CHAPTER 10

A TALE OF TWO REPUBLICS

In July 1963, Nguyen Tuong Tam received a summons to report to a nearby military police station to answer questions about his role in a failed coup attempt against the southern republic’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem. Tam was one of Vietnam’s best-known anticommunist politicians and a cultural giant from the 1930s, better known by his nom de plume, Nhat Linh. He had led a cultural revolution based on the liberation of the individual and the renovation of Vietnamese society. In the 1940s, he had helped to revive and lead the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, the VNQDD, which was opposed to both French colonialism and Vietnamese communism. While Tam had briefly worked with Diem to build a non-communist Vietnam during the Indochina conflict, he now despised the man for what he and his family were doing to the country. Instead of unifying non-communists, Diem was attacking anyone who defied him and in so doing, Tam was convinced, ensuring that the cherished republic would fail. Tam was not alone in his hostility to Diem. A Buddhist protest movement against the Ngo family was gathering strength as well.

Nguyen Tuong Tam had no intention of joining Diem’s long list of non-communist victims. On the auspicious seventh day of the seventh month of 1963, he sat down with his sons in their home in Saigon to enjoy their customary family chat. It was to be their last one, for their father had mixed a lethal dose of barbiturates into his own drink, a glass of his favorite Johnny Walker scotch whiskey. The champion of individual liberty had decided to take his life to make a political point. In words strangely reminiscent of Nguyen Van Thinh’s suicide note of November 1946, Tam wrote a similar message: ‘Let history be my judge. I refuse to accept any other judgment. The arrest and detention of nationalist opposition elements is a serious crime, and it will cause the country to be lost into the hands of the communists. I oppose these acts, and sentence myself to death [. . .] as a warning to those who would trample upon freedom of every kind’. Radio services, newspapers, and friends beamed the message far and wide as thousands of people gathered to watch Tam’s funeral cortège file by a few days later. Ngo Dinh Diem’s security forces carefully monitored the procession as it paused for a prayer service at the Xa Loi Buddhist pagoda before it moved on to Tam’s final resting place. (This temple had become the nerve center for Buddhist protests against Ngo rule.) A month later, Ngo Dinh Diem’s forces occupied the pagoda in a harsh clampdown on the opposition. As one officer fighting communists in the provinces expressed his anger at the Ngo family to an American friend: ‘I’m a Buddhist now.’ He was not, but his point was clear, nevertheless.¹

Things could have been different. Many nationalists who were opposed to Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 had placed their faith in this man only a few years earlier. Not only had he pushed the French out, but he had also succeeded in getting the Americans to end their support of the French protectorate over the Associated State of Vietnam in favor of a fully decolonized non-communist Vietnam. Many had been happy to see Diem end a century-old French policy of divide and rule in favor of the creation of a modern nation-state, organized top down, capable of taking on Ho Chi Minh’s communist state in the north. So what happened? The question divides Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese to this day. But before we try to answer, we need to return to the end of the First Indochina War to understand how the two authoritarian republics, one in the north, the other in the south, had come into being in the shadow of the Cold War.

RESETTING NON-COMMUNIST VIETNAM: THE REPUBLIC OF NGO DINH DIEM

The Rise of the Ngo and the American Break with France²

The American decision to back the French against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in order to contain global communism had undermined the Associated State of Vietnam’s independence bid. When Bao Dai’s first prime minister, Nguyen Phan Long, tried to gain American support for a fully decolonized non-communist Vietnam in 1950, it was easy for the French to replace him as the Americans looked the other way. Containing world communism trumped the promotion of decolonization. During a tour of Vietnam in late 1953, Vice-president Richard Nixon cautioned Vietnamese nationalists not to push the French too hard as the showdown at Dien Bien Phu shaped up. And when King Norodom Sihanouk took his independence crusade to the United States that year, John Foster Dulles had infuriated the mercurial monarch by saying that now was not a good time.

There were dissenting American voices, however. One was the Democrat senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. He personally visited Vietnam in 1951, meeting with a wide range of French and Vietnamese officials. Despite French reassurances that all was fine, Kennedy left with the distinct impression that France was in no rush to relinquish its colonial hold and that by supporting the French instead of the Vietnamese, American policymakers were undermining their own Cold War strategy. Fellow Democratic senator Mike Mansfield also visited Vietnam that year and came away with a similar feeling. From their positions on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, they called on the White House to put pressure on the French to accord Vietnam complete independence. In July 1953, Kennedy joined Republican senator Barry Goldwater in trying to get the Eisenhower administration to persuade the French to decolonize in exchange for continued US military aid. ‘French grants of limited independence to the people of Vietnam’, Kennedy pointed out, ‘have always been too little and too late’. The Republican majority defeated Kennedy and Goldwater’s amendments, fearful that such pressure could lead the French to pull out of the war. Léon Pignon’s strategy of containing American pressure to decolonize was working to perfection.³

That is, until Ngo Dinh Diem, the man the French had sent packing a few years earlier for demanding dominion status, decided to make the non-communist case directly to the Americans. While Diem had no master plan to present to Washington upon leaving in 1950, he and his brothers wanted to shift US support from the French to non-communist Vietnamese nationalists. Ngo Dinh Thuc, his brother and one of the country’s first Vietnamese bishops, put his international Catholic connections at his brother’s disposal. This gave Diem the use of several monasteries from which he lobbied both sides of the Atlantic until 1954. In meetings with a wide range of American diplomats, clergy, statesmen, academics, and journalists, Diem began making his case. As McCarthyism shook the American political establishment, he repeated to his listeners that the French failure to decolonize was only helping the communists, while also pointing out that the French colonial powers were playing the Americans for fools.⁴

Despite difficult encounters which repeated the well-known mantra not to push the French on independence right then, Diem slowly built up a network of support extending well beyond that of the Catholics alone. By early 1954, his contacts included some of the most influential Americans of the time—senators Kennedy and Mansfield, statesman Dean Acheson, Supreme Court judge William O. Douglas, renowned intelligence specialist of wartime Eurasia, William Donovan, and the influential cardinal Francis Spellman. Diem also had an active interest in economic development and built up a lasting relationship with specialists in development theory. This networking put him in the right place, as more American officials began to question the strategic wisdom of supporting the French. Mansfield came away from a lunch with Diem in May 1953 ‘with the feeling that if anyone could hold South Vietnam, it was somebody like Ngo Dinh Diem’.⁵

Inside Vietnam, others in the Diem clan, especially his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, promoted the nationalist cause among disgruntled Vietnamese politicians, youth groups, Catholics, union leaders, and their workers. A labor activist himself, Nhu was the prime mover in the creation of a new nationalist political party, the Can Lao Nhan Vi Cach Mang, or the Personalist Revolutionary Labor Party, often known as the Personalist Party. Drawing on the ideas of French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier (collectively known as ‘Personalism’), and influenced by leftward shifts in French Catholicism in favor of social action and anticolonialism, Nhu imported Personalism to Vietnam. Particularly appealing was Mounier’s rejection of liberal capitalism’s over-emphasis on individualism at the expense of building up communal ties and shared prosperity. Just as important was Personalism’s opposition to communism’s abnegation of the human spirit and its embrace of an Orwellian party-state. For the Ngo brothers, communism and capitalism were ideological dead ends when it came to rethinking Vietnam. Personalism provided an appealing middle-of-the-road approach to socio-economic development, was respectful of human beings, and capable of empowering Vietnam’s large peasant population, but without unleashing a destructive class war as did the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north and Maoism in China. Personalism mixed with a lot of nationalism would put Vietnam on the right postcolonial track and, the Ngos felt, appeal to Catholics and non-Catholics alike.⁶

The Ngo brothers’ strategy of positioning themselves and their cause close to the Americans and disaffected Vietnamese paid off when both international and Indochinese situations changed rapidly in 1953–4. Firstly, inside Vietnam, Bao Dai’s passivity left many convinced that they had to take the nationalist cause into their own hands or pass for collaborators with the French. Secondly, this frustration manifested itself in an increasingly ardent desire to create real political parties, a national assembly, indeed, a republic, so that nationalists could mobilize party politics and use these institutions of democracy against Bao Dai, his ministers, and their colonial backers. Thirdly, the French government’s unilateral decision to devalue the piastre in May 1953 in order to boost metropolitan exports outraged all. It was humiliating proof of just how subservient the relationship with France remained; but it also served as a rallying cry for angry nationalists. When the new French government led by Joseph Laniel promised to complete (‘parfaire’) the Associated State of Vietnam’s independence, the Ngo brothers were determined to make it happen, even if it meant bringing down the French Union.

However, the rapidly changing international situation in 1953–4 also posed threats, much the same ones that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam confronted—Stalin’s death in March 1953, a rapid Sino-Soviet shift toward peaceful co-existence which culminated in the Korean War’s ceasefire, increasing international talk about negotiating the end of the Indochina conflict, and Laniel’s declaration to negotiate an ‘honorable exit’ from Indochina. The main threat for non-communist nationalists in all this was that as long as the French failed to accord the Associated State of Vietnam full independence, there was nothing to stop the French legally from negotiating directly with the communist bloc, including the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and signing an international agreement over the heads of the ASV’s leaders and people.

As international exchanges on ending the Korean and Indochina conflagrations began in September 1953, the Ngo brothers went on the offensive against the French, Bao Dai, and his ministers. In September, relying on his wide range of contacts, Ngo Dinh Nhu presided over something called the ‘Congress of National Union and Peace’. This meeting gathered leaders from all of the major socio-religious and political groups who shared a general disappointment with the present government and its failure to secure complete independence from the French. This meeting intentionally excluded Bao Dai and his cabinet ministers in a move designed to underscore their nationalist illegitimacy, and caught the French off-guard. Once at the congress, delegates vented their frustration with Bao Dai and his associates, while others called on Laniel to negotiate full independence immediately. The message was clear: if Bao Dai would not lead, others would. More than anything else, this congress allowed the Ngo brothers to promote themselves as the architects of an authentic nationalist alternative to failed collaboration. Within a few months, Nhu had created the Personalist Party and used it, and his union contacts, to build up loyal support for his brother as the only untainted Third Force leader who could stand up to the French, unify non-communist nationalists, and convince the Americans to change their policy straight away.

The September congress spurred Bao Dai to action. In October, the head of the Associated State held his own meeting during which he and his allies issued resolutions demanding full independence. The French dragged their feet as always in response, promising to negotiate, but countering that constitutional complexities and internal politics prevented them from moving faster. What the French truly feared was that by according complete independence to the Associated State of Vietnam in 1953–4, they would bring down their entire empire through the domino effect of that action. Indeed, as Diem and Sihanouk were making their cases for independence abroad, the French were engaged in a trans-imperial legal battle against them as well as nationalists in Tunisia, Morocco, Madagascar, and Algeria making similar demands. Even as the French leaders watched Dien Bien Phu fall to the communists, they could not bring themselves to free the ASV from its imperial ‘association’ for fear of what might happen elsewhere in their Union if they did.

As preparations for the Geneva Conference began in 1954, both Bao Dai and Ngo Dinh Diem left for Europe determined to force the French hand once and for all. This meant convincing American diplomats to change their policy of supporting Paris, or risk losing all of Vietnam to the communist bloc. In early June 1954, as Zhou Enlai did everything he could do to reach a deal with Pierre Mendès France, Bao Dai asked Ngo Dinh Diem to serve as his new prime minister. During the meeting between the two men in Paris, Bao Dai led Diem into a room where a crucifix hung from the wall. Standing before the cross, he told Diem: ‘Here’s your God. You will swear before Him to maintain the territory that we confide to you. You will defend it against the communists and if necessary against the French’. Diem swore to it. The French, their Vietnamese allies, and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had every reason to interpret Bao Dai’s choice of Ngo Dinh Diem as a hostile action.⁷

More than anything else, Bao Dai’s decision was designed to shift American support toward the Vietnamese in order ensure that the ASV survived international negotiations. The Expeditionary Corps had not only lost the battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, but the French command was pulling back its troops. In early July, a communist regiment moving through the southern central highlands annihilated a retreating French airborne group near the town of Pleiku. The Americans realized that there was no guarantee that the French army would stay, and the question of Vietnam’s partition or temporary separation was already on the table in Geneva. Moreover, the débâcles of the lost battles at Dien Bien Phu and Pleiku only reinforced a growing stereotype in official American minds which portrayed the French in Indochina in 1954, as it did Europe in 1940, as a second-rate world power. Mendès France only added to the frustration by failing to secure ratification of the treaty that would have created a European army (see chapter 9). To many Americans, the French seemed unreliable in both Europe and Asia.⁸

It was in this complex and rapidly changing context that Dulles, backed by Eisenhower, began resetting American policy on Vietnam in ways already championed by Kennedy and Goldwater. In April 1954, the secretary of state issued instructions stressing the ‘extreme importance’ of getting the French to sign a treaty according full independence to the Associated State of Vietnam before negotiations on Indochina began. If the French could not do it, then the Americans would have ‘to take an active part’ in the conflict, but only if they could collaborate with ‘an authentic Vietnamese nationalist government’. This was precisely what Diem seemed to offer. And this is why the needs of the Eisenhower administration and those of the Ngo brothers finally converged at Geneva in mid-1954, and not before. As the French signed the ceasefire documents and a declaration to hold elections in two years with their Democratic Republic of Vietnam counterparts, backed by Moscow and Beijing, Prime Minister Diem’s government refused to do so, and was fully supported by Washington.⁹

Separation, Peoples, and Choices

Neither the Ngos nor the Americans knew where their new relationship would take them as the ink dried on the ceasefire agreement signed at the Geneva conference. What we do know is that all the parties present in Geneva at the time, including the United States and the Associated State of Vietnam, accepted that the French war for Indochina was over. The three states that had co-existed, intermingled, and competed with each other across all of Vietnam prior to July 1954 now consolidated into two parallel and separate states—the DRV-sovereign ‘North Vietnam’, and a still less than entirely independent ASV-‘South Vietnam’. Although the Geneva agreements never sanctioned the permanent creation of two states—indeed, the declaration called for elections to unify the country into one state—checkpoints appeared along the seventeenth parallel with each side’s national flags waving in the wind on either side of what was becoming a de facto border.

Before this happened, however, the Geneva agreements required each state’s military personnel and administrators to withdraw from their adversary’s zone and accorded civilians the right to move freely from one zone to the other until May 1955 (300 days). As a result, from late July 1954 onward, tens of thousands of French Union and Associated State of Vietnam troops, civil servants, and their families began evacuating areas above the seventeenth parallel, while the Democratic Republic of Vietnam relocated around 100,000 military personnel and administrators from lower Vietnam and Cambodia to the north. In all, around 800,000 people departed for the south, while 120,000 DRV personnel moved north. By May 1955, almost a million individuals in all had moved, thanks to French, American, and, a first, communist bloc transport. Never had so many people emigrated so fast at one time in Vietnam’s history.¹⁰

As in Korea, Germany, and China, the impact of partition on the lives of these people was profound. Within days of learning of the results of the Geneva conference’s agreements, individuals began making hard decisions. Thousands of makeshift markets popped up across the country as civilians and soldiers, merchants, and peasants, young and old, Viet and non-Viet tried to sell things they could not take with them or buy materials they would need on arrival. Real-estate prices plummeted in the north and skyrocketed in the south as administrators scrambled to find housing and jobs for the hundreds of thousands of arrivals. Landowners in the north sold what land they had and abandoned any hope of recovering that which the war had already taken and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had redistributed. Most of the 45,000 Chinese and several thousand French residing above the seventeenth parallel relocated to the south, to Asian port cities, to France, or to elsewhere in the empire. Many of the Chinese in Vietnam held Republic of China passports and moved on to Taiwan. Non-Viet soldiers who had fought with the French moved to the south, including 20,000 Nung people. At least 500,000 Catholics left the north and in so doing shifted the center of gravity of Vietnamese Catholicism firmly in the direction of the south. Two hundred thousand Buddhists also went south, including their main leaders.

Heart-wrenching and tearful family conversations, separations, and inner transformations occurred everywhere as people made decisions in circumstances that were almost always beyond their control. Families left loved ones behind, never to see them again. Some were too old to travel, preferring to live out the rest of their lives in their native villages. Others stayed, determined to protect their homes, land, or livestock, gambling that the promised elections in 1956 would return everything to normal. Those moving southward with the Associated State of Vietnam implored relatives in the countryside to leave the Democratic Republic of Vietnam zone before it was too late, while those allied with the DRV pleaded with their kin not to leave now that the colonialists were finally going. A bright future was on the horizon, they said. Such arguments did not always convince those who had already experienced or feared the radical communization the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had implemented since 1950. Thousands of Vietnamese left communist zones, traumatized by violent land reform and the rectification campaigns discussed in the previous chapter. But it could work the other way too. One cocky young anticommunist nationalist on his way out of Hanoi in 1954 was dumbfounded when a beggar boy took his money and thanked him with a word of caution: ‘The Viet Minh will come here before long. We poor people will be given property, you dirty rich people will be felled, and you’ll beg us for money’.¹¹

But things were never so clear-cut in practice. Regardless of class or race, choices were complicated and loyalties blurred. Ever since losing her husband to the famine of 1945 and her only son to suicide, U Mien had worked as a maid for the family of the northern historian Duong Van Mai Elliott. Part of U Mien wanted to stay put in Hanoi out of her pride in the DRV’s heroic victory over the French. But another part of her wanted to leave and go south with the only family she knew, the Duongs. In the end, she left. But even within the Duong family, like so many others struck by civil strife, loyalties were divided: ‘While we in Hanoi thought our world was crumbling around us’, Duong Van Mai Elliot later wrote of her sister, ‘Thang and her Viet Minh colleagues exploded in celebration at the news of the victory of Dien Bien Phu’. Thang had dedicated her best years to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s struggle and couldn’t wait to begin a new postwar life building a new Vietnam. Meanwhile, their father, Duong Thieu Chieu, oversaw the withdrawal of the ASV from the north. In April 1955 he left the northern city of Haiphong (on one of the last boats out before the communists were to take over), not knowing what his Vietnam would become. Like his own grandfather, discussed in chapter 3, he had dedicated his life to public service and he had made choices in doing so. Now those choices would take him and his family far from their northern homeland. And then there was Jean Moreau, the son of a pencil-pushing French customs official and a Vietnamese-Italian mother. He grew up speaking Vietnamese, fascinated by the language, culture, and history of the people. In mid-1945, as Vietnamese nationalism surged around him (and almost killed him), he joined the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and worked in military intelligence. French officers who encountered him at the seventeenth parallel could not believe that he could choose the ‘other side’. He did and lives there to this day, a Vietnamese citizen.¹²

The United States, Ngo Dinh Diem, and the Making of Another Vietnam¹³

Just as rapid changes in power relations transform the lives of ordinary people in all walks of life, wars and their endings also reshape alliances on high. The Americans, French, and Ngo brothers emerged from Geneva in a very different relationship from the one they had had going in. With Ho Chi Minh’s state now set to take over all of ‘North Vietnam’ from the capital of Hanoi, the Americans were now focused on supporting a fully decolonized, anticommunist, economically vibrant, and heavily armed ‘South Vietnam’ capable of holding the Indochinese line in the struggle to contain communism. While Eisenhower came remarkably close to going to war over Indochina in 1954, in the end he resisted and turned to building up ‘South Vietnam’ and spinning a collective security treaty around it, Laos, and Cambodia. No sooner had the president stated his ‘domino theory’ in April 1954 (that if one country falls to communism in Asia, they all do) than he set Dulles to work creating what became the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in September. It was in turn part of a wider web of American treaties, which ran from the Atlantic alliance in the West to bilateral ones in the East with Japan and Taiwan, linked from below by a southern chain going through Iraq, Pakistan, Bangkok, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines. The South East Asia Treaty Organization connected up this Eurasian rim of containment for the Eisenhower administration. It also served to block the Chinese from using neutralist-minded, non-communist states like India, Burma, and Indonesia to break this chain. And given that Zhou Enlai sought to neutralize Indochina against the Americans, Washington extended SEATO’s protection to the Associated States without formally admitting them to it. Rightly or wrongly, American strategists were convinced that the Sino-Soviet treaty signed by Stalin and Mao in 1950 had not only consolidated communist domination of Eurasia, but that it now would allow Moscow and Beijing to push into the whole of Southeast Asia via Tonkin as the Japanese had done in 1940. As we saw in chapter 1, the Americans and the Japanese were by no means the first to recognize Vietnam’s strategic importance as a gateway to Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean.¹⁴

While Ngo Dinh Diem shared American anticommunism, he focused first and foremost on securing a fully decolonized, economically modern, politically centralized, and legitimate nation-state. He and his family were convinced that only they could do this. Given (in their view) that so many nationalists had become compromised since 1947 by gambling on the French or sitting on the fence, they saw themselves as the chosen ones. Their successful actions in 1953–4 seemed only to confirm it. Critics, however, saw a dangerous turn toward authoritarian rule and nepotism, as Diem leaned ever more heavily on his family. But what counted most, the Ngos retorted, was action and results. Time was short. The ‘colonialists’ and the ‘communists’ had just bargained away half the country at Geneva. In over his head, Bao Dai kept Diem on as prime minister and gave him precisely what the Ngo family wanted—full powers.

Communists lined up behind Ho Chi Minh remained as convinced as ever that they were the rightful masters of all of Vietnam. Neither Bao Dai nor Ngo Dinh Diem had taken up arms against the French. Vietnamese communists easily portrayed the head of state as a puppet, and they rightly pointed out that for all of his tough talk Diem had sat on the fence for years while the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s leaders and people had made huge sacrifices. The Greater Vietnam coalition, the Vietnamese Nationalist Party and Nguyen Tuong Tam had relied on French military power rather than create their own armies to fight both the French colonialists and the Vietnamese communists. Had it not been for French and American military support, Vietnamese communists would be in charge of all of Vietnam. Instead the DRV had fought the American-backed French and Associated State of Vietnam to a draw. In agreement with his allies in Beijing and Moscow, Ho Chi Minh had convinced his party that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam could win via the ballot box and unify what was theirs through political means (in what appeared to be a period of détente in mid-1954). But the communists also knew they had gambled, and perhaps had done so badly, for neither Ngo Dinh Diem nor the Americans had signed any legally binding agreement enforcing them to organize elections in mid-1956. And it remained to be seen if the French would remain as the executor of the agreement, or would they change course along with the Americans?

This is why the Geneva Conference of 1954 may have marked the end of French fighting, but it was potentially only a pause in two separate, though interconnected wars, a Vietnamese and an American one. As long as both Vietnams were content to focus on consolidating their states, one in the north, the other now rebuilding the south, then the ceasefire of 1954 could have held and could have easily produced two separate Vietnamese nationstates today, as in the case of the two Koreas and Chinas. However, if one of the two Vietnams decided that it would renew its claim to sovereignty over or within the other’s zone, then the Vietnamese civil war would resume as one continuous conflict, with its origins in the civil violence of 1945–7. The ‘French war’ might have ended in July 1954, but that did not mean that the one among Vietnamese had.

Similarly, the conference at Geneva can be seen as a pause in the indirect war for Indochina Washington had operated in since 1950. For if the French had manipulated American anticommunism in order to hold on, colonially, in Indochina, the Americans had also used the French army, colonial administration, and their Vietnamese allies to help fight their global anticommunist war along Eurasia’s southeastern flank. The Americans had paid for 80 percent of the costs of the First Indochina War by 1954, precisely because it was ‘their’ war too. Given the high cost of assuring Western European security, not to mention the Marshall Plan, their direct participation in the Korean War, and their maintenance of a global web of military bases, this indirect strategy using the French army and administration in Indochina made good economic sense.

America’s global containment operated precisely through such direct and indirect forms of action. The French communists were not the only ones to point out that France ‘was exporting soldiers to Indochina in exchange for dollars’. No torch was necessarily passed in late July 1954 from the French to the Americans, no sparks flew from the embers of one empire to light the flames of another. Two empires (three, if we count the Japanese one involved during the Second World War) had already intertwined in complex and fascinating ways for decades. Contrary to what is often claimed, the Americans were not newcomers to Asia or Indochina in 1954. Their ‘black ships’ had ‘opened’ Japan in the 1850s. They had colonized the Philippines in 1898, at the same time as the French had consolidated their hold over Indochina and the British had taken over Burma. President Franklin Roosevelt had closely followed Japanese colonial expansion down the Chinese coastline from 1937 onward, into Vietnam in 1940–41, and then, from there, deep into Southeast Asia. During the First Indochina War, the Americans operated indirectly through such institutions as the Military Assistance Advisory Group and the creation of French commando operations in the highlands (while the Chinese communists did something remarkably similar in supporting communist Vietnam in order to keep the Americans off their southern flank; see chapter 9). If anything, Washington sought to replace the ‘colonialist’ French Associated State of Vietnam with a fully decolonized State of Vietnam. And as long as the Americans did not tread on this new Vietnamese nation-state’s sovereignty (just as they had previously carefully respected French colonial sovereignty in Indochina) and Vietnamese nationalist leaders did not endanger the US’s strategic investment in Vietnam by negotiating with the ‘communists’, then a new alliance could work in Indochina which would allow the Americans to contain Eurasian communism indirectly and continue to expand the informal empire they had been building across the Pacific Ocean since the nineteenth century. Such a global perspective—taking into account Vietnam’s position on Eurasia’s eastern façade where so many empires collide—helps to explain why this country remained so important to the Americans right through 1954 and arguably to this day. And if one takes the time to consider how China may have viewed the American presence, it’s not surprising that Beijing was deeply interested in what happened in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.¹⁵

But the ASV was not yet fully sovereign. With the Democratic Republic of Vietnam serious about reaching a political solution by 1956, the Ngos understood that they had a two-year breathing space in which to transform the Associated State of Vietnam into an independent nation-state. With the full powers now granted to him by Bao Dai, the prime minister issued decrees which would place the selection of independent-minded regional and provincial authorities in his hands. Village councils lost their centuries-old autonomy to Ngo Dinh Diem’s desire to impose top-down rule (though it never worked out so neatly in practice). He also wanted control over the armed forces in order to free it from the French and use it to subdue those Vietnamese opposed to his nation-building. On 11 September 1954, he relieved General Nguyen Van Hinh of his command of the ASV’s armed forces. Furious, Hinh immediately began plotting to overthrow his rival, confident that the French would back him. Despite often seething French hostility toward Diem, Nguyen Van Hinh badly overestimated his French partner’s ability or desire to help in post-Geneva Vietnam. Hinh also underestimated the Ngo brothers, who were turning younger, frustrated nationalist officers in the army against him, carefully casting Hinh as a creature of the French. The Ngos required officers and civil servants to join the Personalist Party and study its ideology. Once again, Bao Dai backed his prime minister. Hinh lost his army and moved to France.¹⁶

Despite strong misgivings about Ngo Dinh Diem, the first American ambassador to the Associated State of Vietnam, General Lawton Collins, and the last French High Commissioner for Indochina, General Paul Ely, reached an accord in December 1954, through which the Americans joined the French in training the Vietnamese army from January 1955 onward, while the French would start withdrawing their forces from the ASV and relinquish control of its armed forces by July of that year. In exchange, the Americans would continue to provide military assistance and training via the Military Assistance Advisory Group they had created in 1950. While the overarching goal was to ensure the outfitting and training of a Vietnamese army capable of taking over from the French, the Collins-Ely agreement dovetailed nicely with Diem’s determination to push the French out and take control of the army, with American support. Indeed, this accord allowed massive amounts of American military aid to flow directly to the Associated State of Vietnam instead of via the French, effectively ending Pignon’s protectorate and America’s proxy war enacted through the French. Emboldened by such direct support, and confident that he could win more of it, on 28 December 1954 Ngo Dinh Diem requested the French to withdraw all of their troops from the ASV. In May 1955, as required by the Geneva conference’s agreed date for a ceasefire, the French withdrew from northern Vietnam (which was now being turned into DRV Vietnam). In 1956, the Expeditionary Corps left the south, removing one of the most dangerous threats to Diem’s rise to power and ending a century of French colonial domination.¹⁷

With Bao Dai’s full backing, Ngo Dinh Diem threw himself into creating a truly independent nation-state in record time. On 20 July 1954, he formally withdrew the ‘Associated State of Vietnam’ (ASV) from the French Union, thereby finally making it the ‘State of Vietnam’ (SV). He destroyed Indochinese federalism alongside his Lao and Cambodian counterparts when they all agreed to abolish the Indochinese Office for Currency Affairs (the Office indochinois des Changes) in December 1954 and with it the colonial piastre. Each state officially printed its own national money and administered separate customs, immigration, and border patrol offices. National borders now separated Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. In February 1955, the French Ministry of Relations in charge of the Associated States disappeared. Having freed Vietnam from colonial federalism, Diem promulgated strict nationality laws turning ‘ethnic minorities’ into ‘Vietnamese’ citizens; required the Chinese (over a half million) to adopt Vietnamese nationality or leave; and denied French nationals most of the legal privileges they had enjoyed since the nineteenth century. Like his communist competitors, he nationalized education, imposed Vietnamese as the national language, and dispatched diplomats across the globe.

However, Ngo Dinh Diem’s nationalist partners of 1953–4 did not necessarily embrace the idea of the creation of a centralized nation-state under Ngo rule. This was particularly true in the south of Vietnam, where the DRV’s control had always been weakest and the French had long promoted a policy of divide and rule which favored local fiefdoms. Equally important: ethno-cultural diversity had always been greatest in the Mekong delta, where Viet colonialism was not much older than its French successor. In fact, King Sihanouk had lobbied the French intensively to cede Cochinchina to Cambodia in 1949, claiming that most of it—called ‘Kampuchea Krom’ in Khmer—and its 400,000 ethnic Khmers were historically ‘Cambodian’. The French refused to accord the Kampuchean Krom Khmers a separate legal identity, even though they had granted such a status to hundreds of thousands of ‘ethnic minority’ peoples populating the highlands.

Religious groups also contested Diem’s state-building. Economic change and shifting power relations since the 1920s had thoroughly politicized and militarized the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai faiths’ supporters. Combined, their leaders commanded over two million followers by 1954 and, thanks to the Japanese and the French, operated their own territories, economies, and militias. Although Diem tried to staff his state with fellow Catholics, even the loyalties of the one and a half million Catholics now in the south were not monolithic. Many of them exceeded Ngo Dinh Diem’s own wishes in their desire to avenge their enforced exile from their northern homes in 1954 and to build an uncompromising anticommunist nationalism. Little wonder that so many French, American, and Vietnamese (including the communists) doubted Diem’s ability to last.¹⁸

Ngo Dinh Diem’s first taste of the unruliness of the south occurred in early 1955, when he attempted to rein in the ‘sects’, the pejorative term used to refer collectively and inaccurately to the Binh Xuyen, Hoa Hao, and Cao Dai. Patriotic though their leaders were, they were no more willing to cede their autonomy to Diem’s state-building than they had been to that of Ho Chi Minh a decade earlier. For Ngo Dinh Diem, a professional civil servant by training, this was entirely unacceptable. As he complained to one American confidant: ‘I am not content to wait for the chaos around me to turn into order of its own accord. I am going to try to bring order out of chaos myself’. Indeed, one of the things the Ngos admired most in the communists was their ability to do just that—establish order and loyalty and then structure it methodically and forcefully. While powerful Americans including the newly arrived CIA station chief, General Edward Lansdale, certainly sympathized, he and others advised caution, stressing the need for conciliation in dealing with the ‘sects’. Meanwhile, the American ambassador sent cable after cable to Washington warning that Diem was not up to the task.¹⁹

Events came to a head in early 1955, when the French subsidies to the ‘sects’ dried up and the Ngo brothers moved to take control of them. To do this, they used the army, their contacts, diplomacy, and even American money if it allowed them to re-appropriate loyalties. Those who rallied to the national cause received pretty medals and cushy positions (just as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the French had done before them) while the Ngos simultaneously played off one stubborn leader against another. They adroitly exploited the leader of the Cao Dai, General Trinh Minh The’s dissatisfaction with the French (he ‘defected’ from them four times before 1954), to rally his forces to the Ngo national cause. The Ngos cut similar deals with the Hoa Hao and the Catholics.

The Binh Xuyen’s Bay Vien, however, refused to relinquish his lucrative business interests. In exchange for he and his followers’ defection from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1948, the French had allowed him to carve out a very profitable niche in the Saigon gambling world and in the trafficking of illicit narcotics. By 1954, Bay Vien’s riches were enormous and his influence was such that his men had penetrated the upper reaches of the Associated State of Vietnam’s police force. Ngo Dinh Diem now called in the army to put a stop to all of this. In late April, fighting broke out in and around Saigon. Despite intense firefights, the Binh Xuyen forces were dispersed within a couple of weeks. Diem closed down Bay Vien’s operations and looked on with quiet satisfaction as the Binh Xuyen’s legendary Grand Casino burned to the ground. The prime minister then went after the remaining splinter groups. In 1956, his men executed the Hoa Hao’s rebel leader, Ba Cut, putting an end to the ‘war of the sects’. Civil war in postcolonial Vietnam was more than just a ‘communist’ versus ‘anticommunist’ affair.

While France’s General Paul Ely called for the prime minister’s removal as he watched his southern allies disappear one by one, the high commissioner was no longer in a position to do much without American support. Indeed, high-ranking Americans had come away from the wars against the ‘sects’ impressed by Ngo Dinh Diem’s ability to score victories in such difficult circumstances, convinced that this was the man with whom they could work in building a strong anticommunist state. Dulles now overruled his ambassador in Saigon, instructing diplomats to throw their weight behind Diem. This support was not unconditional and it was often as paternalistic as that of the French had been. Many continued to question Ngo Dinh Diem’s capacity to rule. But for American officials keen on containing communism, there was room for optimism. They had few other choices, in any case.

Joint state-building now got underway in full force. American aid helped Diem to train a new generation of technicians, doctors, policemen, and bureaucrats. Young officers traveled to Fort Leavenworth instead of Saint Cyr to study modern military science as American money also poured in for agricultural development and infrastructure projects. By 1956, the Americans provided Ngo Dinh Diem’s Vietnam with $270 million annually, placing it among the top recipients of aid per capita in the world. Vietnam, the Eisenhower administration declared, had ‘become an example for people everywhere who hate tyranny and love freedom’. Life magazine dubbed Diem ‘The Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam’. Most importantly, the Americans could continue their containment of communism in Asia with this man, without sending troops and without the French casting a colonial hue over Washington’s efforts.²⁰

Flushed with victory, the Ngo brothers then moved against the only person who could block them—their former emperor, Bao Dai, who had served as their head of state since 1949. (Although Bao Dai had abdicated as emperor in August 1945, he had remained as head of state of the Associated State of Vietnam, and, since 1955, of the State of Vietnam.) There was something tragic about the Ngo assault on the last emperor of Vietnam. The Ngo family had faithfully served the Nguyen dynasty since the nineteenth century. Diem owed his premiership to the one-time emperor, not to the Americans. And in many ways, Bao Dai had never wanted to lead and the French had already wrecked the monarchy in any case. But his long association with the French and his passivity cast a dangerous shadow of collaboration and weakness over the Vietnam that the Ngos wanted to make. And this is why, over the summer of 1955, the brothers launched a massive propaganda drive to destroy what little remained of the ex-emperor’s prestige. They then carefully stage-managed a national referendum so that the ‘people’ could decide the fate of the erstwhile monarch. In fact, the Ngos decided everything. In a sham vote held on 23 October 1955, marred by arrests and electoral manipulations, Ngo Dinh Diem received 98 percent of the 5.8 million votes cast.²¹

This fraudulent referendum served more than anything else to cover up what was in reality a palace coup and provide Diem with the clean break and ‘popular mandate’ he wanted to create a new Vietnam divorced from its collaborative past. Three days later, Diem presided over the creation of the Republic of Vietnam under his presidency. He simultaneously declared that there would be no elections to unify ‘South Vietnam’ and ‘North Vietnam’. The Americans backed him on both counts and recognized his government immediately. The French acquiesced, unwilling to reconvene the negotiations at Geneva or to hold the Americans to organizing the elections. Vietnamese communists now had the choice of either accepting that the seventeenth parallel would become a de jure border separating two sovereign states or of renewing their fight to create one sovereign Democratic Republic of Vietnam, theirs.

RESETTING COMMUNIST VIETNAM AND THE REPUBLIC OF HO CHI MINH

Extending DRV Sovereignty above the Seventeenth Parallel

In October 1954, Ho’s government returned to Hanoi and began administering the previously Franco-ASV territories, towns, and public buildings. At the outset, the People’s Army of Vietnam was in charge. It tracked down and crushed armed minority groups that had worked with the French in the highlands. The security services went after real and imagined enemy spies and sleeper cells, worried in particular by those in the Greater Vietnam coalition who had dominated the Associated State of Vietnam bureaucracy. Despite their support of Ho Chi Minh in the early years, Catholics and ‘minority peoples’ were as suspect as the ‘sects’ were for Diem in the south. Meanwhile, the People’s Army of Vietnam troops received orders to slow down the massive exodus of people to the south via military force if necessary, as its officers carefully extended the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s highly militarized ‘resistance administration’ into their new territories in the north. These particular areas (mainly in the river delta valleys and the big cities) were new because they had not formerly been part of the DRV; they had been administered originally by the French, and thereafter by the French in partnership with the Associated State of Vietnam. General Vuong Thua Vu, the man who had led the Battle of Hanoi in late 1946, ruled the capital, until civilian authorities took over about a year later.

Although the Vietnamese Workers Party (VWP) had often been able to recruit communist cadres who had operated covertly in the ‘occupied zone’ of the Associated State of Vietnam during the conflict itself, after the war the new leadership found it had little choice but to maintain many of the former regime’s civil servants as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam opened police stations, schools, tax offices, census bureaus, and hospitals. The government nevertheless carefully collected information on people in the new zone, checked their family backgrounds, listed their occupations, ethnicities, and religions. Officials introduced the DRV’s laws, flags, currency, and stamps. Street names in Hanoi changed yet again as old monuments and statues gave way to new ones. Ho Chi Minh’s portrait went up on office walls and stamps everywhere (as did Diem’s in the south). The Democratic Republic of Vietnam extended its national project through new school manuals, history books, officer- and teacher-training schools, and a host of cultural activities.

From late 1954, the party also went to work communizing all of ‘North Vietnam’, carefully extending the rectification, emulation, propaganda, and mobilization campaigns to the areas which the French and the ASV had previously administered. Next to Uncle Ho’s portrait hung pictures of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao. Of course, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam never abandoned nationalism and anticolonialism as its official ideologies. But as in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Cuba, the Vietnamese leadership introduced communism as the new state religion and deployed class as the new category for defining social and political identity. Peasants, workers, and those coming from loyal families obtained the best jobs and enjoyed better access to higher education. Since 1950, Vietnamese communists had already imported Marxism-Leninism and a heavy dose of Maoism to structure the party-state in the maquis, indoctrinate a faithful bureaucracy and a fresh military caste, and transform the society and its economy in the communist mold. They now extended this to all of Vietnam above the seventeenth parallel.²²

Nowhere was this desire to remake Vietnam better seen than in the land reform campaign that lasted from 1953 to 1956. Communist land reform was designed to achieve several essential and interconnected goals: 1) to mobilize the majority peasant population for making war (up until 1954); 2) to increase the party-state’s legitimacy and social base; 3) to extend and anchor its bureaucratic control over people and territory; 4) to destroy the heretofore dominant ‘feudal’ and ‘bourgeois’ classes and power structures blocking the communist transformation of state, society, and culture; and in doing all this, 5) to prepare the road ahead for eventual full-scale collectivization of agriculture and the concomitant industrialization of the economy along Sino-Soviet lines.

The communists had already started initiating full-blown land reform in the zones it controlled from 1953. Starting in late 1954, cadres dispersed across former Franco-ASV territories to do the same. They had to take control of village society by promoting this top-down social revolution that would allow them to empower the peasants, install a new bureaucratic elite, and take control of the countryside. They carried with them lists of classes to identify and corresponding quotas to fill for land redistribution. The new social categories were: landlords (‘dia chu’), rich peasants (‘phu nong’), middle peasants (‘trung nong’), poor peasants (‘ban nong’), and agricultural laborers (‘co nong’). The main idea was to redistribute land and power from the first two categories to the other three. To supervise this socio-economic upending, the Vietnamese Workers Party relied on its cadre-run ‘special people’s courts’, endowed with extraordinary legal powers authorizing arbitrary arrest, capital punishment, the determination of class, the dismissal of local authorities, and the confiscation of individual property and assets. Over the next two years, these mobile courts visited the majority of villages in the new zones. Military cadres identified landholders, brought them before the courts, carefully gathered the villagers around the accused, and encouraged the crowd to denounce their ‘cruel’ exploiter. These hate-filled ‘struggle sessions’ often ended in violence. The party leadership authorized this radical transformation of the rural state and society. In late 1952, Ho Chi Minh had travelled to Beijing and Moscow to obtain increased military assistance and to inform Stalin of his determination and his party’s plans to embark upon land reform. Upon his return, the land reform campaign began in earnest.²³

That land reform destroyed the ‘feudal’ landowning class and redistributed over 2 million acres of land (800,000 hectares) there can be no doubt. But this social revolution also wreaked socio-economic havoc and indescribable psychological pain. The cadres it deployed were often incompetent and brutal. Few knew the villages they visited. Many were excessively zealous and all too eager to please their superiors instead of the poor subjects they had hauled before them. In order to produce enough ‘class enemies’ in a delta that had never historically produced many feudalists, big landowners or bourgeois merchants to begin with, they began to ‘mis-class’ middle-class and richer peasants as such (who were often in reality dirt poor), cooking the books as they went, but forgetting that what they were doing had catastrophic consequences. The result was that these powerless people were suddenly stigmatized by the state and ostracized by their former neighbors and friends.

The communists also attacked bourgeois and landowning individuals who had duly paid their taxes, donated land, reduced their rents, supported the war of independence, and sent fathers, sons, and daughters to the front. Nguyen Thi Nam was a case in point. Born into a small business family near Hanoi in 1906, she went into business young in order to make ends meet (her husband had squandered everything they had in the first years of the marriage). Her business savvy was such that she became a highly successful merchant in the emerging steel and cement industries in Haiphong. Before long, the ‘Queen of Iron’ (as she was known) was investing in land in Thai Nguyen province, where, by the 1940s, she owned the largest plantation there. She took pride in modernizing this plantation with equipment imported from Europe and established the country’s first granulated sugar factory. She donated large amounts of money to Ho Chi Minh’s government and, during the war against the French, urged her two sons to join the army. They did. A capitalist though she most certainly was, Nguyen Thi Nam’s support was such that she was widely referred to as a ‘resistance mother’ (‘Me khang chien’) in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

All of this changed as the Vietnamese communists presided over the Maoist transformation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam upon Ho Chi Minh’s return from Moscow and Beijing in 1952. As Vietnamese communists joined hands with their Chinese advisors to implement land reform, they singled out Nguyen Thi Nam. She was classified as a ‘bourgeois trader’: she was by then from the wrong class in what was a very virulent class war. This remarkable businesswoman now embodied the enemy class, an obstacle to the party’s ability to take the peasantry in hand, remake rural society ideologically and administratively, and prepare for the ultimate collectivization of the countryside. Patriotism was no longer sufficient to save her. In the summer of 1953, the party put Nguyen Thi Nam on trial under a red banner which read: ‘Overthrow the despotic landlord Nguyen Thi Nam, take back the land for the peasants’. To make an example of her, cadres placed Nam before hundreds of poor peasants and led them in hate-filled denunciations of this ‘atrocious landlord’ and her long list of crimes. Whipped into a frenzy of hate, the crowd jeered at her, spat on her, and slapped her. At some point in July 1953, as land reform officially got underway, the Vietnamese communists executed her.²⁴

Her execution was not the only one. How many occurred? No one knows for sure, but the most reliable estimates put the number of killed between 5,000 and 15,000. Hundreds, possibly thousands, committed suicide, while others fled. Over three years, the Vietnamese Workers Party dispatched tens of thousands of cadres to organize five successive waves of hate and fear that surged through villages, homes, and lives. The communist party encouraged children to spy on their parents, neighbors to denounce each other, and required local village officials to follow orders or risk severe sanction. One man has recently recalled how the party marched into his village and turned his world upside down:

One day while I was out playing, my mother suddenly dragged my younger brother and me back to our house and sat us down next to the cooking fire [. . .] [S]he said to us, sobbing, ‘From now on you need to stay in the house and look after your little brother. You cannot go out to play or go to school anymore. If you meet your friends you must bow and call them “sir” and “madame”’.

When I responded with pouting and sulking, my mother slapped my face so hard that I saw stars. After that, she hugged my brother and me and cried with all her heart, saying things I did not understand: ‘Tan, our family has been assigned a bad class status’. Not until years later did I begin to understand the injustice and humiliation my mother had to endure. I also began to see that the slap she gave me reflected her resolve to overcome the demands of that horrible and pointless period [. . .]

Despite the fact that our family never had enough food, my mother was labeled a ‘cruel village tyrant’. Moreover, the land reform team forbade us from having any relations with our relatives and neighbors in the village. That was the most painful and humiliating aspect of the experience for my mother. All we had to gnaw on was moldy dried cassava roots. There were many meals when we ate only banana root porridge. Every night the sound of the village militia marching past the gate of our house put the fear of death into my mother.²⁵

In November 1956, resistance to land reform was such that the communist party had to send in the People’s Army of Vietnam’s 325th Division to quell what was a full-blown peasant revolt in Quynh Luu. The situation was so bad that Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap publicly apologized for the errors their party had committed against the people during the last three years. Although Ho took over the leadership of the communist party from Truong Chinh, who was cast as the main author of the disastrous land reform, everyone, including Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, were to be counted as responsible ‘for wanting to apply the coercive Stalinist method of collectivization’. The party promised to right the wrongs, to ‘re-class’ those who had been wrongly categorized, to return land and assets, and dismantle the special courts. But as Ho admitted, the party ‘could not bring the dead back to life’. Instead the party organized a massive ‘Rectification of Errors Campaign’, during which leaders and cadres publicly confessed their sins. This public and highly ritualized act of ideological contrition served to clean the slate, ensure that all had the (new) ‘right thinking’, and to reassert the legitimacy of communist rule before moving on, again. This mise-en-scène fooled none of those who had suffered so much in a revolution in which they had had so little to say. Even those who benefitted from finally obtaining a plot of land would have to give it up in a few short years’ time, when the party sought to take it back. As in China and the Soviet Union, what the collectivization of the countryside required trumped any other considerations.²⁶

Failed Communist Reformism (1954–9)

The excesses of the land reform program led to unprecedented internal calls for reform. Highest on that list was judicial change. Just as republican voices reacted with shock to the extra-judicial methods used by the French colonial authorities to suppress peasant revolts in 1908 and 1930–31, a number of supporters of the new state of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam couldn’t believe that the ‘party of the masses’ had committed the same sins as the colonizers. Where was the rule of law, many asked? Did the peasants, 80 percent of the population, have any legal rights? If the 1946 constitution had enshrined them, then why had the communists just violated them so blatantly? These were not new questions. Ho himself had personally witnessed the French firing on starving peasants in 1908, the very event that had sent him on the road to republicanism, into the League of Human Rights, and on to revolution. Outraged peasants seeking justice from Vietnamese cadres who had just violated their basic human rights flooded the office of Vietnam’s best-known lawyer, the French-trained Nguyen Manh Tuong. People were so outraged that the party responded by allowing newspapers to publish full reports on the land reform abuses which had occurred up to 1957, including information about the use of state-sponsored torture, executions, and the existence of concentration camps. Incensed, the devout party member and well-known journalist of the 1930s, Nguyen Huu Dang, called for the introduction of a legal code, independent of the party-state, that would protect individual rights while still allowing for more effective communization of the countryside. Others petitioned for the reform of the judiciary, the drafting of a new constitution protecting individual liberties, and the awakening of the National Assembly. It had only met once since 1946—in late 1953—in order to approve the land reform unanimously.²⁷

This communist reform-minded constitutionalism bumped up against the Vietnamese politburo’s simultaneous goal of drafting a new constitution which would codify the DRV’s wartime transformation into a communist state and make the necessary preparations for collectivization. The Vietnamese Workers Party’s inner core was determined to create a new constitution placing the Democratic Republic of Vietnam officially under the leadership of a ‘people’s democratic dictatorship’. Unlike the constitution of 1946, which was designed to unite and attract all segments of society, this new constitution would legalize the pre-eminence of the communists’ party, put it in charge of a new social alliance between the workers and the peasants, and align the DRV’s economy with the international communist model. The 1946 constitution no longer fitted the needs or the reality of this new revolutionary state. As Ho Chi Minh told young children gathered around him in 1959, ‘[W]hen you grow up, you will have a communist constitution’.²⁸

Not everyone inside the Democratic Republic of Vietnam agreed with Ho or wanted a dictatorship of the proletariat. Although the details remain shrouded in mystery, in late 1956, a handful of unidentified deputies (apparently shaken by what had occurred in their constituencies during the land reform campaigns), joined reformist-minded lawyers, jurists, and intellectuals like Tuong and Dang in starting to push for constitutional reform, including the empowerment of the legislative and judiciary branches of the government as set out in the 1946 constitution. In December 1956, when the National Assembly convened for the third time in its existence, members agreed to establish the personnel who would undertake a special commission on constitutional reform, and who would duly submit a new project. The Vietnamese Workers Party’s Tran Huy Lieu was in charge, seconded by Ho serving as honorary president. Within weeks, deputies in the National Assembly asserted their theoretical power. In January 1957, the assembly passed three laws: one on the ‘inviolability of the home and of correspondence’, another ensuring freedom of assembly, and a third on the freedom of religion and the press. Although the 1946 constitution had already guaranteed such rights, the question now was whether would they be enforced, and to what extent. In light of the Vietnamese Workers Party’s ‘errors’, that is its prior violation of its citizens’ rights, would the legislature or its judicial branches be able to check the party’s power in the post-1954 Democratic Republic of Vietnam? Not one of these three laws was actually promulgated in 1957; but it is clear that intense, behind-the-doors debates had occurred on the nature of the new constitution, the limits of state and party power, and the protection of individual human rights. Like the French before them, the communist leadership feared the implications of allowing a democratically elected national assembly to operate independently. It was the party which ran the state.²⁹

Simultaneous and closely related calls for legal reform occurred in the arts. Between 1954 and 1956, a diverse range of artists, writers, poets, playwrights, and intellectuals loyal to the regime increasingly called for greater intellectual and artistic freedoms. This movement started in early 1955, when Tran Dan, a military writer and veteran of Dien Bien Phu, found himself undergoing re-education and rectification when he dared to ask General Nguyen Chi Thanh, head of the PAVN’s General Political Directorate, for greater freedom of expression in the stifling Maoist-minded world in which he worked. Tran Dan’s case became a rallying cry for intellectuals and artists who published two journals with the express goal of reforming the party’s excessive hold over culture and the arts—Nhan Van (Humanism) and Giai Pham (Fine Arts). Contributors to these journals came from the army, from among French-trained intellectuals, and included such intellectual heavy weights as the renowned philosopher, Tran Duc Thao. Most were communists, some were not; but they all had supported the regime.³⁰

The party’s stance oscillated from tolerance and even tacit sympathy for its opponents to open hostility toward them and outright repression. Such indecision was linked as much to the land reform program’s errors as to the simultaneous secret speech Nikita Khrushchev had just delivered in early 1956. In it, the head of the Soviet communist party criticized Stalin’s crimes against his own people and his cult of personality. Khrushchev also advocated a policy of peaceful co-existence and promoted a wide range of socio-economic and legal reforms to regain the support of the ‘people’, above all the peasants, who had suffered terribly during Stalin’s rule. This was one of Khrushchev’s big foreign policy changes in 1956 that infuriated Mao and not a few Vietnamese. ‘Peaceful co-existence’ was the new buzzword for trying to calm down the Cold War and work things out with the capitalists through negotiation. Unsurprisingly, this Soviet-approved ‘destalinization’ also found supporters in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as it did across the communist world. The problem was that the VWP’s leadership would only go so far. Like their Chinese counterparts, they had only just taken power and were doing all they could to consolidate it (using many of the Stalinist methods Khrushchev now condemned). Ho was not about to abandon his cult of personality when he needed it to win back popular support after the land reform débâcle. The great upheaval was the price to be paid for taking control of the state and society from top to bottom.³¹

Most importantly, the peasants’ protest in Quynh Luu in November 1956 coincided with the popular uprising against communist rule in Hungary which started on 23 October. With Ngo Dinh Diem building a southern state and even speaking of a march on the north, the Vietnamese Workers Party welcomed the Soviet invasion of Hungary on 4 November and decided that it could not let its own reformers transform social discontent or even the regime into something no one could predict or control. Though it took them longer than the Soviet’s quelling of the popular uprising in Hungary did, by 1959 Ho Chi Minh had stopped legislative attempts to curtail the party’s power constitutionally. On 1 January 1960, he promulgated the Democratic Republic of Vienam’s new constitution, enshrining the power of the communist party, ensuring its supremacy over that of the National Assembly, and guaranteeing that communism was now the official ideology of the DRV, its economy, and society. And the communist leadership closed the journals Nhan Van (Humanism) and Giai Pham (Fine Arts) for good. As in China and the Soviet Union, there had to be ideological homogeneity among cadres, officers, and intellectuals. Toward the end of his life, Tran Duc Thao, one of Vietnam’s greatest minds, a man who had collaborated with French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre earlier in his career, found himself psychologically destroyed by constant party attacks on individual thought.³²

EXTENDING REPUBLICAN SOVEREIGNTY IN THE SOUTH

Like Ho Chi Minh, Ngo Dinh Diem may have come from a mandarin family, but he was anything but an inward-looking ‘Confucian’, ‘mandarin’, or ‘traditionalist’. Diem saw himself as a revolutionary. He certainly possessed one of the most modern educations the French could offer, not least of all in administrative practices. He was obsessed with modern sovereignty, nationalism, and state-building. And although the Ngo brothers abhorred the class war the communists had unleashed in the countryside, they agreed that the creation of a new Vietnam did turn on the transformation of rural society, and as Diem had expressed his thinking on rural change in 1949: ‘It is also a social revolution for the economic independence of the Vietnamese farmer and laborer. I advocate the most advanced and bold social reforms, while preserving human dignity and respect, in order that all people in the new Viet Nam may earn a living as truly free people’.³³

In practice, the Ngo brothers had little more respect for the freedom of the people than the communists they so despised. The Ngos were nepotistic, authoritarian and heavy-handed in their rule. If Ho Chi Minh ensured the communist party held a monopoly on power by 1960, Ngo Dinh Diem had already concentrated state power within an authoritarian executive branch of his government. Indeed, the constitution upon which the new republic rested from late 1955 onward was the result of the new National Constitutional Assembly which had been hastily convened under Diem’s personal control. This constitution provided extraordinary powers to its government’s executive branch by subordinating all legislature to presidential fiat. Everyone knew what article 3 of the constitution meant: ‘The activities of the executive and the legislative agencies must be brought into harmony. The president is vested with the leadership of the Nation’. The president enjoyed vast emergency powers. He controlled foreign policy, could declare war, make treaties, commanded the military, and had the power to ‘make all military and civil appointments’. The constitution guaranteed the people’s freedom of expression, but, as in the north, if any individual was deemed to threaten national security, then he or she forfeited his or her rights. ‘Communism’ was outlawed, just as ‘anticommunism’ was in the north. Such labels could and would be used abusively by the state to neutralize all sorts of enemies. Despite paying it lip service, Diem bypassed the National Assembly, preferring to rule by decree, just like Ho Chi Minh had done during the entire Indochina War. The Republic of Vietnam’s judiciary was not independent of the state and had few oversight powers, which led to many of the same human rights abuses committed by the communists—arbitrary arrest, censorship, torture, execution, forced labor, and the use of concentration camps. And behind the president stood his family, not any sort of wider political coalition. By smashing, then refusing to open the political doors to religious groups like the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao, each one as opposed to communism as he was, Diem not only failed to develop a wider, inclusive anticommunism nationalism that could have built up his legitimacy, but he also frustrated such groups and made enemies of them by keeping them out of the political system. The president’s mistrust was such that he failed to create anticommunist alliances even with the Vietnamese Nationalist Party and the Greater Vietnam coalition. Diem struggled even to keep on good terms with those followers of his who made up the base of his support—the Catholic refugees.³⁴

As in the north, Ngo state-building wreaked the greatest havoc upon the very people it was designed to uplift and save. It was never intended that way, of course. Diem’s land reform was top-down, authoritarian, and badly administered. He spoke in the name of the poor masses, but never asked them what they wanted or provided them with the institutional means to make their needs known. If the VWP rammed land reform through its National Assembly in 1953, the Ngos didn’t even consult this institution. Diem simply decreed rural revolution. By redistributing land in areas where there had been large landowners, plantations, and abandoned land, he sought to empower the peasantry, expand the Republic of Vietnam’s administrative control, promote economic prosperity, and in so doing legitimate his nation-building. Diem could look to successful non-communist models in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, where land reform had sparked an increase in agricultural production and created the foundation for export-led growth capable of financing industrialization.

Land reform was an administrative weapon, too. The First Indochina War had convinced the Ngo brothers that the communists had successfully used land reform to extend state control over their people and territory. The Ngos were now confident that they could fight the communists and expand their own socio-political base using the enemy’s own methods. The Americans largely agreed and backed them at the outset. In February 1955, the government lowered rent payments (which farmers had to pay landlords) to between 15 percent and 25 percent of the value of the main crops’ yield and authorized them to cultivate abandoned land. In 1956, redistribution began in earnest with the expropriation of land from large landowners. Unlike the Red River valley, the Mekong basin was home to many large-landowning families. In fact, around 2,500 landowners possessed around 40 percent of the rice-producing land. In all, two million hectares of tenured land was theoretically available for redistribution.³⁵

And yet land reform failed. In all, the government only distributed one-third of tenured land, while almost 50 percent of the RV’s land remained concentrated in the hands of 2 percent of the population. Redistribution also occurred unevenly. In many areas, no land ever changed hands. What happened? For one, landowners resisted the government by paying off corrupt officials or threatening to withdraw their political support if Diem did not back down. ‘We have been robbed by the Viet Minh over the years’, one landowner bemoaned, ‘and we resent similar treatment from the national government’. That this individual was the chief of his province revealed another problem—Diem’s civil service was not up to such a herculean task. It was badly understaffed, increasingly corrupt, and often administered by people who had no interest in seeing land reform succeed. In all, 400 officials presided over the Republic of Vietnam’s attempted land reform, whereas the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had dispatched tens of thousands of cadres (and the Japanese had relied on 400,000 people) to push through rural reform. Diem could have deployed the army to force landowner compliance; but he was loathe to unleash class war and reluctant to risk a coup. In the end, the Ngos backtracked (whereas the communists only feigned doing so via the ‘rectification campaign’). In so doing, the Ngos left millions of peasants frustrated, tens of thousands of whom had already enjoyed land reform under the DRV before 1954. These farmers only reluctantly accepted the return of the landlords in late 1954; and would be quite ready to change loyalties if the local power relations were to allow for it.³⁶

Land reform failure did not stop Diem in his state-building efforts. In mid-1956, he initiated a massive resettlement program known as ‘Planning for Land’. The main goal was to promote state consolidation by moving Vietnamese people into ethnically non-Viet highland zones. Diem wanted to establish the RV’s sovereignty in these peripheral yet strategically important areas where the French had separately administered the ‘ethnic minorities’ until 1954. The central highlands were also areas in which the DRV had extended its own control during the First Indochina War. Just as importantly, Diem also wanted to relieve population pressure in the delta by promoting ethnic Viet migration to the highlands. Immigrants there received plots of land, tools, seeds, and food grants which allowed them to create new settlements in upland areas. By 1959, 125,000 immigrants lived in 84 settlements. In 1962, 230,000 people lived in 173 settlements. The problem was that the resumption of civil war in the south led Diem to go too fast and to use coercion instead of persuasion to move people, build new villages, and construct new roads. Moreover, this policy of internal colonization only exacerbated longstanding tensions between Viet settlers and the still majority non-Viet indigenous peoples in the highlands.³⁷

Diem’s quest for control over people and their loyalties also led him to decree an ‘Anticommunist Denunciation Campaign’ in early 1955. The president used this program to root out communist stay-behinds and sleeper cells in the countryside and to re-educate the large number of sympathizers, former bureaucrats, and members of the DRV’s nationalist fronts and former administrators during the Indochina War. Republic of Vietnam security personnel and provincial officials received orders to classify the population in terms of family background, political affiliations, attitudes toward communism, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the Republic of Vietnam. For those who posed little threat, the government organized village ceremonies and community self-criticism sessions. Re-education centers dealt with tougher cases. In carefully choreographed rituals, former communist supporters would ask for forgiveness from fellow villagers and local authorities before swearing allegiance to the republican flag and its great leader, Ngo Dinh Diem.

The Ngo brothers then went further. In January 1956, a presidential ordinance authorized the arrest and incarceration of anyone deemed a threat to national security. Concentration camps popped up as the security services and army arrested thousands of suspects, many of them in fact non-communists. Indeed, large numbers of democratic-minded, lawabiding political opponents of the regime found themselves censored or detained. More were rounded up following the promulgation in May 1959 of an even more draconian piece of anticommunist legislation, Law 10/59. It created ‘special military tribunals’ with the power to arrest, imprison, and execute people for vaguely defined ‘revolutionary activities’. Between 1954 and 1960, this anticommunist offensive incarcerated almost 50,000 people. While non-communist journalists, politicians, judges, and artists ended up in jail as well, Ngo Dinh Diem’s dragnet did in fact inflict real damage on the communist party’s underground organization. The Vietnamese Workers Party’s clandestine membership below the seventeenth parallel fell from 50,000 in 1954 to 15,000 in 1956. By 1959, the party counted only 5,000 remaining members in southern Vietnam. It was in this desperate situation that party cadres began to plead with the leadership in Hanoi to change the VWP’s line so that they could pick up arms to defend themselves, even if it meant resuming civil war and risking American intervention.³⁸

But it was also in this context that the Ngo family started to go after anyone who defied its power and state-building project, including non-communist nationalists like Nguyen Tuong Tam and politically minded religious movements such as the one coalescing rapidly around the Xa Loi Buddhist pagoda in downtown Saigon. The Ngos also pursued dissidents in their own ranks. Despite their ideological differences, both Ho Chi Minh and Ngo Dinh Diem clearly struggled to impose authoritarian rule and create the legitimacy for these two different Vietnams that had emerged from a century of French colonial rule. Neither brooked any opposition to their right to rule. After all, Diem was not the first to try to crush religious movements and separatism in the south: Ho Chi Minh had first sent Nguyen Binh to try to do this in late 1945. And behind Diem and Ho, of course, stood Minh Mang with his hard-handed efforts to hold Vietnam together in the mid-nineteenth century. This, too, was modern Vietnam.