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,