Fire in the Lake

by Frances FitzGerald

  But then something happened that destroyed all of these careful preparations. In May, General Nguyen Van Thieu announced that he would run for president. The generals were shocked, and quite understandably, for having once fulfilled and assimilated the unreasonable demands of the Americans, they now faced the terrifying prospect of a real political conflict between two equal contenders for the office of chief of state. Now the worst was bound to happen: the army would split, the electorate would divide, and — who knew? — in the general anarchy a civilian candidate might actually win. Interestingly enough, the Americans appeared to share their fears. Above all, the mission did not want a divided army. Suspecting that Thieu had used the announcement as a feint towards some other objective, the embassy appealed to him to withdraw, doubtless with some other offer in hand. But Thieu would have none of it. He agreed that the army should not be divided, but he refused to withdraw unless Ky, too, declared his retirement. For him, so he said, it had become an affair of honor.

  The embassy was, as one reporter put it, “deeply disquieted.” For the past two years the officials had taken for granted that Thieu was no more than a figurehead in a stable Ky government (a peculiar assumption in that respectability is the usual qualification for figureheads); now they had to admit that Ky's power was limited, and that in Thieu the premier had not a submissive partner but a bitter rival. What was worse, the embassy seemed to have no power over either of them. Having failed to persuade Thieu to withdraw, the officials found Ky, their own favorite, equally deaf to their diplomacy. Outraged at the insult to him, and no doubt well aware of what might happen to him if Thieu won, Ky refused to withdraw.

  To resolve this unbearable crisis, the defense minister and chief of staff, General Cao Van Vien, called a meeting of all the general officers in the armed forces of the Republic. The meeting lasted for three days — a three days during which, according to Robert Shaplen's fascinating account, the generals went through the full histrionic range from patriotic outbursts to threats on self and others, to cool fury, to embarrassed silence and tears. On the first day they accused each other of corruption, and debated the suggestions that they should, a) allow a civilian to win the election, or b) tear up the constitution and keep on ruling without it. Generals Thieu and Ky made affecting speeches offering to withdraw their candidacies. The next day General Thieu came to the meeting with a determination that apparently belonged at least in part to his most powerful wife. Instead of keeping to the usual vaguely worded denunciations of the general corruption, he cited facts and figures describing the horrible corruption of the national police. As the police were run by General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, and as General Loan ran Nguyen Cao Ky, the direction of his attack was not difficult to follow. In embarrassment General Loan walked out of the room, and three of the four corps commanders tore off their stars and vowed not to return to their commands until the confrontation was ended. The intolerable moment was relieved by everyone bursting into tears. Thieu wept and thanked everyone for listening to him. Ky wept and offered once more to resign. Finally, as if exhausted by the proceedings, the generals accepted Ky's withdrawal and prevailed upon him to run for the vice-presidency on Thieu's ticket in return for certain compensatory arrangements and guarantees.10

  Once the military crisis was settled, the electoral campaign could proceed in its normal Alice-in-Wonderland manner. Without any transportation of their own, the ten civilian candidates accepted by the Assembly were forced to travel around the country together in an airplane loaned them by the military junta. This mode of travel had its disadvantages. If the candidates organized a meeting in Quang Tri, the airplane would tend to fly them to Dong Ha or some other provincial town where no one was expecting them and where they would face the totally unacceptable alternatives of taking a lift from the Americans or braving a bus ride on the Front-controlled highways. When General Thieu made his rare appearances on the same platform with them, he would insist on speaking in ninth place — nine being the lucky number for the Vietnamese. He did not, of course, need such stratagems, for, even in his civilian clothes, he was the only recognizable figure on the platform. Of the ten civilian candidates, only three had any political reputation — and that almost exclusively in the cities: the ancient Dr. Pham Khac Suu, the former chief of state and president of the Constituent Assembly; Tran Van Huong, the former premier, who, reportedly, had strong support among provincial notables in certain parts of the Delta; and Dr. Phan Quang Dan, the renegade of the Diemist assembly, who had been elected to the Constituent Assembly by an overwhelming vote from the working-class neighborhood of Saigon where he practiced medicine. Though all three were honest men with few political differences, none of them would agree to withdraw to give the others more of a chance. They did not like each other, and that was that. Unable to compromise, unable to reach the mass of the voters by airplane, radio, or newspaper, they and the other civilian candidates took to complaining about the junta to the foreign press — a tactic that was the logical one both because the generals were holding the election to help Johnson win his own political battle with the American public, and because the Vietnamese, by and large, remained as indifferent to the second election as they had been to the first.

  When the ballots were counted on September 3, very few people in Vietnam were surprised to learn that the Thieu-Ky ticket had won. What was astounding was the smallness of its victory. Out of the five million votes cast, the generals won only 1,649,561, or 35 percent — their strongest support coming from the isolated military districts, where the local commanders kept close watch over the voting, and the Americans did not.11 In the more politically sophisticated and less militarily controlled urban districts the generals made such a poor showing that at the end of the day their managers, panicky at the low count, stuffed the ballot boxes with thousands of extra votes. Had they thought in advance that it might be necessary to rig the election, they undoubtedly would have shown more ingenuity; as it was, even the Americans could attest to the fact that in Gia Dinh province (the province surrounding Saigon) twenty-two thousand votes appeared very suddenly on the tally just before the polls closed.12 But the returns came as a surprise to everyone, to the civilian candidates no less than the generals. As runner-up to Thieu came not one of the establishment politicians, but an almost unknown figure called Truong Dinh Dzu. A Buddhist layman with no political background and a rather shady reputation as a lawyer, Dzu waited until the Assembly passed on his candidacy before declaring that he favored recognizing the NLF and engaging in peace negotiations as soon as possible. Under the justifiable impression that Dzu was no political leader, the generals had not bothered to remove him from the ballot, contenting themselves by attacking him personally as (among other things) “a dog that should be put in a cage.” They made an error, for while very few of the Saigonese politicians took him seriously, Dzu with the dove of peace as his ballot symbol, wound up with some 817,120 votes, a large percentage of which came from those parts of the Delta that the generals had conceded to the southerner, Tran Van Huong.13 To many observers it appeared that the Front had taken advantage of the regime's own elections to discredit the regime.

  Conceived by the Americans to “legitimize” the Saigon government and implemented by the junta to “legitimize” President Johnson's war to the American people, the election ended as a fiasco of noble proportions for both responsible parties. A few days after the election, eight of the civilian candidates joined with twenty-seven of the candidates defeated in the senatorial elections to form a committee which openly — and, of course, plausibly — accused the junta of fraud and called upon the Assembly to invalidate the elections. Under pressure (real or imagined) from the generals and the Americans, the Assembly refused to order a new election. The committee then denounced the U.S. embassy for its “interference in Vietnamese domestic affairs” and warned that such interference would “force the Vietnamese people to consider the United States as an imperialist power, plotting colonialism in Vietnam and in under-dev
eloped countries.”14 (Their language, as Shaplen remarked, bore a striking similarity to that of the NLF. But so much was only to be expected as NLF language was the only one the Vietnamese had to express total hostility to the foreigners.) Many of the southern “moderates” of Tran Van Huong's persuasion felt that with the elections went their last chance to gain influence over the American-supported government by conciliation. In their view the Americans had backed the northerners to defeat them. The generals felt no less put upon, even though their candidate won. Ky felt the Americans had wished to depose him. General Thieu was of the opinion that the U.S. embassy set up the entire election, in full knowledge of the results, in order to discredit him personally and to make him more amenable to embassy directives.15

  General Thieu misinterpreted the embassy's intentions, but the fact remained that the elections did considerable damage to what small measure of credibility he had as a head of state. The American press worried about his “lack of popularity,” but the Vietnamese were more interested by his lack of authority. How could a government that possessed every resource for propaganda, voter intimidation, and election fraud fail to gain even a simple majority of the votes? A government that could not create unanimity was no government at all. The fact that the generals' minions made a last-minute attempt to stuff the ballot boxes and failed to get away with it made the generals seem merely laughable. As one Vietnamese student said to an American reporter, “Thieu and Ky are the black humor of Vietnamese history.”16 The student might well have said the same about the American mission in Saigon. Having attempted this “exercise in democracy” with somewhat questionable motives, the U.S. government found itself in the position of having to support what was perhaps the only government in the world that had come close to losing an election at least partially rigged by itself.

  The election had its ludicrous aspects, but it did not end as a comedy for many Vietnamese. Not long after the balloting for the lower house was finished, President Thieu slapped a number of the defeated candidates and their supporters into jail. As the greatest source of his humiliation, Truong Dinh Dzu was the first to go; after him went Thich Thien Minh, the only bonze who remained politically active, and Vo Van Thai, one of the top leaders of the Vietnamese Confederation of Labor, and finally some twenty other political, religious, and labor leaders who, during the campaign, had expressed some doubts about the continuation of the war. When the American AFL-CIO and some civil liberties groups protested these arrests, the State Department replied that it had no control over General Thieu's actions. As always, it had only one lever of influence — and that it was not ready to use. What the civil liberties and labor leaders did not realize was that the elections themselves were responsible. The elections brought all the latent conflicts out into the open. Vietnamese politics being an all-or-nothing game, General Thieu had either to persuade his opponents to join him or to silence them. And he was unable to do the former. The Vietnamese might be able to deal with their own problems but not also with those imposed by the United States.17

  12

  The Downward Spiral

  The elections took their toll, but, like most governmental changes, they affected only a small group of Saigon politicians and passed over the countryside unnoticed. Before the elections many South Vietnamese did not know the name of General Ky; after the elections they remained similarly unconscious of General Thieu and their constitutional rights to form unions and to own the land they tilled. The year of 1967 was for them not the year of the elections but the year of the war. In January the year began with a bombing halt over North Vietnam and a flurry of peace rumors in Saigon. But that was a false start. There was to be no change in the war. No change at all despite the bright new crop of Americans in the provinces — the AID representatives with their scrubbed faces and short-sleeved shirts and the young captains in their starched fatigues. “Now here we're plugging in three more RD teams, and if we can divert some of the budget allocations from district C and get the ARVN to cordon off the east bank of the river, we can give the settlements here, here, and here the status of New Life Hamlets.”

  There was a timeless quality to the American effort — which is not to say that it was static but that it was constantly moving over the same ground. Each year the new young men, so full of vague notions of “development,” so certain of their own capacity to solve “problems,” so anxious to “communicate” with the Vietnamese, eagerly took their places in this old, old war. “Last year's program fell short of its goal, but this year for the first time we've got some coordination between the ARVN, the RF-PF, and the RD. The hamlet chief here is sleeping in his hamlet. And Major Trinh, an outstanding guy, is giving us his full cooperation.” Only the faces of the young men and the numbers of the hamlets changed year after year. For those who stayed in Vietnam long enough, it was like standing on the ground and watching a carousel revolve.

  Nineteen sixty-seven was the year of the “oil spot” approach to pacification, the approach that General Westmoreland had attempted in 1964–1965, and the year of the Ap Doi Moi, the “Really New Life Hamlets.” In parts of the country one could see fences of the Ap Doi Moi standing over the ruins of the New Life Hamlets, which in turn stood on the ruins of the Strategic Hamlets. There was an archaeology of pacification going back ten, sometimes twenty years. Many of the PF outposts, those pathetic mud-walled forts circled with barbed wire, had been built by the French for the fathers of those same peasant soldiers.

  Of course there were always new approaches, new “concepts” in pacification. This year it was a “rethinking” of the Revolutionary Development program. After the failures of 1966, the CIA decided to call back the RD cadre to give them a month more of retraining: a month more, but this time, so the officials said, the program would succeed. To measure that success more accurately, Robert Komer, now chief of the entire RD program, developed, with the help of McNamara's staff a new evaluation system using computers and multiple choice questionnaires. After explaining with logic and clarity how the Hamlet Evaluation System worked, he said modestly that it was not a perfect system, but that it was an improvement over its predecessors. And he was undoubtedly correct: the only uncertainty was what was being measured. And Komer in his clear and logical exposition apparently did not find it necessary to decide. “Some,” he said, “call this [pacification, revolutionary development, or rural reconstruction] chiefly a matter of providing protection or continuous local security in the countryside. Others call it the process of winning hearts and minds. For my money both descriptions are pretty good.”1 It was enough, perhaps, that the new system convinced the American public that 67 percent of the Vietnamese population lived under government control, and that that figure represented a gain of 4.8 percent over the year before.2

  If the figures were not convincing, then a tour of Vietnam almost always was. Year after year delegations of high officials, congressmen, and other dignitaries would arrive in Saigon and, still dizzy from the trip, would receive massive, two- or three-hour briefings from colonels with seven-overlay charts, then dine with the ambassador or the commanding general, those tall, noble Anglo-Saxons who emanated all the confidence of surgeons to their patients. The next day they would be issued green fatigues and flown around by daredevil helicopter pilots to spend (but for the air trip) an unutterably boring day visiting hamlets with pig farms, maternity clinics, “miracle rice” plots, and children washed, scrubbed, and smiling, lining the streets and waving GVN flags. Boredom and all, the tours were almost exact replicas of those that Ngo Dinh Diem used to take, and for which he was so criticized by his American advisers. Only the Potemkin hamlets had changed, for Diem's tours were four pacification programs and four priority areas ago.

  The VIPs would return to announce that progress was being made. How could they deny it? The confidence of the mission officials was so pure. Faced with the contradiction between the ambassador's untarnished faith and a mortar attack on the Tan Son Nhut airbase the day of their arrival, the di
stinguished Americans would have to find that faith somehow more solid and convincing. “I was down in An Giang province just yesterday — and in the Delta,” Robert Komer said, “and it's amazing how much of a difference there is down there in the course of a year.” An Giang province — the very name reduced a decade of American briefings into a single palimpsest. “Why don't you go down to An Giang province and see for yourself…” But there had never been any NLF in An Giang, for the Hoa Hao controlled the province, and they had long ago made their accommodation with the Front. The generations of VIPs who had gone down to An Giang without knowing that! Even the “dove” congressmen and the serious journalists found it difficult to resist this surreal dialogue with the mission. When Ambassadors Porter or Komer announced that x percent of the population was pacified, the New York Times reporter might sagely argue that the figure was probably closer to two-thirds or five-eighths of x, never once asking what “pacification” meant or whether indeed it was the right thing for the United States to be doing in Vietnam. The dialogue of Saigon turned around on its own axis, giving no exit onto reality.

  The dialogue was, of course, not entirely without issue, for though American policy had not changed, the American effort had increased by orders of magnitude. By the fall of 1967 there were half a million American troops in Vietnam — and that partly a result of the mission's confidence. “We are winning,” the argument went. “We can win with a little more support.” Every two or three months Westmoreland asked for thousands more troops, and after some debate the President acceded, though giving him each time something less than he asked for. Finally, Johnson put a “troop ceiling” at 525,000 men, or close to the number the U.S. military could send without calling up the reserves. The figure was arbitrary with regard to Vietnam. But then any figure would have been arbitrary, for no one knew how many troops or how long a fight would be necessary to “stop the North Vietnamese from doing what they are doing.” The dilemma was that the figure of half a million represented not enough and too much at the same time.