Doomed from the Start? Ngo Dinh Diem and the Start of the Vietnam War

Abstract

It is often said there were three critical junctures when the United States could have altered the course of events in Vietnam: l) in 1945/46 when OSS agents established a rapport with Ho Chi Minh, with the prospect of a more moderate policy toward French Indochina on the part of the Truman administration; 2) the 1954 Geneva Agreements and the failure to abide by the provision for elections in 1956; 3) the Buddhist crisis of 1963 which exposed the profound weakness of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime and offered JFK and then LBJ a chance to consider an alternative to the escalation of the war. Jessica Chapman considers the second. By and large she agrees with established accounts that the United States was blinded by Cold War politics to the fatal weaknesses of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime, which was revealed early on by his handling of the so-called sect crisis. The Viet Minh in the south, bound by the 1954 Geneva Accords, had either regrouped to the north or were lying low. The sect crisis of 1955 laid bare the basic nature of the Diem regime – ruthless suppression of “enemies”, failure to even consider compromise with non-Communist opponents, and window dressing in the form of ideological democratic cum modernist propaganda. Although the United States initially considered abandoning Diem at that point, he was able, with CIA-furnished bribes and cunning, to stage an armed showdown against the sects (the Cao Dai, the Hoa Hao, and the Binh Xuyen) in an incident known as the “battle of Saigon”. He then rigged a “plebiscite” to take power from Bao Dai (still the French-derived legal authority, pending elections), and subsequently declared himself President of a new Republic of Vietnam in 1956.