A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

by Neil Sheehan

  In a series of offensives from late 1949 to the fall of 1950 in the mountains ringing the Red River Delta, Giap drained and exhausted the French forces. The befuddled French commander, Gen. Marcel Carpentier, panicked and committed the mistake the Vietnamese had been anticipating. He ordered an emergency evacuation of the remaining frontier towns in October 1950. The French columns tried to retreat down a two-lane dirt road known as Route Coloniale 4 that wound a tortured way amid the limestone crags and rain forests of the borderlands. Giap’s troops were waiting, and the road the French empire built became a road to the empire’s death throes. Six thousand French colonial troops disappeared. The Viet Minh captured sufficient weapons, ammunition, trucks, armored vehicles, and other equipment to outfit an entire division. The debacle was the worst overseas defeat in French history since a British army under James Wolfe beat Louis Montcalm at Quebec in 1759 and France lost Canada. Giap’s victory was a precursor to Dien Bien Phu. The psychological shock of the disaster would probably have precipitated negotiations to end the war had France been left to its own resources, but the Truman administration, which had recently started direct and generous military assistance, encouraged the French to persist.

  From 1950 onward, the task of Giap and his commanders was essentially one of equipping their seasoned army with the Soviet artillery, antiaircraft guns, and other heavy weapons that arrived rapidly with Chinese instructors, and of completing its organization into a modern fighting force. The work was to require additional years, and there were to be mistakes and setbacks. The task was, however, the finishing of a structure that was already well underway. The army that was to triumph to the attention of the world in 1954 and to establish another epic in Vietnamese history had been created before the first truck with the first crates of Soviet weapons crossed the China border.

  Leadership of the war for independence by Ho Chi Minh and his disciples engraved certain popular images in the minds of Vietnamese and established certain fundamental equations in Vietnamese political life. Virtually the entire population was touched—from boys and girls old enough to spy and carry messages, to their grandparents able to lie cunningly with the dignity of age. Vietnamese were confronted with three alternatives: to join the Communists to win the liberation of their country, as many did; to collaborate with the French for a variety of reasons, as many others did; or to avoid participating in the most important moral and political conflict of their time, as a minority, including Ngo Dinh Diem, did. The war made Ho the father of modern Vietnam and defined a Vietnamese patriot as a Communist or someone who fought with the Communists. The war defined someone who collaborated with the French as the Vietnamese equivalent of a Tory in the American Revolution. The war made political figures like Diem who declined to participate irrelevant to the struggle. The act of waiting, attentisme as the French called it, became a passage to obscurity.

  The leaders of the United States were unable to accept these Vietnamese realities. Although Ho ceased direct appeals to the Americans after the war that would end at Dien Bien Phu began with France, he was careful to leave an opening in the hope of one day reaching an arrangement. In early 1949, George Abbott, the diplomat who had spoken to Ho as the first secretary at the Paris embassy in that last, pathetic conversation in September 1946, tried to interest Dean Acheson in the idea that Ho might be an Asian Tito. The break between Stalin and Tito had become public the previous year, and by 1949 it was accepted in Washington that the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were in a state of hostility just short of war. In an analysis written that February, Abbott pointed out an oddity in the behavior of the Vietnamese Communists:

  One peculiar thing about Vietnam Communism is that there has been very little anti-American propaganda. It is obvious that this is not due to ignorance of the current party line. It apparently represents a hope on the part of Ho Chi Minh that he may still obtain American support for or at least acceptance of a Viet Minh government under his leadership.

  Dean Acheson had been involved in U.S. policy toward Indochina almost from the beginning, first as Truman’s under secretary of state and then as secretary for the last four years of the Truman administration. He was another of the founders of the post-World War II system abroad; he entitled his autobiography Present at the Creation. Acheson was not prompted by Abbott’s observation to taking another look at the Vietnamese Communists. He and Truman and other American figures like them in both political parties assumed that all Communist movements were pawns of a centralized superstate directed from the Kremlin and that Joseph Stalin was another Hitler bent on world conquest. Despite the evidence of Tito’s behavior, they could not believe that a Communist leader might have as his basic goal the independence of his country. They helped Tito, but they were never comfortable with him and thought of him as an aberration. Part of the explanation for their failure to take seriously the existence of national Communism (and to perceive that Stalin, monster though he was and responsible for the deaths of millions in the Soviet Union, was in his foreign policy a Russian imperial statesman with limited goals) seems to lie in the fact that they did not want to see the world as a complicated place. If Tito and Ho and Mao Tse-tung were nationalists as well as Communists, if differing cultures and histories might lead Communist nations to develop along distinct lines, then the world was far more complex than these American leaders imagined it to be. Their own inclinations were easier to follow in a simple Manichaean world of Good and Evil.

  Acheson was intent on finding an anti-Communist alternative to Ho. He was convinced that the fundamental error of French policy was France’s old-fashioned colonialism. If the French would set up a native government and declare Vietnam independent, that government would have a chance to attract a popular following to rival Ho’s. In effect, Acheson wanted the French to apply to Vietnam the American imperial system of surrogate regimes. The search for an anti-Communist alternative was pressed harder after Mao Tse-tung’s forces began to move toward victory in the civil war in China. The Truman administration held out the bait of direct economic and military aid for the war if only France would abandon its nineteenth-century mysticism and adopt this sensible policy. The fruit of this American initiative to turn a colonial conflict into a just war of anti-Communism was the so-called Bao Dai solution.

  Bao Dai returned to Vietnam from self-imposed exile in Hong Kong in mid-1949 under French and American sponsorship to reassume his status as emperor. It is difficult for a discredited emperor who has abdicated to unabdicate himself and acquire a popular following, particularly for one with the character of Bao Dai. In his own odd way Bao Dai respected his abdication to the revolution of 1945. He was commonly referred to as the emperor, maintained the status and prerogatives of the office, and was addressed as “Your Majesty.” He carefully left unchallenged that ceremony so full of symbolism for Vietnamese when he had stood on top of the Zenith Gate in the Citadel at Hue and handed Ho’s representatives his imperial sword and dynastic seal. He never attempted to formally reclaim the throne. He called his government a “state,” the State of Vietnam, as distinct from an “empire,” and he took for his official title Head of State. His government, he said, was a de facto successor of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam that Ho had proclaimed in 1945.

  Truman and Acheson recognized Bao Dai’s regime as the legal government of Vietnam in early 1950. It represented “true nationalist spirit,” Acheson said. Ho was “the mortal enemy of native independence in Indochina.” (Acheson’s national leader had difficulty with his native language. Having been educated by French tutors at Hue and in France, where he had spent three years of his youth, Bao Dai could not speak, read, or write Vietnamese well.) In May 1950, Acheson announced the direct military and economic assistance for the war that the French had been promised in exchange for Bao Dai.

  The same year that he was recognized by the United States, Bao Dai sold a gambling, prostitution, and opium concession in Cholon to his friend Bay Vien, the chief of the Binh Xuyen organized crime socie
ty, in exchange for a share of the profits. He also appointed Bay Vien a general in the Vietnamese National Army that the French were organizing and the Americans were equipping for him. This “neurasthenic voluptuary,” as one French journalist of the period described Bao Dai, displayed more understanding than Acheson did of his role in life. He was informed one day that his favorite of the moment, a buxom peroxide blonde he had flown over from the Cote d’Azur, had been seen drunk in public with several Frenchmen she was amusing. “Yes, I know,” he said. “She is only plying her trade. Of the two, I am the real whore.”

  There was no anti-Communist alternative in Vietnam. The French and the shortcomings of the non-Communist nationalists cleared the way for the Communists to lead the struggle for independence back in the 1930s. The French political police in Indochina, the Sûreté Générale, decimated the largest non-Communist nationalist party, the Vietnam Kuomintang, modeled on the Chinese party, after an uncoordinated uprising in 1930. Its leaders were sent to the guillotine. The survivors fled to China. The non-Communists failed to rebuild their movements in the face of French repression because most of them were urban elitists who lacked the interest in social change necessary to marshal a following. The Communists were also badly hurt by a similarly ill-conceived rebellion in 1930 and 1931, organizing peasant soviets for the Foreign Legion to crush. A second peasant revolt fomented in the Mekong Delta in November 1940 was suppressed by the insecure Vichy authorities with unusual ferocity. The Communists recovered and learned, because their concern with social goals always took them back to the bottom, where there was discontent on which to build.

  Ho and the hard-bitten men around him (Pham Van Dong was not the only one among them to know the pain of French prisons; Giap’s first wife, also a party activist, perished in a French jail in 1943) then gave the final blow to the non-Communist nationalists after they took power in Hanoi. During the period right after World War II the survivors of the Vietnam Kuomintang and several other non-Communist factions attempted to set up rival administrations and militias in the North to contest the Viet Minh. Ho crushed them. About a hundred of the leaders were rounded up and executed. The Vietnamese Communists also conducted a campaign of selective assassination against non-Communist nationalists during the sixteen months between August 1945 and the outbreak of uninterrupted war with France. About forty Vietnamese political figures were murdered. One was Ngo Dinh Khoi, Diem’s eldest brother, a Catholic leader and the governor of Quang Nam Province in Central Vietnam until the French replaced him in 1942 because he was intriguing against them with the Japanese.

  The Communists did not seek to eliminate all non-Communist politicians. They killed their most active opponents or those who they suspected might later go over to the French. Most of the survivors did collaborate with France. None of the Vietnamese were democrats, and the non-Communists were as quick to try to eliminate the Communists as the Communists were to succeed in eliminating them. Diem often told Americans how the Communists murdered his brother. He did not add that his brother was scheming with the Japanese to assassinate Viet Minh leaders. The Communists learned of the scheme and murdered Khoi and his son first. In addition to these planned assassinations, Viet Minh adherents in the countryside committed much more widespread and uncontrolled killing of persons suspected of sympathy for the returning French. There is no accurate record of these murders. They ran into the thousands. The killing was especially severe during the French reconquest of the Saigon region and the Mekong Delta in 1945–46.

  Collaboration with the French, which Truman and Acheson encouraged through Bao Dai, was a kind of sordid anticlimax for those non-Communist nationalists who were still alive after all of this ravaging by the prewar colonial regime and then by the Communists. In the years to come, American journalists and U.S. Embassy political officers continued to take seriously the shells of these non-Communist factions. Their leaders had pretensions and were adept at giving the impression that they counted for something. Thousands of words were devoted to their activities. Everything that was written could have been summed up in a paragraph. None of these political parties amounted to more than what the French call une douzaine de messieurs—a dozen gentlemen.

  The American role made the United States as responsible as France for the suffering of the first war, whatever washing of hands over French stubbornness and stupidity was performed from time to time. A quarter of a million to a million Indochinese civilians perished during the nine years; 200,000 to 300,000 Viet Minh died in the fighting, taking 95,000 French colonial troops—Vietnamese, French, Algerians, Moroccans, Senegalese, Germans, and other Foreign Legionaries from sundry Eastern European lands, Cambodians, and Laotians—with them. By the time of Dien Bien Phu, when Eisenhower sat in the Oval Office, the United States was paying 80 percent of France’s war costs in Indochina. American statesmen did not recognize their responsibility. Their ability to blame whatever went wrong on the French left them unfeeling of the moral burden they carried.

  ***

  After the United States and Edward Lansdale put Ngo Dinh Diem in charge of the Vietnamese residue of the French colonial system, Diem deposed Bao Dai but adopted Bao Dai’s flag of three red stripes on a field of yellow, the imperial color, as the flag of his Republic of Vietnam. Diem took Bao Dai’s national anthem for his own. He fired the Binh Xuyen chief of police. He kept the same police and Süreté. The changes Diem did make were not for the better. This man whom Lansdale installed as the leader of “Free Vietnam” provoked the second war in Indochina.

  Ho and his Communist mandarins were preoccupied for the first four years after the Geneva Agreements of 1954 with more problems than they could manage in the North. They had a devastated countryside to reconstruct, a population estimated at 14 million to feed in a rice-deficient region cut off from its traditional source of imports in the South, a scarcity of technicians of every kind, and a small and antiquated industrial plant they wanted to enlarge and refurbish as an essential step to modern nationhood. All the while they were engineering a social revolution to transform the North into a Marxist state.

  Their mistakes compounded their preoccupations. Truong Chinh, the secretary-general of the Party, inflicted a horror on the country by letting the land-reform campaign get out of hand in his zealotry. The terror caused the deaths of thousands of large and small landholders, including a considerable number of Party members who were purged and executed after trials on trumped-up charges before so-called People’s Agricultural Reform Tribunals. The army had to put down an insurrection in November 1956 by Catholic peasants in Ho’s home province of Nghe An, killing many farmers in the process. These Catholics, who had not fled to the South like the other two-thirds of their pro-French community, had been singled out for vengeance by Chinh’s land-reform cadres. (No reliable statistics are available on the deaths resulting from the land-reform campaign and the suppression of the Catholic peasant rebellion. What precise figures have been published, especially the often-cited one of 50,000 deaths, are largely CIA propaganda. It is clear that thousands died.) Ho apologized for the crimes, abolished the tribunals, ordered the release of all who had been imprisoned, and launched a “Campaign for the Rectification of Errors” to try to quiet the furor. Chinh was dismissed from his post as Party secretary-general. In a speech to a Central Committee meeting in the fall of 1956, Giap admitted that among other “errors,” “we … executed too many honest people … and, seeing enemies everywhere, resorted to terror, which became far too widespread. … Worse still, torture came to be regarded as a normal practice.”

  The Soviets, as they had in 1945, betrayed the Vietnamese again for their overriding big-power interests. The Eisenhower administration was intent on perpetuating the division of Vietnam by turning the Geneva Conference’s “provisional military demarcation line” at the 17th Parallel into an international boundary. The National Security Council had taken a secret decision to sabotage the Geneva Agreements a few days after they were reached. Washington used Diem,
with his enthusiastic cooperation, to block the all-Vietnam election the Final Declaration of the conference had scheduled for July 1956. (While Diem was anxious to stop an election he knew he would lose, neither Vietnamese side ever relinquished a claim to sovereignty over the entire country. The three horizontal red stripes on Bao Dai’s and Diem’s flag stood for North, Central, and South Vietnam.) The Soviet Union was cochair with Britain of the Geneva Conference. Khrushchev was pursuing his policy of “peaceful coexistence” in the latter half of the 1950s. To placate the United States, he declined to make an issue of Hanoi’s demands that the election be held. During a UN Security Council debate in early 1957 over an American request to admit South Vietnam to the United Nations, the Soviet delegate proposed that the dispute be resolved by admitting both North and South because “in Vietnam two separate States existed.”

  Ho protested all of this without energy. His internal troubles were so great and he was so dependent on Soviet assistance to rebuild the North that he seems to have become resigned to the division of the country for the time being, at least. The extent of his resignation showed, perhaps more than he intended, in a public letter he addressed in mid-1956 to the 130,000 Viet Minh soldiers, administrative cadres, and their dependents who had withdrawn to the North after the Geneva Conference. The Party had told them when they left that they would be able to return after the 1956 election. Ho tried to explain why they could not go home. “Our policy is to consolidate the North and to keep in mind the South,” he wrote. Diem resolved Ho Chi Minn’s dilemma.