Kindle Notes & Highlights
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May 30 - June 23, 2025
By the middle of August, the diplomatic community in Saigon appears to have been in broad agreement that the man now in effective control of the government of Vietnam was Ngo Dinh Nhu.
The available evidence suggests strongly that Hanoi leaders in this period were broadly sympathetic to a negotiated settlement of the conflict.
at the end of 1962, Ho Chi Minh advocated peaceful reunification of North and South Vietnam through negotiation.
Pham Van 1 Dong said a Geneva conference on South Vietnam should be convened, with the aim of establishing a neutral South Vietnam led by a coalition government.
he understood that the United States could not be expected to lose face and must be allowed to “withdraw with honor satisfied”; as a result, reunification of the two zones of Vietnam would take place only gradually,
First, though they remained fundamentally confident about long-term trends in the war effort, they had concluded to their dismay that the large-scale increase in the American advisory presence during 1962 had made an important difference on the ground, improving to some extent the military position of the GVN.
Like his colleagues at the Foreign Office, and indeed virtually all international observers, Blackwell thought the Vietnamese basically anti-Chinese,
Hanoi was forced to ask China and the Soviet Union for food aid, which only left it even more at the mercy of their growing rivalry. According to procommunist Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, Ho Chi Minh told him all this was an added incentive for making a deal with Saigon.
There was no full-fledged campaign by DRV officials for a Geneva conference in 1962-1963, after all, no strong efforts through diplomatic channels to get talks going.
they also had reason to feel pretty good about the overall course of the war in the South.
Hanoi leaders could also take comfort in the fact that the fighting had not yet put much strain on North Vietnamese resources—the insurgency in the South was to a large extent self-sustaining.
Nevertheless, the original point stands: the period from early 1962 to mid 1963 witnessed a more forthcoming North Vietnamese position on the subject of diplomacy than had been seen previously.
Thus in August, Ho Chi Minh suggested publicly that a cease-fire be worked out in the South.
to ensure an American withdrawal, he told officials at the American embassy, Hanoi would pay almost any price.
De Gaulle was convinced that in an age of decolonization, nationalism would prevail even over a superpowerful United States,
Neutralization is a protean term, and de Gaulle did not specify precisely what he meant by it. Fundamentally, he used the term to describe a situation in which the Vietnamese themselves would settle their conflict without external interference.
De Gaulle saw little to fear in the prospect of a reunified Vietnam under communist control, which he conceded was the most likely ultimate outcome in the event of an American withdrawal.
For de Gaulle, ideologies were passing phenomena in the life of nations, which he saw as the only realities.
Laloulette told the brothers it would be in their interests to distance themselves from the United States by requesting that some American advisers leave South Vietnam. Following that action, Laloulette suggested, a negotiated settlement with the NLF and perhaps Hanoi could be reached. Diem and Nhu sounded receptive, Laloulette reported.
de Gaulle could point to the Laos crisis of 1961 as a situation that bore important similarities to the current one in Vietnam, and in which Kennedy had opted for negotiations rather than war, in part because of the advice he received from France and Britain.
It was not uncommon for foreign diplomats in both Saigon and Hanoi to remark on the powerful hold of the French language and culture on the country, and on how the passage of time appeared to have blunted the feelings of bitterness toward France
like the dog that did not bark, they would be important for what they did not do rather than for what they did.
British officials were in general agreement among themselves on several key propositions. One was that any American decision to step up U.S. involvement in South Vietnam would be unwise; if the war was to be won, the South Vietnamese themselves would have to win it.
Ever since the Korean War, in fact, British leaders had consistently seen Asian communism as less of a threat to world peace than did their American counterparts.
Macmillan scribbled at the bottom of one internal memo. “With so many other troubles in the world we had better keep out of the Vietnam one.”
also that it should avoid deeper diplomatic engagement to try to end the conflict. Great Britain should stay out, period.
but the likely end result, a reunified, Titoist Vietnam, would be acceptable.
Like de Gaulle, Harold Macmillan appears to have seen the Laos example as something that could be duplicated for Vietnam,
This unwillingness of London officials to challenge the Americans over Vietnam, even privately in diplomatic channels, would remain largely intact in the months and years to come, with highly important implications.
British leaders were little inclined to try to influence U.S. foreign policy. The Anglo-American “special relationship,” they knew, had become a client relationship.
Several times that year, Beijing made clear its desire for an international meeting.
Beginning in late 1962, they became less forthcoming on the subject of a conference and more belligerent in their rhetoric, and over a number of months they made several security commitments to the DRV.
No doubt the worsening relations with Moscow were mostly to blame for this alteration in China’s posture, encouraging Beijing to seize the chance to proclaim its leadership of Third World revolutions.
In 1963, the Kennedy administration opposed any move to bring about an early diplomatic settlement, as it had since it came into office and as its predecessor had done before that.
Note here that American officials were not merely skeptical of what negotiations might bring; they were downright fearful of the likely results.
Kennedy, it is now clear, sought to make important departures in the superpower relationship in order to lessen the tension with Moscow, to the point that by 1963 detente was the most important element in his foreign policy, and he proved increasingly reluctant to engage American fighting forces in war, whether in Cuba or in Southeast Asia.
he had greater faith in the possibilities for diplomacy in foreign affairs than, for example, his chief diplomatic representative, Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
At a meeting the day before Kennedy’s January inauguration, Eisenhower stressed the strategic importance of Laos, calling it the key to all of Southeast Asia and apparently warning Kennedy that if it fell, the United States would have to “write off the whole area.” He expressly ruled out neutralization.
When Kennedy responded that if the negotiations faltered at least the threat of American military intervention might be necessary, de Gaulle shook his head. “For you,” he said, “intervention in this region will be an entanglement without end.”
here it will suffice to say, first, that de Gaulle, Macmillan, and Khrushchev believed, both then and later, that it was about the best that could be achieved under the circumstances; and second, that Kennedy thought so as well.
The decision to opt for neutralization in Laos unsettled the South Vietnamese government, which was already suffering under the onslaught of the Vietcong.
Likewise, the Korean War experience taught Kennedy that public opinion in the United States would quickly sour on a similar commitment in that part of the world.
This was Kennedy’s dilemma: he did not want to expand the American military commitment, but he feared a continued military and political deterioration in South Vietnam.
If American forces were dispatched, Mansfield wrote, they would enter Vietnam without much allied support and would, by their mere presence, heighten the possibility of a major intervention by the communist powers. The result would be an open-ended commitment for the United States, one in which the United States would be at a serious logistical disadvantage and that would weaken American positions elsewhere around the globe.
Of the Taylor plan, Ball said prophetically, “If we go down that road, we might have, within five years, 300,000 men in the rice paddies of the jungles of Vietnam and never be able to find them.”
It bears emphasizing, however, that this was a smaller expansion than most of JFK's top advisers wanted—several told him that the war would be lost without a large infusion of U.S. troops. Kennedy said he instinctively opposed the use of American forces, and he pointedly cut the section in the memorandum that committed the administration to preventing South Vietnam’s fall.
At the same time, and complicating any effort to get a clear picture of his thinking in this period, Kennedy showed no interest in pursuing in Vietnam the kind of conference-table settlement that was then in the process of being agreed to with respect to Laos. He expressly ruled out such a solution, despite urgings in that direction from several quarters.
Harriman envisioned a formal agreement that both Hanoi and Saigon would accept and that would include elections for reunification at some point down the road.
Kennedy heard essentially the same message from his ambassador to India, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and from the number-two ranking official in the State Department, Undersecretary Chester Bowles.
So incisive and cogent in analyzing the current state of affairs and the outlook for the future (their ability to consider matters in the long term set them apart from most of their contemporaries), they tended to become tongue-tied on the subject of how exactly a “political solution” would be reached and with what terms.
