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Hanoi's leadership has been remarkably stable. No other Communist Party in the world has endured so long without a major purge. When it was formed in 1945, the Party's Politburo had eleven full members. Today nine of the eleven remain in power; the missing members are Ho and Nguyen Chi Thanh, the North's second-ranking military man, who died in 1967. There were always divisions and differences, but Ho helped keep them submerged by the force of his personality and, in his declining years, by his mere presence. "He was the hoop that held the staves of the barrel in round," says Pike. "Now that hoop is gone." As a result, fissures are likely to appear more frequently. The aim will remain the same—unifying Viet Nam under Hanoi's control—but the five contenders are likely to differ on the means. Pike believes, for example, that they disagree on the major policy issue confronting Hanoi—how best to win the war in the South. Giap, Dong and Le Duan support the current policy: intensive guerrilla activity interspersed with conventional, regular-force battles or "high points," all aimed at inflicting a decisive victory in the tradition of Dienbienphu. Truong Chinh, clearly influenced by the theories of Mao Tse-tung, favors dropping to a lower level of warfare. He argues that such protracted conflict would eventually exhaust the foe.
Ho himself probably advocated the regular-force theory, and some analysts believe that his firmness on this point was largely responsible for freezing the Paris negotiations. According to this theory, as long as Ho was on the scene —healthy or ill—it was impossible for other leaders to make a move toward breaking the deadlock. There has been a lack of progress, in fact, ever since Chief North Vietnamese Strategist Le Due Tho abruptly left Paris last July. Several Washington officials now believe that he may have been called home because Ho had suddenly begun to fail. These officials also believe it was more than coincidental that last week, only hours before Hanoi announced Ho's approaching death, North Vietnamese Negotiator Xuan Thuy hinted at a possible speedup of negotiations should the U.S. accept the principle of total withdrawal from South Viet Nam.
Undisguised Anxiety
Little real movement is expected in Paris, however, until Tho or another senior official returns with new instructions from Hanoi. Even then, it may be a while before the interim leaders can agree on the wording of those instructions. Nor is a quick shift expected on the battlefields of the South, where last week Communist forces staged their heaviest attacks in almost a month. The Viet Cong and North Viet Nam, however, announced that there would be a three-day ceasefire, perhaps this week, to mark Ho's death. There were indications that the allied forces would tacitly follow suit.