Fire in the Lake

by Frances FitzGerald

  Certain American journalists would later accuse Fishel and U.S. officials of deliberately deceiving the American public about the whole nature of the Diem regime and its programs. But the matter was not quite so simply stated. On the one hand the officials had to believe in the essential goodness of their policy; on the other hand they had to believe that Diem shared their goals. If the second was the natural assumption for Americans to make about their Asian dependents — many in the Roosevelt administration had believed the same of Chiang Kai-shek33 — it was also a necessary assumption for those involved in trying to implement their own policy through a foreigner. Many officials would go so far as to suppress their own awareness of the Diemist repressions, while others would rationalize them on the grounds that such measures were necessary in this moment of crisis. In the future, with American advice, matters would certainly be put to rights.

  The result was that the American officials ended by knowing very little about Ngo Dinh Diem or the pressures upon him. Until the NLF forced them to take notice, few of them knew very much more than what Senators Kennedy and Mansfield had known seven years before. They would go on assuming that Diem was jailing Communist agents; they would go on believing that Diem headed a strong, Asian-style government for people not “sophisticated” enough for a full democracy. The Diem regime would, in other words, become a fiction to them, an autonomous creation of the mind. For in reality the Saigon government bore no resemblance whatsoever to a strong, Asian-style government. Indeed, apart from the democratic constitution with which Diem had endowed it, the government resembled nothing so much as an attenuated French colonial regime.

  In putting together his “republic” Diem merged the administrations of Cochin China and Annam; he added a few provinces and abolished the elected village councils. Apart from these measures, Diem — for all his talk of the need for “daring reforms” — made no changes in the administration at all. In Saigon the same ministries filled the same colonial office buildings. The civil servants shuffled the same papers their predecessors had filed before them. Many of the civil servants themselves remained the same. By 1959 over a third of them dated their term of service from before the advent of the Bao Dai government.34 Though Diem disliked and mistrusted these older functionaries for their Francophilia, he made no great effort to replace them. The one civil service academy, the National Institute of Administration, was much too small to meet the need, and in any case trained men more for law careers in France than for any local form of employment. What was most strange was that Diem, this proud nationalist, did not even symbolically dissociate his regime from the government he so despised as a “French puppet.” The Republic of Vietnam had the same flag and the same anthem as the Bao Dai government, and Diem himself lived in the governor’s palace.35

  Diem’s failure to reorganize the administration had some strange consequences. For lack of judicial reform, for example, the Vietnamese courts followed the French colonial code that adjudicated disputes between persons on the basis of the region from which the parties came. When a dispute involved people from two different regions, the courts had to resort to French international law.36 Equally disturbing, Diem centralized the government without relocating the powers of the most important French officials, the provincial résidents, with the result that power fell to whichever official decided to take it. In many cases power fell into a void, for in six years Diem did not fill many of the posts left open at the time of the French withdrawal; he did not even establish a government presence in certain parts of the country. At the national level Diem neither assumed the powers of the French governor nor redistributed them to others. He had a cabinet, but he held few cabinet meetings, conducted no budget reviews, and prepared no comprehensive economic plan. When one department ran out of funds, it would refer its needs directly to the Americans, and the Americans would make up the deficit without any notion of how, or indeed if, the money would be spent.37

  As the Diem regime grew older, the administration began to take on more and more of the properties of a sponge. Money, plans, and programs poured into it and nothing came out the other end. This situation was only to be expected, for under the colonial regime the French had exercised the only initiative, the only authority. With their departure the old-line functionaries seemed to lose all powers of forward motion. As one Michigan State University observer noted, their goal seemed to be to put off all decisions until the day after their retirement.38 In the meantime they guarded their positions by erecting mountains of red tape to bury any program they might have to take responsibility for. Under the French regime the civil servants had looked upon the administration not as a part of a nation-state working for the benefit of the Vietnamese people, but as an exploitative, partially inscrutable, and in any case foreign, concern. They had joined the administration in order to belong to what seemed the most powerful and interesting part of the country, and to take their share of French wealth — as it were, a perfectly reasonable tariff on the foreigners. Early on in his reign, Diem, the puritanical mandarin, issued a law against corruption, recommending the death penalty for all offenders. The difficulty was that few of his officials shared his moral indignation or understood that their long-term interests would best be served by civic probity: the president had not altered their view of the government or filled the vacuum of authority left by the French. For lack of central leadership, private and sectarian politics overwhelmed all national concerns, and corruption abounded in all its forms — from bribery to nepotism to graft to outright embezzlement. Fishel and his associates resolutely defended the corruption on the grounds that all Asian governments were corrupt. Yet Diem had in fact inherited a relatively clean administration. The corruption was increasing, and at least partially as a result of his own efforts. Nepotism, certainly, began at home, and it might well have ended there had the Ngo family been any bigger than it was.

  For all Diem’s talk of enlightened Confucian governments, the president managed in five years to reduce the administration to a form far more primitive than any Confucian emperor would have countenanced: his own family. To his initial six-man cabinet Diem appointed three of his relatives; two other in-laws served in the most important civil service posts for the bulk of his regime.39 Madame Nhu’s father acted as ambassador to Washington, and Diem’s youngest brother, Ngo Dinh Luyen, served as ambassador to Great Britain and other European countries. His three other brothers were by far the most important people in the government, though they held no official posts. Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc took no specific authority for the state, but as the senior member of the family he remained close to Diem’s councils. (This genial, worldly cleric no doubt found his ambitions best satisfied by the Church, which was, after all, a great deal bigger than Vietnam.)

  More directly involved was Ngo Dinh Can. A farouche figure and a bachelor like Diem, Can had lived all of his life with his mother in the family home in Hue. Can had no Western education, and thus very little education at all. With the founding of the Republic he simply assumed power in central Vietnam, and without any official title ruled it as a warlord for the duration of the regime.

  The most important of the brothers was, of course, Ngo Dinh Nhu. It was Nhu who had advised Diem to take the dangerous step of attacking the Binh Xuyen — the move that effectively brought Diem to power. Brought to live in the presidential palace after Lansdale’s departure in 1956, he assumed the title of political counselor and a power that perhaps exceeded Diem’s, for Diem listened only to him. Nhu was a striking figure. By contrast to the rotund president he was a lean man with a pale complexion and piercing eyes. He had spent several years in France at the prestigious but archaic school of paleography, the École des Chartes, and was thought by Diem to be the intellectual of the family. He had not in fact the discipline of an intellectual — he merely liked to speak in sonorous abstractions. He craved power for its own sake and created a Byzantine labyrinth about Diem through which to pursue it. His wife, Tran Le Xuan, in no way moderated
his craving. A relative of the emperor, she was a woman of great beauty and even greater ambition. Living at the palace as the First Lady, she appropriated to herself much of the public spotlight and the authority over all matters touching upon women and the family. She was outspoken and fiercely competitive, even with her husband and even on the subject of Catholicism — a subject about which she knew nothing until she married Nhu. Possibly, because she was less complicated, less involved in all the Confucian formalities and the intellectualizing, she was a stronger character than either of the two men. With her long red nails and her tight ao dais, she appeared as a physical force that quite overwhelmed the two pale, dry mandarins. Apart from her there was a kind of sterility about the family, an empty fervor.

  Ngo Dinh Nhu’s main contribution to the regime was its governing philosophy. “Personalism” or Nhan Vi, as the doctrine was known in Vietnamese, had its roots in a distorted mirror image of Communism. Ngo Dinh Nhu had lived in Paris in the 1930’s when the French Catholic intellectuals were searching for a doctrine that held the promise of Communism while remaining conservative — the era of the Action Française and the philosophical slide into fascism. After the war Nhu had been impressed by the works of Emmanuel Mounier, the Catholic thinker, and misinterpreted them as a doctrine of the corporate state in which the alienated masses would find unity through participating in certain authoritarian social organizations, and through leaders of superior moral fiber.40 Always a highly abstract affair that lacked the rigorous analysis of Marxism, the doctrine in Nhu’s hands grew into an incomprehensible hodgepodge having something to do with state power, the dignity of the Person (as opposed to the individual), and the virtues of humility, renunciation, and sacrifice. Whether or not Nhu had a clear idea of what he meant by Personalism remained questionable, for, when once pursued by an American graduate student hot for dissertation material, he said that no written statement on the subject perfectly expressed the true philosophy of the regime. In the end what remained from all the abstractions was a certain tone of voice. As one British adviser noticed, the phrase Nhan Vi was a “neologism of Chinese roots suggesting rank and thereby hinting that contentment with one’s station might be the quality from the Personalist catalogue the new regime would prize most highly.”41

  In 1955 Ngo Dinh Thuc set up a Personalist school for civil servants in Vinh Long with the intention of persuading them to renounce their egotistical strivings and accept with enthusiasm that enlightened rule of the Ngos. The school did not last long, but the Ngos persisted in their attempt at indoctrination with a series of large-scale political organizations. Founded in 1954, the “National Revolutionary Movement” five years later claimed a million and a half members “grouping in [their] midst revolutionary forces from all classes of the population.”42 Though the number of its members was probably exaggerated, the NRM did have a sizable following for the reason that its leadership was coextensive with the regular administration, and the officials forced the peasants to join. In addition to the NRM the Ngos founded a series of specialized political control groups: the National Revolutionary Civil Servants’ League, the Republican Youth Movement, and the Women’s Solidarity League — the latter two comprising paramilitary units for the defense of the regime. These organizations were also fairly well subscribed to, membership generally being concomitant with any form of employment in the government.43 In the case of the Women’s Solidarity League the ambition of the members had to be quite overpowering, as Madame Nhu took great pleasure in sitting on a raised dais to watch her women performing judo falls on men or marching to stirring patriotic tunes.

  While it was possible to argue that these organizations had their roots in the traditional village community groups or, alternately, that they derived from Communist models, the dominant strain in them was clearly Vichyite. And by no accident. During the period 1940–1945 the French created a number of Vichyite organizations for the Vietnamese — youth groups, sports groups, and so forth — that enjoyed considerable success in Saigon. Nhu admired the Communist organizations and would have liked to imitate them, but the Vichyite groups were the only mass organizations he and his Catholic officials knew anything about. And he did not understand the function of these. The activity of his “revolutionary” organizations consisted almost entirely of lectures. The NRM officials would lecture the peasants, and the Ngos in their turn would lecture the officials. And it was difficult to say which group suffered the most.

  Taken together, the Ngos formed a royal family — a royal family that ruled by fits and starts, in a kind of vacuum. The American officials continued to hope that Diem would finally dispense with some of his relatives and rule through the structure of government. But Diem — much like Chiang Kai-shek — trusted no one else. Apart from those few whom he familiarly “adopted” into his patriarchal clan, he kept his distance from his officials, turning them away with a cold, aristocratic hauteur. Both Diem and Nhu hated to delegate authority. The president would usually work for some sixteen to eighteen hours a day. Each night he would retire with a great stack of papers to sit up into the early hours of the morning in a pathetic attempt to oversee every detail of the administration from the movement of spies to the placement of shrubs about the palace. He did not seem to be able to separate the important from the trivial. For a time he signed all the exit visas for the country himself.

  Physically unable to run the entire government, he and Nhu took the next best course of attempting to insure that no cooperation could possibly exist between any two agencies or any two units of the army. The brothers would interfere directly and without warning at all levels of the government, replacing a district chief here, cutting off a credit there, and sending a battalion into operation without the knowledge of its divisional commander. In 1954 Nhu created a secret network of Catholic refugees, whom he placed at strategic points throughout the government to oversee all the rest of the government officials. The Can Lao Nhan Vi Cach Mang Dang, or Revolutionary Personalist Labor Party, as his organization was known, had immense power, if only because all the other government officials assumed its omnipotence. Under the general aegis of his Can Lao chief, Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen, Nhu built up not one, but ten separate secret intelligence agencies, all of which competed to bring him news of traitors, spies, and foreign plots. The political counselor acted as though he knew what all of them were doing, but the amount of intelligence so produced and the necessity for self-protective fabrications on the part of all the agents in fact prevented him from knowing anything of the sort.44 Officials would occasionally disappear or rise to sudden, unwanted prominence, and that would be that. The inner ring of intelligence agencies, of course, quite neutralized the outer ring, whose job it was to catch Communists. The only consolation for the Diem regime was perhaps that the Communists, who eventually infiltrated both rings in large numbers, were quite as badly informed by the system as everybody else.

  All things considered, the Ngo family seemed to have only one great talent, and that was for inducing a state of profound, indeed vertiginous, boredom in almost everyone — a boredom punctured only by moments of terror. As Ho Chi Minh was laconic in formal speeches, the Ngos were voluble. When interviewed by American journalists, Diem would often lecture from four to six hours at a time on his own philosophy of government and the congruence between his own family history and the history of Vietnam. And, unlike Ho Chi Minh, he had not a grain of humor. For his part, Ngo Dinh Nhu would spend hours of his working day composing high-flown sentences for his public speeches. At night he would settle down to lecture American officials on the true nature of Vietnamese society, on the evils of Communism and capitalism, on the mysteries of guerrilla warfare, and the differences between the spiritual East and the materialist West. Certain officials, such as the CIA chief, John Richardson, would listen for hours, awed by the intellectualism, convinced that they were sounding the depths of unfathomable Asia. For others who wished to get something done or to obtain specific answers to specific questions, the
se sessions were an exquisite torture. On one celebrated occasion when the American embassy forced the Nhus (for their own good) to entertain yet another U.S. congressman for dinner, the Nhus talked from 8 P.M. until four o’clock in the morning, whereupon the congressman, felled by whiskey and jet lag, had to be carried out of the palace.

  The alliance of the Ngo family and the United States was, quite obviously, an ill-matched one. The Americans wanted an able administrator, a strong leader, a man of the people — “another Magsaysay,” as they put it — and Diem was none of these things. Though the American officials spoke significantly of his experience as an administrator, the president had in fact very little experience, and that in the small, far-off country of the Annamese protectorate. Born a mandarin, he had grown up under the tutelage of that older generation of Catholic mandarins who believed in the resurrection of the traditional state. His sense of patriotism came from the elitist tradition of the mandarinate and the Church, and he was, as the Vietnamese said, by temperament less a priest than a monk. In a time of intense anti-French activity, Diem neither formed nor joined a political party, where the real training for independence might be had. He saw himself as a man of destiny, responsible for the nation by right of birth and superior virtue. His career was a stalagmite of refusals. Plus royal que le roi, he held himself aloof from the conflict, waiting for that moment of destiny that God or Fate had already arranged in heaven. And when that moment came, he felt himself justified by it, all his hopes and theories confirmed — never quite understanding that the moment came less as a result of his own virtue than as the result of intervention by a large and interested foreign power. Writing of Diem as he was in 1962, Robert Shaplen perceptively observed that though Diem provoked strong opinions in Saigon,