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Today the government of General Khanh is vigorously rebuilding the machinery of administration and reshaping plans to carry the war to the Viet-Cong. He is an able and energetic leader. He has demonstrated his grasp of the basic elements — political, economic and psychological, as well as military — required to defeat the Viet-Cong. He is planning a program of economic and social advances for the welfare of his people. He has brought into support of the government representatives of key groups previously excluded. He and his colleagues have developed plans for systematic liberation of areas now submissive to Viet-Cong duress and for mobilization of all available Vietnamese resources in defense of the homeland.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara
March 26, 19641
“The fighting is going on in four fronts: the government versus the generals, the Buddhists versus the government, the generals versus the ambassador, and, I hope, the generals versus the VC.”
General Maxwell Taylor to a dozen American correspondents in Saigon, 19652
It was in a way most fitting that General Maxwell Taylor should have served as ambassador to Saigon during the bewildering year that followed General Khanh’s accession to power. With his report to Kennedy in 1961 and his subsequent chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Taylor had done as much as anyone in the American government to lay the groundwork for the American commitment to Vietnam. Previously he had never cared much about GVN politics, but on becoming ambassador he was to place more importance on the creation of representative bodies and the establishment of civilian rule than either McNamara or Cabot Lodge. As a soldier, he was perhaps rather less impressed by soldiers than many American civilian officials. And he believed in the power of the United States to influence the Vietnamese government to reform.
In March 1964, Secretary McNamara reported that since the preceding November, “the political control structure extending from Saigon down into the hamlets virtually disappeared. Of the forty-one incumbent province chiefs of November 1 [1963], thirty-five were replaced. Nine provinces had three chiefs in three months; one province had four.… Almost all major military commands changed hands twice.”3 McNamara looked upon this situation as an abnormality that Khanh might, with some firmness, correct. But the convulsion was merely the visible expression of what had been going on within the army for all the years of the Diem regime. The lid was now off, and the conflicts so long suppressed were now openly fought. And the conflicts did not end with the army. Since the fall of Diem liberated all of the various political groups in the cities to make their bids for power, the political struggle was taking place not only within the army or between the army and the civilians, but between various unstable factions of both, the army officers acting sometimes as the leaders, sometimes as the led. In the resulting chaos it became very difficult to tell where the government began and ended and where the realm of ideological and religious conflict met that of factional and personal ambition.
Almost before General Khanh patched together a government, he began to discover signs of dissension within its topmost ranks. General Minh, whom the Americans insisted be retained as chief of state, attacked Khanh for having arrested his fellow officers, Generals Don, Kim, Dinh, and Xuan. The Dai Viet leaders, whom Khanh appointed to his cabinet, complained that he was using them as figureheads for an army-controlled government, while the militant Catholics accused him of “fomenting religious discrimination.”4 By mid-July of 1964, a group of politicians, including Khanh’s own vice-premier and a number of high military officers, had worked out all the details of a coup against the new regime.
One prime mover in this struggle was the organized Catholic minority. Concerned with the dismissal of a number of Catholics from the administration, the priests and leading laymen in Hue and Saigon began to incite demonstrations and to proselyte within the army so as to build up a secure base of opposition against Khanh. The non-Catholics, with some reason, accused them of having political ambitions. But it was also true that they were frightened — frightened not by the regime itself so much as by the Pandora’s box of animosities that the junta let loose. And they saw no alternative to constituting themselves into a protective association. But for every action there is an opposite reaction, and as the Catholics were by far the most powerful of the city parties, their maneuverings had the effect of polarizing the struggle and creating an anti-Catholic constituency where none had existed before. As the second most powerful group, the Buddhists naturally became the focus of this opposition.
Now thrust into the bread-and-butter issues of local politics, the Buddhists began to develop and harden the outlines of their organization. In Hue, where the death of Ngo Dinh Can left a vacuum of power, Tri Quang began to develop political contacts among a great variety of people, ranging from the local civil servants to the trade unionists to the students and left-wing intellectuals who ran the socialist paper, Vietnam-Vietnam. In Saigon Tam Chau began to build his constituency among the non-Catholic civil servants and businessmen who, though not very far from the southern Catholics politically, wished to develop their own protective associations, their own educational and social services. With money extorted from the Khanh government (there is no other verb for the transaction, but it must be recognized that there was no “better” or more legal way to obtain money from the government), they set up the Vanh Hanh University, a small college in the Xa Loi pagoda dedicated to the teaching of Buddhist studies by contemporary (Western) methods, a number of orphanages, schools, and a Buddhist Youth Center under the leadership of Tri Quang’s deputy in Saigon, Thich Thien Minh.
The Catholics naturally felt challenged by the growth of these new Buddhist associations and by the ability of the Buddhists to compete for administrative posts. There were demonstrations and counterdemonstrations and an occasional revenge-killing in the provinces. And yet there was no clearly defined political issue between them. The Americans, with their tendency to see a struggle as having only two sides, pitted “the Buddhists” against “the Catholics” in their own minds, but the situation was in reality far more complicated. For one thing, the Buddhists and the Catholics were divided among themselves, and for another, they had, as civilians, some common interest in restoring civilian rule and their own hold over the American aid program. After five months of the Khanh regime, the Buddhists, some of the Catholics, and a number of the senior politicians proposed a complete reorganization of the government that would exclude the Military Revolutionary Council from all but military affairs.
Not surprisingly, General Khanh objected to this proposal. Under pressure from Ambassador Taylor, he agreed to have a series of civilian committees draft a constitutional charter, but after the politicians wrote several drafts, he tore up all of them and issued his own somewhat ill-written draft, giving him virtually dictatorial powers over the whole government.5
The Buddhists reacted suddenly. On August 21, Tri Quang’s organizers moved into action in the midst of a disorderly student demonstration in Saigon, forcing what might have been but a fitful gesture of protest into a full-scale governmental crisis. The student demonstrations grew in size and spread to Hue and Da Nang. While the Catholics marched in counterdemonstration, NLF organizers (or so it was thought) incited both demonstrating groups against each other. Unknown agitators set off bombs in various places in Saigon. In Hue Tri Quang’s organization showed its full strength for the first time. From among the student and civil service demonstrators there appeared a group called the People’s Revolutionary Committee that demanded radical changes in the structure of the government and — as some interpreted it — autonomy for the administration of central Vietnam. The demonstrations in Hue remained orderly, but the Buddhists appeared to lose control of those in Saigon. Before the week was out the high school and university students were joined by gangs of young toughs who seemed to answer to no one. Without warning mobs would appear in the streets, overturning cars, burning, looting, and killing with clubs and chains whoever stood
in their way. To American reporters the spectacle was deeply shocking; it was as though the civilization had suddenly disintegrated, leaving people to fight like rats in an overcrowded cage.6
Never his best in moments of crisis, General Khanh retired to Dalat and announced his resignation as president — though not as prime minister. Having made his bid for dictatorial powers, he now seemed not even to possess the authority to call out the police. One day during the crisis the students rode him around through the streets on the top of a tank and forced him to shout, “Down with military power, down with dictatorships, down with the army!”7 With his round face and his little pointed beard, he now appeared a complete figure of fun.
Had the army not been so divided, General Khanh’s reign would, no doubt, have ended there and then. As it was, none of the officers could so much as agree on the terms of their common desire to depose their humiliated commander, and Khanh floated like a cork on the whirlpool of their disputes. On September 1, one group of coup plotters marched into the city with their battalions only to be met by another group that, although not exactly loyal to Khanh, was determined to keep the first group from seizing power. Less than two weeks later a new group of officers, headed by a former member of Khanh’s cabinet and the commander of the Fourth Corps, due to be deposed, staged another completely inadequate attempt at a coup. Air Vice-Marshal Ky bore the main responsibility for its defeat. Supposedly sympathetic to the plotters, he himself flew his air wing over Saigon, counted the troops on the road in from the Delta, found them wanting, and instead of threatening to bomb Khanh’s defenders as planned, threatened to bomb his opponents.8
Over the next few months Saigon politics took on the pace and style of a Marx Brothers movie. Under pressure from Ambassador Taylor, Khanh surprised everybody by making good his promises to establish a civilian government. Under his aegis the High National Council — a body of men so ancient that it became known as the High National Museum — wrote a constitution in record time (a month) and picked two civilians as head of state and prime minister, thereby depriving Generals Khiem and Minh of their jobs and at the same time taking the heat off Khanh. Innocuous as the new government seemed (the chief of state, Dr. Pham Khac Suu, was in his nineties and the prime minister, Tran Van Huong, was an elderly Cochin Chinese schoolteacher who made his reputation by opposing Diem), it pleased no one. When, rather than involve himself in a religious feud, Huong consulted neither the Buddhists nor the Catholics on appointments, he succeeded in driving both sects into the opposition and himself into the hands of the military council, the strongest faction of which did not want a civilian government at all. There followed a demi-coup against the High National Council led by the “Young Turks,” Generals Ky, Thieu, Thi, and Khang.
This last coup drove Ambassador Taylor to the end of his patience. Calling the generals together to protest what he saw as the government’s last shred of legitimacy, he opened the meeting by asking:
“Do all of you understand English?” (Vietnamese officers indicated they did, although the understanding of General Thi was known to be weak.) “I told you all clearly at General Westmoreland’s dinner we Americans were tired of coups. Apparently I wasted my words. Maybe this is because something is wrong with my French because you evidently didn’t understand. I made it clear that all the military plans which I know you would like to carry out are dependent on governmental stability. Now you have made a real mess.”9
Taylor was, once again, wasting his words, for the generals refused to reinstate the High National Council, and Premier Huong, unable to resist their pressure, asked Generals Ky and Thieu to join his government. The Buddhists then mounted a series of anti-Huong, anti-American demonstrations during which a mob of students sacked and burned the USIS library in Hue. Fearing to be outflanked by the “Young Turks,” General Khanh joined his erstwhile enemies, the Buddhists, and pressured the Armed Forces Council into ousting the Huong government. By January 27, 1965, the civilian government that Taylor had so carefully constructed collapsed like a house of cards.10
With thirty thousand American advisers in Vietnam and the bombing of the north under consideration, the American officials naturally took the Saigonese conflicts with extreme seriousness. George Carver and others wrote long analyses of the regional and cultural differences, the religious and ideological feuds that created these imponderable controversies. In fact, like any farce, the Saigonese conflict had a simple, mechanical logic to it. The first principle of it was that the “outs,” whatever their party, hated the “ins,” whatever theirs. This universal principle of party politics was, of course, complicated by the shale-like consistency of each party. If General Khanh appointed a Buddhist, a Hoa Hao, or a Dai Viet leader to government office, the new official would usually find that his party had deserted him on the assumption (usually justified) that once in a position to make his own fortune, he would abandon his original loyalties. As the Buddhist Tri Quang once said, “Experience shows that each time a government was set up, Buddhists were betrayed even though there were Buddhists in it, and sometimes Buddhists betrayed us more than anyone else.” Like Ngo Dinh Diem, the generals discovered that to rule meant to divide. Those divisions which the Americans attributed to ancient regional feuds actually resulted from the second principle, that the “ins” exerted a centripetal force and the “outs” a centrifugal one. Clearly it was in the interests of those who dominated Saigon to back the American project of “building a strong government.” Clearly too, it was in the interests of those who held power in the provinces to engage in the contrary attempt to assure that the central government held as little power as possible. Because they were at the end of the American supply line, the people in the provinces furthest from Saigon tended naturally to be the most “anti-government” and “anti-American.” Once taken into the establishment, however, they tended to modify their line and make extremists out of the former establishment.11 With their base in Saigon the Catholics normally remained the strongest supporters of the government and the Buddhists of Hue the greatest single source of trouble for it. The generals, particularly the corps commanders, would change their viewpoint and their methods whenever they were moved from place to place — those in Saigon engaged in underground battles for influence, those in the First Corps going to the point of open insurrection. These dynamics naturally had the most surreal effect on American policy. Assuming that the disputes had something to do with support for, or opposition to, the war, the officials tended to back whichever group held power in Saigon and to oppose those who ruled the provinces.
It was thus that, five months after he had been publicly humiliated by the Buddhists, General Khanh returned to power with the support of the Buddhists. In the process, however, Khanh infuriated the Catholics and the Americans. In February 1965 a group of Catholic officers attempted their own coup under the leadership of a mysterious figure called Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao, who managed to be at once a former Viet Minh officer, a friend of the departed Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc, and a great favorite of the Americans. The coup failed mainly because Thao’s troops did not succeed in capturing the air base fast enough, and for the second time in five months General Ky, high up in the air over Saigon, threatened to bomb the rival units of his own army. Ky desisted only when it was pointed out to him that there were American troops as well as Vietnamese at the air base. The coup was stalemated for three days during which time General Khanh toured the Delta provinces in search of support. When he returned, he discovered to his surprise that Colonel Thao had been defeated, but that the generals who had apparently rushed to save him were now voting to depose him as president and chief of the Armed Forces Council. On February 21, General Khanh accepted an appointment as ambassador-at-large and joined the other two ousted heads of state, Generals Minh and Khiem, in exile.
The end of the Khanh regime left the political situation more confused than it had ever been. The Armed Forces Council, having succeeded in all its objectives, now could not decide who its leaders w
ere nor whether it ought to dissolve itself in favor of a civilian government. At this point the Buddhist-Catholic conflict broke out again — the struggle duplicated and complicated by the personal rivalries between General Thi and Colonel Thao on the one hand and the civilian chief of state and his new premier, Dr. Phan Huy Quat, on the other. In the end — that is, after some five months of disputation — these rivals knocked each other out, leaving the field clear for the younger generals to seize power. On June 12, 1965, Generals Thieu, Ky, and Co proclaimed the establishment of a National Leadership Council. The triumvirate later expanded to ten members and, to Ambassador Taylor’s dismay, appointed General Ky as chief of the executive council charged with the day-to-day administration of the country.12 About two weeks later President Johnson announced that he was sending a contingent of fifty-three thousand regular combat troops into action beside those of the Saigon government.
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