The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of Vietnam.

A deeply-hidden truth, long since forgotten or never really understood, can come to light unexpectedly and change the world, showing official histories for their the shadowy falseness, and revealing through the realization of what was lost, one chance still to recover some bright prospect of what could have been.?

This is happening now through a new book drawing on newly available research that uncovers the truth about Ngo Dinh Diem, legitimately elected (twice) President of South Vietnam, who, though judged an autocrat or tyrant in the U.S. liberal media, was widely recognized by the Vietnamese, even his enemies, as having the Confucian “Mandate of Heaven” or moral legitimacy to rule, because of his irreproachable character, his integrity, his dedication to principles and to Vietnamese culture and nationalism.

The book is, The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of Vietnam, by Geoffrey Shaw. Quotes and the information for this article are taken from the book.

Diem’s overthrow was ordered by President John F. Kennedy for domestic political reasons, in response to a propaganda campaign by the U.S. media fed by the State Department. Diem and his brother Nhu were brutally assassinated by military thugs whom the U.S. empowered to do this. All because Diem would not sacrifice his principles and surrender Vietnamese sovereignty to America as its new colonial master.

Perhaps the cruelest irony of this heart-breaking tale of betrayal was that Diem’s policies were winning the war against against the communist insurgency. His overthrow gave the communists a victory they would not have had if America had simply honored its commitment to Diem and stayed with his policies. 57,000 U.S. lives were lost, along with lives of millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians. A beautiful country with profounds hopes was defiled. Our country was permanently divided, and the hold that propaganda has on governance continued to grow.

America did not honor its promises to Diem because America was turning into an Empire ruled by propagandists who loved power more than our founding principles and demanded submission by those we helped; men who felt they were godlike, and could remake other nations in their own image. And they still do.

We need to understand who Ngo Dinh Diem was, because there are so few like him today. That is our tragedy.

Diem’s Heritage and Education

Diem was a member of one of the great families of Vietnam, and “by tradition, by capacity, and a thoroughly Confucian sense of duty”, it was proper for members of that family to take their place among the mandarins of the Imperial Court. Diem’s father, Ngo Dinh Kha, was the court minister of Rites and the grand chamberlain to the emperor. He was a devout Roman Catholic who also embraced the teachings of Confucius, one of the few Vietnamese of his generation to be educated both in Vietnam and in a foreign country (Malaya),he directed his sons, particularly Diem and Nhu, to gain both a western and Vietnamese education...?

“There was a political dimension to Diem’s education, upon which his father had substantial influence. His father hosted all manner of Vietnamese leaders in the family home, including emperor Thanh Tai and Emperor Duy Tan, as well as many other powerful men who came?to garner Ngo Dinh Kha’s support or to seek his advice. It was Diem’s good fortune to have discussed current events with these leaders during his formative years. When many Vietnamese nationalists were debating whether to overthrow French colonial rule, and when this subject was approached at home, Diem’s father was unshakable in his opposition to violence or bloodshed. He stressed that revolution must come only through education. When the Vietnamese people were ready to look after their affairs, he argued, Vietnam would gain its independence from France naturally, with no need for killing. The impact of the schooling in politics at his father's knee was profound; for when Diem was President of South Vietnam and hard-pressed by his American Allies to ramp up the physical destruction of the Viet Cong ( VC), Diem would express a visceral reaction against the very idea of killing his fellow Vietnamese. A good friend of the Ngo Dinh family, Andre Nguyen Van Chau, recalled the gentleness of Diem’s character when he noted that the man never liked being harsh with anyone. Douglas Pike, a leading American authority on the Viet Cong concurred with Van Chau’s assessment that Diem, despite the portrait drawn by his critics, was not a violent man, nor even an authoritarian type.”

Diem attended the National College, an institution established by his father so that the Vietnamese mandarins could be introduced to Western thought. He gained such high marks in the final examination that the French offered him a scholarship to attend University in Paris. But Diem’s great desire was to serve the Vietnamese people, and he turned down the French offer, choosing instead to stay in Vietnam. He continued to excel academically. In 1921 he graduated at the top of his class in the French run School for Law and Administration in Hanoi.

When the Japanese conquered Indochina, Diem urged them to grant Vietnam’s independence, for which the French Vichy government put him on its “most wanted” list. The Japanese offered Diem the Prime Ministership of their government, and he refused.?After WWII, when French rule was reimposed, with U.S. backing, Diem published a newspaper arguing for dominion status for Vietnam, and the French shut it down, jailing and killing its editors. When the French reinstated the exiled emperor, under colonial rule, the emperor offered Diem the Prime Minster position. Again he refused.?

In political exile, Diem travelled to Hanoi to warn about the threat of Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh. Diem and his youngest brother were captured by the Viet Minh, and the young brother was killed; buried alive. Diem was brought before Ho Chi Minh, who interrogated him. Ho Chi Minh was so impressed by Diem that he offered Diem a high position. Diem refused, saying that he would never work for his brother’s murders. Incredibly, Ho Chi Minh let Diem go.

Diem’s Catholicism and Confucianism vs. American Liberalism

“During his studies, Diem became increasingly aware that Catholicism and Confucianism had many similarities, including a shared understanding of ethics. As a result, Diem would think and move in a way that was almost incomprehensible to the secular-minded and politically expedient Americans with whom he would later collaborate. A modern western or American policy perspective asserts that individual rights and the freedom to pursue personal happiness are paramount, almost to the exclusion of every other consideration. Diem, however, believed that the individual needed to submit his will and talents to the greater good of the family, the community, and the nation. [“Ask not what your country can do for you…”] In his political philosophy, the individual did not have a right to political activity that threatened the downfall of a legitimate government. Diem’s Catholic faith and Confucian principles were so robustly integrated as to make his political philosophy all but impermeable to contrary argument.”

“Catholicism and Confucianism both stress that the well-being of the family is the most important social responsibility of a people and their rulers. Diem never lost sight of this responsibility, even as the modern world threatened to destroy traditional Vietnamese culture. This seems to be the area where Diem's soul burned with a righteous fire: he lamented that the faith and the family life of his countrymen had diminished under French rule. When he became president, Buddhism, for example, was in such decline that it seemed like a discard from a bygone era. This loss grieved Diem, and during his presidency he appropriated government funds for the restoration of Buddhist places of worship. In effect, Diem was a true conservative: he wanted to conserve the traditional Vietnamese way of life. First and foremost, he wanted to restore the family to its Confucian status as the legal personality and the responsible entity within the village community…. As it would turn out, Diem's sturdy emphasis on religious familial, and social duties placed a spiritual, moral, and intellectual gulf between him and the many of his American advisors, the latter finding this an extremely difficult chasm to cross…”

“Diem’s firm Catholic faith was buttressed by another significant character trait that had a profound appeal to the Confucianist soul of Vietnamese society: asceticism. He led a disciplined life, and this was something the Vietnamese people revered because they believed that the quality of a man was determined by his ability to withstand hardship. Diem's scholarly, monk-like personality made him far more attractive to the Vietnamese people as a leader than, for example, a Western styled, big-toothed, glad-handing, baby-kissing politician. Yet it was this very model that many American advisors tried to push on Diem.”

“There is another reason Diem found favor with the Vietnamese people. As the Vietnamese writer Tran Van Dinh explained, according to Confucian ethics and Taoist concepts of harmony and universal order, those who seek wealth to the near exclusion of all else and attain it are held in low regard. Their motives are suspect, and consequently, so is their morality. even the name for them is derogatory: troc phu, which translates as “filthy rich”. As was expected of a mandarin, Diem and his family had nothing to do with chasing money, and this also may have had some bearing on why, later in his career, Diem did not take a liking to W, Averell Harriman, celebrated scion of American high society who became one of President Kennedy's most influential foreign policy advisors. Opposite the troc phu is the thanh ban, or the learned “immaculate poor”; thus the impecunious scholar had social appeal in Confucian Vietnamese Society. Ho Chi Minh did his level best to appear as thanh ban, to the average Vietnamese, because he knew he would be judged by them according to the Vietnamese Confucian ideas of a good leader. Ho, however, was a bit disingenuous about his image, whereas Diem was the genuine article by birth and training.”

“In nearly every meaningful way, traditional Vietnamese Society had values that were diametrically opposed to those of modern secular Western societies, particularly the United states. The Vietnamese social order, from top to bottom, looks something like this: at the top where the si, or scholars, men of letters like Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu; second down the scale could be found the nong, or peasant farmers; the next lower echelon was occupied by the cong, or workers; considerably farther down in esteem were the thuong, or the businessman and merchants; and finally, last in the Confucian Vietnamese order were the binh, or soldiers, who like modern day sanitation workers were seen as doing a necessary but dirty job. The low standing of soldiers in Vietnamese Society explains why the Washington backed coup against Diem was doomed to failure, because it replaced a si with a group of binh... Political legitimacy, in the form of the Confucian Mandate of Heaven, could never rest upon a military regime.”

President of the Republic.

Diem was the George Washington of the Republic of Vietnam, the father of his small country. The fist years of his presidency, ’55-’58, where the only hears of peace and freedom that his country had known for two centuries. With prosperity and stability returning to the countryside, the communists fought back with a campaign of terror, assassinating over 1,000 village chiefs a year, and to keep students our the the government’s schools, they killed over 20,000 children.

Diem sought American help, and he sought advice from the British expert who had conducted a successful counterinsurgency program in Malaya. The result was the Strategic Hamlet program, which coalesced scattered villages into defensible hamlets, with an emphasis on policing forces, led by the villages, and supported by small military presences on the peripheries. This strategy was working.?

The American military command assumed that Vietnam was like Korea, and that they should mass troops and capture territory. The American measure of success was body counts, dead vet cong. Diem’s metric was viet cong defections, returning to work in their villages. Diem’s vision was that Vietnam could be unified when finally freed from colonial rule. So he resisted any American actions that would make him seem like an American puppet.

Ugly Americanism - Averrell Harriman and the New York Times

The Ugly American was a fictional book published in 1958 that depicted the failure of U.S. diplomacy in Southeast Asia due to American arrogance and deliberate insensitivity to local language, culture, and customs. When President Kennedy came into office, he gave copies of the book to every Senator. He should have given them to his Cabinet and spoken about it to the Press. His administration played out the script of the book to tragic effect; the key actor in this was W. Averrell Harriman

“Son of a railroad baron, Harriman was well established and well known in Elite American society. Having held one important political position after another, including US Secretary of Commerce and ambassador to the Soviet Union. He wielded considerable political power. When in late 1961 President Kennedy made Harriman his assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern affairs, he described him as a man who had held ‘probably as many important jobs as any American in our history, with the possible exception of John Quincy Adams’.”

The combination of Harriman's long, prestigious political career and his financial backing of Kennedy's presidential campaign made him a key figure in the Kennedy administration. As Harriman was reinserting himself into Washington politics, after serving as governor of New York from 1955 to 1958. He saw settling the Laos question as his ticket to influence in the?corridors of American power, and he believed his pals in the Soviet Union would make a deal with him. “… according to [U.S.] Ambassador [to Vietnam, Frederick] Nolting, ‘Harriman told me he based his confidence in the Soviets on his expert fingertips feeling.’ Nolting replied that his fingertips told him just the reverse.”

“Harriman became known as ‘the old crocodile’ around Washington. Harriman liked the moniker, and the reputation that went with it, and used it as his code name for some DOS [Department of State] correspondence.”

Through the force of his remarkable will and skills, Harriman forged an agreement on Laotian neutrality.

“Regardless of his triumph in getting the Soviets to sign the Declaration of Neutrality, in his haste to prove himself to Kennedy, Harriman had overlooked the fact that signatures on a piece of paper are one thing while the reality on the ground is quite another… Laotian neutrality was a catastrophe for Southeast Asia. He attributed the failure of the Laos agreement not to its inherent flaws, of which he was the architect, but to unexpected intransigence on the part of the Laotians and North Vietnamese.”

Through his friendship with Robert Kennedy, Harriman was able to convince President Kennedy that ICC oversight of the treaty, which was opposed by Laos and North Vietnam, could be waived off.

Thus, Harriman proved his clout both inside and outside the Kennedy administration.''He had a political and social constituency that spanned decades and stretched around the world. when it suited him, he could ignore bureaucratic protocol and use his personal channels into far-flung governments, not to mention the White House and the inner Circles of Kennedy's advisers." In the future, rather than quarrel with Harriman, leading DOS officials accepted that I get on board with his policy initiatives or to look the other way while he proceeded with his course of action, although some of these later dubbed the Ho Chi Minh trail the Averell Harriman Memorial Highway.”

“Before the Declaration of neutrality was signed, the Harriman/Nolting dispute spilled into the American Press. In a newspaper interview, Nolting said that he told Harriman he could not support the agreement in good conscience because it was immoral for the US government to break promises it had made to president Diem. According to Nolting, Herriman asserted that “they were not working for God but for the Kennedy administration.”

“And Harriman bullied the President of South Vietnam to override his better judgment. After Harriman won the Russians acceptance of the agreement he met with President Diem in Saigon to demand that he sign it. As Nolting recalled,”Harriman had a long talk with President Diem and rather forcefully told him that he'd better sign it despite president Diem's well-founded misgivings. And this was a rather rugged interview between the two of them. While in that first meeting with Diem, Harriman turned off his hearing aid and dozed while the South Vietnamese president explained that the communists could not be trusted, listing all of the nefarious ways they had already behaved. An American Embassy official took Harriman’s behavior as calculated rudeness to demonstrate his disdain for Diem.”

“As the failure of the policy became more and more apparent, an ever widening gulf grew between Harriman and his DOS faction on one side and Diem, Nolting, and their DOS and DOD supporters on the other side. The foundation for the tragic ending of American involvement in Vietnam therefore was the Laotian agreement.”

The War was being Won

The proof of the substantial gains of the GVN was clear to the experts in the spring of 1963. As Robert Thompson [British counter-insurgency expert] reported, “Now in March 1963, I can say, and in this I am supported by all members of the mission, that the government is beginning to win the shooting war against the viet cong.”?Two months later, Secretary McNamara reported that the overall situation in Vietnam was improving: ”In the military sector of the counter insurgency, we are winning.”

The Harriman group was not content with these military successes however because the Diem government was still far from the western style democracy demanded by the idealists in the Kennedy administration, the press, and the misled American public. Nolting later said that the group's insistence on government reform was the greatest blunder of the Kennedy administration. ”The error was its refusal to understand that the elected constitutional government of Vietnam was the best available. If we were to help South Vietnam survive at all, the only available vehicle that could sustain the country was the government that had been in power for 8 years (after two elections).”

Press Propaganda

“The role of the American Press in focusing the Kennedy administration on Diem's government cannot be overstated. Historian George Herring recorded the successes of the CIP [Counter Insurgency Program] in South Vietnam between 1961 and 1962. He also noted, however, that the young news reporters of the American Press Corps in Saigon placed an entirely different story before the American public. In their version, they did to President Diem what American reporter Theodore White had done to President Chiang Kai-Shek of Taiwan.. The comparison of the media's treatment of President Diem with White's treatment of General Chiang was also made by Clare Boothe Luce, who observed that both storylines included the obligatory Dragon Lady…. In an ad in the New York Times just before Diem’s murder, the former Ambassador and congresswoman asked the following rhetorical question about South Vietnam. “Is the history of the liberal press in Chung King and Havana going to repeat itself?” She answered: “The evidence is that it is.”

“During this period, Nolting stumbled upon a little known fact: at least one American reporter in South Vietnam regarded the country as a career backwater and was looking for a sensational story to provide him with a star exit.”

“On one occasion, when President Diem was dragging his whole entourage around on one of his quick-paced long-distance marches to inspect all manner of crops and fish ponds while talking with the local farmers, New York Times Reporter Homer Bigart made his discomfort more than clear to Nolting.?As Nolting recalled, the day was hot and humid and everyone had trouble keeping up with Diem, who seemed to come alive on these occasions when he could, as in his happier times as a village and then a provincial chief, be directly involved in the projects improving the lives of his people. Bigart however ”was furious with the whole setup.”?He seemed not to realize that Diem’s passion for solving the practical problems confronting the farmers was not feigned for the benefit of reporters or other onlookers.”

Diem was going to expel Bigart, but Nolting persuaded him not to. “The very next day Bigart called Nolting and accused him of ruining his newsworthy expulsion from Vietnam.”

“David Halberstam soon replaced Bigart. Within a few weeks Halberstam became the leader of the ‘get Diem’ press group in Saigon… Halberstam’s considerable writing talent enhanced his influence. Nolting reported that, “Beginning like drops of acid, his reports steadily condition the climate of American opinion. I suspect that Halberstam may have been catering to the Times editorial line. He was, I think, influenced by his bosses and they by his reports, creating a crescendo of anti-Diem propaganda.”?Later in August 1963, Nolting’s suspicions that Halberstam was catering to New York Times editorial bias were reinforced. He received reports from a trusted colleague that Halberstam had been seen at The Caravelle bar (a popular place for American reporters to congregate) proudly displaying a telegram from his newspaper in New York, and the substance was “Good going. Keep it up. State Department is beginning to see it our way.””

Arthur Schlesinger Jr quoted Halberstam who wrote that the US Embassy had “turned into an adjunct of a dictatorship” and that the Strategic Hamlet program “was a fake and a failure”. The reporter took the moral high ground for himself and his colleagues, according to Schlesinger. Halberstam had said, “We are representatives of free society and we weren't going to surrender our principles to the narrow notions of a closed society.”

When Halberstam talks of “principles” that he wouldn’t surrender, the term has no meaning in common with the moral principles that animated the character of Ngo Dinh Diem. Halberstam was a consummate liar and propagandist. This was not principle, as the rest of his quote makes clear. It was an arrogant belief in his superiority, unconnected to moral character, and that excused him to commit crimes against humanity, because he was a “representative” of a culture that justifies atrocities against a society deemed to have “narrow notions.

“All of this carefully groomed pessimism acquired a weight of its own, and it became the foundation upon which Harriman was able to build the case and to marshal the forces for Diem’s removal. Nolting argued right up to and after the murders of Diem and knew that it would be better for the United States to walk away from Vietnam than to breach its promise made to an ally.”

Propaganda destroys a country

Two streams of propaganda, from the communists and the Times, combined to bring the Kennedy administration to breach that promise. A group of radical Buddhist monks, opposed to all modernization and guided (as suspected by a U.S. general and confirmed after the war) by North Vietnam, launched protests that included a monk immolating himself. Western reporters had been invited to photograph the event, and the photo and stories made headlines across the U.S. This was during the height of the civil rights movement, and the press portrayed this as a protest against oppression. That wasn’t the case. Pres. Diem was working diligently with Buddhist leaders to build reconciliation. The countryside and the war effort were unaffected by the protests.?But that’s not what mattered to the American media.

An actual journalist reporting on Vietnam, Margaret Higgins, recalled later, “And thus is history recast. All those Vietnamese-speaking Americans circling the countryside for the purpose of testing Vietnamese opinion; all those American officers gauging the morale of the troops; all those C.I.A. agents tapping their sources (hopefully) everywhere, all those dispatches from Ambassador Nolting -–an army of data-– collectors in reasonable agreement had been downgraded in favor of press dispatches stating opposite conclusions. It was the first time that I began to comprehend, in depth and in some sorrow, what was meant by the power of the press.”

Anne Blair, another American woman reporting on her research of the situation, saw, as Clare Booth Luce and Margaret Higgins had, the real meaning of what the press had done in Vietnam. “She identified the power of the Halberstam-Sheehan group of reporters?to draw attention to and amplify the Buddhist crisis at Kennedy's political expense. She highlighted the fact that Halberstam, Sheehan, and other reporters had made clear their support for a coup. in Blair’s assessment, Kennedy was so driven by domestic concerns related to bad publicity over Diem in South Vietnam that he made himself prey to a flawed and inexpert group headed by the powerful Averrell Harriman. In turn, these domestic concerns prevented him from seeing or hearing what the most experienced Southeast Asian experts were saying: stay the course with Diem.”

Blair wrote, “By their own admission, they [reporters] had taken up the story of a developing dispute between Diem and various Buddhist groups as a vehicle for writing about the political situation in South Vietnam with the quite conscious motive of promoting a coup against Diem. The Halberstam-Sheehan group made the Buddhist crisis story their own; their copy was the basis for almost all the reports that appeared in major American daily newspapers and weekly magazines such as Time and Newsweek. The group's promotion of the story put Vietnam on front pages for several weeks, prompting many editorials and reader's letters abhorring U.S. support for Diem. This development threatened to open up public debate on the conduct of the war that Kennedy wished to avoid.”?

There should be a special category of Nuremberg Trials for reporters. If the First Amendment does not protect shouting “Fire” in a crowed theatre when there is no fire, how does it protect orchestrating with malice aforethought the overthrow of a sovereign government, our ally, that had established its legitimacy with it own people, when the result is a bloodbath?

Coup d’Etat

The coup was launched on Nov. 1, 1963, while troops supporting Diem were dispersed in the countryside fighting the war. Diem and his brother Nhu escaped from the Presidential Palace before the coup troops arrived. They were found the next morning, after attending Mass at St. Francis Xavier church (Diem’s daily practice). They were standing outside the church in a Grotto of Our Lady. They were arrested, rushing into an armored personnel carrier, and brutally murdered.

The coup leaders could not form a stable government, and the road was clear for America to take over the war, where they would be widely seen as the invading murderers of Vietnam’s legitimate president.

What conclusions should we draw from the story of the American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem? I suggest these:

Propaganda is an agency of evil, enabling bad actors and then protecting them from the consequences of their crimes and failures.

When Pres. Kennedy’s political future was on the line, he was not working for God; he was working for himself. And yet, three weeks later, Kennedy himself was killed. It was all for nothing.?

Diem did not lose the Mandate of Heaven. Americans did. In fact, the Mandate of Heaven itself was why Diem was killed. He would not surrender his principles or the policies that were saving his people, their culture, their traditions, their sovereignty; he would not betray all that he believed in and worked for, even if it cost him his life.This moral intransigence was intolerable to the propagandists’ machinations of power, their pride, and the belief in their superiority.?

The agency of evil falls hardest on the good. It is up to us to preserve their memory unstained and to shine a light on true moral legitimacy, the Mandate of Heaven, without which everything falls into desolation.

Profound thanks to Geoffrey Shaw for giving us The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of Vietnam. Highly recommend.