News agencies never sleep, so it was no surprise that Malcolm Browne, the Associated Press correspondent in Saigon, was still at work when his office telephone rang late on the evening of June 10, 1963. The caller was Thich Due Nghiep, a Buddhist monk Browne had come to know while covering the escalating conflict between Buddhists and the Catholic-dominated government of South Vietnam. He told Browne that anyone who appeared at the Xa Loi Pagoda the next morning would witness “an important event.”
That evening, the monk called several other foreign correspondents with the same message. Only Browne took him seriously. He had written extensively about the spreading Buddhist rebellion and sensed that it would shape Vietnam’s future. Before dawn the next morning, he and his Vietnamese assistant set out for the pagoda. They found it packed with monks in saffron-colored robes and nuns in gray ones. The air inside was hot, thick, and heavily sweet with incense. Smoke spiraled upward from a hundred braziers. Holy men and women lost themselves in ancient chants.
Browne took a place. One of the nuns approached him, and as she poured him tea, he could see tears streaming down her face. A few minutes later, Thich Due Nghiep caught sight of him and approached. He had a simple suggestion: do not leave “until events have run their course.”
For half an hour Browne sat amid this scene. Suddenly, at a signal, the monks and nuns stopped their chanting, rose, solemnly filed out of the pagoda, and formed a column outside. They assembled behind an old Austin sedan carrying five monks and followed it through the streets. Where Phan Dinh Phung intersected with one of the city’s major avenues, Le Van Duyet, the procession stopped. Marchers formed a circle to block off all approaches.
Three monks emerged from the car, one elderly and the others supporting him. The younger ones placed a square cushion on the pavement in the center of the intersection and helped the older one settle into the archetypal lotus position. As he fingered his oak beads and murmured the sacred words nam mo amita Buddha, “return to Buddha,” they fetched a gasoline tank from the car and splashed a pink gas-and-diesel mixture over him. After they stepped away, he produced a box of matches, lit one, and dropped it onto his lap. Instantly he was consumed by fire.
As the breeze whipped the flames from his face, I could see that although his eyes were closed, his features were contorted with agony. But throughout his ordeal he never uttered a sound or changed his position, even as the smell of burning flesh filled the air. A horrified moan arose from the crowd, and the ragged chanting of some of the monks was interrupted by screams and cries of anguish. Two monks unfurled a large cloth banner reading (in English), “A Buddhist Priest Burns for Buddhist Demands.”
Stunned by what he was seeing, Browne reflexively shot picture after picture. After a few minutes, a fire truck and several police cars with shrieking sirens appeared, but demonstrators lay in front of them and clung to their wheels so they could not reach the pyre. Soon the flames began to subside. When they died out, several monks appeared with a wooden coffin and tried to lift the dead man’s body into it. His limbs had become rigid. As the coffin was carried back to Xa Loi Pagoda, both arms spilled out. One was still smoking.
Browne’s photos of the burning monk stunned people around the world. The day after they were taken, a visitor to the Oval Office noticed that President John F. Kennedy had a set of them on his desk. They seemed to symbolize the unraveling of South Vietnam and the impotence of its president, Ngo Dinh Diem. Over the next few months, these images helped push the Kennedy administration toward a momentous decision. Diem had lost the administration’s confidence and would be overthrown.
THE VERDANT LAND OF VIETNAM, CURVING LIKE A DRAGON’S TAIL ALONG THE sinuous coast of Indochina, became a French colony in the nineteenth century. Generations of French families built lives there, carving rubber plantations out of the jungle and turning Saigon, the capital, into an exotic colonial outpost. In the turbulent years after World War II, nationalist and anticolonialist passion erupted in Vietnam just as it erupted in lands as distant as Iran and Guatemala. Many foreign leaders failed to recognize its power. The most self-destructively myopic were the Americans. Their blindness would lead the United States to the greatest military defeat in its history.
Japan had occupied and controlled Vietnam during the world war. An army of partisans, the Vietminh, waged guerrilla war against the occupiers, using weapons (and smoking cigarettes) dropped to them by the Americans. After the Japanese surrender, the partisan leader, Ho Chi Minh, a frail-looking figure in his fifties with a thin beard, decided that the time was right to declare his country’s independence. On September 2, 1945, before a large crowd in the northern city of Hanoi, he delivered a speech that any American would have found familiar.
“All men are created equal,” he proclaimed. “They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Ho looked instinctively to the United States, partly because he had what one historian called “a lifelong admiration for Americans” and partly because he had few other allies. France, determined to resume its position as Vietnam’s ruling power, refused to recognize his new government. Britain, which feared the example that a Vietminh takeover would have in its own colonies, also opposed him. Communist leaders in China and the Soviet Union feared his nationalism. It was logical for him to turn to Washington for help.
Ho’s efforts to attract American support, which included sending letters to President Harry Truman and General George Marshall, proved fruitless. The French settled back into their old role in Vietnam. Slowly Ho came to realize that if he wanted to make his country’s independence real, the Vietminh would have to fight another war, this time against French colonialists. That war was reaching its climax when Dwight Eisenhower assumed the presidency in 1953.
By then, the French had been worn down by years of fighting against Vietnamese guerrillas. They concluded, with great pain, that they must give up their splendid colony and sue for peace. Early in 1954, French and Vietminh negotiators met in Geneva. Negotiators from China, the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States were also there. Secretary of State Dulles headed the American delegation. A figure of at least equal stature, Zhou Enlai, represented Communist China. Dulles considered the Chinese regime no less than demonic, and when a reporter asked him if he would consider meeting with Zhou, he replied icily.
“Not unless our automobiles collide,” he said.
Dulles came to Geneva hoping to prevent an agreement. He had little success, and left after a week. Soon afterward, the remaining negotiators agreed to a temporary partition of Vietnam along the seventeenth parallel. Communists would control the north and have a capital in Hanoi. Former allies of the French would establish a separate government in the south, with their capital in Saigon. There would be nationwide elections in two years, after which north and south would be reunited. In the meantime, no outside power was to send weapons or soldiers into either part of Vietnam.
France ended its rule over Vietnam with a suitably muted ceremony. On October 9, 1954, under a rainy sky, a small group of soldiers assembled around a flagpole at Mangin Athletic Stadium in Hanoi and lowered the Tricolor. A bugler played plaintive notes. There were no songs or speeches. In its misbegotten eight-year war, France lost a staggering 44,967 dead and another 79,560 wounded.
Few people in Hanoi noticed the ceremony. They were too busy preparing to welcome their triumphant Vietminh. The day after the French withdrew, thirty thousand guerrilla fighters marched into the city. Their victory was not yet complete, because Vietnam had been divided, but the division was to last only two years. Ho Chi Minh had inflicted a stunning defeat on a far richer and seemingly more powerful enemy. He was the country’s most popular figure. Many Vietnamese assumed that in the 1956 election, he would be chosen to lead their country.
Dulles had done everything he could to keep the French at their posts in Vietnam, but they were determined to leave. That did not mean, however, that he had to sit idly by while Vietnamese voters elected a Communist to lead their reunified country. He never considered the possibility of seeking an accommodation with Ho. Instead he set out to undermine the Geneva agreement by making the country’s division permanent.
To direct this ambitious project, Dulles chose Colonel Edward Landsdale, the most accomplished American counterinsurgency expert of that era. Landsdale had won a great victory by crushing guerrillas in the Philippines, working in partnership with an English-speaking Filipino leader, Ramon Magsaysay, who he plucked from obscurity, lavishly financed, maneuvered up through the political ranks, and finally installed as president. He needed the same kind of partner for his Vietnam project. One was waiting.
Ngo Dinh Diem was a devout Catholic who came from a long line of Vietnamese mandarins. He had studied public administration and, while still in his thirties, served as interior minister in one of Emperor Bao Dai’s pro-French cabinets. Later he came to favor independence, but because of his intense anti-Communism he refused to join the Vietminh. In 1950 he traveled to the United States, where he spent two years living an ascetic life at Maryknoll seminaries in Lakewood, New Jersey, and Ossining, New York. He also made valuable political contacts. Through the intercession of the militantly anti-Communist Francis Cardinal Spellman, he met State Department officials and influential members of Congress. Spellman made a special point of introducing him to Catholic politicians, among them Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts.
When the Americans had to find a Vietnamese to do their bidding in Saigon, Diem was one of the few they knew. He was then a portly fifty-three-year-old bachelor and lay celibate living at a Benedictine monastery in Belgium. Neither Dulles nor Landsdale had ever met him, but Landsdale vouched for his anti-Communist credentials, and that was all Dulles needed to hear. France had no better candidate to suggest. Nor did the pliant Emperor Bao Dai, who was then living in Cannes. A few months before the French withdrawal, Diem was duly anointed. He flew from Paris to Saigon, and took office as prime minister on the propitious day Asians call “double seven,” the seventh day of the seventh month, July 7, 1954.
Landsdale gave Diem a few days to settle in, and then went to meet him at the lavish Gia Long Palace, formerly the French governor’s residence. Walking down one of its corridors, he ran into what he later described as “a plump man in a white suit,” and asked where he could find Prime Minister Diem.
“I am Diem,” the man replied.
That was the beginning of a long, doomed partnership. Landsdale took Diem under his wing, and within a few months rescued him from two attempted coups, one of which he suppressed by bribing rebel leaders with $12 million of the CIA’s money. Then he launched the anti-Communist campaign Dulles had sent him to wage.
Landsdale’s tactics ranged from sabotaging city buses in Hanoi to paying soothsayers to predict doom under the Communists. One of his biggest projects was helping to set off an exodus of hundreds of thousands of Catholics from North to South, urging them to flee with a campaign that included radio messages proclaiming, “Christ has gone to the South” and “Virgin Mary has departed from the North.” None of this provoked the rebellion Landsdale expected, and with each passing day, the nationwide election drew closer. Everyone realized that it would carry Ho, the country’s founder, to the presidency of a united Vietnam. Eisenhower guessed that “possibly eighty percent of the population” would vote for him. This presented the Americans with a serious dilemma. When an aide brought Secretary of State Dulles a cable from Diem suggesting a way out, he read it immediately.
“He sat very quietly,” recalled Paul Kattenburg, the State Department desk officer for Vietnam. “We all sat very quietly. I can recall distinctly the clock ticking away on his wall, and his breathing heavily as he read through the paper—turning to us, the few of us who were there at that meeting, and saying, ‘I don’t believe Diem wants to hold elections, and I believe we should support him in this.’”
VIETNAM WAS SUPPOSED TO BE DIVIDED FOR TWO YEARS ONLY. THAT changed after Diem and Dulles decided not to hold the scheduled 1956 election. With no election, there could be no reunification. Instead, two new nations emerged: North Vietnam and South Vietnam.
At the end of 1955, after a referendum that he won with a reported 98.2 percent of the vote, Diem deposed Bao Dai and made himself chief of state. He used his new power to impose a constitution that gave him sweeping authority. While Ho ruled North Vietnam in traditional Communist fashion, through a politburo made up of trusted comrades, Diem shaped a politburo of his own, made up of close relatives. They ruled the country as a family.
Diem’s eldest brother, Ngo Dinh Can, held no official post but ruled central Vietnam like a feudal warlord. Another brother, Ngo Dinh Thuc, was a Catholic archbishop and also an avaricious investor who had made a fortune in rubber, timber, and real estate. A third, Ngo Dinh Luyen, became ambassador to Britain. Most important and visible of all were the president’s fourth brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, and Nhu’s flamboyant wife. Nhu, an avid admirer of Machiavelli who was sometimes called the “Vietnamese Rasputin,” was President Diem’s closest adviser and alter ego. Madame Nhu, a sharp-tongued defender of the regime, liked to say she did not fear death because “I love power, and in the next life I have a chance to be even more powerful than I am.”
America’s determination to defend an independent South Vietnam led Ho and his comrades to launch their third anticolonial war. In 1960 they proclaimed a military campaign aimed at “the elimination of the U.S. imperialists and the Ngo Dinh Diem clique.” A few months later, leaders of a dozen dissident political and religious groups in the South announced the formation of a new coalition, the National Liberation Front, that would confront Diem politically while guerrillas, now called Vietcong, waged war on the battlefield.
No one in Washington considered the formation of the National Liberation Front to be anything other than a Communist propaganda stunt. That was a lamentable error. The NLF, a fairly broad coalition of left-leaning political parties, urban intellectuals, and middle-class professionals, developed a strong following in many provinces. During its first two or three years of existence, and to a certain degree even later, after it became directly allied with North Vietnam, it had interests different from those of the Communists. Americans never sought to probe those differences or open any channel of contact to anti-Diem civilians.
Secretary of State Dulles fell ill, retired, and died in 1958. After that, President Eisenhower seemed to lose interest in Vietnam. On January 19, 1961, the day before he left office, he briefed President-elect Kennedy on world trouble spots. There was plenty to talk about. The pro-American regime in Laos was collapsing. An anticolonial rebellion was raging in Algeria, and another seemed about to break out in the Congo. The CIA was training a secret army to invade Cuba in the hope of deposing Fidel Castro’s new regime. Tensions were rising in Berlin. It took several months, though, for Kennedy to realize the oddest aspect of that meeting.
“You know,” he marveled to an aide, “Eisenhower never mentioned it, never uttered the word ‘Vietnam.’”
During Kennedy’s presidency, the number of American soldiers in South Vietnam rose from 865 to 16,500. Kennedy sent jet fighters, helicopters, heavy artillery, and all manner of other weaponry, none of which turned the tide of battle. In fact, as the journalist and historian Stanley Karnow later wrote, American aid “paradoxically sapped the Diem regime.”
The aid, overwhelmingly military, confirmed Diem’s conviction that he was waging a conventional conflict, and it stiffened his resistance to political, economic and social reforms. Moreover, his battalions became more and more reluctant to confront the Vietcong squarely, relying instead on American air strikes and artillery shells to do their job for them. This suited Diem, who instructed his officers to avoid casualties. Their primary role, in his view, was not to fight the Vietcong but to protect him against possible coups.
One of the first special envoys Kennedy sent to Vietnam—there would be a steady stream—was Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who flew to Saigon in May 1961. Johnson came back a believer in the “domino theory,” convinced that if the Communists were allowed to take South Vietnam, they would soon push their war to “the beaches of Waikiki.” In one of his speeches, he went so far as to praise Diem as “the Churchill of Southeast Asia,” although when Karnow asked him afterward if he really believed that, he demurred.
“Shit,” he replied, “Diem’s the only boy we got out there.”
With that succinct line, Johnson crystallized United States policy in Vietnam during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Diem was the American surrogate. Lacking a popular base, plucked from a religious group that represented only 10 percent of his country’s population, surrounded by a venal family and uninterested in the daily work of government, he was chosen because no one else fit American requirements. As in so many other countries, the Americans looked in South Vietnam for a leader who would be a crowd-pleasing nationalist and also do what Washington wished, only to discover that they could not have both.
Diem became increasingly uncomfortable with the growing American role in his country. More than once he complained to the United States ambassador in Saigon, Frederick Nolting, that American troops were only intensifying the conflict by provoking strong responses from the North. Still the troops, called “advisers” as a way of maintaining the fiction that they were not fighting, poured in. Between 1961 and 1963, they engaged in hundreds of firefights, and American planes flew thousands of bombing sorties against Vietcong positions. During that same period, 108 Americans were killed, and the United States lost twenty-three aircraft.
Diem complained about “all these soldiers I never asked to come here.” During an inspection tour of Cam Ranh Bay, he pointed to the harbor and told his aides, “The Americans want a base there, but I shall never accept that.” When Ambassador Nolting, following a script written in Washington, told him that the United States wished to “share in the decision making process in the political, economic and military fields,” he replied, “Vietnam does not want to be a protectorate.” People started calling him a reluctant protege, a client who refused to behave like a client, a puppet who pulled his own strings. The worst came when his brother and chief adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu, suggested that perhaps the time had come to negotiate with the Vietcong.
“I am anti-communist from the point of view of doctrine, but I am not anti-communist from the point of view of politics or humanity,” Nhu told a television interviewer in the spring of 1963. “I consider the communists as brothers, lost sheep. I am not for an assault against the communists because we are a small country, and we only want to live in peace.”
The final act in the drama of Diem’s rule was unfolding. On May 8, Buddhists gathered in Hue to mark the 2,527th birthday of the Buddha. The local strongman, Ngo Dinh Can—who was also the president’s brother—decided to enforce an old decree prohibiting the celebrants from flying the traditional blue-red-saffron Buddhist flag, even though only a few days earlier the city had been aflutter with Catholic banners to mark the 25th anniversary of Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc’s ordination. Buddhists began a series of protests. Police fired on one of them, killing a woman and eight children.
Buddhist leaders reacted by launching a nationwide campaign against Diem. They distributed leaflets, met with foreign journalists, and staged rallies and hunger strikes. People flocked to their cause, often for reasons that had little to do with religion. They were have-nots rebelling against the rich, ordinary people defying authoritarian power, and, in the words of New York Times correspondent David Halberstam, “twentieth-century Asians protesting against older Asians molded from a mandarin past.”
When Diem did not respond to this campaign, Buddhist leaders announced that monks might commit suicide as a way of showing the depth of their anger. Diem dismissed this threat. So did many Americans in Vietnam, including some news correspondents. One who did not was Malcolm Browne.
The monk who burned himself to death on the morning of June 11 was named Thich Quang Due. He was sixty-seven years old, had been a monk for nearly half a century, and was revered as a bodhisattva, a being on the path to enlightenment who chooses to forgo it in order to help others become enlightened. In a statement that his comrades distributed after his death, he made a “respectful” plea to Diem to show “charity and compassion” to all religions. The ruling family’s most outspoken member, Madame Nhu, replied by ridiculing the spectacle of what she called a “barbecue.”
“Let them burn,” she said. “We shall clap our hands.”
NO ONE IN WASHINGTON TOOK THE SUICIDE SO LIGHTLY. IT WAS PART OF A steady flow of bad news from Vietnam that President Kennedy and his aides were forced to confront during the spring and summer of 1963. Vietcong guerrillas had established control over 20 percent of South Vietnam and moved freely in an area twice that large. The South Vietnamese army was proving reluctant to fight. Official corruption, fed by ballooning American aid programs, was rampant. Diem was losing popularity. To keep order, he was forced to rule with increasing repression, much of it directed by his brother and chief adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu.
One of Kennedy’s first decisions after the monk’s suicide was to replace Ambassador Nolting, a courtly Virginian who had become close to Diem. He considered naming Landsdale, but there is an unwritten rule against appointing CIA officers as ambassadors, and he dropped the idea. Instead he chose an entirely different figure, one of his oldest political rivals, Henry Cabot Lodge, an aristocratic pillar of the Republican establishment.
Lodge had represented Massachusetts in the Senate until 1952, when he lost his seat to Kennedy. After his defeat, Secretary of State Dulles arranged for him to be named ambassador to the United Nations, where he had played a supporting role in the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. In 1960, Lodge was Richard Nixon’s running mate on the Republican ticket that Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson defeated. His prominence, his diplomatic experience, his strong political base in Washington, and his mastery of the French language made him a logical choice for the Vietnam post. So did his Republican pedigree. Kennedy and his aides knew that the Saigon post was full of risks and liked the idea of having a Republican to blame if things went wrong.
Lodge found South Vietnam in turmoil when he arrived on Friday evening, August 23,1963. Growing unrest, including the self-immolation of four more Buddhist monks, had led President Diem to place the country under martial law. Police squads had swooped down on Buddhist pagodas and arrested hundreds of monks, among them the country’s eighty-year-old Buddhist patriarch. In Hue they fought a pitched eight-hour street battle against Buddhist protesters.
That weekend in Washington, in an appalling display of confusion and missed signals, the Kennedy administration stumbled into a “regime change” operation destined to end in blood. It was the culmination of weeks of debate over how to deal with Diem. Some in the administration believed that he was still the best hope for South Vietnam. Others had given up on him and conjured his demise.
On Saturday, August 24, all three of Diem’s most powerful supporters in Washington were out of town. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was attending a Yankees game in New York, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was vacationing in Wyoming, and President Kennedy was at his home on Cape Cod. That left the American foreign policy apparatus in the hands of three lower-ranking officials, all of whom wanted Diem overthrown.
The most eager of these was Assistant Secretary of State Roger Hilsman, the administration’s chief East Asia specialist. Hilsman, who had been a commando in Burma during World War II, considered himself an expert on both counterinsurgency and the politics of Indochina. On that Saturday, he drafted a fateful cable to Lodge. It directed Lodge to tell Diem directly that the United States “cannot tolerate a situation in which power lies in Nhu’s hands” and to demand that Diem sever all political ties to his brother. If Diem “remains obdurate and refuses,” the cable said, “we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved.”
“Concurrently with above,” it concluded, “Ambassador and country teams should urgently examine all possible replacement leadership and make detailed plans as to how we might bring about Diem’s replacement if this becomes necessary.”
That afternoon, Hilsman and one of his chief allies, Undersecretary of State Averell Harriman, sought out George Ball, who was acting head of the State Department in Rusk’s absence. They found him on the ninth green of the Falls Road Golf Course in Maryland. Ball was the third member of the State Department’s anti-Diem troika. He liked Hilsman’s cable and agreed to telephone Kennedy and recommend that it be sent.
For reasons that remain unclear, Kennedy did not focus on the seriousness of this cable. He may have been distracted by his weekend pursuits. Ball phrased his appeal in terms that he knew would reassure the president. Kennedy made only one minor change in the message, and then approved it.
“If Rusk and Gilpatrick agree, George, then go ahead,” he said.
Neither Rusk nor Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatrick had yet been consulted, but Ball did not mention that. After hanging up, he called Rusk in New York and told him he was preparing to send a cable to Saigon that President Kennedy had already approved. Rusk, as was his habit, told them that anything the President approved was fine with him. He even strengthened their cable with a new sentence: “You may also tell appropriate military commanders we will give them direct support in any interim period of breakdown of central government mechanism.”
According to State Department protocol, a cable of this importance had to be approved not simply by the president and secretary of state but also by the secretary of defense, the director of the CIA, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. All were out of reach on that Saturday evening, so Ball checked with their deputies instead. Officials at that level are not wont to veto presidential directives, and none tried to do so.
Once the anti-Diem group had secured these approvals, they needed only Kennedy’s final go-ahead. Michael Forrestal, a member of the National Security Council, called him to obtain it. To his surprise, he found the president suddenly hesitant. He had been having second thoughts.
“Are you sure you are all right?” Kennedy asked.
Forrestal managed to reassure him, and that was that. At 9:43 that evening, a clerk at the State Department dispatched the cable. The debate that should have taken place beforehand broke out on Monday morning.
An angry Kennedy summoned his foreign policy advisers to the White House and began by sternly reprimanding Hilsman, Harriman, Ball, and Forrestal for what he called their “impulsiveness.” General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was just as upset. He said he would never have approved the cable, and accused those who drafted it of staging “an aggressive end run” that would have been possible only on a weekend. Vice President Johnson, Secretary of Defense McNamara, and CIA director John McCone all warned that overthrowing Diem would create more problems than it would solve. The argument stretched on over four days of meetings, leaving Kennedy angry and frustrated.
“My God!” he exclaimed to a friend that week. “My government is coming apart!”
In Saigon, Ambassador Lodge was enthusiastically preparing the way for “regime change.” He sent signals to dissident generals and dispatched a series of cables to Washington urging quick action against Diem. In one, dated August 29, he warned that if the United States did not “move promptly,” South Vietnam might soon fall into the hands of “pro-communist or at least neutralist politicians.”
We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: the overthrow of the Diem government. There is no turning back because U.S. prestige is already publicly committed to this end in large measure, and will become more so as the facts leak out. In a more fundamental sense, there is no turning back because there is no possibility, in my view, that the war can be won under a Diem administration.
That cable evidently impressed Kennedy. A few days after receiving it, he sat on the lawn of his Cape Cod retreat for a television interview with Walter Cronkite of CBS. When Cronkite asked him if he thought the Diem government could win the war, he gave an answer that was also a signal to Saigon.
“With changes in policies and personnel, I think it can,” Kennedy said. “If it doesn’t make those changes, I would think that the chances of winning it would not be very good.”
When Diem and Nhu heard this, they understood that their regime was in danger. They looked for a new strategy. Nhu decided to propose a rapprochement with the North. Soon after he did, the National Liberation Front said it was willing to join a coalition government in the South; United Nations Secretary General U Thant called for “neutralization” of the South and Vietnam’s eventual reunification; President Charles de Gaulle of France endorsed the idea; and the French ambassador in Saigon began working secretly with a Polish colleague to arrange contacts between the governments of North and South Vietnam—although not secretly enough to prevent the CIA from learning what they were doing.
The Kennedy administration was choosing between two awful alternatives: supporting a corrupt and unpopular government that was losing the war, or endorsing a coup to overthrow that government. From the vantage point of history, it is reasonable to ask why no one suggested the obvious third option. The United States could simply have washed its hands of the crisis and left it for the Vietnamese to resolve. That would probably have led to the establishment of Communist or pro-Communist rule over the entire country, but that is what ultimately happened anyway. A withdrawal at this point would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, avoided the devastation of Vietnam, and spared the United States its greatest national trauma since the Civil War. Why did no one suggest it?
In fact, the idea did surface several times. Paul Kattenburg, who had become chairman of the administration’s Vietnam Interdepartmental Working Group, returned from a trip to Saigon in late August with a very gloomy view. He concluded that the Vietnamese had become steadily more nationalistic and would never accept a foreign-backed regime in Saigon. At a National Security Council meeting on August 31, he suggested that the time had come “for us to make the decision to get out honorably.” His comrades promptly slapped him down.
“We will not pull out until the war is won,” Rusk told him, curtly and to general approval.
Kattenburg had spoken the unspeakable, and was rewarded for his heresy with a diplomatic post in Guyana. A few weeks later, though, no less a figure than Attorney General Robert Kennedy wondered aloud at a White House meeting whether an eventual Communist victory in Vietnam “could be resisted with any government.” If not, he suggested, perhaps it was “time to get out of Vietnam completely.”
Others at the meeting considered this idea so weird as to be almost beyond response. Robert Kennedy might have been able to press his argument if he had thought it through more carefully and prepared a serious case, but he had not. After he spoke, one person at the meeting later recalled, his suggestion “hovered for a moment then died away, a hopelessly alien thought in a field of unexamined assumptions and entrenched convictions.”
In Saigon, Lodge was pressing ahead with his plans for a coup. He had decided that, as he wrote in one cable to Washington, “the United States must not appear publicly in the matter.” That meant he would need a clandestine envoy to the plotters. For this delicate job he chose Lucien Conein, a bluff and broad-shouldered CIA agent with years of experience in covert action.
Conein, who used the code name “Black Luigi,” was a larger-than-life figure and self-described “expert liar.” Reporters described him as a character “sprung to life from a pulp adventure,” a lover of life who “never saw a mirror he didn’t like” and was “eccentric, boisterous, often uncontrollable yet deeply sensitive and thoroughly professional.” When President Kennedy first saw his name and asked who he was, McNamara replied, “He’s a Lawrence of Arabia type.” Ambassador Lodge called him “the indispensable man.” Never was he more so than during the autumn of 1963.
The general who seemed best able to pull off a successful coup was Duong Van Minh, the most prominent and popular officer in the country and President Diem’s nominal military adviser. “Big Minh,” as the Americans called him, was a blunt-spoken veteran of the French colonial army. Diem came to mistrust him, and, by 1963, he had no troops under his command. That left him with plenty of time for his two passions, playing tennis and cultivating orchids. It also disposed him toward plotting.
On August 29, Conein approached General Minh and broached the subject of a coup. The two men spoke for more than an hour. Minh allowed that something could be happening or made to happen, but would say no more. He knew that the Americans were divided among themselves, and feared that if he spoke too freely, someone might leak his plans to Diem. All he needed from Conein was approval to proceed. If the United States wanted Diem overthrown, he said, it should send restive generals a concrete signal.
Conein passed this request up the chain of command, and a few days later the Kennedy administration gave “Big Minh” the signal he wanted. It suspended a $14 million loan to South Vietnam that was to pay for two high-profile development projects, a waterworks and an electric plant. Minh was satisfied and designated his most trusted coconspirator, General Tran Van Don, acting chief of the South Vietnamese general staff, as his liaison with Conein. Don was a French-born aristocrat, a graduate of the French military academy, and something of an intellectual. He and Conein had been friends for nearly twenty years. As the coup plot took shape in September and October, they were in regular touch. To avoid arousing suspicion, they usually met in the office of a Saigon dentist.
“Whatever else happened,” Conein recalled later, “I certainly had a lot of work done on my teeth.”
The political climate in Saigon rose steadily that autumn. Nhu intensified his criticism of United States policy, at one point scorning Lodge as a “man of no morality.” He continued to drop hints about a possible peace overture to the Communists, saying that “the Americans have done everything to push me into their arms.” In a farcical election on September 27, Nhu and his wife were reelected to the rubber-stamp parliament, with identical winning percentages of 99 percent. A week later, another Buddhist monk burned himself to death, the first such suicide since the summer.
Lodge faced one unexpected problem within his embassy. He had made clear from the day he arrived that he wanted his staff to speak with a single voice. At the beginning of October, he started hearing that the chief of the CIA station at his embassy, John “Jocko” Richardson, was having doubts about the coup plot. Richardson maintained ties with Nhu, and because of his position and background—he had directed spectacularly successful anti-Nazi operations in World War II and been a highly effective station chief in the Philippines—his views carried considerable weight in Washington. With these assets, Lodge realized, he could tip the already precarious balance within the Kennedy administration and force cancellation of the coup. At the beginning of October he managed to have Richardson transferred out of Vietnam and replaced by a more enthusiastic agent.
At four-twenty on Tuesday afternoon, October 29, President Kennedy gathered fifteen of his senior foreign policy and national security advisers at the White House for a final meeting about the imminent coup. Years later, a tape of that meeting surfaced. The transcript is deeply disheartening, a textbook example of how not to shape policy. Kennedy’s men presented differing views, as would be expected. What was remarkable about this meeting, though, was that so many of the participants expressed serious doubts about the coup. Even more bizarre, neither Kennedy nor anyone else responded to these warnings. No one suggested that if there was so much dissent, maybe the coup should be suspended or canceled. There was no call for a vote, or even any systematic discussion of what repercussions a coup might have. Once the Americans signaled to their Vietnamese friends that they wished Diem overthrown, the project took on a life on its own.
With Hilsman not attending the meeting, the job of arguing for the coup fell to Harriman. He made the case with remarkable restraint, saying only that he did not believe Diem had “the leadership to carry his country through to victory.” That was the sum total of the pro-coup case. On the other side were four of the administration’s most senior figures: Attorney General Kennedy, General Taylor, CIA director McCone, and Secretary of State Rusk. Another dissident, General Paul Harkins, chief of the American military mission in Saigon, expressed his doubts in a cable that President Kennedy read aloud at the meeting. One after another, they anguished over what was about to happen.
ROBERT KENNEDY: I may be a minority, but I don’t see that this makes any sense on the face of it. . . . We’re putting the whole future of the country and, really, Southeast Asia, in the hands of somebody we don’t know very well. . . . Maybe it’s going to be successful, but I don’t think there’s anybody, any reports that I’ve seen, [indicating] that anybody has a plan to show where this is going.
TAYLOR: I must say that I agree with the Attorney General at present [and] would be willing to step further. . . first because you’ll have a completely inexperienced government, and secondly because the provincial chiefs, who are so essential to the conduct of the field, will all be changed, and it’s taken us over a year now to develop any truly effective work in that area.
MCCONE: Our opinion is somewhat the same as General Taylor expressed. . . . A successful coup, in our opinion—I feel very definitely that’s right—would create a period of political confusion, interregnum, and would seriously affect the war for a period of time which is not possible to estimate. It might be disastrous.
RUSK: I don’t think we ought to put our faith in anybody on the Vietnamese side at this point. . . . I’m skeptical about the likelihood that the Vietnamese are going to play completely honest with us. . . . I don’t think they owe us that, or think they do, and they’re not going to play with Westerners on that basis. So I think there are problems here [that] are pretty far-reaching.
HARKINS: I’m not opposed to change, no indeed, but I am inclined to feel that at this time, the change should be in methods of governing rather than complete change of personnel. I have seen no batting order proposed by any of the coup groups. I think we should take a hard look at any proposed list before we make any decisions.
Even the president himself expressed doubts about the project. “If we miscalculate, we could lose overnight our position in Southeast Asia,” he mused at one point. Then, speaking of Lodge, he said, “Looks to be his ass. He’s for a coup. He’s for it, for what he thinks are very good reasons. I say he’s much stronger for it than we are here.”
After everyone present had spoken his piece, there might have been one logical response. Someone, ideally the president, might have said: We are about to do something hugely important in Vietnam, but what has been said at this meeting raises serious doubts about it. This is our last chance to stop the coup. Should we?
Instead of demanding that his aides give him their precise recommendations, however, Kennedy allowed this meeting to dissolve inconclusively. The miasma of doubt that filled the room remained amorphous and unfocused. No one ever presented a coherent, systematic argument against the coup, nor did Kennedy ever ask to hear one.
“Let’s put it all [on] Cabot,” he said. “Then you’re talking an end to this thing.”
With that cryptic, perhaps flippant comment, the coup was finally approved. “What is remarkable about the discussion on October 29, 1963, is that a broad array of top officials voiced doubts about the coup, including JFK himself, without any actual effect on the course of events,” the historian and archivist John Prados marveled in his introduction to the published transcript. “President Kennedy does not announce a clear decision, but the group proceeds as if the United States does support the coup.”
GENERAL DON HAD PROMISED TO GIVE LODGE FORTY-EIGHT HOURS’ NOTICE before striking his blow, but as the date approached, he and the other plotters decided that would be too risky. All he would tell Conein was that he would move before November 2. The precise moment, as it turned out, was chosen by accident.
Early on Friday morning, November 1, the pro-Diem commander of the South Vietnamese navy, Captain Ho Tan Quyen, played a round of tennis with other officers at the Officers’ Club in Saigon. It was his thirty-sixth birthday, and his comrades invited him to a meal in celebration. He declined, saying he had to return home to attend to his children, but his deputy persuaded him to change his mind. They set out for a nearby restaurant. Along the way, Captain Quyen’s deputy, who was part of the coup plot, shot him dead. This was not part of the plan, but the moment General Minh learned of it, he knew there was no turning back. He had spent several weeks making clandestine contacts within the military and had a variety of infantry, cavalry, and air force units at his disposal. Now he ordered them into action.
As soon as General Don received his orders, he called Conein and asked him to come immediately to the headquarters of the South Vietnamese general staff, and bring with him all the cash he had available. Conein arrived with three million piastres, the equivalent of about $42,000, for food and other expenses; the plotters had not wished to arouse suspicion by raising money in advance. He also brought a radio that put him in direct touch with other CIA officers and, through them, with senior officials in Washington. His first message—“nine, nine, nine, nine, nine”—was a coded confirmation that the coup had begun.
General Don hurriedly summoned all military commanders in the Saigon area to a luncheon at the Officers’ Club. When they had assembled, he told them a coup was under way. Each was asked to declare, on tape, his support. Most did. The others were arrested.
As this extraordinary luncheon was taking place, rebel units were fanning through the city. They seized the airport, the police station, two radio stations, the naval headquarters, and the post office complex. Some units were sent to block highways along which loyal troops might arrive from the provinces.
Rebel officers decided to guarantee Diem and Nhu free passage out of the country if they would surrender immediately, but when they telephoned Gia Long Palace, neither would come to the phone. Diem had survived coups before, and thought he could resist this one as well. His first response was to call General Minh for help. Only when he was told that Minh was leading the uprising did he realize its seriousness. He reached General Don, and said he was prepared to announce reforms and name a new cabinet.
“It is too late now,” Don replied. “All the troops are moving on the capital.”
Diem finally decided to call Ambassador Lodge. The ambassador knew exactly what was happening but pretended he did not. Their conversation was strained to the point of surrealism.
“Some units have made a rebellion,” Diem began, “and I want to know: what is the attitude of the United States?”
“I do not feel well enough informed to tell you,” Lodge replied disingenuously. “I have heard the shooting, but am not acquainted with all the facts. Also, it is 4:30 AM in Washington, and the U.S. government cannot possibly have a view.”
“But you must have some general idea,” Diem insisted. “After all, I am a chief of state. I have tried to do my duty. I want to do now what duty and good sense require. I believe in duty above all.”
“You have certainly done your duty. As I told you only this morning, I admire your courage and your great contributions to your country. No one can take away from you the credit for all you have done. Now I am worried about your physical safety. I have a report that those in charge of the current activity offer you and your brother safe conduct out of the country if you resign. Had you heard this?”
“No,” Diem said. Then he paused for several moments, slowly grasping that Lodge was aligned with the plotters.
“You have my telephone number,” he finally said.
“Yes,” said Lodge. “If I can do anything for your physical safety, please call me.”
At four o’clock the next morning, rebel troops launched their assault on the palace. They fired cannon and machine guns, and were met with return fire from loyal troops inside. After two hours, as dawn broke, a white flag appeared from a palace window. A rebel captain led a squad toward the building to accept Diem’s surrender, but, as he approached, a shot rang out from inside and he fell dead. At that outrage, his men stormed the palace. They found neither Diem nor Nhu.
The two brothers had fled to Cholon, the Chinese section of Saigon, and found refuge with a Chinese businessman there. He took them to a clubhouse of the Republican Youth, one of Nhu’s strong-arm organizations, and then called the Taiwanese embassy to ask if diplomats there would grant the two leaders asylum. The diplomats refused.
Diem finally realized that the end was at hand. He called General Don and said he was ready to surrender at the Cha Tarn Catholic church in Cholon. What he did not know was that several hours earlier, the coup plotters had met to decide his fate. “To kill weeds, you must pull them up at the roots,” one of them told the others. No vote was taken, but the consensus was clear.
General Minh chose a squad of trusted men for the job of picking up Diem and Nhu. One of them was his bodyguard, Captain Nguyen Van Nhung, an accomplished assassin. The squad commandeered two jeeps and an M-113 armored troop carrier. As it was setting off, General Minh flashed a hand signal to Captain Nhung. He held up two fingers of his right hand: dispatch them both.
In short order, the convoy reached Cholon and found the church where Diem and Nhu were waiting. The two brothers were ordered into the M-113. Nhu protested.
“You use such a vehicle to drive the President?” he asked indignantly.
No one listened. Both men’s hands were tied behind their backs, and they were shoved inside. The convoy sped back toward general staff headquarters.
When it arrived, the door to the M-113 opened and Captain Nhung emerged. Inside, the bodies of Diem and Nhu, riddled with bullets, lay in a pool of blood. Nhu had been stabbed as well as shot. The commander of the squad that captured them, General Mai Huu Xuan, marched directly to Minh, saluted, and reported in French, “Mission accomplie.” That startled General Don.
“Why are they dead?” Don asked.
“And what does it matter that they are dead?” Minh replied.
Conein was not present when the bodies arrived. Eager to see what was happening in the city, he had taken a drive toward his home. Moments after arriving there, he received a telephone call summoning him to the embassy. There he was given an order that came directly from President Kennedy: find Diem.
At ten-thirty that Saturday morning, Conein arrived back at military headquarters. He found General Minh sitting in the Officers’ Club. Without hesitating, he asked where Diem and Nhu were.
“They committed suicide,” Minh said smoothly. “They were in the Catholic Church in Cholon, and they committed suicide.”
Conein had left this headquarters only a couple of hours earlier, with the impression that the two brothers would be placed under arrest. He was shocked to hear that they were dead.
“Look,” he told Minh, “you’re a Buddhist, I’m a Catholic. If they committed suicide at that church and the priest holds Mass tonight, that story won’t hold water. Where are they?”
“Their bodies are behind general staff headquarters. Do you want to see them?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Well, if by chance one of a million of the people believe you, that they committed suicide in church, and I see that they have not committed suicide and I know differently, then if it ever leaks out, I am in trouble.”
It was a wise move. Conein suspected the truth, and realized that he would be confronted with it if he saw the corpses. Now he could honestly say he had no information other than what the generals had told him. That is what he wrote in his cable to Kennedy.
The president was at a meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House when Michael Forrestal rushed in with the report that Diem and Nhu were dead. He was stunned. Apparently he had never considered the possibility that the coup might end this way. A head of state who had been an American ally for years, a man Kennedy had personally known and supported, and a fellow Catholic on top of it all, was dead in the wake of an American-backed coup.
“Kennedy leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before,” General Taylor later recalled. “He had always insisted Diem must never suffer more than exile, and had been led to believe or had persuaded himself that a change in government could be carried out without bloodshed.”
The CIA soon obtained a set of photos showing the mangled bodies of Diem and his brother, with their hands still tied behind their backs. At a White House staff meeting on the morning of November 4, the president’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, warned that the pictures would undoubtedly be on the world’s front pages within a day or two. People would draw the obvious conclusion.
“This is not the preferred way to commit suicide,” Bundy dryly observed.
Kennedy was disconsolate. The killings in Saigon, Forrestal later said, “troubled him really deeply . . . bothered him as a moral and religious matter, shook his confidence in the kind of advice he was getting from Vietnam.” According to the historian Ellen Hammer, he was “shaken and depressed” to realize that “the first Catholic ever to become a Vietnamese chief of state was dead, assassinated as a direct result of a policy authorized by the first American Catholic president.” At one point an aide tried to console him by reminding him that Diem and Nhu had been tyrants.
“No,” he replied. “They were in a difficult position. They did the best they could for their country.”