During the Vietnam War, the “Third Force” was a term assigned to individuals and groups in South Vietnamese politics who were presumably neither communist nor anti-communist and who advocated a peaceful solution to the civil war between communist North and anti-communist South Vietnam.
Tuong Vu
During the Vietnam War, the ‘Third Force’ was a broad term assigned to individuals and groups in South Vietnamese politics who were presumably neither Communist nor anti-Communist and who advocated a peaceful solution to the civil war between Communist North and anti-Communist South Vietnam. Individuals associated with this political tendency were ideologically diverse: some rejected the polarization of politics based on humanitarian, nationalist, or religious values; others were simply against war and foreign intervention. Some were sympathetic to, or even closet members of the Communist Party. Many were incumbent or former government officials of the Republic of Vietnam. A significant number were religious figures and university students. Many others were professionals who had thriving careers. Many had political ambitions, and would have been successful politicians in a democracy.
And yet they did not succeed and some paid a steep price for their political activism. Many were physically harassed or even persecuted by the Saigon government, which suspected them of being Communist agents (Huynh Tan Mam, a prominent student and ‘Third Force’ leader, is an example of a Communist agent under cover). Presumably most were not card-carrying Communist Party members. During the war, the Hanoi-directed National Liberation Front worked hard to court their sympathies and provided secret support for their activities. After the war, most were quickly cast aside as cadres sent in from Hanoi to run the government in the South. Some were even imprisoned or placed under house arrest if they expressed any criticisms, like the case of Father Chan Tin. Many fled to the West, like the student leader Doan Van Toai, only to be denounced by the overseas Vietnamese community, who were predominantly composed of refugees and victims of Hanoi and who blamed them for the loss of South Vietnam.
The story of the Third Force is one of dashed hopes, ruined lives and careers, unrealized ideals and ambitions, betrayals (by Hanoi) and ostracism (by many of their Southern compatriots), and other similarly dire consequences. For all their activism, these individuals did not bring peace or development to Vietnam. (Peace and development for Vietnam began only when Hanoi’s leaders abandoned their revolutionary ambitions in the late 1980s just as world Communism collapsed around them). In hindsight, their greatest historical achievement seems to be in the last days of the war, helping to bring about a quick end, with President Duong Van Minh’s order for the South Vietnamese army to surrender rather than keep on fighting. Duong Van Minh was a prominent, if mediocre, politician associated with the Third Force, and his three-day cabinet was staffed with people of similar tendencies, such as Assembly member Ly Qui Chung. To the extent that the activities of Third Force associates are known, they also serve as inspiring, if tragic, evidence and reminder of a vibrant civil society under the Republic of Vietnam that was crushed after 1975 but that is reviving today.
Sophie Quinn-Judge must be commended for her efforts to write about these long-forgotten individuals as a significant force in South Vietnamese politics during the war. This study is perhaps the first scholarly work in English that focuses on them, four decades after they were forced to disband and denied any political role by the victorious Communists in 1975. For all the tragedies that befell them, they deserve sympathy and understanding, which Quinn-Judge clearly displays throughout the book. She aims to “search for local forces that supported these moves toward peace.” In her words, “we need to look at the Vietnamese and their politics as something more complex than the story of communists versus nationalists; or American puppets versus pawns of the communist bloc” (3).
The book relies on a variety of sources, including archival documents from France, the United Kingdom, the U.S., and Vietnam (and occasional documents from the Hungarian and Soviet archives); interviews with a few Third Force individuals such as Assembly member Ho Ngoc Nhuan, student leader Nguyen Huu Thai, Professor Ly Chanh Trung, and the social activist Doan Thanh Liem; memoirs by those individuals and other participants; and many works that have been published in Vietnam since the end of the war. To make her arguments, Quinn-Judge frequently invokes counterfactuals even though at the beginning she declares that “rather than engaging in a counterfactual exercise [about the missed opportunities for peace]…, I would like to record as objectively as possible the dilemmas of the leaders in the middle ground [who advocated peace]” (5). However, counterfactual arguments creep in; here are just a few examples:
[O]ne could posit that a war-weary DRV would not have intervened militarily in the South, if the communists there had been allowed access to a democratic political process after 1954. (5)
If we [Americans] could have foreseen the huge price that our Vietnamese allies would pay, not to mention the sacrifices of so many young Americans, the chances are that we would have examined options for peace more carefully. And had we stopped … (7)
Had [American leaders] looked a little bit more deeply, we might have had more faith in the Vietnamese capacity to settle their affairs (10).
The [draconian] communist policies implemented after 1975 were in my view not inevitable; had a peaceful political solution be implemented earlier, had there been a serious effort to make the Paris Agreement work, the end of the Vietnam War might have been much different. (190)
The book follows a chronological order that begins with the colonial period, followed by politics in the First Republic under President Ngo Dinh Diem when the earliest initiatives for a neutral South Vietnam were proposed; politics in Hanoi that became radicalized during the 1950s; the Buddhist and antiwar movements in the South in the 1960s; various political opposition groups in the Second Republic under President Nguyen Van Thieu; and the events immediately after reunification. As the back cover explains, “[a] unique contribution of this study is the interweaving of developments in South Vietnamese politics with changes in the balance of power in Hanoi; both of the Vietnamese [governments] are shown to evolve towards greater rigidity as the war progresses, while the US grows increasingly committed to President Thieu in Saigon, after the election of Richard Nixon.”
As this quotation suggests, the chronological approach with great emphasis on larger developments beyond South Vietnam has its strengths. The narrative gives a sense of natural flow in which the chance for peace apparently shrank over time, leading to its logical outcome: a military conquest of the South by the North. The approach leads Quinn-Judge to place the blame on the Americans and the Chinese, who appear in the study as the main culprits. In terms of the two Vietnamese rivals, she dismisses the Saigon government as an American creation (2, 156) while showing Hanoi leaders as having acted under Chinese pressure to wage a war (61, 119) when their peace initiatives were rejected by Washington and Saigon.
Given the approach, the title of the book is slightly misleading. The book is really about neutralism as a political solution for the war, not about the Third Force, although many associated with this label advocated neutralism. In fact, in the introduction Quinn-Judge briefly discusses the “Third Force” concept, then quickly moves on to the “Third Way” and the “Third Segment” (2). Yet whether concepts like ‘neutralism’ or the ‘Third Way’ really capture the richly diverse Third Force in South Vietnamese politics is open to debate. Readers do encounter throughout the book many South Vietnamese activists of the Third Force who are given brief biographies and whose activities are discussed. However, one hardly gets a sense of the social, cultural, and political milieu in which these activists emerged and operated: for example, what was the social and political environment in Saigon’s universities and Hue’s pagodas? What attracted monks and students to activism? What were the major groups and their political tendencies, and how were they linked and interacted with each other? The lack of deep analysis of their society makes the peace activists appear disconnected and their stories sporadic in the study.
Quinn-Judge’s shifting of the blame of the war away from Hanoi and on to the Americans and the Chinese places the book in the longstanding tradition of American-centric scholarship since the 1960s.[1] One thus encounters the familiar stories about missed opportunities in 1919 and 1945, when the U.S. failed to help Nguyen Ai Quoc/President Ho Chi Minh (9-10). In response to recent scholarship that portrays Vietnamese Communist Party leader Le Duan as a militant, Quinn-Judge argues that he was actually more practical than many of his comrades. She claims that “over the years… a diversity of opinions in the Politburo kept different options for reunification alive, including the search for a negotiated solution that would leave the Vietnamese the freedom to settle their own affairs” (73).
Works that embrace the myths of missed opportunities exaggerate the U.S. role in the war—what it did or could have done. These myths are based neither on documented evidence nor a deep understanding of Vietnam’s Communist leaders. The myths deny Hanoi’s agency and responsibility for the wars, which have been well-documented in many recent studies.[2] There was no missed opportunity in the 1940s for Ho and his comrades to become Titos, regardless of American policies. As for Le Duan, to use just one piece of counter-evidence, his “Revolutionary Line in the South” written in 1956 clearly portrayed the South as being ripe for revolution, and argued that the enemy to him was not just the Americans but Southern landlords and capitalist class, and that the future of the South would be Communism.[3]
If readers expect this study of the Third Force to underscore the vibrant political scene in South Vietnam, they would be disappointed. Quinn-Judge insists on a nuanced treatment of Hanoi:
To honestly examine the chances for success of such proposals, one has to accept the premise that the communist side was an evolving entity whose capabilities and goals changed over the years. Hanoi’s attitude toward a negotiated peace fluctuated over the course of the war, depending on the views of their allies and their own evaluation of their chances for rapid success. (4)
At the same time, she dismisses the Saigon government as a creation of the U.S. on page 2 of the book. On page 156, Quinn-Judge labels the Saigon leaders “the dependent child of US policymakers.” This familiar trope in the American-centric literature can no longer be defended given the recent studies by Edward Miller, Lien-Hang Nguyen, Geoffrey Stewart, among others.[4]
This points to the study’s failure in understanding the fundamental differences between the socio-political system and foreign relations of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) and those of the communist North. In the former, the socio-political system was relatively open and fluid, whereas in the latter it was closed and repressive. While the RVN was not a democracy, its citizens, even members of its government, were frequently heard criticizing their leaders and the United States. The so-called “Caravelle manifesto” is an example.[5] Ho Ngoc Nhuan, Ngo Cong Duc, and many other Third Force associates were part of the Saigon government in their role as popularly elected Assembly members—the same way Senator Wayne Morse and Congressman Ron Dellums were part of Washington. Internal dissent was more or less open and tolerated, inside or outside of the government.
In the Communist North, freedom of speech did not exist, and even private criticisms of the leadership or the ‘socialist brethren’ could be reported, leading to harsh punishment. Foreign dependence in the North was not just material but mental: if President Richard Nixon was frequently the target of satire and criticism in the Saigon media, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Chinese leader Mao Zedong (until the late 1960s) were revered gods in the North. Criticizing Stalin in the North was taboo. A Southern critic of government policy like Duong Van Minh or Ngo Cong Duc, if living in the North, would have languished in some remote labor camp or worse. To understand the emergence and political role of the Third Force in South Vietnamese politics, one needs a nuanced understanding of its society and political system, including the Ngo Dinh Diem and Nguyen Van Thieu governments. For better or worse, these governments tolerated internal dissent and criticism far more than Ho’s government did, and it is ironic that the book dismisses the former as an American creation while insisting on a nuanced treatment of the latter.
A final shortcoming of the book concerns certain speculations of the author, given what we know and the lack of new evidence. On page 36, for example, Quinn-Judge asserts, without providing any source, that Ho Chi Minh “may have been hoping that the French role [in 1954] would decrease the DRV’s dependence on Chinese advisers.” Yet Ho had written to Chinese leaders in 1950 to ask specifically not only for Chinese military advisors at the headquarters, but also for Chinese military commanders of Vietnamese units down to battalion level.[6] That this request was extravagant is demonstrated by the fact that Mao approved advisers to the division level only, but not to lower levels.
On the excessive killings during the land reform cum political purge of 1953-1956 that led to Ho Chi Minh assuming the position of General Secretary of the Party for a brief period, Quinn-Judge claims, again without evidence, that “this added power allowed Ho Chi Minh to carry out a reasonably thorough correction of errors…” (65). She later poses a hypothesis that “one faction within the Party [might have been] aiming this purge of the Viet Minh at Ho Chi Minh and General [Vo Nguyen] Giap, the two leaders who along with Prime Minister Pham Van Dong were most closely identified with the Viet Minh coalition, as opposed to the old [Indochinese Communist Party] hierarchy” (66). If the claim about Ho carrying out a thorough correction of land-reform errors lacks evidence, the speculation that he, Giap, and Dong were possibly targets of the purge is unsustainable.
In conclusion, The Third Force in the Vietnam War addresses an important and neglected topic even though it mostly addresses neutralism but not the Third Force itself. The study is deeply flawed given its silence on the available evidence about the radical ambitions of Hanoi leaders,[7] its caricature of the politics and workings of the Republic of Vietnam, and its overall failure to move beyond the American-centric scholarship on the Vietnam War. One hopes that it will soon be followed by other studies that place Third Force activists at the center and that make the effort to investigate the socio-political milieu of South Vietnam in which they lived and struggled.
Notes
[1] An influential book of the 1960s is George Kahin and John Lewis, The United States in Vietnam (New York: Dial Press, 1967). More recent works are Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); James Carter, Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building, 1954-1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Christian Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (New York: Viking 2015).
[2] For example, see Stein Tønnesson, Vietnam 1946: How the War Began (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Pierre Asselin, Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Tuong Vu, Vietnam’s Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
[3] Le Duan, “Duong loi Cach mang mien Nam,” [Revolutionary Line in the South], August 1956. Van Kien Dang Toan Tap [Collected Party Documents], v. 17 (Hanoi: Chinh Tri Quoc Gia, 2002), esp. 787-788, 805-806.
[4] Nguyen, Hanoi’s War; Edward Miller, Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); Geoffrey Stewart, Vietnam’s Lost Revolution: Ngô Đình Diệm’s Failure to Build an Independent Nation, 1955-1963 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
[5] This refers to a declaration issued in April 1960 by a group of prominent Saigon politicians calling on Ngo Dinh Diem to institute political reform. Bui Diem (with David Chanoff), In the Jaws of History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987), 94-95.
[6] Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950-1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 18-19.
[7] For examples, see R. B. Smith, An International History of the Vietnam War: Revolution versus Containment 1955-61 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), esp. 10-12; idem., An International History of the Vietnam War, Volume II: The Struggle for Southeast Asia, 1961-65 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), esp. 36-38; Tuong Vu, “From Cheering to Volunteering: Vietnamese Communists and the Arrival of the Cold War 1940-1951,” in Christopher Goscha and Christian Ostermann, eds. Connecting Histories: The Cold War and Decolonization in Asia (1945-1962), 172-204 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); idem., “To Be Patriotic Is to Build Socialism: Communist Ideology in Vietnam’s Civil War,” in Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia: Ideology, Identity, and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 33-52.
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