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

by Neil Sheehan

  Jean Baptiste Ngo Dinh Diem (Vietnamese Catholics often gave their children a French first name as well as their Vietnamese one) was fifty-three years old and almost as ignorant as Lansdale was of the political and social realities of his country when he returned to Vietnam on July 7, 1954, after nearly four years of exile. His ignorance was willful. He was a mystic. He lived in a mental cocoon spun out of a nostalgic reverie for Vietnam’s imperial past. The manner in which he rode into Saigon from the airport on the day of his arrival was characteristic. He sat in the back of a curtained car. None of the curious Saigonese who had gathered along the route for a glimpse of the new prime minister could see him, and he was not interested in looking out. “He comes from another planet,” a member of his family once said of him.

  He claimed to Americans that his family had been high mandarins since the sixteenth century. In fact, his grandfather had been of lowly birth, a fisherman according to some reports, which helped to explain why Diem was a Confucian caricature, more mandarin than the mandarins of old had ever been. The family owed its fortune to Diem’s father, Ngo Dinh Kha, who had been selected by French missionaries to study for the priesthood and to learn French at a mission school in Penang, Malaya. While Kha had been in Malaya, most of his family had been herded into a church and burned to death. The killing had been one of the many revenge massacres of Vietnamese Catholics by non-Christian mobs instigated by the precolonial court at Hue during the French conquest of Indochina, a lengthy struggle of twenty-nine years from 1859 to 1888.

  France utilized Christianity more systematically than any other European power in its colonial expansion. French missionaries came to Vietnam for the greater glory of God and France, and their converts played an essential role in the seizure of the country. When the Vietnamese emperors persecuted the missionaries and their converts as a subversive foreign sect, France used the pretext of “freedom of religion” to justify military intervention. The expeditions provoked more persecutions and massacres, which provided an excuse for more ambitious intervention and permanent occupation. Most of the early converts who had owned land were pauperized by the persecutions, and many of the later ones were lower-class Vietnamese. They saw in the coming of the French an opportunity to rise in the world and feared the consequences if the French did not prevail. They put themselves in the service of the foreigner, breaking the isolation of the European in this Asian land. The French recruited them as soldiers, employed the educated ones as interpreters, and appointed them to positions in the mandarinate (lack of proficiency in Confucian studies was conveniently overlooked) because they could be trusted. Vietnamese parish priests helped to perpetuate colonial rule by nominating lower-level officials for the French authorities. Individual Catholics were to resist the French as patriotically as other Vietnamese, but the role the community played in the conquest and the colonial aftermath was to stigmatize it with an aura of subversion and treachery and to give Catholics in general a complex of insecurity and dependence on foreigners. Folklore said that their churches and cathedrals were erected with lands stolen from patriots and martyrs. The Catholics were especially resented by disenfranchised scholar-gentry families like Ho’s. In his best-known indictment of colonialism, French Colonization on Trial, a book written in French and published in Paris in 1925, Ho portrayed Vietnamese Catholic priests as rapacious land thieves.

  Baptism in the Holy Roman Church and a knowledge of the foreigner’s language brought Diem’s father the robe of a mandarin soon after his return from Malaya, eventually carrying him to a high place in Hue as minister of rites and grand chamberlain to the Emperor Thanh Thai. Kha was forced to retire when the French deposed Thanh Thai in 1907 on suspicion of intriguing against them, but through his connections at court and in the church, he rescued a future for his sons in the colonial world. In addition to Khoi, who rose to the governorship of Quang Nam Province, Diem’s next-older brother, Thuc, was ordained a priest and by the end of World War II had become the leading Vietnamese prelate in the South as bishop of Vinh Long. It was characteristic of the ambivalent attitude of the family that Thuc declined to join the three other Vietnamese bishops in the country when they had initially supported Ho Chi Minh’s declaration of independence in the patriotic fervor of 1945.

  Diem graduated at the top of his class from the French school for colonial administrators in Hanoi and began his career as a district chief. He had his first clash with the Communists in 1930 and 1931 when he was governor of a minor province in Central Vietnam and helped the French to crush the first peasant revolts the Party fomented during those years. Diem took the trouble to do some reading on Marxism-Leninism. The doctrines of social revolution and atheism struck him as anathema, a manifestation of the anti-Christ. By 1933, when he was only thirty-two years old, his record of hard work and honesty and his political reliability were so well established that the French agreed to his appointment as minister of the interior to Bao Dai, then just eighteen. Diem interested the young emperor, not yet a debauché, in reforming the corrupt mandarinate and attempted to persuade the French to grant the monarchy more autonomy to run the country through a purged and effective bureaucracy. The French refused to disturb what to them was a satisfactory status quo. Bao Dai forgot about reform and found amusements. Diem, who was distinctly unpliable and who as a child had often been beaten by his father for his willfulness, resigned.

  For the next twenty-one years he held no public office or other gainful employment. Until the final years of World War II, he lived off the modest landholdings of the family and passed his time at hunting and horseback riding, photography, and a rose garden, remaining celibate, going to mass and receiving communion every morning, writing and talking of politics—never taking any action. The convulsions set off by the world war moved him back into politics, always on the periphery. He negotiated unsuccessfully with the Japanese for the premiership of the puppet regime they set up under Bao Dai; hid from the Viet Minh and was arrested and imprisoned by them; refused an offer from Ho Chi Minh of a place in a coalition government and fled back into hiding; negotiated, once again unsuccessfully, with the French and Bao Dai; and finally went into exile in 1950, first in the United States and then in Belgium and France, because he feared the Viet Minh and the French declined to give him protection. The twenty-one years of waiting carved deeper his eccentricities, hardened his stubbornness, and wrapped him more tightly in his reactionary vision of an imperial past that had never existed. Within Vietnam, except among the narrow circle of anti-Communist nationalists, he gradually passed into the obscurity from which the United States extracted him in 1954.

  As Lansdale guided Diem to success in crushing the sects on the theory that Diem was the Magsaysay to form a new and strong central government, it would never have occurred to Lansdale that Diem was beginning his rule by eliminating the most effective opponents of the Communists in the South. The Viet Minh had not been nearly as strong in the Saigon area and in the Mekong Delta as they had been in Central and North Vietnam. The French had been able to stymie the Communists in the region because the society there was so faction-ridden. The Binh Xuyen crime organization and the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao religious sects were much more interested in autonomy within their individual territories than they were in national independence. By 1954 the Binh Xuyen had risen to such a height of rotten glory that any new government with a claim to decency would have had to suppress them. The two religious sects were a different matter.

  Cao Daiism was a zany melange of Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, of spiritualist seances and various other occult rites; it had a pantheon of saints that included Joan of Arc, Victor Hugo, and Sun Yat-sen. Its cathedral at its Holy See in the province town of Tay Ninh northwest of Saigon would have dumbfounded Walt Disney. Human credulity seems to be limitless in religion, however, and Cao Dai doctrines were no zanier than some of the religious cults that have drawn millions of supposedly educated and enlightened Americans. Whatever its imaginative theology and archi
tecture, the political and military force of the sect was real. With their 1.5 to 2 million peasant adherents and a French-sponsored army of 15,000 to 20,000 men, the Cao Dai pope and his hierarchy of cardinals and generals exercised authority over much of the populated region northwest of Saigon and enclaves in the Delta to the south, including My Tho and its immediate environs.

  The Hoa Hao was a militant Buddhist sect founded in 1939 by a faith healer named Huynh Phu So. The Communists had foolishly murdered him in 1947 because he would not ally the sect with the Viet Minh. Huynh Phu So’s 1.5 million peasant followers, under the leadership of his disciples, had begun killing Viet Minh from that day forward. The Hoa Hao army of 10,000 to 15,000 men dominated the six provinces of the western Mekong Delta.

  A wise ruler would have compromised with the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao. They could have been talked into an arrangement. Diem had, in fact, intrigued with them from abroad, using his family in Vietnam as a contact, and with the Binh Xuyen too, when he was angling to have Bao Dai name him prime minister. He also owed the Hoa Hao a debt. Diem was one of the anti-Viet Minh politicians to whom Huynh Phu So had given shelter. Once in power, Diem would tolerate no potentially independent sources of authority. He was so morbidly suspicious that he could share real authority only with his family. By 1956 he had smashed the sects in a series of campaigns with the ARVN battalions now being paid directly by the Americans rather than through the French as in the past. The Cao Dai pope fled to Cambodia. One of the Hoa Hao leaders was captured and publicly guillotined in Can Tho. The stretches of countryside the sects had controlled became vacuums of authority inhabited by disaffected peasants and the remnants of the sect armies that continued to resist sporadically in guerrilla bands. Had good government been substituted for the shattered theocracies of the sects, their destruction might have been justified. Instead the reign of the Ngo Dinhs began.

  Ngo Dinh Nhu, Diem’s younger brother, bore the title of counselor to the president. He was an intellectual with a corrosive wit, as slim and handsome as Diem was plump and waddling, and a bit daft in his love of power and scheming. In addition to being a chain smoker like Diem, Nhu was a heavy user of opium. His skin had a special yellow hue Vietnamese claimed was characteristic of serious opium smokers. If you pinched the skin, it was said, opium would pop out. No one dared to pinch Nhu. He was the second most powerful man in the country and overseer of numerous intelligence and police agencies he put together to protect the family. At the height of the regime he had thirteen different security agencies operating with the power to arrest and imprison or execute without trial. Nhu had been educated in Paris as an archivist at the Ecole de Chartres, a school of medieval studies, and employed until 1945 at the Imperial Archives in Hue. He had then gone into anti-Communist politics in the 1950s by organizing a Catholic labor union modeled on a counterpart French Catholic labor federation. The connection proved a momentous one for the Ngo Dinh family. The CIA was financing the French federation. When the Dulles brothers began to lose hope that Bao Dai would ever turn into an anti-Communist alternative to Ho, the Agency financed Nhu’s agitation to have Diem named prime minister by channeling money to him through the French union.

  Nhu was responsible for the hodgepodge of ersatz Fascist and Communist techniques that the regime resorted to in its efforts at political motivation and control. Totalitarianism fascinated him. There had been numerous enthusiasts of Mussolini and Hitler in the France of his student years, and Fascist organizations had flourished under the Vichy regime. Nhu had become an admirer of Hitler. Lou Conein stayed on in Vietnam after Lansdale went home in December 1956, serving as CIA liaison officer to Diem’s Ministry of Interior. He nicknamed Nhu “Smiley” because of the mask of a smile Nhu often wore and his grin when he joked at the expense of others. During plane trips to the countryside, Nhu would hold forth to Conein on the magnificence of Hitler’s charisma in stirring up the German people and keeping them entranced. Nhu had also read some of Marx’s and Lenin’s writings, as Diem had, and he envied the discipline of the Vietnamese Communists and their ability to mobilize the masses. The result was that Nhu borrowed promiscuously from both right-wing and left-wing varieties of totalitarianism. The regime’s principal political party, which he created, was a clandestine society called the Can Lao, designed to covertly penetrate, and so better manipulate, the officer corps of the armed forces, the civil bureaucracy, and business and intellectual circles. During the secret initiation ceremony, new members knelt and kissed a portrait of Diem.

  A proper state also needed a mass organization, and Nhu set up one of these too. He called it the Republican Youth, even though most of the members were civil servants and many of them were not young, and patterned it on Hitler’s storm troopers, the so-called Brown Shirts. Nhu dressed his troopers in blue shirts, with blue berets and trousers. (He probably took the precise model for his organization from another of his sources of inspiration—Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang. Chiang had formed a Blue Shirts organization during the 1930s after he acquired German military advisors.) Nhu tried to employ his Blue Shirts in the same way that Hitler had used the storm troopers, as an extralegal national apparatus to shape the loyalties of their neighbors and to spy and police. He was fond of convening mass meetings of his Republican Youth in Saigon and at the provincial capitals, because Diem allowed him to play the role of supreme national leader within the organization. He would often arrive dramatically at the stadium or soccer field in a small French helicopter called an Alouette that the family had purchased for their personal use. Before Nhu gave his speech from a high podium, the assemblage of Blue Shirts would drop to one knee in obeisance, thrust a stiff arm into the air in the Fascist salute, and shout allegiance to the leader.

  Nhu’s wife, Madame Nhu, or Madame Ngo as she preferred to be called for its more regal sound, dominated her husband and her brother-in-law. To interview her at the presidential palace was to enter the mental as well as the physical world of the family. In her youth she had been a petite beauty, the daughter of a wealthy family. Her father, Tran Van Chuong, had been a prominent landowner and lawyer during the French years and had held the post of foreign minister in the short-lived Japanese puppet regime. Her adult years of eagerly grasping and yielding authority gave her features a certain aggressiveness, and she carried herself a bit stiffly. She was still an attractive woman, however, and liked to show off her good looks. She would enter the reception room for the interview wearing an ao dai of delicately patterned silk which had been cut with a V-neck rather than the traditional high collar. The V-neck was a modest one but striking nonetheless. Her shoes had stiletto heels to make her taller. She would sit in a brocaded armchair and lecture on the need for sacrifice to defeat the Communists. As she talked, her lacquered fingernails would toy with a diamond-encrusted crucifix on a neck chain. (She had converted from Buddhism to Catholicism after marrying Nhu.) From time to time a servant would enter to bring a fresh pot of tea or to answer her summons for some errand that suddenly came to mind. The servants were all men. They would shuffle in bent over in a bow, bow lower, and acknowledge her commands with a long “Daaa …” (the D pronounced like a Z), a servile form of “yes” for servants in old, aristocratic households; then they would shuffle back out still bent over.

  Publicly, Madame Nhu asserted herself with an exhibitionist feminism. She formed a counterpart women’s organization to her husband’s Republican Youth, calling it the Women’s Solidarity Movement, played the same role of maximum leader within it, and also used her women to spy and police. The younger members were recruited into a female militia, armed with U.S. Army carbines, and dressed in a uniform like the men’s of blue shirts and slacks but with more flamboyant headgear—wide-brimmed bush hats of a matching blue instead of berets. Madame Nhu also appointed herself arbiter of South Vietnam’s morals. In a country where polygamy was common, she pushed through Diem’s tame National Assembly a “Family Law” that made divorce virtually impossible and at the same time rendered ille
gitimate ex post facto the children born of second wives and concubines. Another of her measures, a “Law for the Protection of Morality,” banned sentimental songs and dancing “anywhere at all,” forbade “spiritualism and occultism” of the kind practiced by the Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai and in less organized forms by most other Vietnamese, and declared the use of a contraceptive a crime punishable by five years imprisonment for repeat offenders. One ambitious legislator suggested that the law also ban the wearing of “falsies” by Vietnamese women, but others pointed out that this would create an unduly complicated problem of enforcement for the police. The resentment she aroused often expressed itself in scurrilous rumors. Vietnamese women would suggest it was not a coincidence that the Saigon bar girls also favored V necklines on their ao dais. (There is no evidence her relationship with Diem involved anything physical.) She became a favorite of Communist propagandists, who always referred to her by her maiden name, an insult to a married woman’s virtue in Vietnamese culture. Her maiden name was Tran Le Xuan, which means “Tears of Spring.”

  The Ngo Dinhs proceeded to impose on South Vietnam what amounted to their own alien sect of Catholics, Northern Tories, and Central Vietnamese from their home region. (Once in the South, many of the non-Catholic Northerners who had fought with the French quickly allied themselves with the Catholics as the group with access to the regime and the new foreigner.) Diem and his family filled the officer corps of the army and the civil administration and the police with Catholics, Northerners, and Central Vietnamese they trusted. The peasants of the Mekong Delta found themselves being governed by province and district chiefs, and by civil servants on the province and district administrative staffs, who were outsiders and usually haughty and corrupt men. Diem intruded further. He did away with the village oligarchies of prominent peasants who had traditionally dominated the village councils—collecting taxes, adjudicating disputes, and performing the basic functions of government. The poorer peasants often did not like these men, but they knew them, and the council members had a sense of how far they could safely push people. In mid-1956, to try to prevent Viet Minh sympathizers and other dissidents from clandestinely controlling village governments, Diem decreed that the province and district chiefs would appoint the village chiefs and council members in the future. The family’s alien sect of outsiders started penetrating right down to the village level, subjecting the Southern peasants to abuses and exactions in their daily lives which they had never known before. Lansdale was so naive about the implications of what he set in train that he formed civic action teams of Northern Catholics to propagandize against the Viet Minh among the Delta peasants. He was disappointed by his lack of success. Lansdale was also upset to discover before he went home at the end of 1956 that as Diem’s position became consolidated, he acted increasingly counter to Lansdale’s advice on political and social issues.