Giving Peace a Chance: National Reconciliation and a Neutral South Vietnam, 1954–1964

Early discussions of establishing a neutral S outh V ietnam started during the G eneva C onference in 1954. Vietnamese negotiator P hạm V ăn Đ ồng met southern leaders, including B ảo Đ ại's former prime minister T rần V ăn H ửu and the C ao Đ ài leader P hạm C ông T ắc, who hoped to form such a government with F rench backing. These southerners pledged to open relations with the DRV , but they were pushed out of the picture by N gô Đ ình D iệm, who with U.S. support became the southern prime minister and then president. Although these early efforts to create a neutral S outh V ietnam and promote national unity failed, the southern communists’ 1956 “Theses on the P ath to R evolution” supported peaceful political struggle to unify V ietnam. Ideas of neutralism were viewed as communist propaganda by most U.S. statesmen and their allies in South Vietnam. Yet there were large numbers of native southerners who viewed the creation of a civilian coalition government as a desirable step, to avoid an A merican‐sponsored war on their soil. In this article, I show how these various neutralist groups, later known as the “Third Segment,” attempted to avoid a civil war that would entangle them in the C old W ar.