What Communists Say to One Another When No One Is Listening

I’m plowing through Hang Nguyen’s Hanoi’s War, a history of the war from the view of North Vietnam’s elite, and ran across this:

On 13 April, the Chinese leader argued that there was a causal link between DRV’s 3 April announcement and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on 4 April: “Had your statement been issued one or two days later, the murder might have been stopped.”

Context: The Chinese were deeply unhappy that Le Duan had agreed to negotiations with the Johnson administration, mostly because the Soviets were pushing hard for the opening of talks, and the Chinese saw the North Vietnamese capitulation on this point as evidence that Hanoi was moving into the Soviet sphere of influence. Le Duan was just as unhappy about the prospect of talks as Zhou Enlai, but Johnson’s public offer of talks left him boxed in.

And this leads Communist leaders to say hurtful things to one another. The fascinating moving parts:

1. The apparent belief of Zhou Enlai that the MLK assassination was orchestrated by the U.S. government.
2. The notion that accepting the idea of peace talks gave the U.S. government the leeway it needed to carry out the assassination.
3. The notion that, even if this were true, Le Duan would care enough about MLK one way or the other to change policy.

1 is, from the point of view of Beijing in 1968, not altogether absurd. 2 is considerably more outlandish, and 3 is just weird.

The rest of the book is also quite good; will review when finished.  The chapter on the reasoning behind the Tet Offensive is particularly interesting, as neither of Hanoi’s patrons thought that it was a good idea.  The Russians were strongly in favor of de-escalation and negotiations, while the Chinese hated the idea of direct attacks on South Vietnamese cities.