Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

But the North Vietnamese could not ignore the increasingly desperate appeals of their southern comrades. Slowly they moved toward a more aggressive policy.34 A central figure in the shift was Le Duan, a former political prisoner of the French who had been a top Viet Minh leader in the south before being named acting secretary-general of the party in Hanoi. The son of a carpenter in Quang Tri province, Le Duan was small in build and plainspoken in manner, and he lacked the educational pedigree and elite family credentials of many party leaders, some of whom mocked his coarse accent and his early job as a railway attendant. But he possessed a formidable intellect, and he did not want for self-confidence. Beginning in mid-1956, when he penned a short report titled “The Path to Revolution in the South,” he nudged his comrades to do more to support the revolution below the seventeenth parallel, even as they continued to give primary emphasis to building socialism in the north.