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By Root 1001 0

a provincial governor in the French Colonial service and as Minister of Interior under Bao Dai, but had resigned in 1933 in protest against French rule and the cancellation of promised reforms. He retired to Japan and after his return had refused a Japanese offer in 1945 to form a government under the ever available Bao Dai. As fervent an anti-Communist as he was a nationalist, he had likewise rejected the alternative of joining Ho Chi Minh, who had offered him a post at Hanoi. This non-cooperation led to his arrest and detainment for six months by the Viet-Minh. Recognized as the leading non-Communist nationalist, he had refused to serve under the Elysée Agreement as incompatible with sovereignty, and in 1949 went again into exile in Japan. In 1950 he came to the United States, where by virtue of a brother who was a Catholic bishop he made contact with Cardinal Spellman of New York.

Introduced by the Cardinal to influential circles, Diem met Justice Douglas in Washington soon after Douglas’ discovery of the “five fronts” of Southeast Asia. Impressed by Diem’s vision of a future for his country combining independence and social reform, Douglas believed he had found the man who could be a real alternative to both the French puppet Bao Dai and the Communist Ho Chi Minh. He conveyed his discovery to the CIA and introduced his candidate to Senators Mansfield and John F. Kennedy, both Catholics. Thereafter, Diem was on his way.

Here at last was the American candidate, a valid Vietnamese nationalist whose Francophobia absolved him of any taint of colonialism and whose approval by Cardinal Spellman certified his anti-Communism. He was safe from Senator McCarthy. He went to Europe in 1953 to promote his candidacy among the Vietnamese expatriates in France and was actively lobbying in Paris in 1954 during the Geneva parley when discovery of a promising leader was urgent. Diem was certainly not a French choice, but France’s need of a cease-fire was more compelling than her dislike of the candidate. With American backing and the wire-pulling of various factions among the expatriates, and with Mendès-France’s deadline drawing close, Diem was reluctantly accepted. Bao Dai, still Chief of State in a comfortable retreat on the Riviera, was prevailed upon to appoint him premier just before the Geneva Accord was signed.

Around this figure, over the next nine years, the effort to construct a viable democratic self-sustaining state of South Vietnam centered and collapsed. Diem proved ill-equipped. Living on theory and high principle, he had no experience of national independent government; he shared the general antagonism to the French, yet inherited the colonial legacy through the class that benefited from it and to which he belonged; he was a devout Catholic in a largely Buddhist society; he had to contend with divisive sects and Mafia-type factions with private armies and gangster methods. Rigid in his ideas, unschooled in compromise, unacquainted with democracy in practice, he was unable to deal with dissent or opposition except by fiat or force. In one of the sad betrayals that high office inflicts on good intentions, circumstances turned him into a dictator without giving him a dictator’s iron means.

Now, with an American Ambassador and full-scale Embassy in Saigon, and with proliferating advisers and agencies in addition to MAAG, United States policy injected itself more purposefully than ever, taking as its first task the training of an effective and, it was to be hoped, loyal and motivated Vietnamese army. MAAG wanted to do it alone without participation by the French, on the theory that American influence would thereby be differentiated from the French. That we would inherit the distaste felt for any white intrusion was not contemplated. Americans saw themselves as “different” from the French, to be welcomed as well-wishers of Vietnamese independence, while the fact that it was the United States which had brought back the French and financed their war was mentally swept under the rug. By helping an independent South Vietnam to