The American decision to back Ngo Dinh Diem was not of itself a major policy decision. The policy of supporting a non-Communist Vietnam had been formulated some years earlier, and Diem himself was but one element of the fallback position hastily devised in the wake of the French debacle. It was not until June 15, 1954, that Secretary of State Dulles told the French definitively that the United States would not commit its own troops and planes to the Indochina war. Even after Dien Bien Phu, administration officials did not accept the Viet Minh victory or the principle of a divided Vietnam. During the Geneva Conference their ambitions were not only to build up a government in Saigon, but to undermine Ho Chi Minh’s government as well. In June Colonel Edward G. Lansdale was sent out as chief of a Saigon military mission with orders to “beat the Geneva timetable of Communist take-over in the north.” By August, during the period of negotiated truce, Lansdale’s teams were scattered about the country from Hanoi to the Ca Mau peninsula conducting sabotage operations and what can only be called agitprop work in direct violation of the U.S. government’s promise at Geneva to “refrain from the threat or the use of force.”5 These teams had small success in the Viet Minh-held areas. Their main achievement in the north was to lay the groundwork for the subsequent “flight” of the Catholics to the south. Their tactics were promises and “black propaganda,” or the falsification of enemy reports. Many of the rest of their activities were little more than terrorist acts. One team, for instance, managed to contaminate the oil supply in the bus depot of Hanoi in order to wreck the engines of all the city’s public transports.6
In fact, high American officials could have had very little confidence in the success of Colonel Lansdale’s mission in the south or the north. In Saigon the French-sponsored government was in a state of near collapse. Shortly after the Emperor Bao Dai appointed Ngo Dinh Diem as his new premier for the State of Vietnam, President Eisenhower wrote Diem a letter of encouragement that fell short of committing the United States to support Diem. The current national security estimate held out little hope for the prospects of either the French or the Vietnamese establishing a strong government in Saigon. In all probability, the estimate noted, the situation would continue to deteriorate and the Viet Minh would extend their control throughout the south. As the United States directly joined the struggle for Vietnam, American officials weighed the odds against a non-Communist solution and, even more heavily, against the success of the small, retiring mandarin, Ngo Dinh Diem.
In Saigon American pessimism appeared fully justified. Always the home of the entrepreneur and the collaborator, Saigon in the last year of the French war was a very sinkhole of violence, corruption, and intrigue. Its atmosphere of dense marsh heat mixed with diesel fumes and the rotting, vegetable smell of the Saigon river accorded perfectly with its political climate. The French army remained the one force for order. Half of Saigon was controlled by Bay Vien’s bandit army, the Binh Xuyen. The countryside belonged largely to the Viet Minh and the sects — the latter no more anxious for a strong government in Saigon than the former. Arriving in Saigon on July 7, Ngo Dinh Diem found himself with hardly a strand of political support. The sects and the Cochin Chinese landlords disliked and suspected him for being a Catholic and a central Vietnamese. The Vietnamese officers and officials regarded him as an interloper, for Diem had left the country four years before in protest against their refusal to hold out for full independence. The French resented him and the whole American undertaking in the south. As for the American military command in Saigon, it retreated into deep diplomatic silence in preparation for backing the strongest candidate that might emerge. When Colonel Lansdale went to visit Diem in the palace of the former governor general, he found the new premier quite alone, abandoned even by his bodyguards.
As a man with a job to do, Lansdale did not share the pessimism of his superiors. Over the next few months he was almost single-handedly to reverse the whole course of events in Saigon. Lansdale was in many respects a remarkable man. Already something of a celebrity among Americans involved with Asia, he had served with the OSS during the war and later helped to rebuild the Filipino army and intelligence service. When the local Communist insurgency movement, the Hukbalahaps, began to gain strength in the Philippines, Lansdale, on special assignment to the Filipino government, counseled the defense secretary, Ramon Magsaysay, on a strategy of social reform and military repression that proved effective in weakening the Huk movement. In the process he became the friend, adviser, and public relations agent to Magsaysay and was instrumental in securing his election to the presidency. In 1954 Lansdale came to Saigon on assignment from Allen Dulles to act as the head of the military mission and then as CIA chief of station for domestic affairs. He met Ngo Dinh Diem just after the premier’s arrival in Saigon, liked him, and shifted the weight of the CIA to his support. “To me,” he said, “[Diem] was a man with a terrible burden to carry and in need of friends, and I tried to be an honest friend of his.”7
The remark was typical of Lansdale, a man who never thought in terms of systems or larger social forces. With all his expertise in black propaganda and every other form of unconventional warfare, Lansdale had an artless sincerity. He had faith in his own good motives. No theorist, he was rather an enthusiast, a man who believed that Communism in Asia would crumble before men of goodwill with some concern for “the little guy” and the proper counterinsurgency skills. He had a great talent for practical politics and for personal involvement in what to most Americans would seem the most distinctly foreign of affairs. In Diem he saw another Magsaysay, a man of integrity with a sense of responsibility for his country who might with the proper advice become a hero to his people. While the American command hesitated, he put all of his many talents to work for Diem as he had for Magsaysay. Going to live in the palace, he became a two-way agent: on the one hand, Diem’s personal contact man and adviser in the attempt to win over the diverse political elements of the South, and on the other an advocate for Diem within the American mission. In an atmosphere of indecision and uncertainty within and without the mission, his advocacy had a decisive impact.
The first problem for Diem was to assert his delegated powers over the army of the State of Vietnam and, in particular, over its commander in chief, General Nguyen Van Hinh. A young air force officer, Hinh, like most of his colleagues, had vague political ambitions, vaguely nourished by Bao Dai and some of the French in Saigon. Lansdale and his team at first tried to reconcile Hinh and the new premier. When that proved impossible, and Diem fired the commander in chief, Lansdale threatened Hinh with the withdrawal of all American support if he should attempt a military coup.8 The move was, perhaps, directed as much towards the Americans as it was against General Hinh, for it forced the American military command to choose between Diem and the ranking Vietnamese officers whom they were advising. After a week of hesitation the Americans decided to rechannel the military subsidies through Diem’s office and permitted Lansdale to ship Hinh off for a ceremonial visit to the Philippines.9
The sects presented Diem with a more formidable challenge, by their very numbers if not by their political strength. From the moment of Diem’s arrival in Saigon the various factions of the Hoa Hao, the Cao Dai, and the Binh Xuyen had engaged in a bewildering series of maneuvers to gain power for themselves in Saigon. Had they taken Benjamin Franklin’s advice to the representatives of the thirteen American colonies to “hang together,” they might possibly have succeeded in unseating Diem. But they were not capable of such grand strategies. Confused, suspicious of each other, and badly in need of funds to replace the French subsidies, they allowed Diem and Lansdale to take advantage of their internal disputes and, almost literally, to hang them separately. According to most historians of the period, Diem’s efforts to destroy the sects cost the American government some twelve million dollars in bribes — or subsidies.10 Lansdale never admitted to having bribed anyone, but it was probably more than a coincidence that the one group that held out in military opposition until Ma
rch 1955 was the one that enjoyed vast revenues from the gambling houses and protection rackets: the Binh Xuyen. On advice from his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, Diem decided to take what seemed to most Saigonese the suicidal step of closing Bay Vien’s concessions and bringing about a showdown. As the Binh Xuyen prepared for conflict, Bao Dai, who had formerly supported the Binh Xuyen, cabled his prime minister to return to France. With Lansdale’s encouragement, Diem defied the emperor, thereby cutting himself loose from his legal mandate and staking his future on the Americans. At the end of April the Binh Xuyen and units of the regular army joined battle in the center of Saigon; in the course of several days’ fighting they managed to destroy an entire district and to plunge the city into chaos and near starvation. Finally the Binh Xuyen retired to the outskirts of the city, allowing the regular army to reoccupy the population centers.
Diem’s victory was in fact much more important than the military confrontation indicated. On the eve of the battle Eisenhower’s military representative in Saigon, General J. Lawton Collins, flew back to Washington and succeeded in persuading the administration to transfer its support from Diem to another more trustworthy politician. The very day that Secretary of State Dulles was to send out instructions to that effect, Lansdale cabled Washington to say that the regular army had defeated the Binh Xuyen, and that Diem was firmly in control.11 The American embassy officials rallied to Diem’s aid, and the Saigonese politicians, caught off-balance by the coup de force, acceded to the Diemist government. With the loss of the city the sect leaders gradually lost faith in the eventual success of their cause. The small warlords retreated into the swamps where, unable to organize a new offensive, they fought a hopeless rearguard action against the well-supplied forces of the regular army. As time went on, administration officials in Washington grew convinced of Lansdale’s proposition: in Diem they had found the strong leader they were looking for.
Ngo Dinh Diem was in many respects a curious candidate for the role of American protégé. He came from Hue and, he boasted, from a family of mandarins that since the sixteenth century had held such high rank in government that the peasants of the region thought it good luck to attempt to bury their dead under the cover of night in the Ngo’s ancestral graveyard.12 In fact Diem’s ancestors had little or no distinction; Diem simply fabricated high mandarin lineage for himself — and this at a time of general social upheaval. Diem also said that his forebears had been among the first converts to Catholicism in the seventeenth century. This claim, though possibly true, was an odd point for this new “nationalist” leader to insist upon, for the non-Catholic Vietnamese believed with some justification that the Catholics had acted as a fifth column for the French in the period preceding the conquest. Certainly the French had always shown great favoritism towards the Catholics, turning them into a self-conscious elitist minority without necessarily imparting to them a greater degree of French culture. Vietnamese Catholicism was harsh and medieval, a product of the strict patriarchate of the Vietnamese village rather than of the liberal French Church. Its churches stood like fortresses in the center of each Catholic village, manifesting the permanent defensive posture of the Catholics towards all other Vietnamese. A Buddhist mob, so Diem reported, raided the Ngos’ village in the period just before the French conquest, killing all of his relatives with the exception of his father, Ngo Dinh Kha.13 Kha made the fortunes of the family by joining the service of the French-supported emperors. Taking on all the attributes of the traditional mandarins, he rose to be minister of the rites, grand chamberlain, and keeper of the eunuchs to the Emperor Thanh Thai. But when the French exiled that uncooperative monarch to the island of Réunion, Kha, like a model mandarin, retired to his village to live out his life as a farmer and a “notable” of the region.
One out of nine children — the third of Kha’s six sons — Diem was born in 1901. A good student, he studied in a small French Catholic school in Hue and then, deciding against the priesthood and a scholarship to France, attended the French college for administration in Hanoi. Graduating first in his class, he went into the mandarinate of Annam (then still under protectorate status) and rose quickly upward through the ranks from district chief to province chief. In 1933 he became minister of the interior. Just two months after his appointment to this most important post in the government, he resigned in protest against the French refusal to allow more Vietnamese participation in the affairs of state. Recalling his decision three decades later, he told Robert Shaplen of the New Yorker: “When the French asked me if I were waging a revolution, I told them we had to transform the country in order to fight Communism. Privately, I was convinced that an alarm had to be sounded to make the people feel the need for daring reforms and to make them respond in an energetic and even violent way. I felt it was my responsibility.”14
The remark looks colored by hindsight, but Diem did in fact recognize the Communists as a potential enemy almost before the French. In the late 1920’s he tracked down some of the earliest Communist cells in his region. At the same time Diem undoubtedly responded to the new currents of nationalist sentiment stirring among educated Vietnamese, and he felt that the correct posture for a man of his rank and estate was one of disengagement from the French authorities.
Upon his resignation from the ministry of the interior, Diem retired to his village, like his father before him, and spent the next decade in the seclusion of his garden, the libraries, and Catholic seminaries. During the years of feverish political activity in the 1930’s and 1940’s Diem joined no anticolonial organization — he believed in government, not in politics — but he maintained contacts with Phan Boi Chau and other anticolonial leaders of his own background. And he held himself ready to take up what he considered his responsibility towards his country. In the light of the American intervention twenty years later he showed a great deal of prescience. During the Second World War, for instance, he sounded out the Japanese on their willingness to overthrow the French Vichyite regime. When the negotiations came to naught, he dissociated himself from the Japanese and remained obdurate even when in 1945 they offered him the prime ministership of the government they hastily assembled in Hanoi. A few months later Diem was captured by the Viet Minh and brought before the high command. Ho Chi Minh, at that point anxious to have a prestigious Catholic in his first coalition cabinet, asked Diem to serve with him. Diem refused, with the explanation that a Viet Minh guerrilla band had killed his oldest brother.
Pursued by the Viet Minh, Diem went south to live with his clerical brother, Ngo Dinh Thuc, outside of Saigon. For the first few years of the war he made a series of unsuccessful attempts to pressure the French into setting up a Vietnamese government under dominion status. His efforts failed partly for the reason that the Saigonese colonial functionaries and intellectuals, unwilling to renounce their own privileged status, refused to join him in his protests. When the French finally decided to do just as he had suggested, he flew to Hong Kong to ask the Emperor Bao Dai to insist upon a greater degree of autonomy for the new government. Again he was disappointed: the indolent but perhaps realistic emperor refused to hold out for his terms. In 1950 Diem left Vietnam for Rome with the intention of staying on for the Holy Year. En route he changed his mind and went on to the United States.15 The decision was fortunate for him in that it was in the United States rather than in Vietnam that the political groundwork for his regime had to be laid.
Upon his arrival in the United States Diem was enthusiastically received by a number of dignitaries of the Catholic Church, including Francis Cardinal Spellman. Living for two years at the Maryknoll seminaries in New Jersey and New York, Diem lectured occasionally at American universities and pressed his cause in Washington under the wing of Spellman. Among those who supported his goal of independence for the State of Vietnam were Senator Mike Mansfield and Senator John F. Kennedy. The two senators were later to become charter members of a lobby group called the American Friends of Vietnam, one of whose most influential charter members was Dr. Wesley Fis
hel, a young academic from Michigan State University with important connections in the Republican administration.16
The enthusiasm for Diem on the part of Mansfield and Kennedy could be explained at least partly by the fact that the early fifties was the height of the McCarthy period. In Washington the Catholic senator from Wisconsin had attacked as “traitors” those U.S. State Department officials who had recommended that the United States accept as a fact Mao Tse-tung’s victory in China. McCarthy had of course taken the anti-Communist rhetoric employed by Truman and Acheson for their anti-Soviet campaign in Europe and turned it about on itself. Now the “Communists” were inside the American government, plotting with the Kremlin for the expansion of international Communism in Asia. Seeing political benefits in it, the right wing of the Republican Party — Nixon and Senators Bridges and Welker — took up the attack, charging the Democrats with the “loss of China” and “softness on Communism.” The campaign was almost entirely rhetorical — no political group advocated putting American troops into mainland China — but it found a sizable audience. Fearing for the loss of their support, the Democratic politicians began to compete with the Republicans for the most staunchly anti-Communist position. Whatever the reason of state involved, it became an axiom to both parties that no administration could possibly survive the “loss of Indochina.” By 1956 Senator John F. Kennedy had taken the “domino theory” of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations for his own. At a meeting of the American Friends of Vietnam he called Vietnam “the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone to the arch, the finger in the dike.” He maintained that “Burma, Thailand, India, Japan, the Philippines, and obviously Laos and Cambodia are among those whose security would be threatened if the red tide of Communism overflowed into Vietnam.” Thus, he added, “The fundamental tenets of this nation’s foreign policy… depend in considerable measure upon a strong and free Vietnamese nation.”17
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