Embers of War (106 page)

Greene plainly touched a nerve among these reviewers, testy about his portrayal of their national character. What they missed was the complexity of both Fowler and Pyle (though not, it must be said, of Phuong, the Vietnamese woman they both covet, who is the real cardboard figure in the book, a physically beautiful and demure airhead who spends her time reading gossip about the British royals). Fowler is jaded and sardonic and content to caricature all things American through one-dimensional analysis, but the novel also shows a dark element in his own character. He feels threatened by Pyle’s vitality and courage and chooses to betray him, perhaps out of sexual jealousy, and he shows scant concern for the ordinary people of Vietnam and what will happen to them. Even after he sets up Pyle to be killed by the Viet Minh, moreover, he admits sneaking admiration for the young American’s willingness to commit to a cause: “All the time that his innocence had angered me, some judge within myself had summed up in his favor, had compared his idealism, his half-baked ideas founded on the works of York Harding, with my cynicism.” After all, Fowler is reminded, “Sooner or later … one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.”
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In the famous nocturnal watchtower scene, the Briton tells Pyle that the peasants in the field care only about securing enough rice, to which Pyle replies that they want to think for themselves. “Thought’s a luxury,” Fowler answers. “Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?” Having apparently conceded this point, Pyle asserts that peasants do not make up the whole of the Vietnamese population. What about the educated? Would they be happy under the Communists? “Oh no,” says Fowler, “we’ve brought them up in our ideas.”
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Generations of college students have debated who gets the better of this exchange. For British journalist Richard West, an admirer of the novel who freely admits to seeing Vietnam “through Greene-tinted spectacles,” the answer is clear: It is the American who wins. “In this debate, I find myself wholeheartedly on the side of Pyle,” West writes in a sympathetic essay published shortly after Greene’s passing in 1991. “It is wrong and arrogant to suppose that because a man lives in a mud hut, he cannot think about God or indeed democracy.” In the late 1960s, West had made a film about the inhabitants in a small village in the Mekong Delta, and though no “expert on their thinking,” he found them to be interested in the outside world and avid listeners to the BBC. In the French period, West rightly notes, the countryside was often the center of discontent and militancy, and he argues that Pyle was right to predict that peasants would resent Communist rule, “partly perhaps because they want to think for themselves.”
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Fowler, in other words, is not immune to the kind of shallow analysis he so often ascribes to Pyle and to Americans generally. He seems blind to the possibility that situations could arise in which Pyle’s idealistic innocence might prove much more humanly useful than his own weary realism.

Of course, behind the innocence there lurks another, more sinister element, a self-righteous and brutal efficiency that Pyle shows no hesitation in deploying. Utterly confident in the theories he picked up in some books while a student at Harvard, he is prepared to do whatever it takes to support them. If some Vietnamese civilians are killed in the process of establishing the Third Force, it is a necessary price to pay. It is this darker element in Pyle’s can-do naïveté that Greene stresses in the novel; over time it is what would give
The Quiet American
its prescience, its seemingly perpetual contemporary resonance. This quality in the U.S. advisory effort in South Vietnam was not clearly evident initially, though, and thus most American reviewers felt free to be dismissive of the characterizations and to recognize nothing of themselves in Alden Pyle.
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It follows that Americans did not pay much attention to Greene’s contemporaneous account, published in
The New Republic
not long after the U.S. release of the novel, of his most recent visit to Vietnam. “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.” And in a second article in the following issue: Diem “represents at least an idea of patriotism … but he is separated from the people by cardinals and police cars with wailing sirens and foreign advisers droning of global strategy, when he should be walking in the rice fields unprotected, learning the hard way how to be loved and obeyed—the two cannot be separated.… The name I would write under his portrait is Patriot Ruined by the West.”
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V

WHAT AMERICANS SAW INSTEAD, IN THE SPRING OF 1956, WAS A
Saigon regime that had gone a long way toward consolidating its authority in South Vietnam. The advance of Communism, which had seemed so ominous just two years before, appeared to have been halted. Washington’s post-Geneva policy of fashioning a pro-Western bulwark in Indochina showed abundant signs of succeeding—and at relatively low cost. 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? Reform would certainly be necessary, but it could come in time. For as U.S. ambassador G. Frederick Reinhardt would later remark, Diem was securing his leadership, not “running a Jeffersonian democracy.” Reinhardt’s boss felt the same way. “I must say,” the ambassador noted, “that Mr. Dulles made my life a lot easier by taking a pretty philosophic view of the question, saying that a truly representative government was certainly our objective in the long run, but one shouldn’t be unrealistic in thinking it was something to be achieved in a matter of weeks or days.”
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Few leaders in Congress and the press questioned this logic at the time. Many among them who followed the Vietnam struggle belonged to an advocacy group called the American Friends of Vietnam (AFV), which was really the Vietnam Lobby in more organized form and which offered full-throated support for America’s mission in Vietnam—and by extension for Diem’s rule. As the group’s founding document in 1955 succinctly put it: “A free Vietnam means a greater guarantee of freedom in the world.” In short order 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. Through these and other friendly publications, the AFV produced a barrage of pro-Diem propaganda in the period, while drastically limiting the number of articles even remotely critical of the Saigon government.
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Time
, with its huge midcentury circulation, led the way, as usual. In historian Robert Herzstein’s words, by this point the magazine “no longer covered Diem; it celebrated him.” In issue after issue, Americans learned that the South Vietnamese premier had brought “peace and stability” to his country and deserved Americans’ unqualified support. 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. Every so often the magazine acknowledged quietly that the Ngo family echoed “authoritarian overtones,” but it would go no further; even then, it trumpeted the regime’s achievements.
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The overall effect of this onslaught was considerable, if not in the upper reaches of the executive branch—the administration was after all already deeply committed to South Vietnam—then in Congress and in the broader American populace. Thanks in part to the AFV’s efforts, a narrative took hold among opinion makers that Diem was the right man to lead Saigon, and that the outlook in the struggle for Vietnam was rosy thanks to his courage and strength and thanks to America’s unstinting support. The White House, sensing the opportunity, aided the AFV by meeting with its officers and sending speakers to the group’s conferences. When the organization’s chairman, retired general William J. Donovan, sent a letter to Eisenhower in February 1956 urging the administration to oppose all-Vietnam elections scheduled for that summer, the president replied promptly that he was in full agreement. Later that spring, through Eisenhower’s urging, Donovan’s successor as AFV chief, retired general John W. O’Daniel, appeared before the House subcommittee on Far Eastern affairs. O’Daniel lavished praise on Diem and said South Vietnam would thrive with continued U.S. backing. The legislators accepted his account without question and offered their own encomiums to Diem and also to the efforts of O’Daniel and his organization.

On June 1, 1956, the AFV held its first major conference on Vietnam, titled “America’s Stake in Vietnam,” at the Willard Hotel in Washington. The administration dispatched Assistant Secretary of State Walter Robertson to assure the delegates of “the determination of this Government that there shall be no weakening in our support for Free Vietnam.” But the keynoter that day was Senator Kennedy, a late addition to the program when Mike Mansfield proved unavailable. JFK had changed on Vietnam, at least in public. Gone was the JFK who as a young congressman in 1951 had visited Indochina and asked such searching questions about the ability of the West to have its way in that part of the world. Kennedy had begun to qualify that position already in 1954, when he backed the concept of United Action to save the French position at Dien Bien Phu. Now the alteration was still more pronounced. JFK praised Diem’s leadership in extravagant terms, then declared that “Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike,” and a “test of American responsibility and determination.” The United States, he continued, had been present at South Vietnam’s birth and had given assistance to her life: “This is our offspring. We cannot abandon it.” Neither the United States nor “Free Vietnam is ever going to be a party to an election obviously stacked and subverted in advance.”
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Was this the possible presidential aspirant talking, positioning himself for a White House run by proclaiming his anti-Communist bona fides before an audience composed partly of influential publishers and journalists? Perhaps. Democrats, Kennedy knew, had been hammered for allegedly “losing China” half a dozen years before; it made sense to cover that flank by talking tough. Still, it’s significant in historical terms that JFK would feel the need to speak in such unambiguous terms in a public setting. His speech was greeted by enthusiastic applause. 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.”
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In the audience for Kennedy’s speech was another speaker at the conference, a young doctor who in the months to come would do more to shape American popular views of the Vietnam struggle at mid-decade than any other person. Largely forgotten today, his was for a time a household name in America—in January 1961, at the time of his premature death of cancer at thirty-four, a Gallup poll ranked him third among the world’s “most esteemed men,” right behind Dwight Eisenhower and the pope. His name was Thomas A. Dooley.

Born into privilege in St. Louis, Dooley was an indifferent student at Catholic schools who barely made it through his medical studies. Upon graduation, he took the only job he could get, signing on with the Navy Medical Corps. In 1954, now twenty-six and assigned to the USS
Montague
, he spent significant time ashore in the refugee camps in Haiphong monitoring the health condition of refugees seeking to relocate from North Vietnam to the south in Operation Passage to Freedom. Fluent in French and possessing boundless energy, Dooley worked tirelessly to combat contagious diseases before the exiles boarded navy vessels, earning accolades from superiors, a Legion of Merit, and a personal decoration from Ngo Dinh Diem.
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The experience also instilled in Dooley a fierce and unrelenting anti-Communism. When William Lederer, a reporter for
Reader’s Digest
and future co-author of the Cold War classic
The Ugly American
, visited Haiphong in early 1955 looking for human interest stories on the refugee crisis, he met Dooley, who described his work in gripping terms. Lederer said it had the makings of a “helluva book” and offered to help create it. Dooley jumped at the chance. The result was
Deliver Us from Evil
, which first ran in abridged form in
Reader’s Digest
—at that time the most popular magazine in the world, with a circulation of twenty million—then came out in hardback to enthusiastic reviews. 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, for the navy did not wish to have a spectacle on its hands, having already decorated Dooley and endorsed his book).