Seymour Topping: Remember, Ho Chi Minh Wanteed Truman's Help But Was Spurned

Seymour Topping in a letter to the editor of the NYT (5-4-05):

Re "The War We Could Have Won" (Op-Ed, May 1):

Stephen J. Morris writes about confrontation with the "profoundly ideological and aggressive totalitarian regime" of North Vietnam over five decades. But he doesn't mention how that came about.

In 1945, President Harry S. Truman abandoned President Franklin D. Roosevelt's proposal for transformation of Indochina into a United Nations trusteeship and yielded to Charles de Gaulle's demands for assistance in restoring French control of the colony in return for cooperation in Europe.

As described in Robert S. McNamara's book "Argument Without End," "This was how U.S. involvement with Vietnam began: absentmindedly, almost as a kind of 'throwaway' in a grand bargain for the heart of Europe, to appease its defeated, temperamental and proud French ally."

Truman never replied to at least eight appeals by Ho Chi Minh for American support of independence and cooperation on the Philippine model. Ho was then compelled to turn to Beijing and Moscow for material aid against returning French troops.

The disastrous, extremist policies described by Mr. Morris came into effect mainly after Ho Chi Minh's death in 1969 with the ascendancy of the Communist hard-liner Le Duan. As Vietnamese war veterans told me when I toured their country in March, the self-sacrificing motivation of North Vietnamese and Vietcong fighters, who suffered 900,000 killed, was not support of any ideology or government but simply determination to rid the country of foreign invaders, as with the Chinese and the French.

It was this human force that defeated American might and the dependent South Vietnam regime.