Fire in the Lake (40 page)

Even after a decade of independence, most of the prominent Saigon politicians and high-ranking intellectuals were being educated abroad. (This in striking contrast to the NLF leaders.)
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Many of them were the very people, or the descendants of the people, who had served the French and acted as their loyal opposition. They lived in the luxurious walled villas of French Saigon and worked in the yellow- or pink-stuccoed office buildings with their ceiling fans and their air of colonial decay. Now after ten years of the Diem regime there were simply more of them than there were before, and some spoke English instead of French. Among them there were a number of intelligent and hard-working men, such as the northern populist, Dr. Phan Quang Dan, the newspaper publisher, Dr. Dan Van Sung, and somewhat further to the left, the lawyer Tran Van Tuyen and the economists Vu Van Thai and Au Truong Thanh. These men provided some cogent criticisms of American policies in Vietnam, and yet they have had no real influence and provide no political alternative. Like Ngo Dinh Diem, many of them were confused men who could find no meeting point between their own education and interests and the demands of their countrymen. Fanon described their dilemma perfectly.

The colonialist bourgeoisie, in its narcissistic dialogue, expounded by the members of its universities, had in fact deeply implanted in the minds of the colonised intellectual that the essential qualities remain eternal in spite of all the blunders men may make: the essential qualities of the West, of course. The native intellectual accepted the cogency of these ideas, and deep down in his brain you could always find a vigilant sentinel ready to defend the Greco-Latin pedestal. Now it so happens that during the struggle for liberation, at the moment that the native intellectual comes into touch again with his people, this artificial sentinel is turned into dust. All the Mediterranean values… become lifeless.… Individualism is the first to disappear.
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That moment had arrived for Nguyen Huu Tho and the other Saigonese leaders of the NLF, but it never did for those who remained behind in the cities. The Saigon politicians and intellectuals would continue to tinker with legislatures and constitutions that did not begin to touch upon the lives of the peasants or even the poor of the cities.

One proof of the impotence of these intellectuals was their failure to provide leadership during the last few months of the Diem regime. In an age of increasing secularism the students of Saigon and Hue looked to the religious groups for guidance at the moment of crisis. Curiously enough, the student conspiracy against Diem began within the Catholic Student Union — the only student organization permitted to exist. When the Buddhist rebellion broke out, the Catholic dissidents allied with the nominally Buddhist students to support the bonzes. After the November coup, the alliance fell apart, leaving the various student activists to form their own small, intransigent movements and to engage in a bewildering series of factional fights that paralleled those of their elders. In the morass of city politics only the religious groups, that drew the city people back to the values that predated colonial rule, managed to sustain any organized vitality.

Because of the nature of the coup, the Catholic organizations did not suffer as much as might have been expected from the fall of the Diem regime. Some of the members of Nhu’s Can Lao Party went to jail and the Buddhists challenged the Catholic dominion over Hue, but the majority of the reprisals were personal vendettas that had little effect upon the Church as a whole. With a communion of at least two million members and the strict discipline imposed by its priestly hierarchy, the Catholics remained the most powerful group in non-Communist South Vietnam. Catholicism was a force which had to be reckoned with by every government — and yet, like the Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai, it was a syncretic sect and not a nationalist movement. If the fact had to be demonstrated (and it did not, for the Catholics did not make the same claim as the Buddhists to representing “the whole mass of the people”), the fall of Diem did that. As a revealed religion with a precise doctrine and a Western form of social organization, it was both too narrow and too closely associated with the French regime to have appeal for the great mass of the Vietnamese. Under the Diem regime a few ambitious young men, such as Nguyen Van Thieu, converted to Catholicism for much the same reason as their predecessors had under the French, but the Catholic population remained essentially stable: one either was a Catholic or one was not depending on one’s family background. Furthermore, one was either a northern or a southern Catholic — the distinction being as hard and fast as any in Vietnamese politics.
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The Catholics formed the most stable and predictable of the southern political groups; the Buddhists, by contrast, constituted the most fluid and ill-disciplined of them all.
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The Buddhists set the standard of rebellion against Diem, but they had, as yet, no coherent political organization and no support in the countryside. Their advantages lay in their leadership and in the resonance of Buddhism in the historical memories of the Vietnamese. Unlike the Catholics, they could claim to speak for “the whole mass of the Vietnamese people” and to feel some common cause even with those Vietnamese who supported the NLF. In a speech to the crowds gathered at the new headquarters, a vast barnlike pagoda in the slums of Saigon, the elderly Thich Tam Chau, now head of the Institute for the Propagation of the Buddhist Faith, could recall the time when a Buddhist monarch ruled Vietnam and when during the years of war and political chaos, Buddhism sustained the inner life of the country. A northerner and a political moderate in Saigonese terms, Tam Chau began to gather followers from among the straight-laced bourgeoisie of Saigon that rejected Catholicism and Communism alike as foreign-influence doctrines. He and his associates worked closely with the rest of the bonzes during the events of 1963, but as time went on it became apparent that the unity of the bonzes could not survive the release of pressure. On goals as well as on questions of tactics Tam Chau split with the High Clerical Council (the spiritual, as opposed to the secular, authority of the Unified Buddhist Church) and the brilliant central Vietnamese, Thich Tri Quang.

The divisions among the bonzes must have run deep, for in many ways Tri Quang was the most able and inspired of all the non-Communist political leaders. An intense and fiercely independent man in his early forties, Tri Quang had spent some time with the Viet Minh during the early part of the French Indochina War. Breaking with the Communists in the early 1950’s, he had returned to the pagoda and directed his enormous energies to forming a Buddhist movement in Hue. As one of the prime movers in the conspiracy against Diem, he had, in flight from Diemist police, taken refuge for several weeks in the American embassy, an asylum for which he professed a debt of gratitude to the United States. After the November coup, he set himself to the task of establishing contact between the Mahayana organizations of the cities and the Theravada bonzes of the Delta. When, like most attempts to organize the Delta, his initiative more or less failed, he began to concentrate his energies upon Hue and the surrounding villages, setting up family and youth associations formed partly on traditional models, partly on those of the Viet Minh.
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A fiery speaker and at the same time an introspective intellectual, Tri Quang belonged to the tradition of religiously inspired Vietnamese leaders. His looks commanded attention — the high forehead, the large brilliant eyes, and the small body expressing the cerebral intensity of the man. As was not true of most of the Saigon bonzes, including his own supporters, Thich Thien Minh and Thich Ho Giac, he lived the correct, ascetic life of a bonze, fasting on the proper days, sleeping in a bare cell, and spending hours of each day in meditation. Like Ho Chi Minh, he lived in a “sincere” manner, and, like him, he had the capacity to inspire trust in all kinds of people from the poor cyclo drivers of Hue to the most sophisticated intellectuals. In Hue he tended to avoid foreigners and to refuse to speak anything but Vietnamese. To Americans, therefore, he was something of an enigma, someone to be watched and mistrusted, a man who professed anti-Communism and yet refused to make an unconditional commitment to the war or to the Saigon government.

But in the winter of 1963–1964 it was not at all clear what the Buddhist movement might become. The American journalists were bewildered by the relation of these bonzes to Vietnamese Buddhism, and understandably so, for no one, including the bonzes, knew who might finally respond to the call of those who claimed to express the wishes of all “Buddhists.” Tri Quang and Tam Chau would not explain that their strength depended upon the extent to which they could reconcile the diverse interests of those who had joined the anti-Diemist demonstrations and mold the formless impulse of rejection into a disciplined force. Nor would they explain that beyond the problem of organizing the urban bourgeoisie lay that of organizing the poor and the people of the countryside, who, though nominally “Buddhist,” obeyed no religious authority. Would “Buddhism” disintegrate, would it harden into a small autarchic sect, like all of the other religious groups, or would it develop and take on the dimensions of a nationalism? The question was an important one for the future — that is, if non-Communist Vietnam had a future — for Buddhism was the only new political movement in the cities and the only one that seemed to have any potential for growth.

It was, in a way, pathetic, this call for unity on the part of the junta. Now, after eight years of the Diem regime, non-Communist Vietnam was less united than ever. To the Delta there remained only a handful of landed families and the miraculous sects; to central Vietnam, the towns and villages in which the Catholics, Buddhists, and old-fashioned political parties continued their fierce blood feuds. Saigon itself remained much as it was when French legionnaires, bitter and exhausted, watched the French empire collapse, revealing unfathomable depths of corruption and chaos.

The generals of the Minh junta themselves represented the last and best dream of France — the success of its
mission civilisatrice
and its policy of assimilation. General Tran Van Don had been born in the Gironde, and many of the others had spent the better part of their youth in France. General Minh — “Big Minh,” as this tall and robust officer was affectionately known — had been a star student at the École de Chartres; General Le Van Kim had trained to be a film maker in Paris and was, it was said, working on a film with Rene Clair when the first Indochina War broke out.
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All of them had joined the army to fight for a French-influenced Vietnam — to preserve what there was of Paris in Saigon — and they had failed to understand that France had never penetrated the villages. The rise of Ngo Dinh Diem put them in a dilemma, for though they were “nationalists” (all Vietnamese were “nationalists” in the sense that they wished for a government by Vietnamese), they found themselves fighting for a Vietnam they did not believe in. Finally, and almost fortuitously, taking power, they found they had nothing to offer the people of the villages and the city streets. Of more immediate consequence, they found that the war was being lost.

During the two months following the November coup, the NLF moved into the Delta provinces just south of Saigon, confining the GVN troops to the province capitals and inflicting upon them their highest casualties of the war. The new Front victories were not precisely the fault of the generals: the Front merely seized the opportunities laid open to them in the interval of change and uncertainty. But as two and then three months passed, the generals seemed to be making slight progress at imposing order within the army and the administration.

Washington was anxious. Shortly before the coup, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had urged that the National Security Council consider disengaging the United States from Vietnam if the war appeared unwinnable by any successor to the Diem regime. President Kennedy at the time dismissed the option of withdrawal and decided to encourage a coup in the hopes that the new government would be more capable of pursuing the war than the last. In giving its support to the military junta, the Kennedy administration passed an important checkpoint in its involvement in the war and its commitment to the Saigon regime. American officials simply assumed that the responsibility they were taking on would lead to a new degree of American influence, or control, over the Saigon government. But in attempting to direct the Minh junta, the Americans might as well have been trying to sculpt in Silly Putty. There were so many generals, so many ambitious young officers, that the embassy could hardly keep track of them, much less exert any pressure. General Minh claimed to be making the decisions for the junta, but he clearly held small authority: the commander of the vital Saigon region did not even make a pretense of doing his job. In December 1963, on the first of what was to be a series of trips to Vietnam over the coming months, Secretary McNamara reported to Johnson that the situation was “very disturbing” and that the generals seemed almost to have given up fighting the war in favor of their internal political squabbling. He lectured the generals on the need for leadership, programs, action.
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The generals respectfully agreed and went back to their squabbling.

Were the generals anti-Communist? Even that was difficult to determine. Certainly they were not as religiously anti-Communist as Ngo Dinh Diem had been. They were soldiers, anti-Communist by social background and economic interest. But above all they were Cochin Chinese who believed in the politics of arrangement. And, American support notwithstanding, the time for an arrangement seemed to be approaching. In December President Charles de Gaulle proposed a plan for the neutralization of all the former states of Indochina in pursuance of the Geneva accords. The Americans worried that the generals might look favorably on his proposals. In his New Year’s message to the Republic of Vietnam, President Johnson wrote to the Minh junta: