No More Vietnams (6 page)

By our standards Diem took excessive actions. He often used his power arbitrarily to suppress critical newspapers and to persecute political opponents, failing to distinguish between enemies of the state and opponents of his government. When I spoke to him of these excesses in 1956, he defended his actions by pointing out that in dealing with Communist violence and armed insurrection, ordinary peacetime rules of conduct would lead to Communist victory. “We are at war,” he said, “and in war it is necessary to use wartime measures.” In 1955, Diem conducted a ruthless nationwide purge of Communists and their sympathizers, shipping off tens of thousands of South Vietnamese to harsh ideological reeducation camps.
Many were part of the Communist network, two-thirds of which was uprooted, but a large percentage were innocent. Once the assault on the Viet Minh underground was completed, political repression in South Vietnam was minimal by East Asian standards. Under Diem, there were at most 300 political prisoners in 1960, while in Burma and Indonesia they numbered in the tens of thousands.

Diem, having imposed order, faced the second task of government: securing the consent of the governed. It was an almost impossible job given the fractious nature of South Vietnamese politics, and his record was mixed. His high-handed style of governing squandered much of the goodwill with which he began, and his willful actions earned him more than his share of enemies, many of whom had friends among the American press in Saigon. But among simple Vietnamese in the countryside, he was a legitimately popular figure.

Some of his popularity derived from his political reforms. Diem's government provided far more freedom than had the French. He also took the first tentative steps toward electoral democracy in a country that had never held an election. Like most Southeast Asian politicians, he tampered with the ballot box. In 1955, for example, the results of the presidential referendum showed him taking a preposterous 98.2 percent of the vote. A fair tally would have been lopsided—with Diem polling perhaps 90 percent—because his opponent, Bao Dai, had never been one to win popularity contests. But even against a strong opponent—Diem undoubtedly would have won a properly conducted election—probably with no less than 65 percent of the vote—because his popularity had reached a high level by that time.

South Vietnam had more of the form than the substance of democracy, but the latter was not wholly lacking. The political opposition, for example, received representation. In the elections for the Constituent Assembly in 1956, one-third of the winning candidates were anti-Diem, and this proportion would have been higher had some parties not boycotted the election. When the assembly convened, it promptly rejected
Diem's draft for the new constitution and rewrote the document itself. But American-style democracy always evoked skepticism in Diem, for he knew meaningful elections consisted of more than ballots and voting stations. As he once asked a reporter, “What can parliamentary democracy mean to a Montagnard when his language does not even have a term to express it?”

Most of Diem's popularity came from the vast array of social programs and reforms that he instituted with American financial and technical assistance. Schools proliferated in the countryside. Land was redistributed to tenant farmers. Pesticides were sprayed to combat malaria. Rice production soared. Roads and bridges were built. Foreign investment increased. Light industry sprang up around Saigon. Two or three days a week, Diem would tour the countryside, scrutinizing the progress of his plans on the local level and inundating officials with advice. Although his programs often taxed his government's meager administrative capabilities, their effect was overwhelmingly beneficial.

• • •

When the two leaders are compared side-by-side, the suggestion that Ho would have outpolled Diem head-to-head seems ridiculous. Yet during the war, many critics of the American effort to save South Vietnam argued this very point. They said that the Geneva Declaration of 1954 legally bound Diem's government and the United States to unify the two halves of Vietnam through elections and that Ho would have inevitably come out the winner. They were wrong on both counts.

The text of the Geneva Declaration about elections was not legally binding on the United States or South Vietnam. Nine countries gathered at the conference and produced six unilateral declarations, three bilateral cease-fire agreements, and one unsigned declaration. The cease-fire agreements alone were binding for their signatories; the provision concerning reunification elections appeared in the separate final declaration. Only four of the nine states attending committed themselves
to the declaration's terms. The United States did not join in it. South Vietnam, which was not even present in Geneva, retained its freedom of action by issuing a formal statement disavowing the declaration. North Vietnam also did not associate itself with the declaration. Very simply, it had no legal force.

Nor did any of the participants expect elections to occur. The Geneva Conference was intended not to establish peace for all time through the ballot box but rather to create a partition of Vietnam similar to that of Korea. Partition was formally treated as a temporary expedient, but all major participants expected it to be permanent. Whatever their words about elections, their actions revealed their intent: They established two governments, allowed for two separate military forces, and arranged for the movement of refugees between the zones. It would have been senseless to go through all this trouble in 1954 only to turn around and undo it after elections in 1956.

The whole idea was wildly unrealistic in any case. Reunification was supposedly to be decided by free elections. Because elections would not be free in North Vietnam, South Vietnam could legitimately object to holding them. A stalemate was inevitable. North Vietnam understood this. After the conference, its delegate, Pham Van Dong, told a reporter, “You know as well as I do that there won't be elections.”

When the time came to discuss elections in 1956, Diem refused to participate, and the United States supported him. We were not afraid of holding elections in Vietnam, provided they were held under the conditions of genuine freedom that the Geneva Declaration called for. But we knew that those conditions would exist only in South Vietnam, and this sentiment was bipartisan. Senator Kennedy said that neither the United States nor South Vietnam should be a party to an election “obviously subverted and stacked in advance.” After spending two years crushing every vestige of freedom in North Vietnam, Hanoi's leaders would never have allowed internationally
supervised free elections to decide their fate. Following later consultations, even the Soviet Union agreed that a plebiscite was unfeasible.

North Vietnam, with a cynicism appalling even for Ho, briefly pressed the issue. But balloting conducted in Viet Minh territory in 1946 revealed just what they had in mind for 1956. Ho never permitted any suspense about the outcome. In order to secure the participation of other political parties, he openly guaranteed the leaders of one party that they would win twenty parliamentary seats and those of another that they would take fifty. The returns themselves made Diem's elections look like a model of good government. Ho received 169,222 votes in Hanoi, a city with a population of only 119,000. That amounted to 140 percent of the vote, if every person regardless of age cast a ballot.

Ho's distaste for uncontrolled free elections had not abated by 1956. Pham Van Dong told a reporter how Ho expected the election to be run. There would have to be a multiparty contest in South Vietnam, but the ballot in North Vietnam, where the people had been “united,” would have only the Communist party on it. This would have made the election a sure thing for Hanoi, because North Vietnam contained 55 percent of the total Vietnamese population. An election that guaranteed victory was the only kind Ho ever would have accepted.

Many in the American antiwar movement claimed that Ho would have defeated Diem in a fair contest. They argued that even President Eisenhower conceded this point in his memoirs. The passage they always cited reads: “I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Bao Dai.” Those who conclude from this quotation that Ho would have won
any
elections overlook two facts. The Geneva-sponsored election was to be held not
at the time of the fighting
, by which Eisenhower meant 1954, but rather in 1956. And Ho's opponent would have been not a
hapless French puppet, Bao Dai, but a popular anti-French nationalist, President Diem.

Ho would not have fared well in a fair election. In 1954, one out of every thirteen North Vietnamese fled the country rather than live under his rule. His so-called land-reform program had convulsed the country, produced severe food shortages, and sparked major peasant revolts that began in Ho's home province and spread into at least two others. General Giap later admitted that in putting down the unrest, his government killed 50,000 people. By 1956, Ho was hardly the man to head up a ticket. Diem, whose popularity was then peaking, would have won decisively. There was only one reason why North Vietnam's leaders, like those of any other Communist country, never would have dared to hold genuinely free elections: They knew that they would lose.

For the United States to have forced South Vietnam to hold elections blatantly stacked to guarantee a Communist victory would have been legally absurd, strategically senseless, and morally ludicrous.

• • •

Ho never wavered in his determination to unite all of Vietnam under Communist rule. It was never a question of
whether
he would try to conquer South Vietnam, but only of
when
and
by what means
he would try to do it.

According to captured documents and the testimony of high-ranking Communist defectors, North Vietnam's decision to conquer South Vietnam came shortly after the Geneva Conference. Ho waited several years before launching the assault. He needed to consolidate his power in North Vietnam, and he expected Diem's government to succumb to the chaotic conditions immediately after the partition and fall of its own accord. His Communist network in southern Vietnam, though substantial, had never been as powerful as the one in the North, and Diem's attacks on it had severely reduced its strength.

But his preparations for the offensive against the South began before the ink of his delegate's signature dried on the cease-fire agreements in Geneva. He had pledged to freeze the
size of his army, but within four months North Vietnam's forces expanded from seven divisions to twenty. Meanwhile, South Vietnam demobilized 20,000 troops. In May 1959, at its Fifteenth Plenum, the North Vietnamese Communist party gave the order to begin the offensive. It resolved that “the basic path of development of the revolution in the South is to use violence, and that according to the specific situation and present requirements of the revolution the line of using violence is using the strength of the masses and relying principally on the political forces of the masses, in combination with armed forces to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the situation, in order to overthrow the rule of the imperialists and colonialists and set up a revolutionary regime of the people.”

By September, large-scale infiltration of Communist guerrillas into South Vietnam had started, the total topping 4,000 in less than two years. Most of these troops were southerners who had moved north in 1954. But the identity of the prime mover was never in doubt. As North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap declared in January 1960, “The North has become a large rear echelon for our army.” With the North serving as the rear, where else could the front be but in the South?

Thus, if wars begin in the minds of men, the Vietnam War began in the mind of Ho Chi Minh. For thirty years he had relentlessly pursued his goal of uniting Vietnam under his totalitarian rule. His undying dream was an unending nightmare for millions of Vietnamese. He had expected the French to turn Vietnam over to him through the March 6,1946, agreement. He had expected the Soviet Union and Communist China to deliver it to him over the conference table in Geneva in 1954. He had expected South Vietnam to fall into his hands after a brief interval under President Diem. He probably even hoped to win South Vietnam through an election on reunification that would have been a patent sham.

In 1959, after all these had failed, Hanoi went to war.

Never in history has so much power been used so ineffectively as in the war in Vietnam.

Seldom has one country enjoyed a superiority in arms greater than the United States held over North Vietnam in 1959. The war pitted a nuclear superpower with a gross national product of $500 billion, armed forces numbering over 1 million, and a population of 180 million against a minor military power with a GNP of less than $2 billion, an army of 250,000, and a population of less than 16 million. On paper it looked like a hopeless mismatch. But wars—and particularly guerrilla wars—are not fought on paper.

North Vietnam held one decisive advantage over the United States: Its leaders had a limitless capacity for barbarity and tenacity. They resorted to any tactics, no matter how cruel or immoral, and were willing to fight indefinitely, no matter how much suffering resulted. American leaders, quite properly, were constrained by morality, and the American people eventually would tire of the burdens of war. Our enemy could never defeat us; he could only make us quit.

Those who opposed our involvement in the war relentlessly pressed one question onto the national debate: Why are we in
Vietnam? Of all the questions asked during those years, none had an answer more simple or apparent. The United States intervened in the Vietnam War to prevent North Vietnam from imposing its totalitarian government on South Vietnam through military conquest, both because a Communist victory would lead to massive human suffering for the people of Vietnam and because it would damage American strategic interests and pose a threat to our allies and friends in other non-Communist nations.