Fire in the Lake (75 page)

39
. One was secretary of state at the presidency and the other the assistant secretary of state for national defense. Diem himself was the secretary of defense.

40
. Duncanson,
Government and Revolution,
pp. 215–216.

41
. Ibid., p. 217.

42
. Scigliano,
South Vietnam,
p.
77.

43
. Ibid., p. 173.

44
. Duncanson,
Government and Revolution,
pp. 255–256.

45
. Shaplen,
Lost Revolution,
p. 104.

46
. Anthony T. Bouscaren,
The Last of the Mandarins,
p. 82.

47
. Duncanson,
Government and Revolution,
p. 215.

48
. Nguyen Thai, “Government of Men,” p. 213.

49
. Ibid., pp. 228–235.

50
. This Catholic law must have seemed very odd to most Vietnamese, for in this quasi-Buddhist country it was often the custom for men to take a second or third wife without the legal formality of a divorce.

51
. A perfect example of this logic appears in an article by Chester Bowles:
    In July, 1954, when the Geneva Agreements were signed, there was some basis for hope that a stable peace might be assured by the free elections which the agreements called for to determine the future governments of North and South Vietnam [sic]. But South Vietnam's President Ngo Dinh Diem, on one pretext or another, refused to cooperate, and, without connivance (the United States never actually signed the accords ), the elections were never held.
    When the Ho Chi Minh Government in Hanoi, bitter over what it considered to be a deliberate violation of the Geneva election agreement, launched a new campaign of terrorism against the Diem Government, Diem promptly sought our assistance.
    In retrospect, this was a turning point. If we had learned our lessons from the failure of Chiang Kai Shek in China and the French in Indochina, and insisted as a condition for our economic assistance, on a sweeping program of domestic reform and development in South Vietnam — a more equitable tax system, increased rural credit, irrigation, schools and roads, and above all a sweeping land reform program that would have assured each rural family in South Vietnam ten or fifteen acres of their own — I believe the political and economic situation still might have been stabilized.
    At first Diem demonstrated a heartening degree of courage and understanding, but gradually, like most recipients of American military aid in the underdeveloped world, he slipped under the control of the great landlords and the other right-wing elements who were determined at any cost of blood and suffering to maintain the political status quo.
    Rejecting what he (correctly, I think) believed to be a half-hearted urging from the United States, Diem refused to place a ceiling on land holdings (as he had promised to do), to clear up corruption in the villages and cities and to grant even minimal local powers in a society long accustomed to strong political institutions in the villages.
    (Chester Bowles, excerpts from testimony to the Joint Economic Committee of Congress,
Boston Sunday Globe,
14 February 1971.)

52
. Fall,
Two Vietnams,
pp. 294–295. Though, as the Americans pointed out, rice production had regained its prewar level, the country had half again as much population as it had in 1938.

53
. Duncanson,
Government and Revolution,
p. 247.

54
. See fuller discussion of land reform in the next chapter. The French government bought out its own nationals who owned rice land, and the Diem regime allowed those who owned rubber plantations or other industries to remain.

55
. Milton C. Taylor, “South Viet-Nam: Lavish Aid, Limited Progress,” p. 243.

56
. Shaplen,
Lost Revolution,
pp. 191–192.

57
. Scigliano,
South Vietnam,
p. 171, cites the hawkish British historian, P. J. Honey.

58
. J. J. Zasloff, “Origins of the Insurgency in South Vietnam, 1954–1960.” See also the RAND interviews cited elsewhere.

59
. Joseph Buttinger,
Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled,
vol. 2, pp. 950–951, cites Malcolm Browne.

60
. Ho Chi Minh,
Ho Chi Minh on Revolution,
pp. 150–152 (“To the People's Executive Committees at All Levels,” October 1945). and pp. 180–184 (“Letter to Comrades in North Viet-Nam,” 1 March 1947).

61
. Gerald C. Hickey,
Village in Vietnam,
p. 90.

62
. Ibid., p. 185.

63
. Conversation with Paul Mus.

64
. The quotations come from RAND Corporation “Interviews Concerning the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam.”

65
. Phan Thi Dac,
Situation de la personne au Viet-Nam,
p. 143.

66
. Of course, in a Vietnamese village the position of a village councilor was not
entirely
determined by birth. But the sense of stability is the same in a society so small that almost everyone knows everyone else.

67
. By means of language the ego adopts extra-family members into the patriarchal clan: the wife becomes, familiarly, “my younger sister,” the schoolteacher “my master” (father).

68
. Charles Gosselin,
L'Empire d'Annam,
p. 45.

69
. Richard Solomon, “Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture.” Phan Thi Dac, Dr. Walter Sloate, and other anthropologists and psychologists working on Vietnam have indicated that Vietnamese behavior, at least from the point of view of comparison with that of the West, contains many of the elements Dr. Solomon describes with reference to the Chinese.

70
.
I Ching,
p. 521. This is the image of
PROVIDING NOURISHMENT.

71
. “Interviews,” RAND Corporation File FD2A, p. 6.

72
. Phan Thi Dac,
Situation de la personne,
pp. 126–127.

73
. Léopold Cadière,
Croyances et pratiques religieuses des viêtnamiens,
vol. 2, P. 313.

74
. Interviews,” RAND Corporation File FD2A, pp. 5–6.

75
. Ibid.

76
. Ibid., pp. 7–8.

77
. Ibid., p. 8.

78
. Ibid.

79
. Halberstam,
Ho,
p. 110.

80
. The strong sect villages — Catholic, Hoa Hao, or Cao Dai — would tend to organize and contain this form of behavior.

81
. “Interviews,” RAND Corporation File FD2A, p. 6.

82
. Cadiére,
Croyances,
vol. 2, on the construction of Hue.

83
. Fall,
Two Vietnams,
p. 236.

84
. Pike,
Viet Cong,
p. 60. After the abortive coup of 1960, Diem said that the “hand of God had reached down” to protect him. Though Diem used the Catholic language, his idea is here not of mercy from an anthropomorphic God, but justification from an impersonal heaven.

85
.
I Ching,
p. 501.

86
. Scigliano,
South Vietnam,
pp. 114–115. In the first five years of the Diem regime, the United States spent 78 percent of its aid to Saigon on the development of the armed forces. To that sum the Department of Defense added eighty-five million dollars a year in direct military assistance — mostly military equipment. Of the remaining 22 percent of the aid budget, the United States spent 40 percent a year on transportation, and most of that on road-building. The Vietnamese officials hoped the roads would serve commerce, but the Americans gave priority to those roads which would serve strategic military interests. (The twenty-mile stretch of superhighway designed to carry heavy military traffic between Bien Hoa and Saigon cost more money than the United States provided for all labor, community development, social welfare, housing, health, and education projects in Vietnam during the entire period from 1954 to 1962.) The second most important percentage of the nonmilitary budget went for food and the third for public administration — that is, primarily for the building of the civil guard, the police, and other security services.

87
. The RF and PF were known as the “Ruff-Puffs” to many Americans in Vietnam.

88
. See McNamara memorandum on Taylor's cable to Kennedy in Sheehan,
Pentagon Papers,
p. 48.

89
. Taylor and others used the phrases. See Sheehan,
Pentagon Papers,
pp. 146–147, and Ralph Stavins, “Kennedy's Private War.” The political recommendations, drawn up by State Department officials, appeared in the official “Taylor report.”

90
. The quotation is from General Maxwell Taylor's report (3 November 1961) on his mission to South Vietnam, in Sheehan,
Pentagon Papers,
p. 147.

91
. Duncanson,
Government and Revolution,
p. 316. The minister of the interior spoke of the Strategic Hamlet program as the last chance for Vietnam to preserve her independence, indicating that the Vietnamese government had heard of the proposal to send American troops.

92
. Bernard B. Fall,
Viet-Nam Witness,
pp. 197–198.

93
. Ibid., p. 283. He cites Robert Scigliano in
Asian Survey,
January 1963.

94
. Warner,
Last Confucian,
p. 116.

95
. Scigliano,
South Vietnam,
p. 61.

96
. Halberstam,
Making of a Quagmire,
p. 41, cites Graham Greene in the
New Republic,
16 May 1955.

97
. These pageants took some pains to produce, as Diem in his role of emperor wished to see only people with clean hands and clean clothes. As one peasant reported his visit: “In early 1962 when he came to visit the agricultural center in Due Hue district, I don't know whether or not he realized that the people in several villages had spent almost two months preparing his walk way. Just imagine! Many people had to work day and night to cut all the bamboo trees in the villages to put on a ten-kilometer muddy road for the President to walk during his one-hour visit to the center.… At the time, all of the villagers disliked Ngo Dinh Diem, but no one dared say anything against him.” (“Interviews,” RAND Corporation File FD1A, p. 14.)

98
. Halberstam,
Making of a Quagmire,
p. 46.

99
. Duong Van Minh,' “Vietnam: A Question of Confidence,” p. 85.

100
. Shaplen,
Lost Revolution,
p. 193, describes Nhu's instigation of the RYM.

101
. Halberstam,
Making of a Quagmire,
p. 205.

102
. Though there were a number of Theravada bonzes in the Delta and in Saigon, they were never very active politically. Tri Quang and others never quite succeeded in recruiting them.

103
. Georg W. Alsheimer,
Vietnamesische Lehrjahre,
p. 133.

104
. Paul Mus, “The Buddhist Background to the Crises in Vietnamese Politics.” The foregoing comes essentially from this work.

105
. Halberstam,
Making of a Quagmire,
p. 211.

106
. Shaplen,
Lost Revolution,
p. 199.

107
. Halberstam,
Making of a Quagmire,
pp. 206–207.

108
. Warner,
Last Confucian,
pp. 231–232.

109
. Shaplen,
Lost Revolution,
p. 189.

110
. Sheehan,
Pentagon Papers,
p. 232.

111
. Shaplen,
Lost Revolution,
p. 210.

4: The National Liberation Front

Politics of the Earth

  
1
. John T. McAlister, Jr., and Paul Mus,
The Vietnamese and Their Revolution,
p. 90.

  
2
. Ibid., p. 117. See further discussion of this below.

The Origins of the National Liberation Front

  
1
. The figure of ninety thousand is the U.S. official estimate. Other sources differ somewhat. Bernard Fall gives the figure of eighty thousand in “Viet-Cong — The Unseen Enemy in Viet-Nam,” in
The Viet-Nam Reader,
ed. Marcus G. Raskin and Bernard B. Fall, p. 224. Other historians say one hundred thousand.

  
2
. Gerald Hickey gives a description of the differences between Viet Minh and other villages in the period from 1955 to 1956 in “Accommodation and Coalition in South Vietnam,” pp. 38–39.

  
3
. After the publication of the White Paper, I. F. Stone gave a convincing rebuttal of the U.S. argument that the NLF was supplied from the north and manned by northerners, using only the internal evidence of the paper. The “infiltrators” the paper spoke of were in fact the southern regroupees who after 1959 began to reinfiltrate the south to join their own liberation movement. I. F. Stone, “A Reply to the White Paper,” in
Viet-Nam Reader,
ed. Raskin and Fall, pp. 155–162.
    In 1964 U.S. official estimates in Saigon were that the NLF obtained a maximum of 10 percent and perhaps only 2 percent of their weapons from the north. (Malcolm W. Browne,
The New Face of War,
p. 24.) Even this estimate may be high, as most of the weapons suspected to have come from the north were Soviet or Czech, and these could have been bought anywhere by the NLF itself.

  
4
. J. J. Zasloff, “Origins of the Insurgency in South Vietnam, 1954–1960,” p. 1.

  
5
. Fall, “Viet-Cong,” in
Viet-Nam Reader,
ed. Raskin and Fall, p. 254.

  
6
. Zasloff, “Origins of Insurgency,” pp. 11, 17. Douglas Pike points out that the Diem regime did not even have a physical presence in many parts of the countryside and thus hazards that the repression could not have been so great as the NLF leaders made out. The apparent contradiction is, however, resolved by the fact that the anti—Viet Minh campaign was not merely the work of the government but of various
revanchiste
political groups, and this particularly in the Viet Minh areas of the center. The NLF leaders naturally do not like to admit this any more than the Saigon government officials.