"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War. Tom Burns

(223), when neither of these outcomes is likely.

Ambassador Lodge, as shown in the historical outline in the first section of this chapter, seems to have had no such moral compunctions and was much more in favor of, and involved in, the coup than his fictional counterpart Amberley. Lodge’s cable to Secretary Rusk (August 29, 1963), for example, reads: “we should proceed to make all-out efforts to get the Generals to move promptly.”44 Washington still wanted to make an “11th hour” attempt to get Diem to initiate reforms, but Lodge replied that refusing American aid would not work. The Ngo brothers had no regard for public opinion or the opinion of anyone else except their own.45 When Diem called Lodge on November 1, the day of the coup, to ask him what the “attitude of the US” was with respect to the rebellion, he apparently wanted to know what steps Lodge himself would take to stop it, but the ambassador could not give him a truthful answer. Instead, he evasively said that he was “not acquainted with all the facts” and that the US government could not have any opinion about it, as it was only four o’clock in the morning in Washington—as if the State Department had no idea at all of a coup attempt or would not have known about it before that day.46 All that Lodge can offer Diem is his physical safety, but it is clear from the exchange of cables that Lodge “barely lifted a finger” to save Diem’s and Nhu’s lives.47

      The novel’s portrait of Diem is also inaccurate. The president is portrayed in the novel as a strong but misguided politician with a serious moral sense and solid achievements behind him: the resettling of a million refugees from the north, the breaking of the power of the Binh Xuyen, and the calling upon the Americans to train his army to fight the guerrillas. He is called “a philosopher as well as a military strategist” (47), a characterization that is stretching the truth considerably if Diem is meant to be an accurate model. Such an astute man (the author would have us believe) would not persecute eighty percent of his own population without a good reason. The justification given is a CIA report “on the infiltration of Communist agents into the Sangha, the Buddhist monastic system” (47). Communist aggression was the argument for any number of desperate measures, and infiltration into the government and the army was real enough, but would a strategist-philosopher pursue such a short-sighted policy of unpopular repression that could only foment more rebellion?

v. Conclusions

      Two of these novels about the fall of Diem were published two or three years after the actual coup and the other one (Vaughn’s) nearly a decade later. The events of the coup and probably even its motivations had by this time been established, but the novels have been discussed here in this particular order, not according to dates of publication but to the respective “distances” of their fictional protagonists from Diem’s person and destiny. In this perspective, the distance proportionally decreases, although even in the first two novels discussed (Hempstone and Vaughn), close ups of Saigon’s palatial politics are given whenever Diem himself appears as a character. The details of the execution, which took place inside an armored military vehicle, and the final thoughts and reactions of the victims had to be imagined by the novelists. In every case, what Diem and Nhu were actually thinking and planning must be deduced from the results in the historical accounts. In these novels, however, they are given voices and personal motives, which account for the differences in these works of political and moral emphases.

      It has been argued that the first and best of the novels discussed, Smith Hempstone’s A Tract of Time, is furthest from the events leading up to the coup in Saigon, although those events will come to determine what happens in the highlands of central Vietnam, where most of the action takes place. Coltart, the CIA operative who works with the mountain tribes, is caught in a conflict of allegiance between these indigenous people, whose confidence he has gained, and the representatives of his own government, who have their own priorities. He discovers to his sorrow that Diem’s government has, historically and culturally, little sympathy for its montagnard allies, and even less so in the confusion generated by the president’s imminent fall.

      The second novel, Robert Vaughn’s The Valkyrie Mandate, views the coup from closer up, through the eyes of an US Army officer who is directly involved as the liaison between the US mission and the rebel Vietnamese generals. There is here another conflict of loyalties. Like the protagonist of Hempstone’s novel, the conflict between the protagonist’s position as an American officer and his devotion, in this case, to Vietnamese culture and its people, proves fatal. If Hempstone seems to be saying that it is impossible to be a man of honor and serve the South Vietnamese government, Vaughn is saying that it is impossible to serve the Vietnamese people by serving its government.

The third novel, Morris West’s The Ambassador, gets even closer to the central crisis of the time by putting the reader inside the mind of the American ambassador who is directly involved in the coup that ousted Diem, showing the political crisis with more complexity and greater moral nuance than the other examples and creating various characters based on actual participants. The main problem with West’s version as historical fiction is the misrepresentation of his historical models. It has been shown here how Amberley is far less complicit in the coup than Lodge was, but Cung’s statesmanship is also exaggerated if it is meant to represent Diem’s. The ambassador recognizes Cung’s achievements in reconstructing his country, including agricultural reforms, expanded commerce and industry, and increased news communications; what is not admitted are the fear of nationwide elections, the rigged referendum, the fact that the vaunted agrarian programs were perceived as “unmitigated disasters,”48 or that the massive influx of American aid that maintained South Vietnam did not prepare it to be an independent nation of industry and commerce.49

      Nor can Cung’s achievements, modest as they are, outweigh his defects as a leader, all admitted by Amberley: he is an elitist, a Catholic who persecutes Buddhists in a largely Buddhist country, a president dependent on American aid but resentful of interference, a man who isolates himself from his people and delegates responsibility only to his family, and a politician singularly inept at handling crises. As for the prosecution of the war, the ambassador admits that “military operations were hampered by political considerations” (161): offensive operations did not take place because military commanders and provincial governors did not get along, and the president was more concerned with threats to his regime than fighting the Communists.

      It is as if the insistence of all these authors to portray Diem as a flawed but well-intentioned leader was a means of upping the ante on the conspirators’ (and the ambassador’s) moral dilemma. In all three novels, Diem is represented as a sympathetic human being, even a strong leader, who has unfortunately clung to misguided political policies or undemocratic methods. By contrast, his ruthless and conniving brother Nhu becomes a sort of scapegoat for the regime. None of the novels voice any suspicion that Diem may have relegated the dirty work of his autocratic regime to his brother intentionally, that their collusion may have been their modus operandi, a union of divergent roles necessary for the project of sustaining their family in power.

In an interesting contrast to these fictional versions, important historical accounts of the war portray Diem as directly responsible for his own destruction and even cite a lack of personal qualities that partly explain his political failures. Stanley Karnow, for example, refers to Diem’s “inflexible pride” and his style of “ruling like an ancient emperor.”50 In a chapter devoted to Diem, Frances FitzGerald calls him “the sovereign of discord.”51 George C. Herring argues that Diem was an autocrat, who merely to please his American advisors “occasionally paid lip-service to democracy but in actual practice assumed actual powers.”52