Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975. Max Hastings

Kennedy’s friend Charles Bartlett claimed later that the Saigon regime’s flirtation with the North was the principal reason for the decision to dispense with Diem. He quoted the president as saying, ‘Charlie, I can’t let Vietnam go to the Communists and then go and ask [American voters] to re-elect me. Somehow we’ve got to hold that territory.’ Nonetheless, Kennedy allegedly added, ‘But we’ve got no future there. [The South Vietnamese] hate us. They want us out of there. At one point they’ll kick our asses out of there.’ This reported conversation seems credible. Kennedy’s private attitude was coloured by the bad faith shown by the communists about implementing his administration’s Laos neutralisation pact; there seemed likewise no prospect of Hanoi proving an honest partner in any coalition settlement for Vietnam.

      American alarm increased when France’s president Charles de Gaulle took a hand. This lofty, profoundly anti-Anglo-Saxon nationalist repeatedly urged that the US should disengage, allowing Vietnam to be neutralised. Washington believed that de Gaulle’s remarks reflected jealousy about France’s displacement from a region that had once been its property. Fredrik Logevall has written: ‘American planners would spend much time discussing the French leader’s actions and ideas, but only in terms of how best to counter them. The substance of his argument was not closely examined, then or later, partly because it was anathema to American officials, and partly because they were convinced he had ulterior motives.’

      Walter Lippmann warned in his column on 3 September: ‘If there is no settlement such as General de Gaulle proposes, then a protracted and indecisive war of attrition is all that is left.’ The veteran commentator, who in those years wrote more about Indochina than any other single issue, believed that the best to which the US could aspire was a Titoist outcome, whereby a unified Vietnam became communist, but not a tool of China or the Soviets. Lippmann implicitly argued that Ho Chi Minh could not be defeated on the battlefield, and that the best alternative might be to woo him with dollars. This was implausible: there seems no more reason to believe that Le Duan, a Robespierrian ‘sea-green incorruptible’, could have been bribed into running a moderate, humane government had he been granted suzerainty over a unified Vietnam in 1963, than he did after 1975. But that does not diminish the validity of Lippmann’s thesis, that the Americans could not prevail by force of arms.

      On 13 September the NSC’s Chester Cooper wrote from Saigon to his old CIA colleague John McCone saying that he thought a diplomatic rapprochement between the Diem regime and Hanoi, involving expulsion of the Americans, was on the cards. Here were gall and wormwood, which made the administration even less inclined to discourage Lodge from inciting Saigon’s generals to intervene. The ambassador had no hesitation about exploiting the authority delegated to him by the White House to instigate a change of government, though this proved a tortured process. It was hard to urge into action the influential soldiers whom he addressed – generals Duong Van Minh, Tran Van Don, Le Van Kim, Tran Thien Khiem. The CIA’s Colby, who hated Lodge and strongly opposed action against a Vietnamese national leader who was as devout a Catholic as himself, wrote later: ‘There was an almost total absence of consideration and evaluation of the personalities who might succeed Diem, beyond generalised references to “the military”.’ The South Vietnamese officers were not unreasonably hesitant about deposing Diem unless or until they were sure their own hand was strong enough, which required unequivocal American backing. They knew that they could expect nothing on paper from the embassy, but were unwilling to risk their own necks merely on the verbal assurances of Lou Conein, who hereafter acted as covert liaison officer between Lodge and the army chiefs.

      A few years after these events, US undercover agents were watching a Marseilles bar involved in the huge Transatlantic drug-smuggling operation that became notorious as ‘the French Connection’. The surveillance team was startled to identify Conein among those present, gladhanding Corsican gangster friends from his OSS days. Frank Scotton nonetheless argued that beneath Conein’s posturings as buccaneer or buffoon, the big thug could work effectively to fulfil an allotted task, which in October 1963 meant providing the link between the US government, which acquiesced in Diem’s extinction, and the Vietnamese generals who brought this about.

      Lodge chafed at the sluggishness of the plotters, who, he wrote crossly, had ‘neither the will nor the organisation … to accomplish anything’. Harkins, having no time for the ambassador, shrugged to Max Taylor, ‘You can’t hurry the East.’ George Ball later argued that the notorious August Harriman/Hilsman telegram was less influential in energising the generals than Kennedy’s TV appearance two weeks later, warning that the US would withdraw aid unless Saigon changed its ways. Many South Vietnamese, both in uniform and out of it, sensed backing for Diem ebbing away. Army lieutenant Nguyen Cong Luan was a passionate anti-communist, who also hated the government: ‘My comrades and I believed that it was necessary to bring new leaders to power so that South Vietnam could deal effectively with the communists and become a place of full freedom and democracy like the United States.’ They had been much excited when South Korea’s dictator Syngman Rhee was forced out of power in 1960. ‘We believed that if our side [in Vietnam] showed enough resolution and strength for a coup attempt, the Americans would have to support us.’

      President Kennedy now confused the issue by dispatching McNamara and Taylor on a ten-day ‘fact-minding mission’ to Vietnam, which began on 25 September. They returned to fantasise about ‘great progress’ on the battlefield, while deploring Diem’s intransigence. They had probed in vain for tidings about the supposedly imminent coup. When Gen. Duong Van ‘Big’ Minh, leader of the army plotters, said nothing significant to Taylor during an energetic tennis game at Saigon’s Cercle Sportif, the American decided that the plan must have been aborted. He and McNamara nonetheless concluded that military victory remained attainable, if only the Saigon government could be sorted. Which required removal of the Ngos.

      The White House cabled Lodge on 2 October, emphasising that deniability was all: ‘No initiative should now be taken to give any covert encouragement to a coup. There should, however, be an urgent effort … to identify and build contacts with possible alternative leadership as and when this appears.’ Three days later Lodge messaged the president that the coup seemed likely to happen after all. Conein and Minh met for some frank exchanges, conducted in French, at an old colonial bungalow in the Saigon garrison compound. The Vietnamese said that his only non-negotiable demand was an assurance that US aid would continue. He warned Conein that time was of the essence: his own was merely one of several rival conspiracies. That day another Buddhist monk burned himself to death.

      Conein’s report caused Lodge to recommend to Washington that he need merely give Minh an assurance that the US ‘will not attempt to thwart’ regime change. Kennedy assented, though warning that Americans must not be actively engaged in the process of a coup. The mood in Saigon was now febrile, with rumours everywhere of an impending threat to Diem. These had their effect in alarming the Vietnamese generals, who once more drew back from the brink. Lodge felt obliged to sack CIA station chief John Richardson, who shared Paul Harkins’ scepticism about dumping Diem.

      Then Nhu intensified his campaign of political repression, and publicly heaped obloquy on the Americans for alleged meddling. After the war, senior communists observed that this would have been an ideal moment to provoke an uprising: South Vietnam had become unstable and vulnerable; almost everyone hated the Ngos. COSVN, however, merely sustained its guerrilla campaign, while in Saigon the generals bargained for support from key army units. Lou Conein sought to keep the plotters on course through soothing conversations with Gen. Don at their mutual dental surgery, which became a safe house for meetings.

      On 26 October, National Day, Diem visited the hill resort of Dalat. In the prevalent jittery mood, his plane was preceded by an identical but empty decoy C-47, and the welcoming honour guard’s rifles were inspected to ensure that they were unloaded. The president had scheduled a meeting with the US ambassador, and Frank Scotton was tasked to enquire of a Vietnamese contact, privy to the coup planning, whether Lodge could enter the presidential guesthouse without getting caught in a storm of bullets. The USIA man got the necessary nod: the generals were not yet ready. The visit, and Diem’s meeting with the ambassador, took place without incident.

      In Washington, divisions persisted. Vice-president Lyndon Johnson exercised little influence, but persistently opposed eviction of