Chapter One

Le Duan’s Rise to Power and the Road to War

Revolution is offensive.
Le Duan

Under the cover of darkness on 22 January 1955, Le Duan, Party secretary of the Southern Territorial Committee, bid a hasty farewell to his second-in-command, Le Duc Tho, at the mouth of the Ong Doc River off the tip of Ca Mau province in the deep south of Vietnam. While Le Duan secretly descended the river on a rickety canoe back to the heart of the Mekong Delta, Le Duc Tho stayed onboard the larger ship headed for North Vietnam. Earlier that day, the two Party leaders had boarded the Hanoi-bound Polish vessel Kilinski amid great fanfare in front of international observers tasked with overseeing the 300-day period of free movement stipulated in the 1954 Geneva Accords. With the imminent closing of the border at the seventeenth parallel, Le Duan, otherwise known as “Comrade Three,” clandestinely remained in the South, leaving Le Duc Tho, or “Six Hammer,” to journey alone to Hanoi.

During the war against the French, the Party sent both men to operate in the Mekong Delta even though neither of them hailed from the region. Le Duan, a man with perennially sad eyes and protruding ears, was from Quang Tri province in the central region, while Le Duc Tho, with his high cheekbones and hair that would turn nearly all white decades later, came from Nam Dinh province in northern Vietnam. Their commitment to southern Vietnam, however, later earned them a reputation for being the “first to set foot in the South and the last to leave” during the struggle for decolonization.

Their connection to the South would have a lasting impact on their leadership beyond the French-Indochina War. As the prospect of speedy reunification dimmed in 1956, “Ba” Duan and “Sau” Tho would find themselves occupying pivotal roles in Party history. As Hanoi’s man in the South, Le Duan was in charge of the increasingly difficult task of exerting Party direction over the revolution as local insurgents, under attack by Saigon forces, took matters into their own hands and demanded support from the North to move the resistance to armed struggle. Rather than temper insurgent ambitions in the South, however, Le Duan fanned the revolutionary flames in the region in an attempt to force his reluctant comrades in the North to go to war. If the Party did not support the local insurgency, he warned, then the southern resistance either would be wiped out or, just as troublesome, would slip out of Hanoi’s control.

His appeal, however, fell on deaf ears as the top-level leadership in Hanoi remained preoccupied with the travails of state building in the DRV in the mid-1950s; however, the opportunity for a policy shift emerged by the end of the decade. The fallout from the Party’s costly campaigns during peacetime greatly compromised the communist leadership’s standing as the North Vietnamese people stood up in defiance of the campaigns’ excesses. Placed in a key position to oversee the fallout, Le Duan’s deputy now in the North, Le Duc Tho, became the Party’s most powerful apparatchik. As rivals in the Politburo fell into disgrace, Tho’s authority allowed him to clean house in Hanoi, a crucial portfolio to possess on a fractious political scene. With the Party looking to rehabilitate its image by promoting a new leader and a cause that could rally the North Vietnamese people, Le Duan emerged as the obvious choice.

Thus, Le Duan and Le Duc Tho were the driving force behind Party policy during Vietnam’s pivotal half century that witnessed revolution, war, and reunification set against the backdrop of the Cold War. Before the United States made Indochina a hot spot in the East-West confrontation, there were driven leaders heading warring factions with local agendas in Vietnam that shaped events in the region and eventually the world.

This chapter examines the early careers of Le Duan and Le Duc Tho from colonial Indochina to postcolonial Vietnam, the lessons they learned along the way, the Party they built in Hanoi, and their policies that led to war not only with the Saigon regime but also ultimately with the United States. Offering a complex picture of the communist leadership in North Vietnam, one that perhaps leads to more questions than it answers, this chapter sheds new light on the inner workings of the one enemy America could not defeat.

THE REVOLUTIONARY EDUCATION OF LE DUAN AND LE DUC THO

Like those of many Vietnamese revolutionaries, Le Duan and Le Duc Tho’s careers were forged in the actual and metaphorical prisons of colonial Indochina under French rule. Born in 1907 in Hau Kien village of Quang Tri province in the French protectorate of Annam, Le Van Nhuan was the second youngest of five children in a poor family. In 1928, Nhuan married Le Thi Suong from his home village, departed for Hanoi to assume work at the Indochinese Railway Office, and shortly thereafter changed his name to Le Duan. Like many young Indochinese of the era, Le Duan was caught up in the anticolonial fervor. He immediately participated in political agitation in the center of the French protectorate of Tonkin by joining the Tan Viet (New Vietnam) Revolutionary Party and later the Hoi Viet Nam Cach Mang Thanh Nien (Vietnam Revolutionary Youth Association), overseeing the mobilization of railway workers. With the establishment in 1929 of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP), which would become the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) after its first plenum later in 1931, Le Duan’s anti-French resistance deepened as the Party leaders designated him a member of the Committee for Education and Training.

Le Duan’s second-in-command possessed a similar revolutionary résumé. Born on 10 October 1911 in what was known then as Dich Le village, My Loc hamlet of Nam Dinh province situated in Tonkin, Le Duc Tho entered the world as Phan Dinh Khai. He began his revolutionary career at the age of fifteen by taking part in school boycotts and other anticolonial activities organized by the famous patriot Phan Chu Trinh. In 1928, he moved closer to the communist faction of the resistance when he joined the Revolutionary Youth League in Nam Dinh province, and like Le Duan, he rose quickly through the ranks of the Party the following year.

For these two young men— and multitudes of other young nationalists— the excitement of anticolonial agitation of the 1920s gave way to the harsh realities of French colonial prisons in the 1930s. With the onset of the global depression and the upsurge in nationalist activity in Indochina, French colonial forces grew more repressive, exemplified by their severe crackdowns against the Yen Bai uprising and the Nghe Tinh revolt. During what historian Peter Zinoman describes as a period of mass incarceration with a deluge of “communists, nationalists, secret-society members, and radicalized workers and peasants” into the French prison system, Le Duc Tho was arrested in Nam Dinh in late 1930 and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment; a few months later in April 1931, Le Duan’s revolutionary career took a decisive turn when French secret agents arrested him in the port city of Hai Phong. Both men became not only prisoners of the French colonial regime but also, and more important, ardent communist revolutionaries by the end of their prison stints at Hoa Lo, Son La, and Con Dao.

The advent of the Popular Front government in Paris in 1936 brought a relaxation in French colonial policies and amnesty for more than 1,500 prisoners, including Le Duan and Le Duc Tho, who were set free from the colonial gulags. Rather than give up revolutionary agitation after their grueling incarceration, they left the prisons even more ideologically and politically committed to the communist path to independence. Le Duan returned to the central region where he made contact with the Party organization and quickly rose to the top as secretary of the Party committee in Annam in March 1938 and a member of the Central Executive Committee (CEC) standing committee the following year. Likewise, Tho returned to his northern home province of Nam Dinh and reconnected with the local Party cell.

During the Second World War, the revolutionaries in Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina found themselves subject to two colonial masters: Vichy France and imperial Japan. 8 In late 1939, soon after rising to the top of Party ranks in the middle region, Le Duan transferred his area of operations to Cochinchina, where he took up residence in the heart of French power in Indochina, Saigon. A few months later, in early 1940, Le Duan’s work for the revolution came to a stop once again when he was captured and imprisoned on Con Dao island. Meanwhile, Tho was also summarily arrested after his return to Nam Dinh and spent the war imprisoned in various jails in the North. During their incarceration, the ICP formed the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi (Vietnam Independence League), otherwise known as the Viet Minh, to fight both the French collaborators and the Japanese fascists.

It was not until nearly the end of the Second World War that Le Duan and Le Duc Tho were finally sprung from jail by their colleagues. Although they had missed out on most of the action during the war, their early involvement in the revolution and long prison records earned them high-ranking positions in the Party on their release. Freed in time to take part in the Viet Minh– led August Revolution of 1945 that brought government institutions into Vietnamese hands after the Japanese surrender but before the arrival of Allied forces, Le Duan and Le Duc Tho— along with the communist leadership— witnessed what they perceived as the Party’s organizational success in harnessing the seemingly limitless power of the masses to effect change. Although the revolutionaries were prepared for violence, there was relatively little bloodshed in the Viet Minh seizure of power. While Ho Chi Minh, using the Nguyen Ai Quoc pseudonym for the final time, called on his countrymen to “stand up and rely on our strength to free ourselves,” differing factions within the Party located in the three regions easily ensured that the August Revolution remained under communist guidance.

Although the desire for self-determination and liberation was strong in all of Vietnam, Party control over the revolutionary political scene varied; it dominated in Tonkin, operated adequately in Annam, but lacked strength in Cochinchina. 11 With Ho Chi Minh’s historic proclamation of the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 2 September 1945 in front of thousands gathered at Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi, the Party was in firm control of the new provisional government. While Ho assumed the presidency of the DRV, Truong Chinh held the reins of power in the ICP as the first secretary, a position he had occupied since 1941. Born Dang Xuan Khu in early 1907 in Nam Dinh province, Khu later changed his name to Truong Chinh, meaning “long march,” in honor of Mao Zedong’s ascent to power. A committed anticolonialist who participated in school boycotts in Nam Dinh city that called for the release of Phan Boi Chu in 1925 and that mourned the loss of Phan Chu Trinh in 1926, Khu eventually moved to Hanoi, where he helped establish the Communist Party in 1929. A year later, he was imprisoned by French authorities and sentenced to twelve years in Hoa Lo and Son La prisons. Freed halfway through his sentence in 1936, Khu— now a staunch revolutionary— was surveilled by the French colonial regime when he returned to Hanoi, where he worked openly as a newspaper editor and secretly as a leading member of the Tonkin Party Committee.

When the Second World War began, Khu rose to the top Party position of first secretary and officially became Truong Chinh. At the Eighth Plenum, held in a small hut in May 1941, Party leaders voted to shift their resources from land reform to national liberation. The historic plenum also witnessed the first meeting between Nguyen Ai Quoc, who would rise to greater fame as Ho Chi Minh, and Truong Chinh. Hailing from two different factions within the Party that operated in different regions in the north during the Second World War— Ho along with Vo Nguyen Giap and Pham Van Dong were part of the Pac Bo contingent near the Chinese border, whereas Chinh led the Red River Delta group that boasted that they were never more than a bike ride away from Hanoi— the revolutionary leaders banded together to seize power in 1945. The latter would prove more powerful.

After his release from prison, Le Duc Tho returned to Hanoi, where he followed in Le Duan’s 1938 footsteps by being elected standing committee member of the CEC and being appointed head of the Party Organizational Committee. In this capacity, Tho’s primary responsibility was to ensure the smooth operation of the Party bureaucracy, a position that would become increasingly important in this next phase of the communist revolution.

At the time, however, the Party’s plans for state building would have to be put on hold as leaders in Hanoi dealt with two seemingly insurmountable obstacles to independence: occupying Chinese nationalist forces stationed in the northern half of the country and the return of French colonial forces, via the British, in the lower half. Although Franklin D. Roosevelt’s insistence on international trusteeship under the United Nations in Indochina had waned in the days before his death, Harry S. Truman was less ambivalent in his recognition of French sovereignty over the region. At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the United States agreed that the Guomindang would oversee the surrender of Japanese troops in northern Vietnam and allowed the British Southeast Asia Command, sympathetic to the French, to oversee the southern half. Although the ICP was in firm control of the political scene in Tonkin, the Guomindang forces pressured Ho Chi Minh to include their Vietnamese allies, non– Viet Minh officials from the Vietnamese Nationalist Party (Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang) and the Revolutionary League, into the new government. Holding out the northern region to the French, Chiang Kai-shek also negotiated economic concessions from France at the expense of the Vietnamese. Events in the southern half of the country posed even greater challenges for the Party. Through British General Douglas Gracey, whose troops oversaw the surrender of Japanese forces in the south, France was able to regain a foothold in Cochinchina, where it intended to reconquer its colony and protectorates. In an effort to thwart France’s attempts to restore its colonial empire, Ho needed to build a broad coalition of forces within the country and win support from countries abroad, particularly the United States.

In this situation fraught with difficulties and no clear solutions, Ho Chi Minh made two decisions that would compromise his position within the Party leadership. In November 1945, he dissolved the ICP into a Marxist-Leninist working group and replaced known communist members with leaders from other political parties in order to attract broad support for a united front and to garner foreign aid, particularly from the United States. At the same time, Ho undertook negotiations with French officials in Tonkin, including Jean Sainteny, who were cognizant of France’s limited military capabilities and opted to negotiate the France’s return peacefully. By signing the Preliminary Accord on 6 March 1946, Ho received French recognition of the DRV, which would form a part of the Indochina Federation under the French Union, in exchange for permitting 15,000 French soldiers to return to Indochina and for allowing the fate of Cochinchina to be determined by a popular referendum at a later date. Meanwhile, despite aid to the DRV cause from individual U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) officials, Washington remained deaf to Ho’s pleas for support. Nonetheless, despite his having no other viable alternatives in 1945– 46, Ho’s decisions to dissolve the Party and shelve the issue of Cochinchina were deeply unpopular among certain factions within the communist leadership.

Although the Ho-Sainteny agreement was meant to be a starting point for further negotiations, French colonial authorities in Cochinchina sabotaged diplomacy at Da Lat and Fontainebleau. Following the French massacre at Hai Phong harbor in late November 1946, militant factions within the DRV disillusioned with diplomacy and impatient to strike back launched a nationwide counterattack on French forces on 19 December. A short time after celebrating the end of World War II, the Vietnamese were plunged into yet another war, this one for decolonization.

THE WILD SOUTH

When the French-Indochina War began, Le Duan sought to make a name for himself in the Party after languishing in prison during the Second World War. In late October 1945, he was elected temporary head of the Southern Territorial Committee at a conference held in My Tho province in the Mekong Delta, possibly after failing to land a higher-level position within the military leadership in Hanoi. Le Duan’s task of directing Party operations in southern Vietnam was an unenviable one, filled with tremendous dangers and professional pitfalls. Far from Party headquarters in Hanoi and close to the center of French colonial power in Saigon, Cochinchina was a region rich in revolutionary tradition that boasted manifestations of strong communist insurrections such as the 1940 Nam Ky Khoi Nghia (Southern Uprising). The region also possessed an array of local actors who vied with the communists for control over its tough terrain that included dense forests, boggy swamps, vertiginous waterways, and cavernous mountains to the west. Religious sects including the Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai possessed powerful armies and committed followers who were much more comfortable in the southern countryside than were the city-based communists. The Party’s response was to send “Nam Tien” (Southward March) units from Hanoi to even out the numbers.

Moreover, the communists in the Mekong Delta were not a monolithic force. Although the Party needed to appeal to a broad array of forces to present a unified front against returning French colonial forces, the communist leadership, first under Tran Van Giau and then Nguyen Binh in 1946, often operated beyond the purview of Hanoi and worked against Party policy. By unleashing revolutionary violence in the increasingly volatile scene in the Mekong Delta, these “rogue” leaders not only threatened Party control in Cochinchina but also incurred the wrath of rival groups in the Delta and exacted high casualty rates in confrontations with and battles against the French.

In order to fortify Hanoi’s control over the chaotic region, the Viet Minh leadership sent Le Duc Tho south in 1948. As a professional revolutionary who had begun to streamline operations in the DRV, Tho would do the same in the Mekong Delta. When Tho met Le Duan for the first time in 1948, he realized that he had met someone he could not push around.  Le Duc Tho thus became Le Duan’s loyal deputy as vice secretary, and together the two men set out in the late 1940s to neutralize their communist and noncommunist opponents while waging war against returning French colonial forces. Their endeavors in these heady days of the war for decolonization forged a partnership that would come to dominate the communist leadership for nearly the next half century.

An event deep in the U Minh Forest in 1948 sealed their friendship. Amid war, a maquis marriage took place between a young southern resistance fighter of the Women’s National Liberation Forces based in Bac Lieu– Can Tho, Nguyen Thuy Nga, and the head of the Southern Territorial Committee, the formidable Le Duan. Earlier in the year, Le Duan met Nga for the first time when her battalion attended a regional committee conference at his headquarters in Dong Thap Muoi. One morning, Nga’s task, which was common given the gender inequity even in the revolutionary maquis, was to make sure that Le Duan enjoyed his sumptuous meal of chicken rice congee with two hard-boiled eggs. Captivated by Nga, Le Duan ordered the wait staff to prepare another seat at his table, and he even offered her one of his eggs. After their brief encounter at breakfast, Le Duan confided to his second-in-command that he was interested in Nga. He was already married, but Le Duan could not see his family since they were living in enemy territory. Losing little time, Le Duc Tho used a visit to Can Tho, where Nga’s battalion was based, to arrange a marriage. “If you agree to marry him,” Tho told Nga, “you are agreeing to a very important task since it would be your job to take care of him and to make sure that he has the health to carry through the revolution.” Thanks to Le Duc Tho’s lam mai  (romantic setup), Le Duan and Nguyen Thuy Nga were married at a ceremony near the Southern Territorial headquarters presided over by Le Duan’s and Le Duc Tho’s close friend, colleague, and coconspirator, Pham Hung.

Far from Le Duan’s revolutionary marriage at Dong Thap Muoi, the key battles against the French eventually emerged at the opposite end of the country in the mountainous terrain in northern Tonkin with the onset of American and Chinese involvement in the French-Indochina War. The early years of the war had produced a stalemate of sorts, with colonial troops occupying the cities and towns by driving Viet Minh forces to the villages in the countryside and to mountain hideouts. With the hardening of positions in Washington and Moscow by 1947 and the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Cold War had arrived in full force in Asia and set the way for the internationalization of the French-Indochina War by 1950.27 While Mao Zedong’s China provided the foreign assistance that Ho Chi Minh and the DRV needed, the Truman administration came to the aid of France’s Fourth Republic and its increasingly unpopular “dirty war.”

The PRC’s diplomatic recognition of the DRV, which led the Soviet Union and its satellite countries to follow suit, allowed Ho Chi Minh to travel to Beijing and Moscow in pursuit of aid. Although Ho was less successful in the Soviet Union in procuring direct assistance, he reached an important agreement with Mao whereby Chinese advisors would train Viet Minh soldiers and help organize a campaign to clear French soldiers from the Sino-Vietnamese border. In January 1951, ties with China were further strengthened by the visit of the DRV’s rising military star, Vo Nguyen Giap, to southern China. Most important, the establishment of the Chinese Military Assistance Group (CMAG) in the DRV (which carried out a task identical to that of the American Military Advisory Assistance Group [MAAG] in Saigon) ensured that the Viet Minh would continue to implement Mao’s revolutionary strategy of warfare. Although the Vietnamese had adopted Mao’s military doctrine prior to the victory of the Chinese communists in 1949, the direct involvement of Beijing in the French-Indochina War indicated that the Sino-Vietnamese alliance would be further strengthened— and ultimately tested— as Mao’s three-stage strategy of warfare unfolded precariously on the Indochinese terrain.

With foreign support, Ho was also able to publicly reinstate the Communist Party following the Chinese model as the Vietnam Workers’ Party, with himself as chairman, at the Second Party Congress in early 1951. Truong Chinh, however, retained the actual leadership of the Party when he was elected first secretary once again in 1951. Preoccupied with events in the Mekong Delta and unable to travel during wartime, the Congress also witnessed the elevation in absentia of Le Duan to the highest level of power within the Party: the VWP Politburo. Le Duan now joined the ranks of revolutionaries such as Ho, Giap, and Pham Van Dong, as well as Truong Chinh, who were already well known within the country. Moreover, operations in the south were given a higher priority with the reclassification of the Territorial Committee of the South as the Central Office of South Vietnam (COSVN). As head of COSVN, Le Duan was now politically and militarily in charge of operations, placing him in direct confrontation with the popular and independent-minded commander of the armed forces, Nguyen Binh.

By 1951, Binh, a colorful “swashbuckling” character who commanded loyal troops in Saigon, had waged a costly war by undertaking a campaign of assassination against rival groups as well as shifting to a more proactive stage against the French by launching large-scale attacks against colonial forces in the south and in southwestern parts of Cochinchina. 30 Binh’s costly offensives did not achieve the desired military results and thus came under fire from Party members who had long envied his popularity. In a series of publications, Le Duc Tho spoke out against Binh’s reckless behavior, alluding to a “spirit of formalism” and cadres who were too aggressive. Shortly after the Party inducted Le Duan into the Politburo, it recalled Binh to Hanoi. Binh, however, never made it back to his home region. Although Binh’s fall from power and the conditions surrounding his death in late 1951 have been a matter of speculation, it is clear that Le Duan and Le Duc Tho, as well as their third-in-command, Pham Hung, greatly benefited at the time from his departure from the southern scene.

Their first brush with political rivals, then, taught Le Duan and Le Duc Tho important lessons that they later applied in Hanoi when they encountered leaders less easily removed than Nguyen Binh. Ironically, they would adopt, to little avail, the same hard-driving military tactics against the Americans that Binh had against the French. Unlike Binh, however, Le Duan, Tho, and Hung were much better at protecting their flank from rival Party leaders who could exploit any missteps.

While Le Duan and his comrades dealt with southern rivals, war escalated in the north. Despite Chinese assistance and recognition and the Party’s internal consolidation of power, the Viet Minh’s military struggle in Tonkin continued to encounter difficulties on the ground. Subscribing to Mao’s revolutionary war strategy, Viet Minh forces shifted from defensive war (phòng ngự), which relied primarily on guerrilla tactics, to the equilibrium stage (cầm cự), which incorporated large-scale attacks, at the beginning of the decade. The final stage, which would lead to certain victory, included the general counter-offensive (tổng phản công). Although the Viet Minh’s 1950 victory over the French at Cao Bang provided forces with a much-needed morale boost, it also led Vietnamese military leaders to undertake foolhardy offensives in 1951– 52, just as Nguyen Binh did in the south. These “human wave” offensives aimed at breaking through the French cordon sanitaire in Tonkin; however, they proved disastrous and were easily blocked by French forces at Vinh Yen and Mao Khe in January and March– April 1951.

The defeat at these two battles prompted a reassessment among the Viet Minh military brass. In early June 1951, Ho’s close ally, Vo Nguyen Giap, who was both the commander-in-chief of the armed forces and the minister of defense, criticized Viet Minh training and military performance and called for a more effective mobilization campaign and greater propaganda efforts. By the late summer of that year, Giap urged greater attention to guerrilla war: a concerted step back to the defensive stage. In his postwar memoirs, Giap takes full blame for the premature shift to the equilibrium stage and claims that he had even disregarded warnings from his Chinese advisors, who had counseled against these offensives. At the time, however, he appeared to have blamed another military leader in northern Vietnam for the mistakes.

The target of Giap’s criticism was a rival high-ranking military officer by the name of Nguyen Chi Thanh. In 1951, Thanh served as the commissar of the army’s General Political Department (GPD), which supervised the ideological aspects of the military. He thus may have directed the frontal assault campaigns that had failed so miserably in the north as the vice secretary of the Party’s Central Military Commission (CMC).  Thanh, whose real name was Nguyễn Vịnh, was born in January 1914 in central Thua-Thien-Hue province. The two military men, Giap and Thanh, could not have been more different. While Giap was a cosmopolitan intellectual fluent in French who had taught in Hanoi at Tonkin’s most prestigious school before becoming a full-time revolutionary, Vinh spent most of his childhood and teenage years as a peasant farmer who only completed primary school before joining the anticolonial movement in the imperial capital of Hue. When Vinh was arrested for his “illegal” anti-French activities in the 1930s, the judge at his hearing asked him why he chose to be a communist. Vinh, with his stern demeanor and square features, responded, “I fight for the people, for democracy, for our livelihood, so what is the sin? I haven’t yet understood communism so how can I be a communist? But communists are patriots and fight for the masses so what is wrong with that?” In July 1937, Vinh was inducted into the Indochinese Communist Party, and by September 1938 he was appointed secretary of the Central Regional Committee. Attending the historic Tan Trao meeting, which laid the groundwork for the August Revolution, Vinh met Ho, Giap, and Dong for the first time and adopted the name Nguyen Chi Thanh. By the Second National Congress in 1951, Thanh, like Le Duan, was elevated to the Politburo.

As the army’s political czar, Thanh was an obvious rival to Giap. Not only did Thanh’s department answer to the Party and not to Giap’s Ministry of Defense, but Thanh also promoted Party primacy and ideological adherence to Marxism-Leninism within the armed forces in contrast to Giap’s preferred professionalism and modernization of the PAVN. The stage was set for a showdown between Giap and Thanh following the costly offensives in 1951 and 1952. While Giap called for temporary restraint in order to rebuild the forces, Thanh urged greater aggression in order to maintain momentum. More than a decade later, these two generals would argue precisely along these same terms during the war against the Americans. Although Giap emerged victorious in the military debates in the early 1950s during the struggle against the French, Thanh’s more aggressive stance would prevail in the 1960s, thanks predominately to the support of Le Duan and Le Duc Tho.

During the height of the Giap-Thanh debates on Viet Minh strategy, the Party recalled Le Duan to the DRV to attend the CEC plenum in 1952. After the plenum, Le Duan traveled to China for undisclosed medical reasons. While there, he saw first-hand the destructive nature of China’s early preparation for what would become the Great Leap Forward, including agricultural collectivization. When he returned to the DRV in 1953, he was aghast to see some of these Chinese measures adopted in the northern Vietnamese countryside. During his stint in northern Vietnam, he also met his long-time nemesis, General Giap, for the first time. Since 1945, Le Duan may have been jealous of the general, who was four years younger but occupied a higher position and enjoyed closer relations with Ho Chi Minh. Subsequent events did little to lessen Le Duan’s envy.

Despite the disastrous campaigns in 1951– 52, Giap would gain international fame— and an enduring historical legacy— as the grand strategist behind the battle of Dien Bien Phu. While Giap and his committee prepared for the siege against General Henri Navarre’s forces in northwestern Vietnam, Le Duan must have felt exiled when the Party sent him to train cadres in Viet Minh’s Interzone 5 in the central province of Quang Ngai, far from the heroic siege that would help end the French-Indochina War. Fortunately for Giap, U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower failed to procure British support and congressional approval for intervention on behalf of the beleaguered French, sealing the fate of the French colonial empire in Indochina.

With the signing of the Geneva Accords and the return to peace, the Party sent Le Duan back to the Mekong Delta to explain the terms of the agreement, convey the orders of the CEC for postwar planning, and oversee the period of free movement in the run-up to the national elections for reunification set for 1956. During Le Duan’s absence, Tho took over as head of COSVN, where he used his position to tear down any remaining vestiges of Nguyen Binh’s legacy in the region. On the day of Le Duan’s return, two rows of cadres lined the road and enthusiastically greeted their leader’s arrival by holding up two fingers, the symbol for reunification of the country. Over the next few days in October 1954, however, during a regionwide conference of southern revolutionary leaders held in Bac Lieu province, Le Duan had to dispel the euphoria when he explained the terms of the Geneva Accords. Although the period from 1954 to 1960 witnessed the “golden era of peace,” especially compared to what would come after, it was also marked by great violence for revolutionaries under the Diem regime.

According to Vo Van Kiet, a Le Duan protégé who would become prime minister of Vietnam, he and his southern comrades were extremely troubled by Le Duan’s rendering of the postwar situation and posed some difficult questions to the top Party leader at the conference: “Why, if Dien Bien Phu was such a massive victory, didn’t the Party continue the struggle for a few more months in order to gain better terms at the negotiating table? Did the Soviet Union and China pressure us to sign the agreement? Why did we agree on a temporary division at the seventeenth parallel instead of cease-fire in place? And finally, why were national reunification elections scheduled for two years from now and would there even be any guarantee that the enemy will abide by these terms?” Revisiting this troubled period, Kiet said he believes that “Uncle Ho and the CEC sent Le Duan to get southerners on board with Party policy, particularly concerning resettlement to the North.” Kiet, who became one of Le Duan’s trusted men in the South, recognized the difficulty of his chief’s duty, later commenting that “this was going to be no easy task.” Keeping his opinions to himself, Le Duan only stated the obvious in his response to his comrades’ questions. “There are two possible outcomes,” Le Duan said. “Perhaps the ‘U.S.-Diem’ [My-Diem] clique will be obligated to carry out the Geneva Accords; just as likely, they may not. The southern revolution has to have a plan for either eventuality.”

Nga, Le Duan’s southern wife, recalled waking one night in 1954 after their joyous reunion to see her husband pacing to and fro in consternation. After the war, the Party wanted Le Duan to return north, but he was convinced that he should remain behind and sent three telegrams requesting that he be allowed to stay below the seventeenth parallel. The Party held firm the first two times but relented with his third plea. Nga, who by 1954 had borne him a daughter, Vu Anh, and was carrying a second child, wanted to stay in the Mekong Delta alongside her husband. Le Duan, however, remained adamant that she and their children remain out of harm’s way by relocating to Hanoi. Showing more resilience than his colleagues in Hanoi, Le Duan quieted Nga’s pleas. “The upcoming situation in the South will be fraught with difficulties,” he told her, “so if you stay back, you and our children will endure hardships and you will inevitably expose my work here.” A new, but no less bloody, era had arrived in Le Duan’s revolutionary career.

THE STATE OF PEACE AND THE ROAD TO WAR

Le Duan was reelected as Party secretary of the Southern Territorial Committee, formerly COSVN, at the October 1954 conference. There he divided the South into three interprovinces, eastern, central, and western, as well as one region covering Saigon– Cho Lon. The shift from COSVN back to a territorial committee underlined the Party’s commitment to political struggle rather than armed conflict to reintegrate the southern half of the country. Following the Geneva Accords, the period of resettlement witnessed some 200,000 people moving northward and 1 million in the other direction. As secretary of the committee, Le Duan opted to remain covertly in the South, alongside approximately 10,000 other revolutionaries, and thus parted ways with northbound Le Duc Tho in early 1955 to travel secretly back to Ca Mau.

Nga, who had failed to convince her husband to allow her to remain in the South, was also on the Kilinski, where she hid in her cabin with their daughter until the Polish ship reached its final destination. In for a rude awakening, Nga, a revolutionary girl who hailed from the western Mekong Delta, was about to face a stern and ideologically rigid Hanoi society that refused to accept her officially— or even informally— as Le Duan’s wife. Le Thi Suong, Le Duan’s first wife, and their children had been separated from Le Duan for the duration of the war against the French, but in peacetime their home village was located in DRV territory. Suong and her children, then, would be considered the first secretary’s family when he rose to power, not Nga and hers.

Far from the domestic squabbles that he created by marrying twice, Le Duan disembarked from the rickety canoe in early 1955 at Ca Mau, where he was greeted by Vo Van Kiet and other deputies. At the time, the Southern Territorial Committee’s offices were divided into two divisions. The base dubbed “Territorial Committee 1” remained in the old headquarters in Tri Phai village, Tho Binh district, Ca Mau province, under Le Duan’s control while “Territorial Committee 2” fell under Standing Member Hoang Du Khuong. From Ca Mau, Kiet and Le Duan’s other bodyguards escorted him northeast to Ben Tre.

Although Le Duan’s position has been portrayed in official histories as caught between a hesitant Party in the North and a hasty insurgency in the South, recent evidence has shown that he may have secretly had a greater role in stoking the revolutionary fires. Moreover, his outwardly conservative position before 1956 in the face of southern demands to undertake military action most likely reflected his desire to exert control over the fractious situation before condoning rash policies that were too reminiscent of Nguyen Binh during the French-Indochina War. According to David Elliott, Le Duan’s position had always been ambivalent after his return to the Mekong Delta, and it only grew bolder and less content with the Party line as the years progressed. Official Hanoi policy during these years remained centered on political agitation primarily and political assassination only when necessary. Even when it became clear that reunification elections would not transpire, the Politburo under Truong Chinh would not budge from its policy of strict compliance with the Geneva Accords and of restricting revolutionary activities to political struggle. Traveling around the western Mekong Delta, the southern countryside, and even the cities, Le Duan undermined Hanoi’s orders by mobilizing irregular and regular troops to prepare for an eventual war. At the same time, he reined in more “hotheaded” southern comrades lest they destroy the resistance with their call to arms or, just as disconcerting, lest they— and not he— reap any rewards if the masses responded.

Caught in this dilemma, Le Duan decided to relocate the headquarters of the Territorial Committee to Saigon, ostensibly to ascertain the political mood of the capital city. Kiet and his crew were responsible for protecting Le Duan in the heart of the enemy’s power, and they feared for his safety each day of his stay in Saigon. These were indeed precarious times, and Le Duan’s actions in Saigon would make them even more dangerous. Once firmly ensconced at the Territorial Committee headquarters at 29 Huynh Khuong Ninh Street in the heart of the city, Le Duan penned what would become his manifesto, Đường lối cách mạng miền Nam (The Path to Revolution in the South), forging the way to liberation through both political and armed struggle. When the political heat became too much to bear, Le Duan headed for the cool environs of the former French mountain resort town of Da Lat, where he stayed for two months until events settled down in the RVN capital.

This manifesto may have been Le Duan’s attempt to simultaneously outflank any competitors in the South and state his campaign in the North. The timing was perfect. In mid-1956, the beleaguered Politburo was searching for a solution to its problems with northern reconstruction, and the situation in the South appeared the most promising distraction from those troubles. The Party announced that it could begin to broach the idea of revising its strict policy of political agitation since it now had a base of support. At the same time that leaders in Hanoi started to reassess their policy below the seventeenth parallel, southern revolutionaries, who were being hunted down by enemy forces, had already begun to take matters into their own hands. In other words, they believed, “war was the only road to take.” Seeing the writing on the wall, Le Duan attempted to move to the forefront of the armed-conflict issue with his manifesto. With Party backing, the shrewd leader believed he could unleash the forces of revolution without losing control over them.

Although the manifesto stated his shared belief with southern revolutionaries that reunification would only be possible with the complete overthrow of the Diem regime, he could not yet sanction armed conflict. At the Second Plenum of the Southern Territorial Committee in late 1956 and early 1957 held in Phnom Penh, Le Duan “opposed efforts to incite war and demand peace and reunification. The most immediate demand,” he claimed, “would be to demand that continued contacts between the two halves of Vietnam be allowed. Immediately following the plenum in Cambodia, the Party recalled Le Duan to Hanoi.

Events in the North would soon bolster Le Duan’s cause. While he snuck back to the Mekong Delta in early 1955, Le Duc Tho returned to Hanoi and assumed the position of secretary of the Reunification Commission, predicated on his experience below the seventeenth parallel during the French Indochina War. By the end of the year, however, Tho’s attentions were drawn away from the situation in the South as domestic problems arose in the DRV. As a second-tier member of the Party leadership, Le Duc Tho benefited from the top rung’s struggle with advancing socialist transformation of the economy during peacetime. In fact, Tho’s personal fortunes rose in direct proportion to the difficulties encountered by the Politburo’s nation-building efforts in the latter half of the 1950s.

Many of the obstacles to North Vietnam’s development were inherent in the transition from war to peace, as well as in the shift from colonial protectorate to independent nation. However, the Politburo under Truong Chinh also made unwise choices to implement policies that were detrimental to a large segment of the population. From December 1953 to July 1956, the VWP had carried out a land reform campaign and an organizational rectification program that aimed to abolish landlordism, placing the land in the hands of peasant smallholders while simultaneously elevating the role of the dispossessed within the Party. In the VWP’s conception of its socialist revolution, the land issue was of utmost importance, since 80 percent of Vietnamese lived in rural areas. At the top, Hanoi leaders strove to consolidate Party control down to the village level and purify the VWP of bourgeois or capitalist elements who had to be tolerated during the exigencies of the French War. In the villages, however, the Party’s policies created an atmosphere of fear, distrust, paranoia, and greed as neighbors turned against one another.

As the top Party leader at the end of the French-Indochina War, Truong Chinh assumed control over land reform during peacetime. In order to bolster his position within the Politburo, the first secretary pushed for greater control of the agrarian issue by the mass organizations over the more established government administration. By 1956, however, the North Vietnamese people, who were subjected to the wave of terror in the countryside, rose up against the excesses of the campaigns, prompting the government to send its armed forces to quell the demonstrations. When soldiers fired on their own people, the VWP leadership understood that it had to make amends with the masses and undertake damage control within the Party. In August 1956, Ho Chi Minh publicly acknowledged the mistakes of the land reform and Party organizational rectification campaigns, but he was powerless to stop the rebellions that ensued through the remainder of the year. Shortly thereafter, General Giap gave a lengthy speech in which he addressed the specific errors committed by the Party.

Official apologies, however, were not enough. The investigation and subsequent reckoning, known as the “rectification of errors” campaign, brought down Truong Chinh and curbed the power of the mass organizations. However, the government (Ho Chi Minh and Pham Van Dong) and the armed forces (Vo Nguyen Giap) were also tainted in the process.  At the Tenth Plenum of the VWP Central Committee in late September 1956, Truong Chinh officially stepped down as first secretary, although he was not ousted from the Politburo. The Party man who oversaw the rectification of errors was none other than Le Duc Tho. When it became clear that Truong Chinh’s policies were wreaking havoc on Party control over the countryside, the CEC made Le Duc Tho head of the campaign and inducted him into the Politburo. After Tho cleaned house in this capacity in late 1956, he was appointed Party organizational chief, a position he had occupied from 1945 until he was sent to the Mekong Delta in 1948. Regaining this portfolio in the late 1950s greatly expanded his powers during a vital period in the VWP’s development.

One by one, then, Le Duan and Le Duc Tho’s rivals to power in the North suffered major blows to their prestige and prominence. Although the rectification of errors was by far the most thorough campaign to destabilize the old power hierarchy within the Party and Politburo, Le Duan and Le Duc Tho could not yet force the VWP to adopt their campaign to launch a war for reunification in the South. Their position within the Party would receive a tremendous boost, however, from two other troubling developments in the DRV and from the inclusion in their clique of two other men— one in the military, the other in propaganda and culture. By the end of the decade, not only did they command a strong base of support within the Party, but the problematic state of the socialist revolution in the North also allowed them to push for war in the South from the top perches of leadership within the VWP.

Following on the heels of the land reform debacle, the Party’s crackdown spread to the cities as the “reeducation of the capitalists [cải tạo tư sản/” and intellectual dissidents threw urban centers into disorder. During the start of the rectification of errors campaign, there was a rise in literati dissent in the capital city of Hanoi, which led to the Nhan Van– Giai Pham (Humanism– Masterpiece) (NV-GP) affair. Named after two shortlived publications, this affair involved the intelligentsia— writers, historians, philosophers, musicians, journalists, critics, and lawyers— who chafed at Party regulation and demanded greater intellectual, cultural, and political freedom of expression, without calling for the overthrow of the entire system as other movements had in Eastern Europe. During the French Indochina War, the Party and the state had beseeched their writers, many of whom joined the army, to produce propaganda and official literature (tuyên truyền) aimed at mobilizing the masses for the decolonization struggle. In 1949, the PAVN established the Army Office of Art and Literature and created the journal Văn Nghệ Quân Đội (Army Art and Literature) to showcase the talents of its writer-soldiers for the anticolonial cause. Since the office fell under Nguyen Chi Thanh’s department, the army’s ideological watchdog known as the GPD, it also regulated the personal and professional lives of the writer-soldiers in an effort to curb any bourgeois tendencies.

The informal contract that existed between the state and intellectuals during the war broke down, however, as the latter began to feel betrayed in peacetime. When a group of disgruntled writer-soldiers complained about the lack of creative freedom in art and literature to the GPD in February 1955, Thanh dismissed their grievances and castigated the soldier-writers for allowing capitalist ideology to seep into their consciousness. These intellectuals, many of whom believed their military service had earned them the right to speak, claimed that the Party’s strict literary guidelines for socialist realism hampered their creativity. Now that the DRV was at peace, there was no longer a reason to subjugate art to the military, the state, or the Party.

After the unsuccessful meeting with Thanh, intellectuals focused their discontent on the Association of Arts and Literature (AAL), which was established and controlled by the Party. Writers argued that it curtailed intellectual expression and established a worrisome precedent for literary achievement. Here, Hanoi’s dissidents would come up against To Huu, a rising member of the Party who, like Thanh, was in charge of policing ideological adherence to Marxism-Leninism in the North. Born in 1920 in Phu Lai village in the central region known then as Annam, To Huu, whose original name was Nguyen Kim Thành, came from a middle-class family outside Hue and joined revolutionary activities in the imperial capital as a young man in the 1930s. During the French-Indochina War, To Huu served as the Viet Minh’s information director, and in 1951 he was elected as alternate member of the VWP Central Executive Committee.

During peacetime, To Huu used his leadership position within the VWP to undercut more talented rivals in the literary community. On a broader scale, he reinforced Party control over the intelligentsia, which threatened to undermine the Party’s status in the DRV. In March 1955, the AAL organized two events that further strained the already tense relationship between the writers and the Party. The first included a session to discuss a book of poetry by To Huu titled Việt Bắc (North Vietnam), and the second involved the distribution of literary prizes for 1954– 55. The literary community in Hanoi expressed near-universal disdain for the widely published Việt Bắc, calling it “bland and small.” Later, writers rallied against the awarding of prizes to substandard works that won for being ideologically correct rather than for any literary merit. A group of these disaffected and disillusioned writers started two publications, a series of four books titled Giai Phẩm Mùa Xuân (Masterpiece of Spring) and a weekly newspaper, Nhân Văn (Humanism), both representing an attempt to reclaim the private, intellectual space from the Party’s grip. The latter publication sought to connect North Vietnam’s intellectual sphere to international, liberalizing tendencies seen in the Hundred Flowers Campaign in China, the Hungarian Revolution, and Poland’s October, even though it never called for the same wide-reaching reform. Nonetheless, the readership of both publications quickly extended beyond intellectuals.

To Huu’s response was severe. With the Party’s support, he imprisoned the writers, shut down publishing houses, and launched a countercampaign. By early 1958, To Huu instituted even more extreme measures, subjecting the intellectual community to self-criticism sessions. The Party eventually suppressed the movement by sending the “counterrevolutionary” ringleaders to labor reform camps and refashioning the literati dissidence as a Trotskyist, reactionary plot.

Within this oppressive environment, with apparatchiks like Thanh, To Huu, and Le Duc Tho ascendant, Le Duan returned to Hanoi in 1957. At that time, Ho Chi Minh, chairman of the VWP, took over as acting first secretary with Vo Nguyen Giap and Politburo member Nguyen Duy Trinh as his assistants following Truong Chinh’s demotion in 1956. This arrangement was only temporary, since the Party leadership needed to promote a new first secretary who had not been involved with the disastrous decision making in the North. Moreover, the old guard— including Ho, Giap, Pham Van Dong, and the recently demoted Truong Chinh— wanted to promote a new acting head who would respect and practice the Vietnamese communist leadership’s long-held tradition of collective decision making. Le Duan, who remained far from the troubles in the North and who appeared to lack a strong base of power within the Party, appeared the ideal candidate, but even then nothing was confirmed. Holding a fake Cambodian passport and traveling under a Chinese name, Le Duan set out from Saigon to neighboring Cambodia and from there to Hong Kong and through Guangzhou to reach Hanoi.

When he arrived in the DRV, Le Duan had to resolve personal matters as well as professional ones. While Nga and her two children bounced around apartments and eventually settled with Pham Hung’s family in Hanoi, Le Duan’s first wife, Suong, and her children resided in their home village of Nghe An more than 100 miles to the south. After exchanging many letters, the two wives and their families met one Tet holiday when their husband was in the South. Nga later described this period as very stressful. Although Suong seemed to accept her as a “younger sister,” her father-in-law was less embracing. Moreover, Nga’s friends— many of whom attended her maquis wedding to Le Duan in the South— began to pressure her into divorce so that Le Duan would not face any criticism in Hanoi. Finally, the real obstacle to their marriage would come from Suong’s adolescent children, who moved to Hanoi for school once their father assumed a leadership role in the Politburo. With the National Assembly’s Family Decree delineating that a family could only consist of one husband and one wife, Nga believed her husband would have to make a choice.

Le Duan, however, believed the law did not apply to him. One quiet afternoon after his return to Hanoi when he visited Nga’s quarters to play with their infant son, Thanh, she broached the subject of dissolving their marriage. He railed against the idea: “I will become First Secretary so it mandates our divorce, but my heart breaks and I cannot rest easy with that decision. A communist must possess loyalty and compassion. If I abandoned you, it wouldn’t sit well with me as a communist and so I cannot do it. I won’t destroy a family.” Not everyone agreed with his stance, and Nga ostensibly faced the repercussions. Although this is hard to believe given Le Duan’s status in the Party, Nga claims that when Le Duan beseeched the Women’s Union to accept Nga and their situation, the women “vehemently opposed.” Despite being a ranking communist official who devoted countless hours to studying Party doctrine in the western Mekong Delta, Nga saw that the Women’s Union in Hanoi was able to negate her training and her accomplishments and instead make her an “object of their scorn [đối tượng các chị ghét bỏ].”

Powerful as he became in the Party, Le Duan may indeed have been powerless when it came to his children. One evening when Le Duan was tending to Nga and their baby son, the daughter of his first marriage, Hong, made a scene by banging against their door and wailing. Le Duan, not knowing what else to do, sent Nga away so he could calm his daughter down. On another occasion, when a southern comrade called on Nga to see if he could set up a meeting with her recently returned husband, the entire household forced her to hide while they pushed him away. Nor did the inhospitality extend only to fellow southern revolutionaries. Nga’s eldest brother and youngest sibling were turned away when they came for a visit. During the engagement party of Le Duan’s eldest son from his first marriage, the future bride’s family made the mistake of calling Nga “Le Duan’s wife,” prompting Hong to wail in defiance. Unable to tolerate the stigma any longer, Nga, then three months pregnant with their third child, resolved to go to China to further her studies.

As domestic bliss evaded Le Duan, he also soon discovered that his rival Vo Nguyen Giap still held the means to undermine him. In early 1957, Ho Chi Minh had entrusted Giap with drafting Resolution 15, which would dictate the Party’s policy toward the southern resistance. Along with Tran Quang Huy and Hoang Tung, Giap consulted members of the Politburo and diligently worked on the resolution, which might have advised against armed struggle, or at least curtailed its use. In early 1958, when Giap gave Ho an update on the drafting of Resolution 15, the aged leader, most likely under pressure from Le Duan, told Giap to hand over the document to Le Duan, who would finalize the resolution and present it to the CEC plenum the following year.  At the same time that he sought to wrestle control over Resolution 15 from Giap, Le Duan faced the added pressure of having to put off two southern emissaries sent North by the resistance in the summer of 1957, Phan Văn Đáng and Phạm Văn Xô, to seek Party approval for armed conflict. Le Duan probably secretly cursed General Giap as he reluctantly locked the southern emissaries away in Hanoi, not allowing them to interact with other Party leaders until he had firm control over VWP policy. It has been speculated that Le Duan’s deep-seated jealousy of Giap and the general’s initial drafting of Resolution 15 were the key reasons Le Duan would devote himself to sidelining the general for the remainder of the war.

The reason for Giap’s reluctance to approve armed conflict may have been connected to the economic situation in the North by the late 1950s. As the dust began to settle in the countryside and in the cities following land reform and the intellectual dissident movements, the Party resolved to take concrete steps toward a centrally planned socialist economy by accelerating its agricultural collectivization and industrialization programs. In mid-February 1958, the National Assembly approved the Three-Year Plan for Economic Development and Transformation of Cultural Development (1958– 60), which outlined the socialist transformation of the economy as well as the cultural and ideological campaign to mobilize the entire nation behind the revolution. At the Fourteenth Plenum in November, VWP leaders decided to accelerate socialist construction. One month later, the National Assembly approved the accelerated Three-Year Plan. Party leaders hoped that collective farming cooperatives, as the bedrock of a socialist political economy, would increase production, control consumption, and direct agricultural earnings to building factories and strengthening other sectors of the economy. In addition, the organizational element of collectivization would contribute to national defense, since the peasantry could easily be mobilized in armies and militias. During the land reform campaign, collectivization collapsed in many areas, but by 1957, cooperative experiments began to increase. Once again, however, the North Vietnamese people resisted the Party’s policies. Political scientist Benedict Kerkvliet describes villagers’ use of “weapons of the weak” to hide their resistance by “shirking work” and “snitching grain” during this period. Ignoring the recommendation of local leaders to avoid a rapid increase in cooperatives, the CEC hastened collectivization efforts in late 1958 with the accelerated Three-Year Plan, fearing that the peasantry would abandon the socialist revolution entirely.  “By late 1960 . . . the reform of agriculture in the North Vietnamese countryside had been virtually completed, using the form of low-level cooperatives. More than 85 percent of the peasant families had joined cooperatives that contained 68.06 percent of the land. Of that 85 percent, 11.81 percent joined high-level cooperatives. In the urban areas, 100 percent of industrial bourgeois families, 98 percent of commercial bourgeois families, and 99 percent of mechanized transportation facilities included in the area of reform were socialized.” Although the Party boasted success, with approximately 2 million people enlisted in the cooperatives from 1958 to 1960, according to Kerkvliet, the collectivization plan rested “uneasily on wobbly foundations.” In some instances, villagers openly resisted the accelerated collectivization attempt even though news of the NV-GP crackdown had trickled to the countryside.

In addition to agricultural collectivization, the VWP attached great importance to urban reconstruction and industrial development. The Three-Year Three-Year Plan stipulated the building of industrial sites throughout Hanoi but with more emphasis on the outskirts of the capital. East European sources reveal that the North Vietnamese leadership launched an overly ambitious program, ignoring the fact that an agricultural country could not be transformed into an industrial one overnight. By the early 1960s, the Hungarians were complaining that the “already chaotic conditions [that] existed in planning further worsened.”

Some of North Vietnam’s difficulties could be attributed to the increasingly complex international environment. During the late 1950s, the fates of postcolonial states were inseparable not only from the struggle between capitalism and communism but also from the schisms that existed within the two camps. In the case of the VWP, the emergence of what would become the Sino-Soviet split greatly complicated North Vietnam’s reconstruction, socialist development, and path toward reunification. By the late 1950s, Hanoi faced two alternative modes of revolution, as Moscow and Beijing solidified their separate ideological positions: peaceful reunification through socialist development of the North and violent reunification through liberation struggle in the South.

The first cracks in the international proletarian movement appeared at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in early 1956, where First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes and cult of personality. Following the historic congress, the Soviet Union decided to pursue a policy of “peaceful coexistence” in competition with the capitalist world. Khrushchev’s line now posed a direct threat to Mao Zedong’s China, ideologically as well as geostrategically, since Mao sought constant revolution both at home and abroad in order to consolidate his authority within the CCP. Wanting to be treated as an equal partner in the Sino-Soviet alliance, the PRC also took offense at what Beijing saw as Soviet insistence on perpetuating an unequal relationship. In particular, Soviet disapproval of Mao’s handling of the Quemoy-Matsu crises, Moscow’s proposal of the 1958 joint naval arrangement that Mao considered unfair, and Soviet neutrality during the 1959 Sino-Indian dispute over Tibet contributed to Beijing’s desire to break free of the patron-client relationship.

Since China provided the bulk of the aid to Hanoi during the French-Indochina War, Beijing wielded more influence over Hanoi’s policies than did Moscow. Moreover, Stalin, and even later Khrushchev, showed little interest in Indochina and, with the founding of the PRC, relegated the region to Mao. However, the Soviet Union continued to be considered by the Vietnamese communists as the ideological center of the world communist movement. During this period of DRV state building, Sino-Soviet relations, though tense, were far from severed. As a result, following Saigon’s cancellation of nationwide elections in 1956, both Beijing and Moscow approved Hanoi’s decision to concentrate on political agitation rather than armed struggle in the South against the Diem regime. China’s Bandung strategy and the Soviet Union’s Asia policy pushed the same ideological line: to encourage neutralism rather than revolution among postcolonial states and nationalist regimes. 95 Both powers encouraged Hanoi to continue its political struggle, implying a de facto acceptance of the continued division of Vietnam. In 1957, Moscow had proposed that both Vietnams enter the United Nations. However, by the end of the decade, as the Soviets and Chinese began to part ideological ways, the growing resistance in the South grew more urgent in North Vietnamese estimation. As Beijing again changed its policy and began to welcome national liberation struggles, including the Iraqi revolution, the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale movement, and the Congolese struggle, to name a few, Moscow cooled to these violent movements. Just as the East-West conflict forced the postcolonial world to choose a side, the emergence of the Sino-Soviet split put communist, radical, and left-leaning revolutions in a bind.

As a result of these international debates, two contending factions began to emerge in the VWP, complicating the already existent power struggles in the Politburo. Although far from homogenous or static, these heterogeneous factions coalesced around the vital question of reunification. “North-firsters” wanted to continue concentrating the DRV’s resources on state building: socialist development of the economy that would compete with and ultimately defeat the South. The “South-firsters” wanted to shepherd the DRV’s resources into supporting the rising resistance in the South: reunification through war. The terms of the debate centered on the rate and methods of the agricultural revolution in the North but were intimately connected with the insurgency in the South. As the Sino-Soviet rift deepened and the conflict in the South intensified, the opposing factions invoked Khrushchev’s peaceful-coexistence and Mao’s anti-imperialist lines to advance their respective causes.

Until the Party archives are opened, it will be difficult to state definitively who was a “North-firster” and who was a “South-firster” in the Politburo; however, reasonable estimations can be made. At the Eighth National Assembly in early 1958, Prime Minister Pham Van Dong reiterated the need to pursue reunification through peaceful means. Alongside Dong, Giap might have also belonged to the “North-firsters,” since he feared getting sucked into a war in the South at the expense of development in the North, especially with the lack of unified international support and the emergence of domestic divisions. A long-time advocate of modernizing the armed forces, Giap perhaps believed that the Party’s support for armed struggle in the South would risk full-scale mobilization of his army, which required time to recuperate and rebuild after the war for decolonization. Given his conservative stance at the outbreak of the French-Indochina War, Ho most likely agreed with his Pac Bo companions that the DRV was not ready to launch a war for reunification. The positions of these men in the subsequent decade lend credence to this argument. For these leaders and other “North-firsters” in the Party, the diversion of men and matériel to the southern battlefield when the socialist revolution in the North remained so fragile was foolhardy. By 1959, asking more sacrifice of the people to support war in the South after so many failures in the North could push the masses to rebel against the Party.

Le Duan, Le Duc Tho, and their “South-first” faction, however, believed the opposite. War in the South could provide the rallying cry that the Party needed to reinvigorate the masses and bolster its position within the DRV— a lesson they drew from recent Vietnamese history. It was a gamble that Le Duan and Le Duc Tho were ready to take not only because they had dedicated their careers up to that point to the southern revolution but also because the promotion of war below the seventeenth parallel was the key to their eventual seizure of power within the Politburo. By 1959, factors in both the North and the South converged, allowing them to seize the initiative. With Giap’s relinquishing of Resolution 15 to Le Duan, the latter and his faithful southern deputy and close confidant Pham Hung began to draft a more militant resolution, one that would bind the Party to supporting armed conflict in the South. In order to strengthen his case to promote Party support for war in the South, Le Duan embarked on a secret trip to the South some time following the Fourteenth Plenum in November 1958. There he found that Ngo Dinh Diem’s anticommunist denunciation campaign of 1955 to 1958 had escalated to even more repressive measures with Decree 10/59 in May 1959, which subjected anyone suspected of political opposition— be they former Viet Minh, communists, or anyone undertaking antigovernment activities— to a sentence of life in prison or death. Although Diem’s draconian law pushed more South Vietnamese villagers into the revolution, it also threatened to unleash an uprising that could slip completely from Party control in the North.

At the same time, Le Duan continued to firm up his base of power by promoting the power of apparatchiks within the Party. The Politburo had recalled Le Duan to Hanoi and made him de facto first secretary because key members believed he lacked a base, but it became apparent that they underestimated his organizational prowess. Giap’s nemesis in the army, Nguyen Chi Thanh, and To Huu— men who had predicated their rise in the VWP on being agents of the apparatus— provided support within the Party that could challenge the other Politburo leaders. By promoting Party primacy to suppress any dissent within the armed forces and the intelligentsia, Thanh and To Huu became obvious allies with the top apparatchik, Party organizational chief Le Duc Tho, who remained Le Duan’s second-in-command. Together, these VWP leaders who had built their careers on promoting the Party apparatus filled the void left by the decline of Truong Chinh’s mass organizations, Ho Chi Minh and Pham Van Dong’s state organs, and Vo Nguyen Giap’s armed forces. Since the Party as a whole had been greatly compromised by the obstacles on the DRV’s road to socialist revolution, Le Duan and his faction exploited the Party leadership’s desire for a new cause that could rally the people behind the Party banner.

And so the die was cast for Le Duan’s ascent to the top Party position as first secretary, thanks to the unsuspecting current heads of the Politburo who agreed to elevate him. In his reminiscences about Le Duan, Giap wrote that he had in fact floated the idea among his comrades within the Politburo that Le Duan should assume the position of first secretary a little while after the latter returned to Hanoi. At the time, according to Giap, Le Duan played coy, saying, “We should wait to see what the Third Party Congress wants to do.”  During the Politburo convention that outlined the agenda for the upcoming Party Congress, the members of the top leadership body suggested that Le Duan head the delegation to prepare the Politburo’s political report, a very important and high-profile task. Again, he demurred: “Since I haven’t been in the North for the past ten years, I fear the responsibility of presenting the political report. I propose that comrades Truong Chinh and Vo Nguyen Giap be on the delegation to prepare the report instead.” In the end, the Politburo decided that Ho would head the delegation and Le Duan would be vice chair.

Le Duan abandoned this feigned reluctance to assume a position of leadership at the expanded plenary meeting of the CEC in late December 1958 and early January 1959. At this gathering Le Duan and the apparatchiks scored their first, albeit limited, victory. As the historic plenum opened, Le Duan took the podium to emphasize the dire nature of the situation below the seventeenth parallel: the southern insurgency was in danger of being annihilated by Ngo Dinh Diem’s troops unless the Party intervened. An unspoken message, which at least the ranking southern representatives present at the plenum understood, was that the lower levels had already begun to take matters into their own hands, and that if the Party refused to sanction their violence, it could lose control of the resistance below the seventeenth parallel. After painting a dismal picture, Le Duan closed his speech with what he thought offered a bright solution to the Party’s dilemma. Resolution 15, which drew from his 1956 southern manifesto but which he and Pham Hung had shepherded through another twenty-two drafts after seizing it from Giap, called for the Party to commit to the overthrow of the Diem government through not only political agitation but also military means. Since the Diem regime refused to carry out nationwide elections for unification, the replacement revolutionary government would have to be imposed by force.

Although the CEC members at the January 1959 plenum had approved Le Duan’s Resolution 15, a question remained about which balance its guidelines should strike between the act of political resistance and the use of military force. To Le Duan’s dismay, Party leaders opted to shelve the issue and reconvene in May. Le Duan may have attempted to alleviate the concerns of the North-first moderate faction of the Party when he stated to the CMC in March: “We won’t use war to unify the country, but if the United States and its puppets use war, then we have to use war, and the war that the enemy has initiated will be an opportunity for us to unify the country.”

The guidelines for the implementation of the Resolution went through three more drafts before it was finally presented in May. Although Party records remain silent on the five months between the Fifteenth Plenum’s two sessions, Le Duan and his faction must have lobbied for the resolution to state, in no uncertain terms, that the Party would move solidly toward armed conflict. At the May meeting, Party leaders finally decided to go ahead with the terms agreed on at the January meeting by establishing a Special Military Operations Corps dubbed Doan 559 (Group 559), named after its founding in May 1959, to maintain the logistical supply route that ran through the Annamese cordillera (Truong Son) to the South, more commonly known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In September, the Party created Doan 959 (Group 959, later Front 959) in order to expand the supply routes running through southern Laos and to serve as headquarters for North Vietnamese military support of Pathet Lao troops. 105 Thus, after nearly a decade of mucking around in the backwaters of the South, Le Duan made the region and its armed struggle a priority for the Party, and perhaps even the solution to the VWP’s domestic problems in the North.

His victory was only tentative, however, since Resolution 15 hesitated to approve the use of armed force in situations other than self-defense. In addition to the internal divisions within the VWP regarding the balance between political resistance and armed conflict, the ambiguous state of relations between Beijing and Moscow contributed to a delay in the transmission and implementation of Resolution 15. According to the late historian Ralph B. Smith, “Until Sino-Soviet relations were clarified, they and their colleagues [Vietnamese Party leaders] decided not to take up a clear position of their own, and to delay publication of the ‘hard line’ 15th Plenum resolution.” Although the PRC’s increasing support of national liberation struggles in the Third World allowed prowar leaders in Hanoi to broach the aim of overthrowing the Ngo Dinh Diem government by force, both Beijing and Moscow advised Hanoi to concentrate on the political struggle. As a result, the contents of the resolution did not reach the South until 1960, when Beijing’s radical stance grew more pronounced. Hanoi’s compromise strategy of caution toward the struggle in the South clearly reflected the burgeoning divisions at home and abroad and was not merely a response to the crisis in the South.

Nonetheless, the North-first moderates in the Party must have seen the May session as a major defeat even though the expanded Sixteenth Plenum, which took place before and after the May session, was devoted to domestic issues. These initial steps toward war, like the establishment of Group 559, meant that northern resources would be funneled to the southern struggle at the expense of development in the DRV. The Party’s campaign to liberate the South from the oppressive Diem regime and to foment a national people’s democracy would delay the socialist revolution in the North, especially if the southern struggle proved to be an epic quagmire. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the country, revolutionaries in the South could not await the return of their high-level leaders (who remained in Hanoi to attend both sessions of the Fifteenth Plenum) for the Party’s approval for war. By the summer of 1959, when the plenum’s delegates returned to their various zones below the seventeenth parallel, the revolution had already begun in some areas. In what the Party calls the Concerted Uprising, peasant revolt had begun to shake the foundations of power in the South.

CONCLUSION

Le Duan and Le Duc Tho’s first brush with anticolonial resistance and grueling incarceration in the 1930s and 1940s set them on a Marxist-Leninist path toward independence and national liberation. During the struggle for decolonization, both men sought to rise in the ranks of the Communist Party in the context of the violent and tumultuous south. Their experiences in the Mekong Delta would equip them with the tools to build a veritable empire during the Cold War and beyond. Although their revolutionary careers during these early decades were noteworthy, their postcolonial activities made the greatest mark on their nation’s development. As they parted ways in 1955 in the delta moonlight, they enacted major events that would change the course of Vietnam’s modern history, which would eventually include engaging the world’s greatest superpower in war.

As rival leaders in the Politburo attempted and failed to bring about a socialist revolution in the DRV, Le Duan’s reunion with Le Duc Tho amid the shambles of the Party’s state building enterprise would seal the fates of North and South Vietnam. The two men engineered the greatest usurpation of power in the annals of the Vietnamese Communist Party. When Le Duan left Saigon in the late 1950s, he would not set foot in the southern capital for nearly two decades; but the South was never far from his mind. Shortly after he arrived in Hanoi, he quickly rose to the highest seat of power and championed a campaign that appeared to solve the Party’s immediate woes not only in the North but also in the South: war for the liberation of the South and ultimate reunification of Vietnam.

Although Le Duan’s Resolution 15 only sanctioned armed force to support the political struggle in the South, it constituted the first stage in Le Duan and Le Duc Tho’s campaign for total war. Armed conflict would prove unsatisfying for the two Party leaders who had built their careers in the Mekong Delta; they wanted a full-scale war for reunification. The 1960s would witness the achievement of that goal.

Nguyen, Lien-Hang T. (2012). Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (The New Cold War History) (Kindle Locations 401-1001). University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.