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April 21 - May 7, 2025
Little did he or anyone else know that this would be his final trip to America, or that the visit would mark the high point of South Vietnam’s long and complex relationship with the United States.
A few minutes later, after the assailant had been dragged away by police, Diem began his prepared remarks. “Dear compatriots
In the countryside, where 75 to 80 percent of South Vietnamese lived, Diem failed to cultivate broad popular backing. Many local officials presided over what historian Philip E. Catton calls “a virtual reign of terror.” They employed bribery and extortion to enrich themselves and did not make fine distinctions in determining who constituted a genuine threat to the community’s safety and well-being.
Diem resisted the advice of American experts such as Wolf Ladejinsky, a Ukrainian-born economist who had planned successful agrarian redistribution programs in Japan and Taiwan and who encouraged the Saigon leader to think boldly.
It was Diem’s single greatest liability as a leader, this proclivity to alienate groups whose backing he needed.
few non-Vietnamese perceived the change at the time.23 One who did was Bernard Fall, who since the French defeat in 1954 had further cemented his position as America’s leading expert on the Indochina conflict.
It struck him, notably, that the obituaries in the South Vietnamese press showed an abnormally high death rate among village chiefs (crucial figures in Vietnam, as the link between the government and 90 percent of the population). Digging further, he determined that 452 village officials had died within a year, or more than one per day. He then made two maps, one showing where they had perished and another indicating the location of guerrilla activity in the same time period.
Saigon, Fall observed, was ringed by villages whose leaders had been assassinated and replaced by Communists.
The ARVN hadn’t been outfought per se, but it had been “outadministered,” which in the end would matter even more.
Ambassador Durbrow, in a 1957 year-end report produced not long after Fall left Vietnam, declared that the Diem “miracle” was increasingly a mirage.
Durbrow’s cautionary notes were sounded also by the CIA and by the military attachés from the three branches of the armed services. But they were resolutely rejected by General Samuel Williams, head of the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG).
“For many Vietnamese peasants,” a Pentagon chronicler would write of this period, “the war of Resistance against French–Bao Dai rule never ended; France was merely replaced by the U.S., and Bao Dai’s mantle was transferred to Ngo Dinh Diem.”
far from imposing the insurgency on the south, as successive U.S. administrations and some scholars would later assert, the DRV leadership went through a wrenching series of deliberations about whether to support it; some Politburo members argued for the need to focus exclusively on building a socialist state in the north.
the broad popular hostility to the Saigon government represented a golden opportunity that should be grasped to hasten the reunification of the country. If Hanoi did not take charge of the effort, southerners would proceed on their own, and the DRV would become irrelevant.
Ho Chi Minh, who at almost seventy no longer involved himself in the DRV’s day-to-day decision making, urged continued restraint.
In the wake of this crucial decision—which has been called Hanoi’s opening shot in the Second Indochina War—North Vietnamese planners took a number of steps to expand their involvement in the south.
The land trails, which had been hacked out of the jungle during the war against the French, would become known to the world as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Most of the personnel in these early trips were “regroupees,” former Viet Minh supporters from the south who had gone to the north for training and indoctrination after the Geneva Conference. Their task now was to return home to provide the insurgency with a solid nucleus of experienced and loyal cadres.
Hanoi moved to give organizational structure to the new politico-military struggle, a process culminating in the founding in late 1960 of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam or, for short, the National Liberation Front (NLF).
The political apparatus, meanwhile, would closely resemble that of the Diem government, with officers at hamlet, village, district, and provincial levels,
Passed in May 1959, Decree 10/59 restored the French guillotine to Vietnam and gave the regime vast new repressive powers by widening the scope of political crimes to include virtually all forms of political opposition.
Within three days of a charge, a special roving court could sentence to death “whoever commits or attempts to commit … crimes with the aim of sabotage, or of infringing upon the security of the State,”
There would be no right of appeal. The number of arrests skyrocketed as local officials, aided by the roving tribunals, arbitrarily consigned opponents of all kinds to life in prison or death—or
In many parts of South Vietnam, the decree gave fuel to the insurgency.
the measure required peasants to leave their old homes, with their family tombs and gardens and groves, for a barren plot of land in an unfamiliar place. Government financial assistance was minimal—about five dollars plus a small loan to help pay for the acre and a half of land that each farmer received.
the agrovilles became for many peasants an enduring symbol of their hatred for the South Vietnamese regime.
In the period 1954–59, some 90 percent of cadres in Ben Tre were killed or thrown in jail. But the revolutionary forces in the province did not completely disappear,
As the decade drew to a close, American leverage with Diem, not high to begin with, had declined further.
CIA officers and embassy personnel in Saigon were well aware of this creeping anti-Americanism infesting the House of the Ngos, and it frustrated them.
They had opted to forge ahead and hope for the best, rather than face the unpleasant task of initiating a fundamental change in policy. This had been the pattern under Harry Truman, and it had continued through Dwight Eisenhower’s two terms.
In 1954, he and Dulles were prepared to intervene directly to save the French position in the Indochina War, and came close to doing so; in the years thereafter, they gambled that they could build a new state in southern Vietnam with a mercurial and unproven leader.
In mid-1959, the White House authorized American advisers to accompany South Vietnamese Army battalions on operational missions to offer combat guidance.
the change was highly significant—hitherto they had been confined to corps and division headquarters, training commands, and logistic agencies and had been obligated to remain behind whenever their units were on patrol.
THERE OCCURRED IN THAT FATEFUL YEAR OF 1959 ONE OTHER EVENT that, with the knowledge of what was to come, perhaps looms largest of all.
At some point after the opening credits rolled, six Viet Cong guerrillas crept up from the river and slipped through the fence undetected. Two edged to the front of the building to cover the guards, two positioned a French-made submachine gun in the mess hall’s rear window, and two placed their gun muzzles against the pantry screen.
But Ovnand and Buis were the first to be killed in the Second Indochina War—or, in the official American euphemism for an undeclared war, the Vietnam Era. Theirs are the first two names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, at the apex, on Panel 1E, Row 1, directly below the large engraved “1959.”
Time published a short three-paragraph account written by a newly arrived young reporter, Stanley Karnow,
was barred from entering but I watched from outside the perimeter fence and saw two-seat T-28s taking off with full racks of bombs. When they returned, I could see that their racks were empty and there were smoke stains behind the guns. As often as not, a Vietnamese was sitting in the back and the actual pilot was blond and blue-eyed and obviously not from Vietnam. By reporting that, I was threatened with expulsion.
Never mind that a principal stated rationale for the containment policy in Asia, namely the need to check a worldwide Communist expansionist conspiracy directed from Moscow, demonstrably no longer pertained, if it ever had.
For years, evidence had accumulated of a Sino-Soviet split;
Just three weeks before the Dallas tragedy, Ngo Dinh Diem had himself been murdered along with his brother Nhu, after a U.S.-sanctioned coup d’état by dissident generals. The coup followed months of widespread anti-government agitation in urban as well as rural areas.
Journalist Theodore White offered a sobering assessment in a letter to his friend John F. Kennedy, describing a scene eerily reminiscent of that which pertained during JFK’s visit a decade earlier: “The situation gets steadily worse almost week by week.… Guerrillas now control almost all the Southern delta—so
Kennedy’s and Johnson’s freedom of maneuver was already constrained by the choices of their predecessors—by Truman’s tacit acknowledgment in 1945–46 that France had a right to return to Indochina; by his administration’s decision in 1950 to actively aid the French war effort; and by the Eisenhower team’s move in 1954 to intervene directly in southern Vietnam, displacing France as the major external power. LBJ had the added burden of Kennedy’s expansion of U.S. involvement in 1961–63.
The skeptics had been there all along, since before the shooting started. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt was their champion, and it’s not fanciful to believe that had he lived beyond 1945, FDR would have tried to keep France from forcibly reclaiming control of Indochina,
On March 18, 1965, President Charles de Gaulle, whose unwavering determination to reclaim Indochina for France at the end of World War II had done so much to start the bloodshed, and who had been summoned back to power in 1958 as his country struggled to defeat another insurgency, this one in Algeria, told his cabinet that major war was now inevitable. The Americans had failed to learn from France’s example, he said, and the fighting “will last a long, long, long time.” The following month de Gaulle offered a more precise estimate: Unless the Johnson administration moved to halt the war
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(Many a U.S. officer got his first real appreciation of the complexity of the Vietnam struggle by reading Fall’s Street Without Joy: Indochina at War 1946–1954,
He quoted Tacitus: “They have made a desert, and called it peace.”
notwithstanding counterinsurgency theory’s emphasis on nonmilitary measures, massive and brutal firepower will invariably be used, resulting in the widespread killing of civilians and increasing local resentments.
For as Fall once said, Americans were “dreaming different dreams than the French but walking in the same footsteps.”
By the end of 1965, 180,000 U.S. troops were on the ground in South Vietnam. More were on the way.
