Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy
Page 15
In October 1956 Diem, unwilling to hold elections that the communists would almost certainly win, instead staged a referendum which deposed Bao Dai and installed himself as South Vietnam’s president and head of state. Lansdale claimed credit for a characteristic stunt – printing Diem’s ballots in red, a lucky colour in Vietnamese eyes, and those of Bao Dai in green, a colour of misfortune. Diem secured a mandate with a preposterous 98.2 per cent of the vote, a majority that even a Soviet candidate might have thought excessive. In Washington, Dulles said: ‘[South] Vietnam is now a free nation. It is not a puppet.’ Yet Diem’s state depended for its existence upon dumper-truckloads of dollars. If there was no viable North Vietnamese economy, nor was there much of a Southern one – instead, a massive trade deficit and a flood of imports funded by the Americans. Vietnamese began to quote the cynical old French saying: ‘Turn Catholic and have rice to eat.’ Nguyen Van Thieu, later president, was among those who heeded this advice, converting from Buddhism in 1958. Aid soared from just $US1 million in 1954 to $322 million a year later, and continued to rise thereafter – more cash per capita than Washington provided to any other nation in the world except Korea and Laos. Paul Kattenberg of the State Department made the imaginative proposal that the US should offer North Vietnam a bribe of $500 million to ‘repair war damage’ – in truth, to leave the South alone. Such a payment, urged Kattenberg, offered a cheaper alternative to funding Diem.
Nobody in Washington was interested, however. Cash poured into Saigon’s coffers, to be spent at the almost absolute discretion of the president’s generals and officials, a formula for waste and corruption. Securing a government import permit opened the tap to a fortune. Some of the urban middle-class prospered mightily from the inflow of cash and commodities: many of the new rich were former Northern exiles who made good – or, perhaps, made bad – in the South. Under the capitalist system, it seemed that only peasants need commit to honest toil: Saigon experienced a surge of bubble prosperity.
3 BOOM TIME
In the late 1950s, the Southern capital still possessed a colonial elegance tinged with Oriental decadence that delighted Westerners. New arrivals were moved to ecstasies by glimpsing Vietnamese girls in ao dai gowns – or better still, out of them. Literate foreigners recalled a Graham Greene line: ‘To take an Annamite to bed with you is like taking a bird: they twitter and sing on your pillow.’ Most Westerners’ sexual couplings were conducted with professionals, while middle-class Vietnamese sustained notably innocent social lives, in which few advanced beyond hand-holding in advance of their arranged marriages. Nguyen Cao Ky, who later became well-known for the range of his wives and lovers, asserted that when he travelled to France as a twenty-one-year-old pilot trainee, like almost all his contemporaries he was a virgin.
Respectable Vietnamese called girls who associated with round-eyes ‘Me My’, a term only marginally less contemptuous than branding them as hookers. Families exercised rigorous social discipline over their offspring of both sexes. Truong Nhu Tang’s father directed his six sons towards appointed careers as doctor, pharmacist, banker, engineer, engineer, engineer. Tang indeed pursued pharmacological studies until he decided that instead he wished to be a revolutionary: ‘Each Sunday we would gather at my grandfather’s house to listen as he taught us the precepts of Confucian ethics. He would remind us of our duty to live virtuous lives, of personal rectitude and filial piety. And he would talk about the cardinal ethical principles: nhon, nghia le, tri, tin – benevolence, duty, propriety, conscience and fidelity … For boys especially, he would tell us, there are two unshakable necessities: protection of family honour and loyalty to the country. We would sing together the morality verses that we all knew by heart: “Cong cha nhu nui Thai Son” – “Your father’s sacrifice in raising you climbs as high as Thai Son Mountain/Your mother’s love and care are ever-flowing streams.”’
The young Hanoi exile Nguyen Thi Chinh’s life took a new twist one day in 1956, when this beautiful young woman met Joseph Mankiewicz, who was in Saigon to shoot the movie of The Quiet American. He asked her to test for the role of Phuong, the Vietnamese girl who is the lover first of Fowler, a British journalist, then of the CIA man Alden Pyle. Chinh was thrilled: her new husband, an army officer, was training in the US. In his absence, propriety obliged her instead to seek consent from her mother-in-law, who rejected with horror the notion of an actress in the family. Only in the following year did Chinh’s movie career get started, when she took a role in a Vietnamese movie which secured the approval of her husband’s family – as a Buddhist nun.
Thereafter, she found herself starring in successive films, twenty-two in all, with such titles as A Yank in Vietnam and Operation CIA. She filmed all over South-East Asia and became a famous and indeed worshipped woman in her own country. For all her success, however, the tragedy of her family’s split, absolute ignorance of the fate of those in the North, never faded from her consciousness: ‘War is my enemy. Without it, what a wonderful life I could have had.’ As for Mankiewicz’s film, Col. Lansdale – who was wrongly supposed to be the original of Greene’s anti-hero, attended a gala screening in Washington and praised the movie to the sky. Nobody else did: Audie Murphy played the quiet American as a wholesome good guy, and the author deplored the sanitisation of his cynical novel.
Though much American money was stolen or wasted, some of the huge aid infusion, together with a respite from war, brought happy times to the Mekong delta in the later 1950s. A peasant said, ‘I regarded this period as something from a fairy tale; I was carefree and enjoyed my youth.’ Communist Party membership declined dramatically. There was rice in the fields, fruit in the orchards, pigs snuffling around the yards, fish in village ponds. Wooden houses increasingly replaced huts. Some peasants acquired a little furniture; many bought bicycles and radios; children attended schools. The first motorised sampans and water pumps began to modernise agriculture.
Yet those at the bottom of the heap failed to benefit. There was an absence of generosity about the Southern political system, mirroring that in the North, though at first less tinged with blood. Landowners returned to claim their rights in villages from which they had been expelled by the Vietminh, and even tried to collect back rent. Diem became progressively more authoritarian: Tran Kim Tuyen, chief of his intelligence service SEPES, stood less than five feet tall and weighed only a hundred pounds, but was notorious as one of the most ruthless killers in Asia. The president never wavered in rejecting any liability to conduct elections. On this, he could make a fair case: his government had never been party to the Geneva Accords, and no matching poll held in the North would be free or fair.
Moreover, Americans and some Europeans viewed South Vietnam in the context of other US client nations. Regimes survived, and even prospered, that were notably more unpleasant than Diem’s. The brutality and corruption of South Korean dictator Syngman Rhee had proved no impediment to his continuing rule. President Ramon Magsaysay of the Philippines employed ruthless methods to triumph over the Huks. The communist threat to Greece had finally been crushed, with shocking savageries by both sides. Few of Latin America’s dictators ran their countries with any pretence of honesty, justice or humanity, yet they continued to enjoy Washington’s favour.
Thus, in the late 1950s, Americans saw no reason to suppose that the incompetence, corruption and repressive policies of Diem’s regime need undo him, so long as they continued to pay the bills. He survived unscathed a February 1957 communist assassination attempt. Col. Lansdale boomed the little president to his bosses, and some were impressed: there were few Western correspondents in Saigon to gainsay Washington’s claims of progress. When Diem paid a May 1957 visit to the US he received a personal welcome from President Eisenhower, and a quarter of a million New Yorkers turned out for his tickertape parade. The New York Times described him euphorically as ‘an Asian liberator, a man of tenacity of purpose’; the Boston Globe dubbed him ‘Vietnam’s Man of Steel’. Life magazine published an article headed
‘The Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam: Diem, America’s Newly Arrived Visitor, has Roused His Country and Routed the Reds’. It would have been hard to crowd more fantasies into a sentence.
Back in Saigon, American advisers persuaded Diem that he should show himself more often before his people: when he did so, they orchestrated enthusiastic crowds. Diem’s monomania was fuelled by these tours, which he believed to reflect genuine adulation. He sought to make a virtue of stubbornness, once musing to journalist Marguerite Higgins that if the US controlled the Saigon government ‘like a puppet on a string … how will it be different from the French?’ The USIA’s Ev Bumgardner said that Diem regarded the Americans as ‘great big children – well-intentioned, powerful, with a lot of technical know-how, but not very sophisticated in dealing with him or his race’.
Diem was indeed his own man, as the South Vietnamese leaders who succeeded him were not. Unfortunately, however, the advice he rejected was that which might have secured his survival and even success: to curb the excesses of his own family; renounce favouritism towards Catholics; select subordinates for competence rather than loyalty; check corruption; abandon the persecution of critics; impose radical land reform.
Saigon people liked to think themselves nguoi Viet – true Vietnamese – while they looked down on Northerners, Bac Ky. Yet Catholic Northern exiles were conspicuous in their dominance of Diem’s court circle, and of his Can Lao political party. Duong Van Mai, who had herself fled from Hanoi, wrote later: ‘the Diem regime increasingly took on the look of a carpetbagger government’. The most disastrous influence on the president was his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, the clever, sinuous, brutal security supremo, whose ‘dragon lady’ wife Madame Nhu might have been chosen by Central Casting to play Wicked Witch of the East. The North Vietnamese politburo employed plenty of executioners and torturers, but the names and faces of such people were unknown outside their own prisons. The Nhus, by contrast, became globally notorious, doing untold harm to the image of the Saigon government.
Likewise, Diem’s generals affected heavy, brassbound military caps worn above sunglasses, a combination that seemed worldwide hallmarks of the servants of tyrants. Some top men went further, affecting tuxedos – Western formal garb – at banquets. Any South Vietnamese peasant who saw photographs of his leaders thus attired beheld a chasm between ‘them’ and ‘us’. A Vietnamese UPI reporter watching Diem arrive at the National Assembly in Saigon observed to a colleague, ‘The people in Hanoi may be absolute bastards, but they would never be so stupid as to appear before the people in a Mercedes-Benz.’ Here was a glaring contrast with Ho Chi Minh, who rejected the former Hanoi governor-general’s palace as a personal residence in favour of a gardener’s cottage in its grounds. An American reporter said: ‘The people upon whom we were relying to build a nation had no relationship with their own people.’
As late as 1960, 75 per cent of all the South’s farmland was owned by 15 per cent of the population, almost all absentees, because terror made them so. The communists urged peasants not to pay their rents, because defiance made them supporters of the revolution: should landlords and their government protectors regain control of a village, debts would have to be redeemed. There was widespread resentment at Saigon’s reintroduction of the old colonial system of forced labour, whereby people were obliged to give five days’ free service a year to government projects. When the CIA’s William Colby pressed Diem for a radical redistribution of farmland, the president replied: ‘You don’t understand. I cannot eliminate my middle class.’ Government-appointed village officials became petty tyrants, with absolute power to decree the guilt or innocence of those beneath their sway – and, indeed, to pass death sentences. The nurse running the local dispensary took bribes; so did the policeman counting families for tax; village council members arbitrating disputes. Fearful villagers felt obliged to invite their oppressors to become guests at weddings and funerals; to offer them choice cuts of the cats and dogs killed for food. Not all officials were bad, but the general run were incompetent, brutal or corrupt, sometimes all three.
Thus, when assassinations became widespread in 1960–61, many villagers applauded, because the terrorists were skilful in targeting as victims the most unpopular officials. Diem also introduced ‘agrovilles’, fortified hamlets into which peasants were compulsorily relocated. The objective was to isolate them from the communists, but the consequence was to alienate those who resented displacement. How brutal was Diem? The communists advanced a claim, to which they still adhere, that between 1954 and 1959 he killed sixty-eight thousand real or supposed enemies, and carried out 466,000 arrests. These figures seem fantastically exaggerated, just as Southerners inflate numbers killed during the North’s land redistribution. What can be stated with confidence is that the Saigon government rashly promoted the interests of Catholics and persecuted former Vietminh. Whereas the Northern communists created a highly efficient police state, its workings veiled from the world, Diem and his family built a ramshackle one, its cruelties conspicuous. This achieved some success in inspiring fear, almost none in securing respect.
The regime’s failure was not inevitable. Had the president governed in a moderately enlightened fashion, the communist revival could have been averted. Fredrik Logevall has written that, granted the indifference of both China and the Soviet Union to non-fulfilment of the terms of the Geneva Accords, ‘it is not impossible to imagine a scenario in which Diem’s South Vietnam survives, South Korea-style … Diem was the only major non-communist political figure to emerge in Vietnam from 1945 to 1975.’ But he became an architect of countless follies: in the three years from 1957 the Saigon regime presided over construction of half a million square yards of high-rental apartment and villa space, fifty-six thousand square yards of dance halls; and just a hundred thousand square yards of school classrooms, 5,300 square yards of hospital building.
The regime’s domestic excesses and shortcomings, rather than its failure to hold reunification elections, provided communists with the tinder to rekindle the war in the South. Both among his own people and on the world stage Ho Chi Minh was a towering victor in the contest for legitimacy as the voice of the Vietnamese people. Ten-year-old Truong Mealy’s communist teacher in the Mekong delta said: ‘Do you know why Ngo Dinh Diem came to Vietnam? He was sent by the US. Now his whole family has power and all the poor people must work to feed them. Who should run Vietnam – Diem or Ho Chi Minh?’ Five years later, Truong Mealy was a courier for the Vietcong, as the South’s resurgent communist guerrilla movement will hereafter be called.
4 A RECALL TO ARMS
The last French soldiers left Saigon on 28 April 1956. To the dismay of Hanoi, the principal Western signatory to the Geneva Accords thus washed its hands of Indochina, and of any responsibility to promote elections. The revival of warfare in the South thereafter was not, at the outset, prompted by a policy decision in Hanoi, but resulted instead from spontaneous anger among local opponents of the Diem regime. A peasant told American researcher James Trullinger that he and his village attributed the communists’ temporary dormancy to cunning – a calculation that if Hanoi waited until Southerners had experienced a few years of Diem, they would be ripe for revolution. Southern fighters began to launch attacks on government troops and installations, without authorisation from any higher authority.
The first communist call to arms was an impassioned December 1956 missive to the Northern politburo from Le Duan, still presiding over COSVN in the Mekong delta. He described the persecution of comrades, the snuffing out of Party cells, the tightening military grip of Saigon, especially in the Central Highlands. In response, Hanoi reluctantly agreed that Southern fighters should be authorised to shoot in self-defence. It also endorsed some assassinations of ‘reactionary traitors’, and terror bombings of ‘Diem institutions’. A small contingent of intelligence officers and elite sappers – what Westerners would call commandos – was dispatched southwards. Thereafter, in the course of 1957 Southern communists claimed that 45
2 South Vietnamese government appointees, mostly village chiefs, were killed, kidnapped or suborned. Terrorism resumed: seventeen people died in an attack on a bar in Chau Doc on 17 July; thirteen were wounded in a Saigon café on 10 October; thirteen American servicemen were injured by three further bombings in the capital.
The next important development was the recall of Le Duan to the North. In the summer of 1957, when he reached Hanoi with a comrade, for a time the two were held in a guest house under guard. This was a precaution presumably rooted in the power struggle then taking place, precipitated by the ongoing economic crisis. The new arrivals nonetheless sneaked out in the evenings to amuse themselves, finding standing room at the Hong Ha theatre and suchlike, until guards deflated their bicycle tyres to keep the visitors at home. Le Duan is alleged to have complained savagely that the politburo sought only a quiet life: ‘They have abandoned us.’