"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War

Chapter Two

Fictional History & Historical Fiction: The Fall of Diem

South Vietnam was an American invention, conceived

by Dwight Eisenhower but delivered by John Kennedy

(Loren Baritz, Backfire).

South Vietnam was essentially the creation of the United States

(The Pentagon Papers).

i. President Ngo Dinh Diem

The major sign of the failure of the US project of nation-building in South Vietnam was the fall of its American-chosen leader, Ngo Dinh Diem. In this chapter, four early novels that deal with Diem’s dramatic final days will be examined. They share roughly the same time frame: the seven-month period from the outbreak of the Buddhist crisis in May 1963, which both exposed and brought to a head public dissatisfaction with Diem’s regime, to his US-assisted assassination in November 1963. In this first section, an overall chronological review of Diem’s career will be given to suggest why Diem was assassinated; more specifically, the events leading up to his death will clarify how the assassination came about. The American involvement in the coup d’état that led to the assassination of Diem and his brother Nhu is, according to Anthony Short, “probably the most painful and controversial episode of the Vietnam War,” but was also “arguably, something that was inherent in the logic of US intervention.”1

In all fairness, Diem’s obstacles to governing were formidable: war lords and competing religious sects, a powerful bandit organization (Binh Xuyen), the influx of nearly a million refugees to southern Vietnam from the north, coup factions within his own army, and northern Viet Minh cadres left behind in the south after the division of the country that were bent on inspiring insurrection. Diem took steps to deal with these problems and solidify his position in accordance with the following time-table. On June 18, 1954, he became Prime Minister of South Vietnam. The exodus of people from the north, mainly Catholics, with the aid of the US Navy, to South Vietnam began the same year, and numbered nearly a million people, furnishing Diem with a ready-made anti-Communist constituency in the south.2 US policymakers affirmed support for his regime while encouraging him to seek a broader basis of political support and to establish more democratic institutions.3 Diem gained control of the military by suppressing the rebellion of his Chief of Staff, General Hinh,4 and began to consolidate his political power by appointing members of his family to the cabinet. He agreed to the needed reforms stipulated in a letter from President Eisenhower (October 24, 1954) as a pre-condition to American aid,5 all of which went directly to Saigon. Diem launched the first of a series of agricultural reform measures (February 1955), but they resulted in more inequalities than before and created unrest among the peasants, which the Communist opposition exploited to its advantage.6

Diem’s forces did battle with the Binh Xuyen and the sects (March-May 1955)—action that is portrayed in two of the novels examined in Chapter One.7 Although Secretary of State Dulles and General Collins discussed replacing Diem, his champion Edward Landsdale urged the embassy to continue supporting him. The French, British, and Americans held talks in Paris (May 7-13, 1955), agreeing to support Diem’s government but expressing the wish to see it more representative. The following day, Diem declared that he was not bound by decisions made at conferences in which he had not participated.8 He launched, however, a successful offensive against the Hoa Hao sect (June 1955) and broke its resistance. Pham Van Dong, the foreign minister of North Vietnam, proposed consultations with the south to prepare for the nationwide elections stipulated by the Geneva Accords for July 1956. Diem replied in a broadcast (July 6, 1955) that since the accords were not signed, South Vietnam was not bound by them.9

The US leadership, including President Eisenhower, did not believe that if Ngo Dinh Diem ran he could defeat Ho Chi Minh, who was popularly perceived as the national liberator from foreign rule, both Japanese and French. For his part, Senator John F. Kennedy declared that free elections could not be held, for the results would inevitably be stacked against the South.10 Life magazine, published by the staunchly anti-Communist Catholics Henry and Claire Booth Luce, gave credence to the American lack of confidence in Diem when (in Life’s issue of May 13, 1957) it considered Diem’s refusal to hold elections as one of his greatest achievements, because the refusal would prevent his country from committing “national suicide.”11 In a rigged referendum abetted by Landsdale (October 1955), in which Diem received one-third more votes in Saigon than there were registered voters, he deposed Bao Dai and proclaimed the Republic of Vietnam, with himself as President, Prime Minister, Defense Minister, and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. The new regime was immediately recognized by the US, five European and three Asian nations.12

By January 1956, Diem’s ruthlessness in purging what remained of Viet Minh cells in the south did not enhance his popularity in his own country and lost many potential allies.13 In Diem’s visit to the United States (May 5-19, 1957), Eisenhower called him the “miracle man” of Asia.14 Guerrillas immediately began a campaign of assassination of South Vietnamese officials (over 400 by the year’s end) that was meant to disrupt his government. He reacted by appointing more military men to administrative positions, which indirectly helped the guerrillas through the neglect of the population’s social and economic problems.15 With the resettlement of the northern refugees, Diem enjoyed perhaps the only popular support for his regime during the years 1955-57, but thereafter his policies only generated discontent.16 At a certain point, the US Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) took up the training of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN),17 and South Vietnam became, in effect, a client state of the US. Millions of dollars in aid, most of which went to the military, poured into South Vietnam annually, and were mostly spent on maintaining Diem and his family in power.18

Popular resistance to Diem gradually began to materialize. A peasant uprising in the Mekong Delta attacked and overthrew village administrations (January 17, 1960), which was a reaction to the oppressive measures of the regime in building and maintaining the hated “agrovilles.” In August of the same year, US intelligence produced an estimate that the South Vietnamese government had to win the support of the peasants or discontent would increase.19 Diem also encountered resistance by his own troops in Saigon. In the paratroop revolt (November 11-12, 1960) led by two colonels, which initiated the cycle of plotting against his regime, Diem was declared incapable of saving the country from Communism, and American intelligence confirmed the dissatisfaction with his inability to inspire resistance to it.20 As if to confirm this perception, there was a dramatic increase in revolutionary activity on the part of Diem’s adversaries. North Vietnamese leaders, who had already authorized limited armed resistance and selected assassinations of officials in South Vietnam, hoped that an indigenous southern movement would lead the insurrection there. They were concerned with consolidating their gains in the north, but their southern strategy received unsolicited help from Diem himself as his unpopularity grew. The southern revolutionary forces united in December 1960 to form the National Liberation Front (NLF)—an organization originally intended to “rally all those disaffected with Diem,” including non-Communists, to push toward independence.21

The US government remained committed to prevent a Communist takeover by means of financial and military support of Diem’s regime. President Kennedy sent one fact-finding mission after another to Vietnam, most of which were optimistic about the possibility of victory. In one report, Defense Secretary McNamara and General Taylor, for example, thought that a military program of anti-guerrilla war might reduce insurgency to “organized banditry” by 1965.22 Diem did not make the American effort easy, although he promised Kennedy in a letter (December 14, 1961) that he would be content to “liberalize” his regime in return for a large increase in aid.23 In January 1962, the US Air Force began flying defoliating missions in Vietnam, and in the following month the organization that would take over responsibility for conducting the war, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), under General Paul Harkins, was installed in Saigon (February 8, 1962).24 Two weeks later (February 27), two Vietnamese pilots flying American planes, in protest against Diem’s prosecution of the war, bombed and strafed the presidential palace, but Diem and his family escaped harm.25

This attack confirmed Diem in his belief that his true enemies were domestic. His “strategic hamlet” program, essentially a renewal of the agrovilles, also proved ineffective and was used mainly by Diem and his brother Nhu to increase their control in the countryside.26 As government repression continued, social ferment increased, culminating in the so-called Buddhist crisis. In a country where Buddhists constituted 70% of the population, twenty thousand Buddhists celebrating the traditional birthday of the Buddha were fired on, resulting in nine dead and twenty wounded. Diem, whose government was dominated by Catholics (10% of the population) because he thought that they were more politically reliable, blamed the shooting on the Vietcong.27 The crisis reached its climax in June, when the monk Thich Quand Doc set himself on fire at a Saigon intersection as a political and moral protest. The widely circulated news photo of this gruesome spectacle brought the regime’s repression of Buddhists to international attention. Diem resisted American requests to defuse the crisis and lost US support.

At home, President Kennedy began to express doubts about Diem, even proclaiming on television that the South Vietnamese leader had become out of touch with his own people. When the rumors emerged that Diem’s brother Nhu had cut a pragmatic deal with the Communists to deal out the Americans and stop fighting the war, the US government began to exert pressure on Diem to discard Nhu, and when that failed, began to consider supporting a military coup.28 Kennedy appointed Henry Cabot Lodge, his former Republican opponent, as Ambassador to Vietnam to reduce criticism of his Vietnam policy before the 1964 election.29 Before Lodge arrived in Saigon (August 22, 1963) to replace Diem’s friend, the current US Ambassador Frederick Nolting, anti-government plotting was already taking place: General Tran Van Don had informed CIA operative Lucien Conein on July 4 that a coup was being planned.30 The Ngo brothers, who controlled an extensive network of spies, suspected that Lodge was sympathetic to a plot against them. The conspirators, led by General Duong Van Minh (nicknamed “Big Minh”), were cautious about committing themselves, because earlier attempts had been aborted for fear they would not be firmly backed by the US. Lodge encouraged the conspirators with promises that the US would not interfere, while the US government insisted on maintaining “plausible denial” of Lodge’s participation.31

Tran Van Don proposed to Diem that he declare martial law to prosecute the war more effectively, but the real motive of the conspirators was to consolidate forces for the coup, while Diem and his brother hoped to implicate the army in cracking down on the Buddhists. Accusing the Buddhists of being Communist inspired, Nhu used members of an organization loyal to him, who were disguised as regular army soldiers, to attack Buddhist temples on August 22, 1963, beating, killing, and arresting hundreds of monks, students, and activists. Spontaneous demonstrations took place in various cities as a reaction, and President Kennedy himself emitted a protest.32 Ambassador Lodge met with Diem, who refused to dismiss his brother Nhu. At the same time, Lodge assured the generals of support if Diem did not agree to this demand as well as other necessary reforms. On October 5, General Minh met with Conein for assurances that the Americans would not hinder the coup and continue with aid afterward. On the same day, Lodge dismissed Saigon CIA chief John Richardson, who had his doubts, and reported to Kennedy that the coup was on. Although Generals Harkins and Taylor also expressed misgivings, Lodge did not deliver this message to the conspirators. Kennedy had left the decision up to him.33

The coup finally took place on November 1, 1963, only three weeks before Kennedy’s own assassination. The South Vietnamese generals laid siege to the presidential palace. The Ngo brothers first thought that the attack signaled a “counter-coup” that had been planned by Nhu and General Dinh, who controlled most of the forces around Saigon, but Dinh had in fact joined the rebellious generals. Diem was unable to get any support to suppress the attack and finally agreed to surrender. Lodge denied knowledge of the coup to Diem and offered him asylum in the embassy to save his life, but Diem and his brother Nhu fled to St. Francis Xavier Church in Cholon, the Chinese district of Saigon, where they were arrested and assassinated (November 2, 1963) under orders by Minh.34 As an immediate reaction, political prisoners were released from Saigon jails and the strategic hamlets in the countryside were destroyed by the peasants. The assassination, with American compliance, may be seen as symptomatic of the insistence of installing undemocratic leaders in other countries for the convenience of ideological or material self-interest.

ii. Stuart Hempstone, A Tract of Time (1966)

Hempstone’s novel views the events surrounding the fall of Diem from the perspective of the Vietnamese Central Highlands.35 It is the most complex and skillfully wrought of the works discussed in this chapter. The prose often evokes Hemingway: