And, more important, there were no two separate nations. In 1954, in spite of the victory of the Vietnamese army, France and its western allies hung on to power in their southern stronghold. At an international convention in Geneva, all sides then agreed that the country should be divided – temporarily – into South Vietnam and North Vietnam, until July 1956, when an election would deliver a new government for the nation as a whole.
The then US president, Dwight Eisenhower, later admitted that if that election had been allowed to take place, some 80% of the Vietnamese people would have voted for Minh and the new socialist society – and the Vietnamese we spoke to concurred. But the US would not allow it. Instead, they turned to a notorious CIA officer, Edward Lansdale, who proceeded to use a dexterous combination of bribes and violence to install a new government in Saigon, headed by the Catholic politician Ngo Dinh Diem.