The experts here believe it might take another two months, perhaps more, of the selected air strikes to convince Ho Chi Minh and his communists that real ruin lies just back of yonder cloud if they do not change their ways.14
Even as this article was published, the North Vietnamese leadership was engaged in repeated public statements of an entirely opposite sentiment, maintaining that they could carry on the struggle almost indefinitely. Ho Chi Minh informed President Lyndon Johnson that, though the war might take fifteen years, eventually Vietnam would prevail.15 North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong rhetorically asked Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times “How long do you Americans want to fight? One year, two years, three years, five years, ten years, twenty years,” adding that “[w]e will be glad to accommodate you.”16 Speaking to his own people, Pham Van Dong's colourful rhetoric is even more forceful:
We have been fighting for our independence for four thousand years. We have defeated the Mongols three times. The United States … strong as it is, is not as terrifying as Genghis Khan.17
After the war, accounts from the North Vietnamese people showed these statements to be more than mere rhetoric. Huong Van Ba, a repeat-infiltrator through the Ho Chi Minh Trail, expressed “such hatred for the enemy and such devotion to the noble cause of liberating our suppressed people that we felt we could overcome any difficulty and make any sacrifice.”18 Sau Thuong, also operating along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, asserts that he “would rather have died in the mountains”19 than fail his superiors in the North. Born into a social matrix that considered self-sacrifice to be “a normal concomitant of the human condition,”2021 The Johnson administration in early 1965, however, had what Sherwood has termed “difficulty understanding Vietnamese politics and culture,”22 and thus continued to underestimate the resolve of the North Vietnamese people. people from North Vietnam were accordingly resilient and determined. Later in the war, U.S. General Ridgway would note admiringly that “they are used to all manner of deprivations which would be extreme hardship to our men.”
Faced with an enemy culture of such hardened hostility and resilience, America was, not surprisingly, unsuccessful in all of its attempts at diplomacy with the North. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's policy of pausing the bombing in the hopes that Hanoi would initiate talks - something that was tried at least seven times during the more than three years of Rolling Thunder23 - never bore fruit. In fact, rather than being influenced to negotiate, Hanoi made the bombing into a propaganda issue, generating useful hatred for the Americans and rallying its citizens with calls for the bombing's unconditional halt.24 One northern propagandist, Hoang Quoc Viet,1 wrote in the Hanoi daily paper Nhan Dan on April 21st, 1965, that:
Johnson further lied that the U.S. attacks on the drv were aimed at military targets, and not to massacre the people, that they were carefully limited. But everybody knows that the so-called military targets attacked by the United States in North Vietnam are populated areas, villages, provincial capitals, townships, schools, markets, and even churches and hospitals.25
Even if such claims were not completely true, and American bombers did not engage in operations for the sole purpose of slaughtering North Vietnamese civilians, the fact remains that the presence of American planes overhead and the sight of American bombs falling on North Vietnam served to rapidly polarize popular opinion against the Americans. Backed by solidified popular support,26 Pham Van Dong very publicly rejected any moves towards peace without the bombing's cessation, “permanently and without conditions.”27 Even after more than two years of American pressure, Ho Chi Minh declared in 1967 that “the Vietnamese people will never submit to force… they will never accept talks under the threat of bombs.”
28 Despite the fact that U.S. pilots could, and frequently did, drop more bombs in one day than the French could deliver during the entire siege of Dien Bien Phu,
29 bombing never brought Hanoi to the negotiating table.
Non-public attempts at diplomacy were equally unsuccessful. In what was known as Operation Marigold, America made use of Polish diplomats in an attempt to covertly open a diplomatic channel. However, Washington's relentless fixation on using bombing pauses as a diplomatic weapon, despite all of its previous failures, continued to cause problems in opening talks. Janusz Lewandowski, the leading Polish diplomat, explained that Hanoi would not reciprocate in any de-escalation process because it would strengthen “the governmental status quo in South Vietnam, whereas it was precisely a change in the South Vietnamese government that the Communist side required.”30 As Ho Chi Minh explained in Americanized terms, “it is like being asked by a Chicago gangster who has you at gun-point what you are willing to pay him not to shoot you.”31 Even in secret, bombing pauses were non-starters for diplomatic progress.
