Fire in the Lake by Frances FitzGerald

American preoccupation with programs and instrumentalities arose out of the ground rules of their involvement in Vietnam. (Officially, the U.S. government was “not interfering in Vietnamese domestic politics.”) In part, however, it came from the basic American — or Western — view of government as a complex machine. Americans tend to speak of “governmental machinery” and to look upon the problem of government as one of programming the machinery correctly to attain the goals desired. For Americans it is ideas, principles, and organization that count: men are replaceable and their “personalities” almost incidental to their functions. (In Vietnam it was simply embarrassing that gossip about the Vietnamese generals described the workings of the government better than all of their organizational charts.) But the Vietnamese look at government in a very different light. To them it is not merely one organization among others, but a complete enterprise that comprehends much of what Westerners would consign to personal life and private morality. In looking for a leader they look not merely for a man with ideas and administrative skills; nor do they, as many Americans assumed, look only for a charismatic figure, a magical authority. They look for a man who expresses in his life how the government and the society ought to behave. In coming to the court of Lu, Confucius made no speeches and gave no orders. He gave the people a picture of the “correct” way of life; he showed them what had to be done.
    The Vietnamese Communists understood policies and programs as well as anyone else in Vietnam, but they, and in particular Ho Chi Minh, made an effort to present a picture of “correct behavior” to the people. Dressed usually in shorts and rubber sandals, the North Vietnamese leader lived as simply as a peasant in order to show that his revolution would inaugurate a truly popular regime. The same dress on Lenin would have been sheer affectation. But for Ho Chi Minh and his representatives to the people it was a necessity, for the Vietnamese do not differentiate between a man’s style and his “principles,” between his private and public “roles”: they look to the whole man.
    It was this very coherency of man and society that was to Westerners the most bewildering and unsympathetic aspect of the Vietnamese — Communists, Buddhists, and Catholics alike. In his biography of Ho Chi Minh, Jean Lacouture observed:
    However ruthlessly the people of North Vietnam may be governed, it would be wrong not to indicate how fully Ho has managed to identify with his fellow countrymen, and what an unusual relationship he has established with them. He is forever addressing ordinary citizens in an easygoing or fatherly tone, forever distributing oranges or other tidbits to the children. This is partly play-acting — why deny it? The character he projects is too well rounded to be entirely spontaneous, and his large red handkerchief has too often dabbed at dry eyes. 30
    While generally admiring of the North Vietnamese leader, Lacouture could not get over the suspicion that he was “playing a part,” that he was, to put it more harshly, insincere. Lacouture was right in a sense. But the very terms he chose to describe Ho Chi Minh showed exactly how Westerners and Vietnamese differ in their view of the function of the individual. To Westerners, of course, “sincerity” means the accord between a man’s words or actions and his inner feelings. But to Vietnamese, for whom man is not an independent “character” but a series of relationships, “sincerity” is the accord between a man’s behavior and what is expected of him: it is faithfulness not to the inner man, but to the social role. The social role, in other words, is the man. To many Vietnamese, therefore, Ho Chi Minh was perfectly sincere, since he
always
acted in the “correct” manner, no matter what effort it cost him. And it was the very consistency of his