Overthrow Series
Vietnam War Series
Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer, 2006, Excerpts
Japan had occupied and controlled Vietnam during the World War II. The Vietminh waged a guerilla war against the occupiers, using weapons dropped to them by the Americans. After the Japanese surrender, Ho Chi Minh, a frail-looking figure in his fifties with a thin beard, declared his country’s independence. On September 2, 1945, before a large crowd in the northern city of Hanoi, he delivered a speech that any American would have found familiar.
“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Ho looked instinctively to the United States, because partly he had a lifelong admiration for Americans and partly he had few other allies. Ho’s efforts to attract American support proved fruitless. The French settled back into their old role in Vietnam. Slowly Ho realized that if he wanted to make his county’s independence real, the Vietminh would have to fight another war, this time against the French colonialists. That war was reaching its climax when Dwight Eisenhower assumed the presidency in 1953.
By then, the French had been worn down by years of fighting against Vietnamese guerillas. They concluded, with great pain, that they must give up their splendid colony and sue for peace. Early in 1954, French and Vietminh negotiators met in Geneva. Negotiators from China, the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States were also there. Secretary State Dulles headed the American delegation.
The negotiators agreed to a temporary partition of Vietnam along the seventeenth parallel. Communists would control the north and have a capital in Hanoi. Former allies of the French would establish a separate government in the south, with their capital in Saigon. There would be nationwide elections in two years, after which north and south would be reunited. In the meantime, no outside power was to send weapons or soldiers into either part of Vietnam.
French Leave Vietnam
On October 5, 1954, France ended its rule over Vietnam with a suitably muted ceremony. In its misbegotten eight-year war, France lost a staggering 44,967 dead and another 79,560 wounded.
The day after the French withdrew, thirty thousand guerilla fighters marched into Hanoi. Their victory was not yet complete, because Vietnam had been divided, but the division was to last only two years. Ho Chi Minh had inflicted a stunning defeat on a far richer and seemingly more powerful enemy. He was the country’s most popular figure.
Dulles had done everything he could to keep the French at their posts in Vietnam, but they were determined to leave. Instead, he set out to undermine the Geneva agreement by making the country’s division permanent. To direct this ambitious project, Dulles chose Colonel Edward Landsdale, the most accomplished American counterinsurgency expert of that era. [Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American was based on Lansdale.]
U.S. Picks Proxy
When the Americans had to find a Vietnamese to do their bidding in Saigon, Ngo Dinh Diem was one of the few they knew. He was then a portly fifty-three-year-old bachelor and lay celibate living at a Benedictine monastery in Belgium. Diem was a devout Catholic who came from a long line of Vietnamese mandarins. In 1950, he traveled to the United States, where he spent two years living at Maryknoll seminaries in Lakewood, New Jersey, and Ossing, New York. He made valuable political contacts with influential members of Congress and Catholic politicians, among them Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts.
Landsdale launched the anti-Communist campaign Dulles had sent him to wage. Landsdale’s tactics ranged from sabotaging city buses in Hanoi to paying soothsayers to predict doom under the Communists. One of his biggest projects was helping to set off an exodus of hundreds of thousands of Catholics from north to South, urging them to flee.
Vietnam was supposed to be divided for two years only. That changed after Diem and Dulles decided not to hold the scheduled 1956 election. With no election, there could be no reunification. Instead, two new nations emerged: North Vietnam and South Vietnam. While Ho ruled North Vietnam in traditional Communist fashion, through a politburo made up of trusted comrades, Diem shaped a politburo of his own, made up of close relatives. They ruled the country as a family.
Diem’s eldest brother, Ngo Dinh Can, held no official post but ruled central Vietnam like a feudal warlord. Another brother, Ngo Dinh Thuc, was a Catholic archbishop and also an avaricious investor who had made a fortune in rubber, timber, and real estate. A third, Ngo Dinh Luyen, became ambassador to Britain.
Ho Launches Campaign Against U.S.
America’s determination to defend an independent South Vietnam led Ho and his comrades to launch their third anti-colonial war. In 1960, they proclaimed a military campaign aimed at the elimination of the U.S. and Diem.
During Kennedy’s presidency, the number of Americans in Vietnam rose from 865 to 16,500. Kennedy sent jet fighters, helicopters, heavy artillery, and all manner of other weaponry, none of which turned the tide of battle. The troops, called “advisors” as a way of maintaining the fiction that they were not fighting, poured in. Between 1961 and 1963, they engaged in hundreds of firefights, and American planes flew thousands of bombing sorties against Vietcong positions.
Vice President Johnson flew to Saigon in May 1961 and came back a believer in “the domino theory,” convinced that if the Communists were allowed to take South Vietnam, they would soon push their war to the beaches of Waikiki. In one of his speeches, he went so far as to praise Diem as “the Churchill of Southeast Asia.” Diem was the American surrogate.
During the spring and summer of 1963, Vietcong had established control over 20 percent of South Vietnam and moved freely in an area twice that large. The South Vietnamese army was proving reluctant to fight. Official corruption, fed by ballooning American aid programs, was rampant. Diem was losing popularity. To keep order, he was forced to rule with increasing repression, much of it directed by his brother and chief advisor, Ngo Dinh Nhu.
Kennedy Plots Regime Change
One of Kennedy’s first decisions after the monk's suicide was to replace Ambassador Nolting with Henry Cabot Lodge, an aristocratic pillar of the Republican establishment. In Saigon, Ambassador Lodge was enthusiastically preparing the way for “regime change.” He sent signals to dissident generals and dispatched a series of cables to Washington urging quick action against Diem.
The Kennedy administration was choosing between two awful alternatives: supporting a corrupt and unpopular government that was losing the war, or endorsing a coup to overthrow that government. Attorney General Robert Kennedy wondered aloud at a White House meeting whether an eventual Communist victory in Vietnam “could be resisted by any government.” If not, he suggested, perhaps it was “time to get out of Vietnam completely.”
The general who seemed best able to pull off a successful coup was Duong Van Minh, the most prominent and popular officer in the country and President Diem’s military advisor. “Big Minh,” as the Americans called him, was a blunt-spoken veteran of the French colonial army.
Rebel units fanned through the city. They seized the airport, the police station, two radio stations, the naval headquarters, and the post office complex. Some units were sent to block highways along which loyal troops might arrive for the provinces. At four o’clock the next morning, rebel troop launched their assault on the palace. They fired cannon and machine guns, and were met with return fire from loyal troops inside.
Diem finally realized that the end was at hand. He was ready to surrender at the Cha Tam Catholic church in Cholon. General Minh chose a squad of trusted men for the job of picking up Diem and Nhu. One of them was his bodyguard, Captain Nguyen Van Nhung, an accomplished assassin. The squad commandeered two jeeps and an M-113 armored troop carrier. When the carrier returned, the door to the M-113 opened and Captain Nhung emerged. Inside, the bodies of Diem and Nhu, riddled with bullets, lay in a pool of blood.
The CIA soon obtained a set of photos showing the mangled bodies of Diem and his brother, with their hands still tied behind their backs. At a White House staff meeting on the morning of November 4, the president’s national security advisor, George Bundy, warned that the pictures would undoubtedly be on the world’s front pages within a day or two. People would draw the obvious conclusion. “This is not the preferred way to commit suicide,” Bundy dryly observed.
A head of state who had been an American ally for years, a man Kennedy had personally known and supported, and a fellow Catholic on top of it all, was dead in the wake of an American-backed coup. Kennedy was shaken and depressed to realize that the first Catholic ever to become a Vietnamese head of state was dead, assassinated as a direct result of a policy authorized by the first American Catholic president.
On November 22, just twenty-two days after Diem was assassinated, Kennedy suffered the same fate. [There is speculation that Colonel Edward Landsdale was "General Y", the operational head of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. This theory was inspired by questions raised about Lansdale's presence in Dealey Plaza during the Kennedy assassination.]
Aftermath
General Duong Van Minh, who carried out the coup, succeeded Diem as president of South Vietnam, with General Tran Van Don as minister of defense. Their government was torn by internecine feuds, many of them stemming from anger over the executions of Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu. It never managed to consolidate itself. After holding power for just three months, it was overthrown in another coup. After that a succession of military strongmen ruled South Vietnam.
During the 1960s, President Johnson escalated the American commitment to South Vietnam until more than half a million American soldiers were on duty there. The Vietnam War destroyed Johnson’s presidency and profoundly shook American society. It ended on April 30, 1975, with ignominious defeat for the United States. A total of 58,168 Americans lost their lives waging it. The Vietnamese toll was far heavier.
One intriguing question the coup raises is whether it was simply a step toward the inevitable doom of the American project in Vietnam, or whether it could have been a turning point. With Diem gone, the United States might have encouraged the formation of a broad-based civilian government. Instead, it kept strongmen in power and charged ahead with its war effort.
After propping up Diem for so long and then discarding him so violently, Americans sank into a war that caused incalculable harm to their interests around the world. The coup bound the United States to South Vietnam in an embrace that proved disastrous to them both. In a sense, it was Dulles’s final legacy.
Overthrow Series
