No More Vietnams Read online

  There is almost nothing in Ho’s biography to indicate that he placed nationalism above communism. In 1911, at the age of 21, he left Vietnam. While most Vietnamese nationalists exiled themselves to Japan, he went to France. Nine years later, he was a founding member of the French Communist party. He once wrote in the party’s newspaper, L’ Humanite, that nationalism, if left uncontrolled, was a “dangerous phenomenon” that could threaten the spread of communism in colonial areas. In 1923, the Soviets brought him to Moscow, where he was trained and indoctrinated as an agent of the Communist International. The Comintern, as it was called, demanded absolute fidelity to the Soviet Union, even if this required its members to betray their native lands. He spent the next two decades either in Moscow studying the science of revolution at Lenin University or in Southeast Asia practicing it for the Comintern.

  Ho formed alliances with virtually all of Vietnam’s nationalist groups, but he never put the common interest above his own. He cooperated with true nationalists only if he could advance his ambitions by doing so. When their interests collided with his, he destroyed them. In 1925, he betrayed Vietnam’s most prominent nationalist, Phan Boi Chau, to the French secret police. Communist histories state that Phan walked right into a trap. But they do not mention that it was Ho who had set it up, for a payoff of 100,000 piasters. At the time, Ho justified his treachery by telling his comrades that Phan was a nationalist, not a Communist, and that as such he would have been a rival in the future.

  Those arguing that Ho was a nationalist always point to the appeals he made to the United States on behalf of Vietnam after World War II. Many know that he repeatedly offered to ally himself with us in exchange for our recognizing an independent Vietnam under his leadership. But few know the entire story. His actions were actually nothing more than an ingenious ruse to propel himself to prominence and power in Vietnam.

  Ho was virtually unknown to the Vietnamese people during World War II. He knew that to win the postwar struggle for power, he first had to win the support of a foreign power, whether it be the United States, China, or France. He ingratiated himself with several American intelligence officers stationed in Vietnam, plying them with information, charm, and flattery. His tactic worked. They supplied Ho with American weapons, which came in handy when he seized power in Hanoi shortly after the war. They also bombarded Washington with memoranda urging that the United States back the Viet Minh.

  On September 2, 1945, when Ho delivered the speech proclaiming the creation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, his newfound American friends loyally stood by his side and even saluted the Communist flag. In his remarks, Ho quoted from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But Ho’s actions spoke louder than his words. Three days later, his government outlawed Vietnam’s largest nationalist political parties. Nevertheless, one O.S.S. officer later remembered Ho as “an awfully sweet guy.”

  Some believe Ho really wanted to be on our side. But the truth is that Ho wanted it to appear that we were on his side. Our association with him had a decisive impact on events. For the Vietnamese people, who trusted and believed in the United States, our officials’ presence at Ho’s speech conferred a degree of legitimacy and prominence that no other figure possessed. He proceeded to play this to the hilt. Emperor Bao Dai, who headed the French puppet government in the South, abdicated within days, later saying that he did so because he had heard the United States had thrown its support behind Ho. No other group could soon overcome the political momentum Ho gained by flim-flamming those pathetically gullible O.S.S. officers.

  The postwar occupation forces of Britain, the United States, and China soon left Vietnam, and France returned. While nationalist groups refused to cooperate with the French, the Communist Viet Minh chose to collaborate. Ho signed the so-called March 6 agreement that brought the French army back into northern Vietnam. His greetings were effusive: “I love France and French soldiers. You are welcome. You are all heroes.” Some say Ho compromised with the French to force the Nationalist Chinese to withdraw. But one week earlier, China had pledged to remove its army in a separate agreement with France. As to the real motivation of the Communists, Ho’s right-hand man, Le Duan, later said it was to “wipe out the reactionaries.” For the Viet Minh, this included all nationalists.

  Ho and the French together massacred hundreds of leaders and thousands of rank-and-file members of nationalist groups. The French gave the Viet Minh military equipment, troops, and even artillery support to carry this out. In July 1946, Ho’s forces stormed the headquarters of all the remaining nationalist groups while French armored personnel carriers cordoned off surrounding areas. Most of the few remaining opposition leaders were arrested and later killed. When the French turned on the Viet Minh in November 1946, it was no accident that Ho became the leader of the only significant resistance. He had killed almost all the others.

  The idea that Ho Chi Minh was primarily a Vietnamese nationalist has no basis in fact. Instead of cooperating with nationalists to win independence, he spent his entire career eliminating all independent nationalists, even if this meant openly collaborating with colonial France. Though he used the rhetoric of nationalism, Ho was first and foremost a Communist totalitarian. He used nationalism to serve communism rather than the other way around.

  Ho’s reputation in the West as a popular humanitarian is equally unfounded. When he took over half of the country under the Geneva Declaration, the Vietnamese people were given sixty days to resettle on either side of the line dividing North and South Vietnam. One million northerners out of a total population of 13 million moved south, while only 90,000 southerners went north. The number of refugees leaving North Vietnam would have been several times greater had the Communists not impeded their departure. Two years later, in 1956, Mrs. Nixon and I visited a refugee camp in South Vietnam. Thousands of people lived there in crowded tents with only those few possessions that they had been able to carry on their backs. It was a heartrending sight that recurred often during the war. The Vietnamese people voted with their feet, and the result was a landslide against the Communists.

  It was easy to see why. Land reform stood at the top of Ho’s agenda for North Vietnam. He had promised the peasants a program of “land to the tiller,” but he delivered one of terror to the tiller. Ninety-eight percent of northern farmers cultivated their own land in 1954, but this did not stop the Communists from finding criminal “landlords” to fill the ever-escalating quota set by Hanoi. One witness said, “At least five percent of a village’s population had to be branded as ‘landlords.’ ” A North Vietnamese army officer who had served in the land-reform campaign and later defected said that “these crimes were only fabrications that the cadres said had been committed.”

  Ho’s men first tortured the victims to extract a confession. Some were hung by their feet from ropes thrown over a rafter and then were beaten or violently pulled up and down. Others had their thumbs placed in a vise that was steadily tightened; with each turn of the screw, the interrogator repeated his question. Still others were put in a water-filled bamboo barrel and then immersed for a couple of minutes at a time until they confessed. A rigged public trial usually followed the confession.

  These exercises were brutal travesties. During this period, one grade-school teacher asked her students to write an essay on “a scene of struggle in our village.” The children obediently composed essays that combined the usual high praise of the Communist party with graphic accounts of arrests, beatings, and tortures. Officially, the party disclaimed responsibility for the terrorism, so the teacher criticized her pupils for their “inaccuracy.” But in their youthful innocence, the students asserted that they themselves had witnessed these scenes, and some even said they had seen party members arranging the trials.

  These so-called trials commonly ended
in a sentence of death. Throughout the terror of the land-reform program, Ho Chi Minh’s party dutifully acted according to one maxim: “It is better to kill ten innocent people than to let one enemy escape.” Estimates are that 50,000 Vietnamese were executed and that another 100,000 were sent to forced-labor camps.

  The torment of Ho’s policies did not end there. The families of convicted “landlords” then faced a government-inspired policy of social isolation. Ho knew his regime had earned the permanent enmity of the families of his victims. In his mind, they were possible future opponents and therefore had to be liquidated. Orders were handed down that no one was to talk with them, contact them, or give them work. One witness said, “Like leprous dogs, they became creatures at whom children were encouraged to throw stones.” These outcasts usually died of starvation. It is estimated that between 300,000 and 500,000 peasants either committed suicide or died as a result of the policy of isolation.

  There are those who say that Ho temporarily lost control of the revolution and that local peasants acting on their own chalked up this toll of terror. That is a fatuous claim. He knew exactly what he was doing. The policy was not improvised. It was imported. The whole program, from blueprints through training manuals, was stamped “Made in Communist China.” He knew very well that these same policies had led to a reign of terror that killed millions of Chinese peasants, but he adopted them nevertheless. He wanted excessive violence and deliberately planned for it. “To straighten a curved piece of bamboo,” he told key party members, “one must bend it in the opposite direction, holding it in that position for a while. Then, when the hand is removed it will slowly straighten itself.”

  Behind Ho Chi Minh’s cruel policies was a brutally simple motive: He wanted to demonstrate with searing clarity that there was no alternative in North Vietnam to life under communism.

  But there was an alternative: It was in South Vietnam. Ngo Dinh Diem had built a state that was substantially free, but, by American standards, not completely free. Like most postcolonial leaders, he governed in a manner that drew its inspiration partly from European parliamentary models, partly from traditional Asian models, and partly from the dictates of necessity.

  Unlike Ho, Diem was an authentic nationalist. He came from an important family in the imperial capital of Hue and was renowned for his vehement opposition to French colonialism. A devout Catholic, he studied for two years at a Maryknoll academy in the United States. In 1933, he agreed to serve as Minister of the Interior of Annam in central Vietnam on the condition that the French undertake certain reforms, including the creation of a national assembly to govern the country. After three months of French inaction, he resigned in anger. But his prominence led to a long succession of offers. The French, who both respected and feared Diem, alternately courted him with offers of public office and threatened him with arrest. He turned down a post in Japan’s wartime occupation government. After the war, Bao Dai, France’s puppet head of state, repeatedly beseeched his help.

  Even Ho respected Diem’s patriotism—enough in fact to have him imprisoned and one of his brothers killed in 1945. Ho exiled Diem to a village near the Chinese border, where he nearly died of malaria. After six months, the Viet Minh leader summoned his future rival to offer him the Ministry of Interior in the new Communist government. Diem rejected it in a stormy exchange and was released. A Communist official later said, “Considering the events that followed, releasing Diem was a blunder.” Soon after, Ho, yet again showing his respect for Diem’s abilities, sentenced him to death in absentia.

  Ho’s respect for Diem was fully justified. In 1954, after the partition of Vietnam, Bao Dai appointed him Prime Minister with full powers. Diem faced a bewildering political task. Properly speaking, there was no state of South Vietnam, only a state of anarchy. Pro-French elements hostile to Diem ran the military and the civil service. Binh Xuyen bandits controlled the Saigon police and openly defied him. Two armed religious sects, the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao, and rural ethnic Montagnards were in constant revolt. Before moving north, the Viet Minh had left behind a powerful infrastructure to subvert the government. A million refugees from North Vietnam, who had increased South Vietnam’s population by 10 percent almost overnight, awaited resettlement.

  Most observers did not expect Diem to survive in power for even a year. But within two years, he had purged disloyal army officers and government officials, seized control of Saigon’s police force, divided and subdued the militant sects, routed the Viet Minh, defeated Bao Dai in a presidential referendum, and was looking forward to the election of a Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution. When I visited Saigon on the first anniversary of his presidency in 1956, I was surprised and impressed by the progress he had made in bringing order out of chaos and in gaining broad support from the Vietnamese people.

  Diem understood that the first task of government is to establish order. Without a strong ruler, South Vietnam’s inherent anarchy and factionalism would have shattered the country’s fragile stability. Diem’s actions were all legitimate acts of government. But they were not without costs. Several thousand South Vietnamese were killed on all sides of the many internecine conflicts between 1954 and 1959. That toll was regrettable, but almost certainly would have been higher if the Communists or another of Diem’s rivals had been in power.

  By our standards Diem took excessive actions. He often used his power arbitrarily to suppress critical newspapers and to persecute political opponents, failing to distinguish between enemies of the state and opponents of his government. When I spoke to him of these excesses in 1956, he defended his actions by pointing out that in dealing with Communist violence and armed insurrection, ordinary peacetime rules of conduct would lead to Communist victory. “We are at war,” he said, “and in war it is necessary to use wartime measures.” In 1955, Diem conducted a ruthless nationwide purge of Communists and their sympathizers, shipping off tens of thousands of South Vietnamese to harsh ideological reeducation camps. Many were part of the Communist network, two-thirds of which was uprooted, but a large percentage were innocent. Once the assault on the Viet Minh underground was completed, political repression in South Vietnam was minimal by East Asian standards. Under Diem, there were at most 300 political prisoners in 1960, while in Burma and Indonesia they numbered in the tens of thousands.

  Diem, having imposed order, faced the second task of government: securing the consent of the governed. It was an almost impossible job given the fractious nature of South Vietnamese politics, and his record was mixed. His high-handed style of governing squandered much of the goodwill with which he began, and his willful actions earned him more than his share of enemies, many of whom had friends among the American press in Saigon. But among simple Vietnamese in the countryside, he was a legitimately popular figure.

  Some of his popularity derived from his political reforms. Diem’s government provided far more freedom than had the French. He also took the first tentative steps toward electoral democracy in a country that had never held an election. Like most Southeast Asian politicians, he tampered with the ballot box. In 1955, for example, the results of the presidential referendum showed him taking a preposterous 98.2 percent of the vote. A fair tally would have been lopsided—with Diem polling perhaps 90 percent—because his opponent, Bao Dai, had never been one to win popularity contests. But even against a strong opponent—Diem undoubtedly would have won a properly conducted election—probably with no less than 65 percent of the vote—because his popularity had reached a high level by that time.

  South Vietnam had more of the form than the substance of democracy, but the latter was not wholly lacking. The political opposition, for example, received representation. In the elections for the Constituent Assembly in 1956, one-third of the winning candidates were anti-Diem, and this proportion would have been higher had some parties not boycotted the election. When the assembly convened, it promptly rejected Diem’s draft for the new constitution and rewrote the document itself. But American-style
democracy always evoked skepticism in Diem, for he knew meaningful elections consisted of more than ballots and voting stations. As he once asked a reporter, “What can parliamentary democracy mean to a Montagnard when his language does not even have a term to express it?”

  Most of Diem’s popularity came from the vast array of social programs and reforms that he instituted with American financial and technical assistance. Schools proliferated in the countryside. Land was redistributed to tenant farmers. Pesticides were sprayed to combat malaria. Rice production soared. Roads and bridges were built. Foreign investment increased. Light industry sprang up around Saigon. Two or three days a week, Diem would tour the countryside, scrutinizing the progress of his plans on the local level and inundating officials with advice. Although his programs often taxed his government’s meager administrative capabilities, their effect was overwhelmingly beneficial.

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  When the two leaders are compared side-by-side, the suggestion that Ho would have outpolled Diem head-to-head seems ridiculous. Yet during the war, many critics of the American effort to save South Vietnam argued this very point. They said that the Geneva Declaration of 1954 legally bound Diem’s government and the United States to unify the two halves of Vietnam through elections and that Ho would have inevitably come out the winner. They were wrong on both counts.

  The text of the Geneva Declaration about elections was not legally binding on the United States or South Vietnam. Nine countries gathered at the conference and produced six unilateral declarations, three bilateral cease-fire agreements, and one unsigned declaration. The cease-fire agreements alone were binding for their signatories; the provision concerning reunification elections appeared in the separate final declaration. Only four of the nine states attending committed themselves to the declaration’s terms. The United States did not join in it. South Vietnam, which was not even present in Geneva, retained its freedom of action by issuing a formal statement disavowing the declaration. North Vietnam also did not associate itself with the declaration. Very simply, it had no legal force.