The March of Folly (51 page)

Adoption of the client made the United States a sponsor in Diem’s fateful denial of the nationwide elections to be held in 1956 as agreed on at Geneva. The North, with a population of 15 million to South
Vietnam’s 12 million, and a general acknowledgment of the greater popularity of the Viet-Minh, had counted on the elections to gain command of the country as a whole. When in July 1955 it invited the South to consult on preparations for the event, Diem refused on the ground that no election under the Hanoi regime would allow a free vote, that enforced results would overwhelm the votes of the South and that in any event he was not bound by the Geneva Accord. While valid, his objection lost something of its force when three months later, in a referendum held in the South to depose the absent Bao Dai as Chief of State and confer the Presidency on Diem, the desired result was achieved by what a foreign observer called “outrageous” methods that delivered 98.8 percent of the vote. A free expression of the voters’ will was obviously not to be expected on either side, nor could it have been otherwise in a country devoid of democratic experience. As a solution for Vietnam’s civil conflict, the election—supposed to have been supervised by a powerless International Control Commission—was never more than a charade devised at Geneva as a desperate expedient to allow temporary partition and a cease-fire.

No one questioned that if the elections were held, as one official reported, “the overwhelming majority of Vietnamese would vote Communist.” In the course of a speech opposing equal status for a Communist regime, Senator John F. Kennedy acknowledged “the popularity and prevalence” of Ho Chi Minh’s party “throughout Indochina”—which seemed to him reason
not
to allow its participation in a national government. Eisenhower, informed by advisers that Ho would certainly win the election, “refused to agree” (according to General Ridgway) to its taking place. While Diem did not need American advice in the matter, his refusal rested on American support. By 1956 more evidence of harsh measures in the North, including widespread killing of landlords on the Chinese pattern, was at hand. Terrorist tactics in an election could be assumed. In June 1956 the State Department officially announced that “We support President Diem fully in his position that when conditions do not exist that could preclude ‘intimidation or coercion’… there can be no free choice.”

The consequence was that, failing reunification by election, North Vietnam resorted to other means—the encouragement of insurgency followed by the so-called War of Liberation. No egregious folly may be charged to the United States in this affair except that, by backing Diem’s decision, America seemed to share in what critics of the war were to claim was a brazen suppression of the people’s will, leaving the North no alternative but insurgency. Suppression it was not, because
the people’s will would not have found a free voice in any case. The non-holding of the elections was an excuse for, not a cause of, renewed war. “We shall achieve unity,” the North’s Deputy Premier Pham Van Dong had warned at Geneva. “No force in the world, internal or external, can make us deviate from our path.”

In the next five years, with a flow of American funds that paid 60 to 75 percent of its budget, including the total cost of its army, and supported an unfavorable trade balance, South Vietnam appeared to flourish in unanticipated order and prosperity. The French armed forces, under insistent American pressure, gradually departed in phased withdrawals until the French High Command was dissolved in February 1956. The American Friends of Vietnam, organized by the Catholic Relief Services and the International Rescue Committee (originally formed to save victims of Nazism and having a list of the most respectable liberal names running down its letterhead), spread word with the assistance of a public relations agent in Saigon, on a $3000 monthly retainer, of the “miracle” of South Vietnam. It seemed, during these five years, as if progress had been made and the gamble would work.

Behind the miracle, facts were less favorable. Ill-planned land reforms alienated more than they helped the peasants; “Communist denunciation” programs, in which neighbors were induced to inform on one another, and endless busy and corrupt official interferences in peasant lives turned sentiment against Diem. Critics and dissenters were arrested, sent to “re-education camps,” or otherwise silenced. The flood of imports paid for by the United States was used as a political instrument to win middle-class support through a generous supply of consumer goods. A study by Americah political scientists reported that South Vietnam “is becoming a permanent mendicant” dependent on external support, and concluded that “American aid has built a castle on sand.”

Peasant discontent supplied ready ground for insurgents. Operating on the move, Viet-Minh partisans native to the South, who had stayed behind after partition, formed guerrilla groups, which were joined by partisans who had gone North at the partition and, after training and indoctrination, filtered back over the border. By 1959 insurgents controlled large areas of South Vietnam. “If you drew a paint brush across the South,” an intelligence agent told Senator Mansfield, “every hair of the brush would touch a Viet-Minh.”

In the same years the North too suffered disaffection, owing partly to food scarcity as a result of being cut
off
from the rice bowl of the South, and partly to Communist oppression. In a public confession
to Party colleagues, General Giap acknowledged in 1956 that “We executed too many honest people … resorted to terror … disciplinary punishments … torture.” Internal stresses kept Hanoi too preoccupied in its own territory to launch war against the South, but reunification remained the fixed goal. While crushing resistance and establishing control during the period 1955–60, Hanoi enlarged and trained its forces, accumulated arms from China and by degrees built up connections with the insurgents in the South.

By 1960 between 5000 and 10,000 guerrillas, called by the Saigon government Viet-Cong, meaning “Vietnamese Communist,” were estimated to be active in the South. While the Vietnamese army, under American advice, was mainly stationed along the partition line to guard against a Korea-style attack, the insurgents were spreading havoc. According to Saigon, they had in the past year assassinated 1400 officials and civilians and kidnapped 700 others. Diem’s most stringent measures, including death sentences authorized for terrorists, subversives and “rumor spreaders,” and relocation of peasant communities into fortified village clusters, proved ineffective, The population felt no active loyalty either to Diem or, on the other hand, to Communism or the cause of reunification. They wanted safety, land and the harvest of their crops. “The situation may be summed up,” reported the American Embassy in January 1960, “in the fact that the government has tended to treat the population with suspicion or to coerce it and has been rewarded with apathy and resentment.”

In that year the Manifesto of the Eighteen, issued by a Committee for Progress and Liberty that included ten former Cabinet members, called for Diem’s resignation and sweeping reforms. He had all of them arrested. Six months later a military coup attempted his overthrow on the ground that he had “shown himself incapable of saving the country from Communism and of protecting national unity.” With the aid of troops summoned from outside the city, Diem suppressed the coup within 24 hours. He received Washington’s congratulations and expression of the hope that with strengthened power, he could now proceed to “rapid implementation of radical reforms.” This American hope was conveyed with monotonous regularity, always with the hint behind it that continuance of aid depended on “standards of performance.” Yet when reforms failed to follow, American aid did not stop, for fear that if it were withdrawn Diem would fall.

American confidence vis-à-vis the Soviet Union suffered another shock in 1957 when the Russians launched
Sputnik
into orbit to a height of 560 miles and a speed around the globe of 18,000 miles per hour. In
the year before this dismaying feat, Soviet armed forces had taken over Hungary while the United States, for all Dulles’ boasts, remained passive. In the year after
Sputnik
, Communists under Fidel Castro took over Cuba, likewise watched helplessly by the United States, though only 90 miles away. Yet the Communists in faraway Vietnam were perceived as a direct threat to American security.

In consultation between Washington and Saigon, a counter-guerrilla or counter-insurgency plan was developed to coordinate the work of American agencies with the Vietnamese army. MAAG’s personnel was doubled to 685 for the program. The new Ambassador, Elbridge Durbrow, had misgivings. He did not think the additional military aid the plan called for should be delivered, or would be effective, without political improvement. But Diem exerted the perverse power of the weak: the greater his troubles, the more support he demanded—and received. In a dependent relationship the protégé can always control the protector by threatening to collapse.

In September 1960 the Communist Party Congress in Hanoi called for the overthrow of the Diem regime and of “American imperialist rule.” Formation of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam followed in December. Though nominally native to the South, it echoed the call for the overthrow of Diem and the “camouflaged colonial regime of the American imperialists” and announced a ten-point program of Marxist social reforms dressed in the usual garments of “democracy,” “equality,” “peace” and “neutrality.” Overt civil war was thus declared just as a new American President, John F. Kennedy, took office in the United States.

The new Administration came into office equipped with brain power, more pragmatism than ideology and the thinnest electoral majority of the 20th century, barely half of one percent. Like the President, his associates were activists, stimulated by crises, eager to take active measures. As far as the record shows, they held no session devoted to re-examination of the engagement they had inherited in Vietnam, nor did they ask themselves to what extent the United States was committed or what was the degree of national interest involved. Nor, so far as appears in the mountains of memoranda, discussions and options flowing over the desks, was any long-range look taken at long-range strategy. Rather, policy developed in ad hoc spurts from month to month. A White House official of the time, asked in later years how the American interest in Southeast Asia was defined in 1961, replied that “it was simply a given, assumed and unquestioned.” The given was that we had to stop the advance of Communism wherever it appeared and Vietnam was then the place of confrontation. If not stopped there, it would be stronger the next time.

As a young Congressman, Kennedy had visited Indochina for himself in 1951, reaching the conclusion obvious to most American observers, that to check the Communist drive South it was essential to “build strong native non-Communist sentiment.” To act “apart from and in defiance of innately nationalistic aims spells foredoomed failure.” It is a dismaying fact that throughout the long folly of Vietnam, Americans kept foretelling the outcome and acting without reference to their own foresight.

By 1956 Kennedy had moved closer to cold war orthodoxy, talking less of “strong native sentiment” and more of dominoes in a variety of metaphor: Vietnam was the “cornerstone of the free world in Southeast Asia, the keystone of the arch, the finger in the dike.” To the usual list of neighbors who would fall “if the red tide of Communism
overflowed into Vietnam” he added India and Japan. The current of rhetoric carried him forward into two traps: Vietnam was “a proving ground of democracy in Asia” and “a test of American responsibility and determination in Asia.”

Two weeks before Kennedy entered the White House, the Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev, offered the decisive challenge of the time in the form of his announcement that national “wars of liberation” were to be the vehicle for advancing the Communist cause. These “just wars,” he said, wherever they occurred, in Cuba, Vietnam, Algeria, would receive full Soviet support. Kennedy responded in his Inaugural Address with alarming reference to the defense of freedom “at its hour of maximum danger.”

The first test was, unhappily, a grotesque and humiliating fiasco. Initiated under Eisenhower, the attempt made in April 1961 to liberate Cuba from Communism at the Bay of Pigs was a joint venture of Cuban exiles and the CIA with frivolously insufficient means and overconfident procedures. Though it was not Kennedy’s plan, he was briefed on it before taking office, and given his go-ahead—impelled by the awful momentum that makes carrying through easier than calling off a folly—it was his responsibility. The invasion foreshadowed Vietnam in underestimating the opponent. Castro’s regime proved well-organized, on guard, alert and ready for combat. The landings were discovered quickly and opposed vigorously, and the expected sympathetic uprisings were either effectively suppressed or never took place. Castro proved, in fact, more popular with his countrymen than the exiles whom the United States was supporting—another situation to be duplicated in Vietnam. With admirable resolve, Kennedy took the hard decision not to send in Air Force and Marines to the rescue, leaving many to perish. The effect of this spectacular snafu in the first ninety days of the Administration was to make all its members grimly determined to prove their muscle in the contest against Communism.

Neither a liberal nor a conservative, Kennedy was an operator of quick intelligence and strong ambition who stated many elevated principles convincingly, eloquently, even passionately, while his actions did not always match. In the major offices of government and the White House staff, he put men of active mind, proven ability and, as far as possible, a hardheaded attitude to match his own. Mostly men of his age, in their forties, they were not the social philosophers, innovators and idealists of the New Deal. In the Kennedy camp the word usually attached to idealist was “slob” or “bleeding heart.” The New Deal was another era; world war and cold war had intervened and the far right still rumbled. The new men in government, whether
Rhodes Scholars, academics from Harvard and Brookings or recruits from Wall Street, politics and the law, were expected to be realistic, sophisticated, pragmatic, tough. Toughness was the tone, and whatever their varying characters and capacities, Kennedy’s group adopted it, as the court around a monarch or a working group around a dominant chief to whom the members owe appointment is likely to do.