Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (11 page)

Still another of the ethnic minorities were the Montagnard, or Mountain People: more than forty tribes of hunters and foragers in the Central Highlands. They hated the Vietnamese because of the annual tribute payment the emperors collected, and they had little use for the French, who also taxed them heavily. In 1946 Giap claimed that “to seize and control the highlands is to solve the whole problem of South Vietnam.” The rugged mountains of the Central Highlands were perfect hiding places for guerrillas, and the Montagnard were perfect guides. The French tried to buy Montagnard support and occasionally succeeded. One French sergeant remarked that he had “the Sedangs as allies. They are great big good-looking fellows with nothing on except paint and tattooing and magic charms.” More often than not, the Montagnard sided with the Vietminh. In the late 1940s, Ho Chi Minh brought thousands of Montagnard to Vietminh schools in Tonkin for training as teachers, nurses, and political agents. He promised them that once the French were gone and the imperial court at Hue was destroyed, there would be no more tribute payments.

In South Vietnam Roman Catholics, successors to Vietnamese converted by French missionaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, numbered 600,000 people in 1954. They were a privileged minority who had worked for the French and received the benefits of land, education, and place. Graduates of the French lycées in Hue and Saigon, many received postgraduate training at military schools and universities in France. In South Vietnam they dominated the professions, colleges, civil service, and military. Among most Vietnamese Buddhists, the Roman Catholics were despised, a community tied to foreigners. Ho had targeted them long ago. Once the French were gone, the South Vietnamese elite had to go as well. But in the 1950s and 1960s, South Vietnam was not to be ruled by the Hoa Hao, Cao Dai, Binh Xuyen, Buddhists, Vietminh, Chinese, Khmer, or Montagnards. Power went to Roman Catholics, and at the center of that elite was the Ngo family.

The Ngo had formed a short-lived political dynasty in the tenth century and then served in the mandarinate at the imperial court for centuries. Early in the 1700s they converted to Catholicism. They were deeply religious. In the 1880s Buddhist monks led anti-Catholic riots that nearly destroyed the Ngo family. A Buddhist mob attacked the parish church at Dai Phong during mass. More than one hundred of the Ngo family were burned at the stake later that day.

One family member was not there. Ngo Dinh Kha was in Malaya studying for the priesthood. When he received news that his parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins were dead, Ngo Dinh Kha returned to Hue and tried to rebuild. He passed the mandarin examinations and, fluent in French, moved quickly up the civil service ladder. Ngo’s first wife died soon after their marriage, but his second wife had nine children. The third of them was Jean Baptiste Ngo Dinh Diem, born on January 3, 1901.

Ngo Dinh Diem grew up Confucian and Catholic. Every morning at 6:00, seven days a week, the family put on their best robes and attended mass, and nearly every day their father spoke to them about duty, fidelity, and loyalty: in effect, the Confucian virtues. Diem attended the French lycée in Hue and became thoroughly engrossed in French history, language, and literature.

Of all the Ngo children, Diem was the most religious. He did not play with other children, and as soon as he could read he spent hours each day by himself studying catechisms and religious histories. At the age of fifteen he entered a Catholic seminary in Hue to begin studying for the priesthood. His older brother, Ngo Dinh Thuc, was doing the same thing. But it soon became apparent that Diem was not meant to be a priest. Thuc urged him to leave the seminary, arguing that he “was too unworldly for the church.” Another friend put it more clearly: “A priest at least learns of the world through the confessional. Diem is a monk living behind stone walls. He knows nothing.” Diem left the seminary but took with him his vow of celibacy, which he kept throughout his life. He attended the French College for Administration in Hanoi and graduated at the top of his class in 1921. Back in Hue, Diem rose through the civil service ranks, becoming a district chief and then a provincial administrator, coming to the attention of the French in 1929 when he uncovered plans for a communist-inspired uprising. There were no distractions in Diem’s life, no women or movies or gambling, only work and prayer. In 1933 Bao Dai appointed him minister of the interior. At the age of thirty-two, Ngo Dinh Diem seemed destined to become prime minister.

1961—Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam, rides through the streets of Saigon. (
Courtesy, National Archives
.)

 

Like so many other Vietnamese, Diem longed for the day when France would leave Vietnam. In Bao Dai’s cabinet, he realized that the French, while talking about Vietnamese autonomy, restricted the imperial court, transforming the emperor and his civil servants into mere puppets. Late in 1933 he resigned from the cabinet in protest.

Diem retired to the family home in Hue, where he spent his days reading, praying, horseback riding, hunting, working in a rose garden, attending mass, and talking with his mother. Except for an abortive attempt to become prime minister in the Japanese puppet regime, Diem for years remained distant from public life. But his relatives believed he was born for greatness, and they supported him financially until an opportunity should come. To his family Diem wrote, “We must continue the search for the Kingdom of God and Justice. All else will come of itself.”

Although a nationalist, Diem kept faith in the Confucian virtues: loyalty, acquiescence, and social place. He wanted the French out, but he did not want the social structure turned upside down. After 1945 Diem’s opposition to communism was intensely personal. His older brother Ngo Dinh Khoi, a former governor of Quang Ngai Province, was anti-French but also anticommunist. The Vietminh arrested him and his young son, convicted them in a kangaroo court, and executed them by burying them alive. Ngo Dinh Diem never forgave the Vietminh. The Vietminh caught up with Diem in Tuy Hoa. They moved him to the highlands of North Vietnam, where he remained in custody for several months, and sent him to Hanoi in January 1946. Ho Chi Minh, interested in gaining the support of Vietnam’s leading Catholic layman, offered Diem a cabinet position. Diem refused, calling Ho an “accomplice and a criminal” in Khoi’s death. Diem was released in March 1946 as part of the Franco-Vietminh Accords.

During the next nine years Diem traveled around the world, staying away from home to avoid the Vietminh. He spent more than three years in the United States, living at the Maryknoll Seminary in Lakewood, New Jersey. At the time the United States was assisting France against the Vietminh but also hoping to find an anticommunist Vietnamese leader around whom a stable government could be built. Diem appeared to be that leader. Wesley Fishel, professor of political science at Michigan State University, met Diem in Japan and spoke at length with him about Indochina. Diem seemed perfect. He was a well-educated Roman Catholic who wanted an anticommunist, independent Vietnam. That Diem was not a believer in democracy mattered little to Fishel. “The people of Southeast Asia are not,” Fishel said, “sufficiently sophisticated to understand... democracy.”

Fishel saw to it that Diem met a number of prominent Americans, including Francis Cardinal Spellman, the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York; Senators John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Mike Mansfield of Montana, and Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas; and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. In 1953 Douglas called Diem “a hero... revered by the Vietnamese because he is honest and independent and stood firm against the French influence.” These men became the core of what was called the Vietnam Lobby, or the American Friends of Vietnam, who incessantly promoted Ngo Dinh Diem in 1953 and 1954. When the Geneva Accords divided Vietnam in 1954, Diem had strong supporters in the United States. On June 18, 1954, destiny called. Bao Dai invited Diem to serve as prime minister in a new government.

Although Ngo Dinh Diem seemed a candidate fit to build an anticommunist South Vietnam, official Washington debated the issue in 1954 and 1955. The French were dead set against Diem. They hoped to stay in South Vietnam and keep their empire, and they knew that he was too much of a nationalist to allow France to remain. They could manipulate Bao Dai, but not Diem. The French reservations concerned President Eisenhower. It was nothing profound, just an uneasiness about Diem’s penchant for a solitary life and his extraordinary commitment to his family. Eisenhower also worried whether so devout a Roman Catholic could really rule a large Buddhist majority. But the real debate in American policy-making circles raged around the views of Diem expressed by two Americans living in South Vietnam in 1954 and 1955: J. Lawton Collins and Edward G. Lansdale.

Nicknamed “Lightning Joe” by his army troops, Collins had commanded the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division at Guadalcanal and then the VII Corps at the D-Day invasion of Europe. After the war Collins served as army chief of staff before President Dwight Eisenhower sent him to Saigon in 1954 as a special envoy to train the South Vietnamese. Collins despised Diem—his political base was too narrow and his sense of destiny too broad. “Lightning Joe” was convinced that Diem would self-destruct and create a political vacuum, which Ho Chi Minh could fill. Collins strongly advised Washington to shift support away from Diem. Diem hated Collins, whom he viewed as a self-righteous American given to pompous advice. Diem wanted American money, not American advice. Collins represented both. In private Diem could be quite animated and often put on a mime act for family members in which he pretended to be Collins, waving his finger in people’s faces and talking loudly about what to do and how to do it. Much more to Ngo Dinh Diem’s liking was Edward G. Lansdale.

Lansdale, an air force officer and former intelligence agent, came to Saigon in 1954 as CIA station chief. He had already helped the Philippines crush the communist-backed Huk Rebellion. Assigned to conduct CIA paramilitary operations against North Vietnam, Lansdale spread rumors and leaflets about Ho Chi Minh, littered North Vietnam with counterfeit currency, warned northern Catholics that communists would persecute them, and destroyed weapons supplies north of the seventeenth parallel. He arranged for several hundred South Vietnamese soldiers to dress up as civilians, infiltrate North Vietnam, and spread rumors that the Vietminh wanted Chinese soldiers to come and rape Vietnamese women. This ploy backfired. The troops went into North Vietnam but did not return, at least not until a few years later, when they came back as guerrillas loyal to Ho Chi Minh. Lansdale became a close friend of Diem, one of the few confidants Diem had outside his family. To Lansdale, Diem was “a man with a terrible burden to carry and in need of friends, and I tried to be an honest friend.” Lansdale thought Diem a dedicated nationalist who loved Vietnam, hated communism, and wanted the best for his people. There was no other individual capable of governing South Vietnam. John Foster Dulles agreed. Dulles’s brother Allen, head of the CIA, told the secretary of state that Lansdale was an astute judge of character and that Diem could be trusted. John Foster Dulles, desperate for a South Vietnamese leader with enough mettle to pull the country together, passed the advice on to Eisenhower, who remained skeptical about Diem’s ability.

South Vietnam preoccupied Dulles. In July 1954, the National Security Council committed the United States to “maintain a friendly noncommunist South Vietnam and to prevent a Communist victory through all-Vietnam elections.” In September 1954 Dulles established the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), a regional security alliance signed by the United States, Great Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, the Philippines, and Pakistan. South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were forbidden by the Geneva Accords from joining, but a subsequent protocol to the treaty stated that if any one of them fell to communism, it would pose a threat to the alliance and justify a military response.

A few people were doubtful. Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson urged Eisenhower to get out as soon as possible. The most eloquent dissent was Graham Greene’s novel
The Quiet American
, published in 1955. “It was a first warning to me,” wrote Gloria Emerson, who read the novel in 1956 and later recalled “but I dismissed the book as brilliant but cynical, until it came back to haunt me.” It is a novel of good intentions, idealism, lack of insight, and dangerous innocence. The quiet American is Alden Pyle, a character based on Edward Lansdale. Pyle believes in a coldly passionate way in abstractions—democracy, freedom, monolithic communism, falling dominoes, and the love of God. The novel is written from the viewpoint of Thomas Fowler, a British journalist who is as committed to reality as Pyle is to abstraction. Trying to convince Pyle of the error of his theories, Fowler observes: