American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (5 page)

They believed Diem could establish a popular, anti-Communist government because he had only served the French briefly, and never in the military. But that meant little in a land that gave the greatest patriotic credentials to those who had actively opposed foreign invaders. Diem did not fight
for
the French, but he had not fought against them.

That key distinction did not deter the Vietnam Lobby. It launched an impressive public relations campaign to promote Diem as a nationalist reformer who would stand up to Communism without the stigma of colonial masters calling his shots. By the time the French were defeated in 1954, Diem’s name was on the lips of everyone shaping U.S. policy in the region. The U.S. government successfully pushed to have him appointed prime minister of South Vietnam. A year later he became president in a referendum guaranteed to produce an all but unanimous “election.”

The Vietnam Lobby was not primarily responsible for U.S. intervention in Vietnam. That distinction belongs to Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who were already committed to building a non-Communist state in South Vietnam. But the lobby did play a key role in sustaining U.S. support for Ngo Dinh Diem, especially during his rocky first year when some U.S. officials were scouting around for a possible replacement.

Once Diem consolidated his power over a variety of rival non-Communist sects in the spring of 1955, the Vietnam Lobby and the U.S. government practically competed over who could offer the most over-the-top praise. The pinnacle of official adulation for Diem came in May 1957, when he made a state visit to the United States. He was given a red carpet airport greeting by Eisenhower, a twenty-one-gun salute, a standing ovation by a joint session of Congress, a ticker-tape parade in New York City, and a banquet presided over by publishing magnate Henry Luce and attended by John D. Rockefeller, Eleanor Roosevelt, William Randolph Hearst Jr., and Senators Mansfield and Kennedy.

The press did little more than echo the kudos. “Brave,” “courageous,” “devout,” “incorruptible,” “freedom-loving,” “miracle worker”—the praise for Diem was so lavish his American publicist, Harold Oram, should have raised his $3,000 monthly fee. Oram’s job was pretty easy, since
five media moguls
were members of American Friends of Vietnam.

Beneath the stirring headlines, however, some of the brutal realities of Diem’s rule occasionally leaked through. For example, a
Life
magazine article (“The Tough Miracle Man of South Vietnam”) began with what had become a standard account of “the miracles he has wrought”—establishing “order from chaos,” initiating “reform,” saving Vietnam from “national suicide.” Yet the article goes on to offer a stunning revelation: “
Behind a façade of photographs
, flags and slogans there is a grim structure of decrees, ‘re-education centers,’ secret police. . . . Ordinance No. 6, signed and issued by Diem in January 1956, provides that ‘individuals considered dangerous to national defense and common security may be confined on executive order’ in a ‘concentration camp.’”

This level of candor about U.S. support for an authoritarian regime was rare in mass-circulation publications. Few Americans were aware of Diem’s harsh rule, or that it became even more draconian in 1959 with the creation of roving tribunals that traveled the countryside and summarily executed anyone regarded as a threat to national security. South Vietnamese papers had photographs of the executions showing people getting their
heads chopped off with a guillotine
. Diem wanted people to know what was in store for them if they rebelled. In the United States, no such photographs appeared. Even as evidence against Diem mounted—his dictatorial rule, his repression of dissent, his discrimination against non-Catholics, his unpopularity—most of it stayed out of the headlines. As late as 1961, Vice President Lyndon Johnson called Diem “the
Winston Churchill of Asia
.” When a journalist asked Johnson if he really believed in that comparison, LBJ replied, “Shit, Diem’s the only boy we got out there.”

Those who championed Diem as pro-democracy had to twist logic and language beyond the breaking point. “Vietnam’s Democratic One-Man Rule” was the Orwellian title of a 1959
New Leader
article written by Wesley Fishel, a Michigan State political scientist who helped train Diem’s secret police. Fishel claimed that Diem had a democratic “vision,” but it would take time to implement. Diem’s dictatorial powers would provide the stability necessary for democracy to evolve. At bottom, the argument rested on the claim that the Vietnamese were not “ready” for democracy. They were too “immature.” As Fishel put it, “
The peoples of Southeast Asia
are not, generally speaking, sufficiently sophisticated to understand what we mean by democracy.”

The blanket of propaganda that hid Diem’s failure to gain popular support ripped open in June 1963 when a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, burned himself to death on a Saigon street. Journalist Malcolm Browne’s photograph of the immolation circled the globe. It showed the robed monk, with shaved head, sitting perfectly upright, legs crossed in the lotus position, engulfed in flames. “
Jesus Christ
!” President Kennedy exclaimed as he viewed the photograph on the front page of the
New York Times
.

Thich Quang Duc’s self-sacrifice was an indelible protest against Ngo Dinh Diem. It symbolized the much larger Buddhist uprising against a regime that reserved high office for Diem’s own family and other Catholics, and discriminated against the Buddhist majority. Americans may already have known that Diem’s rule was threatened in the countryside by a Communist-led insurgency. But now a mass audience was learning that Diem was also opposed by nonviolent Buddhists. Obvious questions arose. Why is the United States supporting a ruler hated by monks? What had Diem done to inspire such extreme protest? How could this happen after eight years of American aid and military support?

Five more monks immolated themselves that summer and fall, keeping media attention on the Buddhist uprising and Diem’s effort to repress it by storming hundreds of temples, killing dozens, and imprisoning thousands.

On November 1, 1963, Diem was overthrown by a junta of his own military officers. Diem and his brother were thrown in the back of an armored personnel carrier with their hands tied behind their backs. Then they were murdered. South Vietnam’s “miracle man” was shot in the back of the head. The Kennedy administration
denied any responsibility
for the coup. In fact, the president had authorized it. He directed the Central Intelligence Agency and American ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, to assure the plotting generals that the United States would approve their seizure of power and would give them the support that had once belonged to Diem. Kennedy did not order Diem’s murder, but he should not have been shocked when it happened. The history of military coups is not noted for its nonviolence.

Kennedy soured on Diem partly because he was dictatorial and unpopular. But he was mostly concerned that Diem had failed to crush
the Communist-led insurgency
. In fact, the White House was worried that Diem’s brother Nhu might be negotiating some kind of accommodation with the Communists. Near the end, Washington found Diem not too tyrannical, but too weak. Perhaps a military junta would do a better job. And so the generals were given the green light to move against the man America had supported for eight years.

The Communist-led insurgency would continue to attack each new American “puppet” government in Saigon. The insurgency first emerged in the South and had roots in the anticolonial war against France. From 1954 to 1959 its supporters focused on political organizing, building ideological commitment to the cause of reuniting Vietnam under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. But by 1959, these southern revolutionaries began to take up arms against the American-backed government. They viewed the United States as a
neo
colonial power—not an old-school colonial power like France that ruled directly but a new (“neo”) kind of imperialist that dominated small countries indirectly through proxy governments like Diem’s.

The southern guerrillas called themselves the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (under the political authority of the National Liberation Front), but were soon dubbed the Viet Cong by an American public relations officer eager to find a name that branded all the insurgents as Communists (Viet Cong means Vietnamese Communist). While the Viet Cong was Communist-led, it did include non-Communist elements. Over time the southern guerrillas began to receive increasing support from Communist North Vietnam. Beginning in 1959, small numbers of North Vietnamese Army troops moved south to support the insurgency. As the United States escalated the war, hundreds of thousands of these uniformed regular army troops poured into the South. However, in the early 1960s, with little northern support, the southern insurgency came very close to victory.

Indeed,
despite Kennedy’s escalation
of U.S. military personnel (from 800 in 1961 to 16,700 in 1963), economic aid (from $250 million to $400 million per year), and arms (helicopters, fighter jets, napalm, chemical defoliants), by 1963 many U.S. policymakers privately concluded that Saigon was losing the war to the Viet Cong. That was the reality that moved Washington to abandon Diem.

With the decline and fall of Diem,
a new form of criticism
appeared in the mainstream U.S. media. Journalists like David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan began to document the many failures of American policy. It wasn’t working nearly as well as senior officials publicly claimed. For all the U.S. support and training, the South Vietnamese military was poorly motivated and incompetent. The government was corrupt and widely despised. The Viet Cong, by contrast, were tenacious and skillful. Yet even the most critical mainstream journalists did not challenge the underlying legitimacy of American intervention. Virtually everyone agreed that it was right for the United States to try to “save” South Vietnam. The only debate was over which tactics might achieve that goal.

What made the mid-1960s articles in
Ramparts
,
Viet-Report
, and
I. F. Stone’s Weekly
so path-breaking were their fundamental challenges to U.S. intervention in Vietnam. U.S. policy was not merely failing, they argued, but fraudulent and unjust. The United States was not supporting democracy and self-determination. In fact, it had
opposed
the popular will of the Vietnamese, first by giving massive support to France’s bloody war to preserve imperial control (1946–1954) and then with the cancellation of nationwide elections in 1956 and its intervention to build a permanent, non-Communist South Vietnam.

Antiwar critics turned Tom Dooley’s picture of Vietnam upside down. Instead of rescuing the freedom-loving masses of Vietnam from an aggressive minority with an alien ideology, the United States was protecting a small, repressive regime against the will of its own people. Instead of saving an infant South Vietnam, it was keeping an ancient civilization divided and war torn. These claims became more widely shared as U.S. military escalation skyrocketed from 1965 to 1968.

By the mid-1960s, Americans saw war news on television almost every night. The networks continued to support U.S. intervention, but many of the stories and images presented troubling evidence of the war’s brutality and intractability. As the killing continued with no end in sight, official justifications became less and less persuasive. By 1971, one poll found that
71 percent of Americans
agreed that the war had been a “mistake” and a remarkable 58 percent believed it was “immoral.”

In the same year, 1971, whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg released a massive collection of top secret government documents to the
New York Times
and sixteen other newspapers. Ellsberg was a once hawkish U.S. defense analyst who had turned against the war. He hoped the documents would galvanize even greater antiwar opposition by exposing the long history of government lies about the war. Quickly dubbed “The Pentagon Papers,” they were widely excerpted and soon published in book form. They made Dooley’s
Deliver Us From Evil
sound like a bizarre fairy tale from the distant past.

Among other revelations,
The Pentagon Papers
detailed the CIA’s key role in promoting the migration of Vietnamese Catholics from the North to the South. While Dooley had made it sound like a spontaneous flight from Communist terror, the once secret documents showed that the CIA launched a major propaganda initiative to increase the migration. The goal was to build a political constituency of Catholics for Ngo Dinh Diem in the South.
The CIA’s Edward Lansdale
deployed agents to North Vietnam to sow terror among the people. They broadcast false reports about Chinese troops moving across the northern border raping and pillaging; about forced-labor camps set up by Ho Chi Minh; about the U.S. intention to drop nuclear bombs on North Vietnam. The CIA even distributed propaganda claiming that the Virgin Mary herself had moved to South Vietnam.

Many Catholics would have moved south without prompting, but the CIA’s fearmongering surely inflated the migration. Diem predicted only a few thousand refugees and was surprised by the flood. Lansdale bragged that his psychological warfare campaign tripled the number of Vietnamese refugees from at least one Catholic district. Catholics who remained in North Vietnam had to accommodate their faith to Communist Party ideology just as southern Buddhists had to accommodate their faith to Diem’s Catholic-dominated state. However, Tom Dooley’s lurid stories of Viet Minh atrocities against Catholic children and priests have never been substantiated. His nearly pornographic accounts of priests with nails driven into their heads in sadistic imitation of the “crown of thorns,” or schoolchildren having chopsticks jammed into their ears, were almost certainly invented.

In 1956, the
U.S. Information Agency
investigated Dooley’s atrocity claims. It found no evidence to support them but did nothing to repudiate them. Even William Lederer, who helped Dooley write and publish his famous book, later admitted that the atrocity stories were fraudulent. In a 1991 interview, Lederer said the “atrocities described [in
Deliver Us From Evil
] never took place or were committed by the French. I traveled all over the country and never saw anything like them.” Nor did one of Dooley’s most trusted aides, Norman Baker, believe his boss. “If I’d found a priest hanging by his heels with nails hammered into his head, I’d have the whole camp hearing about it.” But Baker never saw anything of the kind.