by Tom Bissell
The Geneva Conference of 1954 commenced the day after the Viet Minh finished overrunning the French at Dien Bien Phu. Although the timing was sheer coincidence, many Viet Minh read this as a cosmic endorsement of their victory. The conference was chaired by Great Britain and the Soviet Union and attended by delegates from China, France, the United States (who only “observed” the proceedings), Laos, Cambodia, and the various Communist and royalist representatives of Vietnam. (One of the American intelligence analysts sent to Geneva had this mission: “My first assignment at Geneva was to find out if there really was such a person as Ho Chi Minh”) Ultimately, the Geneva Conference divided Vietnam into two temporary entities: the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north and the Republic of Vietnam in the south. Their dividing line was the Seventeenth Parallel, which, according to the eventual language of the Geneva Agreements, was “only provisional and in no way constitutes a political or territorial boundary”—a significant victory for what became South Vietnam, given that in Bao Dai it had a leader uninterested in leading. In fact, Bao Dai did not even bother to attend Geneva and instead followed the conference from his Cannes villa. Most of South Vietnam's other luminaries had either taken no side in the war against the French or aided the colonialists outright.
Despite the South's tenuous position, the Geneva Conference's major concessions were made by the North, most at the blunt-instrument urging of its allies China and the Soviet Union. For instance, the North agreed to the temporary partitioning along the Seventeenth Parallel even though it had sought a much lower division. The North agreed to elections that would unite the country under a government of popular choosing two years later even though it had initially demanded elections within six months of the conference. The North agreed to support a cease-fire in the South even though the Viet Minh controlled a significant amount of the South's territory. These concessions, which effectively nullified much of what the Viet Minh had won on the battlefield, were not the product of high-mindedness. Zhou Enlai, the Chinese delegate to the Geneva Conference and the first conference participant to suggest that the two Vietnams suffer division, privately assured the North's delegates that with “the final withdrawal of the French, all of Vietnam will be yours.” Nonetheless, North Vietnam's Pham Van Dong would leave Geneva muttering that China had “double-crossed us.”
Many people viewed the promised 1956 elections as the death knell of a salvageable non-Communist Vietnam. The CIA projected a landslide for Ho Chi Minh, as did President Eisenhower, who later wrote that “possibly 80 percent of the population” would have voted for Ho. Even if Ho Chi Minh had not won—it appears he might not have, as Pham Van Dong later admitted that the North had certain “control” of only 30 percent of South Vietnam's people at the time the elections were to have taken place—the Communists would almost certainly have ensured his victory through other means.
Enter the forbidding Vietnamese nationalist and Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem. This strange and fascinating man, once said by one of his own family members to have come “from another planet,” had served Bao Dai as his minister of the interior several years before but had resigned when it became clear that Bao Dai's government had been granted no operational independence by the French. For much of the 1940s and half of the 1950s, Diem wandered the world from one island of Catholicism to another, ultimately winding up in the luxurious waiting room of Francis Cardinal Spellman, a leading member of a crypto-Catholic lobbying group known as the American Friends of Vietnam. Cardinal Spell-man had been one of France's most vocal stateside supporters during its war in Indochina. Diem instantly became a favorite of Spellman, who was not unknown for leaving the mistaken impression upon his fellow Americans that Vietnam was a predominantly Catholic nation, just like the Philippines. (In 1979, the Vatican conducted routine background checks to determine the deceased Spellman's suitability for sainthood and learned that Spellman had been something troublingly close to a CIA agent.) Spellman introduced the socially awkward Diem to many other Friends of Vietnam, among them Senator lohn F. Kennedy.
Historians are at odds as to how Diem came to be offered the prime ministership of South Vietnam by Bao Dai (who cared not for Diem) in lune 1954, when the Geneva Conference was still ongoing and Diem himself was in France. But whether Diem was selected by the CIA, President Eisenhower, or Bao Dai working with a relative amount of freedom, it is clear that Colonel Edward Lansdale had been the man to urge Diem forward. Colonel Lansdale was famous chiefly for helping to end a powerful Communist insurgency in the 1950s in the Philippines and serving as a partial model for Alden Pyle in Graham Greene's The Quiet American and as the total model for Colonel Edwin Hillandale in William Lederer and Eugene Burdick's The Ugly American. In 1954, there were many people with considerable knowledge of mainland Asia within the U.S. government, but most of them were China experts. When it came to Southeast Asia, Robert McNamara has written, there were “no senior officials” in U.S. government with significant knowledge of the region until at least the mid-1960s. Colonel Lansdale, in 1954 the senior official with the deepest knowledge of Southeast Asia, had been sent to Vietnam with this message from CIA Director Allen Dulles: “Save South Vietnam. God bless you.”
To Lansdale's mind, Diem was perfect: a patriot who had not collaborated with the French and, as a bonus, hated Communists. Ominously, the French warned the United States about Diem, saying he had no base of support. The fact that Diem was Catholic—while far from a viscerally hated minority in Vietnam, nevertheless a minority viewed with considerable suspicion—did not, apparently, stagger the enthusiasm of Diem's American backers. To Lansdale's credit, he argued that such mindless support for Diem would result in a personality cult rather than a constitutional, democratic framework that would offer the people of South Vietnam something real and measurable. This plea was disregarded, as was his later augury that Communism in South Vietnam “will not die by being ignored, bombed, or smothered by us.”
The first important thing Diem did was refuse to sign the Geneva Agreement, which he called “catastrophic and immoral.” The United States also refused to sign, saying only that it “took note” of the agreement's signature. (Ultimately only France and North Vietnam signed.) Washington pledged not to upset Geneva's implementation but warned that it would view any “renewal of aggression” on the part of the North with sobriety and concern. The second important thing Diem did was name himself Bao Dai's replacement as head of state, after which Diem's regime was given diplomatic recognition by the United States. The third important thing Diem did was cancel the 1956 elections, which were supposed to unite Vietnam. It is worth pointing out that the Communists had never expected the elections to take place. Twenty-five years after the fact, former Secretary of State Dean Rusk not unreasonably pointed out that “at the same time, the Soviets were utterly opposed to free elections in Korea. So the question must have arisen why should we accommodate them in one spot if they wouldn't accommodate us in these places.” Diem did hold an election, though. Diem's U.S. advisers had suggested he give himself, say, 60 percent of the vote. Diem demurred and allowed himself 98.2 percent of the vote—more than Ho Chi Minh gave himself in North Vietnam's equally rigged election. An unpromising start for our ally in nascent Vietnamese democracy.
Diem surrounded himself with largely Catholic generals. According to William J. Duiker, Diem “found southerners too easygoing to resist effectively the Communists” and consequently stocked his government with northerners living in exile and central Vietnamese. Most of these men had fought against the legendary Viet Minh. Few Vietnamese peasants knew much about a German economist who had lived most of his life in London or the young Russian lawyer who had refined this economist's views, but they knew the Viet Minh had defeated the French, whom they hated. Diem, the peasants slowly realized, was not of the Viet Minh. How, Diem's worried handlers wondered, does one distance those Viet Minh from heroism? One renames them Viet Cong.
After Geneva, North Vietnam's Politburo had ordered 10,000 Com
munist “stay-behinds” to remain in the South and stop all activities but “legal struggle.” They were not ordered to start a war—not yet, at least— but Diem brought war to them. By 1957, Diem's brutal counterrevolutionary tactics had reduced the Communists’ numbers in the South to 2,000, and in 1958 one American adviser said that Vietnam “can be classed as about as stable and peaceful a country in all of Asia.” The South's Communists saw their darkest hour in 1959, by which time it was a “miracle,” in one historian's words, that any of them were still alive. The late 1950s also saw the Diem regime go after South Vietnam's powerful religious sects, the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai, both of which were anti-Communist (the Viet Minh had stupidly assassinated the Hoa Hao's prophet) but secretly supported by Diem's malingering French adversaries. The resistance by these groups, too, was pulverized at the cost of alienating huge swaths of South Vietnam's people. How was Diem so initially successful at crushing dissent? As Neil Sheehan writes, a captain in the U.S. Army named Richard Ziegler personally witnessed Diem's soldiers engage in forms of torture and execution that ranged from the guillotine to skinning people alive to shooting them through the ear to dislocating people's shoulders to electroshocking genitalia with a crank-operated battery-powered field telephone—each method apparently sanctioned by Diem, who was not only a Time magazine cover subject but once proclaimed by Vice President Lyndon Johnson during a 1961 visit to South Vietnam to be “the Churchill of Asia” and judged by Robert McNamara to “rank with the two or three greatest” men he had ever met.
Soon the South's Communists began to fight back with increasing effectiveness, agitating among the peasants who were (at best) ignored and (at worst) mangled by the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. In late 1960, the Communists founded the NLF, and in 1961 they created the People's Revolutionary Party. The 2,000 hunted and desperate Communists of 1958 had grown to 10,000 by 1960. By 1961, there were as many as 30,000, with a passive following perhaps ten times that number. This growth, spearheaded by the southern-born Communist Le Duan, occurred at a time when the North was trying to avoid war. This did not mean that the North was waiting peaceably. Resolution 15, a document released thirty years after it was approved in the late 1950s, establishes that Ho and his government's many public statements about not wanting war were merely a ruse. Resolution 15 said that the “fundamental path of development in South Vietnam is that of violent struggle.” The approval of Resolution 15 meant that the Party had made reunification with the South its single greatest priority. The only question was when. Le Duan helped force the matter when he launched a brutal assassination campaign against South Vietnamese politicians and ARVN officers. More U.S. weapons poured into South Vietnam. For reasons typical to corruption, many of these weapons wound up in the hands of the NLF. The leaders of North Vietnam soon realized they had much to lose by sitting out the intensifying conflict between Diem and the NLF and with Le Duan's complicity began to direct the struggle. Of this bonfire one can say that Diem supplied the wood, the United States provided the tinder, Le Duan lit the match, and North Vietnam's Politburo fanned the flames.
President Diem began to lose hold, and a 1960 coup attempt left him floundering in paranoia. He had no wish to go the way of South Korea's dictatorial Syngman Rhee, recently dumped by his U.S. backers. Diem fired generals whom the Americans put forward for commendation because he worried that anyone the Americans admired could be used in another coup attempt against him. He also urged his generals to keep casualties down. Meanwhile, an ARVN Special Forces unit that the CIA had trained at great effort and expense was used by Diem not to kill Communists but as his personal bodyguards. Diem also raised taxes, not to provide for his people but to remove himself further from them. He lived in opulent barricaded fear in a way the leaders of North Vietnam, who were at least Diem's equals in brutality, did not. Many of North Vietnam's leaders walked freely through the streets of Hanoi, the police officers of which did not (and still do not) carry firearms. Soon Diem's taxes matched those of the old and hated French regime. (The NLF's impromptu “road taxes” were proportionately as high as Diem's— though unlike Diem, the NLF gave the peasants a receipt.)
As Diem turned further inward, he began to trust only his immediate family, especially his brother Nhu and Nhu's wife, Madame Nhu, who served as the chaste Diem's “Platonic wife.” Diem on one occasion told an American diplomat that, when it came to his family, he viewed himself as the father of a holy trinity. His brother Nhu was the director of South Vietnam's thirteen separate intelligence agencies, a steady recipient of CIA aid, a reputed heroin and opium addict, a totalitarianism buff, and quite possibly a psychopath. Nhu's wife, Madame Nhu, the holy spirit of the trinity, also formed a private army, in her case an all-woman commando unit. Called by Robert McNamara a “true sorceress,” Madame Nhu had an assortment of her own troubling peccadilloes and forced through South Vietnam's rubber-stamping legislature a series of bizarre laws that banned “sentimental songs,” dancing “anywhere at all,” divorce, boxing, cockfighting, condoms, beauty contests, padded bras, “spiritualism,” and gambling—in short, everything Vietnamese people liked. During the crisis that saw Buddhists burning themselves alive in protest, criticism of the Ngos turned white hot in the American press. Madame Nhu said publicly that The New York Times reporter David Halberstam should be burned alive, and Nhu himself scribbled the names of Halberstam and his colleague Neil Sheehan onto an assassination list.
Even when Diem acted in accord with American advice, he bestowed upon the results his own poisonous spin. His Strategic Hamlets Program, while more effective than its detractors usually admit, essentially herded peasants into ad hoc villages surrounded by barbed wire to keep them separated from NLF agitprop. Many in these enclosed hamlets, despite being guilty of nothing, were forced to engage in government labor. At the United States’ insistence Diem also initiated land reform. While it was not the bacchanal of violence that Communist land reform had been, Diem's land reform actually made the inequality of land distribution in South Vietnam worse. The man who headed this program to take land away from the Vietnamese landlords was a Diem appointee. His other job? Landlord.
Many U.S. officials consoled themselves with the thought that the government of North Vietnam was worse. That North Vietnam's Communists were finally more repressive is undoubtedly true, but winning a less-awful contest against Communist dictators was not the sort of victory for which so many people had already died or would die. By 1963, with the war against the Communists rushing toward the point of no recouping, the United States was at last forced to look very carefully at the Ngos and their government of “bayonets at every street corner,” in the disgusted words of one U.S. official. What prompted deeper U.S. thought about the Ngos was not that they were publicly applauding their own people burning themselves to death in protest of their government, nor that the Ngos’ supposed base, Vietnamese Catholics, had turned against them, nor that the Ngos were planning to murder American journalists. What was so agitating was news that Nhu was seeking rapprochement with the Communists.
In April 1963, Nhu told Australian diplomats that the United States should leave South Vietnam, as its way of life was not compatible with Vietnam's. Madame Nhu said that the Americans were acting like “little soldiers of fortune” in her country. The forces of autonomy the United States claimed to be protecting in South Vietnam were dangerously close to acting autonomously, and throughout the summer Nhu often hinted to foreign journalists that he was negotiating with NLF and even North Vietnamese representatives. Some argue that these were all stalling tactics to force the United States to give the Ngos more aid. While this view is probably accurate, it is also somewhat beside the point, since Nhu was in fact meeting with NLF representatives, though not, apparently, with North Vietnamese contacts. Nevertheless, by September 13, the CIA's director told the White House he was concerned that a deal between Hanoi and the Ngos was close to being fulfilled.
There have been few satisfying attempts to explain what exactly occurred du
ring the long lead-up to the coup against Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother in November 1963. (A. J. Langguth's account in Our Vietnam is the best I have read.) The coup has always had about it a heavy fog of mystery. It particularly fascinated Richard Nixon, who instructed one of his Watergate felons to fabricate cables that directly implicated Kennedy in Diem's downfall. Studied closely, it seems an affair of strictly unglamorous barbarian logic. Half of Kennedy's administration supported getting rid of Diem, half opposed it. Kennedy himself, who apparently viewed Diem, as a fellow Catholic, with some sympathy, vacillated. The initial agreement to back a group of skittish, coup-plotting generals was called by Robert McNamara “one of the truly pivotal decisions” of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. The coup's green light was given during a confusing weekend that found most of Kennedy's administration out of town, yet the coup itself did not occur for two more months. During that time Diem and Nhu sometimes appeared to be preparing for a literal war with the United States, reportedly adding U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge to the death list. (They intended to blame Lodge's murder, and many others, on the NLE) President Kennedy tried to back out of the coup at the last minute, but Ambassador Lodge, who was running things in Saigon, and who likely would have been fired had the coup not succeeded, blithely cabled back, “Do not think we have the power to delay or discourage a coup.” The mood in the White House turned from that of puppet masters to frightened children. “If the coup fails,” Robert Kennedy said a few days before it finally took place, “Diem throws us out.” No doubt many in the Kennedy administration no longer knew whether they even wanted the coup to succeed.