Ho Chi Minh was not a Vietnamese patriot whose Marxism was a superficial veneer; like North Korea’s Kim Il Sung and Cambodia’s Pol Pot, Ho was both a nationalist and a doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist whose brutal and bankrupt tyranny was modeled on Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China.
Ho was not the only legitimate nationalist leader in Vietnam; he and his subordinates found it necessary to execute, assassinate, imprison, and exile noncommunist nationalist leaders and dissidents in both North and South Vietnam.
Ho was not a Southeast Asian Tito who might have created a neutral united Vietnam equidistant from Moscow, Beijing, and the United States in the 1940s or 1950s; there were pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese factions among the Vietnamese, but no prowestern faction. The United States did not miss an opportunity to befriend Ho in 1945 or 1950 or 1954 or 1956.
South Vietnam did not violate international law by refusing to participate in national elections in 1956.
The murder of South Vietnam’s President Diem in the American-approved coup d’état in 1963 did not abort a potential reconciliation of North and South Vietnam.
The South Vietnamese insurgency was not a spontaneous rebellion against misgovernment; although many noncommunist South Vietnamese took part, the guerrilla war was controlled by Hanoi from the beginning to the end.
The Vietnamese communists were never serious about a coalition government for either South Vietnam or the country as a whole, except as a transition to communist rule; talk of a coalition government was a propaganda ploy intended to fool western liberals and leftists. (It did.)
The South Vietnamese regime did not fall in 1975 because it was uniquely corrupt and illegitimate. It fell to Soviet-equipped North Vietnamese tanks only because the United States, which had left troops in South Korea to defend a comparably corrupt and authoritarian dictatorship, had abandoned its allies in South Vietnam.