Editor’s note: This week and next, millions of viewers will watch “The Vietnam War” series on Public Television. The 18-hour, 10-part series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick is expected to garner record audience numbers for PBS, as did Burn’s previous 1990 series “The Civil War.” But critics are already saying the series falls short of telling the full story, or outright misrepresents the actual history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
Here at The Progressive, we looked into our archives and pulled out this piece from our February 1970 issue in which longtime Quaker peace activist, and then-board member of the American Friends Service Committee, tells a very different story of the unfulfilled opportunities for peace. In June and October of 1969, Elder traveled to Hanoi on behalf of the Friends to deliver open-heart surgical equipment for North Vietnamese civilians. Elder, who is an emeritus professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, continues his work with the people of Vietnam through the projects of Madison Quakers, Inc.
Vietnam: The Other Side Is Responding
During the past year the Vietnamese we are fighting offered President Nixon a handle which, if grasped, might provide the means to end the war. But so far he has apparently rejected—and possibly not even seriously explored—this opportunity for peace.
Meanwhile, thousands of Americans and Vietnamese have died, while U.S. spokesmen contend that the war goes on because the other side will not respond to any of our peace proposals and will make none of its own.
But the other side has responded, as I had a chance to observe first hand on two visits to Hanoi. However, this response, which I helped convey to the President's foreign policy advisers twice, has been ignored by the Administration.
I first visited Hanoi for one week last June on behalf of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) to discuss Quaker assistance to civilians in North Vietnam. (AFSC was already assisting civilians in both Saigon-controlled and NLF-controlled portions of South Vietnam.) While in Hanoi, I conferred with North Vietnam's foreign minister, Nguyen Duy Trinh. During our conversation, I mentioned that I was part of an AFSC committee scheduled to meet with President Nixon's foreign policy advisers in July. "Are there particular points," I asked, "you would like me to stress on your behalf during the meeting?"
The foreign minister paused a moment. Then he said, "Tell President Nixon's advisers that if the United States is seriously interested in holding elections in South Vietnam, it should recognize the importance of the Provisional Revolutionary Government in South Vietnam."
I had first heard of the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) when its formation was proclaimed only five days earlier at a Hanoi press conference. Facing a bank of lights and movie cameras, Nguyen Van Tien, the National Liberation Front (NLF) Party's representative to Hanoi, had announced that eighty-eight delegates and seventy-two guests, representing a range of anti-Thieu-Ky viewpoints, had met in a conference June 6-8 "somewhere in South Vietnam." The conference had been convened jointly by the NLF and the VNANDPF (the Vietnam Alliance of National, Democratic, and Peace Forces, an urban-based anti-Thieu-Ky party formed during the 1968 Tet offensive). From the June 6-8 conference emerged what was proclaimed to be a new government in South Vietnam—- the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam, headed by the prime minister of an eleven-member cabinet.
The newly formed Provisional Revolutionary Government was a coalition of the NLF Party, the VNANDPF Party, the Vietnam People's Revolutionary Party (Communist), the Democratic Party (a nationalist party dating back to the 1930s), and representatives from trade unions and youth, professional, national minorities, armed forces, religious, women's, and other groups.
One of the Provisional Revolutionary Government's acts had been to endorse the NLF's ten-point proposal of May, 1969, for restoring peace in Vietnam. The PRG had also retained the NLF's foreign policy (and flag) and elevated the NLF's chief negotiator in Paris, Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, to the post of foreign minister.
In the domestic arena, the PRG announced it was "prepared to enter into consultations with political forces representing various social sections and political tendencies in South Vietnam that stand for peace, independence, and neutrality . . . with a view to setting up a provisional coalition government. . . . The provisional coalition government will organize general elections in order to elect a Constituent Assembly, work out a democratic constitution . . . and form a coalition government symbolizing national concord and the broad unity of all social segments."
The Vietnamese at the Hanoi press conference I attended had been visibly excited, as were representatives of much of the non-Western world who were present. Within the next week, more than twenty nations had officially recognized the Provisional Revolutionary Government—including several non-Communist-bloc countries.
Foreign Minister Nguyen Duy Trinh of North Vietnam expanded his initial comment for my benefit. The month before, in May, 1969, both the NLF's ten-point proposal and President Nixon's eight-point proposal had called for elections in South Vietnam as a way of ending the war. Now Nguyen Duy Trinh focused on the differences between the two proposals.
"President Nixon's eight points allow Thieu, Ky, and their armies to remain in control during the elections. But Thieu and Ky jail those candidates who disagree with them. I'm afraid we know how 'free' the elections would be if they were held according to the Nixon formula," grimaced Nguyen Duy Trinh.
The foreign minister then turned to the NLF's ten points. The elections they called for would be run by a temporary coalition government. The PRG had already announced it was not that temporary coalition government. It was the government preceding the temporary coalition government. It was prepared to consult with other South Vietnamese political forces standing for "peace, independence, and neutrality" in establishing the temporary coalition government to organize the general elections. Once the elections had been held, the temporary government would dissolve, and the duly elected government would take over. This election plan paralleled a Buddhist South Vietnamese plan I had discussed in Paris with Thich Nat Hanh of the United Buddhist Church.
"President Nixon says he is looking for 'some sign from the other side' in response to his eight points," declared Nguyen Duy Trinh. "We have given him a sign. He has failed to see it."
Four days later, in Hong Kong, I reported my Hanoi discussion to two State Department officers in the U.S. Consulate. Their response was blunt: "The PRG is the same as the NLF. They've just shifted titles around and called themselves a government rather than a party."
In Saigon, eleven days later, I told Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker of the foreign minister's statement. He and his aide also maintained that the PRG was the same set of people as the NLF, with a few changes in titles. The ambassador was unhappy with the "intransigent" position the NLF and Hanoi were taking. "They have lost half a million dead during the war—half of those killed last year. And they are being killed at the same rate this year. They must be hurting. Why don't they negotiate more reasonably?" He said nothing more about the PRG.
Only in Paris did I find a positive response to Hanoi's message—from Philippe Devillers, one of France's leading Vietnam specialists (author of Histoire du Viet-Nam de 1940 a. 1952 and co-author with Jean Lacouture of La Fin d'une Guerre: Indochine 1954). For years Devillers has maintained that the NLF is fundamentally an indigenous southern force driven into being by the oppression of Premier Ngo Dinh Diem and subsequent Saigon rulers. "Because your country still accepts John Foster Dulles' image of world Communism," said Devillers, "it has failed to respond to the many non-Communist elements in the NLF and now the PRG.
"The establishment of the Provisional Revolutionary Government is the first step toward this solution," concluded Devillers.
Back in Washington, in July, our Quaker committee met with President Nixon's foreign policy advisers. I described my conversation with the foreign minister in Hanoi, stressing his concern that the United States take seriously the establishment of the Provisional Revolutionary Government in South Vietnam. I mentioned that the foreign minister felt the PRG was a conciliatory step toward the middle—a step which, if matched by the United States, would speed election day in South Vietnam.
The advisers listened like professors to a seminar report—critical, interested, searching for flaws. When I had finished, one of them wrote for several moments on the yellow pad beside him, commenting that this was something they would have to look into. It was not the enthusiastic response of Philippe Devillers. But neither was it the swift rejection by the State Department officials I conferred with in Hong Kong and Saigon.
Another article in that same issue of the magazine, “Vietnam: the Crucial Issue” by U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright (Democrat of Arkansas) reinforced many of Elder’s points:
In his last major address on the war, President Nixon spoke of the "right of the people of South Vietnam to determine their own future" as the single American war aim which is not negotiable. "Let historians not record," declared the President, "that, when America was the most powerful nation in the world, we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism."
The President's words, part of his November 3 speech, are a reasonable expression of the theory behind our war in Vietnam. Like many theories, however, it does not tell us much about the practice.
The crucial issue of the war is the character of the government which rules in Saigon. As long as American policy is committed to survival of the Thieu-Ky regime or one very much like it, "Vietnamization" will remain a euphemism for victory. The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong have said that they will fight indefinitely to prevent that and they have shown their ability to do so. As outlined by President Nixon, Vietnamization, according to a Rand Corporation expert, "is a policy that must goad the Hanoi leadership to challenge it by increasing the pressure of United States casualties; to which the President promises to respond by re-escalation against all past evidence (and consistent, reliable intelligence predictions) that this would neither deter nor end such pressure."
In his speech of November 3, President Nixon said that "we really have only two choices open to us if we want to end this war"—either "precipitate" withdrawal or, failing acceptance of our terms in the Paris peace talks, Vietnamization. The President, I think, is mistaken. There is a third and better option than either of these: the negotiation of arrangements for a new interim government in South Vietnam, for elections conducted by the interim coalition regime with or without international supervision, and for complete American withdrawal.
Looking back on the history of Vietnam since World War II, if we had not intervened in any way either to support the French or to create the Diem government, the nationalists would probably have achieved the independence of a unified Vietnam. It would have been achieved under the only authentic nationalist leader in modern Vietnamese history, Ho Chi Minh, and we would probably be today on as good terms with a unified Vietnam as we are with Yugoslavia.