It was clear why the GVN officials resented the elections, but it was less clear why they had no interest at all in the results. Questioned about the candidates and their programs, the Delta province chief answered politely, “Oh, yes, there are four slates. We've eliminated another two for technical reasons. No, I have no idea who will win. No, I don't really know if there are any issues except personalities.” While the Americans spoke darkly about the difficulties of holding an election in the midst of a war, the GVN officials faced the prospect with a bored tolerance, as though despite the livid antagonisms of their constituents, the elections were just another tedious bureaucratic routine.
Their confidence was, it seemed, justified. American fears to the contrary, there was very little evidence of direct NLF or government intimidation of the voters and no substantial case of election fraud. An astonishing number of people registered, a figure that, if the population estimates could be trusted, represented two-thirds of the adult population of South Vietnam. Of that number, 81 percent voted in the election — in other words, a far higher proportion than ever turns out for presidential elections in the United States. The South Vietnamese went to the polls with the docility of lambs to the dip. Furthermore, they elected an assembly that quite fairly represented the strength of all the various political groups and minority populations within the GVN, with the striking exception of the militant Buddhists. Among the one hundred and seventeen elected delegates, there were twelve Hoa Hao and five Cao Dai representatives, nine members of the various Dai Viets, twenty military officers, nineteen members of the various VNQDD factions, three Chinese, and nine montagnards (the montagnard deputies were chosen indirectly by their tribal councils). The Catholics were somewhat overrepresented with thirty-two delegates, but the number testified quite accurately to the discipline of their communities and the normal weight of their influence over the GVN. Most of the well-known older politicians, such as Dr. Pham Khac Suu, won their races, but so too did a number of younger men who lived and worked in the districts they represented. In public the Americans were gratified; in private they were as ecstatic as a bureaucracy can get: their distinguished American visitors had seen democracy working at “the rice roots.”
The Constituent Assembly convened in October 1966 with a great flourish of military ceremony. The delegates from the provinces looked awed and somewhat embarrassed by the proceedings. As Richard Critchfield noticed, “One delegation from Quang Ngai Province turned up in matching white Palm Beach suits that all looked as though they had been cut from the same bolt of cloth and probably were. They were mortified to see that the rest of the deputies wore dark suits.”6 They had not realized, in other words, that white suits belonged to the old days of French colonialism and that the Americans wore gray. Still, the deputies seemed proud of themselves and excited by the prospects that lay before them. Once installed in the Assembly building, in the hall that had once held the Saigon opera, they began to make passionate speeches about the reform of the government, their determination to stand up against the Communists, the moral duties of the state, the plight of their nation, the price of rice in Long Xuyen or Vinh Long, and their own rights as deputies. It was as though they had just been released from a seven-year vow of silence. Day after day, week after week, a torrent of words poured out of the Assembly building and fell upon deafer and deafer ears. After all the fuss they had made about the elections, the American embassy officials paid no attention to the speeches. Once they had run a check on their deputies' backgrounds, they seemed to lose all interest in them. As for the Ky government, it made quite clear what it thought of them by small indelicate gestures, such as that of refusing to pay the delegates' promised per diem. On October 22, a number of the poor provincial delegates were evicted from their sleazy downtown hotels because they were unable to pay the inflationary Saigon rate. Ky finally agreed to “loan” them the money, but he did not cease to make obvious his desire to be rid of them as soon as possible. The delegates did not, however, seem willing to oblige. Week after week, they continued to make speeches on every conceivable subject without coming to any kind of resolution. Sitting in the eye of a war and a revolution, the deputies acted like political science professors attending a university-sponsored conference on some imponderable subject. While many of them had special interests to defend, the political factions that formed and reformed in the course of the debate proved neither large nor stable enough to merit the name “party.” The delegates seemed unable to find an issue around which to organize. As Dr. Sung rather pathetically explained, “I ran for the Assembly in order to oppose the government, and now I find there is nothing to oppose.”
Eventually, under some pressure from both the Americans and General Ky, who wished to attend the Guam Conference, the delegates settled down to the job of writing a constitution. With no apparent zeal for the enterprise, they turned out a most professional document — so professional, indeed, that John Roche, the “constitutional expert” whom the U.S. government rather tactlessly appointed as “adviser” to the proceedings, found that he had no advice to give. And not surprisingly, for while Roche had never written a national constitution in his life, many of the members of the Assembly had written at least three. Finally completed in March 1967, in the nick of time for the Guam Conference, the document included a bill of rights, an article on land reform, a provision for the encouragement of labor unions, and a provision supporting an improvement in the general welfare of the peasantry. According to the document, the governmental system was to be a cross between the American presidential system and the French Fifth Republic: on the one hand, a president with wide powers, and on the other, a prime minister and a cabinet responsible to a bicameral legislature. The Assembly made concessions to the junta — notably, the vague determination of presidential powers and the fixing of the age requirement for presidential office at thirty-five instead of forty (a provision that allowed Air Vice-Marshal Ky to qualify), but it showed a certain independence in turning down several of the junta's specific requests. The U.S. embassy was once again gratified. Unlike the Diemist assemblies, this one could not possibly be accused of being a “rubber stamp” congress. At Guam, President Johnson said that he looked at the constitution “just as proudly as I looked at Lynda, my first baby.”7
For Western journalists the whole enterprise from the elections to the writing of the constitution remained puzzling. Great numbers of Vietnamese voted; the constitution was an admirable document — and yet there was an air of inconsequence to the proceedings. It was as though the whole thing had been performed on stage as a graceful and empty gesture. In an atmosphere of total indifference the peasants had turned out in astonishing numbers to vote for the same sort of men as those who had such trouble “pacifying” them. Even by stretching a point, the left-wing European journalists could not explain it away on the basis of electoral fraud or government intimidation of the voters. They had a stronger argument in claiming that the electoral lists were too complicated for anyone to understand, and that the province chiefs in charge of making up the lists had excluded not only “neutralists” and Communists, but everyone that did not meet with GVN approval. To put it simply, the peasants had been free to choose between one landlord and another. But why then had they bothered to vote at all?
The question was finally a more complicated one than could be explained in the columns of a newspaper, for, as was true of so many events in Vietnam, the elections could not be fully understood from one perspective alone. Like a mirror, they reflected only what the onlookers brought to them, and the American and the Vietnamese perspective had very little in common. Looking at the elections, both peoples could find different lessons to be drawn, different victims and different oppressors.
Brought up in a tradition that prescribes free elections as the proper solution for most political conflicts, the Americans had come to look upon them as the moral foundations of a state. If a nation had free elections, it belonged to the “free world”; if it did not
, it belonged to those moral nether regions inhabited by Communists, Fascists, and backward people. The embassy officials did not consider it an immediate moral necessity to press for elections in Vietnam, but even the most cynical of them supposed that elections and a constitution would somehow make the GVN a better government. Their faith was a perfect example of synecdoche, the poetic device that substitutes a part for the whole. “Free elections” implied to the Americans an entire political edifice — a belief in individual freedom, in majority rule and the compromise of individual interests — a skyscraper, as it were, of ideals, principles, and organization, in which the elections were no more than the elevator. Largely unconscious of this edifice, they did not realize that when the Vietnamese used the elections they had an entirely different building in mind — a building founded on the community rather than the individual, fashioned out of uniformity instead of diversity, and operating not on a set of principles, but on an appreciation of the whole man, an entire way of life. Like the Americans, the Vietnamese assumed the architecture of their building, and therefore found no occasion to describe it or to show how the elevator worked within it. When asked what he thought of the 1966 elections, one former hamlet schoolteacher said, “I cannot tell you whether the elections will be good or bad. If the candidates are good men who will work for the people, then they will be good, for the Assembly will bring peace.” In other words, the teacher was not interested in his right to vote, but the duty to register his approval. And with half a million American troops in Vietnam, it was a duty that he could not afford to neglect. Every adult was supposed to have a card showing that he had voted, and the GVN officials checked these along with identification cards in their search for “Viet Cong suspects.”
“So it was not a free election,” one American reporter concluded. “The government coerced the peasants into voting.” But the conclusion was not quite just, though the GVN had made known its wishes to the peasants in no uncertain terms. The essence of the matter was not that the officials were oppressing the peasantry, but that both shared certain assumptions about the nature of government. The peasants, like the officials, saw no reason why the government should ask their advice. Presented with a ballot sheet, their attitude was, “If the program is bound to succeed, the Americans or the French, our counselors, would involve themselves and take credit for its success. If they ‘pass the baby’ to us, if they want us to vote on those issues about which we know so little, it's because it will fail and once it has failed, they will tell us, ‘Well, you asked for it.’ ”8 That the peasants were absolutely right in this case was, in a sense, beside the point, for the logic was based not so much on experience with elections as upon a profound set of convictions about all forms of authority. The idea that their vote might actually help change the government was an almost impermissible one, for it implied that there was no authority above them. And if there was no authority, then there was nothing but chaos and “confusion.” To be given a choice by means of a vote was therefore to be handed an instrument of terror — an unthinkable one.
The Vietnamese governments of the north and the south had used the device of elections many times before 1966, but they had used it for their own purposes and in such a way that it fitted in with the whole architecture of their political life. In 1946 Ho Chi Minh held elections for a legislature in both northern and southern Vietnam. His Viet Minh candidates gained an overwhelming percentage of the vote even in those places where the polling was done secretly in the shadow of the French garrisons. Ngo Dinh Diem held a plebiscite a few years later, and took 98 percent of the vote from the very same areas of the south. Quite clearly in these cases neither Diem nor Ho Chi Minh was interested in giving the voters a choice of alternatives. They used the elections not as a means of settling a political conflict, but as a means of showing the Westerners — and perhaps their own people — that the conflict was already settled. To the Vietnamese people an election used in this way was perfectly acceptable as long as they agreed that the settlement had in fact been accomplished. If it had not been accomplished — as certainly was the case during the Diemist plebiscite — then the elections would be coercive and fraudulent. The election results (though not the real political results) would in any case be the same: the party that held the elections would win. With this understanding the GVN had and would continue to refuse elections with Communist participation. With this understanding, the Buddhists decided in the summer of 1966 to boycott the elections that they had demonstrated for all spring. It was not that they had changed their minds on the principle of elections, but merely that they had predicted the results under two different sets of circumstances.
The 1966 election was then, like all those before it, a redundancy. Once the real issue of power was settled, the South Vietnamese, choosing from a group of names presented to them by the province chiefs, elected a group of delegates from all the racial, religious, and political groups that already exerted influence on the GVN. In all important respects the Assembly was no more than a larger model of the GVN. The Americans congratulated themselves on the establishment of a new institution for sharing power and reconciling diversity, but the Vietnamese saw in the Assembly only a confirmation that Vietnam was passing through a period of interregnum and “confusion.” The generals desired unanimity, but in contrast to Ho, Diem, and Tri Quang, they had no idea of what it might consist. Dr. Sung's surprise at finding “nothing to oppose” was occasioned by the contradiction of his private belief that there had to be some clear intelligence behind all those ranks of soldiers, all that tonnage of machinery.
Ambassador Lodge's opinion to the contrary, the election of 1966 was traditional — the Cochin Chinese tradition being the colonial one. As Bernard Fall pointed out, the French municipal and regional councils had been filled with bitter critics of the colonial regime.9 The new assembly was rather less radical in its constituents (the French had, after all, permitted Trotskyites to run in the 1930's), but the members felt equally free to criticize the government on matters of policy. How, indeed, should they act as a rubber stamp if the generals had no clear policy? They were free, that is, to criticize up to the point of discussing an alternate government or negotiations with the NLF. For as long as the Americans continued to support the GVN, they would be just as dependent on the Americans as the generals. Like the French before them, the Americans felt that all the talk was an encouraging sign: it meant (so they imagined) that the urban bourgeoisie now had a chance to let off steam, and that the Vietnamese would learn to form cohesive parties and majorities for the eventual goal of self-government. The French had been ready to make concessions to these “legally constituted” bodies; the Americans hoped that the generals would do the same. But all the talk led nowhere, nowhere at all, because it did not touch the fundamental issue of power. In the elections the Vietnamese had a choice, but only a choice between one abstraction and another. However they voted, whatever they said, the generals and the Americans would continue to rule the country. Rather than “train them in democracy,” the elections of 1966-1967 convinced the Vietnamese that elections were useless as a means of settling political conflicts.
What did the Americans want? That was the question of the 1967 election, when “the Vietnamese people” would be called upon to vote not simply for a legislature, but for the head of state, for the government itself. For the urban politicians, the need to answer the question seemed to be a matter of life or death. What did the Americans want? Rather than announce their position, the American embassy officials, in their devious Occidental manner, continued to insist that they wanted “free elections.” But that meant nothing. It was rather as if a customer in a restaurant, when asked what he wanted for dinner, kept insisting that he liked to read the menu, but that he would leave the choice to them. To the Vietnamese it was quite evident that the customer did care what he ate, but that he preferred to keep it a secret, so that at any moment he might get up, blame the management for the poor service, and leave without paying h
is bill. The fear of abandonment by the United States was never far from their minds. To them the American silence was infuriating — and furthermore hypocritical, for, as they saw it, the elections would impose a responsibility upon them without really giving them a choice: the United States was already supporting the regime of Nguyen Cao Ky. Until it ceased to do so, there would be no chance for a civilian candidate to win.
Like the generals, the civilian politicians gave the Americans too much credit for purposefulness. It was true that the mission heads more or less favored the continuance of military government. But their inclination owed at least partly to the fact that they saw no alternative — having themselves precluded the formation of one. Had the Assembly agreed to make it impossible for Ky to run, and united behind a single candidate, they would have had a much more difficult decision to make. But after a year of the Assembly, the civilian parties were as divided as ever and, as a result, submissive to the generals. Instead of putting up one candidate, they put up twelve, most of whom had no serious political differences. Under some pressure from above, the Assembly voted by a large majority to invalidate the candidacies of the only two men who looked as if they might run a serious opposition campaign. Au Truong Thanh, the capable former minister of economics under Ky and a former favorite of the Americans who now openly advocated a cease-fire, it eliminated on the grounds that he was a “neutralist.” The once popular General Duong Van Minh, now living in exile, it eliminated on the technicality that he was residing out of the country.
Taking advantage of the civilian disarray, General Ky tightened up on press censorship and limited the forthcoming election campaign to one month, thereby granting himself the exclusive right to press his suit for all the intervening months. To make sure the voters understood the situation, he announced that he would make a coup d'etat if they elected a civilian whose policies he disagreed with. “In any democratic country you have the right to disagree with the views of others,” he explained. But the necessity seemed unlikely to arise, for between them, the Americans, the Assembly, and the generals had succeeded in reducing the element of choice or “confusion” as far as the formal trappings of the elections would permit.
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