Party members were not the only people who expressed criticism of the war. Artists and writers had long used their talents to make political statements, placing them directly in the cross hairs of the ideological police. The doctrines of socialist realism, as strong in North Vietnam as it was in Communist Europe, demanded that all art glorify the party’s policies. When film directors, writers and poets portrayed the horrors of wars or presented nuanced depictions of battle, their art became subversive as the anti-American struggle for liberation and national salvation raged on. When Vu Thu Hien, a screenwriter and the son of Ho Chi Minh’s personal secretary, wrote an ambiguous scene of camaraderie between Vietnamese cadre and French colonial troops in his script for “Last Night and First Day,” he blurred the line between “friend and foe.”

While some artists stridently bucked socialist realism dictates, others merely denied having a political agenda when they refused to toe the ideological line. In Hanoi’s music scene, the only acceptable form of song or ballad was government-sanctioned revolutionary or martial music; playing anything else was illegal in times of war. So-called yellow music (as opposed to revolutionary red) was banned for being retrograde, sentimental or foreign-inspired. When the musicians Nguyen Van Loc, Phan Thang Toan (who went by the name Hairy Toan) and Tran Van Thanh formed a band and began playing prewar love songs and other romantic music at weddings and parties, they knew they were breaking the law. But in their view, they were not “doing politics”; they were simply playing music they liked.

Just like the Johnson administration, the party under General Secretary Le Duan did not tolerate overt manifestation of dissent. While Washington unleashed Operation Chaos, a secret campaign to undermine antiwar activism in the United States, Hanoi carried out its own repressive effort to stamp out domestic dissension. Starting in the summer of 1967, Le Duc Tho, the party’s organizational chief, and Tran Quoc Hoan, the minister of public security, carried out mass arrests of supposed “traitors” and “treasonous elements,” whom they labeled “revisionists.”

The dreaded security police rounded up hundreds of North Vietnamese citizens, including party officials, senior military officers, journalists, lawyers, writers and artists. Once they were detained, Tho and Hoan found them guilty of trying “to sabotage the foreign policies of our Party and our Party’s policy of fighting the Americans to save our nation,” and “ instead supported a policy of rightist compromise and conciliation.” The “Revisionist Anti-Party Affair,” as the 1967 campaign came to be known, would also be known as the “Hoang Minh Chinh Affair,” named after its first arrestee.