Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995

by James S. Olson

  The Ngo had formed a short-lived political dynasty in the tenth century and then served in the mandarinate at the imperial court for centuries. Early in the 1700s they converted to Catholicism. They were deeply religious. In the 1880s Buddhist monks led anti-Catholic riots that nearly destroyed the Ngo family. A Buddhist mob attacked the parish church at Dai Phong during mass. More than one hundred of the Ngo family were burned at the stake later that day.

  One family member was not there. Ngo Dinh Kha was in Malaya studying for the priesthood. When he received news that his parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins were dead, Ngo Dinh Kha returned to Hue and tried to rebuild. He passed the mandarin examinations and, fluent in French, moved quickly up the civil service ladder. Ngo’s first wife died soon after their marriage, but his second wife had nine children. The third of them was Jean Baptiste Ngo Dinh Diem, born on January 3, 1901.

  Ngo Dinh Diem grew up Confucian and Catholic. Every morning at 6:00, seven days a week, the family put on their best robes and attended mass, and nearly every day their father spoke to them about duty, fidelity, and loyalty: in effect, the Confucian virtues. Diem attended the French lycée in Hue and became thoroughly engrossed in French history, language, and literature.

  Of all the Ngo children, Diem was the most religious. He did not play with other children, and as soon as he could read he spent hours each day by himself studying catechisms and religious histories. At the age of fifteen he entered a Catholic seminary in Hue to begin studying for the priesthood. His older brother, Ngo Dinh Thuc, was doing the same thing. But it soon became apparent that Diem was not meant to be a priest. Thuc urged him to leave the seminary, arguing that he “was too unworldly for the church.” Another friend put it more clearly: “A priest at least learns of the world through the confessional. Diem is a monk living behind stone walls. He knows nothing.” Diem left the seminary but took with him his vow of celibacy, which he kept throughout his life. He attended the French College for Administration in Hanoi and graduated at the top of his class in 1921. Back in Hue, Diem rose through the civil service ranks, becoming a district chief and then a provincial administrator, coming to the attention of the French in 1929 when he uncovered plans for a communist-inspired uprising. There were no distractions in Diem’s life, no women or movies or gambling, only work and prayer. In 1933 Bao Dai appointed him minister of the interior. At the age of thirty-two, Ngo Dinh Diem seemed destined to become prime minister.

  1961—Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam, rides through the streets of Saigon. (Courtesy, National Archives.)

  Like so many other Vietnamese, Diem longed for the day when France would leave Vietnam. In Bao Dai’s cabinet, he realized that the French, while talking about Vietnamese autonomy, restricted the imperial court, transforming the emperor and his civil servants into mere puppets. Late in 1933 he resigned from the cabinet in protest.

  Diem retired to the family home in Hue, where he spent his days reading, praying, horseback riding, hunting, working in a rose garden, attending mass, and talking with his mother. Except for an abortive attempt to become prime minister in the Japanese puppet regime, Diem for years remained distant from public life. But his relatives believed he was born for greatness, and they supported him financially until an opportunity should come. To his family Diem wrote, “We must continue the search for the Kingdom of God and Justice. All else will come of itself.”

  Although a nationalist, Diem kept faith in the Confucian virtues: loyalty, acquiescence, and social place. He wanted the French out, but he did not want the social structure turned upside down. After 1945 Diem’s opposition to communism was intensely personal. His older brother Ngo Dinh Khoi, a former governor of Quang Ngai Province, was anti-French but also anticommunist. The Vietminh arrested him and his young son, convicted them in a kangaroo court, and executed them by burying them alive. Ngo Dinh Diem never forgave the Vietminh. The Vietminh caught up with Diem in Tuy Hoa. They moved him to the highlands of North Vietnam, where he remained in custody for several months, and sent him to Hanoi in January 1946. Ho Chi Minh, interested in gaining the support of Vietnam’s leading Catholic layman, offered Diem a cabinet position. Diem refused, calling Ho an “accomplice and a criminal” in Khoi’s death. Diem was released in March 1946 as part of the Franco-Vietminh Accords.

  During the next nine years Diem traveled around the world, staying away from home to avoid the Vietminh. He spent more than three years in the United States, living at the Maryknoll Seminary in Lakewood, New Jersey. At the time the United States was assisting France against the Vietminh but also hoping to find an anticommunist Vietnamese leader around whom a stable government could be built. Diem appeared to be that leader. Wesley Fishel, professor of political science at Michigan State University, met Diem in Japan and spoke at length with him about Indochina. Diem seemed perfect. He was a well-educated Roman Catholic who wanted an anticommunist, independent Vietnam. That Diem was not a believer in democracy mattered little to Fishel. “The people of Southeast Asia are not,” Fishel said, “sufficiently sophisticated to understand... democracy.”

  Fishel saw to it that Diem met a number of prominent Americans, including Francis Cardinal Spellman, the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York; Senators John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Mike Mansfield of Montana, and Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas; and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. In 1953 Douglas called Diem “a hero... revered by the Vietnamese because he is honest and independent and stood firm against the French influence.” These men became the core of what was called the Vietnam Lobby, or the American Friends of Vietnam, who incessantly promoted Ngo Dinh Diem in 1953 and 1954. When the Geneva Accords divided Vietnam in 1954, Diem had strong supporters in the United States. On June 18, 1954, destiny called. Bao Dai invited Diem to serve as prime minister in a new government.

  Although Ngo Dinh Diem seemed a candidate fit to build an anticommunist South Vietnam, official Washington debated the issue in 1954 and 1955. The French were dead set against Diem. They hoped to stay in South Vietnam and keep their empire, and they knew that he was too much of a nationalist to allow France to remain. They could manipulate Bao Dai, but not Diem. The French reservations concerned President Eisenhower. It was nothing profound, just an uneasiness about Diem’s penchant for a solitary life and his extraordinary commitment to his family. Eisenhower also worried whether so devout a Roman Catholic could really rule a large Buddhist majority. But the real debate in American policy-making circles raged around the views of Diem expressed by two Americans living in South Vietnam in 1954 and 1955: J. Lawton Collins and Edward G. Lansdale.

  Nicknamed “Lightning Joe” by his army troops, Collins had commanded the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division at Guadalcanal and then the VII Corps at the D-Day invasion of Europe. After the war Collins served as army chief of staff before President Dwight Eisenhower sent him to Saigon in 1954 as a special envoy to train the South Vietnamese. Collins despised Diem—his political base was too narrow and his sense of destiny too broad. “Lightning Joe” was convinced that Diem would self-destruct and create a political vacuum, which Ho Chi Minh could fill. Collins strongly advised Washington to shift support away from Diem. Diem hated Collins, whom he viewed as a self-righteous American given to pompous advice. Diem wanted American money, not American advice. Collins represented both. In private Diem could be quite animated and often put on a mime act for family members in which he pretended to be Collins, waving his finger in people’s faces and talking loudly about what to do and how to do it. Much more to Ngo Dinh Diem’s liking was Edward G. Lansdale.

  Lansdale, an air force officer and former intelligence agent, came to Saigon in 1954 as CIA station chief. He had already helped the Philippines crush the communist-backed Huk Rebellion. Assigned to conduct CIA paramilitary operations against North Vietnam, Lansdale spread rumors and leaflets about Ho Chi Minh, littered North Vietnam with counterfeit currency, warned northern Catholics that communists would persecute them, and destroye
d weapons supplies north of the seventeenth parallel. He arranged for several hundred South Vietnamese soldiers to dress up as civilians, infiltrate North Vietnam, and spread rumors that the Vietminh wanted Chinese soldiers to come and rape Vietnamese women. This ploy backfired. The troops went into North Vietnam but did not return, at least not until a few years later, when they came back as guerrillas loyal to Ho Chi Minh. Lansdale became a close friend of Diem, one of the few confidants Diem had outside his family. To Lansdale, Diem was “a man with a terrible burden to carry and in need of friends, and I tried to be an honest friend.” Lansdale thought Diem a dedicated nationalist who loved Vietnam, hated communism, and wanted the best for his people. There was no other individual capable of governing South Vietnam. John Foster Dulles agreed. Dulles’s brother Allen, head of the CIA, told the secretary of state that Lansdale was an astute judge of character and that Diem could be trusted. John Foster Dulles, desperate for a South Vietnamese leader with enough mettle to pull the country together, passed the advice on to Eisenhower, who remained skeptical about Diem’s ability.

  South Vietnam preoccupied Dulles. In July 1954, the National Security Council committed the United States to “maintain a friendly noncommunist South Vietnam and to prevent a Communist victory through all-Vietnam elections.” In September 1954 Dulles established the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), a regional security alliance signed by the United States, Great Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, the Philippines, and Pakistan. South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were forbidden by the Geneva Accords from joining, but a subsequent protocol to the treaty stated that if any one of them fell to communism, it would pose a threat to the alliance and justify a military response.

  A few people were doubtful. Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson urged Eisenhower to get out as soon as possible. The most eloquent dissent was Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American, published in 1955. “It was a first warning to me,” wrote Gloria Emerson, who read the novel in 1956 and later recalled “but I dismissed the book as brilliant but cynical, until it came back to haunt me.” It is a novel of good intentions, idealism, lack of insight, and dangerous innocence. The quiet American is Alden Pyle, a character based on Edward Lansdale. Pyle believes in a coldly passionate way in abstractions—democracy, freedom, monolithic communism, falling dominoes, and the love of God. The novel is written from the viewpoint of Thomas Fowler, a British journalist who is as committed to reality as Pyle is to abstraction. Trying to convince Pyle of the error of his theories, Fowler observes:

  I know the record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does ‘go’ mean? If I believed in your God and another life, I’d bet my future harp against your golden crown that in five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they’ll be growing paddy in these fields.... Thought’s a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?... Isms and ocracies. Give me facts.”

  Of course Pyle is impervious to Fowler’s logic. He continues with the best intentions to ruin lives and kill innocent people. When one of his plans goes awry and several innocent Vietnamese are killed, Pyle observes: “They were only war casualties... it was a pity but you can’t always hit your target. Anyway they died in the right cause.... In a way you could say they died for democracy.”

  Greene intended his novel to expose the absence of a moral vision in American policy in Vietnam. Stationed in Saigon as a war correspondent in the early 1950s, Greene witnessed the transference of power from France to the United States. He watched the arrival of fresh Pyles—men with crew cuts and “wide campus gazes” who seemed “incapable of harm” and were determined to do good “not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world.” But harm was implicit in a mission that framed good and evil in universal abstract terms. Yet Americans were not prepared to listen. In 1977, after the war was over, Michael Herr would observe in his brilliant book Dispatches, “Maybe it was already over for us in Indochina when Alden Pyle’s body washed up under the bridge at Dakao, his lungs full of mud.”

  Robert Gorham Davis, reviewing The Quiet American for the New York Times Book Review, declared that Greene’s work was anti-American: “Pyle... does not remind Fowler of the thousands of individuals who make desperate escapes from Communist countries every week in order to live as humans.” For Americans in the mid-1950s this was the crux of the matter: Vietnam was fighting communism and communism was a threat to humanity. That confidence kept the United States in Vietnam and wedded to Ngo Dinh Diem. In October 1954 the Eisenhower administration decided to channel economic and military assistance directly to Diem rather than through the French mission in Saigon. Late in 1954 the CIA foiled several coup attempts against Diem. On the shoulders of Ngo Dinh Diem rested American hopes to save Southeast Asia, strengthen the Japanese economy, rebuild Europe, and preserve the American defensive picket line in the western Pacific.

  It would have taken a political genius to control the centrifugal interests of Catholics and Buddhists, Hoa Hao and Cao Dai, Montagnard and Khmer, Chinese and Binh Xuyen. Ngo Dinh Diem was not a politician; he was a Confucian mandarin who expected to rule with “the mandate of heaven,” to preside over a people who looked to him as their father and behaved obediently. The word “compromise” was not in Diem’s vocabulary. Nor was “democracy.” In Diem’s words: “Our political system has been based not on the concept of management of the public affairs by the people or their representatives, but rather by an enlightened sovereign.” His sister-in-law, Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, stated it more symbolically: “If we open the window not only sunlight but many bad things will fly in also.” Diem, writes the historian William Turley, was “heir to a dying tradition, member of an elite that had been superbly prepared by birth, training, and experience to lead a Vietnam which no longer existed.” Instead of opening the window, Diem tried to shut out every ray of sunlight. He brooked no opposition and expected total obedience, nothing less.

  Diem began against an opponent who deserved to be shut out. In April 1955 he asked Bay Vien and the Binh Xuyen to lay down their arms and close the opium dens and brothels. Bay Vien refused and dared Diem to come into Cholon. Diem called his bluff and invaded Cholon with tanks. As the Binh Xuyen retreated, they set fire to hundreds of homes and buildings. French authorities in Saigon, hoping Diem would fall, assisted the Binh Xuyen. It was civil war in Cholon. Bay Vien escaped to the jungles northwest of Saigon and from there to Paris. By that time thousands of people were dead, most of them Chinese civilians. Diem crushed the Binh Xuyen but in the process earned the enmity of the Chinese. Thousands of Binh Xuyen soldiers fled into the Mekong Delta and Central Highlands, where they vowed to continue the fight against Diem.

  The crushing of the Binh Xuyen resolved the dispute between Edward Lansdale and J. Lawton Collins. Diem had exercised brutal power, but successfully. American praise was quick in coming. John Foster Dulles cabled the French: “Diem is the only means U.S. sees to save South Vietnam and counteract the revolutionary movement.... U.S. sees no one else who can. Whatever U.S. view has been in the past, today U.S. must support Diem wholeheartedly.”

  Flush with victories in Saigon and Washington, Diem in his determination to consolidate his power turned next on Bao Dai. He considered Bao Dai a morally bankrupt whoremonger whose ties to the Binh Xuyen were unforgivable: Imagine—the Nguyen emperor, the symbol of a dynasty that had ruled Vietnam for centuries, taking kickbacks from pimps and drug dealers! In 1955 Diem called for the abdication of Bao Dai. He set up a national referendum to decide the question. In an election in which 605,000 of Saigon’s 405,000 registered voters cast ballots, Diem received 98.2 percent. On October 23, 1955, he proclaimed the Republic of Vietnam, with himself as president.

  Late in 1955 Diem sent troops into the Mekong Delta to destroy another obstacle to absolute power, the Hoa Hao army. The Hoa Hao fought a bloody guerrilla war against the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), but in April 1956 Ba Cu
t was arrested. He had a curious look about him. The short finger still reminded him of the French, but when he heard news of the partitioning of Vietnam in 1954, he had vowed not to cut his hair until the country was reunited. Uncombed and unwashed, the hair tangled down his shoulders. To the sharkskin-suited Diem, Ba Cut was disgusting and dangerous. In July 1956 Diem sent him to the guillotine. Surviving Hoa Hao soldiers scattered throughout the countryside.

  There was also the Cao Dai to dispose of. Diem bought off some Cao Dai leaders. It took $1 million to get General Trinh Minh The to change sides. ARVN troops invaded Tay Ninh Province late in 1955 to disarm the Cao Dai army. The Cao Dai fought for a time, but they knew of Diem’s ruthlessness and did not want to go the way of the Binh Xuyen and Hoa Hao. In February 1956 Pham Cong Tac, the Cao Dai leader, escaped into Cambodia. Most Cao Dai soldiers surrendered their arms, but others escaped into the Mekong Delta.

  With Bao Dai in France, the Binh Xuyen crushed, and the sects in disarray, Diem was able to fulfill his nationalist dream. In a speech on January 19, 1956, he announced, “The presence of foreign troops, no matter how friendly... [is] incompatible with Vietnam’s concept of full independence.” He told the French to leave. The French empire in Vietnam finally died on April 10, 1956, when the last of 10,000 French troops left Saigon.

  The Khmer Kampuchea Krom remained as a challenge to Diem’s rule. Krom troops were powerful in An Xuyen Province, and early in 1956 ARVN troops moved against them. Dressed in the distinctive button-down jacket and skirts with the lower end brought between the legs and tucked in at the waist, Krom soldiers were indistinguishable from Khmer peasants working the rice paddies. ARVN troops, indiscriminate at best, killed thousands of Khmer civilians in their operations against the Krom. In return the Krom launched their own guerrilla war against Diem.