Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam 1945-1995

by James S. Olson

  President Diem’s peculiarities were fast becoming derangements. He was addicted to eighteen-hour work days and then left paperwork at the side of his cot to attend to when he woke up in the night to go to the bathroom. His mind locked into its own private world, he was afraid to leave business to others and assumed more and more duties, even personally approving all visa requests and deciding which streets got traffic lights. He gave military orders as well, not just to divisions and battalions but to companies, often not keeping their commanding officers informed of his decisions. In discussions with foreign journalists and American officials, Diem offered mind-numbing monologues of five, six, even ten hours. Visitors could not get in a single comment. Charles Mohr saved his questions for when Diem was lighting another cigarette; those were the only occasions he stopped talking. As Robert Shaplen of The New Yorker observed of those interviews, Diem’s “face seemed to be focused on something beyond me.... The result was an eerie feeling that I was listening to a monologue delivered at some other time and in some other place—perhaps by a character in an allegorical play.” South Vietnam was a dictatorship: Dissidents were imprisoned, tortured, or killed; elections were manipulated; the press, radio, and television were controlled; and universities were treated as vehicles for government propaganda.

  The national holiday on October 26, 1962, celebrating the triumphant Diem elections in 1955, exposed the depth of Diem’s isolation. He staged an elaborate military parade through Saigon. ARVN troops and armored personnel carriers left the field late in September to get ready for the parade, much to the dismay of American advisers fighting the Vietcong. Diem invited a few members of the press corps and some foreign diplomats to join him on the stand. The parade proceeded uneventfully, except for one bizarre fact: Diem sealed off from the public the entire parade route and several city blocks. The parade wound its way along the Saigon River with no spectators, only vacant sidewalks. ARVN troops and Nhu’s secret police forced store owners to close up shop and leave their buildings. Diem wanted no contact with his people. For David Halberstam the parade was a surrealistic experience: “One felt as if he were watching a movie company filming a scene about an imaginary country.”

  Resentment had long smoldered among the Buddhists who saw power, land, government jobs, and money flow to the Roman Catholics. The Buddhist political movement was led by Thich Tri Quang, an intensely nationalist monk who headed the militant United Buddhist church. Although he was not a communist, Quang had cooperated with the Vietminh in fighting the French and the Japanese. What Thich Tri Quang was able to exploit, in the name of civil liberties, was a widespread popular desire in many parts of South Vietnam to overthrow Diem, expel the United States, and restore Vietnam to its traditional moral values.

  Pent-up feelings exploded on May 8, 1963, the 2,587th birthday of Gautama Buddha. Diem prohibited Buddhists from flying their religious flags during the holiday. More than 1,000 Buddhist protesters gathered at the radio station in Hue demanding revocation of the order. When they refused to disperse, ARVN troops opened fire, killing eight people and wounding dozens more. The next day 10,000 Buddhists showed up demanding an apology, repudiation of the antiflag regulation, and payments to the families of the wounded and the dead. Buddhist hunger strikes spread throughout the country, and demonstrators walked the streets in Saigon. Late in May, Ngo Dinh Can imposed martial law on Hue and patrolled the streets with armored personnel carriers, tanks, and ARVN troops. In Saigon, Ngo Dinh Nhu’s police assaulted Buddhist crowds with attack dogs and tear gas. Mandarin leaders expect obedience, not argument resolved by compromise.

  On June 11, 1963, Thich Quang Duc, a seventy-three-year-old Buddhist monk, knelt on Pham Dinh Phung street in Saigon, surrounded by Buddhist monks, nuns, and invited journalists. A colleague doused him with five gallons of gasoline, and Duc lit a match and ignited himself, burning to death in protest of the Diem regime. The picture of his motionless body burning for ten minutes spread across the world wire services. A series of Buddhist torch suicides came in rapid succession. Madame Nhu remarked that she would be “willing to provide the gasoline for the next barbecue.”

  Throughout July, Ambassador Frederick Nolting pleaded with Diem to reach some accommodation with the Buddhists. Kennedy threatened to cut off economic and military assistance unless Diem acquiesced, but Diem, stiffened by Nhu’s fanatical opposition to American pressure, became more intractable. Many noncommunist South Vietnamese resented the American presence in their country, and Diem had to be careful about appearing to cave in to American pressure. In Vietnamese history, appearing as a puppet to a foreign power was political suicide. If Diem backed down, he might lose what little political support he still had.

  So the assault on the Buddhists continued. Late in July, Nhu’s goon squads, many of them dressed in ARVN uniforms, placed barbed wire around hundreds of Buddhist pagodas and arrested Buddhist leaders. Two weeks later they invaded the pagodas and dispersed all meetings there. In Hue they killed thirty worshipers and wounded two hundred more at the Dieu De Pagoda. Diem arrested children for carrying antigovernment signs and closed schools. By mid-August he had jailed more than a thousand adolescents. Finally, on August 20 he imposed martial law throughout the country. The madness precipitated an intense debate in Washington. Harkins and Nolting insisted that the war was going well and that victory was still within reach. Maxwell Taylor, Robert McNamara, Walt Rostow, and Dean Rusk agreed. But Senator Mike Mansfield insisted that defeat, not victory, was just around the corner. At a meeting of the National Security Council on August 31, Paul Kattenburg, a State Department official who headed the Interdepartmental Working Group on Vietnam, suggested that the United States should “get out while the getting is good.” Unfortunately for Kattenburg, his boss was at the meeting. “We will not,” Dean Rusk insisted, “pull out until the war is won.” Kattenburg kept his mouth shut, but his State Department career was over. Rusk posted him to Guyana.

  Quang Duc, an elderly Buddhist priest, immolates himself in protest against the Diem regime’s religious persecution. (Courtesy, National Archives.)

  It was clear to everyone in the administration, even the optimists, that it was time for a change. Frederick Nolting had to go. An aristocrat Virginian, Nolting sympathized with the Ngo family. But who would replace him? The new United States ambassador to South Vietnam needed Asian experience, but at the same time he had to be independent of the military. The inner circles at the White House discussed the matter at length during the summer of 1963, and Dean Rusk stunned everyone by suggesting Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. The mere mention of Lodge’s name was practically sacrilege. If the Kennedys bled Irish green, Lodge was the bluest of the blue bloods, a North Shore Yankee Republican of Massachusetts ancestry going back three hundred years. The Kennedys had long resented Boston Brahmins who disdained the famine-stricken Irish immigrants. Kennedy’s defeat of Lodge for the Senate seat in 1952 had been gratifying, and in 1960 Lodge was Richard Nixon’s running mate. On the night Lodge accepted the Republican vice-presidential nomination, Kennedy watched Nixon and Lodge raise their clenched hands on television. “That’s the last Nixon will see of Lodge,” he remarked to Kenny O’Donnell, his close friend and aide. “If Nixon ever tries to visit the Lodges at Beverly, they won’t let him in the door.”

  The more Kennedy thought about Rusk’s suggestion, the more he liked it. Fluent in French, Lodge had a Harvard education and a lifetime of experience. As a three-time United States senator and former ambassador to the United Nations, Lodge would not kowtow to anyone. And his gilt-edged Republican credentials might deflect some of the right-wing criticism of the administration. There was one final, mean little twist to the Lodge appointment, summed up in O’Donnell’s later comment: “the idea of getting Lodge mixed up in such a hopeless mess as the one in Vietnam was irresistible.”

  It took Lodge a few days in Saigon to realize what a hopeless mess it was. In a cable of August 28 to President Kennedy, Lodge said that the United States was “launched
on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: the overthrow of the Diem government... There is no possibility that the war can be won under a Diem administration. The chance of bringing off a generals’ coup depends on them to some extent.... We should proceed to make an all-out effort to get the generals to move promptly.”

  Kennedy wanted an independent assessment of how the war was going. On September 6 he asked Victor Krulak to take another look. He also sent Joseph Mendenhall, a career diplomat who had spent three years in Saigon. Both men made whirlwind trips, returning to the White House at about the same time on September 10. Krulak had met with Harkins and Lodge and a variety of MACV officials. Mendenhall spent his time with lower-echelon embassy officials and journalists. Krulak reported to Kennedy that the war was being won and that he could begin the promised withdrawal of 1,000 troops by the end of the year. Mendenhall announced that the Vietcong were getting stronger, that a religious civil war between Buddhists and Catholics was imminent, that the Diem regime had lost even the little credibility it once enjoyed, and that a communist victory was certain. Incredulous, Kennedy remarked at the end of their joint briefing, “You two did visit the same country, didn’t you?”

  Two weeks later, Kennedy sent Maxwell Taylor and Robert McNamara to Saigon. By that time peasants were leaving the strategic hamlets in droves, and the Vietcong were cutting up the barbed wire and using it in mines. The Vietcong were now fielding more than 35,000 troops and another 65,000 people in support services. Taylor and McNamara listened to Harkins and came back with the great promise “that the military campaign has made great progress and continues to progress” in spite of “serious political tensions in Saigon.” By the end of 1965, they astonishingly said, “It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel.”

  When he was in Saigon, Maxwell Taylor arranged a tennis match with General Duong Van Minh to feel him out about the possibilities of a coup. Taylor tried delicately to broach the issue, but a suspicious Minh kept his own counsel, preferring to talk only about forehands and backhands. But he had a view of the war, and it was glum: “more of the population on their side than has the GVN [Diem regime]” and the “heart of the Army is not in the war.” Lodge distanced himself from Diem and Nhu, and it did not take long for them to realize that the United States was seeking their removal. South Vietnamese military leaders were worried that a frustrated United States might cut off military aid. General Tran Van Don, ARVN chief of staff, was aware of Maxwell Taylor’s approach to Duong Van Minh, and he let Lucien Conein know that coup plans were under way. French-born but American-raised, Conein had spent World War II in France as an OSS agent. He was now a CIA agent in Saigon with powerful ARVN connections. He informed Tran Van Don that the United States wanted a new military government. The plotting started.

  Diem and Nhu got wind of the plan and hatched a scheme of their own. Known as Operation Bravo, it involved staging a fake revolt in Saigon, complete with demonstrations, assassinations of prominent politicians—including Minh, Tran, Conein, and Lodge—orchestrated “revolutionary broadcasts” over Saigon radio, and the flight of Diem and Nhu to secret headquarters in the countryside. Once the chaos seemed at its peak, they would reenter Saigon with a column of ARVN troops commanded by their trusted military adviser General Ton That Dinh. They would then crush the “rebellion” and “save” South Vietnam. What they did not know was that Ton That Dinh was part of the conspiracy. On November 1, 1963, the two brothers realized that Operation Bravo was not to be, and they fled to Cholon. The brothers talked with several supporters and decided to give in. Diem telephoned staff headquarters and said that he was ready to surrender with “military honors.” The surrender, the rebel leaders informed him, would be unconditional, but they promised him safety.

  Minh dispatched two jeeps and an armored personnel carrier. Among the men on the mission was Minh’s bodyguard, Captain Nhung, a professional assassin who notched his pistol after each killing. As the convoy set off, Minh gave Nhung a prearranged signal. In office or out, Diem and Nhu were powerful men whose craftiness and base of support commanded respect and honest fear. Such men, several rebels agreed, were best dead. “To kill weeds,” one of them said, “you must pull them out by their roots.” And Captain Nhung was an expert at this sort of gardening. Diem and Nhu surrendered, and rebels put them in the personnel carrier. Both men’s hands were tied. The convoy then headed for the rebel headquarters. Captain Nhung rode with the brothers. When the vehicles arrived at Joint General Staff headquarters, Diem and Nhu were dead. Both had been shot. Nhu had also been stabbed several times, Nhung told Minh. Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc fled to Rome. Ngo Dinh Can was arrested in Hue and executed in Saigon. Madame Nhu escaped the bloodbath only because she was in the United States. When news of the assassinations became public, celebrations erupted in the streets of Saigon.

  Although Lodge had not planned on the assassinations, they did not disturb him. The rebels told him that Nhu and Diem had died of “accidental suicide.” To David Halberstam, Lodge remarked: “What would we have done with them had they lived? Every Colonel Blimp in the world would have made use of them.” Minh was of like mind. “Diem could not be allowed to live because he was too much respected among simple, gullible people in the countryside, especially the Catholics and the refugees. We had to kill Nhu because he was so widely feared—and he had created organizations that were arms of his personal power.”

  When Kennedy got the news, he was profoundly disappointed. During his administration the United States had spent nearly $1 billion in South Vietnam, increased the number of American military advisers to more than 16,000, and had 108 United States soldiers killed there. But the Vietcong were stronger than ever. “Two weeks after the coup, Kennedy instructed Michael Forrestal to begin a “complete and very profound review of how we got into this country, what we thought we were doing, and what we now think we can do.… I even want to think about whether or not we should be there.” Kennedy never got a chance to see the report. On November 22, 1963, he was assassinated in Dallas. Lyndon Johnson became president. A few days after the funeral, Johnson sent a memo to all State Department officials: “Before you go to bed at night I want you to do one thing for me: ask yourself this one question … what have I done for Vietnam today?”

  Up to this point, almost the whole of the serious discussion of Vietnam had been within the administration. Few Americans had any idea of what their country was doing. In movies and television, combat was set in World War II: 12 O’Clock High, a tale of an Army Air Corps bomber group in England; The Wackiest Ship in the Army, a comedy in a Pacific setting; Combat, which tells the story of a World War II army platoon; Convoy, which portrays the navy during the battle of the Atlantic; Mr. Roberts, featuring a naval officer; McHale’s Navy, a slapstick comedy set in the South Pacific; Hogan’s Heroes, a comedy set in a German prisoner-of-war camp. All of these, even the comedies, were extremely promilitary. The screwups of McHale’s Navy and Hogan’s Heroes can still outfight and outthink the enemy, even if in some highly unorthodox ways. When popular culture in the form of comic books did take note of Vietnam, it was even less helpful. In July 1962 Dell Publishing Company began producing its Jungle War Stories. Communist forces, inspired by the Soviet Union and Red China, are undermining the government of South Vietnam as part of a global conspiracy to conquer the world. The Vietcong are bloodthirsty sadists who torture and kill the innocent civilians of South Vietnam. The Green Berets are men of military prowess, humanitarianism, and leadership who help the South Vietnamese defend themselves against the communist juggernaut.

  As yet, critics of the war had been few. A. J. Muste, one of the nation’s veteran pacifists, headed the Fellowship of Reconciliation during the 1950s and early 1960s. Established in 1914 during World War I, FOR had long been the most influential pacifist group in Great Britain and the United States. Late in 1962 Muste began warning Americans about the war. The War Resisters League was even more active. Founded in 1923 as a secular
pacifist organization, the WRL had opposed American involvement in World War II and the Korean War. By early 1963, under the leadership of David Dellinger, the WRL focused its protests on the expanding American military advisement effort in Vietnam. Except for these isolated voices, the Kennedy administration’s Vietnam policy was virtually unopposed. Johnson was not to be so fortunate.

  5

  Planning a Tragedy, 1963–1965

  It is fashionable in some quarters to say that the problems in Southeast Asia are primarily political and economic rather than military. I do not agree. The essence of the problem is military.