An Australian surgeon who served as a civilian volunteer down at Vung Tau wrote later: ‘It seems fair to say what is usually left unsaid, that if the economic aid to South Vietnam had not been prevented by the activities of the Vietcong, the people of the country which today is war-torn and unhappy would have been well-fed, in better health and better-educated.’ Frances Fitzgerald concluded her powerful 1972 account of America in Indochina with an expression of yearning for North Vietnamese victory, for a moment when ‘“individualism” and its attendant corruption give way to the discipline of the revolutionary community’. American officials, she wrote, might attribute this to the triumph of brainwashing by ‘hard-core Communists’. Not so, she asserted: ‘It will simply mean that the moment has arrived for the narrow flame of revolution to cleanse the lake of Vietnamese society.’ Here was a view of the war that seems as delusional at one end of the political spectrum as was that of Gen. Harkins and his kind at the other.
2 THE BUDDHISTS REVOLT
Throughout the spring of 1963, the credibility of the Diem government drained away as surely as Vietcong morale and strength rose, impelled by a surge of excitement after the victory at Ap Bac. In the 261st Battalion, its history records, ‘there was much singing’. COSVN broadcast a new slogan: ‘Emulate Bac!’ The battle provided an important boost to the ‘forward’ faction in Hanoi, which argued ever more insistently that the season for caution had passed; that in the South, the prize lay ripe for taking. Michael Burleigh has written of US policy-making: ‘Seldom has an imperial power put its prestige behind a more suicidal group of puppets than the Ngo Dinh clan.’ Even as the security situation deteriorated, in May the Saigon regime adopted an initiative that set its wagon careering downhill towards the final wreck. Vietnam’s Buddhist priesthood had always resented the favouritism shown by the Ngos towards their fellow-Catholics. On 8 May 1963, when worshippers assembled in Hue for the 2,527th birthday of the Buddha, a Catholic army officer sought to enforce an old decree banning them from displaying their flag. Several thousand Buddhists gathered outside the local radio station to hear a broadcast by prominent bonze Thich Tri Quang. The station director suddenly cancelled the transmission, saying that it had not been approved by the censors. He also telephoned the army, which dispatched to the scene a troop of armoured cars. When the Buddhists ignored an order to disperse, the soldiers opened fire. A woman and eight children died in the ensuing melee.
This gratuitous, murderous folly prompted weeks of anti-government demonstrations in many cities, Buddhists being joined by thousands of students. It was subsequently claimed that the protests were communist-orchestrated. Plainly they suited the NLF and Hanoi: cadres may have encouraged the bonzes. Beyond doubt, however, what took place represented a surge of spontaneous anger against the regime, which refused to apologise for the deaths in Hue, or to punish those responsible. Diem sat on his hands, ignoring warnings from Washington, while his brother Nhu embarked on a programme of repression.
Frank Scotton said: ‘Most of the bonzes were victims of their own wishful thinking about the possibility of representative government, but the Buddhist crisis was not just about politics. For Diem to have made a grand gesture of reconciliation, he would have had to go up against his own younger brother, and he couldn’t bring himself to do that.’ Reporter Marguerite Higgins described Quang, foremost among the rebellious monks. Far from being a passive, meditative figure, she said, ‘deep, burning eyes started out from a gigantic forehead. He had an air of massive intelligence, total self-possession and brooding suspicion.’ A Southern officer wrote: ‘The [Buddhist] crisis was like a great fire, uncontrollable and raging quickly. It had a strong negative effect on the morale of officers and enlisted men … I knew that it was impossible to maintain Diem’s government. My only hope was that power would fall into the hands of a new, competent and loyal leadership.’
When Duong Van Mai returned to Saigon from Washington that autumn, she found that her family, and especially her mother, had become bitterly hostile to the government because of its assault on the faith to which an overwhelming majority of Vietnamese professed adherence. On 10 June David Halberstam wrote: ‘The conflict between the South Vietnamese Government and Buddhist priests is sorely troubling American officials here … [who] are deeply embarrassed … and frustrated in the face of persistent questioning by individual Vietnamese, who ask: “Why does your Government allow this to go on?”’ Americans were perceived as literally calling the shots.
Next day, Western media organisations were alerted to attend a protest in Saigon. Few took heed, however, because its nature was unspecified. On the morning of the 11th, at a busy intersection, an elderly Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc disembarked from a car in orange robes, adopted the lotus position on the street, then sat motionless surrounded by a large crowd while another bonze poured petrol over him. Duc himself struck a match and flicked it at the pyre, then allowed flames to consume and shrivel him. Throughout the process another bonze proclaimed through a megaphone: ‘A Buddhist priest burns himself to death! A Buddhist priest becomes a martyr!’ At this and other such ghastly human sacrifices it was noticed that signs, placards and denunciations were in English: the intended audience was not Vietnamese.
The only Western journalist who had troubled to turn up, Malcolm Browne of AP, wrote later: ‘I could have prevented that immolation by rushing at him and kicking the gasoline away … As a human being I wanted to. As a reporter I couldn’t … I would have propelled myself directly into Vietnamese politics. My role as a reporter would have been destroyed along with my credibility.’ Yet Browne assuredly altered the face of South Vietnamese politics by photographing the scene, just as the Buddhists had intended when they alerted him. His devastating images were ‘pigeoned’ to Manila, then wired around the world. Madame Nhu fuelled outrage with her televised depiction of the event as a ‘barbecue’. She shrugged: ‘Let them burn, and we shall clap our hands.’ Browne said that he never forgot the overpowering scent of joss sticks mingling with that of burning flesh. The perpetrators, well satisfied with the attention secured by their grisly gesture, displayed Duc’s heart in a glass case.
Americans responded with stunned incomprehension. Lt. Gordon Sullivan, an adviser with a Ranger group who chanced to be in Saigon, said, ‘The whole thing changed. This was something new. We didn’t know people did stuff like that.’ The Washington Post editorialised on 20 June 1963: ‘Of course the communists will exploit Buddhist grievances. And why not? It is Mr Diem’s regime itself that is gratuitously serving communist purposes by policies that are morally repugnant and politically suicidal.’ US ambassador ‘Fritz’ Nolting still maintained that this was the least bad Saigon government the US would get, and the CIA’s Colby agreed. In Washington, however, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy and the State Department’s Roger Hilsman took a bleaker view. So did Henry Cabot Lodge, who arrived in Saigon at mid-August to replace Nolting, whose ‘appeasement’ of Diem was deemed discredited.
The new envoy was sixty-one, a Republican grandee from Massachusetts with long experience of diplomacy and the Senate, who had run as vice-presidential candidate on Nixon’s ticket in 1960. Arthur Schlesinger wrote: ‘The president has a habit of designating “liberals” to do “conservative” things, and vice versa.’ Lodge’s appointment was a classic example of this: he was a big figure, bound to seek to play a big role, more proconsular than ambassadorial. If he subsequently misplayed or overplayed his hand, blame rightfully lay with those who appointed him.
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