New Man in Hanoi

...To understand the social method, we must do our best to distinguish it from the mechanical reasoning methods...

...Born Dang Xuan Kha (Truong Chinh is an alias meaning "The Long March"), Le Duan's rival, now 61, is the author of The August Revolution and The Resistance to Win...

...A disciplined Communist party was visualized running things from behind, while a broad united front—the nlf—conducted a protracted guerrilla struggle from a rural base of armed peasantry...

...In November 1967 in Moscow, he claimed the antiwar movement in the United States had become part of the world revolutionary movement...

...Born in 1907 in a small village near Hue in South Vietnam's northernmost province of Quang Tri, at the age of 22 he was recruited by Ho himself into an anti-French "Revolutionary Youth Force...

...As a native of the Hue region who had fought with the Communist-led Vietminh resistance, Le Duan had some claim to being a South Vietnamese...

...He seemed a very common peasant youth," the labor leader remembered...

...Aided by such concessions, the Vietcong would still have to struggle harder than ever, both politically and militarily, while talks dragged on...

...Besides, he went on to argue, the Vietnamese Communists have evolved "unique tactical methods," based on the teachings of Lenin, which enabled them confidently to predict success against the United States...

...Many knowledgeable Vietnamese, who have been pointing to Le Duan as the war's chief strategist since 1960, emphasize that he alone of the 11-man Politburo is of peasant origin...

...These tactics, subsequently spelled out in Le Duan's public speeches and secret letters captured in South Vietnam, are all political in nature...

...Peking, he says, wants the Vietcong not to engage in large-scale actions, but to concentrate instead on guerrilla tactics, with the object of bogging down the United States—perhaps for almost a decade—until China is strong enough to launch an armed offensive in Hanoi's support...

...Conversely, defeat or a significant setback for the Vietcong could change his fortunes...

...Le Duan, on his part, has attacked "those of conservative spirit" who "mechanically copy the past experience of foreign countries...

...You can imagine my amazement when he went to Hanoi after Ho Chi Minh seized it in 1945 and surfaced as a member of the Central Committee...

...Each social phenomenon always has many causes which interact, contradict and influence one another...

...Man in the mass was important, Le Duan said, but so was technology...

...Throughout his writings, the central thrust of his strategy is not military, but rather is directed toward destroying South Vietnam's social structure, so that eventually there will be nothing left to defend...

...In China, charges against former President Liu Shao-chi, who had been Le Duan's closest ally in Peking, were usually framed in the accusation that Liu was "taking the capitalist road...

...In all that time he never gave a sign...

...A year later, he became a founding member of the Indochinese Communist party—formed, so the story goes, in the bleachers during a soccer game in Hong Kong...

...Ultimately, he maintains, the American bargaining position could be made so weak that it would necessarily be obliged to accept Communist peace conditions...

...This nearly happened a year ago when the Tet offensive failed to produce a popular uprising in Saigon and the Southern cities...

...In the nearest thing to a personal attack on Le Duan, Chinh last year publicly declared he "firmly opposes all distortions and misinterpretations of Marxism by the theoreticians who serve the interests of the capitalists...

...Should the Vietcong show promise of achieving victory in the South during the prolonged succession struggle that lies ahead, his position would be nearly unassailable...

...In July, Le Duan finally appeared in public to challenge Mao's favorite dictum: "Man, not weapons, decides the issue of war...

...Some authorities believe it was Ho's deliberate intention to have Le Duan purge the Southern branch of the Vietnamese Communist party rather than risk a victorious rival in Saigon...

...In the role of First Secretary, he controls the Party machine and its policy-making Politburo...

...In essence, he argued that by arriving at "correct solutions" through dialectical reasoning, one could completely manipulate and dominate masses of people, turning them into perfect tools for a cause...

...He is subtly patronizing about the Soviets, as if they would not dare to withdraw support and could be manipulated without much difficulty...

...On the other hand, he appears more apprehensive about the Chinese...

...The key supporting passage from Lenin that Le Duan frequently refers to is worth quoting: "It is possible to defeat a stronger enemy only through displaying great effort and under the necessary condition of taking advantage very minutely, very attentively, very carefully and very cleverly of any rift, even the smallest one, among the enemy...

...The setback was short-lived, however...

...To this the chairman retorted: "We should selectively study and practice the experiences of the brotherly parties...

...The peace movement...

...Anyone who does not understand this truth," he added, "understands neither Marxism nor scientific, modern Socialism in general...

...Nobody suspected Le Duan was a real power in the Communist party...

...He is a strong proponent of land reform, at least as an exploitable issue, and declared in a December 1966 speech: "Without solving the problem of land, it would be impossible to attract all agricultural laborers to rise up and oppose the imperialists and achieve national independence...

...A man could then plan a large number of alternative responses to anything his opponent might do—instead of responding to the unforseen with a mixture of planned action and unplanned reaction, as is usually the case...

...Politics is a science and 1'art du possible...

...In September 1960, he urged his "fellow Southerners" to join the newly formed Vietcong guerrilla movement...

...In the face of a changing environment, we Marxist-Leninists cannot but base ourselves upon the development of this environment's internal contradictions and upon the subjective and objective conditions it generates to anticipate its development possibilities and...

...One passage in particular provides exceptional insight into Le Duan's ability as a master chess player: "We must have a correct thinking method: the materialist dialectical thinking method...

...Chinh, without citing the First Secretary by name, attacked him for having "underestimated the enemy," seeking "to throw all our forces into a few decisive battles," and arguing that "we should not protract the war...

...The National Liberation Front (nlf) was created the following December...

...He believes it would be possible to exact concessions from an American President in return for Hanoi's acceptance of talks...

...yet they have been little studied in this country...

...It is significant in this regard that Premier Chou brought some of China's top arms negotiators to Hanoi prior to Ho's funeral last week...

...Our strategy on negotiations must serve in a practical manner our political aims...

...In 1959, Ho ordered the Vietcong uprising in the Mekong Delta against Ngo Dinh Diem's five-year-old government...

...Jailed during World War II, the two worked side by side in the penal colony's medical dispensary, the union organizer as a clerk and the peasant as a menial orderly's helper...

...Up to the fall of 1964, he seemed willing to adhere to the Chinese Communist revolutionary model of "people's wars of national liberation," given a Vietnamese coloration in the published works of General Vo Nguyen Giap and Truong Chinh...

...We just took it for granted he was an ordinary peasant...

...In a definite historical epoch, social facts may develop according to this possibility, or another, within the scope of the definite conditions of this epoch...

...Indeed, some experts regard his writings as basic to understanding the nature of the conflict...

...The reason for this is made clear in his 1966 letter: "Southeast Asia is the center of the world revolutionary storm and is the convergence point of the most acute contradictions in the world...

...It can be said that the struggle for peace is one of the spearheads poised against imperialism...

...To speak of revolution and war is to speak of politics...

...Last year, during his few months of apparent ascendancy, he called for a Party purge and for "consolidating the repressive measures of the people's democratic state, the people's Army and the people's police...

...His "most clever tactic" in South Vietnam, he added, was the "careful, attentive" application of Lenin's principle of "exploiting internal contradictions in the enemy camp...

...Binh was betrayed into the hands of the French, apparently as a scapegoat for an unsuccessful "general offensive" that Hanoi had ordered against the colonial forces in the Mekong Delta...

...Unlike some North Vietnamese leaders, Le Duan has never spoken the language of a movement fighting a local civil war for internal reasons...

...This firm promise of Russian backing appeared to be Le Duan's main justification for departing radically from Maoist principles of protracted revolutionary warfare a year later, when Hanoi ordered the first of nine regular North Vietnamese Army divisions into the South...

...on the one hand it cleverly took advantage of the regional and temporary contradictions of the enemy to sow division among him...

...In addition, the larger the forces engaged, the more the Vietcong and North Vietnam would have to depend on Russia for scientific modern weapons, and the more Hanoi would have to shift to Moscow in the Sino-Soviet rivalry...

...now 62 and First Secretary of the North Vietnamese Communist party, has been praised by Soviet leaders, who hope he will achieve dominance in Hanoi's new leadership, and has held a series of talks with Chinese Premier Chou En-lai, who hastily flew to the Northern capital six days before Ho's funeral...

...Implicitly criticizing Le Duan for deviating from strict Maoism, Chinh claims that "In the people's war, the spiritual weapon remains the most powerful...

...The National Assembly chairman has repeatedly echoed Maoist principles, declaring revolutionary war must be protracted and self-reliant, not heavily dependent on foreign (i.e., Russian) help...

...On domestic issues, Le Duan seems surprisingly moderate and is opposed to overly strict enforcement of collectivization...

...Although he remains almost as shadowy to the outside world as he was to his prison mates a generation ago, Le Duan appears to be emerging from Ho's death as the most powerful man in North Vietnam...

...Vietnamese who knew him describe him as already being the prototypical scientific political commissar—a man who, despite his background, lacked the charisma to kindle the peasant imagination as Ho Chi Minh had and who preferred to work in the background...

...At this time, China was North Vietnam's principal foreign supporter, supplying half its budget and large amounts of small arms...

...We should not copy those experiences identically...

...Le Duan's attitude toward the Paris peace talks is not firmly documented, but his general views on negotiations were put down in the captured 1966 letter quoted previously...

...If the proletarian revolution is successful in this region, and if the densely populated countries—such as India and Pakistan with nearly 550 million people and Indonesia with more than 100 million people —also move toward Socialism, then, as Lenin predicted, 'There is no doubt about the conclusion of the struggle on a world scale.' " The same document also provides interesting insights into Le Duan's attitude toward Russia and China...

...on that basis, to set the lines and policies which are appropriate to our goals...

...Chinh conceded this tactic had worked in "taking advantage of the contradictions between the doves and hawks in the American ruling class, between the pro-French and pro-American groups [in South Vietnam] and between one pro-American group and another...

...Le Duan went into eclipse for some months while his chief ideological rival, the pro-Chinese chairman of the National Assembly, Truong Chinh, appeared to have won a majority of Politburo support for his call for a return to protracted Maoist warfare...

...Le Duan spent five of the next six years serving his first sentence of hard labor on Con Son Island, but nevertheless rose rapidly in Party ranks...

...Le Duan began making a comeback soon after President Johnson agreed last October 31 to a complete bombing halt and to Vietcong representation at the Paris peace talks...

...In September 1939, as the Nazis marched into Poland, the Communists in Vietnam were once more outlawed and arrested...

...Le Duan's preeminence should be welcomed, for it will undoubtedly focus attention on his strategic doctrine, which borrows heavily from Lenin and has profoundly influenced the Vietnam war...

...The most austere and extremist Vietnamese Communist in his outlook and temperament, Chinh is probably better versed in ideology than Le Duan—to whom he ranks second in the Party hierarchy—and is certainly more hated...

...By 1950, Le Duan had established a reputation as a grim Marxist dialectician and a convinced, even fanatical believer in Communist ideology...

...Perhaps the only striking thing about him was his fanaticism about Lenin, whose works he had studied in some revolutionary youth group...

...From then on, Le Duan identified himself with the Vietcong in the South, always taking credit for its military and political successes...

...In 1951, Ho sent Le Duan to the Mekong Delta to arrange the execution of Nguyen Binh, a Tonkinese sailor trained in China who had become the popular commander of the Vietminh troops in the South...

...Released in 1938 in a general amnesty of 7,000 Vietnamese political prisoners, granted by Leon Blum's Popular Front government in Paris, Le Duan took over the Party apparatus in the old kingdom of Annam, the coastal region that now straddles the demilitarized zone (dmz), For the next two years, 1937-39 —while Ho was in China and Mao Tse-tung was writing his thesis on "people's revolutionary war"—Le Duan lived in Hue...

...Le Duan was again imprisoned on Con Son Island (serving as a hospital orderly) until Ho seized power in Hanoi in 1945...

...In the doctrinal dispute ahead, which will probably decide the Politburo lineup for some time to come, the issues are likely to be similar to those debated last year by Truong Chinh and Le Duan...

...It was not until early 1966 that the dispute between the Le Duan group and the Maoists in Peking became open and acrimonious...

...FIRST PARTY SECRETARY LE DUAN New Man in Hanoi By Richard Critchfield Washington During a recent visit here, a Saigon labor leader recalled sharing a prison cell on South Vietnam's Con Son Island for three years with a young peasant from Hue...

...Perhaps the angriest criticism of all came when Chinh discussed what Le Duan had called North Vietnam's "unique tactical methods"-the complex system of applying Lenin's principle of "exploiting internal contradictions in the enemy camp" to divide and weaken South Vietnamese and American society...

...Chinh has likewise endorsed Mao's belief in perpetual revolution as a means of attaining pure Marxism, dubbing it "constant revolution," and has advocated continued revolutionary violence in North Vietnam itself as well as in the South...

...Six months later, in the October 1966 issue of Hoc Tap, the North Vietnamese Communist party's theoretical journal, Le Duan went further in explaining his strategy and defending it against Maoists: "On the basis of keeping firm in strategy, our Party cleverly applied its tactics...

...Chinh was absent from North Vietnam most of this summer, reportedly seeking "medical treatment" in East Germany, and the First Secretary has been steadily consolidating his position...

...In the past two weeks, Le Duan, Richard Critchfield, a previous contributor and author of The Long Charade: Political Subversion in the Vietnam War, is a correspondent for the Washington Evening Star...

...Both are considered the foremost theoretical works produced by Vietnamese Communism...

...any contradiction, even the smallest one, among the interests of the bourgeoisie of various countries and among the interests of various bourgeois groups and factions in each country...

...He added, however, that knowing how to "attack the enemy at his weakest point" is "another equally important problem," which he implied Le Duan had neglected...

...he said, "is not merely an antiwar movement with a democratic character, as it used to be, but one that takes on a new, really revolutionary and offensive significance...

...They appear to reflect the thinking of a man whose career depends on a successful outcome of the struggle...

...Le Duan, it is felt, may turn out to be one of the most arresting evil geniuses of our time—someday possibly overshadowing even Ho Chi Minh himself...

...In one 26-page letter composed in March 1966 and captured the following year, he explains how the human mind could be conditioned to successfully project a series of possible developments...

...In one speech, Le Duan described "culture and ideology" and "regional and temporary contradictions" as the most fruitful fields for applying Lenin's principle...

...Yet, there is some question whether he is the intellectual equal of the First Secretary...

...There are times, he insisted, when "we must shift to the defensive to gain time, dishearten the enemy and build up our forces for a new offensive...

...On the other, it united with anyone who could be united, won over anyone who could be won over, neutralized anyone who should be neutralized, completely isolated the imperialists and their most dangerous lackeys, and concentrated the spearheads of the attacks on them to overthrow them...

...While studying social sciences, if we reason in a simple and mechanical manner we can by no means find out the rules governing the dialectical development of things, and, of course, cannot manipulate this development so it is consistent with our purposes and requirements...

...In May 1968 he called for a new rallying cry, "Long drawn-out fight and relying mainly on one's self...

...The Chinese bitterly disapproved...

...Russia's involvement in Vietnam began in 1961, with Khrushchev's reaffirmation of Soviet support for "just wars of national liberation," followed by commitments of diplomatic help and arms support in late 1963...

...Peking took the position—and still insists—that the Vietcong should be waging a classical, long drawn-out guerrilla campaign to produce a victory that would vindicate Mao's revolutionary methods throughout the underdog Third World...