Fire in the Lake

by Frances FitzGerald

  In fact the Vietnamese government supported by the French in Saigon had most dubious credentials for statehood. Its very creation had been merely a matter of French convenience — and temporary convenience at that. In 1946, at the very beginning of the war, the French had created a legal fiction called “the Republic of Cochin China” in order to substantiate their claims to the existence of a French union combining the associated states of Indochina. Four years later the French dismantled the “republic” when the exigencies of war demanded that they attempt to provide a rallying point for non-Communist Vietnamese and to demonstrate to American satisfaction that they were fighting an anti-Communist, rather than a colonial, war. The “republic” was clearly inadequate to these purposes, for even the Emperor Bao Dai refused to participate in a government of Cochin China alone. Finally giving in to the principle of a unified Vietnam, the French brought back Bao Dai and on January 1, 1950, installed him as the head of a new “national” government called “the State of Vietnam.” But as the French had created the state mainly for public relations purposes, so the state itself remained to a great degree a mere formality. For as long as the French remained in Saigon they continued to control its budget, its external relations, its internal security arrangements, and its jurisdiction over the French in Vietnam. In fact it had only two attributes of a government: first, a small administration composed of old colonial functionaries whose territorial reach extended not far beyond the outskirts of Saigon, and, secondly, an army of some three hundred thousand men split up into small units and commanded by French officers.43 Taking most accurate stock of his position, Bao Dai removed himself from Saigon to the resort city of Dalat, where he spent the next four years amusing himself with big-game hunting and the distribution of well-paid government appointments. Not until the eve of the Geneva negotiations did the French sign a paper granting the state of Vietnam full independence — a gesture that gave them the means of claiming that they had “handed over” Vietnam not to the Viet Minh, but rather to the Bao Dai government.

  The gift, however, seemed of questionable value to anyone. As the period of truce began, the Viet Minh leaders in the north went about consolidating the government they had exercised in fact since the beginning of the French war. In the south only confusion reigned — a confusion not at all alleviated by the Viet Minh’s regroupment of some ninety thousand soldiers and cadres (the vast majority of them southerners) to the north. The Viet Minh had not been the only ones to fail at organizing the Mekong Delta. For the course of the war the French had managed, rather than actually governed, the Delta, and partly as a result of their attempt to conciliate all the non-Communist groups, the south had become a political jungle of warlords, sects, bandits, partisan troops, and secret societies. To French observers at the time there seemed to be small chance for the establishment of an administration, much less a nation-state, in the midst of this chaos.

  Now in control of the entire western portion of the Delta, the Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai represented a military as well as a political force — or rather, a series of forces, for, since the death of the first Cao Dai grand master and the murder of Huynh Phu So at the hands of the Viet Minh, both sects had split into a number of rival factions. While the Cao Dai remained a church with dissident regional factions and several none-too-cooperative military leaders, the Hoa Hao, without a religious hierarchy, had divided between three different regional warlords. The distinctions between them were, however, small, as the leaders of all the factions looked forward to assuming control of the country or, failing that, control over their own agricultural bases and the rice trade with Saigon. For the sake of freeing their regiments in the north, the French had given military aid and advisers to most of the factions during the course of the war. Though under obligation to the French, the sect factions directed their war efforts almost impartially against the French, the Viet Minh, and each other — depending upon who happened to cross the path directly in front of them. They disliked the Viet Minh, and that was enough for the French in the short term, for they had the power to keep their own territories free of them. The difficulty came only at the end of the war when the sects, with something over two million adherents, refused to allow their troops to be integrated into the national army and refused to permit officials from Saigon to enter their territories. The modicum of control the French had over them came from their manipulation of military aid, and thus it was very much open to question what the sects would do if, and when, the aid ceased and they were left to themselves.

  But the affairs of the sects were grand politics next to those of the other French-supported fiefs near Saigon. During the Japanese occupation a man called Le Van Vien, or Bay Vien, had put together a gang of river pirates to collect taxes on the private traffic in and out of the city. In 1948 the French intelligence services had agreed to recognize his gang in return for his submission. A few years later they gave this genial but absolutely ruthless pirate the title of brigadier general in their auxiliary forces as well as the tacit right to control the vast gambling establishment, Le Grand Monde, and to collect taxes from the rich Chinese merchants of Cholon. On his return to Vietnam, Bao Dai gave Bay Vien his support against his own police chief in Saigon — an inexplicable act to those Americans who assumed they knew the difference between the Vietnamese J. Edgar Hoover and the Vietnamese Al Capone.

  Counting the army of the State of Vietnam and the various sect forces, the French had supported at least six different non-Communist armies in the Delta. To add to the political and military confusion there were, of course, the Catholics, the Buddhists, the montagnard tribes, and the Khmer and Cham populations — most of which minorities had some means of self-defense and some quite reasonable motive for suspecting the motives of all the rest. As the capital of the south, Saigon was the very hub and essence of this disorder. Its economy lay largely in the hands of the French, the white-suited Vietnamese planters, and the invisible Chinese merchant-profiteers who gave their loyalties to France for as long as she would support the piastre at its current artificial price.44 Its administration and its police force were composed mainly of the venal and the opportunist. The former emperor, now chief of state, was no exception to this rule. A reasonable man, he saw no reason to risk his own life and fortune to one or another of the bandit groups in exchange for a largely fictional government. He went to France and in the middle of the Geneva Conference abdicated for all practical purposes to a man he rather disliked, his new prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem.

  The American ability to intervene in the affairs of South Vietnam was not, then, at all in question: the southern politicians were ready to accept any foreign power that would feed and protect them. It was the hope of building “a strong, free nation” that was absurd. How should the south build a strong anti-Communist government when most southerners continued to obey the old authorities of the family, the village, and the sect? Communist, anti-Communist, the next war would begin in a language that few of them understood.

  3

  The Sovereign of Discord

  one

  Ngo Dinh Diem. The name meant a great deal at one time in Washington as well as Saigon. On a trip to Vietnam in 1961 Lyndon Johnson had called Diem “the Winston Churchill of Asia.” Whatever the other points of resemblance between him and that British statesman, the man who undertook the American project of barricading the southern against the northern half of Vietnam certainly provoked hyperbole from Americans. For a period in the mid-1950’s Diem was the hero of the American press: this man of “deep religious heart” who, according to Life, had “saved his people from [the] agonizing prospect” of a national plebiscite; this “tough miracle man” had built a nation in South Vietnam and halted “the red tide of Communism in Asia.” The word “miracle” affixed itself to Diem’s name with the adhesion of a Homeric epithet. Diem had performed the “political miracle” of creating a strong government, the “economic miracle” in rebuilding the economy of South Vietnam from the ruins of war. In 195
7 Diem traveled to the United States on the American presidential airplane. Welcomed by President Eisenhower at the airport, he addressed a joint session of Congress and visited New York, where Mayor Robert Wagner called him “a man history may yet adjudge as one of the great figures of the twentieth century.” Only six years later, Diem was to die in a dark alley of Saigon, denounced by those same periodicals and many of the same politicians as the petty tyrant who had destroyed South Vietnamese society and prejudiced the cause of the Free World in Asia.1

  But in Saigon in 1966 it was difficult to find a trace of Diem anywhere. The same Vietnamese officers who had overthrown the president only three years earlier celebrated the anniversary of the coup, the National Day, with all the abstracted formality of parades and platitudes. Oddly enough, in view of the political terror campaign the regime had conducted, the officers had taken small revenge upon even the closest confidants of the Ngo family. After three years the heads of the secret police were out of jail, and some of them back in government. Few Americans so much as knew their history. Of course, there were few Americans left in Saigon who recalled the days of Ngo Dinh Diem. With the turnover of American personnel every eighteen months and the endless series of Vietnamese military coups, time in Saigon moved forward like an army, obliterating all it passed over. By 1966 even the scenery of the Diem regime had vanished. Of the presidential palace only the outer garden walls remained, enclosing an acre of grass like the walls of a graveyard from which the graves have been removed.

  And yet it was strange that Diem should have disappeared so completely. The round little president and his family had ruled Vietnam for eight years — the entirety of the truce between two wars and the whole history of an unoccupied South Vietnam. The Ngos had not been pale ciphers for the whole American undertaking in that part of the world; on the contrary, any history of the Diem regime would have to be written in vivid, novelesque colors, with the characters of the Ngos quite obscuring those of the Americans. In the first place there was Ngo Dinh Diem himself, the shy, self-righteous Catholic mandarin with his vow of chastity and his ambition to serve as a moral example to his people. There was his brother, the lean, fierce Ngo Dinh Nhu, whose life was a succession of plots, ruses, and metaphysical dogmas. And there was Madame Nhu, the beautiful, outspoken, and wholly outrageous woman whom the American journalists called “the Dragon Lady.” For a decade the Ngos had dominated all conversation in Saigon; Americans and Vietnamese alike had spent hours discussing the latest court intrigue or scandal, hours speculating on the intricacies of their philosophy. The Ngos never disappointed them, even in their death. Played out under the gaze of the television cameras, the fall of the Ngos was in its way pure theatre, the denouement of a baroque tragedy.

  On June 16, 1963, an elderly bonze named Thich Quang Duc seated himself in a major intersection of downtown Saigon, and amid a gathering crowd, set fire to his gasoline-soaked robes. At that moment the political climate in Saigon changed as if hit by the drop in pressure preceding a hurricane. Vast demonstrations broke out. The city people, who had for years remained passive, terrified before the Diemist police, crowded into the pagodas to kneel and weep, then, following the bonzes, burst forth into the streets calling for the downfall of the Ngos. Schoolchildren, university students, government clerks, now fearlessly confronted the legions of the Ngos’ picked troops.

  For some months before, Ngo Dinh Nhu had known that a coterie of generals was plotting a military coup. He had no fear of the officers; he had dealt with their shallow intrigues many times before. It was the bonzes who unnerved him, these unarmed, shaven-headed men who until the moment of Quang Duc’s death had had no political influence in the cities. The brown-robed monks padded day after day through the streets of the capital to be hauled, screaming, into the police trucks. Early on the morning of August 21, the Vietnamese Special Forces under Nhu’s orders surrounded the central pagodas of Saigon, Hue, and other central Vietnamese cities. Shooting at random, they stormed through the sanctuaries, wounding scores of bonzes and hauling the rest off to prison. The next day Nhu claimed that the dissident generals had ordered the massacre. His intention obviously was to destroy the generals and the Buddhists with one coup de force, but as he had already divulged his plans for the raid, not even his American supporters could finally accept the story.

  For a man who had so long and so successfully manipulated both the generals and the Americans, the whole affair looked oddly irrational. As time went on, Nhu’s fury of self-destruction only seemed to increase. When a few American newspapermen reported the truth of the pagoda raids, he and his wife lashed out at the American officials, charging that the CIA chief headed a vast international conspiracy with designs against his life. It was true that a CIA agent had taken up contact with the dissident generals, but the agent had not given them any encouragement until that point.2 With the slaughter of the bonzes, and the denunciation of the United States, Nhu effectively forced the Americans to take the difficult step of dissociating themselves from the Diem regime. Still, even with assurances of American support, the generals did not act. A month went by and there were further Buddhist-led demonstrations. In October Nhu ordered thousands of the student demonstrators arrested and many of them tortured. The move seemed designed to provoke the coup so long delayed, for many of the students were the children of his still-wavering officers and officials. In the end Nhu’s own troops were refusing to fire on the crowds and even openly encouraging the demonstrators. As one American witness reported, “Saigon, those last days of Diem, was an incredible place. One felt that one was witnessing an entire social structure coming apart at the seams. In horror, Americans helplessly watched Diem tear apart the fabric of Vietnamese society more effectively than the Communists had ever been able to do.”3

  Of course in 1966 the Americans in Saigon never spoke of the Ngos. Their reign had been an unmitigated disaster for American policy in Vietnam. Still engaged in the same policy of fighting the Communists and building up the Saigon government, American officials could not afford to puzzle over their initial setback. For a period of eight years the United States had supported an incompetent dictator. So much had to be dismissed as an error — a tactical error that could be corrected with new Vietnamese leaders, new programs for pacification and administrative reform, new American controls over the Saigon regime. Ngo Dinh Diem, after all, was only one man. In the total context of the American war and the larger social forces at work in Vietnamese society, he could be counted as an insignificant factor.

  And yet, perhaps, in passing over the drama of the Ngo family the officials overlooked something essential to the outcome of the entire American effort in Vietnam. Ngo Dinh Diem was only one man; the private psychological drama of Diem and his family was as nothing beside the grand strategies and global concerns of the United States in Vietnam. But, as the French historian, Philippe Devillers, once wrote, “In our age of mass society, where all history seems to be determined by forces so powerful as to negate the individual, the Vietnamese problem has the originality to remain dominated by questions of individuals. Indeed, the problem becomes almost incomprehensible if one transforms men into abstractions.”4 The notion may sound romantic, but it is not so. In the first place, Vietnam in the days of Diem possessed a very small educated society; most of the prominent men knew each other as well as if they had been the inhabitants of one village. In the second place, the Vietnamese traditionally understood politics not in terms of programs or larger social forces, but in terms of the individual. And their perception was not unscientifically based, for given the size and uniformity of the old society, the life of one man might stand as a model for the life of the society as a whole. If that one man was Ngo Dinh Diem, then the personal drama of the Ngo family with its mysterious and violent denouement described the difficulty of the American project in Vietnam better than would a history of all the counterinsurgency programs or an analysis of all the larger social forces.