Hanoi's War fills in key gaps in the history of the Vietnam War, drawing on recently opened North Vietnamese archives to explore the strategy and action of the Communist side. Too much work treats North Vietnam as essentially passive, or worse yet, inevitably victorious. The actual story is far more interesting, of internal divisions and purges, threading the diplomatic needle of the Sino-Soviet split, and tactical successes that were strategic defeats.

Nguyen follows Le Duan, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, and his deputy (and only person to refuse a Nobel Peace Prize) Le Duc Tho, as the key actors during the war, as opposed to the more internationally famous Ho Chi Minh (elderly and in ill-health for much of the war) and Vo Nguyen Giap (side-lined in internal party disputes). Duan is a fascinating character, a guerrilla bureaucrat who started his career in the Mekong Delta, and moved North just prior to the Geneva Peace Accords in 1954. He secured power solely in his office through a Stalinesque series of purges against "reactionaries", and escalated the war in the South, trying to establish firm control over local guerrillas. As a strategist, Duan was a bust, but he had the virtue of endurance and flexibility in the face of adversity. He ordered the Tet Offensive (General Offensive-General Uprising), in the genuine belief that a mass guerrilla attack would topple the South Vietnamese government. The Tet Offensive was a disaster for the Communist side, and it was only later that the "greater victories" of destroying the local Viet Cong in favor of Northerns loyal to Duan, and the propaganda blow against the American home front became apparent. Far from monolithic communism, Laos and Cambodia were five-or-six way fights between local nationals, Vietnamese, and Chinese and Russian backed forced against right wing and neutralist factions that only barely preserved the vital lifeline of the Ho Chi Minh trail. Lam Son 719, the Cambodian incursion, was a tactical victory for PAVN forces but a strategic defeat in the context of super-power diplomacy. Contrary to unending commitment to the cause of a unified Vietnam, Duan and Tho ruled a war-weary population, which they controlled through massive preemptive arrests of anyone who looked like even potential opposition to their policies.

Textually, this book is a dense, almost year by year account from 1963 to 1972. It's best when it stays close to principles and when Nguyen draws from an unpublished memoir by Duan's second wife Nguyen Thuy Nga (speaking of which, Duan was bigamist. He had a family in the North when he married Nga in 1950. The two wives did not get along, and bigamy was illegal.) It becomes much less interesting post-1970, with the years-long drag of Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy between Paris, Moscow, and Beijing. There are few true upsets for mainstream historiography of the Vietnam War. Hopefully, as more high-level archives open up, we'll see further books from the Vietnamese perspective.