Vietnam

Nobody in Washington was interested, however. Cash poured into Saigon’s coffers, to be spent at the almost absolute discretion of the president’s generals and officials, a formula for waste and corruption. Securing a government import permit opened the tap to a fortune. Some of the urban middle-class prospered mightily from the inflow of cash and commodities: many of the new rich were former Northern exiles who made good – or, perhaps, made bad – in the South. Under the capitalist system, it seemed that only peasants need commit to honest toil: Saigon experienced a surge of bubble prosperity.

3 BOOM TIME

In the late 1950s, the Southern capital still possessed a colonial elegance tinged with Oriental decadence that delighted Westerners. New arrivals were moved to ecstasies by glimpsing Vietnamese girls in ao dai gowns – or better still, out of them. Literate foreigners recalled a Graham Greene line: ‘To take an Annamite to bed with you is like taking a bird: they twitter and sing on your pillow.’ Most Westerners’ sexual couplings were conducted with professionals, while middle-class Vietnamese sustained notably innocent social lives, in which few advanced beyond hand-holding in advance of their arranged marriages. Nguyen Cao Ky, who later became well-known for the range of his wives and lovers, asserted that when he travelled to France as a twenty-one-year-old pilot trainee, like almost all his contemporaries he was a virgin.

Respectable Vietnamese called girls who associated with round-eyes ‘Me My’, a term only marginally less contemptuous than branding them as hookers. Families exercised rigorous social discipline over their offspring of both sexes. Truong Nhu Tang’s father directed his six sons towards appointed careers as doctor, pharmacist, banker, engineer, engineer, engineer. Tang indeed pursued pharmacological studies until he decided that instead he wished to be a revolutionary: ‘Each Sunday we would gather at my grandfather’s house to listen as he taught us the precepts of Confucian ethics. He would remind us of our duty to live virtuous lives, of personal rectitude and filial piety. And he would talk about the cardinal ethical principles: nhon, nghia le, tri, tin – benevolence, duty, propriety, conscience and fidelity … For boys especially, he would tell us, there are two unshakable necessities: protection of family honour and loyalty to the country. We would sing together the morality verses that we all knew by heart: “Cong cha nhu nui Thai Son” – “Your father’s sacrifice in raising you climbs as high as Thai Son Mountain/Your mother’s love and care are ever-flowing streams.”’

The young Hanoi exile Nguyen Thi Chinh’s life took a new twist one day in 1956, when this beautiful young woman met Joseph Mankiewicz, who was in Saigon to shoot the movie of The Quiet American. He asked her to test for the role of Phuong, the Vietnamese girl who is the lover first of Fowler, a British journalist, then of the CIA man Alden Pyle. Chinh was thrilled: her new husband, an army officer, was training in the US. In his absence, propriety obliged her instead to seek consent from her mother-in-law, who rejected with horror the notion of an actress in the family. Only in the following year did Chinh’s movie career get started, when she took a role in a Vietnamese movie which secured the approval of her husband’s family – as a Buddhist nun.

Thereafter, she found herself starring in successive films, twenty-two in all, with such titles as A Yank in Vietnam and Operation CIA. She filmed all over South-East Asia and became a famous and indeed worshipped woman in her own country. For all her success, however, the tragedy of her family’s split, absolute ignorance of the fate of those in the North, never faded from her consciousness: ‘War is my enemy. Without it, what a wonderful life I could have had.’ As for Mankiewicz’s film, Col. Lansdale – who was wrongly supposed to be the original of Greene’s anti-hero, attended a gala screening in Washington and praised the movie to the sky. Nobody else did: Audie Murphy played the quiet American as a wholesome good guy, and the author deplored the sanitisation of his cynical novel.

Though much American money was stolen or wasted, some of the huge aid infusion, together with a respite from war, brought happy times to the Mekong delta in the later 1950s. A peasant said, ‘I regarded this period as something from a fairy tale; I was carefree and enjoyed my youth.’ Communist Party membership declined dramatically. There was rice in the fields, fruit in the orchards, pigs snuffling around the yards, fish in village ponds. Wooden houses increasingly replaced huts. Some peasants acquired a little furniture; many bought bicycles and radios; children attended schools. The first motorised sampans and water pumps began to modernise agriculture.

Yet those at the bottom of the heap failed to benefit. There was an absence of generosity about the Southern political system, mirroring that in the North, though at first less tinged with blood. Landowners returned to claim their rights in villages from which they had been expelled by the Vietminh, and even tried to collect back rent. Diem became progressively more authoritarian: Tran Kim Tuyen, chief of his intelligence service SEPES, stood less than five feet tall and weighed only a hundred pounds, but was notorious as one of the most ruthless killers in Asia. The president never wavered in rejecting any liability to conduct elections. On this, he could make a fair case: his government had never been party to the Geneva Accords, and no matching poll held in the North would be free or fair.

Moreover, Americans and some Europeans viewed South Vietnam in the context of other US client nations. Regimes survived, and even prospered, that were notably more unpleasant than Diem’s. The brutality and corruption of South Korean dictator Syngman Rhee had proved no impediment to his continuing rule. President Ramon Magsaysay of the Philippines employed ruthless methods to triumph over the Huks. The communist threat to Greece had finally been crushed, with shocking savageries by both sides. Few of Latin America’s dictators ran their countries with any pretence of honesty, justice or humanity, yet they continued to enjoy Washington’s favour.

Thus, in the late 1950s, Americans saw no reason to suppose that the incompetence, corruption and repressive policies of Diem’s regime need undo him, so long as they continued to pay the bills. He survived unscathed a February 1957 communist assassination attempt. Col. Lansdale boomed the little president to his bosses, and some were impressed: there were few Western correspondents in Saigon to gainsay Washington’s claims of progress. When Diem paid a May 1957 visit to the US he received a personal welcome from President Eisenhower, and a quarter of a million New Yorkers turned out for his tickertape parade. The New York Times described him euphorically as ‘an Asian liberator, a man of tenacity of purpose’; the Boston Globe dubbed him ‘Vietnam’s Man of Steel’. Life magazine published an article headed ‘The Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam: Diem, America’s Newly Arrived Visitor, has Roused His Country and Routed the Reds’. It would have been hard to crowd more fantasies into a sentence.

Back in Saigon, American advisers persuaded Diem that he should show himself more often before his people: when he did so, they orchestrated enthusiastic crowds. Diem’s monomania was fuelled by these tours, which he believed to reflect genuine adulation. He sought to make a virtue of stubbornness, once musing to journalist Marguerite Higgins that if the US controlled the Saigon government ‘like a puppet on a string … how will it be different from the French?’ The USIA’s Ev Bumgardner said that Diem regarded the Americans as ‘great big children – well-intentioned, powerful, with a lot of technical know-how, but not very sophisticated in dealing with him or his race’.

Diem was indeed his own man, as the South Vietnamese leaders who succeeded him were not. Unfortunately, however, the advice he rejected was that which might have secured his survival and even success: to curb the excesses of his own family; renounce favouritism towards Catholics; select subordinates for competence rather than loyalty; check corruption; abandon the persecution of critics; impose radical land reform.

Saigon people liked to think themselves nguoi Viet – true Vietnamese – while they looked down on Northerners, Bac Ky. Yet Catholic Northern exiles were conspicuous in their dominance of Diem’s court circle, and of his Can Lao political party. Duong Van Mai, who had herself fled from Hanoi, wrote later: ‘the Diem regime increasingly took on the look of a carpetbagger government’. The most disastrous influence on the president was his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, the clever, sinuous, brutal security supremo, whose ‘dragon lady’ wife Madame Nhu might have been chosen by Central Casting to play Wicked Witch of the East. The North Vietnamese politburo employed plenty of executioners and torturers, but the names and faces of such people were unknown outside their own prisons. The Nhus, by contrast, became globally notorious, doing untold harm to the image of the Saigon government.

Likewise, Diem’s generals affected heavy, brassbound military caps worn above sunglasses, a combination that seemed worldwide hallmarks of the servants of tyrants. Some top men went further, affecting tuxedos – Western formal garb – at banquets. Any South Vietnamese peasant who saw photographs of his leaders thus attired beheld a chasm between ‘them’ and ‘us’. A Vietnamese UPI reporter watching Diem arrive at the National Assembly in Saigon observed to a colleague, ‘The people in Hanoi may be absolute bastards, but they would never be so stupid as to appear before the people in a Mercedes-Benz.’ Here was a glaring contrast with Ho Chi Minh, who rejected the former Hanoi governor-general’s palace as a personal residence in favour of a gardener’s cottage in its grounds. An American reporter said: ‘The people upon whom we were relying to build a nation had no relationship with their own people.’

As late as 1960, 75 per cent of all the South’s farmland was owned by 15 per cent of the population, almost all absentees, because terror made them so. The communists urged peasants not to pay their rents, because defiance made them supporters of the revolution: should landlords and their government protectors regain control of a village, debts would have to be redeemed. There was widespread resentment at Saigon’s reintroduction of the old colonial system of forced labour, whereby people were obliged to give five days’ free service a year to government projects. When the CIA’s William Colby pressed Diem for a radical redistribution of farmland, the president replied: ‘You don’t understand. I cannot eliminate my middle class.’ Government-appointed village officials became petty tyrants, with absolute power to decree the guilt or innocence of those beneath their sway – and, indeed, to pass death sentences. The nurse running the local dispensary took bribes; so did the policeman counting families for tax; village council members arbitrating disputes. Fearful villagers felt obliged to invite their oppressors to become guests at weddings and funerals; to offer them choice cuts of the cats and dogs killed for food. Not all officials were bad, but the general run were incompetent, brutal or corrupt, sometimes all three.

Thus, when assassinations became widespread in 1960–61, many villagers applauded, because the terrorists were skilful in targeting as victims the most unpopular officials. Diem also introduced ‘agrovilles’, fortified hamlets into which peasants were compulsorily relocated. The objective was to isolate them from the communists, but the consequence was to alienate those who resented displacement. How brutal was Diem? The communists advanced a claim, to which they still adhere, that between 1954 and 1959 he killed sixty-eight thousand real or supposed enemies, and carried out 466,000 arrests. These figures seem fantastically exaggerated, just as Southerners inflate numbers killed during the North’s land redistribution. What can be stated with confidence is that the Saigon government rashly promoted the interests of Catholics and persecuted former Vietminh. Whereas the Northern communists created a highly efficient police state, its workings veiled from the world, Diem and his family built a ramshackle one, its cruelties conspicuous. This achieved some success in inspiring fear, almost none in securing respect.

The regime’s failure was not inevitable. Had the president governed in a moderately enlightened fashion, the communist revival could have been averted. Fredrik Logevall has written that, granted the indifference of both China and the Soviet Union to non-fulfilment of the terms of the Geneva Accords, ‘it is not impossible to imagine a scenario in which Diem’s South Vietnam survives, South Korea-style … Diem was the only major non-communist political figure to emerge in Vietnam from 1945 to 1975.’ But he became an architect of countless follies: in the three years from 1957 the Saigon regime presided over construction of half a million square yards of high-rental apartment and villa space, fifty-six thousand square yards of dance halls; and just a hundred thousand square yards of school classrooms, 5,300 square yards of hospital building.

The regime’s domestic excesses and shortcomings, rather than its failure to hold reunification elections, provided communists with the tinder to rekindle the war in the South. Both among his own people and on the world stage Ho Chi Minh was a towering victor in the contest for legitimacy as the voice of the Vietnamese people. Ten-year-old Truong Mealy’s communist teacher in the Mekong delta said: ‘Do you know why Ngo Dinh Diem came to Vietnam? He was sent by the US. Now his whole family has power and all the poor people must work to feed them. Who should run Vietnam – Diem or Ho Chi Minh?’ Five years later, Truong Mealy was a courier for the Vietcong, as the South’s resurgent communist guerrilla movement will hereafter be called.

4 A RECALL TO ARMS

The last French soldiers left Saigon on 28 April 1956. To the dismay of Hanoi, the principal Western signatory to the Geneva Accords thus washed its hands of Indochina, and of any responsibility to promote elections. The revival of warfare in the South thereafter was not, at the outset, prompted by a policy decision in Hanoi, but resulted instead from spontaneous anger among local opponents of the Diem regime. A peasant told American researcher James Trullinger that he and his village attributed the communists’ temporary dormancy to cunning – a calculation that if Hanoi waited until Southerners had experienced a few years of Diem, they would be ripe for revolution. Southern fighters began to launch attacks on government troops and installations, without authorisation from any higher authority.

The first communist call to arms was an impassioned December 1956 missive to the Northern politburo from Le Duan, still presiding over COSVN in the Mekong delta. He described the persecution of comrades, the snuffing out of Party cells, the tightening military grip of Saigon, especially in the Central Highlands. In response, Hanoi reluctantly agreed that Southern fighters should be authorised to shoot in self-defence. It also endorsed some assassinations of ‘reactionary traitors’, and terror bombings of ‘Diem institutions’. A small contingent of intelligence officers and elite sappers – what Westerners would call commandos – was dispatched southwards. Thereafter, in the course of 1957 Southern communists claimed that 452 South Vietnamese government appointees, mostly village chiefs, were killed, kidnapped or suborned. Terrorism resumed: seventeen people died in an attack on a bar in Chau Doc on 17 July; thirteen were wounded in a Saigon café on 10 October; thirteen American servicemen were injured by three further bombings in the capital.

The next important development was the recall of Le Duan to the North. In the summer of 1957, when he reached Hanoi with a comrade, for a time the two were held in a guest house under guard. This was a precaution presumably rooted in the power struggle then taking place, precipitated by the ongoing economic crisis. The new arrivals nonetheless sneaked out in the evenings to amuse themselves, finding standing room at the Hong Ha theatre and suchlike, until guards deflated their bicycle tyres to keep the visitors at home. Le Duan is alleged to have complained savagely that the politburo sought only a quiet life: ‘They have abandoned us.’

The longer he spent in Hanoi, the better he understood how little support for a new war would be forthcoming from either Moscow or Beijing. Yet fierce energy enabled him, during the months that followed, to shoulder past Northern rivals and become a major influence upon the politburo, supported by his close ally Le Duc Tho, whom a senior cadre characterised as ‘taciturn and chilly’, and who later became Henry Kissinger’s interlocutor at the 1972–73 Paris peace talks. Le Duan’s record, as a veteran who had suffered more for the revolution than almost any other comrade, conferred immense prestige. He famously said: ‘You can’t get anywhere reasoning with the imperialist gang, you have to take a hammer and bash their heads.’ North Vietnam’s Party secretary had been sacked for his role in the shambles of land collectivisation. Giap seemed the natural candidate to succeed him. Instead, however, in December 1957 it was Le Duan who got the job.

He was born Le Van Nhuan fifty years earlier in northern South Vietnam, a carpenter’s son who became a committed revolutionary long before Ho returned from exile. His force of personality was indisputable, but a coarseness of tone and language grated on more fastidious colleagues. Lacking social graces, he despised weakness, either ideological or human, which from an early stage he identified in Giap and probably also – though he would never have dared to say as much – in the ageing Ho Chi Minh. His personal life remained an enigma until long after his death. Only in the twenty-first century did his second wife, former Vietminh courier Nguyen Thuy Nga, reveal her tragic story.

At Tet 1956 – the Vietnamese New Year – while Le Duan was still in the South, Nga travelled outside Hanoi to visit his father, bearing gifts of honey, ginseng roots and a few yards of Ha Dong silk. She found at his house her husband’s first wife, who collapsed in sobs on being confronted with Nga’s existence. A few months later, Party officials descended on Nga: a senior cadre, they said, could have only one wife, and in Le Duan’s case it could not be her. As the mother of his two children she was stunned, and said she could agree nothing until her husband himself came to Hanoi – as he did soon afterwards. He offered no sympathy, merely impregnating her for a third time before handing her over to the Party’s Central Women’s Association, under whose auspices she was dispatched to China to ‘study’.

In her exile Le Duan began to write Nga letters, sometimes passionate, including one which said, ‘I love you, I love you so much. Don’t let a few outward actions or a few unfortunate happenings give rise to any misunderstanding. My darling, love triumphs over all obstacles. If you love me then you can solve all of your problems and difficulties.’ They saw each other occasionally when he visited Beijing on state business, and once she met Ho Chi Minh. Le Duan took custody of their three children, and Nga sobbed desperately when she learned that they were thereafter reared by his other wife. After some years she was granted permission briefly to visit Vietnam and see the children. She spent three days with Le Duan, who seemed ‘uncomfortable and unhappy’, as well he might be. In 1964 she was dispatched to the Mekong delta to work as a propaganda cadre, and did not again see her children until 1975. Here was a glimpse through a dark window of the man and the Party to which he devoted his life.

Radicalism in Hanoi was prompted by rising conviction that peaceful reunification would not come. This precipitated the Party’s November 1958 Resolution 14, advancing the Northern revolution another dramatic step with agricultural collectivisation. The following month, a large number of detainees in South Vietnam, including communists, died of food poisoning in a Diem detention camp. Early in the following year the politburo received emotional plaints and pleas from Southern villages, such as this one obviously drafted by local cadres: ‘Uncle Ho! The Americans and Diem have been wicked too much already – we ask your permission to cut off their heads.’ Weeks of debate followed, at the end of which the Party central committee promulgated Resolution 15, an important step towards escalation. It authorised more aggressive action, in the familiar language of Party exhortations: ‘Only the triumph of the revolution can assuage the plight of the poor and wretched people of the South, confound the evil policies of the American imperialists and their puppets who divide the nation and provoke war.’ Resolution 15 opened the way for ‘volunteers’ – as the Chinese had earlier dubbed their troops who fought in Korea – to set forth for the war zone. During the months that followed, some 4,600 political cadres, technicians and engineers headed into Diem’s territory, most of them Southern natives, former ‘regroupers’. Authorisation was given to open ‘Strategic Route 559’, a secret path to the battlefield that ran through neutral Laos and evolved into the Ho Chi Minh Trail; three-year military conscription had already been reintroduced. One of those who approved Resolution 15 said later, ‘Only [in 1959] did we finally acknowledge that there would be no general elections; that Diem was massacring our people. There were signs that the US would continue to strengthen its presence [and therefore that] the only path to the unification of our country must lie through violence.’

It was significant that Hanoi was slow to inform the Russians about Resolution 15, because Le Duan and his comrades knew how unwelcome it would be. Moreover, only on 7 May 1959 was word of the new mandate passed to COSVN, communist headquarters in the South. North Vietnam’s leaders remained morbidly fearful of provoking the Americans, perhaps even causing them to strike at their territory. The ideological divide between Russia and China was deepening apace, and this was reflected by rival factions in Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh and Giap leaned towards Moscow; Le Duan led those who inclined towards Beijing.

At the time of Mao Zedong’s catastrophic industrialisation programme the Great Leap Forward, which cost the lives of at least fifty-five million of his own people, Le Duan may have been responsible for Hanoi’s inopportune expression of national ambition: ‘The China of today is the Vietnam of tomorrow.’ Meanwhile he and his comrades still struggled to suppress domestic dissent: Catholics staged demonstrations at which they demanded a right to migrate south. Chants of ‘Down with communism’ prompted troops to open fire, inflicting casualties. Economic woes obliged Hanoi to slash defence spending, from 27 per cent of the national budget in 1955 to 19.2 per cent in 1958, 16 per cent in 1960. Factories languished, and falling agricultural production prompted a cut in the rice ration. The Czech ambassador reported home that much Soviet-bloc aid was being wasted. In June 1959 the British consul in Hanoi reported: ‘The standard of living is sinking into ever shabbier and drabber uniformity. Even the poor are poorer … No member of the Western community has ever met a Vietnamese who was in favour of the regime, except the members of the regime itself.’

In a mirror reflection of Diem’s advancement of loyalists at the expense of honest men, Hanoi promoted war veterans and ideological purists rather than its brightest and best. A French diplomatic observer reported that nine-tenths of the North’s population was ‘ready for an uprising if it had the means’. Yet Le Duc Tho, as head of Party organisation, chose this moment to demand fresh purges of ‘undesirables’, meaning former landlords and ‘rich’ peasants. In its preoccupation with ideological rectitude, the North Vietnamese politburo behaved more like Bolsheviks of forty years earlier than latter-twentieth-century socialists. A new Party statute, denouncing dissenters, was enforced by the Ministry of Public Security, whose chief Tran Quoc Hoan became known to his critics as ‘the Beria of Vietnam’, recalling Stalin’s most notorious enforcer.