Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

In the vacuum of power following the Geneva Accords, however, Cao Dai and Hoa Hao leaders had seized the opportunity to expand their control, levying taxes and raising troops in their sectors.

Thus the Cao Dai’s Trinh Minh Thé, whom American analysts had viewed as a potential Third Force leader since he defected with his men from the French Union army in 1951, purportedly received payment after Lansdale convinced him to reintegrate his army with Diem’s military,

the biggest obstacle to Diem’s consolidation of power in the south came from the Binh Xuyen gang—forty thousand strong, well armed, and swollen with profits from gambling, extortion, and prostitution.

One group saw the French as spoilers and wanted them out of Vietnam as soon as possible; the other thought they could still play a stabilizing role. Lansdale was in the former camp, while Collins, whose assessment of the Saigon leader had again turned gloomy, was in the latter.

Congress would be unlikely to fund a successor regime perceived as bearing a “French imprint,” he noted, and the administration needed Democratic support on a range of legislative issues—notably the proposed interstate highway system—and on the crisis in the Taiwan Straits.

“The chances of saving South Vietnam from chaos and communism are slim,” C. L. Sulzberger wrote in The New York Times on April 18. “Brooding civil war threatens to tear the country apart. And the government of Ngo Dinh Diem has proven inept, inefficient, and unpopular.

Subtly at first, and then dramatically, the White House modified its position.

At 6:10 and 6:11 P.M. on April 27, 1955, top-secret cables went out from the State Department to the embassies in Saigon and Paris initiating a process designed to remove Diem and replace him with a leader selected by Generals Collins and Ely

Leading sect figures surrendered. Trinh Minh Thé was killed by a shot to the back of the head while he watched his troops engaging Binh Xuyen forces, the identity and allegiance of his assassin forever a mystery. Soon the crime syndicate was routed, and Bay

Democrat Hubert Humphrey proclaimed that “Premier Diem is an honest, wholesome, and honorable man. He is the kind of man we ought to be supporting, rather than conspirators, gangsters, and hoodlums

Publisher Henry Luce, in his weekly editorial in Life, could barely restrain himself: “Every son, daughter or even distant admirer of the American Revolution should be overjoyed and learn to shout, if not pronounce, ‘Hurrah for Ngo Dinh Diem!’ ” Diem’s decision to confront the “Binh Xuyen gangsters,” Luce went on, “immensely simplifies the task of U.S. diplomacy in Saigon. That task is, or should be, simply to back Diem to the hilt.”

By the start of May 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem had obtained what he had long sought, namely full power in Saigon and firm American backing for his government.

On May 6, the U.S. government, relieved of the pain of reorienting the policy, reaffirmed its commitment to the regime:

Paul Kattenburg, a discerning State Department intelligence analyst who was in Saigon at the time and who would later pen a penetrating account of America’s Vietnam adventure, remarked to a colleague, in the winter of 1954–55, that the most profitable U.S. course would be to offer Hanoi $500 million in grant aid for the reconstruction of war damage. Ho could not refuse such an offer, Kattenburg maintained, since it would afford a means for him to maintain independence from Soviet and Chinese domination. The sum of money was considerable, but it was lower than what Washington seemed to be committing itself to spending on behalf of Ngo Dinh Diem.

He knew, that is to say, what every other serious observer now knew, including not least Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues in Hanoi: The French were Out in South Vietnam, and the Americans were In.

Once again they had miscalculated, wrongly assuming that France would maintain a strong presence in the south through the elections for reunification scheduled for July 1956—elections that virtually all informed observers thought Ho would win—and thereby keep the United States from becoming more heavily entrenched.

On May 20, 1955, French forces withdrew from the Saigon area and assembled in a coastal enclave. From there, their numbers steadily dwindled, until on April 28, 1956, the last French soldier departed Vietnam—signifying the symbolic end, some said, of France’s century in the Far East.

That month Paris also shut down the Ministry for the Associated States and moved its functions to the Foreign Ministry. And to fully sever the old colonial connection, France withdrew her high commissioner from Vietnam (to be replaced by an ambassador, who was not appointed for more than a year).

He refused to enter into preparatory consultations with Hanoi on the matter of the elections (according to paragraph 7 of the Final Declaration, these consultations were to begin by July 20, 1955), on the grounds that the State of (South) Vietnam was neither a signatory at Geneva nor a party to the Final Declaration, and moreover that only a duly elected representative body for the south could authorize the Saigon government to take a position on the subject.

Hundreds of executions occurred, some of them by beheading or disembowelment. The harsh methods were not without effect. Gradually, through 1956 and 1957, clandestine Viet Minh organizations in the south were decimated.

Diem also moved cleverly to remove any lingering threat posed by Bao Dai by calling a referendum to decide whether to maintain the monarchy or to establish a republic with himself as president.

voting day, October 23, 1955, Diem claimed he won 98.2 percent of the ballots, having spurned Pentagon suggestions that he aim for a more credible 60 to 70 percent. (His 605,025 votes in Saigon were one-third more than the city’s registered voters.)13

many later analysts, in judging these and other actions and statements by Diem in the course of 1955, depicted him as a power-hungry and hypocritical autocrat, a reactionary mandarin, a pliant U.S. puppet, and nothing more.

But this is insufficient. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, Diem was a modernizer of sorts, a man who had his own vision for Vietnam’s future and who sought to strike a balance between progress and Vietnam’s cultural traditions.

In hindsight, it seems clear, personalism for Diem and Nhu was more than a cover for crass personal interests or a rationalization of policies pursued for other reasons; it was a motivating factor in its own right, even if not quite the driving force that some sympathetic historians have suggested.

Lansdale even designed the ballots for the Diem–Bao Dai referendum, cleverly placing Diem’s name against a red background (the Asian color of happiness) and Bao Dai’s in green (the color of a cuckold).

“South Vietnam, it can truly be said, was the creation of Edward Lansdale,” author Neil Sheehan would say, an exaggeration that nevertheless gets at the American’s fundamental importance.

the emerging “Vietnam Lobby”—a group loosely coordinated by Diem’s New York publicist, Harold Oram, and counting among its members Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas and Senators Mansfield and John F. Kennedy.

the diminutive career diplomat

Lansdale matters in historical terms because he gave momentum and conceptual clarity to a policy that was already emerging. He described the stakes and the tasks in Vietnam in ways that resonated with Americans, insisting, as he constantly did, on the need to be for something, not merely against Communism. “Democracy” and “freedom” were his watchwords, not “empire” or “intervention,” and he stressed that Americans were in Vietnam not to be colonizers like the French but to build a nation. Their motives were wholly altruistic.

The Chicago Sun-Times called it “the best novel about the war in Indo-China,” while The New York Times said it was “written with Greene’s great technical skill and imagination.”

A. J. Liebling, in a caustic and supercilious review in The New Yorker, took particular umbrage at the direct connection between Pyle and the killing of innocents and concluded that Greene—who, Liebling delighted in pointing out, could not manage to get American idiomatic English right—merely resented America’s assumption of world leadership.

“The South,” he wrote, “instead of confronting the totalitarian North with the evidences of freedom, has slipped into an inefficient dictatorship; newspapers suppressed, strict censorship, men exiled by administrative order and not by judgment of the courts.”

True, some Americans acknowledged, Diem’s government was thoroughly authoritarian, but how could it be otherwise, in view of the myriad challenges he faced to his rule?

the group gained a large and distinguished membership, including Democratic senators John F. Kennedy, Mike Mansfield, and Hubert H. Humphrey, Republican senators Karl Mundt and William Knowland, academics such as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Wesley Fishel, and Samuel Eliot Morison, and even American Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas. Still more impressive was its roster of media barons: Whitelaw Reid, editor of the New York Herald Tribune; Walter Annenberg, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer; Malcolm Muir, publisher of Newsweek; William Randolph Hearst, Jr., of the New York Journal-American; and, at the top of the heap, Henry Luce of the Time Inc. empire.

Schoolchildren across the United States, who would be of draft age in five or ten years, took weekly Time quizzes; securing a good grade meant knowing that Diem was a great patriot and ally of the West.

Now the alteration was still more pronounced. JFK praised Diem’s leadership in extravagant terms,

Few remembered the dissenting remark by distinguished University of Chicago professor Hans J. Morgenthau the same evening: “I shall defend the legal validity of that [Geneva] agreement to the last drop of my blood.”

With its gruesome tales of Viet Minh atrocities, and its trumpeting of Dooley’s own and America’s good deeds in the crisis, the book became a runaway best seller in 1956; sales exploded at about the time of the AFV conference in June (when Dooley was booted out of the service for his “extraordinarily active” homosexuality—quietly,

Other letters of praise came from President Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt, Chief Justice Earl Warren, and Cardinal Spellman.

due course, Deliver Us from Evil would be revealed for what it was: a wholly unsubstantiated account of the Passage to Freedom, studded with misleading claims and outright falsehoods.

(The Pentagon, it will be recalled, had said the opposite in 1954: that evidence of political reform ought to be a condition for expanded military aid.)

From 1956 to 1960, 78 percent of American assistance to South Vietnam went into Diem’s military budget, a figure that excluded security items such as police training and direct equipment transfers. Conversely, only 2 percent of American funds went into programs such as health, housing, and community development.

In a succinct summation of what would later be called the “counterinsurgency” doctrine, Williams declared: “The major political and psychological mission is to win the active and willing support of the people.”

There was wisdom and prescience in this line of analysis, yet Williams was curiously unwilling to act on his own prescription. He dismissed as “communist propaganda” all reports of corruption and nepotism in the ARVN,

The real danger, rather, was a massive conventional invasion across the seventeenth parallel.

“In the event of organized full-scale guerrilla and subversive activity by ‘planted’ Viet Minh elements, control of relatively large undeveloped areas of Free Vietnam would likely pass to the Viet Minh,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded in a sober assessment in 1956. If faced with a conventional attack across the seventeenth parallel, meanwhile, the ARVN could likely hold out a mere sixty days, the Chiefs said.

Nor were there nearly enough South Vietnamese interpreters and translators.

there were no expressions in Vietnamese for most American military terms and phrases.

them. “Probably the greatest single problem encountered by the MAAG,” one of its officers wrote at the time, “is the continual task of assuring the Vietnamese that the United States is not a colonial power—an assurance that must be renewed on an individual basis by each new adviser.”