Lien-Hang Nguyen, the Dorothy Borg Associate Professor in the History of the United States and East Asia at Columbia University, wrote a February 14, 2017 article in The New York Times‘s Vietnam ’67 series titled “Who Called the Shots in Hanoi?”
“Even by 1967, America’s military, intelligence and civilian leaders had no real idea who was actually calling the shots in Hanoi,” Professor Nguyen writes in the article. “To some extent, this is what the North wanted — the impression that decisions were made collectively, albeit under the gentle guiding hand of President Ho Chi Minh. But the American confusion also, inadvertently, reflected the messy, factionalized reality of North Vietnamese politics, one that historians are only now coming to grasp. Thanks to the slow if capricious process of historical declassification, the publications of renegade memoirs and histories, the dissemination of ‘open letters’ by disgruntled former leaders, and the careful and painstaking research and analysis by Vietnam specialists, we now have a better understanding of who was on top in Hanoi and what battles he waged to get there.”
The New York Times‘s Vietnam ’67 series presents articles by historians, veterans, and journalists about 1967 in Vietnam, a year that change the war and changed America.
Please click here to read Professor Nguyen’s complete article.
