Fire in the Lake (54 page)

Brought up in a tradition that prescribes free elections as the proper solution for most political conflicts, the Americans had come to look upon them as the moral foundations of a state. If a nation had free elections, it belonged to the “free world”; if it did not, it belonged to those moral nether regions inhabited by Communists, Fascists, and backward people. The embassy officials did not consider it an immediate moral necessity to press for elections in Vietnam, but even the most cynical of them supposed that elections and a constitution would somehow make the GVN a better government. Their faith was a perfect example of synecdoche, the poetic device that substitutes a part for the whole. “Free elections” implied to the Americans an entire political edifice — a belief in individual freedom, in majority rule and the compromise of individual interests — a skyscraper, as it were, of ideals, principles, and organization, in which the elections were no more than the elevator. Largely unconscious of this edifice, they did not realize that when the Vietnamese used the elections they had an entirely different building in mind — a building founded on the community rather than the individual, fashioned out of uniformity instead of diversity, and operating not on a set of principles, but on an appreciation of the whole man, an entire way of life. Like the Americans, the Vietnamese assumed the architecture of their building, and therefore found no occasion to describe it or to show how the elevator worked within it. When asked what he thought of the 1966 elections, one former hamlet schoolteacher said, “I cannot tell you whether the elections will be good or bad. If the candidates are good men who will work for the people, then they will be good, for the Assembly will bring peace.” In other words, the teacher was not interested in his right to vote, but the duty to register his approval. And with half a million American troops in Vietnam, it was a duty that he could not afford to neglect. Every adult was supposed to have a card showing that he had voted, and the GVN officials checked these along with identification cards in their search for “Viet Cong suspects.”

“So it was not a free election,” one American reporter concluded. “The government coerced the peasants into voting.” But the conclusion was not quite just, though the GVN had made known its wishes to the peasants in no uncertain terms. The essence of the matter was not that the officials were oppressing the peasantry, but that both shared certain assumptions about the nature of government. The peasants, like the officials, saw no reason why the government should ask their advice. Presented with a ballot sheet, their attitude was, “If the program is bound to succeed, the Americans or the French, our counselors, would involve themselves and take credit for its success. If they ‘pass the baby’ to us, if they want us to vote on those issues about which we know so little, it's because it will fail and once it has failed, they will tell us, ‘Well, you asked for it.’ ”
⁸
That the peasants were absolutely right in this case was, in a sense, beside the point, for the logic was based not so much on experience with elections as upon a profound set of convictions about all forms of authority. The idea that their vote might actually help change the government was an almost impermissible one, for it implied that there was no authority above them. And if there was no authority, then there was nothing but chaos and “confusion.” To be given a choice by means of a vote was therefore to be handed an instrument of terror — an unthinkable one.

The Vietnamese governments of the north and the south had used the device of elections many times before 1966, but they had used it for their own purposes and in such a way that it fitted in with the whole architecture of their political life. In 1946 Ho Chi Minh held elections for a legislature in both northern and southern Vietnam. His Viet Minh candidates gained an overwhelming percentage of the vote even in those places where the polling was done secretly in the shadow of the French garrisons. Ngo Dinh Diem held a plebiscite a few years later, and took 98 percent of the vote from the very same areas of the south. Quite clearly in these cases neither Diem nor Ho Chi Minh was interested in giving the voters a choice of alternatives. They used the elections not as a means of settling a political conflict, but as a means of showing the Westerners — and perhaps their own people — that the conflict was already settled. To the Vietnamese people an election used in this way was perfectly acceptable as long as they agreed that the settlement had in fact been accomplished. If it had not been accomplished — as certainly was the case during the Diemist plebiscite — then the elections would be coercive and fraudulent. The election results (though not the real political results) would in any case be the same: the party that held the elections would win. With this understanding the GVN had and would continue to refuse elections with Communist participation. With this understanding, the Buddhists decided in the summer of 1966 to boycott the elections that they had demonstrated for all spring. It was not that they had changed their minds on the principle of elections, but merely that they had predicted the results under two different sets of circumstances.

The 1966 election was then, like all those before it, a redundancy. Once the real issue of power was settled, the South Vietnamese, choosing from a group of names presented to them by the province chiefs, elected a group of delegates from all the racial, religious, and political groups that already exerted influence on the GVN. In all important respects the Assembly was no more than a larger model of the GVN. The Americans congratulated themselves on the establishment of a new institution for sharing power and reconciling diversity, but the Vietnamese saw in the Assembly only a confirmation that Vietnam was passing through a period of interregnum and “confusion.” The generals desired unanimity, but in contrast to Ho, Diem, and Tri Quang, they had no idea of what it might consist. Dr. Sung's surprise at finding “nothing to oppose” was occasioned by the contradiction of his private belief that there
had
to be some clear intelligence behind all those ranks of soldiers, all that tonnage of machinery.

Ambassador Lodge's opinion to the contrary, the election of 1966 was traditional — the Cochin Chinese tradition being the colonial one. As Bernard Fall pointed out, the French municipal and regional councils had been filled with bitter critics of the colonial regime.
⁹
The new assembly was rather less radical in its constituents (the French had, after all, permitted Trotskyites to run in the 1930's), but the members felt equally free to criticize the government on matters of policy. How, indeed, should they act as a rubber stamp if the generals had no clear policy? They were free, that is, to criticize up to the point of discussing an alternate government or negotiations with the NLF. For as long as the Americans continued to support the GVN, they would be just as dependent on the Americans as the generals. Like the French before them, the Americans felt that all the talk was an encouraging sign: it meant (so they imagined) that the urban bourgeoisie now had a chance to let off steam, and that the Vietnamese would learn to form cohesive parties and majorities for the eventual goal of self-government. The French had been ready to make concessions to these “legally constituted” bodies; the Americans hoped that the generals would do the same. But all the talk led nowhere, nowhere at all, because it did not touch the fundamental issue of power. In the elections the Vietnamese had a choice, but only a choice between one abstraction and another. However they voted, whatever they said, the generals and the Americans would continue to rule the country. Rather than “train them in democracy,” the elections of 1966-1967 convinced the Vietnamese that elections were useless as a means of settling political conflicts.

What did the Americans want? That was the question of the 1967 election, when “the Vietnamese people” would be called upon to vote not simply for a legislature, but for the head of state, for the government itself. For the urban politicians, the need to answer the question seemed to be a matter of life or death. What did the Americans want? Rather than announce their position, the American embassy officials, in their devious Occidental manner, continued to insist that they wanted “free elections.” But that meant nothing. It was rather as if a customer in a restaurant, when asked what he wanted for dinner, kept insisting that he liked to read the menu, but that he would leave the choice to them. To the Vietnamese it was quite evident that the customer did care what he ate, but that he preferred to keep it a secret, so that at any moment he might get up, blame the management for the poor service, and leave without paying his bill. The fear of abandonment by the United States was never far from their minds. To them the American silence was infuriating — and furthermore hypocritical, for, as they saw it, the elections would impose a responsibility upon them without really giving them a choice: the United States was already supporting the regime of Nguyen Cao Ky. Until it ceased to do so, there would be no chance for a civilian candidate to win.

Like the generals, the civilian politicians gave the Americans too much credit for purposefulness. It was true that the mission heads more or less favored the continuance of military government. But their inclination owed at least partly to the fact that they saw no alternative — having themselves precluded the formation of one. Had the Assembly agreed to make it impossible for Ky to run, and united behind a single candidate, they would have had a much more difficult decision to make. But after a year of the Assembly, the civilian parties were as divided as ever and, as a result, submissive to the generals. Instead of putting up one candidate, they put up twelve, most of whom had no serious political differences. Under some pressure from above, the Assembly voted by a large majority to invalidate the candidacies of the only two men who looked as if they might run a serious opposition campaign. Au Truong Thanh, the capable former minister of economics under Ky and a former favorite of the Americans who now openly advocated a cease-fire, it eliminated on the grounds that he was a “neutralist.” The once popular General Duong Van Minh, now living in exile, it eliminated on the technicality that he was residing out of the country.

Taking advantage of the civilian disarray, General Ky tightened up on press censorship and limited the forthcoming election campaign to one month, thereby granting himself the exclusive right to press his suit for all the intervening months. To make sure the voters understood the situation, he announced that he would make a coup d'etat if they elected a civilian whose policies he disagreed with. “In any democratic country you have the right to disagree with the views of others,” he explained. But the necessity seemed unlikely to arise, for between them, the Americans, the Assembly, and the generals had succeeded in reducing the element of choice or “confusion” as far as the formal trappings of the elections would permit.

But then something happened that destroyed all of these careful preparations. In May, General Nguyen Van Thieu announced that he would run for president. The generals were shocked, and quite understandably, for having once fulfilled and assimilated the unreasonable demands of the Americans, they now faced the terrifying prospect of a real political conflict between two equal contenders for the office of chief of state. Now the worst was bound to happen: the army would split, the electorate would divide, and — who knew? — in the general anarchy a civilian candidate might actually win. Interestingly enough, the Americans appeared to share their fears. Above all, the mission did not want a divided army. Suspecting that Thieu had used the announcement as a feint towards some other objective, the embassy appealed to him to withdraw, doubtless with some other offer in hand. But Thieu would have none of it. He agreed that the army should not be divided, but he refused to withdraw unless Ky, too, declared his retirement. For him, so he said, it had become an affair of honor.

The embassy was, as one reporter put it, “deeply disquieted.” For the past two years the officials had taken for granted that Thieu was no more than a figurehead in a stable Ky government (a peculiar assumption in that respectability is the usual qualification for figureheads); now they had to admit that Ky's power was limited, and that in Thieu the premier had not a submissive partner but a bitter rival. What was worse, the embassy seemed to have no power over either of them. Having failed to persuade Thieu to withdraw, the officials found Ky, their own favorite, equally deaf to their diplomacy. Outraged at the insult to him, and no doubt well aware of what might happen to him if Thieu won, Ky refused to withdraw.

To resolve this unbearable crisis, the defense minister and chief of staff, General Cao Van Vien, called a meeting of all the general officers in the armed forces of the Republic. The meeting lasted for three days — a three days during which, according to Robert Shaplen's fascinating account, the generals went through the full histrionic range from patriotic outbursts to threats on self and others, to cool fury, to embarrassed silence and tears. On the first day they accused each other of corruption, and debated the suggestions that they should, a) allow a civilian to win the election, or b) tear up the constitution and keep on ruling without it. Generals Thieu and Ky made affecting speeches offering to withdraw their candidacies. The next day General Thieu came to the meeting with a determination that apparently belonged at least in part to his most powerful wife. Instead of keeping to the usual vaguely worded denunciations of the general corruption, he cited facts and figures describing the horrible corruption of the national police. As the police were run by General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, and as General Loan ran Nguyen Cao Ky, the direction of his attack was not difficult to follow. In embarrassment General Loan walked out of the room, and three of the four corps commanders tore off their stars and vowed not to return to their commands until the confrontation was ended. The intolerable moment was relieved by everyone bursting into tears. Thieu wept and thanked everyone for listening to him. Ky wept and offered once more to resign. Finally, as if exhausted by the proceedings, the generals accepted Ky's withdrawal and prevailed upon him to run for the vice-presidency on Thieu's ticket in return for certain compensatory arrangements and guarantees.
¹⁰