Embers of War (99 page)

The following day General Vo Nguyen Giap, after a victorious parade by his troops through the heart of the city, said under clear blue skies: “After eight years of resistance and eighty years of struggle for the liberation of the nation, our beloved capital is now completely free.”
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One man was conspicuously absent during the celebration: Ho Chi Minh, who would slip into Hanoi unannounced two days later in the back of a captured French three-quarter-ton truck, shake hands with members of the International Control Commission, then disappear behind closed doors with a few aides. He would not be seen in public until the arrival of Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru on October 17.
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In a newspaper editorial on October 18, Ho explained that he did not wish to waste his compatriots’ time with a public gala ceremony. “Our mutual love,” he said, “does not depend on appearance.” But the satisfaction Ho felt in these first days was immense. It was thirty-five years since he had made his appeal in vain to the great powers at the Versailles Peace Conference, and nine years since that glorious day in September 1945 when he declared Vietnamese independence before the cheering throngs in Ba Dinh Square. At the start of 1946 he and his lieutenants fled Hanoi for the Viet Bac, just as the fighting began. Now they were back, having prevailed over a great Western power on the field of battle. Never before had a colonial people achieved such a feat.

VICTORIOUS VIET MINH TROOPS PARADE THROUGH HANOI, OCTOBER 10, 1954. THE TOP BANNER READS: “VIETNAM: PEACE, UNITY, INDEPENDENCE, LONG LIVE DEMOCRACY”
(photo credit 25.1)

It was dizzying, on some level, hard to fully digest even now, five months after the smashing victory at Dien Bien Phu. The sight of the departing French signified the breaking of a bond, and for many educated revolutionaries, Ho Chi Minh among them, the moment was not without its bittersweet element. “I felt a sudden twinge of sadness, in the midst of the cheering and singing,” recalled Luu Doan Huynh, a veteran of both the French and American wars, half a century later. “We were never happy slaves under the
colons
, and yet when I went into the jungle in 1946 I carried with me a book of French poetry! I believed in the eternal truths:
liberté, égalité, et fraternité
. And now it was over. Separation had occurred.”
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II

FOR HO CHI MINH, THERE WERE OTHER, MORE IMPORTANT REASONS
to temper the celebrations that mid-October day. To begin with, the price of victory over France had been enormous, in both blood and treasure. From 1946 to 1954, the Viet Minh suffered some 200,000 soldiers killed, and an estimated 125,000 civilians also perished, the majority of them in Tonkin.
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Much of the DRV zone, moreover, lay in ruins. Roads and railways had been cut, bridges blown up, buildings destroyed. Rice production in the Red River Delta had declined precipitously. By the end, in Geneva, Ho had been almost as desperate for a cease-fire as his counterpart in Paris, Pierre Mendès France. Now he and his colleagues were faced with the task of rebuilding their war-torn economy, and of carrying out a revolutionary transformation of the DRV. In many areas, it meant starting essentially from scratch, for the departing French had dismantled post offices and hospitals and stripped factories of tools and machinery, even lightbulbs in some cases.

Most of all, for Ho Chi Minh, there was no getting around the fact that his victory, however unprecedented and stunning, was incomplete and perhaps temporary. The vision that had always driven him on, that of a “great union” of all Vietnamese, had flickered into view for a fleeting moment in 1945–46, then had been lost in the subsequent war. Now, despite vanquishing the French military, the dream remained unrealized, as the country was divided into two zones and as the ethnic and social and political contradictions within Vietnamese society threatened to become more sharply defined—already the two entities were becoming known around the world as North and South Vietnam. In Saigon, Ho knew, Bao Dai’s regime under Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem was working to expand and strengthen its authority. If Diem could have broad American backing in that effort, as seemed highly likely, then the temporary partition at the seventeenth parallel might not be so temporary at all. Even the Soviet Union and China, Ho feared, would be unlikely to work hard to end the split by insisting that the elections for reunification scheduled for 1956 take place; they had bigger fish to fry in global politics, he knew, and especially China might prefer to have a weak and—in every sense of the word—divided Vietnam over a strong and united one.

Ho Chi Minh accordingly determined that he would have to tread carefully, the better to win broad support from the outside world and thereby better the chances of the elections taking place. Even as he secretly left behind Viet Minh cadres in the south to agitate for the 1956 elections and to undermine Diem’s government, he determined he would project the image of that now-familiar figure: Ho the conciliator.
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The new government, he told a group of party officials on October 16, represented the will of the people and would subject itself to popular criticism. The same day he urged foreigners to remain in Hanoi and to continue their jobs, emphasizing that he envisioned a very slow transition to socialism. In choosing his residence, he rejected the Governor-General’s Palace near Hoan Khiem Lake, for the reason that it was too ostentatious, and selected instead a small gardener’s house on the palace grounds. During Nehru’s visit, Ho assured his guest that the Hanoi government would maintain correct and cordial relations with Laos and Cambodia and would seek diplomatic contact with countries on both sides of the East-West divide. On October 18, he offered the same assurances to his old acquaintance and negotiating partner Jean Sainteny, who had been sent by Pierre Mendès France as a special envoy to represent French interests in North Vietnam. Ho told Sainteny that he hoped France would retain a cultural and economic presence in the DRV and insisted he was not a pawn of hard-liners in his government.
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Sainteny responded in kind. Even before the meeting, he warned Paris that Viet Minh leaders would never give up the struggle for a reunited Vietnam under Hanoi’s control, and that any attempt to create a permanent division of the country would ultimately provoke renewed war and ruin all attempts to facilitate improved French-Vietnamese relations. Following his encounter with Ho, Sainteny dwelled on this theme while also stressing the Viet Minh leader’s forthcoming attitude. Ho Chi Minh, he stressed, sought to resume the dialogue where it had been interrupted at Fontainebleau in 1946 and evinced no bitterness about the life-and-death struggle that had just concluded. “Democratic Vietnam asserts that it is ready to talk, to negotiate, to keep a very acceptable position open for us, in other words to respect the Geneva agreements and to ‘play the game,’ ” Sainteny said. He stressed that the DRV would be no puppet of the Soviet Union or China: It would be a Communist state, certainly, but it wanted to follow an independent line. France’s policy should be aimed at supporting this independent policy.
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Mendès France accepted all of this, but he had to take into account other considerations. His success in putting an end to the fighting had not liberated him from Indochinese matters. In particular, his desire to create a basis for amicable relations with Hanoi came up against the promise he had made to Saigon, at the conclusion of the Geneva Conference, that France would have diplomatic relations only with South Vietnam—it was the price for getting the Diem government to stop subverting the negotiations. Thus even while French opinions of Diem’s performance and the VNA’s capacity grew steadily dimmer through the late summer and into the fall, Mendès France determined there could be no fundamental change in French policy. Senior aides agreed.
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The result: Sainteny was not accorded full ambassadorial status, and the French government steadfastly refused to receive a DRV counterpart to Sainteny’s delegation. His authority severely constrained, Sainteny focused much of his effort in the cultural realm. He achieved some successes. The prestigious Lycée Albert Sarraut and the University of Hanoi reopened their doors with French administrators and instructors, the latter even employing a French chancellor who also retained the deanship of the Hanoi Medical School. With Sainteny’s urging, Ho’s government also kept the French personnel of the renowned École français d’Extrême-Orient and of the Pasteur Institute of Hanoi, and it set aside the equivalent of $15,000 a month in convertible Bank of Indochina piasters to pay these employees.
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Mendès France might have been able to circumvent the commitment to the Saigon government—on the grounds that fulfilling the provisions of the accords ultimately meant maintaining productive relations with Hanoi—had it not been for the pressure put on him by the United States, and had it not been for the increased need he felt, in the autumn of 1954, to maintain strong Franco-American ties. This latter task became more difficult on August 30, when the French Assembly, by a vote of 319 to 264, killed once and for all French participation in the European Defense Community. The action was greeted with consternation in Washington and reduced further France’s eroding leverage with the Eisenhower administration.

HO CHI MINH MEETS WITH JEAN SAINTENY IN HANOI ON DECEMBER 16, 1954. ON HO’S RIGHT IS PHAM VAN DONG.
(photo credit 25.2)

Moreover, the EDC vote occurred just as Paris faced mounting nationalist pressures in North Africa—in Tunisia, Morocco, and especially Algeria. In the minds of Mendès France and top officials at the Quai d’Orsay, France would need American backing (or at least acquiescence) to maintain her ascendancy in the Maghreb. Add in that France remained dependent on U.S. aid to support her army in Vietnam, and that domestic public opinion was clamoring ever louder for an end to the Indochina commitment—“What are we still doing there?” was the common refrain—and the prime minister saw ample reason to fall into line with American policy. He instructed Sainteny to avoid close association with the Hanoi leadership, and he abandoned plans to boost French commercial contacts with the DRV and the People’s Republic of China. When Guy La Chambre, the minister for the Associated States, recommended new overtures to Ho Chi Minh, Mendès France’s reply was unambiguous: “In Southeast Asia it is the Americans who are the leaders of the coalition.”
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III

AND AMERICA’S INTENTIONS WERE ALREADY CLEAR. AS WE HAVE
seen, the Eisenhower administration refused to identify itself with the Geneva Accords, and it resolved, even before the agreement was reached, to take responsibility for “saving” southern Vietnam without “the taint of French colonialism” and making it a “bastion of the free world.” After the conference, the administration moved energetically to implement this vision, trying now to do alone what it had previously sought to do in association with France: Create and sustain an anti-Communist government in Vietnam. This government, freed from the encumbrance of the old colonial presence and possessing genuine nationalist legitimacy, could, U.S. officials believed, compete effectively with Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnam—provided it received proper guidance and support from the United States.

In a press conference on July 24, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles laid down the fundamental American objective. “The important thing from now on,” he declared, “is not to mourn the past but to seize the future opportunity to prevent the loss of northern Vietnam from leading to the extension of Communism throughout Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific.” A principal endeavor, Dulles continued, would be to secure a regional defense grouping similar to NATO, whose members could draw a clear boundary, across which no further Communist expansion would be tolerated: “Transgression of this line by the Communists would be treated as active aggression calling for reaction of the parties to the Southeast Asia Pact.”
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Embodied in the Manila Pact of September 8 (ratified by the U.S. Congress in February 1955), the loosely structured alliance, popularly known as the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), included the United States, Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand, together with the only three Asian countries Washington could convince to join: the Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan.