A month before the Geneva agreements were signed, Colonel Edward C. Lansdale arrived in Saigon, where he had been sent by the American Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. He was to head the Central Intelligence Agency office in Vietnam. Lansdale was a remarkable man. His life and his work were wrapped up in the idea of democracy. But he was not just a street-corner preacher. He was a very practical man who had shown that he could do what he said he would do. His soft spoken approach had earned him the nickname “the Quiet American,” His mission was to save Vietnam from communism.
At the end of World War II, he had been sent to the Philippines to do the same thing. That nation, which had recently ended a half-century as an American colony, was facing a serious rebellion led by communists. Lansdale worked closely with Filipino leaders to fight the rebellion through both political and military means. He had succeeded because he was able to convince the government that its best tool against the rebels was to listen to what they said needed to be done-and then to do it. In the Philippines he had picked one leader, Ramon Magsaysay, and became his friend and aide. In Vietnam he planned to do the same thing and he chose Ngo Dinh Diem. That was a great mistake and, in a way, very surprising.
Just ten years before, you remember, the CIA (then known as the OSS) had sent Major Patti to Vietnam. That officer had decided that Ho Chi Minh was the man to back in Vietnam and the United States had done so. The French at that time had been greatly opposed to Ho, of course. Now, after nearly ten years of war, the French had accepted the idea that Ho had the support of the Vietnamese people and that they could deal with him. The United States had also made a complete turnaround. Ho was no longer a nationalist patriot but a communist revolutionary. The United States would oppose him with all its might and would put its hope in Diem.
Lansdale saw Diem as someone very much like his Filipino friend, Magsaysay. Diem was a genuine patriot who was personally honest and who had a dream for his nation’s future. These were certainly good qualities to look for if one was searching, as Lansdale was, for a national leader who would provide a choice between French colonial rule and a communist takeover.
But Diem and Magsaysay were not completely alike. Diem was a Catholic in a country where Catholics were a small group in the great Buddhist population. Magsaysay was a Catholic, also, but so were most of his countrymen. Diem came from the Vietnamese nobility. He was a mandarin, while Magsaysay’s roots were in the rural parts of the Philippines. Diem kept to himself. He was almost a hermit, while Magsaysay had a strong and popular personality.
The man closest to the Magsaysay model in Vietnam was Ho Chi Minh and between him and Diem there was another big difference. Through his many years of lighting and power Ho had gained nothing for himself. He dressed as a peasant and lived simply. Diem too lived simply, but his many friends and relatives used their power to gain great wealth. While Diem himself was not corrupt, he allowed those close to him to become wealthy at the expense of the people.
All of this is easy to see thirty years later. But Lansdale arrived in Vietnam on an urgent mission and he did not have the time to look around for future national leaders. The man who was there, Diem, seemed all right to Lansdale even though he had some problems that had to be overcome. Lansdale made his choice and his choice was Diem. Through him and with him Lansdale set about on his mission-stopping a Communist victory in Vietnam.
Diem had been made Prime Minister of South Vietnam on July 7, 1954, by Emperor Bao Dai. The French had given political freedom to the nation just before the Geneva agreements were signed. The agreements were to be followed by a temporary division of the nation during the first three months of which there would be a “free travel” period in which persons could move freely between north and south-selecting which half of the country they would live in. They would be “voting” with their feet.
Both sides tried hard to attract people to their half of the nation. Diem made his pitch to the Catholic population in the north with the slogan “God has gone south.” This scheme was joined with a CIA plan designed to frighten French businessmen in the north. Both schemes worked and large numbers of Catholics moved south (as did many Viet Minh agents) and most French businesses pulled out of Vietnam. All told, eight hundred and fifty thousand Vietnamese moved south and only eighty thousand went north.
The plan was a disaster as far as the French were concerned. Their hopes for friendly relations with Ho Chi Minh were ruined by the loss of a friendly Catholic population and French business interests in the north. The French felt strongly that the United States was pushing Ho Chi Minh further into the communist camp by taking away his Western allies.
The United States was aware of the problems in their plan. The American ambassador in Vietnam warned the State Department in late 1954 that he had serious doubts about the people’s support for Diem. Secretary Dulles answered that “there is no other suitable leader known to us.” The United States would make do with what it had-Diem.
Lansdale’s hope was that he could quickly make Diem a national hero and give him all opportunity to win the elections set by the Geneva agreement for July of 1956. Of course, since both the United States and South Vietnam had refused to sign those agreements, they were not bound by the elections. But if those elections could be won by Diem, it was good for both nations to let them go on. This might avoid a civil war and show that democracy could win out over communism in a free election. Lansdale used many tricks to build up Diem and cut down Ho. Among these was the publication in Hanoi of a fortune-telling book. The Vietnamese are a superstitious people, and this particular book said that if Ho were to win the election, ,disaster would befall the Vietnamese people.
But the United States was not so sure of a Diem victory that it gave up the idea of military action. It developed a plan to train and equip a South Vietnamese army and, in February of 1955, established the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). This group was based on the NATO alliance, which had bound the nations of Western Europe and North America into a common defense alliance after World War II.
SEATO was very different from NATO though. Most of its members were European nations who joined only because America asked them to. While NATO nations really cared about their treaty, SEATO members had nothing at stake. But SEATO did require that member nations defend any other member attacked by any other country. The SEATO treaty would give America a legal right to fight in Vietnam.
With all the players now on stage, the tragedy of Vietnam began again. Diem had no real power. He had been appointed by the very unpopular Emperor Baa Dai. He had not been elected by the people. He tried to make himself stronger by appointing his friends and relatives to the most important government jobs and by beating the criminal gangs who ran much of South Vietnam (including the Saigon Police Department).
To Diem, giving important jobs to his family and friends was not unusual. He believed in a philosophy called “personalism,” in which personal relationships are the major force in life. The better you knew someone, the more you should respect them. It was natural, then, for him to surround himself with people chosen for their jobs because of their closeness to him rather than on any special talents they might have had.
At Lansdale’s suggestion Diem also called for elections in South Vietnam. These took place in October of 1955 and were intended to strengthen his rule. Diem won the election with a highly suspicious ninety-eight percent of the vote, and then announced that he would not agree to the scheduled national elections because of the chance that they might be rigged by Ho Chi Minh.
While any election held in a country with no history of democracy may be fixed, and while it seems likely that Ho Chi Minh would have been happy to stuff some ballot boxes, Diem’s statement was very odd. There can be no question that Ho Chi Minh would have won any honest election. In fact, Ho’s victory was seen as certain by President Eisenhower. Diem had not caught on with the people as Lansdale had hoped.
It looked very much as if Diem did not want elections because he did not want to lose. To keep himself in power, he used the secret police headed by his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu. This brutal organization killed thousands of opponents of Diem’s regime. At the same time, in the north, the Viet Minh were killing thousands of their own opponents. If you hope to find good guys in this story, you will be disappointed. There are none.
Diem also tried a softer approach. He presented ideas for land reform that would give the peasants a chance to own their own farms and bring some independence to their lives. Unfortunately, the program was run by Diem’s family and friends, who saw it, and took it, as another chance to make some money. At the same time the cost of supporting Diem’s friends and family and of raising an army to protect against invasion from the north also caused a great increase in taxes. The higher taxes upset the peasants very much. In villages throughout South Vietnam opposition to Diem increased.
To stop this opposition Diem took a serious step. For centuries, indeed for thousands of years, the village had been the basic unit of Vietnamese life and government. The village was one’s world and one’s life. Indeed the old Vietnamese word for village, “xa,” comes from the words for “land,” “people” and “sacred.” As we have seen, governments in Vietnam were pretty much powerless except for some phases of French Colonial rule. Diem sought to stop opposition and expand his power by cancelling all village elections and naming village chiefs himself. Village independence had been respected by the invading Chinese, French and Japanese. That a native Vietnamese should end it shows that Diem had become desperate or foolish. The opposition to him was silenced for the moment, but it was not ended.
There were no elections in 1956. Ho Chi Minh made some protest about this, but he seems to have known what the International Control Commission set up by the Geneva agreements publicly stated: the Geneva agreements were a failure. Neither side had honored either the military cease-fire or the political parts of it.
The option was clear-war, long and destructive war. In 1957, Diem began to appeal for more American military aid. In part, Diem wanted help to combat his opponents in South Vietnam. But in part, too, his plea was a response to the increased activity of those people whom Diem called the Viet Cong. That name was intended as an insult. It referred to ‘the Viet Minh supporters who lived in the South. But the name stuck and is useful in a way. It will become more important to know that there was a difference between South Vietnamese who opposed the Diem regime (whether they supported Ho Chi Minh or not) and those people who would soon be moving south as invaders. Neither the United States nor any other foreign nation had much business interfering with a native revolt. Certainly SEATO did not. It promised protection only against outside aggression. When outside aggression did take place, then America’s right to step in was much clearer, in a legal sense at least. While there is much reason to believe that the Viet Cong in South Vietnam took their orders from Hanoi in the north, that is not completely certain, and so it is helpful to speak of the Viet Cong to describe that group of South Vietnamese who were followers of Ho Chi Minh as well as those who simply opposed the Diem regime in South Vietnam. Later, when the lines are less clear between southern rebels and northern invaders, we will use the initials NLF (National Liberation Front) to describe the southern guerrillas. That was their organization and gives us a way to see these native opponents as different from the North Vietnamese Army.
By 1960, Lansdale bad left Vietnam and had been replaced by William Colby as CIA chief. Colby, who later went on to head the CIA during the Nixon administration and to become American ambassador to Iran, launched a new effort called the strategic hamlet program. This program took the Diem mistake about village elections and made it even worse. The village residents were moved out of their homes into fortified camps called strategic hamlets. The hamlets were seen as a means of self-defence against the Viet Cong, who at that time were very busy killing off the village leaders appointed by Diem.
The mistake in the program was that the villagers did not want protection and certainly did not want to be moved from their ancient homes and farms. They did not always necessarily see the Viet Cong as enemies, but as neighbors, friends and family. When night came and the Viet Cong were ready to return home, the villagers opened the gates of their hamlets and let them back in. The program quickly became a joke.
This was so in part because the program was run by the military. That is not to say that the military did not run it well. The problem was that the military naturally act from a military point of view. Their training is in the military way of solving problems. The strategic hamlets were not a military solution; they were to be a way for the villagers to protect themselves without aid from the military. The military leaders, from the first, had very little belief in the program and when they realized that it would be easier to keep the villagers inside the hamlets than to try to keep the Viet Cong alit of them, they turned the hamlets into prisons for the people who lived there. Since you could not tell the Viet Cong from other villagers, the simplest way to keep the Viet Cong from wandering around causing trouble was to lock everybody up in the hamlets. This tactic did little to slow the growth in opposition to the Diem regime.
By 1961, America had to make a major decision about Vietnam. Six years had gone by and billions of dollars had been spent and almost nothing had been gained. The American aid was not doing any good, so the Americans had to consider whether to increase that aid or pull out entirely.
The decision fell to John F. Kennedy, who had been inaugurated as president on January 20, 1961. Two things happened on that day that set the course for what was to follow.
First, Kennedy gave a strong inaugural address in which he said:
Let every nation know… that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.
The language is strong and clear, It announced that President Kennedy was going to be active in foreign affairs, something he would show often in his brief term as president.
The second event was much less public. President Eisenhower spoke to Kennedy about Southeast Asia. He told Kennedy that he thought that he would have to send troops to that area and that, if he did, he could count on Eisenhower’s public support. Eisenhower was very worried about the situation in Laos, which was similar to what was going on in Vietnam, but with more communist military forces involved. The Laos situation was cleared up rather quickly, though, through an agreement as to who would run the country. If Kennedy were to listen to Eisenhower’s warning about Southeast Asia, he would do it in Vietnam.
Eisenhower was not the only leader to give President Kennedy advice about Vietnam. Shortly after his inauguration, Kennedy went to France and met with French President Charles De Gaulle. The French experience in Vietnam was still a painful memory, which was made stronger by the fact that France was now going through the same thing again in its colony in Algeria. DeGaulle told Kennedy, “I predict to you that you will, step by step, be sucked into a bottomless military and political quagmire.” DeGaulle was right.
Kennedy took Eisenhower’s advice very seriously. The communists’ use of force around the world was of real concern to him, but he had problems in trying to stop it. Kennedy had favored a neutral government in Laos, which many people saw as giving an advantage to the communists. He had backed an invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. When that failed he was criticized for not allowing strong air support for the invaders.
After much thought, he decided to increase American military efforts in Vietnam. In December of 1961, he sent in three hundred helicopter pilots. Within a few months the American military support group had increased to four thousand people.
By 1963, the United States was a real military force in Vietnam, and Kennedy had only eleven months left to live. What would have happened had he lived is one of the unanswered questions about Vietnam. But we can see in what happened in those few months some signs of what he planned to do. The fact that the signs are hard to read shows that Kennedy himself was not sure what he intended, and that probably is the real truth.
Things were taking place in Vietnam that would have made any American leader worry. The Buddhists were becoming more active in their opposition to Diem. This opposition had very little to do with any support for Ho Chi Minh. Nearly ninety-five percent of all Vietnamese were Buddhists and yet Diem would not allow them to practice their religion in peace. Some of his actions were very foolish.
On Buddha’s birthday one Buddhist temple flew a religious flag. The secret police removed it. When Buddhists took to the streets to protest, forty of them were killed.
The street protests continued though, and on June 11, 1963 a Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Due sat down on a Saigon street, poured gasoline all over himself, and set himself on fire as a protest against the Diem regime. The newspapers had been told what would happen, and the awful pictures of the monk sitting on fire in the street were seen throughout the world. President Diem’s sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, described the event as a “barbecue.” Diem and his family did not understand that the people’s problems were real and had to be solved.
While Diem’s family may have literally laughed about the burning, President Kennedy was deeply shocked. He began to talk about withdrawing American forces. As a caring person he could not back the things Diem was doing, and as a politician he could not afford another loss in foreign affairs. He began to take steps to show how upset he was.
The American Ambassador to South Vietnam was Frederick Nolting-a Diem supporter. In August, Kennedy replaced him with Henry Cabot Lodge. Lodge was an odd choice in a sense. He was a Republican from Massachusetts (which is a little odd itself) and he had been a United States Senator until he had been defeated by John Kennedy himself. In 1960, he was the Republican candidate for vice president running with Richard Nixon against the Democratic team of Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
But Lodge was a man of great experience in foreign affairs. (He had been Ambassador to the United Nations from 1953 to 1960.) He was also a man of great talent. He would provide the fresh look that Kennedy needed, and Kennedy hoped that his advice would be good.
His first action was to meet with Nolting in Hawaii on his way to Saigon. Nolting told him that the Buddhist problem was over. But while they talked, Buddhist temples all over South Vietnam were being raided, and one thousand four hundred Buddhists were sent to prison. Though no one said it out loud, any person watching what was going on would have known that the United States could no longer aid the Diem government.
Among the people who were watching things closely were the military leaders of South Vietnam. In late August, soon after Lodge arrived in Saigon, word came to him that some of the generals were thinking of overthrowing Diem’s government. Lodge asked Washington what he should do. A telegram came back telling him to do two things. First he was to tell Diem that his brother Nhu had to be removed from power as head of the police. Second he was to tell the generals about this and that, if Nhu was not removed, then all American support would be cut off.
The South Vietnamese military needed American military aid. An end to that aid meant a possible invasion from the north. The generals took the telegram as a “green light”-a signal to go ahead with their plans. It may not have been that. The United States was saying that Nhu had to go; it was not yet saying that Diem had to go. But the generals did not believe that Diem would remove his brother from power, and so to them it meant that Diem had to go in order to keep American aid.
Lodge saw the telegram the same way that the generals did, and he told the State Department that an effort to remove Nhu would be useless. Diem would be removed, he told them, and they may as well support it now. The State Department gave Lodge the power to make his own decisions while hoping that the generals and Diem could work out a way to solve the problem of Nhu.
The same day President Kennedy cabled Lodge himself and told Lodge that he would do what he could to help the generals succeed, but that he might cancel American support at the last minute if he felt that necessary.
While these signs from Washington were not very clear, it seems as if Washington was slowly accepting the need for getting rid of Diem, but wanted also to do the impossible-to seem not to be involved in it.
By early October the Washington policy seemed to be that the United States would not oppose a coup and would work with any new government that came about. At the same time Washington hoped that Diem would remain in power, and if the coup did take place, the United States did not want Diem to be killed.
In Saigon, Lodge felt that the coup was going to happen; things had moved too far and too fast to stop things now. On October 30, Lodge received a telegram from Washington telling him that the coup should not happen unless it was certain to succeed. Lodge reported back that there was nothing he could do to stop it. Whether that was true or not, the coup took place two days later on November 1, 1963. A CIA agent was at the headquarters of the generals with a direct phone line to the American Embassy. Lodge offered Diem and his family a plane to fly them out of the country. Diem refused the offer, and he and his brother went into hiding in the homes of friends.
A junta (joint ruling committee) consisting of Generals Minh, Kim and Dyon took control on November 1. The next day Diem and Nhu were captured and killed.
Washington was shocked. Kennedy himself was deeply saddened and continued to talk about removing American forces from Vietnam. But nothing more than talks took place, for on November 22, 1963, in the streets of Dallas, Texas, John F. Kennedy was himself killed by an assassin’s gun.