Just days before the Tet offensive of 1968, the NLF cadres from the battalions that were to assault Saigon took their men — or so it was reported — to a certain place in the forest to give them their last instructions and words of encouragement. There, where the underbrush had been cleared away for acres, they showed them the hundreds of coffins they had built for the soldiers who would be killed in battle. When they had seen the coffins, the soldiers, it seemed, felt happier and less afraid to die.
As Paul Mus once said, the Vietnamese know a great deal better than we do that society is largely made up of its dead. For the Vietnamese, life is but a moment of transition in the unbroken skein of other lives stretching from the past into the future. Death in the absolute sense comes only when there is a break in the society that carries life on through the generations. Such a break had come in the life of the Ngo family; it had by the 1960’s occurred to most Vietnamese families of the south. It was not just that so many had lost their sons and their ancestral lands in the war; it was that even before the war so few of the young people had practiced the rites of ancestor worship. They had not practiced the rites because they were, as the young said, “not practical.” But the NLF had offered them a new kind of family, a new form of social security. The sight of the coffins reassured the soldiers because it showed them not only that the Front cared about their future, but that it could fulfill its promises. The provision of the coffins was, after all, a logistical triumph and, as such, a sign that the Front had the power to reweave the society and restore its continuity through past, present, and future. The weaver of that unity was Ho Chi Minh.
Upon his return to Vietnam in the 1940’s, Ho Chi Minh set up his headquarters in a cave in the northern mountains above a swiftly rushing river. He renamed that mountain Marx and the river Lenin, making a symbolic connection between the ancient Vietnamese image that defined the country and the new history in which that country would live. His method was traditional — the rectification of names. Ho Chi Minh’s life made the same connection. As a child he lived in the countryside with his mandarin father, who had engaged in the last resistance of the traditional Confucians to the West. As a young man he had gone West — to Paris, to Moscow, and then back to Vietnam by way of China. As a mature man he had made the synthesis, turning Western theories and methods to use against the Western occupation of his country. Through Marxism-Leninism he provided the Vietnamese with a new way to perceive their society and the means to knit it up into the skein of history. He showed them the way back to many of the traditional values and a way forward to the optimism of the West — to the belief in change as progress and the power of the small people. Through Marxism-Leninism he indicated the road to economic development, to a greater social mobility and a greater interaction between the masses of the people and their government. He reformed the villages, linked them together, and created a nation. Whether or not the system could stand up to the full force of the American war, whether it would last a thousand years, whether it would in the end prove only destructive to Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia, it was, nonetheless, a way to national unity and independence, and, by the end of the American war, still the only way the Vietnamese knew.
II
The Americans and the Saigon Government
5
Mise en scène
This war, like most wars, is filled with terrible irony. For what do the people of North Vietnam want? They want what their neighbors also desire: food for their hunger, health for their bodies and a chance to learn, progress for their country, and an end to the bondage of material misery. And they would find all these things far more readily in peaceful association with others than in the endless course of battle.
These countries of Southeast Asia are homes for millions of impoverished people. Each day these people rise at dawn and struggle through until the night to wrest existence from the soil. They are often wracked by disease, plagued by hunger, and death comes at the early age of forty.
Stability and peace do not come easily in such a land. Neither independence nor human dignity will ever be won by arms alone. It also requires the works of peace. The American people have helped generously in times past in these works. Now there must be a much more massive effort to improve the life of man in that conflict-torn corner of our world.
Lyndon Johnson,
Speech at Johns Hopkins University
(April 7, 1965)1
In the forties and fifties we took our stand in Europe to protect the freedom of those threatened by aggression.… Now the center of attention has shifted to another part of the world where aggression is on the march and the enslavement of free men is its goal.…
If we allow the Communists to win in Vietnam, it will become easier and more appetizing for them to take over other countries in other parts of the world. We will have to fight again some place else — at what cost no one knows. That is why it is vitally important to every American family that we stop the Communists in South Vietnam.
Lyndon Johnson at Honolulu
(February 6, 1966)2
On February 6, 1966, the President of the United States met with the premier and chief of state of the Republic of South Vietnam for the first time in over a decade. The meeting, held in Honolulu, was one of those symbolic gestures that statesmen make from time to time in order to underscore a decision — gestures that in this age of television and wire photos become instant portraits, showing, or purporting to show, what is going on behind closed doors. In this case, however, the gesture marked no solution to a crisis, no real change in policy. The American troops had landed in Vietnam almost a year before. If it marked any event at all, it marked the change in Johnson’s temper. Over the past few days the President had had his patience severely tried by, among others, the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who were conducting an investigation into what had become a major war in Vietnam.
Johnson later confessed that he could never understand why Senator Fulbright had questioned his constitutional right to commit American troops to Vietnam when the Tonkin Gulf Resolution so clearly permitted him to “take all necessary steps including the use of force to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.” Senator Fulbright, however, contended that the President ought to have brought a declaration of war before the Senate. The legal argument was important, but the heart of the matter was that Fulbright, with the support of liberals in and out of the universities, had begun to challenge the entire Vietnam policy. In the first month of 1966 Johnson realized that he would have to fight for his war. And thus the Honolulu Conference.
The decision to call the conference was a typically Johnsonian gesture, combined of vanity, shrewdness, and overbearing energy. On February 4, the President, like a Tartar chieftain, suddenly instructed most of the cabinet, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, several generals, ranks of assorted diplomats and technical advisers, the heads of mission in Saigon, and the Vietnamese government officials, to convene in Honolulu in two days’ time. “We are here,” he announced upon arrival, “to talk especially of the works of peace. We will leave here determined not only to achieve victory over aggression but to win victory over hunger, disease, and despair. We are making a reality out of the hopes of the common people.”
It was the great justification. The United States was not going into Vietnam merely for crass power objectives, but for the salvation of the Vietnamese, who, like the majority of mankind, lived in poverty and ignorance. The fight against Communism demanded not only military power and determination, but all the prowess of an advanced industrial society and the generosity of a nation that led the world in its search for peace, prosperity, and freedom. One section of the final declaration read, “The United States is pledged to the principle of the self-determination of peoples and of government by the consent of the governed.… We have helped and we will help [the Vietnamese] to stabilize the economy, to increase th
e production of goods, to spread the light of education and stamp out disease.”
Surely the leader of no other nation would have made such a pledge in the midst of a war. No other leader would have expected his countrymen to take it as anything but a cynical gesture. But Johnson was not cynical, and he did not see himself as straining the limits of American credibility. His rhetoric was, after all, familiar, even traditional, to American diplomacy. Woodrow Wilson wanted to “make the world safe for democracy,” Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Stevenson, and Kennedy had in their turn pledged the nation to fight against oppression, hunger, ignorance, and disease around the world. Confidence in American power and virtue suffused the American view of the world. In proclaiming the Open Door policy for China, in conquering the Philippines and supporting Chiang Kai-shek during the Second World War, American statesmen had confidence that their own actions were in the best interests of the countries concerned. This faith, this shrewd innocence, they guarded with a ferocity.
Lyndon Johnson preserved and guarded it perhaps better than any of his predecessors. Brought up in the small towns of Texas, he began his career as a populist of the old school, a defender of the small farmer and businessman against the vast industrial interests of the East. As a congressman under Roosevelt in the 1930’s and 1940’s he saw the countryside change rapidly as a result of government intervention. He identified with Roosevelt, with government power, and with the notion of a strong presidency. And he believed in the essential goodness of the United States and its almost infinite capacity for righting the wrongs of mankind. “We must move the country forward,” Kennedy said, but Johnson saw Kennedy as the phrasemaker and himself as the instrument of that progress. At home he intended to fulfill Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation with his own “Great Society” program, and abroad… One of the Vietnamese officers understood the implication exactly. “Mr. Johnson,” he said, “we are a small country and we don’t have pretensions to building a Great Society. We just want to have a better society.” But the irony was lost on Johnson. Even more than Roosevelt, who claimed to understand China because of his family connections with it, Johnson tended to see the world as an extension of his own person. In April 1965 he offered the North Vietnamese the opportunity to participate in a billion-dollar American development project for Southeast Asia, centering on a vast TVA-like development of the Mekong River. It would have been the greatest piece of pork-barrel legislation in history — except that the Mekong River does not run through North Vietnam. But perhaps that could be fixed, too. The idea that the United States could not master the problems of a country as small and underdeveloped as Vietnam did not occur to Johnson as a possibility.
Nor did it occur to many other Americans at the time of Honolulu. The Americans who sat with Johnson at the conference table made a picture of that confidence — a heroic frieze portraying the weight and substance behind the Vietnam policy. Beside the President sat Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman; Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, John Gardner; Assistant Defense Secretary John McNaughton; McGeorge Bundy, the President’s chief foreign policy adviser; General Maxwell Taylor; Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp; General Earle Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the Honorable Averell Harriman, Ambassador Leonard Unger, Governor John Burns of Hawaii, General William C. Westmoreland, and Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. If not each of them individually, then all of them taken together gave a fair representation of the power and dominion of the United States. Some of them were brilliant men, and all of them had long and distinguished careers in the high offices of government, of big business, and the universities. They were the essence of professional Washington, the men who had made or influenced policy over the course of several administrations. Though some of them would not have put the matter in quite the same terms as Johnson, all of them believed in the willingness and capacity of the United States to achieve the program of Honolulu in Vietnam. They were powerful men, after all, and, being powerful, they were self-confident.
Too self-confident, perhaps, to notice that the conference, seen as a frieze, had a curious lopsided look to it. On the other side of the table from the Americans were three Vietnamese; in the center, Air Vice-Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky. Ky was not wearing his pearl-handled revolver and his black flying suit with the purple silk handkerchief tied around his neck, but this catlike figure with his rakish moustache still provided some contrast to the gentlemen sitting opposite. For the past eight months the thirty-five-year-old bomber pilot had been acting premier of the Republic of Vietnam. Beside him at the table sat General Nguyen Van Thieu, the chief of state and chairman of the Armed Forces Council. Five years older than Ky, he had a more solid look about him. Reportedly the brains of the junta, he had been Ky’s closest associate in the series of coups that brought them to power, but he remained an unknown quantity even to those Americans arriving from Saigon. On Ky’s other side sat the defense minister, General Nguyen Huu Co, with his strange snake’s head, the yellow skin stretched tight across his small, high cheekbones. Despite his looks, Co was an affable man with a taste for French champagne and pretty women. He had, it was said, made certain investments in Vietnamese real estate soon to be acquired by the Americans.
“The Vietnamese chiefs of state today pledged their country to ‘the work of the social revolution, the goal of free self-government, the attack on ignorance and disease.’”
The New York Times was undoubtedly correct, but somehow its prose failed to convey the quality of the statement, or the extravagance of the gesture that President Johnson had made in calling such a conference. The frieze was there. It accurately recorded the events that were to come, but those men who sat for their portraits did not realize what it signified.
6
Politicians and Generals
Lullaby
There were many nights
Many, many nights
When I nursed and whispered to my child:
Sleep tight my child
Then when you grow up
When you grow up
You will sell your country to become a mandarin.
— A popular song in Saigon, 1969, by Mien Duc Thang.
one
The fall of the Diem regime had come like the breaking of a great river dam, the political energy of the cities overflowing and using itself up in the act of destruction. Having cleared away the barrier of the regime, the rebels seemed to have no positive ideas, no energy for the task of building a government. Rather than organizing and pressuring the generals for reforms, they indulgently returned to their private pursuits: the intellectuals to their endless discussions, the students to their jazz music and their university elections, the Buddhists to the obscure world from which they had come. Hastily assembled from among the most prestigious of the generals, the new military junta barricaded itself into the general staff headquarters on the outskirts of town and occupied its time with bickering over the distribution of army posts.1
There was an air of relief, of celebration. The political prisoners returned from Poulo Condore, the bars and nightclubs reopened, and the bar girls came back like painted swallows to settle in the bars of Tu Do Street. At the same time there was an air of uncertainty and fear for the future. Who, after all, did the “revolution” belong to? A truly popular uprising, it had no single leader and no political dynamic except that of revulsion for the ineffectual tyranny of Diem. The generals had executed the plot, but their coup came as a distinct anticlimax to the outburst of popular demonstrations. The most prestigious of the generals joined the coup only at the thirteenth hour. General Tran Thien Khiem, for instance, had been engaged in another officers’ plot; General Ton That Dinh, a Catholic and a distant member of the royal family, had until the day before the coup appeared to be working for a phony coup planned by Ngo Dinh Nhu himself.2 Because almost every general had been involved in one or more of the officers’ plots, it was only a matter of chance that the
Don-Minh coup succeeded and the others failed. No one was more conscious of this than the junta members themselves. While they made hopeful proclamations of national unity, they took care to post the most powerful of their brother officers to distant parts of the country.
Their difficulty, however, lay not so much in smothering the opposition as in creating a government. The bluff professional soldier, General Duong Van Minh, inspired some trust among the Buddhists, students, and intellectuals — but less, it seemed, for what he did than for what he did not do. He was the chairman of the junta, and yet he refused to appear in public — to give the Vietnamese a picture of the new regime — or to set about reorganizing the government. Undecided about setting themselves up as the state authority, he and his fellow junta members did little to create a framework of civilian institutions through which a political authority might emerge. In all the months of plotting they seemed to have thought little beyond the coup itself.
Fire in the Lake Page 30
