AHC: Is it possible to get the NLF to take power in South Vietnam?

IOTL they were sidelined almost instantly. Is it possible to get their more pluralistic civilian leadership into congress?
 
See https://www.jstor.org/stable/24914135?read-now=1&seq=4#page_scan_tab_contents for an interesting review of Robert Brigham's Guerrilla Diplomacy: The NLF"s Foreign Relations and the Viet Nam War. While the reviewer (and Brigham) reject the view that the NLF was merely "a simple extension of the Workers' party apparatus in Hanoi" the review acknowledges that Workers' Party members "occupied many of the higher-level NLF positions and would not disobey any explicit instructions from Hanoi." Moreover, whenever the NLF showed what Hanoi feared might be dangerous signs of independence, Hanoi reined it in, as with the December 1963 decision to step up northern involvement in the war. And the Tet offensive left the NLF more dependent than ever on Hanoi:

"Hanoi found it very difficult to keep up with such rapid changes [in 1963-4] The Workers' Parry Politburo had endorsed the NLF's neutralism campaign because it helped to widen the anti-imperialist circle and made more difficult Washington's efforts to mobilize international support for intervention in Vietnam. By 1963, however, some Politburo members felt that matters were getting out of control. The NLF was acting too independently, national re-unification needed to be reemphasized, and strategic commitments to the socialist world reasserted. In December 1963, at one of the most important meetings in the twentieth-century history of Vietnam, the party resolved to step up northern involvement in the South and to tighten discipline over its members in the NLF, including diplomats. Two men, Le Duan and Le Duc Tho, emerged dominant within the Politburo, and a purge ensued of hundreds of senior party members who continued to question what was happening. The neutralism plank remained in the NLF platform, but its practical significance had been weakened substantially.

"NLF diplomats enjoyed wide public exposure in China and ready access to Chinese leaders. Brigham points out how Hanoi took advantage of NLF popularity in China, especially in 1966-67, when it was essential to retain Beijing's support for the war effort at the same time that reliance on Soviet aid was increasing and the Cultural Revolution was turning China inward. He also suggests that Beijing "preferred an eventual pro-China southern regime to a Moscow-leaning unified Vietnam. (p. 64). Certainly Beijing would have been well informed of strategic differences inside the Workers' Parry, and it did sustain contacts with the NLF in the South that bypassed Hanoi entirely. China was furious at Hanoi's acceptance of President Johnson's offer to negotiate at the end of March 1968, yet continued to provide aid until the end of the war in 1975.

"Whatever the overall political achievements of the 1968 Tet Offensive, the NLF suffered heavy losses among its experienced cadres; many local organizations were destroyed entirely during the subsequent U.S.-RVN Accelerated Pacification Program. Military replacements continued to arrive from the North, altering the nature of the armed struggle permanently. Surviving NLF cadres might well lament northerners taking over ever more responsibilities, yet their only option short of surrender was to accept this shift and hope for improved circumstances later. Brigham offers us an excellent account of efforts by NLF diplomats to take advantage of unremitting overseas support for the NLF, which in 1969 was renamed the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam (PRG). Still, Hanoi controlled every step of the vital, drawn-out deliberations with the Americans. Le Duc Tho did not even bother to inform the PRG before he dropped the key demand for a coalition government in the South. PRG representatives complained, and even sought Moscow's intercession, to no avail....

"Guerrilla Diplomacy contains an epilogue describing how Hanoi moved quickly following the 30 April I975 victory to reunify North and South Vietnam. The PLAF disappeared into the People's Army, the PRG was disbanded, and senior PRG officials received either figurehead positions or minor ministry portfolios in the newly designated Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The author suggests that no one should have been surprised by these decisions, since northern and southern party members shared a single strategic culture. But other evidence points to animated debates during the summer and fall of 1975, with some former PRG officials stressing the potential benefits of a more gradual approach to reunification. In retrospect they were probably correct, yet the overwhelming hubris and the Leninist preferences of Hanoi's leaders made such gradualism very unlikely at the time."

All in all, the NLF's dependence on Hanoi was so great that I doubt it could ever have played a truly independent role.
 
It would have to be pre-Tet.

Many of the Viet Cong's frontline units were wiped out or severely diminished in manpower and had to be re-consolidated, which often meant losing area knowledge and infiltration progress, or being outright replaced by NVA personnel smuggled in from the Ho Chi Minh trail. For the rest of the war, the fighting would be done almost entirely by NVA personnel.

It should be noted as well that the successes of the NLF in the early 1960s were not replicable once ARVN was joined by American forces. Concentrated airpower limited the availability of follow up advances following a tactical victory over ARVN, and NLF forces were constantly being harassed by American Air Cavalry and Marine expeditions, disrupting their former pattern of success, which was to take hold of an area's village structure, decapitate the leadership, and conscript the peasantry, before launching an attack on a local ARVN unit, and gaining more political legitimacy, etc.

The best hope for success for this idea would be for the NLF to launch a concentrated offensive on the scale of Tet (thereby needing more NVA support earlier on), but to do it right after the fall of Diem, when there was a bit of confusion in the command structure of ARVN, and when the Catholics and refugees in the countryside stopped supporting the government as much as when Diem was in power.
 
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