The project was the outgrowth of a process that began well over three
decades ago. As a foreign service officer serving with the U.S. Embassy in
Saigon in the mid-1960s, I was struck by the extraordinary tenacity and im-
pressive organizational capacities of the Viet Cong in the war that was then
just under way. The contrast with the performance of the Saigon regime was
noteworthy. After leaving government service for an academic career, I de-
cided to study the topic. In a study published by Cornell University Press in
1976, I investigated the emergence of the Communist Party as a major fac-
tor in the Vietnamese nationalist movement prior to World War II. Some of
the salient factors in the Communists' success and the corresponding weak-
nesses of their nationalist rivals began to emerge in that earlier study, but it
was clear that what the Party had achieved by the start of the Japanese oc-
cupation of Indochina in 1940 was no more than a promising beginning. By
no means did it satisfactorily explain the success achieved in the struggles
that followed. Thus gradually emerged my decision to continue my investi-
gation of Vietnamese communism through the conflict with the French after
the Pacific War down to its triumph in the recent war.

There were, I recognized, important obstacles that impeded any serious
study of this nature. First and perhaps foremost, it was a topic of consider-
able magnitude. In an effort to avoid superficiality I restricted my concern to
one of the central issues raised by the conflict -- the nature of the Party's rev-
olutionary strategy toward the seizure of power. The book was not a com-
prehensive history of the war or of the Communist movement per se. Nor
did it deal with domestic policies in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam
(DRV) except where such policies affected war strategy. Finally, it did not
pretend to treat in detail French or American efforts to counter Communist
activities in Vietnam, except where such efforts obviously related to the evo-
lution of Communist strategy. Although such issues are vital to an overall
understanding of the war, they must be left for future analysis.

A second obstacle was the relative paucity of reliable materials published
in the DRV. A few studies had appeared on various aspects of the war and its
origins, but only a handful were available to foreign scholars. As a result,
much remained obscure, not only about the decisions themselves but also
about the entire nature of the decision-making process. For years it had been
surmised that there had been disputes within the Party leadership over strat-
egy, yet the reality was always a matter of conjecture. The researcher was
therefore reduced to foraging for material -- in statements of the official
press, in books or articles by leading Party officials in Hanoi, or in official
documents, diaries, and training-session reports captured during the war.

A third problem was that of credibility. Most of the materials available on
the war, official as well as unofficial, are colored by partisanship. Official
documents issued in Hanoi, Paris, and Washington often reflected the gov-
ernment line. Books and articles by academics and journalists were fre-

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