Embers of War (103 page)

A showdown loomed. Many informed observers thought the odds were against Diem, especially since the French were providing intelligence and other tacit support to the Binh Xuyen. U.S. officials were split, not only on the question of whether Diem’s tough approach was wise, but on how to deal with the French: One group saw the French as spoilers and wanted them out of Vietnam as soon as possible; the other thought they could still play a stabilizing role. Lansdale was in the former camp, while Collins, whose assessment of the Saigon leader had again turned gloomy, was in the latter.

On March 28, Diem, having refused to respond to the sects’ ultimatum, issued one of his own. The Binh Xuyen forces were to vacate promptly the installations they had occupied in and around Saigon. The following night open warfare erupted briefly between government forces and Binh Xuyen police and commandos. French armored units appeared quickly and blocked the streets, and the gunfire ceased. Charges and countercharges flew regarding who fired the first shots, and a French officer on Ely’s staff mediated an uneasy truce. Diem’s view of the French role grew still dimmer, as he suspected them of having incited the Binh Xuyen to violence.

Diem’s hold on power was weakening seemingly by the day. French banking and commercial interests still dominated much of the economy in the south and thus were a force to be reckoned with. Their leaders in Saigon urged the Paris government to act now to install a new leader who would be more malleable and more pro-French. General Ely noted in his diary that whereas previously he had been prepared to retain Diem as a part of a coalition government (for the sake of Franco-American cooperation), that day was gone; now it would be necessary to convince the Americans to abandon Diem in favor of Bao Dai.
⁵⁷
Bao Dai weighed in from his château on the Côte d’Azur, directing Diem to join him in France for “consultations.” Diem ignored the order. Collins, for his part, informed Washington on March 31 that the government’s days were numbered and that active consideration should be given to alternative leaders. He suggested Bao Dai or one of two senior Vietnamese political figures, Foreign Minister Tran Van Do or former defense minister Phan Huy Quat. Dulles phoned Eisenhower, read him part of Collins’s cable, and suggested they should once again seek Mansfield’s input. The president initially demurred, then changed his mind and agreed such consultation would be helpful. The next day Mansfield insisted that all available alternatives were worse than Diem, and that if Diem left, the likely result would be a civil war that would benefit no one but Ho Chi Minh.
⁵⁸

This analysis accorded with Dulles’s own, and his instructions to Saigon counseled Collins to tread carefully. Congress would be unlikely to fund a successor regime perceived as bearing a “French imprint,” he noted, and the administration needed Democratic support on a range of legislative issues—notably the proposed interstate highway system—and on the crisis in the Taiwan Straits. Implicit in the secretary’s message was the worry that Diem’s replacement by someone championed by the French would represent an embarrassing diplomatic defeat for the United States and victory for France.
⁵⁹

Collins did as instructed, but privately he continued to argue for a change in leadership. He noted Diem’s deepening political isolation and his stubborn unwillingness to broaden his advisory system to include people outside his immediate family. As April progressed, the chaos in Saigon became pronounced, a fact duly reported by journalists on the scene, some of whom also picked up on Collins’s pessimism. “The chances of saving South Vietnam from chaos and communism are slim,” C. L. Sulzberger wrote in
The New York Times
on April 18. “Brooding civil war threatens to tear the country apart. And the government of Ngo Dinh Diem has proven inept, inefficient, and unpopular. Almost from the start the French wished to get rid of the little Premier. Now they appear to have sold the idea to General Collins, our special ambassador.” The influential columnist Joseph Alsop, also reporting from Saigon, wrote Diem off as “virtually impotent.”
⁶⁰

Subtly at first, and then dramatically, the White House modified its position. Dulles’s missives to Saigon became open-ended regarding what should occur, even as he reminded Collins that regime change would be problematic in U.S. domestic political terms. Then, in late April, with Collins back in Washington for consultations, Eisenhower and Dulles went further, in effect conceding the ambassador’s point, made during lunch with the president on April 22, that “the net of it is … this fellow is impossible.” They took the plunge. At 6:10 and 6:11
P.M
. on April 27, 1955, top-secret cables went out from the State Department to the embassies in Saigon and Paris initiating a process designed to remove Diem and replace him with a leader selected by Generals Collins and Ely (while every effort was to be made to make the new government appear to be chosen by the Vietnamese). Diem was to be told that “as a result of his inability to create a broadly based coalition government, and because of Vietnamese resistance to him,” the United States and France “are no longer in a position to prevent his removal from office.”
⁶¹

Then, near midnight the same day, came word from Saigon: Fighting had erupted in the streets of the city between the Binh Xuyen and the VNA. Almost certainly Diem had been tipped off about the ouster orders, perhaps by Lansdale, who was by his side almost continuously throughout the crisis. With nothing to lose and much to gain, he then in all likelihood initiated the battle.
⁶²
Diem always denied being the instigator, and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that the Binh Xuyen fired first; conclusive evidence remains elusive. Whatever the case, the violence worked immediately to Diem’s advantage: At 11:56
P.M.
, Dulles canceled the earlier directives calling for Diem’s removal, less than six hours after they had been issued. In the days thereafter, fierce gunfights continued, leaving five hundred dead and two thousand wounded, and government troops gradually got the upper hand. Leading sect figures surrendered. Trinh Minh Thé was killed by a shot to the back of the head while he watched his troops engaging Binh Xuyen forces, the identity and allegiance of his assassin forever a mystery. Soon the crime syndicate was routed, and Bay Vien, the vice kingpin of Saigon-Cholon, fled to a cushy retirement in Paris. The religious sects retreated slowly into the Mekong Delta background, never again to threaten Diem’s rule.

No less portentous for the future, Diem’s actions in the “Battle of Saigon” made him a heroic figure to many in the U.S. Congress and press. In the Senate, California Republican William Knowland offered a lengthy paean to Diem’s fortitude and courage, and Minnesota Democrat Hubert Humphrey proclaimed that “Premier Diem is an honest, wholesome, and honorable man. He is the kind of man we ought to be supporting, rather than conspirators, gangsters, and hoodlums … who are diabolical, sinister, and corrupt.” Mansfield chimed in too, extolling Diem as the leader of a “decent and honest government.” Members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee registered their opposition to the administration’s withdrawing support from Diem. Democratic congressman Thomas Dodd of Connecticut demanded that Collins be fired in favor of “someone who measures up to the needs of the hour.”
⁶³

Publisher Henry Luce, in his weekly editorial in
Life
, could barely restrain himself: “Every son, daughter or even distant admirer of the American Revolution should be overjoyed and learn to shout, if not pronounce, ‘Hurrah for Ngo Dinh Diem!’ ” Diem’s decision to confront the “Binh Xuyen gangsters,” Luce went on, “immensely simplifies the task of U.S. diplomacy in Saigon. That task is, or should be, simply to back Diem to the hilt.”
U. S. News & World Report
made the same argument in more restrained language, as did
The New York Times
. The latter added a prediction: “If Premier Ngo Dinh Diem should be overthrown by the combination of gangsters, cultists, and French colonials who have been gunning for him, the communists will have won a significant victory.”
⁶⁴

A watershed moment had come. By the start of May 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem had obtained what he had long sought, namely full power in Saigon and firm American backing for his government. Just days earlier he had appeared politically finished; now he was more entrenched than ever. That the underlying problems with his government had not gone away was either forgotten or pushed aside by his U.S. backers, who were focused on the here and now at the expense of longer-term strategic considerations. Lightning Joe Collins had raised profound questions about the Diem experiment’s viability; these were now filed away and were not to be articulated by a high-level official again for a very long time.

On May 6, the U.S. government, relieved of the pain of reorienting the policy, reaffirmed its commitment to the regime: “The United States has great sympathy for a nationalist cause that is free and effective. For this reason we have been and are continuing to support the legal government of Ngo Dinh Diem.”
⁶⁵

By this expression of support Eisenhower narrowed the options on Vietnam—for himself and for his successors. Diem’s government had not lived up to the “standards of performance” on which the administration conditioned U.S. aid, but now the president backed him anyway, increasing America’s stake by supplanting the French, in the face of repeated objections from Eisenhower’s “personal representative” on the scene. The White House found it far preferable to stand firm, chiefly because it feared the implications of letting Diem fall. His demise would deliver a blow to American credibility on the world stage, while at home it would embolden the administration’s critics and cause furor among Diem’s growing band of influential supporters. As so often in U.S. policy making on Vietnam, staying the course proved the easiest bet in the short term.

But Eisenhower might have chosen differently. He might have accepted Collins’s argument that using Diem to build a strong, capable democratic alternative to Ho Chi Minh’s DRV was in all likelihood illusory; at a minimum, it required using America’s leverage to force far-reaching changes in how Diem governed, or more ambitiously, it involved working with the French to bring in a new leader, one more likely to win broad-based popular support. Or he might have been bolder and pursued a “Titoist” solution for Vietnam. Ho’s primary concern, in this line of reasoning, was to gain and maintain Vietnam’s independence from France, just as it was Marshal Tito’s to gain Yugoslavia’s independence from the Soviet Union. If the United States could aid Tito, as she had been doing for several years, why should she have to vanquish Ho? Why indeed. Paul Kattenburg, a discerning State Department intelligence analyst who was in Saigon at the time and who would later pen a penetrating account of America’s Vietnam adventure, remarked to a colleague, in the winter of 1954–55, that the most profitable U.S. course would be to offer Hanoi $500 million in grant aid for the reconstruction of war damage. Ho could not refuse such an offer, Kattenburg maintained, since it would afford a means for him to maintain independence from Soviet and Chinese domination. The sum of money was considerable, but it was lower than what Washington seemed to be committing itself to spending on behalf of Ngo Dinh Diem.
⁶⁶

For France, the outcome of the Battle of Saigon was a bitter blow, a stunning demonstration of her waning influence in South Vietnam. For many colonists and a goodly number of French officers, the revolt of the sects had been a last-ditch chance to maintain some authority on the ground. That hope was now gone, replaced by resentment and rancor. Franco-American antagonism in Saigon grew markedly in May, poisoning even the professional relationships between journalists from the two countries. “Some French officers I had known and worked with passed me on the rue Catinat without a sign of recognition,” the USIA’s Howard Simpson later wrote. “If the murderous looks of the old French
colons
on the Continental’s terrace had been knife blades, I would have died a hundred times over.”
⁶⁷

At the highest levels, the tension level was a notch or two lower but still palpable. In a dramatic confrontation in Paris in the second week of May, Prime Minister Edgar Faure (who had succeeded Pierre Mendès France in February) argued forcefully that Diem was “not only incapable but mad” and that France could “no longer take risks with him.” If Washington persisted in its support, France would have to disengage from Vietnam. Dulles was unmoved. The United States would henceforth frame her policies independently, he said, and would not feel bound to consult with Paris before acting. Diem might represent a “gamble,” but he should nevertheless get unreserved support. Having thus established the bottom line—and made clear the power relationship—the secretary appealed for France to stay in Vietnam and support Diem until the Vietnamese could decide their own fate through elections. Faure nodded sullenly. He knew he had no real cards to play.

He knew, that is to say, what every other serious observer now knew, including not least Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues in Hanoi: The French were Out in South Vietnam, and the Americans were In.

CHAPTER 26
MIRACLE MAN

T
HE IMPORT OF THE MOMENT WAS NOT LOST ON LEADERS IN HANOI
. They understood only too well that with his victory over the sects in early May 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem had achieved his long-sought objective: the consolidation of power in Saigon as well as staunch American backing for his government. French military and political influence in South Vietnam, meanwhile, had suffered a blow from which it would almost certainly never recover.