The Americans would be extremely ill-advised to try to open a "your atrociity versus mine" debate with the Vietnamese. That would be like the Germans harping about Soviet crimes. The entire American war in Vietnam was one unbelievably terrible atrocity, with many million victims in a population of only 40 million at the end of the war. Eight and a half million tons of bombs, massive defoliation by Agent Orange that produces hundreds of thousands of grotequely malformed paraplegics every year, assssinations of tens of thousands, deliberately driving masses of peasants off the land into urban slums, prisoners tortured barbarically and held in tiger cages, the savage deaths of millions...What more do you have to talk about? It beggars the imagination.
1
Wow, you keep hitting all the myths and propaganda of Hanoi and the fanatic antiwar people. The tens of thousands of assassinations from 1959-1975 were by the VC, and of course were preceded in the North by the infamous "land reform" that claimed tens of thousands and was so bad that even Ho had to acknowledge it. There are no thousands, much less hundreds of thousands, of "malformed paraplegics" born every year in Viet Nam, if there were the WHO would be all over it, the incidence of birth defects is lower in Viet Nam than in Cambodia next door. Perhaps you missed the 40-70K executions by communists after Saigon fell, the 1.3MM who went to "re-education" for up to 18 years, with a high death rate, and a society so oppressive that over 2MM left as Boat People knowing there was a 25% chance of dying in the attempt. A society still oppressive where bloggers who even mention the concept of having more than one political party get a 10 year prison sentence and corruption is endemic and huge environmental damage is permitted if the bribes are paid. The real history is there, but only if you look.
8
O. Dror under the guuise of objectivity or reconciliation is trying to redeem , to vindicate the south VN regime . She conveniently obfuscate the fact that the majority of Huê victims fell , thanks to the "saving agency of the US , by destroying the town " . US forces brought to bear on civilians indiscriminate , brutal Dresden style bombings .
The Geneva accords tacitly recognize to the Vietminh all sway over Vietnam . The US has no legitimate business , intervening in Vietnam , no more than Napoléon III in Mexico or any eventual foreign power in the US Civil War . Anti communism or Cold war rationales were just ploys to justify US imperialism , who had waited imppariently to pursue their march westward after the conquest of the Philipppines and Hawaii . If the US has not invaded Vietnam the Vietminh would have disposed of the non communists as Lincoln and Grant towards the secessionnists ; ther would not have been so many victims
Wow, here's a serious bit of procommunist commentary. First, there was no indiscriminate Dresden style bombing at all, US artillery and air power were severely limited for the first several days of the fighting, while NVA mortars and rockets were used heavily. Only later, with the permission of the ARVN general in charge, and the stubborn house to house resistance of dug-in NVA troops, was artillery used, some smaller caliber naval gunfire, and close air support. Any wider or larger kinds of support would have endangered the Marines themselves. The city did suffer great damage, as does every city where prolonged close combat takes place. The USA did not "invade" Viet Nam, US support was sought by the Saigon government and supplied to help resist communist aggression, exactly as had been done in Korea. Statements like those above are the official policy of Hanoi, where they still prefer to deny the extent of the massacre in Hue, regardless of the thousands of bodies dug up and the other thousands of those who disappeared and were never seen again.
6
Read Nick Turse's now famous "Kill Anything that Moves" if you want some idea of the terrifying extent of American crimes in Vietnam.
One key difference aside from the numbers: North Vietnamese survivors of the Hue campaign received medals. While not enough was done to punish those responsible for My Lai, several officers were court martialed & one was convicted.
3
My Lai was only one of countless American crimes in Vietnam. Read Nick Turse's famous and frightening book, "Kill Anything that Moves" to realise how many millions died savage deaths at American hands in Vietnam, out of a population of only 40 million at the end of the war.
As someone noted, the victors write the history. However, eventually— and no one knows when that may happen — the truth comes out and reconciliation takes place.
I guess I have my answer after reading the commentaries from the various writers. We all have a prism through which we visit this event; that's just the way it is. And often-times the actual facts get lost. For example, the dynamic between Ho and Le Duan is important in order to understand the shift in strategy during this period and on it goes. I think the entire Vietnam war was a horrible American diplomatic blunder and a matter of presidential ego. War is a horrible event; it leaves those who fought it scarred as well as those considered "collateral damage." It takes lives needlessly. Yet we continue to let old men tell us who we should hate; at least we aren't alone. We need to remember that we can't fix everyone's broken wagon nor should we try. In '79 I was entering Afghanistan from the east to visit the site of the UKs worst battles during its two defeats there. Unbeknownst to me the Soviets were entering from the north. The border guard suggested we turn around and go back which I did. In his mix of Urdu, arabic and something else, he explained it was "their turn to try."
I suppose it will be up to my great grandchildren to make whatever sense there is to this event and hundreds like it.
3
I applaud The NY Times for the breadth, depth and balance of this series and Dr Dror for her quest to bring objectivity to such an emotionally charged issue. I was a MACV senior province intelligence advisor for Lam Dong province over Tet and we had what was a more representative experience of being attach by Communist forces and of successfully defending the province. My province was unusual in that most of the population were either Catholic refugees or Montaignyards who were oppressed by southern and northern low land Vietnamese. Like Hue, all of Vietnam is a patchwork of different cultures, political orientation for which there is no single pattern.
5
“If you want a gun, join the Army!” “Tet” ‘68
Good luck.
Americans are only interested in Vietnsm as a reflection of their own narcissism.
This, as practically all problems in the Vietnam War comes back to the Americans. The only thing to learn about the Hue Massacre is; don't invade countries for no reason and then incite Civil War, mass murder it's population, cause irreparable damage to it's ecosystem, and don't install a puppet government that will turn on you. Sadly America clearly didn't learn from this, as this is the exact same thing they have done in every war since. America didn't need to start the war, they didn't do it for the people, they did it because they couldn't bear Russia wining in any way, if they just let communism succeed, half of the wars in the second half of the 20th century wouldn't have happened.
Based on this narrative, the minimization of the Hue massacres conducted by the North runs a pattern similar to the North's massacre of people in NVN in the 1950's takeover; many of these victims were Catholics, or rural people who wanted nothing to do with the Socialist takeover of their rural hamlets. The tally of victims at that time will probably never be known, but can be estimated to run in 5 figures. Although this systematic massacre was noted by the French, and even noted in detail in the Pentagon Papers, it is largely forgotten in the popular discourse.
7
"Putting the United States front and center as the only perpetrator of the war denies agency to the South Vietnamese who did not want to live under communists and who fought for this cause."
====================================================
This is a rather ridiculous attempt by the writer to justify the actions of the US government.
The US started the war by refusing to honor the withdrawal agreement reached by the Geneva Accords. Led by the intrigues of Cardinal Spellman, it installed its own puppet government, led by the neo-fascist Ngo Dinh Diem.
Later, when Diem proved an obstacle to US interests, it had him assassinated.
Every evil committed in Vietnam can be traced back to the United States. Without US intransigence, there would have been no Hue massacre. Nay, even bigger: a million Vietnamese would not have been killed.
The US is completely and solely responsible for the Vietnam War.
4
The war started well before the US became involved. Maybe google Dien Bien Phu, etc etc.?
1
Your simplistic comment testifies to the main point of Dror's essay: that even today politics prevents us from understanding the meaning of Hue 1968..
1
An admirable essay by Professor Dror.
America's intervention in the struggle between North and South Vietnam was consistent with our nation's foreign policy since the end of WWII,.known as "containment of communism," That's what caused the United States and more than 40 other nations joined with us as the Free World Military Assistance Forces to intervene. (South Korea sent a total of 312,000 combat troops, Spain, 30 medics, West Germany, the hospital ship Helgoland, etc.)
But I disagree with Dr. Dror's assertion that the My Lai massacre (March 16, 1968) helped distract the American press from the bloodshed at Hue. Not so.
The Army's chain of command -- all the way up to the commander of Lt. Calley's Americal Division (Maj. Gen. Samuel Koster) -- knew that discovery of the tragedy would be career enders for everyone involved. So it wasn't until Seymour Hersh was tipped to the story by a Pentagon source in the fall of 1969 that the Army began to act, 18 months after the massacre.
In fact, on Sept. 4, 1969, the Pentagon sent an innocuous press release that Lt. William Calley was charged with violations of Article 118, UCMJ ((Murder). Two days later at Fort Benning we took action to "flag" Calley's records so that he couldn't be released from active duty the next day as scheduled.
What ensued was the longest court-martial in U.S. military history, which convicted Calley in March 1971 of the premeditated murder of an unknown number of South Vietnamese civilians.
2
The "Vietnam '67" series, including this entry from Olga Dror, has been predominantly an exercise in non-Vietnamese writers pontificating on the war, and is, thus, a considerable lost opportunity. Where are the Vietnamese or Vietnamese-American perspectives? They are, evidently, not worth reading.
2
A Russian living in Texas who may not have been born when TET occurred. Just what we need. We brought the might of the most powerful nation to bear on a little third world country for nothing. The writer cannot understand this any more than I can understand Stalin.
3
The number of civilians killed in Hue is only a drop in the bucket compared to the number of civilians killed in North Vietnam in the late fifties after Ho Chi Minh and his murderous cohort took over. Estimates run from 50,000 to 500,000 killed. Their crime? They owned land and rented it out.
7
Thanks for a good piece on a difficult and often omitted subject.
When I heard that the Communists had taken Hue I knew that meant massacres. I have not forgotten. Sadly the Hue massacre was small potatoes compared to Operation Phoenix (1965-1972). And several LRRPs assassination teams each surpassed the highest estimates of deaths at Hue.
1
Excellent - report the complexities of the truth, and let the chips fall where they may. The war had many contradictions despite the neat packaging Hollywood and the Vietnamese government have given it. Sure, the U.S. adventure in Vietnam was misguided and brutal, and the domino theory utterly disproved, but there were some good reasons to stop a Communist takeover of the south (look at the Koreas). Yes, South Vietnam was a venal client state whose politicians and generals often had little interest in defending - but South Vietnam fought courageously after being abandoned (while the North, a client state of the Soviets and Chinese, continued to be supplied with weaponry that allowed it to overwhelm the South). Perhaps Ho Chi Minh was a freedom fighter with some admirable characteristics, but the North was actually being run by the cruel Le Duan. Americans - and Vietnamese - were at times brave, cruel, noble, self-serving, selfless, and cowardly.
6
What business had America to destroy Vietnam in the name of their anti-Communism? Eight and half milion tons of bombs - four times the tonnage dropped in the whole of World War Two, vast defoliation of the land with toxic chemincals that produce hundreds of thousans of grotesquely deformed babies, driving the peasants off the land into city slums to control them, several milion people killed out of only 40 million....The scale of the destruction beggars the imagination.
And quit repeating that tired old falsehood that Saigon was denied enough arms. The Communists captured 130,000 tons of ammunition from Saigon forces in their final 1975 offensive - enough to battle on for many months. This was part of a total captured arms mountain worth 6 million 1970s US dollars - about 30 billion dollars in today's prices. Nor were the Communists well supplied by their allies. Hanoi was on poor terms with China by 1974-75, and the USSR gave Hanoi only outdated tanks - the elderly T54, not the T&2 or even the T62. The Communist forces also lacked ammuniton and in fact made headway only when they captured a lot from the Saigon army. All this is well described by ferociously anti-Communist historians like Emmanuel Todd ("Cruel April" and George Veith "Black April").
I entered Hue on January 30, 1968, enroute, with my platoon, to the DMZ for the "big push" that never occurred. (Truth be told, we were sightseeing.) We fought our way out three days later only to be turned around and sent back. I therefore have a very narrow perspective on what happened. I applaud Mark Bowden for his recent history, not exhaustive by any stretch of the imagination, but well done, nonetheless. I hope for a lot more on this subject during my lifetime not for vindication but for perspective. (We won the Tet Counter-offensive in the field but certainly lost it in the US.) There is so much more we can learn not just for historical reasons or to "set the record straight" but because there is quite possibly something to learn to help us going forward. Every politician who sends man and women to war should first be required to fight in war himself. Thank you for an interesting and thoughtful perspective.
19
Stop repeating that tired old lie that America "won" Tet. It did not. All that happened was that America learned through Tet that the war would go on and on and on and on, killing millions. They couldn't win it. Their enemy was unimaginably tough. They wisely decided to quit.
"...the events in Hue have not received any serious study and have largely, if not completely, faded from American memory and scholarship."
But see "HUE 1968, A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam," by Mark Bowden (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017), a very serious study indeed, from the ground level with interviews with participants on both sides. He is also the author of 'Blackhawk Down.'
6
Thank you for this worthy piece. I'm disappointed that more people haven't commented. Our nation devoted so much capital--human, military and political--to Vietnam fifty years ago. I appreciate the wish to tell the truth. I believe that the whole truth about US involvement in Vietnam reveals our role to have been tragic and wrongheaded, and I hope that one day we might accept responsibility for the human cost of our ill-fated policies. At the same time, I'm sure that the other side in this conflict did not always act as saints and that, as the author points out, Vietnamese civilians must have been caught in the middle all too often. What a horror for them. Thanks for bringing attention to their stories.
3
The 1968 General Offensive--which lasted for nearly a year with two or three phrases--was characterized by Le Duan's intention to destroy the South Vietnamese society, in order to reach a diplomatic negotiation prior to the US Presidential election. Ironically, President Nguyen Van Thieu didn't send his delegation to Paris, as previously promised, which arguably helped Richard M Nixon to win with a close victory and to launch his "Vietnamization of the war." Former President Lyndon B Johnson--who had intensified the peace process from 1966 to 1967, including various secret efforts, such as letters to Nguyen Sinh Con via the North Vietnamese ambassador in Moscow, the temporary halts of bombing of the North, and the secret plan called " Buttercup," aiming at opening direct connections with People's Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam [PFLSVN] from Feb 1967 to February 1968-- later claimed that Thieu's betrayal contributed to Humphrey's defeat, and consequently prolonged the war.
As for the massacres the anti-Communists , it was Le Duan's decisions of using revolutionary cruelty at the 14th Plenum (July 1967-Jan 1968) and at the same time minimizing the Red Chinese pressures, created the second enslaved Front to eliminate the so-called "National Liberation," and to weaken its armed forces, as well as its administrative cadres.
The price: over 40,000 NVA deaths. Historians should get access to Le Duan's diaries to redo this mysterious kamikaze.
3
This account highlights one more reason why war crimes warrant zero tolerance, namely the way in which the My Lai massacre obscured an even worse war crime. Sadly, neither side truly pursued accountability for the decisions that disgraced their fellow soldiers and nations.
2
"an even worse war crime"??? Somehow 5000+ in Hue (the final official total of those murdered or taken away and never seen again) is bigger than 500 in My Lai. Plus the terrible and shameful action in My Lai was an aberration, not a policy, but the slaughter in Hue was preplanned and carried out with full deliberation, and included a huge number of total innocents, like German doctors and French priests. No atrocity is excusable, but comparing the policies of assassinations, atrocities (Dak Son, shelling refugee columns) by the communists to the criminal action of some US soldiers just doesn't measure up.
7
The author is no doubt aware that the victors write history. There is little study of the massacre of the American indigenous population, or the brutality of slavery and its aftermath. The pervasive class system under which we live, and the suppression of labor and labor rights receives little, or no attention in the national narrative.
19
There is little study of the brutality of slavery and its aftermath? Really? There are no Black Studies professors and courses in our colleges, there have been no movies or TV shows about slavery, you missed the whole "Roots" series, there's no BLM movement, there are no NFL players kneeling at games, there are no books both historical and fictional about slavery and its horrors? Suppression of labor? We have no powerful unions both in industry and government, they don't raise many millions to lobby for their causes and exert influence on both state and federal levels? You want to see suppression of labor, try Venezuela, Viet Nam, or of course North Korea.
1
I have no idea why a Russian in Texas would pick at the scabs of someone else’s history. The war of Vietnamese liberation was long and bloody, and only a civil conflict in the sense that French and American governments co-opted witting and unwitting Vietnamese citizens to prolong the imperial presence in South-East Asia. Americans killed more than 8 million Vietnamese in their twenty year interference in Vietnam. If there is anything to learn from this article, it is that conflict are settled more peacefully without foreign involvement.
10
Americans killed over 8 million Vietnamese? Wow, that would have depopulated the country at a level that could hardly go unnoticed. The official toll Hanoi uses is 1.4 million of their people lost in the war, the total in the South was about 250K of the ARVN, at least that many of civilians, including the 40K+ assassinations by the VC, the massacre in Hue, and others killed both as collateral damage or by deliberate shelling of refugee columns by the NVA. Then something between 50-70K were executed after Saigon fell, tens of thousands more died in re-education, and thousands more died fighting in Cambodia against Pol Pot and later against the Chinese invasion. You don't seem to have studied the facts of those times.
7
Dear Mr. Jardine,
Historical truth, memory and perspective are not the sole province of those who have engaged directly in it. She's a scholar and an exceptionallty able reseasrcher. I welcome her analysis.
6
"More peacefully" being a relative term.
1
Sadly, the left and liberal media were so invested in their belief that only American atrocities merited in depth reporting and that claims of a bloodbath being likely to follow a North Vietnamese victory were false that these stories were buried and forgotten.
American atrocities merited extensive coverage and the war inflicted horrible deaths to Vietnamese and Americans under a cover of lies by McNamara, Westmoreland and 3 presidents, but the NVA and VC often received a free pass.
7
The US "ally", the "government" of the "Republic of Vietnam" (note: NOT the "Republic of SOUTH Vietnam") was a fully dependent client state of the US created when the US refused to allow elections following the defeat of the French to determine the future government of Vietnam. This series of articles about Hue has consistently ignored the historical background of support for French colonial claims, of expulsion of residents of southern Vietnam to the North, the US support of the most 'westernized" (nominally Catholic and therefore somewhat out of touch with the majority of Vietnamese as well as rabidly "anti-communist" as in Korea) as their "allies" in this doomed effort.
The possibility that thousands of innocent civilians may (or may not have been slaughtered in Hue) pales - in fact appears (sadly) to be almost completely insignificant - in contrast to the literally MILLIONS of innocent civilians slaughtered in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as a result of the unprecedented American bombing campaigns ("heroic American pilots, not withstanding), the widespread use of landmines dropped from American airplanes, and the unprecedented use of Agent Orange throughout Vietnam.
In addition, while there may or may not have been a "slaughter of innocents" in Hue (an image that sounds calibrated to appeal to Catholics in southern Vietnam), there were dozens if not hundreds of My Lais throughout Vietnam perpetrated with increasing frequency as the war dragged on to its pathetic end.
15
Same comment on elections as above. And you cannot drop land mines from airplanes, BTW. That there was a huge slaughter in Hue is beyond dispute, that there were "many" My Lais is totally disputable. Especially by those of us who were there.
1
North Vietnamese propaganda. The massacre is not a "possibility", but a demonstrated historical fact.
2
This comment is emblematic of the American inability or desire not to see that many South Vietnamese supported the Diem government because they did not want Communism. To pretend that the whole thing was a US creation is a more simple fairy tale with a more obvious lesson - though one that robs thousands of South Vietnamese of the agency they deserve.
6
Would that we actually did have "debates about war"....these days, with a U.S. professional soldier class stationed around the world, it seems to hardly be mentioned at all.
7
If time could be turned back who would not have
wished that the French never went into Indochina,
let alone returned after World War II ?
The murders in Hue were planned and systematically carried out.
The failure of the Tet Offensive only demonstrated that most
South Vietnamese, and dare I say, a majority of the North Vietnamese
did not support the War, did not want the clique led by Le Duan - Ho
Chi Minh handed control of North Vietnam to Duan in 1960, to wage
a brutal war against their own countrymen.
It was never a war of Liberation but one seeking Domination.
12
A free and fair election in both the north and south of the country in 1954 would have prevented thousands of deaths in the next two decades. Guess who stiffed the election process?
5
A million deaths, actually.
The division of Vietnam into North and South was artificial. It was done to permit the French to have a place to withdraw to — the South — in order to be evacuated.
The US saw clearly that the majority of the Vietnamese favored reunification, because the division had separated families and friends.
So the US government had to prevent a referendum, even though that was in direct violation of the Geneva Accords.
Every subsequent death in Vietnam, on both sides, civilian and military, can be laid at the feet of the Eisenhower administration and those of his successors.
1
That would be Ho Chi Minh, who refused to hold secret ballot elections supervised by the UN, as described in the Final Declaration of the Geneva Accords. Why would anyone agree to be bound by elections held under communist control in the North, where the population was slightly higher than in the South? And there was a kind of vote.... nearly a million people voted with their feet to leave the North during partition, but only 50K left the South to move north.
5
Olga Dror hit the nail on the head with her opinion piece. More on that here: >>> http://vietnamveterannews.com/1134-2/
7
Ms Dror
Thanks very much. Your essay is a welcome presentation of objectivity on this subject.
I'm not surprised by the polarization that occurs. While I'm frequently reminded of it, subjectivity and political (ideological?) polarization, in encounters with fellow veterans of war in Vietnam I also starkly remember much of my time there. I vividly remember that not once in my months in combat did the politics of the war come up. I also have sharp memory of many, most really, American soldiers believing they were wasting their lives
Then. Then that was what was portrayed. You'd not necessarily know it in a conversation with some of them now. Yet while a good number of them have never read even "Street Without Joy," let alone Stanley Karnow's history of the conflict, they have strong opinion about who bears responsibility.
Perhaps it's the fate of the current evolutionary manifestation of our species, this compulsion to decide subjectively and exhibit an incapability and or unwillingness to change or to be receptive to information that conflicts with the position we've taken.
But I like to believe it doesn't have to be this way. Albeit slowly, our species is changing. The time will come when not just historians but also those in the general population, too, will discuss Hue and the war objectively.
That war, like others, was an unnecessary slaughter of the living and dead by all participants and should never have been repeated, yet on we've gone.
14
As a Vietnam veteran who observed first hand the devastation of Hue at Tet, I agree with your premise. Interestingly, when I revisited Hue two years ago, I encountered absolutely no animosity from Vietnamese. On the contrary, they showed a warmth, based probably on the realization that our granting them most favored nation status in 1999, jump-started the economy and that the majority of Vietnamese were born after our departure.
As to recognition of the Hue Massacre, you might want to check a mass grave scene in Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" which depicts the recapture of Hue.
25
Yep. It's very pleasant to have money, eh? So dropping eight and a half million tons of bombs on this small country, defoliating it with toxic chiemicals that produce countless paraplegics, committing countless atrocities on civilians, free fire zones, napalm, all are "forgotten". What a fine world you live in. If any of this happened to America you would have a different view.
Try reading Nick Turse's well-known "Kill Anything That Moves" to appreciate the terrrifing extent of U.S. criminality in Vietnam.
This is a thoughtful and well considered essay on the tragic events in Hue and the War itself. I appreciate the "western," objectivity and scholarship and I'm glad I found the article and read it. I lived through that period in the United States, I graduated college in 1968. It was so sad and of course, disruptive to American society and education. We're fortunate to have scholars like Oga Dror working in this field. Fifty years later it is time for Americans to stop trying to assign and accept blame and try more to understand the events of that time.
19
There were atrocities on all sides but the big picture was colonialism, first French, then American. The Vietnamese were not allowed to determine their own form of government. The US should not have been involved at all. That should be clear. The US intervened in over 65 countries in support of dictators against popular revolutions. This has been well documented. e.g. the books of David F. Schmitz
25
That is not true. The communists wished to have a united Vietnam, but only if it was communist. The people in South Vietnam did not want a communist government.
8
And exactly how was that our concern and worth 54,000 American lives. Think about that before you blurt something out.
1
Moira,
That is not true. There was no "north" and "south" until the country was divided to allow the French to withdraw to the south.
The Vietnamese were all involved, throughout the country, in the struggle against the French, which was led by the forces of Ho Chi Minh.
It was the US government that decided to create the south as a separate country and forbid the elections promised by the Geneva Accords-
It knew that the overwhelming majority of Vietnamese preferred to have just one country, regardless of its political and economic system.
6
A step in the right direction in depicting what the Vietnam war was about. And why there are many plausible reasons to support us involvement. Which is why that involvement was supported in Malaysia, Thailand, Korea, Singapore and Japan.
10
The defense of European colonialism and its 'friendly' allies (the "native elites") in the colonies, was a big if not THE reason the US intervened in these anti-colonial struggles. Defending the flow of raw materials from the colonies was considered critical to the dominance of the west in the world. The USSR and China were happy to side with the colonies (and legally "former" but actually economic colonies) in order to reduce the power of the European colonial powers and the rising power of the US.
6
US "involvement," as you call it, was based on forbidding the democratic referendum promised by the Geneva Accords, lying about a non-existent attack on the US in the Gulf of Tonkin, and serving the interests of the US ruling class, spearheaded by the far-right anti-communist Catholic hierarchy of Cardinal Spellman.
"Plausible" to the avaricious, conscienceless wealthy maybe. But not to the 50,000 poor grunts who died for nothing, or the million-plus Vietnamese they killed.
3
Of all the scores of myths about this history, the one where the Geneva Accords promised/guaranteed a democratic referendum, etc, is among the most common and most easily disproven. Nobody signed the Final Declaration of the Accords (look it all up on the Net) that called for secret ballot elections supervised by the UN. Which Ho would never agree to. so in effect it was he who stopped any chance of that ever happening. As to the attack on the Tonkin Gulf, the military museum in Hanoi has pictures of the men who were awarded medals for the first attack and used to have a torpedo tube from one of the boats displayed. The US ruling class pushed for the war? Yep, and we never landed on the moon, either.