The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [470]
“So he [Diem] has sufficient forces to protect himself?” Bobby asked, only half a question. What these men were talking about could easily escalate into a civil war, brother against brother, while the Viet Cong stood by as happy spectators.
“The difficulty is, I’m sure that’s the way it is with every coup, it always looks balanced until somebody acts,” the president said a few minutes later, lighting the tedious discourse with a flash of insight. Kennedy’s overwhelming concern, as he expressed it here and in a subsequent meeting, was whether the coup would succeed, not whether his nation should be promoting or acquiescing in such an action, or whether it would change the dynamics in South Vietnam for the better.
For the most part, this room was full of men acting as technocrats of power, tinkering with formulas, moving their pieces back and forth across their chessboard without seeming to realize that each piece represented a real human being. As they discussed a cable giving Lodge further instructions, Bobby’s voice rose above the banal talk about tank battalions and paratroopers to say something that struck hard and true.
“I may be in a minority, but I just don’t see that this makes any sense, Mr. President,” Bobby said, employing the same deferential formality as the rest of the officials, but speaking with forceful candor. “What we are doing really is we’re putting the whole future of the country, and Southeast Asia, in the hands of somebody [General Tran Van Don] we really don’t know very well. One official of the United States government has had contact with him, and he in turn has lined up some others. It’s clear that Diem is a fighter. He’s not just going to get out of there. If it’s a failure, Diem is going to tell us to get the hell out of the country. He’s going to capture these people. They’re going to say the United States is behind it. I would think we’re just going down the road to disaster. I think this cablegram sounds as if we’re willing to go along with the coup but we think we need a little more information.”
The first of November is La fete des morts, the Day of the Dead, or All Saints’ Day. It also happened to be the thirty-sixth birthday of Captain Ho Tan Quyen, a senior naval officer loyal to Diem. At around noon his deputy came by his house in Saigon and got him to leave his children to go to a seaside restaurant for a birthday luncheon. On the drive through the suburbs of Saigon, the deputy shot and killed the captain.
Soon afterward the dissident generals ordered their troops to seize police and naval headquarters, radio stations, and the post office, and to surround Gia Long Palace. The generals took one of their prisoners, Colonel Le Van Tung, head of the notorious Special Forces, and had him telephone Diem to tell him to surrender. The Vietnamese leader refused to give up, and after the phone call Tung and his brother were led away and killed.
In the middle of the night the insurgents attacked the palace. By dawn the battle was over, but Diem and Nhu had escaped to the Chinese quarters of Chalon. Diem probably could have fled farther into the countryside and sought to rally his own loyalist troops, but he decided instead to surrender. He called General Don and told him that he was prepared to surrender to his troops with “military honors.” He said to those who were harboring him that he did not care whether he lived or died. But he knew these generals as his lifelong colleagues, and he surely expected that they would treat him better than if he had the terrible misfortune of falling into the hands of his Communist enemies.
General Don was not a bloodthirsty avenger. He and his colleagues asked the CIA’s Lucien Conein for a plane to fly Diem