Fire in the Lake (38 page)

This tenacity distinguished the Vietnamese Party, for in so many other Communist countries the top leadership itself destroyed the Marxist-Leninist collectivity. In the Soviet Union, for instance, Stalin, after Lenin’s death, elevated himself to the position of supreme leader with powers of infallibility. Every program he undertook had therefore to be infallibly correct. Ho Chi Minh, by contrast, enforced Party discipline even upon himself, thus endowing his government with a great degree of flexibility.
¹²
After 1954, when the Democratic Republic was firmly established in Hanoi, Ho gave up responsibility for the administration of state to act as the symbol of national unity and, upon occasion, as the arbiter between the political factions. From this position he was able to resolve crises when they arose without damaging the unity of the Party. As Paul Mus once put it, he promoted himself out of the political sphere to become the revered “ancestor” of the revolution within his lifetime. The advantage of the semi-abdication was that while he remained as charismatic a figure to his own countrymen as Mao was to the Chinese, he was able to limit the “cult of personality” and provide for his own succession. When he died in 1969, he left his power and prestige to the same close associates that had been transacting the affairs of state for over a decade.

Given the personal view that the Vietnamese take of politics, the stance and personality of Ho Chi Minh had a significance for the political system as a whole that escapes Western political science “concepts.” For the Vietnamese, Ho Chi Minh was not only “the George Washington of his country,” as an American senator once put it. He was the personification of the revolution — the representative of the new community to itself. For that reason the study of Ho Chi Minh is perhaps more important to an understanding of the Vietnamese revolution than an analysis of all the ideological debates. For Ho was perfectly conscious of his role. He orchestrated his own public gestures just as carefully as the emperors had performed the rites in order to
show
the Vietnamese what had to be done. His reticence was in itself a demonstration.

Quite consciously, Ho Chi Minh forswore the grand patriarchal tradition of the Confucian emperors. Consciously he created an “image” of himself as “Uncle Ho” — the gentle, bachelor relative who has only disinterested affection for the children who are
not
his own sons. As a warrior and a politician he acted ruthlessly upon occasion, but in public and as head of state he took pains to promote that family feeling which Vietnamese have often had for their leaders, and which he felt was the proper relationship between the people and their government. “Our Party,” he said, “is great because it covers the whole country and is at the same time close to the heart of every compatriot.… It has won so much love in thirty years of struggle and success.”
¹³
Whether in giving sweets to children or in asking the peasants what they received of the hog that was killed for the cadre’s birthday, he evoked the world of the old village, where strict patriarchal rule was mitigated by the egalitarian pressure of the small community. The affairs of small nations, he seemed to suggest, are qualitatively different from those of large ones: Vietnam would need none of the great powers’ grandiose illusions — or their grandiose brutalities. The Vietnamese style should be that of simplicity combined with inner strength and resiliency. Ho Chi Minh, with his wispy figure, his shorts and sandals, had the sense of irony and understatement so common among Vietnamese. When asked by a European why he had never written a book of his own “Thoughts,” he answered with perfect ambiguity that Mao Tse-tung had written all there was to say, hadn’t he? In his last will and testament to the Vietnamese people Ho made no claims to singularity. He merely hoped that Vietnam would make a “worthy contribution” to world revolution; he hoped, too, that he would not be given a great funeral lest it “waste the time and money of the people.”

Just days before the Tet offensive of 1968, the NLF cadres from the battalions that were to assault Saigon took their men — or so it was reported — to a certain place in the forest to give them their last instructions and words of encouragement. There, where the underbrush had been cleared away for acres, they showed them the hundreds of coffins they had built for the soldiers who would be killed in battle. When they had seen the coffins, the soldiers, it seemed, felt happier and less afraid to die.

As Paul Mus once said, the Vietnamese know a great deal better than we do that society is largely made up of its dead. For the Vietnamese, life is but a moment of transition in the unbroken skein of other lives stretching from the past into the future. Death in the absolute sense comes only when there is a break in the society that carries life on through the generations. Such a break had come in the life of the Ngo family; it had by the 1960’s occurred to most Vietnamese families of the south. It was not just that so many had lost their sons and their ancestral lands in the war; it was that even before the war so few of the young people had practiced the rites of ancestor worship. They had not practiced the rites because they were, as the young said, “not practical.” But the NLF had offered them a new kind of family, a new form of social security. The sight of the coffins reassured the soldiers because it showed them not only that the Front cared about their future, but that it could fulfill its promises. The provision of the coffins was, after all, a logistical triumph and, as such, a sign that the Front had the power to reweave the society and restore its continuity through past, present, and future. The weaver of that unity was Ho Chi Minh.

Upon his return to Vietnam in the 1940’s, Ho Chi Minh set up his headquarters in a cave in the northern mountains above a swiftly rushing river. He renamed that mountain Marx and the river Lenin, making a symbolic connection between the ancient Vietnamese image that defined the country and the new history in which that country would live. His method was traditional — the rectification of names. Ho Chi Minh’s life made the same connection. As a child he lived in the countryside with his mandarin father, who had engaged in the last resistance of the traditional Confucians to the West. As a young man he had gone West — to Paris, to Moscow, and then back to Vietnam by way of China. As a mature man he had made the synthesis, turning Western theories and methods to use against the Western occupation of his country. Through Marxism-Leninism he provided the Vietnamese with a new way to perceive their society and the means to knit it up into the skein of history. He showed them the way back to many of the traditional values and a way forward to the optimism of the West — to the belief in change as progress and the power of the small people. Through Marxism-Leninism he indicated the road to economic development, to a greater social mobility and a greater interaction between the masses of the people and their government. He reformed the villages, linked them together, and created a nation. Whether or not the system could stand up to the full force of the American war, whether it would last a thousand years, whether it would in the end prove only destructive to Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia, it was, nonetheless, a way to national unity and independence, and, by the end of the American war, still the only way the Vietnamese knew.

II

The Americans and the Saigon Government

5

Mise en scène

    This war, like most wars, is filled with terrible irony. For what do the people of North Vietnam want? They want what their neighbors also desire: food for their hunger, health for their bodies and a chance to learn, progress for their country, and an end to the bondage of material misery. And they would find all these things far more readily in peaceful association with others than in the endless course of battle.

    These countries of Southeast Asia are homes for millions of impoverished people. Each day these people rise at dawn and struggle through until the night to wrest existence from the soil. They are often wracked by disease, plagued by hunger, and death comes at the early age of forty.

    Stability and peace do not come easily in such a land. Neither independence nor human dignity will ever be won by arms alone. It also requires the works of peace. The American people have helped generously in times past in these works. Now there must be a much more massive effort to improve the life of man in that conflict-torn corner of our world.

Lyndon Johnson,
Speech at Johns Hopkins University
(April 7, 1965)
¹

    In the forties and fifties we took our stand in Europe to protect the freedom of those threatened by aggression.… Now the center of attention has shifted to another part of the world where aggression is on the march and the enslavement of free men is its goal.…

    If we allow the Communists to win in Vietnam, it will become easier and more appetizing for them to take over other countries in other parts of the world. We will have to fight again some place else — at what cost no one knows. That is why it is vitally important to every American family that we stop the Communists in South Vietnam.

Lyndon Johnson at Honolulu
(February 6, 1966)
²

On February 6, 1966, the President of the United States met with the premier and chief of state of the Republic of South Vietnam for the first time in over a decade. The meeting, held in Honolulu, was one of those symbolic gestures that statesmen make from time to time in order to underscore a decision — gestures that in this age of television and wire photos become instant portraits, showing, or purporting to show, what is going on behind closed doors. In this case, however, the gesture marked no solution to a crisis, no real change in policy. The American troops had landed in Vietnam almost a year before. If it marked any event at all, it marked the change in Johnson’s temper. Over the past few days the President had had his patience severely tried by, among others, the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who were conducting an investigation into what had become a major war in Vietnam.

Johnson later confessed that he could never understand why Senator Fulbright had questioned his constitutional right to commit American troops to Vietnam when the Tonkin Gulf Resolution so clearly permitted him to “take all necessary steps including the use of force to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.” Senator Fulbright, however, contended that the President ought to have brought a declaration of war before the Senate. The legal argument was important, but the heart of the matter was that Fulbright, with the support of liberals in and out of the universities, had begun to challenge the entire Vietnam policy. In the first month of 1966 Johnson realized that he would have to fight for his war. And thus the Honolulu Conference.

The decision to call the conference was a typically Johnsonian gesture, combined of vanity, shrewdness, and overbearing energy. On February 4, the President, like a Tartar chieftain, suddenly instructed most of the cabinet, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, several generals, ranks of assorted diplomats and technical advisers, the heads of mission in Saigon, and the Vietnamese government officials, to convene in Honolulu in two days’ time. “We are here,” he announced upon arrival, “to talk especially of the works of peace. We will leave here determined not only to achieve victory over aggression but to win victory over hunger, disease, and despair. We are making a reality out of the hopes of the common people.”

It was the great justification. The United States was not going into Vietnam merely for crass power objectives, but for the salvation of the Vietnamese, who, like the majority of mankind, lived in poverty and ignorance. The fight against Communism demanded not only military power and determination, but all the prowess of an advanced industrial society and the generosity of a nation that led the world in its search for peace, prosperity, and freedom. One section of the final declaration read, “The United States is pledged to the principle of the self-determination of peoples and of government by the consent of the governed.… We have helped and we will help [the Vietnamese] to stabilize the economy, to increase the production of goods, to spread the light of education and stamp out disease.”

Surely the leader of no other nation would have made such a pledge in the midst of a war. No other leader would have expected his countrymen to take it as anything but a cynical gesture. But Johnson was not cynical, and he did not see himself as straining the limits of American credibility. His rhetoric was, after all, familiar, even traditional, to American diplomacy. Woodrow Wilson wanted to “make the world safe for democracy,” Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Stevenson, and Kennedy had in their turn pledged the nation to fight against oppression, hunger, ignorance, and disease around the world. Confidence in American power and virtue suffused the American view of the world. In proclaiming the Open Door policy for China, in conquering the Philippines and supporting Chiang Kai-shek during the Second World War, American statesmen had confidence that their own actions were in the best interests of the countries concerned. This faith, this shrewd innocence, they guarded with a ferocity.