Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975. Max Hastings
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liked to pretend to jest ‘Foreigners are not like the folks I am used to,’ though this indeed emphasised an important truth about himself. On 29 October Kennedy convened the NSC to discuss a cable from Harkins, expressing the general’s desire to stick with the Ngos: ‘Rightly or wrongly, we have backed Diem for eight long hard years. To me it seems incongruous to get him down, kick him around and get rid of him.’ This message shook Robert Kennedy, who decided that a coup now looked risky.
National security adviser McGeorge Bundy dispatched another cable to Lodge, reflecting the president’s new doubts. Yet the ambassador had become determined to see the plot through: he never conveyed Washington’s equivocations either to the Vietnamese generals or to Lou Conein. On 1 November the old OSS man arrived by appointment at army headquarters, wearing uniform and carrying a .357 revolver together with $US40,000 in cash, which he deemed the appropriate fashion accessories for an afternoon’s work overthrowing a government. He left his wife and children in their villa guarded by Green Berets, and radioed from his jeep an agreed signal to his superiors that the operation was starting: ‘Nine, nine, nine, nine, nine.’ Rebel troops launched an assault on Diem’s palace, where the president and his brother took refuge in the cellar. In Saigon, the plotters seized and shot several Ngo loyalist officers. At 4.30 p.m. Diem telephoned Lodge to seek his support, and received only the offer of a safe conduct out of the country.
The plotters phoned the president, urging him to quit in exchange for his life. Instead he contacted intimates, trawling for support which was not forthcoming. At eight o’clock that evening Diem and Nhu attempted a desperate gambit, slipping out of the palace and driving to Cholon through deserted streets, defying a curfew imposed by the army plotters. The two took refuge in a house prepared by Nhu for just such an emergency, with its own communications system: they were in Cholon when rebel troops shelled and finally stormed the palace, overcoming guards who died in defence of an absent Diem. Only after hours of fighting was the wrecked building secured, then looted of everything from Madame Nhu’s negligees to the president’s impressive collection of American comics.
At 6 a.m. on 3 November, an audibly exhausted Diem telephoned ‘Big’ Minh and offered to negotiate terms for his resignation. The generals rejected the proposal, likewise a suggestion that he should be allowed to leave the country with the public honours due to the head of state. Minutes later, Diem called again: he and his brother had decided to surrender unconditionally, and were to be found at St Francis Xavier, a Catholic church in Cholon. The generals, uncertain what they should do with their redundant president, turned to Lou Conein. He said it would take twenty-four hours to produce an American plane to fly Diem out, and they would need to find a country willing to grant him asylum.
The generals delegated a veteran secret policeman to fetch Diem and Nhu from Cholon in an M-113 APC. In the party was also Capt. Nhung, Minh’s personal bodyguard, to whom the general is alleged to have given a discreet signal – two raised fingers – to indicate that the captives should be killed: Nhung had already executed two Diem loyalists the previous night. At the church, the Ngos shook hands with their escort, who ushered them into the carrier with an assurance that its armour offered protection against ‘extremists’. On the way back into Saigon, the little convoy halted at a railroad crossing, where an officer emptied a sub-machine-gun into the passengers. The carrier, awash with blood, then continued to Minh’s office at garrison headquarters, where his man announced tersely, ‘Mission accomplie.’ The general told Conein that Diem had committed suicide, then asked, ‘Would you like to see him?’ Absolutely not, said the American: there was a ‘one-in-a-million chance’ that the world would swallow the coup plotters’ story, and he declined to be embarrassed by confronting the truth.
A British Council lecturer found himself identifying the bodies of Diem and Nhu at St Paul hospital, because he was married to the late president’s niece. Diem appeared to have been hit just once in the neck, Nhu repeatedly in the back. Lodge summoned the generals to the US embassy, where he described the coup as ‘a remarkable performance in all respects’, then sent a buoyant cable to Washington: ‘The prospects now are for a shorter war.’ There were public celebrations in Saigon and other cities, with the deposed dictator’s image exultantly torn from the walls of public buildings. Hundreds of political prisoners, some showing marks of torture, were set free. An incongruous memory lingered in the minds of many Saigonese: a ban on dancing, imposed by Madame Nhu in the alleged interests of public morality, was rescinded. Thousands danced, figuratively, on the Ngos’ graves.
Neil Sheehan and some of his press corps colleagues detected an illusory gleam of hope: ‘If you stuck with Diem, you were going to lose the war. We thought, if they got a decent military regime, they had a chance.’ Gen. Duong Van Minh assumed leadership of the junta that took over the government of South Vietnam. In London The Times reported on 5 November: ‘Saigon was acting as if a great weight was lifted. Streets were crowded as they have never been crowded … Thousands of Buddhists flocked to Xa Loi pagoda for almost jubilant prayer services.’ A special correspondent added: ‘The pro-American leanings of several of the Junta … should incline them towards democracy.’
John F. Kennedy was attending a meeting with Max Taylor when news was brought of Diem’s death. The soldier recorded how the president ‘rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay’. Subsequent arguments about responsibility seem otiose. The administration had authorised Lodge to open the seacocks, allowing the regime to founder. Recriminations about whether Washington should have ensured the availability of lifeboats for survivors are beside the point. The South Vietnamese generals would not have dared to remove Diem had they not been assured that this represented Washington’s will. Nobody convincingly warned them not to kill him.
It is sometimes argued that Diem’s regime could have reformed and survived; that the president was South Vietnam’s last nationalist and independent head of state. VNAF fighter pilot Tran Hoi said: ‘I thought the Americans quite wrong to depose him. He was a true patriot.’ Some thoughtful South Vietnamese respected Diem’s efforts, however ill-judged, to pursue his own policies rather than merely to execute American ones. Another air force officer, Nguyen Van Uc, said: ‘Diem knew that if [American combat troops] came in, the communists would always be able to say they were fighting a campaign against imperialist domination.’ A naval officer agreed: ‘After Diem’s death, there was no more real politics in South Vietnam.’
The record shows that the regime was rotten to the core, and commanded negligible popular support. Yet the manner of the president’s extinction, resembling that of a Roman emperor by his Praetorian Guard, dealt a crippling and probably irretrievable blow to America’s moral standing in South-East Asia. The US chiefs of staff were appalled, calling it ‘the Asian Bay of Pigs’. Frank Scotton said, ‘Killing Diem was a catastrophic mistake.’ He told those of his bosses who claimed to see the prospect of a fresh start: ‘Some of these generals are quite likeable guys, but do any of them have the smallest administrative or political leadership skills? Now that the first bloody coup is accepted, anyone with more than two tanks will believe they have licence for a change of government.’
David Elliott had arrived in Vietnam ‘confident that we were doing the right thing. But I soon came to believe that instead of supporting the coup we should have faced the fact that there was no common purpose between ourselves and our ally. We should have walked away.’ An Australian working later in Vietnam wrote: ‘What Americans have not learnt is that they cannot impose “democracy” on the South. For [the US] to support any government is to doom it to failure.’ An Ed Lansdale protégé, CIA officer Rufus Phillips, said of Diem’s killing, ‘I wanted to sit down and cry … That was a stupid decision and, God, we paid, they paid, everybody paid.’ Former Saigon ambassador Fritz Nolting resigned from the State Department in protest.
On 22 November 1963, forty-six-year-old US president John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Even as the world mourned, the knot of Americans privy to the secrets of what had taken place in Saigon less than three weeks earlier reflected upon the harsh symmetry. Kennedy was succeeded by his vice-president, a man of notable political gifts, most of which would later be forgotten as Lyndon Johnson bore to his grave the terrible incubus of Vietnam. In those first days, few people outside America knew anything about its new leader. In London The Times observed with