and Dulles refused to accept was that no firm line
had been drawn against further communist expan-
sion, further erosion of the Western position in
south-east Asia, though they had no wish for the
US to replace colonial France or to exploit South
Vietnam. A halt had been called in Europe and in
Korea: now it appeared that the communists were
poised to move south. Although eventually tragic
in their consequences, the Eisenhower–Dulles
reactions should not be judged as inhumane or
dominated by simplistic ideology. Indeed, it was
the communists who deserved their reputation
for cruelty. In 1955 and 1956, thousands of
Vietnamese ‘traitors’, French sympathisers and
‘landlords’, including many peasants, were killed
by the communists in the North. The entire popu-
lations of Catholic villages fled from the North,
and altogether nearly a million refugees headed
south when the North Vietnamese state was estab-
lished.
Not that Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu
were paragons of democratic virtue in the South.
They imprisoned opposition leaders, rejected any
real land reforms to aid the peasantry and allowed
corruption to run riot; even so, their authoritar-
ian rule did not compare with North Vietnamese
atrocities during the first years after the new
states’ foundation. Uncertain of their outcome,
Diem refused to participate in the Vietnamese
elections scheduled for July 1956 under the
Geneva Agreements. He knew that the North
would be coerced to vote solidly in favour of the
communists and that the opposition parties in the
South would join them to form what might prove
to be a majority. It was an election that would
not be free whoever supervised it. Diem’s control
of voting in the South would be far less effective
than the communist control in the North. That
view was shared by Dulles and Eisenhower. It was
Diem who refused to hold the elections, but he
knew that the American administration was no
keener to see them take place in 1956 and had
advised on ‘postponement’ to soften the breach
with Geneva.
Eisenhower and Dulles were prepared to
accept the 17th parallel as marking the new
boundary of the communist advance in south-east
Asia. They did not encourage Diem to reconquer
the North or even envisage such a conquest;
equally they were not prepared to tolerate any
communist encroachment on the territory of
South Vietnam. They were also obliged to accept
Diem’s rule – there seemed no one else who
could hold the country together. At first Diem
appeared to be mastering the situation. The year
1956 passed and, surprisingly, despite North
Vietnamese protests, there was no renewal of con-
flict between the North and the South. There
were good reasons for this. Ho Chi-minh was
ruthlessly consolidating communist power in
the face of ‘traitors’, ‘landlords’ and peasants,
while ‘land reform’ was accompanied by thou-
sands of executions. In the south Diem likewise
moved mercilessly against remnants of the
North Vietnamese Vietminh, who had been left
behind as a nucleus around whom a communist
insurrection might be constructed. The South
Vietnamese communists, the Vietcong, began
organising in the countryside in 1957, planning
the assassinations of Diem’s village headmen and
officials. But Ho Chi-minh was still holding back.
Diem’s authoritarian rule, his ruthlessness and his
corruption aroused opposition not only among
peasants but among all those groups excluded
from power and from a share in the loot. The
Vietcong assassinations soon made themselves
felt, exciting deep unease throughout the
country. Murder of government officials increased
from 1,200 in 1959 to 4,000 a year by 1961.
Diem’s response was to drive the peasants into
fortified hamlets, but this proved both ineffective
and counter-productive, alienating the peasantry,
who objected to being placed under military com-
manders and were anyway caught between
Diem’s reprisals during the day and the Vietcong
at night. The US administration failed to appre-
ciate that the Vietcong were not lackeys of the
communists in the North but were an expanding
and powerfully organised army of southern com-
munists engaged in a guerrilla civil war. Clearly
South Vietnamese stability was deteriorating,
though Diem was still in control of the cities and
much of the countryside of South Vietnam.
The position in neighbouring Laos by the
close of the Eisenhower administration (January
1961) was more immediately critical. Ostensibly