Fire in the Lake (13 page)

Counting the army of the State of Vietnam and the various sect forces, the French had supported at least six different non-Communist armies in the Delta. To add to the political and military confusion there were, of course, the Catholics, the Buddhists, the montagnard tribes, and the Khmer and Cham populations — most of which minorities had some means of self-defense and some quite reasonable motive for suspecting the motives of all the rest. As the capital of the south, Saigon was the very hub and essence of this disorder. Its economy lay largely in the hands of the French, the white-suited Vietnamese planters, and the invisible Chinese merchant-profiteers who gave their loyalties to France for as long as she would support the piastre at its current artificial price.
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Its administration and its police force were composed mainly of the venal and the opportunist. The former emperor, now chief of state, was no exception to this rule. A reasonable man, he saw no reason to risk his own life and fortune to one or another of the bandit groups in exchange for a largely fictional government. He went to France and in the middle of the Geneva Conference abdicated for all practical purposes to a man he rather disliked, his new prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem.

The American ability to intervene in the affairs of South Vietnam was not, then, at all in question: the southern politicians were ready to accept any foreign power that would feed and protect them. It was the hope of building “a strong, free nation” that was absurd. How should the south build a strong anti-Communist government when most southerners continued to obey the old authorities of the family, the village, and the sect? Communist, anti-Communist, the next war would begin in a language that few of them understood.

3

The Sovereign of Discord

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Ngo Dinh Diem. The name meant a great deal at one time in Washington as well as Saigon. On a trip to Vietnam in 1961 Lyndon Johnson had called Diem “the Winston Churchill of Asia.” Whatever the other points of resemblance between him and that British statesman, the man who undertook the American project of barricading the southern against the northern half of Vietnam certainly provoked hyperbole from Americans. For a period in the mid-1950’s Diem was the hero of the American press: this man of “deep religious heart” who, according to
Life,
had “saved his people from [the] agonizing prospect” of a national plebiscite; this “tough miracle man” had built a nation in South Vietnam and halted “the red tide of Communism in Asia.” The word “miracle” affixed itself to Diem’s name with the adhesion of a Homeric epithet. Diem had performed the “political miracle” of creating a strong government, the “economic miracle” in rebuilding the economy of South Vietnam from the ruins of war. In 1957 Diem traveled to the United States on the American presidential airplane. Welcomed by President Eisenhower at the airport, he addressed a joint session of Congress and visited New York, where Mayor Robert Wagner called him “a man history may yet adjudge as one of the great figures of the twentieth century.” Only six years later, Diem was to die in a dark alley of Saigon, denounced by those same periodicals and many of the same politicians as the petty tyrant who had destroyed South Vietnamese society and prejudiced the cause of the Free World in Asia.
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But in Saigon in 1966 it was difficult to find a trace of Diem anywhere. The same Vietnamese officers who had overthrown the president only three years earlier celebrated the anniversary of the coup, the National Day, with all the abstracted formality of parades and platitudes. Oddly enough, in view of the political terror campaign the regime had conducted, the officers had taken small revenge upon even the closest confidants of the Ngo family. After three years the heads of the secret police were out of jail, and some of them back in government. Few Americans so much as knew their history. Of course, there were few Americans left in Saigon who recalled the days of Ngo Dinh Diem. With the turnover of American personnel every eighteen months and the endless series of Vietnamese military coups, time in Saigon moved forward like an army, obliterating all it passed over. By 1966 even the scenery of the Diem regime had vanished. Of the presidential palace only the outer garden walls remained, enclosing an acre of grass like the walls of a graveyard from which the graves have been removed.

And yet it was strange that Diem should have disappeared so completely. The round little president and his family had ruled Vietnam for eight years — the entirety of the truce between two wars and the whole history of an unoccupied South Vietnam. The Ngos had not been pale ciphers for the whole American undertaking in that part of the world; on the contrary, any history of the Diem regime would have to be written in vivid, novelesque colors, with the characters of the Ngos quite obscuring those of the Americans. In the first place there was Ngo Dinh Diem himself, the shy, self-righteous Catholic mandarin with his vow of chastity and his ambition to serve as a moral example to his people. There was his brother, the lean, fierce Ngo Dinh Nhu, whose life was a succession of plots, ruses, and metaphysical dogmas. And there was Madame Nhu, the beautiful, outspoken, and wholly outrageous woman whom the American journalists called “the Dragon Lady.” For a decade the Ngos had dominated all conversation in Saigon; Americans and Vietnamese alike had spent hours discussing the latest court intrigue or scandal, hours speculating on the intricacies of their philosophy. The Ngos never disappointed them, even in their death. Played out under the gaze of the television cameras, the fall of the Ngos was in its way pure theatre, the denouement of a baroque tragedy.

On June 16, 1963, an elderly bonze named Thich Quang Duc seated himself in a major intersection of downtown Saigon, and amid a gathering crowd, set fire to his gasoline-soaked robes. At that moment the political climate in Saigon changed as if hit by the drop in pressure preceding a hurricane. Vast demonstrations broke out. The city people, who had for years remained passive, terrified before the Diemist police, crowded into the pagodas to kneel and weep, then, following the bonzes, burst forth into the streets calling for the downfall of the Ngos. Schoolchildren, university students, government clerks, now fearlessly confronted the legions of the Ngos’ picked troops.

For some months before, Ngo Dinh Nhu had known that a coterie of generals was plotting a military coup. He had no fear of the officers; he had dealt with their shallow intrigues many times before. It was the bonzes who unnerved him, these unarmed, shaven-headed men who until the moment of Quang Duc’s death had had no political influence in the cities. The brown-robed monks padded day after day through the streets of the capital to be hauled, screaming, into the police trucks. Early on the morning of August 21, the Vietnamese Special Forces under Nhu’s orders surrounded the central pagodas of Saigon, Hue, and other central Vietnamese cities. Shooting at random, they stormed through the sanctuaries, wounding scores of bonzes and hauling the rest off to prison. The next day Nhu claimed that the dissident generals had ordered the massacre. His intention obviously was to destroy the generals and the Buddhists with one
coup de force,
but as he had already divulged his plans for the raid, not even his American supporters could finally accept the story.

For a man who had so long and so successfully manipulated both the generals and the Americans, the whole affair looked oddly irrational. As time went on, Nhu’s fury of self-destruction only seemed to increase. When a few American newspapermen reported the truth of the pagoda raids, he and his wife lashed out at the American officials, charging that the CIA chief headed a vast international conspiracy with designs against his life. It was true that a CIA agent had taken up contact with the dissident generals, but the agent had not given them any encouragement until that point.
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With the slaughter of the bonzes, and the denunciation of the United States, Nhu effectively forced the Americans to take the difficult step of dissociating themselves from the Diem regime. Still, even with assurances of American support, the generals did not act. A month went by and there were further Buddhist-led demonstrations. In October Nhu ordered thousands of the student demonstrators arrested and many of them tortured. The move seemed designed to provoke the coup so long delayed, for many of the students were the children of his still-wavering officers and officials. In the end Nhu’s own troops were refusing to fire on the crowds and even openly encouraging the demonstrators. As one American witness reported, “Saigon, those last days of Diem, was an incredible place. One felt that one was witnessing an entire social structure coming apart at the seams. In horror, Americans helplessly watched Diem tear apart the fabric of Vietnamese society more effectively than the Communists had ever been able to do.”
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Of course in 1966 the Americans in Saigon never spoke of the Ngos. Their reign had been an unmitigated disaster for American policy in Vietnam. Still engaged in the same policy of fighting the Communists and building up the Saigon government, American officials could not afford to puzzle over their initial setback. For a period of eight years the United States had supported an incompetent dictator. So much had to be dismissed as an error — a tactical error that could be corrected with new Vietnamese leaders, new programs for pacification and administrative reform, new American controls over the Saigon regime. Ngo Dinh Diem, after all, was only one man. In the total context of the American war and the larger social forces at work in Vietnamese society, he could be counted as an insignificant factor.

And yet, perhaps, in passing over the drama of the Ngo family the officials overlooked something essential to the outcome of the entire American effort in Vietnam. Ngo Dinh Diem was only one man; the private psychological drama of Diem and his family was as nothing beside the grand strategies and global concerns of the United States in Vietnam. But, as the French historian, Philippe Devillers, once wrote, “In our age of mass society, where all history seems to be determined by forces so powerful as to negate the individual, the Vietnamese problem has the originality to remain dominated by questions of individuals. Indeed, the problem becomes almost incomprehensible if one transforms men into abstractions.”
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The notion may sound romantic, but it is not so. In the first place, Vietnam in the days of Diem possessed a very small educated society; most of the prominent men knew each other as well as if they had been the inhabitants of one village. In the second place, the Vietnamese traditionally understood politics not in terms of programs or larger social forces, but in terms of the individual. And their perception was not unscientifically based, for given the size and uniformity of the old society, the life of one man might stand as a model for the life of the society as a whole. If that one man was Ngo Dinh Diem, then the personal drama of the Ngo family with its mysterious and violent denouement described the difficulty of the American project in Vietnam better than would a history of all the counterinsurgency programs or an analysis of all the larger social forces.

The American decision to back Ngo Dinh Diem was not of itself a major policy decision. The policy of supporting a non-Communist Vietnam had been formulated some years earlier, and Diem himself was but one element of the fallback position hastily devised in the wake of the French debacle. It was not until June 15, 1954, that Secretary of State Dulles told the French definitively that the United States would not commit its own troops and planes to the Indochina war. Even after Dien Bien Phu, administration officials did not accept the Viet Minh victory or the principle of a divided Vietnam. During the Geneva Conference their ambitions were not only to build up a government in Saigon, but to undermine Ho Chi Minh’s government as well. In June Colonel Edward G. Lansdale was sent out as chief of a Saigon military mission with orders to “beat the Geneva timetable of Communist take-over in the north.” By August, during the period of negotiated truce, Lansdale’s teams were scattered about the country from Hanoi to the Ca Mau peninsula conducting sabotage operations and what can only be called agitprop work in direct violation of the U.S. government’s promise at Geneva to “refrain from the threat or the use of force.”
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These teams had small success in the Viet Minh-held areas. Their main achievement in the north was to lay the groundwork for the subsequent “flight” of the Catholics to the south. Their tactics were promises and “black propaganda,” or the falsification of enemy reports. Many of the rest of their activities were little more than terrorist acts. One team, for instance, managed to contaminate the oil supply in the bus depot of Hanoi in order to wreck the engines of all the city’s public transports.
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In fact, high American officials could have had very little confidence in the success of Colonel Lansdale’s mission in the south or the north. In Saigon the French-sponsored government was in a state of near collapse. Shortly after the Emperor Bao Dai appointed Ngo Dinh Diem as his new premier for the State of Vietnam, President Eisenhower wrote Diem a letter of encouragement that fell short of committing the United States to support Diem. The current national security estimate held out little hope for the prospects of either the French or the Vietnamese establishing a strong government in Saigon. In all probability, the estimate noted, the situation would continue to deteriorate and the Viet Minh would extend their control throughout the south. As the United States directly joined the struggle for Vietnam, American officials weighed the odds against a non-Communist solution and, even more heavily, against the success of the small, retiring mandarin, Ngo Dinh Diem.

In Saigon American pessimism appeared fully justified. Always the home of the entrepreneur and the collaborator, Saigon in the last year of the French war was a very sinkhole of violence, corruption, and intrigue. Its atmosphere of dense marsh heat mixed with diesel fumes and the rotting, vegetable smell of the Saigon river accorded perfectly with its political climate. The French army remained the one force for order. Half of Saigon was controlled by Bay Vien’s bandit army, the Binh Xuyen. The countryside belonged largely to the Viet Minh and the sects — the latter no more anxious for a strong government in Saigon than the former. Arriving in Saigon on July 7, Ngo Dinh Diem found himself with hardly a strand of political support. The sects and the Cochin Chinese landlords disliked and suspected him for being a Catholic and a central Vietnamese. The Vietnamese officers and officials regarded him as an interloper, for Diem had left the country four years before in protest against their refusal to hold out for full independence. The French resented him and the whole American undertaking in the south. As for the American military command in Saigon, it retreated into deep diplomatic silence in preparation for backing the strongest candidate that might emerge. When Colonel Lansdale went to visit Diem in the palace of the former governor general, he found the new premier quite alone, abandoned even by his bodyguards.