Vietnam. Max Hastings
ideological ties with China and the USSR, whereas his nationalist rivals knew little of the world outside Indochina. He conducted an extraordinarily skilful balancing act between the two great communist powers, especially after their own relationship turned glacial in the late 1950s.
Hanoi’s politburo was stunned by Nikita Khrushchev’s February 1956 speech to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, denouncing the cult of personality even as Vietnam’s leader was being promoted as a near-deity. Most of Ho’s senior comrades were Stalinists, who had mourned their hero’s 1953 death ‘with tears streaming down our cheeks’, in the words of a Party functionary. Now they were disgusted by Moscow’s renunciation of a military showdown with the West, in favour of a mere economic and ideological contest. The 1956 Hungarian uprising confirmed North Vietnam’s leadership in its view that any indulgence of dissent risked unleashing challenges to its authority.
A Canadian diplomat reported from Hanoi: ‘There is little point in speaking of the possibilities of an economic collapse of North Vietnam, since there is no economic structure.’ At independence, among a population of thirteen million people, there were only thirty qualified engineers and a handful of factories: the country’s rulers were too preoccupied with their domestic predicament to have any stomach for aggressive action in the South. Eighty thousand troops were demobilised and dispatched to swell the rural labour force. Both China and the Soviet Union made it plain that they opposed any armed provocation which might alarm the Americans.
Evidence remains meagre about Hanoi’s 1954–57 Party power struggles. It seems nonetheless plain that Ho Chi Minh and Giap wanted no new war: they believed they could secure a unified communist Vietnam without fighting for it. Their oft-rehearsed commitment to achieving this peacefully was – at that stage – sincere. Other rising men, however, thought differently. As they watched the evolution of Diem’s government in Saigon, they saw scant hope of securing their just inheritance of a unified Vietnam, other than through armed struggle.
2 ‘THE ONLY BOY WE GOT’
The 1954 exodus from North Vietnam was matched by a lesser one from the South. Communist troops marched away, often after emotional send-offs from the communities in which they had been based. In 1954–55, a total of 173,900 Vietminh fighters and 86,000 of their dependants ‘regrouped’ to the North. One veteran revolutionary paid a farewell visit to the Mekong delta before reluctantly obeying the order to join the migration. She told comrades who were staying behind, ‘See you in two years’ – meaning when the country was reunited after the communists’ assured election victory. It became a familiar gesture for Vietminh veterans to hold up two fingers, signifying the time lapse before inevitable fulfilment of their dream. COSVN secretary Le Duan’s wife Nga was pregnant with their second child when her husband dispatched her north on a Polish ship, along with the family of his close comrade Le Duc Tho. He himself stayed. To the end of his days, Le Duan argued that Ho Chi Minh’s two historic mistakes were to acquiesce first in the 1945 return of the French, then in the 1954 partition. He and other hardliners believed that a unified, communist Vietnam would be achieved only by fighting for it. His parting words to Nga were, ‘Tell Ho it will be twenty years before we see each other again.’
In violation of the Geneva Accords, Hanoi ordered ten thousand Vietminh to remain undercover in the South, insurance against a resumption of the armed struggle. Most of the guerrillas who marched North were bewildered and indeed enraged by partition, and became no less so after crossing the new ‘Demilitarized Zone’ – the ‘DMZ’. They experienced hardships greater than they had known in the relatively well-fed South, and many were also gnawed by family separations. Le Duan’s wife found herself living with two small children in a room above a Hanoi garage, writing a column called ‘Vietnamese Women’ for the Party newspaper, and knowing nothing of the fate of her husband at COSVN. Some Southerners proved defiant of Northern authority, and almost all harboured a single ambition: to return whence they had come. Some cadres’ children were meanwhile dispatched to further education in Russia or China.
The new South Vietnam and its government enjoyed considerable advantages: the Mekong delta was the most productive rice-growing area in South-East Asia; the countryside was relatively unscarred; while the Vietminh had commanded widespread support as independence fighters, there was much less enthusiasm for communism; and the Americans were eager that the country should become a showcase for what they called ‘the free world’. A South Vietnamese army officer later reflected on those days: ‘We took our lives for granted. We were not rich, but we were comfortable and had some freedoms. We were soft, as South Vietnamese have always been soft, because they live on rich land. Northerners are tough, because they come from a tough, poor place.’ An exile from the North who rose high in the Saigon civil service wrote: ‘For many of us … the years 1956–60 were among the best of our lives – we were full of expectation and promise.’ Peasant girl Phung Thi Ly, born in 1949, recalled her rustic childhood as ‘a paradise, full of tropical birds and buffalo; dogs and chickens and pigs that we called our pets; rushing rivers to swim in; and wide fields where we could run and laugh’.
Ho Chi Minh had secured mastery of the North after an ordeal by fire. Ngo Dinh Diem, by contrast, was merely the arbitrary nominee of playboy head of state Bao Dai, accorded grudging nods first by the French, then by the Americans. He had some of the qualities that make great leaders: courage, honesty, fluency, passionate commitment to his country. Unfortunately he was also a Catholic religious zealot; blindly devoted to a greedy and unscrupulous family; imbued with messianic faith in his own rightness; nostalgic for a non-existent past; insensitive to the needs and aspirations of his people.
Life under Diem seemed to most Vietnamese a mere continuation of colonialism. The big Americans who pervaded his life – and death – emphasised his own physical slightness. Born in 1901, for a time he favoured a career in the priesthood like that of his brother Ngo Dinh Thuc, whom he persuaded the Vatican to make archbishop of Hue. Instead, however, he entered the civil service and by twenty-five was a provincial governor. In 1933 the French caused Bao Dai to make him minister of the interior, a role in which he lasted only three months, because the colonial power would not invest any Vietnamese with real authority such as he demanded. It was then that he made a remark later hailed as prophetic: ‘The communists will defeat us, not by virtue of their strength, but because of our weakness.’ For a time during World War II he was held prisoner by the Vietminh, who also murdered one of his brothers and a nephew. Diem met Ho Chi Minh, who sought his cooperation, only to be rebuffed. ‘You are a criminal who has burned and destroyed the country,’ Diem claimed that he told Ho. ‘My brother and his son are only two of the hundreds you have killed.’ The communists later lamented Ho’s folly in freeing him.
Following a Vietminh assassination attempt, in 1950 Diem left Vietnam. He spent his first two years of exile as an inmate of Maryknoll Seminary in Lakewood, New Jersey, often performing the humblest domestic chores, but also gaining introductions to such influential fellow-Catholics as Cardinal Spellman, Supreme Court justice William Douglas, together with Senators Mike Mansfield and John F. Kennedy, whom he impressed with the fervour of his hatred for both colonialism and communism. In 1953 he moved to a Benedictine monastery in Belgium, where he made important French connections, and somehow also won the trust of Bao Dai, in exile outside Cannes. Diem’s astute younger brother Nhu, later notorious as his grey eminence, played an important role in steering him towards power.
Diem’s appointment as prime minister, followed by a low-key return to Saigon on 26 June 1954, neither corrupted his asceticism nor diminished his wildly exaggerated self-belief. Religious faith and moral conceit convinced him that he ruled by a divine right as assured as that professed by King Charles I three centuries earlier on the throne of England. Diem viewed South Vietnam’s security entirely as a military problem: his response to it was the 1955 introduction of conscription. He showed no interest in either cultivation of new friends or reconciliation with old foes. He pronounced decisions and demanded fulfilment of them, himself working sixteen hours a day. Obsessed with detail, he might lecture a visiting ambassador or foreign journalist for four hours without a comfort break; he sometimes signed exit visas personally. Whereas Ho Chi Minh was a notably witty conversationalist, Diem was devoid of humour, especially about himself. As for money – national income