Huyền, journalist Chieˆm and
Professor Dương Ky would be expelled to North Vietnam, handed over
in the Demilitarized˙ Zone (DMZ) on the Bến Hải Bridge, shortly after
their arrests. The authorities in the North allowed Dr Huyền, an elderly
man, to travel to France, where he would link up with Trần Va˘n Hữu’s
neutralist movement. Ironically, Prof. Dương Ky was the only Party
member among the three expelled; he would not r˙eturn to his family in
the South until May 1975. Dr Huyền’s daughter, known by her
husband’s name as Mrs Ngoˆ Ba´ Tha`nh, was one of those arrested after the
press conference. A polyglot lawyer, she had studied at Columbia
University, as well as the Sorbonne and in Barcelona. She would become
one of the most fiery and long-suffering members of the Saigon ‘Third
Segment’ and peace movement.

THE BUDDHISTS AND THE URBAN ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT 89

After days of uncertainty, a new civilian prime minister, Dr Phan Huy
Qua´t, was installed on 16 February. His appointment followed the first
US bombings of the DRV since the Gulf of Tonkin incident. These were
explained as retaliation for a communist attack on a US base near Pleiku
in the Central Highlands. Dr Qua´t, although an adviser to the Đai Việt
party, possessed considerable prestige in Central Vietnam and ˙found
favour with the Buddhist hierarchy. The Buddhists had now explicitly
become a force for peace and began to demand the formation of a
‘reconciliation committee’ to negotiate with the two sides, North and
South. Prime Minister Qua´t seemed to be moving closer to their
thinking when he stated on 25 February that ‘Vietnam is suffering too
much. We want to end the war with honor.’27

But once again the balance of power shifted in favour of the
Americans. A strangely muddled coup that followed Dr Qua´t’s
installation resulted in an agreement for Nguyễn Kha´nh to step down
and go into exile. That left the younger officers, in particular Nguyễn
Cao Kỳ and Nguyễn Va˘n Thiệu, to assert their power within the
Armed Forces Council. A young Catholic convert from Phan Thiết on
the south-central coast, Thiệu became the council’s chairman. (He had
been promoted from Colonel to Brigadier General for his role in the
coup against Diệm.) Now, with the generals in control of the situation,
Dr Qua´t declared on 1 March that there could be no negotiated
settlement and no peace until ‘the Communists end the war they have
provoked and stop their infiltration’.28 The start of Operation Rolling
Thunder, the US bombing of the DRV, began in March with no formal
discussions between the South Vietnamese civilian leadership and the
American military. The Americans hoped that this would be the magic
charm to unite the southern politicians and military men, to boost
their morale for the fight ahead. The landing of the first US ground
forces in Danang on 8 March likewise happened without a joint
decision-making process – the operation was already underway when
the US Embassy informed Dr Qua´t. ‘By the same token’, as Qua´t’s
special assistant Bu` i Diễm recalls, ‘the decision to use US airpower in
South Vietnam proper (as distinct from North Vietnam) was also made
without any special notice being taken.’29 In Bu` i Diệm’s account of
those weeks, he makes plain the gap that existed between US
Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, who originally opposed the involvement
of US forces, and the military planners, such as General William