Fire in the Lake (15 page)

Under the circumstances, therefore, the American government’s somewhat haphazard decision to back Ngo Dinh Diem found favor with an influential group of American senators. With respect to the political exigencies of the moment, Diem had all the right qualifications. He was a patriot untainted by service to the Japanese or to the wartime French regime. He had the reputation of a man of integrity and an experienced administrator. Most important of all, he was a Catholic and a strong anti-Communist who had had the foresight to come to the United States for help.

Diem’s first act upon arriving in Vietnam was to request American support in transporting and resettling those people who wished to leave the Viet Minh for the French zone of regroupment. The request could not have been more politic from an American point of view, as it permitted U.S. military and civilian welfare services to take up the congenial cause of “saving” Vietnamese from Communism and then from starvation. With the help of the U.S. Seventh Fleet some 860,000 people, the vast majority of them Catholics from the disciplined bishoprics of Phat Diem and Bui Chu, descended upon the south during the three hundred days of the armistice.
¹⁸
The arrival of the refugees provided Diem with his first political base in the south — and an important one at that, for the Catholics were the most highly organized of all the non-Communist political groups. Their arrival also provided Diem with a great deal of favorable publicity in the United States, for like their French predecessors in the nineteenth century, the American Catholic missions were anything but reticent about their good works.

By the summer of 1955 Diem and his American advisers felt confident enough about their position in Vietnam and the United States to go about setting up the legal framework for a new government in the south. In October 1955 Diem organized a referendum to determine whether the state should be a monarchy under Bao Dai or a republic with himself as president. As organized by Ngo Dinh Nhu — and perhaps with excessive efficiency for American tastes — the vote showed a majority of 99 percent for Diem out of the six million ballots counted. Already in July Diem had repudiated the Geneva accords and, specifically, the article proposing a free election between the two regroupment zones. Not content with making a political division of Vietnam, he proceeded to seal the border between the two regions with surgical precision, refusing the DRVN’s request for the opening of trade relations and forbidding even the establishment of a postal exchange — a bitter blow to those thousands of families whose members the war had scattered between north and south. A year later, and largely as a result of international pressure for elections of some sort, he held an election for a constituent assembly and drafted a constitution for the “Republic of Vietnam.”

The United States government expressed its approval of these measures in the most forceful of terms. By 1956 it was paying the Diem regime an average of $270 million a year — or more aid per capita than it spent on any other country in the world except for Laos and Korea.
¹⁹
The U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), composed of some eight hundred officers, took on the job of reorganizing and retraining the Vietnamese army. The U.S. Operations Mission (USOM) was pumping money into the economy and food for refugee relief into the warehouses of Saigon. The mission was also providing funds for a land reform program and a vast project to resettle the northern refugees and the land-hungry peasants of the center. U.S. officials were lyrical in their reports to the press and to Congress, asserting that the Diem regime was on the way to rebuilding the economy and solving the social problems caused by a decade of war. The American press followed suit in more colorful terms. The
Saturday Evening Post
called South Vietnam “the Bright Spot in Asia.” The blurb for the piece proclaimed, “Two years ago at Geneva, South Vietnam was virtually sold down the river to the Communists. Today the spunky little Asian country is back on its own feet, thanks to a ‘mandarin in a sharkskin suit who’s upsetting the Red timetable.’ ”
²⁰
Other periodicals ran stories vaunting the “economic miracle” that Diem had performed.

The new U.S. aid program and the public enthusiasm for the Diem regime were essentially two halves of the same phenomenon — the second reflecting the first almost exclusively without any reference to South Vietnam. For in truth, few Americans in or out of Washington knew anything about the country. If Vietnam was “the keystone to the arch, the finger in the dike,” it was still a very distant and foreign place, whose major interest to Americans lay in its location to the south of China. Not until the crisis of 1961 did American journalists go in any numbers to investigate this new American dependency. The lacuna had a certain importance, for it meant that for the first six years information about the Diem regime came largely from U.S. government sources.
²¹

By far the most prolific of these government sources was the team from Michigan State University led by Diem’s earliest supporter, Dr. Wesley Fishel. Under government contract this team, consisting of some fifty scholars and public administration experts, went to Vietnam in 1955 to reorganize the Diemist administration, the police, and the civil guard. In laying the groundwork for the reorganization, groups of social scientists set out to research the economics and sociology of the Vietnamese village as well as every aspect of Vietnamese government operations. By 1963 it would have been difficult to argue that they had any influence on the Diem regime itself. Still, their studies added a new dimension to the art of international public relations. It did not much matter that a number of the social scientists turned into critics of the Diem regime on their return to the United States: it was enough that they should discuss the regime in terms of “developing administrative structures” and “functional integration of value systems.” The language alone gave the American project in Vietnam an atmosphere of solidity and respectability. It implied (if the authors did not make the direct assertion) that the United States had certain unimpeachable designs for the development of South Vietnam which with its vast resources of technical expertise it could not fail to achieve. The language also implied (and most reassuringly) that those who did not possess such expertise could not possibly speak with any authority on the subject. As Dr. Fishel himself explained, one had to know the whole history and culture of a country in order to understand its process of political and economic development. As the head of the team, Dr. Fishel himself took over the task of explaining how and in what manner the Diem regime was a democracy.

The idea that the mission of the United States was to build democracy around the world had become a convention of American politics in the 1950’s. Among certain circles it was more or less assumed that democracy, that is, electoral democracy combined with private ownership and civil liberties, was what the United States had to offer the Third World. Democracy provided not only the moral basis for American opposition to Communism but the practical method for making that opposition work. Whether American officials actually believed that the Asians and the Africans wanted or needed democracy — and many officials definitely did not — they saw lip service to it as a necessity to selling American overseas commitments to the American people. The American officials and scholars who backed Diem adhered to this convention precisely. During Diem’s visit to the United States in 1957, they wrote speeches for him that produced a gush from the
New York Times
over his deep religious feelings, his “firm concept of human rights,” and his Jeffersonian stance.
²²
They also encouraged Diem to write a constitution that, with its provisions for a president elected by universal suffrage, a unicameral legislature, an independent judiciary, and a wide-ranging bill of rights, looked something like a cross between the constitutions of the United States and the French Fourth Republic. The difficulty was that while Diem agreed with his American advisers completely on issues such as the Catholic refugees and the American aid program, he did not seem to follow them on the issue of democracy.

Diem talked a great deal about democracy, but, as one Vietnamese scholar pointed out, there was a fundamental misunderstanding. What Diem meant by democracy had very little to do with Thomas Jefferson and a great deal to do with the nineteenth-century Vietnamese emperor, Minh Mang. As the reformer of his day, Minh Mang had proposed the creation of a consultative assembly of mandarins to advise him and to give their collective approval to the royal decrees. As Diem once wrote, “Society functions through proper relationships among men at the top.” In an article completed before his rise to power, Diem spoke of the function of the sovereign to behave as a father to his people and to uphold the moral values of the country. “A sacred respect,” he wrote, “is due to the person of the sovereign.… He is the mediator between the people and the Heaven as he celebrates the national cult.” And, he continued, “The magistrate in his official capacity must conduct himself as one participating in a religious rite.” From the fact that Diem had altars erected about his pictures in the streets and a hymn of praise to him sung along with the national anthem, it could be concluded that Diem, at least in some part of his mind, had assumed the role of the Confucian emperor.
²³
And the emperor required not the support but the obedience of his people; he required not a majority, but unanimity. It was thus with some sense of deception that Diem’s American advisers surveyed the results of the elections they had persuaded him to hold and then so carefully publicized in the United States.

For the results of the elections were unequivocal. In the 1955 referendum Diem got 605,025 votes out of a total of 450,000 registered voters in Saigon. According to Bernard Fall, “
Life
in an otherwise wholly laudatory article on Diem remarked innocently… that Diem’s American advisors had told him that a 60 percent ‘success’ would have been quite sufficient, ‘but Diem insisted on 98 percent.’”
²⁴
In the legislative election of 1959, government candidates won seventy-six out of one hundred and twenty-three seats in the National Assembly. That was the official tally. Actually, of the twenty-two government candidates who lost their races almost all of them lost to other government candidates or to independents who favored the government. (Ngo Dinh Nhu, for example, ran and won his seat under the label of an “independent.”) In fact the outcome of the election was never in much doubt, as the Ngos prevented all opposition parties from running and closed down all the newspapers that printed any criticism of the government. One outspoken opposition candidate, the Harvard-educated Dr. Phan Quang Dan, who surprised the government by winning, was refused a seat in the Assembly, and was subsequently jailed and tortured.
²⁵

While the lack of an opposition gave the Assembly a somewhat lopsided look, the Ngos were more than equal to coping with this cosmetic problem. Quite arbitrarily they divided the Assembly into two groups — a government majority of one hundred and seven, and a “minority” of sixteen, both of which tended to vote with the government. The arrangement did not seem at all unreasonable to the Ngos. As Madame Nhu once told an American university audience, “They [Vietnamese living in the U.S.] ignore the decisions of the Vietnamese people manifested in free elections in order to decree that our executive lacks popular support, and to complain at the same time in the most illogical manner that our legislature is no more than a rubber stamp for the executive.” She paused and then continued, “About that question of the rubber stamp argument, I have repeatedly said, but what’s wrong to rubber stamp the laws we approve?”
²⁶
Madame Nhu’s remark may have had some double meaning, for Diem actually gave the Assembly very few bills to vote on. It was not that he abused his constitutional privilege to rule by executive decree. He simply sent down orders from his office and no one inquired what legal status they held.

The task of extricating American democratic principles from these events was left to Dr. Fishel. And just after the election of 1959 Fishel made a heroic, Houdini-Iike attempt with an article in the
New Leader
entitled “Vietnam’s Democratic One-Man Rule.”

Ngo Dinh Diem has all the authority and all the power one needs to operate a dictatorship, but he isn’t operating one! Here is a leader who speaks the language of democracy, who holds the power of a dictator, who governs a Republic in accordance with the terms of a Constitution. The Constitution was written at his request by a National Assembly which he caused to be elected by the people of the Republic. Ngo Dinh Diem did not
have
to do this. His authority and power at that moment were so absolute.
²⁷

Dr. Fishel presumably felt that the fact that Diem had so generously adopted a constitution excused him from all obligation to abide by it. Such must have been Fishel’s meaning, for in the first five years of his term in office Diem violated every article in the constitution, concentrating his attacks most heavily on the bill of rights.

In 1955 the president, against the express prohibition of the Geneva Agreements, launched an Anti-Communist Denunciation Campaign, a program of political re-education aimed at the Viet Minh and their supporters. Ten months later his officials claimed to have obtained the rally of one hundred thousand former Viet Minh to the government and “entirely destroyed the predominant Communist influence of the previous nine years.”
²⁸
Diem obviously did not consider their efforts adequate. In 1956 he issued an ordinance calling for the arrest and detention of persons deemed dangerous to the state. The order gave legal grounds for the creation of political prison camps throughout the country and the suspension of all habeas corpus laws. In 1959 he issued yet another law establishing military tribunals to deal with “infringements of national security” — tribunals that permitted the accused no right of defense or appeal and handed out only sentences of life imprisonment or death. This same law abrogated the right of assembly in such a definitive manner as to forbid not only demonstrations but assemblies of over seven people — or most family gatherings. In order to be sure of covering all criminals and all crimes against the state, Diem wrote the laws in the most general of terms, never, for instance, specifying the groups to be considered hostile to the regime or the methods to be used by his officials. In 1956 official estimates put the prison camp population at twenty thousand — a figure that could be correct only to order of magnitude, since no government authority supervised the camps and no outside inspections were permitted. Visiting American congressmen perhaps supposed that all the political prisoners were Communists. The camps in fact contained a wide variety of people, from the leaders of the sects and the smaller political parties to the uncooperative members of the press and the trade unions.
²⁹