Fire in the Lake (53 page)

11

Elections

My birthday is in late August. The greatest birthday present you could give me is a national election.

— President Johnson to Generals Ky and Thieu at Guam, March 1967
¹

You journalists make things so complicated. Elections are really quite simple. You can’t expect most voters to know who is good and who is bad. Either they don’t bother to come and vote, or else they choose their candidates at random. Far better to let us choose the candidates for them.

— a Vietnamese district chief
²

Candidates are like birds without feathers. We, the voters, give a candidate his feathers — each vote being another feather. When he has enough feathers, off he flies — and we never see him again.

— a Vietnamese villager
³

A month or so after the bloody end of the Buddhist crisis, the public relations machinery of the U.S. mission went into high gear on the subject of the elections scheduled for early fall. The press corps was alerted; ranks of distinguished Americans were invited to watch the balloting for a constitutional assembly that would in the succeeding months write a constitution for South Vietnam. To the mission, at least, the elections appeared a momentous event in Vietnamese history. The Vietnamese, said Ambassador Lodge, “never had elections on a national basis and a national question. It’s never happened in their whole history.” As Bernard Fall pointed out, the ambassador had not got his facts quite straight: the South Vietnamese had participated in something like twelve elections, the last two of them financed by the Americans under the Diem regime. The last election had taken place just a few months before Cabot Lodge’s arrival as ambassador.
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But then historical memory was never the forte of Americans in Vietnam.

In the United States the liberal social scientists who favored the war delivered themselves of a torrent of Latinisms on the subject of “consensus-making bodies in a fractionalized political system” and “viable institutions for power-sharing which would gradually lead to the legitimization of the entire governmental framework.” While expressing some hesitation about the usefulness of a constitution, Professor I. Milton Sacks, a teacher at the Saigon and Hue universities and a consultant to the American mission, concluded that the elections would at least produce “spokesmen who can claim legitimacy through popular mandate and speak with authority on the issues of war and peace for their constituency.”
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While in private the American officials expressed anxiety about the possibility of election fraud and Viet Cong terrorism, in public they claimed the election as the crowning achievement of the Vietnamese government: the GVN would be a real democracy with a real constitution. The message, as received by the American public, was that the United States was generously bringing all the virtues of its own political system to this underdeveloped country, that it was creating a democracy to win the Vietnamese people away from Communist totalitarianism. So clear was the message that none of the distinguished Americans arriving to view the elections remembered that the embassy and the Ky government agreed to elections in the first place only under the threat of defection of the entire northern half of the country and total anarchy in Saigon. Within the new embassy perspective, the near civil war had become a minor incident and the Buddhist militants non-persons. According to the officials, the Ky government was holding the elections merely to redeem the pledge it made at Honolulu — a pledge most gratifying to Americans. “Of course,” said one embassy official blandly, “the embassy has always been in favor of elections for a civilian government. Look, we've had these elections on our agenda for the past three years.” His argument was incontrovertible: the project of elections had been on the American agenda for the past three years.

The American buildup of the elections was quite typical of the attitude of embassy officials in all their dealings with the GVN. While they patronized the Vietnamese and consciously deceived the American public, they managed at the same time to maintain a perfectly pristine faith in the efficacy of their endeavors. Even those who spoke cynically of the public relations campaign in the United States believed that the elections might help to knit up the snarl of political factions into a few stable, non-clandestine parties and legitimate the government in the eyes of many Vietnamese. They believed it despite all the evidence of history and the opinions of all politically minded Vietnamese.

For the Vietnamese view of the elections offered a rather sharp contrast to the American serendipity. From the Buddhists on one side to the generals on the other, the spectrum of opinion seemed to range from indignation to indifference. Charging “American interference in Vietnamese affairs,” the same Buddhist leaders who three months before had packed the squares of six cities with crowds shouting for elections, now announced that they would organize a boycott against the balloting. Though hostile to the Buddhists, the southern politicians and sect leaders did not give out the expected air of triumph. Dutifully going about the task of selecting candidates and combining them into slates, they displayed as little interest in the elections as they might have in the organization of a new National Day. The GVN officials expressed a weary annoyance about the prospect. “I've had to put off everything,” complained one Delta province chief, “budget revisions, tax schedules, military operations, building programs. I've wasted a whole month on voter registration and there will be another month gone on the election campaigns. But it can't be helped. It's orders from Saigon — highest priority. They want all of the people to vote.” From the way the province chief pronounced the last phrase, it was not difficult to see why he felt the whole enterprise a waste of time. Still, he had some reason to feel put upon. As usual, the district and province chiefs bore the brunt of the work. Under heavy pressure from Saigon, they had to vet all the candidates for “Communist” or “neutralist” sympathies and interpret the voting laws, which, perhaps for a purpose, were more complicated than any ever devised by the ingenious politicians of the French Fourth Republic. Moreover, they had to register a number of voters proportionate to that part of the population they had previously declared “pacified.”

It was clear why the GVN officials resented the elections, but it was less clear why they had no interest at all in the results. Questioned about the candidates and their programs, the Delta province chief answered politely, “Oh, yes, there are four slates. We've eliminated another two for technical reasons. No, I have no idea who will win. No, I don't really know if there are any issues except personalities.” While the Americans spoke darkly about the difficulties of holding an election in the midst of a war, the GVN officials faced the prospect with a bored tolerance, as though despite the livid antagonisms of their constituents, the elections were just another tedious bureaucratic routine.

Their confidence was, it seemed, justified. American fears to the contrary, there was very little evidence of direct NLF or government intimidation of the voters and no substantial case of election fraud. An astonishing number of people registered, a figure that, if the population estimates could be trusted, represented two-thirds of the adult population of South Vietnam. Of that number, 81 percent voted in the election — in other words, a far higher proportion than ever turns out for presidential elections in the United States. The South Vietnamese went to the polls with the docility of lambs to the dip. Furthermore, they elected an assembly that quite fairly represented the strength of all the various political groups and minority populations within the GVN, with the striking exception of the militant Buddhists. Among the one hundred and seventeen elected delegates, there were twelve Hoa Hao and five Cao Dai representatives, nine members of the various Dai Viets, twenty military officers, nineteen members of the various VNQDD factions, three Chinese, and nine montagnards (the montagnard deputies were chosen indirectly by their tribal councils). The Catholics were somewhat overrepresented with thirty-two delegates, but the number testified quite accurately to the discipline of their communities and the normal weight of their influence over the GVN. Most of the well-known older politicians, such as Dr. Pham Khac Suu, won their races, but so too did a number of younger men who lived and worked in the districts they represented. In public the Americans were gratified; in private they were as ecstatic as a bureaucracy can get: their distinguished American visitors had seen democracy working at “the rice roots.”

The Constituent Assembly convened in October 1966 with a great flourish of military ceremony. The delegates from the provinces looked awed and somewhat embarrassed by the proceedings. As Richard Critchfield noticed, “One delegation from Quang Ngai Province turned up in matching white Palm Beach suits that all looked as though they had been cut from the same bolt of cloth and probably were. They were mortified to see that the rest of the deputies wore dark suits.”
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They had not realized, in other words, that white suits belonged to the old days of French colonialism and that the Americans wore gray. Still, the deputies seemed proud of themselves and excited by the prospects that lay before them. Once installed in the Assembly building, in the hall that had once held the Saigon opera, they began to make passionate speeches about the reform of the government, their determination to stand up against the Communists, the moral duties of the state, the plight of their nation, the price of rice in Long Xuyen or Vinh Long, and their own rights as deputies. It was as though they had just been released from a seven-year vow of silence. Day after day, week after week, a torrent of words poured out of the Assembly building and fell upon deafer and deafer ears. After all the fuss they had made about the elections, the American embassy officials paid no attention to the speeches. Once they had run a check on their deputies' backgrounds, they seemed to lose all interest in them. As for the Ky government, it made quite clear what it thought of them by small indelicate gestures, such as that of refusing to pay the delegates' promised
per diem.
On October 22, a number of the poor provincial delegates were evicted from their sleazy downtown hotels because they were unable to pay the inflationary Saigon rate. Ky finally agreed to “loan” them the money, but he did not cease to make obvious his desire to be rid of them as soon as possible. The delegates did not, however, seem willing to oblige. Week after week, they continued to make speeches on every conceivable subject without coming to any kind of resolution. Sitting in the eye of a war and a revolution, the deputies acted like political science professors attending a university-sponsored conference on some imponderable subject. While many of them had special interests to defend, the political factions that formed and reformed in the course of the debate proved neither large nor stable enough to merit the name “party.” The delegates seemed unable to find an issue around which to organize. As Dr. Sung rather pathetically explained, “I ran for the Assembly in order to oppose the government, and now I find there is nothing to oppose.”

Eventually, under some pressure from both the Americans and General Ky, who wished to attend the Guam Conference, the delegates settled down to the job of writing a constitution. With no apparent zeal for the enterprise, they turned out a most professional document — so professional, indeed, that John Roche, the “constitutional expert” whom the U.S. government rather tactlessly appointed as “adviser” to the proceedings, found that he had no advice to give. And not surprisingly, for while Roche had never written a national constitution in his life, many of the members of the Assembly had written at least three. Finally completed in March 1967, in the nick of time for the Guam Conference, the document included a bill of rights, an article on land reform, a provision for the encouragement of labor unions, and a provision supporting an improvement in the general welfare of the peasantry. According to the document, the governmental system was to be a cross between the American presidential system and the French Fifth Republic: on the one hand, a president with wide powers, and on the other, a prime minister and a cabinet responsible to a bicameral legislature. The Assembly made concessions to the junta — notably, the vague determination of presidential powers and the fixing of the age requirement for presidential office at thirty-five instead of forty (a provision that allowed Air Vice-Marshal Ky to qualify), but it showed a certain independence in turning down several of the junta's specific requests. The U.S. embassy was once again gratified. Unlike the Diemist assemblies, this one could not possibly be accused of being a “rubber stamp” congress. At Guam, President Johnson said that he looked at the constitution “just as proudly as I looked at Lynda, my first baby.”
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For Western journalists the whole enterprise from the elections to the writing of the constitution remained puzzling. Great numbers of Vietnamese voted; the constitution was an admirable document — and yet there was an air of inconsequence to the proceedings. It was as though the whole thing had been performed on stage as a graceful and empty gesture. In an atmosphere of total indifference the peasants had turned out in astonishing numbers to vote for the same sort of men as those who had such trouble “pacifying” them. Even by stretching a point, the left-wing European journalists could not explain it away on the basis of electoral fraud or government intimidation of the voters. They had a stronger argument in claiming that the electoral lists were too complicated for anyone to understand, and that the province chiefs in charge of making up the lists had excluded not only “neutralists” and Communists, but everyone that did not meet with GVN approval. To put it simply, the peasants had been free to choose between one landlord and another. But why then had they bothered to vote at all?

The question was finally a more complicated one than could be explained in the columns of a newspaper, for, as was true of so many events in Vietnam, the elections could not be fully understood from one perspective alone. Like a mirror, they reflected only what the onlookers brought to them, and the American and the Vietnamese perspective had very little in common. Looking at the elections, both peoples could find different lessons to be drawn, different victims and different oppressors.