Next in this series about the evolution of the history of the Vietnam war, it's time to tackle Ngo Dinh Diem, Ho Chi Minh's counterpart in South Vietnam. Again, the comparison will be between Stanley Karnow's "established" narrative in his book Vietnam, A History and Moyar's "revisionist" view from his book Triumph Forsaken. The books are 25 years apart in time and show very clearly how our understanding of historical events changes over time (see the first essay in this series for a more thorough explanation of my ideas on the evolution of history).

By the way, I'm seeing literally hundreds of hits to this page from people googling for an image of Ngo Dinh Diem. Would some of you please live comments at the bottom of this page and let me know why? Is it a school project, a documentary you saw that brought him to mind or just a passing interest in the fellow?

Karnow's Diem

Karnow saw Diem as a bungler, too proud and obstinate to properly run the government of Vietnam. Karnow lays this out in a chapter called "America's Mandarin". Like any good writer, he establishes his thesis in the first paragraph: "Ngo Dinh Diem filled a vacuum, but despite his record of integrity, he lacked the dimensions of a national leader." He goes on in detail:

Above all, he could no comprehend the magnitude of the political, social and economic revolution being promoted by his Communist foes. He saw their uprising in narrow military terms–a misperception shared by his American patrons. Limited thus, he could not effectively mobilize the South Vietnamese people to cope with the growing Vietcong insurgency, nor could he check the mounting opposition of his critics, whose frustrations with his regime were only aggravated by his inability to check the Communists. (pp 229)

Karnow knew Diem personally and spent many hours interviewing him over the years, both in Vietnam and in France before he came to power in Vietnam. He claimed that Diem had a "fanatical faith in his crusade" to liberate Vietnam and turn it into a free, sovereign country. In 1933, Diem had been offered the job of minister of the interior under the French puppet Bao Dai. He quit the job after three months, however, when the French refused reforms he insisted on. In 1946, when Ho was consolidating his power in North Vietnam, Diem was asked to join Ho's government. Diem refused to have any part of Ho's repressive, murderous regime (they had killed Diem's brother, after all). Diem eventually left Vietnam for Maryknoll Seminary in the United States, where he lived for two years. In 1953, he left the US for a Benedictine monastery in Belgium. In 1954, after the French had lost in Vietnam and the Geneva conference settled the partition of Vietnam, Diem was set to become Bao Dai's prime minister.

Diem immediately won military assistance from the Eisenhower administration and tried to put it to use defending Vietnam from Vietcong infiltration. Internally, he had to put down an attempt to oust him by General Ngyuen Van Hinh (who thought he could run the country better) and he had to smash a huge criminal gang called the Binh Xuyen, which were being supported by the still-bitter French. After this, he orchestrated (with help from his American advisors) a phony election to oust Bao Dai and make himself the sole leader of Vietnam.

As early as January 1956, having beaten his adversaries in Saigon, Diem launched a drive against Vietminh remnants in the countryside, his offensive a mirror image of the repression then going on in the north. (...)
By 1956, Diem had smashed most of the former Vietminh cells in the Mekong Delta, and those that survived retreated into remote swamps. (pp 242)

In May of 1957, Diem called on President Eisenhower in a visit to the United States. Eisenhower hailed him as the "miracle man" of Asia. Later, Vice President Johnson would call him the "Churchill of the decade". But all was not well at home in Vietnam. Diem's regime had become a "narrow oligarchy composed of his brothers and other relatives." His brother Nhu was a thug and rabble organizer who ran the political Lao Nhan Vi Dang (Personalist Labor) party.

Another blunder at the time was the creation of Khu Tru Mat, known as agrovilles, farm communities designed mainly to isolate the rural population from the Communists. These centers, like the strategic hamlets later, showed Diem's conventional misconception of the problem as simply one of security. In any event, they were built and managed in such a way that alienated peasants, as I learned on a trip during the spring of 1959 to Vi Thanh, in the heart of the Mekong Delta. (pp 246)

Diem's government became more and more repressive. In 1960, a group of eighteen "distinguished nationalists" petitioned Diem for reforms, but he rejected them. Through all of this, Diem lobbied for more and more military aid from the United States. Within the US government, the Joint Chiefs were recommending sending US troops in to help Diem achieve a "early and hard-hitting operation" that would bolster the regime. Kennedy wanted neither option, so he planted a story in the New York Times that said, "military leaders at the Pentagon, no less than General Taylor himself, are understood to be reluctant to send organized US combat units into Southeast Asia." This silenced Diem (although Taylor knew better) for a time.

Diem and Nhu saw the strategic hamlet program as essentially a means to spread their influence rather than a device to infuse peasants with the will to resist the Vietcong. Nhu, personally taking charge, was obsessed by numbers. He tried to build stockades as fast as possible, and Thompson himself would afterward disavow them: "No attention was paid to their purpose. Their creation became the purpose in itself." (pp 273)

At the working level, American soldiers and civilians in Vietnam decried the strategic hamlet scheme. One US officer in the Mekong Delta criticized Diem's lopsided priorities saying the he was "trying to hold everything and thus holding very little." (pp 274)

Diem's army showed itself to be ineffective in 1963 when it a division was "mauled" by a smaller Vietcong force Ap Bac, mostly due to "pusillanimous" officers – officers Diem appointed as part of his oligarchy. The minority Buddhists had been repressed in Vietnam for centuries and they now organized to protest under the leadership of Tri Quang. At a protest, the military was called out and the crowd stampeded, killing a woman and eight children. Then, on June 11, 1963, a Buddhist monk set fire to himself in a busy intersection of Saigon. The spectacle made worldwide headlines.

The US administration was growing more and more frustrated with Diem's leadership. Kennedy sent Henry Cabot Lodge to Vietnam as ambassador, figuring "a Republican in Saigon was insurance against recrimination should Vietnam go down the drain." Lodge took an immediate dislike to Diem and began to argue back to the administration that the US should support a coup to remove Diem from office. In late August, Roger Hilsman of the State Department proposed a memorandum be sent to Lodge that advised a group of generals who were contemplating a coup that the US would support the coup unless Diem removed Nhu from his government. Kennedy, off for the weekend to Hyannis Port, was read the proposed cable and he OK'd it, subject the approval of Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Roswell Gilpatric, the deputy Secretary of Defense for McNamara, who was on vacation. Through a series of misunderstandings, both of them gave their approval, thinking that Kennedy had already given his. Kennedy was furious when he realized what had happened and revoked the cable.

Still, something had to be done. Lodge and others within the Administration were lobbying for a coup. Kennedy eventually gave Lodge responsibility for the decision.

What inspired Kennedy to delegate such power to Lodge remains a mystery that has not been adequately unravelled by any of the self-serving memoirs of the period. It may be, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, wrote, that Lodge was "a strong man with the bit between his teeth" who eluded Kennedy's control. On the other hand, Kennedy may have agreed with Lodge on the need to oust Diem, but preferred to give the Republican a messy job that might backfire politically. (pp 306)

The coup took place and Diem was murdered afterwards.

Analysis

There are lots of suspicious points to Karnow's narrative. Diem is constantly criticized for not being an effective leader, yet he repeatedly dodges coup attempts, thwarts all sorts of internal enemies and has pretty good success against the communists. The only actual military encounter that Karnow spends any amount of time on is the disaster at Ap Bac. Surely other encounters were going on, who was winning? Diem simply doesn't come across as particularly ineffective.

Similarly, Karnow throws in a couple of quotes against the strategic hamlet program, but never actually says what was wrong with it. Saying "no attention was paid to their purpose" tells us just about nothing about what was actually going wrong. He claims that Diem and Nhu were using the program to spread their own influence, but doesn't say how they did it or what was wrong with that.

It's also a bit snarky of everyone involved to criticize Diem for his "oligarchy" of a government when the US President had his brother for Attorney General (and an Attorney General who often sat in meetings and advised his brother on foreign affairs). It seems to me that the Kennedy family was as close to an "oligarchy" as Diem.

I'm also troubled by the many times that Karnow uses the word "I". It comes up many times in this section of the book and it's hard for me to believe that someone as intimately involved in the story could be objective about it. It's nice to know, for example, what Johnson said when Karnow asked him on the plane if he really meant the things he had just said about Diem, but it's not really history, it's anecdote. Karnow's snipe at the "self serving memoirs of the period" could just as easily be leveled at his book, which is, to a good degree, a self-serving memoir itself.

Moyar's Diem

Ngo Dinh Diem had left Vietnam in 1950, after the Viet Minh pronounced a death sentence against him for developing a new nationalist organization. (...)

In June 1954, in the middle of the Geneva negotiations, the despairing French at last granted full sovereignty to Bao Dai's government, and Bao Dai asked Diem to become premier. Bao Dai's decision was not motivated by American pressure as some have speculated, but by expressions of support for a Diem government from numerous Vietnamese political leaders. "The country is at risk of being cut in two," Bao Dai said to Diem. "You do not have the right to avoid your responsibilities. The safety of Vietnam requires it." Diem, who had turned down several offers of the premiership from Bao Dai, said he would take the job if Bao Dai gave him total control over all civilian and military matters. Bao Dai had never delegated such powers to anyone, but he consented, and Diem became premier. (pp 33, Moyar's source: Bao Dai, Le Dragon D'Annam (Paris: Plon, 1980), 328-9)

Moyar claims that Diem's reserved attitude was a traditional "practice of mandarins and emperors" who showed the dignity of their office by their aloof demeanor. He pulls in a nice quote from Edward Lansdale to show that Diem had deep feelings for his country and his people, but just didn't wear his feelings on his sleeve. Moyar also makes it clear from the start that things were different in Vietnam than in the US and that US officials often didn't understand the differences:

...Western critics would take Diem to task for failing to inspire the masses through ideology. This criticism rested on the premise that gaining the support of the Vietnamese people required such an ideology, a mistaken premise. The Vietnamese masses of the mid-twentieth century were not seeking a leader whose ideas appealed to them, but a strong and charismatic leader who would organize the people, protect them, and treat them justly. (pp 37)

Lansdale thought that the Vietnamese people could be won over by offering them democracy and civil liberties, based on the inaccurate presumption that the people thirsted for these things, although he was not dogmatic on the subject or completely blind to South Vietnamese realities as other Americans were. (pp 40)

From the start, Diem is set upon by several forces. General Hinh openly told foreigners that he was planning to oust Diem. Indeed, the American ambassador Donald Heath was invited to a cocktail party that turned out to be a meeting planning the overthrow of Diem. One of the plotters asked Heath if it was OK to change the government. Diem found out about the plan and fired the General, but he was prevented from doing more because the French still backed the General. In fact, the French did everything they could to overthrow Diem, which included funneling money and arms to the Binh Xuyen gang. Diem proved apt at playing the French, Americans and Bao Dai against each other. Eventually, he took care of all the threats against him – to the surprise of the Americans.

John Foster Dulles had just visited Saigon to meet Diem for the first time and had come away with a heightened admiration for the South Vietnamese President. "I was favorably impressed by Diem who is much more of a personality than I had anticipated," Dulles wrote to Eisenhower. (pp 46, Moyar's source: cable from Dulles to Eisenhower).

General J Lawton Collins was sent as ambassador to Vietnam to replace Heath. Eisenhower hoped that Collins would develop a respect for Diem that Heath had not. This did not turn out to be the case. Collins had an instant dislike to Diem and began to denounce him back to Eisenhower immediately. He eventually persuaded Eisenhower that Diem had to go and had Dulles pen a series of telegrams to embassies in Paris and Saigon stating that Collins and Ely would allow Bao Dai and others to select a replacement for Diem. Lansdale, however, got wind of this (possibly through a leak from a pro-Diem official in the Eisenhower administration) and sent a flurry of telegrams to Washington in support of Diem. Eisenhower had the offer to replace Diem revoked and the telegrams burned.

Moyar goes into much more detail about these difficulties than Karnow. He shows over and over that Diem outsmarted and outmaneuvered the Americans and the French to stay in power and govern. Most had though Diem would only last for weeks, but at the end of 1955, after a year and half, he was still standing. "As many foreign observers were now saying, Diem had worked miracles."

Cleared of these issues within his regime, Diem started to get to work on reforming his country. He started to use considerable American aid to train new soldiers and officers. But most of the aid, however, went into economic development:

He spent more than half of all US economic aid, and a great deal of personal time, on new settlements and highways in strategically crucial sections of the country. In April 1957, Diem began the large-scale resettlement of ethnic Vietnamese to the vast central highlands, an area that until that time had seen few Vietnamese aside from the emperor, who had used it as his private hunting reserve. Diem wanted to build what he called a "human wall" in the central highlands to block North Vietnamese advances through this area of crucial military importance. ... Each settler received up to five hectares of land as well as seed, tools, animals, and enough food to last until the first harvest. By the end of 1959, the highlands had 125,000 new residents.

Diem also started a program of land reform in 1956: no one was allowed to own more than 100 hectares of rice-growing land. Any amount over the 100 hectare limit was bought up by the government and given to those without land, who had six years of interest free loans to pay for the land. The campaign suffered from a lack of funds (America's pockets weren't without limits), but it did break up the vast estates of the Mekong Delta and it changed the landless peasants in the area from a majority to a minority.

Over the course of the late 1950s, South Vietnam's economy would surge. Rice production went from 2.6 million tons in 1954 to 5 million tons in 1959. Rubber production also leaped upward, as did the "production" of farm animals. The Communists were losing, too.

A study supervised by the Vietnamese Communist Politburo acknowledged that the Party had lost 90 percent of its members and cadres during the years 1955 to 1958. Cochinchina had 60,000 Communist Party members at the beginning of this period and only 5,000 at the end.

As Diem lay waste to his enemies and strengthened the government and the economy, his prestige rose even higher. No on in the armed forces spoke of overthrowing the government anymore, and among the Saigon elite the chatter about coups was as low as it would ever be. On July 7, 1959, the New York Times commemorated the five-year anniversary of Diem's accession to national leadership by procliaming, "A five-year miracle, not a 'plan,' has been carried out. Vietnam is free and is becoming stronger in defense of its freedom and of ours. There is reason, today, to salute President Ngo Dinh Diem."
Moyar's source: New York Times, July 7, 1959.

But this was not to last. Although there had been a steady, low-level of insurgency all along, in 1960 the Communists got to work in earnest. During the first five months of 1960 Communist insurgents averaged 150 assassinations (generally of government officials) and 50 kidnappings per month. Just at the wrong time, ambassador Durbrow decided that Diem did not need a Self-Defense Corps and cut all funding. Diem's military wasn't mobile enough (very few helicopters) to respond to assassinations and kidnappings randomly spread around the countryside.

Then Diem's own elites got in on the action. Gathering at a hotel on April 26, 1960, they gave to the press a written critique of Diem. Reporters, most of whom lived in Saigon and hob-knobbed with the very elites in question, believed them when they claimed that these criticisms where the feelings of the Vietnamese people in general. Moyar goes on at length to show that US Ambasador Durbrow had actually had a hand in writing the manifesto, precisely for the purpose of making it seem that the vast masses of Vietnam wanted a more liberal, western democracy (his source: Durbrow Oral History Interview at the LBJ Library). Durbrow actually went as far as to call Diem's ways in Vietnam "evil" in letters back to the Administration, but that view of Diem wasn't unanimous:

[CIA Station Chief William] Colby faulted Durbrow and other Americans for obtaining most of their information on Vietnamese public opinion from English- or French-speaking intellectuals in Saigon's tea shops, who reinforced the tendency of some Americans to equate South Vietnam's politics with those of America.
Moyar's source: Colby, Lost Victory, pp 70-75

In November, Col. Nguyen Chanh Thi, along with lawyer Hoang Co Thuy, tried to overthrow Diem's government. Diem's Presidential Guard was able to defend him and save the day, but Diem only avoided being shot in his bed because he happened to be up getting a soda out of the fridge. Some Americans had helped with the coup, but no evidence exists to show that Durbrow was among them. Durbrow did, however, use the evidence of the coup attempt to show Washington that Diem was more unpopular than ever.

When Kennedy took office, he sent General Maxwell Taylor to Vietnam to size up the situation and Diem.

"With all his weaknesses, Diem has extraordinary ability, subbornness, and guts." wrote Taylor. "Despite their acute frustration, the men of the Armed Forces and the administration respect Diem to a degree which gives their grumbling (and perhaps some plotting) a somewhat half-hearted character; and they are willing – by and large – to work for him, if he gives them the chance to do their jobs."
Moyar's source: Taylor to Kennedy, 3 November 1961, FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol 1, 210.

Kennedy was generally happy with Taylor's assessment – except the part that recommended sending US troops to Vietnam, Kennedy wasn't ready for that.

In addition to fighting with the US officials, Diem had to deal with the US press, which was turning increasingly against him. They, too, were spending a lot of time with the Saigon elite in those tea shops. Roger Hilsman of the State Department noted, "Some United States personnel in all agencies have been in Vietnam too long and carry old grudges and frustrations, or are unduly influenced by the views of various South Vietnamese 'dissidents'. These frustrated old-timers feed defeatist talk to the American press. They also talk to and encourage the 'dissidents' among the French-educated South Vietnamese intellectuals who are concentrated in Saigon."

In February 1962, two pilots stole government AD-6 fighter-bombers and tried to strafe and bomb the palace. They only managed to kill one person, a maid, and seemed to have acted alone. Both crash-landed, but only one pilot survived. Upon questioning, he confessed that he had expected US support, based on his reading of the American press in Newsweek and Time. This caused Diem and his brothers to begin to crack down on the foreign press, which, of course, only caused the press to become more suspicious of Diem and his government. It's interesting to note that one of these journalists, Fran?is Sully, who wrote for Newsweek, was widely suspected of being a Communist agent, even by his fellow foreign journalists (although Google is pretty quiet about Mr Sully today). A correspondent for the New York Times, David Halberstam, wrote an article in November 1962 that explained "precisely how the Viet Cong could have attacked government forces more effectively."

While all of this was going on, the Communists stepped up their insurgency and outright military raids into South Vietnam and Laos. Diem wasn't standing still, though: he stepped up the strategic hamlet program and made other military moves to counter the assault.

"In terms of territory and population, Diem made a considerable comeback in 1962," [pro-Communist Australian journalist] Burchett observed. Government armed forces "registered a number of successes and held the strategic and tactical initiative." In the final analysis, stated Burchett, 1962 was "Diem's year."
Moyar's source: Willifred Burchett, Vietnam: Inside Story of the Guerilla War, pp 193-4

Then came the battle at Ap Bac, where Viet Cong forces had their way with Diem's 7th Division. This battle was widely denounced by the American press as an example of Diem's failed leadership and cronyism in selecting officers. A more thorough analysis, however, shows that most of the reasons for failure rested with the Americans and not Diem. In the first place, an American adviser, Captain Richard Ziegler, worked with the South Vietnamese on a battle plan that seriously underestimated the strength of the Viet Cong forces at Ap Bac. Then American Colonel Paul Vann (a buddy of the American reporters in Saigon) selected a landing point for the South Vietnamese forces that was too close to the Viet Cong lines and in the direct line of fire. This lead to the loss of the helicopters and many, many deaths. The South Vietnamese were further hampered by the Viet Cong's strong defensive positions and the necessity to attack through rice paddies to get to them. In short, the criticisms were unfounded, but in the days before the internet, the real word never got out.

Captain Andrew P O'Meara, whose unit arrived at Ap Bac on the morning after the fight, concluded that Vann had disparaged the Vietnamese unfairly and had himself contributed mightily to the failure.
Moyar's source: Andrew P O'Meara, interview with the author

The western press was also good friends with the leaders of the militant Buddhists, who had been an historically repressed minority in Vietnam for centuries. The militants gave the reporters tips on where protests and other actions would be held. They even made sure to write the messages on their banners in English, so western photographers could easily communicate their message. The leader of the Buddhists was Tri Quang, also suspected of being a Communist agent. Two other Buddhist leaders, Pham Ngoc Thao and Pham Xuan An, were actually Communist agents (Moyar doesn't mention this, but there is actually a whole book about Pham Xuan An: Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An Time Magazine Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent).

After the war, journalist Stanley Karnow would acknowledge his heavy reliance on Pham Xuan An during the war: "We would huddle together in the Brodard or the Givral, his favorite cafes, as he chain-smoked and patiently deciphered the puzzles of Vietnam for me."
Moyar's source: Karnow, Vietnam, A History, pp 39 (on that page, Karnow goes on to admit that he only learned that An was a Communist in 1981 during a visit to South Vietnam and this wasn't confirmed until 1990, when An told him, "I did work for the Communists, but my motives were patriotic, not ideological." He also tells us that An served as a reporter for Reuters.)

The Buddhist demonstrations picked up steam and, by August 1963 were involving thousands of Buddhists. Diem's brother put down the protests with what American journalists termed was unnecessary force. By November, Lodge had stirred up the coup that deposed Diem and murdered him. Harriman would later observe, "As you look back on it, Diem was better than the chaotic condition that followed him."

Analysis

It's true that Karnow glosses over nearly all of Diem's successes, but Moyar glosses over most of his failures. It's still clear, however, that his virtues outnumbered his failings.

Moyar presents the picture of a patriot, boldly holding his country together as forces all around him try to bring him down. Moyar shows that he had considerably more military success than the foreign press was willing to acknowledge and that at least some of the unrest he faced at home was actually caused by Communist agents rather than true domestic dissatisfaction.

Moyar's version is very tightly referenced. There are almost certainly some crimes of omission here, but there aren't any false claims. I checked a number of Moyar's references myself and they all seem accurate in both fact and tone. I even went to the extra effort of presenting his references here, so that you can see he isn't just promoting an ideology.

What to make of it all

It's clear, to me at least, that Karnow was trying to make his own journalism stand up as well as possible. It's hard, though, to keep a straight face about it all when he himself admits that one of his best sources was actually an agent for the other side. Karnow simply accepts at face value An's claim that his motivations were "patriotic, not ideological."

To be fair, there are lots of sources that Moyar had access to that Karnow didn't. All of the after-action reports by the Communists showing how effective Diem's military was against them, for example, weren't available to Karnow.

In the end, there's no getting around the fact that almost anyone's reading of the facts is going to see a very different narrative of Diem's career than Karnow's. Diem was smart, patriotic and not the enemy of his people. He was leading a difficult country in difficult times and his biggest enemies were individuals inside the American government and the foreign press.

Karnow had no choice. He and other American journalists had treated Diem unfairly in their initial reporting, but it's not in the nature of most journalists to say, "oops, we were a little hasty in our judgement there." To keep his initial narrative in place, Karnow had to slant the facts against Diem to make him the bad boy. Since the facts weren't on his side, he limited his coverage of Diem to sweeping accusations such as "strategic hamlet program as essentially a means to spread their influence rather than a device to infuse peasants with the will to resist the Vietcong." For these, he gives no source.

It's hard not to draw parallels with the war in Iraq. There, journalists have to rely on local stringers for their information. In doing so, it's not surprising that a few turn out to be agents for the other side. When the US has any success in Iraq, it's barely reported by US media because it simply doesn't fit their narrative. If it weren't for the internet allowing for independent, embedded journalists to speak directly from the foxholes and contradict the narrative, Iraq would already be lost. Would Vietnam have been won if we'd had the internet back then? Maybe, just maybe.