A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (22 page)

When Harkins asked Diem if it was true that he had ordered his officers not to take casualties, Diem lied. It certainly was not true, Diem said. On the contrary, he had lectured the ARVN commanders and his province chiefs to be aggressive. He had ordered them to attack the Viet Cong without hesitation wherever they could be found. Harkins did not question Diem further. He began to accept Cao’s faked body counts and to pass these reports of Communist losses on to Washington with no warnings attached. Vann asked Porter for permission to deny Cao the use of American helicopters to try to put a halt to these farcical operations. Porter told him that Harkins forbade it.

The relationship between the manipulated and the manipulator is a two-way exchange. Vann had thought that he was manipulating Cao, but Cao had gotten his way. Two American presidents, Eisenhower and Kennedy, had sent men of high reputation to Saigon to manipulate the Ngo Dinhs in the interest of the United States and the Ngo Dinhs had gotten their way.

Through November and December, Vann watched the Communist-led guerrillas overrun more outposts, seize more modern American weapons, and build their battalions in the northern Mekong Delta. He got nowhere with Cao or Harkins. Vann became a frustrated and angry man. He had made the same mistake with Cao that his hero, Lansdale, had made with Diem at the commencement of this venture that had brought Vann to South Vietnam.

  
L
OOK, THEY STEPPED
all over my shoes,” Diem said with wonder on the return plane ride to Saigon, staring down at his scuffed and dusty shoes, which had been a lustrous black at the outset of the day. He had been reluctant to go, content to govern from his office in the palace. Now he was glad that he had listened to Lansdale and the Americans around Lansdale. Everet Bumgardner, a Virginian like Vann from the small town of Woodstock on the western edge of the Shenandoah Valley, began working his trade of propaganda and psychological warfare in Vietnam in the mid-1950s as a photo journalist for the U.S. Information Service. He remembered how enthusiastic he and the other Americans on the plane had been after this trip, one of the first visits by Diem in 1955 to what had been a Communist-controlled area, a “liberated zone” in the language of the guerrillas. They had flown up to the small port of Tuy Hoa on the Central Coast that morning. The French had always been unwilling to spare the manpower necessary to permanently occupy Tuy Hoa and the rice-farming hamlets in the valley leading into the mountains behind it. Ho Chi Minn’s Viet Minh guerrillas had held the region undisturbed, except for occasional French forays, during the nine years of the first war. The guerrillas had only recently withdrawn, marching up the coast to the larger port of Qui Nhon, where they had boarded Polish and Russian ships to redeploy north of the 17th Parallel as agreed to at Geneva.

The CIA pilots had to put the old twin-engine C-46 down in an open field. The Viet Minh had destroyed the local airstrip. As soon as the plane stopped, a mass of peasants rushed to it, jostling around it so wildly that Bumgardner was afraid some of them might be killed by the propellers before the pilots could shut off the engines. When Diem emerged, the peasants overwhelmed his guards and almost trampled
this short, plump figure dressed in the correct attire for senior officials—a white linen suit and a black tie. In their eagerness to see him and to touch his hand, some of the peasants accidentally stepped on his shod feet with their bare ones, imprinting the evidence of this frenzied welcome which he was now regarding in happy amazement.

Although Diem’s brother and chief political advisor, Ngo Dinh Nhu, had sent organizers to Tuy Hoa several days earlier to arrange a reception, no one in Saigon had expected anything like this. The drive into town was an unfolding cheer of more peasants and townsfolk. The children and the young people waved miniature paper replicas of the flag of Diem’s Saigon government—a yellow banner with three horizontal red stripes across the center. Bumgardner was unable to make an accurate estimate of the crowd at the town soccer field where Diem spoke because the people were jammed into a mass that extended back from the small speaker’s stand set up for Diem at one end. There were at least 50,000 and possibly 100,000 persons. The size of the crowd astonished Bumgardner. Diem gave a speech on the evils of Communism and attacked Ho and the Viet Minh as puppets of the Russians and the Chinese. He accused Ho of seeking to destroy Vietnamese traditions and to impose an atheistic tyranny on the country. The stilted tones of his Hue accent did not seem to hinder his ability to communicate. The crowd shouted its approval and applauded each time he paused after making a point. Bumgardner photographed the enthusiastic faces and took notes for a story to accompany the pictures in
Free World
, a magazine published and distributed free by USIS in special editions in Vietnamese and the languages of the other non-Communist countries of Asia. USIS also made his photographs and stories available to friendly newspaper editors in Vietnam and elsewhere round the world.

Listening to Diem marvel at his reception while riding back on the plane, Bumgardner decided that the peasants and townspeople were overjoyed to be freed from the oppression of Communism and welcomed this man as their liberator. He was convinced that he and other Americans in Vietnam would be able to promote Diem into a national hero to compete with the leader of the other side. Lansdale intended to turn Diem into another Ramón Magsaysay, the Filipino paragon of an anti-Communist and progressive Asian leader, and to transform South Vietnam into another Philippines of the mid-1950s, the model of the kind of working democracy the American empire preferred to foster in Asia.

The men who ran the American imperial system—men like Dean Acheson, who had been Truman’s principal secretary of state, and the Dulles brothers in the Eisenhower administration, John Foster at the
State Department and Allen at the CIA—were not naive enough to think they could export democracy to every nation on earth. The United States had established democratic governments in occupied West Germany and Japan and in its former colony of the Philippines. If American statesmen saw a choice and high strategy did not rule otherwise, they favored a democratic state or a reformist-minded dictatorship. Their high strategy was to organize the entire non-Communist world into a network of countries allied with or dependent on the United States. They wanted a tranquil array of nations protected by American military power, recognizing American leadership in international affairs, and integrated into an economic order where the dollar was the main currency of exchange and American business was preeminent.

The United States did not seek colonies as such. Having overt colonies was not acceptable to the American political conscience. Americans were convinced that their imperial system did not victimize foreign peoples. “Enlightened self-interest” was the sole national egotism to which Americans would admit. The fashionable political commentators of the day intended more than a mere harkening back to the imperial grandeur of Britain and Rome when they minted the term “Pax Americana.” Americans perceived their order as a new and benevolent form of international guidance. It was thought to be neither exploitative, like the nineteenth-century-style colonialism of the European empires, nor destructive of personal freedom and other worthy human values, like the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and China and their Communist allies. Instead of formal colonies, the United States sought local governments amenable to American wishes and, where possible, subject to indirect control from behind the scenes. Washington wanted native regimes that would act as surrogates for American power. The goal was to achieve the sway over allies and dependencies which every imperial nation needs to work its will in world affairs without the structure of old-fashioned colonialism.

Communists and other radicals claimed that this American imperial system was a more insidious form of colonialism than the old European variety. They termed it “neocolonialism.” Most Americans of the 1950s and early ’60s were untroubled by the accusation. They viewed the Communists as the true practitioners of neocolonialism. Communist leaders, especially Asian Communists, were, by American definition, traitors to their homelands. They were converts to the alien European philosophy of Marxism-Leninism and agents of foreign—i.e., Soviet—power. Lansdale likened Ho to Benedict Arnold, the great traitor of the American Revolution. “The tragedy of Vietnam’s revolutionary war
for independence was that her ‘Benedict Arnold’ was successful,” he wrote. “Ho Chi Minh, helped by … a small cadre of disciplined Party members trained by the Chinese and the Russians, secretly changed the goals of the struggle. Instead of a war for independence against the French colonial power, it became a war to defeat the French and put Vietnam within the neocolonial Communist empire.”

Viewed from the American imperial perspective, the Philippines of 1954 was the best of surrogates. The islands had been an American colony until 1946, when the Philippines had celebrated its independence day. In exchange for the grant of independence, the United States had received a ninety-nine-year lease on twenty-three military bases, including the important naval station at Subic Bay and Clark Air Base. The Philippines military and intelligence services continued to function as auxiliaries to the American ones; the Filipino government was more anti-Communist in its foreign policy than the Dulles brothers; and the islands provided a source of trained manpower for the United States to use in fighting Communist movements elsewhere in Asia.

The achievement in the Philippines had been in jeopardy a few years before. Nourished by peasant discontent with landlordism and by resentment in the countryside and the cities against a corrupt and reactionary central government, the Communist-led Hukbalahap rebellion had grown to formidable proportions by the end of 1949. The Huks were able to field about 15,000 guerrillas and to claim another million sympathizers. The most important section of their politburo operated clandestinely right in Manila; mayors and police chiefs all over the main island of Luzon were in collusion with the Huks out of fear or genuine sympathy; the Philippines Army and Constabulary were ineffective; and elections were a jest of fraud and intimidation which lent logic to the Huk slogan that the way to change the government was with bullets, not ballots. The Huks predicted that they would win control of the Philippines within two years.

It was a time of crisis when men’s reputations were made or broken. Lansdale made his. He was the catalyst and the behind-the-scenes manager of the rescue operation. He recognized in Ramón Magsaysay precisely the kind of honest and charismatic leader needed to rally those Filipinos who did not want a Communist government, but who were now leaderless and adrift. The son of a farmer and blacksmith who was also a teacher, Magsaysay had started World War II running a bunch of buses as makeshift transport for the American and Filipino defenders
of Bataan and had finished it commanding thousands of guerrillas against the Japanese. In 1950, when the job was hardly a sought-after one with the Huk rebellion at its height, he had resigned his seat in the Philippines House of Representatives to accept appointment as secretary of defense. He was an extrovert with abundant if frequently ill-directed energy, an inquisitive mind that also tended to run off in tangents, and a social conscience. He needed a brain trust to organize him.

Lansdale became the brain trust. He had developed some practical ideas on how to suppress the rebellion from a previous tour in the islands as an Air Force intelligence officer assigned to study the Huks. He had returned to the Philippines on detail to the CIA. An affable man who made friends easily, Lansdale was soon sufficiently close to the new secretary of defense to persuade Magsaysay to share his house in the American military compound so that they could spend evenings sorting out Magsaysay’s problems. They made a superb team. The Huks suffered the consequences in a brilliantly led counterrevolution. With Lansdale to coach him, Magsaysay created an excellent intelligence service and reformed the army and the paramilitary constabulary into disciplined organizations with esprit and a sense of mission. He fired lazy and corrupt officers and promoted those who could lead and fight and who understood the importance of convincing the population that the military was their protector and not their despoiler. The troops started to treat the populace with civility and kindness rather than abuse. Civilians wounded in a crossfire received the same treatment as soldiers and constabulary men in military hospitals. Magsaysay saw to it that tenant farmers began obtaining justice in the courts. He assigned army lawyers to defend them against their landlords. Anyone in the Philippines could send a telegram to the secretary of defense for a few centavos and the complaints were acted upon. He convinced a majority of Filipinos that he and their government cared about them. He enforced the election laws and returned to Filipinos the right to change their government. He also gave the Huks a choice. They could surrender and obtain amnesty, or they could face increasingly certain imprisonment or death. By 1953 the rebellion was broken, the guerrillas reduced to small bands being swept up in police actions. Magsaysay was elected president of the Philippines the same year.