The Road Not Taken Read online

  Diem tried to conciliate his Buddhist opponents by guaranteeing them freedom to practice their religion, but he was undermined by the obduracy of the Buddhist hard-liners and of his own brother and sister-in-law. Ngo Dinh Nhu and his wife were convinced, wrongly, that the Buddhist movement was directed by Communist agents,5 and they were determined to crush the protests by force. Madame Nhu’s contemptuous references to the bonze’s “barbecue” only exacerbated the confrontation.6 Adopting the harder line urged by his brother, Diem dispatched his security forces to raid thirty pagodas—out of nearly five thousand in the entire country—that were centers of resistance to his rule. The raids, on the night of August 20–21, led to hundreds of arrests, and they sparked outrage in official American circles. The Kennedy administration, dominated by its own family nexus consisting of the president and the attorney general, wanted Diem to reconcile with the Buddhists, not to confront them—to release all political prisoners, not to round up more of them.

  This was the post–World War II era in which the United States, newly emerged as a superpower and embroiled in a high-stakes Cold War, did not long tolerate trouble from small states, whether allies or enemies, without trying to change their leaders, preferably through the use of cloak-and-dagger covert action. The Eisenhower administration had notoriously connived at coups in both Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) and, less successfully, in Congo, Iraq, and Indonesia. John F. Kennedy would try to topple Fidel Castro in Cuba, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Now many of the president’s aides had decided that, with his opposition to the Buddhist movement, Diem had made himself a liability in the struggle for freedom. Ironically, they placed their confidence in the South Vietnamese generals who thought that he had been too soft, rather than too hard, on the Buddhists.

  LATE IN the day on Saturday, August 24, 1963, the newly arrived American ambassador in Saigon received an “eyes only” cable from Washington—one of the rare diplomatic messages that can change history. “The US Government cannot tolerate situation in which power lies in Nhu’s hands,” it said. “Diem must be given chance to rid himself of Nhu and his coterie and replace them with best military and political personalities available. If, in spite of all of your efforts, Diem remains obdurate and refuses, then we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved.” The cable concluded by granting the ambassador wide latitude to instigate a coup: “You will understand that we cannot from Washington give you detailed instructions as to how this operation should proceed, but you will also know we will back you to the hilt on actions you take to achieve our objectives.”7

  This controversial communiqué had been instigated by an anti-Diem clique at the National Security Council and State Department while President Kennedy and other senior administration officials were away from Washington. On this lazy late-summer weekend, the president, reached at his retreat in Hyannis Port, approved the cable with little debate despite the earlier misgivings of the CIA director, the secretary of defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others, who were out of touch and not consulted.

  The cable’s message, however controversial and ultimately counterproductive, found a receptive audience in the stately personage of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., a patrician New Englander who was a former senator, United Nations ambassador, and Republican vice presidential nominee. On August 22, just a day after the pagoda raids, he had landed at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport8 to assume the duties of American ambassador at the personal request of his fellow Bostonian (and old political rival) who now occupied the Oval Office. Lodge arrived with his own entourage of journalists and an anti-Diem bias that was only reinforced by the latest crackdown on Buddhist critics.

  Far from querying this suggestion to overthrow an allied head of state, Lodge avidly embraced his new role as kingmaker. It was, in fact, a role that he had previously played in American politics as one of the Republican paladins who had persuaded General Dwight D. Eisenhower to seek the presidency in 1952. Lodge had then served as Ike’s campaign manager. Having successfully changed America’s course, Lodge thought it would be child’s play to do the same in the small country—a backward and primitive place, he clearly thought—where he was now posted as the representative of a superpower. Lodge’s “frequently pinched nostrils made it seem as if he were constantly smelling something rotten,” an American visitor later wrote, and Lodge did not hesitate to clean up the malodorous situation he had now discovered.9 He cabled back, “Believe that chances of Diem’s meeting our demands are virtually nil. . . . Therefore propose to go straight to general with our demands, without informing Diem.”10 The State Department assented to his suggestion. A few days later, he added, “We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: The overthrow of the Diem government.”11

  Lodge was disappointed to learn, however, that for all his encouragement, the generals were not yet up to the job of toppling their head of state—they were too disorganized and too suspicious of one another to carry off the operation in August. And many of them were less enthusiastic about removing Diem than Lodge was. Failing to overthrow Diem, Lodge instead chose to freeze him out.

  The two French-speaking mandarins, one from Boston, the other from Hue, had an initial meeting on August 26 at which they wore matching white sharkskin suits. The lanky American towered over the much shorter Vietnamese, symbolically replicating the unequal relationship between their two countries. This conversation was, by Lodge’s own account, fairly cordial, with the president engaged in a “remarkable discourse” lasting two hours “about his own family and extent to which Viet-Nam was an underdeveloped country.”12 Their next conversation, which occurred on September 9 and which would represent the last time the two men would speak privately for the next six weeks, was not so cordial. The ambassador presented a peremptory demand that the president remove his autocratic brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, from the country for at least the next few months and end all censorship of the press, an ultimatum that Diem unsurprisingly rejected. Lodge left fuming about Diem’s “medieval view of life” and his lack of interest in Lodge’s proposed changes.13 Thereafter, the two men did not speak, as Lodge pursued a “policy of silence” designed to cause the Ngo dynasty “a certain amount of apprehension” and possibly get them into “the mood to make a few concessions.”14

  The silent treatment was interrupted only by a state dinner at Gia Long Palace on September 29 that Lodge attended along with two distinguished visitors, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Diem tried to warm up their frosty relationship by inviting the ambassador to spend the day and night of October 27 at the president’s villa in the cool mountain air of Dalat, in the Central Highlands.15 Diem thought this outing, which included “a sumptuous Vietnamese dinner,” signaled a rapprochement with Washington. He had no presentiment that at Tan Son Nhut Airport in Saigon, on his way to Diem’s villa, Lodge personally had given Lieutenant General Tran Van Don, a former army chief of staff, his go-ahead to prepare a coup against the president.16

  Rather than engage with Diem, Lodge and his superiors in Washington preferred to punish him—and the rest of South Vietnam—by cutting off American economic, though not military, aid. This was seen by the South Vietnamese generals as the withdrawal of the “Mandate of Heaven” from Diem, and a sign that his continuance in office would endanger the American aid upon which the entire regime depended for its very survival.17 Most of President Kennedy’s senior advisers remained opposed to a coup—all but Secretary of State Dean Rusk—and the president himself remained skeptical. But not skeptical enough to override Lodge or even order him home. Not only was Lodge the “man on the spot,” but he was also a man with a political constituency, one that the president feared could be mobilized against him in 1964. The last thing that Kennedy wanted was to give Lodge cause to run against him as the Republican nominee for president. Lodge was simply too powerful to be
fired. And he was too self-confident to be reined in; Henry Kissinger, then a young professor at Harvard, was not alone in thinking him “insufferably arrogant and not very bright.”18 So the ambassador, who was determined to oust Diem at all costs, had his way, notwithstanding the serious doubts in Washington about the course on which he was embarked.

  Lodge and Diem met one final time, on the morning of November 1, when Lodge escorted Admiral Harry Felt, the visiting chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, to the Gia Long Palace. The two men, along with aides, saw Diem from 10 a.m. to 11:15. Diem then asked to speak to Lodge alone for twenty minutes. He delivered a conciliatory message that Lodge summed up as: “Tell us what you want and we’ll do it.”19

  His entreaty came too late. The cable containing Diem’s offer was not dispatched to Washington until 3 p.m. on November 1, 1963. By that time an American-supported coup against Diem was already well under way—an event that would undo everything the Kennedy administration was trying to accomplish in Vietnam and thrust America deeper into the disorienting vortex of a grisly and seemingly interminable guerrilla war.

  AT 12:30 p.m. that day, Navy nurse Bobbi Hovis wandered out of the U.S. Naval Station Hospital at 263 Tran Hung Dao in downtown Saigon. Normally this was siesta time in this tropical city, but the streets were abuzz with activity: “Only a hundred yards from me I saw a gun emplacement and barbed-wire barricades. Sandbags surrounded the emplacement, and I found myself staring into the barrels of guns pointing directly at me. Troops were working quickly setting up more concertinas, sandbags, and guns.”

  The go signal had just been given to various military units commanded by officers who had vowed to overthrow Diem. Vietnamese marines were in the lead, supported by airborne and armored units. Almost the entire panoply of South Vietnam’s American-trained armed forces was arrayed against the president, save for the Special Forces and the palace guard. No sooner did the troops enter Saigon than they began attacking in the direction of the well-fortified presidential palace. Standing on a fourth-floor balcony at the hospital, Hovis “had an excellent view of a city about to explode”:

  Swarms of bullets flew down the street. Everywhere I looked, I saw tree limbs snapping and flying in all directions. Lead was ricocheting off building walls. People were taking cover in doorways, while others braved exposed balconies and rooftops. If a volley came too close, they scrambled for cover. When the bullets moved out of their immediate range, once again heads popped up. . . .

  The noise from the street fighting eventually gave way to the booming explosions of aircraft rockets. American-made T-28 fighter bombers moved in from the south, swooping low over the presidential palace. Green tracers fired from .50 caliber machine guns streaked the horizon. The palace responded with a return of antiaircraft fire, creating black smoke that arose in puffs and spread out against the deep blue sky. . . .

  The scene was surrealistic, the illusion of relative safety totally shattered. This was something out of a movie or a book, I thought. It took a few moments for me to adjust to the reality.20

  What made the unfolding scenario all the more bizarre, although Hovis did not know it at the time, was that the Diem brothers were convinced that the coup was their own handiwork. Too devious for his own good, Nhu had contrived a mock coup, code-named Operation Bravo, that was supposed to smoke out traitors in the ranks. It would then be suppressed by loyal army units that would affirm their loyalty to President Diem and bring him back by popular acclamation. The brothers thus were slow to understand that a real coup was under way, not a stage-managed replica.

  When he finally understood that he was under all-out assault by his own army, Diem in desperation telephoned Lodge at 4:30 p.m., wanting to know where the United States stood. By his own account, Lodge smoothly deflected the question with the practiced ease of the veteran politician that he was: “I do not feel well informed to be able to tell you. I have heard the shooting but am not acquainted with all the facts. Also it is 5:30 a.m. in Washington and U.S. government cannot possibly have a view.” The short, frustrating phone call ended with the two men talking past each other.

  Lodge’s final words were, “If I can do anything for your physical safety, please call me.”

  Diem replied, “I am trying to re-establish order.” He then hung up.21

  Lodge’s tone of puzzled innocence was, of course, exceedingly duplicitous. He had been involved every step of the way in encouraging the coup plotters, giving careful direction to the CIA agents who met with the disaffected generals. His chief liaison was Lucien Conein, a French-born CIA officer who had served behind Nazi lines in occupied France and had first come to Indochina in 1945. Conein was famous for his extensive gun collection and for his close contacts with all sorts of Vietnamese characters, ranging from generals to gangsters—categories that were not mutually exclusive. A fellow CIA officer wrote after first meeting him, “Conein impressed me as a dangerous man, a kind of John Dillinger on our side. There was a hint of barely restrained violence about him that his alert, blue eyes under bushy eyebrows, as well as his abrupt, blustery manner and short temper, did nothing to belie.”22

  Conein had been intimately involved in coup plotting since a fateful July 4 meeting with Lieutenant General Tran Van Don. That meeting, like seemingly every other important gathering, had taken place in the Caravelle Hotel, the city’s most modern hostelry, opened in 1959 and boasting a top-of-the-line air-conditioning system, a backup generator, vast stretches of marble, and bulletproof glass along with a rooftop terrace bar where at night revelers could watch air strikes in the distance across the Saigon River—“like aristocrats viewing Borodino from the heights,” the journalist Michael Herr was to write.23 The Caravelle became a favorite watering spot for American war correspondents, diplomats, spies, and contractors as well as upper-class Vietnamese of all stripes. (In 1960 a group of anti-Diem activists issued an attack on the president that became known as the Caravelle Manifesto after the place where it was composed.) Subsequent meetings took place at a complicit dentist’s office, where both Conein and Don pretended to be patients.24

  The generals harbored numerous grudges against Diem—but the president’s suppression of civil liberties was not one of them. Tran Van Don, for one, was aggrieved that Diem had delayed his formal promotion to lieutenant general until the day after a fellow coup plotter, Duong Van Minh, had been elevated to that rank, thereby vaulting “Big” Minh ahead of him in seniority. Because Diem did not fully trust him, Don was then relieved of his command of I Corps, an important combat command, and given a meaningless post in Saigon as “Commander of the Army,” without actual command authority.25 Another coup plotter, Brigadier General Ton That Dinh, the military governor of Saigon, was upset that the president had refused to appoint him interior minister, a post he coveted.26 The coup leader, Big Minh, so called because at six feet he was considerably taller than the average Vietnamese, was yet another spurned job seeker. A graduate of the French École Militaire and the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, he was described by one American reporter as a “heavy, fierce-looking soldier whose single tooth is a proud badge of the Japanese torture he suffered during World War II.”27 He took command of the conspiracy in large part because, despite his bravery in fighting for Diem against various internal enemies in 1955, the president had removed him from a combat command and made him head of a meaningless “Field Command,” which left him with far too much idle time on his hands. As Tran Van Don later acknowledged, “One of Ngo Dinh Diem’s greatest errors was to give some of his most efficient and highly regarded generals meaningless jobs. Not only did they become bitter, but they used their time to think, make plans, and perfect strategies.”28

  As soon as the coup started, the generals got word to Lou Conein. The buccaneering CIA man strapped on a .38-caliber revolver and grabbed a brown bag filled with five million piastres (about seven thousand dollars). He then jumped into a jeep driven by a Vietnamese sergeant and raced off to t
he Joint General Staff Headquarters, leaving behind a U.S. Special Forces team to guard his family from potential retribution by Diem loyalists. Once at the military headquarters, Conein established a secure telephone line to the U.S. embassy, located six blocks from the Gia Long Palace, and spent the rest of the day and night providing play-by-play as the coup unfolded.

  Half of the division commanders outside Saigon remained loyal to the president, but they could not move their units to the capital, because the rebels had cleverly blocked the roads and rivers or spirited away needed boats and trucks. The few senior officers who refused to join the uprising were summarily executed by the coup plotters. Few of the ordinary soldiers mobilized against the president knew that they were part of a coup; many were told they were safeguarding the president. The biggest obstacle to the rebels’ designs was Diem’s palace guard, fifteen hundred strong and armed with tanks, artillery, and machine guns. These men fought stubbornly to defend the palace while Diem and his brother sheltered in a bunker beneath the courtyard.

  Diem tried phoning the generals, offering to negotiate reforms. He had said the same thing during the last army coup attempt, in 1960. Back then, he had used the delay to bring in loyal army units from outside Saigon to crush the uprising. This time the generals would not fall for the same ruse.