A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind (19 page)

This story was recounted by a member of Hanoi’s negotiating team, and whether or not it is fully accurate, it highlights two important facts about the war. First, underdogs must concentrate their energies on a single aim—in this case, how to beat America. Overdogs, in contrast, with global commitments, have their energies dispersed. Second, underdogs must know their enemies better than their enemies know them. Without that knowledge, the underdog’s chances of success are slim.

It has almost become a cliché to opine that America simply did not understand its enemy throughout the Vietnam War. If only the United States had possessed a deeper grasp of the Vietnamese people—their history, language, and culture—so the argument goes, the war might have gone much differently.
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But such lamentations leave us wondering just how well the North Vietnamese leaders actually understood America. Does the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s (DRV) victory in 1975 stem from the fact that its leaders somehow knew their enemy better than the enemy knew them? How did they view
America’s strengths and weaknesses, and how did they use this knowledge to best effect?

Hanoi’s victory in the Second Indochina War has fostered a mystique of shrewdness on the part of its leadership—an image that has been preserved in part by the restricted access to key records about its decision-making. Scholars are still at an embryonic stage in determining how the North Vietnamese leadership functioned, thought, processed intelligence, and reached decisions. Because the most crucial archives—the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense, and the Central Executive Committee Office—all remain largely closed, historians are limited in what they can assert. But thanks to the release of voluminous party records (
Van Kien Dang
 
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) and numerous Vietnamese official histories of the war,
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along with burgeoning scholarship on internal Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP) dynamics, we are gaining new insights into what the Party leaders actually thought about their principal foe.

This chapter and the next concentrate on the person who became the driving force within the Party and a key shaper of communist Vietnam’s protracted war strategy. Much has been written on the person and policies of Ho Chi Minh, but Le Duan’s powerful influence on strategy has been underinvestigated.
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Though other Party leaders influenced wartime strategy, First Secretary Le Duan carried the greatest weight within the Politburo. He exerted the strongest influence over the southern communists, who were pivotal in fighting both U.S. and South Vietnam’s forces. It was in this role as head of southern communists that Le Duan initially devised his strategies for defeating the Americans—concepts he developed and executed as his power grew. We therefore need to spotlight several recurrent themes in his thinking: the nature of a protracted war, the role of casualties, and America’s global standing. Each of these subjects influenced how Hanoi intended to defeat the United States over the long term and offers insights into how Hanoi understood its enemy. In short, by excavating how Le Duan thought, we can better grasp how much strategic empathy the Party leader possessed for America.

When it came to recognizing the enemy’s constraints, Le Duan’s strategic empathy for America was strong. He saw that America was highly vulnerable in a protracted war, and he shaped Hanoi’s behavior in ways that would exploit those weaknesses. With respect to America’s key drivers, Le Duan never fully grasped the motivations of President
Johnson and his top advisors. In spite of this failing, he nonetheless recognized a break in the pattern of American behavior at a critical juncture in the conflict. He understood that the Tonkin Gulf episode represented a highly provocative act, one that presaged an American escalation.

Le Duan’s strategic empathy for America stemmed from a careful consideration of enemy behavior and the context within which the Americans had to function. Although he was known for his strong ideological convictions, ideology did not cloud his conduct of strategy. As a new wave of scholarship on Vietnam has been evolving since the 1990s, researchers have been breaking with old preconceptions about the Indochina wars. One of the more prominent assertions has involved the ideological nature of Hanoi’s thinking. Tuong Vu, for example, has elucidated the depth to which Marxist attitudes infused decision-making from the 1920s onward.
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Others, such as Martin Grossheim,
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have reinforced this notion. These authors have informed our understanding of the dogmatic (and often dangerous) world of domestic politics within the VWP.
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There is evidence to suggest that many Party leaders were committed, true believers in communism. That faith helped galvanize their determination. It convinced them of the wisdom of collectivization, the merits of a centrally planned economy, and that their ultimate victory was historically inevitable. Yet in formulating particular strategies, Party leaders naturally could not be guided entirely by dogma. When assessing the Americans, rhetorical pronouncements of neo-imperialist plots were frequently balanced by sober calculations of America’s key strengths and vulnerabilities. Ideology, therefore, could not always be paramount when it came to strategy. What Hanoi required for victory was not ideological fervor but strategic empathy, and it needed a leader who possessed it.

Le Duan’s Ascension

The noted Vietnam historian Christopher Goscha has called Le Duan and Le Duc Tho the two most powerful Party leaders during the Vietnam War.
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The historian Lien-Hang T. Nguyen placed both men at center stage in her recent study of DRV domestic politics and struggle for peace.
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This belated attention is necessary, for while Le Duc Tho
gained global prominence through his negotiations with Henry Kissinger and subsequent Nobel Peace Prize, Le Duan has long been thought of as a shadowy figure about whom little is known. Because it is now evident that his role atop the Party also enabled him to profoundly shape Hanoi’s wartime course, we need to take a much closer look at Le Duan’s sense of the American enemy. Scholars have yet to explore the roots and development of his strategic thinking, especially as it relates to the United States. In fact, Le Duan’s notions of how to defeat the Americans are inseparable from the story of his rise.

Born in 1908 in Quang Tri Province, part of the central region of Vietnam, Le Duan traversed the country as a young man while working for the railways. Attracted to communism at an early age, he became a founding member of the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930. In 1931, he was arrested by the French for revolutionary activity and was later released in 1936 as part of a general amnesty offered by the new Popular Front government in France. Undeterred and more committed to the cause than ever, Le Duan established a Communist Party branch in central Vietnam and was once again imprisoned from 1940 to 1945. During this incarceration, Le Duan used his time to indoctrinate other inmates in Marxist ideology. Upon his second release, Ho Chi Minh appointed him to the Central Committee. Together with Le Duc Tho, he served as the Party’s chief for South Vietnam. Le Duc Tho had initially been tasked in 1948 by the Central Committee to head the Party organization in the South, but for unknown reasons he decided to serve as Le Duan’s deputy. Their collaboration continued into the 1980s. Le Duan’s rise through Party ranks culminated in 1960, when he became the Party’s General Secretary, serving in that post longer than any other party chair, relinquishing it only upon his death in 1986.

Part of the reason that he shunned the spotlight of world politics (in contrast to his better-known colleagues) may have been related to aspects of his personal life, which he strove to keep secret. Le Duan had two wives and children with each woman, though he managed to keep the existence of the second family quiet. He had married his first wife, a northerner, in the 1930s, prior to his imprisonment by the French. In 1948, while organizing the Party in South Vietnam, he married Nguyen Thuy Nga, a southerner. This second marriage was arranged by none other than Le Duan’s close friend, deputy, and future Politburo
colleague, Le Duc Tho. Although Politburo members were forbidden to have more than one wife, Le Duan flouted that requirement. In order to keep the second wife secret, he sent her to China to study and work in the late 1950s and early 1960s and subsequently dispatched her to South Vietnam to perform Party tasks. Despite their long separations and unorthodox arrangement, his private letters to Nga reveal a softer side to the dogmatic Marxist-Leninist who would erect and orchestrate a brutal police state.

In 2006, a Hanoi-based newspaper ran a five-part series on the late First Secretary’s secret wife. Through these extended interviews with Nguyen Thuy Nga (now in her eighties), along with excerpts from her diaries and love letters she received from Le Duan, we see evidence of a devout revolutionary and passionate husband, as well as a man with something to hide.
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On December 25, 1960, he professed his love and pleaded with her to trust him: “Do not let a few outward actions or a few unfortunate things that happened give rise to any misunderstandings that you might have about me.” His letters reveal that his love for this woman was inextricably tied to the revolutionary cause:

The deep love I have for you, the deep love that we have for our children, the deep love that we have for our revolutionary cause will let us live together and die together and leave behind us an inheritance for future generations—the inheritance that is our children and the inheritance that is our cause in which we were bound together, as if we were one person!
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Around this same time, the late 1950s and early 1960s, Le Duan was also building relationships with cadres throughout the South. Part of Le Duan’s rise within the Party was linked to his development of a wartime strategy against the Americans. Even prior to the French defeat in 1954, it had become clear to Party leaders that the United States would supplant France as a neocolonial adversary. As the United States was already paying roughly 80 percent of French war costs and had been supplying the French with war materiel since the Truman administration, VWP leaders understood that they were indirectly at war with America. At the Party’s eighth plenum in 1955, this recognition took concrete form when the Party designated the United States as its principal adversary.
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Le Duan’s most impactful early strategic assessment of America came in August 1956. Having risen to the post of Cochin China Party Secretary, essentially serving as the Party’s chief representative in the South, he completed an analysis of America’s intentions in South Vietnam. Working with Party members in each province of the Mekong Delta, Eastern Cochin China, and in Saigon-Cho Lon, Le Duan drafted a document that would serve as the political basis for future action. Noting that President Eisenhower’s reelection campaign called for peace, Le Duan argued that even the war-mongering, imperialist nations have publics that desire peace.
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Internal Party statements such as these belie its official proclamations in its newspaper,
The People
(
Nhan Dan
). That same year, the paper published a series of articles defending the DRV’s democratic nature in the wake of the violent measures enacted during the land reform. Contained within these pieces, the Party denounced America as a false democracy whose news media were controlled by its capitalist elite.
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Le Duan’s comments reveal that Party leaders in fact believed that American politicians were beholden to the public, constrained at least in part by democratic processes. This recognition would serve Party leaders well in later years when they hoped that domestic opposition to the war would weaken American resolve.

Le Duan’s thesis, “Tenets of the Policies of the Vietnamese Revolution in South Vietnam” (sometimes translated as “The Path to Revolution in the South”), advocated a period of peace, but it held out the possibility of war if conditions demanded it: “However, the fact that we firmly hold the banner of peace does not mean that the question of conducting armed insurrection as well as a war against foreign aggression will not be raised if the situation has completely changed.”
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This was the pacific note struck by his thesis. It tempered the more bellicose tones within the document: “The mission of the South Vietnamese revolution is to topple the dictatorial, fascist, American imperialist puppet Ngo Dinh Diem government and to liberate the South Vietnamese people from the yoke of imperialism and feudalism.” And later, “Our people in South Vietnam have only one road to take, and that is to rise up against the Americans and Diem to save the nation and to save themselves. That is the path of the revolution. Other than that path, there is no other path that we can take.”
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We cannot read these documents and the contradictions they embody without considering the context within which they were written. The mid-1950s marked an exceedingly turbulent period in the Party’s history, for the North as well as the South. Almost immediately upon taking power, Hanoi experienced a mass exodus of Vietnamese from North to South Vietnam. We still do not know how many Vietnamese were executed during this period, though some estimates range in the tens of thousands.
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The Party’s disastrous land reform program resulted in the demotion of First Secretary Truong Chinh, paving the way for Le Duan’s elevation. In addition, Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful coexistence with the West greatly concerned the VWP leaders. At the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev had boldly declared that nations could only choose between peaceful coexistence or the most destructive war in history. There was no middle ground. Consequently, in its thinking about waging a war against the South, Hanoi had to consider the Soviet Union’s attitudes with care.
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Meanwhile, in South Vietnam, the Diem regime was rounding up and executing Communist Party members, severely weakening its potential. Many of its leaders were forced underground, some having relocated to the Plain of Reeds. Under such circumstances, Le Duan, who had been ordered by Ho to direct the revolution in the South, was compelled to speak of peace while preparing for war.