Fire in the Lake (39 page)

Lyndon Johnson preserved and guarded it perhaps better than any of his predecessors. Brought up in the small towns of Texas, he began his career as a populist of the old school, a defender of the small farmer and businessman against the vast industrial interests of the East. As a congressman under Roosevelt in the 1930’s and 1940’s he saw the countryside change rapidly as a result of government intervention. He identified with Roosevelt, with government power, and with the notion of a strong presidency. And he believed in the essential goodness of the United States and its almost infinite capacity for righting the wrongs of mankind. “We must move the country forward,” Kennedy said, but Johnson saw Kennedy as the phrasemaker and himself as the instrument of that progress. At home he intended to fulfill Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation with his own “Great Society” program, and abroad… One of the Vietnamese officers understood the implication exactly. “Mr. Johnson,” he said, “we are a small country and we don’t have pretensions to building a Great Society. We just want to have a better society.” But the irony was lost on Johnson. Even more than Roosevelt, who claimed to understand China because of his family connections with it, Johnson tended to see the world as an extension of his own person. In April 1965 he offered the North Vietnamese the opportunity to participate in a billion-dollar American development project for Southeast Asia, centering on a vast TVA-like development of the Mekong River. It would have been the greatest piece of pork-barrel legislation in history — except that the Mekong River does not run through North Vietnam. But perhaps that could be fixed, too. The idea that the United States could not master the problems of a country as small and underdeveloped as Vietnam did not occur to Johnson as a possibility.

Nor did it occur to many other Americans at the time of Honolulu. The Americans who sat with Johnson at the conference table made a picture of that confidence — a heroic frieze portraying the weight and substance behind the Vietnam policy. Beside the President sat Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman; Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, John Gardner; Assistant Defense Secretary John McNaughton; McGeorge Bundy, the President’s chief foreign policy adviser; General Maxwell Taylor; Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp; General Earle Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the Honorable Averell Harriman, Ambassador Leonard Unger, Governor John Burns of Hawaii, General William C. Westmoreland, and Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. If not each of them individually, then all of them taken together gave a fair representation of the power and dominion of the United States. Some of them were brilliant men, and all of them had long and distinguished careers in the high offices of government, of big business, and the universities. They were the essence of professional Washington, the men who had made or influenced policy over the course of several administrations. Though some of them would not have put the matter in quite the same terms as Johnson, all of them believed in the willingness and capacity of the United States to achieve the program of Honolulu in Vietnam. They were powerful men, after all, and, being powerful, they were self-confident.

Too self-confident, perhaps, to notice that the conference, seen as a frieze, had a curious lopsided look to it. On the other side of the table from the Americans were three Vietnamese; in the center, Air Vice-Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky. Ky was not wearing his pearl-handled revolver and his black flying suit with the purple silk handkerchief tied around his neck, but this catlike figure with his rakish moustache still provided some contrast to the gentlemen sitting opposite. For the past eight months the thirty-five-year-old bomber pilot had been acting premier of the Republic of Vietnam. Beside him at the table sat General Nguyen Van Thieu, the chief of state and chairman of the Armed Forces Council. Five years older than Ky, he had a more solid look about him. Reportedly the brains of the junta, he had been Ky’s closest associate in the series of coups that brought them to power, but he remained an unknown quantity even to those Americans arriving from Saigon. On Ky’s other side sat the defense minister, General Nguyen Huu Co, with his strange snake’s head, the yellow skin stretched tight across his small, high cheekbones. Despite his looks, Co was an affable man with a taste for French champagne and pretty women. He had, it was said, made certain investments in Vietnamese real estate soon to be acquired by the Americans.

“The Vietnamese chiefs of state today pledged their country to ‘the work of the social revolution, the goal of free self-government, the attack on ignorance and disease.’”

The
New York Times
was undoubtedly correct, but somehow its prose failed to convey the quality of the statement, or the extravagance of the gesture that President Johnson had made in calling such a conference. The frieze was there. It accurately recorded the events that were to come, but those men who sat for their portraits did not realize what it signified.

6

Politicians and Generals

Lullaby

There were many nights

Many, many nights

When I nursed and whispered to my child:

Sleep tight my child

Then when you grow up

When you grow up

You will sell your country to become a mandarin.

— A popular song in Saigon, 1969, by Mien Duc Thang.

one

The fall of the Diem regime had come like the breaking of a great river dam, the political energy of the cities overflowing and using itself up in the act of destruction. Having cleared away the barrier of the regime, the rebels seemed to have no positive ideas, no energy for the task of building a government. Rather than organizing and pressuring the generals for reforms, they indulgently returned to their private pursuits: the intellectuals to their endless discussions, the students to their jazz music and their university elections, the Buddhists to the obscure world from which they had come. Hastily assembled from among the most prestigious of the generals, the new military junta barricaded itself into the general staff headquarters on the outskirts of town and occupied its time with bickering over the distribution of army posts.
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There was an air of relief, of celebration. The political prisoners returned from Poulo Condore, the bars and nightclubs reopened, and the bar girls came back like painted swallows to settle in the bars of Tu Do Street. At the same time there was an air of uncertainty and fear for the future. Who, after all, did the “revolution” belong to? A truly popular uprising, it had no single leader and no political dynamic except that of revulsion for the ineffectual tyranny of Diem. The generals had executed the plot, but their coup came as a distinct anticlimax to the outburst of popular demonstrations. The most prestigious of the generals joined the coup only at the thirteenth hour. General Tran Thien Khiem, for instance, had been engaged in another officers’ plot; General Ton That Dinh, a Catholic and a distant member of the royal family, had until the day before the coup appeared to be working for a phony coup planned by Ngo Dinh Nhu himself.
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Because almost every general had been involved in one or more of the officers’ plots, it was only a matter of chance that the Don-Minh coup succeeded and the others failed. No one was more conscious of this than the junta members themselves. While they made hopeful proclamations of national unity, they took care to post the most powerful of their brother officers to distant parts of the country.

Their difficulty, however, lay not so much in smothering the opposition as in creating a government. The bluff professional soldier, General Duong Van Minh, inspired some trust among the Buddhists, students, and intellectuals — but less, it seemed, for what he did than for what he did not do. He was the chairman of the junta, and yet he refused to appear in public — to give the Vietnamese a picture of the new regime — or to set about reorganizing the government. Undecided about setting themselves up as the state authority, he and his fellow junta members did little to create a framework of civilian institutions through which a political authority might emerge. In all the months of plotting they seemed to have thought little beyond the coup itself.

The government was leaderless — and perhaps predictably so, for, insofar as the coup represented more than a change of personalities, it represented a victory for the southerners against the northerners and centrists, a victory for the landlords against the mandarins. Like many of the Saigon students and intellectuals, the generals came mostly from the Cochin Chinese bourgeoisie. They were people who lacked any tradition of self-government and who, as men from the rich provinces, considered government more a threat or a nuisance than a way of life.
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Still, as Vietnamese, they could not conceive of government as a federal system. For years they had relied on the French to provide the authority for a system they could not themselves manage. After twelve years of Diem they both feared a strong central government that would forceably reduce the complexities of southern politics, and feared the anarchy that would result from its absence.

But the choice could not be made in the abstract. And in the winter of 1963 there was no one in the cities who possessed that revolutionary legitimacy that the Vietnamese knew as the Mandate of Heaven. Lacking such authority, the generals could do little but wait and watch the slowly shifting colors of the political landscape. The Americans — officials and reporters — attributed their inaction to personal weakness, or worse, to their “neutralist sympathies,” but the generals exercised only realism by refusing to push forward with some arbitrary plan. For the Vietnamese there either was a “correct solution” or there was no solution at all. And in that winter the prospects for a national anti-Communist movement arising did not look bright.

In the countryside the non-Communist political groups had grown considerably weaker since 1954. Between them, the NLF and the Diem regime had managed to disable, if not to destroy, most of the local governments that had resisted the Viet Minh — the one exception being the Catholics. The landlords were gone from much of the Delta. Some continued to collect rents through the GVN officials, but the vast majority had lost their exclusive hold over the peasants. The Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai had survived the Diemist repressions, but their area of influence had contracted to a few provinces along the Cambodian border: An Giang, Chau Doc, and Tay Ninh. Because their greatest desire was to avoid occupation by either of the large armies, no government in Saigon could count on them for active military support. In central Vietnam the old Vietnamese Kuomintang, the VNQDD, held onto a few thousand adherents in the villages and the cities. Led by a group of rather tired old men, it remained totally autarchic — anti-Communist, anti-Buddhist, and anti whatever part of the Saigon government challenged its rule over the villages.

Unlike the French, the Diem regime had paid very little attention to conciliating the non-Vietnamese minorities: the Cambodians of the western Delta, the Cham of central Vietnam, the montagnard tribes, and the urban Chinese. The last two were of particular importance — the montagnards because they inhabited the strategic Central Highlands, the Chinese because they controlled virtually all the trade and commerce of the country. Over the years the Ngos had attempted to reduce these groups’ importance by settling Vietnamese in the Highlands (on montagnard land) and by insisting that the Chinese accept Vietnamese citizenship and Vietnamese government control. They had succeeded only in alienating both groups. By 1963 the montagnards were divided between tribes that supported the NLF and tribes that, largely because of the work of the American Special Forces and the CIA, claimed their independence from all Vietnamese authorities. The Chinese, for their part dependent on the trade through Saigon, held themselves aloof from political commitment and, in general, from Vietnamese society.

This patchwork of sects and ethnic minorities was further complicated by factionalism within each group. The Chinese were divided into a number of societies, the montagnards into numerous language groups. The VNQDD had three factions, the Hoa Hao at least four, and the Cao Dai a masterful eight, none of which agreed even on the terms of disagreement with each other, and all of whom opposed any intrusion by the central government.

In the cities alone could an American-backed government expect to find mass support. As an economic enterprise, Saigon was, as always, a capon tied to the strings of the international market. During periods of war it lived off foreign aid instead of foreign trade and grew more and more dependent. The political repression of the intellectuals aside, Saigon profited under the Diem regime, and could expect to do so as long as its armies kept the NLF out of the city itself and American support continued. The French arrangement, in other words, continued to work in the cities as it did not in the countryside. The one difficulty with this arrangement was that it did not operate as anything more than a negative political force.

In Saigon and Hue the fall of the Diem regime called forth a mass of new political parties and newspapers and a whirlwind of rhetoric consisting of denunciations of the old regime and proposals for and criticisms of the new. The debates came as a welcome change after the uniformity of the Diemist press, but they revealed all too clearly the absence of any coherent political force. Such “parties” as existed were fragmentary and generally unstable coalitions formed around one or two intellectuals or civil servants. In Saigon, it was said, two men constituted a party, three men a party and a faction. The largest of these parties, the Dai Viet (of which there were three factions) was little more than a network of useful contacts for prominent officers and civil servants. And none of these parties had a plan, a program, even an ambition to organize in the countryside or among the poor of the cities.

The smallness and incoherence of the urban parties had been a hallmark of Vietnamese politics since the colonial period. During the years of French liberalism in the 1930’s, Saigon had supported dozens of such parties from the Constitutionalists to the Trotskyites. Since that time none of them had grown to any size or penetrated beyond the suburbs. French, and later American, analysts provided complicated cultural explanations for this phenomenon, but the most convincing explanation is economic. The group of intellectuals and civil servants from which these parties came constituted a privileged elite — an elite such as exists only in colonized countries, an elite that sustains itself not on any local base of production but on the work of the foreigners. Frantz Fanon has argued with regard to African countries that the role of this elite is to serve as an intermediary between the foreigners and the natives of the interior. In periods of colonial liberalism it forms parties not to organize the people against the foreigners but to manipulate the foreigners for its own ends, using the threat of the discontented masses as its means of leverage. It demands independence for the country, but it cannot produce it, for its interests lie not in building a nation but in assuming exclusive control over what the foreigners have created.
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Granted independence, it will attempt to continue to act as an intermediary with the foreigners and to defend its own exclusive entrée into the trade market, the higher educational system, and the government bureaucracy. The Saigon intelligentsia was such a group under the Americans as under the French. By virtue of its success as an intermediary, it became a group of people with a very different culture from the rest of the Vietnamese.