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 “Hurray for Ngo Dinh Diem!”’
In October 1956 Diem, unwilling to hold elections that the communists would almost certainly win, instead staged a referendum which deposed Bao Dai and installed himself as South Vietnam’s president and head of state. Lansdale claimed credit for a characteristic stunt – printing Diem’s ballots in red, a lucky colour in Vietnamese eyes, and those of Bao Dai in green, a colour of misfortune. Diem secured a mandate with a preposterous 98.2 per cent of the vote, a majority that even a Soviet candidate might have thought excessive. In Washington, Dulles said: ‘[South] Vietnam is now a free nation. It is not a puppet.’ Yet Diem’s state depended for its existence upon dumper-truckloads of dollars. If there was no viable North Vietnamese economy, nor was there much of a Southern one – instead, a massive trade deficit and a flood of imports funded by the Americans. Vietnamese began to quote the cynical old French saying: ‘Turn Catholic and have rice to eat.’ Nguyen Van Thieu, later president, was among those who heeded this advice, converting from Buddhism in 1958. Aid soared from just $US1 million in 1954 to $322 million a year later, and continued to rise thereafter – more cash per capita than Washington provided to any other nation in the world except Korea and Laos. Paul Kattenberg of the State Department made the imaginative proposal that the US should offer North Vietnam a bribe of $500 million to ‘repair war damage’ – in truth, to leave the South alone. Such a payment, urged Kattenberg, offered a cheaper alternative to funding Diem.
Nobody in Washington was interested, however. Cash poured into Saigon’s coffers, to be spent at the almost absolute discretion of the president’s generals and officials, a formula for waste and corruption. Securing a government import permit opened the tap to a fortune. Some of the urban middle-class prospered mightily from the inflow of cash and commodities: many of the new rich were former Northern exiles who made good – or, perhaps, made bad – in the South. Under the capitalist system, it seemed that only peasants need commit to honest toil: Saigon experienced a surge of bubble prosperity.
3 BOOM TIME
In the late 1950s, the Southern capital still possessed a colonial elegance tinged with Oriental decadence that delighted Westerners. New arrivals were moved to ecstasies by glimpsing Vietnamese girls in ao dai gowns – or better still, out of them. Literate foreigners recalled a Graham Greene line: ‘To take an Annamite to bed with you is like taking a bird: they twitter and sing on your pillow.’ Most Westerners’ sexual couplings were conducted with professionals, while middle-class Vietnamese sustained notably innocent social lives, in which few advanced beyond hand-holding in advance of their arranged marriages. Nguyen Cao Ky, who later became well-known for the range of his wives and lovers, asserted that when he travelled to France as a twenty-one-year-old pilot trainee, like almost all his contemporaries he was a virgin.
Respectable