After Diem's Demise-Three Articles
NIEBUHR, ROBERT S. ELEGANT / WILL SPARKS / REINHOLD
After Diem's Demise - Three Articles The Task in Vietnam By Robert S. Elegant IN these times when politicians, inconsistent by nature, are rendered positively mercurial by the darting...
...Thus the enormous popularity Diem enjoyed in 1956 gradually slumped to a nearly universal disgust with his government...
...American prestige is now completely identified with the light against the Communists in South Vietnam...
...was an indigestible stew of Confucianism, Catholicism and French quasi-Fascism of the 1930s...
...The open trails between Laos and South Vietnam, fed in part by airlifts from the north, are the channels through which the Communists reinforce and re-equip their units in the south...
...When in 1956 he finally consolidated his position...
...One wonders, too, whether the McNamara-Taylor mission was not responsible—directly or indirectly—for awakening the generals...
...interests, rather than to meet a crisis already acute...
...The question of how Communistic Castro really was at the time of the revolution will probably never be satisfactorily answered...
...Ironically, the CIA was not involved in Diem's overthrow...
...The idea of peaceful revolution, the proposition that continuous amelioration of poverty and expanding political suffrage is the effective answer to Communist subversion, is not acceptable to a vociferous clement in American political life...
...It all depends on individual circumstances...
...involvement and self-interest to its logical conclusion...
...From that time forward, the career of Ngo Dinh Diem was a saga of nepotism in government and the suppression by violence of political opposition...
...There is no call for apology on either side...
...That is why we must keep a wary eye on the CIA...
...At the present time we are engaged in such places as Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa, and our influence exceeds that of the storied empires of antiquity and the Middle Ages...
...financial and military aid...
...officers in the field in Vietnam—who were misleading their superiors about the "true" situation...
...The moment these interests diverged, it became apparent that Ngo Dinh Diem was, and had been, not a patriot but a confirmed family man in the crudest feudal sense...
...Still, it is worth repeating the truism that the real test of U.S...
...Its anti-Communist interference with other governments has often not only been unwise but has frequently been in contradiction to the main purposes of U.S...
...When they finally did, they were on intimate enough terms with some diplomatic and military authorities of the imperial power to let them know of the plans...
...And the action in Vietnam was unique in that it was taken to avert future peril to U.S...
...The Viet Cong can be defeated only by clearing them from one small area after another and then keeping those areas clean while the fight continues elsewhere...
...For the first time, Washington has followed the thread of U.S...
...3. Ngo Dinh Diem was an American creation...
...He did not elaborate, but his meaning seems clear...
...The Right, consistent as always, staunchly supported Ngo Dinh Diem, presumably because he symbolized the status quo and because he proclaimed himself anti-Communist, though one cannot avoid the suspicion that his repressive measures touched a sympathetic chord in their breasts...
...That conclusion is inescapable...
...During a six-and-a-half-hour interview in 1961, a record even for the voluble Diem, he allowed me to ask questions for a total of four minutes and dwelt on international politics for approximately 15 minutes...
...The fact is that Madame Nhu's natural form of expression is indistinguishable from that of the Birchites and other representatives of the American Radical Right...
...Diem was a clever Mandarin who won the protection of a Great Power, bent it to his own ends for some nine years and then, largely as a result of his own intransigence, saw it abruptly withdrawn...
...In Mexico, Tunisia, India and other nations, one party has been the permanent bearer of authority, though without repressing minority parties...
...When the community is not sufficiently integrated, the authority of a democratic government is not impressive...
...Usually, however, our interference has not been for the purpose of establishing democracy...
...REALITY VS...
...Henry Cabot Lodge, the representative of responsible conservatism, was as much a disappointment to the autocrats in Saigon as he had been previously to those of his countrymen who regard the National Review as a well-intentioned but ultimately soft-hearted organ of opinion...
...One of the poorest of Latin American countries...
...With the road open, Vietnamese and Americans can now get to the heart of the problem...
...from her traditional unreasoning, reflexive subservience to every petty tyrant clever enough to exploit the naivete of American ambassadors and the cupidity of Washington lobbyists...
...Even before the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem and her husband, Ngo Dinh Nhu, on November 1, she herself had begun1 to lay the groundwork for the myth of betrayal now in gestation with comments about "the little soldiers of fortune"—i.e., junior U.S...
...A year after his return to Vietnam, in 1954, Diem engineered a referendum which deposed Bao Dai and installed himself as President...
...In 1959 one could safely drive an automobile over any of the paved roads within a 50-mile radius of Saigon...
...commercial interests with a stake in Cuba could have dissuaded Castro from complete commitment to the Communist bloc, but the question is moot...
...To speak of an American anti-Diem conspiracy is, therefore, nonsense...
...Those to whom she was a plausible heroine while advising us to "clap our hands at these monk barbecues" and dismissing expressions of papal concern with the remark that "the Pope worries easily," will not overlook the possibilities for spurious martyrdom in her present tragic circumstances...
...According to an aide at the press conference, "they" are Americans stationed in Saigon...
...Are they compatible with democratic freedom...
...Nor can we apply the lessons of Malaya indiscriminately, since the conflict there is not analogous either...
...Between them, the civilian and military authorities must restore minimal stability so that the peasants, who are now either intimidated by the insurgents or convinced of eventual Communist victory, will cease to provide food and intelligence for the Viet Cong...
...Nhu By Will Sparks WE have not seen the last of Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu...
...soldiers and dollars to a conflict which Diem made it impossible to win...
...That is why many constitutional democracies that attempt to superimpose democracy on a feudal society, as in Latin America, frequently alternate between military and civilian rule...
...We project our idea of democracy onto the new nations even though today an open society is possible only when a culture and economy have achieved cultural and technological standards of a high order, standards that are probably beyond the reach of many of these nations at this stage in their development...
...who were instantly and spontaneously smothered by a larger crowd of Bolivian non-Communists...
...For at least 40 years, the central problem of U.S...
...The Saigon government proved to be a repressive police state under the introverted Ngo family, similar to regimes that abound in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America...
...On the other hand, it sometimes requires decades for a revolutionary military power to subordinate itself to a civilian government...
...aid per capita than any other Latin American country...
...In Anglo-Saxon tradition this usually means a two-party government...
...It is quite correct to say, therefore, that the U.S...
...Beginning with the reluctant acceptance of the revolutionary regime of Victor Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia more than a decade ago...
...in 1963 it was foolhardy to be caught on the other side of the Saigon River after sunset...
...Then there is Ghana, a one-party nation where the majority has put so many minority leaders in jail that one fears about its future...
...No one, including Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-tung on the one side, and British and American experts in guerrilla warfare on the other, really knows all the factors that will figure in the struggle for South Vietnam in the coming months...
...Yet Kennedy is today under attack for his cautious and deliberately considered decision to withdraw the American hand from over Diem's head and to permit virulent Vietnamese discontent to destroy him...
...And this is due in no small part to U.S...
...Diem's animus toward the United States, where he found refuge during his exile, stemmed from Washington's decision to "dump" him by withholding crucial support at the height of his struggle with the sects...
...from hopeless tyrannies...
...The results were dramatically apparent during the Cuban crisis a year ago, when Bolivian Communists resorted to their customary tactic of stirring up a mob around the American Embassy in La Paz...
...diplomats and soldiers will be to guide the new regime without attempting to impose our will in all cases...
...But it is clear that the reluctant official American judgment that Diem was sure to lose came, quite properly, long after most observers who did not bear responsibility for policy (myself among them I had reached that conclusion...
...But we must not be deterred by cliches of the past...
...South Vietnam, though certainly a vivid example, is not the only case where the forms of democracy were exportable, but not the realities of freedom and justice in an open society...
...Therefore, it is essential that those trails be closed...
...But certain general principles do obtain...
...But one cannot insure by constitutional means that force will be only a minor component in the structure of power...
...Many liberals wished to wash their hands of Vietnam with the solvent of neutralization, though they should have realized that such abdication could lead only to Communist victory...
...It is entirely conceivable that, through their earnest endeavors, Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu's usefulness to the cause of international Communism will be extended several years beyond the demise of her family in Saigon...
...Washington has shown signs of trying to extricate itself from this blind alley...
...The Administration seemed incapable of action in the American interest beyond urging reform upon Diem—and committing U.S...
...It also is fortunate for U.S...
...General Duong Van Minh, who led the military junta which deposed Diem, is himself an apolitical general relieved of his command for the sole crime of excessive popularity, due to the success of his campaigns against Communist guerrillas...
...Even the Eisenhower Administration showed belated recognition of the need to dissociate the U.S...
...I am sorry to see that events have proved them right...
...It is no coincidence that the month of October saw the enshrinement of Madame Nhu, an attack by Senator Goldwater on Victor Paz Estenssoro as "no friend of Democracy," and a nationwide campaign against Halloween collections for Unicef...
...So we are in the clear in regard to South Vietnam, excluding a suspected miscalculation on the part of the CIA before the revolt...
...It is no exaggeration to say that we must now win in Vietnam or reconcile ourselves to impotence in Asia...
...On this occasion, the Communists succeeded in raising a crowd of fewer than 500 demonstrators...
...We can thus eliminate one side of the triangle of our predicament by ceasing to project democracy as a Utopian alternative to the version of Utopia represented by Communism...
...Consequently, a great deal depends on events in Vietnam during the next few months...
...In both earlier events, the terrain and the political circumstances were quite different from Vietnam's and the enemy was less determined...
...If the antiCommunist campaign in Vietnam now progresses to a reasonably satisfactory conclusion, we may have to endure nothing worse than a slight decible increase in the noisy protests of our political Right...
...In the Middle East military dictatorships have been revolutionary and have succeeded in destroying the old feudal order...
...Diem's demise has removed a roadblock between us and our objectives in Southeast Asia...
...In Los Angeles she said, ". . . now that victory in Vietnam is continuing, they think they will be able to rob the fruits of victory from its real victors, with the help of their little friends, whom we all consider in Vietnam as traitors to their fatherland...
...The remainder of the time was taken up by a precise and detailed denunciation of U.S...
...Although it is obvious that the effect of the Administration's decision was chiefly to let natural forces take their own course, the same groups and publications which have for so long accused the Democrats of "losing China" through inaction are today berating them for taking action calculated to prevent our "losing Vietnam...
...The first task in South Vietnam is to intensify the immediate military pressure on the Viet Cong so that the government may begin to restore its authority in the countryside...
...The generals who mounted the revolt in Saigon were, in fact, slow in taking the hint...
...He refused to cooperate with the Communists in the days just after World War II when to most Vietnamese they appeared to embody nationalist aspirations...
...The greatest challenge to U.S...
...It is the authority derived from the community to speak for the community...
...The campaigns in China and North Vietnam that ended with Communist victories were unlike the struggle that can be expected to unfold...
...Hence the failure of some so-called democracies to make the military power subordinate to the civilian power...
...This line was continued right up to her public reaction to early news of the coup...
...For a long time the interests of South Vietnam, the United States and the Ngo family were identical...
...Together with his ruthless, egomaniacal wife, he ran the country as his personal fief, opposing the Americans more effectively than the Communists, enriching himself, and deceiving Diem us to the state of the nation...
...In Mexico, for example, this transfer of power did not take place until the regime of President Cardenas in 1940...
...despite her waspish tongue and apparent total lack of either compassion or humility, she has always been a woman of charisma...
...We must deal with a great number of variables and unknown quantities on our own side of the border before we even consider the X of Communist intentions and strategy...
...He later refused to participate in the government of Emperor Bao Dai, whom the French wished to establish as the puppet chief of an "independent" Vietnam...
...Curiously enough, our anti-imperialistic creed has not prevented us from interfering with the institutions of client states...
...In a healthy democracy power is not force...
...policy in Vietnam since 1954—most of it, to my own knowledge, based firmly upon demonstrable fact...
...From the Czar to Chiang Kaishek, we have somehow found our fortunes linked to those of discredited autocrats with no future save oblivion, while the international Communist movement reaped harvests from one popular uprising after another...
...His career began when, during a selfimposed exile, he purported to lobby for Vietnamese interests in Washington, but succeeded only in gaining American support for his Premiership of Vietnam, under Emperor Bao Dai...
...It is wrong, incidentally, to assume that the military is always reactionary...
...Castro's emergence as a frankly Communist leader was an unmitigated disaster for responsible molders of foreign policy in both the Eisenhower and the Kennedy administrations because it tended to make them helpless in face of the familiar Right-wing argument that all social revolutionaries are cryptoCommunists...
...In the end, it was the original demonstrators, not the Embassy, who needed police protection...
...One assumes that they could count on the latter's approval...
...In time, of course, the question of Laos must arise...
...There is the long history of military takeovers in Latin America...
...Diem felt with almost complete justice that he had succeeded entirely through his own efforts...
...support of revolutionary change anywhere in the world, regardless of the entrenched injustice which inspires such change or the denial of mechanisms for orderly reform which makes it inevitable...
...Despising his chief ally and convinced of his own omniscience...
...Nor ought we to equate all dictatorships with those dictatorships that aspire to create a new culture and civilization on the basis of the absurd belief that the institution of property is the root of all social evil...
...The democracies of Western Europe—in Scandinavia and Holland, for instance— normally manage to form coalition governments in a multi-party structure...
...He was a man whose every action, from the very beginning, sought maximum advantage for himself and his family...
...Nothing is more problematical than continuing cooperation between a poor and imperilled nation and the rich and distant Protector who seeks to succor it...
...The danger is that she will become the focus of a new "betrayal" myth which, if at all successful, may tie the hands of foreign policy officials for years to come...
...But there are indications that, until rapped on the knuckles, it supported the Special Forces of Diem's brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu...
...In addition, Nhu was a cruel and devious intriguer, delighting in the misuse of power for his emotional and financial aggrandizement...
...it was on the verge of being lost...
...Madame Nhu suits their requirements admirably, and thus we are certain to hear more from her and about her...
...Rather, the coup has provided an opportunity...
...We must also distinguish between those dictatorships which are reversible and those which, like the Communist dictatorship, are not because they are dominated by an inflexible dogma...
...policy...
...Power By Reinhold Niebuhr The situation in South Vietnam throws a lurid light on America's predicament as a nation with power of imperial proportions which impinges on all parts of the world...
...HEROINE OF THE AMERICAN RIGHT A New Role for Mme...
...We must distinguish between repressive dictatorships that suppress all civil liberties and those that allow a measure of freedom...
...Nonetheless, Ngo Dinh Diem's regime withstood two attempted coups and endured until a few weeks ago because of the steady increase in U.S...
...And in 1955 he refused to yield to the threats and mortar shells of the three dissident, quasi-religious "sects" whom the French supported in their attempt to overthrow his infant government...
...Today Madame Nhu is no longer the wife and sister-in-law of despots but the suddenly widowed mother of four children...
...There is always the possibility that communities which arc unable to avoid chaos and consequent extinction in any other way will ultimately resort to military force to preserve order...
...The withholding of recognition from reactionary regimes in Honduras and the Dominican Republic (whose Rightist coups were probably encouraged by our indecision in Peru), and the withholding of aid from the tyranny in Haiti are all manifestations of a major effort to extract the U.S...
...That includes the right to use force in behalf of the community, yet therefore involves a minimal use of force...
...In sum, democracy cannot be a simple alternative to Communism in the cold war...
...When that has been done, Saigon can begin to root out the Communists by progressively expanding cordons similaires...
...Will Sparks, a longtime New LEADER contributor, recently returned from un extended stay in Vietnam...
...For years it appeared that the tragic misunderstandings which characterized the American response to Communism in China were to be repeated on a smaller scale in South Vietnam...
...The far Left, recoiling in horror from Diem's excesses, implied that the Communists were entitled to rule because they represented an alternative...
...Constitutions may enjoin this subordination, but if the civilian power lacks true authority, it cannot be guaranteed...
...After Diem's Demise - Three Articles The Task in Vietnam By Robert S. Elegant IN these times when politicians, inconsistent by nature, are rendered positively mercurial by the darting pressures of rapid communications, Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam was a man hewn of unchanging granite: He refused the honors and opportunities offered by French colonialism in the 1930s...
...Secondly, our political creed assumes that democracy is a universally viable political alternative to Communism that can be successfully employed to wage ideological competition in the cold war...
...The existence of a Communist Cuba remains a potent argument in the rhetoric of those who oppose U.S...
...The United States, whether by acts of commission or of omission, was responsible for the change of regimes...
...In the last two years of the Diem regime, effective military action against the Viet Cong guerrillas had become increasingly difficult...
...Nor can we divest ourselves of the responsibilities we have as one of the two modern super-nations...
...We would do well to eliminate the second side by dismantling the CIA as an instrument of our imperial power and reducing its functions to pure intelligence...
...Diem's removal should make possible a reasoned policy of alternate defense and attack against the Viet Cong guerrillas among a rural Vietnamese population as it gradually replaces its present antagonism to the government with a neutral attitude toward the contending factions...
...prospects for success are good...
...In Diem, who was neither intoxicated by power nor personally corrupt, that intensity manifested itself in a personal vow of celibacy and a firm conviction that his interests and the nation's were identical...
...personnel, were little more than an occasional nuisance...
...The easy phase of the struggle in Vietnam is over...
...Only a few years earlier, there would have been some 2,000 howling, stone-throwing anti-Americans pushing against lines of policemen defending the building with clubs and tear gas...
...Rapid movement of troops was almost impossible due to the necessity of obtaining prior clearance from Saigon— where Ngo Dinh Nhu wanted to make sure that any proposed movement was not a prelude to an attack on the Palace...
...had nothing to do with Diem's downfall, except of course that President Kennedy had for some months freely expressed his disapproval of the regime's repressive policies...
...If Washington had not finally withdrawn its moral support from Diem and, at least tacitly, encouraged the restive generals, the coup which finally destroyed him might not have occurred...
...Ultimately, Washington will have to face the necessity for action in Laos because the supply routes, which are few and well defined in the mountains of that country, fan out into dozens of smaller trails on the plateaus of Vietnam...
...interests are threatened, even if he needs the stimulus of dramatic events—Russian arrests or missiles in Cuba, racial violence in the South, or Madame Nhu's "Buddhist barbecues" in Saigon...
...He would neither have obtained power nor have held it without active American support...
...It was strengthened by the bumbling of a succession of inept American ambassadors...
...The myth of Vietnam which we must now anticipate will read something like this: "Ngo Dinh Diem was a dedicated, if not saintly, opponent of Communism who unified his country and was on the verge of final success against the Communist guerrillas in Vietnam when victory was snatched from him by officers of the U.S...
...The predicament lies in two additional facts: First, we are antiimperialistic in political creed in a world in which anti-imperialism and self-determnation have become universal political dogmas, despite the vast disproportion of power and responsibility between the two "super-nations" and the emergent new nations...
...To define it as our imperial power is to summon connotations which seem to be inconsistent with our liberal creed...
...THE IDEAL Dilemma of U.S...
...it has by no means guaranteed— or even made it likely—that we will now achieve them...
...a colloquy in which the parties are not so much Democrats and Republicans as responsible officials trying to make themselves heard above the cacaphony of citizens whose frustrations have surpassed their capacity for restraint...
...Theories will not change the fact that we bear power of imperial proportions, and that power means responsibility...
...But what of one-party systems...
...He did destroy the Binh Xuyen gangsters who controlled the Saigon police and its narcotics and prostitution rackets...
...The equation is highly complex...
...The aid is effective because the government's land reform programs and genuine concern for the country's predominantly Indian population keep the money out of Swiss bank accounts and put it to work in the countryside...
...Over a longer period, the people may even become friendly toward the government because they have decided that it will win...
...Fellow-feeling for her hosts in Texas and Los Angeles is displayed in the statement that "many Americans have told me that Ambassador Lodge would be swallowed and exploited to the bone by the State Department...
...The Communist guerrillas were carving out ever larger areas of effective control within which raids by government troops, airlifted by U.S...
...In a speech at Princeton University in 1947, General George C. Marshall said that he did not see how anyone could hope to understand the present international situation without at least reviewing in his mind the history of the Peloponnesian War...
...The most notable feature of that era was the ceaseless effort of democratic Athens, in the name of peace and free trade, to prop up the hated regimes of petty oligarchies all over the Hellenic world at a time when totalitarian Sparta, hoping to profit from chaos, encouraged discontent and rebellion wherever it found a government allied with Athens...
...Nhu's ideology, called "personalism...
...It would certainly not have succeeded...
...Democracies derive their authority from the whole of the community...
...It is still much too early to tell whether the new regime can halt the progress of infiltration and military assault...
...our objective has been to insure a strong anti-Communist policy...
...The campaign was more successful than most observers anticipated...
...It is not yet possible to assess the situation in the new one-party state of Algeria, but recent events ominously point to the development of a dictatorship there...
...Ideally, democracy implies the toleration of the minority by the majority, along with the freedom of the former to challenge the latter and try to win sufficient popular support to set up an alternative government...
...A corps of dedicated and able civilian officials already exists, though it will have to be cleared of Nhu's political appointees and encouraged by greater independence of action...
...At the same time, Germany's Weimar Republic and France's Fourth Republic have revealed the dangers of too many political parties...
...The struggle will be protracted and unpleasant, drawing extensively upon the reserves of patience, men, and treasure of both Americans and Vietnamese...
...We also had better be cautious in following the Machiavellian precepts of the past...
...It maybe that a finer eye to the longrange interests of the country and a deafer ear to the importunities of U.S...
...The chaos in morale and administration produced by the odd triumvirate invited attack by the Communist North Vietnamese, and was, in turn, worsened by the guerrillas" depredations...
...It can only be regarded as the ultimate goal of the so-called "free world...
...Unfortunately, the very qualities responsible for his emerging triumphant from a series of crises which logically should have destroyed him ultimately isolated him from the daily life and the hopes of the great mass of Vietnamese...
...The identity of their little friends, whether Buddhist priests or someone else, was not spelled out, but we may anticipate that they will be identified repeatedly in the near future, and that each successive revelation will encompass a larger circle of traitors...
...Before that goal is achieved, we must be prepared to tolerate many approximations of a healthy democracy, and occasionally even contradictions to it...
...The facts, however, are likely to be soon forgotten in the American political dialogue over foreign policy...
...But no guerrilla force can be defeated so long as it can be resupplied at will...
...There were unmistakable signs, in the weeks preceding the revolt which stripped her family of power, that extreme Rightist elements in the United States were engaged in a concerted campaign to build up her image as an anti-Communist heroine...
...Diem did indeed bring the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao religious sects under control...
...The American political Right has acquired a new symbol which it will not soon abandon...
...The Army is greatly cheered by its release from political coercion and distasteful missions of repression...
...If, as is at least equally likely, the new regime in Vietnam proves as intolerant and inept as its predecessor, mounting thunder on the Right may freeze American foreign policy for another decade...
...In this sense, he brought a degree of stability to South Vietnam...
...foreign policy has been that we are almost always on the wrong side of every revolution...
...As I have observed many times in these pages, the defense of South Vietnam is inextricably linked to the problem of Laos...
...Since no guerrilla force has yet triumphed in Asia without a readily accessible external supply base, U.S...
...the exacting phase has just begun...
...Among the facts which the myth will ignore are these: 1. The war in Vietnam was not on the verge of being won...
...IT took more than two years and the final scandal of Buddhist immolations on the streets of Saigon to persuade President Kennedy that Diem could not preserve South Vietnam from Communist conquest...
...The attempt to withhold recognition from the Rightist military coup in Peru collapsed within weeks, but at least the attempt was made...
...Our commitment, overwhelming before Diem's fall, is today total...
...The question is whether we can permanently sustain the triangle of imperial power, anti-imperialistic creed, and the dogma that democracy is an available alternative for all nations, whatever their cultural and technical achievements...
...While no one can rejoice in the sordid assassination of the intense, ungainly little Mandarin, the manner in which the coup came about is an occasion for hope...
...Bolivia today receives more U.S...
...And to be sure there are good reasons for military insurrections when civilian governments become dictatorial, as in Turkey, Argentina and Vietnam...
...All of which is not to say that we should refrain from being critical of all irresponsible power, as well as of every monopoly of power that is not checked by competing and balancing forms of power...
...The point is, we should regard an open and just society as the ultimate goal, rather than an immediate possibility, in seeking to aid others...
...But no constitution alone could—or ever has—ordain a two-party system...
...The third side of the triangle we cannot eliminate...
...The Kennedy Administration, nevertheless, has shown a disposition to listen to policymakers who counsel the need for accelerated change in places like Latin America, aware that it does so at increasing political risk...
...Bolivia is also one which has least to fear from her local Communists...
...And American concurrence in the coup led by General Duong Van Minh could prove to be the turning point in our hitherto unsuccessful attempts to halt the advance of Communist aggression into Southeast Asia...
...Above all, the deliberate decision to permit the coup has demonstrated that a strong President who is willing to accept personal political risks can act decisively when vital U.S...
...2. Ngo Dinh Diem was not an altruistic patriot corrupted by power only in the last several months of his regime...
...It is not easy to outline the specific steps which must be taken in South Vietnam, and it will be infinitely more difficult to put them into effect...
...willingness to support the regime which followed her Leftist, non-Communist revolution...
...There is Korea, where two revolutions have occurred even after our rescue operation, and where the present military junta under General Chung Hee Park is hardly moving toward democratic self-government...
...We can only hope that modern industrialization will gradually widen the scope of democratic self-rule and eliminate military takeovers...
...helicopters piloted by U.S...
...Diem listened only to his younger brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, whose family resemblance could be seen in the flaring intensity and occasional perversity of his emotions...
...Government who were either Communist sympathizers or the naive victims of a conspiracy by the American liberal press in Saigon, calculated to prevent a final solution of the struggle for Southeast Asia...
...But he was so much the mystic that he had to seek intellectual justification of his regime from his brother, the "philosopher...
...Thus the ciA has become the instrument of our imperial power, and it is an increasingly dubious one—whether engaged in a Bay of Pigs disaster or in Vietnam...
...His stubborn self-confidence, his fanatical courage and his sense of divine mission enabled Diem not only to survive, but to create the Republic of South Vietnam...
...Robert S. Elegant, for 11 years Newsweek's chief Southeast Asian correspondent, is now head of that magazine' sC entrai European bureau...
...One is impelled to ask whether Ngo Dinh Diem was truly so remarkable in his obduracy, whether his refusal to face facts is not equalled—or actually exceeded —by the stubbornness of certain American conservatives...
...The picture is obscured by the anarchical conditions which prevailed in Vietnam in the mid-'50s...
...And clearly we cannot exercise those responsibilities within the limits of past dogmas...
...Recall her statement, for example, that the "whole world is watching Vietnam and knows what's going on there, despite the international Communist propaganda network" —a network which she, like the Birchites, believes to include the New York Times and the Associated Press...
...And in addition to making Diem unpopular, the lack of democratic freedom weakened the war effort against the Communist Viet Cong...
...It will be recalled that Sparta won the war...
...In the light of later events, however, it is obvious that the one constant factor in his behavior was the securing of the Ngo family fief...
...will and capabilities in Vietnam is yet to come...
...It was so inchoate that one American authority on Vietnam finally gave up his efforts to write a Ph.D dissertation on personalism, despairing of ever presenting it as a coherent doctrine...
...Onto the domestic political stage at this critical juncture steps the pathetic figure of Madame Nhu, whom any Greek playwright would recognize instantly as the fitting subject of an historical tragedy on the role of hubris in the relations between God and man, but whom the political Right in America will now embrace as a providential gift in its struggle against "liberals" in the State Department...
...policymakers, who have no desire to administer another great shock to American public opinion at the moment, that action in Laos can be postponed for a time—certainly until the more urgent problems within South Vietnam have been met...
...The last days of the Batista regime were characterized by a marked coolness between the dictator and Washington...
...The next task will be to establish an effective intelligence net for the government...
Vol. 46 • November 1963 • No. 24
