CHAPTER VII

——————

The Indochina War

SINCE its emergence under Ho Chi Minh’s leadership about 1930, the Vietnamese Communist movement has sought to dominate the whole of Indochina, Vietnam directly and the rest through Laotian and Cambodian junior partners. This effort would probably have succeeded, at least in Vietnam and Laos, after the Japanese collapse in 1945, in view of the Communists’ superiority in organization to their local rivals, their militant ideology, and their ruthless use of terror, if the northern part of Indochina had not been occupied by Chinese Nationalist troops and the southern part by British forces, under arrangements worked out at the Potsdam Conference. This was only the first of a series of foreign interventions and initiatives that have checked the Vietnamese Communists short of their goal, but the termination of each has left them closer to it than before.

The French Defeat

The French, badly weakened by their ordeal in the Second World War, were nevertheless determined to regain their empire in Indochina. The British gave way readily to them in the south, but the Chinese Nationalists had to be maneuvered out through tacit cooperation between the French and Ho Chi Minh, who regarded them as the lesser and more short-lived evil. Furthermore, Stalin at that time had high hopes for the political future of the French Communist Party and was reluctant to antagonize French public opinion by encouraging insurgency on the part of the Vietnamese Communists. Ho accordingly showed a willingness to keep the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), as he called the regime he had established in North Vietnam at the time of the Japanese surrender, within the French Union, provided it were given control over South Vietnam as well. But this the French were unwilling to do, and fighting broke out between the two sides in Hanoi at the end of 1946. The more powerfully armed French soon pushed their adversaries back into the jungle and mountains and settled down to fight what promised to be a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign, one for which their commanders were rather poorly prepared.

The war was a serious drain on the French, but they were able to get American aid and support for it after the formation of NATO, of which France was a key member, in April 1949. But American aid was conditioned on greater freedom for the Indo-chinese states, to which accordingly France granted limited degrees of self-government at intervals between 1949 and 1953. On the other hand, the French resisted an American effort to provide training and equipment directly to a non-Communist Vietnamese national army and insisted on performing this role themselves. They did it badly on the whole, as their poor colonial record predicted. Their indifferent success in what later came to be called Vietnamization, political as well as military, helped to ensure their defeat and to make Ho Chi Minh a great national hero in the eyes of most Vietnamese, including many non-Communists.

Another important cause of the French defeat was the Communist victory in China, even though it enhanced American willingness to support the French effort in Indochina. For ideological reasons, Peking desired the victory of its Vietnamese colleagues in Vietnam itself, although not necessarily in Laos and Cambodia, where China has ambitions of its own. Peking recognized the DRV in January 1950, and later that year Ho Chi Minh’s forces opened the Sino-Vietnamese border to Chinese aid by clearing it of French outposts. The actual flow of aid, however, was limited by Peking’s preoccupation with the Korean War. At the end of 1950 Ho Chi Minh’s forces launched a premature and disastrous offensive against the Hanoi area. This defeat apparently enhanced Chinese political influence, one possible manifestation of which was the foundation of the Vietnam Workers Party (Lao Dong), in reality a Communist Party, in the spring of 1951. On the other hand, like all Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh was strongly determined to remain free from Chinese control.

In 1953 the end of the Korean War made possible a considerable increase in the flow of Chinese military aid to the DRV. This development helped to convince the French, who in any case were tiring of the losses and strains imposed by the Indochina War, that they could not win and must withdraw. They were also influenced by a desire to concentrate their resources on holding Algeria, which had begun to be threatened by Egyptian support for nationalist insurgents. They hoped to leave behind a viable non-Communist Vietnamese state and to strengthen its position by some final military initiatives. One of these, aimed at preventing a repetition of earlier Vietnamese Communist thrusts into Laos, was the occupation at the end of 1953 of Dienbienphu, a post in northwestern Vietnam on a road into Laos and unfortunately surrounded by hills that the French did not control and did not reconnoiter adequately. With equipment specifically supplied by the Chinese, Ho’s forces besieged Dienbienphu in March 1954 and took it after heavy fighting on May 7, the day before a major international conference at Geneva began to negotiate a settlement of the Indochinese conflict.

The Geneva Settlement

The conference had been decided on in February at a meeting of the Big Four foreign ministers (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France). Its convening and proceedings were considerably complicated by two preoccupations of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. One was his determination to remain on good terms with the powerful Republican right wing in Congress. This led him to veto the People’s Republic of China as one of the convening powers of the conference, a status that would have allowed the chairman of its delegation to chair sessions of the conference in rotation with delegation chairmen of the other convening powers. Dulles would tolerate Peking only as one of the participating powers, and the chairmanship alternated between the British and Soviet delegation chairmen. The other preoccupation was Dulles’ determination to use the Indochina crisis as a springboard to facilitate the formation of a new anti-Communist alliance, SEATO (see Chapter V), which would be his equivalent achievement to NATO, the creation of his predecessor Dean Acheson. As a means of stampeding Britain, France, and the anti-Communist states of Southeast Asia into the prospective new alliance, Dulles in April 1954 let it be thought that he was contemplating American military intervention to save Dienbienphu, although in reality he appears to have been considering nothing of the kind even if some of his colleagues in Washington were. In addition, Dulles had made his “massive retaliation” speech in January, which even though the label is misleading (it actually espoused the concept of “flexible response”) made a considerable impact on the leaders of the Communist world as well as others. Occasionally, during the spring of 1954 and last months of 1953, he threatened American military intervention in Indochina. His behavior, as well as a series of colossal thermonuclear tests conducted by the United States in the Pacific in March 1954, gave the United States and the entire non-Communist side considerably enhanced leverage at the Geneva Conference. An additional concern for the Soviet Union was a desire not to be so tough with France as to push it into adhering to the European Defense Community, a proposed integrated West European army that was anathema in Moscow because there would be West German participation.

During the first stage of the conference, however, the Soviet and Chinese representatives (Molotov and Chou En-lai, respectively) gave full support to the DRV’s demands for prompt political settlements (including elections) in all three of the Indochina countries on a virtual package deal basis, so that military victory in Vietnam could be translated into political triumph in the entire region. The result was a deadlock at Geneva and the fall of the French government. The new Premier, the energetic and able Pierre Mendes-France, increased his leverage significantly by saying that he would resign if a settlement were not reached within six weeks; no other party to the conference, apparently, wanted to risk the uncertain consequences of his resignation. After his coming into office and another round of threats from Dulles, the deadlock was broken, mainly through a reduction in the level of Soviet and Chinese diplomatic support for the DRV, which was understandably infuriated. Chou En-lai agreed that the three Indochina countries should be treated separately, each on the basis of its individual situation. Molotov agreed that Vietnam, the major prize, should be partitioned at the 17th parallel pending elections, rather than farther south as the DRV had been demanding.

The agreements signed on July 21, just before Mendès-France’s deadline, gave Peking something it wanted very much, in that the Indochina states were prohibited from entering into military alliances, having foreign troops or bases on their soil, or receiving arms from external sources at more than replacement levels; these provisions tended to guarantee against an American military presence in Indochina that might threaten China. Peking failed in another of its objectives, to get an American signature on the main political agreement; for the reason already indicated, the United States would not sign a document also signed by a Chinese Communist representative, and accordingly the main political agreement was not signed by anybody. The essence of it and the other agreements reached at the conference was that there should be no legal Communist presence in Cambodia; that in Laos the local Communist front (the Pathet Lao) should have two provinces bordering on North Vietnam into which to “regroup” its political cadres and military personnel pending the working out of an agreement to hold national elections and install a coalition government reflecting their outcome; and that Vietnam should be divided temporarily near the 17th parallel for purposes of “regrouping,” the DRV’s zone being in the north and the non-Communist Vietnamese government’s zone being in the south, pending national elections to be held within two years to unify the country, presumably under a coalition government. The conference also created an International Control Commission for each country, with an Indian chairman, a Polish member, and a Canadian member, to verify the observance of the military aspects of the settlement; the International Control Commission for Vietnam was to operate in the North as well as in the South.

Although the DRV was distressed over several aspects of the settlement, notably the postponement of elections in Vietnam for two years, it soon came to realize that the Communist ticket would not only sweep the North (given Communist skill at manipulating the semblance of support from people under their control) but do very well in the South, given Ho Chi Minh’s prestige. The result presumably would be a nation-wide Communist victory. The DRV began to count heavily on achieving in this way what it had not quite been able to achieve by force of arms, control over the whole of Vietnam.

Socialism in Half a Country

The DRV proceeded rapidly and effectively to establish control over the North. Its leadership’s penchant for terror and a tendency at that time to imitate the Chinese Communist example produced a bloody “land reform” campaign in 1954-55, in the course of which many thousands of innocent people were killed. In 1956 Hanoi realized it had gone too far and eased the pressure on the rural population considerably, but much irreparable damage had been done. In November a serious peasant revolt, which was suppressed by North Vietnamese troops, broke out in the southernmost province of the DRV.

The time-table established at Geneva called for certain preliminaries to the elections of 1956 to be set in motion as early as July 1955. Anxious that the elections be held, Hanoi tried to get these preliminaries started, only to encounter firm opposition from South Vietnam and the United States. This situation obviously created the difficult problem of deciding what to do next; Hanoi’s inclination in all probability was to revert to force in one way or another, but a decision of such importance could not be made without some reference to the views of its allies.

As they had already demonstrated at Geneva, the Soviet Union and China were none too reliable from Hanoi’s point of view. Their strong distaste for becoming involved in a crunch with the strategically superior United States, at any rate over an area as remote as Indochina, persisted, and it was clear that the United States was involving itself increasingly in aid and support for the South Vietnamese government.

With seeming appropriateness, Moscow and Peking began to do the same for Hanoi; in the second half of 1955 major commitments to give economic aid to the DRV were made by the Soviet Union and China, and their fulfillment in due course gave North Vietnam the most advanced industrial system in Southeast Asia. The International Control Commission was unable to observe, let alone interrupt, the military aid that also flowed in from the Soviet Union and China. It is also very likely, although it cannot be proved, that Moscow and Peking were consciously encouraging Hanoi in effect to build socialism in half a country and to refrain from stirring up a crisis by putting military pressure on South Vietnam. At any rate, Soviet and Chinese reluctance to see such a crisis occur, and their preference for preserving the status quo for at least a while longer, are reasonably clear. In 1957 the Soviet government proposed, although unsuccessfully, that both Hanoi and Saigon be admitted to the United Nations.

In 1960 the DRV felt itself sufficiently stabilized to introduce a new state constitution strongly resembling that of the People’s Republic of China. Like Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh was to occupy a special and prestigious position, that of President of the Republic. Communist control was preserved behind a semi-democratic facade. Support for national unification through the “liberation” of South Vietnam from alleged American domination, the leadership’s main objective, was demanded of the people as well. The DRV’s policy toward its montagnards (mountaineer minorities), although firm, has been the typically Comunist one of granting them at least the semblance of autonomy and has probably been less repressive in practice than that of some non-Communist Southeast Asian governments.

The Emergence of Diem

During the Geneva Conference the post of Premier of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), which seemed to have little if any future, was bestowed by President Bao Dai on Ngo Dinh Diem. His family, to which he was very close and to whose leading members he gave a variety of important posts, was Catholic, whereas most of the population was non-Catholic, Buddhist for the most part. The Ngo family, partly isolated from the people by religion, tended to lean on other Catholics for support, and many of these were Northerners (and hence aliens to the Southerners) drawn from the 800,000 Catholics who moved to South Vietnam in 1954 to get away from the Communists. Although personally honest, Diem was conservative and narrow-minded; his brother Nhu, on whom he depended heavily, had much less integrity and was apparently not of sound mind. All in all, it was an unhealthy and unpromising situation from the start, even apart from the Communist problem, and the United States government tended to believe that Diem and his government would not survive and should not be supported on a large scale.

But since he was not under attack from the Communists, who were waiting for the 1956 elections, Diem in an astonishing burst of courage and energy succeeded in 1955 in winning over his Army leadership and in crushing his main non-Communist adversaries. At this point the United States came to the conclusion that he had been underestimated and that he stood a chance of surviving as long as he was not forced to sign his own death warrant by agreeing to the elections prescribed at Geneva. American aid, economic and military, began to flow to him on a large scale.

Under these circumstances, Diem was able to make his refusal to hold the elections envisaged at Geneva stick. This success emboldened him, unfortunately, to set up later in 1956 what increasingly became a dictatorship under himself and his family. At the local level, this policy involved serious restrictions on the traditional autonomy of the village, and police pressures aimed at eliminating actual, suspected, and alleged Communists. Although the Diem government was never quite as bad, at least in comparison with some other Asian governments, as the American press came to portray it after 1960, there is no question that it grew increasingly repressive, ineffective, and unpopular. To a large extent, it dug its own grave.

Insurgency in South Vietnam

In violation of the Geneva Agreements, several thousand Communist cadres of southern origin remained south of the 17th parallel after 1954. They stayed underground, presumably with the mission of getting into position to influence the elections. But when the July 1956 deadline passed without elections, peasants began in some cases to inform on the Communist cadres to Diem’s police and troops, who made life very difficult for them. They began, about the spring of 1957, to engage in acts of terror and sabotage. Hanoi, however, while keeping in touch with them and determined to preserve them as the nucleus of a probable “people’s war” in the future, still withheld its consent to the actual launching of such a war. As already suggested, the main reason was probably Moscow’s and Peking’s attitude.

But in 1957-58 Peking’s general policy, foreign as well as domestic, shifted in a more militant direction, and Hanoi’s difficulty was eased to some extent. A probably more important influence, in the same direction, was a crisis that arose in Laos in 1959. The agreement for that country envisaged at Geneva had been reached in 1957. The ensuing elections, held in the spring of 1958, gave a strong bloc of thirteen seats in the National Assembly to the Pathet Lao and their allies. With a threat to suspend its aid, which is vital to the survival of a non-Communist government in Laos, the alarmed United States government then forced the neutralist Premier, Prince Souvanna Phouma, out of office and attempted with some success, and in violation of the Geneva Agreements, to encourage the emergence of a more Western-oriented government that would be willing to appeal to SEATO for support if necessary. As a result of this a crisis broke out in the spring of 1959, in the course of which both Peking and Hanoi made it clear that they would not tolerate such a situation. Accordingly, American intervention eased off for a time, and a neutralist coup restored Souvanna Phouma to power in the summer of 1960.

Parallel with the Laotian crisis, and presumably emboldened by a more sympathetic attitude in Peking, Hanoi began in the spring of 1959 to send Communist cadres of southern origin who had been in the North since 1954 into South Vietnam, with arms, funds, etc., to start an insurgency in earnest. This they proceeded to do, with increasing effect.

The Beginnings of Direct American Involvement

Although the Eisenhower administration had continued to assume complacently that Diem was a good man and had things under reasonable control, it was obvious to the Kennedy administration almost from the time it took office that such was not the case. Worse still, the situation in South Vietnam threatened to deteriorate rapidly on account of developments in Laos.

At the time of his restoration to power in the summer of 1960, Souvanna Phouma was still not acceptable to the United States government. Accordingly, the Central Intelligence Agency engineered his overthrow by a right-wing army. He fled to Cambodia and appealed for Soviet support, which soon began to arrive by air. The arms involved were intended for Souvanna Phouma’s “neutralist”’ forces, but a high percentage actually got into the hands of the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese. Taking advantage of the general confusion and the lame duck period between American administrations, North Vietnamese troops occupied most of the highlands of eastern Laos in force at the beginning of 1961, never to be dislodged. Through this wilderness they then began to construct the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail, actually a complex of trails leading from North Vietnam into South Vietnam via Laos. Together with its subsequent extension via Cambodia, the so-called Sihanouk Trail, these routes posed a mortal threat first to the highlands of South Vietnam, and ultimately to the lowlands, including the Mekong Delta.

The impact of these developments on Laos itself was also serious. President Kennedy rejected the idea of American military intervention and promptly abandoned the Eisenhower administration’s efforts to create an anti-Communist government in Laos; he considered that the best that he could get would be a neutral Laos. To cope with the onward advance of the Pathet Lao and their North Vietnamese patrons, as well as to deter possible Soviet and Chinese support for them, he indulged in early 1961 in a number of threatening gestures (“coercive diplomacy”), while pressing vigorously for negotiations. The outcome was another international conference at Geneva in 1961-62, similar in some ways to the one held in 1954 but confined to Laos. The external powers participating agreed that Laos should be neutral, under the supervision of a revived but still weak International Control Commission. It was to have a coalition government under a neutral premier (obviously Souvanna Phouma), a Pathet Lao vice premier, and an anti-Communist vice premier, any of whom was to have a veto over any major proposed act of the government; this formula, clearly designed to produce a deadlock and prevent interference from Vientiane with the advance of the left-wing forces on the ground, was essentially a Soviet invention, and its acceptance was hardly a triumph for American diplomacy.

In reality, this machinery worked as intended for only a brief period. Encouraged by the fact that most of the North Vietnamese forces that had entered Laos remained there in violation of the agreement, the Pathet Lao soon began to exert pressure on Souvanna Phouma’s neutralists to win over as many as possible. The main result was to polarize the political scene into two elements (rather than three), drive Souvanna Phouma closer to the United States and vice versa, and produce the breakdown of the projected tripartite (“troika”) government. Without violating the agreement to the extent of maintaining a formal military presence in Laos, the United States began to support; (through the Central Intelligence Agency) an effective anti-Communist irregular army composed of Meo tribesmen from the vicinity of the Plain of Jars (a strategic area in northern Laos) under the redoutable General Vang Pao.

Laos was important to the United States (and to the North Vietnamese) mainly on account of its relevance to South Vietnam, and the situation there seemed serious enough so that the Kennedy administration sent a high-level mission under General Maxwell D. Taylor in October 1961 to take stock and make recommendations. It urged a policy of pressing reforms and aid simultaneously on Diem as the best means of keeping South Vietnam out of Hanoi’s hands. The reforms never came but the aid did. A rapidly growing number of American military advisers and technicians, although not yet full-fledged combat units, began to appear in South Vietnam during the next few years. Given the Diem government’s shortcomings, the results were not encouraging, and it appears that if President Kennedy had survived to be re-elected in 1964 he would then have begun to eliminate the American involvement in support of Saigon.

Diem and Nhu were barely aware of the seriousness of their problems, of the nature of the needed countermeasures, or of the means of putting the latter into effect. They insisted on treating intellectuals, opposition politicians, and other critics as subversives. In the early 1960s Nhu inaugurated an alleged effort to give security to the rural population by reconcentrating much of it in “strategic hamlets.” But the program was undercapitalized and aimed to a large extent at building a personal political base for Nhu; this it failed to do, and the entire effort was probably countereffective from Saigon’s standpoint. The Communist insurgency continued to grow more serious.

In the spring of 1963 the Diem government became involved in a violent dispute with a large percentage of the Buddhist population. This triggered a series of student demonstrations, and the Army leadership began to show increasing reluctance to support a government whose political base was obviously crumbling. The situation was all the worse because Nhu was in secret contact with the National Liberation Front (or “Viet Cong”), the South Vietnamese Communist organization. These developments, taken as a whole, completed the process of souring the Kennedy administration on the Diem government and leading it to look favorably on an emerging conspiracy within the South Vietnamese military leadership to overthrow it. The coup took place on November 1, and Diem and Nhu were killed on the following day (contrary to Washington’s wishes).

Bad as the Diem government had become, its overthrow was probably a serious mistake, at least in the sense that the political and military situations began to deteriorate at an even faster rate. The United States would have preferred, and tried to foster, a truly democratic civilian government as the successor to the Diem dictatorship. But the latter had so effectively prevented the emergence of a loyal opposition (as contrasted with the thoroughly disloyal Communist opposition) that there was no alternative but rule by the only force strong enough to overthrow Diem, the Army of course. Increased military involvement in politics after November 1963 tended to distract the Army from fighting the Communists and to produce further successes for the latter.

The year 1964 was a tense one that saw a further American build-up in South Vietnam, especially in the field of tactical air-power, and American bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and of some North Vietnamese naval shore installations following the so-called Tonkin Gulf Incident of early August, which President Johnson used to get a joint Congressional resolution authorizing him to use American forces in Southeast Asia virtually as he saw fit. On the other hand, during the American election campaign President Johnson took a rather dovish line in public on Vietnam, although this was mainly in order to contrast his own apparent reasonableness with the hawkishness of his Republican opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater. Hanoi apparently took Johnson’s remarks too literally and drew great encouragement from his overwhelming electoral victory. In addition, the North Vietnamese may have feared that a victory for the Viet Cong, which appeared fairly imminent as long as there was no further American intervention, would lead to an overly independent (of Hanoi) Communist regime in South Vietnam, unless North Vietnamese forces were also on the scene.

Escalation

Probably for these reasons, at the end of 1964 Hanoi began to introduce regular North Vietnamese Army units into South Vietnam for the first time. Their apparent mission was to establish bases in the highlands from which the lowlands could be seized with the support of the Viet Cong. Hanoi had great expectations of victory in 1965. Moscow, more experienced and sophisticated at interpreting American motivation, seems to have realized that the United States was not likely to accept this outcome without counterintervention, and that its actions would probably include air strikes against North Vietnam. Accordingly, during a visit to Hanoi in February 1965 Premier Kosygin offered to provide substantial air defense equipment (surface-to-air-missiles, etc.). The timing could not have been better, since the United States inaugurated air strikes against North Vietnam and against Communist forces in South Vietnam during his visit. In the spring the United States sent in Marine combat units and, beginning in the middle of the year, Army units as well. A reason often given for this step was the need to take reprisals against Viet Cong attacks on American military personnel already in South Vietnam. The actual reason was to prevent the fall of Saigon. Whatever the legitimacy of this objective—the arguments pro and con are familiar and in many cases go far beyond Vietnam—the United States government had the mistaken impression that tlanoi was acting as a virtual agent of Peking, much as Washington had believed earlier, also mistakenly, that Peking was acting as a virtual agent of Moscow. Thus the American escalation, or more accurately counterescalation, in Vietnam was officially viewed, until about 1967, as a critical aspect of the containment of China.

And yet to a large extent because of an exaggerated fear of another war with China, this time over Vietnam, as well as for other reasons such as a regard for domestic and international opinion, the Johnson administration publicly repudiated any intent to use measures likely to bring about the collapse of the North Vietnamese state. It therefore refrained from invading the North and from systematically bombing population centers or the dikes containing the Red River. Mainly in order to avoid a confrontation with the Soviet Union, it also refrained from mining or blockading Haiphong, the port through which flowed most of those Soviet supplies for North Vietnam that did not move across China by rail. Given the absence of any serious threat to its survival, North Vietnam was able to send virtually as much of its Army as it pleased into South Vietnam, subject to the none-too-effective if energetic American efforts at interdiction through air strikes. To cope with this large North Vietnamese military presence in South Vietnam, the United States felt compelled to engage in massive “search and destroy” operations, which inflicted not only heavy losses on the combatants but also substantial damage on the countryside and civilian population of South Vietnam.

The United States ended by waging something that resembled a regular war more closely than a counterinsurgency, that generated serious strains in its domestic politics and foreign relations, that compelled the Soviet Union and China to increase the level of their aid to North Vietnam by way of response, and that had almost no advantages apart from giving career American military men a chance to try out their latest weapons and win promotions. In this way a well-intentioned decision, to refrain from threatening North Vietnam with destruction, produced results so bad that the United States was able to accept them for only a limited time and had to withdraw from the war (after 1969) without having achieved a decisive result in compensation for its effort and sacrifices; furthermore, the United States government was not even given credit for good intentions. It would perhaps have been more humane and fruitful as to result, even though less obviously well-intentioned, if the United States government had posed a credible threat to invade North Vietnam—without actually invading it—by some such means as occasional demonstrations by an amphibious landing force in the Gulf of Tonkin, and in this way kept most of the North Vietnamese Army pinned where it presumably belonged, in North Vietnam. It has been said that God writes straight with crooked lines; in Vietnam the Johnson administration wrote crookedly with straight lines.

It is also true that the American overmilitarization of the war in South Vietnam after 1965 flowed from the virtual physical impossibility of isolating the battlefield, as the United States had been able to do in the case of Japanese-held islands in the Pacific during the Second World War and as the British had been able to do during the Emergency in Malaya. The enemy could not be denied, even by intensive bombing, the ability to receive reinforcements and supplies in significant amounts from his base in North Vietnam and from his Soviet and Chinese patrons. The enemy was too numerous and well organized, and the terrain too difficult, to permit the American and South Vietnamese forces to isolate and defeat him within the limits of time, casualties, and expenditure that American and world opinion would accept.

Nevertheless, at vast cost, considerable if not decisive progress was made. The North Vietnamese Army suffered far heavier losses than it inflicted on its American adversaries. The Saigon government survived and even began to stabilize itself somewhat, although still under the essentially military rule of President Nguyen Van Thieu. It was far from a democracy, but it did make some slow and uneven progress toward “pacification/’ or in other words the elimination of the Viet Cong “infrastructure” (cadres, paramilitary units, etc.) in the rural areas. In 1967, Hanoi evidently made an “agonizing reappraisal” of its position and concluded that it was gradaully losing the war in South Vietnam, in addition to suffering serious although not crippling damage at home from American bombing. Peking’s advice to de-escalate to the level of a protracted “people’s war” and imitate China’s Cultural Revolution in order to regenerate public morale was rejected, and another approach was decided on. This was to launch major simultaneous offensives by the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong aimed at producing some American military defeats along the lines of Dienbienphu, seizing and holding some important South Vietnamese cities, and producing a collapse of the Saigon government and the creation of a leftist alternative oriented toward Hanoi. One reason for the obvious sense of urgency was that Ho Chi Minh’s life was running out, and he unquestionably wanted to see South Vietnam “liberated” before he died.

From these causes flowed the famous Tet Offensive, which began at the end of January 1968. After some spectacular initial successes achieved through surprise, it turned into a disaster. The North Vietnamese units suffered heavy losses, and the Viet Cong organization, which necessarily surfaced and exposed itself in the process of playing its assigned part in the offensive, was reduced almost to ineffectiveness by hostile action. On the other hand, the psychological impact on American opinion, via the television screen in particular, of the galvanic Communist effort was sufficient to crystallize a determination in influential circles to de-escalate. The futility of competitive escalation in a war that, realistically speaking, neither side could win in the conventional sense, was driven home to both the major adversaries. Hanoi decided to seek by diplomatic means, and while Ho still lived, the goal that had eluded its commanders. The door to an exit via negotiations, at least for the United States, began to open.