Fire in the Lake (16 page)

With a few brave exceptions, the Americans in Saigon at that period did not so much as criticize the repressive legislation or even acknowledge the existence of the prison camps. Instead, they concentrated on describing the “positive achievements” of the regime, shifting their emphasis slowly from the theme of democracy to that of “strong leadership.” Wolf Ladejinsky, for instance, the land reform expert who went to Vietnam to help Diem with his agrarian programs, argued in the
Reporter:
“The overwhelming majority of the people in South Vietnam are not affected by the regime’s authoritarianism. They have probably never enjoyed greater freedom in the conduct of their life and work or benefited in a greater variety of ways. Impatience with the government on the part of those intellectuals who want power for the asking doesn’t extend to the peasantry.”
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Dr. Fishel further explained: “The peoples of Southeast Asia are not, generally speaking, sufficiently sophisticated to understand what we mean by democracy and how they can exercise and protect their own political rights.” It was, he continued, naïve to suppose that a “new” state that had no traditions of democracy and no enlightened electorate could immediately adopt a Western-style democratic system. What Vietnam needed for the moment was strong leadership — and strong leadership necessarily implied the concentration of great power. Popular support for the regime could be best assured once the police and security services throughout the country had been adequately developed.
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In fact, of course, American officials in Saigon were not at all anxious to see Diem adopt an electoral democracy. Their attitude sprang less from a principle than from a prediction. According to all intelligence estimates, the Communists would win more than a majority of the votes in a free election. The main objective of the U.S. officials was to build up the Saigon government to the point where it could deter the northern regime and suppress the southern Communists. To that end they were spending some 80 percent of the entire aid budget each year on the development of the former French colonial forces and another large slice on the creation of a civil guard and other security and intelligence services. Rather than pressure Diem to create a consensus among the political factions, or find a base of popular support, they urged him to increase his control over the countryside. And Diem was all too willing to oblige. Within the first two years in office he dispensed with the French system of village elections and replaced the local village councils with government officials appointed from the outside — many of these Catholics. At the same time he issued laws under which his officials imprisoned members of every political faction along with some of the active Communist agents in the south. As his official biographer explained:

The fundamental fact about Vietnam, and which is not generally well understood, is that historically our political system has been based not on the concept of the management of the public affairs by the people or their representatives, but rather by an enlightened sovereign and an enlightened government.…

The problem that confronts a man like President Ngo Dinh Diem, well grounded in traditional administrative principles, but also familiar with the Western political systems, is therefore one of giving Vietnam a solid moral basis on which to rebuild a strong, healthy democratic State. To think of the form before the substance is certainly to run into failure. The main concern of President Ngo Dinh Diem is therefore to destroy the sources of demoralization, however powerful, before getting down to the problem of endowing Vietnam with a democratic apparatus in the Western sense of the word.
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Certain American journalists would later accuse Fishel and U.S. officials of deliberately deceiving the American public about the whole nature of the Diem regime and its programs. But the matter was not quite so simply stated. On the one hand the officials had to believe in the essential goodness of their policy; on the other hand they had to believe that Diem shared their goals. If the second was the natural assumption for Americans to make about their Asian dependents — many in the Roosevelt administration had believed the same of Chiang Kai-shek
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— it was also a necessary assumption for those involved in trying to implement their own policy through a foreigner. Many officials would go so far as to suppress their own awareness of the Diemist repressions, while others would rationalize them on the grounds that such measures were necessary in this moment of crisis. In the future, with American advice, matters would certainly be put to rights.

The result was that the American officials ended by knowing very little about Ngo Dinh Diem or the pressures upon him. Until the NLF forced them to take notice, few of them knew very much more than what Senators Kennedy and Mansfield had known seven years before. They would go on assuming that Diem was jailing Communist agents; they would go on believing that Diem headed a strong, Asian-style government for people not “sophisticated” enough for a full democracy. The Diem regime would, in other words, become a fiction to them, an autonomous creation of the mind. For in reality the Saigon government bore no resemblance whatsoever to a strong, Asian-style government. Indeed, apart from the democratic constitution with which Diem had endowed it, the government resembled nothing so much as an attenuated French colonial regime.

In putting together his “republic” Diem merged the administrations of Cochin China and Annam; he added a few provinces and abolished the elected village councils. Apart from these measures, Diem — for all his talk of the need for “daring reforms” — made no changes in the administration at all. In Saigon the same ministries filled the same colonial office buildings. The civil servants shuffled the same papers their predecessors had filed before them. Many of the civil servants themselves remained the same. By 1959 over a third of them dated their term of service from before the advent of the Bao Dai government.
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Though Diem disliked and mistrusted these older functionaries for their Francophilia, he made no great effort to replace them. The one civil service academy, the National Institute of Administration, was much too small to meet the need, and in any case trained men more for law careers in France than for any local form of employment. What was most strange was that Diem, this proud nationalist, did not even symbolically dissociate his regime from the government he so despised as a “French puppet.” The Republic of Vietnam had the same flag and the same anthem as the Bao Dai government, and Diem himself lived in the governor’s palace.
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Diem’s failure to reorganize the administration had some strange consequences. For lack of judicial reform, for example, the Vietnamese courts followed the French colonial code that adjudicated disputes between persons on the basis of the region from which the parties came. When a dispute involved people from two different regions, the courts had to resort to French international law.
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Equally disturbing, Diem centralized the government without relocating the powers of the most important French officials, the provincial
résidents,
with the result that power fell to whichever official decided to take it. In many cases power fell into a void, for in six years Diem did not fill many of the posts left open at the time of the French withdrawal; he did not even establish a government presence in certain parts of the country. At the national level Diem neither assumed the powers of the French governor nor redistributed them to others. He had a cabinet, but he held few cabinet meetings, conducted no budget reviews, and prepared no comprehensive economic plan. When one department ran out of funds, it would refer its needs directly to the Americans, and the Americans would make up the deficit without any notion of how, or indeed if, the money would be spent.
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As the Diem regime grew older, the administration began to take on more and more of the properties of a sponge. Money, plans, and programs poured into it and nothing came out the other end. This situation was only to be expected, for under the colonial regime the French had exercised the only initiative, the only authority. With their departure the old-line functionaries seemed to lose all powers of forward motion. As one Michigan State University observer noted, their goal seemed to be to put off all decisions until the day after their retirement.
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In the meantime they guarded their positions by erecting mountains of red tape to bury any program they might have to take responsibility for. Under the French regime the civil servants had looked upon the administration not as a part of a nation-state working for the benefit of the Vietnamese people, but as an exploitative, partially inscrutable, and in any case foreign, concern. They had joined the administration in order to belong to what seemed the most powerful and interesting part of the country, and to take their share of French wealth — as it were, a perfectly reasonable tariff on the foreigners. Early on in his reign, Diem, the puritanical mandarin, issued a law against corruption, recommending the death penalty for all offenders. The difficulty was that few of his officials shared his moral indignation or understood that their long-term interests would best be served by civic probity: the president had not altered their view of the government or filled the vacuum of authority left by the French. For lack of central leadership, private and sectarian politics overwhelmed all national concerns, and corruption abounded in all its forms — from bribery to nepotism to graft to outright embezzlement. Fishel and his associates resolutely defended the corruption on the grounds that all Asian governments were corrupt. Yet Diem had in fact inherited a relatively clean administration. The corruption was increasing, and at least partially as a result of his own efforts. Nepotism, certainly, began at home, and it might well have ended there had the Ngo family been any bigger than it was.

For all Diem’s talk of enlightened Confucian governments, the president managed in five years to reduce the administration to a form far more primitive than any Confucian emperor would have countenanced: his own family. To his initial six-man cabinet Diem appointed three of his relatives; two other in-laws served in the most important civil service posts for the bulk of his regime.
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Madame Nhu’s father acted as ambassador to Washington, and Diem’s youngest brother, Ngo Dinh Luyen, served as ambassador to Great Britain and other European countries. His three other brothers were by far the most important people in the government, though they held no official posts. Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc took no specific authority for the state, but as the senior member of the family he remained close to Diem’s councils. (This genial, worldly cleric no doubt found his ambitions best satisfied by the Church, which was, after all, a great deal bigger than Vietnam.)

More directly involved was Ngo Dinh Can. A farouche figure and a bachelor like Diem, Can had lived all of his life with his mother in the family home in Hue. Can had no Western education, and thus very little education at all. With the founding of the Republic he simply assumed power in central Vietnam, and without any official title ruled it as a warlord for the duration of the regime.

The most important of the brothers was, of course, Ngo Dinh Nhu. It was Nhu who had advised Diem to take the dangerous step of attacking the Binh Xuyen — the move that effectively brought Diem to power. Brought to live in the presidential palace after Lansdale’s departure in 1956, he assumed the title of political counselor and a power that perhaps exceeded Diem’s, for Diem listened only to him. Nhu was a striking figure. By contrast to the rotund president he was a lean man with a pale complexion and piercing eyes. He had spent several years in France at the prestigious but archaic school of paleography, the École des Chartes, and was thought by Diem to be the intellectual of the family. He had not in fact the discipline of an intellectual — he merely liked to speak in sonorous abstractions. He craved power for its own sake and created a Byzantine labyrinth about Diem through which to pursue it. His wife, Tran Le Xuan, in no way moderated his craving. A relative of the emperor, she was a woman of great beauty and even greater ambition. Living at the palace as the First Lady, she appropriated to herself much of the public spotlight and the authority over all matters touching upon women and the family. She was outspoken and fiercely competitive, even with her husband and even on the subject of Catholicism — a subject about which she knew nothing until she married Nhu. Possibly, because she was less complicated, less involved in all the Confucian formalities and the intellectualizing, she was a stronger character than either of the two men. With her long red nails and her tight ao dais, she appeared as a physical force that quite overwhelmed the two pale, dry mandarins. Apart from her there was a kind of sterility about the family, an empty fervor.

Ngo Dinh Nhu’s main contribution to the regime was its governing philosophy. “Personalism” or
Nhan Vi,
as the doctrine was known in Vietnamese, had its roots in a distorted mirror image of Communism. Ngo Dinh Nhu had lived in Paris in the 1930’s when the French Catholic intellectuals were searching for a doctrine that held the promise of Communism while remaining conservative — the era of the
Action Française
and the philosophical slide into fascism. After the war Nhu had been impressed by the works of Emmanuel Mounier, the Catholic thinker, and misinterpreted them as a doctrine of the corporate state in which the alienated masses would find unity through participating in certain authoritarian social organizations, and through leaders of superior moral fiber.
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Always a highly abstract affair that lacked the rigorous analysis of Marxism, the doctrine in Nhu’s hands grew into an incomprehensible hodgepodge having something to do with state power, the dignity of the Person (as opposed to the individual), and the virtues of humility, renunciation, and sacrifice. Whether or not Nhu had a clear idea of what he meant by Personalism remained questionable, for, when once pursued by an American graduate student hot for dissertation material, he said that no written statement on the subject perfectly expressed the true philosophy of the regime. In the end what remained from all the abstractions was a certain tone of voice. As one British adviser noticed, the phrase
Nhan Vi
was a “neologism of Chinese roots suggesting rank and thereby hinting that contentment with one’s station might be the quality from the Personalist catalogue the new regime would prize most highly.”
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