Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
From time to time certain members of this elite suffered an apparent eclipse, but Ho Chi Minh ostensibly intervened on their behalf, mediated the dispute in which they were involved, and restored them to the inner circle -- usually in a different position. Thus, Truong Chinh was "fired" as First Secretary of the Party in 1956 after the Land Reform Campaign had been pressed too far and fast, but after a period of absence from the public scene, re-emerged in 1958 as Vice Premier, and became in 1960 Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National Assembly. Vo Nguyen Giap, who delivered a sharp critique of Truong Chinh in October 1956, disappeared for two months in October 1957, while Ho Chi Minh was on a Bloc trip, amid rumors of a realignment of DRV leadership. Ho's return brought Vo's resurrection. Other examples of this phenomenon attest both to the immutability of the core leaders, and to the centrality of Ho to their position. 16/
A similar testimony to Ho's eminence lies in the murky evidence of factional dispute within the Lao Dong. In 1946 Truong Chinh and Giap appeared to foreign observers as "extremists," urging violence on Ho; in 1956 Truong was the Maoist extremist, Vo a Soviet-style moderate; in 1966, Vo was rated a moderate, but Truong had become a neutral, and reportedly himself had come under fire of "extremist" Le Duan. 17/ Increasingly, Ho has risen above the politics of personalities an intramural clashes, and to the extent that he became involved, seems to have mediated and reconciled rather than disciplined. Demonstrably, his personal leadership qualities kept the DRV elite a cooperative, integrated team, with individual ambitions and hardline-moderate factions delicately in balance.
The larger circle of the Central Committee of the Lao Dong exhibited no different complexion from the inner leadership, except that while most of the Politburo members are considered generalists, the 33 other Central Committee members include Party administrators, State specialists, or military and internal security leaders. More than half of the Central Committee have been identified as ICP members before World War II. 18/ The DRV of 1960, was, then, a state dominated by a coterie or revolutionaries of a particularly hardened breed. Ho himself, in a 1960 speech, paid this tribute to his colleagues:
"I wish to remind you that thirty-one of the comrades who are now in the Central Committee were given altogether 222 years of imprisonment and deportation by the French imperialists before the Revolution, not to mention the sentences to death in absentia and the years of imprisonment evaded by those who escaped from prison .... Our comrades made up for the years in prison in discussing and studying political theory. Once more, this not only proves that the enemy's extremely savage policy of repression could not check progress, but on the contrary, it became a touchstone, it has further steeled the revolutionaries. And the result was that the Revolution has triumphed, the imperialists have been defeated …" 19/
