Fire in the Lake (17 page)

In 1955 Ngo Dinh Thuc set up a Personalist school for civil servants in Vinh Long with the intention of persuading them to renounce their egotistical strivings and accept with enthusiasm that enlightened rule of the Ngos. The school did not last long, but the Ngos persisted in their attempt at indoctrination with a series of large-scale political organizations. Founded in 1954, the “National Revolutionary Movement” five years later claimed a million and a half members “grouping in [their] midst revolutionary forces from all classes of the population.”
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Though the number of its members was probably exaggerated, the NRM did have a sizable following for the reason that its leadership was coextensive with the regular administration, and the officials forced the peasants to join. In addition to the NRM the Ngos founded a series of specialized political control groups: the National Revolutionary Civil Servants’ League, the Republican Youth Movement, and the Women’s Solidarity League — the latter two comprising paramilitary units for the defense of the regime. These organizations were also fairly well subscribed to, membership generally being concomitant with any form of employment in the government.
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In the case of the Women’s Solidarity League the ambition of the members had to be quite overpowering, as Madame Nhu took great pleasure in sitting on a raised dais to watch her women performing judo falls on men or marching to stirring patriotic tunes.

While it was possible to argue that these organizations had their roots in the traditional village community groups or, alternately, that they derived from Communist models, the dominant strain in them was clearly Vichyite. And by no accident. During the period 1940–1945 the French created a number of Vichyite organizations for the Vietnamese — youth groups, sports groups, and so forth — that enjoyed considerable success in Saigon. Nhu admired the Communist organizations and would have liked to imitate them, but the Vichyite groups were the only mass organizations he and his Catholic officials knew anything about. And he did not understand the function of these. The activity of his “revolutionary” organizations consisted almost entirely of lectures. The NRM officials would lecture the peasants, and the Ngos in their turn would lecture the officials. And it was difficult to say which group suffered the most.

Taken together, the Ngos formed a royal family — a royal family that ruled by fits and starts, in a kind of vacuum. The American officials continued to hope that Diem would finally dispense with some of his relatives and rule through the structure of government. But Diem — much like Chiang Kai-shek — trusted no one else. Apart from those few whom he familiarly “adopted” into his patriarchal clan, he kept his distance from his officials, turning them away with a cold, aristocratic hauteur. Both Diem and Nhu hated to delegate authority. The president would usually work for some sixteen to eighteen hours a day. Each night he would retire with a great stack of papers to sit up into the early hours of the morning in a pathetic attempt to oversee every detail of the administration from the movement of spies to the placement of shrubs about the palace. He did not seem to be able to separate the important from the trivial. For a time he signed all the exit visas for the country himself.

Physically unable to run the entire government, he and Nhu took the next best course of attempting to insure that no cooperation could possibly exist between any two agencies or any two units of the army. The brothers would interfere directly and without warning at all levels of the government, replacing a district chief here, cutting off a credit there, and sending a battalion into operation without the knowledge of its divisional commander. In 1954 Nhu created a secret network of Catholic refugees, whom he placed at strategic points throughout the government to oversee all the rest of the government officials. The Can Lao Nhan Vi Cach Mang Dang, or Revolutionary Personalist Labor Party, as his organization was known, had immense power, if only because all the other government officials assumed its omnipotence. Under the general aegis of his Can Lao chief, Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen, Nhu built up not one, but ten separate secret intelligence agencies, all of which competed to bring him news of traitors, spies, and foreign plots. The political counselor acted as though he knew what all of them were doing, but the amount of intelligence so produced and the necessity for self-protective fabrications on the part of all the agents in fact prevented him from knowing anything of the sort.
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Officials would occasionally disappear or rise to sudden, unwanted prominence, and that would be that. The inner ring of intelligence agencies, of course, quite neutralized the outer ring, whose job it was to catch Communists. The only consolation for the Diem regime was perhaps that the Communists, who eventually infiltrated both rings in large numbers, were quite as badly informed by the system as everybody else.

All things considered, the Ngo family seemed to have only one great talent, and that was for inducing a state of profound, indeed vertiginous, boredom in almost everyone — a boredom punctured only by moments of terror. As Ho Chi Minh was laconic in formal speeches, the Ngos were voluble. When interviewed by American journalists, Diem would often lecture from four to six hours at a time on his own philosophy of government and the congruence between his own family history and the history of Vietnam. And, unlike Ho Chi Minh, he had not a grain of humor. For his part, Ngo Dinh Nhu would spend hours of his working day composing high-flown sentences for his public speeches. At night he would settle down to lecture American officials on the true nature of Vietnamese society, on the evils of Communism and capitalism, on the mysteries of guerrilla warfare, and the differences between the spiritual East and the materialist West. Certain officials, such as the CIA chief, John Richardson, would listen for hours, awed by the intellectualism, convinced that they were sounding the depths of unfathomable Asia. For others who wished to get something done or to obtain specific answers to specific questions, these sessions were an exquisite torture. On one celebrated occasion when the American embassy forced the Nhus (for their own good) to entertain yet another U.S. congressman for dinner, the Nhus talked from 8
P.M.
until four o’clock in the morning, whereupon the congressman, felled by whiskey and jet lag, had to be carried out of the palace.

The alliance of the Ngo family and the United States was, quite obviously, an ill-matched one. The Americans wanted an able administrator, a strong leader, a man of the people — “another Magsaysay,” as they put it — and Diem was none of these things. Though the American officials spoke significantly of his experience as an administrator, the president had in fact very little experience, and that in the small, far-off country of the Annamese protectorate. Born a mandarin, he had grown up under the tutelage of that older generation of Catholic mandarins who believed in the resurrection of the traditional state. His sense of patriotism came from the elitist tradition of the mandarinate and the Church, and he was, as the Vietnamese said, by temperament less a priest than a monk. In a time of intense anti-French activity, Diem neither formed nor joined a political party, where the real training for independence might be had. He saw himself as a man of destiny, responsible for the nation by right of birth and superior virtue. His career was a stalagmite of refusals.
Plus royal que le roi,
he held himself aloof from the conflict, waiting for that moment of destiny that God or Fate had already arranged in heaven. And when that moment came, he felt himself justified by it, all his hopes and theories confirmed — never quite understanding that the moment came less as a result of his own virtue than as the result of intervention by a large and interested foreign power. Writing of Diem as he was in 1962, Robert Shaplen perceptively observed that though Diem provoked strong opinions in Saigon,

… there was a peculiar impersonal quality to everything that was said about him, as if, despite the urgency of the moment, everyone were talking about a figure in history, already remote and shadowy. The words one heard — “courageous,” “proud,” “patriotic,” “cold,” “detached,” “uninspiring” — sounded like clichés rather than characteristics of a living, breathing man who held his country’s future in his hands. The image was oddly wooden, the portrait unreal, as if there were some doubt as to its authenticity.

When one met Diem, this sense of unreality was borne out. He was a short, broadly built man with a round face and a shock of black hair, who walked and moved jerkily, as if on strings. He always dressed in white and looked as if he were made out of ivory. His self-absorption became apparent as soon as he started to speak.… His dark eyes shone, but they seemed to be looking through his listener, through the walls of his palace, through everything, and one experienced an almost eerie sense of listening to a soliloquy delivered in another time and place by a character in an allegorical play.
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And perhaps after all those years of isolation Diem did find something unreal about the fact of himself governing a country full of flesh-and-blood people. It was as if he had made an image of himself — an image that was static, two-dimensional, like an icon hung in a museum whose significance has long been forgotten. For Diem was not truly a traditional ruler — he was a reactionary, and like so many reactionaries, he idealized the past and misconceived the present. His whole political outlook was founded in nostalgia — nostalgia for a country that did not exist except in the Confucian texts, where the sovereign governed entirely by ritual and the people looked up to him with a distant, filial respect. Diem realized that Vietnam had changed. But he saw it as his duty to restore the old society and preserve it from the corrupting influences of the West, not by efficient measures but by moral example. “We want,” he said, “to re-arm the Vietnamese citizen morally… to reinforce the spiritual cohesion… which accounts for the capacity to enjoy for many centuries a largely decentralised system without falling into anarchy.”
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Diem’s Catholicism, far from opening him up to new ideas, only persuaded him that government by ritual and moral instruction could work, as indeed it seemed to in the ironclad, priest-ridden villages of the north and center. What he did not realize was that such parochial governments could operate merely because the French protected them and organized the administration of the country. His ambition to restore the old society therefore resembled that of the paternalistic French colons who had opposed the reformist programs of the metropolitan administrators — the difference being that while the French wished to keep the modern sector for themselves, Diem did not recognize its importance. For him, the modern world was Saigon, that parasite city that fattened from the blood of the countryside and the lucre of the West. Unlike Ho Chi Minh, he saw no distinction between modernization and the corruption that had accompanied foreign rule. The French had protected him from such an insight and left him helpless before their own achievement.

Finally, the Ngo family came from an unfortunate conjunction of worlds. Like so many former colonials, Diem and Nhu were fascinated by the West, though they had set themselves up against it: colonialism and Communism were joined in their minds as the two great evils, the two great enemies of Vietnam. At the beginning Diem was influenced by the Americans to the point where he accepted many of their suggestions with eagerness. But he understood their general goals no better than he understood Marxism-Leninism. Despite their Western education, he and his brother had absorbed nothing of the scientific, positivist outlook of the West. They knew nothing about management, even less about economics.
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Diem “thought in a bundle,” as the Vietnamese said of those who had not mastered Western systematic thought.
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As their interests were confined to metaphysics and the sonorous abstractions of French philosophy, their Western education merely confused them, bringing them personalism and Vichyite style, without the substance of the French Vichyite regime. Most Americans looked upon Ngo Dinh Can as the most primitive and backward of the Ngos. But Can, the one brother without any Western education, was in fact the best administrator of them all. Unlike Diem and Nhu, he had a consistency of purpose and a down-to-earth approach to the politics of his region.
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The other two lived half in one world, half in their own confused perception of another. Unable to reconcile the two, they lived in a constant state of insecurity and defensiveness with regard to both Americans and Vietnamese.

While the Ngo brothers were essentially pathetic figures, their regime was an indissoluble mixture of nightmare and farce. The farce lay generally in the cities, among the people supported by the American aid program and the realms where Madame Nhu could whimsically enforce an anti-divorce law or a ban on dancing.
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The nightmare lay generally in the countryside, among the rice farmers further impoverished by the American importation of food and the new influx of money to the cities, and where no laws held. The difference was, however, invisible to most Americans.

two

Among those officials and journalists flying in to survey the breaking crisis of 1961 there were very few who understood where the root of the trouble lay. Those who believed that the Saigon government itself was at fault tended to blame the Ngo family itself. Visiting Vietnam on special assignment for President Kennedy, the economist, Eugene Staley, reported that the Diem government would have to carry out wide-ranging reforms in its administration and armed forces before American aid could have any effect. Journalists, such as Robert Shaplen, criticized Diem for alienating the peasants by his oppressive measures, raising a host of secondary questions: Why were the American advisers not having any influence on Diem? Were they giving him the wrong advice? Why did they not insist on a sweeping program of reform? The same questions were to preoccupy for a decade a host of officials and journalists, including such experienced and politically diverse men as Douglas Pike, Chester Bowles, and the British counterinsurgency expert, Sir Robert Thompson.
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These men saw Diem as the enemy of the anti-Communist project. They wrote history using Diem as the principal actor: “Diem,” said Pike, “tore apart the fabric of Vietnamese society.” But the United States government had created the Diem regime, and in 1961 the question was whether their creation had any autonomous existence or any roots in the countryside.