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c haPter 9

Vietnam, Protest, and

Counterculture

O

n 2 September 1945, Ho Chi Minh spoke before a half million
Vietnamese in the capital of Hanoi and declared that the DRVN, the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam, was a free and independent country. He
began, “All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of
Happiness.” Ho, the new president, a nationalist who had fought against
French and Japanese occupation of Vietnam, and a founder of the Communist
Party of Indochina [the region including Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos], chose
those words on purpose, as they came from the American Declaration of
Independence and he wanted to develop a relationship with the U.S. He con-
cluded that Vietnam had the right to be a sovereign country and assumed that
the United Nations would recognize it as such. Just before this, after all, the
French colonialists who had dominated Vietnam since the 1860s and the
Japanese who had occupied Vietnam during World War II had been forced
out; so it was only natural that Ho and his followers, especially the political-
military group called the Viet Minh, would take leadership of the country.
That was not to be, however. The French had been forced out of Indochina
by the Japanese and occupied by Germany in Europe during World War II but
decided to return and gain control over Vietnam, where it had significant
investments, especially in rubber plantations. The Americans had misgivings