battle erupted between the South Vietnamese army and the Binh Xuyen. Six hours after Dulles demanded that Diem should be put down, he hastily rescinded his cable: the issue remained in abeyance through a miniature civil war in which five hundred Vietnamese died. At the end of May the government’s forces emerged victorious: Bay Vien was obliged to flee into exile, becoming a permanent guest of his French sponsors. The Americans decided that Diem had more about him than previously thought, and clasped him in a mawkishly warm embrace. Senator Hubert Humphrey, a prime mover in the influential lobby group American Friends of Vietnam, declared that the South’s leader was ‘honest, wholesome and honourable’. Henry Luce wrote in Life: ‘Every son, daughter or even distant admirer of the American Revolution should be overjoyed [by the defeat of the Binh Xuyen] and learn to shout “Hurray for Ngo Dinh Diem!”’
In October 1956 Diem, unwilling to hold elections that the communists would almost certainly win, instead staged a referendum which deposed Bao Dai and installed himself as South Vietnam’s president and head of state. Lansdale claimed credit for a characteristic stunt – printing Diem’s ballots in red, a lucky colour in Vietnamese eyes, and those of Bao Dai in green, a colour of misfortune. Diem secured a mandate with a preposterous 98.2 per cent of the vote, a majority that even a Soviet candidate might have thought excessive. In Washington, Dulles said: ‘[South] Vietnam is now a free nation. It is not a puppet.’ Yet Diem’s state depended for its existence upon dumper-truckloads of dollars. If there was no viable North Vietnamese economy, nor was there much of a Southern one – instead, a massive trade deficit and a flood of imports funded by the Americans. Vietnamese began to quote the cynical old French saying: ‘Turn Catholic and have rice to eat.’ Nguyen Van Thieu, later president, was among those who heeded this advice, converting from Buddhism in 1958. Aid soared from just $US1 million in 1954 to $322 million a year later, and continued to rise thereafter – more cash per capita than Washington provided to any other nation in the world except Korea and Laos. Paul Kattenberg of the State Department made the imaginative proposal that the US should offer North Vietnam a bribe of $500 million to ‘repair war damage’ – in truth, to leave the South alone. Such a payment, urged Kattenberg, offered a cheaper alternative to funding Diem.
Nobody in Washington was interested, however. Cash poured into Saigon’s coffers, to be spent at the almost absolute discretion of the president’s generals and officials, a formula for waste and corruption. Securing a government import permit opened the tap to a fortune. Some of the urban middle-class prospered mightily from the inflow of cash and commodities: many of the new rich were former Northern exiles who made good – or, perhaps, made bad – in the South. Under the capitalist system, it seemed that only peasants need commit to honest toil: Saigon experienced a surge of bubble prosperity.
3 BOOM TIME
In the late 1950s, the Southern capital still possessed a colonial elegance tinged with Oriental decadence that delighted Westerners. New arrivals were moved to ecstasies by glimpsing Vietnamese girls in ao dai gowns – or better still, out of them. Literate foreigners recalled a Graham Greene line: ‘To take an Annamite to bed with you is like taking a bird: they twitter and sing on your pillow.’ Most Westerners’ sexual couplings were conducted with professionals, while middle-class Vietnamese sustained notably innocent social lives, in which few advanced beyond hand-holding in advance of their arranged marriages. Nguyen Cao Ky, who later became well-known for the range of his wives and lovers, asserted that when he travelled to France as a twenty-one-year-old pilot trainee, like almost all his contemporaries he was a virgin.
Respectable Vietnamese called girls who associated with round-eyes ‘Me My’, a term only marginally less contemptuous than branding them as hookers. Families exercised rigorous social discipline over their offspring of both sexes. Truong Nhu Tang’s father directed his six sons towards appointed careers as doctor, pharmacist, banker, engineer, engineer, engineer. Tang indeed pursued pharmacological studies until he decided that instead he wished to be a revolutionary: ‘Each Sunday we would gather at my grandfather’s house to listen as he taught us the precepts of Confucian ethics. He would remind us of our duty to live virtuous lives, of personal rectitude and filial piety. And he would talk about the cardinal ethical principles: nhon, nghia le, tri, tin – benevolence, duty, propriety, conscience and fidelity … For boys especially, he would tell us, there are two unshakable necessities: protection of family honour and loyalty to the country. We would sing together the morality verses that we all knew by heart: “Cong cha nhu nui Thai Son” – “Your father’s sacrifice in raising you climbs as high as Thai Son Mountain/Your mother’s love and care are ever-flowing streams.”’
The young Hanoi exile Nguyen Thi Chinh’s life took a new twist one day in 1956, when this beautiful young woman met Joseph Mankiewicz, who was in Saigon to shoot the movie of The Quiet American. He asked her to test for the role of Phuong, the Vietnamese girl who is the lover first of Fowler, a British journalist, then of the CIA man Alden Pyle. Chinh was thrilled: her new husband, an army officer, was training in the US. In his absence, propriety obliged her instead to seek consent from her mother-in-law, who rejected with horror the notion of an actress in the family. Only in the following year did Chinh’s movie career get started, when she took a role in a Vietnamese movie which secured the approval of her husband’s family – as a Buddhist nun.
Thereafter, she found herself starring in successive films, twenty-two in all, with such titles as A Yank in Vietnam and Operation CIA. She filmed all over South-East Asia and became a famous and indeed worshipped woman in her own country. For all her success, however, the tragedy of her family’s split, absolute ignorance of the fate of those in the North, never faded from her consciousness: ‘War is my enemy. Without it, what a wonderful life I could have had.’ As for Mankiewicz’s film, Col. Lansdale – who was wrongly supposed to be the original of Greene’s anti-hero, attended a gala screening in Washington and praised the movie to the sky. Nobody else did: Audie Murphy played the quiet American as a wholesome good guy, and the author deplored the sanitisation of his cynical novel.
Though much American money was stolen or wasted, some of the huge aid infusion, together with a respite from war, brought happy times to the Mekong delta in the later 1950s. A peasant said, ‘I regarded this period as something from a fairy tale; I was carefree and enjoyed my youth.’ Communist Party membership declined dramatically. There was rice in the fields, fruit in the orchards, pigs snuffling around the yards, fish in village ponds. Wooden houses increasingly replaced huts. Some peasants acquired a little furniture; many bought bicycles and radios; children attended schools. The first motorised sampans and water pumps began to modernise agriculture.
Yet those at the bottom of the heap failed to benefit. There was an absence of generosity about the Southern political system, mirroring that in the North, though at first less tinged with blood. Landowners returned to claim their rights in villages from which they had been expelled by the Vietminh, and even tried to collect back rent. Diem became progressively more authoritarian: Tran Kim Tuyen, chief of his intelligence service SEPES, stood less than five feet tall and weighed only a hundred pounds, but was notorious as one of the most ruthless killers in Asia. The president never wavered in rejecting any liability to conduct elections. On this, he could make a fair case: his government had never been party to the Geneva Accords, and no matching poll held in the North would be free or fair.
Moreover, Americans and some Europeans viewed South Vietnam in the context of other US client nations. Regimes survived, and even prospered, that were notably more unpleasant than Diem’s. The brutality and corruption of South Korean dictator Syngman Rhee had proved no impediment to his continuing rule. President Ramon Magsaysay of the Philippines employed ruthless methods to triumph over the Huks. The communist threat to Greece had finally been crushed, with shocking savageries by both sides. Few of Latin America’s dictators ran their countries with any pretence of honesty, justice or humanity, yet they continued to enjoy Washington’s favour.
Thus, in the late 1950s, Americans saw no reason to suppose that the
