by Max Boot
By the time Lightning Joe Collins arrived back in Saigon the next day, he was confronted, much to his frustration, with a fait accompli. The ambassador was left to reflect that when “word of Diem’s bold action and the army’s initial success reached Washington, whatever influence I might have had . . . was quickly dissipated.”78 Collins was summarily informed that he would be replaced by a new ambassador, the career diplomat G. Frederick Reinhardt, who arrived in Saigon on May 10. He would take a more conciliatory stance toward Diem, as advocated by Lansdale.
Collins had defeated Japanese and German armies, but in South Vietnam he had been bested by a former advertising man with a colonel’s wings on his collar. Privately smarting at what he viewed as Lansdale’s insubordination (he later griped that it was a “big mistake” to have “two people supposedly representing the United States government” in Saigon),79 Collins planted his tongue firmly in his cheek when he thanked Lansdale in a farewell letter for his “splendid help during the past six months.”80 Also leaving was Emmett McCarthy, the chief of the regular CIA station in Saigon who was constantly at odds with Lansdale.81
Amid all these departures, the French, Lansdale noted, “were asking me pointedly when in hell I was leaving.” He jested that he “was being traded for two French generals and a second baseman,” but the joke fell flat, and not only because the Europeans were unfamiliar with America’s national pastime; “these local French are now so sour on life that they just glared at me.”82 While the French sulked, Lansdale and his team exulted. For one bright, shining moment in the glorious spring of 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem and Edward G. Lansdale—the premier and his premier supporter—reigned supreme in Saigon.
LANSDALE DID not, of course, single-handedly determine the outcome of the 1955 sects crisis, any more than he had done with the 1953 Philippine presidential election. Diem, like Ramon Magsaysay, was ultimately master of his own fate. Bernard Fall was right to call Diem’s handling of the Battle of Saigon his “finest hour.”83 But it was Lansdale’s finest hour, too. His wooing of sect leaders such as Trinh Minh Thé had swung the balance of power in Diem’s favor and given Diem the confidence to fight and defeat the Binh Xuyen. Most importantly, he had persuaded the Eisenhower administration to reverse its decision to topple Diem. The CIA’s official history, which is generally hostile to Lansdale because he was so often at odds with career CIA officers, nevertheless concludes that he was “the largest single influence on deliberations in Washington at the most critical point of Diem’s tenure before 1963.”84 The history goes on to assert that the CIA’s role in helping Diem to consolidate power was the biggest achievement of its entire involvement in Vietnam, which was to last twenty more years.
Lansdale’s pro-Diem cables would not prove as important as George F. Kennan’s Long Telegram, sent from Moscow in 1946, which laid out the policy of containment. But they surely rank among the more influential diplomatic dispatches of the postwar period. And just as Kennan’s telegram was influential because it gave expression to an already existing disposition to oppose Soviet expansionism, so too Lansdale’s cables were influential because they also crystalized an already existing policy, albeit one that was in momentary danger of being abandoned—a policy of backing Diem as an anti-Communist bulwark in Southeast Asia. It became known as “sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem,” and its author was the buoyant chief of the Saigon Military Mission. William Conrad Gibbons, a leading historian of the American war effort, was later to say, “If it hadn’t been for Lansdale, Diem would have been out in April of 1955. . . . He was the mastermind of the whole thing.”85
Eight years later, a different set of policymakers in Washington would decide to topple Diem, with calamitous consequences. That mistake was narrowly avoided in the spring of 1955 largely because of Lansdale’s intervention. Some might argue, given the problems subsequently encountered by Diem, that it might have been better to remove him early on, but the coup plotters in 1955 were as unlikely as the ones in 1963 to form a government that could have been successful in mobilizing popular support. Indeed, the 1955 plotters would have been even harder put to assert any legitimacy because of their French colonial connections. By saving Diem from his enemies in Saigon and Washington, Lansdale had made a powerful and on balance positive impact on the course of Vietnamese history. Although he did not know it at the time, he had reached the apogee of his power and influence.
17
“Stop Calling Me Papa!”
I like the guy, but won’t buy fascism.
—EDWARD LANSDALE
THE Battle of Saigon, waged across the metropolis in the spring of 1955, had made Edward Lansdale the object of violent antipathy on the part of the French and the rebellious sects because of the pivotal role he played in keeping the Ngo Dinh Diem regime alive. “The Binh Xuyen, the Hoa Hao, the French, and the Vietminh are still keeping me on their old s——t lists as public enemy number one,” Ed wrote to Pat Kelly.1 Even after the outcome of the battle was clear, some of the French “soreheads” came gunning for him and his team members in a subterranean spy-versus-spy war that raged for months.2
One day in 1955, Richard “Dick” Smith, the Marine captain who handled logistics for the Saigon Military Mission, came out of the “pool house” on Rue Taberd and saw a French army jeep that had been parked down the street accelerating toward him. As the car sped past, a soldier in the rear seat leaned out and opened fire at him with a pistol through a side curtain. Because it was an awkward angle and the jeep was going too fast, the rounds went into the curb and the wall. Just as Smith was reaching for the .38 pistol he normally carried in his pocket to return fire, he realized that he had left it in the house. He could do nothing but watch in frustration as the jeep sped away.
And one night, while Army Captain Russell “Mike” Moriarty, the Saigon Military Mission’s “tough, funny, very Irish” man in Haiphong, was sleeping in his apartment, he woke up to see assassins in his room. He opened fire with the pistol he kept by his bed. Once he was fully awake he realized that he had been shooting at his own clothes hanging on wooden valet stands; in the dark the suits and hats resembled men. He subsequently showed Dick Smith the bullet holes in some of his jackets—a sign of how paranoid he was becoming, and not without reason.3
Such attacks, previously isolated incidents, became endemic in the summer of 1955. Lansdale’s men received an anonymous mimeographed note from a hitherto unknown group calling itself the Front for National Unity and against American Domination, warning them that if they did not leave the country immediately their safety could not be assured. Explosions shattered the plate glass window of the U.S. Information Service Library in Saigon, cars belonging to Americans were blown up, and grenades were tossed into the yards of houses where Americans lived. Rufus Phillips, now driving Lansdale’s old 2CV, checked it regularly for bombs every morning before starting the ignition.4
That June, a Frenchman with a mustache similar to Lansdale’s parked a black Citroën nearly identical to Lansdale’s on his block and spent the night in a house across the street. In the morning, as the Frenchman was driving away, a jeep filled with men with automatic weapons pulled alongside his car and riddled him with bullets. The police detectives investigating the murder told Lansdale that the gunmen had been after him. “Now the French with mustaches like mine will be shaving them off,” Ed joked to Pat Kelly. “I’d shave mine off only you say I look like hell without it. So I’ll just keep ducking.”5
When Lansdale complained to French security officials, they blamed such attacks on the Vietminh. But Lou Conein heard that Colonel Jean Carbonel, Lansdale’s boss at TRIM, was responsible. Lansdale confronted Carbonel. Speaking as usual through the adjutant, Lansdale told Carbonel that, with the death of the mustachioed Frenchman, this “cruel farce” had gone too far. He added melodramatically, “I hereby inform you that I am withdrawing my protection from the French Expeditionary Corps. Don’t forget you are ten thousand miles from Metropolitan France. Whatever happens to you from now
is on your own heads.”
This earned Lansdale an upbraiding the following morning at the American embassy. The new ambassador, the veteran diplomat G. Frederick Reinhardt, told him that his words were at odds with the spirit of Franco-American friendship. Lansdale defiantly replied that as long as junior French military personnel continued to terrorize Americans in Saigon, he and his small staff of a dozen men were certainly not going to “protect” the French Far East Expeditionary Corps of eighty thousand troops6—thus bringing himself into conflict with yet another American envoy.
Soon thereafter Rufus Phillips stopped by the “pool house” to find Lou Conein in the kitchen. In front of him, on an enameled kitchen table, were “bars of C-3 plastic explosives, orange-colored primacord, a roll of fuses, a box of caps, and rolls of friction tape.” Conein was assembling plastic bombs while uttering a string of curses in English and French—“salauds, espece de con, bastards, goddam sons of bitches, assholes.” Phillips asked what was going on. Conein replied, “None of your goddam business. What the hell does it look like?”
Phillips offered to help. Conein gave him a kitchen knife and asked him “to cut up the rest of the C-3 into five-inch lengths and tape primacord to the sections, just like the others.” When Phillips was finished, he asked Conein whether he needed any more assistance. “No, goddammit,” Conein muttered. “You didn’t see any of this. Get out of here!”
After midnight, Conein set off for a little drive through Saigon along with his fiancée, a woman of mixed French and Vietnamese ancestry named Elyette Brochot. She was cradling the bombs in her lap, handing them to Conein as they drove by the homes of Colonel Carbonel and other Frenchmen. Conein lit the fuses with his cigarette lighter and tossed the bombs into the yards of the houses. The final bomb went into the garden of the French ambassador.
The French naturally complained about this attack, even though no one had been hurt, but they had little more to say when some junior French officers were arrested by Vietnamese police. In their possession were explosives and a list of American targets. With French complicity exposed, the attacks on Americans finally ended.7
AS THE summer of 1955 progressed, South Vietnam became more peaceful than it had been at any time since the 1930s—or that it would be again until the 1980s. The French war was over; the American war had not yet begun. The Communist regime in Hanoi was in the midst of a brutal collectivization and land redistribution program that would result by mid-1956 in the deaths of an estimated fifteen thousand “landlords” and “traitors” in a process that even Ho Chi Minh later admitted had gotten out of control.8 The sects in South Vietnam were in disarray. French forces were finally leaving after nearly a century of colonial occupation. The Vietnamese army was regaining control of areas vacated by the Vietminh. “Diem was pretty well consolidated at this time . . . so these were fairly tranquil days for Vietnam,” recalled an American reporter.9
Under the Geneva Accords, an election was supposed to be held by July 1956 to unify the country. But neither South Vietnam nor the United States had signed the treaty, and neither Diem nor Eisenhower had any interest in holding a vote that they were sure would be won by Ho Chi Minh—not just because of his popularity but also because of the police-state control he exerted over the North. For the foreseeable future, Vietnam would be divided into two nations. North Vietnam was already a Communist dictatorship. What kind of nation would South Vietnam become?
The debate over this question, in both Saigon and Washington, would echo similar debates that recurred during the Cold War. The United States would find itself allied with numerous undemocratic regimes such as Fulgencio Batista’s Cuba, Anastasio Somoza’s Nicaragua, Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire, Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan, and the Shah’s Iran. There was considerable discussion over the years about whether and how the United States should push its allies to democratize, but with a few exceptions, including the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Chile in the 1980s and Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s, both Republican and Democratic administrations were generally content to ignore the illiberal practices of allied regimes as long as they contributed to stability and security. The credo of this realpolitik policy came from President Franklin Roosevelt’s apocryphal comment about Somoza: “He’s a sonofabitch, but he’s our sonofabitch.”
This was not a view that Lansdale shared. In both the Philippines and South Vietnam, he was convinced that fostering representative government was not only morally right but strategically smart. In June 1955, he wrote of his “strong feelings about how to fight Communism: by giving the guy in the street or the rice paddy something he can believe in so strongly that he will defend it with everything he has, whether or not anybody asks him to do so. It’s old-fashioned Americanism, representative government, an armed force which protects the people as brothers, all men created equal.”10
In long conversations during the summer of 1955 with Ngo Dinh Diem, accompanied as usual by small cups of tea and endless cigarettes, Ed Lansdale explained the drafting of the American Constitution and urged Diem to replicate the division of powers created by the Founding Fathers. Above all, he extolled the example of George Washington, the aristocratic Virginian who had put himself above party politics and had left office after two terms, making himself the beloved “father” of his country. Diem was unconvinced. An old-fashioned mandarin, he believed in the rule of the scholarly and virtuous elite—men like himself—and did not think that South Vietnam could risk the messiness of French-style democracy, with governments rising and falling on an annual basis, while confronting Communist subversion. Given his own philosophy of “benevolent authoritarianism,”11 Diem became annoyed when Lansdale tried to upbraid him for undemocratic moves such as closing opposition newspapers. Lansdale would ask him, “Do you think that’s the right thing for ‘the father of his country’ to do?” Diem would snap, “Stop calling me papa!”12
Lansdale’s advice was being eclipsed by the influence of Diem’s brother Ngo Dinh Nhu and his sister-in-law, the tart-tongued Madame Nhu, known for her intemperate opinions and form-fitting ao dai dresses. Having studied in France, Ngo Dinh Nhu was in thrall to the abstruse French Catholic philosophy known as personalism, which claimed to be a communitarian, split-the-difference alternative to both “liberal individualism and Marxist collectivism.”13 In Nhu’s hands, this became the justification for an increasingly powerful state designed to buttress his brother’s authority at all costs. Lansdale thought that Nhu was a “Mussolini-type character” who was attempting to “evolve a Fascist type state.”14 But he was powerless to block Nhu, who had moved into the presidential palace with his family, with Madame Nhu now serving as first lady to her bachelor brother-in-law.
Not only did Nhu have the trust of Diem; he also had the CIA and State Department behind him. Having established a covert relationship with the CIA in 1952, Nhu had his own CIA liaison officer, Paul Harwood, who was working at cross-purposes with Lansdale.15 A bespectacled and buttoned-down intelligence officer with a degree in Asian studies and a “modest, reflective” air that was far removed from the “macho covert action type” of legend, Harwood became as close to Nhu as Lansdale did to Diem—he served as confirmation sponsor for the Nhus’ daughter.16
Ambassador Frederick Reinhardt and the new CIA station chief, John Anderton, backed Nhu and Harwood over Lansdale. Lansdale tried appealing to his patrons, the Dulles brothers, but they were not sympathetic. John Foster Dulles argued at an NSC meeting on May 19, 1955, “In the Orient, it was necessary to work through a single head of government rather than through a coalition in which various personal interests had to be submerged in a common loyalty.” Dulles cited approvingly the examples of Syngman Rhee and Ho Chi Minh. His only quarrel with Ho, it seemed, was that he was on the other side.17
With Washington’s support, Diem, in the manner of a Southeast Asian Franco or Perón, set about creating a one-party state built around his own, CIA-funded political party, the National Revolutionary Movement (NRM).18 It would as
sume a prominent role in organizing pro-government rallies and parades and in crusading against what the puritanical Diem called the “four social evils”: alcohol, prostitution, opium, and gambling.19 Not content with creating a public political party, Nhu set up a secret party, too, known as the Can Lao (the Personalist Labor Revolutionary Party). Like the Communist Party, it was organized into covert cells. New members reportedly had to kiss a picture of Ngo Dinh Diem and to swear loyalty to him. Membership in either the NRM or the Can Lao became a prerequisite for career advancement in the government, whereas Vietnamese who belonged to older political parties such as the Dai Viet and the Vietnam Nationalist Party (VNQDD) were discriminated against or worse. A secret police organization with the deceptively innocuous name Service for Political and Social Study (known as SEPES after its French initials) monitored anyone who could pose a threat to Diem’s rule, whether pro- or anti-Communist.
While building up their own political base, Nhu and Diem were determined to eradicate the remaining Vietminh infrastructure in the South. In July 1955, they launched a “Denounce the Communists” campaign and in January 1956 issued the notorious Ordinance No. 6, permitting the authorities to lock up for two years anyone considered a danger “to the defense of the state and order.” A year later, Lansdale passed along a report that seven thousand political prisoners were being held at one Saigon prison alone.20
Many of the detainees were held on nebulous or unconvincing evidence and, where possible, Lansdale exerted his influence to free them. But he found it hard to “come to grips” with Diem’s growing authoritarianism, which was far removed from Ramon Magsaysay’s more democratic practices in the Philippines. “Every time I charge in when folks are arrested for ‘political crimes,’ ” Lansdale complained, “I discover no charges, and nobody who ordered the police to arrest, and everyone is released. Next thing, everyone disappears, and then comes the baffling deal of trying to find out if they were kidnapped and bumped off, or are in hiding, or have run out of the country.”21
