The Vietnam War: Vietnamese and American Perspectives

Vietnamese and American Perspectives

Jayne Werner, Luu Doan Huynh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317454007
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume derives from an unprecedented seminar held at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs in November 1990. At the seminar, leading Western diplomatic and military historians and Vietnam scholars met with prominent Vietnamese Communists to reflect on the Vietnam War. The book contains four parts: The Vietnamese Revolution and Political/Military strategy; the war from the American side; the war in the South and Cambodia; and retrospective and postwar issues. In addition to Jane Werner and Luu Doan Huynh, the contributors are Mark Bradley, William Duiker, David Elliott, Christine White, George Vickers, James Harrison, George Herring, Ronald Spector, Paul Joseph, Jeffrey Clarke, Ngo Vinh Long, Benedict Kiernan, Marilyn Young, Keith Taylor, and Tran Van Tra. General Tra was Commander of the People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam from 1963 to 1975. His eye-opening analysis of the Tet Offensive has never before been available in English.

Part One

The Vietnamese Revolution and Political/Military Strategy

1

An Improbable Opportunity: America and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s 1947 Initiative

Mark Bradley

Shortly after the outbreak of the First Indochina War, Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) launched a four-month diplomatic initiative in the spring and summer of 1947 designed to secure the support of the Truman administration. Centered in Thailand, the Vietnamese effort was led by Pham Ngoc Thach, deputy minister in the Office of the President and one of three men who directly advised Ho Chi Minh. From April to June, Thach presented a series of substantive proposals to representatives of the American government and business community in Bangkok aimed at winning American confidence and assistance: calls for recognition of the DRV and mediation of the war with the French; requests for economic rehabilitation loans and promises of economic concessions to American businesses; and appeals for technical assistance and cultural exchange.

The Vietnamese initiative inspired the Truman administration’s only sustained internal reexamination of its relationship with the DRV between 1946 and 1949. The initiative prompted efforts to reestablish direct diplomatic contact with the DRV as well as a comprehensive evaluation of Ho Chi Minh’s government and its willingness to accept American advice and guidance. Nonetheless, the DRV’s initiative ended in failure. As with Ho Chi Minh’s better known efforts to seek American support in 1946 and 1949,¹ the administration met the Vietnamese proposals with public silence. By the fall of 1947, the Truman administration hesitantly began to embrace French efforts to organize a non-communist, nationalist alternative to the DRV, a policy that culminated in American recognition of the Associated States of Vietnam under the former emperor, Bao Dai, in February 1950.

Despite its failure, the DRV initiative and the reactions of the Truman administration to it provide new evidence about the character of Vietnamese and American policy toward each other in the late 1940s, a period contemporary critics of American policy termed a “lost opportunity”² for closer relations between the United States and the DRV. First, this episode permits a reexamination of the nature and aims of the DRV’s diplomacy. The character of Pham Ngoc Thach’s proposals to the Truman administration and the domestic context from which they emerged suggest that, rather than viewing world politics solely through a Leninist prism, Ho Chi Minh and the DRV took a pragmatic approach to foreign relations in this period. Second, this episode illustrates the factors that influenced the Truman administration’s policy toward the DRV. In part, it sustains the conclusions of scholars like Gary R. Hess who argue that anti-communism and French pressure framed administration policy in Vietnam.³ But it also demonstrates the institutional processes by which French concerns made their way into American policy deliberations. More importantly, the administration’s reaction to the DRV initiative reveals the roles that ambivalent attitudes toward the Nanjing⁴ government in China and culturally based judgments of the DRV’s incapacity for independent government played in shaping the administration’s unfavorable perceptions of Vietnamese communism.

Spring of 1947 was a time of internal crisis for the DRV. After nine months of often acrimonious diplomatic negotiations over the terms of Vietnamese independence, war broke out between the French and the DRV in December 1946.⁵ The first three months of the Indochina War brought sustained military defeat and escalating administrative chaos, putting the continued survival of Ho Chi Minh’s government in jeopardy. Moreover, with Soviet diplomacy focused on Europe and the Chinese Communists preoccupied by civil war, the DRV faced almost complete isolation from the Communist world. In large measure, pragmatism rather than ideology shaped the DRV’s efforts to address this crisis. With the possibility of external assistance from the Communist world foreclosed, the DRV’s diplomacy focused on the United States and the Nanjing government in China. At the same time, the Vietnamese government launched a series of internal reforms aimed not so much at socialist revolution as at boosting its popular legitimacy and developing military and economic self-sufficiency.

The Vietnamese government’s national authority quickly eroded as the DRV’s army faltered under the strong French military challenge at the outbreak of the Indochina War. French armed forces took most of the provincial capitals of Bac Bo and Trung Bo⁶ in January 1947. By early February, the imperial capital of Hue had fallen to the French after a six-week siege. In mid-February, after two months of sporadic fighting, Vietnamese forces withdrew from Hanoi which once again fell under French control. The adverse military situation prompted Ho Chi Minh to move his government from Hanoi to the jungles of Thai Nguyen in northern Bac Bo to escape French capture. Although the government in Thai Nguyen retained loose control of most of rural Bac Bo, the central state apparatus built by the DRV in 1945 and 1946 ceased to function by March 1947. As one contemporary critic noted in the DRV newspaper, Su That (Truth), “plans were slow in coming out” and “orders and instructions were not complete.” Each rural community, this critic continued,

simply followed its own developments concerning tactics and organization. At the same time the way our cadres worked was also poor so that each time an order to set something in motion needed coordination it seemed to be too difficult.⁷

The crisis precipitated by military defeat and the collapse of the government’s administrative structure were compounded by the DRV’s isolation from its potential allies in the communist world. No evidence of sustained contact or of financial and technical assistance from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the Soviet Union, or the French Communist Party in the spring and summer of 1947 is available.⁸ Support from the CCP, increasingly important to the DRV after 1949, was insignificant in this period. The CCP, preoccupied with fighting the Nanjing government in Manchuria and northern China in early 1947, served as a model for Vietnamese military strategy, but offered no financial or technical assistance. Nor did the Soviet Union extend substantial guidance or assistance to the Vietnamese. Concerned with events in Europe, including the communist struggle for power in France, the Soviets expressed sympathy for the Vietnamese cause but remained noncommittal about the specific levels of assistance the Vietnamese might receive.⁹ The French Communist Party remained aloof from the DRV until its ejection from the French ruling coalition in the spring of 1947; even then, however, members were able to offer little more than internal party resolutions to secure the withdrawal of French troops.

Against this backdrop of internal crisis and international isolation, the DRV sent Pham Ngoc Thach to Bangkok in the spring and summer of 1947 to seek the Truman administration’s support.¹⁰ Two elements comprised the DRV initiative: efforts to convince the administration of the moderate and independent character of the Vietnamese government and calls for American political, economic, and cultural assistance. Thach’s contacts with the American embassy in Bangkok between April and May were directed at the former. In frequent conversations with the assistant military attache to the Bangkok embassy, Lt. Col. William Law, and with American businessmen, Thach sought to inform the American government of developments in Indochina from the DRV’s perspective, demonstrate the moderate character of the Vietnamese regime, and convey the DRV’s capability and seriousness of purpose.

During this initial phase of the DRV initiative, Thach submitted two Vietnamese documents to the American government that illustrate the nature of his efforts. The first was a series of answers Thach gave on April 9 to questions formulated by Law and Edwin F. Stanton, the American ambassador to Thailand. Thach’s responses stressed the broad composition of the Vietnamese government and the nationalist orientation of communism in Vietnam. “The actual government,” Thach said, “is … of broad national makeup, comprised of men from all three regions of the country.” The cabinet ministers “are not associated with a particular party,” he continued, rather, the “choice of ministers has been made in consideration of their worth and popularity.” Emphasizing its nationalist program rather than a commitment to socialist revolution, Thach argued that communism in Vietnam since 1932 had embodied “the spirit of national resistance against French colonialism” and “is nothing more than a means of arriving at independence.” Thach also sought to reassure the administration about the DRV’s economic program, claiming that “the government” and “the communist ministers … favor the development of capitalist autonomy and call on foreign capital for the reconstruction of the country.”¹¹

In a second Vietnamese document, Thach sought to translate these broader appeals into concrete proposals aimed at increasing American confidence in the DRV’s capabilities. This document, a memorandum to representatives of the American International Engineering Group in Bangkok, is one of several Thach prepared and distributed to American firms in Thailand. It offered a quid pro quo: guarantees of monopolistic economic concessions to American business in return for agricultural and industrial equipment as well as $10 million to $20 million in American rehabilitation loans. Of particular interest are what Thach termed the “economic privileges” the DRV was willing to grant to American firms. The strangest, perhaps, was tourism; at a time of political and socioeconomic turmoil, Thach called Vietnam “an ideal country for tourists.” More serious were promises of tax-free monopolies for American imports and for the rice export trade, potentially the largest in Asia, as well as calls for establishment of small American manufacturing plants in Vietnam. Significantly, in view of Thach’s efforts to demonstrate conciliation toward the French, an American rubber concession was specifically excluded from the proposal. “The majority of rubber fields’ owners are French,” Thach said, “so we cannot guarantee the monopoly of export because it is necessary to give some economic interests to the French.”¹²

The moderate image Thach sought to convey to the Truman administration in the initial phase of the DRV’s initiative was reinforced by his own appointment and a subsequent reshuffling of the DRV cabinet. By selecting Thach to represent the DRV to the Truman administration, Ho Chi Minh sought to communicate a conciliatory message to the Americans. Thach had been a member of the Viet Minh executive committee, which oversaw efforts to establish a provisional government in Nam Bo in August and September of 1945. Thach’s formal position was commissioner for foreign affairs; in that role he had served as the Vietnamese liaison for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the fall 1945 “Embankment” mission to Saigon led by Peter Dewey. The leadership of the DRV, particularly Ho Chi Minh, saw Dewey’s mission, along with another OSS mission led by Archimedes Patti to Hanoi, as the high point of Vietnamese-American cooperation. The selection of Thach to meet American officials in 1947 may be seen as an effort to capitalize on this favorable association.¹³ Ho Chi Minh also hoped to influence favorably American perceptions of his government’s composition through his appointment of Hoang Minh Giam, the leader of the Vietnamese Socialist Party, as foreign minister in March and a shift in the composition of his cabinet in July. Three Communist ministers were dismissed in the July cabinet reshuffle, including Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap (who continued to run the army), and were replaced by non-Communists who supported Ho’s policies.¹⁴

Thach’s calls for direct American assistance to the Vietnamese government in late May and early June opened the final phase of the DRV initiative. This was preceded on May 8 by Foreign Minister Giam’s appeal to the Truman administration for American diplomatic recognition, a policy Giam claimed “would increase United States prestige and influence … and establish peace in Southeast Asia.”¹⁵ The substance of Thach’s message was more pragmatic: “we recognize the world-politics of the U.S. at this time does not permit taking a position against the French.” Instead, Thach appealed for political, economic, and cultural assistance from the Truman administration. He sought American mediation of the Indochina War to guarantee a settlement with France either through tripartite discussion or the presentation of the Vietnamese case before the United Nations by the Philippines. Thach explicitly disavowed any interest in American weapons, repeating the request he made of American businessmen for a substantial loan to provide capital and technicians for economic reconstruction and development. He also expressed concern that the Vietnamese had “seen U.S. culture only through the French ‘prison’ [sic]” and proposed the establishment of joint scientific organizations, funding for a chair in American literature at the University of Hanoi, and scholarships for Vietnamese students at American universities to foster enhanced mutual understanding.¹⁶

The absence of documentation on the processes of Vietnamese decision making in undertaking the initiative to the Truman administration makes it difficult to authoritatively address DRV motivations and aims.¹⁷ In one view of Vietnamese diplomacy, most recently put forward by Ton That Thien,¹⁸ the DRV’s ideological solidarity with the Soviet Union prevented it from undertaking any sustained relationship with the non-Communist world. Party doctrine, Thien argues, viewed diplomacy as part of the political and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• The Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction—The Vietnam War: Vietnamese and American Perspectives
• Part One: The Vietnamese Revolution and Political/Military Strategy
• Part Two: The War from American Side
• Part Three: The War in the South and Cambodia
• Part Four: Retrospective and Postwar Issues
• Index