The Best and the Brightest (59 page)

Lodge, biding his time, letting the family guess his intentions, began to deal with Diem and found him as unresponsive as ever. Diem asked about reinstatement of American aid, and Lodge parried by demanding the release of hundreds of arrested Buddhists and students. Diem, Lodge later reported, offered a vast number of excuses. Finally Lodge said, “Mr. President, every single specific suggestion which I have made, you have rejected. Isn’t there some one thing you may think of that is within your capabilities to do and that would favorably impress U.S. opinion?” According to Lodge, Diem gave him a blank look and changed the subject. It was in fact a tactic which had worked in the past: give the Americans at best a vague promise, count on them to be so committed to you that they would never turn aside; also that whoever dealt with you would be afraid to face domestic reverberations if he failed with you.

With the coup imminent, Harkins discovered in late October that he had been cut out of major decisions and cable traffic; in addition, he was irate over Lodge’s pessimistic assessments of the military status. Now, on October 30, he reported back to Taylor that he doubted a coup was coming. General Tran Van Don had told Conein that it would take place before November 2, but when Harkins asked Don he denied any knowledge of a coup. In addition, Harkins reported that he had sat with Generals Don and Minh for two hours the previous weekend and neither had mentioned a coup (which was of course true; both generals regarded Harkins as the last Diem loyalist in the country).

The Harkins cable unsettled an already jittery Washington, and later that day there was a nervous Bundy cable to Lodge saying that despite what Lodge had said, the U.S. role on a coup could be crucial; he demanded more military information on what the generals were going to do, which units they had and which they lacked. Lodge answered that it was essentially a Vietnamese affair, though of course it was possible to give to Diem the information that Conein had received from the generals, which would place the United States in the position of being traitors. If at this point, he warned, we pulled back on the generals, it would guarantee that Diem and Nhu would never change, nor could they ever be moved. The United States, he continued, was trying “to bring this medieval country into the 20th Century and . . . we have made considerable progress in military and economic ways but to gain victory we must also bring them into the 20th Century politically . . .”

Bundy was still not satisfied with the Lodge answer. He cabled once more suggesting that the United States could control Vietnamese events, that he was not suggesting the betrayal of the plotters but perhaps a delay until there were better chances of success. But it was too late, the final plans were in motion. On November 1 the Saigon embassy and CIA predicted in their early reports to Washington that a coup would come that day; MACV, which was supposed to be the best-informed on what the Vietnamese military were doing, dissented and said it would not come (when the coup did take place, MACV called up the embassy and asked to have the cable killed).

Shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon, troops committed to the generals began taking over key points in Saigon. Ngo Dinh Nhu had been tipped off earlier by one officer that a coup was coming, and true to form, instead of trying to break it then, he had devised an enormously elaborate countercoup which was designed to lure the plotters into the open, destroy them, destroy the Buddhists and all American sympathizers and raise such havoc that the Americans would be glad to have the Nhus back in power. As the first incidents took place, Nhu was confident it was his own countercoup set in motion. By the time he realized that he was mistaken and that he had lost control, he and Diem were practically surrounded, only the palace guard remained loyal. Since their situation was almost hopeless, Diem and Nhu asked the generals to call a halt and negotiate demands, but the same thing had happened before, in 1960, when Diem used it as a means of smashing a coup and gaining time for loyal units to enter the city. Now the brothers tried it again, but there were no loyal units. At four-thirty in the afternoon Diem finally called Lodge, and the embassy preserved this record of the conversation:

diem: Some units have made a rebellion and I want to know what is the attitude of the U.S.?

lodge: I do not feel well enough informed to be able to tell you. I have heard the shooting, but am not acquainted with all the facts. Also it is 4:30 a.m. in Washington and the U.S. Government cannot possibly have a view.

diem: But you must have some general ideas. After all, I am a Chief of State. I have tried to do my duty. I want to do now what duty and good sense require. I believe in duty above all.

lodge: You certainly have done your duty. As I told you only this morning, I admire your courage and your great contributions to your country. No one can take away from you the credit for all you have done. Now I am worried about your physical safety. I have a report that those in charge of the current activity offer you and your brother safe conduct out of the country if you will resign. Had you heard this?

diem: No. (And then after a pause) You have my telephone number.

lodge: Yes. If I can do anything for your physical safety, please call me.

diem: I am trying to re-establish order.

The fighting continued through the night and into the early morning. By the time the rebels took the palace, Diem and Nhu were gone, having slipped out through a secret tunnel. They fled to the Chinese suburb of Cholon, where they remained in touch with the generals. Reportedly they finally accepted safe-conduct out of the country, but were picked up by the insurgents, and on orders of the new junta, killed while in the back of an armored personnel carrier. The body of Ngo Dinh Nhu was repeatedly stabbed after his death.

It was all over. One day photographs and statues had been everywhere, but not just of Diem, of his sister-in-law as well, a personality cult. The next day it was all gone, the statues smashed, the posters ripped through, his likeness left only on the one-piastre coin. In the streets the population mobbed the generals and garlanded the troops with flowers (one combat officer from the Delta later recalled that it was the first time he liked being a soldier, the first time he felt popular with the people). When Lodge himself walked through the streets, he was cheered like a presidential candidate. For the Americans it was a high moment, yet it would soon be followed by darkness; the reality of how badly the war was going would now come home as the death of Diem opened the floodgates of reporting and allowed officers to tell the truth. In addition, the one factor which had briefly in the nine years of the country’s existence given even the vaguest element of unity to a non-Communist South Vietnam was gone—opposition to the Ngo family. For Diem the responsibility had been too much; he was a feudal leader, a man of the past trying to rule by outmoded means and dependent upon outside Caucasian support. There were many epitaphs written for him in the next few weeks, but curiously and prophetically the best one had been written some eight years earlier by Graham Greene:

Diem is separated from the people by cardinals and police cars with wailing sirens and foreign advisers when he should be walking in the rice fields unprotected, learning the hard way how to be loved and obeyed—the two cannot be separated. One pictured him sitting there in the Norodom Palace, sitting with his blank, brown gaze, incorruptible, obstinate, ill-advised, going to his weekly confession, bolstered up by his belief that God is always on the Catholic side, waiting for a miracle. The name I would write under his portrait is the Patriot Ruined by the West.

In Washington almost everyone concerned had seen the coup against Diem as somewhat inevitable. Taylor, reflecting the position he and Harkins had created, had been the most reluctant. But there was one other figure strongly opposed to it, who had rumbled about it, disliked it and would have fought it, had he exercised the power. He did not exercise the power, and neither his opinion nor his opposition was taken very seriously; perhaps had the issue involved legislation on the Hill or a conflict in Texas politics the others might have paid serious attention to his dissent, but not in the field of foreign affairs, where he was considered particularly inept. His name was Lyndon B. Johnson. He had hated the coup against Diem from the very beginning. All this talk about coups. Cops-and-robbers stuff, he said, coups and assassinations. Why, he and Ralph Yarborough had their differences down in Texas but they didn’t go around plotting against each other, murdering each other. “Otto Passman and I, we have our differences, God knows he can slow up a lot of God’s good work for mankind,” he said, “but I don’t plan his overthrow.” In the summer, as others challenged the regime, Johnson had occasionally attended meetings and had defended it. The important thing, he had said, was to get on with winning the war. He felt genuine admiration for Diem as a man. Oh, he had his problems, but “in Texas we say that it’;s better to deal with the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.” When Johnson went to Vietnam in 1961, he had personally symbolized an American commitment to Diem, and part of his allegiance stemmed from this, that he had been the conduit of a promise, so arguing against Diem was arguing against Johnson; but some of it was broader, a somewhat more simplistic view of the world, and of who was a friend and who was an enemy. Friends were real friends, they signed on with you. Ayub Khan of Pakistan, for instance, was a friend. He spoke our kind of language, committed himself to our side, was willing to fight; Johnson would complain to those he suspected of having pro-Indian sympathies “of what
your
Indians are doing now.” Arguments that Ayub was an American friend because he was using American aid against India rather than against Communists, and that India had five times as many people as Pakistan and thus deserved a certain amount more consideration, did not move him. Ayub was a friend, but these Indians, they never committed themselves. A contract was a contract, a deal was a deal, you held out your hand and they held out theirs and that was the way it was done. Even Tshombe—Johnson was a not-so-secret admirer of Tshombe, who, after all, alone among all those Africans, was willing to say he liked us and disliked the Communists.

The talk about the overthrow of Diem hit a very negative chord; he didn’t like these young amateurs running around causing problems (often the people who were most against Diem seemed also to be the people who were against
him,
those people in the White House, not the seasoned professionals like Rusk, and this did not help his attitude). So he came to dislike and distrust the men who he thought were engineering the pressure against Diem, the young White House types, the brash know-it-all Hilsman, the young reporters out there who were, he said, traitors to their country—all these young people who had not even been through World War II, challenging senior people. Though he usually exempted John Kennedy from all criticism, on this subject he did not; he felt that Kennedy had played too great a role in the whole affair, and a few months later, after Kennedy had been assassinated, Johnson would turn to a friend and say, in an almost mystical way, that the assassination of Kennedy was retribution for the assassination of Diem. So in the months of 1963 when Kennedy was so carefully moving the bureaucracy over, the President, who was usually very careful about Johnson, had not worked on his Vice-President; he had been preoccupied with other matters, with moving more central players, and he had simply neglected to work on Johnson. No other word. Neglect. It did not, however, seem important at the time.

The months of September and October were very good ones for John Kennedy, rich in themselves, full of promise for the future. Above all the beginning, perhaps just the beginning of an end to a particularly rigid era of the Cold War. Not the end of the Cold War, the problems were too great and too deep on both sides. Some of the competition was very real and would always remain so; but perhaps turning back the paralyzing effects of it, the almost neurotic quality which had provoked a country to reach beyond its own real interests because of domestic fears which had been set up at home. The opportunity had come first in the post-Cuban missile thaw, and Kennedy had explored it, cautiously, again not too quickly.

There had been the speech at the American University about a reappraisal of attitudes toward the Communists, and he had encouraged and dispatched Averell Harriman to work out a limited test-ban treaty, which was the first break in the almost glacial quality of the Cold War. It had not come easily; the bureaucracy itself was not really prepared for a change and there was considerable resistance within the government. The Chiefs were opponents (though they finally went along with a limited test-ban treaty in order to kill off pressure for a comprehensive one). Taylor was helpful here, in part because he thought nuclear war impossible for a democracy. McNamara was dubious at first and then a genuine ally (in large part because of the pressure and reasoning from his aide John McNaughton, one of the two or three most important men in the government in the fight to limit the arms race; but McNamara by the very act of appointing McNaughton had in effect created a disarmament lobby in Defense, something which Rusk had not done at State). Mac Bundy was neither a help nor an opponent. He did not push it, and he did not use his position to expedite it, but he made sure that the advocates had all the access to the President they needed.