No More Vietnams by Richard Nixon

days a week, Diem would tour the countryside, scrutinizing the progress of his plans on the local level and inundating officials with advice. Although his programs often taxed his government’s meager administrative capabilities, their effect was overwhelmingly beneficial.
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    When the two leaders are compared side-by-side, the suggestion that Ho would have outpolled Diem head-to-head seems ridiculous. Yet during the war, many critics of the American effort to save South Vietnam argued this very point. They said that the Geneva Declaration of 1954 legally bound Diem’s government and the United States to unify the two halves of Vietnam through elections and that Ho would have inevitably come out the winner. They were wrong on both counts.
    The text of the Geneva Declaration about elections was not legally binding on the United States or South Vietnam. Nine countries gathered at the conference and produced six unilateral declarations, three bilateral cease-fire agreements, and one unsigned declaration. The cease-fire agreements alone were binding for their signatories; the provision concerning reunification elections appeared in the separate final declaration. Only four of the nine states attending committed themselvesto the declaration’s terms. The United States did not join in it. South Vietnam, which was not even present in Geneva, retained its freedom of action by issuing a formal statement disavowing the declaration. North Vietnam also did not associate itself with the declaration. Very simply, it had no legal force.
    Nor did any of the participants expect elections to occur. The Geneva Conference was intended not to establish peace for all time through the ballot box but rather to create a partition of Vietnam similar to that of Korea. Partition was formally treated as a temporary expedient, but all major participants expected it to be permanent. Whatever their words about elections, their actions revealed their intent: They established two governments, allowed for two separate military forces, and arranged for the movement of refugees between the zones. It would have been senseless to go through all this trouble in 1954 only to turn around and undo it after elections in 1956.
    The whole idea was wildly unrealistic in any case. Reunification was supposedly to be decided by free elections. Because elections would not be free in North Vietnam, South Vietnam could legitimately object to holding them. A stalemate was inevitable. North Vietnam understood this. After the conference, its delegate, Pham Van Dong, told a reporter, “You know as well as I do that there won’t be elections.”
    When the time came to discuss elections in 1956, Diem refused to participate, and the United States supported him. We were not afraid of holding elections in Vietnam, provided they were held under the conditions of genuine freedom that the Geneva Declaration called for. But we knew that those conditions would exist only in South Vietnam, and this sentiment was bipartisan. Senator Kennedy said that neither the United States nor South Vietnam should be a party to an election “obviously subverted and stacked in advance.” After spending two years crushing every vestige of freedom in North Vietnam, Hanoi’s leaders would never have allowed internationallysupervised free elections to decide their fate. Following later consultations, even the Soviet Union agreed that a plebiscite was unfeasible.
    North Vietnam, with a cynicism appalling even for Ho, briefly pressed the issue. But balloting conducted in Viet Minh territory in 1946 revealed just what they had in mind for 1956. Ho never permitted any suspense about the outcome. In order to secure the participation of other political parties, he openly guaranteed the leaders of one party that they would win twenty parliamentary seats and those of another that they would take fifty. The returns themselves made Diem’s elections look like