The Buddhist crisis of 1963 was seized upon by President Diem’s enemies as the final proof he must be replaced. The crisis began in the city of Hue, where Diem’s elder brother was the Catholic archbishop. In May, during celebrations of the birth of the Buddha, Buddhists were told to stop flying religious flags. Although there was a law against public displays of religious flags, some Buddhists believed the prohibition had been unfairly enforced in their case by the government, which they were told had been made into an intolerant Catholic regime by Diem and his family. Hard feelings led to a violent protest against the government, which was suppressed by government troops, and nine unarmed civilians died. News reports blamed the riot police for the deaths, while the GVN blamed the protestors for the violence and the Viet Cong for the deaths. More protests followed, including those by Buddhist monks setting themselves ablaze, leading to more government suppression and civilian deaths. More news reports of the protests, along with poignant photos of monks immolating themselves, spread throughout the world, as did demands for Diem’s removal. U.S. support for the beleaguered South Vietnamese president then appeared to the Kennedy administration as politically untenable.
Before the roots and the effects of the Buddhist crisis are explored, this author must first maintain that President Diem was no religious bigot or enemy of Buddhism. He had almost single-handedly brought South Vietnamese Buddhism back from near extinction. Diem was an equal-opportunity supporter of those who would provide a pro-Vietnamese, non-Communist religious influence in the country in the wake of French rule—whether they followed Buddha, Confucius, or Christ. His government gave aid for the rebuilding of religious structures and communities destroyed by colonialism and war.
The essential data indicating the Buddhist renaissance under the Ngo Dinh Diem regime are recorded by Father Piero Gheddo, an Italian Catholic missionary who researched the situation of the Catholic Church in Vietnam and other countries in Southeast Asia. He found that Diem’s allocation of government funds to rebuild Buddhist infrastructure—including pagodas and schools—played a substantial role in the revival of the religion. Under his patronage, “the upper schools for bonzes in South Vietnam increased from 4 to 10; of the 4,766 pagodas in the country, 1,275 were built after 1954 and 1,295 were renovated or rebuilt after that year. The Diem government at the same time gave nine million piastres for the building of Buddhist pagodas (about $1,600,000), and President Diem himself gave a major contribution for the reconstruction of the famous Xa Loi pagoda.”1
Father Gheddo also discovered that in South Vietnam during the Diem years, under the direction of the General Association of Buddhists of Vietnam, “three communities were organized, including 3,000 bonzes and 300 nuns, and another three communities of lay followers, even in the most deserted villages; these three communities grouped together about one million Buddhist laymen, to whom were joined the non-affiliated laymen.”2 Additionally, the GVN encouraged Buddhist programs, periodicals, conferences, lectures, and libraries.
Even before the Buddhist crisis, Diem’s critics had accused him of creating an intolerant regime led only by his Catholic family members and cronies. As we have seen, this characterization had already found its way into American newspapers. Those making this accusation either did not know or simply failed to mention “his not wanting the name of God in the 1956 Constitution, as the Catholics requested, but only the name ‘Most High,’ as the representatives of Buddhism and the Buddhist sects asked.”3 Diem did hire and promote many Catholics, and one reason for this was mentioned earlier: the Catholic schools prepared more people for government and military leadership positions than other schools at that time. Many of his advisors and most of his generals and cabinet members, however, were Buddhists or other non-Catholics.4 General Nguyen Khanh, who participated in the 1963 military coup that removed Diem from power, scoffed at the idea of Diem persecuting or discriminating against Buddhists. In an interview with the author, he said he, a Buddhist, enjoyed the president’s trust and friendship.5 Diem “entrusted the most important positions only to the most trusted persons,” explained Father Gheddo, “but this was not on the basis of the individuals’ religious persuasion but on the basis of their anti-Communism. The Diem regime could in no way be called ‘Catholic.’ ”6
Diem was keenly aware of the claim that his Catholicism coloured the way he led the country and worked hard to create a balanced government that was truly representative of the Vietnamese people. It is ironic that the spark that set off the Buddhist crisis was his enforcement of a law prohibiting the public display of religious flags. According to Ambassador Frederick Nolting, Diem agreed to enforce the law precisely because Vatican flags had been inappropriately given prominence at a recent Catholic celebration in Hue.7
From where came the idea that Diem was anti-Buddhist? According to Ambassador Nolting, if Diem had a prejudice it was against the Saigon bourgeoisie; everyone who knew him had observed that he preferred the company of farmers to that of those he described as “spoiled middle class, always complaining, not worth anything”.8 The disdain was mutual, and this group helped to characterise Diem as an intolerant man.
As noted previously, some of Diem’s detractors had drafted a manifesto of complaint during a meeting at the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon in 1960. The Caravellists were intellectuals, professionals, and politicians who desired a more open and democratic government with a place for themselves within it. Although the group was not Communist, it cannot be overlooked that the Caravellists served a propaganda purpose for the Viet Cong, albeit unwittingly. Their complaints were eagerly received by the American reporters who frequented the Caravelle Bar and whose stories helped to turn U.S. policy makers against the Diem regime, which in the end helped the Viet Cong to take over the country. Another way the Caravellists helped the Viet Cong was the route they took to spread their cause against Diem. In seeking to build a larger political base, they ironically sought support from a group Diem had restored to a prominent place in Vietnamese society: the Buddhists. The Caravellists formed an underground political opposition within the urban pagodas, and Buddhism gave them an air of legitimacy they lacked on their own.9
The Buddhists they collaborated with were a small, radicalised coterie who had fallen under the sway of Thich Tri Quang, a bonze whose political activities had begun in the 1940s during the wars against French rule. While there is no hard evidence that he was a Communist Party member, it has been documented in North Vietnam that he worked alongside Vietnamese Communists in their campaigns against Western colonialism.10 According to Marguerite Higgins, one of the few reporters to interview him at length, he was a disciple of Thich Tri Do, the leader of the Buddhist organization in Hanoi approved by the Communist regime there.11 To Higgins, Thich Tri Quang was quite unlike the peaceful, meditative Buddhist monks of her acquaintance. “Deep, burning eyes stared out from a gigantic forehead. He had an air of massive intelligence, total self-possession, and brooding suspicion.”12 Throughout the Buddhist crisis, Higgins watched him stir up protesters. “The results were frightening. By the time Thich Tri Quang was through with the mobs, they would cheerfully go drown themselves in the Saigon River, if that were what he wanted. He was, and is, a true demagogue. Hate emanates from the man. Mobs thrive on hate.”13
An alliance of the Caravellists, Thich Tri Quang, and other radical bonzes could not have come at better time for the Viet Cong. During the period leading up to the Buddhist crisis, the Communists in South Vietnam were struggling, according to Viet Cong expert Douglas Pike.
Diem was proving more durable than expected. . . . For the NLF it was a period that began with high hopes and ended with disillusionment. Most significantly, for rural Vietnamese it was a time of disenchantment in the NLF, its cause, and its increasing use of repression and terror. . . . Internal reports of the period stressed over and over the assessment that the Revolution was not moving with the necessary speed, that it had encountered far more resistance and hostility than anticipated, that the Diem government’s counter-insurgency efforts, even if unpopular, might fatally injure the Revolution. . . They feared that the GVN might with short-run measures destroy the NLF structure and crush the insurgency. This attitude became strongest in April 1963, which conversely was the high-water mark of the Diem government.14
After the Buddhist crisis, everything went downhill for the GVN.
Because the core of the struggle for South Vietnam concerned political legitimacy, the Communists needed a group who, through protest and subversion, could cause doubt about the righteousness of Diem’s leadership in the minds of ordinary Vietnamese. Of equal or perhaps even greater importance to the Communists was the need to divorce American support from Diem in order to undo his effective counterinsurgency campaign.15 Diem’s record as a legitimate nationalist concerned for the welfare of the average peasant in South Vietnam was near unassailable, so another route of subversion needed to be found. The Communists concluded that the Vietnamese president’s weakest point was American reluctance to continue supporting an undemocratic leader. They were astute enough to realise that the tail wagging the dog of U.S. foreign policy was American public opinion, which is largely shaped by the media. In May 1963 the Communists had found the necessary tool to pry U.S. support away from Diem: radical Buddhists whose dramatic protests could commandeer the attention of newsmen in Saigon.
The question of whether the Viet Cong were actively helping the radical bonzes cannot be answered with certainty with the current evidence. In his research of Viet Cong propaganda in spring 1963, for example, Pike found no mention of the Buddhist protests:
Attacks on Americans mounted in intensity and hysteria. Radio Liberation acted as though the Buddhists did not exist. Nor, as had been anticipated, did the NLF agit-prop teams flood the countryside with anti-Diem leaflets in the name of Buddhism. The leadership appeared unwilling or unable to capitalize on the most significant struggle movement in Vietnamese history. . . . Had the NLF leadership wished to do so, it could have used its impressive struggle machine to launch in the name of Buddha a nation-wide struggle movement that conceivably could have ended with its long-pursued General Uprising. The NLF’s reluctance to involve itself deeply in the Buddhist struggle was somewhat puzzling.16
Pike could have added, however, that the Viet Cong’s lack of public identification with the Buddhist uprising was outright suspicious. He discovered that two leading bonzes in the Buddhist protests, Thich Thien Hao and Thich Thom Me The Nhem, were members of the National Liberation Front and met with Communist leaders in China and North Vietnam.17
An educated guess might be that the Buddhist protests were carried out with the full support of Communist leaders from Hanoi to Moscow who told the Viet Cong leaders in South Vietnam to maintain a hands-off position for obvious reasons. This kind of political sophistication was well within the capabilities of Ho Chi Minh and his backers in China and Russia. Stephen C. Y. Pan of the East Asian Research Institute in New York City met and interviewed Ho Chi Minh, Ngo Dinh Diem, and other Southeast Asian leaders. This expert on Vietnamese politics concluded that the Buddhist crisis was indeed a Communist front: “The communists knew how to cope with Diem’s appeals. Highly skilled at spreading false propaganda, they created incidents, and launched demonstrations. Masters of cold war strategy, they decided that the Achilles heel in Vietnam was the Buddhist associations. They realised the acute sensitivity of Americans, in particular, to the charge of religious persecution.”18
What unfolded in the spring and summer of 1963 was no spontaneous uprising of persecuted Buddhists who could no longer stand the “burden of oppression”—because there simply was no oppression. “Among the other freedoms granted by the Diem regime there was that of religion, of non-political assembly, freedom to demonstrate, a certain freedom of the press and finally the open admission into the country of many foreign journalists of every political stripe who were able to report abroad the opinions of the opponents of the regime, and the regime’s mistakes.”19 The Buddhist protests therefore would seem to have been masterfully planned acts of political manipulation carefully directed at American public opinion in order to destroy U.S. policy in South Vietnam. Ambassador Nolting said a few years later in an interview, “The charge that this was a spontaneous uprising of Buddhists because of religious persecution was, in my opinion, false.”20 While the Buddhist crisis might not have been spontaneous in the sense that it lacked behind-the-scenes planning and organisation, to Nolting and other U.S. officials it did appear to come out of nowhere.
In early 1963, Ambassador Nolting asked Secretary of State Rusk to replace him in Saigon.21 The assistant secretary of state Harriman replied to Nolting that, owing to the progress that was being made in South Vietnam, Nolting should remain indefinitely according to the discretion of DOS. He advised Nolting to plan for a holiday sometime in the spring or summer. Reports from the DOS and the DOD verify that from the American point of view the American-Vietnamese counterin-surgency effort was making considerable headway in spring 1963. Secretary of Defense McNamara told White House officials: “The over-all situation in Vietnam is improving. In the military sector of the counter-insurgency, we are winning. Evidences of improvement are clearly visible, as the combined impact of the programs which involve a long lead time begin to have effect on the Viet Cong.”22 American intelligence reports made similar claims.23 Everything appeared to be moving along quite satisfactorily in South Vietnam, albeit, according to Hilsman and Forrestal, a bit slower than Washington would wish.24 No American official seems to have realised that Buddhists were about to explode onto the political stage of South Vietnam.
No American reporter seems to have realised this either. Researcher Ellen Hammer was in South Vietnam just before the breaking of the Buddhist crisis. When she visited Hue in April and asked a local doctor for the latest news, “he did not speak of war but of peace. ‘Something important,’ he said. ‘The Buddhist Youth are organising.’ ”25 Hammer was intrigued by this bit of news, she said, but the American press was not: “What the upsurge in Buddhism might portend did not interest American reporters that spring. They were in Vietnam to cover a war, and their articles reported complaints of American officers that the Vietnamese did not want to fight or fought badly.”26
The upsurge in Buddhist political activity reached a critical mass with the protest against the flag law in early May, just before Ambassador Nolting was to go on holiday with his family. Here is his account of what happened:
President Diem directed that the Vietnamese flag be given precedence over religious banners flown in public displays. He issued the order in response to the prominence given the Vatican flag at a recent Catholic celebration in Hué. Two days later, a large crowd assembled in Hue to celebrate the birth of Gautama Buddha. Buddhist flags were displayed ahead of the national flag. As the crowd attempted to take possession of the radio station, Vietnamese troops were called in by the province chief to enforce the recent decree and to protect the radio station. The demonstration became violent. Several shots (or explosions) occurred. Eight people died.27
The first official telegram about the protest sent by John J. Helble, the American consul in Hue, to the State Department was not as informative as it should have been, given the circumstances.28 It did not give any context or background, and it was noncommittal as to what exactly had killed the demonstrators. It seemed to indicate that gunfire had been the cause of the fatalities, but the American embassy in Saigon added to this the possibility that explosions had killed the demonstrators.29
There were serious and substantial discrepancies in reports on the incident, and these spilled over into the news media. Some reports indicated that GVN gunfire had been responsible for the carnage, while others claimed that grenades or even bombs had been thrown or planted. The discrepancies attracted the notice of war correspondent Marguerite Higgins, who after investigating the incident concluded that some of the news reports about the protest were false: “For example, on June 30, 1963, a dispatch from Saigon toThe New York Times said, ‘The Buddhists said that they would not join a commission to investigate the alleged Buddhist grievances unless the government accepted responsibility for the incident on May 8, 1963, that set off the crisis. Troops fired then on Buddhists demonstrating against a ban on displaying their religious flag. Nine Buddhists were killed.’ But these three sentences do not reflect the true situation.”30 Higgins went on to lament that false information made it all the way to the White House, where it effected a change in U.S. foreign policy: “And yet the account given in The New York Times’ news dispatch represents what many Americans, even some in official positions, still believe to be the truth about Hue. I find this appalling, because crucial national policy was, it now appears, based on ‘facts’ of highly doubtful authenticity.”31
Given the differing reports about the Buddhist crisis and the tremendous impact they had on U.S. foreign policy, historian Ellen Hammer and reporter Marguerite Higgins researched the incident in order to set the record straight. First they discovered, as has been already documented, no evidence that Diem was practicing or endorsing the persecution of Buddhists. Nor did they find any evidence that his enforcement of the flag law in May 1963 was an attack on Buddhists. According to Higgins, Diem’s choice to enforce the decree about displaying the Vietnamese flag before any others, including religious banners, was actually aimed at his own brother, Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc, who had permitted ceremonies celebrating the silver anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood to be too lavish. At that event Vatican flags were many and national Vietnamese ones few, and President Diem rightly believed this was provocative and insensitive to non-Catholics. Hence Higgins’ claim that the description of the law in the New York Times was false: “[As for the] assertion that there was a ban on Buddhist flags, no such thing existed. This dispatch implied also that there was some ruling applying solely to Buddhists. Again, this is not true. . . . The regulation applied to all religions. . . . There is no doubt, however, that the Vietnamese government’s decision to revive these flag regulations on May 6, 1963, made possible the Hue tragedy.”32
Hammer uncovered another twist in the story of how that decision was made.33 Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc was upset by the prominence of Buddhist flags being displayed to celebrate the birth of Buddha, which he personally observed as he drove through Hue on May 7, 1963. Thuc ordered Ho Dac Khuong, the man who represented the Saigon government in Hue, to have the flags removed according to the decree. Khuong immediately protested, arguing that it was too late and that such a move would deeply offend the Buddhist community. Khuong even appealed to Saigon, but to no avail. Minister of the Interior Bui Van Luong, who was in Hue at the time, visited the pagodas to reassure the bonzes that their flags could be flown and that the order to have them taken down had been rescinded; he later told United Nations representatives about his efforts to reassure the Buddhists. Unfortunately, these GVN efforts were too late: the police had already taken down some flags. This gave Thich Tri Quang the excuse he needed to begin a campaign that would bring down Diem and his government.
According to Higgins and Hammer, Thich Tri Quang, in Higgins’ words “a kind of Machiavelli with incense” played a leading role in the way the protests developed.34 First some of the Buddhist flags Thich had displayed were inscribed with antigovernment slogans. The government tolerated religious assemblies but not antigovernment ones; the political slogans might have been one of the reasons the flags upset the archbishop and some GVN officials. After the GVN ordered the removal of the flags, the minister of the interior, trying to avoid a provocation, told Tri Quang privately that they did not have to come down. Yet Tri Quang turned around and ordered his monks to take down the flags, as if to provoke their outrage. Tri Quang also told his monks to inform the citizens of Hue that the banners were coming down because of Diem’s order to ban Buddhist flags. Next he told people in the crowd, “Go to the radio station—something very interesting will happen there.”35 When Tri Quang and his followers reached the radio station, the Buddhist leader demanded that the station director broadcast a speech calling for Diem’s overthrow instead of the government-approved taped message commemorating Buddha’s birthday.36 Tri Quang and the crowd grew raucous when the station director said he could not broadcast an unauthorised political speech. Fearing that a riot would break out, the director telephoned the deputy province chief who was in charge of public security, Major Dang Sy.
Major Dang Sy reached the radio station two hours later. He and his men arrived in rubber-tired armoured cars, not tanks as some reports alleged. They were equipped with stun grenades and tear gas canisters. While they were still in their armoured cars, more than fifty yards away from the station, two massive explosions ripped through the crowd, scattering the shocked people. Dang Sy feared that a Viet Cong attack was underway and ordered his men to deploy their stun grenades and gas canisters. When the smoke cleared and the crowd had fled, he found seven dead adults and one dying child lying on the ground. The bodies of the dead had been mutilated, some even decapitated, by the force of the two explosions. A Buddhist doctor who examined the bodies of the victims said that their injuries had to have been caused by something exceeding the capacity of GVN anti-riot gear. Some therefore concluded that the blasts had been caused by homemade bombs, perhaps plastic and fertiliser bombs planted beforehand. Such bombs would indicate the handiwork of the Viet Cong.37
Back to Higgins’ point about the discrepancies between what her research uncovered what the American media reported on Vietnam, here is an alternate and widely accepted version of the incident from a popular history of Vietnam written by American journalist Stanley Karnow:
Several thousand [Buddhists] gathered peacefully in front of the city’s radio station to listen to loudspeakers broadcast a speech by Tri Quang, a Buddhist leader. The station director cancelled the address, claiming that it had not been censored. He also telephoned Major Xi, who dispatched five armoured cars to the scene. The commander ordered the crowd to disperse, then told his men to fire. The people stampeded. A woman and eight children died, either shot or trampled in the melee.38
According to journalist John Mecklin, the American press in South Vietnam during the Buddhist crisis had been guilty of inaccurate or even biased reporting.
In a scathing article (September 20, 1963) that led to the protest resignation of Charles Mohr, its chief correspondent for Southeast Asia, Time asserted: “The press corps on the scene is helping to compound the very confusion that it should be untangling for its readers at home. . . . They pool their convictions, information, misinformation and grievances. . . . They have covered a complex situation from only one angle, as if their own conclusions offered all the necessary illumination.”39
Mecklin noted that columnist Joseph Alsop, like Clare Boothe Luce, compared the work of some Saigon newsmen with the campaign against Chiang Kai-Shek by some of the correspondents in China in 1944.40
President Diem perceived that disaster lay in the Buddhist revolt, especially since it threatened to undo all that he had accomplished to build bridges between Buddhists and Catholics and to convince Buddhists that the program of his government was better for the country than the one the Communists would bring if they seized power. Bonze Nhat Hanh, remarked, “Under the Diem government there came to light an awareness of a distinction existing between the Communists and the national resistance, and this was Diem’s most valid contribution to the country.”41 In order for that distinction to remain in view after the protest in Hue, Diem met with Buddhist leaders, offering generous indemnification for the families who had suffered losses in the protest.42 In addition, he formed a special commission directed by a Buddhist, Vice President Nguyen Ngoc Tho, to reach amicable agreements between the GVN and the Buddhist communities.43 Diem, confident that government forces had not caused the deaths in Hue, refused to accept blame for the killings prior to an internationally supervised investigation, which had been requested by Thich Tri Quang. A critical fact that should have drawn more attention to the monk’s motives in requesting such an investigation was that, once Diem had agreed to it, Tri Quang rejected the idea.44
During the first meeting with the Buddhist leaders, Diem explained to them that errors had been made by GVN officials with respect to the flags. He reminded them that they were guaranteed freedom of worship under the constitution of the Republic of South Vietnam, and he also reminded them that there were troublemakers at the Hue radio station who had nothing to do with Buddhism; indeed, Catholics were amongst the injured.45 Diem went to great lengths to assuage Buddhist fears and to meet their demands. He issued a joint communiqué with Thich Tinh Kiet, head of the General Association of Buddhists, which addressed all of the Buddhist demands except the one from Thich Tri Quang wherein Diem was to admit guilt before any inquiry.46 The reasons for Diem’s position were relayed to Washington in a telegram from Ambassador Nolting on May 22, 1963.47 The American journalists, almost to a man, ignored Diem’s substantial efforts, which included presidential clemency for all bonzes who had broken the law in the riot,48 because they believed his government was responsible for causing the protests and the deaths that resulted from it.
American journalists, though, were not alone in blaming the GVN for the Hue killings and in believing the protests arose from GVN mistreatment of Buddhists. Here is how Consul Helble described the situation in Hue following the initial protest:
Population must be judged as tense. Duration and intensity of crisis unusual in view generally passive nature Vietnamese in terms public demonstrations. People seem to have taken seriously Bonze speech morning 8th ‘now is time to fight.’ While word fight perhaps overemphatic, desire of people seems to be to have some sort of showdown following years of frustration for Buddhists. Student banner morning 9th ‘please kill us’. Man on street expressing great desire for world to know of killings on 8th. While GVN line is VC responsible, no credibility this among population.49
Helble added that Thich Tri Quang was propelling the Buddhist campaign forward by trying to organise a massive funeral rally for the victims of the Hue incident to be attended by international Buddhist leaders.50 Some hours later Helble wrote DOS that Tri Quang was trying to incite a nationwide Gandhi-styled protest against the GVN. He noted that another prominent Buddhist leader, whose name still remains classified, tried to prevent further violence by telling Quang-incited crowds that, in fact, Diem’s government was a good one.51
At the time of the Buddhist protests, Ambassador Nolting was still trying to resolve the disagreements between Saigon and Washington over joint control of U.S. counterinsurgency funding, as mentioned in the previous chapter. Correspondence from Nolting shows that differences between the two governments were being overcome and that, counterinsurgency funding would rest on a better foundation than before.52 Nolting stated in his memoirs that resolving the differences seemed routine enough at the time. Yet information that subsequently came his way revealed that it did not appear routine to the Kennedy administration. The National Security Council (NSC) was scheduled to discuss whether counterinsurgency funding should continue if Saigon did not agree to share control over it with Washington. The discussion never took place, Nolting wrote, and Diem eventually agreed to joint control, but the “dispute deepened Washington’s perception that Diem was a difficult person to deal with and enhanced its impression that Nhu was even more stubborn than his brother. . . . [T]he argument left a bad taste in officialdom’s mouth.”53
The issue of Ngo Dinh Nhu’s stubbornness related to his views about the American military presence in South Vietnam. In an interview with Warren Unna, a reporter for the Washington Post, Nhu had raised pointed questions about the number of American troops in South Vietnam and the need for its reduction. Specifically, Ngo Dinh Nhu pointed out that their high profile was playing right into the hands of Communist propaganda. Secretary of State Dean Rusk sent a telegram to Ambassador Nolting complaining about the interview.54 Four days later, Roger Hilsman sent a brisk telegram to Nolting in which he claimed that Nhu was making support for the GVN very difficult in Washington. Essentially, Hilsman wanted Nolting to persuade Diem to reign in his brother.55Nolting replied there was not much more that he could do in this regard. He added that much of the unfortunate impact of the interview was due to way it was handled by the Washington Post.56
There was little for Nolting to do because, as Ellen Hammer pointed out, Nhu and Diem had genuine concerns over what would happen to Vietnamese sovereignty if American armed forces started to deploy in increasing numbers in their country without the oversight of the Vietnamese government. Before the outbreak of the Buddhist crisis, Diem’s main concern was about American intentions for South Vietnam, hence the disagreements over a jointly controlled counterinsurgency fund. “The real problem troubling the Vietnamese President was not money but men—the American advisers who seemed to be everywhere, too numerous, too deeply involved in Vietnamese affairs.”57 As a nationalist, Diem was alarmed at the growing number of the American men in South Vietnam, who were increasingly bypassing his administration, leaving him wondering if South Vietnam had gotten rid of French colonialism only to see it replaced with an American version.58
President Diem might have dodged the joint funding bullet and the Nhu bullet, but it can be argued that those in Washington who wanted him out of the way found exactly what they were looking for in the Buddhist crisis, which lasted for months both in South Vietnam and on the front pages of the New York Times and other newspapers.
As can be seen from his Times’ articles, David Halberstam couched the issue as a conflict between an oppressive minority government and an oppressed majority population. Given that the regime was an ally of America, its apparent violations of religious rights and freedoms was both troubling and embarrassing for the Kennedy administration. Here are typical excerpts:
The conflict between the South Vietnamese Government and Buddhist Priests is sorely troubling American officials here. . . .
For a variety of reasons Americans wish to dissociate themselves from the Saigon Government’s role in the religious crisis. . . .
It is reported that Washington has already told its officials here to express extreme concern over the developments and the Government’s handling of them, and to press for a solution to the religious strife. . . .
Americans are deeply embarrassed by the events, and frustrated in the face of persistent questioning by individual Vietnamese, who ask: “Why does your Government allow this to go on? Why don’t you Americans say or do something?”. . .
American political officials here are worried about the effect of the crisis on the war effort in a country where an estimated 70 per cent of the population considers itself Buddhist. Since President Diem and most of his close associates are Roman Catholic, it is almost impossible to maintain the Government’s stand that it is only interested in keeping order, and that the struggle has no religious overtones.59
Halberstam’s claims about the religious profile of South Vietnam and its government, which shaped American public opinion and ultimately American foreign policy, deserve scrutiny. As we have seen, the GVN was religiously diverse. Also, however many Buddhists there were in the country, the question should have been asked whether the leaders of the protests were, in fact, speaking on behalf of all or even most of them. Later, after more protests and some of the monks immolated themselves, one Buddhist monk told war correspondent Higgins, “No true Buddhist would commit suicide. It is written in the verses of Buddha that suicide is wrong. Buddha says that a man’s responsibility is to mend his own life, not to meddle in politics. So those men who are, according to your newspaper article, marching in the streets [of Hue and Saigon] are not Buddhists. They betray Buddhism.” Higgins replied, “These people are believed by the Americans to represent Buddhism.” Then the monk said, “White men have brought many things to Vietnam. But white men have not brought much understanding to Vietnam.”60
While the Kennedy administration was growing restless from the political fallout of the Buddhist crisis, other positive reports about the counterinsurgency surfaced. One in particular was given by Colonel Francis Philip “Ted” Serong, head of the Australian Training Mission to South Vietnam, at a high-level meeting of the Special Group for Counterinsurgency on May 23, 1963, attended by Averell Harriman, Robert Kennedy, John McCone, and Generals Victor Krulak and Maxwell Taylor, amongst others. Colonel Serong told the group that the war against the Viet Cong was being won.61 Several indicators displayed the favourable trends, he said, not least of which was the substantial increase in spontaneous intelligence given to the GVN. Colonel Serong attributed this to the strategic hamlets, since they afforded the people greater security from the threats of the Communists. He put the success within the context of frustration that was being leaked by American advisors to the press. While acknowledging that things in South Vietnam were far from perfect, he stated that the real success story was being overlooked in Washington. Additionally, in his laconic soldier’s style he noted that the American press, for some strange reason, was ignoring the story too.62
A significant point made by Colonel Serong was that Ambassador Nolting had effectively and positively influenced relations between Washington and Saigon in such a manner as to allow the CIP to succeed. Nevertheless, the wheels had already been put into motion to replace Ambassador Nolting with a different sort of man. In a memorandum to President Kennedy two weeks before Serong’s report, Michael Forrestal of the National Security Council staff stated, with regard to the embassy in Saigon: “What we need is fresh leadership in the field.”63 As we have seen, the Harriman group had already begun a search for a replacement government in South Vietnam,64 and Nolting, in his loyalty to Diem, was not cooperating.
Indeed, Nolting had cautioned his own countrymen that their hubris and zeal would undo the patient work he had accomplished. He strongly hinted at this when he told Secretary of Defense McNamara that “it was difficult, if not impossible, to put a Ford engine into a Vietnamese ox-cart.”65 According to Nolting, McNamara agreed with his analogy but claimed that the United States had the capability to do just that and to make it work in short order.