by Max Hastings
The entire landlord class suffered institutionalised humiliation, designed to boost the self-regard of the peasantry as much as to abase owners of property. Even an ardent communist such as Dr Nguyen Thi Ngoc Toan admitted later: ‘Many things happened that I thought didn’t make sense.’ For years she herself was denied promotion, despite her devotion to the Party: ‘everything required the right family background’. By this she meant that those of peasant origins were favoured over people such as herself, from educated and allegedly ‘privileged’ backgrounds. Dissent, diversity, freedom of information were alike abolished. North Vietnam adopted the Stalinist approach to truth, which became whatever the politburo decreed that it should be.
Truong Nhu Tang, later a secret cadre, acknowledged that many of the executed ‘enemies of the people … so-called landlords … had simply been poor peasants who happened to own slightly larger plots than their neighbours, all the holdings being minuscule to begin with’. He also notes that the Party has never expressed remorse for its 1956 campaign to suppress ‘intellectuals’: even those who escaped imprisonment were condemned to house arrest, incommunicado. In November 1956 there were violent rebellions, which two army divisions were deployed to suppress. One such episode took place in Nghe An province, which a later communist history attributed to three ‘reactionary Catholic priests’, named as Fathers Can, Don and Cat, who barricaded villages, seized weapons, captured cadres and organised demonstrations against land reform.
A communist narrative acknowledges: ‘We were obliged to use military forces … All leaders and their key lackeys were arrested.’ In addition to hundreds who died in hot blood, up to two thousand executions followed, and many more prison sentences. Between 1956 and 1959 there were further disturbances in Lai Chau province. Hanoi professed to blame these on agitation by Chinese Nationalist agents, but the revolts created ‘many difficult political situations … creating fear and worry among the population about socialism and diminishing the people’s confidence in the Party and Government’.
Lan, brother of Nguyen Thi Chinh who had fled south in 1954, was frustrated in his attempt to join the Vietminh, who instead imprisoned him for six years. Thereafter, denied a ration card, he was reduced to selling his blood to hospitals, and became a street porter. Their father’s fate was worse: even when released from imprisonment he was unable to secure a ration card or access to employment, and eventually succumbed to beggary. One night, cold and starving, he knocked at the door of an old friend and novelist named Ngoc Giao. Giao’s wife, on opening the door, took one look at the visitor and implored him to go away: her husband was himself in bad odour with the regime. But Giao came down from the roof where he had been hiding, in expectation that the night visitor was a policeman. He insisted on admitting Cuu, feeding him and allowing him a shower. They talked all night, until the writer said regretfully, ‘I’m afraid you can’t stay here.’ Before Cuu left, he said to Giao, ‘If you ever hear anything of my daughter, please tell her how much I love her.’ Then he vanished into the street. Giao and his wife thereafter provided the only assistance they dared, placing a bag of rice in the back alley early each morning. This was collected for a fortnight or so, then one night was left untaken. Cuu vanished from their lives and from that of Vietnam, dying at a time and place unknown. Chinh secured this glimpse of her father’s latter days only long after the war ended.
North Vietnam became known in Western intelligence parlance as a ‘denied area’. Yet thanks to the prestige of its leader, a figure of unimpeachable anti-imperialist credentials, embodiment of a triumphant revolutionary struggle, his country stood well in the world. Its status as a closed society invited shrugs from most Westerners, that this was merely the communist norm. A Northern intellectual suggested later that Ho’s career should be seen in three distinguishable phases – first as a simple patriot; then as a communist; finally as an apparent nationalist who was in reality pursuing the interests of the Communist International. In the view of a compatriot, he profited greatly from his cosmopolitan experience and ideological ties with China and the USSR, whereas his nationalist rivals knew little of the world outside Indochina. He conducted an extraordinarily skilful balancing act between the two great communist powers, especially after their own relationship turned glacial in the late 1950s.
Hanoi’s politburo was stunned by Nikita Khrushchev’s February 1956 speech to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, denouncing the cult of personality even as Vietnam’s leader was being promoted as a near-deity. Most of Ho’s senior comrades were Stalinists, who had mourned their hero’s 1953 death ‘with tears streaming down our cheeks’, in the words of a Party functionary. Now they were disgusted by Moscow’s renunciation of a military showdown with the West, in favour of a mere economic and ideological contest. The 1956 Hungarian uprising confirmed North Vietnam’s leadership in its view that any indulgence of dissent risked unleashing challenges to its authority.
A Canadian diplomat reported from Hanoi: ‘There is little point in speaking of the possibilities of an economic collapse of North Vietnam, since there is no economic structure.’ At independence, among a population of thirteen million people, there were only thirty qualified engineers and a handful of factories: the country’s rulers were too preoccupied with their domestic predicament to have any stomach for aggressive action in the South. Eighty thousand troops were demobilised and dispatched to swell the rural labour force. Both China and the Soviet Union made it plain that they opposed any armed provocation which might alarm the Americans.
Evidence remains meagre about Hanoi’s 1954–57 Party power struggles. It seems nonetheless plain that Ho Chi Minh and Giap wanted no new war: they believed they could secure a unified communist Vietnam without fighting for it. Their oft-rehearsed commitment to achieving this peacefully was – at that stage – sincere. Other rising men, however, thought differently. As they watched the evolution of Diem’s government in Saigon, they saw scant hope of securing their just inheritance of a unified Vietnam, other than through armed struggle.
2 ‘THE ONLY BOY WE GOT’
The 1954 exodus from North Vietnam was matched by a lesser one from the South. Communist troops marched away, often after emotional send-offs from the communities in which they had been based. In 1954–55, a total of 173,900 Vietminh fighters and 86,000 of their dependants ‘regrouped’ to the North. One veteran revolutionary paid a farewell visit to the Mekong delta before reluctantly obeying the order to join the migration. She told comrades who were staying behind, ‘See you in two years’ – meaning when the country was reunited after the communists’ assured election victory. It became a familiar gesture for Vietminh veterans to hold up two fingers, signifying the time lapse before inevitable fulfilment of their dream. COSVN secretary Le Duan’s wife Nga was pregnant with their second child when her husband dispatched her north on a Polish ship, along with the family of his close comrade Le Duc Tho. He himself stayed. To the end of his days, Le Duan argued that Ho Chi Minh’s two historic mistakes were to acquiesce first in the 1945 return of the French, then in the 1954 partition. He and other hardliners believed that a unified, communist Vietnam would be achieved only by fighting for it. His parting words to Nga were, ‘Tell Ho it will be twenty years before we see each other again.’
In violation of the Geneva Accords, Hanoi ordered ten thousand Vietminh to remain undercover in the South, insurance against a resumption of the armed struggle. Most of the guerrillas who marched North were bewildered and indeed enraged by partition, and became no less so after crossing the new ‘Demilitarized Zone’ – the ‘DMZ’. They experienced hardships greater than they had known in the relatively well-fed South, and many were also gnawed by family separations. Le Duan’s wife found herself living with two small children in a room above a Hanoi garage, writing a column called ‘Vietnamese Women’ for the Party newspaper, and knowing nothing of the fate of her husband at COSVN. Some Southerners proved defiant of Northern authority, and almost all harboured a single ambiti
on: to return whence they had come. Some cadres’ children were meanwhile dispatched to further education in Russia or China.
The new South Vietnam and its government enjoyed considerable advantages: the Mekong delta was the most productive rice-growing area in South-East Asia; the countryside was relatively unscarred; while the Vietminh had commanded widespread support as independence fighters, there was much less enthusiasm for communism; and the Americans were eager that the country should become a showcase for what they called ‘the free world’. A South Vietnamese army officer later reflected on those days: ‘We took our lives for granted. We were not rich, but we were comfortable and had some freedoms. We were soft, as South Vietnamese have always been soft, because they live on rich land. Northerners are tough, because they come from a tough, poor place.’ An exile from the North who rose high in the Saigon civil service wrote: ‘For many of us … the years 1956–60 were among the best of our lives – we were full of expectation and promise.’ Peasant girl Phung Thi Ly, born in 1949, recalled her rustic childhood as ‘a paradise, full of tropical birds and buffalo; dogs and chickens and pigs that we called our pets; rushing rivers to swim in; and wide fields where we could run and laugh’.
Ho Chi Minh had secured mastery of the North after an ordeal by fire. Ngo Dinh Diem, by contrast, was merely the arbitrary nominee of playboy head of state Bao Dai, accorded grudging nods first by the French, then by the Americans. He had some of the qualities that make great leaders: courage, honesty, fluency, passionate commitment to his country. Unfortunately he was also a Catholic religious zealot; blindly devoted to a greedy and unscrupulous family; imbued with messianic faith in his own rightness; nostalgic for a non-existent past; insensitive to the needs and aspirations of his people.
Life under Diem seemed to most Vietnamese a mere continuation of colonialism. The big Americans who pervaded his life – and death – emphasised his own physical slightness. Born in 1901, for a time he favoured a career in the priesthood like that of his brother Ngo Dinh Thuc, whom he persuaded the Vatican to make archbishop of Hue. Instead, however, he entered the civil service and by twenty-five was a provincial governor. In 1933 the French caused Bao Dai to make him minister of the interior, a role in which he lasted only three months, because the colonial power would not invest any Vietnamese with real authority such as he demanded. It was then that he made a remark later hailed as prophetic: ‘The communists will defeat us, not by virtue of their strength, but because of our weakness.’ For a time during World War II he was held prisoner by the Vietminh, who also murdered one of his brothers and a nephew. Diem met Ho Chi Minh, who sought his cooperation, only to be rebuffed. ‘You are a criminal who has burned and destroyed the country,’ Diem claimed that he told Ho. ‘My brother and his son are only two of the hundreds you have killed.’ The communists later lamented Ho’s folly in freeing him.
Following a Vietminh assassination attempt, in 1950 Diem left Vietnam. He spent his first two years of exile as an inmate of Maryknoll Seminary in Lakewood, New Jersey, often performing the humblest domestic chores, but also gaining introductions to such influential fellow-Catholics as Cardinal Spellman, Supreme Court justice William Douglas, together with Senators Mike Mansfield and John F. Kennedy, whom he impressed with the fervour of his hatred for both colonialism and communism. In 1953 he moved to a Benedictine monastery in Belgium, where he made important French connections, and somehow also won the trust of Bao Dai, in exile outside Cannes. Diem’s astute younger brother Nhu, later notorious as his grey eminence, played an important role in steering him towards power.
Diem’s appointment as prime minister, followed by a low-key return to Saigon on 26 June 1954, neither corrupted his asceticism nor diminished his wildly exaggerated self-belief. Religious faith and moral conceit convinced him that he ruled by a divine right as assured as that professed by King Charles I three centuries earlier on the throne of England. Diem viewed South Vietnam’s security entirely as a military problem: his response to it was the 1955 introduction of conscription. He showed no interest in either cultivation of new friends or reconciliation with old foes. He pronounced decisions and demanded fulfilment of them, himself working sixteen hours a day. Obsessed with detail, he might lecture a visiting ambassador or foreign journalist for four hours without a comfort break; he sometimes signed exit visas personally. Whereas Ho Chi Minh was a notably witty conversationalist, Diem was devoid of humour, especially about himself. As for money – national income for his new country – on 12 August 1954 the US National Security Council decided that the domino theory was valid, that it was thus essential to restore the prestige of the West in Indochina, grievously injured by French defeat. A week later Eisenhower approved NSC5429/2, which caused the US to become South Vietnam’s paymaster.
The gravest handicap burdening the Saigon regime was that scarcely any of its standard-bearers and officials had participated in the independence struggle: many, indeed, were former servants of the French. Diem broke an early promise to grant amnesty to Vietminh activists, whom he began to imprison. In Paris, prime minister Edgar Faure asserted that the little zealot was ‘not only incapable but mad’, and the US government increasingly inclined to agree. Yet who else was there? Not until 1961 did Vice-President Lyndon Johnson deliver his memorable apologia for Diem: ‘Shit, man, he’s the only boy we got out there.’ But from 1954 onwards, though Americans doubted the prime minister’s survivability, within the tiny circle of Saigon’s educated elite they could identify no more plausible non-communist candidate to rule.
Among early American players in South Vietnam was air force colonel Edward Lansdale, forty-eight-year-old head of the Military Mission, a covert operations group that launched ineffectual sabotage sorties into the North, which cost the liberties or lives of virtually all the locals ill-starred enough to be recruited for them. In the course of the ensuing two decades, Washington impresarios would introduce onto the Vietnamese stage a succession of actors auditioning for the role of ‘Lawrence of Indochina’, of whom Lansdale may be deemed the first. A former advertising executive of notable persuasive charm, he established a relationship with Diem that seemed likely to give Washington leverage. The colonel had made his reputation advising Philippines president Ramon Magsaysay on suppression of the Huk guerrillas, and was now mandated by Dulles to repeat this achievement. He enjoyed a mixed press among his fellow-countrymen in Saigon. Some regarded him as an unguided missile, but one colleague said later: ‘What I respected was that with both Americans and Vietnamese, he was a good listener and a shrewd calculator. He displayed a very good understanding of what was possible, and what was not.’ Lansdale repeatedly warned Diem that he must win hearts and minds.
The colonel’s intrigues were more controversial. He is alleged to have been responsible for thwarting an October 1954 generals’ coup. He paid the leaders of the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao sects several million dollars of CIA money to stick with Diem. He sought also to cut a deal with Bay Vien, boss of Saigon’s mighty armed mafia the Binh Xuyen. Its empire of brothels and opium dens centred upon the Dai The Gioi – Great World casino – located behind high walls in Cholon, and composed of fifty tin-roofed wooden buildings, housing two hundred tables. Vien was protected by a green-bereted private army, forty thousand strong – and by the French.
In those days the dispossessed colonial rulers were competing for influence with the Americans, new kids on the block, which produced some black-comic clashes. Lansdale liked to tell a story of how the US embassy secretaries were alarmed by the discovery of grenades in the vestibule of their quarters, which the CIA identified as a gesture of menace by its Gallic rivals. That evening the Military Mission’s rough games specialist, Lou Conein, marched into L’Amiral, Saigon’s most popular French rendezvous, produced a grenade from which he extracted the pin, and brandished it while he addressed the clientele in their own language: ‘I know how distressed you all are that the American community, and especially our secretaries, should feel threatened. If anything unpleasa
nt or unworthy should take place, we would have common cause for regret.’ He then replaced the pin in the grenade and strode out, justly confident that the mission staff would be exposed to no further French frights.
When Lansdale failed in his attempt to buy off Bay Vien, however, the Americans became alarmed that French support might enable the gangster to prevail over the prime minister. British observers were equally pessimistic: a Foreign Office review concluded: ‘M. Diem has many of the qualities required by a national revolutionary leader dedicated to saving his country – courage, integrity, persistence, faith and an implacable hostility to communism.’ Unfortunately, added the British diplomat, he was also ‘incapable of compromise’ and had ‘little administrative capacity’. When Gen. Joseph ‘Lightning Joe’ Collins, a bustling, short-fused 1944–45 corps commander under Eisenhower, visited Vietnam as the president’s personal envoy, he returned home to report that the US was backing a loser. Collins said later: ‘I liked Diem, but I became convinced he did not have the strength of character to manage this bizarre collection of characters.’ At 6.10 p.m. on 27 April 1955, Dulles sent a cable from Washington to Saigon authorising the prime minister’s removal, much as he might have ordered the sacking of an unsatisfactory parlourmaid.
Yet Diem confounded the sceptics. That very evening, and probably by coincidence, though it is possible that Lansdale played a role, a Saigon street battle erupted between the South Vietnamese army and the Binh Xuyen. Six hours after Dulles demanded that Diem should be put down, he hastily rescinded his cable: the issue remained in abeyance through a miniature civil war in which five hundred Vietnamese died. At the end of May the government’s forces emerged victorious: Bay Vien was obliged to flee into exile, becoming a permanent guest of his French sponsors. The Americans decided that Diem had more about him than previously thought, and clasped him in a mawkishly warm embrace. Senator Hubert Humphrey, a prime mover in the influential lobby group American Friends of Vietnam, declared that the South’s leader was ‘honest, wholesome and honourable’. Henry Luce wrote in Life: ‘Every son, daughter or even distant admirer of the American Revolution should be overjoyed [by the defeat of the Binh Xuyen] and learn to shout “Hurray for Ngo Dinh Diem!”’