4
GIA LONG PALACE looms ahead as I walk along streets flying red and yellow bunting and past ice cream parlors busy with the celebrating crowds. I’ll soon have my first look at the small, plump man chosen to be ruler in Saigon at a time when the country is falling to pieces, a man reputed to laugh rarely though today, in a neat dark suit pulled tight around his middle, he smiles a lot. Ngo Dinh Diem is observing the eighth anniversary of his presidency of South Vietnam, defying the odds against his survival that was initially put at six months by some experts. Eight years have gone by, and the bombing attacks and attempted coups d’état against him have come and gone.
He nods at me as I shuffle along the receiving line. His jet-black hair seems lacquered on. Diem was chosen to lead his country because of impressive nationalist credentials and stubborn courage in stabilizing the south after the French war, but he’s becoming an odd man out for leading the fast-developing life-or-death struggle against the communists. Even Ambassador Frederick Nolting, his most fervent American supporter, acknowledges Diem’s eccentricities and Mandarin style, remembering sitting through six hours of “incredible verbosity” in his first private meeting with him. “Between us,” Nolting writes in his autobiography, “we must have smoked several packs of Vietnamese cigarettes and drank dozens of cups of pale, lukewarm tea.”
General Maxwell D. Taylor, sent several times to Saigon as an emissary of President Kennedy, tells me in an interview that he noticed Diem “at times getting a glassy look in his eyes and dozing off,” during his presentations. William Colby, chief of station for the CIA, says in an interview Diem sees his function “as a kind of monk to bring his mission to an end, to bring Vietnam into the modern world.” Kennedy’s impatience with Diem’s modus operandi is said to have persuaded him to pursue a military option that will place South Vietnam’s future more under American supervision.
In mid-February 1963, I sit through a speech given by Ambassador Nolting at a business conference praising Diem and renewing his displeasure with the press, and calling for an end to “idle criticism, from snide remarks and unnecessary comments, and from spreading allegations and rumors which either originate from communist sources, or play directly into communist hands.” I feel we’re covering Saigon like our stateside colleagues are covering Washington, D.C., and too bad that the ambassador doesn’t like it. I don’t know how not to write stories about what we are seeing and hearing.
In the early morning of June 11, Mal Browne, our bureau chief at AP, is roused from his sleep with a telephone tip from a monk friend at the Xa Loi pagoda, the center of a growing Buddhist protest against the Saigon government. An important demonstration will wind through city streets an hour or so later. Such events have become commonplace, but Browne and office assistant Bill Havantran attend anyway because the continuing Buddhist unrest that began with the bloody police suppression of a religious parade in Hue on May 8 has caught the attention of American editors.
Police are clearing the streets of traffic. A group of monks march silently and slowly along Phan Dinh Phuong Avenue behind an old gray sedan. They stop in front of the Cambodian Embassy. A few monks step out of the ranks as the others, several hundred in number, form a circle in the middle of the intersection. Browne and Havantran ready their cameras. Something new is about to happen.
An elderly monk in bright yellow robes walks slowly from the sedan and seats himself cross-legged on a cushion. Two companions pour gasoline over his shaved head and drench his robes. The monk lights a match in his lap and then folds his hands in the lotus position as flames envelop him. An astonished Browne clicks away as another monk in the crowd shouts out in English, “This is the Buddhist flag. He died for this flag. Thich Quang Duc burned for this flag.”
Browne’s photograph of the aged monk enveloped in smoke and flames shocks the world. Later, Browne is sometimes asked why he didn’t intervene and prevent the suicide. His response: “I was too busy doing my job, but there were several hundred militant monks there. They would have torn me to pieces if I made a move,” he told one interviewer.
The ramifications of that one picture are immediate. President Kennedy has a copy of the front page of The Washington Post on his desk in the Oval Office when he meets with Henry Cabot Lodge, who has agreed to replace Nolting as ambassador. Kennedy points to the picture and instructs, “Get out there and make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Lodge tells me in an interview.
The Saigon government clamps down harder on the Buddhists and their sympathizers. One afternoon I see two truckloads of young girls dressed in traditional silken white ao dai dresses being driven from their high school dormitories to detention centers because of their Buddhist sympathies. Browne is accused by Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, the firebrand sister-in-law of President Diem, of providing the gasoline for Thich Quang Duc’s immolation.
The police crack down ferociously on our news coverage. On July 7, I cover a demonstration at the Chantareansay pagoda in the northern suburbs of Saigon. I’m pushed into an alley by surging protesters. I try to get my bearings as I’m punched in the head. I’m tackled to the ground and beaten up and kicked by a group of plainclothes security men who stamp on my camera. They are enjoying it. Suddenly a large person is standing over me, growling like a bear, his fists raised. It is my buddy David Halberstam of The New York Times, who is built like a fullback. He pulls me to my feet and turns to my much smaller attackers and says loudly, “You want him? Then get through me.” I doubt the security men understood his words, but they did his menace. They raised their hands in submission and slipped away.
The local authorities up the ante. Two days later, Browne and I are ordered to the main Saigon police station on trumped-up charges of assaulting the police, and subject to a four-hour interrogation that borders on the Kafkaesque in its disorienting and menacing quality. We are freed after word reaches the American Embassy that we might face serious charges that would further heighten the already fraught situation and become a cause célèbre.
By now our troubles have caught the attention of the media establishment in America. Our New York headquarters advises us of a letter sent to President Kennedy on July 18 by the president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Herbert Drucker, editor of The Hartford Courant. It says in part, “In recent weeks as you are aware there have been charges that Vietnamese secret police pummeled, knocked down and kicked American reporters and smashed their cameras.” He concludes the letter, “It is not yet certain that all possible efforts are being made to prevent further deliberate obstacles to free reporting. Whatever the difficulties, we urge you to bear in mind the need for the American people to have the fullest possible factual information from South Vietnam, no matter what anyone may think is right or wrong about the situation there.”
I feel the wind in my sails. The bruises, the arrests, the hectoring by officials are nothing compared to my growing awareness that I’m doing the right thing, that I, Browne and the other reporters have consequential roles to play in the growing drama that is South Vietnam.
I’m at the airport to cover the arrival of Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, scion of a prominent Massachusetts family, a legendary figure in American diplomacy and politics. I ride there with my colleagues in a bus escorted by police through streets emptied by the early curfew. We expect Lodge’s appointment to be a game changer, with pressure put on Ngo Dinh Diem to allow political freedoms and to improve military competence. Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, both well versed in New England patrician ways, joke that in the challenging days ahead for American-Vietnamese relations, “Our old Mandarin can lick your old Mandarin.”
Lodge did not disappoint. He emerged from his aircraft into glaring television lights and began talking about American democracy and the essential role of the press. Four newsmen on the flight with him include the AP’s chief executive in Asia, Robert Eunson. He pulls me out of the crowd and says, “The ambassador’s on our side,” introducing me to one of Lodge’s aides, Major John Michael Dunn, who nods in affirmation.
I’m exhilarated. Unlike his predecessor Frederick Nolting, the State Department veteran, who always seemed impatient with the press and regularly swatted at us as though we were flies buzzing around carrion, Lodge is an old pol, a former candidate for the vice presidency of the United States among many other political offices, and in his early life a journalist. He knows the value of a friendly media.
Within a few hours of his arrival on Aug. 22, 1963, Lodge makes a well-publicized visit to two Buddhist monks granted asylum at the U.S. military headquarters on Rue Pasteur. On Nov. 1, 71 days later, the Saigon government is overthrown in a brutal coup d’état by disaffected military officers. President Diem and his influential brother Ngo Dinh Nhu are both murdered after surrendering.
Flashing forward 15 years, it’s early autumn 1978, and I sit with an aging Lodge in his family home in Boston. As amiable as always, he’s agreed to a television interview for a documentary I’m working on. He tells me about the day Diem died.
“I visited his palace late morning along with General Harkins and Admiral Felt. I was leaving for Washington on a routine visit the following day. Diem says, ‘Every time the American ambassador goes to Washington I hear coup rumors. I hear these rumors now, I know there will be a coup but I don’t know who’s behind it.’ I took Harkins and Felt home to lunch, and while we’re sitting there we hear this tremendous automatic weapons fire, it sounded as though it was right in the next room. And the planes were flying overhead. It was the beginning of the overthrow.”
I ask Lodge what he knew in advance, because the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. government’s secret study of the war, had already revealed American awareness of the plotting. The old Mandarin smiled. “President Kennedy told us to stay out of it, let it run its course. He wanted the Vietnamese to run it as a Vietnamese thing. And Washington said they would stay out of it and they stayed out of it.”