In July 1954, France was forced to leave Viet Nam after
one hundred years of colonial rule. Viet Nam General Vo
Nguyen Giap defeated the allied French troops at the remote
mountain outpost of Dien Bien Phu. After their defeat here,
the French knew they could no longer maintain their
Indochinese colonies and quickly sued for peace. As the two
sides met in Geneva, Switzerland, international events were
already shaping the future of Viet Nam.
The Geneva Peace Accords of 1954, written just after the
Korean War, represented the worst of all possible futures
for Viet Nam. Because of outside pressures by the Soviet
Union and the People's Republic of China, Viet Nam's
delegates to the Geneva Conference agreed to the temporary
division of their nation at the seventeenth parallel to
allow France a face-saving defeat.
According to the terms of the Geneva Accords, Viet Nam
would hold national elections in 1956 to reunite the
country. The division at the seventeenth parallel, a
temporary separation without cultural precedent, would
disappear with the elections. US Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles did not support the Geneva Accords, claiming
they granted too much power to the Communist Party.
Instead, Dulles and President Dwight D. Eisenhower supported
the creation of a counter-revolutionary alternative south of
the seventeenth parallel. The United States supported this
effort through a series of agreements that formed the
Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO).
Using SEATO for political cover, the Eisenhower
administration helped create a new nation in southern Viet
Nam. In 1955, with the help of US military, political, and
economic aid, the Government of the Republic of Viet Nam
(GVN or South Viet Nam) was born. The following year, Ngo
Dinh Diem, a staunchly anti-Communist figure from the South,
won an election that made him president of the GVN. Almost
immediately, Diem claimed that his government was under
attack from the north. Diem argued that the Democratic
Republic of Viet Nam (DRV or North Viet Nam) wanted to take
South Viet Nam by force. In late 1957, with American
military aid, Diem began to counterattack. Diem passed a
series of acts known as Law 10/59 that made it legal to hold
someone in jail if he was a suspected Communist without
bringing formal charges.
The outcry against Diem's actions was immediate.
Buddhist monks and nuns were joined by students, business
people, intellectuals, and peasants in opposition to the
corrupt rule of Ngo Dinh Diem. In response to these
attacks, Diem claimed the Communists were trying to take
South Viet Nam by force. This was, in Diem's words, "a
hostile act of aggression by North Viet Nam against peace-
loving and democratic South Viet Nam."
The Kennedy administration seemed split on how peaceful
or democratic the Diem regime was. Some believed Diem had
not instituted enough reforms to remain a viable leader in
the nation-building experiment. Others argued that Diem was
a better choice than others.
From 1956-1960, the Communist Party of Viet Nam sought to
reunite the country through political means alone. After
Diem's attacks on suspected Communists in the South,
southern Communists convinced the party to pursue more
violent tactics to facilitate Diem's downfall. In January
1959, the Communist Party approved the use of revolutionary
violence to overthrow Diem and liberate Viet Nam south of
the seventeenth parallel. The result was the creation of a
united front to help mobilize southerners in opposition to
the GVN.
The united front had long roots in Viet Nam. Used
earlier in the century to mobilize anti-French forces, the
united front brought together Communists and non-Communists
into an organization that had limited but important goals.
On December 20, 1960, the National Liberation Front (NLF),
was born. Anyone could join this front as long as they
opposed Diem and wished to unite Viet Nam.
The NLF and its relationship to Hanoi has caused
considerable debate. From the birth of the NLF, US
government officials claimed that Hanoi directed the NLF's
attacks against Saigon. In a separate series of government
papers, Washington denounced the NLF, claiming that its non-
Communist elements were Communist dupes. Washington
continued to discredit the NLF, however, calling it the
"Viet Cong," a derogatory and slang term meaning Vietnamese
Communist.
In 1961, President Kennedy sent a team to Viet Nam to
report on conditions in the South and to assess future
American aid requirements. In response to their findings,
the president sought a limited accord with Diem. The United
States would increase the level of its military involvement
in South Viet Nam through more machinery and advisers, but
would not intervene whole-scale with troops.
By the summer of 1963, the GVN was on the verge of
collapse. Diem's brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, had raided the
Buddhist pagodas of South Viet Nam, claiming they harbored
Communists. The result was massive protests on the streets
of Saigon that led Buddhist monks to self-immolation. The
pictures of the monks engulfed in flames made world
headlines and caused considerable consternation in
Washington. By late September, the Buddhist protest had
created such dislocation in the south that the Kennedy
administration supported a general's coup. In 1963, some of
Diem's own generals in the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam
(ARVN) approached the American Embassy in Saigon with plans
to overthrow Diem. On November 1, 1963, Diem and his
brother were captured and later assassinated. Three weeks
later, President Kennedy was murdered on the streets of
Dallas.
At the time of the assassinations, there were 16,000
military advisers in Viet Nam. The Kennedy administration
had managed the war without the introduction of American
combat troops. The political problems in Saigon convinced
the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, that more aggressive
action was needed. After a DRV raid on two US ships in the
Gulf of Tonkin, the Johnson administration argued for
expansive war powers for the president.
In August 1964, in response to American and GVN
espionage, the DRV launched an attack against the C. Turner
Joy and the U.S.S. Maddox. In response, the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution passed both the House and Senate with only two
dissenting votes (Senators Morse of Oregon and Gruening of
Alaska). The Resolution was followed by limited reprisal
air attacks against the DRV.
In the fall and winter of 1964, the Joint Chiefs of Staff
wanted to expand the air war over the DRV quickly to help
stabilize the new Saigon regime. The civilians in the
Pentagon wanted to apply gradual pressure to the Communist
Party with selective bombings. In early 1965, the NLF
attacked two U.S. army installations in South Viet Nam, and
as a result, Johnson ordered the bombing missions over the
DRV that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had long advocated.
The bombing missions, known as OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER,
caused the Communist Party to reassess its own war strategy.
From 1960 through 1964, the Party believed it could win a
military victory in the south "in a relatively short period
of time." With the new US military commitment, the Party
changed to a protracted war strategy. The Communist Party
believed that it would prevail in a protracted war because
the US had no clearly defined objectives, and would
eventually demand a negotiated settlement.
Eventually, there were not enough volunteers to continue
to fight a protracted war and the government instituted a
draft. As the deaths mounted and Americans continued to
leave for Southeast Asia, the Johnson administration felt
the full weight of American anti-war sentiments. Protests
erupted on college campuses and in major cities. By 1968,
every town seemed to have felt the war's impact.
In late January 1968, the DRV and the NLF launched
coordinated attacks against the major southern cities.
These attacks were designed to force the Johnson
administration to seek a resolution to the war. In late
March 1968, Lyndon Johnson hinted that he would consider
options to end the war.
Negotiations began in the spring of 1968 in Paris.
Despite the progress in Paris, the Democratic Party could
not rescue the presidency from Republican challenger Richard
Nixon who claimed he had a secret plan to end the war.
Nixon's plan was taken from a strategic move from Lyndon
Johnson's last year in office. The new president continued
a process called "Vietnamization", an awful term that
implied that Vietnamese were not fighting and dying in the
jungles of Southeast Asia. This strategy brought American
troops home while increasing the air war over the DRV and
relying more on the ARVN for ground attacks.
The expanded air war did not deter the Communist Party
and it continued to make hard demands in Paris. By the
early fall 1972, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and
DRV representatives Xuan Thuy and Le Duc Tho had written a
preliminary peace draft. Washington and Hanoi assumed that
their southern allies would accept any agreement drawn up in
Paris, but were mistaken. The new leaders in Saigon,
President Nguyen van Thieu and Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky,
rejected the peace draft, demanding that no concessions be
made.
In January 1973, the Nixon administration convinced the
Thieu-Ky regime in Saigon that they would not abandon the
GVN if they signed onto the peace accord. On January 23,
the final draft was initialed, ending open hostilities
between the United States and the DRV. The Paris Peace
Agreement did not end the conflict in Viet Nam as the Thieu-
Ky regime continued to battle Communist forces. From March
1973 until the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, ARVN forces
tried to save the South from political and military
collapse. The end finally came as DRV tanks rolled south
along National Highway One. On the morning of April 30,
Communist forces captured the presidential palace in Saigon,
ending the Second Indochina War and more than one hundred
years of bloodshed.
