(Sanitized)

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80R01720R000200100002-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 31
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: April 15, 2004
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: April 16, 1969
• Content Type: LETTER

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TOPIC 17:
By
Mr. George A. Carver, Jr.
"This is an official document of The
National War College. Quotation from
Abstraction from, or Reproduction of all
or any part of this document is NOT
AUTHORIZED without specific permission
of the Commandant of The National War
College."
Presented at
The National War College
Washington, D. C.
2 April 1969
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:tJ1
CULTURE AND POLITICS IN VIETNAM
By
Mr. George A. Carver, Jr.
(2 April 1969)
DR. ASHBROOK: (Introduced the speaker).
MR. CARVER: Gentlemen, it is always a pleasure and a
privilege to come and talk to this distinguished gathering.
I have been asked by those who run your efficient course
to speak for a few minutes this morning on "Culture and Politics
in Vietnam." Let me make clear from the outset one or two things
that I am not going to do. I do not propose in the course of these
remarks to say anything about pacification, counterinsurgency per
se, the current state of military operations, or other factors of
the situation which are very much on the front pages of your daily
newspapers or for those of you who keep up with the traffic, the
top of your bulletins, and in-boxes back in your respective offices.
Instead, this morning I think it would be useful if for
a few moments we stepped away from the hustle and bustle of current
events and took a look at not the situation but what causes the
situation to be the type of struggle or type of environment that we
in fact find in Vietnam today. No one can have even the most cursory
experience with the struggle there going on without realizing how
complex it is and how many tangled skeins and threads are interwoven
throughout it. But I think it might be useful for a few moments
this morning to pause and reflect on some of the more basic factors
which will, I think, give us an indication of how truly complex the
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whole situation and struggle is and why certain aspects of it are
extremely difficult to come to grips with and why many of our own
approaches, even analytic approaches, often produce as much con-
fusion as clarity and why in Western eyes, in a Western context,
we can find it very difficult to comprehend.
Therefore, rather than talk in these remarks about the
situation per se, I would like to invite your attention for a short
while on the root factors which shape it, the factors which in effect
constitute what you might call the social and political matrix within
which the Vietnam struggle is not only being waged but within which
it has been waged for the past two decades.
Right at the outset we have to pause because one of the
chief problems in looking at Vietnam is the fact that the very
language that we tend to employ or want to employ when talking
about a situation like.that is the source of more confusion than
clarity.
When we talk about politics, either in our offices or in
the National War College or in our universities or in writing
columns for our newspapers, and things of that nature, we naturally,
unavoidably, fall into a language or a universal discourse which
we were shaped in in the course of our academic training. We talk
about nation-states; we talk about aggression; we talk about self-
determination; we talk about elections; we talk about political
parties; we employ, in short, a whole vocabulary that is in effect
rooted in our own Western political experience; and we use, without
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pausing to reflect very much on their meaning, a large number of
terms which in effect are really concept labels for concepts that
are historically rooted in our own Western tradition.
The problem when you try to apply this type discourse to
Vietnam is that very few of our Western concepts have any one-for-
one relationship to the situation as it pertains out there. Our
labels are not applicable; hence, the language that we are prone
to use tends to produce more distortion than enlightenment. We
cannot talk, for example, about the struggle in Vietnam as a struggle
between two nation-states. The whole sort of metaphor which is
unconscious in our whole discourse of a kind of dispute between two
nations, each of which recognizes the other's right to existence,
so they have some dispute over their frontier --a la the U. S. per-
haps and Canada -- simply does not apply.
If you want to understand the dynamics of the situation
in Vietnam and the root factors in the struggle you have to look
elsewhere and you have to pick very carefully among words to select
those which do the least to betray you and the most to help you.
There are several factors, I think, that we simply have to hoist
aborad if we are going to try to make sense out of this complicated
struggle.
Perhaps the most important to begin with is the simple
fact, easily escaped, that Vietnam is not and never has been a
politicized society in our sense or understanding of the term. Nor
has Vietnam any political tradition as we in the West understand
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it and know it.
Now, let us be a little bit careful here to be sure we
know what we are saying and are not saying more than we mean.
The Vietnamese, as any of you who have spent any time out
there are only too well aware, have an acutely, keenly, highly
developed sense of pride in themselves as Vietnamese and pride in
their own ethnic tradition. They have an acute sense of what you
might call Upeoplehood" but they have almost no sense of what we
would call "nationhood" which is a sense of participation in and
identification with a shared common body of political experience.
There is, in short, no political institutional cement in Vietnamese
society or, for that matter, there is no tradition of single rule
or political rule over the entire territory that is now known as
Vietnam. This is a fact that is extremely important to grasp, be-
cause it colors a great deal of Vietnamese political attitudes and
permeates much of Vietnamese political life.
The lack of institutional cement and tradition is also
extremely important, although easily overlooked.
Now just stop for a moment and think about what kinds of
experiences you have in the United States and realize that they are
almost utterly lacking when we talk about the Vietnamese and their
own experiences. We grow up unconsciously participating, even from
our earliest kindergarten days, in a kind of political process which
imbues in us from early childhood the notion of, say, the sanctity
of majority rule. I mean, if a kindergarten class in the United
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States is debating whether they go to the Zoo or the Fire House, a
notuncommon practice is to take a vote and if twelve of them decide
they want to go to the Zoo and eleven decide they want to go to the
Fire House everybody accepts that they go to the Zoo. This is the
kind of political familiarization that begins almost in the cradle
in American life and is utterly foreign and lacking in Vietnam.
We unconsciously accept, although we sometimes debate in
our public print, nonetheless few really question the validity of,
say, our court system or our court structure, which provides here
in the United States what we might call a hierarchy of umpires for
settling disputes. As disputes between people, between people and
political institutions, between individuals and states, or indi-
viduals and corporations go through the court system, if one party
or the other does not like what the court of first instance decides
it goes to an appellate procedure, eventually it winds up at the
Supreme Court. One may not be happy, if one is a participant particu-
larly, with the Supreme Court's decision, but it does not really
occur to very many of us to question the Supreme Court's right to
decide. Nor does it really occur to very many of us to doubt the
fact that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter and, once it has
made its ruling, then within the structure of our legal system there
is nowhere else to turn, and we just have to accept that ruling as
a fait accompli.
Again, this very approach to politics or political life or
even commercial life or private life conducted within a framework of
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laws and traditions and institutions presupposes an attitude and a
view towards politics which is completely lacking in Vietnam. Simi-
larly, we have a parliamentary or a representative tradition here
in the United States which provides a forum through which political
balances can be struck and political disagreements can be worked
out.
It is accepted as perfectly normal that you have a majority
party and a minority party in Congress, that on particular issues and
particular bills deals are made; relative political strengths can be
tested; the political importance of various constituencies can be
voiced to their elected representatives. We have a very intricate
system, for, as I say, striking balances, working out deals, testing
strengths, seeing who really has the muscle and who does not, and
working this all out within a relatively peacefully, sometimes
noisily, through an institutional framework rather than through the
use of tanks or mobs in the streets. This kind of institutional
framework, this kind of institutional experience, this kind of insti-
tutional tradition is completely lacking in Vietnam; and Vietnamese
political disputes, hence, are carried on by means and through ways
quite different from ours.
I do not want to belabor these points, but I do think that
we have to appreciate at the outset, as we turn to look at the Viet-
namese, how they function politically and why they function politically
the way they do, to realize that they have almost none of the things
that we take so much for granted here in the United States or, for
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that matter, within the Western tradition generally, that we do not
even pause to reflect on their absence; and we are very easily mis-
led at times by bodies which use in foreign countries, particularly
in Southeast Asia, the names of institutions we have here in the
United States, even though the institutions in those other countries
play roles or functions or have an importance radically different
from that which we know and enjoy in the experience closest to home
for us.
Now, I do not want to take the time here to go into a
long disposition on Vietnamese history, but there are one or two
factors of Vietnamese history that I think are salient if we want
to appreciate how the culture works and how it influences political
life in Vietnam.
The first think you have to remember is that, although
the Vietnamese, as I said, do have an intense pride in their own
ethnic homogeneity -- they are very proud of being Vietnamese; they
consider themselves a cut above all foreigners; they have a great
sense of identification in their own cultural tradition. Nonethe-
less, their culture (and do not ever say this to a Vietnamese
directly, but it happens to be true) is largely derivative, heavily
patterned on Chinese influence.
The Vietnamese, after all, were under ten centuries of
direct Chinese rule and almost ten more centuries of more or less
effective Chinese influence and suzerainty. This produced in Vietnam
a very Sinicized culture which has certain particular aspects or
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ramifications which heavily influence the Vietnamese approach to poli-
tics in Vietnamese political life.
Secondly, you have to remember that the life motif of Viet-
namese history is the gradual southward expansion of the ethnic
Viets who sprang up as a separate identifiable cultural and racial
group in the Red River Delta in about the third century B. C. and
who gradually moved southward over the course of the ensuing 18th
century to occupy that territory which we now know under the label
of Vietnam. But recognizing that this is the main stream of life
motif, if you will, of Vietnamese history, you also have to appreciate
that Vietnamization of the present land of Vietnam, particularly in
the southern portions thereof, is actually a relatively recent his-
torical event. The Vietnamese did not begin to get down, for example,
into the Mekong Delta until the 17th century, and serious Vietnamese
colonization and take-over of the Mekong Delta is a development of
the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Most important of all, in determining the Vietnamese atti-
tudes toward politics, is that you have to realize that in all the
almost 2,000 years of Vietnamese at least oral tradition for only
sixty of these years, the period from 1802 and 1862, has the terri-
tory that is now denoted as Vietnam, North and South on our maps,
been under a single political rule. That was the very brief period
when the Emperor Gia Long (former Nguyen) acceded to power in 1802
by crushing the remnants of the Tay Son revolt until 1862 when he
had to cede what was Cochin-China, or the southern part of South
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Vietnam, the three easternmost provinces, to France.
Thus you do not have, despite a strong unified ethnic
tradition, a political tradition and. you have no tradition of a
nation-state whose authority or writ runs over the entire borders
of what we now know as Vietnam.
Furthermore, because the Vietnamese evolved historically
in the way that I have just described in very summary fashion, they
developed, instead of loyalty to some central political authority
or some central political tradition, a very strong pattern of
regional orientation. This again was a result of a number of
factors, not the least of them being excessively barberous communi-
cations during the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. And what
you got was not a single united people so much as a people with a
broad sort of vague, fuzzy, diffuse sense of ethnic brotherhood
who developed basically into three regionally oriented subcultures
in the Red River Delta in the North and the coastal strip along
the coast between the Red River Delta and the Mekong Delta, and in
the Mekong Delta in the South -- these three cultural areas being
known in the French days and still referred to sometimes as Tongking
in the north, Annam in the center, and Cochin-China in'the south.
Furthermore, on top of this whole period of Chinese influ-
ence, this Chinese patterned, regionally oriented cultural develop-
ment, there came during the latter part of the 19th and the early
20th centuries a strong French cultural overlay as a result of the
French colonial tradition and experience, which again produced some
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rather drastic effects and very marked effects on contemporary and
current Vietnamese life.
Now, how does all this put together and how does all this
relate even remotely to the sort of prollems that we have to deal
with, if not here in the National War College, at least the minute
we go back to our offices in our various Services and agencies from
whence we came?
Well, the way it influences and the way it works out is
as follows:
The Vietnamese, in the absence of the kind of political
tradition that we have, have developed other sorts of institutions
which have ramifications or importance that we would consider as
political. The chief of these and the most important and perhaps
the linchpin of Vietnamese society is the family or the extended
family -- not the family quite in the sense of simply father, mother,
and children, but the family in the sense of father, mother, and
children under the second and third generations. The cult of the
family has very deep roots that go right back to the beginning of
Vietnamese civilization. There is a great deal of historical specu-
lation about it. The most persuasive hypothesis I have ever seen,
although this is not the sort of thing that is susceptible to proof
beyond a reasonable doubt, is that in Vietnam, as in other agricul-
tural societies throughout Southeast Asia and elsewhere in the world,
the family cult arose in response to the needs of a rice-growing
culture.
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If you stop and think about the cultivation of rice for a
moment you will realize that it has a couple of unique peculiarities
in that at seed time and harvest you need intensive labor on the part
of a great many people, whereas during the rest of the year, when
the crops are growing, there is not very much for people to do; they
require only casual attention. There are some scholars and some
sociologists who believe, and I think they probably have a pretty
good case, that the notion of the family or the institution of the
family evolved as a response to the need for having sufficient hands
around to serve you at harvest time with some institutional mechanism
which imposed on the rest of the society the obligation of taking
care of the idle personnel during times other than harvest or seed
time.
Be that as it may, the family, as the kingpin or the linch-
pin of Vietnamese life, has 2,000 years of tradition behind it and
it is not something that is liable to change overnight or within the
next year or within the next decade of indeed within the lifetime of
any of us sitting here in this room.
The importance of the family cuts twofold in Vietnamese
life. One way it cuts is that it produces a kind of person or a
kind of individual who, from the very cradle, looks at life in a
way rather different from the way you and I tend to. We are the
legates and the heirs, if you will, of the 17th century atomists
and scientists who brought us up in a tradition or who shaped our
intellectual tradition and caused us to be brought up thinking of
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ourselves primarily as individuals. We have ties; we have loyalties;
we have friends; we honor our parents in most cases; we feel some
measure of affection for our siblings, brothers, and sisters; we
have people that we went through school with, be it West Point,
Annapolis, or some civilian institution. None is to say that we
are sort of automata, off by ourselves. But stop and think for a
moment.
When you reflect on yourself who you are, what you are,
where you are going, what you are doing, you tend to think of your-
self as a single individual person who is going to make it or
not make it on your own and who is going to find your fulfillment
and your satisfaction through the exertion of your own individual
labors and endeavors. This is perfectly natural and this is
perfectly normal, but in a certain sense you have a general
tendency to look at yourself or think of yourself as a kind of
social atom in a world of other social atoms or other individuals.
You band together and when you want to make decisions, at least if
you are not in the military service or some hierarchical body, you
do it by counting how many atoms want X and how many atoms want Y,
and the larger number of atoms makes the decision, and that is
perfectly right, perfectly natural, and that is the way life works
in a Western society or at least in ours. But that is not the way
it works in Vietnam, because a Vietnamese child, from the moment
of his conscious awareness, is by and large taught to think of him-
self not as an individual but as a member of a group -- first and
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foremost, the family group; thus, he finds his fulfillment; he finds
his self-identity; he finds his meaning in life, if you will, not
through his own individual exertions or efforts but through the
cooperative endeavor with other members of groups with which he
identifies. And if you cut him off totally from the group -- for
instance, send him to the United States for training, if he is not
properly oriented or culturally developed to the point where he can
profit from it -- he is a very lost fish out of water indeed.
All this may sound like misty and rather irrelevant theo-
rizing matters of hazy social jargon., but I can assure you that it
is not, because this orientation towards the family first and fore-
most, for example, has a profound influence on certain things that
we consider very politically important, far from the least of which
is this matter of corruption.
Just stop and think how this works for a second. In the
United States, or, for that matter, in Western societies generally,
if you catch an individual with a hand in the till (and Lord knows
this is not unknown in the United States)at least he thinks he ought
to feel guilty or at least most other people think he ought to feel
guilty. He thinks he ought to feel guilty and most of us would feel
that he ought to feel guilty. If, instead of having his own hand
directly in the till, he abused a position of profit or trust to
give favored treatment to jobs, import licenses, positions, promotions
to his brother, to his nephew, to his cousin, to his son-in-law, to
his wife's aunt, etc., etc., etc., again none of this is unknown in
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the United States -- I mean, Boston, New York, and many other places,
or even Washington, D. C. this sort of nepotism and family favoritism
is certainly not a Vietnamese invention -- but it is something in the
United States that we would just as soon not have put in public print,
that we would rather not get caught doing; and when someone is caught
doing it those of us who are on the outside and witnessing being
caught feel that he ought properly to be punished.
You see, in Vietnam -- oversimplifying somewhat but not
much -- it works almost exactly the other way around. Because of
the way one is brought up in the Vietnamese tradition in the Vietnamese
society, if you have a position where you can do something for some-
body -- let us say, grant promotions in the army; let us say,
appoint people to provincial office; let us say, give people import
licenses or withhold import licenses -- and you do not take care of
your brother, your nephew, your son-in-law, your niece's husband,
t hen it is you who are not committing a crime but committing a moral
sin in running counter to the grains and the mores of the society,
because your first and primary obligation as a true Vietnamese is
the obligation derived from your membership in the family, all of
whose members are supposed to take care of each other. Thus, if you
are in a position to do something to advance the family or members
thereof and, instead of giving them the preferment which the tradition
of society rightly insists that you should do, according to their
traditions,you go and do a favor for an outsider who has no claims
on you and who is not a member of the clan, then you had done something
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which in strict Vietnamese tradition is morally wrong.
I have oversimplified and over schematized the case some-
what, but this lies behind a lot of Vietnamese thinking and it
influences a lot of Vietnamese practice that we would be inclined
to dismiss or to write off as corrupt. This is not to say that
there is not genuine corruption in Vietnam. This is not to say
that such corruption that exists is something that should be done
about. To explain something is not necessarily to excuse it, but
I cite this as an example of how Vietnamese political traditions
and cultural traditions can produce political behavior of a kind
that we often find difficult to comprehend; yet, to a Vietnamese it
is perfectly rational and perfectly understandable.
A second thing that you need to remember is that this
local orientation of Vietnamese society, which is a function of
history and which is a function of a wide variety of factors, has
produced only the most tenuous kind of affection for any national
government and, instead, has induced, people to identify themselves
most closely, if not with their families, with those in the village
from whence they came and has tended to make local ties and local
loyalties more important than any sort of vague claims of some
abstract concept, such as the national state. Your first and fore-
most obligation is to your family. The second class of people to
whom you are most likely to turn and. with which you are most likely
to feel comfortable are those from your own village, or, if not
from your own village, from your own province. This again is a
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cultural and social outlook and has a profound influence on Viet-
namese behavior in more obviously political fields, such as, for
example, picking personnel for jobs or preferment or appointment
in either the military or the civil service.
There is another aspect of Vietnamese society which again
it is almost essential that we bring ourselves up short and think
about because it is something that we have gone a long way from
over the course of the past 200 years.
The traditionally Vietnamese society is a highly strati-
fied society, and this is thought to be right and proper. You had
the king or the emperor; you had the court nobles; you had the
various services or degrees of services in the mandarinate; you
had the village with the village council of notables; you had the
well-to-do farmers; you had the poor farmers; and you had along
the Chinese fashion a sort of ascending hierarchy running from the
peasant up through toward the king or to the emperor.
Now, Vietnam, in its traditional approach to politics,
has a very (what you might call) 17th century flavor about it which
in many ways is quite foreign to the sort of 20th century approach
that we are accustomed to, brought up in, and handle or think in
without reflecting upon here in the United States. We consider it,
for example, wrong to have the notion that a man is consigned by
birth to a particular role in society and that there is something
vaguely immoral or improper or that the universe is somehow slightly
out of kilter if he transcends that role to which he was assigned by
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birth, and performs some other function, rising in the social world
or, in some cases, declining. This is not an approach that we find
congenial at all; but it is an approach that is, again, deeply rooted
in 2,000 years of Vietnamese history.
There is in the Vietnamese tradition the idea that a per-
son has a station in life -- an idea that we used to have, as I say,
200 years ago and have come a long way from -- that this is the
station into which he is born, that that is the way life is, that
is the way the universe is, that is the way the great chain of
being runs, that there are certain classes of people destined to
till the soil, there are certain classes of people who by right
own land, there are certain classes of people who by right hold
government offices, there are certain classes of people who by right
hold commissions in the army, and that if you get this thing too
much out of kilter you are getting the whole universe out of kilter
and this is bad, and this is something which the Vietnamese in-
stinctively tend to resist.
There is a peculiarity of the old traditional Sinicized
culture with its fairly rigid stratification which also has a pro-
found impact on current Vietnamese behavior and practice. The path
in the Chinese tradition to upward mobility was through education,
and education of a very highly specialized form. Literary skill
and expertise in manipulating the Chinese classics was the skill
which enabled you to go sit for the examinations which enabled you,
even though a poor farm boy, to become a mandarin and jump five or
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six notches in the social ladder; hence, benefit your children by
having them become the children of a manderin rather than the
children of a peasant. This was the same way in the Vietnamese
tradition, because the classical Vietnamese educational system
was almost exactly patterned from the Chinese system. The exami-
nations for the Vietnamese mandarinal civil service were the
almost exact replicas of those used in China during the 15th, 16th,
and 17th centuries.
This notion of stratification, this notion of advancement
through a certain specialized, rather stylized socially conditioned
education, was very much reinforced by the French colonial experi-
ence, because, after all, the French are great believers in edu-
cation of a very literary kind as an avenue to advancement in French
life. The doors are largely closed in France unless you can over-
come the hurdle of the baccalaureate. This was a French penchant
or a French tradition which grafted right onto a root Vietnamese
way of looking at things. Although the mandarinal civil service
examinations were abolished in 1911, the French set up a series of
schools and 1vcdes in Vietnam, and it was a very easy shift for the
upper-class Vietnamese mind to change gears from the idea that the
path to advancement led through the mandarinal exams to the idea
that the path to advancement led through the lycde, that all doors
to higher positions or that all roads to higher positions should
require first going through the door of the first and second parts
of your baccalaureate. This is a view that is still very much
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prevalent in South Vietnam.
Again, is this just area social theory? Does this have
anything to do with the price of eggs? Does this have the remotest
relationship to the war that we are fighting at the present time?
Or any significant aspect thereof?
Yes, gentlemen, it does, because one of the problems that
has beset us the most over the past decade or so in Vietnam is this
great problem of first-echelon leadership in the South Vietnamese
Army -- finding the right kind of platoon leaders, senior squad
leaders, but particularly platoon leaders, company commanders,
assistant company commanders, etc.
Well, our adversaries have faced the same problem. How
have they solved it? They have solved it by promoting to such
positions in many cases very simple peasant youths, whom they enlist
on their side and for whom they provide avenues of advancement --
in fact, these very avenues of advancement in many cases are one
of the strongest inducements that the V. C. recruiters have to
offer.
Why are not these avenues open or why have not they
traditionally been open on the G.V.N. side? Well, you get right
back to this social thing that I was talking about. It is very
difficult for the aristocratic Vietnamese to hoist aboard the
idea that commission service in the military is not the proper
monopoly of ones stratified segment of society to which he belongs
or to hoist aboard the idea that you should not have a so-called
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"educational" qualification (in this case a baccalaureate), which is
in effect a social qualification.
When we go andtalk, as many of your colleagues in the mili-
tary service do go and talk constantly, and with increasing detail
and attention in the last few months, to their Vietnamese friends
about opening up the avenues for commissions, more promotions from
the ranks, less insistence on the requirement of a baccalaureate,
what they do not really realize is that they are bucking 2,000 years
of history and they do not really realize why they are bucking 2,000
years of history; and they do not sometimes realize that the foot-
dragging on the part of the Vietnamese is not because of any debate
over the relative educational merits of baccalaureate training as
opposed to field experience, but because they are running up against
the very root social attitude that is so radically different from
ours that we find it very hard to appreciate that it exists, let
alone appreciate its full importance.
Again, I do not want to go into too much detail or go too
far afield, but there are one or two other factors of traditional
Vietnamese life which also influenced their outlook on politics
and the way the political system works.
We talked about the family loyalty; we talked about the
notion of stratification in society. I think you have to also
recognize that one of the principal political legacies of the French
colonial experience is that Vietnamese politics tends to be very
much the politics of conspiracy. The Vietnamese political structure,
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or at least Vietnamese political parties that exist today, almost
all grew up during the French colonial era as clandestine, covert,
nationalist parties who had as their aim and object the overthrow
of the French regime. If they were going to survive at all against
the administrations of the French sfixretd and the French police
they had to become conspiratorial and they had to become adept in
clandestine operations; and they had to devote most of their
attention towards testing the loyalty of their adherents and work-
ing only within a closed tight circle and fearing for their very
lives from sfretd agents or agent provocateur or betrayal by their
rivals within the Vietnamese political spectrum.
Here again, this is a subject on which we could talk for
great length and which I assure you I will not this morning.
What this has produced is a kind of approach and atti-
tude towards politics by those Vietnamese, particularly the civilians,
who are active in political life, particularly those of the gener-
ation of their late 30s, 40s, and early 50s, to whom one would think
the society could look for political leadership, yet who were by
temperament and training and background unfitted to provide that
leadership because their whole political experience has been an
experience in the techniques of revolutionary overthrow and not in
the techniques of constructive advocacy and that the general instinc-
tive Vietnamese way of thinking about political life is not that of
cooperation or balance, striking any sort of overt review, but of
forming a clandestine covert party keyed to a point of doctrine
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which is very prone to break up into splinter actions of other
clandestine parties simply because that is the way you had to stay
alive and that is the way you had to compete and that is the kind
of models that were developed and the kind of experience that was
set during the period of French rule, which set a tone to the
climate of Vietnamese political life that still exists today.
Then you have various other factors that you have to con-
sider which I will not take the time to dwell on in any great de-
tail. But in the absence of political institutions, to which
people can attach their loyalties and which can influence politi-
cal life as we know it, zeli;ion has often formed a surrogate symbol
for politics. This is one of the reasons why you find in Vietnamese
life people tending to cluster about religious labels, be they
Catholic, be they Buddhist, be they Hoa Hoa, be they Cao Dai, be
they whatever, when actually there is no issue of religious doctrine
involved but where in the absence of political labels religious
labels have always had a great deal of appeal. Hence, you find
that political wars for preference, for position, for influence
are often being waged or carried on, or struggles at least are be-
ing carried on under religious guises.
This is the sort of thing we have going on today when the
opposition of Quang to the Thieu government is being carried on under
the banner of Buddhism, or at least of one factor of the Buddhist
church, when there is absolutely no doctrinal issue at all involved
but where, because of the accidents
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of Vietnamese history, the religious organization that surrounds the
Anquang Pagoda happens to be one of the most effective political
vehicles in contemporary Vietnamese life.
We could go on at great length in illuminating further
examples, but I will not take the time to do it. Suffice it to
say, we have to realize that because we do not have in this country
a political tradition as we understand it political life has taken
on a form quite different from that to which we are used. We have
a value structure and a value system and a mode of looking at things
and a way of behaving with respect to your fellow and to your neigh-
bor which produces a kind of political experience and a kind of
political outlook that is so different in many respects from ours
that the very language of politics that we use produces more dis-
tortion than clarity when we are prone to talk about the Vietnamese
situation.
It is against this backdrop that the current struggle in
Vietnam is being waged and that the struggle has been waged in the
past decade-and-a-half. The struggle that is going on is not a
struggle between two countries or nation-states as we understand
them, despite the fact that both sides use the names of North Vietnam
and South Vietnam. But basically it is a struggle betwen two sets
of Vietnamese protagonists, each of whom goes about politics and
political life in its own way.
These protagonists can be briefly and I think not inaccur-
ately explained as on the one hand the Communist Party and its adherents
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and clients and on the other hand those who are opposed to communist
rule. That may sound like the grossest kind of oversimplification;
and in stating the situation that baldly in that way may make me
sound like I am an unrepentent cold warrier or an unreconstructed
McCarthyite, or whatever you want to say. Let me assure you that
that is really not as much an oversimplication as it may sound, and
if you approach Vietnamese politics in this vein you are going to
find that a lot of the chinks fall into place.
What you have to recognize is that on one side of the
struggle you have a reasonably cohesive system but that this cohesion
was imposed by the Vietnamese Communist Party through the exploitation
of doctrine, discipline, organization, and a fanatic degree of ruth-
lessness. All these divisive trends in political traditions that I
have described exist in North Vietnam as well as in South Vietnam,
but they have been to a certain degree surmounted in North Vietnam
by the activities of the Communist Party, which has been willing to
pay a social price that we on the U. S. side and those Vietname in
South Vietnam who work with us would, I think, quite properly regard
it as socially unacceptable. The price that had to be paid, for
example, was the price of being willing to deliberately eradicate
and destroy five percent of your population for doctrinal reasons --
which is what happened in North Vietnam during 1954 through 1956
during the so-called land rent reductions and land reform campaigns.
You do have in the Vietnamese Communist Party and its
adherents a sort of closed system with a tight degree of organization
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headed by an identifiable group of eleven people chaired by a remark-
able man who now calls himself Ho Chi Minh. Because of their disci-
pline, because of their skill in the use of front organizations,
the Party has been able to achieve a position of pre-eminence in
North Vietnam and has been able to build and structure an extremely
important and powerful organization in the South which it keeps
under tight and complete effective control, even though, of course,
there are many who are fighting on the V. C. side in South Vietnam
who never heard of Marx or Lenin and who are not fighting for any
reason of communist doctrine, who are not members of the Party, and
who were induced to serve in the ranks for a variety of personal or
other reasons, some of them in some cases very noble indeed. But
the fact that there are many noncommunists in the ranks does not
and should not be allowed to becloud the other fact, which is of
equal importance, that the total movement, which is striving for
political control over Vietnam, is and always has been under the
tight and effective control of the Vietnamese Communist Party and
is operated in every echelon in its important military and politi-
cal aspects through Party command channels.
The great problem or difficulty with the struggle in
Vietnam is: Whereas on the one side one set of protagonists is
fairly clearly defined and fairly easy to identify, on the other
side the other set of protagonists is not, because the other set
of protagonists can perhaps only be accurately generically labelled
as consisting of all those who are opposed to the concept of communist
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rule. In fact, that is the only thing on which many of them are
unified at all, because opposition to the notion of communist rule
does not, unfortunately, and never has, translate necessarily into
positive support for any particular governmental institution or any
particular set of noncommunist leaders.
This diffuse group that runs from almost the extreme
Left over to the very extreme Right in the aggregate probably com-
prises the majority of the politicized Vietnamese in South Vietnam
at least. If this were not the case, the war would have been ended
years ago in an inevitable communist victory. I might also say
that this group of the communists and their clients who are driving
for power and those who are opposed to communist rule and are work-
ing more or less effectively with American support to try to prevent
it, does not necessarily exhaust the entire population of Vietnam.
There is, of course, a third group of indeterminant size, primarily
located in the countryside, which really has no great loyalties one
way or the other and wants above all to be left alone.
But the prosecution of the struggle is being carried on,
as I say, by on the one hand the Party and its clients and followers
and on the other side this much more diffuse unstructured group who
are seldom united on anything but the fact that whatever else they
may or may not want they do not want to live under a communist re-
gime or under a communist state -- many of them, people on this side
of the spectrum,having had only too much first-hand experience or
family experience with what life under communist rule can in effect
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The balance or the race, if you will, in Vietnam, putting
aside the military factor for the moment, putting aside other fac-
tors, such as foreign involvement, and stripping this thing down to
its essentials, has always been this:
Is the Communist Party so well-organized that it will
inevitably come to power because of the lack of organization and
lack of unity and lack of cohesion among its opponents, who suffer
from these divisive and, politically in some ways, debilitating
social and historically rooted trends that I have outlined? Is
the Party so well-organized that its acquisition of power is inevi-
table? Or can the group who is opposed to communist rule have the
time to develop and to build and to shape down a structural or
institutional matrix sufficiently keyed to the realities of Viet-
namese political life so that it has some genuine viability and
life of its own and can be developed to the point where it is capable
of coping with the internal challenge of the highly disciplined and
highly organized Communist Party?
This has been the real political struggle that has been
going on since 1956 when this insurgency first developed. Unfortu-
nately, and for the cause of noncommunist Vietnam, the development
or evolution of Vietnamese political life got off to a promising
start which proved to be a blind alley, because, although Diem
accomplished many things in his early years -- he crested his high-
water mark in 1957 and after that was in the longer term sense more
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of a brake on political development in noncommunist Vietnam than a
prod or assist thereto -- after Diem's inevitable overthrow -- and
I personally believe that by 1963 it was inevitable -- you had the
period where you had to go back three or four years and pick up from
about 1957 and go through a shake-out process to try to find where
the real political lines of force were in Vietnam and begin once
again to develop an institutional structure capable of knitting to-
gether the country which had never been a country in 2,000 years and
which, as I said earlier in my remarks, had no tradition of politi-
cal society and no institutional cement to support it.
Now, a great deal of progress has been made since 1963
and particularly in 1965 towards developing an institutional counter
with some sort of governmental effectiveness. We still have not
seen the answer to the question I have just posed and you still
have at the root of the struggle a contest as to who is going to
provide the answer for the politicized life of Vietnam in the second
half of the 20th century. Will it be the Communist Party operating
off of doctrinal fanaticism and superior organization? Or can those
who are opposed to communist rule build and develop the institutional
response necessary before they are overwhelmed?
That really is what the political struggle in Vietnam is
and always has been about. That is the race that is currently going
on. And I think the only fair way that you can categorize the race
at the moment is to say that the outcome simply has not been decided.
So, in my own personal view the acid test is coming during
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the next ten to twelve calendar months. If I were to be invited
back to The National War College next year to give this same lec-
ture I think I would have to speak after drawing a balance sheet
to tell you why the race came out one way or the other. At the
moment I cannot.
There is the race; there is the struggle; there is what
the political debate in Vietnam at heart is all about. The issue
has not been closed, but I think it probably will be decided during
the course of this year; that is why this year is one of the most
interesting of all years for one to be privileged to work on Viet-
namese affairs.
Thank you very much.
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