1. Certainly not as many would have died if the elections had actually been held.
2. Yeah, Ho had people killed while he was fighting the French. So, for that matter, did the French. But, at the risk of repeating something widely known, he was more of a nationalist than a Communist. Yeah, he studied in the USSR. But, just as China wasn't a Soviet client and wasn't "communist" in the same way as the USSR, so was Vietnam. It would have been very difficult--almost impossible--for the USSR to have merely "dictated" to Ho what to do. He was an astute politician. IMHO, if the elections had been permitted, and if the Vietnamese French deadenders had permitted the elected govt to rule while accepting a minority position in the govt, Ho would have tilted enough to the West (the US, definitely NOT to France) to keep the Soviets honest, and perhaps even more than that.
But all that is hypothetical now. The Dulles brothers (and their followers, a fair portion of the country at the time)were too nuts about communism to have permitted it, seeing "It" as a giant blob-like "thing" spreading across the world. It was a false and self-destructive view, both of communism and the USSR. |
