No More Vietnams Read online

  Unlike the American administration, Ho viewed all of Indochina not as four separate countries but as one strategic theater. His motive in signing the Geneva agreement was simple and cynical: He hoped it would enable him to restrict our zone of operation while his armies continued to operate freely throughout Indochina.

  When the plan worked, the North Vietnamese wasted no time in exploiting their advantage. Through the work of their Group 559, they virtually annexed southern Laos and constructed an elaborate system of infiltration routes—dubbed the “Ho Chi Minh Trail”—into South Vietnam and Cambodia.

  Those who argued that the war in Vietnam was an internal South Vietnamese conflict minimized the importance of the Ho Chi Minh Trail or even questioned its existence. The official North Vietnamese history of the war does not. It reads: “During the sixteen years of operation, Group 559, which at first had only a few hundred people who primarily used cargo bicycles on narrow trails, became a force with many components: transportation troops, military engineers, infantry, antiaircraft artillery, [fuel supply] troops, communications units, etc., totalling tens of thousands of people and thousands of cargo trucks organized into many divisions, regiments, troop encampments, workshops, stations, etc. There was created a strategic route bearing the name of the great Uncle Ho which crossed the Troung Son mountains [in Laos], connected the battlefields, and amounted to a relatively complete land route, pipeline, and river route network.”

  The Ho Chi Minh Trail became a lifeline for the Communist aggressors in Indochina and, in the end, a noose for their victims. By 1970, North Vietnam had stationed almost 70,000 troops in Laos and had transported over 500,000 troops along their network of roads. The Geneva agreement on Laos in 1962 paved the way for the Communist victory in South Vietnam in 1975.

  The United States’ response to North Vietnam’s massive violations was tepid. Our friends in Laos were begging for help as the renewed Communist offensive drained their stocks of ammunition, but for months Harriman refused to allow the CIA to send any military or paramilitary assistance. He later reluctantly permitted covert shipments of ammunition, provided that he had approved the cargo manifest of each supply flight and that the arms be used for defensive purposes only. With North Vietnam’s offensive in high gear, it was not difficult to satisfy the second condition.

  The Kennedy and Johnson administrations steadily stepped up our covert operations in Laos, which later became known as “the secret war.” But our actions were sharply circumscribed and never matched those of North Vietnam. Neither administration wished to abandon the Geneva agreement entirely. Both sought to observe the spirit, if not the letter, of the agreement by enforcing two critical limitations on our involvement: They refused to give enough aid to our Laotian allies to enable them to expel the North Vietnamese, and they rejected plans to intervene directly in Laos with American ground forces. Our anti-Communist friends in Laos fought a valiant guerrilla war that exacted a high toll on North Vietnamese forces. But because of our sharp limits on aid, they never succeeded in denying Hanoi effective control of Laos.

  Our policy was a sad combination of wishful thinking and willful ignorance. In 1964, when I spoke with Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in Saigon, I sensed that he was uncomfortable as he tried to explain the reason for the administration’s opposition to sending forces into Laos and Cambodia in hot pursuit of Communist units and to cutting off the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The administration contended that this would violate the neutrality of these countries, undermine the Geneva agreement, and widen the war. But it was obvious that North Vietnam had already widened the war by taking over southern Laos and eastern Cambodia. By failing to defend Laos, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations made it easier for North Vietnam to wage their war against South Vietnam by sending tons of weapons and thousands of men down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  In conversations I had with President Diem and with the leaders of Thailand in 1956, they expressed deep distress at the lack of safeguards in the 1954 Geneva treaty and the ease with which North Vietnam flouted the treaty’s terms in Laos. They understood, as Eisenhower had, that Laos was vital to the security of all Indochina. Years later it would be fashionable in academia to deride the domino theory. But whatever academics would say about it, the dominoes certainly believed it.

  Our failure to prevent North Vietnam from establishing the Ho Chi Minh Trail had fatal consequences. Hanoi could not have waged the kind of a war it did in the South without a free run down the Laos panhandle. If the Communists had been unable to use Laos and Cambodia as staging grounds for their invasion, they would have had to strike across the forty-mile-long border of the demilitarized zone. On this narrow front, South Vietnam would have been able to defend itself without the assistance of American forces.

  Our acquiescence in Hanoi’s violations of the 1962 Geneva agreement lengthened the front that Saigon had to defend from 40 to 640 miles. Our unilateral restraint gave North Vietnam privileged sanctuaries from which to attack American and South Vietnamese forces.

  At first, when the Communists fought in small guerrilla units, they could pick and choose their targets, execute hit-and-run raids, and slip back across the border before reinforcements could arrive. Later, when they used division-size conventional units, they could concentrate overwhelmingly superior offensive power against overextended defensive forces. Our failure in Laos turned over the strategic and tactical initiative to Hanoi.

  Had the Geneva agreement turned Laos into a genuine neutral buffer state, our problems in Vietnam would have been reduced to manageable proportions. It did not, but we acted as if it did. We treated the fate of Laos as if it were of secondary importance to that of South Vietnam. But the two were inextricably linked. Guerrilla attacks were breaking out across South Vietnam. North Vietnam was the driving force behind them, and its troops and armaments arrived via Laos.

  By allowing the Ho Chi Minh Trail to become a freeway for Hanoi’s invasion, we put Ho Chi Minh in the driver’s seat in the Vietnam War.

  • • •

  We made our third critical mistake in South Vietnam in 1963. The Kennedy administration, increasingly frustrated with President Diem, encouraged and supported a military coup against his government. This shameful episode ended with Diem’s murder and began a period of political chaos in South Vietnam that forced us to send our own troops into the war.

  Being a ruler of a Third World country usually means making enemies. Diem was no exception. He was a bold decision-maker, initiating vast programs for the betterment of his country. Often, he alienated those who supported a different plan or who saw his reforms as a threat to their interests in preserving the status quo.

  Like all leaders, Diem made some poor decisions. He replaced the old custom of village self-government with a centralized system of appointed leaders, thereby undermining the local initiative on which democracy depends. He alienated many important civilian and military leaders in the aftermath of an attempted coup against him in 1960. He started to rely too heavily for his rule on members of his own family. As his strong political base began to erode, he became more authoritarian.

  Diem jealously guarded his independence, often rejecting or ignoring the advice of his American advisers. After all, he was a proud Vietnamese nationalist who would not take orders from Americans any more than he had from the French. “America has a magnificent economy and many good points,” he once told a reporter. “But does your strength at home automatically mean that the United States is entitled to dictate everything here in Vietnam, which is undergoing a type of war that your country has never experienced?”

  Diem assumed that despite his occasional difference of opinion with American policymakers, the United States was an ally he could depend on in the end. He also assumed that the United States saw no alternative to his leadership. He was wrong on both counts.

  As Kennedy and his advisers grew increasingly unhappy with their strong-willed ally, they began to lose sight of the fact that the issue was not whether South
Vietnam would develop a perfect constitutional democracy but whether it would have a government capable of resisting an expansion of Communist control that would destroy all democracy. In the early 1960s, South Vietnam was already under military attack. While assassinations, abductions, and terrorist and guerrilla raids proliferated, our officials acted as if the real problem were gerrymandered electoral districts and stuffed ballot boxes.

  The crisis that convinced the Kennedy administration to abandon Diem began in May 1963. After Catholics flew dozens of Vatican flags during public celebrations in Danang, Diem, himself a Catholic, enacted a law to prevent the subordination of the national flag to religious ones. It prohibited any group from flying its flag above the national flag in public demonstrations; the display of flags within a house of worship was not affected. Buddha’s birthday fell two days later, with major celebrations scheduled across the country. Diem was aware that many Buddhists would fly their banner without knowing about the new law, so he suspended enforcement of it.

  Word of Diem’s action arrived too late in Hue, and what became known as the “Buddhist crisis” resulted. Local police took down several Buddhist flags that were flying above the South Vietnamese banner. Thich Tri Quang, a Buddhist priest who practiced his politics more devoutly than his religion and who was eager to find fault with the Catholic President, delivered a bristling antigovernment tirade in his pagoda during religious ceremonies.

  Hue’s Buddhists were primed for dissent. Mayor Ngo Dinh Thuc, who was one of Diem’s brothers, was a notorious religious bigot. Tri Quang took a recording of his anti-Diem speech to a radio station and demanded that it be broadcast. Outside the station, a bomb exploded in the crowd of protesters who had followed him, killing eight people. Buddhist leaders accused government soldiers of detonating an American-made concussion grenade. Diem denied the charge, and a United Nations commission eventually determined that the blast resulted not from a grenade but from plastic explosives, a favorite weapon of the National Liberation Front. But the Buddhists escalated their political attacks and demanded that Diem personally accept responsibility for the tragedy.

  Then, on June 11, a Buddhist monk doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire in protest against Diem’s government. The next day, the grisly picture of the scene—the monk with his hands clasped in prayer as the flames consumed him—ran on the front page of almost every American newspaper.

  The monk’s self-immolation was a carefully contrived ritual staged for the American news media. Buddhist leaders had tipped off the press beforehand and afterward quickly distributed mimeographed copies of antigovernment letters purportedly written by the monk. None of that was reported. The picture stood alone and seared a single word into the minds of many Americans: repression.

  Here a small group of influential American reporters in Saigon, all of whom opposed Diem, had a decisive impact on events. Some of them worked for the United States’ most influential newspapers. They accepted almost any anti-Diem accusation as gospel, and met frequently to compare stories with one another so that their line would be consistent. Tri Quang rightly considered them allies, so much so that he distributed copies of their stories as propaganda to win converts. That the South Vietnamese President was a devout Catholic made him an ideal candidate to be painted as a repressor of Buddhists. During the crisis, the reporters obligingly portrayed Diem as an enemy of all the people and a holdover from the French colonialist who practiced ruthless repression against nationalist and Buddhist South Vietnamese. They wrote that 70 percent of the South Vietnamese were Buddhist. The true figure was at most 30 percent.

  Facts, however, were not important to these correspondents. Undercutting Diem, perhaps even destroying him, was all that mattered. This was one of the few times during the Vietnam War when the United States government and the American press would find themselves working toward the same goal.

  The issue of religious repression was a complete fabrication. Diem appointed his top officials without regard to their faith. Of his eighteen cabinet ministers, five were Catholic, five Confucianist, and eight Buddhist, including the vice president and the foreign minister. Of his thirty-eight provincial governors, twelve were Catholic and twenty-six were either Confucianist or Buddhist. Of his nineteen top generals, three were Catholic and sixteen were Taoist, Confucianist, or Buddhist. He permitted Buddhists to exempt themselves from mandatory military service on religious grounds, while Catholics and others were required to serve. No Buddhist was ever arrested for practicing his religion, and not a single piece of credible evidence has ever been produced to show that Diem repressed Buddhists on the basis of religion.

  Politics, not religion, was on the minds of those behind the crisis. A few ambitious Vietnamese had shaved their heads, donned Buddhist monk’s clothing, and contrived the crisis to advance their own political agenda. Their leader was Tri Quang, and they operated out of the Xa Loi pagoda in Saigon. It was hardly a place of reverence. Mimeograph copiers churned out propaganda sheets. Organizers barked out instructions on where to hold the day’s demonstrations. Messengers hurried about with newly painted banners. Journalists and photographers milled around hoping to get the inside word on the location of the next burning. Anyone who glanced in the door could see that the Xa Loi pagoda was not a house of worship but the political headquarters of a movement intent on bringing down Diem’s government.

  During a United Nations investigation of the charges against Diem, two young Buddhists who had been prevented from burning themselves to death testified about how Tri Quang’s General Buddhist Association had recruited them. Both were told horror stories about how Diem’s government was burning pagodas and beating, torturing, and disemboweling Buddhists. One said a recruiter told him that “the Buddhist Association worked for the Communists” and that ten volunteers were needed for death by fire. After he volunteered, he was told that the “suicide-promotion group would make all the arrangements.” This included providing him with a gasoline-soaked robe, driving him to a location that would maximize publicity, and writing letters of protest for him that would be handed out to the waiting press.

  The other, who came from a remote province, said he was horrified when a recruiter told him Diem had burned Saigon’s pagodas. He volunteered to die when he was informed that by doing so he might be reincarnated as a Buddha. He was brought to the capital and given a carefully prescribed route, designed to avoid the city’s thoroughly intact pagodas, to reach the location for his suicide. When he changed course because a street was blocked off, he came upon a pagoda where Buddhists were peacefully worshiping. He then voluntarily surrendered to a policeman.

  Just as he sought to deceive the world, Tri Quang deceived his victims in order to achieve his political ends. After Diem had yielded to all reasonable demands, Tri Quang injected unreasonable ones to keep the crisis alive. He was interested not in compromise but in conflict. As one monk at Xa Loi asked a reporter, “How many suicides will it take to get rid of Diem?”

  Tri Quang made no secret of his real goals. He had been arrested twice by the French for working with the Viet Minh. He admitted that after 1945 he had served with Buddhist groups that were nothing more than Communist front organizations to help Ho’s army. He was a disciple of Thich Tri Do, the leader of the Communist-dominated Buddhist church in North Vietnam, and had once said that Buddhism was entirely compatible with communism. On one occasion, a reporter asked Tri Quang whether it was ethical to induce young monks to commit suicide in so painful a manner just to be able to fly the Buddhist flag a notch or two higher. Tri Quang shrugged his shoulders and said with perfect candor that “in a revolution many things must be done.”

  Storms of outrage broke out in the United States and Europe when the Buddhist suicides began. Sensationalized news media reports made matters even worse. The suicides were political ploys by a few fanatic extremists, but the media said they represented the mainstream opinion of South Vietnamese Buddhists. The press played up the Buddhists as oppressed hol
y people, and the world blamed their political target, Diem.

  Most critics attributed the suicides to Diem’s repression. Nobody seemed to notice when the number of suicides increased after he was overthrown. The radical Buddhists had sought to get rid of Diem not because of religious repression but because he blocked the road to a revolutionary overthrow of South Vietnam’s non-Communist government.

  News-media reports of Buddhist repression had the desired effect: They turned American public opinion against Diem. One of the three reasons Secretary of State Dean Rusk listened when the Kennedy administration first considered abandoning Diem in August 1963 was the pressure of American public opinion.

  The Buddhist crisis escalated dramatically on August 21 when Diem sent units of his special forces to raid the pagodas at the center of the Buddhist rebellion. Diem had not singled out the Buddhists; he would have cracked down on any group that openly sought to overturn the government. His forces did not rampage through holy places. No one was killed. They seized only pagodas, like Xa Loi, that were political command posts. Diem’s raids affected just twelve of South Vietnam’s 4,776 pagodas. His troops seized spears, daggers, guns, and plastic molds for making bombs, together with documents linking the radical Buddhists to the National Liberation Front.

  Kennedy’s advisers now lost all perspective. They accused Diem of outright repression. Even recently, a top official from that era displayed his lack of understanding by characterizing the crisis as one in which “a Frenchified Catholic Vietnamese President began to beat up the pagodas and kill Buddhist priests and Buddhist nuns.” This view was typical and totally at odds with the facts. Kennedy’s anti-Diem advisers had refused to believe the balanced reports on the crisis sent previously by Ambassador Frederick Nolting and instead came to rely on the news accounts of stridently anti-Diem reporters. Roger Hilsman, the assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, summed up the Kennedy administration’s attitude when he commented, “After the closing of the pagodas on August 21, the facts became irrelevant.”