See It Through with Nguyen Van Thieu

SEE IT THROUGH WITH NGUYEN VAN THIEU

THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION EMBRACES A DICTATOR, 1969-1974

By JOSHUA K. LOVELL, BA, MA

A Dissertation Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

McMaster University © Copyright by Joshua K. Lovell, June 2013

McMaster University DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (2013), Hamilton, Ontario (History)

TITLE: See It Through with Nguyen Van Thieu: The Nixon Administration Embraces a Dictator, 1969-1974

AUTHOR: Joshua K. Lovell, BA (University of Waterloo), MA (University of Waterloo) SUPERVISOR: Professor Stephen M. Streeter

NUMBER OF PAGES: ix, 304

ABSTRACT

Antiwar activists and Congressional doves condemned the Nixon administration for supporting South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu, whom they accused of corruption, cruelty, authoritarianism, and inefficacy. To date, there has been no comprehensive analysis of Nixon’s decision to prop up a client dictator with seemingly so few virtues. Joshua Lovell’s dissertation addresses this gap in the literature, and argues that racism lay at the root of this policy. While American policymakers were generally contemptuous of the Vietnamese, they believed that Thieu partially transcended the alleged limitations of his race. The White House was relieved to find Thieu, who ushered South Vietnam into an era of comparative stability after a long cycle of coups. To US officials, Thieu appeared to be the only leader capable of planning and implementing crucial political, social, and economic policies, while opposition groups in Saigon’s National Assembly squabbled to promote their own narrow self-interests. Thieu also promoted American-inspired initiatives, such as Nixon’s controversial Vietnamization program, even though many of them weakened his government. Thieu’s performance as a national leader and administrator was dubious, at best, but the Nixon administration trumpeted his minor achievements and excused his gravest flaws. Senior policymakers doubted they would find a better leader than Thieu, and they ridiculed the rest of the South Vietnamese as fractious, venal, and uncivilized. While the alliance ultimately chilled over disagreements regarding the Paris peace negotiations, Washington’s perception of Thieu as a South Vietnamese superman facilitated a cordial relationship for most of Nixon’s first term in office.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe debts of gratitude to a wide variety of people, without whom I could not have completed this dissertation. Professor Stephen M. Streeter provided much needed guidance as I planned and organized this project, and offered critical feedback on chapter drafts. Drs. Jaeyoon Song and Richard Stubbs similarly offered exceptional advice along the way. I am indebted to my colleagues in the graduate program at McMaster University, who provided encouragement at various junctures. I would similarly like to thank Dr.

Andrew Hunt, from the University of Waterloo, for inspiring my interest in the Vietnam War in the first place.

I could not have conducted my research without the generous assistance of the staff and archivists at the LBJ Presidential Library, Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, and National Archives and Records Administration. They helped me organize my investigation, and directed me to source material that I would not have otherwise found. I also owe special thanks also to “B” and Gloria Newell, who helped me navigate unfamiliar cities during prolonged visits to those archives.

I depended very heavily on my family over the course of this doctoral program. My parents, Kevin and Robbin Lovell, and brothers, Lucas and Matthew, urged me to pursue my dream and provided much needed assistance along the way. My grandparents—Burt and Eileen Lovell and Ross and Doreen Auliffe—never failed to provide much appreciated support. My partner and fiancé, Sarah Bornstein, galvanized my determination to complete this project and patiently suffered through the neuroses of a busy graduate student. Finally, I would like to thank Dylan Auliffe for serving as a

tremendous source of inspiration. Dylan’s life was unjustly brief, but I will always remember him as a model of courage, strength, and determination.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

APC: Accelerated Pacification Campaign ARVN: Army of the Republic of Vietnam

BNDD: Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs

CAP: Code for Outgoing Telegram from the White House CDST: Camp David Study Table

Chron: Chronological File

CIA: Central Intelligence Agency CIP: Commercial Import Program

CNR: Committee of National Reconciliation

CORDS: Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support COSVN: Central Office for South Vietnam

CR: Congressional Record

Deptel: Telegram from the Department of State Embtel: Embassy Telegram

FRUS: Foreign Relations of the United States (series) FWWR: Files of Walt W. Rostow

GVN: Government of Vietnam (used in some source material titles) HAK Telecons: Henry A. Kissinger Telephone Conversations

IAC: Irregular Affairs Committee IMF: International Monetary Fund JCS: Joint Chiefs of Staff

JUSPAO: Joint US Public Affairs Office

LBJLM: Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum LTTP: Land-to-the-Tiller Program

MACV: Military Assistance Command, Vietnam MP: Memoranda for the President

MPC: Military Payment Certificate MR: Military Region

MTP: Memos to the President

NARA: National Archives and Records Administration

NCNRC: National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord NLF: National Liberation Front

NSC: National Security Council NSCF: National Security Council Files

NSCIF: National Security Council Institutional (“H”) Files NSCMM: NSC Meeting Minutes

NSDF: National Social Democratic Front NSF: National Security Files

OO: Oval Office

PAVN: People’s Army of Vietnam PC: Presidential Correspondence

PF: Popular Forces

POF: President’s Office Files POW: Prisoner of War

PRG: People’s Revolutionary Government PSDF: People’s Self Defense Force

RG: Record Group

RVNAF: Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces SMOF: Staff Member and Office Files

TJN: Tom Johnson’s Notes

TOHAK: Telegram to Henry A. Kissinger US: United States

USAID: United States Agency for International Development USIA: United States Information Agency

VC: Viet Cong, derogatory term for NLF VCF: Vietnam Country File

VSF: Vietnam Subject Files WHSF: White House Special Files WHT: White House Tapes

WR: Walt Rostow

DECLARATION OF ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT

Joshua Lovell is the sole author of this dissertation.

INTRODUCTION

He was lying in the back of an armored personnel carrier. Once the most powerful man in the country, Ngo Dinh Diem looked quite humble on this late-fall morning. He had entered the vehicle willingly, despite his disappointment that the generals had not arrived in a limousine. Desperate times required him to sacrifice some of the conveniences of his office. The personnel carrier did not offer the safety it promised, though. Once inside, a disgruntled junior officer shot Diem in the head and stabbed his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, repeatedly. Blood splattered across Diem’s face as his body fell awkwardly, his back bent forward with his hands tied behind him. He was later granted an ignoble burial in a prison cemetery. His cause of death was listed as “suicide,” though the government added the adjective “accidental” after pictures of the corpse became public. His death certificate listed him as a province chief, but he had long since moved beyond this office. Until 2 November 1963, Ngo Dinh Diem had been the president of the Republic of (South) Vietnam.¹

Before his death, the White House had shaped its foreign policy in Vietnam around the slogan of “sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem.”² In late 1963, however, President John F. Kennedy and his advisers grew weary of Saigon’s incurable instability

¹ Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and

U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 1; Seth Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of America’s War in Vietnam, 1950-1963 (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 6; Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: The Viking Press, 1983), 276. See also Edward Miller, Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).

² Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam, 2.

and Diem’s heavy-handed reactions to dissent. With approval from the White House, a cabal of South Vietnamese generals orchestrated a coup. General Duong Van Minh, also known as “Big Minh,” seized power in Saigon, releasing a wave of coups and countercoups that yielded five different governments between November 1963 and June 1965. South Vietnam did not achieve a measure of stability until two young officers took control. A brash air marshal named Nguyen Cao Ky and an army general named Nguyen Van Thieu succeeded in stabilizing South Vietnam by late 1966. Both men had participated in the coup that unseated Ngo Dinh Diem. Ky originally took the top office in Saigon, but Thieu surpassed him in 1967 and stepped into the presidency.³

Kennedy died three weeks after Diem.⁴ His successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, grew increasingly frustrated with the instability in Saigon, which threatened to undermine the anticommunist state. The Johnson administration never particularly liked any of the South Vietnamese leaders that emerged after Diem’s death, including Nguyen Van Thieu. Johnson, however, did not remain in office long enough to develop faith in his new client. In 1969, just a year after and a half after taking the presidency, Thieu watched his greatest ally of the war walk into the White House. President Richard Milhous Nixon was dedicated to ending the war on terms Americans could respect, and he built his Vietnam policy around the preservation of Thieu.

³ George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950- 1975, Fourth Edition (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 103-129, 162; Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin, 1-4; Bui Diem with David Chanoff, In the Jaws of History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 105, 121, 146-147, 171, 207; George McTurnan Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 195; Nguyen Cao Ky with Marvin J. Wolf, Buddha’s Child: My Fight to Save Vietnam (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 91-99.

⁴ Herring, America’s Longest War, 127-129.

Washington’s decision to prop up this particular dictator was guided by a complex array of factors that shaped the entire US intervention. Hoping to contain Chinese and Soviet influence, the White House sought a fierce anti-communist who could serve as a bulwark for Western—specifically, American—power. Hoping to protect the American empire, and make it more sustainable, the Nixon administration needed a leader who could maintain the stability of South Vietnam while Washington reduced its commitments to the country. Nixon fancied himself a realist, who need not interfere with the internal policies of his allies unless it suited US interests. He therefore sought to reduce some of the burdens Washington bore in its pursuit and preservation of empire.

This realignment of priorities forced the White House to rely on a strongman who could preserve order, even to the detriment of the US mission to protect South Vietnamese self- determination. As an adept political leader who enjoyed the backing of the South Vietnamese military, Thieu appeared to be the best candidate.⁵ Nixon also credited Thieu with facilitating the Republican Party’s victory in the 1968 US presidential elections. By undermining Johnson’s efforts to reach a peace settlement, Thieu had hampered the campaign of the Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

5 Melvin Small, The Presidency of Richard Nixon (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 60-­‐61; Michael Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 142; John L. Linantud, “Pressure and Protection: Cold War Geopolitics and Nation-Building in South Korea, South Vietnam, Philippines, and Thailand,” Geopolitics 13, no. 4 (November 2008): 635-656, p. 647; Robert J. McMahon, The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia Since World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 157; Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 208-216

Finally, Washington backed Thieu because US officials did not think that anyone else could serve as a suitable replacement. American support for Thieu was based less on a belief that he was a perfect client—though the Nixon administration was generally pleased with his performance—than that strong leadership seemed to be in short supply in South Vietnam. Their experiences in Vietnam up to 1969 had left American officials disenchanted with Saigon’s political and military leadership. The White House’s support for Thieu was therefore partly based on the racist assumption that all other Vietnamese were irrational, fractious, selfish, and incompetent.

Nixon administration officials would have likely denied that they were racist in the same fashion as, say, pre-Civil War slave owners. To apply historian Seth Jacobs’ phrase, racism in the Nixon administration was “historically specific.” Few policymakers in the White House described the Vietnamese as a “distinct genetic group," but US officials believed that their allies embodied certain character flaws that made them inferior. Usually, those officials blamed these weaknesses on Vietnamese culture and history. As such, it might be better to describe American prejudices as “ethnocentrism.” As Jacobs notes, though, ethnocentrism is “a word academics employ to avoid saying what they mean.” The virulence of American prejudices toward the Vietnamese is better conveyed with a term like “racism.”⁶

⁶ Seth Jacobs, The Universe Unraveling: American Foreign Policy in Cold War Laos

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 7-14.

counterparts. These flaws are social inventions, without the backing of scientific evidence. Throughout the Cold War, American policymakers condemned foreigners as comparatively weak, irrational, mercurial, corrupt, and primitive. These perceived differences helped Americans justify extraordinary measures in conflicts abroad, particularly the employment of violence. It did not really matter whether Washington considered a given community biologically or culturally deficient, because the results were the same either way.⁷

Nixon’s personal views on race were complex, and sometimes inconsistent. His successful electoral campaign in 1968 was based largely on a policy of courting white Southern racists who were angry with the black Civil Rights Movement. Before his presidential campaign, however, Nixon had actually been one of the Republican Party’s greatest supporters of civil rights. As Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president, Nixon

⁷ Gerald Horne, “Race to Insight: The United States and the World, White Supremacy and Foreign Affairs” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 2^nd ed. edited by Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 323-335; Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945, 3^rd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 3; Thomas Borstelmannn, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 6-7; Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 301-397; Stuart Anderson, Race and Rapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-American Relations, 1895-1904 (Toronto et al: Associated University Presses, 1981); Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 176-177; Michael L. Krenn, The Color of Empire: Race and American Foreign Relations (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, Inc., 2006); Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam, 14-15; Alana Lentin, “Replacing ‘race,’ historicizing ‘culture’ in multiculturalism,” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 4 (December 2005): 379-396; David Brion Davis, “Constructing Race: A Reflection,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (January 1997): 7-18; John Solomos and Les Back, “Conceptualising Racisms: Social Theory, Politics and Research,” Sociology 28, no. 1 (February 1994): 143-161.

helped defeat a Senate filibuster threatening civil rights legislation. He also traveled to Ghana as Washington’s representative at a ceremony commemorating that country’s independence, and was appointed an honorary member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in recognition of his support for black Americans. Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) claimed that Nixon’s efforts to impress Southern racists in 1968 were simply shrewd politicking, or “hunting where the ducks are.”⁸

As president, however, Nixon left a long record of racism. He referred to blacks as “niggers” and “jungle bunnies.” When he was informed about a new educational program for black students, he responded, “Well it’s a good thing. They’re just down out of the trees.” The president was also an ardent anti-Semite, believing that Jewish Americans prioritized Israeli interests over their own patriotic duties. Once, after Nixon’s Jewish national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, wrapped up a Cabinet briefing on the Middle East, the president asked, “Now, can we get an American point of view?”⁹ Kissinger, astonishingly, helped sustain the president’s anti-Semitism. During a discussion on relations with Moscow, Kissinger stated that, “if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” Nixon could not have agreed more: “We can’t blow up the world because of it.”¹⁰

Nixon’s prejudices were linked to faulty assumptions about both biology and culture. He claimed on numerous occasions that blacks were genetically inferior to their

⁸ Borstelmannn, The Cold War and the Color Line, 223-225.

⁹ Ibid, 226-227.

¹⁰ Adam Nagourney, “In tapes, Nixon Rails About Jews and Blacks,” New York Times, 10 December 2012.

white counterparts.¹¹ He linked this alleged biological difference to the slave trade. Secretary of State William Rogers believed that blacks could strengthen the country, Nixon once explained to his assistant, Rose Mary Woods. Rogers’ belief was “a decent feeling,” Nixon declared, but blacks would need five hundred years to become strong. “What has to happen,” Nixon said, “is they have to be, frankly, inbred.” Nixon did not restrict his prejudices to the descendants of slaves. Indeed, he argued in February 1973 that, “I’ve just recognized that, you know, all people have certain traits.” For example, the “Irish can’t drink. What you always have to remember with the Irish is they get mean.

Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks. Particularly the real Irish.” Of course, the Irish were not the worst of the European lot to Nixon’s mind. “The Italians, of course, those people… don’t have their heads screwed on tight.”¹²

Nixon was not the only member of his administration to harbor such prejudices.

When Roger Morris, a member of the National Security Council (NSC), prepared to present a briefing on African issues, he noted that General Alexander Haig, Kissinger’s deputy, “would begin to beat his hands on the table, as if he were pounding a tom-tom.” Morris also heard numerous comments about apes and smells, which seem to have pervaded the White House. On his way to a dinner for African ambassadors, one night, Kissinger asked Senator J. William Fulbright, “I wonder what the dining room is going to smell like?”¹³

¹¹ Borstelmannn, The Cold War and the Color Line, 226-227.

¹² Nagourney, “In tapes, Nixon Rails About Jews and Blacks.”

¹³ Borstelmannn, The Cold War and the Color Line, 228.

The Nixon administration’s condemnations of the Vietnamese were usually, though not always, framed in terms of culture. American policymakers lamented that the Vietnamese were too suspicious or manipulative for their own good. The Vietnamese allegedly developed these traits because evasiveness allowed them to survive their long history of fighting off powerful foreign invaders. Washington also criticized the South Vietnamese for allowing their vanity or selfish desires to override political pragmatism. As Saigon’s policymaking elites debated major national policies, US officials vented about an inherent Vietnamese predisposition toward factionalism that stalled critical wartime programs. Worse still, the Vietnamese seemed incapable of implementing policies efficiently or effectively, even when they could reach a consensus.

American officials sometimes framed their criticisms in gendered language, but such discourses were rooted in racism. Senior policymakers scoffed at Vietnamese caution in military campaigns or the peace process, and suggested that Washington’s allies needed to act with greater confidence, strength, or other stereotypically masculine traits. Similarly, US officials sometimes took it upon themselves to offer guidance to the Vietnamese, using language reminiscent of father-child relationships. In these cases, Washington policymakers portrayed the Vietnamese as immature, instead of feminine, men. The White House also made war plans without consulting its allies, which in some cases suggested that the Vietnamese were too childish to be trusted with their own

defense. While important on their own, these gendered discourses emerged within a much broader and more detailed dialogue regarding South Vietnamese racial inferiority.¹⁴

The White House’s prejudices toward the Vietnamese reflected popular opinions. In 1969, the media discovered that American soldiers had slaughtered innocent civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai. The military covered up this story for over a year, but laid charges against Lieutenant William J. Calley for murdering seventy “Oriental human beings” after news of the massacre broke. The American public was more concerned about US soldiers than foreign victims, and many assumed that Vietnam was causing the kind of moral decline that resulted in the My Lai Massacre. Many Americans, including Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, portrayed Calley as a scapegoat. After Calley was sentenced, Carter asked Georgians to keep their headlights on when they drove, in order to “honor the flag” as Calley had. Some soldiers who had been honorably discharged gasped in disbelief at Calley’s trial. “The people back in the world don’t understand this war,” one soldier said. “We are here to kill dinks. How can they convict Calley for killing dinks? That’s our job.”¹⁵ Even if they were not involved directly in criminal slaughter, many Americans referred to the Vietnamese as “gooks” or “slopes.”¹⁶

¹⁴ The role of gender in US foreign relations has been well established. See, for example: Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); Geoffrey F. Smith, “Security, Gender, and the Historical Process,” Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (January 1994): 79-90; Robert A. Nye, “Review Essay: Western Masculinities in War and Peace,” American Historical Review 112, no. 2 (April 2007): 417-38; and Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches & Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

¹⁵ Ibid, 229-230.

¹⁶ Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, 176-177.

Despite these prejudices, there was at least one Vietnamese leader who earned the Nixon administration’s respect. After Ngo Dinh Diem’s death, South Vietnam was consumed by political turmoil. By 1967, however, Nguyen Van Thieu emerged as the undisputed leader of the country. The South Vietnamese president quelled the national turbulence, and seemed both capable and willing to implement American policy advice. The White House praised Thieu for being pragmatic, reasonable, and energetic, while condemning South Vietnamese opposition leaders for absurd obstructionism. Thieu had many flaws, and US officials easily identified them. Nixon and his advisers frequently expressed frustration with Thieu’s slow, cautious approach to political reforms. They also noted that Thieu seemed to share an alleged Vietnamese obsession with prestige and status. As such, he could not promote policies unless the public believed that he was acting on his own volition, free of American pressure. Thieu also worried about the very significant opposition he faced over controversial policies like austerity taxes and American troop withdrawals. He was therefore slow to implement such policies.

Seth Jacobs argues that Ngo Dinh Diem had faced similar prejudices from US officials, but his Catholicism and capacity to transcend the perceived limitations of his race allowed him to maintain American support. The White House rationalized Diem’s authoritarianism and brutality as products of an inferior Asian culture, but praised him for taking a strong pro-Western stance in a country where communism and neutralism were both popular.¹⁷ Several years later, Thieu benefited from a similar dynamic. American officials believed that, while Thieu was too cautious, he was still a more effective leader

¹⁷ Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam, 11-16.

than any of his predecessors since Diem. If he was an oppressive tyrant, it was because he was a traditional mandarin in a nation wracked by discord. If he sometimes acted unwisely, he was far more reasonable than South Vietnamese civilian leaders, communists, or neutralists. An American might have been bolder, smarter, and more effective, but Americans could not govern in Saigon. The White House believed that Thieu manifested the perceived character flaws of his race, but he could also break past them.

Vietnamese stereotypes seemed to explain the weaknesses of Saigon’s political leaders. Such prejudices could also serve as a moral salve, when a realism-driven White House sustained support for a tyrannical and authoritarian regime in Saigon. Indeed, the high frequency with which US officials referenced alleged South Vietnamese character and cultural flaws suggests that they were convincing themselves of the righteousness of their actions. The Nixon administration’s racism therefore constituted not only a set of faulty assumptions that skewed evaluations of the Vietnamese, but also a process of justifying American actions in Vietnam over the protests of external figures and individual consciences.¹⁸

18 This process has been observed in other arenas. Edward Said, for example, argues that prejudices regarding Asians have justified efforts to dominate and re-­‐order societies in the region. Racism is thus a critical component of empire. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 3. Similarly, Tami Davis Biddle argues that decision makers tend to discount the drawbacks of certain options, in order to make repugnant choices more palatable. When these choices are particularly off-­‐putting, decision makers raise cognitive barriers that make reconsideration more difficult. See Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-­ 1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 4-­‐6

Despite the great effort exerted by the White House to support the South Vietnamese president, accounts of the Nixon-Thieu relationship remain limited largely because the requisite archival material was only recently declassified. While there have been few scholarly inquiries into this relationship, Thieu has not been completely left out of the story of the Vietnam War. Political scientist Larry Berman explores Thieu’s perspectives on the peace process in No Peace, No Honor. Nguyen Tien Hung and Jerrold Schecter do the same in The Palace File, an exceptional work crafted without the benefit of Nixon’s national security files. Stanley Karnow briefly explains Thieu’s wartime roles in Vietnam: A History, as does Gabriel Kolko in his magisterial survey, Anatomy of a War. Howard B. Schaffer, a former US diplomat, describes the American ambassador’s relationship with Thieu in Ellsworth Bunker. Schaffer demonstrates that Bunker was unjustifiably accommodating of Saigon’s strongman, but the author’s focus on the embassy prevents him from conducting a comprehensive analysis of opinions of Thieu in the White House. Jeffrey Kimball argues in Nixon’s Vietnam War that Nixon bolstered the Saigon regime because it was stable, and because Thieu could potentially embarrass his counterpart over a Republican plot to derail the 1968 peace negotiations. Kimball’s book is limited by his focus on broader wartime strategy. As such, he does not explore the full dynamics of the Nixon-Thieu alliance.¹⁹ Other historians comment on Thieu over the course of their narratives, but they do not address his role in great detail.²⁰

¹⁹ Larry Berman, No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam (New York: The Free Press, 2001); Kolko, Anatomy of a War, especially 208-222; Karnow, Vietnam; Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 87-91; Nguyen Tien Hung and Jerrold R. Schecter, The Palace File (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1986); Howard B. Schaffer, Ellsworth Bunker: Global

There is as yet no scholarly work dedicated specifically to Nixon’s relationship with Nguyen Van Thieu. This dissertation is designed to help fill that gap. It is based on American sources alone, and therefore does not amplify significantly on Thieu’s perspectives on the war or his allies. Such a study would no doubt be useful, and scholars should look forward to the day when the relevant Vietnamese archival records become available. This dissertation nonetheless contributes to the field by addressing a major question about American foreign policy. One of the most important decisions hegemons make in proxy wars is the choice of a client. The US media and public regarded Thieu with contempt, so the Nixon administration’s support for him is puzzling. Surely, there must have been alternative candidates for the presidency of South Vietnam.

While such figures may have existed, the Nixon administration never devoted significant attention to them. Convinced that most South Vietnamese were selfish, venal, corrupt, and ineffective, the most important US policymakers were largely satisfied with Thieu’s performance. He was friendly and cooperative, in sharp contrast to some of his predecessors, and he was at least partially successful at achieving his major policy goals. Some of his efforts, such as his land and economic reforms, did not actually resolve

Troubleshooter, Vietnam Hawk (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 160-259.

²⁰ See, for example: Francis Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1972); C.L. Sulzberger, The World and Richard Nixon (New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1987); Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991); George C. Herring, LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994); Robert D. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941- 1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Small, The Presidency of Richard Nixon; Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007).

Saigon’s problems. American perceptions of his successes, however, seem more important than the actual outcomes of his policies. Whenever he managed to force a bill past his political opposition, Thieu strengthened his reputation in the White House as a strong leader. The negative consequences of some of those new laws for the South Vietnamese public did not necessarily tarnish the Nixon-Thieu relationship.

Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, occupied the White House while Thieu rose to power in Saigon. Taking office just after Diem’s assassination, the Johnson administration grew disappointed with the series of South Vietnamese governments that emerged between late 1963 and mid-1965. Ineffective and fragile, these regimes were neither capable of defeating their enemies nor stymieing internal conflict. When Nguyen Cao Ky emerged as prime minister, he settled much of the conflict among Saigon’s military brass. The Johnson administration did not particularly respect him, either, though. He was prone to making outrageous statements, and failed to fulfill his promise to initiate a grand social revolution to improve the lives of his people. When Thieu ascended to the presidency in 1967, he also failed to win Johnson’s respect. His feud with Ky for the top office and his lethargic response to a military crisis in 1968 reinforced American assumptions that the Vietnamese were selfish and incapable of promoting their own interests.

When Johnson pushed for a peace agreement in late 1968, however, he realized that Thieu was a stronger force than the White House had previously understood. Saigon successfully blocked the peace initiative, which helped propel Richard Nixon into the White House. The Nixon campaign may have tried to encourage Thieu along this path. If

Johnson’s peace initiative failed, Nixon’s odds of winning the US presidential election would be greatly increased. Working through an envoy named Anna Chennault, Nixon promised Thieu that the Republicans would be far friendlier to Saigon than the Democrats. Thieu had his own reasons to obstruct the 1968 peace deal, and there is little evidence that Chennault had significant influence over Saigon. Since the negotiations stalled, however, Nixon felt indebted to Thieu, and perhaps wary that Saigon would release details of the Republicans’ skullduggery. When Nixon took office, he intended to reward Thieu’s apparent cooperation in the Anna Chennault Affair.

²¹ Nixon used the phrase “honorable peace” at the very outset of his presidency, in January 1969. Berman, No Peace, No Honor, 5.

Sometimes, Thieu opposed US-inspired programs instead of promoting them. The US ambassador to Saigon, Ellsworth Bunker, was disappointed with Thieu’s failure to broaden his base of domestic support by creating an alliance of political parties and making his Cabinet more socially diverse. Bunker held many of the same prejudices as his colleagues in Washington, however, and remained mostly pleased with Thieu’s performance. Nixon was a devotee of realpolitik, the principle that national interests should take priority over all other considerations. He did not believe that interfering in South Vietnam’s internal affairs was in America’s interest, nor did National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. Nixon centralized the decision-making process for Vietnam policies in the Oval Office and NSC, so his opinion and Kissinger’s mattered more than those of other senior policymakers. Since neither Nixon nor Kissinger cared very much about the failed nation-building programs, Thieu maintained his reputation in the White House as a superior South Vietnamese leader.

The dynamics that characterized the Nixon-Thieu relationship in 1969 persisted into the next year, but the strategic environment in Vietnam turned grim. Thieu continued to deliver policy successes in 1970. He implemented austerity measures, despite continued domestic opposition, and maintained his support for US troop withdrawals. He also succeeded in passing legislation for the Land-to-the-Tiller Program, a land reform project designed to build public support for the government. These efforts infuriated Thieu’s domestic opposition, however, which was already upset at his heavy-handed repression of dissidents and protection of corrupt officials. The political stability that Thieu had maintained for years seemed to be unraveling. After a joint US-South

Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia yielded uninspiring results, the White House began to doubt that it could win the war through military pressure alone.

Worried that Saigon’s strength was waning, and that the loss of South Vietnam would seriously jeopardize American credibility as a global power, Nixon and Kissinger began to contemplate a grand betrayal of Thieu. Under this scheme, Washington would provide just enough aid to allow its client to survive for a few years after all US troops had left Vietnam. If Saigon fell to the communists after a “decent interval,” Nixon could not be held responsible. Scholars have engaged in a vigorous debate about whether or how relentlessly Nixon pursued the decent interval strategy. The consequences for the Nixon-Thieu relationship, however, would have been the same regardless of the White House’s decision. Nixon decided in late 1970 to reaffirm and enhance his commitment to Nguyen Van Thieu, either because he needed a strongman in Saigon to maintain stability for a decent interval, or because he wanted to preserve a permanent government in a tumultuous war zone.

In 1971, therefore, the Nixon administration attempted to further strengthen the Thieu regime. Washington provided American assets to assist Thieu’s campaign during the South Vietnamese presidential election. Nixon even modified the schedule of American troop withdrawals, so that South Vietnamese voters would feel safe on Election Day. Officials in both Washington and the US embassy in Saigon protested when Thieu drove his competition out of the contest, but they rallied to his side when he orchestrated a one-man election. If ever the Nixon administration had an opportunity to replace Thieu with someone else, the 1971 election was it. American officials never gave any serious

thought to such a plan because they were convinced that all of the other candidates were weak, incompetent, and misguided. Even as the Nixon administration worried that its client state was collapsing, Thieu maintained his status as an exceptional South Vietnamese specimen.

Thieu’s re-election did not convince Nixon that he no longer needed to consider a decent interval strategy. Other efforts to strengthen the Thieu regime failed, though US officials hoped that the South Vietnamese president could reinvigorate some of these programs after he secured a second term in office. Nixon’s War on Drugs, for example, was designed in part to repair Thieu’s reputation at home and abroad. Widely considered corrupt, and accused of participating in the drug trade, Thieu needed to improve his public image. His regime was built on a pyramid of corruption, however, where tolerance for certain criminal practices allowed junior officials to secure the patronage of their superiors. Thieu could not attack narcotics traffickers without compromising many of the people who owed him allegiance. Pacification, which was relegated to lower echelons of both the South Vietnamese and American governments in 1971, floundered as well.

Finally, North Vietnamese soldiers routed their Southern counterparts when the latter invaded Laos. While Thieu promoted the White House’s claim that the invasion was a tremendous success, Nixon and Kissinger were still deeply troubled about the prospects of achieving peace with honor. They continued to mull over a potential decent interval solution. While Thieu discerned some of the details of the American negotiating strategy, he did not yet know the full extent of Nixon’s scheming.

Despite the new tensions developing in the Nixon-Thieu relationship, the alliance remained strong through the first part of 1972. When Hanoi launched the Spring Offensive, an ambitious invasion of the South, Washington came to Saigon’s aid. Thieu’s performance as a leader was far more impressive this time than during the 1968 Tet Offensive, though he still lost some territory to the enemy. The Spring Offensive also convinced Washington and Hanoi that it was time to earnestly pursue a peace settlement, however, which was finally signed in January 1973. Thieu vehemently opposed this settlement because it put his government at political and military disadvantages. The Nixon administration was baffled by this resistance, and promised Thieu he would have the full support of the United States if Hanoi violated a peace treaty. When such promises failed to bring Thieu along, US officials voiced their prejudices toward the Vietnamese in brutal, virulent terms. No longer convinced that Thieu was a South Vietnamese superman, Nixon and Kissinger lashed out with threats and insults. Eventually, Thieu conceded defeat, but the American alliance with Saigon had been shattered and South Vietnamese security was fatally compromised.

While the US intervention was finally over, the Paris Peace Accords did not settle the war for the Vietnamese. Both parties violated the ceasefire, and Hanoi finally secured victory with the Ho Chi Minh Offensive of 1975. Nixon met Thieu in San Clemente, California, shortly after the Accords were signed. The US president renewed his pledge to retaliate against communist ceasefire violations, but he never again sent American soldiers to Vietnam. Soon distracted by the Watergate scandal, Nixon devoted less attention to Saigon. Gerald R. Ford replaced Nixon as president, when the latter was

forced to resign in disgrace. Ford lacked the political capital necessary to overcome Congressional and public opposition to a renewed commitment to Vietnam, and he never met with Thieu. The South Vietnamese president fled Saigon just before the city fell to the communists. The American war in Vietnam was finally over.

Nixon did not fight the Vietnam War simply because he was racist, and there were certainly elements of realpolitik in his sustained support for a dictatorial client. American prejudices, however, helped the White House choose Thieu over potential alternatives. Officials in the White House and Embassy Saigon believed that the Vietnamese were innately inferior to Americans. Nixon and his advisers complained bitterly throughout the war about Vietnamese factionalism, incompetence, and venality. Thieu did not conform perfectly to this stereotype, and so convinced Americans that he had transcended his racial weaknesses. At the same time, the Nixon administration’s bigotry protected Thieu from criticism regarding his brutal repression, tolerance of corruption, and electioneering. He may have been an exceptional leader, US officials thought, but he was still Vietnamese. He could not escape his basic nature. Even when the Vietnam War seemed to turn against the allies, and Nixon was forced to consider a terrible betrayal, Washington held on to Nguyen Van Thieu. Poor performance and brutality could not tarnish the reputation of Saigon’s superman. The Nixon-Thieu relationship was only dissolved when American and South Vietnamese national interests clashed directly.

CHAPTER 1: THE RISE OF NGUYEN VAN THIEU, 1964-1968

When Lyndon Baines Johnson took over the US presidency, he faced a precarious strategic environment in South Vietnam. America’s strongman in Saigon, Ngo Dinh Diem, fell to assassins three weeks prior to John F. Kennedy’s tragic death. Over the next year and a half, the fledgling nation was wracked by instability, falling under the sway of no fewer than five different governments. As the Republic of Vietnam struggled to fill the power vacuum Diem left, it suffered debilitating losses to the insurgents of the National Liberation Front (NLF). Described derisively by their enemies as Viet Cong (VC), for Vietnamese communists, the Front comprised a diverse group of nationalists seeking to overthrow the government in Saigon.¹

The NLF’s achievements in the field put the survival of South Vietnam at risk, and it was not until 1965 that leaders strong enough to hold the South together seized power. Even then, the Johnson administration expressed frustration with the South Vietnamese government. American officials assumed that South Vietnam was incapable of rational political development, so they instead focused on finding a leader who would maintain stability. Nguyen Van Thieu eventually emerged to fulfill this role, but he too failed to earn Johnson’s respect. While Richard Nixon later embraced Thieu as a superior national leader, the Johnson administration considered Saigon’s new strongman just another manifestation of South Vietnamese backwardness. Thieu was stronger than the Johnson administration expected, though, as he demonstrated by derailing the 1968 peace

process. An ardent nationalist, Thieu refused to negotiate in good faith with the North

¹ Herring, America’s Longest War, 127, 133, 140, 151-152, 162.

Vietnamese and NLF. Never satisfied with his client in South Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson now lacked the power to force Thieu’s compliance with American policies.

Racism was not the sole cause of the Johnson administration’s frustrations with Saigon. The South Vietnamese government was weak and too focused on internal political challenges to fight its enemies effectively. As such, there were perfectly rational reasons for the White House to express frustration with its client. The Johnson administration’s prejudices exacerbated those tensions, though, and seemingly explained Saigon’s political instability. After complaining that South Vietnamese civilization was weak and under-developed, the White House abandoned its lofty goals for a democratic, civilian government in Saigon, and instead relied on dictators who could maintain order.

LYNDON JOHNSON’S VIETNAM WAR

Johnson’s predecessor, John F. Kennedy, was an ardent Cold War hawk who had tried to arrest the spread of communism by offering economic and military assistance to modernize the Third World. American officials believed that developing countries were “primitive” and “childlike,” compared to the “advanced” West, and thus vulnerable to communist subversion. According to Kennedy adviser Walt Rostow, as primitive societies evolved toward more advanced economic models, “individual men are torn between the commitment to the old familiar way of life and the attractions of a modern way of life.” Rostow argued that communists took advantage of such instabilities to pervert the modernization process. Kennedy’s foreign aid programs were therefore

designed to protect countries like Vietnam from communist subversion by accelerating their evolution toward Americanized capitalism.²

Lyndon Johnson shared many of Rostow’s views of the developing world, and followed his predecessor’s commitment to nation building as a defense against communism. With a hyper-masculine desire to stand up to the communist “bully,” Johnson wanted to uplift “young and unsophisticated nations” from the torments of “hunger, ignorance, poverty, and disease.”³ To Johnson’s mind, Vietnam fell perfectly within that rubric of unsophisticated countries. He once referred to North Vietnam as a “raggedy-ass, little fourth-rate country.”⁴ He was no more generous with the South Vietnamese, whom Johnson regarded as primitive, fractious, and completely irrational.⁵

While Johnson phrased his goals for the Third World in altruistic terms of protection and development, he never lost sight of his ultimate goal: containing communism. As such, he did not always apply American democratic models in Vietnam. Johnson’s focus on the Cold War competition led him to diverge from Kennedy’s policy

² Stephen M. Streeter, “The US-Led Globalization Project in the Third World: The Struggle for Hearts and Minds in Guatemala and Vietnam in the 1960s,” in Empires and Autonomy: Moments in the History of Globalization, edited by Stephen M. Streeter, John

C. Weaver, and William D. Coleman, 196-211 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009), 196-199. See also, Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution; David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); and David Engerman et al (ed.), Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003).

³ Michael Hunt, Lyndon Johnson’s War: America’s Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945- 1968 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), 75-76. See also Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 201-240.

⁴ Hunt, Lyndon Johnson’s War, 104-105.

⁵ Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 243.

in two important ways. First, whereas Kennedy hesitated to adopt a significant combat role in Vietnam, Johnson accepted such a sacrifice as a necessary condition for victory. Second, Johnson was more devoted to maintaining order when nation-building projects floundered. He thus fervently opposed Kennedy’s guidance of the November 1963 coup in Saigon. Ngo Dinh Diem had been a brutal dictator with limited popular support, but Johnson credited him with stabilizing South Vietnam. During a visit to that country in 1961, Johnson even compared Diem to a heroic Winston Churchill.⁶

⁶ Hunt, Lyndon Johnson’s War, 75-79; Lloyd C. Gardner, Pay any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995), 52-54.

YOUNG TURKS

In the fall of 1964, South Vietnam was still struggling to fill the power vacuum that Ngo Dinh Diem’s death had created, but a group of young military officers was emerging as a strong political force. Chief among these Young Turks was a thirty-five year old air marshal named Nguyen Cao Ky. He had the support of another rising star: forty-two year old army General Nguyen Van Thieu. The Young Turks were ambitious, and sought additional power and authority. They lobbied their embattled junta leader, Nguyen Khanh, to make room for fresh military leadership by firing several senior generals.⁷

Khanh was a career soldier, not the kind of able administrator needed to unify South Vietnam’s competing political and religious factions. Catholics accused Khanh of discrimination after he fired several key officials. Buddhists comprised the largest share of the non-Catholic population, which also included groups such as the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai religious sects. The Buddhists opposed both Catholic ambitions and Khanh’s authoritarianism. The stability of the country was seriously threatened, so Khanh—under pressure from US Ambassador Maxwell Taylor—began to build a constitutional framework for his government. He established a High National Council of veteran statesmen to draft a constitution and appointed an elderly nationalist, Phan Khac Suu, his chief of state. The ancient Tran Van Huong became prime minister. As a result of these institutional changes, Khanh could not act unilaterally when the Young Turks’ demanded

⁷ Diem with Chanoff, In the Jaws of History, p. 121; Robert S. McNamara with Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Times Books, 1995), 186.

that he fire Generals Le Van Kim, Tran Van Don, Duong Van “Big” Minh, and others. Suu needed to sign the decree before it could become official, and the new chief of state adamantly refused Khanh’s request.⁸

Their ambitions stifled, the Young Turks took matters into their own hands, demonstrating that Taylor’s lectures to Khanh about creating a stable civilian government carried little weight. On December 20, claiming they were responding to rumors of a coup against Suu, the Young Turks kidnapped the High National Councilmen and shipped them to Pleiku.⁹ Taylor exploded when he found out what had happened. He told the Young Turks that Washington was “tired of coups,” and warned them that the White House could not support Saigon if the generals continued to act rashly. The ambassador then announced that because Khanh had become too much of a problem for Washington, it might not be possible for the United States to maintain its support for him.¹⁰ Khanh sensed an opportunity to earn some goodwill among the Vietnamese, and rose to the Young Turks’ defense. Much to Taylor’s chagrin, Khanh suggested that Washington should recall its ambassador to Vietnam.¹¹

Khanh’s ploy failed, and he did not remain in power much longer. On 14 February 1965, he dissolved the current government and asked Dr. Phan Huy Quat to build a new administration. While civilians technically led this new government, Khanh retained control over the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), and through it controlled

⁸ Diem with Chanoff, In the Jaws of History, 119-121; Ky with Wolf, Buddha’s Child, 109; Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake, 248-256.

⁹ Diem with Chanoff, In the Jaws of History, 122; Ky with Wolf, Buddha’s Child, 110.

¹⁰ Gardner, Pay any Price, 159-160.

¹¹ Diem with Chanoff, In the Jaws of History, 122.

much of South Vietnamese policymaking. Unfortunately for Khanh, Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao and General Lam Van tried to usurp power, proving that South Vietnamese stability remained fragile. Khanh sought out Ky for protection, but the attempted coup marked the end of Khanh’s reign. Thao and Van agreed to cease their efforts in exchange for Khanh’s resignation and exile. With the junta leader gone, the Young Turks were now the dominant military faction in South Vietnam.¹²

Prime Minister Quat survived only long enough to oversee Lyndon Johnson’s introduction of combat troops into Vietnam. As a northerner, Quat’s leadership in Saigon frustrated many southerners, so he was never able to rally all of the rival military and civilian factions in South Vietnam. While Quat successfully secured an agreement to dissolve the Armed Forces Council, the body through which the military had influenced government policy since the Khanh era, civilian control of the Republic of Vietnam was tenuous. Ky had already made it clear that the military would seize power if the civilians did anything that he considered treasonous. The dissolution of the Armed Forces Council did not change the balance of power in Saigon. Lacking a strong popular base or military support, Quat stood on a precipice. He finally fell from power after he tried to replace two of his Cabinet ministers. When southern politicians successfully discouraged Suu from signing the termination orders, government operations ground to a halt.¹³

¹² Ibid, 122-123.

¹³ Diem with Chanoff, In the Jaws of History, 124-147; Gardner, Pay any Price, 175-176.

chief of state. Ky stood in the spotlight, and Thieu’s status as chief of state was largely ceremonial. Thieu also chaired a committee of officers called the Directorate, however, which served as the real authority in South Vietnam. Through the Directorate, Thieu exercised considerable influence over government policies. The White House was not particularly fond of Quat, so few US officials protested this coup. Taylor simply shrugged off the coup under the rationalization that the military would always rule the Republic of Vietnam.¹⁴ Undersecretary of State George Ball was an exception; he argued that the latest coup demonstrated that South Vietnam was too weak to remain stable, even with American aid. “These people are clowns,” he lamented.¹⁵

The Johnson administration became divided over the quality of the new Ky regime. Deputy Ambassador Alex Johnson described Ky as an “unguided missile,” and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara condemned the South Vietnamese prime minister, who “drank, gambled, and womanized heavily.” Ky unnerved US officials because of his flashy dress (he wore a “zippered black flying suit belted with twin pearl- handled revolvers”) and his tendency to make outrageous statements.¹⁶ He told London’s Sunday Mirror, for example, that he admired Hitler, who “pulled his country together when it was in a terrible state.” To stave off the communist threat, Ky proclaimed, “We

¹⁴ Diem with Chanoff, In the Jaws of History, 146-147, 158; Gardner, Pay any Price, 224-225; Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 138; Kahin, Intervention, 344-345.

¹⁵ Gardner, Pay any Price, 224-225.

¹⁶ McNamara with VanDeMark, In Retrospect, 186.

need four or five Hitlers in Vietnam.”¹⁷ Despite such hyperbole, President Johnson appreciated Ky and Thieu’s capacity to maintain stability after an extended period of chaos. Johnson was also heartened by Ky’s promise to defeat the enemy, rebuild the countryside, stabilize the economy, and improve South Vietnamese democracy.¹⁸ Ky appealed to Johnson’s highest priorities for Vietnam: stability and Americanized nation building. Perhaps because LBJ held such high hopes for what could be accomplished in South Vietnam, he was particularly disenchanted when Ky failed to deliver.

Most US officials grew anxious about the South Vietnamese leaders who succeeded Diem. Alex Johnson regarded the Young Turks as xenophobic nationalists who had grown weary of democracy. The deputy ambassador reported that the new government underestimated the complexity of the policy challenges it faced, and overestimated the capacity of its bureaucracy to implement Saigon’s orders. Maxwell Taylor appeared grateful that Ky seemed genuinely intent on mobilizing his country for war, but he considered the young airman too immature and inexperienced for the prime minister’s office.¹⁹

¹⁷ Quoted in Congressional Record [Hereafter, CR], 89^th Cong., 1^st sess., 1965. Vol. 111, pt. 12, S: 17146-17154.

¹⁸ Lyndon B. Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963-1969

(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 242.

¹⁹ Telegram from the Embassy in Vietnam to the Department of State, 13 June 1965, Foreign Relations of the United States [Hereafter, FRUS], June-December 1965, Vol. III: Document 2; Telegram from the Embassy in Vietnam to the Department of State, 17 June 1965, FRUS, June-December 1965, Vol. III: Document 5. Documents from FRUS that are available in print or PDF format will include page numbers before the document number. All documents that do not include page numbers are available online as HTML files.

Ky and Thieu had to face all of the old tensions that had destroyed the previous regimes that emerged after 1963. The military remained fractious. The new Cabinet seemed competent, but there were many competing political factions. Catholics were wary of Ky, a Buddhist, and Buddhists disliked Thieu, a Catholic. Taylor regarded the new regime as unwieldy. He noted that the government’s decisions were divided among numerous committees, and doubted that Ky would prove capable of managing all of them. Taylor resigned himself to supporting Ky, however, in the belief that this regime was probably the best Washington could achieve for the moment.²⁰

Taylor’s assessments of Ky were partially colored by his distaste for the South Vietnamese. In a long letter to Ky, he described the military and economic problems he wanted corrected. He concluded by raising an issue that he had addressed on many occasions with Ky. Taylor lamented the filth and dirt in Saigon, and asked Ky to resolve this matter. “Cleanliness,” Taylor wrote, “is a mark of pride and self respect….”²¹ Taylor’s disgust was clear, and his insinuation that the South Vietnamese were dirty and lacking in self-respect insulting. As historians Gail Bederman and Michael Krenn have demonstrated, white men have often contrasted their cleanliness with the alleged filth of non-white communities.²² Taylor’s lecture was a critique of what he considered Vietnamese primitivism.

²⁰ Telegram from the Embassy in Vietnam to the Department of State, 21 June 1965,

FRUS, June-December 1965, Vol. III: Document 9.

²¹ Letter From the Ambassador to Vietnam (Taylor) to Prime Minister Ky, 1 July 1965,

FRUS, June-December 1965, Vol. III: Document 37.

²² Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 207-211; Krenn, The Color of Empire, 54.

McNamara waxed skeptical about the merits of the Ky regime. In a memorandum to President Johnson on July 20, he claimed that Saigon’s position in the war was deteriorating rapidly. McNamara argued that the new South Vietnamese government was not at all sufficient to meet current needs, but if the military stayed loyal and Vietnam’s various religious factions remained “quiescent,” Ky could hold onto power. Otherwise, South Vietnam would again fall prey to internal conflict and Saigon might ineptly try to negotiate a peace treaty with the North Vietnamese. As Johnson escalated the American troop presence in South Vietnam, McNamara recommended that US advisers press Ky into making reforms.²³

Carl Rowan, director of the US Information Agency (USIA), worried that the Ky regime could sink the American war effort. “Unless we put the screws on the Ky government,” he said, “175,000 men will do us no good.” The man who soon replaced Maxwell Taylor as ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., concurred. He decried South Vietnamese backwardness, and recommended that the White House avoid letting Ky hinder American foreign policy. “There is no tradition of a national government in Saigon,” he said. “There are no roots in the country.” The ambassador doubted that the South Vietnamese government could accomplish much of significance until a strong leader emerged, and he was skeptical that any such figure was available. “There is no one who can do anything.” Lodge argued that Washington should take whatever actions it required to promote American interests, whether the South

²³ Memorandum from Secretary of Defense McNamara to President Johnson, 20 July 1965, FRUS, June-December 1965, Vol. III: Document 67.

Vietnamese liked it or not. He did not believe Saigon was sufficiently competent to define and promote its own interests.²⁴

To some degree, Ky benefitted from these pessimistic assessments. When Lodge took over Embassy Saigon in the summer, he tried to establish a cordial and productive relationship with Ky. While disenchanted with Ky’s capacity to rally public support over the next several months, Lodge held him to a low standard. The ambassador praised Ky for such banal feats as speaking proper English and staying in power for several months.²⁵ Ky may have been a weak leader, but he surpassed Lodge’s lowered expectations.

Ky eventually convinced Lodge that he had the potential to grow as a national leader, though South Vietnam’s future remained in doubt. In October 1965, Lodge wrote that Ky’s administrative and political skills were rapidly improving. If the young prime minister could avoid a coup, the ambassador mused, he could become “a first class political leader.” Lodge’s praise for Ky was effusive: “If there are [governments] in this world which have a man of much better quality and potential than General Ky, then I do not know what they are.”²⁶ Nguyen Cao Ky had many flaws, but he was a stabilizing

²⁴ Notes of Meeting, 21 July 1965, FRUS, June-December 1965, Vol. III: Document 71.

²⁵ Memorandum for President Johnson, Undated, FRUS, June-December 1965, Vol. III: Document 128; Telegram from the Embassy in Vietnam to the Department of State, 4 September 1965, FRUS, June-December 1965, Vol. III: Document 134; Memorandum by Chester L. Cooper of the National Security Council Staff, 10 September 1965, FRUS, June-December 1965, Vol. III: Document 138; Telegram from the Embassy in Vietnam to the Department of State, 22 September 1965, FRUS, June-December 1965, Vol. III: Document 146; Telegram from the Embassy in Vietnam to the Department of State, 13 October 1965, FRUS, June-December 1965, Vol. III: Document 165.

²⁶ Telegram from the Embassy in Vietnam to the Department of State, 20 October 1965, FRUS, June-December 1965, Vol. III: Document 172; Telegram from the Embassy in Vietnam to the Department of State, 7 January 1966, FRUS, 1966, Vol. IV: Document 10.

force in country wracked with instabilities. By managing to avoid a coup, he seemingly justified American support for him.

HONOLULU, GUAM, AND MANILA

While Ky managed to hold onto power longer than his post-Diem predecessors, he was unable to broaden his popular base of support, and thus provide the Republic of Vietnam with democratic legitimacy. Johnson, one of America’s greatest advocates of social reform, expressed deep frustration with this failure. As a young congressman, Johnson had championed President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal; as president, he wanted to promote the Great Society, a program that included civil rights legislation, a war on poverty, improved education and health care services, environmental protection laws, and various other reforms.²⁷ The president regretted that the Vietnam War distracted him from this ambitious agenda. After he retired, Johnson famously complained about “that bitch of a war on the other side of the world” that prevented him from focusing on “the woman I really loved—the Great Society.”²⁸ His unruly Vietnamese mistress prevented him from protecting his legislative agenda. The president wanted Ky to improve the lot of the South Vietnamese, but was disturbed by Saigon’s lack of progress on this front. Johnson sought to address this concern during a summit meeting in Honolulu.²⁹

Johnson’s had other reasons for seeking a meeting with Ky. The chairman of the

Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright (D-AR), disapproved of the

²⁷ Hunt, Lyndon Johnson’s War, 74, 83-84.

²⁸ Ibid, 72.

²⁹ Dallek, Flawed Giant, 354.

White House’s handling of the war. In early 1966, he opened public hearings into the administration’s conduct. Johnson hoped in vain that the Honolulu conference would distract the American mass media from the Fulbright hearings.³⁰ He also wanted to meet Nguyen Van Thieu, in case Ky did not work out. On 3 February 1966, Johnson told Secretary of State Dean Rusk that he wanted to invite Thieu to the meeting in Honolulu because “we'd have a little insurance” in case “something happened to Ky.”³¹ Johnson’s comments were more indicative of a lack of faith in Ky than a high opinion of Thieu. The president admitted after the conference that he knew almost nothing about Ky or Thieu before he met them, so he had no reason to favor one over the other.³² All Johnson knew for sure was that South Vietnam had a history of political instability, and he did not want to be caught unaware in the event of another coup.

At Honolulu, Saigon’s new leaders impressed Johnson. While he had received few positive reports about Ky and Thieu before the conference, he was pleasantly surprised to discover that they were eager to make progress in the war. Ky, in particular, earned Johnson’s favor by expressing a shared devotion to political, social, and economic reforms. Johnson understood that Ky—a political novice—might not be able to deliver on his promises, because he would face significant opposition to such policies. The Honolulu conference was nonetheless a good step toward a cordial working relationship. In a joint communiqué issued after the conference, the allies expressed their commitment to

³⁰ Gardner, Pay any Price, 285.

31 Telephone Conversation between President Johnson and Secretary of State Rusk, 3 February 1966, FRUS, 1966, Vol. IV: Document 63

³² Telephone Conversation between President Johnson and the Indian Ambassador (Nehru), 10 February 1966, FRUS, 1966, Vol. IV: Document 71.

defeating aggression, promoting a social revolution, eliminating suffering, and protecting the principle of self-government. The newly articulated American policy, which Vice President Humphrey called a new Johnson Doctrine, extended the Great Society to Southeast Asia. Ky and Thieu departed in high spirits, basking in the renewed US commitment to Saigon.³³

Johnson left Honolulu believing that the conference had been a partial success.

The spectacle did not protect the White House from Fulbright’s hearings, but the president hoped the meeting would strengthen the new government in Saigon and dedicate it to Johnson’s favored nation-building programs. Unfortunately, the conference had the opposite effect. Ky and Thieu did not attempt to rally public support or initiate a grand social revolution. The US president was no more successful at encouraging Saigon’s leaders to embark on such projects during a 1966 summit in Manila or a 1967 meeting in Guam.³⁴ In fact, the Honolulu Conference was actually detrimental to South Vietnamese stability. A new threat to the Ky regime appeared, as a result, and his response to it alienated many Americans.

³³ Diem with Chanoff, In the Jaws of History, 163, 189; Dallek, Flawed Giant, 354-355; Gardner, Pay Any Price, 284-285, 295-296; Telephone Conversation between President Johnson and the Indian Ambassador (Nehru), 10 February 1966, FRUS, 1966, Vol. IV: Document 71. Scholars have applied the phrase ‘Johnson Doctrine’ to both the president’s stated goals in Southeast Asia and a policy of protecting countries in the Western Hemisphere against communist aggression. The latter usage is perhaps more common in US foreign relations literature, generally, but some of the most prominent historians of Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War describe the president’s statements in Honolulu as an articulation of a “Johnson Doctrine.” In this study, the “Johnson Doctrine” refers to Southeast Asia only. In addition to Gardner and Dallek, above, see Heiko Meiertons, The Doctrines of US Security Policy: An Evaluation Under International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 132-135.

³⁴ Dallek, Flawed Giant, 383-384; Gardner, Pay any Price, 302, 312, 356-359; Johnson,

The Vantage Point, 259.

THE BUDDHIST CRISIS

Under Ngo Dinh Diem’s First Republic, many Buddhists protested the government’s favoritism of Catholics and its heavy-handed repression of religious protesters. This criticism did not subside after Diem’s assassination, as Buddhists continued demanding religious freedom and advocated for a negotiated settlement to end the war. While the participants of the Buddhist Movement held diverse ideologies, militant activists such as Thich Tri Quang became the focus of American ire. These antiwar Buddhists insisted that not all members of the NLF were communists and called for a coalition government that included the insurgents. Consequently, US officials regarded Vietnamese Buddhists as naïve and ignorant.³⁵

Buddhist activists grew anxious that Johnson’s support for Ky at the 1966 Honolulu conference indicated that the war would continue indefinitely. Afterwards Ky sought to eliminate General Nguyen Chanh Thi, one of his chief rivals, from the Directorate. Thi was the commander of I Corps, where he formed strong relationships with local Buddhists. Ky claimed that Thi had abused his authority, was plotting a coup in Central Vietnam, and supported negotiations with the enemy to end the war. Ky also suspected that Thi was a communist. Tensions between the two ambitious officers had been brewing for some time, however, so there was also a personal element to their rivalry. Thi, who considered Ky and Thieu American puppets, scolded the prime minister for selling out to Washington. Ky threatened to resign if Thi retained his position, so the

Directorate voted to dismiss the beleaguered general on March 10. The firing of Thi

³⁵ Robert J. Topmiller, The Lotus Unleashed: The Buddhist Peace Movement in South Vietnam, 1964-1966 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), vii-32.

sparked Buddhist protests across the country, and the radical Thich Tri Quang took leadership of this new Struggle Movement.³⁶

The US government’s reaction to these events was mixed. Lodge originally cautioned Ky not to act rashly against Thi, because the prime minister’s personal prestige would suffer considerable damage if he was unable to successfully dismiss a subordinate. After the Directorate’s vote, however, the ambassador was pleased to see Thi gone.³⁷ Back in Washington, Lyndon Johnson asked if “our people wanted [Thi] to leave.” McNamara stated flatly that he did. Maxwell Taylor concurred: “He’s a bad character and good riddance.” General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), called Thi a “conniver,” but noted that he had earned the sympathy of some US military personnel, most notably Lieutenant General Lew Walt, commander of the III Marine Amphibious Force.³⁸ For the most part, the Johnson administration was satisfied with Ky’s decision to fire Thi, but this affair soon tested American faith in Saigon.

Shaken by the scale of the Struggle Movement protests, Johnson met with Rusk, McNamara, Rostow, presidential assistant Jack Valenti, and Press Secretary Bill Moyers on April 2. The president explained that the White House would, “Make every effort to keep Ky. But be ready to make [a] terrible choice. Perhaps take a stand in Thailand—or take someone else other than Ky.”³⁹ That same day, Lodge authorized Ky to use US

³⁶ Topmiller, The Lotus Unleashed, 33-38; Dallek, Flawed Giant, 358-359; Gardner, Pay any Price, 299.

³⁷ Topmiller, The Lotus Unleashed, 35.

³⁸ Notes of Meeting, 11 March 1966, FRUS, 1966, Vol. IV: Document 93.

³⁹ Notes of Meeting, 2 April 1966, FRUS, 1966, Vol. IV: Document 109.

transport planes to help defeat the rebels. Johnson did not overrule his ambassador, but sent orders to keep US forces out of South Vietnamese riots.⁴⁰

Ky intended to put his new resources to good use. On April 3, he announced that he was deploying troops to Danang in order to restore government control of that city.

Seeking to justify this action, Ky denigrated the protesters as communists, and threatened to shoot the mayor of Danang for supporting the insurrection. Two days later, Ky arrived in Danang with four divisions from ARVN. He did not bring enough soldiers to confront the collection of dissidents and ARVN deserters, however, and was forced to accept a political compromise. After some vacillation on the details of the settlement, the Directorate agreed on April 14 to meet Buddhist demands for democratization by hosting elections for a new constituent assembly.⁴¹

President Johnson disliked the proposal for an assembly, saying he would “rather have someone we can control rather than a communist takeover at the Assembly.” Johnson’s highest priority was stability, and Ky had not proven competent to break the cycle of South Vietnamese instability. “The way I see it, Ky is gone, the last gasp. Doubt he can pull it off. When he goes, there’ll be hell in this country. Let’s get a government we can appoint and support. We need a tough advisor.” If the South Vietnamese were not capable of governing themselves, Johnson thought, the White House would do so for them. Taylor argued that, “We can minimize our losses if Ky goes and the Directory stays. We have to take sides this time.” Johnson did not respond. He was still shocked that Ky had threatened to shoot the mayor of Danang. Incredibly, Johnson asked his

⁴⁰ Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant, 361.

⁴¹ Topmiller, The Lotus Unleashed, 43, 53-55.

advisers if Ky had made any other mistakes since taking office. Taylor replied: “The Hitler statement—but I thought he had matured.”⁴²

The Buddhist Crisis triggered a new debate in the White House about the Vietnam War. While Johnson worried about the dangers of a constituent assembly, the State Department believed such a body would be crucial to garnering international and domestic support for the US intervention. When Ky announced on May 6 that he would retain power until elections could be held in 1967, therefore, Rusk was incensed. The secretary of state recommended that Johnson threaten to leave Vietnam if Ky did not hand over power to an assembly much earlier. Johnson disliked that idea, and told the National Security Council (NSC) that, “we are committed and we will not be deterred.”⁴³

Although Johnson vetoed Rusk’s recommendation, historian Robert Topmiller argues that the White House genuinely considered abandoning Saigon in light of this most recent turmoil. In the end, Johnson decided to stay the course, primarily because he was still a committed Cold Warrior who was not prepared to abandon Vietnam for his Great Society. The “loss” of China to communism had caused considerable domestic turmoil in the United States during the 1950s, and Johnson did not want a similar disturbance to hamstring his legislative agenda. While the White House acted primarily to promote geostrategic and domestic political interests, Johnson, Rostow, and Taylor were also motivated by their intense hatred of the Vietnamese Buddhists. In particularly dramatic terms, Taylor suggested that a “whiff of grapeshot” could help stabilize the Ky

⁴² Notes of Meeting, 4 April 1966, FRUS, 1966, Vol. IV: Document 112.

⁴³ Dallek, Flawed Giant, 363.

regime. Johnson appears to have appreciated Taylor’s instinct to employ violence, since he asked Rostow if US officials were following that advice.⁴⁴

As General William Westmoreland, the top US commander in Vietnam, crafted plans to help Saigon defeat the Struggle Movement, Ky began his own crackdown. On May 15, without first notifying American officials, he launched another attack on Danang. Before Westmoreland could bring US resources to bear, the dissidents collapsed beneath Ky’s assault. There were a few scattered protests after the attack on Danang, but Ky shut them down with the same brutal efficiency. Johnson defended Ky’s heavy handedness on May 21, arguing that communist aggression justified Saigon’s violent reaction to the protests. South Vietnam eventually produced a constituent assembly and constitution, as promised, but there was no doubt that the military ruled South Vietnam.⁴⁵

By serving as prime minister for more than a year, Nguyen Cao Ky had proven more successful than any of his predecessors since Ngo Dinh Diem. The Buddhist Crisis demonstrated, however, that Ky’s control of the county was tenuous at best. In light of this turbulence, Johnson decided to prioritize stability over democratization. The Vietnamese, the White House decided, were not sophisticated enough for democracy. If Ky was to remain in power much longer, he needed to maintain unity in the armed forces. In this, he both succeeded and failed. While senior officers sustained their support for Independence Palace, the young prime minister lost his title and power. After the election of 1967, South Vietnam entered an era of comparative stability under a new president.

⁴⁴ Topmiller, The Lotus Unleashed, 96-111.

⁴⁵ Topmiller, The Lotus Unleashed, 78-79, 84-85, 126-136; Dallek, Flawed Giant, 363; Gardner, Pay Any Price, 300.

THE PRESIDENCY OF NGUYEN VAN THIEU

Saigon had one more opportunity to create a legitimate, popular government that would meet Johnson’s standards. Instead of marking meaningful progress, however, the 1967 South Vietnamese presidential election devolved into a farce. Faced with potential instability and the collapse of military unity in Saigon, the White House sacrificed its democratic ideals in exchange for order. Political scientist James McAllister correctly notes that historians have largely neglected the 1967 election, despite the immense investments of time and brainpower US officials devoted to the matter.⁴⁶ The election marked a turning point in the war, as a new president emerged in Saigon.

In January 1967, US presidential adviser Robert Komer suggested that neither Ky nor Thieu should participate in the upcoming contest. “Even if they could win legitimately, which most experts doubt, few in VN [Vietnam] or elsewhere would believe that it was not a rigged affair.”⁴⁷ As McAllister explains, however, US policy regarding the election was formulated in Embassy Saigon, rather than Washington. Ambassador

⁴⁶ James McAllister, “A Fiasco of Noble Proportions”: The Johnson Administration and the South Vietnamese Elections of 1967,” Pacific Historical Review 73, no. 4 (November 2004): 619-652, p. 619-621. A few scholars have given the 1967 election greater treatment than is usual. Ellsworth Bunker’s biographer devoted a few pages to the contest, though this treatment seems designed to prove that the ambassador acted ethically throughout the affair. See Schaffer, Ellsworth Bunker, 182-183. Frances Fitzgerald devoted a brief chapter to the Assembly and presidential elections in Fire in the Lake. Although Fitzgerald did not have access to cable traffic between Saigon and Washington or internal US memoranda at the time of publication, her study warrants consideration, as she writes passionately about the dramatic conflict between Thieu and Ky. See Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake, 323-338. For a rosy portrayal of the election, see Howard R. Penniman, Elections in South Vietnam (Washington and Stanford: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, 1972), 49-89.

⁴⁷ McAllister, “A Fiasco of Noble Proportions,” 619-620.

Lodge and his replacement, Ellsworth Bunker, strongly supported a policy of non- intervention in the election, arguing that stability and military unity should take priority over a fair contest. Several officials in the State Department and White House rejected this position, claiming that the election was too important to leave to Saigon’s military. These officials wanted to take responsibility for guaranteeing a free and fair election.

Johnson, favoring a policy that facilitated stability, chose not to engage this particular debate, and let the embassy have the last word.⁴⁸

The State Department was more opposed to a Thieu ticket than a Ky campaign.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Leonard Unger and Vietnam Working Group Director Robert Miller argued that a Thieu presidency “would be considered a victory for the status quo, for continued military domination of the government and for conservativism (sic) in the political, economic, and social fields.” According to these officials, Thieu “inspires too much distrust to gain [a] key elected leadership position in [an] honest campaign.”⁴⁹ South Vietnamese Ambassador Bui Diem later confirmed this impression, claiming that the chief of state was a perpetual schemer.⁵⁰

Maxwell Taylor, now working as a presidential consultant, indicated in late January that Americans did not think much more of Ky than Thieu. Among embassy

⁴⁸ McAllister, “A Fiasco of Noble Proportions,” 621-623; George Allen, None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 230-231; Johnson, The Vantage Point, 263.

⁴⁹ McAllister, “A Fiasco of Noble Proportions,” 624-625.

⁵⁰ Diem with Chanoff, In the Jaws of History, 197-198. Ky did his best to promote these observations. On 10 January 1967, he told pacification expert Edward Lansdale that Thieu’s reputation for cleverness made him unelectable. See Telegram from the Embassy in Vietnam to the Department of State, 10 January 1967, FRUS, 1967, Vol. V: Document 12.

staff, “Thieu is regarded as the more desirable in terms of experience and stability but he is not generally popular and suffers politically from being a Catholic and an alleged Dai Viet.”⁵¹ Historian Seth Jacobs argues that Ngo Dinh Diem’s Catholicism was crucial to the American decision to support him.⁵² After Diem’s struggles with the Buddhist Movement, and Saigon’s subsequent troubles with this group, Washington learned a valuable lesson. A Catholic president could destabilize South Vietnam, and Thieu lacked the ability to counteract the problems created by his religion. Presidential adviser Clark Clifford reported in August that Thieu would probably be a better administrator, but he lacked key political skills. “Ky is shrewd,” Clifford said. “Thieu is possibly more discreet and more profound. Thieu doesn't have the flair for drama and exercises more caution.

Thieu may be somewhat less popular, as a result.”⁵³

State Department officials were more generous with Ky, but they still considered him a weak candidate. He was a Northerner in a country divided by regionalism, and a military officer in a culture that, according to Daniel Ellsberg, “accords little respect to the role.” Ky’s violent suppression of the Struggle Movement demonstrated his aversion to democracy, Ellsberg continued. “In fact, it is a challenging exercise to imagine just how one would change or add to this set of properties to invent a less acceptable, more alien figure for the role of popular, representative, symbolic, inspiring national leader in

⁵¹ Letter from the President’s Consultant (Taylor) to President Johnson, 30 January 1967, FRUS, 1967, Vol. V: Document 30. The Dai Viet was a secret society of militant Vietnamese nationalists. See Diem with Chanoff, In the Jaws of History, 16-17, 23-34.

⁵² Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam.

⁵³ Notes of Meeting, 5 August 1967, FRUS, 1967, Vol. V: Document 270.

South Vietnam.”⁵⁴ Given the weaknesses of both candidates, the State Department preferred to either sacrifice government efficacy in favor of a more representative administration or to encourage Ky or Thieu to serve a civilian leader as vice president or prime minister.⁵⁵

Embassy Saigon, however, doubted that the elections would fundamentally change the power dynamics of South Vietnam. Ambassador Lodge had grown to appreciate Ky and Thieu, and believed military unity and stability should take priority over a fair election. Besides, Lodge saw no worthy civilian presidential candidates. When Johnson asked the ambassador about potential civilian leadership, Lodge said that, “the course of recent Vietnamese history has produced a breed of politicians trained in the techniques of plot and conspiracy but ill-suited by background or experience to provide positive political leadership.” Once again, Lodge denigrated the Vietnamese as politically primitive. He further argued that the two civilians seeking the presidency, Tran Van Huong and Phan Khac Suu, were “survivors from the days of conspiracies against the French and against Diem... but neither Suu nor Huong would be likely to run the government with anything like the efficiency of Thieu or Ky.”⁵⁶

While they were divided over the desirability of a military presidential ticket, all Johnson administration officials agreed that a joint Ky-Thieu ticket would prove an

⁵⁴ Quoted in McAllister, “A Fiasco of Noble Proportions,” 626. Daniel Ellsberg was a personal assistant for the deputy ambassador to Vietnam, William Porter. The CIA originally believed the successful termination of General Thi provided Ky and Thieu with greater prestige, although this observation preceded Ky’s assault on Danang. See National Intelligence Estimate, 15 December 1966, FRUS, 1966, Vol. IV: Document 343

⁵⁵ McAllister, “A Fiasco of Noble Proportions,” 627.

⁵⁶ Ibid, 628-632. For the whole conversation, see Memorandum for the Record, 21 March 1967, FRUS, 1967, Vol. V: Document 116.

unmitigated disaster. Komer and Rostow claimed such a ticket would turn the contest into a farce, and the State Department was firmly committed to improving civilian representation in Saigon. Rostow suggested that Westmoreland and Lodge should encourage Thieu to withdraw from the race and take command of ARVN and military modernization. Lodge had no clear preference between Ky and Thieu, however, and opposed such intervention. Thieu insisted on running, resisting both heavy-handed efforts by Ky’s supporters and gentle nudging from Westmoreland and the newly appointed Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker to do so.⁵⁷

By May, US officials had received numerous reports that Ky’s supporters were working to rig the election. General Nguyen Ngoc Loan—who notoriously executed a man accused of serving in the NLF during the Tet Offensive—monitored, bribed, and blackmailed candidates for the new National Assembly in order to garner support for Ky. Bunker advocated taking an even stronger stand against a Thieu campaign, hoping that Ky would act more ethically if his foremost competition was eliminated. Specifically, the ambassador recommended offering Ky covert financial assistance and advice in exchange for firing Loan. Bunker’s proposal, described by a staffer on Johnson’s NSC as a “power play against Thieu,” met strong opposition in Washington. While few Americans held Thieu in high regard, nobody believed Ky would accept such a deal or keep it secret.⁵⁸

Despite American preferences, Thieu eventually forced Ky to abandon his presidential ambitions. In late June, the Directorate met for three days to discuss the

⁵⁷ McAllister, “A Fiasco of Noble Proportions,” 634-637. Bunker replaced Lodge on 5 April 1967 as US ambassador to South Vietnam.

⁵⁸ Ibid, 640-641. Ky also started his campaign early, in violation of “the spirit, if not the letter, of the law,” as Penniman puts it. See Penniman, Elections in South Vietnam, 55.

competing military tickets. In the end, Ky agreed to join Thieu’s ticket as the vice presidential candidate. Ky claimed that he stepped aside in order to preserve military unity after Thieu threatened the country with a divided ticket. The prime minister also argued that Thieu had agreed to serve as a symbolic leader, and to grant Ky authority over Cabinet appointments and the military. In theory, a shadow military committee chaired by Ky would enforce this division of power. Thieu eventually dissolved this committee, though, and concentrated power in his own office. While US officials once considered a joint ticket the worst of all predicted outcomes, Bunker was glad to hear that the South Vietnamese military was united under one banner.⁵⁹

After the military ticket was finally settled, McAllister argues, Bunker returned to Embassy Saigon’s old policy of non-intervention. The ambassador may indeed have largely conformed to such an approach, but in August he tried to secure covert funding for Thieu and Ky, as well the leading opposition candidate, Tran Van Huong. Bunker argued that these bribes would give the embassy leverage over both the winners and runners-up in the election. The government in Saigon would therefore remain receptive to American advice, and Bunker could encourage the opposition to cooperate with the new administration. The CIA rejected this request, claiming that Ky already had enough money to campaign. The Agency explained that it did not want a relationship based on

⁵⁹ McAllister, “A Fiasco of Noble Proportions,” 641; Diem with Chanoff, In the Jaws of History, 204-205; Karnow, Vietnam, 451.

bribery with Ky. The CIA also doubted that financial transactions with Huong could be kept secret, or that the opposition candidate even desired such assistance.⁶⁰

For the most part, Bunker did not interfere with the election, which gave Thieu and Ky the freedom to eliminate their competition without American interference. Au Truong Thanh, Ky’s former minister of finance, had resigned in October 1966 as an advocate for neutralism. As punishment, Thieu and Ky barred him from the presidential contest. Duong Van “Big” Minh, Saigon’s first leader after the 1963 coup, met a similar obstacle. A popular figure that could potentially rally both military and civilian support, the government had exiled Minh to Thailand in late 1964, when Phan Khac Suu replaced him as chief of state. Thieu and Ky banned Big Minh from returning to South Vietnam, claiming he represented a national security threat. The State Department ordered Bunker to describe for Thieu and Ky the possible political consequences of prohibiting Minh from competing for the presidency. Bunker did not want Minh to run, either, though.

Despite his instructions, the ambassador only told Thieu and Ky to find a legal excuse for their judgment against Minh.⁶¹

Reports of further electioneering soon followed. All of the presidential candidates, most of whom travelled together, were supposed to attend a rally in Quang Tri on August

6. Most of the candidates were flying to the rally when the plane suddenly diverted to Dong Ha. Conveniently, nobody from the Thieu-Ky campaign was aboard. Thieu and Ky

⁶⁰ Telegram From the Station in Saigon to the Central Intelligence Agency, 16 August 1967, FRUS, 1967, Vol. V: Document 282; Telegram From the Central Intelligence Agency to the Station in Saigon, 19 August 1967, FRUS, 1967, Vol. V: Document 289. ⁶¹ McAllister, “A Fiasco of Noble Proportions,” 642-643; Tran Van Don, Our Endless War: Inside Vietnam (London: Presidio Press, 1978), 135.

claimed they were innocent in the affair. Bunker accepted these protests, but the other candidates were skeptical. To this day, there is no clear proof that Thieu and Ky arranged for the plane to fly off-track, but they certainly had a record of unseemly conduct.⁶²

Several members of the US Congress expressed disgust over the reported electioneering. Fifty-seven members of the House of Representatives condemned Ky on August 10 for rigging the elections. Senators Jacob Javits, John Pastore, and Robert Kennedy also rebuked Saigon, arguing that such fraud was the natural consequence of America’s misbegotten adventure in Vietnam. The American media generally treated the election favorably, though, and suggested that most Vietnamese voters were able to vote freely. Thieu and Ky took office with a plurality; they received less than thirty-five percent of the vote. In fact, the vote was so low that Thieu believed the United States had rigged it so he would be more receptive to American advice. The runner-up, Truong Dinh Dzu, led a campaign to void the results because of the fraud. American officials largely dismissed these complaints, but the National Assembly nearly nullified the election as a result. Dzu then learned the price of dissent; the government imprisoned him and several other candidates.⁶³

Despite American preferences, Nguyen Van Thieu soared into the presidency of South Vietnam. Johnson had not been comfortable with any of the previous regimes that took power after Ngo Dinh Diem’s death, and Thieu did not have an auspicious start at changing American minds about South Vietnamese factionalism and skullduggery. Had

⁶² McAllister, “A Fiasco of Noble Proportions,” 645.

⁶³ McAllister, “A Fiasco of Noble Proportions,” 647-650; Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake, 337; Penniman, Elections in South Vietnam, 82-83.

he maintained the stability of his country and initiated a broad nation-building program, he might have earned Johnson’s belated respect. He achieved neither goal before the 1968 US presidential election, however. Under Thieu, South Vietnam nearly collapsed before an enemy assault and his alliance with the White House chilled considerably over peace negotiations. In the end, it was Johnson—not Thieu—who succumbed to these pressures.

TET OFFENSIVE

Thieu was not long in his new office before he faced a major military threat. In early 1968, North Vietnamese forces attacked the US marine base at Khe Sanh, near the demilitarized zone. While Washington focused on the siege, North Vietnamese and NLF units launched a major attack on January 30. Over the course of the Tet Offensive, the enemy assaulted thirty-six provincial capitals, five major cities, sixty-four provincial capitals, and fifty hamlets. The NLF even struck the US embassy and Independence Palace, and took temporary control of a fortress in the old imperial capital of Hue.⁶⁴ Washington and Saigon recovered, and the Tet Offensive is now widely considered a military failure for the Vietnamese revolutionaries. The enemy, however, struck political and psychological blows against the United States, as it became clear that the war had stalemated. The Johnson administration’s publicly expressed optimism about the war rang hollow after the Tet Offensive, discrediting him as a reliable American leader.⁶⁵

⁶⁴ Herring, LBJ and Vietnam, 152-153. For a brief overview of the battles of the Tet Offensive, see James H. Willbanks, The Tet Offensive: A Concise History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 3-78.

⁶⁵ Ronnie E. Ford, Tet 1968: Understanding the Surprise (London: Frank Cass, 1995); David F. Schmitz, The Tet Offensive: Politics, War, and Public Opinion (Toronto: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), xiii-xvii, 110-112; Herring, America’s

In light of the Tet Offensive, the White House began to question its strategy in Vietnam. The US military, particularly General Wheeler, pressured the president to escalate the American combat role in Vietnam, and forced Westmoreland to submit a request for additional troops. McNamara resigned as secretary of defense on March 1, but he opposed investing more soldiers at the beginning of the Offensive. His replacement, Clark Clifford, was of a similar mind. The Tet Offensive even convinced the president’s hawkish foreign policy advisers—the so-called Wise Men—that the United States could not defeat its enemies militarily. Johnson’s final decision satisfied none of his advisers.

When Wheeler and Westmoreland submitted a contingency plan that called for an additional 206,000 soldiers, Johnson authorized only 13,500 reinforcements. In addition, the president announced on March 31 that he would neither seek nor accept the Democratic presidential nomination for the upcoming US election. To facilitate peace negotiations with Hanoi, Johnson also offered to initiate a partial bombing halt.⁶⁶

Thieu’s performance during the Tet Offensive did little to solidify American support for him. While US forces were alert when the enemy struck, half of Thieu’s troops were furloughed for the Tet holiday. Thieu had wanted a forty-eight-hour truce for

Longest War, 229-234; Don Oberdorfer, Tet! (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1971), 238-239; Robert J. McMahon, "Turning Point: The Vietnam War's Pivotal Year, November 1967-November 1968," in The Columbia History of the Vietnam War, ed.

David L. Anderson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 191-216. As James Willbanks notes, the strategic political and psychological victory that Hanoi achieved may have been an unintended, but welcomed, consequence of the Offensive. See Willbanks, The Tet Offensive, 79-85.

⁶⁶ Herring, LBJ and Vietnam, 152-163; Gardner, Pay Any Price, 459. Johnson’s decision was also motivated by a challenge to his incumbency by Democrats Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. See, for example, Larry Berman, Lyndon Johnson’s War: The Road to Stalemate in Vietnam (New York: Norton, 1989), 186-187.

the celebration, and had only consented to reducing the duration to thirty-six hours under American pressure.⁶⁷ Thieu’s decision therefore put both South Vietnamese and American soldiers at risk.

On February 1, Westmoreland advised Wheeler that the Tet Offensive offered Thieu an opportunity to exert “real leadership.”⁶⁸ Some US officials were not content to wait for that to happen. The CIA claimed that Saigon had failed to mobilize its people or provide dynamic government and military leadership. The Agency wanted Thieu to appoint Ky his chief of staff and director of operations, and to place him in charge of reviewing all South Vietnamese personnel files, with the goal of improving leadership. The CIA also advocated for the creation of a South Vietnamese War and Reconstruction Council to organize and review the performance of Saigon’s resistance to the invasion. If Thieu refused to follow such a scheme or failed to make progress, the Agency concluded that Washington should seek new South Vietnamese leadership, halt the bombing and negotiate with Hanoi, or discuss the creation of a coalition government with the NLF. Rusk adamantly refused to issue this kind of threat, claiming that this was not how Americans should treat their allies.⁶⁹

Embassy Saigon did, however, encourage Thieu to mobilize the general population to tackle some of the most important problems he faced. Bunker’s list of immediate concerns included opening roads, sustaining economic activity in an active

⁶⁷ Karnow, Vietnam, 544; Oberdorfer, Tet! 132-133.

⁶⁸ Telegram From the Commander, Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (Westmoreland) to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Wheeler), 1 February 1968, FRUS, January-August 1968, Vol. VI: Document 43.

⁶⁹ Memorandum Prepared in the Central Intelligence Agency, 2 February 1968, FRUS, January-August 1968, Vol. VI: Document 44; Oberdorfer, Tet! 182.

war zone, improving ARVN leadership, and enhancing Saigon’s intelligence systems. The ambassador also raised longer-term issues such as corruption, which damaged the government’s reputation with the South Vietnamese polity. Reflecting Johnson’s opinion, Bunker encouraged Thieu to break from his normal pattern of caution by exerting proactive leadership on these challenges.⁷⁰

Washington feared that Thieu’s usual reluctance to take decisive action posed a major threat to South Vietnamese security.⁷¹ Thieu’s decision to request additional US soldiers to face the Offensive, rather than raise additional South Vietnamese forces, also disturbed the White House. Rusk, a hawkish Cold Warrior, objected to Thieu’s request in a February 12 meeting, even as Westmoreland called for additional reinforcements. Clark Clifford later repeated Rusk’s disgust. The secretary of state, however, still favored sending six battalions if it would help Thieu repel his enemies. According to McNamara, Thieu needed those troops just to avoid a rout at Khe Sanh.⁷²

Thieu did commission a Central Recovery Committee, but his vice president took credit for its strong performance. This new body was responsible for interring corpses,

⁷⁰ Schmitz, The Tet Offensive, 102; Telegram From the Embassy in Vietnam to the Department of State, 2 February 1968, FRUS, January-August 1968, Vol. VI: Document 45.

⁷¹ Memorandum From William J. Jorden of the National Security Council Staff to the President's Special Assistant (Rostow), 3 February 1968, FRUS, January-August 1968, Vol. VI: Document 49; Schmitz, The Tet Offensive, 100-101. Thieu was not pleased with the US government, either. He reportedly believed rumors that the White House knew about the Tet Offensive beforehand, and allowed it to happen in order to encourage the development of a coalition government in the South. According to these rumors, Johnson hoped this new regime would facilitate US troop withdrawals and continue to accept American advice. See Oberdorfer, Tet! 180.

⁷² Notes of Meeting, 12 February 1968, FRUS, January-August 1968, Vol. VI: Document

70; Gardner, Pay Any Price, 440.

assisting the wounded, feeding refugees, and rebuilding destroyed infrastructure. As head of the Recovery Committee Ky so impressed the CIA that the Agency declared him the “man of the hour.” Unfortunately, Ky’s achievements were highlighted in the press, and rumors swirled that he was planning a coup. To prevent his rival from gaining too much prestige, Thieu forced Ky to resign from the Committee. The vice president’s work was nonetheless appreciated by the US embassy, which noted progress in all of the committee’s areas of responsibility.⁷³

At the end of February, before Ky resigned from the Recovery Committee, Thieu began to earn greater American goodwill by taking a more active role in the recovery effort. Bunker reported that Thieu had chaired two meetings, and intended to do so twice a week in the future.⁷⁴ As more time passed, Thieu earned greater respect from the ambassador. On March 14, Bunker informed Washington that, “President Thieu is continuing to take an increasingly active and decisive role in the government, providing more effective and more visible leadership than at any time in the past.” Bunker acknowledged that Thieu was neither a charismatic nor dynamic leader, but the

⁷³ Oberdorfer, Tet! 181-182; Vietnam Situation Report, 12 February 1968, FRUS, January-August 1968, Vol. VI: Document 72; Telegram From the Embassy in Vietnam to the Department of State, 22 February 1968, FRUS, January-August 1968, Vol. VI: Document 82; Memorandum From the Ambassador's Special Assistant (Lansdale) to the Ambassador to Vietnam (Bunker), 27 February 1968, FRUS, January-August 1968, Vol. VI: Document 88.

⁷⁴ Telegram From the Embassy in Vietnam to the Department of State, 29 February 1968,