Embers of War (100 page)

This was a poor imitation of the robust “United Action” concept that Eisenhower and Dulles had sketched out back in the spring. Key nations in the region—India, Indonesia, Burma—refused to sign up, and because of restrictions in the Geneva settlement, South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were barred from formally participating. Pakistan joined the pact less because of a desire to contain Communist aggression in Southeast Asia than because she saw SEATO as a means to gain leverage against rival India. The Philippines, meanwhile, had virtually no history of involvement in or cooperation with mainland Southeast Asian countries. Nor did the member nations pledge to do very much—they bound themselves only to “meet common danger” in accordance with their own “constitutional processes” and to “consult” with one another. British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, a principal architect of the Geneva deal, showed how much importance he attached to the endeavor when he opted to skip the Manila meeting altogether. He sent a subordinate instead.

For all that, Dulles nevertheless took satisfaction in the pact. He had what he wanted, which was an alliance that made few hard-and-fast commitments on its members (including the United States) but that might well deter Communist expansion in the region. He also secured inclusion of a separate protocol that specifically designated Laos, Cambodia, and southern Vietnam as areas that, if threatened, could “endanger” the “peace and security” of SEATO signatories. This protocol was crucial in Dulles’s eyes, for it provided a legal basis for intervention in Indochina of the type that had been missing in the spring debate concerning United Action, and it was a pointer that Washington would not stand idly by if South Vietnam looked likely to go Communist. In this way, SEATO endowed the seventeenth parallel with a political character that the Geneva Accords had prohibited, and it laid the basis for a separate statehood for the southern area. As Dulles candidly told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “In fact the military regrouping [zones] will be apt to gradually become a live de facto political division.”
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With SEATO thus providing the foundation for establishing a U.S.-protected state in southern Vietnam, the administration set about making that state a viable entity. In the National Security Council’s words, the United States should “make every possible effort, not openly inconsistent with the U.S. position as to the armistice agreements … to maintain a friendly non-Communist South Vietnam and to prevent a Communist victory through all-Vietnam elections.”
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The new venture retained the same name as its French-sponsored predecessor—the State of Vietnam—and Bao Dai stayed on as chief of state. But in American eyes the similarities ended there. In particular, U.S. planners sought to fulfill quickly and unambiguously a provision in the Geneva deal that they had sought for years: the formal abolition of French rule. These officials did not doubt that France would continue to exert significant cultural and economic influence in Vietnam, but they were confident that Western efforts against Ho Chi Minh’s revolution from now on could be undertaken without the taint of colonialism. Now, at last, a genuine Third Force—neither French-backed nor Communist—could develop and sustain genuine support among the Vietnamese people.

The man to lead that force was, of course, Ngo Dinh Diem, who arrived in Saigon on June 25, 1954, and took formal power on July 7. Diem considered the subsequent Geneva agreement to be a disgrace and saw the division of the country as a personal betrayal. But he also realized swiftly that he had no option but to accept it; such was the immensity of his task below the seventeenth parallel. He encountered a city wracked by political intrigue, and his government lacked broad authority and strength.
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Nor did Diem help matters with his early performance. His absence of some four years from Vietnam and of more than two decades from ministerial service had left him out of touch with his compatriots and unable to seize and galvanize a heavy and cumbersome administrative mechanism. His early contacts with the International Control Commission (ICC) were tentative and stilted, in contrast to Ho Chi Minh’s forthcoming and assured approach. Diem evinced little charisma or practical managerial talent, and his senior subordinates for the most part lacked administrative experience. Unlike Ho, he showed not a grain of humor. Press reaction to his arrival in office was muted and unenthusiastic. With his younger brother and closest adviser Ngo Dinh Nhu—a charismatic, intelligent, scheming, witty, and strikingly handsome figure, who had an ego to match—he strove to establish a highly centralized government unrestrained by dissent, in which Bao Dai’s oversight powers would be vitiated and French influence eliminated, and in which all non-Communist parties would be subordinated into a single government-sponsored party, the Nhu-led Can Lao Nhan Vi (Personalist Party).
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The CIA’s Saigon station, which had worked hard in previous weeks to smooth the way for Diem’s assumption of power, voiced early doubt that he could offer serious competition for Ho Chi Minh. In August, Paul Harwood, the station’s covert action chief, noted that Diem’s unwillingness to delegate authority beyond a tight inner circle was creating a government by coterie, one disinclined to pursue political compromise. Such an approach was not, Harwood dryly remarked, “a political asset which will attract mass support.”
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It didn’t help in this regard that Diem entered a State of Vietnam that was deeply splintered, in which armed religious sects dominated in the Mekong Delta and the Binh Xuyen crime syndicate controlled much of Saigon.
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These groups lacked any sense of cohesion and common purpose. Neither the French nor the Vietnamese who had supported Bao Dai’s previous regimes were eager to come forward and back the new government, especially as there were complex administrative and military arrangements still to be worked out with France, whose army continued to wield power in the south and was slated to remain there for two more years to protect French citizens and property. Diem made no secret of his desire to neutralize France’s influence in South Vietnam, and the
colons
in Saigon wholly reciprocated the animosity. All the while, the politically ambitious chief of staff of the Vietnamese National Army, Nguyen Van Hinh, a French citizen who was married to a French woman, seemed to be laying plans to launch a coup. Diem removed him from his command and ordered him out of Vietnam, but Hinh flouted the directive by charging around Saigon on his motorcycle, waving the expulsion notice.

Yet Diem was sanguine about his ability to surmount these challenges. Neither the sects nor the Binh Xuyen nor the French presented serious problems for his government, he assured U.S. senator Mike Mansfield when the latter came calling at Diem’s private lodgings on September 2. As for Hinh, he appeared to be “coming around.” Mansfield was sympathetic but skeptical, having heard from Ambassador Donald Heath that Diem was “utterly honest but tended to operate in a cloister,” and from other Americans on the scene that the Saigon leader was self-centered and intellectually obdurate. But Heath also stressed that “if Diem goes, there is no replacement for him in sight.”
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Mansfield agreed. He returned to Washington convinced that Diem, whatever his flaws, must be backed, or America’s grand design in Indochina would founder. Diem’s program “represents genuine nationalism,” the senator told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in mid-October; only Diem offered any hope of creating a government worthy of American backing. With no viable alternatives available, Mansfield maintained, the U.S. course was clear: “In the event that the Diem government falls … I believe that the United States should consider an immediate suspension of all aid to Vietnam.” Diem, sensing an opportunity, had one hundred thousand copies of the senator’s report printed and distributed.
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And no wonder: Mansfield was a figure of rising influence on Vietnam matters, whose recommendation was widely interpreted as representing American policy. He was the Congress’s resident Indochina expert, after all—he had taught Asian history before coming to Washington and had visited Vietnam twice, albeit for a total of only twelve days—and was known to get along well with Dulles, having accompanied the secretary of state to Manila for the SEATO meeting. Now he would assume what his biographer Don Oberdorfer calls “an extraordinary role” on Indochina. In Manila, he had emphasized to Dulles that Diem might be “the last chance” for a leader who could prevent a Communist takeover of southern Vietnam. When Guy La Chambre subsequently told Dulles that Diem was “totally ineffective” in securing broad-based popular support and should be replaced, the secretary of state replied that he “did not believe any useful purpose would be served in getting rid of Diem since no better substitute had been advanced.” Dulles capped his claim by asserting that “Senator Mansfield had recently been in Indochina” and quoting Mansfield’s perspective that Diem was the “last chance.”
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“From that day on,” Oberdorfer writes, “the Montana senator was the State Department’s principal interlocutor on support for Diem in the mid-1950s, and the most important backer in Congress of the Saigon leader.”
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From the perspective of a Republican White House still feeling vulnerable to partisan charges that it had “allowed” half of Vietnam to be given away at Geneva, it was a huge plus to have a respected Democrat in its corner, and Dulles and his aides wasted few chances in the fall of 1954 to cite Mansfield’s views on Diem to back up their own. After Mansfield in a September 24 cable extolled Diem’s commitment to achieving “genuine national independence and internal amelioration” and said all other potential leaders were too closely identified with the French colonials, Dulles quoted from it at length in a top-level meeting the next day, adding that “the senator’s views would carry a lot of weight in the Foreign Relations Committee, especially with the Democrats.” Later the same day Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith also referred to the cable in a meeting with La Chambre. Mansfield’s championing of Diem and of the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam, Smith stressed, would have “great influence in Congress, particularly with Democrats.” The Frenchman, hemmed in by his government’s need to maintain smooth relations with Washington, reluctantly agreed to a secret commitment to support Diem and to urge all anti-Communist forces in South Vietnam to do likewise.
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In domestic terms, Mansfield’s advocacy came at a critical time, for even now there were doubters. A National Intelligence Estimate in August, echoing the assessment of the CIA’s Saigon station, cautioned that even with robust backing by the United States, the chances of establishing a strong government with broad popular support were “poor.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff, when asked to create a program for training the South Vietnamese military, said it would be “hopeless” to build an army without a “reasonably strong, stable civil government in control.” Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson recommended that the United States get out of Indochina “as completely and as soon as possible.” With the French experience firmly in mind, Wilson warned that he could “see nothing but grief in store for us if we remained in that area.”
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A cartoon by Daniel Fitzpatrick in the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, meanwhile, showed Uncle Sam gazing into a dark swamp labeled “French Mistakes in Indochina.” The caption asked, “How would another mistake help?”
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Prophetic sentiments, all of them, but they did not carry the day where it counted: in the White House. Eisenhower and Dulles had their own doubts about the prospects in Vietnam, and in particular about the Diem government’s long-term viability, but they did not waver in their determination. To do nothing would risk the loss of all of Indochina, and that remained anathema to them, for geopolitical as well as domestic political reasons. Accordingly, the administration moved energetically to reorganize and retrain the Vietnamese National Army, eventually winning the acquiescence of the Joint Chiefs in doing so. Still skeptical about the advisability of undertaking a training program “from a military point of view,” the JCS agreed in mid-October to go along “if it is considered that political considerations are overriding.” Never mind that this Joint Chiefs position was, strictly speaking, illogical: In their minds, it was precisely the political weaknesses of the current Saigon government that made the creation of an effective South Vietnamese army an impossible task. Perhaps the Chiefs were referring to U.S. domestic politics, in which case their position made more sense; or—most likely of all—they were being savvy bureaucrats, putting on record their objections to the training program and thereby giving responsibility to civilian officials while simultaneously allowing the effort to move forward.
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On October 22, 1954, the State Department instructed the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) immediately to formulate and initiate with the Vietnamese government a “program for training that number of Vietnamese armed forces necessary to carry out internal security missions.” The following day in Saigon, Ambassador Heath delivered a letter (drafted several weeks before) from Eisenhower to Diem offering expanded American assistance to the Saigon government for the purpose of “developing and maintaining a strong, viable state, capable of resisting attempted subversion or aggression through military means.” The United States had of course already been providing assistance, but much of it was through the French; this time, Eisenhower stressed, the aid would be given “directly to your government.” The letter did caution Diem that U.S. assistance would be conditioned on the Saigon government’s readiness “to give assurances as to the standards of performance it would be able to maintain,” and on its commitment to “undertaking needed reforms.”
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In its public announcement of the new policy, however, the administration played down any such concerns. The core concern of the president’s letter, officials said, was to emphasize America’s support and “to strengthen the hand of the Premier and give his regime ammunition to use against his political enemies.”
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Thus began, it could be said, the formal U.S. commitment to South Vietnam.