Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

  The film, skillfully directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and shot on location in Saigon, in other respects tracks closely to the plot and the dialogue of the novel, but this was small comfort to Graham Greene, who expressed mocking disdain upon learning of the alteration. “If such changes as your Correspondent describes have been made in the film,” he wrote in a letter to the editor of the London Times, “they will make only the more obvious the discrepancy between what the State Department would like the world to believe and what in fact happened in Vietnam. In that case, I can imagine some happy evenings of laughter not only in Paris but in the cinemas of Saigon.” In his memoir Ways of Escape, Greene referred to “the later treachery of Joseph Mankiewicz.” Elsewhere he wrote that “the book was based on a closer knowledge of the Indo-China war than the American [filmmaker] possessed and I am vain enough to believe that the book will survive a few years longer than Mr. Mankiewicz’s incoherent picture.”15

  Contrast this with the view of Edward Lansdale, who was a consultant on the film and who, in a letter to Ngo Dinh Diem, praised its alterations from Greene’s “novel of despair.… I now feel that you will be very pleased with the reactions of those who see it.” In October 1957, Lansdale invited representatives of “virtually all [U.S. government] departments, agencies, and services concerned with psychological, political, and security affairs” to attend a pre-screening of the film in Washington; “they all,” he wrote the chairman of the AFV, “seemed to enjoy it as much as I did.”16

  On January 22, 1958, the AFV sponsored the “world premiere” of the film at Washington’s Playhouse Theater, a screening attended by, among others, Senator Mansfield, Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, and General J. Lawton Collins. “History has somewhat negated the story of the book by Graham Greene, and the motion picture, in our opinion, sets the record straight by placing the turbulent event period of 1954 [sic] into a more accurate historical perspective,” the group’s press release declared.

  The motion picture gives appropriate weight to the constructive role played by the United States in assisting the Vietnamese in their quest for national independence. Mr. Greene’s book, written before it became clear that Free Vietnam would survive, denies the possibility of a third alternative between communism and colonialism. The record since Dienbienphu is demonstrably clear—that third force, Vietnam ruled by the Vietnamese, has become a reality. Consequently, in attempting to set the historical record in order, this motion picture has a most important function.17

  III

  THE AFV’S JUDGMENT WAS PREMATURE. APPEARANCES DECEIVED. The well-stocked store shelves in Saigon and the shiny new motor scooters on its streets hid the degree to which the U.S. aid program, necessary though it was, was failing to promote a robust South Vietnamese economy that could in time stand on its own. In fiscal year 1957, American aid supported the entire cost of the Vietnamese armed forces, almost 80 percent of all other government expenditures, and nearly 90 percent of all imports.18 The assistance created a semblance of middle-class prosperity while fostering a dependent relationship; a well-heeled minority of Vietnamese benefited, while the majority saw little or no gain. With the market saturated with consumer goods of all kinds, merchandise accumulated on the docks, left to rot by importers who hadn’t the money to pay for it. A study by U.S. political scientists found that South Vietnam “is becoming a permanent mendicant,” dependent on outside support, and asserted that “American aid had built a castle on sand.”19

  In the countryside, where 75 to 80 percent of South Vietnamese lived, Diem failed to cultivate broad popular backing. Many local officials presided over what historian Philip E. Catton calls “a virtual reign of terror.” They employed bribery and extortion to enrich themselves and did not make fine distinctions in determining who constituted a genuine threat to the community’s safety and well-being. “If people attempted to resist the authorities,” Catton writes, “local officials often clamped down even harder, thus encouraging a vicious action-reaction cycle between the government and the rural populace.”20

  On land reform, Diem resisted the advice of American experts such as Wolf Ladejinsky, a Ukrainian-born economist who had planned successful agrarian redistribution programs in Japan and Taiwan and who encouraged the Saigon leader to think boldly. Diem allowed landowners to keep up to one hundred hectares of rice land—an enormous amount in regions where the land was so fertile—and another fifteen for burial grounds and ancestor worship. This was more than ten times that allowed in Japan and Taiwan, and it meant that little acreage was available for redistribution. Savvy landowners got around even these restrictions by transferring title to some of their land to family members. In other cases, local officials lacked the will to force compliance, or the efforts became ensnared in red tape. To compound the problem, Diem’s policy required peasants to pay for land they had been given free by the Viet Minh in the war against the French, thus fueling the resentment.21

  It was Diem’s single greatest liability as a leader, this proclivity to alienate groups whose backing he needed. He had created a relatively stable South Vietnam, but in order to do so he had resorted to draconian measures—measures that, while temporarily hindering the ambitions of local Communist activists, ultimately facilitated their objectives by fomenting hatred of the government. The arbitrary and often capricious nature of many arrests by the police angered many in the urban elite, who then found avenues for expression closed off by the regime’s brutal actions. Newspapers whose editorial line or whose reporting displeased the Ngos were suppressed with regularity, and the Nhu-led Vietnam Bureau of Investigation went after subversives with a ruthlessness that would have made FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wince. Many intellectuals bemoaned the pervasive and growing influence of the covert Can Lao party, the reach of which extended into virtually every facet of South Vietnamese political life. Can Lao members, most of them Catholic, held the key positions in the administration, the armed services, the National Assembly, the judiciary, the police, and the trade unions, from which they exercised influence clandestinely, often by way of political and economic blackmail.

  Conditions were ripe for a backlash, and it occurred. The second half of 1957 witnessed a marked increase in antiregime activity by hard-pressed Communist cadres and other victims of regime repression. On July 17, for example, armed men gunned down seventeen patrons in a bar in Chau Doc. On September 14, the district chief of My Tho and his family were stopped on a highway in broad daylight and assassinated in cold blood. On October 10, a bomb thrown into a café in Saigon wounded thirteen people, including two plainclothes police officers. And on October 22, thirteen U.S. servicemen were injured in three separate attacks directed at American installations in Saigon.22

  A new insurgency had begun, provoked by Diem’s suffocating repression, though few non-Vietnamese perceived the change at the time.23 One who did was Bernard Fall, who since the French defeat in 1954 had further cemented his position as America’s leading expert on the Indochina conflict. As 1957 began, Fall felt restless at home in the United States. He longed to be back in the Vietnam that captivated and charmed him, the Vietnam that his wife, Dorothy, called his mistress and that he referred to as a “bad love affair.” Although Dorothy was pregnant with their first child that spring, Fall sought and secured an invitation from the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington to spend three months in country examining developments since partition in 1954.24

  He arrived in June 1957. “I keep looking over the roadsides in the usual wide and wary sweeps of wartimes,” he wrote in an early letter to Dorothy, “but there’s nothing more dangerous in sight than a buffalo emerging suddenly from the underbrush. The [French] watchtowers, now showing the wear and tear of the war years and of neighboring scavengers eager to use their bricks for building materials, are unmanned. The country’s at peace at last … but for how long?”

  The question assumed more urgency as Fall’s visit wore on. He compared the U.S. presence favorably to that of the French (�
�they want to go home p.d.q.,” he wrote of the Americans; “no colonialists they”), but as he traveled the countryside and interrogated people from all walks of life, he grew despondent. His alarm increased when he compared notes with François Sully, a fellow veteran of the French Resistance in World War II who reported for Time and would later write for Newsweek before being expelled by Diem for writing negatively of the regime. Though government officials assured Fall that South Vietnam was stable and the security situation under control, his findings indicated the opposite. It struck him, notably, that the obituaries in the South Vietnamese press showed an abnormally high death rate among village chiefs (crucial figures in Vietnam, as the link between the government and 90 percent of the population). Digging further, he determined that 452 village officials had died within a year, or more than one per day. He then made two maps, one showing where they had perished and another indicating the location of guerrilla activity in the same time period. The result indicated a clear link. Saigon, Fall observed, was ringed by villages whose leaders had been assassinated and replaced by Communists.

  For Fall, the finding was highly significant. The killings were not random; they conformed to a pattern. The victims were village chiefs who had been landlords and were not much loved by the villagers. The insurgents got the double benefit of being Robin Hoods to the local population and putting other village notables on notice that they could be next. When Saigon appointed a new acting village chief, chances were he too would soon be found with a machete in his back or a bullet in his head. How would number three on the list respond? Simple, Fall surmised: Unless he wanted to die a martyr’s death, he’d quietly declare his fidelity to the revolution. And just like that, another village would have gone Communist. The change would be invisible to the outsider; everyday life would go on as before. ARVN units coming through the village would be greeted courteously, but the insurgents who came through later would get the intelligence and the rice and the use of the U.S.-supplied radio set. The ARVN hadn’t been outfought per se, but it had been “outadministered,” which in the end would matter even more.25

  Fall sought out the minister of the interior and said to him, “Your Excellency, you are in trouble in Vietnam. Do you know that?”

  “Yes, I know that,” the minister answered.

  “Did you tell President Diem?”

  “Nobody can tell President Diem we are in trouble. He believes we are doing fine.”

  “Do the Americans know? ”

  The minister shook his head. He did not think so.26

  In fact, though, some Americans did know. Ambassador Durbrow, in a 1957 year-end report produced not long after Fall left Vietnam, declared that the Diem “miracle” was increasingly a mirage. The South Vietnamese president’s autocratic style and suspicious nature, combined with his lack of vision and his seeming unconcern with broadening his base of support, augured poorly for the future. So did his seeming inability to delegate authority, or to differentiate the vital from the trivial. In Durbrow’s analysis, the regime’s concentration on security at the expense of the economic and social needs of the mass of southerners was fraught with risk, and its easy resort to repression and intimidation to suppress opposition played into Communist hands by alienating key groups in society. He concluded by hinting at America’s lack of leverage: It was regrettable, he wrote, that the United States had not found more ways to make her influence more effective.27

  Durbrow’s cautionary notes were sounded also by the CIA and by the military attachés from the three branches of the armed services. But they were resolutely rejected by General Samuel Williams, head of the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG). Williams thought Durbrow far too critical of the Saigon regime, and he disliked him personally. The ambassador, he told an aide, was “better suited to be senior salesman in a good ladies shoe store than to be representing the U.S. in an Asian country.”28 Officially Durbrow outranked Williams, but the general did not like it and sought whenever possible to make decisions on his own. Frequently their meetings degenerated into shouting matches. Williams sharply rejected Durbrow’s claim that Diem was headed for trouble. The people supported the Saigon leader, Williams insisted, and he was adamant that the guerrilla threat could be contained without undue difficulty.

  It was a welcome message in Washington in early 1958, where President Eisenhower had more pressing foreign policy concerns—notably tensions over the status of Berlin and the fallout from the Soviets’ successful launch, in October 1957, of their unmanned Sputnik satellite. In November 1957, moreover, Mao Zedong had paid a seemingly successful visit to Moscow, boasting to students that “the East wind prevails over the West wind.”29 South Vietnam’s problems loomed small in comparison. In May 1958, on the anniversary of Diem’s visit to Washington, Eisenhower sent the Saigon leader a warm personal note, extolling him as “the foremost advocate of our interests in the area” and praising the Republic of Vietnam as an example to free nations everywhere.30

  Even as the president wrote these words, however, there were fresh signs of the deterioration, from the northern provinces of Quang Nam and Thua Thien to the Ca Mau peninsula in the extreme south. In Tay Ninh province, in the heart of the rubber plantation region near the Cambodian border, revolutionary leaders began to integrate their local military forces into combined units to defend against sweeps by government troops. In August, soon after the U.S. embassy reported that “in many remote areas the central government has no effective control,” guerrilla units attacked and briefly captured the province capital in Tay Ninh.31

  Nor did it help Diem’s popularity that his government remained so dependent on American power, a fact that led to increased anti-U.S. animus as well. “For many Vietnamese peasants,” a Pentagon chronicler would write of this period, “the war of Resistance against French–Bao Dai rule never ended; France was merely replaced by the U.S., and Bao Dai’s mantle was transferred to Ngo Dinh Diem.” Consequently, when resistance to Diem increased in the late 1950s, the “opprobrium catchword ‘My-Diem’ (American-Diem) thus recaptured the nationalist mystique of the First Indochina War.” Or as Robert Scigliano would write of the period, “So deeply has the My-Diem relationship been established in the minds of the peasants that Vietnamese government officials have been addressed, with all respect, as ‘My-Diem’ by peasants doing business with them.”32

  IV

  THE GROWING DISCONTENT IN THE COUNTRYSIDE IN SOUTH VIETNAM, and the corresponding rise in insurgent attacks, pointed to the need for party leaders in Hanoi to make a decision: Should they move away from their policy of pursuing reunification through peaceful means? That they were wrestling with this choice at such a late date is exceptionally important in historical terms—far from imposing the insurgency on the south, as successive U.S. administrations and some scholars would later assert, the DRV leadership went through a wrenching series of deliberations about whether to support it; some Politburo members argued for the need to focus exclusively on building a socialist state in the north. Moreover, they wondered, could an insurgency against the Saigon regime even succeed, given Diem’s success in thwarting all challenges to his rule?

  Contributing to Hanoi’s caution was the restraining influence of its principal allies, China and the Soviet Union. The Chinese had no objection to a low-level insurgency in South Vietnam—after all, such a conflict could increase Hanoi’s dependence on Beijing while avoiding the risk of major U.S. involvement—but they continued to warn against the resumption of large-scale war as had existed up to 1954. Conditions were not yet ripe for such an escalation of the struggle, Mao Zedong warned Ho Chi Minh when the latter came calling at Mao’s summer retreat at Beidaihe in the summer of 1958, and might not be for a very long time—a decade, perhaps, or even a century. The Soviet leadership, meanwhile, were even more adamant that revolutionary fires in the south must not be stoked, not now and perhaps not ever. So eager was the Kremlin to avoid renewed international tensions over Vietnam that it even floated the idea of admitt
ing both Vietnams into the United Nations, a move that left DRV authorities sputtering with impotent rage. (The Western powers, fearful of the implications for Germany, quietly rejected the suggestion.)33

  But the North Vietnamese could not ignore the increasingly desperate appeals of their southern comrades. Slowly they moved toward a more aggressive policy.34 A central figure in the shift was Le Duan, a former political prisoner of the French who had been a top Viet Minh leader in the south before being named acting secretary-general of the party in Hanoi. The son of a carpenter in Quang Tri province, Le Duan was small in build and plainspoken in manner, and he lacked the educational pedigree and elite family credentials of many party leaders, some of whom mocked his coarse accent and his early job as a railway attendant. But he possessed a formidable intellect, and he did not want for self-confidence. Beginning in mid-1956, when he penned a short report titled “The Path to Revolution in the South,” he nudged his comrades to do more to support the revolution below the seventeenth parallel, even as they continued to give primary emphasis to building socialism in the north.35

  In late 1958, Le Duan conducted a secret inspection tour of the south. Upon his return, the Politburo gathered in special session to assess the situation and decide on future actions. Conditions in the south, Le Duan warned, were dire. The Diem government’s brutal crackdown had left the revolution drastically weakened. People were suffering terribly. At the same time, the broad popular hostility to the Saigon government represented a golden opportunity that should be grasped to hasten the reunification of the country. If Hanoi did not take charge of the effort, southerners would proceed on their own, and the DRV would become irrelevant. Henceforth Le Duan concluded, liberation of the south must have equal priority with consolidation of the north.