Chapter 5

Diem and the National Liberation Front: 1954–1960

The origins of the second Vietnam War – or what can be considered a resumption of the first – may, perversely, be thought of in analogy with events and concepts a hundred years earlier. Whether or not it merits the contemporary description of the only perfectly useless war of modern times, the decision of France and Britain to support the Ottoman Empire in its quarrel with Russia produced the Crimean War of 1854. In Lord Palmerston's view the war was fought to curb the aggressive ambitions of Russia – not so much to keep the Sultan in power as to keep the Russians out – but when the war ended and material circumstances for the moment forced the Russians to conclude what they regarded as a humiliating peace it was a settlement which ‘came to rest, essentially, on the faithful observance of treaty obligations’. This, it has been suggested, proved to be a slender foundation.¹

Palmerston, for one, thought that peace would only last a few years – ten at most – but even this required some guarantee and a fortnight after the Peace of Paris was signed in 1856 Britain, France and Austria engaged themselves in a Triple Treaty to defend the settlement. Comparisons with the Treaty that was signed at Manila in September 1954 to protect the Geneva settlement may seem far-fetched, although a quotation, in which they are implicit, is irresistible.

There is, as the fate of the Triple Treaty shows, little value in diplomatic engagements not based on a lasting community of interests; yet where such a community of interest exists, written agreements, as a rule, would seem hardly necessary. The Triple Treaty designed to buttress the Crimean settlement was shown in the event to have embodied the permanent interests of not one of the three signatories. It was this which spelt its doom. Unwanted, ignored, broken in the spirit if not the letter, it dragged out its undistinguished existence. It did not achieve even decent burial and consignment to the ‘sepulchre of archives’. Unwept, unhonoured and unsung, it had, in fact, ignominiously ‘sneaked out of existence’ years before the British government posthumously proclaimed its demise. Like other carefully negotiated instruments both before and since, it had failed signally to achieve its object or, in fact, to serve any useful purpose whatever.²

As its death was comparatively recent, an attempt to extend this obituary to SEATO might seem unwise as well as spiteful but there can be little doubt that its principal purpose, which was an American purpose, was to guarantee the sovereign integrity of Laos and Cambodia and to legitimize the birth of South Vietnam. In a word it was to keep the communists out and the territory most at risk was that of South Vietnam. In 1856 it can be argued that the framers of the Triple Treaty were careless in their drafting – ‘They should clearly have written into the Treaty a guarantee of the Ottoman Empire as valid only so long as Turkey was capable of defending herself single-handed’³ – and even if one would not go so far as the unlikely event of an out and out attack upon South Vietnam by the Chinese People's Republic, nevertheless the ability of the South Vietnamese government to draw on substantial support in its own country was of major importance even if its legitimacy was not. If, in the aftermath of Geneva, the attainment of de facto and de jure independence as the French departed had coincided with a consolidation and integration of political purpose which to all intents and purposes would have been a demonstration of national sovereignty, a new and viable state could conceivably have been born. Comparisons, sometimes misleading, would often be made with West Germany and South Korea, neither of which had any absolute right to exist, and although it would have been hard to say right away that the régime that was being created by Ngo Dinh Diem lacked the essential qualities of national integrity, nevertheless, and to revert to another 19th-century concept, in retrospect at least it would seem over too long a period to have lacked that indispensable characteristic which Bismarck described as ‘alliance-worthiness’.⁴

THE STATUS OF SOUTH VIETNAM

To begin with, in what Eisenhower called ‘the miserable political situation’ of South Vietnam, the frailty of what was still, nominally, the government of Vietnam was understandable and excusable and Diem himself was in an unenviable position. Whatever its status, the Final Declaration at Geneva had at least established a context and written a scenario for what might happen in the South. The government of Vietnam might have more claim to authority, by breadth of international recognition, than the DRVN in the North, but, rightly or wrongly, independence was more widely attributed to the efforts of the Vietminh than to the government of Emperor Bao Dai. In any case, the Cease Fire Agreement itself (the one that was signed) seemed to imply an equivalence of authority, with ‘the conduct of civil administration’ on either side recognized ‘pending the general elections which would bring about the unification of Vietnam’. This carried the further implication that, as in the North, it was an interim authority, an arrangement and a government therefore that was liable to terminate in two years' time, and that Diem might be no more than the head of a caretaker administration. On this reading of the Final Declaration too, Diem's position might have been undermined by the International Commission for Supervision and Control which, if Geneva was an international settlement, then, like some conference of ambassadors, the Commission appeared to exist in order to carry it out. Only in this case none of the states represented on the Commission had had any part in the Geneva settlement itself; each gave separate instructions to its representatives; each had its own understanding of what had been agreed and what had to be done. The Indian chairman, for example, said that it should have been a Commission for supervision and conciliation, rather than control; of his colleague ‘the Polish version of Machiavelli’ the Canadian member added ‘I doubt whether the Soviet Bloc could have had a more effective representative.’⁵ The primary purpose of the International Commission was to control and supervise the application of the cease-fire agreement although it seems (Art. 28) that the primary responsibility for its execution lay with France and the DRVN. Apart from the regrouping of the combatant forces, the Commission's main concern was with Chapter III of the Agreement: ‘Ban on the introduction of fresh troops, military personnel, arms and munitions, foreign bases’ and what gave rise to even more disagreement under Article 14, how civilians were to be permitted and helped to move from one zone to the other and the prevention of reprisals or discrimination against those who remained.

Although it was to deploy hundreds of men in fixed and mobile teams, even if there had been no deliberate obstruction it would have required an army of observers to detect the import of illicit munitions in North or South Vietnam, particularly the North, and while the arrival of large, regular formations of foreign reinforcements would presumably have stood out, again, particularly in the North, smaller units or individuals who were ‘rotating’ did not. In the period before the second Vietnam War began (or the first one resumed) it is hard to say whether there was a significant change in the military balance and, although it was widely believed that the Chinese had effected a massive re-supply of the People's Army within a year or so of the armistice, it could be argued, to take just one category, that it was permissible replacement of artillery which had worn smooth and mortars that had practically burned out during the siege of Dien Bien Phu.⁶ In so far as the International Commission was supposed to prevent a resumption of hostilities in the two-year period before the scheduled elections it succeeded; but in so far as war, to cite Hobbes, ‘consisteth not in actual fighting but in the known disposition thereto’ it was, and could hardly not have been, less successful. That is, if one assumes that its purpose was to maintain the unity of Vietnam rather than to assist as midwife at the birth of two Vietnams. Nevertheless, as one Canadian put it, ‘The Commission reflected stalemate; it didn't create it’⁷ and as far as the co-chairmen of the Geneva Conference, Britain and the USSR, were concerned, as long as the dogs were asleep, or at least quiet, they were content to let them lie. When Macmillan and Molotov met in New York in September 1955 no decisions were taken on reconvening the Geneva Conference (which might at this point have proved awkward for both powers) and extended Anglo-Russian conversations in London in April and May 1956 seemed to confirm, in the words of an Indian study, that the co-chairmen implicitly acquiesced in the virtual partition of Vietnam.⁸

If Britain and the USSR were anxious to absolve themselves of continuing responsibility for the settlement in Vietnam, France and the US were not. One, in spite of the disaster of Dien Bien Phu, wished to retrieve what it could and to retain what influence it might have even in a communist Vietnam. The other, having come so close to participation in the war at the time of Dien Bien Phu, was not yet ready to back off although the commitment was by no means confirmed, to begin with, by all branches of government nor was policy agreed at all levels. In the immediate aftermath of Geneva perhaps the commonest word in US analysis and memoranda was ‘salvage’ and for a moment, although one may wonder whether Dulles was ever serious when he talked about spending the money elsewhere, it seemed just possible that the US would not put all its weight behind a government in Saigon of doubtful worth. ‘We feel’ said the State Department a propos Diem a week after the Geneva Conference ended ‘we must know whether his government is likely to last … we would not wish to give aid to government which did not enjoy support and confidence of Vietnamese people’.⁹ But while these criteria had still to be met, and others were being proposed, the major evaluation of Geneva in terms of what was likely to happen in Indo-China suggested what the US might do in a sort of joint-stock venture to create a new Vietnam.

The National Intelligence Estimate of 3 August 1954 ‘Post-Geneva Outlook in Indo-China’ was far more than a conventional intelligence assessment in that it had immense operational consequences as well as profound political implications.¹⁰ In effect, while it was a most perceptive analysis and in almost all respects extremely accurate forecast, it put forward, at the highest level, a draft programme for US policy. The contrasts were vivid. In the North, Ho Chi Minh, who was regarded as the man who had liberated Tonkin from 70 years of French rule. In the South, where it was impossible to predict even the broad outlines of French policy, frustration, disillusionment, widespread uncertainty and the mutual jealousies of Vietnamese politicians. Rather than armed invasion, the communist offensive to control all Indo-China was expected to be political, psychological and para-military; and the course of future developments, it said, ‘will be determined less by the Geneva agreements than by the relative capabilities and actions of the Communist and non-Communist entities in Indo-China’, and it added, ‘of interested outside powers’.

Retrospectively one might argue that while, in the then existing pattern, the fortunes of the South would depend heavily on what the French decided to do, the North was inherently stronger and more likely to be able to sustain itself at least over the short run if elections did take place in 1956, but the most potent if not the most interested outside power was, plainly, the US. Their inherent inexperience, immaturity and weakness notwithstanding, if they were given opportunity, guidance and material help in building nation states, the countries of Indo-China might be able to attain viability. ‘We believe that the energy and resourcefulness necessary for the achievement will not arise spontaneously among the non-Communist Indo-Chinese but will have to be sponsored and nurtured from without.’ Recommendations were hardly in order in an intelligence estimate but the inferences were inescapable. Energy and resourcefulness are recognized and obvious American characteristics. If they were applied to the requirements stipulated – an effective security force, local government organization and a long-range programme for economic and social reform – then the solution to a finite problem was there for the taking. The French, because of the traditional interests and emotions which governed their Indo-China policy, would be unlikely to arouse active loyalty and popular support for a South Vietnamese government and, in any event, it was expected that the Vietminh stay-behind units would become at least politically active within a year and might even be involved in open guerrilla fighting.¹¹

SPONSORED OPPORTUNITY

For an administration in Washington that was still convinced that Indo-China was of vital importance to the US, that communists and particularly Chinese communists were poised to break out into South-east Asia and beyond, and who had almost finished putting together the alliance that would stop them if there was open aggression, there might have seemed little doubt that it would respond to the clear invitation of the NIE (National Intelligence Estimate). Indeed, their military man on the spot in Saigon, General O'Daniel, was about to put forward his own ambitious proposals for comprehensive US assistance – alongside every key official and government agency in ‘Free Vietnam’ there should be one or more US specialists – that would include housing, schools, sanitation and hygiene. O'Daniel had already cabled his enthusiastic opinion that there was a great opportunity for the US to assist in pointing Vietnam in the right direction and, he said, the area was one that could be used as a testing ground to combat the warfare Communists would hope to employ elsewhere including, he added, mysteriously, the US.

Whether or not the US administration would take up the challenge, and on such a scale, there were practical matters that required their urgent attention as another massive exodus got under way in a familiar pattern of post-war partition. Most were coming from the North, whole villages at a time and, in the case of the predominantly Catholic refugees, led and organized by village priests.¹² Altogether something like 900,000 refugees, most of them Catholic, came south but when the number was still below 100,000 it was obvious that the government of Vietnam could not possibly cope and the US Ambassador was asking for enough tents to accommodate thousands. Moving that number was beyond French resources, too, and in the the end most of the refugees arrived in US ships. The spectacle and dimensions of this vast and often pitiful flow gave Americans an emotional as well as a practical involvement in those who were obviously fleeing from communism and a concern with what was to happen to them afterwards. There were some rather hopeful projections of political arithmetic which suggested that they might even turn the scales of an anti-communist vote if there were elections but, as long as the overall assessment of political prospects was unchanged, the possibility of elections and a communist victory was like an unexploded bomb which threatened to blow away whatever might be achieved.

From time to time over the next 18 months or so US officials gave the impression that elections were likely to take place and that US efforts were geared to putting the government of Vietnam into the best possible position so that they could take part and withstand the impact. That was certainly the French and, more or less, the British position as well but US instincts were different, even if it took time for operational policy to set hard. In the aftermath of Geneva and what it described as America's loss of prestige and increased Asian doubts about US leadership and capabilities to check further communist expansion, the National Security Council engaged in two massive debates in August 1954 as part of its general review of Far Eastern policy. For the most part they were in an aggressive mood but although it had been a Vietnamese disaster it was China, in effect, who was held responsible and who had to bear the brunt of America's cardinal as well as contingent reactions. In the agreed statement of policy (NSC 5429) South Vietnam was only mentioned once, the object of collective defence in a security treaty, but Southeast Asia generally was where there was to be a new initiative to protect the US position and to restore its prestige throughout the Far East. Limited military assistance and training missions would continue to be provided to the states of Southeast Asia (Vietnam, indirectly, had been far and away the largest recipient) so as to bolster their will to fight, to stabilize legal governments and to assist them in controlling subversion; but subversion, which was now identified as the nut that had to be cracked, was to receive the full sledgehammer treatment.

If requested by a legitimate local government which requires assistance to defeat local Communist subversion or rebellion not constituting armed attack, the US should view such a situation so gravely that, in addition to giving all possible covert and overt support within Executive Branch authority the President should at once consider requesting Congressional authority to take appropriate action, which might if necessary and feasible include the use of US military forces either locally or against the external source of such subversion or rebellion (including Communist China if determined to be the source).¹³

The distinction that was made between ‘legal’ and ‘legitimate’ was probably unintentional and scarcely requires a philosophical disquisition; but a great deal would turn on whether South Vietnam, as well as being legal, was a legitimate government or not. Something, perhaps, which in certain circumstances might be decided by elections but, as Dulles told the NSC on 12 August, he had not believed that there was any way to bring about a non-communist victory in any all-Vietnam elections. So, instead, he ‘thought our real objective should be to avoid having such elections’.¹⁴ Defense Secretary Wilson, who was openly sceptical of Vietnam's vital importance to the US, was the only one to underline the Geneva agreements but in the absence of any other internal opposition or dissent US policy was now at least implicitly directed towards this end. The Government of South Vietnam was therefore to be seen as much as a means to this end as it was an end in itself, something that would help to ensure that the elections never took place but it was also a contingent government which from 21 July onwards depended upon a particular interpretation of the Geneva agreements and, from its inception, depended even more upon the massive support of the US. That, however, was not the same as absolute, immediate, and unconditional support as far as Ngo Dinh Diem was concerned and even though he would, before long, have the backing of a powerful lobby, the American Friends of Vietnam, he had first to show some capacity for government and his ability to take part in America's ‘new initiative’. The principal attraction was that he was profoundly anti-French and the principal temptation was to assume that he could, if only for a limited period, maintain the integrity of South Vietnam without relying on French power. Economically, this was possible in that the US had been paying for most of the French war effort in Indo-China; but even if the structure of French colonial government could be rapidly dismantled without causing too much damage the same could not be said of the French Expeditionary Corps which was probably the most stable element in a compound which would not have taken much to dissolve or to explode. As long as French forces remained, so did French influence and so did the mutual fears and suspicions of Diem and the US concerning what it was the French were up to, either on their own, or with someone like General Hinh, Chief of Staff of the Vietnamese Army and other Vietnamese who still felt themselves aligned with the French rather than with Diem. This particular and personal confrontation between Diem and his Chief of Staff was beginning to paralyse Vietnamese government at a time when urgent decisions had to be taken on the matter of training the Vietnamese Army. When the cease-fire was signed the French still had some 5,000 officers and men engaged in training the Vietnamese Army. Diem's government now wanted the Americans to take over. Military assistance and training missions, the Americans agreed, would stabilize legal governments. Even the sober-sided Dulles, the morning after Geneva, had confessed he would almost rather see the French get out of the rest of Indo-China and allow the US to work directly with the native leadership. Now there was both opportunity and necessity and as the continuing turmoil of Vietnamese politics brought US assessments that Saigon was on the brink of an army coup so it also brought US mediation and personal commitment to Diem. For one thing Diem seemed to be so much more a Vietnamese nationalist. General Hinh would have been a better choice to impose the national discipline of a Praetorian Guard and would almost certainly have been more amenable to French purposes, but this in itself, in a Vietnam that was trying to assert its national independence, was as much a disqualification as Hinh's French citizenship and commission in the French Air Force.

SYMPATHY FOR DIEM

At least as far as the US was concerned, with a steady stream of telegrams from Ambassador Heath in Saigon, there was growing sympathy in Washington not only for the principle of civil supremacy but, personally, for Diem who was not only under threat from his French-trained military commanders but seemed to be subject to a fair amount of bullying from the French in Saigon who had told him to compromise with Hinh and had their own ideas as well who should be in Diem's cabinet. In fact both French and Americans were offering their advice on whom Diem should have and what he should do and although, as the French complained, he would play one off against the other, Diem was in close and frequent touch with various Americans and often used one as a go-between with another. Well before the Geneva Conference was into its stride the CIA in one disguise or another started arriving in Vietnam. According to French authors Lacouture and Devillers the successive arrivals in Saigon of Colonel Lansdale on 1 June 1954 and General Donovan, wartime head of the CIA's precursor, OSS, and currently Ambassador in Thailand, on 3 June were connected with a move by his brother Nhu to advance Diem to Prime Minister; and a month later the CIA major who, ironically, was heavily involved in the 1963 coup in which Diem and Nhu were murdered, arrived to join Lansdale and then to engage in some rather desultory sabotage around Hanoi.¹⁵ Lansdale's account of himself as friend and confessor to Diem suggests a remarkably close relationship in which, even allowing for exaggeration, Diem is seen as a projection of US ideals and ambitions in Asia. As Lansdale put it, he was apparently trying to convince Diem that, like George Washington, he could become the father of his country. By this time, and although their ambassador had warned that a ‘relief pitcher’ might be necessary, the US was already a partner in an elaborate quadrille with Diem, the French and Emperor Bao Dai, not to mention the various sects, cabals and individuals who constituted Vietnamese political forces. None was quite so bizarre as either of the two religious sects, the Cao Dai or the Hoa Hao, on whose private armies the French had long relied and whose integration into the Vietnamese Army would provide Diem before long with his most serious challenge. Again, there was a US interest because it would be paying; and by an ironic coincidence the day before Heath had recommended the ‘relief pitcher’ Eisenhower had agreed that Diem should be reassured of US intentions to aid free Vietnam. Obviously it would have been difficult to tell Diem that the US was willing to send aid direct to his government and to train his army and, at the same time, to mention that they were thinking about his replacement and although in the event, the letter was not sent for another month, when it was finally delivered at the end of October it was a formal and personal commitment. Before that happened Dulles had gone one stage further in avoiding elections in Vietnam, telling the NSC that when the time came, as there was no possibility of fair elections in the north, ‘we would have ample grounds for postponing or declining to hold them in the south.’¹⁶

DOUBTS AND COMMITMENT

There was no doubt about the seriousness in Dulles' mind concerning the US commitment to South Vietnam in the event of an overt attack from the North – US bombing of Tonkin and probably general war with China – although he explained: ‘Our concept envisages a fight with nuclear weapons rather than the commitment of ground forces.’ Within Vietnam, however, ground forces, that is to say a Vietnamese army, was what mattered and although he described grandiose plans originating from MAAG (Military Assistance Advisory Group) in Saigon for a ten-division army trained for an offensive mission at an annual cost of half a billion dollars as ‘silly’, it was obvious that an army was needed and Diem needed it most. By this time however the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense were notably at odds. Wilson told Dulles that it was hopeless to try to save Vietnam and further expenditures were a waste of money; and a week later, after another major decision had been taken, Wilson's words, if anyone remembered them – and they seem curiously little known – would have haunted US policy-makers over the next 20 years. The only sensible course, he said, was for the US to get out of Indo-China completely and as soon as possible. The situation there was utterly hopeless and these people should be left to stew in their own juice. There would be nothing but grief in store if we remained.

It was an emotional and prophetic statement and was, of course, contradicted by the logic of the situation as it was seen by others in Washington. On 22 October 1954 in Dulles' absence, the NSC was once again trying to work out how to save Indo-China and, again, policy seemed to be decided by operational necessities. In this case the premise was that time was running out, new and immediate US moves were necessary to break what was called a paralysing impasse and without them the Diem government would collapse.¹⁷ The Operations Co-ordinating Board had already decided on a crash programme, the first stage of a limited training movement to sustain the Diem government and establish security in ‘Free Vietnam’ but the political implications were enormous. They amounted, as acting Secretary Hoover explained, to a mission of re-orienting the top officers of the Vietnam Army away from Hinh and towards Diem or, in the President's words: ‘What we wanted was a Vietnamese force which would support Diem … the obvious thing to do was simply to authorise General O'Daniel to use up to X millions of dollars – say 5, 6 or 7 – to produce the maximum number of Vietnamese military units on which Prime Minister Diem could depend to sustain himself in power.’¹⁸

As a result of this meeting instructions were sent to Saigon that the Ambassador and Chief of MAAG were to collaborate in improving the loyalty and effectiveness of the Free Vietnamese forces in the hope that within a month or so Diem's government would be strong enough to decide on long-range programmes. The postscript, that the State Department would ‘undertake to obtain appropriate understanding and means of augmentation’, referred to the limit of 342 military personnel which the State Department thought could be on the strength of MAAG without breaching the terms of the Franco-Vietminh cease-fire but which, understandably, even if all of them were engaged in training, the Defense Department reckoned would be quite inadequate to build a new model army in Vietnam. The original condition that the JCS laid down for training the Vietnamese Army which, from their point of view, was absolutely essential, was that there should be a reasonably strong, stable civil government in control. It was hopeless, they said, to expect a US military training mission to achieve success unless the nation concerned was able to perform essential governmental functions effectively.¹⁹ Now the sequence was to be reversed and US military assistance was to be given in order to produce a reasonably strong and stable civil government. Nevertheless, as a more or less formal contract, it could be argued that there were important conditions attached: as President Eisenhower's letter to President Diem revealed when it was released on 25 October. In return for ‘an intelligent programme of American aid’ given directly to Diem's government it must, in turn, be prepared to give assurances regarding the standards of performance it would be able to maintain and that it would undertake needed reforms. What these reforms were was not specified, but an independent Vietnam endowed with a strong government was expected to be ‘so responsive to the nationalist aspirations of its people, so enlightened in purpose and effective in performance that it would be respected both at home and abroad’. At the same time it was to be a strong, viable state, capable of resisting attempted subversion or aggression through military means and although one may wonder, in retrospect, whether a comma may have been intended after ‘subversion’, if it was not then it may be argued that the US ended up with the state which its blueprint was intended to produce: one which would resist attempted subversion by military means.²⁰

In the meantime, even as Eisenhower's letter of support was about to be delivered, the reports from Saigon became more alarming. ‘Everyone in Embassy’, said Heath, ‘convinced that Diem cannot organise and administer strong government’.²¹ Diem had hardly left the Presidential Palace where he had been working 18 hours a day; delegating responsibility would be counter to his fanatical sense of personal mission; it was doubtful that he would accept any limitation of his authority and, ultimately, ‘We will probably have to use Bao Dai's thread of legitimate authority to compel Diem either to constitute effective government or, if he remains intractable and inept, to resign in favour of some person or persons capable of forming a government strong enough to keep free Vietnam from going Communist.’

THE COLLINS MISSION

Together with what was practically his valedictory a couple of weeks later – ‘Diem may not be up to the job … a possible successor must be sought’ – these reports would seem to confirm that Ambassador Heath had already lost confidence in Diem and, for that reason probably, Washington had lost confidence in Heath. On 3 November General J. Lawton Collins, currently US member of the NATO Standing Group and perhaps Eisenhower's best and most trusted corps commander from the Second World War, received the President's instruction that he was to go to Vietnam ‘to assist in stabilising and strengthening the legal government of Vietnam under the premiership of Ngo Dinh Diem.’²² He was told by Dulles that his chances of success were one in ten but whether these were the odds against better co-ordination of the US effort in Vietnam, improving internal security or engendering more support for Diem, is not clear. Nevertheless, according to Collins' own account: ‘I made it clear that the US intended to support the government of Diem and a National Army as long as it was loyal to President Diem.’²³ Loyalty to Diem was obviously a cardinal issue; and, immediately involved in the Diem-Hinh feud, Collins told Hinh that if he attempted a coup it would mean the end of military aid to Vietnam. To which Hinh replied: ‘The question was whether Vietnam was better off with Diem and US aid or without Diem and without US aid’ but for the moment, and certainly as far as Collins was concerned, this was an academic question. Diem was there to be helped. The only question was how was it to be done. With a great deal of support from General Ely, Collins quickly produced the outline of US military support for the Vietnamese Army. General O'Daniel's MAAG would assume full responsibility for its development and training by January 1955 and it would be fully autonomous by the following July. The French, in effect, would be replaced in a matter of months.

There was, of course, far more to it than that and in General Collins, the US Special Representative in Vietnam, one may see the first of the American pro-consuls. That may equally well be an arguable proposition but his functions, both in his own and in the official account, went far beyond those of the normal ambassador. They were, as he reiterates in his memoirs, used to assist Diem and to strengthen his government, to the point where it could be said that Collins was himself taking on some of the normal functions of government even if, at this time, the result did not yet amount to the creation of a client state. As the US commitment deepened over the next ten years it went through the same progression as that for which the Dutch, ruefully, blamed themselves in their Indonesian policies: ‘Let me show you how to do it. Let me help you do it. Let me do it for you.’ It would have been for Americans anathema even to think that was what they were doing in Vietnam for the six months that Collins spent there but matters such as land reform, the selection and training of a national civil service, not to mention the creation of a National Assembly, are usually reckoned to be the prerogatives of an independent nation state rather than something to be delivered as part of a seven-point programme from a foreign ambassador, no matter how friendly or how benevolent the intentions.

As far as Diem himself was concerned it was not an unwavering US commitment, as his relations with Collins would show, and by mid-December 1954 it is probably not too far fetched to suggest that, for Collins, Diem represented the type of unsuccessful divisional commander who should be removed (and the sort who Collins had, in fact, removed during the war). The most striking feature, practically from the beginning, is that Diem's hold on power rested on US assent: and that the US should already have been in such a commanding position in Vietnam.

‘A SYNTHETIC STRONG MAN’

Before he demitted office, and on an occasion when he was Acting Secretary of State, Bedell Smith identified the relationship, and the problem, quite clearly. Can we, he asked, make a synthetic strong man of Diem? And can we associate with him competent people who may compensate for his deficiencies in administrative abilities and governing capacity?²⁴ The trouble was that in answering the question Collins was not entirely consistent, allowing himself to be swayed by day-to-day developments, but if there were doubts whether Diem was playing the right tunes at least there was no question who was paying the piper. In the supplement to his report on Vietnam in January 1955 Collins estimated the Vietnam government's tax revenue for the year would be approximately $140 m., almost all of which would go on normal civilian expenditure. The small surplus, plus borrowing, would enable it to spend somewhat less than $70 m. on its military and refugee programme and the balance of almost $330 m. would have to be met by the US.²⁵

DIEM ON THE ROCKS

Obviously, therefore, the government of South Vietnam was quite unable to meet the financial commitments of the political and economic programmes that were being devised for it; and in the absence of continuing French support it was at least in danger of becoming a minority shareholder in a joint-stock US-Vietnamese enterprise. Practically as soon as Diem's government took office it was recognized in Washington that it was incapable of standing on its own feet but as the months went by and, as Collins complained, one excuse for inaction followed another, the forecasts became gloomier and practically reached rock bottom in the National Intelligence Estimate of 23 November 1954. The authority of the South Vietnam state, it said, was nominal; it was ‘largely ineffective in meeting vital tasks such as maintaining domestic order, performing the normal functions of civil administration, dealing with the extraordinary problems created by the armistice, and overcoming long-standing problems such as inefficiency and corruption’.²⁶ In Vietnamese political life expediency had in most cases substituted personal aggrandisement for integrity and devotion to public service. The Vietnamese National Army was described as an instrument of the French High Command, its General Staff was involved in political affairs to the exclusion of adequate internal security and the rest of the army were neglected, insubordinate and irresponsible.

Faced with this remarkably pessimistic and accurate forecast it may seem almost incredible that the US, on a reasonable calculation of the odds, could have hoped for successful intervention but there was a glimmer of light. According to the National Intelligence Estimate the Vietminh were unlikely to invade South Vietnam openly before July 1956 (on the assumption that the reunification elections had not been held by then) and as the US had already decided to build a strong anti-communist government in South Vietnam rather than allow one to develop that might seek accommodation with the North, there seemed to be a breathing space for the crash programme that would represent an act of will on America's part. The logical progression was something like this. The French, as the NIE recognized, held the key to political power in South Vietnam. The French were not reliable (because they sought accommodation with the North). Therefore the US must choose between the French solution, which would lead to a communist Vietnam; or replace them as the effective power in the South. As a crude approximation, get rid of the French, pour in dollars and ‘expertise’, and you might end up with an instant nation. After all, Diem, like Syngman Rhee in South Korea, was patriotic, anti-communist and, in Diem's case, seemed to deserve US support in mucking out the Augean stables. He also represented a more rational and familiar style of government, at least by comparison with the garish anomalies of the religious sects and their mixture of mysticism and corruption, not to mention the Binh Xuyen gangsters and their even more shameful control of the national police that was sanctioned by Emperor Bao Dai for their mutual enrichment.

On existing trends, admittedly, South Vietnam would be lost but, paradoxically, the situation was so bad as to call for a policy of boldness. Whether or not the US could reverse the trend that, one way or another, would lose Vietnam, and in spite of some initial uncertainties and lack of commitment to Diem, when Mendès France came to Washington in November 1954 Dulles told him that Diem was ‘our last and only hope’. Like Senator Mansfield, Dulles seemed to believe that there was no alternative to Diem and in spite of the possibility that Dulles was using Mansfield as a stalking horse for Administration policies what this meant was that neither was prepared to consider anyone else. It was an argument that the French had used to the point of exhaustion about Bao Dai and now, ironically, Collins would support the idea that Bao Dai, or some sort of ‘imperial delegate’, might have to replace Diem. The possibility that Prince Buu Loc, Bao Dai's cousin, a distinguished Vietnamese doctor associated in France with Joliot-Curie but, apparently, like him, sympathetic to communism and the Vietminh cause, might, presumably on French initiative, be sent by Bao Dai to replace Diem would have been doubly unacceptable to Dulles who, in any event, was deeply suspicious that the French had made their own deal with the Vietminh. To this day one hears echoes of the assertion that, in order to achieve peace in Indo-China, Mendès France had promised the Russians that the French would abort rather than deliver the European Defence Community and, at the time, French doubts about Diem could thus be dismissed in Washington on account of their probable duplicity. If there was duplicity it may not only have been on one side. When Mendès France had visited Washington in November he and Dulles had taken the unusual step of sending common instructions to French and US representatives in Indo-China, in effect that they should stop competing with each other, and stating categorically: ‘It is not the purpose of the US to seek itself to supplant France in the Associated States.’²⁷ At the same time Dulles knew perfectly well, as he told Deputy Secretary of Defence Anderson, that Collins, with the strong backing of the JCS, was taking the position that, in effect, the French had to be phased out altogether from the standpoint of military forces and training. That, said Dulles, would be difficult to accomplish but perhaps it can be.²⁸ What worried Dulles was the question of US responsibility if they attempted to replace the French – who would, said Dulles, plaster us with the responsibility all over the world and try and sabotage the result – and the consequence that, if the US failed, ‘It will be a tremendous blow to our prestige in that area’. So far, as Dulles said, ‘We have been able to say the losses in that area have been French failures’ and as he told Collins the same day: ‘We do not wish to be saddled with full responsibility for what happens in Vietnam because prospective developments there are very dubious.²⁹

There was, however, another facet to responsibility, as General Hinh, one of the ‘alternative leaders’ told Ambassador Heath when he was recalled to France by Emperor Bao Dai. Those, he said, who intervened to keep Diem in power are responsible for the future of Vietnam.³⁰ For a period of five or six months until the end of April 1955 US support for Diem rested on a knife edge. Conceivably, if Collins had stuck to his guns or if Dulles and the State Department had been less reluctant to part with Diem, the crisis would have come in early December 1954 when Collins reported that if Diem had not demonstrated by about 1 January 1955 that he was capable of governing, America and France would have to consider alternatives.³¹ A week later Collins provided another gloomy forecast but he asked the State Department not to consider alternatives until he had communicated his ‘final judgement’. In the meantime the Vietnamese Ambassador in Washington was trying hard to pull US policy in a different direction, putting most of the blame for Vietnamese government failures on the French, and asking why French commitments in Vietnam should be prolonged. Why not, he asked, in a naive but pointed question, replace advances from the French Treasury by advances direct from the US Treasury since in reality both came from the same US source? With a mixture of flattery and persuasion he sought to convince the US that it only needed to give aid, it did not need to fight, and that only America could save Vietnam: ‘All the difficulties and defeats suffered in Vietnam stemmed from the fact that America tried to let someone else carry out a task which she alone could accomplish.’

The somewhat ostentatious way in which the State Department deferred to Senator Mansfield at this time, eliciting from him the opinion that Collins' ultimatum was ‘political dynamite’ and that the US should hold Vietnam as long as possible, even if it would cost a lot, suggests that they might have been succumbing to the temptation to regard themselves as the only people who could in fact save Vietnam and, furthermore, that Dulles had already gone firm on Diem. When Dulles came to Paris just before Christmas 1954 there might have been a last chance to establish a common Western policy towards Vietnam but he made no mention of Collins' inauspicious despatches and countered Eden's pessimism by saying that while he recognized Diem's deficiencies he had not heard of any acceptable substitute.³² In tri-partite discussions on 18 December, however, Ely, who had returned to Paris, said, without apparent rejoinder from Dulles, that both he and Collins ‘were virtually convinced that it was hopeless to expect anything of Diem’, whom he described as a man in a dream. Rather optimistically Ely had told Radford that if it was established no later than January 1955 ‘a good strong government in Vietnam could win the elections in 1956’ and from this it might seem that a last chance of a working partnership with France to get a more effective government in Vietnam had appeared; but only if the objectives coincided. The French at this stage wanted some sort of election in 1956. The US, and Diem, did not; even if Diem's role was never precisely defined either as an instrument of US policies to frustrate elections or as the sort of figure whose popularity might make it possible to win them.

It was, ultimately, to be an expensive and fateful ambivalence but, having decided, as Dulles put it, that even a slight chance of success was worth considerable investment and having put their money on Diem, the US was now embarked on a course not only that committed it to his government but which also required it to build a nation state that was capable of withstanding communism and the appeal of national reunification. Once they decided to get rid of the French, they would soon be on their own – apart, that is, from whatever support they might have from Diem. Positions were now practically reversed. Ultimately this meant that, for operational purposes, and as far as the US as principal shareholder was concerned, Diem might be dispensable. Diem's position depended therefore as much if not more on what happened in Washington as on what happened in Saigon. The two obviously influenced each other but in this period Diem seemed more secure in the US. Could any successor, asked Dulles in his Christmas Eve appraisal in 1954, make up for Diem's deficiencies without also lacking Diem's virtues? Could the US anticipate a stable process of succession and not worse confusion and weakness than there was already? Whether these were real or rhetorical questions Dulles answered the most important one himself. There was, he said, no successor in sight; and with this sort of predisposition in his favour it would have taken more than average misfortunes in Vietnam to unseat Diem. Another argument in his favour was that if he were replaced it would be seen as a French victory and as something that could lead to a North/South accommodation; and while Dulles would not prove to be entirely impervious to the evidence it is obvious that he was fighting a stubborn rearguard action to hold on to Diem.

A month after his outburst and apparent abandonment of Diem in December 1954 Collins had swung back in his favour – ‘the best available Prime Minister to lead Vietnam in its struggle against Communism’³³ – and weeks later presented his assessments to the NSC. From a national army to a national assembly and taking in refugees and resettlement almost everything seemed to be within reach so there was, as Collins said, at least a fifty-fifty chance of saving South Vietnam from the communists. These were sporting odds, much better than a deeper analysis might suggest, but they were good enough to provide another few months in which to deepen US commitments. Collins, personally, did not get close enough to Diem to discuss major political issues, other than to record on one occasion ‘his instinctive resistance to any political view contrary to his own’³⁴ and when Dulles arrived in Saigon on 1 March 1955 for a flying visit he did not get very far either. In a separate meeting with Foreign Minister Tran Van Do: ‘The Secretary after an opening exchange of amenities, assured Mr Do of the complete support of the US government for the Diem government and of his satisfaction with the increasing position of strength in which the Diem government found itself.’ But even this sort of reassurance which he also gave Diem – Dulles said that the President and he had great stake in him and that Congress and American public opinion had come to accept decisions of US support for Diem and Free Vietnam – did not tempt Diem to budge from a position of total if somewhat veiled intransigence.³⁵ In particular Diem had resisted Dulles' suggestion that, now that he was secure, he could afford to bring into his government men who might otherwise be his political opponents. Dulles, obviously, was hoping to strengthen Diem's national appeal. Diem, however, was more concerned with confronting his enemies in the Binh Xuyen and Hoa Hao and blamed the French not only for supporting but for encouraging them to move against his government. When the sects formed a nominally united front in March 1955 a government of national union was the object of their ultimatum and while transparently designed to improve their own fortunes it was also supported by the Foreign Minister whom Dulles had assured of total US support only a few days before. To Collins, in Saigon, it appeared that Diem was almost totally isolated and after a spate of resignations including Defence Minister Minh (Diem, characteristically, took over the portfolio himself) Collins reported that Diem was ‘operating practically one-man government with his two brothers Luyen and Nhu as principal advisers’.³⁶ When fighting broke out between the Binh Xuyen and forces loyal to Diem, Collins was inclined to put at least part of the blame for the tension on Diem and was ‘gravely disturbed’ that he had not been consulted. In any case it was enough to provoke Collins into proposing once again that Diem must go – and suggesting alternatives.³⁷

In Washington this seems to have taken both Dulles and Eisenhower by surprise. Collins, said Dulles, was apt to be hasty. While Eisenhower was not keen to have Dulles talk to him about Vietnamese affairs his advice to Collins was to play it by ear and not to give up on Diem ‘until it is quite certain’ because, as the President repeated, ‘We bet pretty heavily on him’.³⁸ Obviously they were in a quandary. Having sent Collins to Vietnam to see for himself neither Eisenhower nor Dulles now wanted to take his advice. Dulles, in particular, could argue that it would be intolerable to treat Diem as inferior to rebellious sect leaders and was not the only one to think that the French were heavily involved in the affair; that the French were unreliable; and, at least by implication, that Collins was paying too much attention to what they thought. The French, incidentally, thought Diem was on the verge of megalomania, impervious to advice, but if they were right and the US agreed to his removal would this not be seen as a French victory and would not many Vietnamese conclude that the French were still the arbiters of political action in South Vietnam?

This at least was one of the arguments presented to Allen Dulles, Director of the CIA, by an assistant director together with a conclusion that if he was given full US and French backing Diem would be capable of dealing with the Saigon crisis and it was part of an emerging consensus in Washington that Collins was wrong. At the beginning of April 1955 the State Department may for a moment have been in two minds and Collins was certainly authorized to tell Diem that unless he could do better ‘we may have to cease US support for Vietnam which would jeopardise not only himself but the whole country’. On the whole it seems to have been rather an empty threat which stands out as an anomaly against a background of support that was being mobilized on Diem's behalf both in Washington and in Saigon. Whether they were practical or moral considerations, the danger in getting rid of Diem, of going from frying pan into fire, or his obvious sense of personal outrage that the Saigon police should be in the hands of the Binh Xuyen who derived their income from gambling and prostitution, Dulles epitomized the State Department in its sympathy for Diem. Whether or not Dulles was drafting the cables himself there was at least a lively sense of Diem's predicament and sense of insecurity. Expressions of Congressional opinion, although limited to a few, were, in the person of Senator Mansfield or Congressman Judd outspoken in support of Diem and in their refusal to consider an alternative. Then there was Colonel Lansdale who, his rank notwithstanding, provided Dulles and the State Department with second opinions and an alternative news service. Lansdale was a genuine if romantic supporter of Diem and obviously in a position, directly or indirectly, to make his opinions known at the highest levels. Thus on an occasion when Dulles travelled to Augusta to brief the President he told him that Lansdale had much more confidence in Diem than Collins had: confidence which, by inference, Dulles appeared to share.³⁹ During the period of armed truce in Saigon between Diem and the Binh Xuyen another of Diem's US supporters and confidants, the remarkable young Professor Wesley Fishel who, like Lansdale, was now ensconced in Diem's presidential palace, journeyed to Washington to drum up support, notably from Senator Mansfield. Like Lansdale, Fishel blamed the French and their influence on Collins: none of which may have been immensely significant in itself but taken together would have helped to undermine confidence in Collins' judgement.

Nevertheless Collins was a formidable opponent, both of Diem and of those who believed that he could be saved, and one can only assume that it was his return to Washington which, against the odds, finally persuaded the Administration that in certain circumstances Diem would have to be removed. Until then Dulles, notably, had stood fast in the face of Collins' repeated criticisms of Diem and his intransigence, whether it was changing Collins' ‘authorization to acquiesce in plans for Diem's replacement’ to ‘discretion to acquiesce in the idea of replacement or in the search for “some intermediate solution’”.⁴⁰ Now that Collins was in Washington his message was that it would be a major error of judgement to continue to support a man who had demonstrated such a marked inability to understand the problems of Vietnam; that Diem simply could not get along with other capable men; that in five months he had not one original constructive suggestion, idea or plan; that compromise with Diem was impossible; and that other able men were available.

As the admiral who took notes on Collins' debriefing observed, the State Department was reluctant to face the fact that they must admit failure in US policy; and would therefore obviously attempt to retain Diem in some capacity.⁴¹ Ignominious and shameful though it would be, it looked as if they would have to bring Bao Dai into play in order to get rid of Diem even though, almost until the last moment when the decision was taken, Dulles insisted it would be disastrous to destroy the morale and authority of Diem's government before they had any idea what would come next. One reason, perhaps, why Dulles and the State Department were about to change course was that they realized that Bao Dai, almost certainly with French support, was about to dismiss Diem: something that would have had very messy consequences as far as the US was concerned. Even then it was obvious from the first of three cables to Paris on 27 April how grudging was the admission that ‘some change in political arrangements in Vietnam may be inevitable’ and that until Vietnamese ‘nationalist elements evolve another formula warranting continued US assistance and support’ the US would continue to support the legal government under Prime Minister Diem. Assuming a managerial function in the second telegram the State Department said that, provided the French accepted certain conditions, Collins and Ely were jointly to inform Diem that, because of his inability to create a broadly based coalition government, and because of Vietnamese resistance to him, their governments were no longer in a position to attempt to prevent his removal from office. Do or Quat were to replace him; and even if, in practice, Collins and Ely would probably have to be the catalysts, every attempt should be made to keep the Vietnamese label. In short, therefore, and in extremis, the US was prepared to take over the government of Vietnam.

A REPRIEVE

At this point, whether out of confidence or desperation, Diem launched his attack on the Binh Xuyen and their control of the Saigon police. Having been told by Collins before he left Saigon that it was unlikely he could be saved and that Bao Dai would probably remove him it seems to have been the obvious thing to do. At least, knowing that he was almost on the scaffold it was worth the chance, more particularly when he had US support at a lower but no less effective level. In the event, with the noose practically round his neck, it was a cable from Lansdale which secured Diem's reprieve and allowed the US to back away from the execution. Lansdale claimed, once the fighting started, that new facts were emerging and while he himself, and presumably the CIA, had been heavily engaged in the bribery and persuasion that was supposed to change the balance of political power in Saigon it was the limited but unmistakable victory of Vietnamese army units over the Binh Xuyen which allowed Diem to emerge as the local hero. The ordeal by battle which Dulles and Eisenhower had half anticipated was over and at the eleventh hour the instructions for Diem's replacement were cancelled. From this point onwards reservations were put on one side. Diem had succeeded. The gangsters had not won, after all, and even if there might be long-term risks for the moment, at least, Diem had saved the day: for himself and, it seemed, for the US as well.

From the non-agreements of Geneva and the promise of non-elections onwards, there had always looked like a connection between Diem as the anti-communist nationalist leader and Diem as the potential instrument of US policies. Now the connection had been fused, the commitment had been made and for the next seven years the Diem family government would represent itself as the epitome of South Vietnam's national interests and America, having allowed Diem to make the bed, would have to lie on it. From the beginning it was a connection which entirely transcended the alliance of one sovereign state with another. In the first place, South Vietnam, as an integral nation state, had still to be created; and while it would have denied the intention, and even the idea might not have occurred to it, the question which arose from the US assumption that the Vietnamese could not be left to themselves, was whether the US had the aptitude and capability for such a neo-colonial enterprise: here defined as the privilege and responsibility of running someone else's country. To begin with, however, and even though the US would be taking over from France, it seemed as if it could be quite a modest exercise: ‘a real likelihood that training, technical assistance and moderate aid might be all that was required.’ This, at least, was an opinion from the NSC Planning Board – a sort of low-risk, high-return investment – which ‘would put us clearly in our traditional role of supporting the independence and legitimate aspirations of peoples’. If, however, the US really was going to be involved with peoples rather than their acknowledged governments, or what might dismissively be termed ‘ruling cliques’, it could be practically an open-ended commitment. It depended, of course, on what was identified as the need – and who identified it.

ADVISERS AND CRITICS

One of the most influential US advisers in Vietnam in the ‘nation-building’ exercise and period of the middle and late 1950s was Wolf Ladejinsky who brought comparable experience of land reform in Japan and Taiwan to his appointment as a personal adviser to Diem. Describing US advisers in general Gibbons says their role was central to the US programme: ‘they provided access to, influence over and intelligence about Diem and his government that could not have been obtained in any other way.’⁴² In the end none of them had enough influence to keep Diem on a course which the US approved but at the beginning it might reasonably have been argued that almost any government would have been overwhelmed by the size of the tasks which some Americans at least had perceived. Ladejinsky, for example, in a detailed and impressively honest account of one of his extended trips through the countryside of South Vietnam at a time when the national government might have been expected to be extending its authority reported on ‘the lack of zeal and zest on the part of most officials encountered on this trip’. With few exceptions, he said, chiefs of provinces and district officers are disturbingly unconcerned.

Even the exceptional official tends to engage in merely verbalising the need for the enforcement of the law rather than concentrating on what little he could do to gain the confidence of the farmers and persuade them to accept the national government as their government. The emphasis is on the word ‘little’, for, in justice to this better type of local administrator, he cannot do much until and unless the national government does its part in helping create a climate of ‘acceptance’. The much vaster job of the national government lies beyond successful trial of arms – it is to demonstrate its appreciation and understanding of the fundamental aspirations of the farmers. Of that there is only the merest beginnings. The people close to the grass roots must shift for themselves as best they know how, and the best is none too good. Unless the situation is radically improved, it will continue to benefit the anti-government forces.⁴³

Ladejinsky took his stand on what he called the simple, unadorned truth that in Vietnam the peasant is the centre of the piece.

We cannot afford to forget that much of our economic and non-economic aid to Vietnam stands or falls in the degree to which the great majority of the people share or don't share in it.⁴⁷

Concerned in particular with the peasantry who, he said, were more interested in land ownership than in rent reduction, he asserted that the greatest impediment to progress was the character of the national and local administrations.

This was in 1955. More recently, a study of South Vietnam between 1955 and 1975 – Foreign aid, war, and economic development – aggregates the experience of 20 years in its supporting assertion that ‘this lack of interest in development by Vietnam's leaders goes far in explaining why it fell so far behind the others’.⁴⁸ The others, in this case, were Taiwan, South Korea and Israel and although the situation in Vietnam obviously was different it was taken for granted, says Professor Dacy, that the people would be provided for adequately by US aid. In spite of its prefaced political assertion (‘If we learned anything, it was that troops, money, and advice by themselves cannot secure the loyalty of a people to its government and, in excess, abundance may even be counter-productive …’) this was largely economic analysis after the event but it may be set alongside the experience of one of Diem's erstwhile supporters who was heavily involved with the South Vietnamese cause for many years. A refugee Austrian socialist with bitter memories of the struggle with communists as well as Nazis, Joseph Buttinger had helped in the autumn of 1955 to found the American Friends of Vietnam, an immensely powerful lobby and support group with which ‘it is reasonable to assume that the US government was indirectly if not directly involved’.⁴⁶ History, says Buttinger, offered Diem a real chance but in the event he was unable to see that Vietnam's national revolution could be completed and the last vestiges of colonialism wiped out only through radical economic and social reform. Exploitation, says Buttinger, the dominant reality of a feudal land régime, was equated by the peasants with landlordism; the landlords, far from being eliminated were in fact more than any other group able to assert their interests under Diem.⁴⁷

In the event, too, Buttinger argues that US aid became a substitute for political support while peasant dissatisfaction became the main theme of communist propaganda in the South and although he sounds at times like a disappointed suitor, and although liberal/socialist aspirations and critique were not widely shared in Republican Washington in the Eisenhower years, protection and support of the infant Vietnam was a cause that attracted all-party support. The future President Kennedy is often cited as an example of these generous feelings and in his speech to the American Friends of Vietnam in June 1956, with much the same rhetoric as his inaugural address, he described Vietnam in terms of US responsibility and determination and as a proving ground of democracy in Asia. If not the actual parents of ‘little Vietnam’ then, surely, said Kennedy, we are the god-parents.

This is our offspring – we cannot abandon, we cannot ignore its needs. And if it falls victim to any of the perils that threaten its existence – Communism, political anarchy, poverty and the rest – then the United States, with some justification, will be held responsible; and our prestige in Asia will sink to a new low.⁴⁸

With culminating hyperbole, he offered a non-communist revolution to a nation that was taking its first feeble steps towards the complexities of a republican form of government.

Three months later, if one were to have believed General O'Daniel, now chairman of the American Friends of Vietnam, that revolution had practically succeeded. O'Daniel, who had gone to Vietnam at Diem's invitation, reported to Walter Robertson, Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, that ‘Free Vietnam’ was now entirely pacified and secure and that Diem's government was growing increasingly popular.⁴⁹ This was in September 1956, two months after elections might have taken place to re-unite Vietnam. According to what Diem and the US chose to regard as the optional schedule the consultations between the two parties, North and South, were to have taken place by July 1955 and it was an embarrassment to the US when Diem refused even to go through the motions of contacting the North. US strategy had been laid down in May 1955 in the NSC report on All-Vietnam Elections in which US policy was simply to prevent a communist victory. Instead of the Geneva protocol ‘Free Vietnam’ would have to be strong enough to win a free election limited to its own zone and held under its own auspices and control and US policy was to be directed to this end. By a sort of sleight of pen all the necessary conditions for the free expression of the national will – which at Geneva were supposed to come after the elections – were now neatly, reasonably and deceptively transposed to exist before all-Vietnam elections could take place. If the Government of Free Vietnam were to ‘insist in the first instance on adequate guarantees of freedom, elections and adequate supervisory powers in a Supervisory Commission (eminently sensible but a revision of the Final Declaration nevertheless) it was fairly obvious, considering that the conditions included freedom of speech, press and radio, that there would have been enough excuses to invalidate elections in the North many times over.⁵⁰

In the meantime elections, of a sort, had been held in South Vietnam which helped to compound the illusion, for those who wished to see it, that Diem's government was based on popular support. Dulles, for example, told Eisenhower that the elections had been ‘healthy’ but the first exercise had taken place in October 1955 when, after hurling anathemas at each other like rival Popes, Diem finally got rid of Bao Dai in a stage-managed referendum which produced the highly gratifying result of a 98.2 per cent vote in favour of the Emperor's deposition. In March 1956 elections for a constituent assembly produced a massive majority of members who were expected to support the government (more than 100 out of 123) with only three who could be said to be in genuine opposition. Although press censorship had been lifted temporarily during the election campaign publication of news or comment favouring ‘communist or anti-national’ activities were punishable by up to five years' imprisonment; ironically, the freedom of speech, press and radio which was demanded of the North was little more in evidence in the South. Indeed, aggregating the experience of elections in 1956, 1959 and 1961, one of the Michigan State University advisers, Robert Scigliano, wrote, shortly before Diem's death,

even if elections were completely free in Vietnam, they would be ineffective channels of democratic expression. The control by the government of all political party life, of the press, of the Trade Union movement, and of most other organised activities make serious electoral competition a most difficult task.⁵¹

He concluded that for practical purposes South Vietnam had become a one-party state.

One may assume that in 1955 this had not been the result that was intended by the US. Rather, the purpose had been to rescue the people of South Vietnam from the clutches of a totalitarian state; that, as in Western Europe, they should be maintained as part of the free world; that there was an identity of basic interests, or at least congruence, between them and the US. If the last was not self-evident then it should and would become clear to them and as the US government had identified their country as of critical strategic importance, it, in turn, was prepared to make a major investment in order to accelerate South Vietnam's economic development and, if necessary, to help in remaking South Vietnamese society. With so many apparently similar or comparable examples to choose from, the preservation of the Philippines, military intervention in Korea, land reform in Taiwan – or Japan, as perhaps the greatest success of all – not to mention minor coups such as Iran or Guatemala, South Vietnam in 1955 did not look like one of America's larger or more pressing problems. Retrospectively at least it could have been argued that five years of commitment and Cold War since 1950, while it might have been expensive, had in fact achieved more than half the territorial objective with the loss of hardly a single American life; with the departure of a dilettante emperor – and that of the French under way – there would, other things being equal, have been good reason to hope for a favourable outcome. Thus, the National Intelligence Estimate of July 1956 was able to offer what it called a moderately hopeful outlook for South Vietnam and good overall prospects for internal security. It was assumed that the South Vietnamese Army would probably be able to pacify and extend government authority into any areas of existing communist influence. Diem's ‘success’ in bypassing the July 1956 election date without evoking large-scale communist military reaction was given as the reason why many Vietnamese would be reassured and encouraged to co-operate with government programmes to expose and root out communists. This, in turn, was attributed to two factors. First, because the USSR had failed to press DRV demands that the UK and the USSR, as co-chairmen, should reopen the Geneva Conference, it was assumed that the Geneva Conference powers had tacitly accepted the partition of Vietnam for an indefinite period.⁵² Second, because it assumed that the DRV was firmly committed to the Sino-Soviet bloc ‘even to the extent of subordinating or postponing the pursuit of its local or regional objectives in the interests of overall bloc tactics and strategy’. As long as these factors obtained South Vietnam seemed reasonably safe and could get on with its own separate development and although the situation contained many elements of instability, progress would continue to depend on firm US support.

SOUTH VIETNAM AS AN AMERICAN DEPENDENCY

The firmness of US support, in fact, meant the difference between success and failure in Diem's retention of power; and although they should not be plucked from their context, remarks and questions such as ‘We are concerned with lack of progress in agrarian reform’ or ‘In our long-range planning in Vietnam what should be the political targets in terms of political parties and political movements?’ suggest something that bordered on corporate interest and managerial concern. In two out of three of its state functions, the economy and defence, South Vietnam was to be a case study in the practice (in advance of the theory) of dependency. Between 1955 and 1960 the US contributed, on average, 58 per cent of the South Vietnamese budget.⁵³ The French war had already cost the US about $2½ billion in what was primarily military expenditure. Now it was to start spending almost as much per annum in economic assistance alone using techniques such as the Commodity Import Program and counterpart funds which derived from the Marshall Plan and had helped to keep Western Europe alive after the war. South Vietnam was, however, becoming much more of a dependency, second only to South Korea among non-European beneficiaries, to the point where the entire cost of the military part of the South Vietnamese budget, which was itself half the total budget, was paid for by the US. By 1961 one of Diem's former tax advisers declared that after six years of large-scale US aid, Vietnam was becoming a permanent mendicant⁵⁴; another of Diem's advisers says it was apparent that only the financing of the armed forces had succeeded (industrialization was unnaturally slow while consumer goods that were being imported stayed in the towns, whose middle-class tastes were being catered for) so that, regrettably, the US aid programmes must be reckoned to have failed⁵⁵; and an economist ‘simply speculates’ that the availability of massive aid presented the Vietnamese government with little incentive to face up to their internal economic problem.⁵⁶ In effect, according to this last evaluation, the government used foreign aid to buy the support of the population – it was the easiest way to ‘pacify’ – but a further criticism is that at the same time as aid perpetuated Diem's dependence on the US ‘it helped him towards independence of the people he was governing by making it less necessary to tax them’.⁵⁷ No doubt Vietnamese farmers in particular did not complain but it was one fewer point of contact between government and the people they were supposed to be governing. In practice nearly all tax revenue came from imports; another contribution which the US made to South Vietnam's economy.

Far and away the greatest contribution which the US made to the preservation of the Diem government was in equipping, training and paying for the Vietnamese Army. General O'Daniel and MAAG assumed responsibility for the organization and training of the South Vietnamese Army in February 1955 and straight away set about forming the divisions that were to be deployed in the event of a conventional invasion from the North. As US policy was directed to the prevention of all-Vietnam elections in 1956, perhaps it was only prudent to anticipate a violent reaction when the prospect of reunification was obliterated but by preparing for the major premise of invasion it neglected the minor premise of subversion and, eventually, armed insurrection. From the official history of the US Army in Vietnam it would seem that O'Daniel's successor as MAAG chief bears a heavy responsibility for turning the army of South Vietnam into the sort of force that might have done reasonably well if the Korean War had been refought in Vietnam but which was going to be of very little use, at least to begin with, in dealing with incipient revolution. General Williams, in spite of his appreciation of discipline in the US Army, was less successful with the Vietnamese; to the point where it may be argued that the RVN Army's reputation as oppressors rather than defenders of the people was the critical difference between it and the Vietminh. While he was not unaware of the guerrilla problem – communist guerrillas, he said, had been destroyed in Greece, Korea the Philippines and Iran and they could be destroyed in Vietnam, too – he did not seem to have the faintest idea about counter-insurgency or how to begin. The British concept of the army in support of civil power may have been too restricted and too sophisticated but Williams' plans called for aggressive action, seizing the initiative and applying relentless pressure: all of which may, in his experience, have worked in Korea but was the antithesis of successful counter-insurgency.⁵⁸

Apparently obsessed with the importance of divisional training and field exercises Williams succeeded in creating an army of seven regular divisions, each with its own artillery battalions, which was a fair replica of US – or Korean – formations but which could hardly have been less appropriate to the situation they were soon to face. Apart from the fact that Williams, like many generals, did not like and did not understand small units and small wars, his command function with the American Military Assistance Advisory Group was largely independent of the structure of Vietnamese government: to the point where it was Williams, with or without the Ambassador, who told Diem what sort of army he needed – and what sort of army he was going to get. When it became evident that an insurrection was beginning the sort of army Diem had got was largely irrelevant to the task it faced and for all the assumptions that Diem simply wanted the Civil Guard and Self Defence Corps as his private auxiliary armies there are some recorded meetings which suggest that it may have been Diem rather than his US advisers, civil or military, who had the better, perhaps instinctive, sense of what security in the villages really meant.⁵⁹ Not that US civil and military ideas always coincided and apart from shouting matches between Williams and Ambassador Durbrow the co-ordination of US policy in Vietnam was made more difficult by the fact that it was being made by half a dozen agencies, including the US Embassy, each of which was doing its own thing. Ultimately President Eisenhower himself was responsible for the overall direction of policy but at a lower level the Operations Co-ordinating Board of the National Security Council was supposed to put the act together. Spector says its studies were vague and general – but in practice General Williams seemed every bit as important as Ambassadors Reinhardt or Durbrow, especially because of his access to and practically unwavering support of Diem.

Differences between the civil and the military approaches to Diem, or what might be called the Diem problem, were not that much in evidence in Saigon as long as US estimates agreed that he was doing well and as 1956, a year that seemed to catch both North Vietnam and Diem's opponents in the South by surprise, was almost a year of triumph, the differences were marginal. Everyone agreed that Diem needed help and no one appeared to challenge Admiral Radford's verdict (a propos the possibility that he was acting as his own Defence Minister) that, if this was so, his grasp of the problem was defective and would not be corrected unless it was through the medium of US advice. Like a great deal of US advice – well-meaning and much of it impeccable – it simply assumed that the US knew best or, at the very least, had far more experience over the whole range of government activities and institutions, from land reform and logistics to constitutions, police forces and propaganda. The trouble with Diem, however, was that while he enjoyed US support he was not amenable to US advice which impinged on the prerogatives he associated with a style of government that was somewhere between that of the mandarin and the paranoiac. Personally approving passport applications or four- and five-hour monologues could be described as idiosyncratic and his solicitude for his rather vicious family might have looked like misplaced loyalty but the political forms of, at best, the corporate state which may have seemed to be degenerating into one of the more obsessive tyrannies was probably only reaching its natural level. Described by supporters or friendly critics as ‘democratic one-man rule’ or ‘patriarchy’, others, in delineating his regime, used analogies with Divine Right and the Inquisition or else cited descriptions of ‘Hitlerian gangsterism’. One of the characteristic political forms of the régime was the Can Lao, the Revolutionary Personalist Workers Party, a sort of sinister freemasonry, which, using the same cellular pattern as the communists, combined political support and political surveillance. It helped to create what has been called an anti-communist ‘people's democracy’ where, even if it did produce only a small number of ‘verified unjudicial executions’ nevertheless relied on detention without trial to the extent that, in the culminating crisis of the Eisenhower years, a civilian US adviser in Vietnam was reporting privately that the number of political arrests had risen to approximately 5,000 a month.

In a new state under threat, if not under siege, it was hardly surprising that it should pay so much attention to internal security. As long as it was self-sustaining it could, within limits, do as it pleased but the problem with and for Diem's increasingly despotic government was that it was not, that it had to rely on the US, and that it depended eventually upon its approval. For the US it raised a question whether a divided country in Vietnam's precarious position could afford a greater measure of representative government than that which the Diem régime was willing to permit. And whether, in US opinion, that was enough. Doubts about Diem and his resistance to US advice (significantly, perhaps, after the danger of non-election consequences had passed) began to surface in Washington towards the end of 1956 even in the minds of those like Kenneth Young, Director of South-East Asian Affairs in the State Department, who had been his most devoted supporters. But the response from the Saigon Embassy was that little could be done: the problem had existed since Diem, indeed it was Diem, ‘and will’, said Ambassador Reinhardt, ‘likely be with us for some time’. It was also going to get worse. Having succeeded in inviting himself to Washington in 1957 Diem was preceded by his brother Nhu who made courtesy calls on Dulles and Eisenhower (the Acting Secretary of State reminded Eisenhower that Vietnam ‘is our newest and one of our staunchest friends in Asia and we have great reason to be satisfied with President Diem's performance’) and when he discussed more economic assistance for Vietnam he was assured by the Director of the International Co-operation Administration of the great admiration for such a fine man as Prime Minister Diem and of their pride in helping him to accomplish so much.⁶⁰ Not long after this Diem heard similar sentiments from Eisenhower directly and even more extravagant praise from Senator Mansfield ‘for the man whom the Vietnamese admire and trust, a man in whom the US has unbounded confidence and great faith’. The saviour, in fact, of all Southeast Asia.⁶¹

Even allowing for US relief that the election deadline of 1956 had passed off quietly, the danger with commendations such as this was that Diem and his family would start to take them seriously. The US may have been indispensable to them but they, after all, were indispensable to the US. By the beginning of 1958, however, as the documentation of ‘Divided Councils Amid Growing Insurgency’ reveals,⁶² the early doubts about Diem's worth were beginning to take root. From the US Consul in Hué there was an account of the beatings and torture that accompanied a communist denunciation campaign run by another of Diem's brothers, Ngo Dinh Can, and Can's instructions to tone things down so as not to upset the US; in May there was open, if temporary, disagreement between Defense and State Department representatives on the Operations Co-ordinating Board. Diem, the State Department insisted, had been heavy-handed over internal security and the authoritarian tendency was dangerous because it was creating opposition. Defense disagreed. Their reports were different; they preferred ‘stern’ to ‘heavy handed’; in any case everyone agreed that because of America's substantial and successful investment in Vietnam further determined efforts would be justified. Like ‘independence’ under the French, political stability, economic progress and popular support were all being perfected.

‘ADVERSE TRENDS’

In 1960, under the impact of an attempted coup in Saigon, all these hopeful assumptions were shaken. As in the 1955 crisis, but after five years' experience, Americans were still divided between those whose advice was to loosen up and those who said batten down. Again, the man on the spot, Ambassador Durbrow, was losing patience – ‘all these resentments could only be met by assuring Diem that we will back him at all times, under all circumstances and forever. This we cannot do’ – and once again Lansdale, from his position in the Pentagon, was trying to play the role of king-maker, or at least grey eminence, denouncing Durbrow and suggesting reasons to quash most of his recommendations.⁶³

By then, however, mounting concern in Washington as well as Saigon showed itself in a Special National Intelligence Estimate (23 August 1960) which said that the past six months indicated a trend ‘adverse to the stability and effectiveness of President Diem's government.… These adverse trends are not irreversible, but if they remain unchecked they will almost certainly in time cause the collapse of Diem's regime.’ The larger fear was that Hanoi had probably been encouraged to take stronger action and behind Hanoi, ‘supported and guided by the Chinese Communists', the CIA and its associates discerned a probable Chinese objective of weakening the American position in Southeast Asia at little cost or risk’.⁶⁴ Vietnam, therefore, was again coming to the forefront of US considerations, this time as an international problem, because, although it was still only dimly perceived, the US was deeply if not irretrievably involved in a revolution.

The genesis of that revolution, however, may still be regarded as one of the most controversial origins of the Vietnam War. When the authors of the Pentagon Papers sought the origins of the insurgency – and by implication the origins of US involvement in the war – they produced four principal questions:

1.Was the breakdown of the peace of 1954 the fault of the US, or of the ambiguities and loopholes of the Geneva Accords?

2.Was the insurgency in essence an indigenous rebellion against Ngo Dinh Diem's oppressive government, transformed by the intervention of first the US, and then the DRV?

3.Was it, rather, instigated, controlled and supported from its inception by Hanoi?

4.When did the US become aware of the Vietcong threat to South Vietnam's internal security, and did it attempt to counter it with its aid?

They decided, at that time at least, that they could provide no conclusive answers:

Tentative answers are possible, and form a continuum: by 1956, peace in Vietnam was plainly less dependent upon the Geneva Settlement than upon the power relationships in South-East Asia – principally upon the role the US elected to play in unfolding events. In 1957 and 1958, a structured rebellion against the government and Ngo Dinh Diem began. While the North Vietnamese played an ill-defined part, most of those who took up arms were South Vietnamese, and the causes for which they fought were by no means contrived in North Vietnam. In 1958 and 1960, Hanoi's involvement in the developing strife became evident. Not until 1960, however, did the US perceive that Diem was in serious danger of being overthrown and devised a Counter-insurgency Plan.⁶⁵

EMERGENCE OF THE NLF

Perhaps more questions, across the political spectrum, are in order. Was the National Liberation Front the response to Diem's repressive state? Was theirs the only course to take? Were peasants alienated by the lack of land reform? Did thousands of villages find it intolerable that their councils should now have appointed rather than elected heads? Was the Vietnamese Army trained to fight the wrong enemy (external rather than internal) and was that why they never managed to play a more positive role when the insurgency began? Was the resettlement programme so mismanaged as to create enemies rather than supporters of the government? Was the battle, in fact, lost before it began? On almost all these questions there is conflicting evidence but the fundamental question is whether the government of South Vietnam created its own insurrection by policies that were both vicious and inept. That is to say, did it eventually succeed in destroying itself? The answer: conceivably, although in the absence of the NLF it would probably have needed more time. Alternatively, in that time the Government of South Vietnam might have reformed or else destroyed its political opponents: either of which in the post-war perspective of divided nations would have helped its status as a sovereign state. Diem's régime, like scores of other repressive governments, would not necessarily have generated enough discontent among the organized but decimated groups and individuals who participated in the political system to have produced effective opposition. The pressure may have been there – and the occasional flashpoints – but for all the dislike and fear of his political methods there was no mobilizing factor or catalyst that was able or allowed to produce a democratic alternative. There was a communist party and apparatus that was for the time being dormant; when it either chose or was forced to reassert itself it found, rather as it had in the inter-war years, that the legal government had effectively disposed of its nationalist opponents and, in so doing, had practically cleared the field for its own team. To put it another way, in its determination to produce an antiseptic régime Diem and his US supporters had effectively destroyed the antibodies, too.

In the event it was touch and go whether the Communist Party in the south would survive; the fact that it emerged in December 1960 as the major constituent of the National Liberation Front conceals not only remarkable vicissitudes and hesitation but also what seems to have been a very close-run race. When the first Vietnam War ended in July 1954 probably well over 100,000 Vietminh soldiers and civilians went north. Of the Vietminh supporters and Party members who remained – some 50–60,000 – most were civilians who, by the agreed terms at Geneva, were entitled to amnesty in respect of their former association with the Vietminh and their resistance activities. What would happen to them, and what they would do, depended on what happened to the Geneva Agreements and how they were understood and this provided the first set of anomalies. Although most of the Vietminh fighting forces were regrouped in the north the greater part of their civilian support, indispensable for the guerrilla, remained in the south. Many of them were under the impression elections would be held in 1956 but in the meantime they were effectively at the mercy of the Diem government and whatever support would be forthcoming from the International Control Commission. Conversely, the Diem government knew that it could hardly rely on the support of the Communist Party and its adherents, even if some of them were initially impressed by Diem's patriotism and were waiting to see how he would turn out and what his government would do; and although General William's advice, that they should be exterminated like vermin, had yet to come there was the immediate and mutual problem of whether a Communist Party with what were ultimately revolutionary objectives could be reconciled with the purposes and existence of a non-Communist state.

If elections were going to take place in 1956 it was obviously only a temporary problem but in another sense, too, the problem might have been solved if the division was in fact to be perpetuated. Much would, equally obviously, depend on whether a credible and effective government emerged in the South but in the meantime, with the transfer of communist authority to the North, Ho and the Party were preparing for all eventualities. The most obvious, and the one that was ultimately most feared by those who stayed in the South, was the Stalinist option of socialism in one country. The signs that this was what was going to happen were there to be seen – and heard – from the middle of 1955 onwards when, in spite of sympathy for the South and the attempts to be even-handed – ‘simultaneously to pay adequate regard to South Vietnam’ – the Party Central Committee left no doubt that in order to win the struggle it was first necessary to consolidate the North.⁶⁶ As long as there was a chance that the reunification of Vietnam might be put to electoral choice in 1956 – and for quite some time it seems that the Party were expecting that the French would be able to insist that this happened – or that Diem's government would collapse or at least have to turn itself into a coalition, the strengthening of the new socialist fatherland was understandable⁶⁷. When none of these events seemed likely, and the North was preoccupied with its own problems, it is equally understandable that many of the southern Party felt they had been abandoned if not betrayed.

Whether or not, as Pike argues, ‘perhaps from the very start, unification passed from mere Party policy to holy crusade, from goal to obsession’⁶⁸, the Party in the North did not give way to romantic and Trotskyite visions of general revolution in 1954. Instead, by way of demonstrating their orthodoxy and their prominent position among the recipients of Soviet-bloc aid – Fall reckons that up to 1961, in terms of strictly economic aid, the North received about as much per capita as the South did from the US⁶⁹ – the Party invoked ‘two important judgements’ of the Twentieth Party Congress of the CPSU to strengthen its own position. First, that all existing world conflicts could be resolved by means of peaceful negotiations. Second, that the revolutionary movement in many countries could develop peacefully. Again, however, task number one was ‘Firmly Consolidate the North’ and although there might have been some ambiguity about the second task ‘Strongly push the Southern Revolution Movement’ and in spite of subsequent attempts to alter the incidence of advice, as Kahin has recently pointed out, nowhere in the document was there any reference to political struggle being supported by military activity.⁷⁰ The document in question was the first major analysis of the ‘Southern problem’ that was apparently prepared by Le Duan, later to be Secretary General of the Party and one of Kissinger's principal negotiating adversaries, entitled ‘The Path of Revolution in the South’. Nevertheless, one might have at least inferred from it that the struggle had by no means been called off – ‘There is no other path but Revolution’ – but that would depend on what one meant by revolution and how it was to be achieved.

By 1956 it was becoming clear that if Christ and the Vietminh had gone South, Marx and Mao Tze Dong had gone in the opposite direction and there was, for many in the Party, the feeling that they had been left to get on with it even if one day, somehow, they might be rescued when things went wrong. For some, too, the revolutionary struggle had lost its intensity now that the French had gone and the South as well as the North had become independent but those who remained with and in support of the Party discovered that with their armed forces regrouped in the North they had lost their shield as well as their sword. Under orders to concentrate on the political campaign, first for reunification elections and then, when that had manifestly failed, to rebuild what was left of the Party machine ‘The Path of Revolution in the South’ was a message of hope but also an injunction to steer clear of premature propulsion. After the event, regional and provincial committees criticized the Party, or themselves, for ‘rightist tendencies’ and ‘legalistic reformism’ but if the figures which a senior and most articulate committee member (who subsequently defected) gave for his province are even only approximately correct for South Vietnam as a whole – 50 per cent of the Party cells smashed by the summer of 1955 and 90 per cent by the summer of 1956 – they were lucky that there were enough of them left for self-criticism or anything else.⁷¹

In spite of the Party's virtual annihilation in the South at the hands of an implacable government the situation was not without hope. Race, for example, has argued that of the province of Long An in 1956 it could not be said that anyone controlled it, politically or militarily. During the French war the Vietminh had succeeded in overthrowing the power of the local élite ‘which the French had employed to carry out the functions of the central government in the countryside’; but even though the exiled village councils had returned in 1954 ‘the daily sight on village roads of those who had killed landlords’ was a powerful reminder that the day of the village notables had gone forever.⁷² Eventually, the vacuum of power in the villages would have to be filled. The peasant farmer of the South, left to himself, may have been unpromising material for a Communist revolution – believing, like Lenin, that the peasant was the greatest bourgeois of all, Party cadres were told never to mention collectivisation – but resentment, as long as it smouldered, could presumably be fanned into fire in the right circumstances and with enough time. Time, however, did not seem necessarily to be on the Party's side in spite of its assertions of inevitable victory. In 1956, in the North, it had encountered massive opposition which turned into revolt when its collectivization plans were revealed in Nghe-An province (coinciding with Suez and the Hungarian Revolution it was not widely reported or commented on at the time) and with its organization in the South very nearly in ruins, and in spite of the fortitude that was officially demanded, the Party went over to a limited offensive in 1957. Race describes it as a transitional year for the Party's armed forces in the South. Fall declared that in early 1957 the Second Indo-China War began by deliberate Communist design. Whether it did or not it was scarcely recognizable as such at the time but the activity to which both refer was the Party's campaign for ‘the extermination of traitors’.

As Race's respondent explained, ‘traitor’ allowed for flexible definitions. In general it meant anyone who worked for the government, honest hamlet chiefs rather than corrupt ones, teachers who understood politics, were ‘pure nationalists’ or who might have become anti-Communist leaders. On one interpretation it might seem then that the revolution, if not the war, had now begun. By the end of the year several hundred government officials had been assassinated but still the signal had not been given, because of caution or uncertainty, to begin the armed struggle. Aware of the mounting pressure in the South to start, the Party in the North did its best to dampen the enthusiasm but even after another year had passed, while it was agonizing over ‘rightist’ and ‘leftist’ deviations, the message was still ‘not yet’.⁷³ It was a message and a decision, or, rather, a postponed decision, which probably needs to be explained but even the decision to go, when it was taken by the Central Committee in January 1959, is still open to different explanations. Was it because the North was preoccupied with its own problems? Was it because the USSR was insisting that nothing should be done to rock the boat of peaceful co-existence? It is likely, says Race, that both factors entered into the Party's deliberations but in his interviews with Southern cadres neither of them was mentioned as an explanation for Hanoi's wish to postpone the phase of armed struggle. Instead, and although it may seem at first sight a metaphysical concept for professional revolutionaries, they believed that ‘ripeness is all’.

How does one create a ‘ripe situation’? That is the purpose of political struggle. During that period Diem's terrorist policy was becoming more blatant day by day, and the alienation of the people from the government was becoming greater and greater. Thus the Party pushed the struggle movement, which increased the terrorism. But the more the people were terrorised, the more they reacted in opposition, yet the more they reacted, the more violently they were terrorised. Continue this until the situation is truly ripe, and it will explode, according to a saying of Mao Tse-tung: ‘a fire-fly can set a whole field ablaze’. Yet for a fire-fly to set a whole field ablaze the fields must be extremely dry. ‘To make the field dry’ in this situation meant that we had to make the people suffer, suffer until they could no longer endure it. Only then would they carry out the Party's armed policy. That is why the Party waited till it did.⁷⁴

DECISION IN HANOI

They had been waiting, that is, until indiscriminate repression in the South had become intolerable and in the meantime had been doing their best to help it in this direction. It had been touch and go because, at the same time, the Party and its supporters were being wiped out. There was a widespread belief that the cadres had suffered very heavy casualties – those who were killed as well as those who were in prison – and so it seems that apart from death, capture or surrender, the Party finally had no option but to activate its comparatively small armed units in the South, to begin sending Southerners back from the North and, in short, to start the armed struggle. These decisions were taken in January by the Fifteenth Plenum of the Central Committee and even if, subsequently, the operational instructions seemed to have been sub rosa, rather than a loud and unmistakable bugle call for all-out attack, there is no doubt that the Party, belatedly but unmistakably, had identified a revolutionary situation and that the decision had been taken in Hanoi.⁷⁵ When the Third National Congress of the Vietnamese Workers Party was eventually held in September 1960, after a lapse of almost ten years, the new policy was approved but even then it was not presented as armed struggle as such: rather a move from lower to higher and from legal to illegal forms of struggle.⁷⁶

Internationally, it seems there may be two explanations for this sotto voce approach to revolution. The first was to avoid getting out of step with the world Communist movement. Even though the Chinese were pressing the Russians hard at this time to adopt a more revolutionary line, it needed another couple of months and presumably successful lobbying before the Moscow Conference of Communist and Workers Parties gave its cautious approval for continuing the revolutionary struggle against colonialism with, as Clausewitz might have put it, the admixture of other means. The second possibility was that the Party was preparing itself, and had now to persuade the people, to take on the US.

Whether war, in the case of South Vietnam, was the appropriate form of struggle for Vietnamese communists, was also subject to another qualification. A few days before the Geneva Conference and the first Vietnam War ended in July 1954, when he was preparing the Party for what he assured them was not partition but a temporary measure leading to reunification, Ho had told the Central Committee: ‘US imperialism is the main enemy of world peace. Consequently we must concentrate our forces against it.’ It was, at the time, an astonishingly prescient remark but over the next five years almost everything that happened in the South seemed to confirm what Ho had said. In part, perhaps, it was ultimately a self-fulfilling prophecy but it was not until 1960, when the National Liberation Front was created, that Ho, Hanoi, North Vietnam and the Party in the North as well as in the South were prepared to meet the challenge of the US.

REFERENCES AND NOTES

1. W. E. Mosse, The Rise & Fall of the Crimean System (London 1963), p. 6.

2. Ibid. p. 201,

3. Ibid. p. 200.

4. My apologies to Dr Bruce Waller of Swansea, Dr Alasdair Stewart of Aberdeen and my former teacher, the late Professor W. N. Medlicott, in the likely event that I have misunderstood – or at least misapplied – the concept of ‘bündnisfähig’!

5. Canadian delegation to ICSC Hanoi, to Secretary of State, Ext. Affairs, Ottawa. 14 February 1955, Sherwood Lett Papers, Department of External Affairs Library, Ottawa.

6. Western allegations were that the People's Army received enough military equipment to increase the number of their divisions from 12 to 20.

7. John W. Holmes, ‘Geneva 1954’, International Journal, 1967, Vol. XXII.

8. D. R. SarDesai, Indian Foreign Policy in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, 1947–1964 (Berkeley 1968), p. 105.

9. FRUS, 1952–4, Vol. XIII, Indochina, p. 1889.

10. FRUS, Vol. XIII, pp. 1905–14.

11. ‘Even if a stable government could be established, we estimate that the national elections scheduled for 1956 would almost certainly give the Vietminh control of South-Vietnam.’ Subsequently amended ‘If the Vietminh does not prejudice its political prospects.’

12. There is some argument about how much was spontaneous and how much was undertaken for political effect. The irrepressible and roving CIA agent, Colonel Lansdale, the model for Graham Greene's ‘Quiet American’, may or may not have been responsible for the slogan ‘Christ and the Virgin Mary are going South’. It certainly seems to have his hallmark. Years later when he was working at the Pentagon he apparently sought to convince Cuban Catholics that Castro had lost God's confidence: ‘Cuba was to be flooded with rumours that the Second Coming was imminent, Christ had picked Cuba for his arrival, and that He wanted the Cubans to get rid of Castro first. Then, on the night foretold, a US submarine would surface off the coast of Cuba and litter the sky with star shells, which would convince the Cubans that The Hour Was At Hand.’ Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, Pocket Books (New York 1981), p. 176.

13. FRUS 1952–4, Vol. XII, East Asia and the Pacific, p. 774.

14. Ibid. p. 730.

15. Lacouture and Devillers are cited in W. C. Gibbons, The US Government and the Vietnam War (Washington 1984), p. 264.

16. Ibid. p. 2122.

17. Ibid. p. 2159.

18. Ibid. p. 2154.

19. Ibid. p. 1938, (12 Aug).

20. The text of Eisenhower's letter (undated) which was delivered on 23 Oct. is given in FRUS, Vol. XIII, pp. 2166–7.

21. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 2151, (22 Oct.).

22. Op. cit. pp. 2205–6.

23. Lightning Joe. An Autobiography (New York 1979).

24. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 2085, (28 Sep. 1954).

25. US-Vietnam Relations, Book 10, p. 875 (not printed in FRUS).

26. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 2288.

27. Ibid. p. 2274, (20 Nov.).

28. Ibid. p. 2270, (19 Nov.).

29. Ibid. p. 2271.

30. Ibid. p. 2239.

31. Ibid. p. 2341, (6 Dec).

32. Ibid. p. 2385, (16 Dec).

33. FRUS, 1955–7, Vol. I, Vietnam, p. 53.

34. Ibid. p. 91.

35. Ibid. p. 102.

36. Ibid. p. 169.

37. Ibid. p. 170 (31 March 1955).

38. Ibid. p. 175–6 (1 April).

39. Ibid. p. 250 (16 April).

40. Ibid. p. 237 (11 April).

41. Ibid, p. 287.

42. Gibbons, op. cit. p. 311.

43. Louis J. Walinsky (ed.) Agrarian Reform as Unfinished Business: The Selected Papers of Wolf Ladejinsky (New York 1977), p. 244.

44. Op. cit. p. 267.

45. Douglas C. Dacy, op. cit. (Cambridge 1986).

46. Gibbons, op. cit. p. 301.

47. Accounts of the American Friends of Vietnam, and sundry ramifications, are given in Robert Scheer and Warren Hinckle ‘The Vietnam Lobby’, Ramparts, July 1965 and Robert Scheer, How the United States Got Involved in Vietnam, Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Santa Barbara, California, 1965.

48. Gibbons, op. cit. p. 304.

49. FRUS, 1955–7, Vol. I, Vietnam, p. 739.

50. Ibid. p. 412.

51. Robert Scigliano, South Vietnam: Nation Under Stress (Boston 1963), p. 91.

52. United States – Vietnam Relations 1945–1967, Book 10, p. 1080. When Gromyko and Lord Reading, as co-chairmen, met in London in May 1956 Britain committed itself publicly, and for the first time, to free nationwide elections for the re-establishment of the national unity of Vietnam and to the validity of the Final Declaration. Afterwards, the Foreign Office said that it had been ‘the unavoidable price of Russian support for the cease-fire’. See Short, ‘British Policy in South-East Asia: the Eisenhower Era’ in Warren Cohen (ed.) International Relations of East Asia in the Eisenhower Era (New York 1989).

53. Dacy, op. cit. p. 225.

54. Professor Milton C. Taylor quoted in Fall, The Two Vietnams (London 1963), p. 290.

55. Dennis J. Duncanson, Government and Revolution in Vietnam (London 1968), p. 287.

56. Dacy, op. cit. p. 237.

57. Duncanson, op. cit. p. 285.

58. FRUS, 1955–7, p. 609.

59. One document which stands out (at least in my memory, having seen it years ago in the US Army Center for Military History in Washington) is the memorandum of a conversation between Diem, Ambassador Reinhardt and Generals O'Daniel and Williams in November 1955. Diem wanted village defence units averaging ten men each for an estimated 6,000 villages. Williams asked why they had to be put on the government pay-roll. Diem replied that the villages were too poor to do otherwise and that they were needed ‘to provide a strong nucleus around which to build morale and the will to self-defence in the villages’. The French, said Diem, had supported local defence units made up of local people who knew the community in which they lived and they had in fact been a more effective anti-communist instrument than the army itself. But they had been dissolved after Geneva. The document is now reprinted in FRUS 1955–7, Vol. I, pp. 582–4.

60. FRUS, 1955–7, Vol. I, p. 773. In another conversation, in the State Department, Nhu seemed to be on the outer edge of reality. He had a secret plan which, within a few months, would provoke a massive exodus of up to 2 m. refugees from the North to the South (op. cit. p. 774). This was easily matched in its obsessional qualities by Diem. ‘He, the President himself, frequently had to edit, to correct, to rewrite orders of service which had been prepared by lesser officials. This was true of almost every form he could think of, and he had himself created new forms for the civil servants because they did not seem to have any judgement of their own. His ministers did not know how to get the facts and he had to teach them. He had given them all the responsibility and all the authority they needed. He had delegated, and delegated, and delegated, but they had proved unworthy of the delegation of authority and responsibility time and again, and this was why he felt constrained to step into the breach which existed and bring order out of the chaos’. Op. cit. pp. 835–6.

61. Gibbons, op. cit. pp. 332–3. In addition to a New York ticker-tape parade Diem was met at the airport by President Eisenhower, spoke to a joint session of Congress and to the National Press Club, was fêted in New York by the American Friends of Vietnam, attended a reception at the Council On Foreign Relations, had breakfast with Cardinal Spellman, and was given a private luncheon by John D. Rockefeller III.

62. I am much indebted to Dr David W. Mabon, Office of the Historian, Department of State, for a copy of his paper with this title. As I am, also, to Dr Edward C. Keefer of the same Office for his paper ‘The United States and the Consolidation of the Diem Government, 1955–1957’. They, of course, are not responsible for my selection and evaluation of the data.

63. With his ad-man's adjectives Lansdale recommended ‘thoughtful planning’ on just how to introduce a National Assembly to a ‘healthy, constructive role’ and wanted Eisenhower to provide Diem with another endorsement. FRUS, 1958–60, Vol. I, Vietnam, p. 383. On another occasion, in August 1960, Lansdale, with a lot of insinuation, suggested that opposition to Diem was exaggerated if not actually produced by the communist enemy, questioned Embassy reporting and while he thought, on the whole, they had done rather well, hoped that the army and police in Vietnam ‘will act in warm friendship with the people’. Painting a rather idyllic picture of Diem's ‘agrovilles’ and grand resettlement programme Lansdale concluded with gratuitous and inimitable advice to the incoming chief of MAAG. ‘Finally, I would like to pass along an operating rule which I have used personally as my ‘passport’ throughout Asia: remember to smile in a friendly way. It will make Asians want to do things your way. There is a responsiveness to a friendly smile in Asia which is a unique and wonderful thing – and you deserve this rich experience!’ Altogether Lansdale seems to provide enough of the naivete and bland but sometimes sinister optimism to account for Graham Greene's portrait.

64. FRUS, 1958–60, Vol. I, Vietnam, pp. 536–41.

65. Pentagon Papers (Gravel) I, p. 242.

66. Gareth Porter, Vietnam: The Definitive Documentation of Human Decisions (London 1979), Vol. II, p. 8.

67. There is contrasting evidence about the Party's expectation of reunification elections. Higher-level Party cadres were apparently certain that general elections would never take place: although this was not discussed at lower levels so as to maintain morale. Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An (Berkeley 1972), p. 34. Carlyle Thayer says that in September 1954 the Political Bureau, on the other hand, expected that the terms of the Agreements would be honoured by the French and that unification would take place as planned. ‘Southern Vietnamese revolutionary organisations and the Vietnam Workers Party: Continuity and Change, 1954–1974’ ‘In Joseph A. Zasloff and MacAlister Brown, Communism in Indochina (Lexington, Mass.), 1975. On 17 July 1955 Sherwood Lett, Head of the Canadian component of the International Control Commission recorded in his diary this conversation with Pham Van Dong: ‘We are Communists. That is a fact. But I tell you that we will have elections for the unification of Vietnam. They will be free elections and we will give all the guarantees asked for, and those guarantees will be carried out. The form of election is immaterial to us as long as they are free and we will guarantee that they are free.’

68. Douglas Pike, History of Vietnamese Communism, 1925–1976 (Stanford 1978), p. 115.

69. He also cites Tibor Mende's opinion that the Communist world was making a deliberate effort to transform North Vietnam into a show window for all of Southeast Asia: preparing for the day when the doors would be open to allow people of the area to marvel at the progress made by North Vietnam on the magic carpet of Communism. Bernard Fall, The Two Vietnams (London 1963), p. 178.

70. George McT. Kahin, Intervention (New York 1987), pp. 466–7.

71. Race, op. cit. pp. 375–362.

72. Race, op. cit. p. 40.

73. See, for example, Porter, op. cit. Vol. II, p. 36.

74. Race, op. cit. p. 112.

75. There are some interesting, and not altogether misleading, comparisons that may be made with the beginning of the communist insurrection in Malaya in 1948. See, for example, Short, The Communist Insurrection in Malaya 1948–1960 (London 1975).

76. William J. Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam (Boulder, Colorado), 1982, p. 193.