Even friendly observers expressed dismay at these electoral tactics. “The one-sided ‘election campaign’ and the methods employed to assure an almost unanimous vote for Diem were quite outrageous,” one ardent supporter of South Vietnam later wrote. “The use of these methods to secure the victory of a good cause boded ill for the future of a regime whose leader liked to advertise his acts as morally inspired.” State Department officials privately agreed but publicly claimed to see in the election the further “evolution of orderly and effective processes in an area of Southeast Asia which has been and continues to be threatened by Communist efforts to impose totalitarian control.”14
Flush with victory, Diem proclaimed the birth of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN), with himself as her first president. He stood supreme. Six months after facing near-certain demise, he was now in uncontested control of South Vietnam, having defeated the sects, having virtually eliminated political and military French influence, and having deposed Bao Dai. Soon thereafter Diem abolished elected village councils and replaced them with appointed administrators, many of them Catholics who had moved down from the north and who were unknown to the villagers. With no trace of irony, Diem again renounced the nationwide elections prescribed in the Geneva Accords, because they could not be “absolutely free.”
It’s no surprise that many later analysts, in judging these and other actions and statements by Diem in the course of 1955, depicted him as a power-hungry and hypocritical autocrat, a reactionary mandarin, a pliant U.S. puppet, and nothing more. But this is insufficient. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, Diem was a modernizer of sorts, a man who had his own vision for Vietnam’s future and who sought to strike a balance between progress and Vietnam’s cultural traditions. “We are not going to go back to a sterile copy of the mandarin past,” Diem told journalist Marguerite Higgins. “We are going to adapt the best of our heritage to the modern situation.”15 Along with his brother and chief adviser Ngo Dinh Nhu, he embraced the ideology of personalism, which was rooted in the efforts of humanist Roman Catholic intellectuals in interwar France to find a third way to economic development, between liberal democracy and Communism. A key figure was philosopher Emmanuel Mounier, who expounded his ideas in books and in the journal Esprit. For Nhu, an intellectual and a graduate of France’s L’École des chartes, personalism’s emphasis on the value of community, rather than individualism, while at the same time avoiding the dehumanizing collectivism of socialism, held tremendous appeal and could complement the traditional concern of Vietnamese culture with social relationships.16
At least theoretically. In hindsight, it seems clear, personalism for Diem and Nhu was more than a cover for crass personal interests or a rationalization of policies pursued for other reasons; it was a motivating factor in its own right, even if not quite the driving force that some sympathetic historians have suggested. In late 1955, however, it remained to be seen whether the brothers were truly committed to working hard to realize the personalist vision, and, if so, whether the ideology could work in the real world of practical politics. In particular, how would they square the ideology’s emphasis on Vietnamese autonomy and Vietnamese solutions with the RVN’s real and continuing dependence on American aid? Hypersensitive to questions concerning his nationalist legitimacy, especially in light of the DRV’s battlefield successes against the French, Diem from the start was obsessed with the specter of collaboration. Dependence on the United States could, he feared, taint his credentials as a nationalist, thus playing into the hands of his enemies. But what option did he have? U.S. material and political support was, and would continue to be for some time to come, vital to his political survival.
III
AMERICAN PLANNERS WERE NOT UNAWARE OF DIEM’S NEOCOLONIAL conundrum, and the more sagacious among them understood that it could cause problems for the U.S.–South Vietnamese relationship down the line. But they took comfort from the fact that, during his first eighteen months in office, Diem worked reasonably amicably with his American advisers. Edward Lansdale, especially, was seemingly always there, just off center stage, prodding Diem, urging him on, counseling restraint when the need arose. Lansdale even designed the ballots for the Diem–Bao Dai referendum, cleverly placing Diem’s name against a red background (the Asian color of happiness) and Bao Dai’s in green (the color of a cuckold). On a range of political and military issues confronting the regime in the course of 1955, Lansdale offered his counsel, which Diem always accepted even if he did not always choose the recommended course. “South Vietnam, it can truly be said, was the creation of Edward Lansdale,” author Neil Sheehan would say, an exaggeration that nevertheless gets at the American’s fundamental importance.17
Nor did Lansdale matter only in terms of his counsel to Diem. He also sent admiring dispatches to Washington concerning the South Vietnamese leader and his prospects. Whatever appearances to the contrary, Lansdale insisted, Diem could defeat his multiple enemies; no other candidate for the leadership offered the same hope. The message hit home with policy makers, as the USIA’s Howard Simpson recalled: “[Lansdale’s] cables were vibrant accounts of what he had witnessed during the Saigon fighting. The events and conversations he reported backing Diem’s actions had an impressive ‘I was there’ quality, and these trumped the more staid diplomatic correspondence between government officials.”18
The claim for influence should not be overstated. President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had already decided, before Lansdale was on the scene, to create and sustain a non-Communist bastion in southern Vietnam; to the extent that they had doubts in the early months, these concerned Diem and whether to keep him, not whether to maintain the American commitment. Key players such as Mike Mansfield were likewise predisposed to welcome Lansdale’s bullish missives, as were other members of the emerging “Vietnam Lobby”—a group loosely coordinated by Diem’s New York publicist, Harold Oram, and counting among its members Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas and Senators Mansfield and John F. Kennedy.19 Donald Heath, the diminutive career diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador in Saigon until November 1954, was himself an important adviser to the new government, his car often parked outside the palace. Other Americans were likewise providing assistance, in ways large and small, notably Professor Wesley Fishel, who headed a Michigan State University Group that advised Diem on issues relating to public administration and policing.
But that in a way is the point: Lansdale matters in historical terms because he gave momentum and conceptual clarity to a policy that was already emerging. He described the stakes and the tasks in Vietnam in ways that resonated with Americans, insisting, as he constantly did, on the need to be for something, not merely against Communism. “Democracy” and “freedom” were his watchwords, not “empire” or “intervention,” and he stressed that Americans were in Vietnam not to be colonizers like the French but to build a nation. Their motives were wholly altruistic. Through development aid and technical know-how, the United States would help the Vietnamese and other newly independent nations transition from the “traditional” world to the modern one without falling prey to the false attractions of Communism. For despite differences in culture or history, all societies traveled toward the same universal end point, one already reached by the United States, the “first new nation.” Consequently, Lansdale and other modernization devotees argued, nation building would serve American interests while also creating a safer, more peaceful world.20
Today we know that the results did not often match the claims. Combining reformist zeal with the easy resort to military force, nationbuilding efforts sometimes created authoritarian, dictatorial regimes rather than liberal states—including in Vietnam. In practice, American modernizers tended to be distrustful of populist politics and inclined to favor elite-led societies; often they turned to modernization as a means of counterinsurgency and social control. But the message resonated powerfully in its day, and Edward Lansdale was a particularly skillful exponent of it. “Ed was
low-key but he could always convince people,” one colleague remembered. “God! The way Ed explained the situation in Vietnam. If we gave up, all of Asia would go down the drain. It was just remarkable.… Of course he was an advertising man, a salesman, very soft-spoken, very quiet, very smooth.”21
Moreover, Lansdale’s views were more complicated—and contradictory—than some later critics allowed. His certainty that the American way was right for all concerned did not prevent him from extolling the need for U.S. officials to show empathy for local values and practices. “Let’s cut the American self-delusion,” he declared, with reference to CIA colleagues concerned only with espionage and State Department officers who belittled the Vietnamese. Though tone deaf to foreign languages, Lansdale took genuine interest in foreign cultures and enjoyed spending extended time with villagers in the Philippines and Vietnam, charming some of them by taking out his harmonica and gamely trying to learn the local songs and always taking care to be gracious and polite. In this way, Southeast Asia became for Lansdale, in historian Jonathan Nashel’s apt formulation, “simultaneously exotic and proto-American.”22
IV
A COURTEOUS AND SOFT-SPOKEN AMERICAN COMES TO SOUTHERN Vietnam completely convinced of the moral virtue of his anti-Communist ends and gives scant concern to the means he employs to realize those ends. It all sounds uncannily like another figure who made his appearance just as Ngo Dinh Diem’s Republic of Vietnam came into being at the end of 1955: Alden Pyle, the title character in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, which was published in Britain in December and came out in the United States the following March. In the novel, set in Cochin China in 1952, Pyle—the quiet American of the title—is a new arrival in Saigon who works for the CIA and is intent on encouraging an indigenous Third Force that is neither Communist nor colonialist. He befriends British journalist Thomas Fowler, who introduces him to his young Vietnamese mistress Phuong. A tempestuous love triangle develops. When Fowler learns that Pyle has supplied a Third Force general with matériel used in a bombing in a Saigon square, he betrays the American to the Viet Minh, who murder him and dump his body in a canal.
As we have seen in an earlier chapter, Lansdale was almost certainly not the model for Pyle—Greene began writing the novel long before he knew of Lansdale—and there are notable differences between them. Lansdale was considerably older than Pyle, for one thing, and lacked his schoolboy innocence. He also did not possess the bookishness and inexperience that Pyle exhibits in the novel; nor was he quite as earnest as Pyle. Yet the similarities are nonetheless striking, and it’s easy to see why Greene—much to his frustration—never could quite dispel the notion among literary critics and journalists that he had patterned Pyle after Lansdale.
The novel won lavish praise from British critics. “The best [Greene] novel for many years, certainly since The Power and the Glory,” declared Donat O’Donnell, the pen name of Conor Cruise O’Brien, in the New Statesman. Evelyn Waugh, writing in The Sunday Times, found the work “masterly, original, and vigorous,” while Nancy Spain (Daily Express) thought it “as near a masterpiece as anything I have ever read in the last twenty years.” In the view of The Times Literary Supplement, “it is quite impossible to close the discussion simply by closing the book,” in view of the issues at stake. “A particular excellence of The Quiet American lies in the way in which [Greene] builds up the situation finally to explode in the moral problem which for him lies at the heart of the matter.… The effect is powerful and long-lasting, and it is by this effect that the whole book must be judged.” And in The Manchester Guardian, Norman Shrapnel pronounced the novel “superb, the sort of prize for devotion to duty that comes to a reviewer once in several years.… Attack the book at its weakest points and nothing essential fails.”23
Many American reviewers felt differently. Not all of them: Contrary to later myth, the novel received broadly favorable notice in various U.S. publications, with critics lauding Greene for his skillful pacing, his evocative sense of place, and his taut, clean style. The Chicago Sun-Times called it “the best novel about the war in Indo-China,” while The New York Times said it was “written with Greene’s great technical skill and imagination.” Even some of these reviewers, however, as well as those who were wholly negative in their evaluations, faulted the author for what Newsweek called “This Man’s Caricature of the American Abroad.” Why did Greene invent such a shallow, cardboard figure as Pyle, one who was never allowed to win any of his debates with Fowler, the cynical and well-traveled British narrator? The only explanation was that the author had allowed his palpable anti-Americanism (resulting, some of the reviewers speculated, in part from his being temporarily denied a visa to enter the United States in 1952) to drive his story. A. J. Liebling, in a caustic and supercilious review in The New Yorker, took particular umbrage at the direct connection between Pyle and the killing of innocents and concluded that Greene—who, Liebling delighted in pointing out, could not manage to get American idiomatic English right—merely resented America’s assumption of world leadership. “There is a difference,” Liebling charged, “between calling your over-successful offshoot a silly ass and accusing him of murder.”24
Greene plainly touched a nerve among these reviewers, testy about his portrayal of their national character. What they missed was the complexity of both Fowler and Pyle (though not, it must be said, of Phuong, the Vietnamese woman they both covet, who is the real cardboard figure in the book, a physically beautiful and demure airhead who spends her time reading gossip about the British royals). Fowler is jaded and sardonic and content to caricature all things American through one-dimensional analysis, but the novel also shows a dark element in his own character. He feels threatened by Pyle’s vitality and courage and chooses to betray him, perhaps out of sexual jealousy, and he shows scant concern for the ordinary people of Vietnam and what will happen to them. Even after he sets up Pyle to be killed by the Viet Minh, moreover, he admits sneaking admiration for the young American’s willingness to commit to a cause: “All the time that his innocence had angered me, some judge within myself had summed up in his favor, had compared his idealism, his half-baked ideas founded on the works of York Harding, with my cynicism.” After all, Fowler is reminded, “Sooner or later … one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.”25
In the famous nocturnal watchtower scene, the Briton tells Pyle that the peasants in the field care only about securing enough rice, to which Pyle replies that they want to think for themselves. “Thought’s a luxury,” Fowler answers. “Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?” Having apparently conceded this point, Pyle asserts that peasants do not make up the whole of the Vietnamese population. What about the educated? Would they be happy under the Communists? “Oh no,” says Fowler, “we’ve brought them up in our ideas.”26
Generations of college students have debated who gets the better of this exchange. For British journalist Richard West, an admirer of the novel who freely admits to seeing Vietnam “through Greene-tinted spectacles,” the answer is clear: It is the American who wins. “In this debate, I find myself wholeheartedly on the side of Pyle,” West writes in a sympathetic essay published shortly after Greene’s passing in 1991. “It is wrong and arrogant to suppose that because a man lives in a mud hut, he cannot think about God or indeed democracy.” In the late 1960s, West had made a film about the inhabitants in a small village in the Mekong Delta, and though no “expert on their thinking,” he found them to be interested in the outside world and avid listeners to the BBC. In the French period, West rightly notes, the countryside was often the center of discontent and militancy, and he argues that Pyle was right to predict that peasants would resent Communist rule, “partly perhaps because they want to think for themselves.”27 Fowler, in other words, is not immune to the kind of shallow analysis he so often ascribes to Pyle and to Americans generally. He seems blind to the possibility that situations could arise in which Pyle’s ide
alistic innocence might prove much more humanly useful than his own weary realism.
Of course, behind the innocence there lurks another, more sinister element, a self-righteous and brutal efficiency that Pyle shows no hesitation in deploying. Utterly confident in the theories he picked up in some books while a student at Harvard, he is prepared to do whatever it takes to support them. If some Vietnamese civilians are killed in the process of establishing the Third Force, it is a necessary price to pay. It is this darker element in Pyle’s can-do naïveté that Greene stresses in the novel; over time it is what would give The Quiet American its prescience, its seemingly perpetual contemporary resonance. This quality in the U.S. advisory effort in South Vietnam was not clearly evident initially, though, and thus most American reviewers felt free to be dismissive of the characterizations and to recognize nothing of themselves in Alden Pyle.28
It follows that Americans did not pay much attention to Greene’s contemporaneous account, published in The New Republic not long after the U.S. release of the novel, of his most recent visit to Vietnam. “The South,” he wrote, “instead of confronting the totalitarian North with the evidences of freedom, has slipped into an inefficient dictatorship; newspapers suppressed, strict censorship, men exiled by administrative order and not by judgment of the courts.” And in a second article in the following issue: Diem “represents at least an idea of patriotism … but he is separated from the people by cardinals and police cars with wailing sirens and foreign advisers droning of global strategy, when he should be walking in the rice fields unprotected, learning the hard way how to be loved and obeyed—the two cannot be separated.… The name I would write under his portrait is Patriot Ruined by the West.”29
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam Page 76