This article examines the genesis and outcomes of the so-called August Revolution undertaken by the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) in 1945. Drawing on Vietnamese archival materials and ICP resolutions, instructions, and assessments, the article shows that the revolution did not culminate in ICP dominance of Vietnamese politics and that Chinese Nationalist occupation authorities in northern Vietnam were neither cordial nor obliging toward the government established by Ho Chi Minh after he declared Vietnam's independence on 2 September 1945. The so-called bourgeois revolution Ho and the ICP instigated that summer faced insurmountable challenges, including domestic fracturing and contestation, that precluded its swift completion. The August Revolution that inspired Ho's declaration of independence marked the beginning of a bloody internal struggle for power in Vietnam, not its culmination.

After the Tet Offensive of early 1968, Hanoi agreed to hold talks with U.S. representatives in Paris. The North Vietnamese, however, used the resulting talks with the Johnson administration not to negotiate in any traditional sense but to probe the intentions of Washington and to manipulate domestic and world opinion. Hanoi continued this charade for approximately a year, until domestic and international circumstances forced a meaningful reassessment of its position on a negotiated settlement of the war with the United States. This article explores that reassessment, as well as the evolution of North Vietnam's diplomatic strategy thereafter. Specifically, it considers the factors that conditioned the thinking and policies of Vietnamese Communist leaders, including the balance of forces below the seventeenth parallel and the behavior of close allies in Beijing and Moscow vis-à-vis the United States. The article proposes that military and economic setbacks in the South and in the North combined with recognition of the limits of socialist solidarity forced Hanoi to talk secretly and then to negotiate seriously with the Nixon administration and, ultimately, to accept a peace settlement that fell far short of the goals set by the Vietnamese Communists at the onset of the war.

Based largely on new documentary evidence from Vietnam, this article examines North Vietnamese policymaking immediately after the signing of the 1954 Geneva accords. The article demonstrates that leaders in Hanoi sought to abide by the accord on Vietnam because they genuinely believed that implementation would produce national reunification peacefully and in accordance with the interests of the “socialist revolution.” To that end, they instructed all operatives and supporters in both halves of Vietnam to undertake no activity that might sabotage and otherwise undermine the Geneva accord or provoke or justify non-compliance by the enemy. This stance disappointed revolutionaries in the South, who considered the French, the Americans, and their indigenous “lackeys” incapable of respecting the Geneva agreement.