Diem's Final Failure: Prelude to America's War in Vietnam

Modern War Studies

by Philip E. Catton

Often portrayed as an inept and stubborn tyrant, South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem has long been the subject of much derision but little understanding. Philip Catton's penetrating study provides a much more complex portrait of Diem as both a devout patriot and a failed architect of modernization. In doing so, it sheds new light on a controversial regime.

Catton treats the Diem government on its own terms rather than as an appendage of American policy. Focusing on the decade from Dien Bien Phu to Diem's assassination in 1963, he examines the Vietnamese leader's nation-building and reform efforts-particularly his Strategic Hamlet Program, which sought to separate guerrilla insurgents from the peasantry and build grassroots support for his regime. Catton's evaluation of the collapse of that program offers fresh insights into both Diem's limitations as a leader and the ideological and organizational weaknesses of his government, while his assessment of the evolution of Washington's relations with Saigon provides new insight into America's growing involvement in the Vietnamese civil war.

Focusing on the Strategic Hamlet Program in Binh Duong province as an exemplar of Diem's efforts, Catton paints the Vietnamese leader as a progressive thinker trying to simultaneously defeat the communists and modernize his nation. He draws on a wealth of Vietnamese language sources to argue that Diem possessed a firm vision of nation-building and sought to overcome the debilitating dependence that reliance on American support threatened to foster. As Catton shows, however, Diem's plans for South Vietnam clashed with those of the United States and proved no match for the Vietnamese communists.

Catton analyzes the mutually frustrating interactions between Diem and the administrations of Eisenhower and Kennedy, highlighting personality and cultural clashes, as well as specific disagreements within the American government over how to deal with Diem's programs and his hostility toward American goals. Revealing patterns in this uneasy alliance that have eluded other observers, he also clarifies many of the problems, setbacks, and miscalculations experienced by the communist movement during that era.

Neither an American puppet, as communist propaganda claimed, nor a backward-looking mandarin, according to Western accounts, Catton's Diem is a tragic figure who finally ran out of time, just a few weeks before JFK's assassination and at a moment when it still seemed possible for America to avoid war.

Genres: History, American History

310 pages, Hardcover

First published January 17, 2002

Reviews

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 5 out of 5]

The failed nation building in South Vietnam was the reason for many personal tragedies. One such tragedy was Ngo Dinh Diem's attempt to prevail in the struggle against the Viet Cong and prepare South Vietnam for its future as a modern democracy. He governed wisely and in most cases effectively. Yet, his political talent notwithstanding, in the end he was betrayed by his superpower ally, America, and assassinated by his own generals. His removal, the official version of events claims, was a necessary step – Diem had degraded into a cruel, senseless dictator. In reality, though, Diem's tragedy lay not in having been corrupted by power, but in the fact that his vision of how his country should have been developed and led toward victory and modernization clashed with that of American policy-makers and military leaders. 

In his book, Philip E. Catton examines the Strategic Hamlet Program to prove both that Diem was an effective leader and that the many frustrating disagreements regarding the program between him and the administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy shook the uneasy American-South Vietnamese alliance and impacted the Saigon government's war effort negatively.

The Strategic Hamlet Program came to life in 1962 and became the essence of a new strategy employing military, political, and economic resources in accord. Its creation is incorrectly attributed to Robert Thompson, a Briton who had led the successful counterinsurgency effort in Malaya and who, since September 1961, had headed the British Advisory Mission in Vietnam. In fact, the South Vietnamese government developed the first strategic hamlets on its own several months before Thompson’s arrival. Much of the confusion over the program’s origins resulted from Diem’s unwillingness to inform his American advisers about the program in its early stages, a decision made on the (justified) assumption  that the Americans would interfere in counterproductive ways if they knew about it. Thompson, drawing on his experiences in fortifying Malaya’s villages, gave the Vietnamese advice on refining the program, some of which they disregarded. It was Diem's brother Ngo Dinh Nhu who would lead from the top and bring the program to life.

The first step in creating a strategic hamlet was to cut down the vegetation surrounding the hamlet, in order to give hamlet defenders clear sight of approaching enemies and to make room for protective barriers. Next, workers encircled the hamlet with a fence of bamboo and barbed wire and dug a ditch or moat around it. As the author explains, such defenses proved quite useful in encouraging the residents to view the Viet Cong as intruders who were to be resisted. The principal strength of the strategic hamlet was not its fortifications but its defenders. The representatives of the South Vietnamese government were present in greater numbers than ever before, and they were there twenty-four hours a day, refusing to cede the hamlets to the Viet Cong at night as had been the case in many hamlets since 1960. Members of the Self-Defense Corps and the Republican Youth, who were generally drawn from the local area and thus had family members upon whom they could rely as informants, defended the hamlet from within. Importantly, contrary to the Viet Cong, the government tried to gather and use the power of family bonds rather than destroy them.

Civil Guard companies, which were based at the district headquarters, patrolled the areas between strategic hamlets and guarded bridges, government bases, and other essential installations. When the Viet Cong attacked a strategic hamlet, the Civil Guard were to come to the hamlet’s assistance. The government also eliminated numerous small militia outposts that were scattered across the countryside, many of them distant from the population and thus highly vulnerable to attack, thereby freeing up additional militiamen. The South Vietnamese Army, which expanded from 168,000 to 196,000 in this time period, attacked Viet Cong forces operating outside the populous areas. To minimize collateral damage to civilians, the government put major restrictions on the use of air and artillery strikes near the strategic hamlets, although the army was known to disregard the rules at times.

The government cadres who were assigned to the strategic hamlet program recruited and trained villagers, helped tend the fields, and administered medical care. They gave the villagers agricultural loans and supplies such as fertilizer and rat poison, which the Viet Cong could never give them. The cadres closely monitored the movements of the peasants and the arrival of strangers. In government-built schools and markets, the strategic hamlet cadres preached the virtues of the government and decried the evils of the Viet Cong. They talked of simple things of immediate interest to the peasants, such as government pig-raising programs and the superiority of their rifles to those of the Viet Cong, rather than complicated political theories.

The villagers were required to participate in hamlet construction projects without pay, with the poorer inhabitants bearing the brunt of the unpaid work because those who were better off could pay others to do their share. Some of the villagers grumbled – especially in the Mekong Delta, which was assigned a lower priority in the program than the country’s other regions – but they generally proved willing to cooperate when the government if there was adequate leadership. The government’s projects and programs were giving the peasants greater wealth than they had ever possessed, and most of the obligatory work took place during the periods when the need to work the family’s fields was relatively low. Furthermore, communal labor pushed villagers towards supporting the government, for when the Communists destroyed a bridge that the peasants had built with their own hands, the peasants naturally began to resent them. 

All in all, the Ngo brothers' Strategic Hamlet Program yielded good results, promoted well-being, and frustrated the Viet Cong a lot. However, the Americans were offended that Diem had been developing the program behind their backs and had sought the advice of a few British experts over that of the sprawling American mission. Furthermore, the strategic hamlets were deemed undemocratic – by American standards. In fact, the program was democratic, but its version of democracy was Vietnamese. The Americans criticized the elections of hamlet leaders because the government’s district chief told the peasants to vote for certain candidates, who were generally members of the traditional village elites, and invariably those candidates came out on top. What the Americans failed to appreciate is that this way the government made sure the chiefs were competent and loyal and prevented the Viet Cong from influencing the elections. This manipulation of elections did not particularly bother the rural population. What mattered in the battle  for the support of the peasants was not ideology or democracy, but military power and good leadership. 

The majority of American officials failed to appreciate this too, and complaints about Diem's allegedly authoritarian and reactionary rule began to rise. Such complaints further intensified after Diem's government adopted Madam Nhu's "Social Purification Law", which the Americans did not like in the least. It put restrictions on divorce, smoking, and alcohol consumption by minors, and outlawed prostitution, dancing, beauty contests, cockfighting, sorcery, and contraceptives. “Foreigners come here not to dance, but to help Vietnamese fight Communism,” Madam said. “Asians are not used to promiscuity between men and women. If the Americans want to dance, they should go elsewhere.” After the law took effect, South Vietnamese cities began looking more like the cities of a country at war and less like Asian Las Vegas. The changes did not please the American correspondents, whose entertainment options were sharply reduced, and the bitter complaints about Diem intensified. The Prime Minister entered the worst and final stage of his term – that in which he struggled fruitlessly to balance the success of the war effort with the increasingly vocal American demands for liberalization. His overthrow a year later threw the country into chaos, which dealt the Strategic Hamlet Program an irreparable blow, as the nine-year effort to promote a non-Communist, and specifically Vietnamese, solution to the problem of nation building and keep Saigon’s superpower ally at arm’s length came to an end.

DIEM'S FINAL FAILURE is an outstanding study that persuasively dispels the myths around the Diem regime. Catton describes the workings of the strategic hamlets graspably, engagingly, and in great detail. This book is one of the most objective and insightful assessments of Diem I have read so far. I highly recommend it.