V
WHAT AMERICANS SAW INSTEAD, IN THE SPRING OF 1956, WAS A Saigon regime that had gone a long way toward consolidating its authority in South Vietnam. The advance of Communism, which had seemed so ominous just two years before, appeared to have been halted. Washington’s post-Geneva policy of fashioning a pro-Western bulwark in Indochina showed abundant signs of succeeding—and at relatively low cost. True, some Americans acknowledged, Diem’s government was thoroughly authoritarian, but how could it be otherwise, in view of the myriad challenges he faced to his rule? Reform would certainly be necessary, but it could come in time. For as U.S. ambassador G. Frederick Reinhardt would later remark, Diem was securing his leadership, not “running a Jeffersonian democracy.” Reinhardt’s boss felt the same way. “I must say,” the ambassador noted, “that Mr. Dulles made my life a lot easier by taking a pretty philosophic view of the question, saying that a truly representative government was certainly our objective in the long run, but one shouldn’t be unrealistic in thinking it was something to be achieved in a matter of weeks or days.”30
Few leaders in Congress and the press questioned this logic at the time. Many among them who followed the Vietnam struggle belonged to an advocacy group called the American Friends of Vietnam (AFV), which was really the Vietnam Lobby in more organized form and which offered full-throated support for America’s mission in Vietnam—and by extension for Diem’s rule. As the group’s founding document in 1955 succinctly put it: “A free Vietnam means a greater guarantee of freedom in the world.” In short order the group gained a large and distinguished membership, including Democratic senators John F. Kennedy, Mike Mansfield, and Hubert H. Humphrey, Republican senators Karl Mundt and William Knowland, academics such as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Wesley Fishel, and Samuel Eliot Morison, and even American Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas. Still more impressive was its roster of media barons: Whitelaw Reid, editor of the New York Herald Tribune; Walter Annenberg, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer; Malcolm Muir, publisher of Newsweek; William Randolph Hearst, Jr., of the New York Journal-American; and, at the top of the heap, Henry Luce of the Time Inc. empire. Through these and other friendly publications, the AFV produced a barrage of pro-Diem propaganda in the period, while drastically limiting the number of articles even remotely critical of the Saigon government.31
Time, with its huge midcentury circulation, led the way, as usual. In historian Robert Herzstein’s words, by this point the magazine “no longer covered Diem; it celebrated him.” In issue after issue, Americans learned that the South Vietnamese premier had brought “peace and stability” to his country and deserved Americans’ unqualified support. Schoolchildren across the United States, who would be of draft age in five or ten years, took weekly Time quizzes; securing a good grade meant knowing that Diem was a great patriot and ally of the West. Every so often the magazine acknowledged quietly that the Ngo family echoed “authoritarian overtones,” but it would go no further; even then, it trumpeted the regime’s achievements.32
The overall effect of this onslaught was considerable, if not in the upper reaches of the executive branch—the administration was after all already deeply committed to South Vietnam—then in Congress and in the broader American populace. Thanks in part to the AFV’s efforts, a narrative took hold among opinion makers that Diem was the right man to lead Saigon, and that the outlook in the struggle for Vietnam was rosy thanks to his courage and strength and thanks to America’s unstinting support. The White House, sensing the opportunity, aided the AFV by meeting with its officers and sending speakers to the group’s conferences. When the organization’s chairman, retired general William J. Donovan, sent a letter to Eisenhower in February 1956 urging the administration to oppose all-Vietnam elections scheduled for that summer, the president replied promptly that he was in full agreement. Later that spring, through Eisenhower’s urging, Donovan’s successor as AFV chief, retired general John W. O’Daniel, appeared before the House subcommittee on Far Eastern affairs. O’Daniel lavished praise on Diem and said South Vietnam would thrive with continued U.S. backing. The legislators accepted his account without question and offered their own encomiums to Diem and also to the efforts of O’Daniel and his organization.
On June 1, 1956, the AFV held its first major conference on Vietnam, titled “America’s Stake in Vietnam,” at the Willard Hotel in Washington. The administration dispatched Assistant Secretary of State Walter Robertson to assure the delegates of “the determination of this Government that there shall be no weakening in our support for Free Vietnam.” But the keynoter that day was Senator Kennedy, a late addition to the program when Mike Mansfield proved unavailable. JFK had changed on Vietnam, at least in public. Gone was the JFK who as a young congressman in 1951 had visited Indochina and asked such searching questions about the ability of the West to have its way in that part of the world. Kennedy had begun to qualify that position already in 1954, when he backed the concept of United Action to save the French position at Dien Bien Phu. Now the alteration was still more pronounced. JFK praised Diem’s leadership in extravagant terms, then declared that “Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike,” and a “test of American responsibility and determination.” The United States, he continued, had been present at South Vietnam’s birth and had given assistance to her life: “This is our offspring. We cannot abandon it.” Neither the United States nor “Free Vietnam is ever going to be a party to an election obviously stacked and subverted in advance.”33
Was this the possible presidential aspirant talking, positioning himself for a White House run by proclaiming his anti-Communist bona fides before an audience composed partly of influential publishers and journalists? Perhaps. Democrats, Kennedy knew, had been hammered for allegedly “losing China” half a dozen years before; it made sense to cover that flank by talking tough. Still, it’s significant in historical terms that JFK would feel the need to speak in such unambiguous terms in a public setting. His speech was greeted by enthusiastic applause. Few remembered the dissenting remark by distinguished University of Chicago professor Hans J. Morgenthau the same evening: “I shall defend the legal validity of that [Geneva] agreement to the last drop of my blood.”34
In the audience for Kennedy’s speech was another speaker at the conference, a young doctor who in the months to come would do more to shape American popular views of the Vietnam struggle at mid-decade than any other person. Largely forgotten today, his was for a time a household name in America—in January 1961, at the time of his premature death of cancer at thirty-four, a Gallup poll ranked him third among the world’s “most esteemed men,” right behind Dwight Eisenhower and the pope. His name was Thomas A. Dooley.
Born into privilege in St. Louis, Dooley was an indifferent student at Catholic schools who barely made it through his medical studies. Upon graduation, he took the only job he could get, signing on with the Navy Medical Corps. In 1954, now twenty-six and assigned to the USS Montague, he spent significant time ashore in the refugee camps in Haiphong monitoring the health condition of refugees seeking to relocate from North Vietnam to the south in Operation Passage to Freedom. Fluent in French and possessing boundless energy, Dooley worked tirelessly to combat contagious diseases before the exiles boarded navy vessels, earning accolades from superiors, a Legion of Merit, and a personal decoration from Ngo Dinh Diem.35
The experience also instilled in Dooley a fierce and unrelenting anti-Communism. When William Lederer, a reporter for Reader’s Digest and future co-author of the Cold War classic The Ugly American, visited Haiphong in early 1955 looking for human interest stories on the refugee crisis, he met Dooley, who described his work in gripping terms. Lederer said it had the makings of a “helluva book” and offered to help create it. Dooley jumped at the chance. The result was Deliver Us from Evil, which first ran in abridged form in Reader’s Digest—at that time the most popular magazine in the world, with a circulation of t
wenty million—then came out in hardback to enthusiastic reviews. With its gruesome tales of Viet Minh atrocities, and its trumpeting of Dooley’s own and America’s good deeds in the crisis, the book became a runaway best seller in 1956; sales exploded at about the time of the AFV conference in June (when Dooley was booted out of the service for his “extraordinarily active” homosexuality—quietly, for the navy did not wish to have a spectacle on its hands, having already decorated Dooley and endorsed his book).
Movie-star handsome and a gifted orator, Dooley also embarked on a nationwide lecture tour, giving eighty-six talks in seventy-four cities. At least three-fourths of the talks were broadcast. Audience members reported being spellbound as he wove his tale; many broke down in tears as Dooley piled image upon wrenching image. “What do you do for children who have had chopsticks driven into their ears [by the Viet Minh]?” he would ask. “Or for old women whose collarbones have been shattered by rifle butts? Or for kids whose ears have been torn off with pincers? How do you treat a priest who has had nails driven into his skull to make a travesty of the Crown of Thorns?” In Dooley’s telling, the refugees were hapless victims, unable to think or act for themselves, utterly dependent on the heroic efforts of American doctors and sailors, while the Viet Minh were irredeemably evil, so devoid of conscience that Dooley referred to them simply as that “ghoulish thing.”36
TOM DOOLEY AND KIRK DOUGLAS, THE ACTOR WHO WOULD PLAY HIM IN THE FILM VERSION OF DOOLEY’S BOOK, DELIVER US FROM EVIL, CONVERSE IN A RESTAURANT IN APRIL 1956. (photo credit 26.2)
Diem recognized what he had. He cabled a message to Dooley in the midst of the speaking tour to thank him for “the wonderful service you have rendered Vietnam.… [Y]ou have eloquently told the story … of hundreds of thousands of my countrymen seeking to assure the enjoyment of their God-given rights.” Other letters of praise came from President Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt, Chief Justice Earl Warren, and Cardinal Spellman.37
In due course, Deliver Us from Evil would be revealed for what it was: a wholly unsubstantiated account of the Passage to Freedom, studded with misleading claims and outright falsehoods. A group of U.S. officials who served in the Hanoi-Haiphong area during Dooley’s time there reported already in 1956 that his account was “not the truth” and that his accounts of Communist misdeeds were “nonfactual and exaggerated.” Their report, however, was kept secret. Lederer himself acknowledged in 1991 that the atrocities Dooley described “never took place.” Even more damning, one of the corpsmen who had served under Dooley’s command in Haiphong said years later that he never witnessed any of the barbaric spectacles detailed in the book.38
At the time, however, in the mid-1950s, many Americans were ready to believe. To them, Dooley’s appalling account only confirmed what so many others in the culture were already saying: that Communists, in evangelist Billy Graham’s words, were “inspired, directed, and motivated by the devil himself, who has declared war on Almighty God.” That Dooley knew little about Vietnam or geopolitics—in his book and lectures, he got even elementary facts wrong—did not matter much, for his legions of adoring fans knew even less. By the millions, they bought what he was selling, literally and figuratively. Others would plead Ngo Dinh Diem’s cause in the mid- and late 1950s, but no one touched so many Americans, in such an emotional way, as the doctor from St. Louis.
VI
JULY 1956 CAME AND WENT. ACCORDING TO THE FINAL DECLARATION at Geneva, the elections for the reunification of Vietnam, to be supervised by the ICC, were to be held in this month, but no voting took place, and July ended without incident in Vietnam and without much international comment. American planners breathed a sigh of relief; they had successfully bypassed an election they were certain their guy would lose. In the months thereafter, as U.S. aid dollars, technical know-how, and products poured into South Vietnam, some Washington officials spoke hopefully about a “Diem miracle,” about the RVN being a “showcase” for America’s foreign aid program. Saigon store shelves were well stocked with consumer goods, and food supplies were abundant. More than a thousand Americans were now in South Vietnam, assisting Diem in virtually all areas of civil and military administration, and the U.S. mission in Saigon was the largest in the world. American economic and security assistance totaled about $300 million per year starting in 1956—a manageable sum for taxpayers, even if it made Diem’s small state the fifth-largest recipient of American foreign aid.
The vast bulk of American assistance to South Vietnam was military. This accorded with Diem’s own preferences, and with John Foster Dulles’s view, expressed already in the summer of 1954, that a strong and effective South Vietnamese army would be an essential prerequisite to achieving political stability. (The Pentagon, it will be recalled, had said the opposite in 1954: that evidence of political reform ought to be a condition for expanded military aid.) From 1956 to 1960, 78 percent of American assistance to South Vietnam went into Diem’s military budget, a figure that excluded security items such as police training and direct equipment transfers. Conversely, only 2 percent of American funds went into programs such as health, housing, and community development.39
Under Lieutenant General Samuel T. Williams, the Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) undertook a crash program to build the new South Vietnamese Army (formally the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or ARVN) into an effective fighting force. A native of Texas and a veteran of both world wars as well as Korea, Williams was a tough, no-nonsense commander with a leathery face and a stiff mustache, who bore the nickname “Hangin’ Sam” for imposing the death penalty on a rapist in his regiment in Korea. The name also suited his character, that of a strong disciplinarian prone to issuing fierce tongue-lashings toward underlings.
Williams arrived in Saigon in 1955 wholly ignorant of the social, political, and cultural complexities of Vietnam and not in any big rush to learn. He was, however, a keen student of guerrilla warfare, having paid close attention to irregular operations in Korea. To be successful, he reasoned, the guerrilla must win the backing of a significant portion of the civilian population as well as access to supplies from friendly powers. Armed with this support, small and well-led guerrilla units could successfully tie down much larger conventional forces arrayed against them. They could achieve and retain the allegiance of the population by emphasizing the purity of their motives: to defeat colonialism, to stamp out corruption, to end governmental repression, to implement reforms. To defeat these guerrillas, Williams continued, superior military power would not be enough; rather, government officials needed a combined approach, involving political, psychological, economic, and administrative as well as military elements. In a succinct summation of what would later be called the “counterinsurgency” doctrine, Williams declared: “The major political and psychological mission is to win the active and willing support of the people.” Absent that, and absent a concomitant effort to cut the guerrillas off from supplies provided by the sponsoring power, no lasting victory could be achieved.40
There was wisdom and prescience in this line of analysis, yet Williams was curiously unwilling to act on his own prescription. He dismissed as “communist propaganda” all reports of corruption and nepotism in the ARVN, even when presented with strong evidence that some officers embezzled official funds, ran prostitution rings, trafficked in drugs, and extorted the very peasants whose support Williams supposedly considered it so vital to win.41 He also decided—on the basis of his Korean experience—that the guerrilla threat in South Vietnam was not so dire after all. The real danger, rather, was a massive conventional invasion across the seventeenth parallel. The DRV would use guerrillas, to be sure, but only to draw defenders away from border areas. Once the defenders fell into the trap of vacating the border, the hammer blow would follow. “Communist guerrilla strategy is simple,” Williams said to Diem.
By using a small amount of arms and equipment and a few good military leaders, they force [their opponents] to utilize relatively large military forces in a campaign that i
s costly in money and men. In Korea in 1950, the South Koreans were using three divisions to fight less than 7,000 guerrillas in the Southeast. When the North Koreans attacked, the South Korean Army suffered from this diversion as their army was not strategically or tactically deployed to meet the North Korean attack.42
Building from this analysis, Williams rejected the need for comprehensive political reform that might facilitate popular support for the government and instead urged Diem to build his conventional forces. Diem needed little convincing. He and Williams formed a strong bond, and the two men would have regular sessions that lasted several hours. Typically, Diem held forth. “Sometimes the general was able to get in some important points,” an American aide recalled, “but most of the time it was a case of General Williams making small talk while the president just plain rambled.” The two would sit with an interpreter at a small table, upon which a tea service and a tray of Vietnamese cigarettes were laid out. Diem would pick up one cigarette after another—the interpreter would light them—take a puff or two, and then move to another brand. The hard-pressed translator would attempt to take notes, translate, and keep his lighter at the ready.43
Williams set to work. Limited by the Geneva Accords to a total of 342 U.S. military personnel, he used various subterfuges to get the number up to 692. Utilizing these men he then reorganized and trained the ARVN, while Washington supplied approximately $85 million per year in uniforms, weapons, trucks, tanks, and helicopters. The United States also paid the salaries of ARVN officers and enlisted men, underwrote the costs of training programs, and bankrolled the construction of military facilities.
Gradually, a new, leaner South Vietnamese military took shape, its numbers totaling 150,000 troops organized into mobile divisions. Problems, however, remained. The army suffered from an acute shortage of officers, and many of those in senior positions were of marginal quality, in part because of Diem’s habit of choosing loyal rather than competent people for key posts. Trained specialists such as engineers and artillerymen were also lacking, and there were persistent concerns about the level of logistical support for troops in the field. “In the event of organized full-scale guerrilla and subversive activity by ‘planted’ Viet Minh elements, control of relatively large undeveloped areas of Free Vietnam would likely pass to the Viet Minh,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded in a sober assessment in 1956. If faced with a conventional attack across the seventeenth parallel, meanwhile, the ARVN could likely hold out a mere sixty days, the Chiefs said.44
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam Page 77