An American Requiem

by James Carroll

  Among the many cursed moments that led to the American tragedy in Vietnam, none looms more fatefully than the meeting in 1950 between Cardinal Spellman and Ngo Dinh Diem, an obscure Vietnamese mandarin exiled because of opposition both to the Communists—Ho Chi Minh's Vietminh troops had killed one of Diem's brothers—and to the French. Another of his brothers, Ngo Dinh Thuc, was a Roman Catholic bishop, and it was he who introduced Diem to Spellman.

  Diem was a Catholic mystic who had taken a lifelong vow of celibacy. At the time, he lived at the Maryknoll seminary in Ossining, New York, just up the Hudson from the city. He had also lived in seminaries in Belgium and, upon first coming to America, in New Jersey. Spellman was immediately taken with Diem. Shortly after they had met, still in 1950, the cardinal arranged a meeting of the Vietnamese exile and the head of the Asia desk at the State Department in Washington, a young official named Dean Rusk.

  Catholics in Vietnam were disillusioned with French colonial rule, but they could be counted on as opponents of the Communists, who had taken the lead in the anti-French revolution. Thus, though Catholics amounted to less than 10 percent of the country's population, they seemed a potential base for a "third way" between colonialism and Communism. Such an innovation could be the key to solidifying Western influence throughout the postcolonial world. This humane wish was the beginning of America's interest in Vietnam. Through Spellman, Ngo Dinh Diem seemed a potential guarantor of U.S. influence.

  By the time of Dien Bien Phu, in May of 1954, Diem was the beneficiary of an elaborate, mainly Catholic network of American support. Spellman had recruited to his cause Joe Kennedy and his son the senator from Massachusetts; "Wild Bill" Donovan, the former head of the Office of Strategic Services; and Henry Luce, husband to the most famous Catholic convert in America. Diem had met with editorial boards at the great newspapers and lectured at prestigious universities, especially Catholic ones. When the U.S. government proposed him as prime minister to the Vietnamese emperor Bao Dai after the French defeat, Diem's support ran from Eisenhower's Washington to Pius XII's Vatican.

  In June, Diem returned to Vietnam as the head of government. His brother Thuc became archbishop of Saigon. That August, Spellman addressed the American Legion convention in Washington, and he made the first major American declaration of support for the new regime, saying that its failure would be "taps for the buried hopes of freedom in Southeast Asia ... bartering our liberties for lunacies, betraying the sacred trust of our forefathers, becoming serfs and slaves to the Red rulers' godless goons."

  Tom Dooley, a Spellman favorite and a Navy doctor operating out of Haiphong, soon began describing the plight of Catholic refugees being driven by the Reds from their homes in the North. A pious Catholic, Dooley was instantly taken as a hero of the Cold War. His best-selling books, which described the torment of Vietnamese Catholics, and his broad-based appeal for funds made Dooley famous. Not incidentally, his reports caused most Americans to believe that Vietnam was a Catholic country under Communist siege—an Asian Poland, you might say. Later, Robert McNamara would accept this fiction—he said so at Harvard in 1995—and so would others of the best and the brightest as they stepped onto the slippery slope leading down to an endless, lightless tunnel. Dooley, who died in 1961 just as John Kennedy ignited the torch of freedom, would be put forward for sainthood by Spellman, but his candidacy would later be swamped in revelations of the secret ties between his efforts and those of the CLA. The post-Dien Bien Phu exodus of "terrified Catholics" from North Vietnam to South had in fact been deliberately staged by American intelligence agents, not caused by the vicious Reds. The CIA wanted the hundreds of thousands of Catholics in Haiphong and Hanoi to move because Ngo Dinh Diem needed them as a political base in overwhelmingly Buddhist Saigon. Tom Dooley, whether as a dupe or a villain, had engineered the first big lie of the United States in Vietnam.

  By 1956 Spellman had succeeded in solidifying the commitment to Diem of the liberal establishment. Robert McNamara, in his memoir In Retrospect, would cite a speech that year by Senator John Kennedy as determinative. "Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia," Kennedy said. "It is our offspring. We cannot abandon it, we cannot ignore its needs." Formerly French Vietnam was by no stretch of the imagination our "offspring," but Ngo Dinh Diem certainly was. Early American support of his regime was channeled through Spellman, with millions of dollars in U.S. aid being disbursed by the Catholic Relief Service. The Church was the rock upon which America intended to build its new kind of Free World nation.

  Unfortunately, whatever the merits of America's romantic search for a "third way" between Communism and colonialism, the concrete form it took was an embrace of a dangerous illusion. Instead of leading a democratic government, Diem ruled through his malevolent family: his brothers Thuc, Ngo Dinh Can, and Ngo Dinh Nhu, the conspiratorial head of the secret police, and his wife, the nefarious Madame Nhu. Lyndon Johnson would call Diem "the Winston Churchill of Asia," but he was more like its "Papa Doc" Duvalier, only far more heavily armed and funded by his U.S. patrons. While the American government credited Diem with cracking down on Communists and jailing dissidents, he was mainly waging an ever more vicious war against Buddhists. He had the Catholic faith of the Inquisition, and he sought to impose it especially on rural peasants, who unlike city dwellers were not beneficiaries of lavish American aid. Diem was the Vietminh's dream, driving more and more of the populace into its arms. Americans expected him to be a democrat, but he was a true medieval Catholic of the kind that even the Vatican knew only in nostalgia. Diem believed that he ruled by the will of God.

  McNamara cites the U.S. support of Diem as the critical first mistake. "That he had studied at a Catholic seminary in New Jersey in the early 1950s seemed evidence that he shared Western values. As we got closer and closer to the situation, however, we came to learn otherwise ... We totally misjudged that."

  Buddhists staged a huge demonstration on May 8, 1963, in Saigon to protest Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc's edict banning Buddhist flags on Buddha's birthday. Nine people were killed when the Catholic-led army fired at the protesters. The unrest only mounted, culminating in early June, when Thich Quang Due, a Buddhist monk, set himself on fire on a Saigon street. Douglas Pike wrote that he could see "the whole fabric of Vietnamese society coming apart." Around the world, and even in Washington, the immolated monk—Madame Nhu's infamous "Barbecued Bonze"—was seen as a true sacrament of Diem's failure. A few months later, in what McNamara would call "the fateful fall of 1963," Diem and his brother Nhu, abandoned even by Spellman, were killed in a coup the Kennedy administration tacitly approved of, if it did not outright engineer it.

  Diem and Nhu died on All Souls' Day, wearing the cassocks of Catholic priests—a putative disguise, but also an epiphany of the entwined relationship between their brutal failure and their religious hubris. Their brother Archbishop Thuc escaped by having gone to Rome for a session of the Vatican Council. He would never return to Vietnam. Thuc had not been reprimanded by the Vatican for the fascist Catholicism, the blood of which greased the skids of the coming American war. However, when he later dared embrace the cause of radical traditionalist Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, rejecting, for example, the use of the vernacular in the liturgy, Thuc was excommunicated.

  By the time Diem was dead, and in large part because of the way he died, the United States, according to McNamara, had forfeited its freedom to stay out of the quagmire. Diem had been, in JFK's word, America's offspring. Alas, so had been Diem's murder. In his last days, Kennedy was haunted by it, and when three weeks later he himself was killed, Madame Nhu said now we're even. Lyndon Johnson and his advisers shouldered the burden of the war in Vietnam, trying to bring order to chaos, for a number of reasons—not the least of which was that we had caused that chaos. Washington hoped to cancel the moral debt of America's central, if misguided, role in the rise and fall of Ngo Dinh Diem.

  Cardinal Spellman, meanwhile, had not allowed himself a second thought. As th
e war became Americanized, he became even more devoted to it. He became Curtis LeMay in a red soutane. He traveled to Vietnam frequently: early to dedicate a Marian basilica he had funded; later, armed with "Holy Smokes," to spend Christmases with grateful GIs. It was during a Christmas visit to Vietnam that he made his famous statement of faith, "My country right or wrong." The grunts who cheered him for his unthinking loyalty to the mystery of what had put them there had no more way of knowing than I did, as I looked forward to his ordaining me, that central to that mystery was Spellman himself. If some Catholics went on to act as if they bore special responsibility for ending the war, perhaps it was because they did.

  Less than a month after the pope's visit to the United Nations, on November 2, 1965, two years to the day after the murders of the Ngo brothers, a thirty-one-year-old Baltimore man set out for a drive with his infant daughter. Saying goodbye to his wife, he added the question, "What can I do to make them stop the war?" As a new father, the man had been particularly upset by the deaths of Vietnamese children caused by American bombs. From Baltimore he drove to Washington, and then across the Potomac into Arlington. It was rush hour when he pulled into a parking lot at the Pentagon. Still holding his daughter, he poured kerosene onto his clothes. At the last moment he put the baby aside, then struck a match on his shoe, igniting himself. His name was Norman Morrison. He died quickly.

  Immediately above Morrison was the third-floor office of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, who, according to his biographer Deborah Shapley, noticed when "a column of orange flame leapt twelve feet high." McNamara went to his window and, realizing what had happened, was stunned. Years later, he told Shapley that the suicide was "a personal tragedy for me."

  In his memoir, McNamara would write about Morrison's death: "I reacted to the horror of his action by bottling up my emotions and avoided talking about them with anyone—even my family. I knew Marg and our three children shared many of Morrison's feelings about the war, as did the wives and children of several of my cabinet colleagues. And I believed I understood and shared his thoughts. There was much Marg and I and the children should have talked about, yet at moments like this I often turn inward instead—it is a grave weakness. The episode created tension at home that only deepened as dissent and criticism of the war continued to grow."

  I cannot read McNamara's words now without wanting to take them as an expression of my father's feelings—even if he never admitted to them. My father's office was down the hall from McNamara's, so perhaps he saw the pillar of fire too. At the time, I wanted to call my father, as much to console him for the shock he must have felt, I think, as to seek help in dealing with my own. But I was afraid to call. "Kook" was a word I'd heard Dad apply to protesters, and, confused as I was by Morrison's act, it would have been unbearable to hear him dismissed as that, even if my father were to do so out of his own version of McNamara's bottled-up emotion.

  Much was made of the fact that Morrison was a Quaker, as if his membership in that heretofore benign but exotic sect kept him at a remove from the rest of us, as if he were a saffron-robed Buddhist. As with those earlier Saigon immolations, I was incapable of reading such news, or of seeing reports of it on television, without thinking of my father. I always thought of him at such times with the deepest feeling of love. My father was the best man I knew, and to me he was always watching from the sidelines of whatever field I was playing on. We were arguing about civil rights by now, but not about Vietnam. My father was no warmonger. Hadn't I heard his voice shake with fear at the thought of war? The course being set in Vietnam was being set, in some small part, by him. So it had to be right. Despite a visceral, if horrified, sympathy, I convinced myself in a snap that Norman Morrison was a victim of his own naive assumptions. After all, Quaker or not, wasn't suicide an act of violence? And wasn't this particular form of it, in the presence of a child, an act of savagery?

  The distance between me and the likes of Morrison was one thing, but then, a week later, no doubt in response to the self-immolation at the Pentagon, the thing happened again. On November 9 Roger Laporte, twenty-one, set fire to himself at the United Nations buildings in New York, the site of the pope's speech the month before. Laporte was a member of Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker community on Chrystie Street near the Brooklyn Bridge—a soup kitchen I had visited myself. The Catholic Workers were our heroes, and news of this one worker's act was shattering beyond anything that had preceded it. I recall standing in the front hallway of the oldest wing of St. Paul's College, reading the Washington Post. It was very early in the morning, and I had stopped here intending only to catch the headlines on my way to chapel. Then I saw the front-page story about Laporte. "I am a Catholic Worker," he said before dying. "I am antiwar, all wars. I did this as a religious act."

  Religious act? A Catholic? I carried the question into morning prayer with me, feeling a new level of anguish! Jesus on the wall above me had never seemed so wretched. What did Laporte know about war, about religion, that I didn't know? I remember furious arguments among my fellow Paulists after Laporte's death. The very men who'd reacted to Norman Morrison with a detached horror responded to the young Catholic with extreme feeling. Some denounced the suicide. Others denounced the war. The conflict that began that day would go on for years, and I realized soon enough from my place on its margin that I could make the arguments for either side better than anybody. Inside I was screaming: I am antiwar, all wars! And: I love the U.S. Air Force! But to all appearances, I was numb.

  I was already writing poetry and taking cues from poems I read. George Starbuck's poem "Of Late" would stun me: "Norman Morrison, Quaker of Baltimore, Maryland, burned what he said was himself. You, Robert McNamara, burned what you said was a concentration of the Enemy Aggressor." Starbuck would be my teacher years later. Everywhere I turned, it seemed, the formerly pallid art of poetry felt subversive. My ideal of priesthood had been the Jesuit poet Daniel Berrigan. His first collection, Time Without Number, had won the Lamont Prize in 1957. Marianne Moore had called his work "literary magic." Berrigan was the rare Catholic writer, cleric or not, who'd established a serious reputation outside the narrow subculture, and that alone had drawn me to him. I had imitated his poems with poems of my own. I had used his writing as focal points of my religious meditation. I already thought of Berrigan as our living Gerard Manley Hopkins. When I studied with Allen Tate in the summer of 1966, he would tell me that Daniel Berrigan was "one of our best poets."

  Berrigan's emergence as the first Catholic of the antiwar movement had already disoriented me. Because of him, even before the war began to cloud my dream of the future, the image of the military chaplain had begun to bow in my mind before that of the priest-poet. "The priest calls to the poet"—these lines from Karl Rahner I'd taped to my mirror—"The poet calls to the priest." And also this, from Goethe: "To the true poet God has given the mission to say what he suffers." I could not know it, but in Daniel Berrigan, meanwhile, the priest-poet was bowing to the image of the prophet.

  Roger Laporte, it turned out, was a friend of Berrigan's. I was in no way prepared for it when I read that the Jesuit, during a funeral Mass offered at the Catholic Worker house, defended Laporte's suicide. "His death was offered," Berrigan said in a eulogy, "so that others may live."

  I thought Berrigan's statement was terribly misguided. What, we were now to have a rash of self-immolations? How would that advance the cause of peace? The great Thomas Merton rebuked Berrigan, and so, far more predictably, did Cardinal Spellman. He was in Rome, at the Council, but he ordered Berrigan out of New York. The Jesuit authorities complied, effectively banishing Berrigan, although purportedly sending him on a tour of mission outposts in Latin America. The news of this disciplining caused an uproar among as yet unmobilized Catholics, which confused me even further.

  At that time, the severest critics of LBJ, the war, and now Spellman were so full of certitude and self-righteousness that I found it impossible to identify with them. The arguments raged around me.
Laporte was criticized or defended, and then so was David Miller, another young Catholic Worker who became notorious that season—for immolating his draft card. Daniel Berrigan's brother Philip called Miller's act "the highest expression of loyalty" to his country, but if that was so, what expression of loyalty was it that kids like us were offering by the tens of thousands already—the ones who'd shipped out and now were stepping on shit-encrusted punji sticks and homemade land mines? What would Laporte, Miller, or either Berrigan be to them?

  That fall of the unprecedented events was not over yet. Catholic Americans reacted with outrage to the disciplining of Daniel Berrigan. Much in the way that Spellman had made the film Baby Doll an overnight sensation by condemning it, he had made the Jesuit an instant national figure. Hunger strikers protested at a cathedral in New Hampshire and at Notre Dame. Pickets carried signs outside St. Patrick's Cathedral which read, "Merry Christmas, Dan Berrigan, Wherever You Are" and "End Power Politics in the Church." There were demonstrations near my own St. Paul's College, over at Catholic University, but—this was nine months after I had first picketed for Martin Luther King at the White House—I could not bring myself to participate.

  Neither could I ignore the seismic jolt it was to open the New York Times on December 12, 1965, and see a full-page ad criticizing Cardinal Spellman and demanding Berrigan's return. The ad was signed by nearly a thousand people, many of them priests. The real shock came when they forced Spellman to back down. Berrigan returned from his exile. He and others like him had only just begun, while—and here was what Berrigan's victory meant—the likes of Spellman were finished. The bold people who took out the ad identified themselves as the Committee for Daniel Berrigan, and despite my welter of reservations and disagreements, I felt physically sick that morning not to be one of them.