The year 1963 was one of decision with regard to the future of American-Vietnamese relations. William Colby recalled the pressures that were building in Saigon and the split that developed within the Kennedy administration over South Vietnam: “On the American side, the differences grew between those who saw the problem as chiefly one requiring a strong effort in the countryside, military and paramilitary, and those who believed the effort was doomed unless Diem changed his authoritarian regime to attract popular support and include oppositionists in a national effort.”1 In the end the latter group won and eclipsed the efforts of Ambassador Nolting to stick with the original U.S. policy in support of the Diem regime.
The historical record places the responsibility for the fate of South Vietnam upon the shoulders of specific individuals, powerful men within the Kennedy administration who directly and intentionally abrogated America’s pledges to President Diem’s government. Their decisions resulted in the destruction of the South Vietnamese government and created a moral imperative for the United States to fill the political vacuum they produced with military might. Ambassador Nolting, as the senior State Department man on the ground in South Vietnam at that time, stood against these men. During the course of his protest, however, he was replaced as ambassador in the summer of 1963. Michael Forrestal of the National Security Council had advised President Kennedy that a successor was needed for Nolting, whose tour was up in April of that year. Forrestal had bluntly stated: “More vigor is needed in getting Diem to do what we want.”2
There was considerable irony at work, because the beginning of 1963 seemed to be the harbinger for the same kind of success that the year 1962 had proved to be in the American-Vietnamese fight against the Viet Cong. This success was summarised in the “Current Intelligence Memorandum Prepared in the Office of Current Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency”. Much of this document has been redacted, or sanitised, and its full content remains unknown. Nevertheless, given its documentation of the accomplishments of the GVN with American help, it supported a continued relationship between Washington and President Diem. With regard to the progress of the counterinsurgency, for example, the document indicated the favourable seizure rate of Communist weaponry and the positive impact of the strategic hamlets.3
Specifically, the CIA report noted that the GVN was probably holding its own against the insurgents and even reducing the threat of the guerrillas in some areas. Cautiously, the CIA analysts explained it was too early to declare that the back of the Communist organisation had been broken. They did report, however, that the South Vietnamese were successfully curbing the insurgency through extensive American assistance. U.S. tactical advice had resulted in the ARVN being more efficient, mobile, and aggressive against the insurgents. The Diem government was gaining ground; the future disaster being predicted by reporters such as Halberstam and Sheehan was unlikely.4 The United States was not sinking with Diem; it was at least treading water, and the Communists were doing no better. In some ways, thanks to the strategic hamlets, they were doing a good deal worse.5
The CIA opinion was by no means the only official report done on the situation in South Vietnam in early 1963. The Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a lengthy assessment based on General Earle G. Wheeler’s observations in the country. In the Wheeler assessment, Ambassador Nolting was doing an impressive job at making the U.S. effort work. Wheeler and his team also noted that General Paul Harkins had established cordial, direct, and trustworthy relations with Diem’s govern-ment.6 They praised the substantial value of the strategic hamlets in the counterinsurgency effort against the Communists.
In specific terms, the Wheeler report labelled the military measures being taken in South Vietnam as vital. These measures would pave the way for security and stability, without which political and economic growth could not occur. The main problem that plagued rural South Vietnam was the lack of law and order; reestablishing government control would allow the GVN’s measures for political and economic growth to take hold. Attached to this fundamental problem was the historical reality that the central government had never before done anything to improve the lives of the peasants. Nor had the peasants ever linked themselves, their activities, or their futures with the central government. As a result, they had no comprehension of national political issues, of what really was at stake if the Communists took over the whole country. The Wheeler report team did note, however, that the slow dawning of change was taking place.7
The Wheeler report identified the SHP as the greatest single political-military instrument the GVN had for making themselves relevant to rural South Vietnamese. The defence of the strategic hamlets allowed the GVN the opportunity to inaugurate political, economic, and social reforms at the hamlet level. As a result, elections had been held in over one thousand hamlets. The American team noted that these were fair and democratic elections. As such, they allowed councils and hamlet chiefs to represent the people in the efforts to defend and to improve the villages. While noting that the democratisation process was slow, the team recognised that democracy could not be forced on the people from legislative action in Saigon, due to pressure from abroad, but could grow through the political participation afforded by the strategic hamlets.
The Wheeler report concluded that the Americans were not in a position to direct the GVN. It recommended that the Kennedy administration do precisely what Nolting and Harkins had been urging all along: influence the GVN through good relations and friendly advice. The relationship between Washington and Saigon would only continue to improve if the excellent partnership put into place by Nolting and Harkins were maintained.
Wheeler’s team recognised that opposite their positive view was the American media’s negative one. The constant cynical and pessimistic reporting was causing serious problems for Secretary of State Dean Rusk and his attempts to stay the course with official U.S. foreign policy toward South Vietnam.8 Rusk even sent a brief telegram to Nolting requesting his evaluation of what the U.S. newsmen were doing and what he thought could be done.9 As noted by the Wheeler report, American journalists were also creating problems for Diem’s family, the GVN, and the military effort.10 Specifically they were making a serious public relations predicament for the war effort in Vietnam.
As a result of the negative reporting, the Wheeler report noted, the GVN had come to regard the foreign press as completely untrustworthy. Reporters had a predilection for publishing unreliable information derived from private, biased sources. News stories tended to portray the GVN and its undertakings in the worst possible light by focusing on mistakes and failures; rarely did they record anything being done well. To illustrate this point, the Wheeler report pointed to the scandal caused by the stories about the Battle of Ap Bac, which were discussed in the previous chapter.11
Wheeler’s team summed up the effect of American newswriting: great harm had been done to the combined U.S.-GVN effort to defeat the insurgency. There was no gainsaying the fact that both Congress and the American public had been influenced by the newsmen to think that the war effort in South Vietnam was badly off track. The ARVN and the GVN were seen as lacking drive, determination, courage, training, and competence. In turn, within South Vietnam, there was a serious backlash to declining American opinion. It was apparent to the Wheeler team that the Vietnamese bitterly resented the derogatory portrait of them being painted by the media.
The growing public antagonism toward South Vietnam could only hinder the continuation of current U.S. foreign policy toward the country. Even Harriman, who certainly wanted a change in policy, was worried about the influence U.S. newspapers were exerting on Washington, and he noted as much in a letter to Nolting at the end of January 1963. Harriman asked for Nolting’s help in improving the news reports coming from South Vietnam, because of “the need for support and understanding at home for the expensive, continuing and sometimes dangerous programs which we are carrying out in Viet-Nam”. Harriman mentioned that the administration was requesting more balanced reporting from the media. While waiting for that, Harriman wrote, Nolting must do something to stop the criticisms of the South Vietnamese made to the press by U.S. military personnel: “Nothing could be more destructive of the cooperation we must have with the Vietnamese or more helpful to the Communist propagandists.”12 Ambassador Nolting responded immediately to Harriman. He suggested that he be recalled to Washington for several weeks of consultations, during which he could devote much of the time to public relations work concerned with U.S. policy toward the government of South Vietnam.13
On February 5, 1963, Nolting sent a lengthy cable to the State Department that acknowledged the U.S. press problem in South Vietnam, which he said “is not unparalleled in other new countries”.14 He explained that older, more experienced correspondents in South Vietnam “are able to take the larger view of what’s at stake here and logic of US policy under circumstances”. Younger reporters, however, often finding news sources amongst equally young American advisors, “tend to be shocked, angry, indignant because they think US is being ‘suckered’, though most of them accept basic US policy intellectually when considered in calmer moments.” Nolting suggested that these young reporters and advisors additionally failed to understand the “petty, often rather pathetic, maneuvers to save face” often employed in Asian cultures. “And they forget that the face of the government has vital bearing on support of its people in conduct of war.” He continued that these particular reporters and this particular regime disliked each other to a “degree that verges on neurotic”.15
William Colby observed that the failure of American reporters to move beyond a short-term tactical view of events caused much of the bad blood between them and the Diem government. He recalled that when things were quieter in Vietnam, between 1956 and 1960, the American press generally ignored Diem’s programs and his attempts to modernise South Vietnam socially, politically, and economically. When the Communists began the insurgency in earnest, the regional reporters from Tokyo and Hong Kong began to make more visits to South Vietnam, and the resident press corps began to expand.16 Once in South Vietnam, the reporters, like many of the American civilian officials, naturally gravitated toward contacts with Saigon officials and members of the quarrelsome political elite who were fluent in French or English. The reporters, according to Colby, made their rounds in Saigon, where intrigue was constant and fascinating, and they only occasionally varied their gossip-column approach with trips to the countryside where the real story of South Vietnam was unfolding.
These trips, however, were often problematic, because interviews were hampered not only by laborious and time-consuming translations of questions and answers but also by an immense cultural gap. With deadlines for filing stories ever present, reporters understandably preferred the convenient Saigon gossip-circle interview over the far-flung, difficult, and often dangerous interview with a peasant in a remote hamlet. Because it was impossible to interview the Communists—their clandestine nature made such attempts futile—the reporters could focus only on the GVN and their American support structure. Additionally, the reporters were professionally trained to seek out the flaws in the banal statements made by officials, and in this regard both American and South Vietnamese officials were treated the same, with disdain and distrust.17
In summarizing his analysis of this issue, William Colby acknowledged that Saigon had been seen by journalists as a secondary story source for years before the Communist insurgency. After the insurrection began, Saigon attracted young and inexperienced reporters hopeful of launching their careers with a sensational story that could make the front page. For this and the other reasons cited above, distortions of the situation in South Vietnam were bound to occur.
The aftermath of Ap Bac was having an ugly influence on American-Vietnamese relations. The American press was poised to seize on anything that could be held as proof of failed American policy and Vietnamese government corruption. Well into February 1963, Ambassador Nolting was still doing damage control. He sent a cable to DOS stating that Ngo Dinh Nhu had assured the American embassy that the GVN was truly going to pull all of its punches in any future dealings with the young reporters from the United States. This was Nhu’s way of suggesting that the GVN might even attempt to effect some sort of rapprochement with the editors back in New York and Washington.18
Regardless of Nolting’s efforts to improve U.S.-Vietnamese relations, a policy shift was underway in Washington. A classified memo to Assistant Secretary of State Averell Harriman from Michael Forrestal of the National Security Council staff outlined some initial moves for making this change. The embassy was to create some distance between U.S. diplomatic personnel and President Diem by making themselves available to members of Diem’s non-Communist opposition. Forrestal explained that there were two major reasons for doing this: “First, it would be part of a carefully designed program to establish a somewhat more independent U.S. position in SVN. Second, it should eventually increase our alternatives in the event of an accident which results in a shift in the government.”19 Forrestal wrote that although he agreed with Nolting that such activity could reawaken Diem’s suspicions about U.S. intentions, “the risks in remaining too closely tied to Diem’s government will increase rather than decrease as time goes on.”
Nolting saw the writing on the wall and immediately objected strongly to it in a letter to Secretary Harriman. First he objected to the implication that he and his staff had isolated themselves in “cocoons” and had not already reached out to opposition leaders to hear their concerns and to pass them along to the GVN when appropriate. “There is, of course,” he wrote, “a great difference between being accessible to oppositionists and giving them encouragement. Many of them tend towards radical solutions and we give them no encouragement. If we are not crystal clear on this, we would stimulate revolution.”20 Second Nolting objected to the idea that Americans should be building up “an alternative to the present government”. He reiterated his belief that there was no workable alternative to Diem, that the civilian opposition was not capable of running a government. William Colby, his successor John Richardson, and Robert Thompson all agreed with Nolting’s estimation of the civilian opposition in Saigon, that they were not fit to lead a coup or a headless country. Colby and the others therefore surmised that the real political threat to Diem lay within the army. Any attempt to remove Diem from power, Nolting continued, would “ruin the carefully built base of our advisory and supporting role here, which must rest on persuasion and on confidence in our integrity”. In conclusion, he stated that he could not be “the agent in a change of US policy away from forthright support of the legitimate government”.21
In a later interview, Nolting repeated some of the same points he made in his letter to Harriman. He said the shift in policy away from supporting Diem happened gradually: “It just happened, little by little, with people with a new slant coming in, sending me a telegram to do something which was quite contrary to what the original basic instructions had been, including, for example, instructions to cultivate the opposition to Diem. . . This was a very serious change of instructions, and I questioned it very strongly.”22Ambassador Nolting questioned the change in policy not only because of his practical and moral considerations but also because of his expectation that 1963 was going to witness even more progress in the fight against the insurgents. The Hilsman-Forrestal and Wheeler visits reinforced his feelings that the United States was “on the right track”.23 Furthermore, results on the ground in South Vietnam also seemed to demonstrate the counterinsurgency was working: “The pacified area in the country continued to expand, government services to the people continued to increase and improve, and the Strategic Hamlets program appeared to be consolidating these gains. The infiltration rate from North Vietnam was estimated at less than 500 a month.”24 Nolting was therefore confident that Washington would stay the course in South Vietnam.
Then the Mansfield report was made public in March 1963 and shattered Nolting’s confidence. Senator Mike Mansfield, as previously noted, was a respected and powerful Democratic politician; thus, his report to President Kennedy carried substantial weight. Senator Mansfield called for a thorough reassessment of U.S. security interests in Southeast Asia. Such a study, he stated, might lead to the conclusion that America should be doing less rather than more in the region.25 Nolting was astounded at the report’s negative analysis of South Vietnam and GVN, which hurt Diem deeply because he had always considered Mansfield a personal friend.26 The report, which the Harriman group used as proof of the Diem regime’s incompetence, served as a warning to Nolting that the Kennedy administration, while still claiming to follow the original policy toward South Vietnam, was embarking on another course. It marked the beginning of the end of Nolting’s influence.
Nolting disagreed with Mansfield’s allegations that Diem was isolated from the people and absolutely dependent on the advice of his family. His observations were being used by those calling for immediate democratic reforms, which Nolting knew would be destructive of WashingtonSaigon relations. Efforts to broaden the GVN to include its opposition, Nolting perceived, would have an effect in South Vietnam exactly the opposite of that which was intended. Encouraging the non-Communist dissidents would likely drive Diem to come down even harder on threats to his government, thereby narrowing his base instead of broadening it. Equally disastrous would be the response of the Viet Cong, who would view the report as evidence that support for Diem was weakening in the United States. “In retrospect,” observed Nolting, “I consider the Mansfield report the first nail in Diem’s coffin. Diem was right to fear its effect on President Kennedy and other policymakers in Washington.”27
The Mansfield report stood in opposition to what Nolting had been telling Washington about the successes of the counterinsurgency. It also contradicted the Wheeler report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which declared that the ARVN, with American help, was slowly winning against the Viet Cong. Ominously, though, the Wheeler report warned against too much interference with the way the Vietnamese were conducting the war—including introducing large amounts of U.S. forces and demanding the United States be given control of the war.28
Given the fallout of the Mansfield report and the continued negative reporting in the press, Nolting tried to avert another public relations disaster for Diem. He wrote Harriman to defer indefinitely the public release of a U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) report on South Vietnam (for the period 1958 to mid-1962), which he had read in draft form and which was severely critical of the GVN. He explained that “signs of reluctance and disillusionment on part of certain segments of US opinion, have without doubt encouraged coup plotting, have made the govt here tighten up rather than liberalize, and have encouraged the enemy. I do not think in these circumstances we can afford a public chastisement of the GVN (and / or our own policy) by a US agency.”29 He stated that the report would not give the Americans any kind of leverage over the GVN but only weaken it. “Any sign of weakening could well result in another attempt to overthrow the government,” he wrote. “The predictable result of such an attempt—whether successful or not—would be, in my judgment, a bonanza for Hanoi.”30 On March 28, 1963, Ambassador Nolting telegraphed the State Department regarding an intense meeting he had with Defence Minister Nguyen Dinh Thuan about the GVN’s reluctance to collaborate with Washington on a counterinsurgency fund containing U.S. aid dollars. Thuan claimed that Ngo Dinh Nhu was backing away from a previous agreement to the fund in principle because of “doubts and misgivings engendered by the Mansfield report, by editorial and press pressures against the GVN in America, [and] by what appeared to Nhu to be indications of US uncertainty in continued support of GVN”.31 Ambassador Nolting reported that he did his best to overcome GVN fears of American duplicity: he emphasised that the agreement could restore the mutual confidence of both governments, and he promised to find ways to answer the GVN’s objections. Nolting ended his despatch to the State Department by warning Secretary Rusk that these reactions of the South Vietnamese had been brewing for some time and that Washington needed to do something to reassure Diem and Nhu.
Rusk replied immediately to Nolting, telling the ambassador to assure Diem and Nhu of continuing U.S. support: “You are also authorized tell Nhu and Diem that you instructed assure them US policy remains full support of Diem’s government in its efforts defend VN against VC attack and bring better life to VN people. Mansfield report does not mean change in US policy of support for GVN against Communist threat. This connection you may wish quote President Kennedy’s March 6 press conference remarks on Mansfield report.”32 He then quoted what President Kennedy had said when asked whether he would implement the recommendation of the Mansfield report to cut back American support of Southeast Asia: “I don’t see how we are going to be able, unless we are going to pull out of Southeast Asia and turn it over to the Communists, how we are going to be able to reduce very much our economic programs and military programs in South Viet-Nam in Cambodia, in Thailand.”33 Rusk’s message also contained a warning: “If GVN unwilling trust us to extent of continuing successful and vital CI programs under proven machinery, difficulties of working together for common goals will be greatly increased.” Despite the thinly veiled threat, the day after receiving Rusk’s telegram, Nolting cabled back and expressed his appreciation for the authority to reassure Diem and Nhu.34
On April I, 1963, in the early afternoon at the State Department, a peculiar conversation took place between Assistant Secretary of State Averell Harriman and Sir Robert Thompson, the head of the British Advisory Mission to Vietnam. Two other supporters of Harriman were also in attendance: Michael Forrestal of the National Security Council and William H. Sullivan, who served as Harriman’s deputy during the Laotian negotiations and later became President Johnson’s ambassador to Laos. These men were accompanied by Chalmers B. Wood, director of the Vietnam Working Group, who sent a report on the discussion to Nolting in Saigon. While Thompson sketched a favourable but not perfect picture of South Vietnam, wrote Wood, Harriman asked provocative questions and made sceptical comments, which betrayed the storm of doubt Harriman was unleashing in Washington against the Diem government. For example, when Thompson emphasised the necessity of building confidence, Harriman asked whether that were possible. Harriman said better leaders were needed at the local level, while Thompson countered that their calibre had already improved. On the issue of press relations, Harriman said the Kennedy administration had done everything it could to improve them; the rest was up to Diem.35
Oddly enough it was Thompson, an Englishman, who was defending the core and the continuity of American policy toward South Vietnam even as it appeared that some U.S. officials had lost faith in it. He championed the CIP, the SHP, and the role of the GVN in both. His visit to Washington included meetings at the highest levels. In a meeting with President Kennedy, at which Wood and British Ambassador to the United States David Ormsby Gore were present, Thompson emphasised that Diem did indeed have support in rural Vietnam. He also said that if Diem were removed from power, the repercussions would be devastating.36
Thompson underlined what Nolting, Colby, and Harkins had already reported to Washington about the successes of the counterinsurgency against the Viet Cong. He said that war was moving in the right direction. “He cited particularly the increased number of defectors (from an average of 15-20 a week in early 1962 to 148 for the week ending March 25, 1963).”37 He stressed that the special attention given the losses at Ap Bac was misguided and that the Americans had to be ready for occasional battlefield reverses. He cautioned against expecting major victories, adding that patience and time were key elements to the successful conclusion of the campaign.
Given the progress that had been made so far, as evidenced by the fact that “an observer in a plane could distinguish, on the one hand, GVN-controlled territories where roads and bridges were repaired and strategic hamlets built, and, on the other hand, VC territory where the bridges were generally down and the roads cut”, Thompson said that by the end of the year, if the United States stayed the course, it would be able to announce a reduction in its forces in South Vietnam by about one thousand men. This, he said, would have three good effects: “It would show that the South Vietnamese were winning; it would take the steam out of the Communists’ best propaganda line, i.e., that this was an American war and the Vietnamese were an American satellite; and it would reaffirm the honesty of American intentions.”38 He advised President Kennedy to downplay or ignore the heavy criticism of Diem and American policy in the press.
Kennedy was cautious and sceptical. He asked Thompson: Why had the Viet Minh been able to defeat the French? Thompson’s reply was immediate and straightforward: the French never had a hope of getting the Vietnamese on their side. Thompson stressed that the SHP was what was making the difference in Vietnam. The strategic hamlets were giving the Vietnamese a degree of security that the French had never been able to provide.
Thompson made a specific point of praising the quality of the American military personnel and their behaviour in South Vietnam. He also noted that the morale of the Vietnamese civilian and military authorities had improved. Communist terror was on the decline but would increase again when it became obvious to the Viet Cong that their position was desperate. He warned Kennedy that helicopters, while useful for surprising the insurgents and for preventing them from concentrating, were not capable of winning large-scale victories. In counterguerrilla warfare, he said, such victories are attained only by using one’s “brains and feet”.39 The British were not without considerable expertise in this area, since they had been the first to use rotary-winged aircraft in a counter-insurgent environment (in Malaya).
In one of his final points on counterinsurgency tactics and programs, Thompson told Kennedy that the surrender policy put into place by Ngo Dinh Nhu for the GVN’s erstwhile guerrilla enemies was a good one. He told the president that the United States should give the policy public support when it was announced. This would bolster Diem’s political legitimacy by demonstrating the subordination of U.S. policy to that of South Vietnam. Too much U.S. involvement, he added, undermined Diem’s credentials as a legitimate Vietnamese nationalist and provided the Communists with proof of their claim that Diem was an American puppet.
Later in the afternoon of the same day, April 4, Thompson met with the Special Group for Counterinsurgency, which included Harriman, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Roswell Gilpatric, CIA Director John McCone, Michael Forrestal, and General Maxwell Taylor, amongst others. Thompson repeated much that he had told President Kennedy. He stressed the importance of American patience, the fact that the U.S. news media were out of control, and that the reporting in American papers concerned with the overall effort in Vietnam could be improved.40 In the presence of counterinsurgency warfare experts, Thompson handed Harriman a rebuttal to his claim that the fault for negative reporting lay with Diem. The most important point made by Thompson was about what would happen if Diem were removed from office. He bluntly told the Americans that the entire government would collapse without Diem and that the counterinsurgency effort would be left in serious disarray.41
Wood sent Nolting a report also about this meeting with the counterinsurgency group. Particularly noteworthy was Wood’s mention of Thompson emphasising that America would lose the fight against the Viet Cong if it lost Diem, that inflammatory press reporting should not cause Washington to panic, and that Harriman actually paid attention to what Thompson was saying. About the last point, Wood said that Harriman “kept his hearing aid in with the volume up. This is, I believe, a record for undivided gubernatorial attention.”42 Wood added in his letter to Nolting that Thompson had met with Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, Roger Hilsman, and Warren Unna of the Washington Post and that these meetings had gone well. Thompson had repeatedly raised the question about what the American press was trying to accomplish in South Vietnam.43
The apparent success of the Thompson visit to Washington notwithstanding, the direction the press was driving official opinion in America continued to be a major concern for Ambassador Nolting. The press corps did not irritate him, he said, but caused him “great alarm and pain” because “they were quite unjust, quite unjust, in the overall picture they gave of what the Vietnamese government was trying to do and what it was, in fact, doing for the benefit of its own people.”44 Also unjust, according to Nolting, was the 1962 Mansfield report, which American reporters continued to cite as a source of information. Ironically, the report was based, in part, on those very same reporters. When it came to the description of Diem as isolated, cut off from his countrymen, Nolting said Mansfield “had gotten most of his information, I think, on this point from the American press corps in Saigon. And I think it was a mistake. I think it was an injustice.”45
Returning to the matter of the American-Vietnamese counterinsurgency fund, Nolting’s earlier talks with Thuan had failed to produce an agreement. Thus, Nolting sought a meeting with Diem to convince him of the necessity of coming to terms with the Americans on this key issue. During the course of this meeting, Nolting had to tell Diem that his protracted reluctance could result only in a further deterioration of U.S.-GVN relations and a change in U.S. policy. Diem continued to express his concerns that if he gave this kind of control to the Americans, he would be surrendering his legitimacy in the eyes of his people.46 One other key factor that had caused Diem to stand so firmly on this issue was the fact that lower-level American officials were interfering with the direction in which Saigon wished to go and were reporting negatively back to Washington. In the aforementioned discussion with Diem, Nolting denied this interference, but he admitted many years later that he had found out that Diem had been correct in the allegation.47
In an April 7, 1963, telegram to Washington, Nolting informed DOS that he had consulted with General Harkins and Joseph L. Brent, director of the Operations Mission in Vietnam. The three men had agreed that before the United States took any actions to show Diem that they were serious about reducing aid if he did not comply with the joint counterinsurgency fund, they should ask him for a written rejection or acceptance of the proposal. Their concern was that forcing Diem’s hand risked further deterioration of the Washington-Saigon relationship and “might light coup fuse”. He again reiterated that nothing good would be gained by such an outcome.48 By April 17, 1963, Nolting was able to report back to Washington that Diem had softened his stance considerably and that the way was open for an agreement.49 Nolting also mentioned in this report that he had spoken to Diem about Madame Nhu’s penchant for making inflammatory remarks to the U.S. press and that this undermined their joint position. Diem defended Madame Nhu but also admitted that she tended to overstate her points.
By this breakthrough, in addition to many others, it would seem that Ambassador Nolting had fought hard to preserve a steady course in U.S. policy toward South Vietnam. He had consistently stated very firmly his opposition to the removal of President Diem. He had also made it plain to Diem that the Vietnamese president had to meet the Americans at least halfway on many issues, including the counterinsurgency fund. In Nolting’s efforts to preserve continuity in direction for the U.S. mission in South Vietnam, the ambassador had received powerful support from Robert Thompson, who had argued the Nolting position very effectively in Washington.
Despite all of the above, the evidence indicates that the covert and overt powers of Harriman and those who agreed with him had already subtly and effectively undermined the old policy of support for Diem. The Mansfield report, according to Nolting, acted in Washington as evidence in favour of the direction Harriman wanted the Kennedy administration to go. It also had an impact in Saigon, where it weakened the GVN’s trust in America’s intentions. Ambassador Nolting ran headlong into this distrust in his initial attempts to seek GVN compliance with agreement over the joint counterinsurgency fund. This fund, proposed by Washington, was a test of Diem’s cooperation by the Kennedy administration.
Despite the Harriman group’s suggestions that the United States should distance itself from Diem in order to find a government to replace him, there is no documentary evidence that proves anyone in the group ever found a viable alternative to the Vietnamese president. Like the U.S. newsmen, they knew what they did not like and what they did not want, but they had failed to produce another leader in South Vietnam who had the same prestige amongst ordinary Vietnamese as Diem. Simply put, there was no political legitimacy beyond the Diem administration, and this is precisely what Nolting, Colby, and Thompson had told Washington. Yes, Diem, his family, and his regime were far from perfect, but he was a rare man in South Vietnam at that time: a genuine, traditional, nationalistic Vietnamese leader with political legitimacy. His enemies knew that a major crisis was needed to pull him down from that pillar.