Embers of War (109 page)

The new American ambassador in Saigon, Elbridge Durbrow, a pudgy career foreign service officer, had barely arrived before he expressed concerns about this centralization of power and Diem’s seeming determination to quash all forms of political opposition. A mere week before Diem’s departure for the United States, Durbrow warned the State Department that the Saigon leader had “become more intolerant of dissenting opinions” and that he continued to “rely heavily on a small circle of advisers including members of his family.” Diem might be the undisputed leader in the south, Durbrow continued, but he lacked broad popular support, having alienated a great many people with his rigidity and his easy resort to repression. No doubt Durbrow’s grim assessment grew partly from conversations he had with CIA officers in Saigon, who continued to despair at the Saigon leader’s poor leadership qualities and the lack of competent, motivated people available to staff his government.
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Even some members of the AFV experienced buyer’s remorse that spring. Norman Thomas, the American Socialist leader, resigned his membership in the organization, remarking in a letter to Mike Mansfield that the United States needed to show positive support for democracy “against fascist as well as communist forms of oppression.” More notably, Joseph Buttinger, co-founder of the AFV, began to express unease about the large number of political prisoners in Saigon jails, most of them non-Communist nationalists. It bothered Buttinger not merely that Diem ignored repeated entreaties to release the prisoners but that he lied to the U.S. press on this matter during his American tour.
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Buttinger was not yet prepared to give up on his project, however, and the AFV as a group continued in the succeeding months to champion Diem and the U.S. commitment to him at every turn. Compared to the chaos in many ex-colonial areas of Asia and Africa, organization leaders pointed out, South Vietnam was the very picture of stability. Moreover, nation-building efforts were succeeding, and the Commercial Import Program (CIP) continued to hold inflation in check by making available sizable quantities of consumer goods. The AFV also drew attention to the fact that fifteen hundred American specialists advised Saigon officials on everything from farming techniques to traffic control, and that one particular outfit, the Michigan State University Group under Wesley Fishel—himself an AFV member—brought a cadre of academics who instructed South Vietnamese on education, law enforcement, and personnel management.
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Most important of all, spokesmen said, U.S. and South Vietnamese officials appeared to be working well together, including on important projects such as land reform and rural resettlement.

The AFV also poured its energies into promoting Hollywood’s adaptation of
The Quiet American
, which changed the story to make Pyle the completely good American and Fowler a Communist dupe who betrays Pyle solely out of sexual jealousy. In the novel, Pyle works for the Economic Mission, while in the film his employer is the more noble-sounding “Friends for Free Asia.” No longer is he the upper-class New England boy from Harvard but an aw-shucks Texan who went to Princeton. And whereas in Greene’s version the Pyle-backed Third Force leader Trinh Minh Thé is responsible for the bombing in the square, in the movie the blame is pinned on the Communists.

The film, skillfully directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and shot on location in Saigon, in other respects tracks closely to the plot and the dialogue of the novel, but this was small comfort to Graham Greene, who expressed mocking disdain upon learning of the alteration. “If such changes as your Correspondent describes have been made in the film,” he wrote in a letter to the editor of the London
Times
, “they will make only the more obvious the discrepancy between what the State Department would like the world to believe and what in fact happened in Vietnam. In that case, I can imagine some happy evenings of laughter not only in Paris but in the cinemas of Saigon.” In his memoir
Ways of Escape
, Greene referred to “the later treachery of Joseph Mankiewicz.” Elsewhere he wrote that “the book was based on a closer knowledge of the Indo-China war than the American [filmmaker] possessed and I am vain enough to believe that the book will survive a few years longer than Mr. Mankiewicz’s incoherent picture.”
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Contrast this with the view of Edward Lansdale, who was a consultant on the film and who, in a letter to Ngo Dinh Diem, praised its alterations from Greene’s “novel of despair.… I now feel that you will be very pleased with the reactions of those who see it.” In October 1957, Lansdale invited representatives of “virtually all [U.S. government] departments, agencies, and services concerned with psychological, political, and security affairs” to attend a pre-screening of the film in Washington; “they all,” he wrote the chairman of the AFV, “seemed to enjoy it as much as I did.”
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On January 22, 1958, the AFV sponsored the “world premiere” of the film at Washington’s Playhouse Theater, a screening attended by, among others, Senator Mansfield, Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, and General J. Lawton Collins. “History has somewhat negated the story of the book by Graham Greene, and the motion picture, in our opinion, sets the record straight by placing the turbulent event period of 1954 [
sic
] into a more accurate historical perspective,” the group’s press release declared.

The motion picture gives appropriate weight to the constructive role played by the United States in assisting the Vietnamese in their quest for national independence. Mr. Greene’s book, written before it became clear that Free Vietnam would survive, denies the possibility of a third alternative between communism and colonialism. The record since Dienbienphu is demonstrably clear—that third force, Vietnam ruled by the Vietnamese, has become a reality. Consequently, in attempting to set the historical record in order, this motion picture has a most important function.
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III

THE AFV’S JUDGMENT WAS PREMATURE. APPEARANCES DECEIVED
. The well-stocked store shelves in Saigon and the shiny new motor scooters on its streets hid the degree to which the U.S. aid program, necessary though it was, was failing to promote a robust South Vietnamese economy that could in time stand on its own. In fiscal year 1957, American aid supported the entire cost of the Vietnamese armed forces, almost 80 percent of all other government expenditures, and nearly 90 percent of all imports.
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The assistance created a semblance of middle-class prosperity while fostering a dependent relationship; a well-heeled minority of Vietnamese benefited, while the majority saw little or no gain. With the market saturated with consumer goods of all kinds, merchandise accumulated on the docks, left to rot by importers who hadn’t the money to pay for it. A study by U.S. political scientists found that South Vietnam “is becoming a permanent mendicant,” dependent on outside support, and asserted that “American aid had built a castle on sand.”
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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. “If people attempted to resist the authorities,” Catton writes, “local officials often clamped down even harder, thus encouraging a vicious action-reaction cycle between the government and the rural populace.”
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On land reform, 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. Diem allowed landowners to keep up to one hundred hectares of rice land—an enormous amount in regions where the land was so fertile—and another fifteen for burial grounds and ancestor worship. This was more than ten times that allowed in Japan and Taiwan, and it meant that little acreage was available for redistribution. Savvy landowners got around even these restrictions by transferring title to some of their land to family members. In other cases, local officials lacked the will to force compliance, or the efforts became ensnared in red tape. To compound the problem, Diem’s policy required peasants to pay for land they had been given free by the Viet Minh in the war against the French, thus fueling the resentment.
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It was Diem’s single greatest liability as a leader, this proclivity to alienate groups whose backing he needed. He had created a relatively stable South Vietnam, but in order to do so he had resorted to draconian measures—measures that, while temporarily hindering the ambitions of local Communist activists, ultimately facilitated their objectives by fomenting hatred of the government. The arbitrary and often capricious nature of many arrests by the police angered many in the urban elite, who then found avenues for expression closed off by the regime’s brutal actions. Newspapers whose editorial line or whose reporting displeased the Ngos were suppressed with regularity, and the Nhu-led Vietnam Bureau of Investigation went after subversives with a ruthlessness that would have made FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wince. Many intellectuals bemoaned the pervasive and growing influence of the covert Can Lao party, the reach of which extended into virtually every facet of South Vietnamese political life. Can Lao members, most of them Catholic, held the key positions in the administration, the armed services, the National Assembly, the judiciary, the police, and the trade unions, from which they exercised influence clandestinely, often by way of political and economic blackmail.

Conditions were ripe for a backlash, and it occurred. The second half of 1957 witnessed a marked increase in antiregime activity by hard-pressed Communist cadres and other victims of regime repression. On July 17, for example, armed men gunned down seventeen patrons in a bar in Chau Doc. On September 14, the district chief of My Tho and his family were stopped on a highway in broad daylight and assassinated in cold blood. On October 10, a bomb thrown into a café in Saigon wounded thirteen people, including two plainclothes police officers. And on October 22, thirteen U.S. servicemen were injured in three separate attacks directed at American installations in Saigon.
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A new insurgency had begun, provoked by Diem’s suffocating repression, though few non-Vietnamese perceived the change at the time.
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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. As 1957 began, Fall felt restless at home in the United States. He longed to be back in the Vietnam that captivated and charmed him, the Vietnam that his wife, Dorothy, called his mistress and that he referred to as a “bad love affair.” Although Dorothy was pregnant with their first child that spring, Fall sought and secured an invitation from the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington to spend three months in country examining developments since partition in 1954.
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He arrived in June 1957. “I keep looking over the roadsides in the usual wide and wary sweeps of wartimes,” he wrote in an early letter to Dorothy, “but there’s nothing more dangerous in sight than a buffalo emerging suddenly from the underbrush. The [French] watchtowers, now showing the wear and tear of the war years and of neighboring scavengers eager to use their bricks for building materials, are unmanned. The country’s at peace at last … but for how long?”

The question assumed more urgency as Fall’s visit wore on. He compared the U.S. presence favorably to that of the French (“they want to go home p.d.q.,” he wrote of the Americans; “no colonialists they”), but as he traveled the countryside and interrogated people from all walks of life, he grew despondent. His alarm increased when he compared notes with François Sully, a fellow veteran of the French Resistance in World War II who reported for
Time
and would later write for
Newsweek
before being expelled by Diem for writing negatively of the regime. Though government officials assured Fall that South Vietnam was stable and the security situation under control, his findings indicated the opposite. 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. The result indicated a clear link. Saigon, Fall observed, was ringed by villages whose leaders had been assassinated and replaced by Communists.

For Fall, the finding was highly significant. The killings were not random; they conformed to a pattern. The victims were village chiefs who had been landlords and were not much loved by the villagers. The insurgents got the double benefit of being Robin Hoods to the local population and putting other village notables on notice that they could be next. When Saigon appointed a new acting village chief, chances were he too would soon be found with a machete in his back or a bullet in his head. How would number three on the list respond? Simple, Fall surmised: Unless he wanted to die a martyr’s death, he’d quietly declare his fidelity to the revolution. And just like that, another village would have gone Communist. The change would be invisible to the outsider; everyday life would go on as before. ARVN units coming through the village would be greeted courteously, but the insurgents who came through later would get the intelligence and the rice and the use of the U.S.-supplied radio set. The ARVN hadn’t been outfought per se, but it had been “outadministered,” which in the end would matter even more.
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