The one who called the shots in Hanoi

The world, for all these years, thought it was Ho Chi Minh who led North Vietnam — the world was wrong

s any account of combat in the Vietnam War will tell you, America fought an “elusive enemy”: Guerrillas who would strike and then disappear; battalion commanders who refused to engage in open battles. But there’s more to the cliche than most people realise. Even by 1967, America’s military, intelligence and civilian leaders had no real idea who was actually calling the shots in Hanoi.

To some extent, this is what the North wanted — the impression that decisions were made collectively, albeit under the gentle guiding hand of the then president Ho Chi Minh. But the American confusion also, inadvertently, reflected the messy, factionalised reality of North Vietnamese politics, one that historians are only now coming to grasp. Thanks to the slow if capricious process of historical declassification, the publications of renegade memoirs and histories, the dissemination of “open letters” by disgruntled former leaders, and the careful and painstaking research and analysis by Vietnam specialists, we now have a better understanding of who was on top in Hanoi and what battles he waged to get there.

During the war, American intelligence experts cycled through a long list of suspects. At one point or another, intelligence reports and analyses at the time named all 11 members of the top Communist leadership, the Political Bureau or Politburo (Bo Chinh Tri), as the true leader of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party. The obvious choice was Ho Chi Minh, a grandfatherly figure whose global travels and illustrious anti-colonial career made him a world-renowned figure. Another popular candidate was Vo Nguyen Giap, the general credited with foiling superior French forces in spectacular fashion at Dien Bien Phu. Even the then prime minister, Pham Van Dong, who represented the Democratic Republic of Vietnam at the Geneva talks in 1954, was put forward as the real mastermind behind Hanoi’s war.

In fact, it was none of these. The real leader was Le Van Nhuan, who later took the name Le Duan, a nondescript party official from humble origins in central Vietnam. Largely out of sight from American intelligence, Le Duan ruled the party with an iron fist from the late 1950s until his death in 1986.

The post-independence days for Le Duan and for Vietnam were trying times. The French had no intention of letting their empire dissolve without a fight, and Le Duan found that asserting himself in the new government was a challenge. Hoping to be named the minister of defence, he lost out to Giap, who had a closer relationship with Ho Chi Minh. This slight in 1945 might be one source of Le Duan’s lifelong disdain for Giap and Ho Chi Minh.

Sensing an opportunity

Instead of staying in Hanoi as a Politburo member with a comfortable ministerial post, Le Duan headed party operations in what can only be called the “Wild South”. He headed to the Mekong Delta, where the party’s grasp on power was much weaker than in the North. In 1948, Le Duc Tho arrived on the scene to serve as his deputy. With Tho at his side, Le Duan erected a powerful police state in North Vietnam, bent on launching a full-scale war in South Vietnam. Their opening came in late 1963, after presidents Diem and John F. Kennedy were assassinated. Sensing an opportunity for a rapid victory against a leaderless south, Le Duan was able to corral the party leadership to go all out and win the war with a daring plan he called the General Offensive and the General Uprising (known in Vietnamese as “Tong tien cong va noi day”).

It was a gamble. In 1964, when Le Duan began developing his plans, Communist forces were not strong enough to destroy the government army and thus incite the people to rise up. By the fall of 1964, the general secretary drew up Plan X, the final phase of his bid for victory that included an ambitious offensive aimed at Saigon. The influx of American combat troops in 1965 put a crimp in Le Duan’s plan for a rapid execution of Plan X, but the general secretary persisted. Convinced that reverting to a defensive guerrilla war would weaken Communist morale, Le Duan ordered his men to maintain the initiative and launch big-unit battles. When this offensive strategy encountered major American sweeping operations in the southern countryside in 1966 and early 1967, Le Duan’s command of the war came under heavy criticism in Hanoi.

Le Duan and Tho’s control over North Vietnam and the war effort was suddenly at risk. While American bombs fell, Le Duan and Tho set off a fierce political battle for Hanoi in 1967 that would result in the largest purge in the history of the Vietnamese Communist Party — and set up what they intended to be the climactic campaign of the Vietnam War.

Lien-Hang Nguyen is a professor of History at Columbia and the author of the forthcoming Tet 1968: The Battles That Changed the Vietnam War and the Global Cold War.

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