The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [174]
No one questioned that if the elections were held, as one official reported, “the overwhelming majority of Vietnamese would vote Communist.” In the course of a speech opposing equal status for a Communist regime, Senator John F. Kennedy acknowledged “the popularity and prevalence” of Ho Chi Minh’s party “throughout Indochina”—which seemed to him reason not to allow its participation in a national government. Eisenhower, informed by advisers that Ho would certainly win the election, “refused to agree” (according to General Ridgway) to its taking place. While Diem did not need American advice in the matter, his refusal rested on American support. By 1956 more evidence of harsh measures in the North, including widespread killing of landlords on the Chinese pattern, was at hand. Terrorist tactics in an election could be assumed. In June 1956 the State Department officially announced that “We support President Diem fully in his position that when conditions do not exist that could preclude ‘intimidation or coercion’… there can be no free choice.”
The consequence was that, failing reunification by election, North Vietnam resorted to other means—the encouragement of insurgency followed by the so-called War of Liberation. No egregious folly may be charged to the United States in this affair except that, by backing Diem’s decision, America seemed to share in what critics of the war were to claim was a brazen suppression of the people’s will, leaving the North no alternative but insurgency. Suppression it was not, because the people’s will would not have found a free voice in any case. The non-holding of the elections was an excuse for, not a cause of, renewed war. “We shall achieve unity,” the North’s Deputy Premier Pham Van Dong had warned at Geneva. “No force in the world, internal or external, can make us deviate from our path.”
In the next five years, with a flow of American funds that paid 60 to 75 percent of its budget, including the total cost of its army, and supported an unfavorable trade balance, South Vietnam appeared to flourish in unanticipated order and prosperity. The French armed forces, under insistent American pressure, gradually departed in phased withdrawals until the French High Command was dissolved in February 1956. The American Friends of Vietnam, organized by the Catholic Relief Services and the International Rescue Committee (originally formed to save victims of Nazism and having a list of the most respectable liberal names running down its letterhead), spread word with the assistance of a public relations agent in Saigon, on a $3000 monthly retainer, of the “miracle” of South Vietnam. It seemed, during these five years, as if progress had been made and the gamble would work.
Behind the miracle, facts were less favorable. Ill-planned land reforms alienated more than they helped the peasants; “Communist denunciation” programs, in which neighbors were induced to inform on one another, and endless busy and corrupt official interferences in peasant lives turned sentiment against Diem. Critics and dissenters were arrested, sent to “re-education camps,” or otherwise silenced. The flood of imports paid for by the United States was used as a political instrument to win middle-class support through a generous supply of consumer goods. A study by Americah political scientists reported that South Vietnam “is becoming a permanent mendicant” dependent on external support, and concluded that “American aid has built a castle on sand.”
Peasant discontent supplied ready ground for insurgents. Operating on the move, Viet-Minh partisans