This document summarizes and analyzes a 1962 interview report by Bernard Fall with Ho Chi Minh, the leader of North Vietnam. Some key points: - Fall documented rapid industrialization and economic development in North Vietnam, contradicting claims it was a failure. - Fall correctly quoted Ho Chi Minh saying North Vietnam would prevail over US-backed South Vietnam, which proved true when North Vietnam reunified the country in 1975. - However, Fall incorrectly assumed North Vietnam wanted to control all of former French Indochina, when in reality its ambitions were focused on reunifying Vietnam. - The document analyzes inaccuracies in Fall's views of North Vietnam's relationships with China and the Soviet Union,

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History 279: The Viet Nam War (Autumn 2009)
Professor Robert Brigham
Stephen Cheng
Take-home final exam essay
Foreseeing Anti-Imperialist Victory and Imperial Defeat: An Analysis of One Account in
Bernard B. Fall’s War Reportage
Bernard B. Fall's interview with Ho Chi Minh is more than a mere interview -- it is a
profile of both the revolutionary leader himself and the nation-state he presided over, known
colloquially as North Viet Nam and formally as the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam (DRV).
Fall documents the industrial modernization in the country and his conversation with Ho and the
then-prime minister of the DRV, Pham Van Dong. He provides a glimpse into the “enemy”
(from the perspectives of the United States and the Republic of Viet Nam) homeland. Although
Fall was hardly the Edgar Snow of Marxism-Leninism in Viet Nam, he acknowledges the rapid
economic development of the country, so much so that North Viet Nam actually outpaces other
developing countries in Southeast Asia. It is not quite the social and economic failure that many
a rightist would like to say of any Marxist-Leninist nation-state. Fall's words proved prophetic,
however, in hindsight due to Viet Nam's ascension as a regional economic power in the 1980s
and 1990s via the Đổi Mới neoliberal economic reforms.
Concerning accuracies and inaccuracies, Fall very aptly begins by quoting Ho Chi Minh's
statement that the Viet Namese anti-imperialist national self-determination movement, or more
precisely the National Liberation Front (NLF) in South Viet Nam, will prevail. This is followed
by Fall's own commentary: "Every time an American dies somewhere in the swamps of the
Mekong Delta it will be because North Vietnam hungers to extend its rule into South Vietnam,
into Laos and Cambodia, into all of the fertile crescent that was once French Indochina." Ho's
statement proved accurate enough. Almost thirteen years later, the Viet Nam War ended with the
occupation of Saigon by the People's Army of Viet Nam (PAVN). But Fall's statement is not as

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accurate. Granted, there were likely some North Viet Namese Communist party members who
wished to see a unified Viet Nam and thus advocated military intervention south of the
seventeenth parallel. At the same time, there were those content with "building socialism" in the
north and with temporary or permanent peaceful coexistence with South Viet Nam. Furthermore,
and at this point in time one cannot fault Fall, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, also formally known as
Democratic Kampuchea, with its blood-and-soil nationalism masquerading as socialism, actually
harbored a "hunger" to rule over all of the former French Indochina. Yet in Fall's defense, he was
not the only one to think that North Viet Nam was resolutely in favor of conquering South Viet
Nam. US military and intelligence officers thought the same.
However, Fall was absolutely correct to note that the war was as much political as it was
military and that France lost because it had no political program to rival that of the Viet Minh.
Likewise, the US would lose, in spite of its military technology and arsenal, in the fight against
the National Liberation Front due to its lack of a coherent political program. The result for the
US was to be on the losing side of a protracted people's war in which the PAVN and NLF could
determine the length and intensity of the conflict at their own discretion. One major example was
the Tet Offensive of 1968. It belied General William Westmoreland's declaration that the armed
forces of the US and the Republic of Viet Nam were in full control of the combat situation
beneath the seventeenth parallel and that an anti-Communist military and political victory was in
sight.
Fall was also in error to write, in July 1962, that the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam
"followed Russian rather than Chinese leadership." Yet he also correctly notes that the North
Viet Namese government was "aware of China's ambitions for expansion" (28). In light of the
historical facts, the People's Republic of China (PRC) initially, during the mid-1950s, had a

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neutral stance towards revolution in South Viet Nam and took a more encouraging stance
towards the promotion of "socialist revolution and reconstruction" in North Viet Nam (Chen
Jian, 357-358). Later on, in 1963 and 1964, the PRC increased military support for North Viet
Nam in light of the threat of US military incursion above the seventeenth parallel as the war
progressed (Chen Jian 359). Chinese support for the North Viet Namese government and military
continued into the late 1960s. However, PRC-DRV relations worsened during the same decade.
The DRV balked at deferring to Chinese "superiority" and thus leaned closer to the Soviet orbit.
Shortly after the newly unified DRV deposed the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, a PRC ally, the
Chinese government took umbrage. In retaliation, the PRC invaded the DRV in 1979. China was
thus willing to lord its might over other nation-states, including fellow Marxist-Leninist ones,
when its allies and, by extension, its power has been attacked. Incidentally, during the 1950s, the
Soviet Union was not supportive of Viet Namese national unification and, possibly due to Nikita
Khrushchev's policy of "peaceful coexistence" and much to Hanoi's dismay, had called for "two
Viet Nams," thus recognizing two sovereign Viet Nams which share the seventeenth parallel as a
common border (Turley, 35-36). The realities of the DRV's relations with the PRC and the
Soviet Union were much more complex than Fall interprets them to be.
But in spite of the reunification ambitions of some party members in North Viet Nam. Ho
Chi Minh and Pham Van Dong probably had no intention of giving the US solid reasons to
deploy military forces on DRV soil, as indicated in a quoted statement which concludes Fall's
article. Of course, Ho and Pham could be lying, but such a published statement illustrates the
dilemma that the DRV had to contend with: either focus on developing the economy and
infrastructure of North Viet Nam and thus risk the growing de facto normalization of the division
at the seventeenth parallel or pursue national unification and therefore bear the inevitable war-

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induced losses. This dilemma also reflected international disputes. The Soviet Union and the
PRC pursued different approaches to world politics -- peaceful coexistence for the former and
armed national self-determination struggles for the latter. Yet again, Fall's remarks about the
political dimensions of the Viet Nam War run deep -- deeper than what Fall himself may have
expected.
Ultimately, Fall lays bare the reality that the old colonial world was no longer viable: that
newly established nation-states like North Viet Nam were making their own decisions as
sovereign powers; that these same nation-states were also undergoing modernization and
industrialization and thus rivalling the advanced capitalist countries of "the West"; that new
powers like the Soviet Union and China, once fledgling nation-states themselves, were giving
support and guidance to those rising nation-states; and that conventional military means (from
weaponry to tactics and strategies) were no longer adequate in the enforcement of imperial
hegemony. In short, the fragmentation of the overseas European empires which began soon after
the Second World War was still ongoing in the 1960s and the US, having inherited the mantle of
imperial power from the weakened European powers, was forced to contend with this
decolonization process. Although the US tried to stem the tide in places like Viet Nam, it
ultimately had to acquiesce. As an obvious example, US government and military personnel had
to evacuate Saigon via any available aircraft as PAVN units completed the Ho Chi Minh
Campaign with little or no resistance in their way. Ho Chi Minh, who already passed away by
then, was effectively vindicated in his statement that the North Viet Namese side would prevail
in the war. The US, like France before, was thus defeated.
Fall did not make any predictions about the result of US war efforts in the Viet Nam War,
but the likely possibility of a US defeat was strongly implied when he writes about the

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conversion of South Viet Nam from an agriculturally sufficient nation-state into a dependent one,
the US public's understandable reluctance to support a drawn-out war, and the lack of a political
program which could rival that of the National Liberation Front (26). Perhaps he did not have to,
given that the signs of US defeat were growing clear over time. Despite his reporting errors
about the DRV's supposed ambitions to control the whole of the former French Indochina and
DRV-Soviet relations in the early 1960s, he still provided a prescient piece of reportage on the
growing power of the DRV and the doomed fate of the US armed forces and the regime it was
fighting for beneath the seventeenth parallel.

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References
Fall, Bernard B. “2000 Years of War in Viet-Nam” (33-48) in Bernard B. Fall, Last Reflections
on a War: Bernard B. Fall’s Last Comments on Vietnam, Stackpole Books, 2000.
Fall, Bernard B. Last Reflections on a War: Bernard B. Fall’s Last Comments on Vietnam.
Stackpole Books, 2000.
Turley, William S. The Second Indochina War: A Concise Political and Military History (second
edition). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.