Authors: Frances FitzGerald
As usual, the Vietnamese were right — only in a somewhat oblique manner. As the events of the past eight months were later reconstructed, the Ky junta had remained in power as a result not of its own virtues but of the hundreds of thousands of American troops in Vietnam. Pressured by the Americans to form a “stable government,” the generals of the ARVN had come to a meeting of minds and agreed on a careful division of power: General Thi ran the First Corps, General Vinh Loc the Second, General Bao Tri the Third, and General Dan Van Quang the Fourth; the other generals and colonels either claimed their due from the corps commanders or divided up the non-territorial services between them. As titular head of this collection of autarchic baronies, the generals chose the man who seemed to have the least ability or ambition to interfere with their arrangements and who, fortunately enough, got along with the American ambassador. The Americans expected that a stable regime would bring the ARVN some measure of unity and coherence, but the generals saw to it that the opposite would happen. In dividing up the country they carefully removed all power from the central government so that the very stability of the Ky regime was no more than a function of its weakness. A vain but not a stupid man, Ky understood his position perfectly well. To an American reporter he once described his government as “a very delicate matter, in which many things must be kept balanced. The way we work is that my colleagues decide what they want done and then I try to carry it out.”
1
Regulated by arrangements normal to the Delta, as opposed to central Vietnam, the Ky government had in its own way functioned quite harmoniously until the Honolulu Conference. And then it foundered, for, like almost every other Vietnamese, Ky interpreted the meeting with Johnson as a demonstration of U.S. support and a mandate for him to attempt to consolidate power in his own hands. His dismissal of General Thi was the old Diemist tactic of weakening the territorial commands in order to rule them — except that Ky’s problem was not to maintain control but to achieve it.
2
During the week of March 18, it became quite clear that the political crisis ran a great deal deeper than the quarrel between the generals. The dismissal of General Thi was no more than a trip wire setting off the explosion of long-suppressed anger against the regime and all it stood for. Despite the skepticism of the Americans, the Buddhists meant exactly what they said: they had no interest in a power play for one of the general’s cliques. When on the eve of Thi’s departure for the United States the American embassy persuaded Thi to return to Hue and help quiet the students, Thi went docilely but could do nothing. Without official position, he was of no use to the Buddhists. In the weeks that followed he took to sulking in his small villa, going out occasionally to lurk on the fringes of the crowds assembled to hear the impassioned voice of Thich Tri Quang.
In Saigon the demonstrations became an almost daily occurrence. Beginning in the heart of the French city, in Cholon, or in outlying slums, they started up quickly and without warning, as if from a spontaneous combustion of the noise, the dirt, the traffic, and the crowds. One day it was a gang of fierce slum boys running through the streets, breaking windows, overturning buses and American jeeps and burning them. Another day it was a thousand people squatting in the dust before the Vinh Hoa Dao pagoda, listening patiently to hours of speeches; another day, a parade of students chanting slogans followed by crowds of people wheeling their bicycles and Hondas and turning the streets into rivers of tear gas and exhaust fumes. The bonzes themselves marched only in peaceful demonstrations, but the threat of violence was always there, even in the faces of the white-shirted bourgeois boys of the Buddhist Youth Movement. An American walking through the hot streets knew that he could not trust the police to save him.
In Hue, by contrast, the demonstrations were most often orderly affairs. Led by bonzes or university students, they would move down the long tree-lined avenues between the pagodas and the government and university buildings without disturbing a stone. At night, crossing the bridge over the Perfume River in torchlight procession, they would look like a Chinese festival of lights. In Hue lay the real strength of the Buddhist “struggle movement.” On March 22, the students took over the radio station and closed the university. A large proportion of the soldiers and civil servants in the city went over to their side while the rest guarded an uneasy neutralism. The American advisers simply woke up one morning to find their “counterparts” at war with what they considered the Vietnamese government. When on April 1 General Ky sent his gentle northern colleague, General Pham Xuan Chieu, up to negotiate with the local army officers, the students, shouting and jeering, put Chieu in a pedicab, wheeled him around the city, then sent him ignominiously home. The top generals of the First Corps remained in radio contact with Saigon, but their American advisers could not predict from moment to moment what they would do. In Da Nang the civilian mayor, Dr. Nguyen Van Man, openly went over to the side of the dissidents and was to be seen in the front of the government offices encouraging the soldiers and civil servants to oppose the regime. In Qui Nhon the province chief, a notoriously venal man, barricaded himself into his house to protect himself from the hundreds of angry, heckling high-school students, and refused to perform his duties.
To experienced observers the struggle movement was assuming the shape of the first attack on the Khanh government in the summer of 1964: on the one hand a regional separatist movement in Vietnam, on the other a revolt of the civilian parties — including the Catholics — against military rule. These two major vectors were complicated by a student protest against corruption in government, a nascent peace movement, and a growing anti-American sentiment among student groups, left-wing intellectuals, and some of the trade unions. As always, the Buddhists provided a focus for the movement, but the bonzes remained as divided as ever. Tam Chau, the cautious old northerner, made his peace with the Catholics and the Americans, and counseled moderation. The radicals, Thich Thien Minh and Thich Ho Giac, sped around Saigon in their black limousines and called for action. Thich Tri Quang, as always, remained the controlling influence over the whole struggle movement in central Vietnam. Only now, as befitted the gravity of the war, the proportions of the Buddhist movement were a great deal larger than they had been in 1964.
To American journalists new to Vietnam the whole situation had become hallucinatory. For the past six months the American generals had been congratulating themselves on their great victory in preventing the Viet Cong from “cutting the country in half” and now the opposite had happened: the GVN had cut itself in half and all the American troops in Vietnam could do nothing about it. Where now was the “government” that the United States claimed to be supporting? The GVN officials in the First Corps remained conciliatory, but the demonstrations revealed a great reservoir of anti-American feeling among the urban population. And a deep hostility to the Saigon generals.
On April 4, Air Vice-Marshal Ky announced that Da Nang was an “enemy-held city” and that he intended to liberate it from the Communists. General Wallace M. Greene, the U.S. Marine commandant visiting Da Nang, took strong exception to Ky’s statement — as far as he was concerned, the U.S. Marines were still holding Da Nang — but the American embassy in Saigon appeared to agree with Ky’s view, for on the same day Ambassador Lodge declared that “the government” was justified in attempting to reestablish its control over Da Nang and Hue by all means, including the use of force. A week of chaos followed.
On April 5, Premier Ky and Defense Minister Nguyen Huu Co arrived at the Da Nang air base with fifteen hundred Vietnamese Marines and two companies of national police in six U.S. troop transports piloted by Americans.
3
On arrival they discovered that their writ extended no further than the end of the runway — indeed not that far, as the Da Nang air base was controlled by the Americans. Learning that the local dissident troops had set up roadblocks and machine gun positions on the road to the city, the American commander thought it advisable to close the airport gates. After a day spent at the airport — a day spent watching the irate citizens of Da Nang cursing and throwing bottles at his troops — Ky flew back to Saigon with the surprising announcement that what he faced was a “political problem.”
Ky’s inept little demarche left the junta in a much weaker position than before, for now its troops had been counted and found wanting. The commanders of the Second and Fourth Corps, Generals Vinh Loc and Quang, began to absent themselves from meetings of the Armed Forces Council with curt excuses about pressing appointments. The demonstrations blossomed once more in Saigon and throughout the cities held by the First Corps. The Da Nang incident forced the Buddhists to take a much harder stand. Having backed the use of force, the Americans now tried the diplomatic threat of removing all American civilians from Hue and Da Nang — with the result that the demonstrations took on an even more anti-American tone. In Hue there were street signs reading
DOWN WITH THE CIA, END THE FOREIGN DOMINATION OF OUR COUNTRY, AND END THE OPPRESSION OF THE YELLOW RACE.
Sent to relieve General Thi’s replacement (the first government appointee ended by defecting to the Buddhists), General Ton That Dinh found that he had no troops to carry out the junta’s orders. Against all instructions he began to meet with the Buddhist leaders, to calm the fears of the Catholics and the VNQDD, and to restore some order to the city.
4
His was the only intelligent move made by a government official for the duration of the crisis, for by April 10 it was clear that the Buddhist struggle movement controlled central Vietnam, and that the three generals of the junta would have to negotiate — on their own.
On April 10, American transports removed the Vietnamese Marines from Da Nang, and the next day President Thieu convened a National Political Congress made up of representatives from all political parties, including the Buddhists, to work out a transfer of power to the civilians. Two days later, ignoring Ky’s threatening movement of paratroopers in and out of the airports of Saigon and Da Nang, Thieu signed a decree promising elections for a constitutional assembly within three to six months. The document was vaguely worded, but it was interpreted as a total capitulation to the Buddhists.
The irony of the American position was now complete. Calculated to impress the Vietnamese with the need for stability and political harmony, the Honolulu Conference had done the opposite. Instead of pressuring Ky into more cooperation with the United States, it boxed the Americans into supporting the general in whatever self-serving or impolitic schemes he might undertake. With the Buddhist revolt, the United States found itself backing three generals (now quarreling among themselves) against the biggest popular movement ever to arise out of the Vietnamese cities, and opposing what they had more or less favored all along — elections and a constitutional civilian government. What was more, they had counseled the use of force against a civilian population. What was more, they lost.
What could account for such a policy? In part it had to do with the strange rigidity of State Department thinking. After six months of “stability,” the military junta in Saigon had in the eyes of American officials become a government on a par with that of West Germany or Great Britain. The fact that the Ky regime had little support in its own country, and the idea that purely as a matter of realpolitik it might not be the best government with which to fight a war, did not seem to weigh as considerations. The Ky junta was the government and therefore the Buddhists were the illegal insurgents.
Behind the legalistic habit of mind, however, was the fact that the United States had made a heavy investment in the Vietnamese army and none in the civilian parties. The commitment of two hundred and fifty thousand American troops in 1966 was a commitment not so much to a government or to a political process as to the thirty thousand American soldiers and the millions of dollars the United States had
already
invested in Vietnam. Only two junior officers in the entire State Department staff at the embassy were employed to pay some attention to the civilian parties; the rest were formally required not to have any contact with the opposition — an order which under the Ky regime effectively prevented them from seeing any civilian politicians at all. At the outset of the crisis the U.S. embassy had almost no contact with the Buddhists. In the entire American establishment in Vietnam — a matter of some thousands of people apart from the regular combat troops — only a handful of young men, volunteer workers for the nongovernmental International Voluntary Service, had any notion of the extent of the Buddhist and central Vietnamese resentment against the Ky regime.
Still, U.S. policy did not seem to be entirely a function of unconditional American support for the junta. As the crisis wore on, U.S. officials in both Saigon and Washington seemed to grow more and more convinced that the Buddhist movement would be, if it were not already, dominated by the Communists. Just after Ky’s debacle in Da Nang, Johnson’s chief adviser, McGeorge Bundy, attacked Tri Quang in a public speech, charging that he intended to seize power and then make a coalition with the Communists.
5
A few days later the
New York Times
columnist, Cyrus L. Sulzberger, who was at the time staying at Deputy Ambassador Porter’s house in Saigon, wrote a series of editorials describing the Viet Cong infiltration of the Buddhist movement and predicting a Communist take-over of Hue and Da Nang if the Buddhists were not stopped.
6
The truth of these allegations was extremely questionable. There were, to be sure, NLF agents within the Buddhist movement, but at the time no American official could have ascertained that there were more of them in that movement than, say, in the ARVN headquarters of the General Staff or in the American employ. Given the previous American ignorance of Buddhist politics, the speed with which the officials came to such a drastic conclusion revealed less about the Communist leanings of the Buddhists than about the suspicion and hostility existing between the Buddhists and the Americans.