Imperial Stars 3-The Crash of Empire (13 page)

Never, that is, until long after the event. Exhaling his bitterness in 1979, in an interview published by the German weekly
Der Spiegel
, Thieu said: "What he [Kissinger] and the U.S. government exactly wanted was to withdraw as fast as possible, to secure the release of U.S. prisoners. They said they wanted an honorable solution, but really they wanted to wash their hands of the whole business and scuttle and run. But . . . they did not want to be accused of abandoning us. That was the difficulty."

An understandable bitterness, but misdirected and unfair—such was the gist of Kissinger's reaction to the
Spiegel
interview. And so he privately wrote to Thieu, who now lives in London, in January 1980: "I continue to believe that the balance of forces . . . could have been maintained if Watergate had not destroyed our ability to obtain sufficient aid . . . from the Congress in 1973 and 1974. Had we known in 1972 what was to come in America, we would not have proceeded as we did."

There is something moving in this letter—almost (but not quite) a
mea culpa
from a man little noted for brooding on his own mistakes, although he has repeatedly made the point, as readers of his memoirs will remember, that statesmen are often obliged under the pressure of events to make fateful decisions on the basis of insufficient or uncertain information. But this is not one of the wittily rueful
obiter dicta
that adorn Kissinger's memoirs; here he is writing to a man who now sees himself consigned to a sort of hell, the ruin of his people, and protesting—sincerely, no doubt—that his intentions were good. The fact remains that both the balance of forces and the American will to provide sufficient aid were profoundly affected, before Watergate, by Kissinger's negotiations (over a period of four years) with Lei Duc Tho.

Thieu, in any event, never replied to Kissinger's letter, although he allowed Hung to include it in
The Palace File
.

Phan Dinh Phung, after whom "my" street in Saigon was named, was a distinguished scholar, the leader of a 19th-century movement against the French. After the surrender of the boy emperor, Ham Nghi, he stubbornly continued the struggle, was betrayed, captured, and punished, according to Phan Boi Chau's
History of the Downfall
, in a particularly barbarous manner: the bones of his parents were dug up and burned. This story still causes the Vietnamese to shudder, I am told, despite the many new forms of barbarism they have experienced in more recent times, presumably because something more precious than Phung's corporeal existence was at stake: his spiritual links to home and homeland, to the generation of the departed and the generations to come, symbolized by the graves of his parents and the household altar where the ancestral spirits were enshrined.

To what extent these beliefs still hold I never was able to learn, my friends in Saigon being of different minds on the subject, and there was little time to talk about such things. But it was because of these graves and altars that the Vietnamese were said to be so deeply attached to the villages they have been fleeing from in such surprising numbers since the war.

For outsiders there is nothing more difficult than to understand and measure the persistence of old ways of thinking in evolving cultures, especially in those that are violently invaded by new ideas—first, because the point of departure, the original mind set, remains so foreign to us, and then because it is not a person whose thinking and behavior we are trying to understand, which would be complicated enough, but an infinitely various people who reflect the old and the new in an infinite variety of modes and combinations, so that we are driven to oversimplify what otherwise we would be unable to grasp at all.

This can lead to gross misjudgments, as when Frances FitzGerald in her immensely successful
Fire in the Lake
(1972) argued that there was a profound harmony, an almost mystical accord, between the praxis of the Vietnamese Communists and the ancient system of values and beliefs—that Communism, in short, was not only the wave of the future in that unhappy country but also, curiously, the wave of the past.

This book created a considerable stir, as I recall, because it was no longer merely saying that our intervention in Southeast Asia was ill-conceived and doomed, which many had said before, but that it would be a good thing if the other side won. But then it did win, and our allegedly wise and prescient adversaries, with their deep roots in Vietnamese tradition, proceeded to wreak such horrors and atrocities on their people, and on the Laotians and Cambodians as well, that the cleansing fire in FitzGerald's lake, the Communist victory in Indochina, must now be seen as it is seen by millions of prisoners and refugees: as one of the worst disasters of our time. (Not that Miss FitzGerald has ever made her apologies to the boat people, as many other former supporters of the Vietnamese Communists have done.)

In Washington, once, I ran into Dang Duc Khoi, who used to serve on the staff of Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky, and asked him to forget Frances FitzGerald's politics and tell me what he thought of her account of the old Vietnamese ethos. Generally, for reasons I
feel
rather than understand, the Vietnamese are loath to talk about their religion, but in this case Khoi was fairly rabid: "It's bullshit, she's got it all wrong." From which I concluded that Khoi was unable to forget Miss FitzGerald's politics, and let it go at that. Most of
Fire in the Lake
, after all, despite the promise of the opening chapter, is political: a rehash of the conventional wisdom of the Saigon press corps on the themes I encountered so often (since the correspondents came to see me every day) that I ended by keeping lists of them under such rubrics as VNNDG, meaning the Vietnamese Are No Damned Good, and VCTFT, meaning the Vietcong Are Ten Feet Tall, etc.—such being the foregone conclusions toward which questions, in that atmosphere, were almost always directed.

The point here is not that the conventional wisdom was wrong, or, for that matter, right, but that it was terribly lacking in background and context. Frances FitzGerald at least began with an attempt—practically unique in the journalism of the war—to understand the Vietnamese on something like their own terms. But knowing little to begin with, unable to speak or read Vietnamese, she was obliged to go to France and sit at the feet of Paul Mus, a renowned sociologist who had spent much of his life in Indochina.

There was no American Paul Mus, for the simple reason that we were not interested in the Vietnamese. We became intensely involved with them, perforce, but briefly; and what we learned about them was superficial and functional, as when our "grunts" learned to say
dee-dee
when they needed to move people in a hurry, or
ba-mee-ba
, when they wanted a beer. There were exceptions, of course, personal or professional, but on the whole we kept an extraordinary distance from these people, it seems to me now, even as we made our presence felt in every corner of the country. Indeed, the distance grew in direct proportion to our numbers.

That Phan Dinh Phung gave his name to our street is of little consequence to our story, unless it served to remind us that there were other possible paths to national liberation available to the Vietnamese, before and after the rise of Ho Chi Minh's Lao Dong, or Communist party. As Western imperialism ebbed, exhausted by Europe's internecine wars, Asia experienced a rebirth of self-assertion, confused and tentative at first, pulled this way and that by ancient popular traditions and modernizing impulses, so that the Vietnamese in their struggle against the French had access to a wide range of ideas and models, from the Japan of the Meiji restoration to the Japan of the postwar constitution, from the China of the Kuomintang to the China of Mao, not to mention phenomena intellectually if not geographically more distant, from Gandhi to Nehru to Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore.

What we now call Vietnam came under French colonial rule in the heyday of empire and had been subject to French cultural and economic influence for centuries. Vietnam's misfortune—and ours—was that the period of its decolonization coincided with the extraordinary vogue of Marxism among the French intelligentsia after World War II; and that the most talented and charismatic of its anti-colonial leaders, Ho Chi Minh, opted for Leninism early in his career and stuck to it as it evolved into Stalinism, brilliantly adapting its conspiratorial methods to local conditions, emulating (in the movement he forged) the energy and discipline of the Bolsheviks, their patience and also, alas, their peculiar unconcern with the consequences of their action on the people for whom, theoretically, it was undertaken. As they were the instruments of history, their conscience was always clear. Their task was neither to agonize about means nor to indulge in Utopian blue-printing of the future, but to smash the old state and set up a new one, after which they would "proceed to build socialism," as Lenin said on the evening of the October
Putsch
, with only the foggiest notion of what this entailed.

So the accent of Ho Chi Minh's Lao Dong, or Communist, party was always on how to win, not on what it would do with its victory; and this helps to explain why the state the Communists wound up with in the North after the French gave up and went home remained essentially a war machine, geared and oiled and rigged for further fighting, and not much good for anything else.

But very good for that—especially since the Soviets and the Chinese seemed prepared to fuel the machine forever. It took some hubris to imagine that the soft, slothful, disorganized South could prevail against it or even survive, unless Hanoi could be persuaded to turn its energies elsewhere. But this was unlikely. In his long march to power Ho was known by many other names, and so was the Lao Dong, but the main thrust of their action was always the same: first against their Vietnamese rivals to establish their monopoly of the revolutionary project, so that no nationalist would have anywhere else to go; and only then against the foreigner.

The latter, whether French or American or Chinese, was condemned by the iron law of history; his departure could and should be accelerated by the
dau tranh
, the movement, but it was inevitable in the long run. The great thing was to ensure that it happened under the leadership of the anointed party, so that there could be no question, afterward, about who was in charge. Thus the Bolshevik praxis, carefully studied by Ho during his long exile in China, Moscow, and Western Europe, not only permitted but required him and his comrades to eliminate other nationalist leaders, even if this meant assassinating them or betraying them to the French police.

The name of the game was power, undiluted, unshared—and unlike the interminable and insufferable chatter of the Frenchified intelligentsia, so busy plotting against one another in the South, it was played for keeps. Indeed, the very existence of an independent South was intolerable, and the major affair of the North, once it had secured its base, was to put an end to it. With military supplies assured and the Northern population thoroughly regimented, only tactical concerns dictated prudence for a time. But all this, as my friend Khoi used to say, was
connu et archi-connu
, "clear beyond a shadow of a doubt," except to the contemporary versions of Lenin's "useful idiots" in the West.

He might have added that there were useful idiots in Saigon, too. The South was at once indubitably Vietnamese and indubitably different, and the number and quality of Southerners who said
vive la difference
were such that the Lao Dong was obliged for the moment to concoct an elaborate lie about its intentions, especially after news of how the common folk in the North were faring under Communist rule—stories of famine and bloody repression—began to seep through the bamboo curtain. Hence the creation of the National Liberation Front (NLF) and its military arm, the Vietcong, every unit (as we now know from Hanoi itself) carefully controlled by its core of Lao Dong cadres; and the constantly reiterated promise that the South, until it rallied spontaneously to Communism, would be allowed to go its own way.

Connu et archi-connu!
Instructed by experience, the Northerners who had fled to the South—now grown to more than a million—could hardly be expected to fall for this line, but there were others (increasingly as the Diem government disappointed and outraged them) who believed it and others who joined the NLF, or supported it for one reason or another, without believing it or half-believing it or simply hoping that something would happen to make it come true—enough of them to start the war against the South that was as fatal to them in the end as it was to the declared enemies of the Lao Dong.

So much for ancient history—and by way of explaining why the street of Hung's family was called Phan Dinh Phung. Most of the streets of central Saigon were renamed after the French left in honor of the heroes and slogans of the independence movement, ancient and modern, which the Republic of Vietnam claimed to incarnate in defiance of Hanoi. The republic's writ, to be sure, did not run everywhere in the South. During the Buddhist troubles of 1963 it did not always run the full length of Phan Dinh Phung. But now that South Vietnam had got rid of the nefarious and incompetent Diem and his brother—so I was told in Washington and Honolulu when I was briefed for my new assignment—it would pull itself together with our help and offer a haven to the nationalist forces that the Communists had repressed or extinguished in the North: to Catholics and Buddhists, political parties like the Dai Viet and VNQDD, as well as to the Southern sects and ethnic groups, the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao, the Chams and Khmers and Montagnards, that had either survived the age-old drift of the Vietnamese from the Red River delta toward the Mekong, or sprung up during the past hundred years under French imperial rule.

Arriving in Saigon in January 1965, with no inkling of the chaos we had unleashed by sponsoring the overthrow of Diem two years earlier, I thought it a reasonable proposition that, given time and tranquillity, the republic should be able to survive and enhance the world's varietal richness. The South had always been Vietnam's New Found Land or, more recently, its California, offering room and resources for all, and now—the curtain having come down in the North—a promise of freedom. It was a promise as yet more honored in the breach, to be sure, but the republic was barely seven years old and under siege from the day it was born. This much I had gathered from what I had heard and been able to read during the long journey from Geneva to Washington and then to Honolulu and Saigon.