JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (43 page)

As of mid-April 1963, Diem and Nhu were suddenly steering the South Vietnamese government in a more independent direction, asking that Americans of every stripe be withdrawn from Vietnam. The Pentagon had already become aware of Diem’s resistance to a widening of the U.S. military presence in Vietnam. Diem had been telling more and more people that he would never agree to the new air and naval bases the United States wanted to establish in his country. In July 1962, during an inspection of Cam Ranh Bay, he pointed to a mountain and said to his aides, “The Americans want a base there but I shall never accept that.”
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Diem also shared his rejection of U.S. military bases with the French ambassador. But by April 1963, Diem wasn’t just resisting more bases. Now he wanted the U.S. to withdraw thousands of its people who were already in South Vietnam.

The military and the CIA were alarmed at the Ngo brothers’ change of course. On the other hand, the Ngos’ turn toward autonomy held the hope for JFK of facilitating his decision to withdraw from Vietnam, shared with Mike Mansfield and understood by the Ngos in response to the Mansfield report. A Kennedy withdrawal policy had now become more feasible, if done in conjunction with Diem’s desire that Vietnam “not become a U.S. protectorate.” Diem and Nhu had decided they wanted their government and army back, in sudden response to JFK’s desire to give them back. It was a ripe and dangerous moment.

On May 6, Kennedy began to implement his withdrawal policy through the order McNamara gave the generals at the Honolulu conference that one thousand U.S. military personnel be pulled out of South Vietnam by the end of the year. For a few days, the time seemed hopeful for a convergence of interests between Kennedy and Diem leading toward a U.S. withdrawal. Then on May 8, 1963, mysterious explosions set off in the South Vietnamese city of Hue began a chain reaction of events that in the next six months would obliterate the hope of a Kennedy-Diem alliance for peace, overthrow the Diem government, and result in the November 2 assassinations of Diem and Nhu.

On May 8, the fateful Buddhist crisis of South Vietnam began to simmer in Hue, as thousands of Buddhists gathered to celebrate the 2507 birthday of Buddha. The South Vietnamese government had just revived a dormant regulation against flying any religious flags publicly. That public honor had been reserved by the Diem government exclusively for the national flag. It was a part of Diem’s “uphill struggle to give some sense of nationhood to Vietnamese of all faiths,”
[178]
as the
New York Herald Tribune
’s Marguerite Higgins wrote. It was claimed later that the enforcement of Diem’s nationalist order was provoked ironically by fellow Catholics who had flown the Vatican flag in Da Nang a few days earlier. In any case, the edict from the Catholic president of South Vietnam was proclaimed in Hue on the eve of the Buddha’s birthday, when Buddhist flags were already flying. In response the next morning, the Buddhist monk Thich Tri Quang gave a spirited speech to a crowd at Hue’s Tu Dam Pagoda protesting the order. Tri Quang accused the government of religious persecution. The crowd responded enthusiastically.
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What happened next, as described here, is based on Ellen J. Hammer’s
A Death in November
, Marguerite Higgins’s
Our Vietnam Nightmare
, and testimony received by the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission to South Viet-Nam in October 1963.
[180]

On the evening of May 8, encouraged by Tri Quang and other Buddhist leaders, a crowd gathered outside the government radio station in Hue. At about 8:00 p.m., Tri Quang arrived carrying a tape recording of his morning speech. He and the people demanded that the tape be broadcast that night. When the station director refused, the crowd became insistent, pushing against the station’s doors and windows. Firefighters used water hoses to drive them back. The station director put in a call for help to the province security chief, Major Dang Sy. As Dang Sy and his security officers were approaching the area in armored cars about fifty meters away, two powerful explosions blasted the people on the veranda of the station, killing seven on the spot and fatally wounding a child. At least fifteen others were injured.

Major Dang Sy claimed later that he thought the explosions were the beginning of a Viet Cong attack. He ordered his men to disperse the crowd with percussion grenades, crowd-control weapons that were described by a U.S. Army Field Manual as nonlethal. However, from the moment the armored cars drove up and the percussion grenades were thrown, Major Dang Sy and the South Vietnamese government were blamed for the night’s casualties by Thich Tri Quang and the Buddhist movement. The Buddhists’ interpretation of the event was adopted quickly by the U.S. media and government.

Dr. Le Khac Quyen, the hospital director at Hue, said after examining the victims’ bodies that he had never seen such injuries. The bodies had been decapitated. He found no metal in the corpses, only holes. There were no wounds below the chest. In his official finding, Dr. Quyen ruled that “the death of the people was caused by an explosion which took place in midair,”
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blowing off their heads and mutilating their bodies.

Neither the Buddhists nor the government liked his verdict. Although Dr. Quyen was a disciple of Thich Tri Quang and a government opposition leader, his finding frustrated his Buddhist friends because it tended to exonerate Diem’s security police. They were apparently incapable of inflicting the kinds of wounds he described. On the other hand, the government imprisoned Dr. Quyen for refusing to sign a medical certificate it had drawn up that claimed the victims’ wounds came from a type of bomb made by the Viet Cong—something Quyen didn’t know and wouldn’t certify.
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The absence of any metal in the bodies or on the radio station’s veranda pointed to powerful plastic bombs as the source of the explosions. However, the Saigon government’s eagerness to identify plastic bombs with its enemy, the Viet Cong, was questionable. As Ellen Hammer pointed out in her investigation of the incident, “In later years, men who had served with the Viet Cong at that time denied they had any plastic that could have produced such destruction.”
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Who did possess such powerful plastic bombs?

An answer is provided by Graham Greene’s prophetic novel
The Quiet American
, based on historical events that occurred in Saigon eleven years before the bombing in Hue. Greene was in Saigon on January 9, 1952, when two bombs exploded in the city’s center, killing ten and injuring many more. A picture of the scene, showing a man with his legs blown off, appeared in
Life
magazine as the “Picture of the Week.” The
Life
caption said the Saigon bombs had been “planted by Viet Minh Communists” and “signaled general intensification of the Viet Minh violence.”
[184]
In like manner, the
New York Times
headlined: “Reds’ Time Bombs Rip Saigon Center.”
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In Saigon, Graham Greene knew the bombs had been planted and claimed proudly not by the Viet Minh but by a warlord, General The, whom Greene knew. General The’s bombing material, a U.S. plastic, had been supplied to him by his sponsor, the Central Intelligence Agency. Greene observed in his memoir,
Ways of Escape
, it was no coincidence that “the
Life
photographer at the moment of the explosion was so well placed that he was able to take an astonishing and horrifying photograph which showed the body of a trishaw driver still upright after his legs had been blown off.”
[186]
The CIA had set the scene, alerting the
Life
photographer and
Times
reporter so they could convey the terrorist bombing as the work of “Viet Minh Communists” to a mass audience.
[187]

Horrified and inspired by what he knew, Graham Greene wrote the truth in his novel, portraying a quiet American CIA agent as the primary source of the Saigon bombing. In
The Quiet American
, Greene used the CIA’s plastic as a mysterious motif, specifically mentioned in ten passages,
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whose deadly meaning was revealed finally in the Saigon explosions blamed falsely on the communists.

A decade later, plastic bombs were still a weapon valued in covert U.S. plots designed to scapegoat an unsuspecting target. In March 1962, as we have seen, General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, proposed “exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots” in the United States, then arresting and blaming Cuban agents for the terrorist acts.
[189]

In May 1963, Diem’s younger brother, Ngo Dinh Can, who ruled Hue, thought from the beginning that the Viet Cong had nothing to do with the explosions at the radio station. According to an investigation carried out by the Catholic newspaper
Hoa Binh
, Ngo Dinh Can and his advisers were “convinced the explosions had to be the work of an American agent who wanted to make trouble for Diem.”
[190]
In 1970
Hoa Binh
located such a man, a Captain Scott, who in later years became a U.S. military adviser in the Mekong Delta. Scott had come to Hue from Da Nang on May 7, 1963. He admitted he was the American agent responsible for the bombing at the radio station the next day. He said he used “an explosive that was still secret and known only to certain people in the Central Intelligence Agency, a charge no larger than a matchbox with a timing device.”
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Hue’s Buddhists were incensed by a massacre they attributed to the Diem government. The U.S. Embassy in Saigon acted quickly in support of the Buddhists. Ambassador Frederick Nolting urged Diem to accept responsibility for the May 8 incident, as the Buddhists demanded. Diem agreed to compensate the victims’ families, but said that he would never assume responsibility for a crime his government had not in fact committed.
[192]

As the Buddhist crisis began to unfold, the Ngo brothers shocked the U.S. government by publicizing in Washington their wish for far fewer Americans in Vietnam. On Sunday, May 12, an article based on an interview with Ngo Dinh Nhu appeared on the front page of the
Washington Post
headlined: “Viet-Nam Wants 50% of GIs Out.”
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The article began: “South Viet-Nam would like to see half of the 12,000 to 13,000 American military personnel stationed here leave the country.”
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Ngo Dinh Nhu told
Post
reporter Warren Unna that “at least 50 per cent of the U.S. troops in Viet-Nam are not absolutely necessary.” Their unnecessary presence simply reinforced the Communists’ claim that “it is not the people of Viet-Nam who are fighting this war,”
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only a colonial power giving them orders.

Moreover, Nhu and Diem distrusted Americans working at local levels in Vietnam. Many of them, Nhu said pointedly, were nothing more than U.S. intelligence agents.
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“Five months ago I told the American authorities that it was possible to withdraw about one half of the Americans,”
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Nhu said, thus dating his earlier wish for fewer Americans to December 1962, when Mike Mansfield had made his report to the president urging a similar policy.

Putting a pro-Kennedy spin on his remarks, Nhu said that a large withdrawal of Americans from Vietnam “could do something spectacular to help show the success of the Kennedy Government’s policy in Viet-Nam.”
[198]

The Ngo brothers had preempted Kennedy. They had succeeded, for the moment, in proclaiming their ardent wish for a U.S. withdrawal that JFK had already quietly decided upon.

Making the connection, the
Post
article noted that, although “no formal request to withdraw troops has ever been made” by South Vietnam, the meeting earlier that week in Honolulu of “top American military and civilian officials” presided over by McNamara “is known to have focused on the problem. A compromise reportedly was reached in which Viet-Nam will assume that about a thousand of the U.S. troops here will be withdrawn within a year.”
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It was suddenly becoming evident in Washington, D.C., that a U.S. withdrawal was in the works, now in apparent response to the wishes of the South Vietnamese government. However, Ngo Dinh Nhu’s remarks provoked quick rebuttals.

The
Washington Post
was outraged by his call for a U.S. withdrawal. A
Post
editorial tried to dismiss Nhu’s desire for 50 percent fewer Americans in Vietnam by linking it with his government’s failure to carry out the reforms necessary for a victory over the communists. The
Post
editors asked in dismay: