Ho Chi Minh
Ho founded the Viet Minh, accepted a 1954 partition he expected elections to erase, and died in 1969 before victory. His name brands the trail and the renamed Saigon.
Died
3
Role
3
City
3
US presidents and MACV generals are over-photographed; Le Duan and southern revolutionaries are under-photographed in English.
Antiwar icons (King's 1967 speech, veterans against the war) are part of the US political cast.
People
Ngo Dinh Diem
Diem built an anti-communist southern state with US aid and alienated Buddhists and peasants. He was killed in the 1963 coup.
Office
3
End
3
Backer
3
Lyndon B. Johnson
Johnson Americanised the war in 1965 and was destroyed politically by Tet. He declined to run in 1968.
Build-up
3
Tet
3
Exit
3
Vo Nguyen Giap
Giap, already famous from Dien Bien Phu, oversaw a people's-war strategy that mixed conventional and guerrilla phases. Historians argue about his later role versus younger generals in 1975.
Fame
3
War
3
Later
3
William Westmoreland
Westmoreland ran the big-unit war of 1964-68 and the body-count metric that Tet discredited as a political measure.
MACV
3
Metric
3
After
3
Richard Nixon
Nixon promised peace, widened the Cambodian map, mined Haiphong, and signed Paris 1973. Watergate then destroyed his presidency.
Policy
3
Accords
3
After
3
Le Duan
Le Duan was the key southern-offensive advocate in the politburo after Ho's decline -- more important to 1968-75 strategy than Western fame admits.
Peak
3
Line
3
1975
3
Nguyen Van Thieu
Thieu ran the south from 1967 to 1975, opposed the Paris terms, and left as the state collapsed. His army's 1975 disintegration is still argued as morale, aid, or design.
Office
3
Paris
3
End
3
Debate
Winnable or not?
Orthodox, revisionist and post-revisionist US schools still argue whether a different strategy could have preserved a southern state -- or whether the political material was never there.
Media and defeat
Whether television "lost" the war is a durable myth; most historians put the cause in Vietnamese politics and US strategy, not in camera angles.
Memoirs from both armies now exist in translation; the first generation of US books was one-sided.
K-dramas and Korean veterans' memoirs are a separate iconography for ROK service in Vietnam.