A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (31 page)

Ngo Dinh Nhu, Diem’s younger brother, bore the title of counselor to the president. He was an intellectual with a corrosive wit, as slim and handsome as Diem was plump and waddling, and a bit daft in his love of power and scheming. In addition to being a chain smoker like Diem, Nhu was a heavy user of opium. His skin had a special yellow hue Vietnamese claimed was characteristic of serious opium smokers. If you pinched the skin, it was said, opium would pop out. No one dared
to pinch Nhu. He was the second most powerful man in the country and overseer of numerous intelligence and police agencies he put together to protect the family. At the height of the regime he had thirteen different security agencies operating with the power to arrest and imprison or execute without trial. Nhu had been educated in Paris as an archivist at the Ecole de Chartres, a school of medieval studies, and employed until 1945 at the Imperial Archives in Hue. He had then gone into anti-Communist politics in the 1950s by organizing a Catholic labor union modeled on a counterpart French Catholic labor federation. The connection proved a momentous one for the Ngo Dinh family. The CIA was financing the French federation. When the Dulles brothers began to lose hope that Bao Dai would ever turn into an anti-Communist alternative to Ho, the Agency financed Nhu’s agitation to have Diem named prime minister by channeling money to him through the French union.

Nhu was responsible for the hodgepodge of ersatz Fascist and Communist techniques that the regime resorted to in its efforts at political motivation and control. Totalitarianism fascinated him. There had been numerous enthusiasts of Mussolini and Hitler in the France of his student years, and Fascist organizations had flourished under the Vichy regime. Nhu had become an admirer of Hitler. Lou Conein stayed on in Vietnam after Lansdale went home in December 1956, serving as CIA liaison officer to Diem’s Ministry of Interior. He nicknamed Nhu “Smiley” because of the mask of a smile Nhu often wore and his grin when he joked at the expense of others. During plane trips to the countryside, Nhu would hold forth to Conein on the magnificence of Hitler’s charisma in stirring up the German people and keeping them entranced. Nhu had also read some of Marx’s and Lenin’s writings, as Diem had, and he envied the discipline of the Vietnamese Communists and their ability to mobilize the masses. The result was that Nhu borrowed promiscuously from both right-wing and left-wing varieties of totalitarianism. The regime’s principal political party, which he created, was a clandestine society called the Can Lao, designed to covertly penetrate, and so better manipulate, the officer corps of the armed forces, the civil bureaucracy, and business and intellectual circles. During the secret initiation ceremony, new members knelt and kissed a portrait of Diem.

A proper state also needed a mass organization, and Nhu set up one of these too. He called it the Republican Youth, even though most of the members were civil servants and many of them were not young, and patterned it on Hitler’s storm troopers, the so-called Brown Shirts. Nhu dressed his troopers in blue shirts, with blue berets and trousers. (He
probably took the precise model for his organization from another of his sources of inspiration—Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang. Chiang had formed a Blue Shirts organization during the 1930s after he acquired German military advisors.) Nhu tried to employ his Blue Shirts in the same way that Hitler had used the storm troopers, as an extralegal national apparatus to shape the loyalties of their neighbors and to spy and police. He was fond of convening mass meetings of his Republican Youth in Saigon and at the provincial capitals, because Diem allowed him to play the role of supreme national leader within the organization. He would often arrive dramatically at the stadium or soccer field in a small French helicopter called an Alouette that the family had purchased for their personal use. Before Nhu gave his speech from a high podium, the assemblage of Blue Shirts would drop to one knee in obeisance, thrust a stiff arm into the air in the Fascist salute, and shout allegiance to the leader.

Nhu’s wife, Madame Nhu, or Madame Ngo as she preferred to be called for its more regal sound, dominated her husband and her brother-in-law. To interview her at the presidential palace was to enter the mental as well as the physical world of the family. In her youth she had been a petite beauty, the daughter of a wealthy family. Her father, Tran Van Chuong, had been a prominent landowner and lawyer during the French years and had held the post of foreign minister in the short-lived Japanese puppet regime. Her adult years of eagerly grasping and yielding authority gave her features a certain aggressiveness, and she carried herself a bit stiffly. She was still an attractive woman, however, and liked to show off her good looks. She would enter the reception room for the interview wearing an
ao dai
of delicately patterned silk which had been cut with a V-neck rather than the traditional high collar. The V-neck was a modest one but striking nonetheless. Her shoes had stiletto heels to make her taller. She would sit in a brocaded armchair and lecture on the need for sacrifice to defeat the Communists. As she talked, her lacquered fingernails would toy with a diamond-encrusted crucifix on a neck chain. (She had converted from Buddhism to Catholicism after marrying Nhu.) From time to time a servant would enter to bring a fresh pot of tea or to answer her summons for some errand that suddenly came to mind. The servants were all men. They would shuffle in bent over in a bow, bow lower, and acknowledge her commands with a long “Daaa …” (the D pronounced like a Z), a servile form of “yes” for servants in old, aristocratic households; then they would shuffle back out still bent over.

Publicly, Madame Nhu asserted herself with an exhibitionist feminism.
She formed a counterpart women’s organization to her husband’s Republican Youth, calling it the Women’s Solidarity Movement, played the same role of maximum leader within it, and also used her women to spy and police. The younger members were recruited into a female militia, armed with U.S. Army carbines, and dressed in a uniform like the men’s of blue shirts and slacks but with more flamboyant headgear—wide-brimmed bush hats of a matching blue instead of berets. Madame Nhu also appointed herself arbiter of South Vietnam’s morals. In a country where polygamy was common, she pushed through Diem’s tame National Assembly a “Family Law” that made divorce virtually impossible and at the same time rendered illegitimate
ex post facto
the children born of second wives and concubines. Another of her measures, a “Law for the Protection of Morality,” banned sentimental songs and dancing “anywhere at all,” forbade “spiritualism and occultism” of the kind practiced by the Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai and in less organized forms by most other Vietnamese, and declared the use of a contraceptive a crime punishable by five years imprisonment for repeat offenders. One ambitious legislator suggested that the law also ban the wearing of “falsies” by Vietnamese women, but others pointed out that this would create an unduly complicated problem of enforcement for the police. The resentment she aroused often expressed itself in scurrilous rumors. Vietnamese women would suggest it was not a coincidence that the Saigon bar girls also favored V necklines on their
ao dais
. (There is no evidence her relationship with Diem involved anything physical.) She became a favorite of Communist propagandists, who always referred to her by her maiden name, an insult to a married woman’s virtue in Vietnamese culture. Her maiden name was Tran Le Xuan, which means “Tears of Spring.”

The Ngo Dinhs proceeded to impose on South Vietnam what amounted to their own alien sect of Catholics, Northern Tories, and Central Vietnamese from their home region. (Once in the South, many of the non-Catholic Northerners who had fought with the French quickly allied themselves with the Catholics as the group with access to the regime and the new foreigner.) Diem and his family filled the officer corps of the army and the civil administration and the police with Catholics, Northerners, and Central Vietnamese they trusted. The peasants of the Mekong Delta found themselves being governed by province and district chiefs, and by civil servants on the province and district administrative staffs, who were outsiders and usually haughty and corrupt men. Diem intruded further. He did away with the village oligarchies of prominent peasants who had traditionally dominated the village councils—collecting taxes, adjudicating disputes, and performing the basic
functions of government. The poorer peasants often did not like these men, but they knew them, and the council members had a sense of how far they could safely push people. In mid-1956, to try to prevent Viet Minh sympathizers and other dissidents from clandestinely controlling village governments, Diem decreed that the province and district chiefs would appoint the village chiefs and council members in the future. The family’s alien sect of outsiders started penetrating right down to the village level, subjecting the Southern peasants to abuses and exactions in their daily lives which they had never known before. Lansdale was so naive about the implications of what he set in train that he formed civic action teams of Northern Catholics to propagandize against the Viet Minh among the Delta peasants. He was disappointed by his lack of success. Lansdale was also upset to discover before he went home at the end of 1956 that as Diem’s position became consolidated, he acted increasingly counter to Lansdale’s advice on political and social issues.

Diem turned next to the land. In the areas they had held south of the 17th Parallel—the 225-mile stretch of Central Vietnam and their enclaves in the Mekong Delta—the Viet Minh had seized French rice plantations and the holdings of “Vietnamese traitors” who sided with the colonial regime. These lands had been distributed to tenant farmers. The peasants had also conducted an
ad hoc
land reform themselves in much of the rest of the country, including regions that had been under sect domination. Many of the landlords had abandoned their rice fields to seek safety from the fighting in the towns and cities. The peasants had divided up these holdings or had ceased paying rent on those they were working. With 85 percent of the population living in the countryside and drawing a livelihood from agriculture, it was difficult to find a single issue of more profound social, economic, and political sensitivity than land.

Lansdale and other senior Americans pressed Diem to launch a land-reform program of his own in order to undercut the Communists by fully ending the injustices of landlordism in the South. The American desire would at first glance appear to create a conundrum for Diem, because he was opposed to any alteration of the traditional social structure. He wanted to return to the landlords of the South as much of their land as was practical and have them act as a buttress to his regime. He wanted the peasants to remain peasants. The trip to Tuy Hoa in 1955 taught him that he liked trips to the countryside, although the excitement of having his feet stamped on once was enough. He was a man who needed decorum, and he saw to it that future occasions were orderly. He would chat in friendly fashion with groups of farmers as well as give
formal speeches. What he never did was to question the peasants seriously in order to learn their desires. He believed that his duty was to tell them what to do and their duty was to obey. He disposed of the conundrum by announcing that he was conducting a land-reform program while accomplishing something else.

Diem took away all of the land that the Viet Minh had distributed to tenant farmers by invalidating the land titles these peasants had been given. He then confiscated the former French property for his “agrarian reform” program, and he did distribute much of this land, but he gave a lot of it to the Northern Catholic refugees rather than to Southern farmers. Most of the rest of the land he seized went back to the original Vietnamese landlords who had sided with the French or to other supporters of the regime who could buy it. (Diem’s land-reform act specified a ceiling of 247 acres for an individual holding, quite generous by Vietnamese standards, but the Ngo Dinhs encouraged their officialdom to smile at subterfuges to get around the ceiling. The minister for agrarian reform was a landlord. The entire holding of a landlord family would be disguised by splitting it up among family members.) The regime also confiscated and returned to its former owners the abandoned land the peasants had taken for their own. The small minority of Southern tenant farmers who did receive land discovered that they had to pay for it in yearly installments. When the Viet Minh had given them land they had been told it was theirs by right. They were not nearly as angry as all of the other former tenant farmers who were now tenants again as a result of Diem’s “reform.” By 1958, Diem attained his objective. Through unstinting resort to the armed forces and the police, he reversed the pattern of land ownership in the Mekong Delta back toward one resembling the prewar pattern, when 2 percent of the owners had held about 45 percent of the land and approximately half of the farmers had been landless.

Disorder came with loss of land. In his ignorance and his concern for the protection of his power to the exclusion of anything else, Diem paid no heed to the Civil Guards and the SDC militia. When he first returned in 1954, Diem thought that he could do without large numbers of infantry and substitute fighter-bombers. (To the end of his days he advocated indiscriminate air and artillery bombardments and was forever urging the Americans to bring in more planes and howitzers.) The civil war with the Binh Xuyen and the sects taught him the value of a regular army as a bastion, or a sledgehammer. The unwieldy, road-bound ARVN that the U.S. Army generals in the Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) then built for him (on the rationale, an unlikely
one, that the Viet Minh would next resort to a Korea-type invasion across the 17th Parallel) therefore got all of his attention. It did not occur to him that good territorial formations were equally important to his long-term survival. He allowed the forces that were supposed to provide local security to become instead the principal source of insecurity for the inhabitants of the countryside, a daily manifestation of the “capricious lawlessness” of Diem’s regime, as one atypical American observer of the period put it. The Civil Guards received some care from the province chiefs, who needed them, but were ill equipped and often unpaid. They used their guns to extort a salary. The SDC militia were treated with such relentless shabbiness that the majority became indistinguishable from bandits. The militiamen caused most rural crime. They were constantly robbing and raping and beating up farmers who dared to protest. Many of the peasants remembered that the last time they had known any security and decent government had been under the Viet Minh or their sect theocracies.