Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (From Indochina to Vietnam: Revolution and War in a Global Perspective) by Pierre Asselin

Author:Pierre Asselin [Asselin, Pierre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520276123
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2013-08-02T06:00:00+00:00

THE COUP AGAINST DIEM

The climatic episode that would push Hanoi into a definitively militant strategy in the South came in the fall, when the political landscape there changed suddenly and radically. On 2 November 1963, Diem and his brother Nhu were killed in a coup by ARVN officers. General Duong Van Minh thereafter became head of the Saigon government. Publicly, DRVN leaders dismissed Diem’s overthrow as a mere change of personnel, further proof of the bankruptcy of Washington’s policies in the South. Privately, however, they were alarmed. Specifically, they feared that the new leadership might rally popular support for its policies, setting back the revolution in the South. “Signs of this fear are the constant warnings in the North Vietnamese press and on the South Vietnamese Liberation Radio to the people of South Vietnam not to be duped by the new Government’s talk of ‘democracy and freedom,’” western observers noted.116

DRVN leaders believed then and Vietnamese scholars believe now that Washington engineered the coup.117 In Hoc tap, Ha Van Lau of the Foreign Ministry immediately postulated that the Kennedy administration, bent on precipitating a wider war, had sanctioned the coup because Diem had failed to “satisfy” Washington’s requirements of “saving” the South and “crushing the Viet Cong rebellion.”118 By most Vietnamese accounts, the Kennedy administration engineered the overthrow to gain greater freedom of action in the South.119 Diem had behaved too independently, according to these sources, and Washington replaced him with a more pliable leader.120 Luu Doan Huynh, a late Vietnamese diplomat, noted that as early as 1962 Hanoi began noticing “increasing contradictions” between Diem’s regime and Washington and felt some trepidation, not knowing what this might presage.121 For many in Hanoi, the coup confirmed what they suspected all along: that the United States had from the beginning intended to assume the colonial mantle from the French in Indochina.

To many in the VWP, the coup was tantamount to revolution, marking as it did the transition from a bourgeois reactionary to a military counterrevolutionary regime in Saigon.122 Reprehensible as the former had been, it was preferable to the latter because it had included civilian and nationalist elements. Leaders of the new regime were nothing but lackeys handpicked by Washington for their eagerness to benefit from America’s neocolonial project. In the words of historian Le Cuong, the Kennedy administration had replaced a nepotistic regime with a “most submissive” one.123 The French historian Philippe Franchini has drawn a parallel conclusion. “The arrival to power of a junta suggested the reinforcement of [Saigon’s] ties to the United States,” Franchini has written, the “expected effect” of which for Hanoi was “an increased American engagement that threatened to imperil the southern liberation movement.”124

In the more direct language of a former Hanoi official, the coup “increased the danger of U.S. direct military intervention” in South Vietnam.125 The new leadership in Saigon existed, according to another source, for the express purpose of creating political conditions that would enable the Americans to step up the hostilities in the South to their fullest extent.

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