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<p> This doctoral dissertation investigates how the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, or North Vietnam), under the leadership of President Ho Chi Minh, created a "diplomatic front" to implement "people's diplomacy." The main focus is on the period from 1965-1972 when the DRV needed these strategies to win worldwide support and sympathy for the Vietnamese Revolution. The diplomatic front consisted of Vietnamese writers, cartoonists, workers, women, students, artistic performers, filmmakers, architects, medical doctors and nurses, academics, lawyers, and sportspersons. Research in Vietnamese, American, and Canadian archives reveals that the front forged important links with antiwar activists abroad, thus lending greater credibility to their efforts to portray North Vietnam in a positive light. People's diplomacy made it difficult for the United States to prolong the war because the North Vietnamese, together with the peace movment abroad, brought popular pressure on U.S. President Lyndon Johnson to end the war. People's diplomacy was much more effective than traditional DRV diplomacy in gaining the support and sympathy of Westerners who were averse to communism. People's diplomacy damaged the reputation of the United States by exposing U.S. war crimes and casting North Vietnam as a victim of American imperialism. As a result, many of America's Western allies did not send troops or provide aid to South Vietnam. People's diplomacy also helped North Vietnam gain crucial economic, military, and diplomatic support from the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, Cuba and North Korea.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation examines the early U.S.-D.R.V. relationship by analyzing related myths and exploring Viet Minh policies. I go beyond the previous literature to examine the Viet Minh government's modernization and anti-imperialist projects, both of which proved critical to D.R.V. policy evolution and the evolution of a new national identity. During the French era, as Vietnamese thinkers rethought the meaning of "being Vietnamese," groups like the Viet Minh determined that modernization was the essential to Vietnam's independence and that imperialist states like the U.S. posed a serious threat to their revolution and their independence. I argue that D.R.V. officials dismissed all possibility of a real alliance with the U.S. long before 1950. Soviet and Chinese mentors later provided development aid to Hanoi, while the D.R.V. maintained its autonomy and avoided becoming a client state by seeking alliances with other decolonizing countries. In doing so, Vietnamese leaders gained their own chances to mentor others and improve their status on the world stage. After Geneva, Hanoi continued to advance modernization in the North using a variety of methods, but its officials also heightened their complaints against the U.S. In particular, the D.R.V. denounced America's invasion of South Vietnam and its "puppet" government in Saigon as evidence of an imperialist plot. In advocating an anti-imperialist line and modernized future, D.R.V. leaders elaborated a new national identity, tying modernization and anti-imperialism inextricably to "being Vietnamese." Yet modernization presented serious challenges and Hanoi's faith in anti-imperialism had its drawbacks, limiting their ability to critique and evaluate the U.S. threat fully. / History

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