On November 2, 1971, the eighth anniversary of Ngo Dinh Diem’s assassination, several thousand people gathered in Saigon to commemorate the death of the former president of Vietnam. “A yellow-robed Buddhist monk offered a Buddhist remembrance, and Catholic prayers were said in Latin. Banners proclaimed Diem a saviour of the South. The previous day, All Saints Day, Catholics had come to the cemetery from the refugee villages outside Saigon, carrying portraits of the slain president.”1
Indeed, ever since 1970 the loss of Ngo Dinh Diem has been publically mourned throughout many communities in Vietnam, albeit somewhat secretly at times. His memory has been kept alive more openly by the Vietnamese diaspora around the world.2 The question becomes, then, who was this slain South Vietnamese leader who has remained at the centre of the history of post-1945 Vietnam? It is hoped that this introduction will give the reader at least a reasonable grounding in the man’s background, which in turn makes the true story of his tragic death less opaque.
Probably the single most important theme of this work is the role of Ngo Dinh Diem in American diplomatic, military, and domestic political planning from the beginning of his presidency until his murder—or martyrdom, according to the long-suffering Vietnamese Roman Catholic community.3 Unquestionably, his Catholic faith, often described as monk-like with a touch of severity, was at the heart of this man’s spirit. Without his presence there would have been no South Vietnam of any consequence and certainly not one that, in the face of the most militant, atheistic Communism, could have flourished and succeeded as a fledging nation-state caught in the very midst of the Cold War.
There is simply no gainsaying the fact that the impact of Ngo Dinh Diem upon the history of post-1945 Vietnam is of such significance that even the academic historical schools concerning the Vietnam War are essentially demarked by where a scholar stands on the man: those who condemn him depend on this harsh judgement as if it were the very glue that binds all so-called orthodox adherents together; those who recognise his great charitableness, as made manifest in his love of God, the Catholic Church, and his fellow Vietnamese, constitute the disciples of the inadequately named “revisionist school”. Those whose worldview is more horizontal see Diem as an obstacle to progress, and bluntly, some of them hate him; those with a transcendent view of man, who embrace his capacity for nobility through humility, duty, and self-sacrifice, lionise Diem. Either way, Ngo Dinh Diem stands at the epicentre of all historical studies of America’s Vietnam War. If it is acceptable for Vietnamese Roman Catholics to gather every November 2 at the site of Diem’s murder and there to offer up prayers for his revered soul, then perhaps it is fitting for this non-Catholic Canadian “revisionist” historian of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War to offer up his own form of veneration.
Most of the popular sources on the Vietnam War, American and Vietnamese, cite the city of Hue as the birthplace of Ngo Dinh Diem, yet careful study of older Vietnamese records convinced French journalist and historian Bernard Fall that the more likely location was Dai-Phuong, in Quang Binh Province, north of what was to become the demilitarised zone between North and South Vietnam. Determining the birthplace of Ngo Dinh Diem is important for understanding why, many years later, he directed his foreign minister at the 1954 Geneva Conference to protest forcefully against a partitioned Vietnam. In Vietnamese culture, the tie between individuals and their place of birth, their ancestral and family home, is at the core of how they view themselves in the world. The Americans (aid advisors, diplomats, and politicians) seem never to have fully grasped Diem’s long-term goal and deep desire to reunite Vietnam under an anti-Communist central government.
Although born in the north, Diem had ties to the mandarin centre of all Vietnam, Hue. In fact, his elevated social position was derived from links to the imperial court there, connections that had been established several centuries earlier. Diem was a member of one of the great families of Vietnam, and “by tradition, by capacity, and through Confucian sense of duty”, it was proper for members of that family to take their places amongst the mandarins of the imperial court.4 Diem’s father, Ngo Dinh Kha, was the court minister of rites and the grand chamberlain to the emperor. He was a devout Roman Catholic who also embraced the teachings of Confucius. One of the few Vietnamese of his generation to be educated both in Vietnam and in a foreign country (Malaya), he directed his sons, particularly Diem and Nhu, to gain both a Western and a Vietnamese education.
At an early age Diem had already absorbed his father’s dedication to education. He would get up before dawn and study by the light of an oil lamp until it was time for him to go to his French Catholic school. His steadfastness went well beyond his early-morning study sessions after he won his first school prize at the age of six. As one of his brothers later recalled for Time magazine, once Diem snuck off to school along the dike tops when he and his brothers had been told by their father to stay home because of flooding. When his father punished him for his disobedience, Diem had no sense of any injustice being done and accepted his father’s discipline with equanimity.5 Diem’s exceptional determination, which did not falter in the face of adversity, became the mark of the man’s later political life.
There was a political dimension to Diem’s education, upon which his father had substantial influence. His father hosted all manner of Vietnamese leaders in the family home, including Emperor Thanh Tai and Emperor Duy Tan, as well as many other powerful men who came to garner Ngo Dinh Kha’s support or to seek his advice.6 It was Diem’s good fortune to have discussed current events with these leaders during his formative years. When many Vietnamese nationalists were debating whether to overthrow French colonial rule, and when this subject was broached at home, Diem’s father was unshakable in his opposition to violence or bloodshed. He stressed that revolution must come only through education. When the Vietnamese people were ready to look after their affairs, he argued, Vietnam would gain its independence from France naturally, with no need for killing. The impact of this schooling in politics at his father’s knee was profound; for when Diem was president of South Vietnam and hard-pressed by his American allies to ramp up the physical destruction of the Viet Cong (VC), Diem would express a visceral reaction against the very idea of killing his fellow Vietnamese. A good friend of the Ngo Dinh family, Andre Nguyen Van Chau, recalled the gentleness of Diem’s character when he noted that the man never liked being harsh with anyone.7 Douglas Pike, a leading American authority on the Viet Cong, concurred with Van Chau’s assessment that Diem, despite the portrait drawn by his critics, was not a violent man, nor even the authoritarian type.8
Diem proved just as capable at higher education as at his childhood studies. He attended the National College, an institution established by his father so that Vietnamese mandarins could be introduced to Western thought. He earned such high marks in the final examinations that the French offered him a scholarship to attend university in Paris. But Diem’s great desire was to serve the Vietnamese people, and he turned down the French offer, choosing instead to stay in Vietnam, where he continued to excel academically. In 1921 he graduated at the top of his class at the French-run School for Law and Administration in Hanoi.
During his studies, Diem became increasingly aware that Catholicism and Confucianism had many similarities, including a shared understanding of ethics. As a result, Diem would think and move in a way that was almost incomprehensible to the secular-minded and politically expedient Americans with whom he would later collaborate. A modern Western or American policy perspective asserts that individual rights and the freedom to pursue personal happiness are paramount, almost to the exclusion of every other consideration. Diem, however, believed that the individual needed to submit his will and talents to the greater good of the family, the community, and the nation. In his political philosophy, the individual did not have a right to political activity that threatened the downfall of a legitimate government. Diem’s Catholic faith and Confucian principles were so robustly integrated as to make his political philosophy all but impermeable to contrary argument.
Catholicism and Confucianism both stress that the well-being of the family is the most important social responsibility of a people and their rulers. Diem never lost sight of this responsibility, even as the modern world threatened to destroy traditional Vietnamese culture. Indeed, this seems to be an area where Diem’s soul burned with a righteous fire: he lamented that the faith and the family life of his countrymen had diminished under French rule. When he became president, Buddhism, for example, was in such decline that it seemed like a discard from a bygone era. This loss grieved Diem, and during his presidency he appropriated government funds for the restoration of Buddhist places of worship. In effect, Diem was a true conservative: he wanted to conserve the traditional Vietnamese way of life. First and foremost, he wanted to restore the family to its Confucian status as the legal personality and the responsible entity within the village community. Toward this end, and in accordance with his Christian faith, he wanted to outlaw polygamy and concubinage.9 As it would turn out, Diem’s sturdy emphasis on religious, familial, and social duties placed a spiritual, moral, and intellectual gulf between him and many of his American advisors, the latter finding this an extremely difficult chasm to cross. Such matters are weightier than other sorts of policy concerns because they stem from the heart of what a man essentially is.
One of the more revealing historical footnotes about Diem is that his earliest ambition was to be a priest; indeed, he attended a seminary when he was fifteen, before deciding to become a civic leader. Catholicism was always closer to Diem’s heart than purely political ideas. His lengthy monologues irritated many of the American officials who attended meetings with him because they were a bit too much like sermons. A member of Diem’s family drew journalist Denis Warner’s attention to Diem’s otherworldliness when he stated, “You think you can have a meeting of minds with Diem. . . , [but] I tell you it is impossible. To a Westerner, Diem does not just come from another culture and another hemisphere. He comes from another planet.”10
Diem’s committed Catholicism was inculcated by his father, and it had a practical utility inasmuch as it was intended to strengthen his sons for the inevitable anti-Christian hostility that would come their way. From the time that Diem’s great-grandfather embraced Christianity, the Ngo Dinh family endured considerable anguish whenever the Church was identified with the French, and the French with oppressive colonialism. Like many other Vietnamese Catholics, the Ngo Dinhs then had to pay a high price for their faith. It should be added, however, that the persecution of Christians in Vietnam was by no means unrelenting; often there were periods of peaceful acceptance.11
Diem’s firm Catholic faith was buttressed by another significant character trait that had profound appeal to the Confucianist soul of Vietnamese society: asceticism. He led a disciplined life, and this was something the Vietnamese people revered because they believed that the quality of a man was determined by his ability to withstand hardship. Diem’s scholarly, monk-like personality made him far more attractive to the Vietnamese people as a leader than, for example, a Western-styled, big-toothed, glad-handing, baby-kissing politician. Indeed, such a politician offended Vietnamese sensibilities, and yet it was this very model that many American advisors tried to push on Diem.
There is another reason Diem found favour with the Vietnamese people. As Vietnamese writer Tran Van Dinh explained, according to Confucian ethics and Taoist concepts of harmony and universal order, those who seek wealth to the near exclusion of all else and attain it are held in low regard. Their motives are suspect, and consequently, so is their morality. Even the name for them is derogatory: troc phu, which translates as “filthy rich”. As was expected of a mandarin, Diem and his family had nothing to do with chasing money, and this also may have had some bearing on why, later in his career, Diem did not take a liking to W. Averell Harriman, the celebrated scion of American high society who became one of President Kennedy’s most influential foreign policy advisors. Opposite the troc phu is the thanh ban, or the learned “immaculate poor”; thus, the impecunious scholar had social appeal in Confucian Vietnamese society. Ho Chi Minh did his level best to appear as thanh ban to the average Vietnamese, because he knew he would be judged by them according to the Vietnamese-Confucian ideas of a good leader. Ho, however, was a bit disingenuous about his image, whereas Diem was the genuine article by birth and training.
In nearly every meaningful way, traditional Vietnamese society had values that were diametrically opposed to those of modern, secular Western societies, particularly the United States. Vietnamese social order, from top to bottom, looked something like this: at the top were the si, or scholars, men of letters like Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu; second down the scale could be found the nong, or peasant farmers; the next lower echelon was occupied by the cong, or workers; considerably further down in esteem were the thuong, or the businessmen and merchants; and finally, last in the Confucian Vietnamese order were the binh, or soldiers, who like our modern-day sanitation workers were seen as doing a necessary but dirty job.12 The low standing of soldiers in Vietnamese society explains why the Washington-backed coup against Diem was doomed to failure, because it replaced a si with a group of binh. Moreover, the “revolving door” coups of military men that followed left the average Vietnamese wondering who had turned the world upside down. Political legitimacy, in the form of the Confucian Mandate of Heaven, could never rest upon a military regime.
The Vietnamese held that only a man who had trained himself in hardship and had disciplined himself through the denial of his physical passions could truly lead the people, and Diem was known to be such a man. In an interview with the author, General Nguyen Khanh said that Diem’s purity and simplicity of life made him exemplary to the Vietnamese, Catholic and Buddhist alike. The general, who had participated in the coup that resulted in Diem’s murder, recalled how Diem, while living in the presidential palace, would have nothing to do with ostentation. He slept on an old army cot in his office, for example. Amongst the Vietnamese there is still, to this day, a deep reverence, bordering on awe, when they talk of the former president. Vietnam expert Paul Mus, a French scholar who grew up in Vietnam, told historian Ellen Hammer that only one man in Vietnam vied successfully with Ho Chi Minh for power: Ngo Dinh Diem. Mus knew both Ho and Diem, and he emphasised that it was Diem’s reputation for virtue that made him such a challenge to Ho. He told American officials back in 1949 that Diem was the only viable alternative to the Communists, but he also warned them that Diem could not be bought and would never be “their man” in Saigon.13
Many of the finer accolades of Diem came from his enemies. For example, General Tran Van Don, a leader of the military conspiracy that overthrew Diem in 1963, admitted that he was an ardent patriot who had been a resolute defender of national independence and whose rectitude was unassailable.14 Another military leader and coconspirator, Nguyen Cao Ky, praised Diem for his honesty and integrity.15 The most famous testament to the unimpeachable character of Diem came from none other than Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Communist take-over of Vietnam and Diem’s implacable enemy. In September 1945 Diem’s brother Khoi was murdered by Viet Minh guerrillas, and Diem, having also been captured, was brought before their leader, Ho Chi Minh. Ho tried to convince Diem to join the Viet Minh in their war against French rule. Diem refused, stating that he could never work with the Communist murderers of his brother, who were destroying his country. Ho remonstrated with him, saying that the orders to kill Khoi had not come from him and that any violence against his family was carried out in error. Flattering Diem about his well-known nationalist credentials, he tried to cajole him. Diem would have none of it, and deeply impressed with Diem’s courage, Ho—amazingly—let him go, perhaps thinking that once Diem had had enough of what the French were doing and had gotten a whiff of the Americans, he would be back.16
After Diem’s college graduation in 1921, he entered the provincial administration of French-controlled Vietnam as a district chief in charge of some 225 villages. This was no small task for such a young man, but regardless of his youth and inexperience, he displayed genuine leadership qualities as he developed a counterstrategy to Ho Chi Minh’s insurgents working in Vietnamese villages. Diem set up his own intelligence within the Communist political infrastructure. He would then, at the opportune moment, arrest Ho’s operatives, reeducate them, and then turn them against the Communists. He was extraordinarily successful at this because he eschewed bloodshed.17 In order to implement such an effective operation, Diem thoroughly studied Marxism and Communism as they were applied in Vietnam, thereby becoming one of the first Vietnamese officials fully to discern the extent to which the Communists had gained support in the country.18
Although the French ignored his perceptive reports on the nature and the extent of the Communist threat in the villages, they nevertheless rewarded Diem for his work in 1929 by appointing him, at age twenty-eight, governor of Phan Thiet Province. During the next four years, Diem became well known as an honest and competent administrator and a formidable opponent to violent revolutionaries. Significantly, he depended on the rule of law, and not his own personal authority, to maintain order, and thus he was able to please both the French and the Vietnamese, at least briefly. The French found him to be an outstanding civil servant, and the Vietnamese respected him for his ability to work hard on their behalf while not resorting to corruption or repression to get the job done—a very rare administrative talent in the recent memory of most Vietnamese.19
All was not perfect, however, in the relations between Diem and the French colonial administration, for Diem had been unrelenting in his plea to the French for greater freedom for the Vietnamese people. Specifically, he requested that more autonomy be granted to the Vietnamese peasants at the village level, especially in the context of increasing Communist activity in the countryside. The French, however, consistently ignored him, because they believed that the gravest threat came from neither the Communists nor the peasants but rather from the Vietnamese nationalists—in other words, from Vietnamese just like Ngo Dinh Diem. Nevertheless, Diem continued to argue that not only were the Communists a major threat but so too was the growing apathy or, conversely, hostility toward government of any kind amongst the hard-pressed peasants. Diem tried to demonstrate that the Communist inroads, which largely depended on propaganda and intimidation, could be headed off by simple government assistance at the village level, but the French were not listening.20
Regardless of their disdain for Diem’s harangues and warnings on the state of the peasants in the countryside, the French recognised his extraordinary administrative talents and advised their man, Emperor Bao Dai, to install Diem as the minister of the interior, which in effect was the prime minister. Trouble began almost immediately, though, when the French discovered that, unlike Bao Dai, Diem could not be bought so as to be more amenable to their will. To the contrary, and true to his forthright nature, Diem complained bitterly to the French that the government had little authority and even less political legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Moreover, he said that he would not stand by while Emperor Bao Dai’s powers were reduced to nothing. As a result, animosity formed between Diem and the French colonial administration. It seemed as if the French never forgave Diem for exposing and complaining about the true nature of the Bao Dai regime, that it was a government firmly under French control. When it became obvious to Diem that the French would not permit any meaningful reform, he resigned and became subject immediately to French retaliations. They stripped him of his awards for his excellent work and threatened him with deportation. The French, however, were loath to carry their retribution too far, because they did not want to make a martyr out of a leader so deeply respected by his own people;21 it would take the less experienced Americans to make that grievous error many years later.
Having been judged a troublemaker who had the most disconcerting inability to be purchased, Diem found himself subject to constant harassment by French colonial officialdom over the next ten years. During his hiatus from any sort of public office, Diem spent much of his time living with his younger brother Ngo Dinh Can in the city of Hue. Prayer and daily Mass were regular parts of each day, along with much reading and study. Occasionally he would go riding, dabble in photography, or tend the family garden. Many Vietnamese nationalists beat a path to the Ngo Dinh residence in Hue, and Diem visited the same people in Saigon. While many talked of revolution, nothing came of such discourse. The one truly outstanding political relationship that Diem forged at this time was with Vo Nguyen Giap, who later became the successful commander of the Viet Minh. Resisting Diem’s arguments for a nonsocialist approach, Giap, for his part, attempted to win Diem to the socialist cause. Neither one was successful in converting the other, although they created a sort of mutual admiration society.22
A significant event occurred during Diem’s years of political exile that lent further legitimacy to his nationalist credentials. When the Japanese moved into Indochina during the Second World War, Diem, believing an opportunity to help his country was at hand, asked them to grant independence to the Vietnamese people. The French took a dim view of Diem’s overture, and the Vichy government placed him under even closer surveillance. In 1944, Vichy openly denounced Diem as a subversive and placed his name on their “most wanted” list. But the French need not have bothered, because the Japanese were not interested in Vietnamese political aspirations; they were far more concerned with maintaining efficient control over their Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. In 1945, however, the Japanese attempted to bring Diem into their Indochina administration by offering him the prime ministership of a government they had hastily cobbled together in Hanoi. Diem, true to his character, would have nothing to do with what he believed was a thinly disguised Japanese puppet regime created more out of desperation than anything else, given that these were the dying days of their empire.23
During the post-war period, Diem was confronted with two substantial problems: first, he was still on the French wanted list and was being pursued by them relentlessly; and second, Ho Chi Minh had already set up a temporary government in Hanoi. These developments compelled Diem to leave the relative safety of his friends in Saigon and head north in order to warn the ordinary people there about Ho’s true intentions. It was during this trip that he was captured by the Viet Minh, as previously mentioned. Although he was eventually set free by Ho himself, his hostility toward the Viet Minh remained;24 this was not surprising given that the Viet Minh not only had murdered his brother, by burying him alive, but had raided the Ngo Dinh family home, destroying its library of more than ten thousand books in the process.25
Almost immediately after he was released by the Viet Minh, Diem began organising anti-Communist bases in North Vietnam. But he lacked the necessary funds and supply of arms for such an undertaking, and nothing but threats against his life were the result. In desperation, he took refuge with some Canadian monks living in Vietnam until a temporary accord with the Viet Minh and the French was signed on March 8, 1946.
Diem was not discouraged from making other attempts to organise Vietnamese nationalists, and in the spring of 1947 he founded a political party, the National Union Front, with the set purpose of achieving dominion status for Vietnam within the French Union.26The National Union Front published a newsletter in Saigon until the French closed down the party and the paper after jailing one of its editors. Another editor was murdered by hired gangsters. As a result, Diem experienced political disappointment once again.
From 1947 to 1948 the French made a concerted effort to reinstall their favourite emperor, Bao Dai. Diem also made an overture to Bao Dai: he travelled to the latter’s place of exile in Hong Kong, where he beseeched him not to accept the French offer without an unequivocal French commitment to grant Vietnamese independence within the near future. Regardless of Diem’s entreaties, Bao Dai unconditionally returned to his role as the emperor of French-controlled Indochina. In May 1949 he requested Diem to become his prime minister, and in disgust Diem refused.27 The French, like the Japanese and later the Americans, had failed to take Diem’s obstinate adherence to his principles and his commitment to Vietnamese independence into their political calculations.28
By 1950 Diem’s aspirations for his country were firmly established, yet he was still searching for the necessary means by which he could gain the power of national leadership necessary to realise them and thus save his country from many more years of colonial rule or something even worse. Along with his brothers Ngo Dinh Nhu and Bishop Ngo Dinh Thuc, the apostolic vicar of Vinh Long, Diem had been hard at work in creating new political movements such as the Christian Socialist Party, but the Viet Minh and the French authorities, each for their own reasons, thwarted most of these efforts. Politically frustrated and wishing to escape a death sentence imposed by the Viet Minh, Diem and Bishop Thuc left Vietnam in August 1950 to look for support overseas. Much to Diem’s surprise, those warmhearted neophytes from the Occident, the Americans, would soon be backing his patriotic ambitions.
Diem’s first stop was Japan, where apart from visiting an old friend, he attempted to solicit General Douglas MacArthur’s help in obtaining American support for a nationalist Vietnamese government. Preoccupied with Korea, MacArthur was not interested, so Diem sought other Americans in Japan for advice and assistance. Not surprisingly, some of these were impressed and inspired by Diem and his anticolonial patriotism, including a young professor of political science from Michigan State University, Wesley Fishel, who advised Diem to take his plea for an independent Vietnam directly to the United States, advice Diem followed.29 On his way from Japan to the United States, Diem stopped in Rome, where he was granted a private audience with the Pope, a visit some have suggested was intended to impress America’s Catholic elite.30 But there is another explanation: 1950 was a Holy Year, when many devout Roman Catholics made pilgrimages to Rome. At this time, Diem and his bishop brother would have been naturally drawn to Rome, where the latter had studied at the Gregorian University. For pious reasons alone they would have sought a papal audience.
During his two-year stay in America, Diem lived in Maryknoll Mission Society seminaries in upstate New York and New Jersey.31 Diem embraced the Maryknoll way of life, doing the same menial chores as the seminarians. Visitors of high import in American politics were stunned to see Diem taking out the garbage, washing the floors, and doing other lowly labours without complaint. Plainly, the man was seeking political power not for his own aggrandisement but out of dedication to God and his fellowmen, whom he wished to serve. Diem greatly impressed Francis Cardinal Spellman, archbishop of New York, who introduced him to everyone he knew in Washington who might help him. As a result, Diem made friends with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Senator Mike Mansfield, and the rising political star Congressman John F. Kennedy.32
What seems to have appealed to these Washington power brokers, apart from Diem’s Catholicism, was his resolute stand against both Communism and French colonialism. Justice Douglas, one of the original creators of the Diem “miracle man” myth, concluded after visiting Southeast Asia in 1954 that Ngo Dinh Diem was “revered by the Vietnamese because he is honest and independent and stood firm against French influence—a hero in Central and North Vietnam, with a considerable following in the South too”.33Diem seemed to be exactly what the Americans were looking for—a popular, incorruptible, non-Communist nationalist. What Douglas and other Americans seemed not to realise was that the very qualities they admired in Diem would later lead their government into conflict with him.
Although the Washington contacts would become more significant for him as time passed, in the short term Diem had no concrete plans for engaging this robust American support. To the contrary, he stepped back for a while to assess things, and he left the United States in May 1953, heading for a Benedictine monastery in Belgium. There he took refuge from the world in order to draw closer to God. By this time in his life, Diem had formed a pattern of going in and out of worldly affairs, a pattern he would continue until his death. When troubled, under threat, or just in need of quiet and reflection, he would retreat into a monastery or a similar religious institution. After his soul had been calmed and his thoughts organised through Christian contemplation, he would return to the hurly-burly of politics once more. After his Belgium retreat in 1953, he travelled to Paris to visit his brother Luyen, who had been seeking and organising support for Diem within the large Vietnamese community there.
Diem appeared torn between his attraction to the religious life and his sense of civic duty. In an apparent attempt to fulfil both, on January 12, 1954, he joined the third order of the Benedictines, making a commitment to live according to the rule of Saint Benedict as befitted a layman.34 Many years later, in a moment of exasperation with Diem’s political naïveté during the Buddhist crisis of 1963, his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu shouted that he should have been a monk and not a president.35 Everyone who knew the man realised that if not for his sense of filial duty to both his family and his country, he would have entered a monastery.
The support that Diem had garnered during his visit to America began to expand at a prodigious rate a year later when it became apparent to the U.S. government that the Communists were intent on bringing all of Southeast Asia under their sway. They already controlled China, North Korea, and, after the 1954 Geneva Accords, North Vietnam. Championing Diem in this important period were formidable Americans such as Senators John F. Kennedy and Mike Mansfield; Kenneth Young of the Department of State; Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles, both with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); and Edward Geary Lansdale, a military intelligence officer who became a true friend to Diem.36 Outside of the Eisenhower administration, Diem’s advocates included the editors of Life and Time; and the powerful lobby group led by Cardinal Spellman, Justice Douglas, Professor Fishel, Leo Cherne of the Research Institute of America, and Cherne’s associate Joseph Buttinger, a well-known socialist activist and author from Austria.37 Later in 1955, when Diem was president, both Fishel and Buttinger acted as advisors to him in Saigon. Eventually Buttinger became disillusioned with Diem.
Another important figure in Diem’s founding relationship with the United States was Wolf Ladejinsky, a colourful New Deal Democrat. More importantly for Diem’s credentials as a reorganiser, Ladejinsky was an Asian land reform expert, having served the U.S. government in that capacity in both post-war Japan and Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan. A Jewish refugee of the Russian Revolution, Ladejinsky was fired from the Department of Agriculture in 1954, when he was accused of being involved in “un-American activities”. Nevertheless, when Diem hired Ladejinsky as his land reform tsar, the move created substantial goodwill on the part of America’s liberal elite, because they took this as proof of Diem’s sincerity with regard to that important issue.38
Finally, a brief note needs to be included here regarding Diem’s attitude toward Buddhism. Diem deeply respected Buddhism. Indeed, in a moment of candour he admitted to a close family friend that he preferred Buddhist practice to Confucian philosophy because the former involved looking inward and mending one’s own life.39 As a devout Roman Catholic, Diem knew that the best way to win anyone to Christ was via the example of his own conduct; the very notion of forcing his religious beliefs on anyone was anathema to the Vietnamese leader. Additionally, Diem saw in Buddhism a means of reinvigorating Vietnamese identity. French colonialism had, for the most part, robbed the people of their traditional culture, a vacuum that was at risk of being filled by Communism. Diem hoped that a revitalised Buddhism at the village level would provide the people with a spiritual centre of gravity that would prevent the Communists from taking over the countryside. Even without such a strategy in mind, Diem could never have attacked Buddhism as his critics have claimed; his Confucian ethic of honouring his parents and ancestors would not have permitted him to dishonour the Buddhism of his great-grandfather and other forebears.