Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995

by James S. Olson

  Ho’s acquiescence in the partitioning of his country caught many Vietminh offguard. The victory at Dienbienphu should have let them dictate the diplomatic settlement at Geneva and secure outright independence. Ho Chi Minh, however, still hoped to work out a rapprochement with the United States, to restore some of the trust he had enjoyed during World War II. That the United States had granted the Philippines independence without a fight in 1946 left Ho with the conviction that many Americans must have been sympathetic with the aspirations of colonial peoples. He was also convinced that in 1956 he would win the election handily and see his country reunited without more bloodshed.

  Signed on July 21, 1954, the Geneva Accords received a wholesale endorsement only from France, Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union. Pham Van Dong signed the agreement for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, but Vietminh leaders were privately bitter about the partitioning. The Geneva Accords accomplished little. Pham Van Dong left the conference expecting free elections in 1956 to bring about the long- awaited unification of Vietnam. But Georges Bidault and the French left hoping to maintain French authority in Saigon and the Mekong Delta. They dreamed of bringing Tonkin back into the French Union. Ngo Dinh Diem, the anticommunist Vietnamese nationalist who became prime minister of the State of Vietnam on July 7, refused to sign the accords. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told the American delegation to leave the agreement unsigned. The first Indochina War was over, and the second was beginning.

  Ho Chi Minh’s prediction in 1946 that France would kill ten Vietnamese for every dead French soldier proved prophetic. When the mud dried around Dienbienphu, the eight years of war had resulted in the deaths of nearly 300,000 Vietminh and up to a million Vietnamese civilians. France counted 95,000 dead. But the war was not a body count, a simple military equation in which the party that piled up more kills emerged as victor. As Ho Chi Minh had believed all along, the first Indochina War was a political conflict in which the Vietminh outlasted the French. It was a lesson the United States would have to relearn

  3

  The Making of a Quagmire, 1954–1960

  There are profound differences between the Vietnamese and American people, in customs, outlook, political training, and philosophy. I hope we can find a bridge between Eastern and Western cultures.

  —Ngo Dinh Diem, 1961

  Intoxicated with his victory, convinced that he would win the elections in 1956 and take over South Vietnam, and now ready to live more fully his commitment to communism, in 1954 Ho Chi Minh set out on a savage campaign. With the French gone, he was determined to right the other great wrong in Vietnam: upper-class Vietnamese landlords who exploited peasants. Actually, few North Vietnamese peasants owned more than three or four acres, but Ho created Agricultural Reform Tribunals in every village to identify landlords. Accusations, lies, informants abounded as neighbor turned against neighbor. The tribunals had quotas of landlords to identify and kill, and their justice, if it could be called that, was as swift as it was capricious.

  Ho behaved as if he had something to prove. Stalin was dead, but his legacy of viciousness and mass death lingered. Several million kulak peasants in the Ukraine had succumbed during his campaign of terror and land redistribution, and Mao’s ruthlessness knew no bounds. Mao had repeatedly since 1949 employed mass terror as a blunt instrument of political control. The victory over the French at Dienbienphu had demonstrated the triumph of Ho’s nationalism, while the Agricultural Reform Tribunals revived communist credentials.

  With a year, thousands of landlords were dead and tens of thousands more were in labor camps for “reeducation.” The whole process was a political disaster. By the summer of 1956, Ho decided the campaign had gone too far. On August 17, he wrote a public letter confessing that “all this has caused us to commit errors and meet with shortcomings carrying out land reform.” Of the people who had been executed, Ho Chi Minh simply said, “One cannot wake the dead.” In Nghe An Province, however, his apology did not satisfy his constituency. Early in November, farmers in Quynh Luu district, angry about the land reform program as well as the government’s official anti-Catholicism, rioted and government troops were dispatched to restore order. The whole program, in Vo Nguyen Giap’s description, was “an extraordinary error.... We did not emphasize the necessity for caution and for avoiding unjust punishment of honest people... [and] resorted to terror on a wide scale.” With the end of the Agricultural Reform Tribunals, political life in North Vietnam settled down.

  Not so in South Vietnam. In the Mekong Delta, formerly Cochin China, debt burdens and farm tenancy rates had risen in the last years of the war. The country depended on rice and rubber exports, as well as French money, to keep the economy going, and that source of funds was about to dry up. There was a wealth of peasant resentment of the French and the pro-French Vietnamese. Rural South Vietnam was ripe for rebellion. The region was also a bewildering caldron of competing ethnic, religious, economic, and political groups. Most of them were at least reasonably happy that the French were gone, but there was nothing approaching a consensus about who would fill the vacuum and rule the country. In Hanoi, there was only one power center in 1954. In South Vietnam there were many.

  The least of the South Vietnamese power centers, the remains of the three-hundred-year-old Nguyen dynasty, was occupied in theory by Emperor Bao Dai. Born as Prince Nguyen Vinh Thuy in 1913, he had been tutored by French nannies and teachers from birth. Bao Dai was round faced with a high brow, husky and full but not fat, a face reflecting the cherubic complacency of a man who had never missed a meal. S. J. Perelman, who met him in Hanoi in 1946, has left a description: “Bao Dai was seated in a snug alcove surrounded by several hostesses.... The royal exile, a short, slippery-looking customer rather on the pudgy side and freshly dipped in Crisco, wore a fixed, oily grin that was vaguely reptilian.”

  In 1921, Bao Dai left Vietnam for Paris. When his father, Emperor Khai Dinh, died in 1925, he returned to Vietnam for the funeral, but the French whisked him back to Paris. He did not return to Vietnam until 1932; by that time his French was better than his Vietnamese. In Paris, Bao Dai had learned more than French literature and history. He spent his spare time in high-class Paris brothels and cabarets, becoming more infatuated with sexual acrobatics and mirrored ceilings than he had ever been with Rousseau or Voltaire. Bao Dai was intelligent, but he suffered from a fatal political weakness. He was a “man who resisted nobody.” He did attempt some modernization of imperial rule, and wanted for Vietnam as much independence as the French would allow, but he had no real ability to stand up to France. During the Japanese occupation of Indochina in World War II, Bao Dai served as the head of state for the Japanese. When Ho Chi Minh called for his abdication in 1945, Bao Dai was quick to agree, not wanting, in his own words, “to make the same mistake Louis XVI made.” Later the French restored him, and once more he accepted a role that others demanded of him. Bao Dai was careful in public to wear the regal, gold-brocaded ao dai, speak Vietnamese, and conduct himself with regal reserve. In private, he preferred to wear double-breasted suits, speak French, and hunt, dance, eat, and enjoy women. Bao Dai was still on hand in 1954, but most Vietnamese held him in contempt.

  December 8, 1950—Ex-emperor Bao Dai and General Marcel Carpentier, commander in chief of French forces in the Far East, enjoy refreshment in the presidential palace in Saigon after signing the French-Vietnam military pact creating a pro-French Vietnam army. (Courtesy, Library of Congress.)

  Huynh Phu So, source of the effective Hoa Hao movement, was born in 1919 in the Mekong Delta village of that name. He had a sickly childhood accompanied by a mystical sensibility. In 1939 he entered a Buddhist monastery where, in his own words, he underwent a “vision and miraculous cure.” An extraordinary speaker and jpgted practitioner of herbal medicine and acupuncture, Huynh Phu So returned to the Mekong Delta and began preaching a curious mixture of Buddhism and nationalism. He believed people should pray four times a day to Buddha as well as such ancient Vietna
mese heroes as the Trung sisters, Ly Bon, Tran Hung Dao, and Le Loi. The nationalist mystic, bitterly hostile to France, converted thousands of southern Vietnamese and earned from the French police the title the mad monk. They arrested Huynh Phu So in 1940 and placed him in a mental hospital, where he converted his psychiatrist and most of the staff.

  Hoa Hao conversions skyrocketed during World War II. Enjoying the protection of the Japanese, Huynh Phu So raised a personal army of 15,000 troops in the Mekong Delta. In 1946 he established the Dan Xa, or Social Democratic party, to oppose the French. But in 1947 Ho Chi Minh, concerned about Huynh Phu So’s growing power, ordered his death, and that year Vietminh assassins killed him. One of the new Hoa Hao leaders was a man named Ba Cut. A committed nationalist, Ba Cut sliced off the tip of his forefinger in 1947 to remind himself how much he hated the French. By the early 1950s the Hoa Hao had more than 1.5 million followers in South Vietnam. Most of them were anticommunists.

  Another powerful Buddhist sect in South Vietnam was the Cao Dai. Ngo Van Chieu, born in Cholon in 1878, was deeply involved with spiritualism and seances. He was also infatuated with movies, which he watched in the theaters of Saigon. Claiming to have received a visit from the supreme power, the Cao Dai, Ngo Van Chieu established a religion fusing Buddhism, Christianity, and the movies. Cao Daists prayed to Buddha, Confucius, Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc, Victor Hugo, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and a host of other religious, historical, and pop culture figures. Their pagodas were plastered with posters of the Cao Dai symbol, the huge, all-seeing eye. The Cao Dai faith spread rapidly in the Mekong Delta and frightened the French, who harassed its leaders. Centered around Tay Ninh, about sixty miles northwest of Saigon, the Cao Dai evolved into a semiautonomous state, eventually maintaining its own army. Van Chieu died in 1932. By the early 1950s, the Cao Dai under their new leader Pham Cong Tac had two million adherents and an army of 25,000 troops.

  Regular Buddhist monks were another political force. Buddhist monks lived in nearly every village, maintaining pagodas, working in the fields, living side by side with peasants. Most of them were well educated, and they knew a great deal about philosophy, medicine, and astrology. Buddhist political activity functioned on a local level, trying to maintain balance and peace in the villages. The monks took little interest in Hanoi or Saigon unless either disrupted village life. They turned against the French for just that reason. In promoting Roman Catholicism and harassing Buddhist priests, the French committed the unforgivable sin: They brought dissonance to the villages. With the French gone, the monks returned to local concerns, but they were still capable of causing trouble.

  No less important were the Binh Xuyen. Led by a ruthless cutthroat, Bay Vien, the Binh Xuyen were the Vietnamese Mafia. They were centered in Cholon, the Chinese suburb of Saigon. By the early 1950s they were a powerful political faction, complete with an army of 25,000 soldiers. Bay Vien’s complex in Saigon was legendary. The Grande Monde was a huge gambling complex capable of taking two piasters from a Vietnamese drunk or a million francs from a wealthy French businessman. Down the block was the world’s largest brothel, the infamous Hall of Mirrors, where a thousand “tricks” could be performed at once. Further down the block, an opium factory refined a high-grade product for distribution throughout Indochina. Bay Vien’s opulent home was separated from his complex by a moat occupied by dozens of alligators. Outside his bedroom, on a very long chain, a full-grown leopard paced. Pythons slithered up the two posts on the front porch. A huge Siberian tiger lived in a cage; its door could be tripped open from inside the house. It was not uncommon to find bits of cloth and human bones inside the cage. Bao Dai accepted payoffs from the Binh Xuyen, and in return, with French consent, the emperor made Bay Vien a general in the South Vietnamese army and head of the national police, with authority over casinos, prostitution, opium traffic, gold smuggling, and currency manipulation. Bay Vien had little use for the communists.

  The most troublesome political group were the Vietminh. At the time of the French surrender at Dienbienphu, there were more than 100,000 Vietminh soldiers in South Vietnam, most of them native southerners. They controlled a third of the country and were especially powerful in the Ca Mau Peninsula and along the Cambodian border. When the Geneva Accords were signed, Ho ordered most Vietminh to move to North Vietnam until after the 1956 elections. About 10,000 stayed behind with orders to return to their villages, work in the fields, and organize the peasants for the elections. The Vietminh had no doubt they would win a free election. But if the elections were postponed or canceled, the Vietminh were to become the heart of a new guerrilla movement. They were revolutionary nationalists. They hated the French and the Chinese as well as the Vietnamese emperor and his upper-class mandarins.

  Among the ethnic minorities that further divided Vietnam were the Chinese. In 1954 there were almost 1 million in South Vietnam, most of them in the Saigon suburb of Cholon. The Vietnamese nurtured an intense dislike for the Chinese, not just for China’s periodic invasions of Indochina but for their control of business and commerce. The Chinese were hardly bent on gaining political power. On the contrary, they were economic opportunists ready to work with whatever regime came to power, as long as goods moved and profits flowed. What the Chinese did have was an intense anticommunism. The French, the mandarins, the Nguyen emperors, even the Japanese—anybody, as far as the Chinese were concerned—would be better for business than the communists.

  The second-largest ethnic minority were the Khmer, the ethnic Cambodians. Totaling more than 600,000 people, the Khmer were concentrated northwest of Saigon around Tay Ninh, southwest of Saigon near Phu Vinh, and throughout An Xuyen Province in the Mekong Delta. They hated the French for conquering Cambodia, but they also despised the Vietnamese. Hundreds of years ago, the Khmer had controlled the Mekong Delta, but beginning in the eleventh century the Vietnamese expanded slowly out of Tonkin, down the spine of Annam, and into the Mekong Delta, crushing the Khmer and pushing them up the Mekong River into present-day Cambodia. The Vietnamese looked down upon the Khmer as backward, ignorant people, and the Khmer returned the dislike. After World War II, Khmer guerrillas, known as the Khmer Kampuchea Krom, began fighting the French, hoping to bring the Mekong Delta back under Cambodian sovereignty. Periodically, the Krom also fought the Vietminh and the Vietnamese National Army. When the French surrendered at Dienbienphu, the Krom launched a small-scale guerrilla war against the Vietnamese.

  Still another of the ethnic minorities were the Montagnard, or Mountain People: more than forty tribes of hunters and foragers in the Central Highlands. They hated the Vietnamese because of the annual tribute payment the emperors collected, and they had little use for the French, who also taxed them heavily. In 1946 Giap claimed that “to seize and control the highlands is to solve the whole problem of South Vietnam.” The rugged mountains of the Central Highlands were perfect hiding places for guerrillas, and the Montagnard were perfect guides. The French tried to buy Montagnard support and occasionally succeeded. One French sergeant remarked that he had “the Sedangs as allies. They are great big good-looking fellows with nothing on except paint and tattooing and magic charms.” More often than not, the Montagnard sided with the Vietminh. In the late 1940s, Ho Chi Minh brought thousands of Montagnard to Vietminh schools in Tonkin for training as teachers, nurses, and political agents. He promised them that once the French were gone and the imperial court at Hue was destroyed, there would be no more tribute payments.

  In South Vietnam Roman Catholics, successors to Vietnamese converted by French missionaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, numbered 600,000 people in 1954. They were a privileged minority who had worked for the French and received the benefits of land, education, and place. Graduates of the French lycées in Hue and Saigon, many received postgraduate training at military schools and universities in France. In South Vietnam they dominated the professions, colleges, civil service, and military. Among most Vietnamese Buddhists, the Roman Catholics were despised, a
community tied to foreigners. Ho had targeted them long ago. Once the French were gone, the South Vietnamese elite had to go as well. But in the 1950s and 1960s, South Vietnam was not to be ruled by the Hoa Hao, Cao Dai, Binh Xuyen, Buddhists, Vietminh, Chinese, Khmer, or Montagnards. Power went to Roman Catholics, and at the center of that elite was the Ngo family.