“Hanoi’s War” by Lien-Hang T. Nguyen

Lien-Hang Nguyen used unprecedented access to Hanoi’s governmental archives to write her 2012 book Hanoi’s War, a political history of the Vietnam War from the northern perspective focused on two powerful key figures in the North Vietnamese government, Le Duan and Le Duc Tho — the most powerful man in the northern government and his protege and chief negotiator, respectively.  The book had less insight into northern military operations than I’d hoped, but it’s still an excellent if somewhat preliminary work and I eagerly await Nguyen’s next major work.

Les Miserables

Nguyen centers Hanoi’s War on General Secretary Le Duan and his protege Le Duc Tho, though not to the exclusion of other perspectives.  She does not dwell much on biographical details, instead examining the North Vietnamese fight for a unified Vietnam from the political perspective of Le Duan’s rise, consolidation of power, and strategy.  Nguyen’s sources allow her to portray the northern government as an actual human organization rather than the black box of realist IR theory or ignorant historians.  She both builds a compelling case that Le Duan held the dominant position in the north and that this explains critical aspects of northern strategy: the subordination (and post-war marginalization) of southern revolutionaries to North Vietnam (DRV), repeated failed attempts at a General Offensive / General Uprising campaign, and the direction of effort towards conquest of the south rather than development of the north.

Le Duan

Hanoi’s War devotes a great deal of writing to diplomacy, something I normally don’t read much about but which was particularly important in Vietnam.  The book would be valuable for this alone.  Interestingly, the book’s northern-centric perspective makes the United States’ diplomatic efforts appear more important and effective than, I think, they really were based the military & domestic situations and on the ultimate outcome.

Nguyen writes only vaguely about the methods Le Duan used assert his control over the North’s wartime economy and society, probably the result of her restricted access to military & intelligence archives, although she did extensively interview one former political prisoner, Hoang Minh Chinh.  Repression in the DRV appears less harsh than in the early Soviet Union or contemporary China, but Nguyen doesn’t have enough information on the matter to make a conclusive judgment.

The Lost Cause

One of Nguyen’s major sources were the archives of the former South Vietnamese (RVN) government.  These sources create a rather separate thread from the main focus on Le Duan’s government and Le Duc Tho’s international diplomacy.  Nguyen avoids making this an awkward distraction, and in fact left me wanting to know more.  I suspect Nguyen will write more on the war from the perspective of the RVN in the future given the information she collected.

Le Duc Tho with Henry Kissinger

Some of this material sheds little light on relatively well-established topics like the relations between the RVN and the United States.  In keeping with her focus on international diplomacy however, she details the RVN’s fumbling of a potential anticommunist alliance with Cambodia (something which might have actually allowed both governments to survive) in considerable detail, a significant topic about which I had zero awareness.  In his memoirs Westmoreland complained that he had been given no authority outside the bounds of South Vietnam; Nguyen offers further evidence of the importance of a unified war effort at the international level.

A Great Start

My biggest complaint about Hanoi’s War is that it’s too short — I wanted more.  This is really to Nguyen’s credit — she tells the story of the Les’ rise and the DRV’s victory and leaves it at that — but she leaves a few things hanging.  She assigns high impact to the DRV/NLF “people’s diplomacy” (personified in Nguyen Thi Binh) but doesn’t do much to detail or quantify its effects compared to other diplomatic subjects.  I also wanted to hear more about the North’s wartime society and economy, and about the South’s internal perspective.

Madame Binh

I went into Hanoi’s War relatively blind and expecting a more military-focused history just by personal default but wasn’t disappointed by what I found.  The book did raise my already high opinion of Vo Nguyen Giap by outlining how Le Duan deliberately sidelined him in order to issue questionable orders like the 1972 offensive.  I was a little surprised to learn that Nguyen’s next and latest book is about the Tet Offensive given the focus of Hanoi’s War and her limited access to northern military records, but I will be buying it when it’s released later this year.

I don’t recommend this as a first book on the Vietnam War; the author assumes a basic familiarity with the country and the war.  However, Hanoi’s War is a must for anyone who wants to expand their knowledge on the nature and scope of the war.