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French Colonialism and the Origins of the American War in Vietnam

In August 1850 “a French naval squadron … attacked the port city of Da Nang.… This started a war of colonial conquest that, aided by the politics of appeasement by the Vietnamese court, resulted in the takeover of the country in stages until its total annexation by the French in 1884.”¹ In keeping with their long history of struggle against invasions by the Chinese, Mongols, and Japanese, the Vietnamese resisted French colonialism.

Despite this history of resistance to foreign invaders, French colonialism “totally humbled the Vietnamese state and deeply humiliated the people,” writes historian and former Marine Corps intelligence officer David G. Marr. France’s economic policies put new pressures on the peasantry, who were “exposed as never before to the depredations of money lenders and collaborator landlords.” French exports forced more Vietnamese to deal with the “impersonal fluctuations of the imperialist world market.” Though the profound changes brought by French colonialism led to a great deal of “covert intellectual and political ferment,” this ferment was not organized into a systematic and powerful resistance force until 1941, when the Indochinese Communist party (ICP) under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh (meaning “He Who Enlightens”) met and founded the Vietnamese Independence League (Viet Minh). They would lead the Vietnamese to “victory in the August 1945 Revolution and effective leadership of the anticolonial struggle in Vietnam.”²

French colonial rule was brutal and violent, especially for peasants. It also antagonized the small but influential group of Western-educated (mostly in France) Vietnamese who played an important role in the nationalist movement that emerged after the First World War. But French suppression of anticolonial efforts drove these Vietnamese nationalists underground. After 1930, the Indochinese Communist Party led the underground movement, under the leadership of Ho, who would become the greatest figure in the Vietnamese independence struggle. A nationalist and Communist, he had spent thirty years away from his native Vietnam living in England, where he championed independence for Ireland; in France, where he became a founder of the French Communist Party; in the Soviet Union; and in China. Continually imprisoned for his revolutionary efforts, he helped to build a core of guerrilla fighters led by the former history teacher General Vo Nguyen Giap, who would lead the Vietnamese military until the end of the American war in 1975.

During his stay in France, Ho Chi Minh became the spokesman for Vietnamese independence. In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of the First World War, he led a group of Vietnamese who attempted to petition the Allied leaders attending, especially U.S. president Woodrow Wilson. According to historian Mark Lawrence, they wished to have Wilson “honor the principle of self-determination that … [he] had repeatedly avowed during the war.” Wilson and the other powerful officials ignored Ho Chi Minh’s relatively modest appeal, however, “just as they ignored similar demands from groups representing other colonized peoples.”³

Historian Bernard Fall, the eminent and highly influential French military scholar who was killed in Vietnam in 1967 on patrol with U.S. Marines, states that Ho was brushed off by many aides when he tried to see Wilson, and “finally gave up in despair. He realized that his hopes of “a ‘liberal’ solution for his country” were dead, and he saw “what the other unsuccessful petitioners were muttering among themselves—the Irish in the lead—armed revolution was the answer.”⁴

The Paris experience profoundly affected Ho, and he looked for alternatives to help the anti-colonial struggle. He joined the French Socialist Party, but “quickly grew discouraged by the party’s lack of interest in colonial problems” and was influenced by the Communists in the newly formed Soviet Union. He became a founder of the French Communist Party in 1920 and was invited to live and study in Moscow. Lawrence writes that Ho had a mixed experience in the Soviet Union, commencing “an ambivalent relationship with communist powers” that continued for the rest of his life. He also had to deal with the “pervasive scorn” Soviet leaders felt toward agricultural societies such as Vietnam.⁵

From the beginning, French colonialism rested on economic exploitation, but justified it with the argument that it helped the Vietnamese materially and morally. Like all other colonial rulers, the French believed that they were civilizing people even while they brutally exploited Vietnamese workers. More than one in four rubber workers died laboring on the harshest plantations and those who ran away faced execution. This colonial rule, therefore, profoundly changed life for the overwhelming majority of Vietnamese, while it enriched the small elite who worked as colonial administrators for the French. The peasants suffered greatly, and the disparity between the wealthy few and the many poor grew. Out of this oppression, however, arose a militant, Communist-led nationalist movement that would eventually defeat French colonialism.⁶

Brutal prison conditions were a key aspect of this harsh rule, according to historian Peter Zinoman. This brutality backfired for the French, however, as these prisons became places of resistance for a growing and militant Communist Party that organized thousands of jailed activists in political education and action. These inmates “contributed decisively” to the revolutionary movement throughout Vietnam, providing a base for later military struggle against the French after the formation of the Viet Minh. Released, escaped, and amnestied prisoners became the “hardened core of disciplined, experienced, and fiercely loyal cadres skilled in the arts of underground organization.”⁷

The 1930s brought a “dramatic expansion of anticolonial policies in Indochina. It was reflected in the rise of labor activism, the flowering of the radical press, the growth of the Communist Party, the formation of hundreds of popular Action Committees, and a campaign to establish an Indochinese Congress.” These efforts were led by thousands of former political prisoners, many of whom were released in 1939 as part of a widespread amnesty policy implemented by the new French Popular (Left) Front government.⁸

During the Second World War, the French administered the country for the Japanese, and the colonial prison “resumed its role as a focal point of anticolonial activism” as thousands of Communist Party members were imprisoned. As during the early 1930s, this led to a resumption of agitation as political prisoners renewed their organizational and political work. Once again, the Communists took the lead in the anticolonial resistance against the French.⁹

It was during the Second World War that Viet Minh cadre, who were “armed, carefully trained and indoctrinated,” made contact with local village leaders and, as David Marr writes, “began convincing them of the inevitable collapse of the Japanese, of Allied support for the independence of colonial peoples, and of the necessity for village participation in taking over the government and defending it against all enemies.” Serious economic problems played a major role in these dramatic and historic changes, especially during the winter of 1944–45 when the increasing demand for rice by the Japanese and the French, breaches in the Red River dike system, and disruption of communications between northern and southern Vietnam because of Allied bombing produced a terrible famine in northern Vietnam, killing an estimated one to two million people.¹⁰

Near the end of the Second World War, in March 1945, the Japanese disarmed French troops and interned French civilians there; combined with the economic crises and famine, this created a political vacuum that helped to produce the revolutionary movement that would lead to the end of French colonialism. This occurred in part because “enough Vietnamese knew that a proud history and a proud culture were worth fighting for,” but also because a revolution had arisen during the French absence that gave “millions of poorer peasants a vision of massive social and economic readjustment once the ‘barbarians’ were ejected.”¹¹

In the late 1940s, the French began to fear a Communist victory in China, and they shifted to anti-Communism as the key to their gaining U.S. support on Vietnam. They played this card because they knew that this shift to an anti-Communist rather than a colonial war helped make their case for U.S. assistance. The Eisenhower administration supported them, as it saw the Viet Minh as simply a tool of Soviet and Chinese expansion, even though the Soviet Union had ignored the Vietnamese struggle for independence in its critical early years, and the Viet Minh had gained power four years before the Chinese revolution could possibly provide any material assistance.¹²

Despite all the propaganda about Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh as tools of the Soviet Union, historian Fredrick Logevall points out that Ho could not obtain “meaningful assistance” from Soviet dictator Stalin, who was more concerned about Europe and thought that Ho was “too independent-minded to be trusted.” The French Communist Party, “anxious to appear patriotic and moderate before the metropolitan electorate, repeatedly refused [Ho’s] pleas for support, and indeed connived in the venture of reconquest.”¹³

Logevall discusses the visit that John F. Kennedy, then a Massachusetts congressman, made to Vietnam in 1951. About his trip, Kennedy noted: “We are more and more becoming colonialists in the minds of the people.” The United States should take a different path from the collapsing British and French empires and show that the enemy is not merely Communism but “poverty and want,” “sickness and disease,” and “injustice and inequality.” After returning home, he stated, “In Indochina we have allied ourselves to the desperate effort of the French regime to hang on to the remnants of an empire.… There is no broad general support [for] the native Vietnamese government among the people of that area.” It is “a puppet government” and every neutral observer believes that Ho and the Communists would win a “free election.”¹⁴ A decade later Kennedy administration officials and the corporate media harshly criticized those citizens who made similar criticisms of Kennedy’s support of the U.S.-backed Diem regime.

Some two decades after Kennedy’s first assessment of French colonialism, Ho, and U.S. options in Vietnam, Abbot Low Moffat, who had been there at the end of the Second World War, and later headed the State Department’s Division of Southeast Asian Affairs, offered the following assessment of Ho Chi Minh:

I have never met an American … who had ever met Ho Chi Minh who did not reach the same belief: that Ho Chi Minh was first and foremost a Vietnamese nationalist. He was also a Communist and believed that Communism offered the best hope for the Vietnamese people. But his loyalty was to his people. When I was in Indo-China it was striking how the top echelon of competent French officials held almost exclusively the same view.¹⁵

Despite Moffat’s glowing comment about Ho Chi Minh, there were different views among OSS personnel in Vietnam regarding him and the Viet Minh, ranging from admiration and sympathy to outright condemnation and hostility based on his Communist philosophy and activism.

Truoung Nhu Tang, a founder of the National Liberation Front who spent thirty years in the resistance movement against the French, Diem, and the United States, was a double agent. After the war ended in 1975, he became “profoundly disillusioned by the massive political repression and economic chaos the new government brought with it,” fleeing Vietnam and living in exile in Paris. A longtime admirer of Ho Chi Minh, Truoung felt that Ho’s motivations were similar to his own, and that the former’s Communism ultimately served the cause of Vietnamese nationalism. Ho had the welfare of the people at heart, and Truoung gave “[the] Northern government the benefit of the doubt on this score, knowing that the restoration of nationhood would be a long and difficult process..” Although Ho was deeply involved with the international Communist movement, he had forged the struggle of independence from nationalism and communism, shaped by a “unique political vision [that] always retained a sensitivity to options and potential allies.”¹⁶

Although the overwhelming majority of the Vietnamese and some members of the American OSS respected Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh, the Communist-led resistance struggle should not be romanticized. Bitter and repressive French colonial policies shaped internal struggles, including the elimination of rivals, secret and hierarchical decision making, and violent excesses in the land reform program. Ho recognized the land reform excesses, however, and moved to stop the violence and remove the responsible officials. The nature of French colonialism and later direct U.S. intervention forced the Communist leadership to engage in secretive and authoritarian practices. These internal contradictions must be balanced, however, by decades of courage and heroic leadership in the struggle for independence and self-determination, something that could never be imagined or possible under the French or Americans. The Communists offered far greater hope to the Vietnamese than the foreign intervention and repression that nearly destroyed the country.¹⁷

The Second World War

The Viet Minh led the resistance against the Japanese and the French. During the war, they worked with officers of the OSS who had been sent to Vietnam to help organize guerrilla efforts against the Japanese. The Viet Minh helped rescue American pilots who were shot down over Indochina, and in return received weapons and training. Essentially “a nationalist-front organization” led by the Indochinese Communist Party the Viet Minh attracted Vietnamese patriots “in a common struggle against the Japanese and the French [by] emphasizing … patriotic themes that would appeal to radicals and moderates alike.”¹⁸

In March 1945, the Japanese overthrew French administrative authorities in Vietnam and imprisoned them and French citizens, and formed a regime headed by the emperor Bai Dai, who had faithfully served the colonial regime. During the period between this takeover and the end of the Second World War in early September 1945, Viet Minh territory “expanded to include six provinces in northern Vietnam. In this ‘liberated zone,’ entirely new local governments were established, self-defense forces recruited, taxes abolished, rents reduced, and, in some places, land that had belonged to French landlords was seized and redistributed.”¹⁹

By early September 1945, Viet Minh forces had defeated the combined Japanese-French colonialists, and on September 2, before hundreds of thousands of people in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). It became the first former European colony to establish a popular democratic government after the war. At this independence celebration, the opening lines of Ho’s speech were taken from the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Americans were the only honored foreign guests, and Major Archimedes Patti of the OSS stood next to General Giap, the commander of the Viet Minh forces. Some Americans who were in Hanoi and Saigon during the war supported the Viet Minh struggle; they “warned of imminent cold war and recommended U.S. withdrawal from the area, [and] also argued against providing assistance to France for the purpose of returning to Vietnam.” The Truman administration ignored their recommendations.²⁰

At the end of the Second World War, at this moment of independence, David Marr writes, millions of Vietnamese “knew they were making history, not just witnessing it. Many sensed that their lives were changing irrevocably.…” This historic Vietnamese struggle was to be blocked by U.S. allies Britain and France. In late September 1945, the British rearmed some fourteen hundred French soldiers and civilians who “in the name of restoring law and order,” rampaged through Saigon, “cursing, beating up, detaining, and otherwise offending any native encountered.” Vietnamese then retaliated by killing more than a hundred and fifty French civilians; many were women and children. Later that fall, British, French, and Japanese troops attacked the Viet Minh near Saigon.²¹ Let this historical fact sink in: Japanese troops, who a few months earlier were killing and wounding British and U.S. troops, now joined British forces trying to destroy Vietnamese resistance against the returning French colonialists.

In early 1950, the Vietnamese resistance against the French was strengthened when the People’s Republic of China became the first nation to formally recognize the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. China sent American weapons and ammunition it had captured in Korea, and this allowed General Giap to arm new divisions in the fight against the French. Chinese aid later included anti-aircraft units that Giap used in the May 1954 victory over the French at the critical battle of Dien Bien Phu. During this period and into the early years of the American war, the Chinese “exerted considerable influence” over Vietnamese Communists until their own Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. ²² Relations worsened considerably after President Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, eventually leading to war in 1979 when the Chinese invaded Vietnam. President Jimmy Carter supported this invasion, urged on by his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

After the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, David Marr writes, “the most important question” was how much assistance the United States would provide France; this was done “above all by facilitating the arrival of French troops, equipment, and supplies … Most French soldiers were outfitted with U.S. weapons and uniforms, and they roared around in U.S. jeeps, trucks, and armored cars—a startling, depressing sight for Vietnamese who had hoped for American neutrality, if not outright support.” As the Cold War heated up in the late 1940s, the Truman administration increased its economic and military support to the French, becoming more generous after the Chinese Communist Revolution in late 1949, “when Indochina came to be seen as a vital segment of the global anticommunist front line.”²³

Historian Michael Gillen contends that the United States missed an opportunity when its officials did not listen to OSS agents on the ground in Vietnam, such as Lt. Col. Peter Dewey, who wrote from Saigon in September 1945: “Cochinchina [southern Vietnam] is burning, the French and the British are finished here, and we [the Americans] ought to clear out of Southeast Asia.” Dewey became the first U.S. casualty of the war in Vietnam when he was killed by Viet Minh soldiers at a military checkpoint.²⁴

Historians point out that President Franklin Roosevelt was not happy with French colonialism and wished to see it end after the Second World War. Historian Michael H. Hunt argues that Roosevelt’s verbal opposition to French control of Vietnam—something the United States did not oppose during his presidency—was a form of racism that “was common for his generation and that would prove a consistent strand in later U.S. policies.” FDR did not believe that “the peoples of Indochina and other ‘brown people in the East,’ such as the Koreans,” were able “to exercise freedom with wisdom.” ²⁵

Hunt writes that the August 1945 revolution was “a promising bid for full-fledged independence.” The Viet Minh “commanded the political high ground as the only effective political group … with an untarnished patriotic reputation … and a demonstrated capacity to mobilize rural support. From that position, it had sponsored a government with national pretensions and broad representation.”²⁶

Vietnam’s declared independence did not last long, however, as immediately after the Second World War U.S. material support for French colonialism grew dramatically. France desperately needed American troopships and other military equipment to transport its colonial troops to Vietnam. Harold Issacs, a war reporter for Newsweek, was in Saigon as these troops came off American ships: there were “thousands every week, first in French transports and then in a long succession of American ships, flying the American flag and manned by American crews.… They marched past cheering crowds of relieved French civilians and moved out … to restore French order.”²⁷

Sailors from the USS Stamford Victory were among the few Americans to see the sight of “fully armed Japanese soldiers, several weeks after [Victory over Japan] Day, being employed by the British in Vietnam.” The crews of this and other U.S. ships witnessed the Vietnamese reaction. One sailor reported that they “all spoke to us of their hatred of the French and their wonder at the Americans [for] bringing the French invaders back.” These members of the National Maritime Union (NMU) protested “the policy of the United States Government in chartering ships, flying the American flag,” to transport French troops “in order to subjugate the native population of Vietnam.”²⁸ In a stunning shift in history, U.S. vessels brought French troops to Vietnam so they could join recently released Japanese troops to support France’s attempt to crush the Vietnamese independence movement. The sailors’ action was the first organized antiwar protest against Washington’s policy, twenty years before campus protests began in 1965.

The French-Indochina War and U.S. Involvement

Vietnamese resistance against the returning French expanded, and by early 1946, “under their own government and without assistance from any foreign country, the people of Northern and Central Vietnam were free of famine and colonial taxation, and on the way to universal literacy.” But these accomplishments did not matter as the French began to retake Vietnam, calling its aggression fighting Communists. The United States presented its alliance with France as protecting the “free world” and defending against the spread of totalitarian Communism. This language was necessary to hide the real purposes of U.S. support. Historian Marilyn Young contends that the American public did not look “directly at the [French] army receiving this aid,” which included thousands of French Foreign Legionnaires who had fought for the Nazis.²⁹ How many Americans knew that these former Nazi troops were part of the French colonial forces attempting to reconquer Vietnam? How many today know this fact?

Gabriel Kolko and H. Bruce Franklin stress the powerful impact of these U.S. decisions to help France in Vietnam. Kolko argues that U.S. support for French colonialism after the war was “logical as a means of stopping the triumph of the Left … not only in that nation but throughout the Far East.” When de Gaulle visited President Truman in August 1945, he was told that the United States “favored the return of France to Indo-China. The decision would shape the course of world history for decades.” Franklin points out that the White House and the Pentagon “tried from the very beginning to keep their actions secret. When they decided to send Americans to fight in Vietnam, they conspired at first to wage war covertly, later to conceal how the war was being conducted, and finally to expunge the memory of the entire affair or bury it under mounds of false images.”³⁰

There was a temporary pause in the French-Viet Minh conflict in March 1946, when France signed an agreement with Ho’s government that “recognized the Republic of Vietnam as a Free State … within the … French Union.” This government, therefore, was the only legal one in Vietnam. But France quickly withdrew its recognition and set up a client regime in southern Vietnam. The betrayal led to armed conflict when the French navy shelled Haiphong harbor in November 1946, killing an estimated six thousand civilians; a month later, France occupied Hanoi, and the war soon spread throughout all of Vietnam. From the moment the Vietnamese declared their independence in September 1945, and certainly after a free and general election throughout Vietnam in January 1946 resulted in an overwhelming victory for Ho Chi Minh and his supporters, any U.S. involvement against this independent state, whether by supporting the French or setting up a separate regime in the South, was an act of aggression deserving of resistance.

The propaganda from Washington and the mainstream media portrayed the Vietnamese as tools of the Soviet Union, even though the latter did not recognize or aid the Ho government for five years after it declared independence. This is another inconvenient fact that contradicts the story of the Communist conspiracy directed from Moscow. The Vietnamese did not even have strong support from the French Communist Party. Although the French CP was to become the largest political party in France, it was afraid of losing votes if it “acquiesced in the liquidation of France’s overseas empire.” It remained in the French cabinet and aided the effort to regain control over Vietnam. This support continued until late 1949 “when the party finally adopted a policy of demonstrations and strikes aimed at obstructing the movement of troops and supplies to Vietnam.”³¹ The claim of an international and monolithic Communist solidarity on behalf of the Vietnamese struggle against the French, therefore, is wrong.

According to historians Michael Hunt and Steven Levine, at the close of the Second World War the United States was far and away the most powerful nation in the world, “approaching the [peak] of their domination in eastern Asia” at the same moment as the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence in 1945. But Washington did not listen to the vast majority of Vietnamese who had great expectations that it would support their anticolonial struggle against France. What happened in Vietnam, as earlier in the Philippines and South Korea, was that the United States “would take the place of one colonial power and set to work with collaborating in yet another exercise” to maintain the empire. When it came to policies that enhanced national self-determination, the rhetorical “support for independence movements was so blatantly violated by on-the-ground U.S. policies that it generated damaging charges of hypocrisy.”³²

Hypocrisy is a mild term, however, given the death and destruction caused by French colonialists and the refusal of the United States to support the Vietnamese resistance. Whether it was Woodrow Wilson’s championing of “democracy” at the same time that U.S. authorities at the Versailles Peace Conference refused to hear Ho’s plea for recognition of the Vietnamese, or opposition to nationalist movements after the Second World War, one should never listen to what American officials say about colonialism and nationalism. Rather, one should always see what they actually do.

According to Gabriel Kolko, it was the Chinese Revolution in late 1949 that caused the United States to reconsider the importance of the French-Vietnamese conflict, even though Washington had supported the French from the end of the Second World War. His view is that Vietnam was a “global” concern for Washington; and it was for this reason that after 1950 it “became the most sustained and important single issue.… Victory rather than a political settlement was necessary because of … other basic and more permanent factors in guiding U.S. policy.” U.S. officials were “convinced that the ‘domino’ theory would operate should Vietnam remain with the Vietnamese people,” that is, other countries in Southeast Asia would collapse if the Vietnamese independence struggle won.³³ The dominant perspective thus allowed powerful U.S. officials and their corporate media allies to accuse the Vietnamese revolutionary movement of being controlled and directed from Moscow, a false assertion.

A CIA report, however, revealed that the Viet Minh army represented the “vast majority” of Vietnamese, including “a majority of the generally anti-Communist Catholics” who supported Ho Chi Minh against the French. This report had no influence on U.S. policy, because early in the French-Vietnamese war, leaders in Washington became “wholly convinced” that the Soviet Union was behind the Vietnamese anticolonial struggle and other revolutionary nationalist movements around the world—and would subvert Washington’s “attainment of its political and economic objectives of a reformed, American-led capitalist world order.”³⁴

The long struggle for liberation from French colonialism ended at the battle of Dien Bien Phu on May 7, 1954, when the Vietnamese, led by the Viet Minh, crushed the French forces and gained a historic victory for the independence movement, the first major battlefield defeat of a European colonial power after the Second World War. Through a powerful nationalist appeal the Communist-led Viet Minh “had organized and inspired a poor, untrained, ill-equipped population to fight and ultimately win against a far better equipped and trained army.” On the fifth anniversary of the battle at Dien Bien Phu, General Giap, who led the revolutionary forces, wrote about its “great historic truth: a colonized and weak people, once it has risen up and is united in the struggle and determined to fight for its independence and peace, has the full power to defeat the strong aggressor army of an imperialist country.”³⁵

Almost a hundred thousand French soldiers—including colonial troops from Algeria, Morocco, Senegal, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—died in what the Vietnamese call the Anti-French Resistance War, as well as an estimated 300,000 Viet Minh soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of civilians perished.³⁶ This staggering human toll was a prelude to an even greater loss of life in the American war. The end of the colonial war also affected the French empire, as Algerians who fought in Vietnam returned to their own country to resist French colonialism there. Remarkably, large numbers of exploited French colonial subjects fought and died for their colonial master, once again revealing the power of rulers to get those they exploit to fight for the very system abusing them.

The Geneva Conference and Agreements

As the French-Vietnamese military struggle was ending, a conference met in Geneva, Switzerland, to settle the conflict. The Geneva Agreements established a cease-fire line in Vietnam, behind which both sides withdrew their military forces, the French to the south, the Viet Minh to the north. The French were to withdraw from Vietnam, and by 1956 an election would be held to reunify the country. All knowledgeable persons knew that Ho Chi Minh and the Communists would win, something the United States would not allow. It blocked the election it was sure to lose, a decision that shaped all else that followed in Vietnam after 1956. The National Security Council (NSC) understood the propaganda issue involved: “The overall U.S. position in the world would be harmed by U.S. identification with a policy which appears to be directed towards avoidance of elections,” and “world opinion, and for that matter, domestic U.S. opinion, would have difficulty understanding why the U.S. should oppose in Vietnam the democratic procedures which the U.S. had advocated in Korea, Austria and Germany.”³⁷ This internal NSC admission was not shared with the public.

British filmmaker and journalist Felix Greene reports that the deadlock over issues at Geneva was broken when Ho’s government made some far-reaching concessions. Although the Viet Minh controlled much of the country, they agreed to a temporary division of Vietnam that would give them only about half of it. They specified very particular conditions, however: the temporary separation was not to be permanent; elections were to be held by 1956 for reunification; and neither of the temporary zones could establish “international alliances or receive military help from the outside.” Every government at Geneva accepted these provisions, except the Americans and the French-installed regime in the South.³⁸ The United States refused to sign the final agreements, but it pledged that it would not “disturb or interfere with what had been settled there.” It also stated that it favored the principle of free elections under United Nations supervision and that countries in the region should determine their own future. In fact, the United States would kill nearly four million Vietnamese to keep them from truly exercising such self-determination.

As is now known, at the time of the Geneva Agreements, CIA agents under the direction of Colonel Edward Lansdale were engaged in sabotage in and around Hanoi. Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, who covered the war for two decades, reported that Ho Chi Minh “was aware of secret aggression against the North, immediately after the Geneva Accords went into effect.” He and the former Viet Minh were “aware of the American hand behind false rumors—such as those, spread by the Lansdale team, of Chinese troops raping North Vietnamese girls—and the propaganda campaign to scare Catholics into fleeing to the South to escape the A-bombs [that] would be used against the ‘pagans’ who remained in the North.” Burchett reminds us that Lansdale wrote with pride how one of his teams “had spent the last days of Hanoi in contaminating the oil supply of the bus company … and in writing detailed notes of potential targets for future paramilitary operations.” In other words, the United States used a covert operation to disturb the Geneva Agreements that it solemnly pledged it would not disturb.³⁹

The head of the French delegation in Geneva, Jean Chauvel, put U.S. actions and intentions around the proposed 1956 elections—that Ho Chi Minh and the Communists would have won hands down—in their proper perspective: “As far as they are concerned, the general elections must be prevented by any excuse whatsoever. The only purpose of the Geneva Agreements, as they see them, is to provide a cover for the political, economic, and military preparations for the conquest.” ⁴⁰

Historian Gareth Porter also challenges the dominant view in the United States at the time that tyrannical Communist powers, aiming to expand throughout the world, were behind the Vietnamese independence struggle. “The Communist powers did not even attempt to use the Geneva Accords as a framework” to work out a “creative diplomatic compromise” with the United States that might have “avoided the use of force in South Vietnam.” They knew that as the dominant power, the United States would resist any compromise. Over the next twenty years, Washington was to prove this contention true, as it refused to engage in serious negotiations regarding the war in Vietnam until forced to do so after the Tet Offensive in early 1968. It is now clear, Porter argues, that Secretary of State Dulles’s “hard line against any diplomatic compromise in Geneva … [was] aimed primarily at reinforcing Soviet and Chinese fears that the U.S. might continue the war if the Geneva settlement was not acceptable to Washington.”⁴¹

When it came to the critical years of the Geneva Agreements and aftermath, including the rise of the brutal Diem regime set up by the United States, the following summary by Noam Chomsky bears repeating and reflection: “The record is quote clear that the Viet Minh … accepted the Geneva Accords in good faith and made a serious effort to initiate discussions that would lead to the elections promised in 1956.” Diem’s regime, however, “took advantage” of this effort and engaged in “an extensive repression in which thousands were killed and tens of thousands imprisoned. By 1959 a good part of the former Viet Minh political structure had been wiped out.”⁴²