Life under Diem seemed to most Vietnamese a mere continuation of colonialism. The big Americans who pervaded his life – and death – emphasised his own physical slightness. Born in 1901, for a time he favoured a career in the priesthood like that of his brother Ngo Dinh Thuc, whom he persuaded the Vatican to make archbishop of Hue. Instead, however, he entered the civil service and by twenty-five was a provincial governor. In 1933 the French caused Bao Dai to make him minister of the interior, a role in which he lasted only three months, because the colonial power would not invest any Vietnamese with real authority such as he demanded. It was then that he made a remark later hailed as prophetic: ‘The communists will defeat us, not by virtue of their strength, but because of our weakness.’ For a time during World War II he was held prisoner by the Vietminh, who also murdered one of his brothers and a nephew. Diem met Ho Chi Minh, who sought his cooperation, only to be rebuffed. ‘You are a criminal who has burned and destroyed the country,’ Diem claimed that he told Ho. ‘My brother and his son are only two of the hundreds you have killed.’ The communists later lamented Ho’s folly in freeing him.
Following a Vietminh assassination attempt, in 1950 Diem left Vietnam. He spent his first two years of exile as an inmate of Maryknoll Seminary in Lakewood, New Jersey, often performing the humblest domestic chores, but also gaining introductions to such influential fellow-Catholics as Cardinal Spellman, Supreme Court justice William Douglas, together with Senators Mike Mansfield and John F. Kennedy, whom he impressed with the fervour of his hatred for both colonialism and communism. In 1953 he moved to a Benedictine monastery in Belgium, where he made important French connections, and somehow also won the trust of Bao Dai, in exile outside Cannes. Diem’s astute younger brother Nhu, later notorious as his grey eminence, played an important role in steering him towards power.
Diem’s appointment as prime minister, followed by a low-key return to Saigon on 26 June 1954, neither corrupted his asceticism nor diminished his wildly exaggerated self-belief. Religious faith and moral conceit convinced him that he ruled by a divine right as assured as that professed by King Charles I three centuries earlier on the throne of England. Diem viewed South Vietnam’s security entirely as a military problem: his response to it was the 1955 introduction of conscription. He showed no interest in either cultivation of new friends or reconciliation with old foes. He pronounced decisions and demanded fulfilment of them, himself working sixteen hours a day. Obsessed with detail, he might lecture a visiting ambassador or foreign journalist for four hours without a comfort break; he sometimes signed exit visas personally. Whereas Ho Chi Minh was a notably witty conversationalist, Diem was devoid of humour, especially about himself. As for money – national income for his new country – on 12 August 1954 the US National Security Council decided that the domino theory was valid, that it was thus essential to restore the prestige of the West in Indochina, grievously injured by French defeat. A week later Eisenhower approved NSC5429/2, which caused the US to become South Vietnam’s paymaster.
The gravest handicap burdening the Saigon regime was that scarcely any of its standard-bearers and officials had participated in the independence struggle: many, indeed, were former servants of the French. Diem broke an early promise to grant amnesty to Vietminh activists, whom he began to imprison. In Paris, prime minister Edgar Faure asserted that the little zealot was ‘not only incapable but mad’, and the US government increasingly inclined to agree. Yet who else was there? Not until 1961 did Vice-President Lyndon Johnson deliver his memorable apologia for Diem: ‘Shit, man, he’s the only boy we got out there.’ But from 1954 onwards, though Americans doubted the prime minister’s survivability, within the tiny circle of Saigon’s educated elite they could identify no more plausible non-communist candidate to rule.
Among early American players in South Vietnam was air force colonel Edward Lansdale, forty-eight-year-old head of the Military Mission, a covert operations group that launched ineffectual sabotage sorties into the North, which cost the liberties or lives of virtually all the locals ill-starred enough to be recruited for them. In the course of the ensuing two decades, Washington impresarios would introduce onto the Vietnamese stage a succession of actors auditioning for the role of ‘Lawrence of Indochina’, of whom Lansdale may be deemed the first. A former advertising executive of notable persuasive charm, he established a relationship with Diem that seemed likely to give Washington leverage. The colonel had made his reputation advising Philippines president Ramon Magsaysay on suppression of the Huk guerrillas, and was now mandated by Dulles to repeat this achievement. He enjoyed a mixed press among his fellow-countrymen in Saigon. Some regarded him as an unguided missile, but one colleague said later: ‘What I respected was that with both Americans and Vietnamese, he was a good listener and a shrewd calculator. He displayed a very good understanding of what was possible, and what was not.’ Lansdale repeatedly warned Diem that he must win hearts and minds.
The colonel’s intrigues were more controversial. He is alleged to have been responsible for thwarting an October 1954 generals’ coup. He paid the leaders of the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao sects several million dollars of CIA money to stick with Diem. He sought also to cut a deal with Bay Vien, boss of Saigon’s mighty armed mafia the Binh Xuyen. Its empire of brothels and opium dens centred upon the Dai The Gioi – Great World casino – located behind high walls in Cholon, and composed of fifty tin-roofed wooden buildings, housing two hundred tables. Vien was protected by a green-bereted private army, forty thousand strong – and by the French.
In those days the dispossessed colonial rulers were competing for influence with the Americans, new kids on the block, which produced some black-comic clashes. Lansdale liked to tell a story of how the US embassy secretaries were alarmed by the discovery of grenades in the vestibule of their quarters, which the CIA identified as a gesture of menace by its Gallic rivals. That evening the Military Mission’s rough games specialist, Lou Conein, marched into L’Amiral, Saigon’s most popular French rendezvous, produced a grenade from which he extracted the pin, and brandished it while he addressed the clientele in their own language: ‘I know how distressed you all are that the American community, and especially our secretaries, should feel threatened. If anything unpleasant or unworthy should take place, we would have common cause for regret.’ He then replaced the pin in the grenade and strode out, justly confident that the mission staff would be exposed to no further French frights.
When Lansdale failed in his attempt to buy off Bay Vien, however, the Americans became alarmed that French support might enable the gangster to prevail over the prime minister. British observers were equally pessimistic: a Foreign Office review concluded: ‘M. Diem has many of the qualities required by a national revolutionary leader dedicated to saving his country – courage, integrity, persistence, faith and an implacable hostility to communism.’ Unfortunately, added the British diplomat, he was also ‘incapable of compromise’ and had ‘little administrative capacity’. When Gen. Joseph ‘Lightning Joe’ Collins, a bustling, short-fused 1944–45 corps commander under Eisenhower, visited Vietnam as the president’s personal envoy, he returned home to report that the US was backing a loser. Collins said later: ‘I liked Diem, but I became convinced he did not have the strength of character to manage this bizarre collection of characters.’ At 6.10 p.m. on 27 April 1955, Dulles sent a cable from Washington to Saigon authorising the prime minister’s removal, much as he might have ordered the sacking of an unsatisfactory parlourmaid.
Yet Diem confounded the sceptics. That very evening, and probably by coincidence, though it is possible that Lansdale played a role, a Saigon street battle erupted between the South Vietnamese army and the Binh Xuyen. Six hours after Dulles demanded that Diem should be put down, he hastily rescinded his cable: the issue remained in abeyance through a miniature civil war in which five hundred Vietnamese died. At the end of May the government’s forces emerged victorious: Bay Vien was obliged to flee into exile, becoming a permanent guest of his French sponsors. The Americans decided that Diem had more about him than previously thought, and clasped him in a mawkishly warm embrace. Senator Hubert Humphrey, a prime mover in the influential lobby group American Friends of Vietnam, declared that the South’s leader was ‘honest, wholesome and honourable’. Henry Luce wrote in Life: ‘Every son, daughter or even distant admirer of the American Revolution should be overjoyed [by the defeat of the Binh Xuyen] and learn to shout