SAIGON
RATHOLE WATCHING, AS REPORTERS CALLED it, was the solemn duty of news wire services. Every U.S. embassy announcement, all reports from the American military, statements by Gia Long Palace—the daily run of the predictable had to be checked out by the wire services, usually with marginal results. It tied up the limited manpower of the Associated Press, United Press International, and Reuters, the British wire service. The specials—the correspondent for the New York Times, for instance—could ignore predictable events and race off to the Mekong Delta to follow hunches and play angles on the main story. If the unpredictable occurred, well, leave it to the wires. Or the newspaper correspondent could fold the wire service story into a dispatch with the special’s byline. Plagiarism was a hallowed tradition. After all, newspapers paid for the wire service reports. The most fabled example came from a Fleet Street reporter’s message to the London editor: “I looked in horror as … Pick Up Reuters.”
That practice contributed to Malcolm Browne’s decision to reject David Halberstam. The New York Times reporter wanted to set up his office in the Associated Press’s Saigon bureau. No, said Browne. Perhaps the main reason was lack of space in the cramped office at 158 rue Pasteur. But Browne, the AP bureau chief, was a competitive reporter, and the competition for news in Saigon had suddenly become intense by the summer of 1963. With a desk in the AP, Halberstam would be able to pick and choose from Browne’s daily report, and overhear talk about exclusive or investigative dispatches that he and his staff worked hard to produce. Besides, they were different cats. Halberstam was big and noisy and craved company after work. His dispatches ran on and on. Browne was cool and reserved. He holed up in the apartment above the bureau and delighted in vinyl records of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Browne harped sharply, cablese pidgin for writing tautly, the hallmark of the wire service copy. Halberstam had already become a pain for Browne. The New York Times reporter used his boundless energy and his newspaper’s influence to gather information that AP did not have. That would produce rockets from New York and Tokyo demanding Browne match Halberstam’s efforts. Browne loathed these callbacks, as they were known. They implied the AP bureau was falling down on the job.
In fact, Browne was on top of the story that would put Saigon at center stage. It began May 9, with an innocuous announcement from the Gia Long Palace rathole: There would be a press conference to discuss the May 8 killing of eight Buddhists by the Viet Cong in Hue. Halberstam got the palace alert but kissed it off and left Saigon for a monthlong vacation. Leave it to the wires. Halberstam then missed the beginning of the end of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Events in Hue, four hundred miles north of Saigon, united his enemies—in Saigon and Washington—who wanted to end his rule.
It started with a dispute between Buddhists and Catholics, something familiar on the banks of the Perfume River in the old capital of Hue. Diem had been born there, one of six sons of Ngo Dinh Kha. Religious persecution had almost killed Diem’s father. By chance, Kha was studying abroad when rampaging Buddhists herded more than a hundred members of the Ngo clan into a church and set it afire. It was part of an anti-Catholic, anti-French movement that the royal government initiated as Paris increased control of Indochina at the close of the nineteenth century. As the French colonial masters were despised, so was its imported religion. Buddhism, its adherents argued, was the rightful and traditional belief of Vietnam.
Diem was sensitive to religious preferences. Although a devout Roman Catholic, Diem also had a streak of Confucian beliefs. Along with most in South Vietnam, Diem adhered to Confucius’s dedication to religious tolerance. His government was generous with funds to construct Buddhist pagodas throughout South Vietnam. He appointed Buddhists to key government positions. But his government was top-heavy with Catholics. One reason was education. The French legacy of Catholic schools in Vietnamese cities meant Catholics were the best educated, the best qualified. While the schools were open to everyone, Catholic children were most likely to end up in universities in Saigon and Paris.
A week before the Buddhist uproar, Diem could almost see it coming. He was in Hue for ceremonies honoring his brother, Ngo Dinh Thuc, the archbishop of Hue. As the oldest living brother, Thuc by tradition dictated to Diem on family and religious matters. Also attending was another brother, Ngo Dinh Can, the governor of Hue and the region. Can lived with their mother in the old family home in Hue. Can and Thuc had lined the streets of Hue with the gold-and-white banners of the Catholic church. It was a violation of a rarely enforced law, and Diem became irritated. He knew it could inflame old wounds. Flags were permitted in the church or on pagoda grounds but not outside. Diem complained to Can and said the religious flags should be limited in the future. A week later, to celebrate Buddha’s 2,587th birthday, Hue’s Buddhists planned to outdo Archbishop Thuc with their own multicolored banners. When the police said no, the passive, peace-loving Buddhists turned into a mob angry over the double standard. They defied water cannons used at one demonstration. Another protest by 3,000 Buddhist supporters at the Hue radio station demanded their local leader, Thich (the Reverend) Tri Quang, be permitted to broadcast his objections.
Tri Quang was a leader in the New Buddhism movement that began in 1950. The World Buddhist fellowship wanted monks to be more socially and politically active instead of restricting their lives to incense and chanting in the pagoda. To Tri Quang, that meant removing the Roman Catholic president in favor of a Buddhist and Buddhism as the national religion.
Police and army soldiers confronted the protestors. It was never certain what happened next. But police gunfire and explosions killed one woman and six children. A seventh child was run over by an armored vehicle. In Saigon the next day, Diem’s spokesman blamed Viet Cong agents. Another demonstration in Hue sent fifty-four Buddhists to the hospital. Brothers Can and Thuc clearly lost control in Hue. A month later, Diem lost control in Saigon.
In their saffron robes Buddhists from all over the country swarmed into the capital to protest Diem’s policies in Hue. The Western press considered this a case of religious persecution of the country’s Buddhist religion by a dictator who was a member of the Catholic religion. New York Times reporter Halberstam and other Western journalists reported—erroneously—that Buddhists accounted for 70 to 80 percent of the population. That off-repeated “fact” meant that Diem was conducting a nationwide crackdown on almost everyone in South Vietnam. At his post in Paris, ex-ambassador Durbrow was outraged by Halberstam’s reporting, even though he had no love for Diem. Durbrow saw Diem as dedicated to equal treatment to all religions. “Vietnam is not a Buddhist country, never has been a Buddhist country, and can’t be unless they boot a bunch of them in,” Durbrow said. “About 10 percent were Buddhists. About 10 percent were Catholic. Most of the population, about 40 percent, was a mixture of Confucianism, Taoism, and very few tenets of Buddhism. We had this dirty, mean old Catholic Diem persecuting these nice poor Buddhist people. It was the best bunch of propaganda and undermining operation you can think of.” He complained to the Times bureau in Paris.
In fact, the Vietnamese worshipped ancestors, trees, rocks, and other inanimate objects that might contain spirits. Of the 14 million people in South Vietnam, only about 4 million were practicing Buddhists. Still, throughout the crisis, the New York Times portrayed the Buddhists as accounting for 70 percent of the population. News dispatches from both the AP and the New York Times tempered their accounts with “alleged” and other qualifiers. But in the “he said, she said” reporting for the next month, Diem and his government clearly lost out to Tri Quang. The tiny band of American reporters, resentful of policies by Diem and the American government establishment supporting him, colored their reporting to bolster the Buddhist claims. Public relations were Diem’s weakest suit, and he never did mount a coherent explanation of dedication to religious freedom.
Initially, Tri Quang demanded—and Diem refused—reparations for the families of those killed in Hue and an investigation of soldiers and police under brother Can’s control to single out the culprits. Can wanted a compromise, but Archbishop Thuc told Diem to crack down hard and the Buddhists would come crawling. Tri Quang was a junior member of the General Association of Vietnamese Buddhists. He baffled one American diplomat who approached him in Hue with U.S. concerns. Tri Quang listened and replied, “The sky is blue, but clouds drift across it.” Diem reached out to Buddhist leaders other than Tri Quang. In a previous statement, Diem had pronounced the demonstrators “damn fools,” a view underlined by an official palace statement using the same language. Then the palace issued a call to respect religious freedom.
Where Diem appeared a clumsy and intemperate autocrat, Tri Quang peddled Buddhist persecution with a slick—by Saigon standards—public relations campaign. His base of operations was set up in the heart of Saigon in the Xa Loi Pagoda. The changing banners out in front—in English—all had the same theme. “Down with the Government,” or, the next week, “Destroy the Government.” Nolting, the American ambassador, became convinced that the Viet Cong had infiltrated the ranks of the Buddhists. After all, anyone could shave his head and become a monk. To Nolting, the Buddhists were intent on toppling the Diem government. In fact, in later interviews with U.S. officials, Tri Quang would admit to that goal. Ho Chi Minh had the same goal. To Nolting, religious persecution was overstated, particularly by Halberstam in the New York Times. The press was being manipulated. “They never gave Diem a break,” Nolting said.
Xa Loi Pagoda became a daily stop for newsmen, like police headquarters back home. Inside, the Buddhist nuns wore white. The bonzes were in bright orange. Children shrieked. The smell of boiling cabbage mixed with incense filled the nose. The chanting was backed by gongs and tinkling chimes. It was a step inside the mysterious East. Tri Quang’s press representative was twenty-four, frail, with an ever-present smile. At one point, he did a stint at Yale Divinity School. “Boola, boola” was his greeting to every American reporter. His name was Thich (the Reverend) Duc Nghiep. Western tongues simplified it to Tic Tac Toe. He struggled with English as well. But he was dedicated in alerting by telephone or messenger all reporters, who were filing almost daily dispatches. His promise to writers and photographers was that a monk would soon disembowel himself or set himself on fire to protest Diem’s persecution. One way or another, the press was promised a public suicide. A decade earlier, some Buddhists had immolated themselves to protest French rule, and Buddhists had done the same in China and, more recently, in Tibet. But the idea was new to Saigon reporters. Soon the story started to fade at Xa Loi. Most days were spent following Buddhist marchers chanting as they marched through the inner city. Despite the promises, a suicide was never staged. Some reporters grew weary of Duc Nghiep and his “boola, boola.”
Not Malcolm Browne. He delighted in the delicious vegetarian dishes served to him at Xa Loi. The pagoda was a pleasant rathole compared to the palace or the U.S. embassy, where the occupants were in a constant lather over press treatment of the Buddhist protests. The AP bureau chief was the only American reporter to take seriously Duc Nghiep’s call that something very special and important was going to happen at Xa Loi on the morning of June 11. “He sent the same message to half a dozen other American correspondents, but they all ignored it,” Browne said. “I did not.”
* * *
At 7:45 A.M., Browne arrived with his Petri 35mm, a Japanese camera supplied by the AP. The news photographers carried Nikons, Canons, or Leicas, but Browne was a writer, not a shooter, so he had to make do with AP’s second line, the Petri. It was not the digital point-and-shoot so familiar today, with its crisp color and perfect, computerized exposure. Browne had to focus to make sure the subject was not blurred. The lens opening had to be correct; otherwise the picture would be too dark or too light. Setting the speed of the shutter was crucial for picture sharpness. So much could go wrong. After each picture, Browne had to flick the speed winder to advance the film. It was loaded with Kodak Tri-X, a high-speed black-and-white film. Browne had eight extra rolls. The film needed to be immersed in three chemical baths before negative images could be examined in a dark room.
At Xa Loi, almost five hundred Buddhists had assembled. The heat was suffocating. Incense smoke filled the air. Browne sat next to a large gilded statue of Buddha. Buddhist nuns in tears served Browne tea. The chanting became intense. Duc Nghiep hurried over. “I advise you,” he told Browne, “to stay until the very end.” At eight A.M., a column of marchers formed behind a British-made two-tone Austin sedan that was leading the way. Inside were five monks in saffron robes. At the intersection of two busy streets—Le Van Duyet and Phan Dinh Phung—the Austin stopped. The marchers formed a circle around the car, effectively blocking the intersection. The chanting was hypnotic as it grew louder, faster. The sounds were rising to a crescendo, similar to a moment in one of his favorite operas, Götterdämmerung.
Three monks got out of the Austin. One was old and feeble from fasting. He was assisted to the center of the intersection by two younger monks. They placed a cushion in the center of the street and the old man sat down on it. It was the seventy-three-year-old Thich (the Reverend) Quang Duc. From Duc Nghiep’s earlier promises, Browne had an idea what was going to happen. “A horror show was at hand, I realized, and the sweat started from my brow and I cocked my camera,” Browne said. His watch read 9:20 A.M. From the Austin, two monks lugged a five-gallon plastic container. Browne learned later that it contained gasoline mixed with kerosene to ensure a lasting conflagration. They sloshed a pink fluid over Quang Duc, soaking his face, his body, his orange robes, and the cushion. His legs and arms were folded in the lotus position for meditation.
“I saw Quang Duc strike a match in his lap and let it fall,” Browne said. “Instantly he was enveloped in a column of smoky yellow flame. As the breeze whipped the flames from his face, I could see that although his eyes were closed, his features were contorted with agony.” He was looking at the scene through the viewfinder of his Petri. “Numb with shock, I shot roll after roll, focusing and adjusting exposures mechanically and unconsciously,” Browne said. “Trying hard not to perceive what I was witnessing, I found myself thinking: ‘The sun is bright and the subject is self-illuminated, so f16 and 125th of a second should be right.’”
White-belted police who had been struggling to hold back a sea of orange monks turned to watch the human inferno. More and more monks prostrated themselves before burning Quang Duc. Browne kept shooting and tried to ignore the stench of burning flesh. “But I couldn’t close out the smell.” Chanting gave way to screams and wailing. A banner was unfurled: “A Buddhist Priest Burns for Buddhist Demands,” it said in English.
“It took him eight to ten minutes to die,” Browne said. The flames died away. Smoke and the reek of burning flesh hung over the intersection. Quang Duc pitched over. His legs twitched. Then he was still, his body smoldering. A wood coffin was produced, but his contorted arms and legs would not fit and were sticking out as the coffin was carried away. Browne raced on foot to the AP bureau. The photos would never get past the Saigon censors. He decided to send the unprocessed rolls of exposed film by “pigeon,” meaning a passenger on a regular flight whom you have persuaded to carry a package for you. “The whole trick was to get it to some transmission point,” Browne said. “We used a pigeon to get it as far as Manila. And in Manila, they had apparatus to send it by radio.”
Once on the AP network, Browne’s photos made the world’s jaw drop. Pictures of the blazing Quang Duc were sent to every newspaper, every magazine, every television station everywhere on the globe. Words exchanged between Gia Long Palace and the Xa Loi Pagoda gave way to images of a human who had sacrificed himself. Browne made the dying Quang Duc immortal, an icon of the turmoil that raged on June 11 just as it had in Indochina for centuries. Not everyone realized the import of the moment. But President Ngo Dinh Diem instantly recognized the depth of the wound Quang Duc inflicted. “An undeserved death that made me very sorry,” the president of South Vietnam said in a radio broadcast later that day. There was no scheme to crush Buddhism, Diem said, and noted the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom—a law he promised to enforce by himself.
Few were reassured. Within a week, Diem reversed himself and granted compensation to the families killed in Hue, where the death toll had risen to nine. There were more Diem meetings with Buddhist leaders but not with those from Xa Loi Pagoda. More than ten thousand protestors showed up in Saigon for Quang Duc’s funeral. Younger monks battled briefly with police and fire hoses. The dead bonze’s other robes were sliced into thousands of orange swatches that suddenly could be seen pinned to countless sympathizers all over Saigon. Police officers began ripping off the bits of cloth but quickly gave up trying to suppress the silent protest.
In Washington, the photo of Quang Duc’s immolation outraged Harriman after he saw it on July 11 in the Washington Post and Times Herald. It was time to slap down the defiant president of South Vietnam. Without consulting Kennedy or Rusk, Harriman fired off a cable demanding that Diem accept the Buddhists’ demands. “If Diem does not take prompt and effective steps to reestablish Buddhist confidence in him, we will have to reexamine our entire relationship,” Harriman said in a cable drafted by Roger Hilsman, the assistant secretary of state for the Far East.
Details of the cable were quickly leaked—probably by Harriman—to New York Times reporter Max Frankel. His June 14 dispatch was the first Kennedy knew of the damaging ultimatum to Diem. It was the president’s turn to be angry at Harriman’s usurpation of Kennedy’s prerogatives. “The president was upset that Diem has been threatened with a formal statement of disassociation,” said a White House memo. “He wants to be sure that no further threats are made and no formal statement is made without his own personal approval.”
Kennedy had personally ordered Ambassador Nolting to support Diem without interfering in domestic matters or using threats of cutting off aid. But Nolting was in Greece on vacation. He was confident that conflict with the Buddhists had simmered down enough to permit a long-postponed holiday with his children. He left Saigon on May 23. “I could not have made a worse mistake,” Nolting said.
William Trueheart, his deputy, was left with instructions to contact him if a crisis developed. Nolting checked daily with the U.S. embassy and the CIA station in Athens. There was nothing from Trueheart. Had he been alerted, Nolting was convinced he could have mediated the dispute between Saigon and Washington. Trueheart was listening to Harriman and Hilsman, who has replaced Harriman as assistant secretary of state for the Far East. After a stop in Washington, Nolting finally returned to Saigon on July 10. Trueheart apologized but said he was just too busy to call. Besides, Trueheart said he had become convinced that the war against the communists could not be won with Diem in power.
To Nolting, his deputy’s betrayal was more a case of “drifting with the winds from Washington.” The new American ultimatum to Diem, Nolting knew, came from Harriman, now number three at State. And Nolting believed Harriman ordered Trueheart not to contact him in Greece. Earlier in the year, Harriman sent Nolting a letter saying it was “time to be cultivating the opposition” to Diem. The very same wording was used by others under Harriman’s control. Nolting rebuffed Harriman at the time, noting Kennedy’s orders to create a friendly atmosphere of support for Diem. Now Browne’s photos gave Harriman a new opening.
To Nolting, Harriman was getting back at Diem for his refusal to sign the Laos treaty in 1961. “No doubt I underestimated Harriman’s influence, tenacity, and vindictiveness,” Nolting said, tracing it back to Diem’s confrontation with Harriman two years earlier. “I never envisioned that he would carry his grudge against Diem to the extent he did. Nor did I think that he would develop a grudge against those of us who supported [Diem] as the best available leader.”
The American military commander in Saigon, General Harkins, summed up the change in policy for Nolting. “It looks like the State Department thinks Diem is the enemy rather than the Viet Cong,” Harkins told Nolting.
Halberstam’s report about a possible coup against Diem seemed colored by his own animosity toward the president of South Vietnam. Rumors of coups were a Saigon constant. Halberstam faced some hostile questioning while a guest at the U.S. embassy Fourth of July reception. When it came time for the traditional toast to Diem as the leader of the host nation, Halberstam refused.
“I’d never drink to that son of a bitch,” Halberstam announced loudly. He had inherited his dislike for Diem from his predecessor, Homer Bigart. The celebrated war-horse detested Diem, Saigon, the weather, and the secrecy. “I almost went nuts,” Bigart said of his six-month stint. He was much more comfortable on the battlefields of World War II and Korea. Bigart was a shoe-leather reporter. He would not have missed the burning of Quang Duc. Halberstam slept in on the day in happened. About nine A.M. he and a UPI reporter who was staying at the Times’s Saigon villa were rousted. They ran to the intersection, but the action was pretty much over. Browne, the rathole watcher, was leaving just as they arrived. Neither had a camera.
Next day the Times ran a Halberstam dispatch that led with Diem’s apology. It mentioned Quang Duc’s death lower in the report, but it had none of the horror and drama of that landmark moment. Even so, Long Island University cited his “eyewitness” report on Quang Duc’s death in giving him the 1963 George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting. Browne’s photo lost out to another AP colleague, Roger Asnong, who captured Jack Ruby’s shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald.
The June 11, 1963, edition of the Times also lived up to its nickname of the Grey Lady, a paper that prefers columns of black ink to pictures. The editors refused to run Browne’s picture of Quang Duc. “They said it was not suitable for its breakfast audience,” Browne said. The photo did finally appear in the Times and again in the Washington Post when a group of ministers used Browne’s picture for a full page ad. The ad’s text reflected recurring errors in both papers, saying that Buddhists accounted for 79 percent of the population and that the protest was strictly about religious persecution—not the overthrow of the Diem government.
But the June 27 ads with Browne’s picture were a deep political wound for President Kennedy, the most important supporter of President Ngo Dinh Diem. To William Colby, then overseeing Vietnam at the CIA, Browne’s photograph greased the skids for Diem. “Once the picture appeared, it was all over for the Diem government,” Colby said.