… there was a peculiar impersonal quality to everything that was said about him, as if, despite the urgency of the moment, everyone were talking about a figure in history, already remote and shadowy. The words one heard — “courageous,” “proud,” “patriotic,” “cold,” “detached,” “uninspiring” — sounded like clichés rather than characteristics of a living, breathing man who held his country’s future in his hands. The image was oddly wooden, the portrait unreal, as if there were some doubt as to its authenticity.
When one met Diem, this sense of unreality was borne out. He was a short, broadly built man with a round face and a shock of black hair, who walked and moved jerkily, as if on strings. He always dressed in white and looked as if he were made out of ivory. His self-absorption became apparent as soon as he started to speak.… His dark eyes shone, but they seemed to be looking through his listener, through the walls of his palace, through everything, and one experienced an almost eerie sense of listening to a soliloquy delivered in another time and place by a character in an allegorical play.45
And perhaps after all those years of isolation Diem did find something unreal about the fact of himself governing a country full of flesh-and-blood people. It was as if he had made an image of himself — an image that was static, two-dimensional, like an icon hung in a museum whose significance has long been forgotten. For Diem was not truly a traditional ruler — he was a reactionary, and like so many reactionaries, he idealized the past and misconceived the present. His whole political outlook was founded in nostalgia — nostalgia for a country that did not exist except in the Confucian texts, where the sovereign governed entirely by ritual and the people looked up to him with a distant, filial respect. Diem realized that Vietnam had changed. But he saw it as his duty to restore the old society and preserve it from the corrupting influences of the West, not by efficient measures but by moral example. “We want,” he said, “to re-arm the Vietnamese citizen morally… to reinforce the spiritual cohesion… which accounts for the capacity to enjoy for many centuries a largely decentralised system without falling into anarchy.”46 Diem’s Catholicism, far from opening him up to new ideas, only persuaded him that government by ritual and moral instruction could work, as indeed it seemed to in the ironclad, priest-ridden villages of the north and center. What he did not realize was that such parochial governments could operate merely because the French protected them and organized the administration of the country. His ambition to restore the old society therefore resembled that of the paternalistic French colons who had opposed the reformist programs of the metropolitan administrators — the difference being that while the French wished to keep the modern sector for themselves, Diem did not recognize its importance. For him, the modern world was Saigon, that parasite city that fattened from the blood of the countryside and the lucre of the West. Unlike Ho Chi Minh, he saw no distinction between modernization and the corruption that had accompanied foreign rule. The French had protected him from such an insight and left him helpless before their own achievement.
Finally, the Ngo family came from an unfortunate conjunction of worlds. Like so many former colonials, Diem and Nhu were fascinated by the West, though they had set themselves up against it: colonialism and Communism were joined in their minds as the two great evils, the two great enemies of Vietnam. At the beginning Diem was influenced by the Americans to the point where he accepted many of their suggestions with eagerness. But he understood their general goals no better than he understood Marxism-Leninism. Despite their Western education, he and his brother had absorbed nothing of the scientific, positivist outlook of the West. They knew nothing about management, even less about economics.47 Diem “thought in a bundle,” as the Vietnamese said of those who had not mastered Western systematic thought.48 As their interests were confined to metaphysics and the sonorous abstractions of French philosophy, their Western education merely confused them, bringing them personalism and Vichyite style, without the substance of the French Vichyite regime. Most Americans looked upon Ngo Dinh Can as the most primitive and backward of the Ngos. But Can, the one brother without any Western education, was in fact the best administrator of them all. Unlike Diem and Nhu, he had a consistency of purpose and a down-to-earth approach to the politics of his region.49 The other two lived half in one world, half in their own confused perception of another. Unable to reconcile the two, they lived in a constant state of insecurity and defensiveness with regard to both Americans and Vietnamese.
While the Ngo brothers were essentially pathetic figures, their regime was an indissoluble mixture of nightmare and farce. The farce lay generally in the cities, among the people supported by the American aid program and the realms where Madame Nhu could whimsically enforce an anti-divorce law or a ban on dancing.50 The nightmare lay generally in the countryside, among the rice farmers further impoverished by the American importation of food and the new influx of money to the cities, and where no laws held. The difference was, however, invisible to most Americans.
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Among those officials and journalists flying in to survey the breaking crisis of 1961 there were very few who understood where the root of the trouble lay. Those who believed that the Saigon government itself was at fault tended to blame the Ngo family itself. Visiting Vietnam on special assignment for President Kennedy, the economist, Eugene Staley, reported that the Diem government would have to carry out wide-ranging reforms in its administration and armed forces before American aid could have any effect. Journalists, such as Robert Shaplen, criticized Diem for alienating the peasants by his oppressive measures, raising a host of secondary questions: Why were the American advisers not having any influence on Diem? Were they giving him the wrong advice? Why did they not insist on a sweeping program of reform? The same questions were to preoccupy for a decade a host of officials and journalists, including such experienced and politically diverse men as Douglas Pike, Chester Bowles, and the British counterinsurgency expert, Sir Robert Thompson.51 These men saw Diem as the enemy of the anti-Communist project. They wrote history using Diem as the principal actor: “Diem,” said Pike, “tore apart the fabric of Vietnamese society.” But the United States government had created the Diem regime, and in 1961 the question was whether their creation had any autonomous existence or any roots in the countryside.
A quarter of a billion dollars a year did not, perhaps, seem very much to the Americans, but for the first five years of the Diem regime it covered the whole cost of the Saigon government’s armed forces and 80 percent of all other government expenditures. The American aid not only subsidized the government; it paid for the annual trade deficit of $178 million. The American officials initially hoped that the deficit would diminish, but on the contrary it continued to rise owing to the new American expenditures on government services. By 1959 South Vietnam was importing twenty million dollars’ worth of food per year under the Food for Peace plan — though food was still its greatest national resource.52 Except for the settlement of the northern Catholics, all of Diem’s agrarian programs were almost unmitigated disasters. In 1955, for instance, Diem undertook a resettlement program designed to establish some land-hungry and politically bothersome central Vietnamese in the formerly uninhabited regions of forest, mountain, and swamp. The Americans provided funds for the program, but the government neglected to prepare most of the new settlement areas adequately or to introduce a crop that could be grown economically in the mountains. With certain exceptions the resettlement camps and the later, much-touted “prosperity centers” and “agrovilles” became little more than squalid banishment camps whose inhabitants slipped away as soon as the government restrictions were relaxed.53 The land reform program met a similar fate. In 1955 the American ambassador and the French high commissioner proposed a rent reduction and land redistribution law for the double purpose of buying out the French landlords and undermining the appeal of the Viet Minh land program. After a year of hesitation, Diem finally issued a land law that was so poorly designed and so badly
implemented that it managed to antagonize both the landlords and their tenants — though very little land actually changed hands.54 The American and international aid teams managed to perform certain technical feats such as road- and bridge-building, malaria control, and refugee relief. But the Diemist administration had very little hand in these, and by 1960 it would have been difficult to say what else the regime had done in the way of social or economic development. The “economic miracle” of the south was a sleight of hand, having nothing to do with economic growth or increased production. As one disappointed Michigan State University economist wrote in 1961, “In its economic aspect, American aid represents a large-scale relief project more than an economic development program, and because development has not been emphasized, termination of American aid would almost certainly produce both political and economic collapse in Viet-Nam.”55
The failure of development essentially sprang not from the American aid techniques but from the politics of the Diem regime. Neither Diem nor the responsible American officials dared to put the country on an austerity footing. Through the Commercial Import Program — a fiscal device whereby the Vietnamese importers ordered foreign goods to be paid for in dollars by the U.S. government and put their artificial value in piastres into a counterpart fund for the United States to spend on the Saigon government — they poured money and goods into the cities and into the pockets of these officials and merchants. To pacify the landlords and the businessmen, Diem lowered taxes to almost nothing and put up with the unproductive manorial system of land tenure. The only people who suffered were, of course, the peasants and landless farm laborers: they suffered as they always had under the French from an unjust social system and from the concentration of money in the cities. Neither the Diem regime nor the Americans could alter their plight, for a real program of social and economic reform would have involved a real conflict of interests between the peasants on the one hand and the landlords and the city people on the other. To take the part of the peasants was difficult not merely because the role had been successfully preempted by the Communists, but because it required a concern for the peasants, a fundamental grasp of the problems of the country, ideology, organization, and a will to take risks. And it was precisely those capacities that the Diem regime and its American supporters lacked.
In all the years of his reign Ngo Dinh Diem found only one ally in the countryside, and that was the Catholics, most particularly the northern refugees. From the beginning he staffed his administration heavily with Catholics and favored the Catholic villages over all the rest. The Diemist officials, working closely with the priests, saw to it that the Catholic villages took the bulk of U.S. relief aid, the bulk of the agricultural credit. They gave the Catholics the right to take lumber from the national reserves and monopoly rights over the production of the new cash crops introduced by the American aid technicians. “Turn Catholic and have rice to eat,” went the old Vietnamese saying under the French regime. Under Diem the South Vietnamese continued to follow the injunction. In central Vietnam particularly, thousands of people, including in some cases whole villages, turned Catholic in order to escape the government corvées or to avoid resettlement — for the benefit of their Catholic neighbors — into some hardship zone of jungle or swamp.56 To feed the Catholics at the expense of the rest of the population was, of course, a shortsighted policy, but Diem saw no alternative, and the Americans offered him none.
Politically the most enlightened piece of advice the Americans ever offered the Ngos was to “broaden the base” of their government to include other non-Communist groups such as the sects, the urban politicians, and the smaller political parties. What the Americans were asking for — though they did not perhaps conceive of it in that way — was the reinstatement of the French system of group and interest management through a neutral bureaucracy. The idea did not appeal to the Ngos, who saw themselves as creating a government in the full Vietnamese sense of the word — an entire way of life, a uniform society. Throughout their career the Ngos viewed all of the organized political groups as enemies on a par with the Communists. And with some justification, for the Hoa Hao and the VNQDD did not in any way correspond to, say, the American Baptist Church or the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party. They were not just sects or parties. They were, whatever their size, potential states quite as absolutist as Diem’s own. Still, had Diem taken the American advice, his position would hardly have been strengthened. The non-Communist sects and factions meant little without the French army. Diem’s real political problem was that he did not even control those groups and factions who more or less supported the American-backed government. He did not so much as control his own bureaucracy.
In the period 1955–1959 Diem issued a series of laws that many Americans liked to think were directed against Communist agents actively trying to overthrow the Diem regime. At the time certain French journalists, including Jean Lacouture and Philippe Devillers, reported that the Diem regime was conducting a large-scale campaign of terror against all of the Viet Minh as well as against the leaders of the smaller political factions. Some American and British sources confirmed this report,57 but neither the American officials nor journalists investigated the matter at the time. Only years later did the next generation of American social scientists designing the next series of counterinsurgency programs discover the full consequences, the reason and cause of the campaign.58 According to the testimony of the victims — many of whom consequently joined the National Liberation Front — the Diemist officials arrested thousands of people whose only political sin was to have fought for independence against the French before Diem took power. Some of these people they killed on arrest, others they beat and tortured; still others they held for indefinite periods under inhuman conditions in order to extort money or confiscate their land. In certain areas whole hamlets were subjected to such treatment. What most surprised the American researchers was that few of these arrests were ever made in Saigon or in any of the larger cities — a fact that indicated that Diem did not directly order them. In most cases the officials seemed to have acted on their own initiative and for their own personal or sectarian interests. Some of the officials were, after all, former colonial functionaries with blood scores to settle against the Viet Minh. Others were former village notables and landlords who had been driven from their villages by the Viet Minh during the war. Some of them were Catholics fighting their old sectarian battles, and still others were adventurers who joined the new administration in order to make their fortunes. By issuing the anti-treason laws Diem had, in other words, opened a Pandora’s box of violence, permitting those Vietnamese who had guns to terrorize those who did not. Even if Diem had understood that the terror campaign worked against the long-term interests of his government, he could have done nothing to stop it. Apart from those people who could use his administration to their own private advantage, he had little support in the country.
The anti-Viet Minh campaign was only one manifestation of the anarchy within the administration and the army. Almost all the American reporters who came to Saigon in 1961–1962 had tales to tell of army officers gaining promotions through bribery or political influence, of generals running illicit traffic in rice or opium, of intelligence officers refusing to divulge information or lying to conceal a job undone, of officers stealing their men’s pay and of soldiers treating the peasants like the members of a conquered race. As one experienced reporter wrote, “Of the thousands of Vietnamese officials I have known, I can think of none who does not more or less hold the Vietnamese people in contempt.”59 There were exceptions, of course, but they remained exceptions. On the whole, the behavior of the officials had a curious uniformity to it. Their misdeeds formed a pattern that transcended the region or social class from which they came. From the tales of the Diem regime as told by the villagers, it would seem that the history of the south was but the history of one village repeated over and over again.
The story as told by villagers throughout the country had its stoc
k characters: the government-appointed village chief; the “haughty,” “arrogant” official who took bribes from the local landlords and forced the villagers to work for him; the village security officer — a relative, perhaps, of the district chief — who used his position to take revenge on old enemies or to extort money from the villagers; the government soldiers who, like juvenile delinquents, drank too much, stole food, and raped the village girls; the village self-defense guards, who huddled in their earthwork forts each night and fled when the Liberation Front came in force to the village; the district and provincial officials who, like Kafka’s bureaucrats, seemed to inhabit a world impossibly remote from the village. Finally there were the villagers themselves, who complained so little that for years the Americans thought the insurgency would find no root among them. And there was a denouement to the story shocking to Americans of the period: when the Front cadres moved into the village and assassinated one or two of the government officials, the villagers reacted with enthusiasm or indifference.
Dr. Fishel and his colleagues contended that the Diem regime was not the worst government in Asia, and possibly it was not. But the Vietnamese did not make such comparisons — nor did they look upon the corruption and violence of the officials as natural or inevitable, an acceptable reversion to the traditions of the past. The behavior of the officials in fact excited more attention among Vietnamese than it did among Americans. With all the analyses of the American social scientists, it was a North Vietnamese author who compiled the best catalogue of the official failings:
Breaches of the law. Because of personal enmity and rancor, you arrest honest people and confiscate their property, causing them distress.…
Sectarianism and connivance. You group your friends and relatives around you and give them positions for which they have no ability. Those who are competent and satisfactory but do not please you, are discarded.
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