Fire in the Lake

by Frances FitzGerald

  The government was leaderless — and perhaps predictably so, for, insofar as the coup represented more than a change of personalities, it represented a victory for the southerners against the northerners and centrists, a victory for the landlords against the mandarins. Like many of the Saigon students and intellectuals, the generals came mostly from the Cochin Chinese bourgeoisie. They were people who lacked any tradition of self-government and who, as men from the rich provinces, considered government more a threat or a nuisance than a way of life.3 Still, as Vietnamese, they could not conceive of government as a federal system. For years they had relied on the French to provide the authority for a system they could not themselves manage. After twelve years of Diem they both feared a strong central government that would forceably reduce the complexities of southern politics, and feared the anarchy that would result from its absence.

  But the choice could not be made in the abstract. And in the winter of 1963 there was no one in the cities who possessed that revolutionary legitimacy that the Vietnamese knew as the Mandate of Heaven. Lacking such authority, the generals could do little but wait and watch the slowly shifting colors of the political landscape. The Americans — officials and reporters — attributed their inaction to personal weakness, or worse, to their “neutralist sympathies,” but the generals exercised only realism by refusing to push forward with some arbitrary plan. For the Vietnamese there either was a “correct solution” or there was no solution at all. And in that winter the prospects for a national anti-Communist movement arising did not look bright.

  In the countryside the non-Communist political groups had grown considerably weaker since 1954. Between them, the NLF and the Diem regime had managed to disable, if not to destroy, most of the local governments that had resisted the Viet Minh — the one exception being the Catholics. The landlords were gone from much of the Delta. Some continued to collect rents through the GVN officials, but the vast majority had lost their exclusive hold over the peasants. The Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai had survived the Diemist repressions, but their area of influence had contracted to a few provinces along the Cambodian border: An Giang, Chau Doc, and Tay Ninh. Because their greatest desire was to avoid occupation by either of the large armies, no government in Saigon could count on them for active military support. In central Vietnam the old Vietnamese Kuomintang, the VNQDD, held onto a few thousand adherents in the villages and the cities. Led by a group of rather tired old men, it remained totally autarchic — anti-Communist, anti-Buddhist, and anti whatever part of the Saigon government challenged its rule over the villages.

  Unlike the French, the Diem regime had paid very little attention to conciliating the non-Vietnamese minorities: the Cambodians of the western Delta, the Cham of central Vietnam, the montagnard tribes, and the urban Chinese. The last two were of particular importance — the montagnards because they inhabited the strategic Central Highlands, the Chinese because they controlled virtually all the trade and commerce of the country. Over the years the Ngos had attempted to reduce these groups’ importance by settling Vietnamese in the Highlands (on montagnard land) and by insisting that the Chinese accept Vietnamese citizenship and Vietnamese government control. They had succeeded only in alienating both groups. By 1963 the montagnards were divided between tribes that supported the NLF and tribes that, largely because of the work of the American Special Forces and the CIA, claimed their independence from all Vietnamese authorities. The Chinese, for their part dependent on the trade through Saigon, held themselves aloof from political commitment and, in general, from Vietnamese society.

  This patchwork of sects and ethnic minorities was further complicated by factionalism within each group. The Chinese were divided into a number of societies, the montagnards into numerous language groups. The VNQDD had three factions, the Hoa Hao at least four, and the Cao Dai a masterful eight, none of which agreed even on the terms of disagreement with each other, and all of whom opposed any intrusion by the central government.

  In the cities alone could an American-backed government expect to find mass support. As an economic enterprise, Saigon was, as always, a capon tied to the strings of the international market. During periods of war it lived off foreign aid instead of foreign trade and grew more and more dependent. The political repression of the intellectuals aside, Saigon profited under the Diem regime, and could expect to do so as long as its armies kept the NLF out of the city itself and American support continued. The French arrangement, in other words, continued to work in the cities as it did not in the countryside. The one difficulty with this arrangement was that it did not operate as anything more than a negative political force.

  In Saigon and Hue the fall of the Diem regime called forth a mass of new political parties and newspapers and a whirlwind of rhetoric consisting of denunciations of the old regime and proposals for and criticisms of the new. The debates came as a welcome change after the uniformity of the Diemist press, but they revealed all too clearly the absence of any coherent political force. Such “parties” as existed were fragmentary and generally unstable coalitions formed around one or two intellectuals or civil servants. In Saigon, it was said, two men constituted a party, three men a party and a faction. The largest of these parties, the Dai Viet (of which there were three factions) was little more than a network of useful contacts for prominent officers and civil servants. And none of these parties had a plan, a program, even an ambition to organize in the countryside or among the poor of the cities.

  The smallness and incoherence of the urban parties had been a hallmark of Vietnamese politics since the colonial period. During the years of French liberalism in the 1930’s, Saigon had supported dozens of such parties from the Constitutionalists to the Trotskyites. Since that time none of them had grown to any size or penetrated beyond the suburbs. French, and later American, analysts provided complicated cultural explanations for this phenomenon, but the most convincing explanation is economic. The group of intellectuals and civil servants from which these parties came constituted a privileged elite — an elite such as exists only in colonized countries, an elite that sustains itself not on any local base of production but on the work of the foreigners. Frantz Fanon has argued with regard to African countries that the role of this elite is to serve as an intermediary between the foreigners and the natives of the interior. In periods of colonial liberalism it forms parties not to organize the people against the foreigners but to manipulate the foreigners for its own ends, using the threat of the discontented masses as its means of leverage. It demands independence for the country, but it cannot produce it, for its interests lie not in building a nation but in assuming exclusive control over what the foreigners have created.4 Granted independence, it will attempt to continue to act as an intermediary with the foreigners and to defend its own exclusive entrée into the trade market, the higher educational system, and the government bureaucracy. The Saigon intelligentsia was such a group under the Americans as under the French. By virtue of its success as an intermediary, it became a group of people with a very different culture from the rest of the Vietnamese.

  Even after a decade of independence, most of the prominent Saigon politicians and high-ranking intellectuals were being educated abroad. (This in striking contrast to the NLF leaders.)5 Many of them were the very people, or the descendants of the people, who had served the French and acted as their loyal opposition. They lived in the luxurious walled villas of French Saigon and worked in the yellow- or pink-stuccoed office buildings with their ceiling fans and their air of colonial decay. Now after ten years of the Diem regime there were simply more of them than there were before, and some spoke English instead of French. Among them there were a number of intelligent and hard-working men, such as the northern populist, Dr. Phan Quang Dan, the newspaper publisher, Dr. Dan Van Sung, and somewhat further to the left, the lawyer Tran Van Tuyen and the economists Vu Van Thai and Au Truong Thanh. These men provided some cogent criticisms of American policies in Vietnam, and yet they have had no real influence
and provide no political alternative. Like Ngo Dinh Diem, many of them were confused men who could find no meeting point between their own education and interests and the demands of their countrymen. Fanon described their dilemma perfectly.

  The colonialist bourgeoisie, in its narcissistic dialogue, expounded by the members of its universities, had in fact deeply implanted in the minds of the colonised intellectual that the essential qualities remain eternal in spite of all the blunders men may make: the essential qualities of the West, of course. The native intellectual accepted the cogency of these ideas, and deep down in his brain you could always find a vigilant sentinel ready to defend the Greco-Latin pedestal. Now it so happens that during the struggle for liberation, at the moment that the native intellectual comes into touch again with his people, this artificial sentinel is turned into dust. All the Mediterranean values… become lifeless.… Individualism is the first to disappear.6

  That moment had arrived for Nguyen Huu Tho and the other Saigonese leaders of the NLF, but it never did for those who remained behind in the cities. The Saigon politicians and intellectuals would continue to tinker with legislatures and constitutions that did not begin to touch upon the lives of the peasants or even the poor of the cities.

  One proof of the impotence of these intellectuals was their failure to provide leadership during the last few months of the Diem regime. In an age of increasing secularism the students of Saigon and Hue looked to the religious groups for guidance at the moment of crisis. Curiously enough, the student conspiracy against Diem began within the Catholic Student Union — the only student organization permitted to exist. When the Buddhist rebellion broke out, the Catholic dissidents allied with the nominally Buddhist students to support the bonzes. After the November coup, the alliance fell apart, leaving the various student activists to form their own small, intransigent movements and to engage in a bewildering series of factional fights that paralleled those of their elders. In the morass of city politics only the religious groups, that drew the city people back to the values that predated colonial rule, managed to sustain any organized vitality.

  Because of the nature of the coup, the Catholic organizations did not suffer as much as might have been expected from the fall of the Diem regime. Some of the members of Nhu’s Can Lao Party went to jail and the Buddhists challenged the Catholic dominion over Hue, but the majority of the reprisals were personal vendettas that had little effect upon the Church as a whole. With a communion of at least two million members and the strict discipline imposed by its priestly hierarchy, the Catholics remained the most powerful group in non-Communist South Vietnam. Catholicism was a force which had to be reckoned with by every government — and yet, like the Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai, it was a syncretic sect and not a nationalist movement. If the fact had to be demonstrated (and it did not, for the Catholics did not make the same claim as the Buddhists to representing “the whole mass of the people”), the fall of Diem did that. As a revealed religion with a precise doctrine and a Western form of social organization, it was both too narrow and too closely associated with the French regime to have appeal for the great mass of the Vietnamese. Under the Diem regime a few ambitious young men, such as Nguyen Van Thieu, converted to Catholicism for much the same reason as their predecessors had under the French, but the Catholic population remained essentially stable: one either was a Catholic or one was not depending on one’s family background. Furthermore, one was either a northern or a southern Catholic — the distinction being as hard and fast as any in Vietnamese politics.7

  The Catholics formed the most stable and predictable of the southern political groups; the Buddhists, by contrast, constituted the most fluid and ill-disciplined of them all.8 The Buddhists set the standard of rebellion against Diem, but they had, as yet, no coherent political organization and no support in the countryside. Their advantages lay in their leadership and in the resonance of Buddhism in the historical memories of the Vietnamese. Unlike the Catholics, they could claim to speak for “the whole mass of the Vietnamese people” and to feel some common cause even with those Vietnamese who supported the NLF. In a speech to the crowds gathered at the new headquarters, a vast barnlike pagoda in the slums of Saigon, the elderly Thich Tam Chau, now head of the Institute for the Propagation of the Buddhist Faith, could recall the time when a Buddhist monarch ruled Vietnam and when during the years of war and political chaos, Buddhism sustained the inner life of the country. A northerner and a political moderate in Saigonese terms, Tam Chau began to gather followers from among the straight-laced bourgeoisie of Saigon that rejected Catholicism and Communism alike as foreign-influence doctrines. He and his associates worked closely with the rest of the bonzes during the events of 1963, but as time went on it became apparent that the unity of the bonzes could not survive the release of pressure. On goals as well as on questions of tactics Tam Chau split with the High Clerical Council (the spiritual, as opposed to the secular, authority of the Unified Buddhist Church) and the brilliant central Vietnamese, Thich Tri Quang.

  The divisions among the bonzes must have run deep, for in many ways Tri Quang was the most able and inspired of all the non-Communist political leaders. An intense and fiercely independent man in his early forties, Tri Quang had spent some time with the Viet Minh during the early part of the French Indochina War. Breaking with the Communists in the early 1950’s, he had returned to the pagoda and directed his enormous energies to forming a Buddhist movement in Hue. As one of the prime movers in the conspiracy against Diem, he had, in flight from Diemist police, taken refuge for several weeks in the American embassy, an asylum for which he professed a debt of gratitude to the United States. After the November coup, he set himself to the task of establishing contact between the Mahayana organizations of the cities and the Theravada bonzes of the Delta. When, like most attempts to organize the Delta, his initiative more or less failed, he began to concentrate his energies upon Hue and the surrounding villages, setting up family and youth associations formed partly on traditional models, partly on those of the Viet Minh.9

  A fiery speaker and at the same time an introspective intellectual, Tri Quang belonged to the tradition of religiously inspired Vietnamese leaders. His looks commanded attention — the high forehead, the large brilliant eyes, and the small body expressing the cerebral intensity of the man. As was not true of most of the Saigon bonzes, including his own supporters, Thich Thien Minh and Thich Ho Giac, he lived the correct, ascetic life of a bonze, fasting on the proper days, sleeping in a bare cell, and spending hours of each day in meditation. Like Ho Chi Minh, he lived in a “sincere” manner, and, like him, he had the capacity to inspire trust in all kinds of people from the poor cyclo drivers of Hue to the most sophisticated intellectuals. In Hue he tended to avoid foreigners and to refuse to speak anything but Vietnamese. To Americans, therefore, he was something of an enigma, someone to be watched and mistrusted, a man who professed anti-Communism and yet refused to make an unconditional commitment to the war or to the Saigon government.

  But in the winter of 1963–1964 it was not at all clear what the Buddhist movement might become. The American journalists were bewildered by the relation of these bonzes to Vietnamese Buddhism, and understandably so, for no one, including the bonzes, knew who might finally respond to the call of those who claimed to express the wishes of all “Buddhists.” Tri Quang and Tam Chau would not explain that their strength depended upon the extent to which they could reconcile the diverse interests of those who had joined the anti-Diemist demonstrations and mold the formless impulse of rejection into a disciplined force. Nor would they explain that beyond the problem of organizing the urban bourgeoisie lay that of organizing the poor and the people of the countryside, who, though nominally “Buddhist,” obeyed no religious authority. Would “Buddhism” disintegrate, would it harden into a small autarchic sect, like all of the other religious groups, or would it develop and take on the dimensions of a nationalism? The question was an important one for the future — that is, if non-
Communist Vietnam had a future — for Buddhism was the only new political movement in the cities and the only one that seemed to have any potential for growth.

  It was, in a way, pathetic, this call for unity on the part of the junta. Now, after eight years of the Diem regime, non-Communist Vietnam was less united than ever. To the Delta there remained only a handful of landed families and the miraculous sects; to central Vietnam, the towns and villages in which the Catholics, Buddhists, and old-fashioned political parties continued their fierce blood feuds. Saigon itself remained much as it was when French legionnaires, bitter and exhausted, watched the French empire collapse, revealing unfathomable depths of corruption and chaos.

  The generals of the Minh junta themselves represented the last and best dream of France — the success of its mission civilisatrice and its policy of assimilation. General Tran Van Don had been born in the Gironde, and many of the others had spent the better part of their youth in France. General Minh — “Big Minh,” as this tall and robust officer was affectionately known — had been a star student at the École de Chartres; General Le Van Kim had trained to be a film maker in Paris and was, it was said, working on a film with Rene Clair when the first Indochina War broke out.10 All of them had joined the army to fight for a French-influenced Vietnam — to preserve what there was of Paris in Saigon — and they had failed to understand that France had never penetrated the villages. The rise of Ngo Dinh Diem put them in a dilemma, for though they were “nationalists” (all Vietnamese were “nationalists” in the sense that they wished for a government by Vietnamese), they found themselves fighting for a Vietnam they did not believe in. Finally, and almost fortuitously, taking power, they found they had nothing to offer the people of the villages and the city streets. Of more immediate consequence, they found that the war was being lost.