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New Cold War History
Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam
While most historians of the Vietnam War focus on the origins of U.S. involvement and the Americanization of the conflict, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen examines the international context in which North Vietnamese leaders pursued the war and American intervention ended. This riveting narrative takes the reader from the marshy swamps of the Mekong Delta to the bomb-saturated Red River Delta, from the corridors of power in Hanoi and Saigon to the Nixon White House, and from the peace negotiations in Paris to high-level meetings in Beijing and Moscow, all to reveal that peace never had a chance in Vietnam.
Hanoi's War renders transparent the internal workings of America's most elusive enemy during the Cold War and shows that the war fought during the peace negotiations was bloodier and much more wide ranging than it had been previously. Using never-before-seen archival materials from the Vietnam Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as materials from other archives around the world, Nguyen explores the politics of war-making and peace-making not only from the North Vietnamese perspective but also from that of South Vietnam, the Soviet Union, China, and the United States, presenting a uniquely international portrait.
Hanoi's War renders transparent the internal workings of America's most elusive enemy during the Cold War and shows that the war fought during the peace negotiations was bloodier and much more wide ranging than it had been previously. Using never-before-seen archival materials from the Vietnam Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as materials from other archives around the world, Nguyen explores the politics of war-making and peace-making not only from the North Vietnamese perspective but also from that of South Vietnam, the Soviet Union, China, and the United States, presenting a uniquely international portrait.
464 pages, Hardcover
First published July 15, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
February 16, 2014
Anyone who's seriously interested in the Vietnam war should read this book. Drawing on information from North Vietnamese archives, Nguyen (I'm assuming she's using the western conventions for order of names, apologies if I have that wrong) complicates the standard story that posits a more-or-less unified North Vietnam against the U.S. She demonstrates several important points:
1. There was a deep and lasting division within North Vietnam between those who wanted to concentrate on building the North internally and those who wanted to unify North and South Vietnam.
2. The American image of Ho and Giap as the dominant figures in the North is just flat wrong. At almost every major point of decision, the two symbolic representatives of the Vietnamese independence struggle lost to Le Duan and Le Duc Tho.
3. The North Vietnamese saw Tet as a real chance to win the war, not--as the standard story posits and as I've taught my students--a psychological blow aimed at the U.S. They thought the South Vietnamese would rise up against the Saigon regime. They didn't. That doesn't change the fact that in some ways Tet did "win the war," although it took a long time to play out.
4. While the superpowers--the U.S.,the Soviet Union and China--were major players in the war, both the South and North Vietnamese did masterful jobs of taking advantage of their position to manipulate rivalries for their own ends.
Those aren't minor changes. They redefine the shape and meanings of the war in profound ways. I'll certainly never teach the political and diplomatic dimensions of the war the same way I have been.
So why just three stars? There are two significant problems with the book. One is a writing style that piles detail upon detail--the alphabet soup of organizations and the huge cast of diplomatic players--in ways that are sometimes hard to follow. In addition Nguyen often repeats details, occasionally to make points that come closer to contradicting one another. It's just a slog to read, and a lot of the details float free of the themes of the section or chapter they're part of. The second, and more important problem, is that when Nugyen does make judgements, I don't trust them. She repeatedly castigates the Comrades Le for their misjudgments, concluding that they missed a variety of opportunities and that Ho and Giap were in the right. I get why she says this--for the most part Ho and Giap counseled restraint and cooperation. Clearly they would have preferred a much earlier settlement to the war, as would anyone with a sense of the human cost of the war. However--and it's a huge however--if the real goal for the North was to unify the country under communist rule, Le Duan and Le Duc Tho succeeded. It's very difficult to see how taking a different path at the various crossroads could have attained that goal anywhere near as quickly as it happened. Similarly, Nguyen is far far more sympathetic to Thieu, the South Vietnamese ruler during the long endgame, crediting him with diplomatic successes which, as far as I can tell, ultimately accomplished nothing whatsoever.
Despite these drawbacks, this is an important book, one that will provide a foundation for better ones in times to come. It also makes me eager to see what happens when (or if) additional archives--party and military--become available to scholars.
1. There was a deep and lasting division within North Vietnam between those who wanted to concentrate on building the North internally and those who wanted to unify North and South Vietnam.
2. The American image of Ho and Giap as the dominant figures in the North is just flat wrong. At almost every major point of decision, the two symbolic representatives of the Vietnamese independence struggle lost to Le Duan and Le Duc Tho.
3. The North Vietnamese saw Tet as a real chance to win the war, not--as the standard story posits and as I've taught my students--a psychological blow aimed at the U.S. They thought the South Vietnamese would rise up against the Saigon regime. They didn't. That doesn't change the fact that in some ways Tet did "win the war," although it took a long time to play out.
4. While the superpowers--the U.S.,the Soviet Union and China--were major players in the war, both the South and North Vietnamese did masterful jobs of taking advantage of their position to manipulate rivalries for their own ends.
Those aren't minor changes. They redefine the shape and meanings of the war in profound ways. I'll certainly never teach the political and diplomatic dimensions of the war the same way I have been.
So why just three stars? There are two significant problems with the book. One is a writing style that piles detail upon detail--the alphabet soup of organizations and the huge cast of diplomatic players--in ways that are sometimes hard to follow. In addition Nguyen often repeats details, occasionally to make points that come closer to contradicting one another. It's just a slog to read, and a lot of the details float free of the themes of the section or chapter they're part of. The second, and more important problem, is that when Nugyen does make judgements, I don't trust them. She repeatedly castigates the Comrades Le for their misjudgments, concluding that they missed a variety of opportunities and that Ho and Giap were in the right. I get why she says this--for the most part Ho and Giap counseled restraint and cooperation. Clearly they would have preferred a much earlier settlement to the war, as would anyone with a sense of the human cost of the war. However--and it's a huge however--if the real goal for the North was to unify the country under communist rule, Le Duan and Le Duc Tho succeeded. It's very difficult to see how taking a different path at the various crossroads could have attained that goal anywhere near as quickly as it happened. Similarly, Nguyen is far far more sympathetic to Thieu, the South Vietnamese ruler during the long endgame, crediting him with diplomatic successes which, as far as I can tell, ultimately accomplished nothing whatsoever.
Despite these drawbacks, this is an important book, one that will provide a foundation for better ones in times to come. It also makes me eager to see what happens when (or if) additional archives--party and military--become available to scholars.
April 10, 2018
This was a much needed addition to the scholarship of the War for Peace in Vietnam (the name given to the war by the Vietnamese themselves). It is an international look at the war from a Vietnamese voice (and therefor perspective), foregrounding the Vietnamese players on either side of the War for Peace, while the Sino-Soviet split and the USA (and even the French in the early stages) are discussed in terms of what affects their machinations had on their respective Vietnamese allies.
This is not an act of erasure of the great colonial, imperial and neo-imperial powers, but a broadening of the discussion in order to better understand how North Vietnam prevailed -- despite their many short comings and errors -- and how the USA failed -- despite their many victories and military might.
Now that I have finished, I look forward to the PBS-Burns-Novick documentary. I hope their work goes for a similar balance in their examination of the War for Peace, demystifying both Vietnamese sides and cutting through the increasingly depressing US propaganda, which attempts to diminish and justify US crimes and failures. If it fails in that balance, however, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen's excellent Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam has me well shielded.
This book is a true step towards beginning to understand this definitive battle of the Superpowers' supposedly "Cold War."
This is not an act of erasure of the great colonial, imperial and neo-imperial powers, but a broadening of the discussion in order to better understand how North Vietnam prevailed -- despite their many short comings and errors -- and how the USA failed -- despite their many victories and military might.
Now that I have finished, I look forward to the PBS-Burns-Novick documentary. I hope their work goes for a similar balance in their examination of the War for Peace, demystifying both Vietnamese sides and cutting through the increasingly depressing US propaganda, which attempts to diminish and justify US crimes and failures. If it fails in that balance, however, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen's excellent Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam has me well shielded.
This book is a true step towards beginning to understand this definitive battle of the Superpowers' supposedly "Cold War."
December 11, 2019
An interesting, well-written book on the Vietnam War from an international perspective, something most American histories of the war fail to appreciate. North Vietnam comes off as a puzzle in most of those histories, but Nguyen does a great job fleshing their role out.
Much of the book deals with North Vietnam’s complicated international situation; stuck in a war with a superpower and with allies that often weren’t even that interested in the region. It also shows the intense rivalries in Hanoi, and how many of the actors were rational and fairly competent. A good deal of the book is focused on Le Duan: his rise to power, his use of purges, manipulation of wartime hysteria, and his hawkish position on the war. The often bizarre paranoia of the leadership in Hanoi is ably explained.
One of the author’s main arguments is that US intervention in Vietnam was largely dictated by factors in Hanoi and Saigon that were beyond American control. Nguyen also covers all of the mistakes and miscalculations made by Hanoi, which frequently blindsided the NVA/VC forces in the South, and more or less abandoned them after deciding on a conventional invasion. The domestic situation in North Vietnam is also given treatment: "The common notion of the Vietnamese struggle for national liberation as a unified war effort comprised of North and South Vietnamese patriots led by the Party conceals a much more complicated truth. In reality, Le Duan constructed a national security state that devoted all of its resources to war and labeled any resistance to its policies as treason."
Still, the book is somewhat disappointing at times. It is too narrowly focused and short on real analysis. Inexplicably, it ends in 1973 and provides no coverage of what role the Hanoi government played in the final offensives and the capture of Saigon. Even more awkwardly, it begins in 1960, for reasons that remain unclear. Even the decision to go to war comes off as somewhat unimportant. Much of the book is dominated by meetings between North Vietnamese and foreign leaders. Still, I’m sure some the shortcomings have to do with the lack of archival access to the relevant material; the top-level North Vietnamese material remains closed to researchers.
Still, this book is quite interesting and relevant to any study of the time period.
Much of the book deals with North Vietnam’s complicated international situation; stuck in a war with a superpower and with allies that often weren’t even that interested in the region. It also shows the intense rivalries in Hanoi, and how many of the actors were rational and fairly competent. A good deal of the book is focused on Le Duan: his rise to power, his use of purges, manipulation of wartime hysteria, and his hawkish position on the war. The often bizarre paranoia of the leadership in Hanoi is ably explained.
One of the author’s main arguments is that US intervention in Vietnam was largely dictated by factors in Hanoi and Saigon that were beyond American control. Nguyen also covers all of the mistakes and miscalculations made by Hanoi, which frequently blindsided the NVA/VC forces in the South, and more or less abandoned them after deciding on a conventional invasion. The domestic situation in North Vietnam is also given treatment: "The common notion of the Vietnamese struggle for national liberation as a unified war effort comprised of North and South Vietnamese patriots led by the Party conceals a much more complicated truth. In reality, Le Duan constructed a national security state that devoted all of its resources to war and labeled any resistance to its policies as treason."
Still, the book is somewhat disappointing at times. It is too narrowly focused and short on real analysis. Inexplicably, it ends in 1973 and provides no coverage of what role the Hanoi government played in the final offensives and the capture of Saigon. Even more awkwardly, it begins in 1960, for reasons that remain unclear. Even the decision to go to war comes off as somewhat unimportant. Much of the book is dominated by meetings between North Vietnamese and foreign leaders. Still, I’m sure some the shortcomings have to do with the lack of archival access to the relevant material; the top-level North Vietnamese material remains closed to researchers.
Still, this book is quite interesting and relevant to any study of the time period.
April 30, 2017
I am really glad that I was able to finish this book on the "Reunification Day" - the day that the Vietnam War was ended and Vietnam-the country was able to be reunified at last. For this is a terrific book in which the author excellently "connected the dots" by digging through a vast trove of historical records from both sides of the war. For foreigners the book might appear not really interesting as it focused on obscure historical figures who have never been of great interest among Western scholars and readers (although I hope that they can change such disappointing perception after reading this terrific book). But for Vietnamese, this book is of great value at it sheds light upon very difficult, complex, lesser-known, and full of rumours or biased testimonies periods in modern Vietnam's history, when the demarcation of ideology and "righteousness" was often blurred under great powers' pressure and in some cases personal determination/stubbornness. Written with a coherent, clear, academically sound, and unbiased voice (albeit very few transliterate errors and minor mismatches between chapters in terms of quality and structure), this book should be read widely, at least by Vietnamese, so that we can understand that the struggle for peace and reunification was never, even for a moment, an easy tasks for Vietnamese leadership, not only because of their own miscalculations or misperceptions, but mostly due to the complex and bigger theatre that was Cold War international politics, where the welfare and self-determination of people in small countries like Vietnam was never put at the centre of the negotiations between great powers and their politicians, who, understandably, cared first and foremost for their political destinies and their own countries' gains in the power play. The price our country paid for the final result was tremendous, in blood, in money, and in lost opportunities. And the controversy over "what would have been" will continue forever. But peace and a unified state are still reality. A reality that deserves respect. Just like this book.
June 17, 2022
For me this book is foundational for reading about the American war in Viet Nam. It details vital insight and background in particular during the sixties about which I knew nothing.
The people I assumed were leading Viet Nam during the sixties were not actually in charge. I am not competent to offer a fair analysis but I do recommend reading Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, who had access to source material from the communist government of Viet Nam. This might not be the first work to read but it is a good second place to begin.
The people I assumed were leading Viet Nam during the sixties were not actually in charge. I am not competent to offer a fair analysis but I do recommend reading Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, who had access to source material from the communist government of Viet Nam. This might not be the first work to read but it is a good second place to begin.
July 15, 2015
Audio book.
A history of the Vietnam War from the North Vietnamese perspective. The book contains really two large theme: 1) a biography of Le Duan, and 2) the Diplomatic activities on all sides near the end of the war. The author consulted recently available NVA archives to get at a lot of the information.
Here's a list of my impressions (Note I am not a Vietnam War expert, so a lot of this might be common knowledge, nevertheless they are fascinating and are new to me).
1. Ho chi-ming was pretty much sidelined already during much of the American phase of the war. Instead the dominating figure in NVA politics is first Secretary Le Duan (D is pronounced with "z").
2. Americans tend to think of NVA political entity as some Borg like automaton bent on a Communist domination of SE Asia. Instead there are many voices within the party about whether they should go for negotiated peace or war, or to go for a more traditional campaign or a Mao style peasant's uprising. The result is not a forgone conclusion, and what actually happened was through the relentless pursuit of Le Duan.
3. It is amazing how the US is really a reactor to events instead of an actor. In this game of Go the NVA was the one setting the tempo.
4. Ted Offensive was not some calculated NVA conspiracy to rid the Southern based VC, but rather a miscalculation (Duan believed that a popular uprising was immenant but that never came). It's only after the fact (and after the VC are almost wiped out did they come up with this as an attack on American hearts and minds. At the end it worked and laid the seed to the beginning of the American withdrawal.
5. The world think of Kissinger as some kind of diplomatic genius, but he is really a joke. All that back and forth negotiation between US and NVA by '72 was a forgone conclusion. The reason is very simple. When your goal is to get out, as fast as possible, then there really isn't much of a leverage. The only US leverage at that point is through bombing (conventional troop withdraw have already began), and since bombing do not win wars, the NVA just have to wait them out.
6. The only successful diplomatic leverage from the US was the superpower diplomacy that Nixon was playing. The detent with USSR and the China are really freaked the NVA out that they are about to be sold out. Since the US is ready to sell out the ARVN government too, it comes down to a matter of playing chicken. and the NVA won that contest because they have more gumption.
7. Still unanswered question in my mind is whether ARVN ever had a chance? Some of the later campaign undertaken by the ARVN troops after Vietnamization proved that they can fight, but they are badly led. The fact that there are no general uprising from the peasantry means that the masses aren't that fed up with the ARVN despite the endamic corruption. In hindsight, can they "evolve" into a more enlightened and democratic polity given time and US protection? (a la South Korea or Taiwan?) We will never know but I wonder.
8. After the US withdrew, the NVA invasion in '75 felt like a hot knife through butter. What I did not get (or missed) from the book is "WHY"? the ARVN troops should have enough training and equipment to put up a fight which it proved could happen just scant two years ago. Did something changed that drastically? (Off to look for some answers).
9. Looking back, the tragedy of the long war was due to the successful ascendency of the hawks on both sides. Then again the 20th century was a story about the ascendancy of the extremists (there is no proof that has changed in the 21st century for that matter).
10. Highly recommended for serious student of international history. Though I would not recommend this if you know nothing about the war. I would suggest one start with a general history (Stanley Karnow's work was where I started, not sure if there is anything more recent deemed a worthy successor) before tackling this.
A history of the Vietnam War from the North Vietnamese perspective. The book contains really two large theme: 1) a biography of Le Duan, and 2) the Diplomatic activities on all sides near the end of the war. The author consulted recently available NVA archives to get at a lot of the information.
Here's a list of my impressions (Note I am not a Vietnam War expert, so a lot of this might be common knowledge, nevertheless they are fascinating and are new to me).
1. Ho chi-ming was pretty much sidelined already during much of the American phase of the war. Instead the dominating figure in NVA politics is first Secretary Le Duan (D is pronounced with "z").
2. Americans tend to think of NVA political entity as some Borg like automaton bent on a Communist domination of SE Asia. Instead there are many voices within the party about whether they should go for negotiated peace or war, or to go for a more traditional campaign or a Mao style peasant's uprising. The result is not a forgone conclusion, and what actually happened was through the relentless pursuit of Le Duan.
3. It is amazing how the US is really a reactor to events instead of an actor. In this game of Go the NVA was the one setting the tempo.
4. Ted Offensive was not some calculated NVA conspiracy to rid the Southern based VC, but rather a miscalculation (Duan believed that a popular uprising was immenant but that never came). It's only after the fact (and after the VC are almost wiped out did they come up with this as an attack on American hearts and minds. At the end it worked and laid the seed to the beginning of the American withdrawal.
5. The world think of Kissinger as some kind of diplomatic genius, but he is really a joke. All that back and forth negotiation between US and NVA by '72 was a forgone conclusion. The reason is very simple. When your goal is to get out, as fast as possible, then there really isn't much of a leverage. The only US leverage at that point is through bombing (conventional troop withdraw have already began), and since bombing do not win wars, the NVA just have to wait them out.
6. The only successful diplomatic leverage from the US was the superpower diplomacy that Nixon was playing. The detent with USSR and the China are really freaked the NVA out that they are about to be sold out. Since the US is ready to sell out the ARVN government too, it comes down to a matter of playing chicken. and the NVA won that contest because they have more gumption.
7. Still unanswered question in my mind is whether ARVN ever had a chance? Some of the later campaign undertaken by the ARVN troops after Vietnamization proved that they can fight, but they are badly led. The fact that there are no general uprising from the peasantry means that the masses aren't that fed up with the ARVN despite the endamic corruption. In hindsight, can they "evolve" into a more enlightened and democratic polity given time and US protection? (a la South Korea or Taiwan?) We will never know but I wonder.
8. After the US withdrew, the NVA invasion in '75 felt like a hot knife through butter. What I did not get (or missed) from the book is "WHY"? the ARVN troops should have enough training and equipment to put up a fight which it proved could happen just scant two years ago. Did something changed that drastically? (Off to look for some answers).
9. Looking back, the tragedy of the long war was due to the successful ascendency of the hawks on both sides. Then again the 20th century was a story about the ascendancy of the extremists (there is no proof that has changed in the 21st century for that matter).
10. Highly recommended for serious student of international history. Though I would not recommend this if you know nothing about the war. I would suggest one start with a general history (Stanley Karnow's work was where I started, not sure if there is anything more recent deemed a worthy successor) before tackling this.
January 7, 2025
Very informative and an interesting read showing a different perspective we often don’t learn about from the Vietnam War. However, very wordy and can be difficult to follow along unless you have a pretty firm understanding of the subject already.
February 11, 2014
After 10 books from different perspectives on the American War in Vietnam, finally a book that fills in the gaps from the Vietnamese side. As early as '62 the power of Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap was on the wane and Le Duan and Le Duc Tho's war focus on a Southern strategy rankled and pushed the VWP leadership into strategic blunders that prolonged the war every bit as much as Nixon postponing negotiations for electoral value. This book follows the rise of the 'Le' brothers to their ascendant by the end of the war and deaths shortly after the war. A key stage in Vietnam's development can now be understood and appreciated. Finally, the war is making a bit of sense!
February 1, 2019
Most of the stories about the Vietnam War are told from the American perspective because most of the available documentation is from America. Lien-Hang T. Nguyen turned to records recently made available in Vietnam (as well as to some sources from China, the Soviet Union and some Eastern European nations) to shift the narrative into more international territory.
Mainly, she sheds light how disagreements within the Vietnamese Communist Party and the schism between the Soviet Union and China shaped the war, and argues that the North Vietnamese communists were neither mindless drones taking orders from Moscow and Beijing nor were they passive victims of American imperialism.
Some things I learned:
>> There was a split within the North Vietnamese Communists between those who wanted to bolster the economy and spread that the revolution South that way, and those who wanted to instigate all-out war in the cities of South Vietnam to provoke a "people's uprising" that would topple the American "puppet regime." The war-mongers won.
>> Le Duan and Le Duc Tho, not Ho Chih Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, were the principal decision makers of the pro-war faction and the architects of the 1968 Tet Offensive. The "people's uprising" never happened but the Tet Offensive was a turning point in the war and the beginning of the end for America. It essentially deposed U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who declined to seek re-election after 1969.
>> Le Duan and Le Duc Tho also created a police state in the North to quash dissidents who were critical of their war-first strategy. Le Duan and Le Duc Tho were both imprisoned by the French during the Inochina War and Le Duan especially took away from that experience and from the 1954 Geneva Convention that to negotiate for peace was a losing strategy and the only way to bring about unification of Vietnam was to rid the South of its American-backed government and the only way to do that was through fighting.
>> It wasn't just America that used war as a strategy to negotiate for peace. The Vietcong dragged their feet at the negotiating table and launched numerous Tet Offensive-like attacks in an attempt to topple the government in Saigon. They never succeeded but both sides tried to leverage victories in the battlefield into victories at the negotiating table.
>> Nixon's trips to China and the Soviet Union in 1972 really changed the balance of power as it became clear to the North Vietnamese that their communist allies would very likely sell them out in a bid for more normalized relations with the U.S. And China and the Soviets, whose relationship had soured in the late 1950s after disagreements on interpretations of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, did jockey to get the better position with the U.S. Nixon's trips also triggered immense anxiety in Saigon where the government there suspected that the U.S. would likely settle on a deal that would cut them out and leave them vulnerable without U.S. power to back them up.
>> Once the North Vietnamese realized they were not going to get a decisive victory on the battlefield, they launched a campaign to capitalize on anti-war sentiment in the U.S. and internationally. Nixon ended up deploying the National Guard, which fired on and killed protesters at a college campus, and Vietnam War veterans threw their military medals at the White House in protest. Stories about Nixon's "secret" bombings that expanded the war into Laos and Cambodia (the Ho Chi Minh trail, which the Vietcong used to shuffle weapons and troops from the North to the South ran through those neighboring countries) were leaked to the press and further stoked the national furor. The North Vietnamese brought Jane Fonda and Joan Baez to Hanoi to view the impact of American bombing campaigns.
>> The war caused a schism between the Vietnamese communists and the communists in Cambodia who basically felt as if the Vietnamese were treating them as Western colonizers had treated Vietnam. This growing hatred of the Vietnamese in Cambodia led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge.
This book also has me interested in learning more about the Sino-Soviet split and Cambodia. But not yet. As always after reading about this topic, I need a break.
For a great look at the Vietnam War from the Laotian perspective, I recommend Tragic Mountains by Jane Hamilton Merritt.
Mainly, she sheds light how disagreements within the Vietnamese Communist Party and the schism between the Soviet Union and China shaped the war, and argues that the North Vietnamese communists were neither mindless drones taking orders from Moscow and Beijing nor were they passive victims of American imperialism.
Some things I learned:
>> There was a split within the North Vietnamese Communists between those who wanted to bolster the economy and spread that the revolution South that way, and those who wanted to instigate all-out war in the cities of South Vietnam to provoke a "people's uprising" that would topple the American "puppet regime." The war-mongers won.
>> Le Duan and Le Duc Tho, not Ho Chih Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, were the principal decision makers of the pro-war faction and the architects of the 1968 Tet Offensive. The "people's uprising" never happened but the Tet Offensive was a turning point in the war and the beginning of the end for America. It essentially deposed U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who declined to seek re-election after 1969.
>> Le Duan and Le Duc Tho also created a police state in the North to quash dissidents who were critical of their war-first strategy. Le Duan and Le Duc Tho were both imprisoned by the French during the Inochina War and Le Duan especially took away from that experience and from the 1954 Geneva Convention that to negotiate for peace was a losing strategy and the only way to bring about unification of Vietnam was to rid the South of its American-backed government and the only way to do that was through fighting.
>> It wasn't just America that used war as a strategy to negotiate for peace. The Vietcong dragged their feet at the negotiating table and launched numerous Tet Offensive-like attacks in an attempt to topple the government in Saigon. They never succeeded but both sides tried to leverage victories in the battlefield into victories at the negotiating table.
>> Nixon's trips to China and the Soviet Union in 1972 really changed the balance of power as it became clear to the North Vietnamese that their communist allies would very likely sell them out in a bid for more normalized relations with the U.S. And China and the Soviets, whose relationship had soured in the late 1950s after disagreements on interpretations of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, did jockey to get the better position with the U.S. Nixon's trips also triggered immense anxiety in Saigon where the government there suspected that the U.S. would likely settle on a deal that would cut them out and leave them vulnerable without U.S. power to back them up.
>> Once the North Vietnamese realized they were not going to get a decisive victory on the battlefield, they launched a campaign to capitalize on anti-war sentiment in the U.S. and internationally. Nixon ended up deploying the National Guard, which fired on and killed protesters at a college campus, and Vietnam War veterans threw their military medals at the White House in protest. Stories about Nixon's "secret" bombings that expanded the war into Laos and Cambodia (the Ho Chi Minh trail, which the Vietcong used to shuffle weapons and troops from the North to the South ran through those neighboring countries) were leaked to the press and further stoked the national furor. The North Vietnamese brought Jane Fonda and Joan Baez to Hanoi to view the impact of American bombing campaigns.
>> The war caused a schism between the Vietnamese communists and the communists in Cambodia who basically felt as if the Vietnamese were treating them as Western colonizers had treated Vietnam. This growing hatred of the Vietnamese in Cambodia led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge.
This book also has me interested in learning more about the Sino-Soviet split and Cambodia. But not yet. As always after reading about this topic, I need a break.
For a great look at the Vietnam War from the Laotian perspective, I recommend Tragic Mountains by Jane Hamilton Merritt.
July 17, 2021
One of my most fav history books. Highly recommended for those interested in learning more about Vietnamese agency in the Vietnam War.
Overall impressions:
Intriguing story-telling, well-organized data, thoughtful interpretation. This book covers a wide range of aspects of the 2nd Indochina War, from the involvement of the Soviets and China in the war, different strategies employed by sides to the contextualization of the preconditions for the 3rd Indochina War as well as the political path of the most "mysterious" figure - Le Duan (I have never heard about him in the victory narratives despite the fact that he played a key role in shaping most of the decisive turnings points of the War. What's interesting is Le Duan is always known for being the best student of Bac Ho and then it turned out that he was a major force in the marginalization of Bac Ho and many other different his loyal comrades).
The storyline was developed based on the political life of Le Duan.
About the first chapter!
I've been instilled with the image of Ho Chi Minh probably since I was born. On April 30 every year, I would cry so hard because of the documentaries featuring Bac Ho. I was melted by him, more exactly by what people wanted me to know. It was not until when I joined the course in Politics in contemporary in Vietnam that I knew what I had been known was just a part of the story.
And reading this book, I knew that there were Le Duan, Truong Chinh, To Huu, and so many other political figures that I used to believe to stand in the same line with Ho Chi Minh were actually yearning for a different vision of Vietnam. The divisions that I am trying to understand now are transcended into the regime, have no longer been framed in races, regions, and social class. Who knows that within a Communist regime, there existed a division.
The more I read, the more confused and lost I become. But I love the experience. It is like, day by day, patiently, I get to know more about "Vietnam". In the recent interview with chi Linh, I was asked about my personal compass which guides my thoughts, feelings, and decisions when throwing myself into many versions of Vietnam. What I read can be different from what I knew and even disappointed and betrayed my imagination of one Vietnam I know. What is my compass? Do I have it? I'm observing myself.
Overall impressions:
Intriguing story-telling, well-organized data, thoughtful interpretation. This book covers a wide range of aspects of the 2nd Indochina War, from the involvement of the Soviets and China in the war, different strategies employed by sides to the contextualization of the preconditions for the 3rd Indochina War as well as the political path of the most "mysterious" figure - Le Duan (I have never heard about him in the victory narratives despite the fact that he played a key role in shaping most of the decisive turnings points of the War. What's interesting is Le Duan is always known for being the best student of Bac Ho and then it turned out that he was a major force in the marginalization of Bac Ho and many other different his loyal comrades).
The storyline was developed based on the political life of Le Duan.
About the first chapter!
I've been instilled with the image of Ho Chi Minh probably since I was born. On April 30 every year, I would cry so hard because of the documentaries featuring Bac Ho. I was melted by him, more exactly by what people wanted me to know. It was not until when I joined the course in Politics in contemporary in Vietnam that I knew what I had been known was just a part of the story.
And reading this book, I knew that there were Le Duan, Truong Chinh, To Huu, and so many other political figures that I used to believe to stand in the same line with Ho Chi Minh were actually yearning for a different vision of Vietnam. The divisions that I am trying to understand now are transcended into the regime, have no longer been framed in races, regions, and social class. Who knows that within a Communist regime, there existed a division.
The more I read, the more confused and lost I become. But I love the experience. It is like, day by day, patiently, I get to know more about "Vietnam". In the recent interview with chi Linh, I was asked about my personal compass which guides my thoughts, feelings, and decisions when throwing myself into many versions of Vietnam. What I read can be different from what I knew and even disappointed and betrayed my imagination of one Vietnam I know. What is my compass? Do I have it? I'm observing myself.
August 27, 2025
One sign that the US remains, for all its many faults, a liberal democracy is that literally thousands of books have been written about our experience in Vietnam, relying on open archives of memos by key decision makers and even tape recordings of Presidents and cabinet members discussing the war in real time. Meanwhile, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is a closed authoritarian society where records of decision-making from independence in 1954 through the fall of Saigon in 1975 are for the most part unavailable to scholars.
Nguyen, born in Saigon in 1974, five months before her family fled to the US, was able to crack open at least some of the key Vietnamese sources: those at the Vietnamese National Archives and, more impressively, those at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where she was the first historian of any nationality to gain access. Remarkably, the sources available included a daily chronology of the Paris negotiations between 1968 and 1973, including telegrams back and forth between Le Duan, the North Vietnamese supreme leader, and Le Duc Tho, his head negotiator.
You can sometimes feel the limits of even these sources in Nguyen’s writing; as she concedes in the introduction, she sometimes needs to “read between the lines” of heavily sanitized records to get at what, she surmises, really happened. That said, she was still able to put together an account of the war from Hanoi’s perspective that looks markedly different from Western perceptions at the time.
Some things I learned from Nguyen, both common knowledge and new observations enabled by her archival work:
* By the mid-1960s, Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, the two most famous Vietnamese Communists in the West, had been completely marginalized within party leadership. They were “North firsters” who believed in developing socialism in the North first before taking the war to the South.
* Le Duan and his close ally Le Duc Tho (the “Comrades Le”) were responsible for that marginalization. Southerners by background, they were “South firsters” who believed that unifying the country remained paramount, even if it meant a massive war with the US. The South firsters won the day, sometimes by outright purging their enemies and other times, as with Ho and Giap, by discrediting them (in Ho’s case by emphasizing times in 1945 and 1954 he had “sold out” the revolution at negotiations).
* Le Duan was a big believer in traditional, large-scale military maneuvers, with an eye toward provoking outright revolution in the South that could overthrow the government and lead to unification. This was his “General Offensive and General Uprising” philosophy.
* Eventually Le Duan attempted the “GOGO” approach not once, not twice, but three times, ending in massive failure on each occasion.
* The first try was in 1964, as an attempt to capitalize on the chaos after Ngo Dinh Diem’s death. It failed to collapse the South and take Saigon and contributed to the US decision to intervene with hundreds of thousands of troops and regular bombings of the North, which Le Duan knew was a risk and was trying to avoid.
* The second try was the Tet Offensive, which Nguyen argues was a military and political debacle for the North. It imposed massive casualties and failed at its key objective of deposing South Vietnamese dictator Nguyen Van Thieu. Yes, it led directly to a surge in antiwar sentiment in the US and LBJ stepping aside — but it thus led to Richard Nixon, who extended the war for years, imposing even greater costs on the North.
* The third try was the 1972 general offensive. At this point, Le Duan was boxed in. His aide Le Duc Tho had been negotiating with US officials in Paris for the better part of four years. The US president was making historic visits to both China and the Soviet Union, and in light of the thaws in these relationships, the North’s backers in Moscow and Beijing were urging it to make a deal in Paris sooner rather than later. Le Duan knew a deal wouldn’t topple Saigon, leaving a last-ditch military effort as his only shot.
* The 1972 offensive, of course, failed to topple the South, forcing Le Duan to give into his great power backers’ wishes and instruct Le Duc Tho to, finally, make a deal with Kissinger in Paris. Luckily for the North, by this point intense domestic antiwar sentiment, and the momentum of Vietnamization (which made military alternatives to a deal unthinkable to the US) meant that Kissinger was willing to almost totally abandon Thieu and the South, and agreed to a deal that left North Vietnamese troops in the South while arranging US withdrawal.
* Le Duan was able to hold onto power until his death in 1986, which was a positive turning point for the country — his successors adopted perestroika-style economic reforms and laid the foundation for Vietnam’s current prosperity, which Le Duan’s orthodox Marxism-Leninism had prevented from developing.
Nguyen, obviously, does not hold Le Duan in very high regard, and more or less openly wishes that Ho and Giap had been in control of the state instead (“It is worth contemplating how Hanoi’s war would have been different had Ho and Giap been in charge”). But she comes by that judgment honestly. If there’s a single major takeaway from the book, it’s that the war was chosen both in Hanoi and Washington. The US, of course, did not need to intervene in the extreme and horrendously damaging way it did. But the North did not need to order and fuel a Southern insurgency either, and it certainly did not need to complement that insurgency with more conventional operations like Tet that hurt itself as much as the enemy.
One small detail that took me out: on April 3, 1968, the North finally agreed to talk to the US in Paris. The next day, MLK Jr. was murdered in Memphis. Zhou Enlai, a week or so later, literally argued that the North agreeing to talk caused King’s death, telling Northern premier Pham Van Dong, ““Had your statement been issued one or two days later, the murder might have been stopped.” I don’t understand, on a basic mechanical level, how that could even possibly be true.
Nguyen, born in Saigon in 1974, five months before her family fled to the US, was able to crack open at least some of the key Vietnamese sources: those at the Vietnamese National Archives and, more impressively, those at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where she was the first historian of any nationality to gain access. Remarkably, the sources available included a daily chronology of the Paris negotiations between 1968 and 1973, including telegrams back and forth between Le Duan, the North Vietnamese supreme leader, and Le Duc Tho, his head negotiator.
You can sometimes feel the limits of even these sources in Nguyen’s writing; as she concedes in the introduction, she sometimes needs to “read between the lines” of heavily sanitized records to get at what, she surmises, really happened. That said, she was still able to put together an account of the war from Hanoi’s perspective that looks markedly different from Western perceptions at the time.
Some things I learned from Nguyen, both common knowledge and new observations enabled by her archival work:
* By the mid-1960s, Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, the two most famous Vietnamese Communists in the West, had been completely marginalized within party leadership. They were “North firsters” who believed in developing socialism in the North first before taking the war to the South.
* Le Duan and his close ally Le Duc Tho (the “Comrades Le”) were responsible for that marginalization. Southerners by background, they were “South firsters” who believed that unifying the country remained paramount, even if it meant a massive war with the US. The South firsters won the day, sometimes by outright purging their enemies and other times, as with Ho and Giap, by discrediting them (in Ho’s case by emphasizing times in 1945 and 1954 he had “sold out” the revolution at negotiations).
* Le Duan was a big believer in traditional, large-scale military maneuvers, with an eye toward provoking outright revolution in the South that could overthrow the government and lead to unification. This was his “General Offensive and General Uprising” philosophy.
* Eventually Le Duan attempted the “GOGO” approach not once, not twice, but three times, ending in massive failure on each occasion.
* The first try was in 1964, as an attempt to capitalize on the chaos after Ngo Dinh Diem’s death. It failed to collapse the South and take Saigon and contributed to the US decision to intervene with hundreds of thousands of troops and regular bombings of the North, which Le Duan knew was a risk and was trying to avoid.
* The second try was the Tet Offensive, which Nguyen argues was a military and political debacle for the North. It imposed massive casualties and failed at its key objective of deposing South Vietnamese dictator Nguyen Van Thieu. Yes, it led directly to a surge in antiwar sentiment in the US and LBJ stepping aside — but it thus led to Richard Nixon, who extended the war for years, imposing even greater costs on the North.
* The third try was the 1972 general offensive. At this point, Le Duan was boxed in. His aide Le Duc Tho had been negotiating with US officials in Paris for the better part of four years. The US president was making historic visits to both China and the Soviet Union, and in light of the thaws in these relationships, the North’s backers in Moscow and Beijing were urging it to make a deal in Paris sooner rather than later. Le Duan knew a deal wouldn’t topple Saigon, leaving a last-ditch military effort as his only shot.
* The 1972 offensive, of course, failed to topple the South, forcing Le Duan to give into his great power backers’ wishes and instruct Le Duc Tho to, finally, make a deal with Kissinger in Paris. Luckily for the North, by this point intense domestic antiwar sentiment, and the momentum of Vietnamization (which made military alternatives to a deal unthinkable to the US) meant that Kissinger was willing to almost totally abandon Thieu and the South, and agreed to a deal that left North Vietnamese troops in the South while arranging US withdrawal.
* Le Duan was able to hold onto power until his death in 1986, which was a positive turning point for the country — his successors adopted perestroika-style economic reforms and laid the foundation for Vietnam’s current prosperity, which Le Duan’s orthodox Marxism-Leninism had prevented from developing.
Nguyen, obviously, does not hold Le Duan in very high regard, and more or less openly wishes that Ho and Giap had been in control of the state instead (“It is worth contemplating how Hanoi’s war would have been different had Ho and Giap been in charge”). But she comes by that judgment honestly. If there’s a single major takeaway from the book, it’s that the war was chosen both in Hanoi and Washington. The US, of course, did not need to intervene in the extreme and horrendously damaging way it did. But the North did not need to order and fuel a Southern insurgency either, and it certainly did not need to complement that insurgency with more conventional operations like Tet that hurt itself as much as the enemy.
One small detail that took me out: on April 3, 1968, the North finally agreed to talk to the US in Paris. The next day, MLK Jr. was murdered in Memphis. Zhou Enlai, a week or so later, literally argued that the North agreeing to talk caused King’s death, telling Northern premier Pham Van Dong, ““Had your statement been issued one or two days later, the murder might have been stopped.” I don’t understand, on a basic mechanical level, how that could even possibly be true.
July 13, 2019
Erudite and detailed, Hanoi's War delineates the bedrock of "The American War," as it is termed in Vietnam. However, it's an incredibly tedious book constructed of plodding, leaden prose. If you treat it like a textbook, you'll probably be fine. Anything else, not. It's likely a good book to flip around with and cherry pick a chapter here or there.
September 28, 2020
It took me a while to finish this book, because I actually started reading the first half while teaching a course on the Vietnam Wars at UNC-Chapel Hill prior to the pandemic starting. I've just now gotten the time to finish it with a close read. Lien-Hang T. Nguyen's work on the political and diplomatic history surrounding the Vietnam Wars (plural here to encompass both the French and American-led war efforts to sustain "South Vietnam") is perhaps one of the most enlightening and groundbreaking books I've read on the war in several years.
Much of her originality comes from her source base—Nguyen received unprecedented access to communist archives in Hanoi, where shew as able to pore over never before seen documents related to Hanoi's (North Vietnam's) war effort from the French-Indochina War until the collapse of Saigon in 1975. The result is a book pregnant with insight about how the United States essentially played into a Game of Thrones-esque political environment of competing interests between Saigon, Hanoi, Beijing, and Moscow. Each large and small player in this drama made it almost inevitable that the question of achieving "peace" in Indochina would come by the sword.
There is a poignant moment in the PBS miniseries The Vietnam War, perhaps in Episode II or III, where Defense Secretary Robert McNamara is informing President Johnson that Ho Chi Minh did not have perhaps as much control as the Americans suspected in Hanoi, as he lost political ground and power to a mysterious figure named Le Duan. Nguyen's book charts Le Duan's rise to power in an illuminating way, showing how through chicanery and brute force he climbed his way to the top of the Hanoi Politburo as its General Secretary and sidelined Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap through various machinations and blackmail. Once in power, Le Duan realized that the best way to take care of domestic turmoil within North Vietnam—largely due to unsuccessful and bloody collectivization schemes during the late-1950s and early-1960s—was to create a distraction by waging war in South Vietnam for National Unification. Thus, from 1963 onward, Le Duan pursued the elusive goal of a General Uprising - General Offensive (GO-GU) that he thought would force the Americans out of Indochina by toppling the Saigon regime suddenly and thoroughly through a combination of offensive military campaigns, psy-ops, and political subversion and assassination. The Americans were happy to oblige by increasing the scale of violence tit-for-tat throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, ever afraid of "losing face" on the international scene in its broader Cold War with the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.
Another intriguing aspect of the book occurs in the final three chapters, detailing the tortuous process of peace negotiations in Paris between Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho. In short, Nguyen demonstrates how these peace negotiations were not necessarily prolonged because of American "bad faith," but because each principal actor (Hanoi, Saigon, and Washington, as well as, Beijing and Moscow on the periphery) perceived better outcomes through prolonged talks. Even toward the end, when Washington and Hanoi were on the cusp of achieving peace in the Fall of 1972, the American-backed leader in South Vietnam, Nguyen Van Thieu, became obstinate in an attempt to "hold out" for better terms. His intransigence, combined with further diplomatic sabotage from Hanoi, convinced Nixon that the infamous "Christmas Bombing" campaign was warranted to end the war immediately. Nguyen concludes that the Christmas Bombing was a strategic defeat for Hanoi, whose leadership wanted to avoid the resumption of American bombing at all costs, a political defeat for Nixon who became equated with a bloodthirsty tyrant, but an all over victory for Thieu who likely gained three years from the crushing blow American bombs dealt to Hanoi's military infrastructure.
This is a great book, but definitely one catered to experts in the field and other scholars. Nguyen does not have the most accessible writing style—parts are extremely dense either by requiring background knowledge about the war or because of the level of intricate detail that must be followed—as evidenced by the frustration my undergraduates experienced trying to "slog" through the first 150 pages last year. But, for those with an abiding interest in America's intervention in Indochina, this is an extremely important work to read and consider.
Much of her originality comes from her source base—Nguyen received unprecedented access to communist archives in Hanoi, where shew as able to pore over never before seen documents related to Hanoi's (North Vietnam's) war effort from the French-Indochina War until the collapse of Saigon in 1975. The result is a book pregnant with insight about how the United States essentially played into a Game of Thrones-esque political environment of competing interests between Saigon, Hanoi, Beijing, and Moscow. Each large and small player in this drama made it almost inevitable that the question of achieving "peace" in Indochina would come by the sword.
There is a poignant moment in the PBS miniseries The Vietnam War, perhaps in Episode II or III, where Defense Secretary Robert McNamara is informing President Johnson that Ho Chi Minh did not have perhaps as much control as the Americans suspected in Hanoi, as he lost political ground and power to a mysterious figure named Le Duan. Nguyen's book charts Le Duan's rise to power in an illuminating way, showing how through chicanery and brute force he climbed his way to the top of the Hanoi Politburo as its General Secretary and sidelined Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap through various machinations and blackmail. Once in power, Le Duan realized that the best way to take care of domestic turmoil within North Vietnam—largely due to unsuccessful and bloody collectivization schemes during the late-1950s and early-1960s—was to create a distraction by waging war in South Vietnam for National Unification. Thus, from 1963 onward, Le Duan pursued the elusive goal of a General Uprising - General Offensive (GO-GU) that he thought would force the Americans out of Indochina by toppling the Saigon regime suddenly and thoroughly through a combination of offensive military campaigns, psy-ops, and political subversion and assassination. The Americans were happy to oblige by increasing the scale of violence tit-for-tat throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, ever afraid of "losing face" on the international scene in its broader Cold War with the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.
Another intriguing aspect of the book occurs in the final three chapters, detailing the tortuous process of peace negotiations in Paris between Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho. In short, Nguyen demonstrates how these peace negotiations were not necessarily prolonged because of American "bad faith," but because each principal actor (Hanoi, Saigon, and Washington, as well as, Beijing and Moscow on the periphery) perceived better outcomes through prolonged talks. Even toward the end, when Washington and Hanoi were on the cusp of achieving peace in the Fall of 1972, the American-backed leader in South Vietnam, Nguyen Van Thieu, became obstinate in an attempt to "hold out" for better terms. His intransigence, combined with further diplomatic sabotage from Hanoi, convinced Nixon that the infamous "Christmas Bombing" campaign was warranted to end the war immediately. Nguyen concludes that the Christmas Bombing was a strategic defeat for Hanoi, whose leadership wanted to avoid the resumption of American bombing at all costs, a political defeat for Nixon who became equated with a bloodthirsty tyrant, but an all over victory for Thieu who likely gained three years from the crushing blow American bombs dealt to Hanoi's military infrastructure.
This is a great book, but definitely one catered to experts in the field and other scholars. Nguyen does not have the most accessible writing style—parts are extremely dense either by requiring background knowledge about the war or because of the level of intricate detail that must be followed—as evidenced by the frustration my undergraduates experienced trying to "slog" through the first 150 pages last year. But, for those with an abiding interest in America's intervention in Indochina, this is an extremely important work to read and consider.
March 6, 2018
I first learned of “Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam” when I read an interview with Lien-Hang T. Nguyen in Vietnam Magazine. (http://www.historynet.com/interview-l... obligatory disclosure: at the time I was web editor for the company that publishes Vietnam Magazine. I am including this link because the interview addresses some issues raised by other reviewers.) I finally read the book recently, immediately after reading “The Pentagon Papers.” Combined, those two books provide excellent insight into what the thinking was in Washington and Hanoi and into some of the personalities involved. The sheer number of sources cited in “Hanoi’s War” is impressive, and I appreciate the places in the footnotes where the author points readers to sources that offer a different view than the one she presents.
The book began as a grad-school thesis and its writing style is often dry, but this is a book to read for its information, not as a page-turner. The most “human” parts of it concern Le Duan’s second wife, Nguyen Thuy Nga, taken from her unpublished memoir (he wed her without ending his first marriage and thus forced his second wife into second-class status in North Vietnam), and the fate of Hoang Minh Chinh (interviewed by the author), who was imprisoned “for most of my life” for criticizing Le Duan’s tilt toward Maoist revolutionary theory instead of “peaceful coexistence.”
For me, the two most useful elements of “Hanoi’s War” are: 1. the information on the extent of Le Duan’s control of the Vietnamese Communist Party, his sidelining of Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, and his almost-unshakable belief in the General Offensive–General Uprising theory of war; 2. the byzantine political machinations between Hanoi, Beijing and Moscow as well as what Nguyen presents as President Richard Nixon’s use of detente with the major Communist powers in order to pressure them to encourage Hanoi to negotiate. As the author acknowledges, a full picture can’t be assembled until more of Hanoi’s documents are made accessible to researchers. Regardless, she has made a valuable contribution to Vietnam War-Cold War literature with this book.
A number of reviewers have complained that the book focuses too much on the period 1968–73. In the Vietnam Magazine interview, Nguyen says, “The 1968 to 1973 period really interested me because I was trained in diplomatic history and wanted to focus on the peace negotiations in Paris. One of the big questions of the day was the extent of the Chinese and Soviet roles in the war and whether they had pressured North Vietnam to settle.“
In short, I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting a broader view of the tragedy that was the Vietnam War—a tragedy for all concerned—and I recommend consulting its extensive bibliography for an even wider view. Nguyen says she wants to write a complete history of the war “and this time pay more attention to Saigon.” I hope she does; I’ll be among the first to buy it.
This review originally appeared on Amazon.com
The book began as a grad-school thesis and its writing style is often dry, but this is a book to read for its information, not as a page-turner. The most “human” parts of it concern Le Duan’s second wife, Nguyen Thuy Nga, taken from her unpublished memoir (he wed her without ending his first marriage and thus forced his second wife into second-class status in North Vietnam), and the fate of Hoang Minh Chinh (interviewed by the author), who was imprisoned “for most of my life” for criticizing Le Duan’s tilt toward Maoist revolutionary theory instead of “peaceful coexistence.”
For me, the two most useful elements of “Hanoi’s War” are: 1. the information on the extent of Le Duan’s control of the Vietnamese Communist Party, his sidelining of Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, and his almost-unshakable belief in the General Offensive–General Uprising theory of war; 2. the byzantine political machinations between Hanoi, Beijing and Moscow as well as what Nguyen presents as President Richard Nixon’s use of detente with the major Communist powers in order to pressure them to encourage Hanoi to negotiate. As the author acknowledges, a full picture can’t be assembled until more of Hanoi’s documents are made accessible to researchers. Regardless, she has made a valuable contribution to Vietnam War-Cold War literature with this book.
A number of reviewers have complained that the book focuses too much on the period 1968–73. In the Vietnam Magazine interview, Nguyen says, “The 1968 to 1973 period really interested me because I was trained in diplomatic history and wanted to focus on the peace negotiations in Paris. One of the big questions of the day was the extent of the Chinese and Soviet roles in the war and whether they had pressured North Vietnam to settle.“
In short, I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting a broader view of the tragedy that was the Vietnam War—a tragedy for all concerned—and I recommend consulting its extensive bibliography for an even wider view. Nguyen says she wants to write a complete history of the war “and this time pay more attention to Saigon.” I hope she does; I’ll be among the first to buy it.
This review originally appeared on Amazon.com
April 14, 2021
Most of the scholarship on - what is known in the US as - the Vietnam War privileges the US and their motivations/objectives while ignoring or marginalizing the perspective of the Worker's Party of Vietnam. So a book that focuses on the internal dynamics/debates and point of view of the latter is undoubtedly refreshing.
After the victory of Vietnamese communists over French colonialists, the country was artificially split in two. How to proceed split the North Vietnamese into two camps: (1) there were those who preferred to focus on consolidating their revolutionary gains and use the country’s resources to develop socialism in the North and (2) those who wanted to get directly involved in the South in order to achieve reunification.
According to the author, the second group won through persuasion, political maneuvering, and repression though the terror unleashed by Ngo Dinh Diem on Southern communists certainly played a role in the North's decision to launch a military campaign. Perhaps the most eye-opening revelation in the book, to me at least, was the effective marginalization of comrade Ho Chi Minh - the international face of Vietnam’s revolution - by Le Duan, who then proceeded to centralized all decision-making vis-à-vis the war.
The book has a hyper-focus on Le Duan. He was determined to topple the Western-backed regime in Saigon and launched a major offensive in 1963 with the additional goal of pre-empting the Americanization of the conflict. It failed, as did other large offensives in 1968 and 1972. This led Le Duan to take a negotiated solution more seriously, and this became even more urgent after Richard Nixon sought rapprochement with both China and the Soviet Union.
The book ends prematurely, in my opinion, with the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords and the subsequent withdrawal of US troops. This is unfortunate because not only were the Accords immediately broken, but it provides no insight on North Vietnamese strategy post-US withdrawal and the successful liberation of Saigon just two years later.
After the victory of Vietnamese communists over French colonialists, the country was artificially split in two. How to proceed split the North Vietnamese into two camps: (1) there were those who preferred to focus on consolidating their revolutionary gains and use the country’s resources to develop socialism in the North and (2) those who wanted to get directly involved in the South in order to achieve reunification.
According to the author, the second group won through persuasion, political maneuvering, and repression though the terror unleashed by Ngo Dinh Diem on Southern communists certainly played a role in the North's decision to launch a military campaign. Perhaps the most eye-opening revelation in the book, to me at least, was the effective marginalization of comrade Ho Chi Minh - the international face of Vietnam’s revolution - by Le Duan, who then proceeded to centralized all decision-making vis-à-vis the war.
The book has a hyper-focus on Le Duan. He was determined to topple the Western-backed regime in Saigon and launched a major offensive in 1963 with the additional goal of pre-empting the Americanization of the conflict. It failed, as did other large offensives in 1968 and 1972. This led Le Duan to take a negotiated solution more seriously, and this became even more urgent after Richard Nixon sought rapprochement with both China and the Soviet Union.
The book ends prematurely, in my opinion, with the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords and the subsequent withdrawal of US troops. This is unfortunate because not only were the Accords immediately broken, but it provides no insight on North Vietnamese strategy post-US withdrawal and the successful liberation of Saigon just two years later.
November 23, 2024
4.5 stars. This is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the American/Vietnam War. Hanoi's War makes a major contribution to the literature by making use of North Vietnamese primary sources and interviews with contemporary Vietnamese officials to tell a familiar story from the perspective of high-level North Vietnamese decision-makers.
Hang does an awesome job of not only highlighting the debates and disagreements within the Vietnamese Politburo - and the central role of Le Duan therein - but also of placing Vietnam's "small-power diplomacy" in the context of the Sino-Soviet split. The picture of the war that emerges is one where the Vietnamese are active agents in their own history rather than passive victims of Western Imperialism.
In this telling, there is a schism within the North Vietnamese leadership. Le Duan ultimately side-lines Ho Chi Minh and advocates a contentious strategy of "General Uprising-General Offensive" in an attempt to topple the regime in Saigon and thus force a fait accompli on the Americans. This strategy was behind the Tet Offensive which, in this telling, was a costly failure that was genuinely intended to topple to the Saigon regime rather than to just weaken US public support for the war.
The author does a great job of telling a familiar story from Hanoi's perspective, and in so doing nicely weaves in the impact of the Sino-Soviet split on Vietnam War effort.
At times, the book gets a little too in-the-weeds as it follows the twists and turns of the Paris negotiations - ground which has been covered elsewhere and which probably could have been streamlined somewhat here - but on the whole this is a highly readable account (there are some great anecdotes about Kissinger though, who emerges as a conniving jerk who manages to piss off Nixon, the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese). This book does assume some prior knowledge of the war, however, so it may not be an appropriate first book on the subject. Highly recommended.
Hang does an awesome job of not only highlighting the debates and disagreements within the Vietnamese Politburo - and the central role of Le Duan therein - but also of placing Vietnam's "small-power diplomacy" in the context of the Sino-Soviet split. The picture of the war that emerges is one where the Vietnamese are active agents in their own history rather than passive victims of Western Imperialism.
In this telling, there is a schism within the North Vietnamese leadership. Le Duan ultimately side-lines Ho Chi Minh and advocates a contentious strategy of "General Uprising-General Offensive" in an attempt to topple the regime in Saigon and thus force a fait accompli on the Americans. This strategy was behind the Tet Offensive which, in this telling, was a costly failure that was genuinely intended to topple to the Saigon regime rather than to just weaken US public support for the war.
The author does a great job of telling a familiar story from Hanoi's perspective, and in so doing nicely weaves in the impact of the Sino-Soviet split on Vietnam War effort.
At times, the book gets a little too in-the-weeds as it follows the twists and turns of the Paris negotiations - ground which has been covered elsewhere and which probably could have been streamlined somewhat here - but on the whole this is a highly readable account (there are some great anecdotes about Kissinger though, who emerges as a conniving jerk who manages to piss off Nixon, the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese). This book does assume some prior knowledge of the war, however, so it may not be an appropriate first book on the subject. Highly recommended.
January 27, 2025
4.25 ⭐️
In many ways, the American public's perception of Vietnam is stuck in the early 1970s, overly preoccupied with the context of the American involvement in the war. Thankfully, the 21st century has given rise to what's called the 'Vietnamese turn': an increase in scholarship around the 1955-1975 period that prioritizes Vietnamese perspectives. Hanoi's War is part of this.
Through unprecedented access to internal Vietnamese documents from this time period, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen details the 1960s and early 1970s primarily from the point of view of North Vietnam, increasingly including perspectives from the Nixon administration, South Vietnamese leadership, China, and the Soviet Union as we get closer to the 1973 Paris Peace Accords. More than anything, this book teaches you that everyone had their own agenda and ulterior motives when it came to how the war played out, and no one was merely a puppet of the US government (as much as longstanding narratives about the South would like to convince you otherwise).
4 stars because the writing occasionally got repetitive and could have been streamlined. I have a feeling this is simply a consequence of academic writing standards (this is an academic piece of nonfiction, after all, and each chapter is structured as such). Otherwise, I highly recommend this to anyone who's interested in learning more deeply about this time period. It's time for many Americans to decenter themselves in the historical record of these global conflicts, not to absolve the war crimes and other atrocities that took place at our government's command, but to respect the agency and decision-making of the Vietnamese north and south of the 17th parallel.
In many ways, the American public's perception of Vietnam is stuck in the early 1970s, overly preoccupied with the context of the American involvement in the war. Thankfully, the 21st century has given rise to what's called the 'Vietnamese turn': an increase in scholarship around the 1955-1975 period that prioritizes Vietnamese perspectives. Hanoi's War is part of this.
Through unprecedented access to internal Vietnamese documents from this time period, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen details the 1960s and early 1970s primarily from the point of view of North Vietnam, increasingly including perspectives from the Nixon administration, South Vietnamese leadership, China, and the Soviet Union as we get closer to the 1973 Paris Peace Accords. More than anything, this book teaches you that everyone had their own agenda and ulterior motives when it came to how the war played out, and no one was merely a puppet of the US government (as much as longstanding narratives about the South would like to convince you otherwise).
4 stars because the writing occasionally got repetitive and could have been streamlined. I have a feeling this is simply a consequence of academic writing standards (this is an academic piece of nonfiction, after all, and each chapter is structured as such). Otherwise, I highly recommend this to anyone who's interested in learning more deeply about this time period. It's time for many Americans to decenter themselves in the historical record of these global conflicts, not to absolve the war crimes and other atrocities that took place at our government's command, but to respect the agency and decision-making of the Vietnamese north and south of the 17th parallel.
January 2, 2026
Great book unearthing a critically overlooked perspective of the vietnam war which is the perspective of the vietnamese themselves, particularly, the north, and their diplomatic maneuvers. The attempt of the north vietnamese to square the circle of maoist use of combat over diplomacy early on combined with soviet military doctrine of coordinated urban strikes to quickly win the war is an interesting microcosm of how junior cold war players utilized great power dynamics such as the sino soviet split to nationalize ideological imperatives.
I think what is clear is that the sino soviet split was a great travesty to the cause of international communism, perhaps only second to the defeat of the german revolution. Another obvious lesson is that where the “left” were correct in attempting national liberation of the whole of vietnam over just prioritizing the economic development of the north, the “right” were clearly right that a guerrilla war combined with a more emphatic use of diplomacy early was a less bloody way to achieve what eventually ended up being achieved as the mass assaults and attempts insurrections resurrections failed and undid any economic progress made in the north.
I think what is clear is that the sino soviet split was a great travesty to the cause of international communism, perhaps only second to the defeat of the german revolution. Another obvious lesson is that where the “left” were correct in attempting national liberation of the whole of vietnam over just prioritizing the economic development of the north, the “right” were clearly right that a guerrilla war combined with a more emphatic use of diplomacy early was a less bloody way to achieve what eventually ended up being achieved as the mass assaults and attempts insurrections resurrections failed and undid any economic progress made in the north.
December 5, 2021
A very interesting perspective as opposed to the usual (biased) views one finds in so many obtainable US (and western) books on the subject. It's not that they're all wrong. It's just that you're getting one side, but there were other players obviously, so it's interesting to get other perspectives. And for those who have an issue with my saying that, I'd like to remind you that just because the people we encountered and battled for far too long were are enemy, the US lost a mere 56,000 fatal casualties (sad and too many, but inevitable in protracted wars), the it's unknown how many Vietnamese were killed, but most experts have long agreed it's easily in the millions, ranging from one to two and a half million,which almost makes US losses look like tiddly winks in comparison. With all due respect. Very recommended.
April 4, 2025
Important book to help us all better understand the end of the Second Indochina War from the perspective of the Vietnamese leaders. It deeply complicates all normative understandings of the war from the media and other broader history textbooks. It places a spotlight on the many many internal conflicts within the Vietnamese leadership and their tumultuous relationships with the U.S., China, and the Soviet Union. It’s all very complicated and nuanced. The book is filled with details, almost too much for someone (me) whose capacity for information retention on this topic is quite low, but I still think it was well worth the read. But do not go into this expecting a breezy retelling of events. Expect an extremely minute explanation of diplomacy behind the war in all of its phases. It’s dense, but ultimately necessary. There were no pawns in this war. No true victors either.
February 5, 2018
An interesting take on the North Vietnamese side of the strategic history of the war in Vietnam, given that like most people my reading focuses on the American side. Uses the career of te comparatively little known Le Duan as the filter to the evolution of NV strategy and statemaking. I would suspect that since nearly all the important North Vietnamese archives are still sealed that this is a worthwhile provisional statement about the complexities of internal politics in the north, not the final word. I should also say that while I can appreciate the work that went into this, diplomatic history is not my favorite branch of the discipline.
February 13, 2018
This was a very interesting book and presented how the North Vietnamese government fell into a ground war in the south in similar fashion to the USA, by lying to the people and suppressing the opposition. Although they had a more vocal opposition and their suppression was more physical and less psychological then here. The author was obviously a supporter of the south and so some of her observation are prejudice. It also becomes repetitious after a while...but well worth reading to get the point of view of the how the north got involved in as ground war with the USA.
September 19, 2024
Basically a political biography of Le Duc Tho and Le Duan.
Le Duan's life is basically super secretive. It would have been nice to hear more about his family. The struggle between his first and second wives basically drove the conflict in the beginning of the book. I really could have used more of that and less of Henry Kissinger trying to convince Le Duc Tho that America was negotiating in good faith. The North Vietnamese had a habit of feeling burned by bad faith negotiations. It does not cover the period of time after the negotiations with America and the Fall of Saigon.
Le Duan's life is basically super secretive. It would have been nice to hear more about his family. The struggle between his first and second wives basically drove the conflict in the beginning of the book. I really could have used more of that and less of Henry Kissinger trying to convince Le Duc Tho that America was negotiating in good faith. The North Vietnamese had a habit of feeling burned by bad faith negotiations. It does not cover the period of time after the negotiations with America and the Fall of Saigon.
October 30, 2020
Next level read
Lien-Hang T Nguyen offers a rare glimpse into an opponents decision making in war. Her research should help calibrate historians and soldiers as to the nature of conflict. Concise and clarifying. The book does require a background on the conflict and past literature on the war to truly appreciate.
Lien-Hang T Nguyen offers a rare glimpse into an opponents decision making in war. Her research should help calibrate historians and soldiers as to the nature of conflict. Concise and clarifying. The book does require a background on the conflict and past literature on the war to truly appreciate.
August 6, 2021
I don't know much about the Vietnam war, and I'm not American either, so I can't say if this book really brings new perspectives to the table. However, I think this book works as a standalone introduction to the war, even though its focus is perhaps a bit unconventional. Despite being titled "Hanoi's War", this book captures the international context very well. It is truly an "International History" in that it both explores the war from the perspective of North Vietnamese as well as places it within the greater international conflict (or should I say, the complex web of relationships between superpowers and their allies).
Some reviewers have mentioned how tedious it was to get through this book. I somewhat agree. The level of detail is sometimes excessive, making "Hanoi's War" hard to follow at times. Remembering all the names and acronyms was even harder given that I listened to the audiobook. However, I can't say I was bored while listening, perhaps specifically because I had to hold all the context in my brain.
Some reviewers have mentioned how tedious it was to get through this book. I somewhat agree. The level of detail is sometimes excessive, making "Hanoi's War" hard to follow at times. Remembering all the names and acronyms was even harder given that I listened to the audiobook. However, I can't say I was bored while listening, perhaps specifically because I had to hold all the context in my brain.
February 22, 2025
The main thing I got from this was "no wonder I (and most people I know) have never understood the Vietnam war."
It was inconsistent, and confusing even when it was happening
It's still clear that the United States never should have gone to war in Vietnam. However, nothing about the war was straightforward was what I got from this book
It was inconsistent, and confusing even when it was happening
It's still clear that the United States never should have gone to war in Vietnam. However, nothing about the war was straightforward was what I got from this book
May 16, 2025
Learnt more about the failures of both sides when conducting the war and the struggles in the background. I would love to learn more about the North Vietnamese side but alas, the documents provided by the governments will never be sufficiently released.
December 8, 2025
It was a great book overall! Very insightful and provides a lot of important and detailed information. I will warn readers though this is one of those history books that reads like a textbook. That’s the only reason I took off a star. Heavily recommend nonetheless.
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May 12, 2021read for a class :)
September 29, 2024
A masterpiece, what feels like a life’s work
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