Page:Pentagon-Papers-Part IV. A. 5.djvu/82

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Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011


TOP SECRET – Sensitive

36.  American Friends of Vietnam, America's Stake in Vietnam (New York: Carnegie Press, 1956), 69.
37.  NSC 5612/1 (September, 1956); NSC 5809 (2 April 1958). The First Indochina War culminated in Viet Minh military victory and the

Geneva Conference of 1954, but during it a Vietnamese government under Bao Dai, like Ho Chi Minh's DRV claiming dominion over all the Vietnamese, but Nationalist, anti-Communist, and French-supported, came into being. From 1949 on, this nascent state provided the political alternative to the DRV; it was Bao Dai's regime which inherited South Viet Nam, and a counterclaim to a unified nation, after the 1954 Geneva settlement. (Fall, The Two Viet Nams, op. cit., 210–223).

The United States recognized Bao Dai's regime, the GVN, on February 7, 1950. We had no relations with the DRV, although for six months after the departure of the French from the DRV in 1955, we maintained a vice-consulate in Hanoi, withdrawing it after persistent DRV isolation and harassment. Since, the United States has maintained full relations with GVN, but not even a postal exchange with the DRV. (Ibid., 191, 194). However, although no formal U.S. recognition has been extended, we have acknowledged DRV sovereignty, at first implicitly, and then, after 1962, explicitly. At the Geneva Conference in 1954, the U.S. "observer" related U.S. policy toward the DRV to that we have pursued re North Korea and East Germany. U.S. recognition of, consistent relations with, and increasingly strong support of the GVN after Geneva, were not accompanied by public policy statements more directly aimed at changing the status quo in North Viet Nam than that 1954 position. However, national policy papers of the period included the more ambitious objectives quoted.

38.  Ho on Revolution, op. cit., 298–299; also Central Intelligence Agency, Current Intelligence Weekly Review (10 May 1956). Ho's statement may also have been an answer to Kruschev's 11 April 1956 speech on "peaceful competition"; Cf. U.S. Dept. of State, Soviet World Outlook (publication 6836, July 1959), 98.
39.  "Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities in Vietnam," in U.S. Congress, Background Information..., op. cit., 54.
40.  The table is from Fourth Interim Report of the International Commission for Supervision and Control in Vietnam (April 11, 1955 to August 10, 1955). (London: HMSO, 1955), 30, App. IV. Cf. B.S.N. Murti, op. cit.) 88–91. The U.S. Dept of State's "White Paper" of 1965 entitled Aggression from the North mentioned "more than 900,000 refugees" who fled from North Viet Nam.[1] Bernard Fall has used the figure 860,000 in his books and essays;[2] Fall also has reported that the French transported 610,000 refugees South.[3] The
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  1. U.S. Dept. of State, "Aggression from the North," Bulletin, March 22, 1965, 404–425 (esp Part V), reproduced in U.S. Congress, Background Information..., op. cit., 195.
  2. Bernard B. Fall, The Two Viet Nams (New York: Praeger, Revised Edition, 1964), 153–154, 358; Fall, Viet Nam Witness (New York: Praeger, 1966), 76.
  3. Fall, The Two Viet Nams, op. cit., 154; Fall, "How the French...," op.cit., 88.