"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War

iv. Morris West, The Ambassador (1965)

West’s novel concentrates on Diem’s persecution of the Buddhists, the conspiracy against him, and his eventual assassination, with the unwilling compliance of the American ambassador, “Maxwell Gordon Amberley,” based on Henry Cabot Lodge.43 Amberley is regarded as a shrewd professional, an ambassador for ten years but now somewhat at a loss after the death of his supportive wife. He is undertaking instruction from a Zen Buddhist master in Japan when he is called upon to deal with the current government crisis in Vietnam. An assistant explains (again, by the domino theory) that the US has become involved in the country because “we want to maintain a military foothold in Southeast Asia. If South Vietnam goes, Thailand is outflanked and Singapore is threatened,” and “we backed Phung Van Cung [Diem’s name in the novel] and his family because they were the best and strongest administrators available” but can no longer be controlled (9). Cung and his family are persecuting the Buddhist majority and will no longer listen to reason, i.e. do what the Americans tell him to do. It is essentially Amberley’s job to give him this message more firmly or help get rid of him.

The ambassador finds it exciting that the streets in Saigon are tense until he witnesses the suicide of a Buddhist monk. Because the suicide coincides with his arrival, he realizes he has been an “accomplice.” To put pressure on President Cung to cease the persecution of the Buddhists, Amberley announces the threat of US sanctions, including an immediate stop to funding and the gradual withdrawal of military personnel. His top military commander, General Tolliver, realizes that the war cannot be won as long as their allies are a liability owing to their political intrigues among the high command, demoralized troops, and rampant economic waste.

The embassy’s political advisor, Mel Adams, the voice of reason in the novel, argues that Cung’s administration is “a ramshackle dictatorship founded on mandarin ethics, warlord intrigues, the secret police and old-line Gallic Catholicism” (34). Cung has alienated the students, lost the allegiance of the rural people, and isolated himself by surrounding himself with sycophants—an accurate summary of some of Diem’s failings as president. When Amberley asks Adams what policy should be put forward in these circumstances, he advises pulling out and letting the country “determine its own future,” a policy that at the time of West’s novel seemed correct to very few Americans in high places. The ambassador, for example, objects that “Uncle Ho” would soon take over if that were the case. “He’s taking over now,” said Mel Adams flatly. “He’s taking over because the man who truly wants to rally the country lacks the talent to do it; because we are bankrupt of everything but arms, men and money” (62).

Cung has raised the ante by raiding pagodas in a number of cities, followed by a declaration of a state of siege and martial law, actions that Amberley perceives as a means of forestalling potential threats to the regime. When he goes to see Cung to protest against the brutality of the Buddhist repression, Cung counters by showing him photographs of Vietcong atrocities, such as one showing a pregnant woman disemboweled with a bayonet: “Am I to be tender with those who plan such things and then take a hypocritical refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha…This is Asia, not Geneva or Manhattan! Here the man who holds power is the strong man armed” (53). When Amberley threatens the withdrawal of arms and money, Cung does not believe him. He cites the domino theory, merely altering the metaphor: is the US really willing to let Cambodia, Laos and Thailand “fall like a house of cards? This is your last foothold in Asia” (55). That is to say, you need us as much as we need you.

Amberley is portrayed as a man of conscience pursuing an unwanted task, so the role of amoral plotter necessary to higher policy must be transferred to the CIA chief, Harry Yaffa (historically, Lucien Conein, the CIA liaison between Lodge and the plotting generals), who has helped the generals plan their coup and will help them execute it once the American government has given its approval. Cung requests that Yaffa leave the country, which Amberley cannot permit because it would be a public admission that there was an American-supported plot. Cung is sensitive to the plotting. He admits to Amberley that he cannot make popular tours of the countryside because if he leaves the palace “it may fall overnight into the hands of traitors and conspirators” (104).

Tension in Saigon mounts as a bomb is thrown in front of the ambassador’s car, which may have been Cung’s response to the sanctions. The Americans begin to fear that a separate agreement might be made with North Vietnam, undermining their whole effort in Vietnam, and they speculate among themselves about a “neutralization” process proposed by the French. In an embassy meeting, this possibility polarizes the staff, with Mel Adams proposing self-determination and Henry Yaffa supporting continued containment. At a cocktail party, a French diplomat explains that Cung will never bow to American pressure because he a “Jansenist saint” who will defend the last foothold of Christianity in Asia, a provocative notion of which Protestant Americans are likely not to have thought. The Frenchman warns that after the war is continued without a breakthrough, the US will be forced to “neutralize” under pressure from its own Congress. In effect, the Americans will have to make a worse bargain than the one they could make now.

Adams is the staff-member most concerned with saving Cung’s life. He will be disappointed in that hope when Cung and his brother are assassinated instead of spared (historically, this was originally agreed on by the conspiring generals). The general who leads the coup, however, recognizes that such things cannot always be controlled. It is admitted that Adams, who ends up resigning from the Foreign Service, is too good a man for ambassadorial rank: “he lacks the streak of amorality and opportunism which makes a first-rate negotiator” (203). Amberley’s young protégé Groton, an idealist and a serious student of Buddhism, is also unlucky—he is gunned down in the street. The ambassador seems to want to be more like these men of principle, and yet aware that he is successful in the service (“my sorry trade,” he calls it) precisely because he is not like them.

One thing that requires explanation for a novel so closely modeled on historical events is why the author has changed his historical model from an eager conspirator to a reluctant one. One answer may be that once Cung has been identified as Diem, the outcome is already known to the reader, and giving the ambassador a conscience is a way of retarding the inevitable and drawing out the narrative. West, however, seems to have greater ambitions for his protagonist. Personally sympathetic to Cung, Amberley is shown as a man wracked by moral doubt who vacillates on the coup for more than political reasons. After Amberley gets the go-ahead from Washington (historically, it was the other way around) and he gives the dinner speech that signals to the conspirators the American approval of the coup, he feels like he has betrayed Cung: “Cung was still the villain. I was still the white knight, beyond fear or reproach. It was too late now to say what I knew in my secret heart: that for all my noble words, for all my outraged virtue, I was one of the bastards, too” (117). This attitude reduces an opportunistic political decision, of the kind Amberley is shown to be good at making, to misplaced personal loyalty.

Is it immoral to dump a leader bent on destroying his own country, which happens to be in the process of becoming a client state of the nation that the ambassador represents? Or for Amberley to be what he is, a diplomat—someone who must often lie and always follow orders in the service of his country? Giving Amberley a conscience and allowing him to speak his doubts and fears does not, in this case, make him more interesting—in fact, the novel is far more agile and interesting in the exchanges where the characters act according to their public roles in the give-and-take of diplomatic maneuvering. Rather it seems to be a fictional move to make the protagonist more sympathetic, a man of spiritual depth, an adept of Zen Buddhism who might better “understand” Asians, but Amberley would have been more convincing as a cunning and cynical public figure, like the kind of character Gore Vidal portrays so well in his political novels. It sounds pretentious to have Amberley say, after he has agreed to go ahead with the coup and knows he may be blamed, that “there are no more terrors for a man who has come to terms with death and with his own damnation” (223), when neither of these outcomes is likely.

Ambassador Lodge, as shown in the historical outline in the first section of this chapter, seems to have had no such moral compunctions and was much more in favor of, and involved in, the coup than his fictional counterpart Amberley. Lodge’s cable to Secretary Rusk (August 29, 1963), for example, reads: “we should proceed to make all-out efforts to get the Generals to move promptly.”44 Washington still wanted to make an “11th hour” attempt to get Diem to initiate reforms, but Lodge replied that refusing American aid would not work. The Ngo brothers had no regard for public opinion or the opinion of anyone else except their own.45 When Diem called Lodge on November 1, the day of the coup, to ask him what the “attitude of the US” was with respect to the rebellion, he apparently wanted to know what steps Lodge himself would take to stop it, but the ambassador could not give him a truthful answer. Instead, he evasively said that he was “not acquainted with all the facts” and that the US government could not have any opinion about it, as it was only four o’clock in the morning in Washington—as if the State Department had no idea at all of a coup attempt or would not have known about it before that day.46 All that Lodge can offer Diem is his physical safety, but it is clear from the exchange of cables that Lodge “barely lifted a finger” to save Diem’s and Nhu’s lives.47

The novel’s portrait of Diem is also inaccurate. The president is portrayed in the novel as a strong but misguided politician with a serious moral sense and solid achievements behind him: the resettling of a million refugees from the north, the breaking of the power of the Binh Xuyen, and the calling upon the Americans to train his army to fight the guerrillas. He is called “a philosopher as well as a military strategist” (47), a characterization that is stretching the truth considerably if Diem is meant to be an accurate model. Such an astute man (the author would have us believe) would not persecute eighty percent of his own population without a good reason. The justification given is a CIA report “on the infiltration of Communist agents into the Sangha, the Buddhist monastic system” (47). Communist aggression was the argument for any number of desperate measures, and infiltration into the government and the army was real enough, but would a strategist-philosopher pursue such a short-sighted policy of unpopular repression that could only foment more rebellion?

v. Conclusions

Two of these novels about the fall of Diem were published two or three years after the actual coup and the other one (Vaughn’s) nearly a decade later. The events of the coup and probably even its motivations had by this time been established, but the novels have been discussed here in this particular order, not according to dates of publication but to the respective “distances” of their fictional protagonists from Diem’s person and destiny. In this perspective, the distance proportionally decreases, although even in the first two novels discussed (Hempstone and Vaughn), close ups of Saigon’s palatial politics are given whenever Diem himself appears as a character. The details of the execution, which took place inside an armored military vehicle, and the final thoughts and reactions of the victims had to be imagined by the novelists. In every case, what Diem and Nhu were actually thinking and planning must be deduced from the results in the historical accounts. In these novels, however, they are given voices and personal motives, which account for the differences in these works of political and moral emphases.

It has been argued that the first and best of the novels discussed, Smith Hempstone’s A Tract of Time, is furthest from the events leading up to the coup in Saigon, although those events will come to determine what happens in the highlands of central Vietnam, where most of the action takes place. Coltart, the CIA operative who works with the mountain tribes, is caught in a conflict of allegiance between these indigenous people, whose confidence he has gained, and the representatives of his own government, who have their own priorities. He discovers to his sorrow that Diem’s government has, historically and culturally, little sympathy for its montagnard allies, and even less so in the confusion generated by the president’s imminent fall.

The second novel, Robert Vaughn’s The Valkyrie Mandate, views the coup from closer up, through the eyes of an US Army officer who is directly involved as the liaison between the US mission and the rebel Vietnamese generals. There is here another conflict of loyalties. Like the protagonist of Hempstone’s novel, the conflict between the protagonist’s position as an American officer and his devotion, in this case, to Vietnamese culture and its people, proves fatal. If Hempstone seems to be saying that it is impossible to be a man of honor and serve the South Vietnamese government, Vaughn is saying that it is impossible to serve the Vietnamese people by serving its government.

The third novel, Morris West’s The Ambassador, gets even closer to the central crisis of the time by putting the reader inside the mind of the American ambassador who is directly involved in the coup that ousted Diem, showing the political crisis with more complexity and greater moral nuance than the other examples and creating various characters based on actual participants. The main problem with West’s version as historical fiction is the misrepresentation of his historical models. It has been shown here how Amberley is far less complicit in the coup than Lodge was, but Cung’s statesmanship is also exaggerated if it is meant to represent Diem’s. The ambassador recognizes Cung’s achievements in reconstructing his country, including agricultural reforms, expanded commerce and industry, and increased news communications; what is not admitted are the fear of nationwide elections, the rigged referendum, the fact that the vaunted agrarian programs were perceived as “unmitigated disasters,”48 or that the massive influx of American aid that maintained South Vietnam did not prepare it to be an independent nation of industry and commerce.49

Nor can Cung’s achievements, modest as they are, outweigh his defects as a leader, all admitted by Amberley: he is an elitist, a Catholic who persecutes Buddhists in a largely Buddhist country, a president dependent on American aid but resentful of interference, a man who isolates himself from his people and delegates responsibility only to his family, and a politician singularly inept at handling crises. As for the prosecution of the war, the ambassador admits that “military operations were hampered by political considerations” (161): offensive operations did not take place because military commanders and provincial governors did not get along, and the president was more concerned with threats to his regime than fighting the Communists.

It is as if the insistence of all these authors to portray Diem as a flawed but well-intentioned leader was a means of upping the ante on the conspirators’ (and the ambassador’s) moral dilemma. In all three novels, Diem is represented as a sympathetic human being, even a strong leader, who has unfortunately clung to misguided political policies or undemocratic methods. By contrast, his ruthless and conniving brother Nhu becomes a sort of scapegoat for the regime. None of the novels voice any suspicion that Diem may have relegated the dirty work of his autocratic regime to his brother intentionally, that their collusion may have been their modus operandi, a union of divergent roles necessary for the project of sustaining their family in power.

In an interesting contrast to these fictional versions, important historical accounts of the war portray Diem as directly responsible for his own destruction and even cite a lack of personal qualities that partly explain his political failures. Stanley Karnow, for example, refers to Diem’s “inflexible pride” and his style of “ruling like an ancient emperor.”50 In a chapter devoted to Diem, Frances FitzGerald calls him “the sovereign of discord.”51 George C. Herring argues that Diem was an autocrat, who merely to please his American advisors “occasionally paid lip-service to democracy but in actual practice assumed actual powers.”52 Bernard Fall points out that Diem thought that political “compromise has no purpose and opposition of any kind must of necessity be subversive.”53 Robert D. Schulzinger notes Diem’s “inability to generate popularity in the countryside and his adamant refusal to delegate responsibility to anyone other than his brothers.”54 Finally, Marilyn B. Young sums up the relationship of the US government and the Diem regime in this way: “what the United States had labored mightily to produce was not a democratic, independent new nation-state but an autocratic ruling family held in place by a foreign power.55 Mutual dissatisfaction led inevitably to Diem’s fall.

1 Short, Anthony, The Origins of the Vietnam War (London: Longman; 1989) p. 263.

2 Bowman, John S. (ed.), The Vietnam War Day by Day (Hong Kong: Brompton Books Corporation, 1989), p. 14.

3 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p. 14.

4 Short, Origins of the Vietnam War, p. 193.

5 Short, Origins of the Vietnam War, p. 196.

6 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p. 16.

7 See Short, Origins of the Vietnam War, p. 203, for the confrontation with the sects, and p. 206, for the battle with the Binh Xuyen.

8 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p.16.

9 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p. 17.

10 Boettcher, Thomas, Vietnam—the Valor and the Sorrow (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1985), pp. 149-150.