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.’
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