Throughout their history, the people of Vietnam have struggled against foreign invasions. Until the nineteenth century this struggle was against their large neighbor to the north, China. Although the Chinese periodically conquered the Vietnamese, they never completely subdued them. The Chinese incursions however left their mark on Vietnam as the Vietnamese adopted the Chinese social structure, system of lettering, and the complex system of irrigation required for the farming of rice. The Vietnamese were not strong enough, however, to resist the French in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
French missionaries began to travel to Vietnam in the early seventeenth century. The Vietnamese emperors initially welcomed these missionaries because of their technical knowledge and access to modern arms and European trade. Many upper class Vietnamese, especially, in the South, became converts to Catholicism. French attempts to expand their control in Vietnam were fiercely turned back in 1768 and 1859, causing one French officer to remark: “Everything, here tends toward ruin.” France did not give up, however. Determined to fulfill its mission civilisatrice, the French equivalent of Britain’s “White Man’s Burden,” the French returned with 6,000 men in 1861 and conquered large parts of the rich Mekong Delta in the South. Overwhelmed, the Vietnamese Emperor Tu Duc even appealed to U.S. President Abraham Lincoln for aid in resisting the French.[1] Fearful of total defeat, Tu Duc consented to making the southern part of Vietnam, what the French called Cochinchina, a French protectorate in 1862. By 1883 the French had extended their control over all of Indochina (modern day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). After centuries of struggle against Chinese domination, the Vietnamese had lost their independence to France in less than thirty years. Vietnamese attempts to resist the French had been hampered by regional divisions and internal squabbles. The French also dealt brutally with any attempts at resistance. Entire villages were destroyed if it was even suspected that they harbored anti-French elements.
The French gave the natives little role in administering their new colony. Vietnamese were allowed to occupy only minor positions in the government as there was little effort to educate the Vietnamese. The French banned the use of Chinese lettering and insisted on the use of French; however, few schools were provided. By 1900, only 20% of Vietnamese male children attended any school at all. A few Vietnamese were able to attain an education beyond the elementary level by attending French run universities in Indochina or by traveling to France, but there was no role for educated Vietnamese in Indochina once they graduated. As a result, by the early twentieth century, most Vietnamese were illiterate. Indochina became the world’s third largest rice exporter as well as a major source of rubber, coal, and silk. Conditions for the natives were brutal. On the Michelin rubber plantations, 12,000 of the 45,000 workers died between 1917-1944. There were periodic attempts to resist the French. Major rebellions in the 1880s, 1907, and 1916 failed.
The major voice of Vietnamese nationalism came to be known as Ho Chi Minh. Ho was born in 1890 under the name of Nguyen Sinh Cung. His father had earned the highest rank in the Confucian testing system, yet refused to accept a position as a mandarin (an elite group of government officials), choosing to teach in a rural school instead. Ho was educated in a French school at Hué but was expelled in 1908 for participating in an anti-French demonstration. He then left Vietnam, serving as a cook’s helper aboard ships and lived briefly in New York City and London. By the beginning of the First World War Ho was living in Paris where he adopted the name Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the Patriot). For the next six years, Ho became a vocal critic of the French regime in Indochina. In 1920, he was given a copy of Lenin’s Thesis on the National and Colonial Questions and for the first time read a world leader’s condemnation of colonialism. The effect on his mind was dramatic: “I was overjoyed to tears. Though sitting alone in my room, I shouted aloud as if addressing large crowds: ‘Dear martyrs, compatriots! This is what we need, this is our path to liberation.’”[2] In 1920, Ho became one of the founders of the French Communist Party and in 1923 traveled to the Soviet Union. There he was frustrated that the Soviet leaders showed little interest in Asia but soon began to be viewed as the Comintern’s leading spokesperson on East Asian affairs. Ho stayed in Moscow only briefly and then traveled to China where he worked for the next three years for the Soviet news agency in Canton. After he published The Revolutionary Path, the first Marxist-Leninist literature ever to be written in Vietnamese in 1926, he was forced to flee China, eventually making his way back to Moscow. For the next five years he taught at the Institute for National and Colonial Questions before once again returning to China. Traveling to Vietnam for the first time in thirty years, in 1940 he met with other communist and nationalist leaders, using the name Ho Chi Minh (he who enlightens) for the first time. Together with Phan Van Dong and Vo Nguyen Giap, both of whom would remain trusted associates throughout the rest his life, Ho formed the Vietnamese Independence League or Vietminh.
The Nazi blitzkrieg that swept through Western Europe during the spring of 1940 had profound ramifications in the Far East as well. Conquered by the Germans, the French were in no position to defend their empires against Japanese attack. For the Vichy French this meant that they could do nothing to oppose Japanese landings in northern Vietnam in September of 1940. The French officials decided to cooperate with the Japanese. This arrangement greatly benefited the Japanese because they were required to devote very few troops to occupying Indochina.
After the Japanese invasion, Ho went to China and by 1943 was working for the U.S. Office of War Information, supplying the U.S. with intelligence information in regard to Indochina. Periodically Ho slipped back into Vietnam where the Vietminh were steadily increasing in strength under Giap’s leadership. Late in the war, when a famine broke out, the Vietminh raided Japanese warehouses and distributed the seized rice to the peasants. This action helped build strong support for Ho’s followers in the North. In April 1945, Ho met with Major Archimedes Patti of American OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA) and agreed to accept U.S. training to build the Vietminh into a force capable of harassing the Japanese. Beginning in July 1945, the Americans supplied the Vietminh with weapons and training. In return, the Vietminh assisted with the recovery of downed Allied pilots and generally guided the Americans in their attacks against Japanese installations. Major Patti later said of Ho:
I was aware that Ho Chi Minh was a Communist, or had been in Moscow and had some training there…. [But Ho] did not strike me as a starry-eyed revolutionary or a flaming radical… I saw that his ultimate goal was to obtain American support for the cause of a free Vietnam and felt that desire presented no conflict with American policy.[3]
What exactly American policy was toward Indochina was much in question. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had told Secretary of State Cordell Hull in January of 1943 that Indochina “should not go back to France.” He added, “France has had the country … for nearly a hundred years and the people are worse off than they were at the beginning. [The Vietnamese] are entitled to something better than that.”[4] Practical considerations regarding the U.S.’s key allies soon overrode FDR’s instincts. Britain feared that depriving France of the right to reacquire her former colonies after the war could hinder Britain’s efforts to regain its own colonies. The French were determined to regain Indochina and offered 62,000 troops to expel the Japanese. In January of 1945, FDR refused to allocate transport for the French but avoided clarifying U.S. policy in regard to an eventual French return.
When the war suddenly concluded, the Allies agreed that Nationalist Chinese forces would accept the surrender of the Japanese north of the sixteenth parallel and British troops, who had been fighting in Burma, would accept the surrender south of the parallel. The Vietminh, however, had no intention of waiting for another occupation. On September 2, 1945, as Japanese delegates were surrendering to General MacArthur aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Ho Chi Minh stood in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square and proclaimed the creation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Ho wrote several appeals for recognition to President Harry Truman between September 1945 and late 1946 but none of these appeals were answered.
Why did the United States ignore Ho’s pleas to support Vietnamese independence? The simple answer is that loyalty to a long-time ally, France, was considered more important than the opposition to restoring a brutal colonial regime. In working with the OSS, Ho Chi Minh expected American support after the end of World War II, believing that, “America was for free popular governments all over the world and that it opposed colonialism in all its forms.”[5] Events in Europe, however, soon produced a reversal in U.S. policy. The Soviet threat to Western Europe provided France with the perfect wedge to drive between any ties that the U.S. had with the Vietminh. De Gaulle told the American ambassador in Paris that, if the U.S. opposed France’s return to Indochina, it would cause “terrific disappointment” and drive the French toward the Soviets. The French also hammered away at Ho’s communist ties. With it increasingly apparent that the USSR had no intention in relinquishing its control of Eastern Europe, Secretary of State George Marshall believed that the U.S. could not allow part of Asia to also fall under Soviet control. OSS agents in Vietnam, who had worked with the Vietminh, and the Southeast Asia experts in the U.S. State Department, however, were not convinced that Ho was a dedicated communist or controlled by the USSR. The head of the Division of East Asian Affairs, Abbott Low Moffat, later testified to the U.S. Congress: “I never met an American, be he military, OSS, diplomat, or journalist, who had ever met Ho Chi Mini who did not reach the same belief: that Ho Chi Minh was first and foremost a Vietnamese nationalist.” A State Department study in 1948 found no evidence to indicate a link between Vietnamese communists and Moscow, and stated that Ho Chi Minh was “the strongest and perhaps ablest figure” in the region.[6] Archimedes Patti believed that Ho could have been cultivated as an American ally, describing him as available on “a silver platter,” but most State Department officials simply saw his claims to be more of a nationalist than a communist as a deception. During the early years of the Cold War it was unlikely that any American government could have supported someone who had such strong ties to communism. In the first major U.S. policy statement issued on Indochina in 1948, the State Department cited the number one immediate objective of U.S. policy in Indochina “to eliminate so far as possible Communist influence in Indochina and to see installed a self-governing nationalist state … as opposed to the totalitarian state which would evolve inevitably from Communist domination.”[7] For this reason, the U.S. decided to support France’s return to Vietnam.
French forces began to return to Indochina in late 1945 and eventually replaced the Chinese and British occupation forces. Attempts by the Vietminh to negotiate a French commitment to independence failed, and by November 1946 fighting had broken out. The French military commander proclaimed: “If these gooks want a fight, they’ll get it.”[8] In December, the Reuters news agency reported that France had 89,000 troops in Vietnam and that military experts in Paris believed that it would take 200,000 troops to conquer Indochina. In January, the Vietminh withdrew from Hanoi and began a campaign of guerrilla war against the French. For the next three years the modern French army chased what they referred to as the “Barefoot Army” of the Vietminh. The French were able to control the cities but were powerless to control the countryside. When the French occupied hostile villages, the Vietminh simply evacuated and then returned after the French left. As the fighting continued, the French sought to create an acceptable nationalist alternative to the Vietminh. In June 1949, under French sponsorship, former emperor Bao Dai proclaimed the establishment of the State of Vietnam with France retaining control of its army, finances, and foreign relations. The French then set out to create a Vietnamese army to fight the Vietminh. The Vietminh responded by accusing the French of creating “a puppet government under Bao Dai to back up their war of reconquest and to hoodwink the world.”[9]
The character of the war changed dramatically in 1950 as Cold War tensions increased. Mao’s victory in China in 1949 shocked the West and focused increased attention on the need to contain communism in Asia. In January 1950, the USSR and China recognized Ho’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam. In February, the U.S. and Britain recognized the Bao Dai government and U.S. Secretary of State Dean Atcheson referred to Ho as a long-time communist and agent of Moscow. With the recognition of Ho’s government by the world’s leading communist powers came access to modern military weapons. Within a year the Vietminh, commanded by General Giap, had gone from a “barefoot army,” capable of only guerrilla warfare, to a well armed conventional force. Between 1949 and 1950, Giap quadrupled the size of his fighting force, reaching a strength of 117 battalions. By now the war was becoming increasingly unpopular in France; the French had lost 50,000 men in the fighting and were spending $500 million per year. Washington became concerned that France would be forced to abandon its efforts to prevent a communist victory in Indochina. U.S. officials saw the Cold War as analogous (comparable) to the events leading up to the Second World War. Although there were differences in communist regimes, American leaders believed that ultimately all communist actions emanated (came from) from Moscow. International communism was on the march, both in Europe and Asia, and if the U.S. failed to contest this aggression, it would succeed just as fascist aggression had during the 1930s. On June 28, 1950, three days after the Korean War began, President Truman authorized the first direct military aid to the French in Indochina. The initial amount was $15 million, but during the next four years, the U.S. would spend nearly $3 billion in support of French efforts.
Between 1950-53, the war grew more intense with the Vietminh receiving a steady supply of arms from China. Growing weary of the conflict, the French sought out a climactic battle that would defeat the Vietminh. In November of 1953 the French occupied Dien Bien Phu, a town northeastern Vietnam that served as a link between northern Vietnam, Laos, and China. Surrounded by miles of jungle, the French were convinced that the occupation of Dien Bien Phu would not only cut off Vietminh supplies, but also trap the Vietminh into fighting a set piece battle that the French were confident they could win. The French stationed 10,000 men at Dien Bien Phu and busily began constructing fortifications. Despite the French preparations, General Giap was confident that the French had made a tremendous error. Dien Bien Phu sat in a valley. If the Vietminh could seize the surrounding hills and mount their artillery above the French, they could rain shells directly into the base. The problem was supplies. How could the Vietminh supply an attacking army hundreds of miles away from their supply sources? Dien Bien Phu sat surrounded by dense jungle. The hills surrounding the valley were so steep that the French believed that no guns could be mounted on them. The key to the battle would prove to be the Vietminh’s ability to bring supplies to Dien Bien Phu. For months, an army of 20,000 Vietnamese civilians worked to cut supply roads through the dense jungle and mountainous terrain. Supplies slowly made their way toward the battlefront, many of them couriered by bicycle. The greatest Vietminh achievement was the hauling of their heavy artillery up the steep cliffs surrounding the valley. Two hundred pieces of heavy artillery were hauled up the mountains, an inch at a time. As the Vietminh prepared for battle, events in Europe upped the stakes. In January, the Soviet Union accepted a long-standing proposal for a summit conference to deal with Cold War issues with Britain, China, France, and the United States. The date of the conference was set for April 26 in Geneva. Both the French and the Vietminh knew that Indochina would be part of the agenda. A decisive victory at Dien Bien Phu by either side would have a strong effect on the upcoming negotiations.
The Vietminh attack began in the early evening of March 12, 1954. For an hour shells rained down on the French forces. The commander of the French elite paratroop force described the barrage as “a massacre” and 500 Frenchmen died. The French were amazed that the Vietminh had managed to locate their guns so close to the valley. Most agonizing was the realization that the guns were too well hidden to be hit by French artillery. For over a month the Vietminh pounded the French with artillery and dug closer to the fortifications. France appealed to the U.S. for direct military intervention. Attempting to built support for the French request, President Dwight Eisenhower used the analogy of falling dominoes to describe the threat to the rest of Southeast Asia should Dien Bien Phu fall in a news conference on April 7. With this innocent analogy, the domino theory became a tag phrase for American involvement in Vietnam. Although Eisenhower favored using U.S. forces to support the French, many military and Congressional leaders opposed him. General Matthew Ridgeway, the former commander of U.S. troops in Korea, argued that “Indochina is devoid of decisive military objectives” and that involvement there “would be a serious diversion of limited U.S. capabilities.” Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas said: “I am against sending American GI’s into the mud and muck of Indochina on a blood-letting spree to perpetuate colonialism and white man’s exploitation in Asia.”[10] Reluctantly, Eisenhower decided not to act and one day before the Geneva Conference turned to Indochina, Dien Bien Phu fell. Both sides suffered horribly. The French lost 3,000 dead and 4,000 wounded, Vietminh deaths were estimated at 8,000 with another 15,000 wounded. Of the 8,000 French who were captured, less than half survived captivity.
At the Geneva Conference of 1954 the Vietminh representative Pham Van Dong, insisted that the French withdraw and leave the Vietnamese to settle their own differences. The French and representatives of the Bao Dai government promptly rejected these demands and ultimately China and the Soviet Union forced the Vietminh to accept a settlement. French Indochina was to be divided into Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Vietnam itself was to be temporarily partitioned at the seventeenth parallel. A demilitarized zone (DMZ) would temporarily divide the two states. The Vietminh would control the North while Bao Dai would remain in control of the South. Elections to unify the country were to be held in two years. The United States refused to sign the agreement, viewing it as legitimizing at least a partial communist victory. For the first time since 1948, territory had been “lost” to communism.
In the midst of the Geneva Conference, Bao Dai appointed a new prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem’s appointment came with strong American support and symbolized the transition from French to American sponsorship of the southern government. Like Ho Chi Minh, Diem was born in central Vietnam, the son of a mandarin, and was French educated. Diem’s family were devout Catholics and he had entered the French administrative system, becoming a provincial governor at the young age of twenty-five. Although he later resigned, Diem was arrested by the Vietminh in September 1945 and remained a prisoner until early 1946. During that time the Vietminh shot his oldest brother. Despite personally refusing to aid Ho, Diem was eventually released. He became one of the leading anti-communist nationalists but also refused to serve in Bao Dai’s French-supported government. Diem eventually fled the country after being condemned to death by the Vietminh in 1950 and spent two years in the United States where he was introduced to many prominent politicians. Diem appeared to be the “third force” that many Americans hoped would emerge in Vietnam. Fiercely anti-communist and anti-French, Diem was also free from the personal corruption that tainted the Bao Dai regime.[11]
Once in power Diem received strong American support from the CIA. Spreading the word in the Catholic communities of the North that “God has gone south,” hundreds of thousands of Catholics emigrated to the South. These Catholics became the core of Diem’s support. The CIA also destroyed transportation in the North and supported anti-Vietminh guerrillas.[12] Diem weathered several coup de’état (violent overthrow of the government) attempts in 1954 and 1955, and it was apparent that he appeared capable of staying in power. During the summer Diem moved against Bao Dai by planning a referendum to remove the authority of the emperor and confirm his position as head of state. In October, Diem won the referendum with 98.2% of the vote amid charges of ballot stuffing and intimidation. Even though all indications were that Diem would have won a totally fair election, the election proved to be an embarrassment to the U.S. After the referendum, Diem had no intention of holding the reunification vote in 1956 called for by the Geneva agreement. Diem maintained that all-Vietnamese elections could not be fairly conducted because the government of the North would prevent their people from voting freely, and as a result, the North’s population of fifteen million would outvote the twelve million southerners. Other indications showed that Ho would win the scheduled vote regardless of the circumstances. Eisenhower believed that Ho would win as much as 80% of the vote.[13] The U.S. strongly supported Diem’s objection to holding the election. When the 1956 elections were canceled, Ho asked his supporters to be patient. His policy was to consolidate his power in the North before further addressing unification. As a result, the Vietminh who had remained politically active in the South, in accordance with the terms of the Geneva agreement, were now exposed to arrest or assassination by the Diem government. By the end of 1956, 90% of the Vietminh operatives in the South had been eliminated. 75,000 were killed and more than 50,000 imprisoned. This campaign was not just directed against known communists. Anyone who had opposed the French was also suspect. Diem’s actions created many new enemies among former nationalists who were falsely accused of being communist agents. American reports from Vietnam indicated that the majority of those jailed for political reasons were neither communists or sympathetic to communism and that, by 1957, South Vietnam had become “a quasi-police state characterized by arbitrary arrest and imprisonment.”[14]
Diem’s leadership style also was a source of concern for Washington. The National Assembly seldom met, and Diem frequently ruled by decree (executive order). Diem also offended village leaders by appointing village chiefs because chiefs had traditionally been elected within the village. Of even greater concern was the issue of nepotism (favoritism to members of one’s family). His younger brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, was his top advisor and head of the secret police. Nhu’s wife was the government’s official hostess and served as an unofficial government spokesperson. Madame Nhu’s father served as South Vietnam’s ambassador to the United Nations. Diem’s elder brother, Thuc, occupied the top position in the Vietnamese Catholic Church—Archbishop of Hué. In addition, two other brothers served as regional governors, and various other cousins served in other top governmental positions.
By this time the U.S. was financing between 60-75%
of South Vietnam’s entire budget. The
need for military aid increased as Ho’s supporters began guerrilla attacks in
the South. Diem began to refer to these
South Vietnamese communists as Vietcong,
and in December 1960 Ho authorized the formation of the National Liberation
Front (NLF) in attempt to unite southern opposition to Diem. Although the NLF (which became synonymous
with the term Vietcong) contained non-communists, its activities were largely
directed from Hanoi. With the formation
of the NLF came a dramatic increase in both political and military pressure
against Diem’s government. In 1959,
U.S. intelligence reports noted that “If you drew a paint brush across the
South, every brush would touch a Viet-Minh.”
The response to this growing communist threat took two main forms, the creation of the Strategic Hamlet Program, and an increase in American military commitment. The Strategic Hamlet Program was designed to isolate the rural population from Vietcong influence. Villagers in remote areas were moved to fortified camps where they could be “protected” against attack. The communists condemned the policy as building “concentration camps,” and they were unpopular among the South Vietnamese populace. Farmers were uprooted from their lands and the burial grounds of their ancestors. The U.S. government viewed the Viet Cong threat as primarily a military problem and increased the American military presence. By the end of 1960, the U.S. had given more than $7 billion of military and economic aid to South Vietnam. In addition, there were over 600 military advisors stationed in South Vietnam. These advisors trained Vietnamese troops and accompanied them on missions against the Vietcong.
In January 1961, John F. Kennedy became president. In his inauguration address, Kennedy indicated that his administration would continue the cold war policies of his predecessors. Also, similar to the Eisenhower administration, the Kennedy administration operated on two basic premises in regard to Vietnam. One was that the fall of South Vietnam to communism would threaten the security of the free world, and the other was that American support should be limited to training and logistical (management) support.[15] Attempting to find a solution to the steadily increasing Vietcong pressure, Kennedy created various task forces and sent a number of advisors to Vietnam on fact-finding missions. In May 1961, he rejected a task force recommendation for a massive increase in U.S. military personnel but agreed to proposals increasing the South Vietnamese Army (referred to as ARVN—Army of the Republic of Vietnam) and the number of U.S. advisors from 700 to 800. Vice President Lyndon Johnson was sent to Vietnam in May where he compared Diem to Winston Churchill. When asked by a reporter if he really meant the obvious hyperbole (exaggeration), LBJ replied: “Shit, Diem’s the only boy we got out there.” Kennedy, however, remained distrustful of the value of massive U.S. troop deployments: “The troops will march in, the bands will play, the crowds will cheer, and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.” Although recommendations for massive increases were denied, America’s presence continued to grow to 6,000 advisors by 1963. Much of the increase came in the form of Special Forces (later called Green Berets) who were to train the South Vietnamese military. In addition, U.S. helicopters began to ferry Vietnamese troops to suspected Vietcong areas and provide fire support during operations. This increasing presence was kept secret because it violated prohibitions on foreign troops contained in the Geneva Accords. Kennedy also lied about the involvement of U.S. forces in combat. When asked in a January 1962 news conference if U.S. troops were engaged in fighting, he responded “no,” despite both the helicopter operations and the fact that American officers had led South Vietnamese troops into combat.
The Vietcong quickly adapted to the new helicopter tactics. A massive raid on Vietcong positions at Ap Bac (forty miles southwest of Saigon in the Mekong Delta) in January 1963 resulted in the death of 61 South Vietnamese troops and three American helicopter crewmen as South Vietnamese troops failed to press their attack or close off the communist escape routes. At one point, the South Vietnamese mistakenly shelled their own troops, almost killing the top U.S. advisor. Ap Bac brought to light the deficiencies of the South Vietnamese Army. A New York Times editorial questioned if the ARVN could ever hold its own against communist forces: “The lack of will to fight for their own independence that Vietnamese troops displayed at the battle of Ap Bac … merits fundamental administration review of its current policy of military aid to South Vietnam.” In April of 1963, French President de Gaulle suggested a neutralist settlement to the war, similar to what had earlier been employed in Laos in 1961. This suggestion was swiftly rejected by Washington without serious consideration. For the foreseeable future, the U.S. would stay the course with Diem.
Many members of the Kennedy administration were becomingly increasingly frustrated with Diem; however, no one could foresee the dramatic events of the summer of 1963 that would topple Diem and his family from power. The source of these events was a religious controversy. Buddhists had long resented Diem’s open favoritism toward Catholicism but had taken no action against the regime until a major blunder occurred on May 8 in Hué.[16] Though Catholics were allowed to fly Vatican flags at a church celebration honoring Archbishop Thuc, three days later the government forbade the Buddhists to unfurl their religious flags for the 2,507th birthday of Buddha. When the Buddhists staged a protest march against the edict, government armored cars fired over the heads of the rioters. In the melee, nine people were killed. The Buddhists blamed the slaughter on Diem's troops; the government blamed the killings on Communist agitators. Following the violence in Hué, Buddhist protests intensified and on June 11 the world’s attention was drawn to South Vietnam as a Buddhist monk doused himself with gasoline and then sat cross-legged on a city street and set himself aflame. The Buddhist leaders had tipped off an Associated Press photographer who captured the image which dominated the front page of almost every major newspaper in the world. The sight of the monk’s self-immolation shocked President Kennedy, and it led to a series of events which were to finally topple Diem from power. As the CIA station chief in Saigon, William Colby, later said: “The thing that did as much as anything to lead to the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem was that photograph of the bonze [monk] burning himself. Now the fact was that the bonze did that in protest against Diem.”[17] In the weeks following Quang Duc’s suicide, six additional monks burned themselves to death. Madame Nhu referred to the suicides as “a barbecue show,” criticized them for using imported gasoline, and said “Let them burn, and we shall clap our hands.”
In an effort to signal American displeasure to Diem, Kennedy sent a new ambassador to Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge. Fluent in French, Lodge was a prominent Republican who would help build bipartisan (Republican and Democratic) support for the U.S. efforts in Vietnam.[18] Lodge was given unprecedented power over the disbursement of U.S. aid to South Vietnam and was instructed to pressure Diem to end the Buddhist crisis on conciliatory terms. Diem and his brother Nhu refused to respond to the U.S. pressure and ordered further attacks on Buddhist temples. In June, several Vietnamese generals approached an agent of the CIA in Saigon inquiring about possible American reaction to a coup to topple Diem. Kennedy’s advisors, principally Assistant Secretary of State Roger Hillsman, began to openly discuss the possibility of a coup. Hillsman, an outspoken critic of Diem within the administration, drafted a telegram to Lodge which he received upon his arrival in Saigon on August 24. The telegram instructed Lodge to tell Diem that he needed to dismiss his controversial brother Nhu as his chief advisor. Diem ignored the request.
As plans for a coup began to develop in Saigon, Kennedy appeared to publicly step away from the Diem government, stating that “in my opinion during the last two months the government has gotten out of touch with the people.” In a televised interview on September 2 with CBS’s Walter Cronkite, he added:
I don’t think that unless a greater effort is made by the [South Vietnamese] government to win popular support that the war can be won out there. In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisors, but they have to win it, the people of Vietnam, against the Communists…. All we can do is help …[19]
On October 2, the administration announced that it intended to withdraw 1,000 men from Vietnam by the end of the year. Finally, on October 30, Lodge was told “… once a coup under responsible leadership has begun … it is in the interest of the U.S. government that it should succeed.”[20] With the assurance of U.S. support, two days later the generals moved against Diem. Troops attacked the presidential palace and other key installations in Saigon. By the evening, Diem and his brother had fled the palace. The next day they were captured and executed.
Upon hearing the news of Diem’s death in the midst of a meeting of the National Security Council, President Kennedy was noticeably shaken. Kennedy’s military advisor, Maxwell Taylor later commented: “It was a shock to all of us but I think perhaps to the President more than any of us—because he didn’t realize that we were all playing with fire when we were at least giving tacit encouragement to the overthrow of this man.”[21] When Madame Nhu heard the news of her husband and brother in law’s deaths, she issued a prophetic statement in a press conference to American reporters: “… if really my family has been treacherously killed with either official or unofficial blessing of the American Government, I can predict to you all that the story of Vietnam is only at its beginning.”[22] Three weeks later Kennedy himself was dead, the victim of an assassin’s bullets in Dallas. New administrations in both Saigon and Washington would have to deal with an increasingly deteriorating situation in 1964.
Jeffrey T. Stroebel, The
Sycamore School, 2002.
[1] In 1861 Lincoln, however, had more pressing concerns with the beginning of the Civil War. No reply was made to the emperor’s request.
[2] William Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life (New York: Hyperion 2000) , p. 64.
[3] Although this is not intended to be a formal academic paper and I have not attempted to cite the source of all quotations, I have footnoted all lengthy quotations and other statements that might be viewed as controversial. Although I have used many reference sources, the basic content of this information is taken from Michael Maclear, Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War (London: Thames Methuen, 1982) and Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking Press, 1983).
[4] Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly (New York: Ballantine, 1984), p. 235.
[5] OSS District Chief Col. Paul Halliwell quoted in Tuchman The March of Folly, p. 239.
[6]United States—Vietnam Relations: 1945-1967 Vol. I [hereafter cited as The Pentagon Papers] (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), p. 34.
[7] The Pentagon Papers Vol I, p. 144.
[8] Karnow, Vietnam, p. 157.
[9] New York Times 20 January 1950.
[10] The debate over American intervention is contained in Karnow, Vietnam, pp. 196-198.
[11] Diem’s personal life was a total contrast from Bao Dai who had been called the “Playboy Emperor.” Diem remained a celibate bachelor whose only vice was chain-smoking cigarettes.
[12] Pentagon Papers Vol. 1, pp. 575-577.
[13] Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change 1953-1956 (New York: Doubleday, 1963), p. 372.
[14] Comments regarding those arrested are from P.J. Honey, “The Problem of Democracy in Vietnam, The World Today, February 1960, p. 73. The evaluation of South Vietnam as a police state is from William Henderson, “South Viet Nam Finds Itself”, Foreign Affairs, January 1957, pp. 285-288.
[15] Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 29.
[16] Buddhists comprised 80% of South Vietnam's 15 million people.
[17] Maclear, The Ten Thousand Day War, pp. 86-87.
[18] Lodge and Kennedy were old political foes. Kennedy had taken Lodge’s Massachusetts Senate seat by defeating him in 1952 and Lodge was the unsuccessful Republican vice presidential candidate in 1960 when Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon.
[19] CBS Evening News 2 September 1963.
[20] Pentagon Papers II, p. 793.
[21] Maclear, The Ten Thousand Day War, p. 106.
[22] New York Times 3 November 1963.