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According to a recent book, written by a Vietnamese with recently declassified documents, Le Duan (General Secretary of VCP) launched a coup against Ho Chi Minh in 1965, effectively starting the aggressive attempt to unite Vietnam. With the American involvement in 1960 (much earlier), expect the man to remove the idea completely. Ho Chi Minh preferred building up his force in the North (to make it much more self-reliant) before pushing out.

ComradeH - I was intrigued by this post. It goes so far as to portray Le Duan's rise as a coup and calls out old man Ho as a "northern-firster". I take it the recent book is only in Vietnamese right now and not in English translation? The documents he used were recently declassified by Hanoi, despite the impression it might give of Ho being not 100% "patriotically correct"?

So how important was Le Duan as an individual? If had died by the 1960s or fallen from from the Communist Party's top echelon, what difference would it have made for Party policy towards the war? Would the circumstances of the early and middle 1960s have simply resulted in the rise of another skilled party member championing the same ideas as Le Duan rising and implementing those ideas?

So here is the "what-if" content. What if Le Duan never rises in Vietnamese Communist Party or falls out of the leadership any time between 1945 and 1965?
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