The Columbia History of the Vietnam War

David Anderson

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780231509329
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Vietnam War
• Index: History

Rooted in recent scholarship, The Columbia History of the Vietnam War offers profound new perspectives on the political, historical, military, and social issues that defined the war and its effect on the United States and Vietnam. Laying the chronological and critical foundations for the volume, David L. Anderson opens with an essay on the Vietnam War's major moments and enduring relevance. Mark Philip Bradley follows with a reexamination of Vietnamese revolutionary nationalism and the Vietminh-led war against French colonialism. Richard H. Immerman revisits Eisenhower's and Kennedy's efforts at nation building in South Vietnam, and Gary R. Hess reviews America's military commitment under Kennedy and Johnson. Lloyd C. Gardner investigates the motivations behind Johnson's escalation of force, and Robert J. McMahon focuses on the pivotal period before and after the Tet Offensive. Jeffrey P. Kimball then makes sense of Nixon's paradoxical decision to end U.S. intervention while pursuing a destructive air war.

John Prados and Eric Bergerud devote essays to America's military strategy, while Helen E. Anderson and Robert K. Brigham explore the war's impact on Vietnamese women and urban culture. Melvin Small recounts the domestic tensions created by America's involvement in Vietnam, and Kenton Clymer traces the spread of the war to Laos and Cambodia. Concluding essays by Robert D. Schulzinger and George C. Herring account for the legacy of the war within Vietnamese and American contexts and diagnose the symptoms of the "Vietnam syndrome" evident in later debates about U.S. foreign policy. America's experience in Vietnam continues to figure prominently in discussions about strategy and defense, not to mention within discourse on the identity of the United States as a nation. Anderson's expert collection is therefore essential to understanding America's entanglement in the Vietnam War and the conflict's influence on the nation's future interests abroad.

PART I

Chronological Perspectives

1. Setting the Stage

VIETNAMESE REVOLUTIONARY NATIONALISM AND THE FIRST VIETNAM WAR

Mark Philip Bradley

On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh mounted a raised wooden podium in Hanoi’s central Ba Dinh Square to proclaim Vietnam free from more than eighty years of French colonial rule. The speech marked the culmination of the August Revolution, which had brought to power the largely Communist leadership of the first postcolonial independent Vietnamese state, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). Ho began his speech this way: “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States in 1776.”¹ Vietnamese independence, Ho continued, drew not only on the sensibilities of the American Revolution, but also on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

Ironically, the echoes of eighteenth-century Euro-American revolutionary politics in Ho Chi Minh’s declaration of Vietnamese independence were almost immediately challenged by the very powers he drew on for inspiration. For the next thirty years, war engulfed Vietnam as initially France and later the United States fought against the Ho Chi Minh government and divided the country between the Communist North and non-Communist South. In April 1975, those efforts came to an end when tanks driven by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) crashed through the gates of South Vietnam’s presidential palace and took the surrender of the last remnants of the American-backed South Vietnamese state. After decades of bloody warfare that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of French and Americans and millions of Vietnamese, much of the promise of Ho’s Independence Day speech was fulfilled. An independent Vietnam was reunified under Communist control.

This chapter explores how it was that Ho Chi Minh came to proclaim Vietnamese independence in 1945 and the sharp challenges to it in the first Vietnam war, from 1946 to 1954. In part, it moves backward in time, focusing on the dislocations to Vietnamese society under French colonialism and the rise of Vietnamese revolutionary nationalism. But it also looks to the period of the French war to consider the complex ways in which the struggle for Vietnamese independence became joined with the dynamics of an emergent Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. Finally, it considers the legacies of the postcolonial moment in Vietnam for the contours of the second Vietnam war, what the Vietnamese call the “American war,” after 1954.

VIETNAM BEFORE THE FRENCH

Precolonial Vietnamese state and society traced its origins to as early as 2500 B.C.E. in the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam, where indigenous lords and kings governed a peasant population largely engaged in wet rice agriculture. For some 1,000 years, from 111 B.C.E. to 939 C.E., Vietnam was a Chinese protectorate, which developed a complex relationship between the two peoples. On the one hand, the Vietnamese aggressively fought against Chinese rule. Even after throwing off Chinese control in 939, the Vietnamese put up successful resistance to repeated Chinese efforts to reclaim Vietnam between the tenth and eighteenth centuries. These efforts to retain their independence against China produced a powerful indigenous tradition in folktales and legends of the Vietnamese as indomitable resistance heroes.

At the same time, however, Vietnamese elites consciously borrowed Chinese patterns of governance and Confucian social norms. Although Vietnamese Buddhism provided an alternative tradition of political and social organization, Chinese forms and practices increasingly over time came to structure state and society. The three Confucian bonds—emperor to subject, father to son, and husband to wife—along with the veneration of ancestors and familial lineages through filial piety (hieu) came to shape the Vietnamese political and social order, as did Chinese practices of training and selecting Confucian superior men (quan tu) as the scholar-officials who would serve the emperor in governing the state. The Vietnamese Confucian order reached its apogee in the nineteenth-century Nguyen dynasty, which would face not Chinese but French colonial invaders.

Southern Vietnam’s historical development was somewhat different. Only in the fifteenth century did the Vietnamese people begin what is known as the March to the South, conquering and colonizing the Muslim Cham and ethnic Khmer who lived in the region. Parts of the Mekong Delta in the south were not settled until the early twentieth century. The impact of Chinese Confucian models was less intense in the south, particularly in rural areas. Geographies also reinforced regional differences. Dry weather, overpopulation, and periodic flooding of the Red River posed difficulties for agricultural production in the north and prompted a tightly knit communal village structure in part to maintain the dikes necessary to prevent the dangers of flooding. By contrast, the sparser settlement and fertile character of the Mekong Delta in the south produced a looser village social structure, with southern peasants more individualistic and entrepreneurial in their outlook than their northern counterparts.

Whatever these regional differences, the bulk of Vietnam’s precolonial population lived in rural villages. Although hardly egalitarian utopias, they were organized in ways that worked to limit severe gaps between rich and poor. Communal lands, often 25 percent of village land, were periodically redistributed to support poor and landless peasants. Social convention in the form of patron–client ties between large landowners and village notables and small holders, tenants, and the landless forced wealthy villagers to consider the interests of poorer residents. Patron–client ties were hierarchical and unequal, but they promoted reciprocity. In times of poor agricultural harvests, for instance, patrons and agents of the Vietnamese state at the local level often reduced the tax and other burdens on middle-income and poor peasants. These ties were also highly personal because both patron and client usually lived in the same village. If a patron became too exploitative, oppressed clients could resort to subtle social pressures (ostracism, ridicule, or insult), shift patrons, flee the village, or, in extreme cases, resort to murder or open rebellion. Far from conflict free, precolonial rural society nonetheless operated through these universally accepted social norms to produce relatively stable levels of familial and individual well-being.

THE COMING OF FRENCH COLONIALISM

French conquest of Vietnam in the mid- to late nineteenth century brought profound disruptions to the political and social organization of Vietnamese society and to the lives of indigenous elites and the mass of peasants. At the political level, the Confucian system of governance was replaced by French control. French officials ruled colonial Vietnam in the south directly under French law. The emperor was preserved as a figurehead in central and northern Vietnam, but real power rested with French colonial officials. In the economic sphere, the French created a huge rice industry in the Mekong Delta. By 1930, colonial Vietnam was the third-largest exporter of rice in the world. The French also built large concentrations of rubber and coffee plantations in the south and expansive mining operations for coal and minerals in the north. Beyond filling the need for indigenous labor to service the colonial extractive economy, the Vietnamese had little place in the new colonial order. Traditional elites watched as the French enervation of Vietnamese political, economic, and social life undermined the Confucian premises that had shaped their views of the world. For many, French rule seemed to foretell what the Vietnamese called “national extinction” (vong quoc). As one contemporary Vietnamese observer wrote, “Why do they rule the world while we bow our heads as slaves?”²

The introduction of the modern capitalist economy into the Vietnamese countryside destroyed many of the protective conventions that had shaped precolonial rural society. The French colonial state’s increased bureaucratic intervention strengthened the local landowners’ authority and made it easier for them to ignore local opinion. It also prompted the seizure of communal lands, increasing levels of rural stratification. Commercialization of the economy forced the use of cash rather than barter in the terms of trade. It placed many smallholders in a dependent tenancy and landless peasants in staggering debt. Rapid demographic growth—the Vietnamese population increased from 9 million in 1890 to 37 million in 1930—put serious pressure on cultivatable land and caused the terms of agricultural tenancy to decline further. Increases of as much as 500 percent in the rural tax burden under French rule added to peasant woes. The French used the head and land tax to finance the cost of its colonial project in Vietnam, but such policies greatly intensified rural indebtedness. One Vietnamese villager from central Vietnam recalled the differences these transformations made in the lives of his family: “There was a rich family protecting my family for many years. Even before I was born they rented us land very cheaply…. But during the French time they raised the rent so high it was ridiculous.”³ Taken together, colonial-era policies and developments affected the lives of Vietnamese peasants in substantial ways and significantly widened the potential for class tension and rural disorder.

THE RISE OF REVOLUTIONARY NATIONALISM

Resistance to French rule emerged almost immediately among Vietnamese elites. Patriotic court officials and provincial elites launched the Save the King (Can Vuong) movement in the face of French conquest of northern Vietnam in the 1880s. Seeking to restore the emperor and preserve traditional society, the movement was ultimately ineffective against superior French firepower. Out of these failed efforts, however, a second generation of anticolonial leadership emerged in the first decade of the twentieth century. These leaders began to look outside of Vietnamese traditions to understand Vietnam’s humiliating defeat by the French and to recast the meanings of state and society. For the first time, European and American historical experiences became a major part of Vietnamese political discourse.

Members of the reform generation were captivated by the writings of Rousseau and Montesquieu, the nation-building projects of Peter the Great and George Washington, and the inventiveness of James Watt and Thomas Edison. Perhaps the most compelling Western thinker for Vietnamese reformers was Herbert Spencer, whose social Darwinism appeared to offer a powerful explanation for the weaknesses in traditional society that they believed led to Vietnam’s domination by the French. Their efforts to translate these new perspectives into effective anticolonial agitation floundered in part because of harsh French repression. But it also floundered because the movement’s scholar-gentry leadership directed little attention to mass action that might have effectively combined their largely elite concerns with efforts to address the social and economic problems that plagued Vietnamese rural society.

The 1920s brought a new generation of young nationalists to the Vietnamese political stage, among them the future leaders of Vietnamese Communism. Their embrace of more radical paths to Vietnam’s political and social transformation increasingly dominated anticolonial politics in the late colonial period. Many of these young radicals were students—sons and daughters of traditional elites—who were impatient at the pace of change. They were as critical of French rule as they were of the precolonial Confucian political order and of what they perceived to be the reform generation’s inability to respond effectively to the predicament posed by French colonialism. The movement also drew on a new indigenous social grouping in urban Vietnam who bitterly resented French colonialism. This urban intelligentsia was made up of shopkeepers, smaller traders, clerks, primary schoolteachers, journalists, and technicians, whose livelihoods had emerged in the context of French colonialism. Despite this connection to the French, they deeply resented their economic marginality and the limits the French placed on their opportunities for education and political participation.

Self-consciously experimental and iconoclastic, Vietnamese radical thought was never fully anchored in a body of shared principles. The radicals’ disparate search for individual and societal transformation rested on an almost romantic belief in revolutionary heroism. It was expressed most forcefully in the numerous biographies authored by radicals that were the dominant mode of indigenous publishing in the late 1920s. Often highly emotional in tone, radical biographies of such figures as Gandhi, Sun Yat-sen, Catherine the Great, and George Washington urged readers to emulate the personality traits of their subjects in the belief that they offered exemplary models for collective action against French colonialism. As one biography of Abraham Lincoln concluded, “From the story of Lincoln, we know that fate does not control individuals…. We know that his accomplishments were in all cases due to his inner virtue. If we aspire to the accomplishments of Lincoln we must first develop his virtues.”⁴

Within this radical intellectual milieu, Ho Chi Minh founded the Vietnam Thanh Nien Cach Menh Hoi (Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League) in 1925. The Youth League served as the forerunner of Vietnamese Communism, providing much of the movement’s top leadership and its ideological orientation during the World War II and French war periods. Its largely student membership included Pham Van Dong and Truong Chinh, who, along with Ho Chi Minh, would oversee the DRV after 1945. Both were students shaped by the radical politics of the 1920s. Only Vo Nguyen Giap, who led the DRV’s army in the French war and formed the third member of the leadership troika under Ho after 1945, was not a member of the league. He was, however, an active participant in the radicalizing events that shaped his generation.

Ho Chi Minh was central to the establishment of the Youth League and its ideology. Several decades older than the league’s student membership, Ho was born sometime between 1890 and 1894 in central Nghe An Province to a poor scholar-gentry family. Through his father, a minor scholar official closely involved in anticolonial activities, he came to know many of the leaders of the reform generation. He left Vietnam for Europe in the summe...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Vietnam War and Its Enduring Historical Relevance
• PART 1: Chronological Perspectives
• PART II: Topical Perspectives
• PART III: Postwar Perspectives
• List of Contributors
• Index