A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (30 page)

Ho and his Communist mandarins were preoccupied for the first four years after the Geneva Agreements of 1954 with more problems than they could manage in the North. They had a devastated countryside to reconstruct, a population estimated at 14 million to feed in a rice-deficient region cut off from its traditional source of imports in the South, a scarcity of technicians of every kind, and a small and antiquated industrial plant they wanted to enlarge and refurbish as an essential step to modern nationhood. All the while they were engineering a social revolution to transform the North into a Marxist state.

Their mistakes compounded their preoccupations. Truong Chinh, the secretary-general of the Party, inflicted a horror on the country by letting the land-reform campaign get out of hand in his zealotry. The terror caused the deaths of thousands of large and small landholders, including a considerable number of Party members who were purged and executed after trials on trumped-up charges before so-called People’s Agricultural Reform Tribunals. The army had to put down an insurrection in November 1956 by Catholic peasants in Ho’s home province of Nghe An, killing many farmers in the process. These Catholics, who had not fled to the South like the other two-thirds of their pro-French community, had been singled out for vengeance by Chinh’s land-reform cadres. (No reliable statistics are available on the deaths resulting from the land-reform campaign and the suppression of the Catholic peasant rebellion. What precise figures have been published, especially the often-cited one of 50,000 deaths, are largely CIA propaganda. It is clear that thousands died.) Ho apologized for the crimes, abolished the tribunals, ordered the release of all who had been imprisoned, and launched a “Campaign for the Rectification of Errors” to try to quiet the furor. Chinh was dismissed from his post as Party secretary-general. In a speech to a Central Committee meeting in the fall of 1956, Giap admitted that among other “errors,” “we … executed too many honest people …
and, seeing enemies everywhere, resorted to terror, which became far too widespread. … Worse still, torture came to be regarded as a normal practice.”

The Soviets, as they had in 1945, betrayed the Vietnamese again for their overriding big-power interests. The Eisenhower administration was intent on perpetuating the division of Vietnam by turning the Geneva Conference’s “provisional military demarcation line” at the 17th Parallel into an international boundary. The National Security Council had taken a secret decision to sabotage the Geneva Agreements a few days after they were reached. Washington used Diem, with his enthusiastic cooperation, to block the all-Vietnam election the Final Declaration of the conference had scheduled for July 1956. (While Diem was anxious to stop an election he knew he would lose, neither Vietnamese side ever relinquished a claim to sovereignty over the entire country. The three horizontal red stripes on Bao Dai’s and Diem’s flag stood for North, Central, and South Vietnam.) The Soviet Union was cochair with Britain of the Geneva Conference. Khrushchev was pursuing his policy of “peaceful coexistence” in the latter half of the 1950s. To placate the United States, he declined to make an issue of Hanoi’s demands that the election be held. During a UN Security Council debate in early 1957 over an American request to admit South Vietnam to the United Nations, the Soviet delegate proposed that the dispute be resolved by admitting both North and South because “in Vietnam two separate States existed.”

Ho protested all of this without energy. His internal troubles were so great and he was so dependent on Soviet assistance to rebuild the North that he seems to have become resigned to the division of the country for the time being, at least. The extent of his resignation showed, perhaps more than he intended, in a public letter he addressed in mid-1956 to the 130,000 Viet Minh soldiers, administrative cadres, and their dependents who had withdrawn to the North after the Geneva Conference. The Party had told them when they left that they would be able to return after the 1956 election. Ho tried to explain why they could not go home. “Our policy is to consolidate the North and to keep in mind the South,” he wrote. Diem resolved Ho Chi Minn’s dilemma.

Jean Baptiste Ngo Dinh Diem (Vietnamese Catholics often gave their children a French first name as well as their Vietnamese one) was fifty-three years old and almost as ignorant as Lansdale was of the political and social realities of his country when he returned to Vietnam on July 7, 1954, after nearly four years of exile. His ignorance was willful. He was a mystic. He lived in a mental cocoon spun out of a nostalgic reverie
for Vietnam’s imperial past. The manner in which he rode into Saigon from the airport on the day of his arrival was characteristic. He sat in the back of a curtained car. None of the curious Saigonese who had gathered along the route for a glimpse of the new prime minister could see him, and he was not interested in looking out. “He comes from another planet,” a member of his family once said of him.

He claimed to Americans that his family had been high mandarins since the sixteenth century. In fact, his grandfather had been of lowly birth, a fisherman according to some reports, which helped to explain why Diem was a Confucian caricature, more mandarin than the mandarins of old had ever been. The family owed its fortune to Diem’s father, Ngo Dinh Kha, who had been selected by French missionaries to study for the priesthood and to learn French at a mission school in Penang, Malaya. While Kha had been in Malaya, most of his family had been herded into a church and burned to death. The killing had been one of the many revenge massacres of Vietnamese Catholics by non-Christian mobs instigated by the precolonial court at Hue during the French conquest of Indochina, a lengthy struggle of twenty-nine years from 1859 to 1888.

France utilized Christianity more systematically than any other European power in its colonial expansion. French missionaries came to Vietnam for the greater glory of God and France, and their converts played an essential role in the seizure of the country. When the Vietnamese emperors persecuted the missionaries and their converts as a subversive foreign sect, France used the pretext of “freedom of religion” to justify military intervention. The expeditions provoked more persecutions and massacres, which provided an excuse for more ambitious intervention and permanent occupation. Most of the early converts who had owned land were pauperized by the persecutions, and many of the later ones were lower-class Vietnamese. They saw in the coming of the French an opportunity to rise in the world and feared the consequences if the French did not prevail. They put themselves in the service of the foreigner, breaking the isolation of the European in this Asian land. The French recruited them as soldiers, employed the educated ones as interpreters, and appointed them to positions in the mandarinate (lack of proficiency in Confucian studies was conveniently overlooked) because they could be trusted. Vietnamese parish priests helped to perpetuate colonial rule by nominating lower-level officials for the French authorities. Individual Catholics were to resist the French as patriotically as other Vietnamese, but the role the community played in the conquest and the colonial aftermath was to stigmatize it with an aura
of subversion and treachery and to give Catholics in general a complex of insecurity and dependence on foreigners. Folklore said that their churches and cathedrals were erected with lands stolen from patriots and martyrs. The Catholics were especially resented by disenfranchised scholar-gentry families like Ho’s. In his best-known indictment of colonialism,
French Colonization on Trial
, a book written in French and published in Paris in 1925, Ho portrayed Vietnamese Catholic priests as rapacious land thieves.

Baptism in the Holy Roman Church and a knowledge of the foreigner’s language brought Diem’s father the robe of a mandarin soon after his return from Malaya, eventually carrying him to a high place in Hue as minister of rites and grand chamberlain to the Emperor Thanh Thai. Kha was forced to retire when the French deposed Thanh Thai in 1907 on suspicion of intriguing against them, but through his connections at court and in the church, he rescued a future for his sons in the colonial world. In addition to Khoi, who rose to the governorship of Quang Nam Province, Diem’s next-older brother, Thuc, was ordained a priest and by the end of World War II had become the leading Vietnamese prelate in the South as bishop of Vinh Long. It was characteristic of the ambivalent attitude of the family that Thuc declined to join the three other Vietnamese bishops in the country when they had initially supported Ho Chi Minh’s declaration of independence in the patriotic fervor of 1945.

Diem graduated at the top of his class from the French school for colonial administrators in Hanoi and began his career as a district chief. He had his first clash with the Communists in 1930 and 1931 when he was governor of a minor province in Central Vietnam and helped the French to crush the first peasant revolts the Party fomented during those years. Diem took the trouble to do some reading on Marxism-Leninism. The doctrines of social revolution and atheism struck him as anathema, a manifestation of the anti-Christ. By 1933, when he was only thirty-two years old, his record of hard work and honesty and his political reliability were so well established that the French agreed to his appointment as minister of the interior to Bao Dai, then just eighteen. Diem interested the young emperor, not yet a debauché, in reforming the corrupt mandarinate and attempted to persuade the French to grant the monarchy more autonomy to run the country through a purged and effective bureaucracy. The French refused to disturb what to them was a satisfactory status quo. Bao Dai forgot about reform and found amusements. Diem, who was distinctly unpliable and who as a child had often been beaten by his father for his willfulness, resigned.

For the next twenty-one years he held no public office or other gainful employment. Until the final years of World War II, he lived off the modest landholdings of the family and passed his time at hunting and horseback riding, photography, and a rose garden, remaining celibate, going to mass and receiving communion every morning, writing and talking of politics—never taking any action. The convulsions set off by the world war moved him back into politics, always on the periphery. He negotiated unsuccessfully with the Japanese for the premiership of the puppet regime they set up under Bao Dai; hid from the Viet Minh and was arrested and imprisoned by them; refused an offer from Ho Chi Minh of a place in a coalition government and fled back into hiding; negotiated, once again unsuccessfully, with the French and Bao Dai; and finally went into exile in 1950, first in the United States and then in Belgium and France, because he feared the Viet Minh and the French declined to give him protection. The twenty-one years of waiting carved deeper his eccentricities, hardened his stubbornness, and wrapped him more tightly in his reactionary vision of an imperial past that had never existed. Within Vietnam, except among the narrow circle of anti-Communist nationalists, he gradually passed into the obscurity from which the United States extracted him in 1954.

As Lansdale guided Diem to success in crushing the sects on the theory that Diem was the Magsaysay to form a new and strong central government, it would never have occurred to Lansdale that Diem was beginning his rule by eliminating the most effective opponents of the Communists in the South. The Viet Minh had not been nearly as strong in the Saigon area and in the Mekong Delta as they had been in Central and North Vietnam. The French had been able to stymie the Communists in the region because the society there was so faction-ridden. The Binh Xuyen crime organization and the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao religious sects were much more interested in autonomy within their individual territories than they were in national independence. By 1954 the Binh Xuyen had risen to such a height of rotten glory that any new government with a claim to decency would have had to suppress them. The two religious sects were a different matter.

Cao Daiism was a zany melange of Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, of spiritualist seances and various other occult rites; it had a pantheon of saints that included Joan of Arc, Victor Hugo, and Sun Yat-sen. Its cathedral at its Holy See in the province town of Tay Ninh northwest of Saigon would have dumbfounded Walt Disney. Human credulity seems to be limitless in religion, however, and Cao Dai doctrines were no zanier than some of the religious cults that have
drawn millions of supposedly educated and enlightened Americans. Whatever its imaginative theology and architecture, the political and military force of the sect was real. With their 1.5 to 2 million peasant adherents and a French-sponsored army of 15,000 to 20,000 men, the Cao Dai pope and his hierarchy of cardinals and generals exercised authority over much of the populated region northwest of Saigon and enclaves in the Delta to the south, including My Tho and its immediate environs.

The Hoa Hao was a militant Buddhist sect founded in 1939 by a faith healer named Huynh Phu So. The Communists had foolishly murdered him in 1947 because he would not ally the sect with the Viet Minh. Huynh Phu So’s 1.5 million peasant followers, under the leadership of his disciples, had begun killing Viet Minh from that day forward. The Hoa Hao army of 10,000 to 15,000 men dominated the six provinces of the western Mekong Delta.

A wise ruler would have compromised with the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao. They could have been talked into an arrangement. Diem had, in fact, intrigued with them from abroad, using his family in Vietnam as a contact, and with the Binh Xuyen too, when he was angling to have Bao Dai name him prime minister. He also owed the Hoa Hao a debt. Diem was one of the anti-Viet Minh politicians to whom Huynh Phu So had given shelter. Once in power, Diem would tolerate no potentially independent sources of authority. He was so morbidly suspicious that he could share real authority only with his family. By 1956 he had smashed the sects in a series of campaigns with the ARVN battalions now being paid directly by the Americans rather than through the French as in the past. The Cao Dai pope fled to Cambodia. One of the Hoa Hao leaders was captured and publicly guillotined in Can Tho. The stretches of countryside the sects had controlled became vacuums of authority inhabited by disaffected peasants and the remnants of the sect armies that continued to resist sporadically in guerrilla bands. Had good government been substituted for the shattered theocracies of the sects, their destruction might have been justified. Instead the reign of the Ngo Dinhs began.