Fire in the Lake (22 page)

The new American aid commitment bought time for the Saigon regime, but it increased the dangers confronting the Ngo family itself. The larger the military bureaucracy grew, the more it grew to resemble the country itself, its officers no more “pacified” and no more loyal to the Diem regime than the peasants inside the strategic hamlets. Ngo Dinh Diem knew this perfectly well. He as much as told his American advisers that he feared his ministers and generals. But the Americans did not understand his situation. From the very beginning Diem’s aim had been not to run the administration but to render it helpless, to bypass it with the help of his brothers. As time went on, his attempt to divide and rule required more and more extreme measures: the sabotaging of military operations, the replacement of the most competent officers by the most venal. The Ngos were not so much running a government as running an opposition within it. Between them they managed to create an underworld of warlords, secret societies, and bandit groups such as had existed in the periods of greatest anarchy between Confucian governments. In order to finance the Can Lao Party and his other subversive intelligence agencies, Nhu engaged in activities similar to those of his old enemy Bay Vien: waterfront piracy, extortion rackets, illicit trading in opium, and exchange manipulation.
⁹⁴
Ngo Dinh Can ran central Vietnam as his own private business venture: he controlled the local shipping and the cinnamon trade, and with Diem’s tacit consent ruled the local officials through adroit manipulation, graft, and extortion.
⁹⁵
The two brothers jealously guarded their sources of revenue from each other — their agents occasionally killing each other off in an excess of zeal. Madame Nhu had the foresight to amass a fortune in goods that might be quickly translated into European assets. It was later said that, among other things, she owned a large theatre on the Champs Élysées — an odd investment for this most self-advertised of Catholics.

Amazingly, despite all of this illicit traffic, the Ngos maintained an impenetrable façade of self-righteous hauteur. The world, they seemed to be saying, was not good or pure enough for them. After the abortive military coup of 1960 — a daredevil operation mounted by a few paratrooper units under the command of Colonel Nguyen Chanh Thi and crushed after a day or so — Diem declared that the “hand of God” had sustained him against the rebel assault. And yet the attempted coup had a demonstrable effect on the Ngo family. Ngo Dinh Diem had at one time trusted his relatives, but after 1960 even his family members began to drop away: some were fired, others resigned, still others remained at their posts but no longer had any influence on Diem or Nhu. The extended family narrowed down to the nuclear family of Diem, Can, Thuc, and the Nhus. And even within this inner ring there were fights for power and prestige with Nhu claiming the protocol arrangements for a head of state and Madame Nhu claiming responsibility for her husband’s ideas. Only the farouche Can remained constant.

After the coup of 1960 Diem began to withdraw more and more into himself. It was true that he had long been something of a recluse. He was always as Graham Greene so brilliantly pictured him in 1955: “Separated from the people by cardinals and police cars with wailing sirens and foreign advisers droning of global strategy… sitting with his blank brown gaze, incorruptible, obstinate, ill-advised, going to his weekly confession, bolstered up by his belief that God is always on the Catholic side, waiting for a miracle.”
⁹⁶
But in the past he had traveled a great deal around the country, visiting those villages where his officials had taken pains to produce elaborate pageants of a thriving, moral, and deeply respectful peasantry.
⁹⁷
Now he traveled less and appeared at fewer public ceremonies. Each year he celebrated his election as chief of state with a day of parades and speeches. At the anniversary parade of 1962 the
New York Times
reporter, David Halberstam, observed that there were no Vietnamese crowds to be seen anywhere near the route of the parade. The police, on Diem’s orders, had erected great barricades to keep the people away, and the parades were held in a vacuum for Diem and his foreign advisers.
⁹⁸
Now, too, Diem began to talk more and more. In the last year of his life he would lecture for six and sometimes ten hours at a stretch, refusing to be interrupted by questions. Some of the American reporters saw his incessant talking as a sign of defensiveness. The Vietnamese understood it to have a very precise meaning: his talking was the sign that he could no longer exercise the self-control of a true “father,” a Confucian gentleman. Diem was frightened of his subordinates, but he had no recourse except to insist on his authority — the image of the open mouth. By his talking he threatened to starve them.

As Diem withdrew into himself, the influence of Ngo Dinh Nhu began to displace the president’s as the dark the light of the waning moon. Diem himself possessed many of the puritanical virtues of the true Confucian monarch. Nhu had, and to some degree personified, the complementary vices of arrogance, indiscipline, and brutality. As Diem represented the first sovereign of a dynasty, Nhu represented the last one. Certainly, Nhu came to the end of the “downward spiral” long before 1963. Perhaps anticipating Diem’s failure at moral instruction, Nhu had quite early on begun to bully. It was Nhu who defended the special military courts on the grounds that those found guilty must be “wicked people.” It was Nhu who organized the internal spy system and who encouraged corruption and factionalism in order to control the bureaucracy. It was Nhu who so divided and demoralized the officer corps that it provided small resistance to the NLF. In the end Diem displayed some of the classical anxieties of a failed Confucian ruler, but Nhu gave signs of insanity. It was Nhu who precipitated the coup of 1963 against his own family.

After a period of quiescence following the failure of the 1960 coup, the army officers once again began to plot against the regime. This time their victory appeared assured. The military collapse persuaded most of the top generals and much of the Saigon bourgeoisie that the existence of the republic required the removal of the Ngo family. And then there were few officers to whom the Ngos had not given excellent reasons for a private vendetta. As one general described the situation in another context — his image recalling the oldest of Confucian metaphors, “While the government deludes itself and its powerful allies by giving the outward impression of authority, those responsive to its authority became fewer and fewer… [until it is] balanced like an inverted pyramid and requires only a push from some other self-centered group to topple it from power.”
⁹⁹
In other words, the same process was taking place inside the government as outside it.

But the officers vacillated. Most of them were afraid of Nhu. For eight years Nhu had almost single-handedly prevented them from taking that share of power they always felt was rightly theirs. He had bribed many of them, blackmailed others, and manipulated all of them so successfully that not one of them trusted another. The officers feared that any one among them might inform or lead a counter-coup to place himself in the Ngos’ favor. They feared that in the event of a successful coup against the Ngos, one of their number might seize power and oust the rest of them. Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen, Nhu’s own security chief, now turned against the Ngos and organized a plot that brought several officers to the point of counting battalions. But still the officers could not bring themselves to act. The Americans controlled the purse strings of the government, and the officers knew they could not count on the rest of the army until they obtained a firm commitment from the embassy. In the spring of 1963 this commitment seemed impossible to come by. Despite the disintegration of the ARVN, Ambassador Frederick Nolting and General Paul Harkins, the MACV commander, remained optimistic about the war and about the capacities of the Ngo family to reform the government under their tutelage. The heads of the mission appeared unable to comprehend the seriousness of the situation inside or outside of the government. Given their faith in the Ngos’ own military estimates and their obliviousness to the silent defections within the government, they might, it seemed, have remained ignorant of the situation up until the moment when the NLF took over the government — and then perhaps a little beyond it. Contemplating that end, the officers waited, as if paralyzed.

But then something surprising happened. On May 8, 1963, large crowds of Buddhist priests and laymen surrounded the radio station in Hue to protest Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc’s order forbidding them to carry the Buddhist flags on the birthday of the Buddha. When the crowds would not disperse before fire hoses, blank shells, and tear gas, the Catholic deputy province chief ordered his troops to fire live ammunition into the crowd, with the result that nine people were killed. The next day the government claimed that the Viet Cong had set off plastic charges in the midst of the crowd — a lie that further antagonized the Buddhists. After weeks of argument, the Americans finally persuaded Diem to meet with the Buddhist leaders and to give in to some of their demands. But the regime never admitted responsibility for the killings, and Nhu ordered the Republican Youth to protest Diem’s signing of the agreement.
¹⁰⁰
The bonzes demonstrated before the National Assembly building and embarked upon a hunger strike in Hue.

In the second week of June the bonze Thich Quang Duc died by fire, seated in the lotus position in the middle of a busy intersection in Saigon. From that moment on the bonzes went into determined, organized opposition to the Diem regime. Traveling from city to city, the leaders in Hue and Saigon held mass meetings of prayer and political protest; their spokesmen held almost daily conferences for the American press. From that moment on it became increasingly clear that the days of the Diem regime were numbered. Only the details and the timing of their demise remained to be settled.

four

To American journalists in Saigon the whole affair of the Buddhists was puzzling in the extreme. Who were “the Buddhists,” after all? Until the May incident the few hundred bonzes who inhabited the city pagodas had never appeared upon American horizons. Few of them spoke Western languages, and with one or two exceptions they seemed naïve about the outside world.
¹⁰¹
It was known, of course, that all nonsectarian Vietnamese were “Buddhists” in some vague sense: they worshiped the image of the Buddha along with the scrolls of their ancestors and the Taoist spirits. But these city bonzes could not be said to represent them, for at least among the peasantry Buddhism had no established tradition, no network of pagodas such as existed in Thailand, Burma, or Japan. The bonzes who initiated the demonstration were men, or the heirs of men, who had gone abroad during the 1930’s to draw from the pure, intellectual stream of Mahayana Buddhism and later set up study centers in Hanoi, Hue, and Saigon. At the time of the great nationalist eruption of the 1930’s and 1940’s they remained politically inconspicuous. Like most of the urban groups, they made their accommodation with the French, never venturing out to seek a following in the countryside, never rivaling the Catholics in organizational strength. By 1962 they had a number of pagodas in Saigon and the central Vietnamese cities and a small following loosely organized into what the Americans always assumed was a “purely religious” group, the Association for the Propagation of the Buddhist Faith.
¹⁰²
The nominal Buddhists of the countryside had suffered from Catholic persecution since 1954, but the bonzes of the city pagodas never felt the same pressures. In Hue it was said that Ngo Dinh Can had often gone to visit the most important of the Buddhist leaders, Thich Tri Quang, in order to discuss the affairs of the community. It was only when Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc, randy for a cardinal’s hat, tried to prove his zeal as a defender of the faith that the government issued edicts that impinged upon the Buddhists’ religious freedom.
¹⁰³
But now, suddenly, the bonzes became the leaders of a powerful movement of opposition to Diem. They were energetic, persistent, resourceful — and irreversibly committed to the overthrow of the regime. Most extraordinarily, they seemed to call forth an intense, emotional reaction from the Vietnamese of the cities, and even from those who had never visited their pagodas before. The televised pictures of another monk’s death by fire showed people running to the body to fall on their knees and weep. The reaction remained unexplained by the Vietnamese; it was as if the bonzes had touched a chord so profound that it lay beyond explanation.

The logic behind the Buddhist protest was in fact not at all obvious; it lay buried in the depths of Vietnamese history, and it had to do with the particular function that Buddhism had always served in Vietnam. Introduced into the Red River Delta in the second century
A.D.
, Buddhism — Mahayana Buddhism of the school of the Bodhidharma — dominated the intellectual life of Vietnam at the most critical period of its history, the struggle for independence in the tenth century. After the successful conclusion of that struggle the emperors recognized Buddhism as one of the Three Religions, but the Confucian state in its periods of greatest strength suppressed the pagodas and forbade the circulation of Buddhist texts. Buddhism after the eleventh century descended to the intellectual level of the village, where, blending in with the competing strains of Taoism, Confucianism, and animism, it became a part of the popular religion — a tonality, a series of beliefs, rather than a pure, isolated discipline. Buddhism did not reappear again as an intellectual force until the seventeenth century — and then in the worst period of civil wars under the declining Le dynasty. It is said that “the Vietnamese are Confucians in peacetime, Buddhists in times of trouble.” The old adage has an historical basis in fact, for the Buddhist pagodas would reappear throughout the country each time the Confucian state went into decline. When the pyramid of Confucian society crumbled, the Buddhist bonzes would return as if to fill the vacuum, to give the country a stable moral and intellectual center apart from the state and the official religion. Even the popular, quasi-Buddhist sects often played the same role. During the decline of dynasties, or the struggle between warlords, “Buddhist” magicians and sorcerers rose up from the underground of the villages to lead small peasant rebellions against the anarchy and violence of a weak ruler. In the period of nationalist resurgence against the French, both forms of Buddhism re-emerged: popular Buddhism in the Hoa Hao and intellectual Buddhism in the city brotherhoods. The scholar of Asian religions, Paul Mus, had indicated just why Buddhism should play such a part in Vietnamese history.
¹⁰⁴