The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [173]
Washington was in a quandary, vainly seeking an alternative to Diem, anxiously questioning whether to invest more support in a wavering regime. General Collins was re-called for consultation. At a press conference, President Eisenhower allowed an almost painful glimpse of his hesitation: “In Vietnam there have occurred lots of difficulties. People have left the Cabinet and so on … it is a strange and almost inexplicable situation.… What the exact terms of our future policy will be I can’t say.”
Here was another opportunity for disengagement. Diem’s government had not lived up to the “standards of performance” on which Eisenhower had conditioned American aid. The implications of the French defeat, the refusal of the British to commit themselves to united action, the pallid partnership of the NATO nations—why did not the Eisenhower Administration put it all together and, given the President’s great prestige at home, detach itself from a losing proposition? In the bureaucracy, doubtless no one did put it all together; and besides, the fear of being “soft on Communism” abided.
Diem’s success in smashing the coup d’état with troops loyal to the source of American largesse gave him a reprieve. He tightened his government by bringing in his three brothers to replace opponents and took on the appearance of a strong man. The United States, relieved of the pain of re-thinking, publicly reaffirmed its support for him, chiefly because it feared the consequences of letting him fall. Donald Heath, the new Ambassador in Saigon, stated the choice: committing “over $300 million plus our national prestige” on the retention of a Free Vietnam was a gamble, but withholding support would be worse by assisting a Communist takeover. The choice, as all too often, was between two undesirables.
Enforcing the choice was always the fear of domestic outcry. Mansfield, the influential Senator, “believes in Diem,” it was said, and the reaction to be expected from Cardinal Spellman if his protégé were dumped was unpleasant to contemplate. “Alas! for the newly betrayed millions of Indochinese,” he had declared after Geneva, “who must now learn the awful facts of slavery from their eager Communist masters” in repetition of “the agonies and infamies inflicted upon the hapless victims of Red Russia’s bestial tyranny.” Communism had been following a “carefully set-up timetable for the achievement of a world plan.” Red rulers knew what they wanted with “terrible clarity” and pursued it with “violent consistency.” The Cardinal had continued in this vein, rousing a convention of the American Legion to unanimous bristle. In mid-1955, when Eisenhower was preparing to run for a second term, he had no desire to let loose more tirades of this kind.
Adoption of the client made the United States a sponsor in Diem’s fateful denial of the nationwide elections to be held in 1956 as agreed on at Geneva. The North, with a population of 15 million to South Vietnam’s 12 million, and a general acknowledgment of the greater popularity of the Viet-Minh, had counted on the elections to gain command of the country as a whole. When in July 1955 it invited the South to consult on preparations for the event, Diem refused on the ground that no election under the Hanoi regime would allow a free vote, that enforced results would overwhelm the votes of the South and that in any event he was not bound by the Geneva Accord. While valid, his objection lost something of its force when three months later, in a referendum held in the South to depose the absent Bao Dai as Chief of State and confer the Presidency on Diem, the desired result was achieved by what a foreign observer