Ho Chi Minh Demands U.S. Withdrawal from Vietnam

Apr. 9, 1965 - President Ho Chi Minh of North Vietnam was reported today to have demanded the withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Vietnam as a condition for any settlement.

He dismissed U.S. talk of negotiations as “misleading,” it was reported, and said the Vietnamese people were “determined to fight to the end against the aggressors.” 

President Ho’s remarks were made in a recent interview with a correspondent of Akahata, journal of the Japanese Communist party. Thus they did not constitute a direct reply to President Johnson’s speech in Baltimore Wednesday night, which offered in effect negotiations without prior conditions.

But the prominent attention given to Mr. Ho’s interview today by the North Vietnam Press Agency suggested that it was intended to serve for now as a statement of Hanoi’s policy.

In the interview, President Ho also said that if the U.S. withdrew from South Vietnam and stopped “provocative attacks” against North Vietnam, this would “bring about favorable conditions for a conference along the pattern of the 1954 Geneva conference” that divided Vietnam into Communist and non-Communist sectors.

Mr. Ho added that American “imperialists” had recently “put forward misleading talk about ‘peace’ and ‘negotiations.’”

Replying to such bids, he asserted: “The peoples of the world are fully aware of their aggressive and warlike nature. The step-up in aggression in South Vietnam and the bombing of the North are part of their policy of ‘special warfare.’”

Communist China’s first response to Johnson’s speech was expressed today in a dispatch by Hsinhua, the Chinese Communist press agency.

Johnson “told a pack of lies and made many deceptive remarks” in his speech, Hsinhua said. It said all Johnson’s address had to offer was “gangster’s logic and big lies.”

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