The Origins of the Vietnam War

Podcast Transcripts

The Vietnam War was perhaps the most significant event that took place in the last half of the 20th century.

It had profound impacts on the United States and, of course, Vietnam.

However, many people have a very simplistic view of the causes of the war. They assume it was just a result of Cold War politics. While that was certainly a cause, the root causes go back much further.

Learn more about the origins of the Vietnam War and how and why it happened on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

This episode is not about the Vietnam War per se. I’m not going to be talking about troop movements, battles, or even events that occurred in the United States during the war.

This episode is about the long lead-up to the war and why it ever happened in the first place.

The short explanation that most people have regarding the Vietnam War is that the United States was trying to stop the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia.

To be sure, that is a big part of the story, as we’ll see in a bit. But there is a lot more to it than that. The events that unfolded in Vietnam didn’t appear out of nowhere in the 1950s. They were the result of a long line of events that began almost a century beforehand.

The war’s origins can probably be traced back to the 16th and 17th centuries when French Jesuits arrived in Vietnam.

The Jesuits, as they did in so many places, arrived to convert people to Christianity. Notable among them was Alexandre de Rhodes, a French Jesuit who is credited with creating the Vietnamese alphabet, known as qu?c ng?, which uses the Latin script.

Over time, the French began to have a larger and larger presence in Vietnam.

During the 18th century, some French adventurers and missionaries provided military and political support to the Nguy?n lords, who were one of the rival factions vying for control of Vietnam. This early involvement set the stage for later French intervention.

It wasn’t until the mid-19th Century that French involvement in Vietnam became more formal.

In particular, France’s formal involvement began with a military expedition in 1858, ostensibly to protect Catholic missionaries who were facing persecution. French forces, alongside Spanish allies, launched an attack on ?à N?ng, but it was not immediately successful.

In 1862, after several years of conflict, the French forced the Nguy?n dynasty to cede three provinces in southern Vietnam, marking the beginning of French colonial rule in the region known as Cochinchina.

Over the next few decades, the French gradually expanded their control over the rest of Vietnam. By 1884, after defeating the Vietnamese forces and their Chinese allies in the Sino-French War, the French had effectively taken control of the entire country. Vietnam was divided into three regions: Cochinchina, which was directly ruled by France, Annam, a French protectorate in central Vietnam, and Tonkin, a French protectorate in northern Vietnam.

In 1887, the French established the Indochinese Union, which included Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. This marked the formal establishment of French colonial rule in the region.

The French colonial administration exploited Vietnam’s natural resources and labor. They introduced cash crops like rubber and rice for export, built infrastructure to serve colonial interests, and imposed heavy taxes on the Vietnamese population.

The French also sought to impose their culture and language on the Vietnamese through the education system while simultaneously suppressing traditional Vietnamese culture. French became the language of administration, and many Vietnamese elites were educated in French schools.

Needless to say, this did not sit well with the Vietnamese people. The French were attempting to undermine their culture and replace it with a completely foreign one.

From the outset of French rule, there was resistance from various Vietnamese groups. The most notable early resistance leader was Phan ?ình Phùng, who led a rebellion in the 1880s and 1890s.

By the early 20th century, modern nationalist movements began to emerge. Figures like Phan B?i Châu and Phan Châu Trinh advocated for reform and independence. However, it was the rise of the communist movement under Ho Chi Minh that would pose the most significant challenge to French colonial rule.

Ho Chi Minh, the future leader of North Vietnam, was a central figure in the struggle for Vietnamese independence. He was born Nguy?n Sinh Cung in 1890.

He was born in a small village in central Vietnam. His father, a Confucian scholar and teacher, instilled in him a strong sense of Vietnamese identity and resistance to French colonial rule. In his early twenties, Ho left Vietnam to work as a cook on a French steamer, which took him to various countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom.

Ho became a leader in the Vietnamese independence movement. In 1919, he attended the Versailles Peace Conference, where he petitioned for Vietnamese self-determination.

At the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, Wilson advocated for the right of people to choose their own governments, which was a cornerstone of his vision for a new world order.

Ho, along with many others in Southeast Asia, was deeply moved by the words of US President Woodrow Wilson. Ho Chi Minh issued a document titled the “Eight Demands of the Annamite People,” which called for greater rights and freedoms for the Vietnamese people under French colonial rule.

Ho was not given a response, and despite his lofty rhetoric, President Wilson didn’t bother to meet with him. The Versailles Conference was about European Powers, not their colonies.

This became known as the Wilsonian Moment. A missed opportunity by the United States to appeal to nationalist movements that became disillusioned. With respect to this episode, a lost chance to make an ally of a leader who was otherwise pro-American.

After Versailles, Ho Chi Minh began to work more closely with socialist and communist groups that were willing to give him support.

Historians have debated how much Ho Chi Minh was a communist versus how much he was a nationalist and whether his rejection at Versailles resulted in his embracing communism or if he was committed beforehand.

Regardless of how and when he embraced communism, embrace communism he did.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the resistance movement in Vietnam grew but never achieved critical mass.

What changed everything was the invasion of Vietnam by the Japanese in 1940. While the Japanese physically occupied the country, it was very different than how they occupied the rest of the countries in Southeast Asia they invaded.

After Germany had invaded France, France was ruled by the German puppet Vichy government. The Vichy government continued to administer Vietnam with the support of the Japanese military.

The Vichy Government’s use of the Japanese to pacify the country weakened French control and increased nationalism amongst the Vietnamese.

In one of the odd twists to this story, during the war Ho Chi Minh worked with the United States Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. In “Operation Deer Team” the OSS sent military advisors to Vietnam to provide assistance to the Viet Minh.

After the war, when the Japanese left, there was a power vacuum in the country.

In August 1945, the Communist Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, launched the August Revolution, seizing control of Hanoi and declaring Vietnam’s independence.

France attempted to reassert its control over Vietnam, leading to the First Indochina War between the French and the Viet Minh. The conflict was characterized by guerrilla warfare.

Perhaps more importantly, it became one of the first conflicts in the new Cold War between the West and the Communist Bloc.

In the context of the emerging Cold War, United States President Harry Truman viewed the Viet Minh as a communist threat aligned with the Soviet Union and China. Consequently, his administration decided to support France in its efforts to regain control of Vietnam.

This decision by Truman had profound implications for the United States. During and after the Second World War, the United States was largely in favor of France and Britain giving their colonies independence.

However, in Vietnam, Truman made an exception due to the fact that the Viet Minh were communists.

In 1950, Truman authorized sending military advisors to Vietnam as part of the Military Assistance Advisory Group, which helped the French fight the Viet Minh.

A competitor state known simply as the State of Vietnam, established in 1949, was part of the Indochinese Union.

The First Indochina War raged on for eight years until 1954 when the Viet Minh achieved a significant victory over French forces at the battle of ?i?n Biên Ph?. This was a stunning defeat for the French that marked the end of French colonial rule in Vietnam.

The Geneva Accords of 1954 officially ended the First Indochina War. Vietnam was divided at the 17th parallel, with North Vietnam controlled by the communist Viet Minh and South Vietnam by a non-communist government supported by the West. Both countries were no longer colonies of France.

Ho Chi Minh became the leader of North Vietnam, and the person who was selected to lead South Vietnam was Ngô ?ình Di?m.

Di?m was staunchly anti-communist and anti-colonialist and was a member of the Catholic minority in the country. He was supported by the Eisenhower Administration, and Di?m pursued American support because they were stronger and more reliable than France.

Di?m suspended the elections that were promised in the Geneva Accord, and soon began eliminating his potential political rivals.

Di?m was a dictator and behaved as such. He was deeply unpopular in South Vietnam. He managed to eliminate or suppress all of his political opponents….except for the Communist insurgents, which were funded by the North.

That being said, many Communist sympathizers in the south, which Di?m called Viet Cong, were arrested. Over 100,000 people were imprisoned, tortured, or executed.

The US was well aware that Di?m was a dictator, but he was their dictator, which was all that mattered in the Cold War.

One of the reasons why the United States was so concerned about Vietnam and supportive of Di?m in the late 1950s and early 1960s was called the Domino Theory.

The “Domino Theory” posited that if one country in a region fell to communism, others would follow. Thus, communism in Vietnam had to be stopped lest it spread to other countries in the region.

The problem was that supporting an unpopular dictator in Di?m only increased support for the Viet Minh, who were the only real alternative. This was especially true in rural areas.

Di?m also cracked down on Buddhists in an overwhelmingly Buddhist country and favored Catholics.

Nonetheless, throughout the 1950s, the number of American military advisors in the country remained relatively small. As of 1960, the number was only 900.

The number of American military personnel began to increase in 1961 with the inauguration of President John Kennedy.

Ngô ?ình Di?m, the President of South Vietnam, was assassinated on November 2, 1963, following a military coup. The coup was orchestrated by a group of South Vietnamese generals who had grown increasingly frustrated with Di?m’s autocratic rule, his repressive policies, and his inability to combat the communist insurgency effectively.

Di?m was found hiding in a Catholic Church in Saigon. After he was captured, he and his brother were executed while in transit.

The United States, via the CIA, approved the removal of Di?m as president.

Finally, in 1964, North Vietnam supposedly attacked American Naval vessels in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. The resulting uproar in Congress, which I covered in a previous episode, led to the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and its signing by President Lyndon Johnson.

This was the event that ushered in the dramatic increase in American military personnel, which resulted in the start of a full-scale war in Vietnam.

There were many steps that led to the Vietnam War, in some cases decades in advance, which would have totally changed the direction history took.

If President Wilson had acknowledged the grievances of Ho Chi Minh in 1919, or if President Truman had taken a different approach, or if the Indochina War had taken place before the start of the Cold War, things might have turned out very different.