The War That Could Have Been Won
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Mark Moyar’s new history is the first of a definitive two-volume work on the Vietnam War. Mr. Moyar, a Cambridge Ph.D. and currently an associate professor at the U.S. Marine Corps University, has done extensive and careful research in newly available primary sources such as North Vietnamese histories of the conflict. The result is a valuable revisionist study that rejects much of the conventional wisdom about our early involvement in the conflict. In particular, most of histories of the early part of the war have painted America’s proxy leader of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, as an obtuse and tyrannical reactionary. Mr. Moyar’s first major contribution is to show that the American decision to abandon and help overthrow Diem was the most fatal mistake of the war.
Ngo Dinh Diem, who became premier of the newly independent South Vietnam in 1954, was known among the Vietnamese for his fierce nationalism. Within a year he succeeded in settling most of about one million refugees who had left the communist regime in the North and in disarming the private armies that threatened his government. Diem’s regime appeared well on the way toward creating the kind of new nation that was well worth American support in a highly unstable Southeast Asia. Diem governed in an authoritarian way because he considered Western-style democracy inappropriate for a country that was fractious, demoralized and caught in a life-and-death struggle against a determined communist enemy. Despite a heavy influx of personnel and war supplies via the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, by 1962 the war against the communists had experienced a dramatic turnaround and was going well. Yet Diem’s mandarin ways of governing also drew sharp criticism from some of his own people, and Western observers, and this included the American ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge. The overthrow of Diem on November 1, 1963, instigated by Lodge without the consent of President Kennedy, is seen by Mr. Moyar as a terrible miscalculation that resulted in a needless defeat — “Triumph Forsaken” as stated in the title of the book (Cambridge, 562 pages, $32).
Mr. Moyar’s basic thesis is not new. It was argued in the 1960s by some of the most experienced American journalists on the scene such as Marguerite Higgins, Keyes Beach, and Joseph Alsop, as well as by scholars like Ellen J. Hammer and Dennis J. Duncanson. The contrary view was pushed by two young reporters, David Halberstam of the New YorkTimes and Neil Sheehan, who looked upon Vietnam as if it were fundamentally the same as the United States and attributed all difficulties to Diem’s authoritarian rule. Lodge shared this outlook, and this caused him to view the Diem regime with fierce contempt.
Some of the most interesting parts of Mr. Moyar’s book describe how Mr. Halberstam and Mr. Sheehan presented Lodge and their readers in the United States with grossly inaccurate information on the Buddhist protest movement and on South Vietnamese politics, much of it unwittingly received from two secret Communist agents. Pham Ngoc Thao was a colonel in the South Vietnamese army and was touted by the Americans as a brilliant Young Turk who could help turn South Vietnam around. Pham Xuan An worked as a stringer for Reuters and brilliantly manipulated and misled the foreign press. As a result of disinformation and driven by their own bias, Mr. Halberstam and Mr. Sheehan seized upon the Buddhist protest movement as evidence that the Diem government was hopelessly repressive, lacked public support, and therefore deserved to be overthrown. They argued that 70% or 80% of the South Vietnamese population was Buddhist and that to alienate the Buddhists was to alienate the country’s majority. In fact, the number of Buddhists was between 10% and 27% of the population, depending upon whether non-practicing Buddhists were counted. Most of South Vietnam’s Buddhists lived in the countryside and knew nothing of the political disturbances in Saigon and Hue.
A significant number of the protesters against Diem were communist agents and this included some of the monks. Such infiltration was easy, for any Vietnamese man could pose as Buddhist monk by shaving his head, donning a monk’s robe, and acting with humility. For many years the Hanoi regime kept silent about the sensitive subject of its involvement in the Buddhist movement, but in the early 1990s it began publishing detailed accounts of its complicity. A high-level communist resolution in 1961 had advised planting agents in religious organizations: “Once our agents are planted, they then lead these organizations to work for the cause of the people.” According to one communist history, the Central Committee of the National Liberation Front “quickly directed the people of all classes of the population to cooperate actively with the Buddhist monks and nuns in a resolute struggle until the goals were achieved.”This account credits the NLF with organizing several demonstrations in provincial capitals in which the demonstrators denounced the United States and Diem and demanded “freedom of religion” and “democracy.”
The Vietnamese communist government never acknowledged that Tri Quang, the foremost leader of the violent Buddhist protesters, was an agent, but according to Mr. Moyar considerable evidence points in this direction. In his sermons Tri Quang argued that Buddhism and communism were compatible. His political methods, especially with respect to the spreading of propaganda and the manipulation of crowds, were strikingly similar to those of the Vietnamese communists and were very different from those of traditional Vietnamese Buddhists. This fact accounts in part for his success in mobilizing the masses far more effectively than traditional Buddhists. Tri Quang refused to accept generous concessions made to the Buddhists by various South Vietnamese governments. Just like the communists, he was not interested in religious freedom but sought political power. On March 31, 1975, as the South Vietnamese government was reeling from the blows of invading North Vietnamese divisions, he participated in a public demonstration demanding the resignation of President Nguyen Van Thieu.
In August 1963, several South Vietnamese generals urged Diem to declare martial law and to clear the pagodas of outside monks so that they no longer could serve as “privileged sanctuaries of subversion.” Diem consented and in many cities government forces encountered resistance when they evicted protesting monks from the pagodas. Some monks and policemen were hurt and required hospitalization. An after-action report for Diem noted that government forces had discovered weapons and Viet Cong documents in several of Saigon’s pagodas. The government’s show of force impressed the populace, and even among Western observers many concluded that Diem had successfully averted a serious threat to his government.
This favorable view, however, did not prevail for long, largely as a result of distorted reporting by Mr. Halberstam on the pagoda raids that would shape the opinions of many Americans. According to a dispatch filed by Mr. Halberstam on August 23, during the evacuation of Tu Dam pagoda in Hue, at least 30 people had been killed and at least 70 wounded. This report created an international stir and caused the United Nations to send an investigative commission to South Vietnam. The commission did not reach Saigon until October 24, by which time the alleged total of Buddhist dead during the pagoda raids had shriveled to four. Upon investigation, commission members actually met and interviewed all four of these monks. Mr. Halberstam omitted his false claim from his subsequent famous book “The Best and the Brightest” (1972), but by then the damage had been done.
Mr. Moyar shows that the reporting of Mr. Halberstam and Mr. Sheehan on military events often was equally inaccurate and played a pivotal role in turning influential Americans and South Vietnamese against the Diem regime. A good example was the battle of Ap Bac in January 1963, during which government forces experienced a tactical failure and suffered heavy losses despite having more troops and far better weaponry. The person primarily responsible for this defeat was the American adviser, Colonel John Paul Vann, who had picked a wrong site for a helicopter landing. When Vann briefed Mr. Halberstam and Mr. Sheehan on the battle, he made all the failures the fault of the Vietnamese. “It was a miserable performance, just like it always is. These people won’t listen. They make the same mistakes over and over again in the same way,” he said. This is what the two journalists had expected to hear, and their reporting on the fight emphasized that Ap Bac exemplified general South Vietnamese ineptitude. In actual fact, many details of the battle reflected positively on the South Vietnamese units involved.
Contrary to most other histories of the period, Mr. Moyar argues that the strategic hamlet program initiated by Diem during the first half of 1962 was a success. Residents of strategic hamlets were required to participate in fortifying the villages without pay, which created some grumbling. According to Mr. Moyar, however, the program as a whole became a solid core of pacification. The communist leadership acknowledged the significance of this development when a bit later it credited the Saigon government with successfully creating 5,000 strategic hamlets nationwide: “The enemy has been able to grab control of population and land from us, and he has drawn away for his own use our sources or resources and manpower.”
Much of this achievement collapsed following the overthrow and murder of Diem. The generals who took power ousted many of the district and province chiefs appointed by Diem. They also disarmed large numbers of strategic hamlet militia units because of doubt about their loyalty to the new regime. The military leaders soon fought more against one another than against the Viet Cong. Pacification now entered into a steep decline. Communist sources cited by Mr. Moyar confirm that the government held the upper hand until the coup and quickly lost it thereafter.
Mr. Moyar concludes that under the continued leadership of Diem, South Vietnam quite possibly could have survived without the help of American ground forces. Diem’s successors shared most of Diem’s shortcomings while they lacked his prestige as a nationalist leader and mandarin father figure. The fast-changing successor regimes did not reform any of the faults of Diem’s patriarchy. Instead what was already bad — patronage, corruption, etc. — became worse. It is a fact that we did not win with them. Whether we could have won with Diem will have to remain one of the unknowns of history, which even this excellent book cannot clarify and resolve.
Mr. Lewy is professor emeritus of political science, University of Massachusetts/Amherst, and the author of “America in Vietnam” (1978).