BY 1969THE WAR had devastated the land and demoralized the people
of Vietnam both north and south of the seventeenth parallel. It had also
exhausted the patience of most Americans. The government of South Viet-
nam remained unpopular, but it was more stable than it had been before the
election of President Nguyen Van Thieu and Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky
in September 1967. Ordinary South Vietnamese continued to resent the
avoidance of conscription by privileged young men. Village life in Vietnam
had been turned upside down, as the fighting in the countryside drove over
four million peasants from their traditional homes into the bloated cities.
Many of these newcomers depended for their livelihoods on the jobs or
handouts provided by hundreds of thousands of Americans in Vietnam,
whose presence confronted ordinary Vietnamese with a heart-wrenching di-
lemma. As long as massive numbers of Americans remained in Vietnam, the
war would continue. But their departure would leave hundreds of thousands
of Vietnamese destitute.

Above the seventeenth parallel, the government retained the tight control
over North Vietnamese society it had exercised since 1954. But Ho Chi Minh,
the charismatic leader whose nationalist achievements had helped bind North-
erners together, was not the man he had been after the Vietminh's victory
over France. As his health had failed, the direction of life in North Vietnam
had fallen to Ho's friends who had formed the Communist Party with him in

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