Professor Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, with her new book Hanoi’s War, significantly deepens our understanding of North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front policies during the conflict. She also sets Hanoi’s decisions into the context of US and South Vietnamese policies to produce a most enlightening book on the war as a whole. From a refugee family herself, leaving Saigon in 1975 at the age of five months in her mother’s arms, Nguyen grew up with her eight siblings in the United States, aware that there were many different interpretations of the war. One particular strength that this wide background has given her is an appreciation of the political qualities of the government of the Republic of Vietnam (or South Vietnam). She does not write it off as a puppet of the United States, as many have, and indeed shows that it had its own position on the conduct of the war, which did not always accord with US preferences.

‘What on earth was that war about?’

Her main contribution, however, is to clarify our picture of what was happening in the senior councils of the Communist Party in Hanoi during the war. She provides this understanding largely through access to the surviving documents in Hanoi, and she has been assisted through having had her book accepted by the University of North Carolina’s excellent series on the Cold War, edited by distinguished scholar Odd Arne Westad. His several outstanding books have enabled him to put Nguyen’s volume into a broader context, which is very helpful in giving us insights into the motivations of the principal belligerents in the Vietnam War. It is easy to forget the context of the Cold War, and the concerns held by many Western decision-makers in the 1950s and 1960s that the ‘domino theory’ carried some weight. As Nguyen tells us, Chairman Mao Zedong did not neglect the opportunities that he saw for the expansion of communist control in South-East Asia with Chinese political and diplomatic support. He did, however, show that he had learned from the painful lessons of the Korean War, by avoiding the provision of the kind of direct military support to Hanoi that would have led to a further confrontation with the military might of the United States.

The most important set of insights that Nguyen provides lies in her account of the inner workings of the communist leadership in Vietnam. Contrary to the beliefs of many in the West who followed the events of the war closely in the 1960s and 1970s, it was not Ho Chi Minh and Giap who were in overall command, conceiving the main policy guidelines, but the former ‘Comrade Three’, secretary general of the National Liberation Front, Le Duan. Born in Quang Tri in 1907, Le Duan was a founder member of the Indo-Chinese Communist Party in 1931 who, despite two long prison sentences in the 1930s and 1940s, rose rapidly to become the secretary of the Regional Committee in the South (Cochin China), and then headed the Central Office of South Vietnam from 1951 to 1954. During this time he built a position of strength for the revolutionaries, out of relative weakness, earning himself much credit in the process.

Le Duan in 1978

Le Duan’s personal experience as a youth, and then as a convict in French colonial prisons, hardened his resolve and commitment to the path of revolution, and also gave him excellent credentials for a high-level career in the higher echelons of the Communist Party. He was fortunate in developing a close friendship and working relationship with Le Duc Tho, who was to become not only his deputy but also a very skilled tactician in the shaping of the higher levels of the party, enabling Le Duan to rise to the secretary-generalship of the Party in 1960. With the assistance of Tho, Le Duan was able to displace former Secretary-General Truong Chinh and to greatly decrease Giap’s influence. This change in personalities had a significant impact on policies because Le Duan was so strongly committed to national reunification and independence that he was willing to accept huge numbers of casualties and to keep the conflict going for many years if necessary. He had greater faith in the stamina, bravery, and level of commitment of his fellow Vietnamese than many other Vietnamese communist leaders. And Ho Chi Minh’s acceptance of Le Duan as a working partner gave him the essential opportunity to break through at the top level of the Communist Party.

Nguyen is particularly perceptive in the way in which she integrates the Vietnamese civil war into the wider framework of the Cold War. Assisted by Westad’s view of the Cold War as being related not merely to Europe and the balance of military power between the superpowers, but also to the social and political development of the Third World, it becomes easier for the reader to understand why this war was so bloody and went on for so long. For Western readers this is an extremely important and helpful perspective to have on the war. The fact that it was not shared by most senior shapers of Western policy during the Vietnam War helps to explain why they saw the war as essentially a military conflict between the United States and North Vietnam, a country that was believed to be serving Russian and Chinese interests.

If that were the real nature of the war, then the prospects for US success looked reasonably good. Instead, it was a social and political conflict between the two halves of Vietnam, each reinforced by friends and sponsors at the global level, and by public opinion in many Western countries. However, the civil war dimension of the conflict led the more nationalistic side, North Vietnam, to be willing to sustain enormous efforts and casualties, with the assistance of substantial support from China and the Soviet Union. The international Cold War dimension limited what the United States and its allies could do for South Vietnam. The lessons of over-reaching against North Korea and China in 1950–51 were still held clearly in the memories of US leaders. While they were able to undertake bombing offensives against the North in the 1960s, they were deterred from invading North Vietnam by the prospect of direct Chinese intervention. By 1971 President Nixon was thinking about moving to open a normal, friendly relationship with China. No longer was the undertaking of hostile acts against China or its friends by the United States an available policy option. The transition from Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 through to the final US withdrawal from South Vietnam in 1975 had its own logic and driving power.

The weight of the burden that the Vietnamese communists, under Ho and Le Duan, were willing to carry through the 1960s and the early 1970s was remarkable. It amounted to millions of Vietnamese lives, huge sacrifices in terms of national, societal, and individual development possibilities, and the imposition of a strict internal régime. This could be sustained only by a highly capable and committed leadership, primarily exemplified by Le Duan. It was he and others like him, such as Le Duc Tho, who enabled the Vietnamese communists to survive those testing years with relative unity and cohesion, while the appeal of the Vietnamese communist cause divided public and political opinion in the United States, Western Europe, Australia, and many other nations. Le Duan certainly benefited from the basis of nationalism and military strength created by Ho and Giap, but it was he himself who drove the major decisions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Finally Vietnamese stamina convinced the Nixon administration to find better ways of serving US interests in East and South-East Asia, other than by continued war in Vietnam. The Nixon visit to China opened the way.

Assuming that Nguyen’s scholarship stands the tests of time, all readers of Hanoi’s War will benefit from her major contribution to the historiography of the Vietnam War. As a former participant in that war, and as a scholar who has taught and written on the conflict over the past forty-five years, I know that since reading Nguyen’s book I have a much better understanding of the internal dynamics of the communist leadership and its conduct of the war. I am grateful for her rigorous research and analysis.