Embers of War (108 page)

Ngo Dinh Diem, meanwhile, prepared to embark on a triumphant visit to the United States. Four years had passed since his previous American stay. Back then he had been a mostly anonymous exile, speaking before modest-size audiences on college campuses and cultivating relationships with public figures who he anticipated could help him attain power at some point in the future. This time, Diem knew, the reception would be of a different type altogether; this time he would be hailed as the conquering hero, America’s loyal ally, who as the fearless and clear-sighted leader of Free Vietnam had stood valiantly to stem the Red tide. Little did he or anyone else know that this would be his final trip to America, or that the visit would mark the high point of South Vietnam’s long and complex relationship with the United States.

CHAPTER 27
THINGS FALL APART

T
HE TRIP ALMOST DIDN’T HAPPEN. ON FEBRUARY 22, 1957, AS NGO
Dinh Diem prepared to give a speech at the fairgrounds in Ban Me Thuot in the Central Highlands, a shot rang out. Do Van Cung, South Vietnam’s minister of agrarian reform, went down, clutching a bleeding side and left arm. “They have shot me,” he gasped. Diem, unflappable as always in the face of physical danger, calmly bent down to check on his colleague, even though he surely understood that the bullet was intended for him, and even though he had no way of knowing that the assassin’s automatic pistol had jammed (hurriedly fitting the magazine, he had neglected to push it home fully) and that there would be no more shots. Diem then raised himself and gazed over the assembled crowd, a newspaper account said, “with his sharp and heavy look in an attitude of the most striking impassability.” A few minutes later, after the assailant had been dragged away by police, Diem began his prepared remarks. “Dear compatriots …”
¹

The attempted murder was a sign of things to come, an omen, but few remembered it when Diem’s plane touched down at Washington National Airport on May 8. The mood was expectant among the assembled dignitaries and journalists. The White House had pulled out all the stops for this state visit, even putting President Eisenhower’s personal plane, the
Columbine III
, at Diem’s disposal. Reporters were urged to give the stay maximum coverage, and officials set a schedule for the coming days that many a world leader would envy. In addition to a state dinner, there would be a speech to a joint session of Congress, an address to the National Press Club, private meetings with Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and Vice President Richard Nixon, as well as a ticker-tape parade on Broadway in New York City. Diem would also take his turn as host, at a formal dinner for Eisenhower at the South Vietnamese embassy.

Most telling of all, perhaps, Eisenhower endured the heat and sweltering humidity of this summerlike day in Washington to be on hand at the airport to greet Diem personally, a gesture he had made only once before to a visiting head of state. “You have exemplified in your part of the world patriotism of the highest order,” Eisenhower said to Diem at a makeshift news conference after escorting him along the polished ranks of the honor guard. Diem, perspiring in a heavy double-breasted dark suit, waved away the compliment. It was the courage of his people, he told Eisenhower, and “your own faith in my country” that “accomplished the miracle of Vietnam.” The two men posed for photographs, then rode off in the backseat of an open limousine, entering Washington by the Lincoln Memorial. Crowds edged the curbs, getting deeper as the motorcade neared the White House. Several military bands played martial airs, and a bagpipe group in kilts skirled, as the two presidents passed.

EISENHOWER AND DIEM PREPARE TO DEPART WASHINGTON NATIONAL AIRPORT SHORTLY AFTER DIEM’S ARRIVAL, MAY 8, 1957.
(photo credit 27.1)

Reporter Russell Baker of
The New York Times
succinctly summarized official Washington’s hopes for the visit: “The prime purpose of the present trip is to demonstrate to President Diem the depth of the Administration’s liking for him and what he has done.”
²

Journalists did their best to help out, competing to outdo one another in praising the Miracle Man for his enlightened leadership and his rock-ribbed steadfastness. The American Friends of Vietnam had urged them on, declaring in a telegram, sent to more than a hundred publishers and editors, that Diem ought to be accorded “the warmest welcome” with “positive editorial comment.”
³
Diem, gushed
The New York Times
, was “an Asian liberator, a man of tenacity of purpose, a stubborn man … bent on succeeding, a man whose life—all of it—is devoted to his country and his God.” For the
St. Petersburg Times
, he was the quintessence of “the nationalist leader, struggling to stand against both the Red tide and reaction.” Under the headline “Welcome to a Champion,”
The (Washington) Evening Star
praised Diem as a “valiant and effective fighter,” while to
The Boston Globe
he was “Vietnam’s Man of Steel.”
The Washington Post
acknowledged that America’s “massive aid” had had something to do with South Vietnam’s success; a huge part of the answer, though, lay “in the determination and the resources of character of this remarkable man.” Not to be outdone,
The Saturday Evening Post
pronounced Diem “the mandarin in a sharkskin suit who’s upsetting the Reds’ timetable.”
⁴

Even skeptics, who had never imagined the South Vietnamese leader would last in power this long, struck a new chord. “I had always thought of him,” one witty scribe remarked, “as Per Diem—good only for a day.”
⁵

American ethnocentrism permeated much of the reporting, with emphasis given to Diem’s can-do optimism, his love of freedom, his Western attire, and most of all, his faith. Diem, the administration’s press release pointedly noted, was “a deeply religious man.” Would the point have been underscored had Diem practiced the Buddhism of the vast majority of Vietnamese, so alien to American sensibilities at midcentury? Hardly. But he was the good Catholic Christian, a fact that had not mattered much to U.S. planners at the time of his appointment by Bao Dai in 1954 but was worth a lot now, at his American coming-out party.

Diem proved himself shrewd at playing to the mood in the U.S. capital, mixing in equal doses of humility, gratitude, and determination in his public utterances. His speech to Congress, delivered in heavily accented English, was enthusiastically received, as lawmakers repeatedly interrupted him with applause. Time and again he thanked the United States for her outpouring of “moral and material aid,” without which South Vietnam could never have “overcome the chaos brought about by the war and the Geneva Accords.… I could not repeat too often how much the Vietnamese people are grateful for American aid.” Then a warning: If the aid programs were curtailed or eliminated, the Communists could sweep right in.

Behind closed doors, Diem asked for stepped-up assistance, and although U.S. officials refused to be drawn in—Congress, they informed him, sought to reduce foreign aid spending, not expand it—they assured their guest that America’s core commitment to his government could not be firmer. During his after-dinner toast on the second evening, Eisenhower lauded Diem’s ability to withstand whatever the Communists threw at him, attributing it to the Saigon leader’s understanding of “how much moral values and the concept of human dignity could count for in the minds of men.” Through Diem’s inspired leadership, South Vietnam had become an international symbol of what a small nation could do to resist outside aggression. Eisenhower concluded by raising a glass to President Diem, the Vietnamese people, and “the great and lasting friendship between our two countries.”
⁶

Then it was on to New York for two event-packed days. Diem was stunned and delighted by the parade from lower Broadway to City Hall, for which a crowd estimated at 250,000 lined up to cheer him, throwing bunting and confetti and streamers at the motorcade.
⁷
Mayor Robert Wagner presented him with the city’s Medal of Honor and predicted that history would judge him one of the great leaders of the century. That evening, May 13, the AFV and the International Rescue Committee (IRC) put on a banquet in Diem’s honor at the Ambassador Hotel. Henry Luce presided, and Francis Cardinal Spellman gave an invocation. Guests included John D. Rockefeller, Eleanor Roosevelt, Senators John F. Kennedy and Mike Mansfield, and William Randolph Hearst, Jr. “The word
friends
should be my theme for tonight,” an emotional Diem declared to the gathering after dinner had been served. “Looking at the newspapers since I have arrived in your country, one would think that everybody in America is now a friend of Vietnam.”
⁸
As if to demonstrate the point, IRC chairman Leo Cherne then read the guests a telegram from President Eisenhower praising Diem for showing “the highest qualities of heroism and statesmanship.”
⁹

From there Diem flew to Michigan, then Tennessee, then Los Angeles, and finally Honolulu. Everywhere the accolades continued to rain down. When he boarded the plane for home on May 19, only one verdict was possible: The U.S. visit had been a smashing triumph, a diplomatic tour de force. The red carpet had been rolled out, literally and figuratively, and in those early hours in the capital Eisenhower had set the tone by extolling Diem’s leadership and declaring him “an example for people everywhere who hate tyranny and love freedom.” The adulatory press had steered clear of criticism of Diem’s authoritarian rule, while to the world he had demonstrated in a way he never had before that he had the full support of the most powerful nation on the earth.

Nor was it just the international community that took away this message; Middle America did too. This is what makes these eleven days in May 1957 so important historically. As a result of Diem’s stay and the fawning coverage it received, America’s commitment to Vietnam had been personalized in way it never was before—this in a culture in which, as the saying goes, all politics is personal. A Cold War political commitment made by a comparative handful of elites had become a U.S.
public
commitment, thereby reinforcing it, deepening it, in a way only dimly visible at the time. The visit crystallized the self-congratulatory perception in the popular mind of Ngo Dinh Diem as the lionhearted fighter, the devout Christian in suit and tie, the Miracle Man of Asia, fighting off the rapacious Communists with America’s selfless help. Ticker-tape parades and speeches to joint sessions of Congress have a way of doing that, as do images of a U.S. president standing patiently on the tarmac in the humid noonday sun, waiting for his guest’s plane to touch down.

II

IT IS IRONIC, IN LIGHT OF THE EUPHORIA AND BULLISH CONFIDENCE
surrounding Diem’s visit, that it was precisely at this time that another narrative took hold concerning South Vietnam, one much more somber. Some who adhered to this point of view still detected reasons for long-term optimism; others saw only darkness the deeper they peered into the tunnel. Diem’s repressive system of governance elicited particular concern. “South Vietnam today is a quasi-police state characterized by arbitrary arrests and imprisonment, strict censorship of the press, and the absence of an effective opposition,” an analyst wrote in
Foreign Affairs
in January 1957. “All the techniques of political and psychological warfare, as well as pacification campaigns involving extensive military operations, have been brought to bear against the underground.” Though the repression was in theory aimed at Communists, in practice it targeted anyone, of whatever political stripe, who dared challenge the government.
¹⁰

Even
Life
magazine, otherwise staunchly pro-Diem, felt moved to assert, in an issue that hit the newsstands on the eve of the Saigon leader’s arrival in Washington: “Miraculous though their recovery and progress have been, Diem and Vietnam still have plenty of problems.… For all its electoral and constitutional show, South Vietnam appears in many ways to be as much of a police state as its Viet Minh rival to the north, and Diem may easily be mistaken for another dictator.”
¹¹

More and more, the regime resembled a narrow royal oligarchy, in which real power resided with Diem and his brothers—Ngo Dinh Can, based in Hue and the virtual warlord of Central Vietnam; Ngo Dinh Thuc, the Catholic archbishop of Hue and primate of Vietnam; and, especially, Ngo Dinh Nhu, the president’s main political adviser who together with his wife, the lacquered and bejeweled Madame Nhu, became increasingly influential in the Presidential Palace. The family’s main instrument of rule was its own covert political apparatus, the Can Lao party, whose members, many of them Catholics, held principal posts in the government bureaucracy, as well as in the officer corps and police.