Throughout the
1940s Ho Chi Minh and other Vietnamese leaders made repeated appeals to Truman and other American officials to help them gain independence from French colonial rule. These appeals were generally ignored.
On
February 16th, 1945 Ho Chi Minh wrote a letter to President Truman asking for American assistance in gaining Vietnamese freedom. The letter closed with the remarks:
We ask what has been graciously granted to the Philippines. Like the Philippines our goal is full independence and full cooperation with the UNITED STATES. We will do our best to make this independence and cooperation profitable to the whole world.
I am dear Mr. PRESIDENT,
Respectfully Yours,
Ho Chi Minh
The letter was not declassified until 1972.
For the full text of this letter, and others, see:
Collection of Letters by Ho Chi Minh
In 1945 Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese Independence, and conflict between the French and the Vietnamese people officially began.
The Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam starts:
"All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; among these are Liberty, Life and the pursuit of Happiness."
This immortal statement appeared in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, it means: all the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live and to be happy and free.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, made at the time of the French Revolution, in 1791, also states: "All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights."
Those are undeniable truths.
Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of liberty, Equality and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow-citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice.
Politically: they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty…
Due to the fact that Ho had tried every conceivable way to cooperate with both the French and Americans in gaining Vietnamese independence, and all of those efforts had been fruitless, Ho turned to the Communists for help.
The US generally took an approach of non-involvement in the issue of Vietnamese and French conflict, and in doing so supported French colonialism. America became less and less inclined to support Ho Chi Min due to his Communist affiliation yet
at the same time American analysts could not draw any link between Ho Chi Minh and Moscow, writing that Ho Chi Minh did not seem to be following any directive from Moscow and that the policies of Ho Chi Minh did not correlate with Russian policy.
Nowhere did the coming of Americans, in the case a mere handful of them, mean so much to a people as it did to the population of northern Indo-China. To Annamites, our coming was the symbol of liberation not from the Japanese occupation but from decades of French colonial rule. For the Annamite government considered the United States the principal champion of the rights of small peoples, guaranteed so promisingly by the United Nations conferences... Our prowess in the war, our vast production abilities, our progressiveness in technical and social fields- all were known by the Annamites, to a surprising degree. In their blueprint for self-government they envisaged American trade bringing them peacetime products.
American technicians to help then industrialize Vietnam, American consulates in the political, medical and social sciences. Essentially, they feel that the French did not develop the resources of the country for the benefit of the people themselves, and in their own planning have emphasized their intention to throw Vietnam open to American commercial penetration. As a matter of practical preference they would like to see the economy of Vietnam geared to our own if that were possible or desirable to us. Above all they want the good will of the American people and our government. From the top of the Annamite leadership to the bottom of the social scale in Tonkin, every person made a visible effort to please American officers and men. They offered courtesies and simple gestures of friendship at every opportunity.
The C.B.I. patch on the shoulder of an American was his ticket to a warm welcome and good treatment... Annamites asked for all sorts of advice-how to run a newspaper, how to repair and operate machinery, how to run a street-cleaning department most efficiently-even though they were managing quite well indeed in operating utilities and other physical functions of government. They inquired about our schools, our courts, our elections, about the workings of both houses of the Congress. They seemed to feel that every American contained within himself all the virtues and accomplishments of the nation they wanted most to emulate...
- Arthur Hale, U.S. Information Agency 1945 (not declassified until 1972)
Viet-Minh, as its first move after seizure of the government, sought a united front against French imperialism...
Frenchmen think that by labeling Viet-Minh "Communist," they have summed up the situation to the disadvantage of the Vietnam government. There is considerable communist influence in Viet-Minh... The national salute is very nearly the raised right arm salute of the communists. Posters, banners, have been adapted from Western leftist art... But at the same time there is ample evidence of an equally strong influence from the United States... Policy statements and declarations by the government are obvious imitations of American techniques of democratic government. In short, the Viet-Minh leadership seems to have used communist methods of appeal to arouse the masses behind a program for an independent democracy...
- Arthur Hale, U.S. Information Agency 1945 (not declassified until 1972)
It was clear that the Vietnamese people wanted freedom from foreign intervention.
What followed between the region of South East Asia and Western powers was an unnecessary escalation of conflict. Western powers, including the United States, feared Communism and they also felt that non-Western people were not adequate to govern themselves and certainly not to be trusted with important resources and geographic regions. It was felt that it was important to keep economically and militarily strategic locations under Western authority. Had the United States or France given support to Ho Chi Minh and supported the right of Vietnam to self determination at any time up to this point, it is very likely that Vietnam would never have pursued Communism. The only reason that the Vietnamese did was because the Communists were the only ones who were supporting Vietnam's goal of independence.
In
1967 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech called "Beyond Vietnam", in which he stated:
They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence -- in 1945 -- after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead,
we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China -- for whom the Vietnamese have no great love -- but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.
For video and audio footage of Dr. King's speech see:
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 1929-1968
In 1950 the French gave up their effort to maintain direct control over Vietnam and transferred power to Bao Dai. The US recognized Bao Dai, but the Vietnamese people did not; he was generally a puppet of the French.
In 1954 President Eisenhower wrote:
I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held at the time of the fighting, possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather then Chief of State Bao Dai.
In 1953 President Eisenhower proclaimed at the Governor's conference in Seattle:
Now let us assume that we lose Indochina. If Indochina goes, several things happen right away. The Malayan peninsula would be scarcely defensible- and tin and tungsten we so greatly value from that area would cease coming… All of that weakening position around there is very ominous for the United States, because finally if we lost all that, how would the free world hold the rich empire of Indonesia? So you see, somewhere along the line, this must be blocked. That is what the French are doing…
So, when the United States votes $400 million to help that war, we are not voting for a giveaway program. We are voting for the cheapest way that we can to prevent the occurrence of something that would be of the most terrible significance for the United States of America- our security, our power and ability to get certain things from the riches of South East Asia.
This is one of my favorite quotes because it so eloquently illustrates the reality of the geopolitical situation. "…how would the 'free world' 'hold' the rich empire of Indonesia?" Indeed. This gets to the crux of not only the Vietnamese situation but the global situation, and obviously the Iraqi situation. The free world is free because it does "hold" control over the "other" parts of the world. The world that is not "free" is not free precisely because it is "held" by the "free world", and the freedom that is possible in the "free world" is only possible because of these holdings.
The Vietnamese people never accepted the rule of Bao Dai. Ho Chi Minh and his forces continued to fight for true independence and the establishment of a communist government that would be free from foreign intervention.
