ABSTRACT
The Saigon government may have been justified at the time in regarding the insurgents as a minor irritant. The loss of representatives in the countryside, Saigon's symbols of authority as well as sources of information on rural conditions, put the Diem government in the position of "legislating in a void," to use Bernard Fall's apt phrase. The communists slowly transformed the National Liberation Front (NLF) into a shadow government, with political cells extending from the village level, through district and province political committees, to a clandestine central authority. Communist Party members, however, dominated the upper echelons of the NLF's political apparatus, and the Politburo in Hanoi directed its policies, goals, and strategy. The French failure to share political and economic power drove many Vietnamese leaders to join anticolonial groups such as the nationalist Vietnam Quoc Dan Dang or the Indochinese Communist Party.
