He was born Le Van Nhuan fifty years earlier in northern South Vietnam, a carpenter’s son who became a committed revolutionary long before Ho returned from exile. His force of personality was indisputable, but a coarseness of tone and language grated on more fastidious colleagues. Lacking social graces, he despised weakness, either ideological or human, which from an early stage he identified in Giap and probably also – though he would never have dared to say as much – in the ageing Ho Chi Minh. His personal life remained an enigma until long after his death. Only in the twenty-first century did his second wife, former Vietminh courier Nguyen Thuy Nga, reveal her tragic story.
At Tet 1956 – the Vietnamese New Year – while Le Duan was still in the South, Nga travelled outside Hanoi to visit his father, bearing gifts of honey, ginseng roots and a few yards of Ha Dong silk. She found at his house her husband’s first wife, who collapsed in sobs on being confronted with Nga’s existence. A few months later, Party officials descended on Nga: a senior cadre, they said, could have only one wife, and in Le Duan’s case it could not be her. As the mother of his two children she was stunned, and said she could agree nothing until her husband himself came to Hanoi – as he did soon afterwards. He offered no sympathy, merely impregnating her for a third time before handing her over to the Party’s Central Women’s Association, under whose auspices she was dispatched to China to ‘study’.
In her exile Le Duan began to write Nga letters, sometimes passionate, including one which said, ‘I love you, I love you so much. Don’t let a few outward actions or a few unfortunate happenings give rise to any misunderstanding. My darling, love triumphs over all obstacles. If you love me then you can solve all of your problems and difficulties.’ They saw each other occasionally when he visited Beijing on state business, and once she met Ho Chi Minh. Le Duan took custody of their three children, and Nga sobbed desperately when she learned that they were thereafter reared by his other wife. After some years she was granted permission briefly to visit Vietnam and see the children. She spent three days with Le Duan, who seemed ‘uncomfortable and unhappy’, as well he might be. In 1964 she was dispatched to the Mekong delta to work as a propaganda cadre, and did not again see her children until 1975. Here was a glimpse through a dark window of the man and the Party to which he devoted his life.
Radicalism in Hanoi was prompted by rising conviction that peaceful reunification would not come. This precipitated the Party’s November 1958 Resolution 14, advancing the Northern revolution another dramatic step with agricultural collectivisation. The following month, a large number of detainees in South Vietnam, including communists, died of food poisoning in a Diem detention camp. Early in the following year the politburo received emotional plaints and pleas from Southern villages, such as this one obviously drafted by local cadres: ‘Uncle Ho! The Americans and Diem have been wicked too much already – we ask your permission to cut off their heads.’ Weeks of debate followed, at the end of which the Party central committee promulgated Resolution 15, an important step towards escalation. It authorised more aggressive action, in the familiar language of Party exhortations: ‘Only the triumph of the revolution can assuage the plight of the poor and wretched people of the South, confound the evil policies of the American imperialists and their puppets who divide the nation and provoke war.’ Resolution 15 opened the way for ‘volunteers’ – as the Chinese had earlier dubbed their troops who fought in Korea – to set forth for the war zone. During the months that followed, some 4,600 political cadres, technicians and engineers headed into Diem’s territory, most of them Southern natives, former ‘regroupers’. Authorisation was given to open ‘Strategic Route 559’, a secret path to the battlefield that ran through neutral Laos and evolved into the Ho Chi Minh Trail; three-year military conscription had already been reintroduced. One of those who approved Resolution 15 said later, ‘Only [in 1959] did we finally acknowledge that there would be no general elections; that Diem was massacring our people. There were signs that the US would continue to strengthen its presence [and therefore that] the only path to the unification of our country must lie through violence.’
It was significant that Hanoi was slow to inform the Russians about Resolution 15, because Le Duan and his comrades knew how unwelcome it would be. Moreover, only on 7 May 1959 was word of the new mandate passed to COSVN, communist headquarters in the South. North Vietnam’s leaders remained morbidly fearful of provoking the Americans, perhaps even causing them to strike at their territory. The ideological divide between Russia and China was deepening apace, and this was reflected by rival factions in Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh and Giap leaned towards Moscow; Le Duan led those who inclined towards Beijing.
At the time of Mao Zedong’s catastrophic industrialisation programme the Great Leap Forward, which cost the lives of at least fifty-five million of his own people, Le Duan may have been responsible for Hanoi’s inopportune expression of national ambition: ‘The China of today is the Vietnam of tomorrow.’ Meanwhile he and his comrades still struggled to suppress domestic dissent: Catholics staged demonstrations at which they demanded a right to migrate south. Chants of ‘Down with communism’ prompted troops to open fire, inflicting casualties. Economic woes obliged Hanoi to slash defence spending, from 27 per cent of the national budget in 1955 to 19.2 per cent in 1958, 16 per cent in 1960. Factories languished, and falling agricultural production prompted a cut in the rice ration. The Czech ambassador reported home that much Soviet-bloc aid was being wasted. In June 1959 the British consul in Hanoi reported: ‘The standard of living is sinking into ever shabbier and drabber uniformity. Even the poor are poorer … No member of the Western community has ever met a Vietnamese who was in favour of the regime, except the members of the regime itself.’
In a mirror reflection of Diem’s advancement of loyalists at the expense of honest men, Hanoi promoted war veterans and ideological purists rather than its brightest and best. A French diplomatic observer reported that nine-tenths of the North’s population was ‘ready for an uprising if it had the means’. Yet Le Duc Tho, as head of Party organisation, chose this moment to demand fresh purges of ‘undesirables’, meaning former landlords and ‘rich’ peasants. In its preoccupation with ideological rectitude, the North Vietnamese politburo behaved more like Bolsheviks of forty years earlier than latter-twentieth-century socialists. A new Party statute, denouncing dissenters, was enforced by the Ministry of Public Security, whose chief Tran Quoc Hoan became known to his critics as ‘the Beria of Vietnam’, recalling Stalin’s most notorious enforcer.
Meanwhile in the South, during the months following promulgation of Resolution 15, revolutionaries continued to kill government officials and launched a new round of attacks on South Vietnam’s army, hereafter known by the acronym conferred by its US trainers: the ARVN. A young Vietnamese told an American interviewer: ‘I hated the soldiers … because they were very haughty. The villagers were already very poor, and yet the soldiers commanded them to build roads and bridges … The soldiers carried weapons to protect [Diem] and his regime.’ Symbols of American nation-building became favoured targets: for instance, in the spring of 1959 near the Cambodian border, black-clad attackers blew up two John Deere tractors.
Many young country people, trapped in a relentless cycle of agricultural toil under the petty tyranny of local officials, discovered a romance in revolution. An eighteen-year-old told how an old man who had fought against the French exhorted the teenager to take up arms in his turn. ‘I got excited when he told me about Vietnamese heroes. He told me that Diem had asked the Americans to … help in their plot to put South Vietnam under their rule. He urged me … to perform the duty of a young patriot in fighting for the independence of the country to bring back happiness and prosperity.’ During the weeks of military training that followed,