Misalliance

Edward Miller

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674075351
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

In the annals of Vietnam War history, no figure has been more controversial than Ngo Dinh Diem. During the 1950s, U.S. leaders hailed Diem as "the miracle man of Southeast Asia" and funneled huge amounts of aid to his South Vietnamese government. But in 1963 Diem was ousted and assassinated in a coup endorsed by President John F. Kennedy. Diem's alliance with Washington has long been seen as a Cold War relationship gone bad, undone either by American arrogance or by Diem's stubbornness. In Misalliance, Edward Miller provides a convincing new explanation for Diem's downfall and the larger tragedy of South Vietnam.For Diem and U.S. leaders, Miller argues, the alliance was more than just a joint effort to contain communism. It was also a means for each side to pursue its plans for nation building in South Vietnam. Miller's definitive portrait of Diem—based on extensive research in Vietnamese, French, and American archives—demonstrates that the South Vietnamese leader was neither Washington's pawn nor a tradition-bound mandarin. Rather, he was a shrewd and ruthless operator with his own vision for Vietnam's modernization. In 1963, allied clashes over development and reform, combined with rising internal resistance to Diem's nation building programs, fractured the alliance and changed the course of the Vietnam War.In depicting the rise and fall of the U.S.–Diem partnership, Misalliance shows how America's fate in Vietnam was written not only on the battlefield but also in Washington's dealings with its Vietnamese allies.

1

MAN OF FAITH

The grave of Ngo Dinh Diem lies in a cemetery in the town of Lai Thieu in Binh Duong province, on the northern outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City. Little distinguishes his cement tomb from the hundreds of others in the crowded graveyard, which abuts a busy highway. Indeed, Diem’s Vietnamese name does not even appear on the marble tablet that serves as the tomb’s headstone. Instead, the occupant of the grave is identified only by his Catholic baptismal name—“Gioan Baotixita,” a Vietnamized form of “Jean Baptiste”—and by the generic term “Huynh,” which means “elder brother.” Diem’s grave attracts numerous visitors each year, including many overseas Vietnamese who come to pay their respects . Pilgrims express their veneration by placing burning joss sticks in the small pot positioned at the foot of the grave. In 2005, some of these admirers arranged for the cryptic headstone to be replaced by another that explicitly identified the grave as Ngo Dinh Diem’s. But local authorities ordered it removed.¹

Who was Ngo Dinh Diem? And what accounts for his continuing ability to generate attention, sympathy, and controversy today, half a century after his death? Despite persistent claims to the contrary, Diem has not been forgotten in the country of his birth.² However, there is no consensus—either in Vietnam or elsewhere—about how he should be remembered. Some maintain that Diem is best understood as a creature of U.S. Cold War policy; according to this view, Diem was able to gain office in 1954 and retain it thereafter because he was Washington’s chosen instrument. Others argue that Diem was beholden not to the United States but to “traditional” Vietnamese ways of thinking; for these authors, Diem was either a latter-day sage who ruled according to age-old Confucian precepts or a latter-day despot who clung to outmoded beliefs.

The grave of Ngo Dinh Diem (foreground), Lai Thieu, Vietnam, 2006. The other two tombs in the same style are those of Diem’s mother, Pham Thi Than, and his younger brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu. (Photo by author)

The account presented here does not conform to any of these interpretations. Instead of portraying Diem as a tool of U.S. policymakers or as an avatar of Vietnamese tradition, I aim to understand him by placing him within the era and circumstances in which he was born and lived. Such an approach necessarily begins with Diem’s pre-1954 life and career—a topic which has received surprisingly little attention from scholars. Examining this neglected part of Diem’s biography reveals two key facts about his path to power. First, contrary to what many authors have suggested, Diem was neither plucked from obscurity nor installed in office by the United States in 1954. Rather, he was a prominent and active figure in Indochinese politics who successfully engineered his own appointment as premier of the SVN. Second, Diem’s thinking about politics and society was defined above all by his determination to fashion a new vision of how Vietnam might become a modern nation. This vision was an ambitious attempt to synthesize certain contemporary ideas and discourses about Catholic Christianity, Confucianism, and Vietnamese national identity. Diem’s efforts to win popular support for this vision proved unsuccessful in the long run. But it is precisely in the failure of his vision of national development that his historical significance lies. To make sense of what Diem said and did after he became leader of South Vietnam, we must first locate him in the time and place in which he came of age.

Religion, Culture, and Nation in Colonial Indochina

Almost everyone who has written about Ngo Dinh Diem’s life and career has noted his twin identity as a Catholic and a Confucian. As president of South Vietnam, Diem displayed Christian piety in everything from his devotional practices to his habit of inserting references to the Bible into his speeches. He was also a self-proclaimed Confucianist who made Confucius’s birthday a state holiday and who liked to show off his knowledge of classical Chinese texts. That Diem’s thinking about government, politics, society, and history was deeply influenced by both Catholicism and Confucianism seems undeniable.

But what was the nature of these influences, exactly? During the 1950s and 1960s, some of Diem’s critics portrayed his Catholicism and Confucianism as proof that he was trapped in a premodern cast of mind. For these critics, Diem’s Christian faith was “made less of the kindness of the apostles than of the ruthless militancy of the Grand Inquisitor” and his thinking about governance “was made less of the constitutional strength of a President of the republic than of the petty tyranny of a tradition-bound mandarin.”³ According to this view, Diem’s blind allegiance to the past prevented him from comprehending the political and social realities of the present.

This way of representing Diem and his worldview does not stand up to scrutiny. Although Diem was both a Catholic and a mandarin, those who have described him as a “Catholic mandarin” have often misunderstood the historically specific meanings that he ascribed to his Christian and Confucian heritages. Catholicism and Confucianism both have ancient pedigrees, but neither has been uniform across space or time. In early twentieth-century Vietnam, as in other eras and places, to be a Catholic or a Confucian was to lay claim to a complex and dynamic set of traditions. These traditions affected Diem’s thinking about the past, but his understanding of their contemporary relevance was forged in the cultural and social context in which he spent his youth and young adulthood.

Diem was born in the Vietnamese imperial capital of Hue on January 3, 1901, to a family that was both well known and well-to-do.⁴ Members of the Ngo household marked Diem’s delivery according to the Vietnamese lunar calendar, and noted that it took place during the Hour of the Buffalo on a day near the end of the Year of the Rat. That the baby had been “born under two signs” was deemed auspicious.⁵ Yet Diem’s arrival also appeared full of significance when reckoned by the Euro-Christian calendar, which indicated that he had arrived not at year’s end but at its beginning—in fact, on the third day of a new century. Auspices aside, the fact that Diem was born into a family literate in both Vietnamese and European calendrical practices points up the futility of trying to distinguish between “Eastern” and “Western” elements in his upbringing. In fact, members of the Ngo family routinely and easily drew on multiple cultural and ideological traditions in their daily lives. From an early age, Diem learned to navigate these various traditions, and to look for points of connection among them. In this way, his upbringing inclined him toward eclecticism and helped turn him into something of an intellectual magpie. As an adult, he would attempt to weave new theories and doctrines out of the conceptual strands he had collected from diverse religious and philosophical sources. The results were often bewildering to others, but for Diem they were a natural and logical extension of the syncretic thinking he had learned in his youth.

During Diem’s childhood, the Ngo home in Hue was dominated by his father. Ngo Dinh Kha embodied all of the religious, cultural, and political currents that defined Diem’s early life. In addition to being a devout Catholic, Kha had a successful career in the Vietnamese imperial bureaucracy and eventually became a high-ranking official at the Nguyen royal court. An accomplished student of both Latin and classical Chinese, he made sure that his sons were well schooled in both the Christian scriptures and the Confucian classics. But Kha was no rigidly traditionalist “Catholic mandarin.” Although he had been born in the province of Quang Binh in central Vietnam, Kha had been educated at a Catholic school in Malaya where he learned English and studied a European-style curriculum. He returned to Vietnam in the late 1870s with plans to become a priest. However, his facility with languages attracted the attention of the newly established French colonial state. During the 1880s, Kha worked for French military commanders as an interpreter and participated in campaigns against anticolonial rebels in the mountains of Tonkin. This service, in tandem with his multicultural educational background, helped him win an appointment as the first headmaster of the National Academy in Hue. Founded in 1896, the academy was a showcase for the colonial state’s “Franco-Annamite” schools. Classes at the academy featured a mix of European and Vietnamese subjects and included instruction in French, Chinese, and Vietnamese. Among Kha’s pupils at the academy was the young Nguyen emperor, Thanh Thai, who came to view his erudite headmaster as a mentor and adviser. The bond between the two became even stronger after Kha was elevated to the post of grand chamberlain at the court.⁶

Kha’s support for French military and educational ventures, in addition to his service at the French-dominated imperial court, led some to view him as a collaborator and an apologist for colonialism. The fact of his collaboration is indisputable, but he was motivated less by Francophilia than by certain reformist ambitions. Like many other Vietnamese political leaders of his generation, Kha believed that independence from France could come only after sweeping changes in Vietnamese politics, society, and culture. His interest in education reflected this belief, as did his criticisms of Vietnam’s contemporary political culture. In this respect, Kha’s views were similar to those of some of the leading anticolonialists of the day, such as the scholar-activist Phan Chau Trinh and the organizers of the Eastern Capital Free School, a reform movement launched in 1906 in Hanoi.⁷

Like many of his compatriots, Kha was skeptical of French claims about the benevolent nature of colonial rule. Although he initially refrained from voicing these doubts, his frustration finally boiled over in 1907, when French officials schemed to remove Thanh Thai from the throne and forced him into exile. The emperor’s ouster was a bitter setback for Kha, who had hoped that his protégé would reclaim some of the royal rights and honors previously surrendered to the French. Furious that his reformist plans had been wrecked, Kha resigned as grand chamberlain and withdrew from the royal court. As the news of Kha’s actions spread, anticolonialists across Indochina hailed him as a patriot. Among those who expressed admiration for Kha was the young man who would later become known to the world as Ho Chi Minh. Decades later, Ho could still recall how the old mandarin’s protest had been celebrated in a popular Vietnamese proverb: “To deport the King, you must get rid of Kha.”⁸

Ngo Dinh Kha was a demanding father, and his impact on young Diem was profound. As a boy, Diem developed an allergy to fish. Unfortunately for him, the Catholic practice of dining on fish on Fridays was strictly observed in the Ngo household, and Kha insisted that Diem eat what was served—even though he often vomited afterward.⁹ In addition to enforcing the family dietary regime, Kha had high expectations for his son’s education. At Kha’s insistence, Diem enrolled at the Pellerin School, a Catholic primary school in Hue. Like the National Academy, Pellerin featured a Franco-Annamite curriculum and instruction in French, Latin, and classical Chinese. Diem quickly gained facility in all three languages, and he was later said to have pursued his studies with an assiduousness that bordered on obsession. His drive was fueled in part by fierce sibling rivalries with his two older brothers, Ngo Dinh Khoi and Ngo Dinh Thuc. Khoi, who was ten years senior to Diem, chose to emulate Kha and studied administration in preparation for entering the mandarinate. Thuc, four years older than Diem, opted for the career path Kha had abandoned and became a seminarian.¹⁰

Diem at first seemed inclined to follow Thuc into the priesthood. Even as a teenager, the strength of his devotion to his faith was evident; members of his family later recalled the boy’s habit of spending long hours in prayer and reflection. He reportedly swore himself to celibacy—a vow he apparently kept even after he decided not to become a man of the cloth. Some observers would later cite Diem’s religiosity, along with his lifelong bachelor status, as evidence that he was “a kind of lay monk.” This interpretation is not entirely wrong—at one point, young Diem briefly entered the novitiate at a Catholic seminary at Quang Tri—but it overlooks the depth of his professional and personal ambition.¹¹

In 1918, having decided not to pursue a clerical career, Diem entered the prestigious School of Administration, which trained Vietnamese for service in the imperial bureaucracy. This proved an inspired decision. Diem graduated first in his class and in 1921 became a junior official in Thua Thien, the province in which Hue is located. Over the next decade, he rose quickly through the ranks of the colonial bureaucracy, serving as a district chief in both Thua Thien and nearby Quang Tri province. In 1930, shortly before his thirtieth birthday, Diem became chief of province (Tuan phu) in Ninh Thuan, a coastal province in the southern part of Annam. His most notable accomplishment in Ninh Thuan was his suppression of a plot to launch an antigovernment uprising in the provincial seat of Phan Rang. Since the conspiracy was directed by agents of the newly formed Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), this episode demonstrated the depth of Diem’s anticommunist convictions and foreshadowed some of his later actions as leader of South Vietnam. It also helped secure his promotion to the post of chief of Binh Thuan province, a larger and more populous territory in the same region.¹²

In official biographies published in South Vietnam after 1954, Diem’s supporters attributed his rapid rise through the imperial bureaucracy to his extraordinary ability to work long hours and his refusal to use his authority for personal profit.¹³ Diem’s reputation for workaholism and incorruptibility undoubtedly helped him, but his ascent was also boosted by developments in Vietnamese Catholic politics during the 1920s, and especially by the emergence of a new nationalist sensibility in the Vietnamese Church. In the years following World War I, senior Catholic leaders in Rome undertook to “indigenize” church hierarchies in colonized territories. These efforts led eventually to the appointments of the first Vietnamese bishops during the 1930s. For Vietnamese Catholics, the unprecedented elevation of Vietnamese prelates to high offices presented a means to challenge the common perception of the Church as a foreign institution. Indigenization could also be a way for Vietnamese Catholic elites to distance themselves from the colonial regime and from the taint of collaboration with French authorities.¹⁴

The leading proponent of the new Catholic nationalism was Nguyen Huu Bai (1863–1935), a high-ranking mandarin at the Hue court. Like Diem’s father, Bai was a onetime colonial collaborator who had grown resentful over ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1. Man of Faith
• 2. New Beginnings
• 3. The Making of an Alliance
• 4. Revolutions and Republics
• 5. Settlers and Engineers
• 6. Countering Insurgents
• 7. Limited Partners
• 8. Mixed Signals
• 9. The Unmaking of an Alliance
• Conclusion
• Abbreviations
• Published Collections of Government Documents
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index