Vietnam

A British Council lecturer found himself identifying the bodies of Diem and Nhu at St Paul hospital, because he was married to the late president’s niece. Diem appeared to have been hit just once in the neck, Nhu repeatedly in the back. Lodge summoned the generals to the US embassy, where he described the coup as ‘a remarkable performance in all respects’, then sent a buoyant cable to Washington: ‘The prospects now are for a shorter war.’ There were public celebrations in Saigon and other cities, with the deposed dictator’s image exultantly torn from the walls of public buildings. Hundreds of political prisoners, some showing marks of torture, were set free. An incongruous memory lingered in the minds of many Saigonese: a ban on dancing, imposed by Madame Nhu in the alleged interests of public morality, was rescinded. Thousands danced, figuratively, on the Ngos’ graves.

Neil Sheehan and some of his press corps colleagues detected an illusory gleam of hope: ‘If you stuck with Diem, you were going to lose the war. We thought, if they got a decent military regime, they had a chance.’ Gen. Duong Van Minh assumed leadership of the junta that took over the government of South Vietnam. In London The Times reported on 5 November: ‘Saigon was acting as if a great weight was lifted. Streets were crowded as they have never been crowded … Thousands of Buddhists flocked to Xa Loi pagoda for almost jubilant prayer services.’ A special correspondent added: ‘The pro-American leanings of several of the Junta … should incline them towards democracy.’

John F. Kennedy was attending a meeting with Max Taylor when news was brought of Diem’s death. The soldier recorded how the president ‘rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay’. Subsequent arguments about responsibility seem otiose. The administration had authorised Lodge to open the seacocks, allowing the regime to founder. Recriminations about whether Washington should have ensured the availability of lifeboats for survivors are beside the point. The South Vietnamese generals would not have dared to remove Diem had they not been assured that this represented Washington’s will. Nobody convincingly warned them not to kill him.

It is sometimes argued that Diem’s regime could have reformed and survived; that the president was South Vietnam’s last nationalist and independent head of state. VNAF fighter pilot Tran Hoi said: ‘I thought the Americans quite wrong to depose him. He was a true patriot.’ Some thoughtful South Vietnamese respected Diem’s efforts, however ill-judged, to pursue his own policies rather than merely to execute American ones. Another air force officer, Nguyen Van Uc, said: ‘Diem knew that if [American combat troops] came in, the communists would always be able to say they were fighting a campaign against imperialist domination.’ A naval officer agreed: ‘After Diem’s death, there was no more real politics in South Vietnam.’

The record shows that the regime was rotten to the core, and commanded negligible popular support. Yet the manner of the president’s extinction, resembling that of a Roman emperor by his Praetorian Guard, dealt a crippling and probably irretrievable blow to America’s moral standing in South-East Asia. The US chiefs of staff were appalled, calling it ‘the Asian Bay of Pigs’. Frank Scotton said, ‘Killing Diem was a catastrophic mistake.’ He told those of his bosses who claimed to see the prospect of a fresh start: ‘Some of these generals are quite likeable guys, but do any of them have the smallest administrative or political leadership skills? Now that the first bloody coup is accepted, anyone with more than two tanks will believe they have licence for a change of government.’

David Elliott had arrived in Vietnam ‘confident that we were doing the right thing. But I soon came to believe that instead of supporting the coup we should have faced the fact that there was no common purpose between ourselves and our ally. We should have walked away.’ An Australian working later in Vietnam wrote: ‘What Americans have not learnt is that they cannot impose “democracy” on the South. For [the US] to support any government is to doom it to failure.’ An Ed Lansdale protégé, CIA officer Rufus Phillips, said of Diem’s killing, ‘I wanted to sit down and cry … That was a stupid decision and, God, we paid, they paid, everybody paid.’ Former Saigon ambassador Fritz Nolting resigned from the State Department in protest.

On 22 November 1963, forty-six-year-old US president John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Even as the world mourned, the knot of Americans privy to the secrets of what had taken place in Saigon less than three weeks earlier reflected upon the harsh symmetry. Kennedy was succeeded by his vice-president, a man of notable political gifts, most of which would later be forgotten as Lyndon Johnson bore to his grave the terrible incubus of Vietnam. In those first days, few people outside America knew anything about its new leader. In London The Times observed with obvious scepticism: ‘On the world stage he is almost unknown.’ Arthur Schlesinger wrote dismissively: ‘He knows little and yet seems disinclined to add to his knowledge as, for instance, by talking to foreign visitors.’

Torrents of ink have been expended on speculation about the course John F. Kennedy might have pursued in Vietnam, absent the Texas bullets. The CIA’s William Colby thought he would have recognised the need for a credible political strategy, as a precondition for any US troop commitment. White House aide Kenny O’Donnell later claimed to have heard the president say that the ideal outcome would be for a Saigon regime to ask the Americans to leave. The monarch of Camelot might have persisted in a limited commitment, without dispatching half a million troops. Robert McNamara asserted that Kennedy would have got out once the 1964 election was won. However, the defense secretary’s biographer notes that he expressed this belief only long afterwards.

The evidence seems overwhelming that the president’s thinking was dominated by the requirements of his forthcoming re-election campaign. In the previous spring he had told Senator Mike Mansfield that he favoured quitting Vietnam, but could not be seen to do so before polling day. On 22 November at Dallas Trade Mart, Kennedy was scheduled to say: ‘We in this country in this generation are the watchmen on the walls of freedom … Our assistance to … nations can be painful, risky and costly, as is true in South-East Asia today. But we do not weary of the task.’ J.K. Galbraith recalled: ‘I heard [Kennedy] say many times … “There are just so many concessions that one can make to the Communists in one year and survive politically.”’

Breathless modern admiration often obscures the fact that in mid-November 1963, Kennedy’s global standing was low. The London Times editorialised on the 12th, ten days before Dallas, about a ‘sense of paralysis’ pervading the US government, of ‘general disappointment’ about its performance, reflected in failures of policy across several continents. ‘For some reason, the American administration is becoming increasingly powerless to influence events at home or abroad.’ It seems implausible that Kennedy would have dared to act in a fashion that made him seem weak in advance of November 1964. Following re-election, he might have displayed the moral courage that Lyndon Johnson lacked, to cut America’s losses – but he probably would not.

Kennedy’s Vietnam policy suffered from the same fundamental flaw as that of every other president between 1945 and 1975: it was rooted in the demands of US domestic politics, rather than in a realistic assessment of the interests and wishes of the Vietnamese people. Kennedy was a sufficiently intelligent and sensitive man – consider his earlier scepticism about Indochina – to recognise the unlikelihood of American military success there. However, in the climate of the Cold War, which was then very cold, the political costs of staying in South Vietnam appeared to the Kennedy White House lower than those of being seen to quit, fail, lose, give best to the communists. Neither the president nor Robert McNamara grasped the depth of the potential downside of Vietnam for their own country.

By the end of 1963 the Saigon government had no physical presence in some parts of the Mekong delta, designated by the communists the ‘20/7 Zone’ – date of the 1954 Geneva Accords – and such ‘liberated areas’ expanded rapidly in the confusion following the death of Diem. Southern troop morale slumped, and even supposedly elite formations showed little appetite for engaging the enemy. The strategic hamlets programme collapsed. With astonishing suddenness, across large areas of the country the NLF found themselves in the driving seat. Americans enjoyed a black joke about an alleged conversation between Lodge and ‘Big’ Minh, in which the ambassador urged the general to promote reassurance among the Vietnamese just as Lyndon Johnson did with his televised address after Kennedy’s assassination. Minh said: ‘Fine. Give us TV.’

The fall of Diem prompted a crisis meeting of Hanoi’s central committee, which began on 22 November. Ho Chi Minh offered to moderate, but the hawks rebuffed this suggestion: there is an unconfirmed claim that he stormed out, in dismay or disgust. Such a gesture would have been uncharacteristic, though a month later he is alleged to have told the Soviet ambassador that he was retiring from politics. What is certain is that the meeting marked the end of Ho’s significant influence upon events – though not of his status as the personification of his country in the eyes of the world – and confirmed Le Duan as foremost power in Hanoi, with Le Duc Tho his most influential subordinate. Le Duan enjoyed an immense advantage over his foes both in his own country and in the US: he was the only important player whose objective was clear and unwavering – to create a unified, Stalinist Vietnam. It is worthy of notice that less than thirty years before the collapse of the Soviet empire, he displayed no glimmer of understanding of the epochal failure of its economic model.

Relations with Beijing – now more Stalinist than Stalin’s Soviet successors – had become much closer: on 2 August in Beijing, the Chinese had signed an agreement promising direct military support for North Vietnam in the event of a US invasion. Whether Mao would have honoured this is highly debatable, but in the autumn of 1963 the pact greatly strengthened the hand of Le Duan and his activist comrades in the politburo. China’s president Liu Shaoqi, visiting Hanoi, offered more active encouragement for the Southern liberation struggle than had any recent Beijing leader. Chinese weapons began to arrive in quantity, and to flow southwards, while 7,850 troops from the North made the epic trek to ‘Battlefield B’, as Hanoi designated the South. November’s Party central committee meeting ended with an unequivocal commitment to a new proactive, aggressive, explicitly military campaign.

Le Duan and his colleagues thought the new Saigon regime would quickly implode, and thus that the Americans were unlikely to dispatch ground troops in support of a lost cause. Anxiety to fill the power vacuum in the South caused them to decide upon an urgent escalation, expressed in Resolution 9, formulated in December 1963 and enshrined in two documents of which one was published on 20 January 1964, the other remaining secret: ‘Strive to Struggle, Rush Forward to Win New Victories in the South’. Meanwhile at home, the hardliners launched a new purge of ‘rightist deviationists’, some of them heroes of the Vietminh era: thousands of officials, journalists and intellectuals were dispatched for re-education.

Resolution 9 represented a historic commitment to wage an armed struggle to the bitter end. While Moscow and Beijing were troubled by its possible consequences, and for some months Soviet aid was near-zero and the Russians had no ambassador in Hanoi, both became reluctantly convinced that they must be seen to support the cause of revolution and liberation with ever more generous arms supplies. Hanoi roused its supporters: ‘The time has come for North Vietnam to increase its assistance to the South … The enemy … is using his armed forces to kill and plunder the people … The only way to smash them is through armed struggle, which hereafter becomes decisive.’ Though the Mekong delta witnessed the most immediate increase in guerrilla activity, the epicentre of the struggle would progressively shift towards the Central Highlands and the area north-west of Saigon. The communists’ ambitious new objective was to engage, maul and break the spirit of the South Vietnamese army.

Some historians believe that in 1962–63 important opportunities were missed to make a peace deal. This may be true, insofar as the North Vietnamese, and Le Duan himself, for a season considered negotiating an American exit, followed by neutralisation. It is wildly unlikely, however, that President Diem would have accepted a deal that involved sharing power with the NLF. Moreover, had a bargain been struck, this would have provided only the briefest pause before Vietnam became a unified communist state: neither Hanoi nor COSVN would have renounced violence in exchange for anything less.

Hindsight may suggest that such an outcome, such a surrender, would have been preferable to the decade of murderous strife that instead ensued. Most South Vietnamese, and especially the Buddhist leadership, would have chosen peace on any terms; it was their American sponsors who rejected such an outcome, arguing that to sentence the people of South Vietnam to share the dismal economic, social and political fate of their Northern brethren would represent a historic betrayal.

The communists and the United States rightfully share responsibility for the horrors that befell Vietnam after the death of John F. Kennedy, because both preferred to unleash increasingly indiscriminate violence, rather than yield to the will of their foes. American field artillery officer Doug Johnson said: ‘The first major turning-point in the war was the assassination of Diem. From that day, we had lost the moral high ground. Everyone knew that we were complicit. Who was going to trust us? Serving in Vietnam, I thought: “I will do the best I can, and I wish these people well, without much hope that this will end in a good way.”’

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