South Vietnam

To PRESIDENT Ngo Dinh Diem and his family, the Buddhist crisis last summer was a cleverly contrived political conspiracy designed to bring down the government by a coup d’etat. They blamed the Communists, a handful of self-seeking, ill-educated Buddhist leaders, numerous members of the American diplomatic and military missions in Vietnam, and the international press. To the Buddhist leaders, who drew on deep wells of religious feeling to arouse a passionate political temper among the people, it was a simple question of religious persecution.

In fact, neither side was right; both deliberately distorted the facts, exaggerated, and lied. In the tangled webs they wove, truth was often hard to discern, though some of the more blatant misrepresentations were readily apparent.

Whatever it may become eventually, the Buddhist leadership has not been Communist. As in neighboring Southeast Asian countries, the Communists in South Vietnam have attempted to infiltrate the Buddhist organizations, but the most patient investigation does not suggest that they have had significant success. Nor was it true that Communist grenades caused the deaths of nine Buddhists in the old imperial capital of Hué on May 8, thus precipitating the crisis, as the government claimed. Responsibility for this blunder lay with the government itself. By attempting to conceal its guilt, which was well known, it destroyed its own credibility, thereby creating a situation that the Buddhists were only too ready to exploit.

At the same time, Buddhists’ claims that they were persecuted by the government were untrue, at least until May 8. Discriminated against, they were, but not persecuted. From the moment when the troops opened fire on 10,000 Buddhist demonstrators, however, and armored cars crushed the fallen in the narrow streets of Hué, this obvious persecution became a rallying cry for political action in which the ghastly acts of self-immolation, long-drawn-out and highly emotional memorial services, and politically motivated religious rallies all had their organized part.

In some ways, the ruthless action against the monks and nuns in their pagodas on August 21 and the subsequent use of martial law to discipline wayward university and high school students appeared to be successful. By acting repressively and harshly, the government overcame the immediate threat much more quickly than many Western observers believed possible. But its short-term victory contained the seeds of ultimate defeat in the deep gulf that separates the Confucian elite from the predominantly Buddhist masses. The coup d’etat on November 1, through which the military seized control of the government, in fact had wide support among the people.

The people’s religion

By too frequent references to the Roman Catholicism of the Ngo Dinhs, the Western press implied, and sometimes stated, that this was an incipient war between Buddhism and Catholicism. It was not. It was actually a much deeper, older, and more basic struggle. For centuries Vietnam has been ruled by highly educated Confucianists who, venerating learning and knowledge, were remote from the earthy peasants, whose Buddhism is gay and exuberant and heavily mixed with animism and Taoism. Buddhism flourished because it was the people’s religion. Two thirds of the population are at least nominal followers, and perhaps a third of the population could be described as devout.

Traditionally, Buddhist leaders have come from among the people rather than from the ruling Confucian class, of which President Diem was a striking example. Dedicated, honest, obdurate, and supremely confident of his own omniscience, he lived in a different world from his people, whose Confucian duty, he believed, is not to challenge authority but always to submit loyally to it.

Thus, the enchanting Madame Nhu, with a diamond-encrusted crucifix around her neck, was being Confucian rather than Catholic when she declared that it was a question of national honor that such a low intellectual level of Buddhist leadership should be crushed without pity. It was not merely treasonable but, worse, humiliating that Buddhist monks should hoist such slogans as “Down with the Uppish Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu.” She regarded such people, she made clear, with contempt.

The revolt against feudalism

What Madame Nhu, her husband and brother-in-law failed to appreciate, however, was that the Buddhist leaders, whatever their intellectual capacities (which were a good deal higher than the palace ever gave them credit for), were the spearhead of a revolt against Confucian feudalism. Urged time and again to make conciliatory gestures, to lead by inspiring unity, President Diem could not bring himself to step down from his pedestal and to treat with people of a lower social order. The sum of his experience had taught him that the only way to deal with opposition was to crush it. So often right in the past, he could not believe that this time he might be wrong. He failed to see that there was a fundamental difference between the unarmed Buddhists and the armed Binh Xuyen gangsters, whose corrupt hold on Saigon he broke courageously in 1955.

Suspicious of his generals, contemptuous of Saigon’s intellectuals, and even of Saigon itself, which he called a place of commerce and not a capital, and rather more the little tyrant than the little father of his people, Diem forfeited any right to expect a popular following. Yet, for the discontent so obvious among his own people he tended increasingly to blame the United States. Senior American officials, who had been working overtime to help win the war, suddenly found themselves accused of being “foreign adventurers” plotting to overthrow the government by force.

The Central Intelligence Agency was the obvious whipping boy in this campaign, which persisted even after it became public knowledge that Colonel Le Quang Tung’s special forces, armed, trained, and subsidized by the C.I.A. for operations inside Communist territory, had been diverted instead to Operation Buddhist and that the C.I.A. chief in Saigon still believed that the war could be won with Diem only.

Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, who arrived in Saigon in the tensionfilled days following the attacks on the pagodas, took his time in assessing the situation. When he decided finally that the Nhus should go, or at least take a long holiday abroad, Diem listened in outrage, then rose in defense of his brother, who had always been the driving force and the theorist of the regime. Nhu had organized the secret Revolutionary Workers’ Party, which spread the family net through all branches of the civil and military services; he also organized the security services, the Republican Youth Movement, and a huge secret contingency fund, which Nhu himself believed to be sufficient to win the war with or without continued U. S. support.

Nhu was clever, impetuous, and authoritarian. In July and August, when the army seethed with talk of a coup d’etat, he called the generals together and lectured them on nepotism, dictatorship, and the strategy of the coup d’etat. “There are two rules for dealing with a coup d’etat,” he told his astonished audience. “You break it like an egg before the chicken has hatched, or, if you cannot prevent it, you join in and exploit it.” His method of exploitation was to turn Saigon into an armed camp, excluding from his plans all military leaders who could not be relied on absolutely, and to organize the suppression of the Buddhists and all others who dared to speak out against the regime.

Meeting the Communist threat

The vital question was, How much had this divisive policy weakened the war effort? United States aid had not been given to prop up a discredited government but to help the Vietnamese people beat an externally initiated and directed Communist campaign to seize the country by armed revolt.

Even before the Buddhist affair had reached a climax in May, there were divided views on the progress of the war. The top American military and C.I.A. leadership and Ambassador Frederick E. Nolting, Jr., who left in August before the action against the pagodas, were all convinced that the campaign was going well. Some experienced American officers believed that, on the contrary, the war was being lost, an opinion also expressed in their official reports by at least two other Western embassies.

Thanks largely to the recommendations of General Maxwell Taylor, who initiated the vastly increased American contribution during his visit to Vietnam late in 1961, the period between early 1962 and early 1963 was marked by significant, even great, achievement. For the first time, a real effort was made to meet the Communist threat at the grass roots.

It is true that the strategic-hamlet program went too far and too fast in some areas, and that some new hamlets could not be built at all without destroying the economic life of the peasants in the old ones, but many hamlets provided both security and improved standards of living, the principal American aim. Such indicators as rice and pig production, drawings from the agricultural credit organization, the distribution of chemical fertilizer, and the creation of rural schools all suggested that the peasants were doing better.

More and more information was available about the activities of the Viet Cong, and large numbers responded to the call to lay down their arms. A new Army division had taken the field, and in Quang Ngai Province, for so many years under Viet Minh control, it gave an excellent and aggressive account of itself. About half of the other regular units in the Army had been retrained. The civil guard and selfdefense forces had been given the means and the know-how to defend themselves, and sometimes the promise of quick support if they ran into trouble. Helicopters and armored amphibious tractors had brought hitherto inaccessible Viet Cong lairs within the scope of heavy attack. In mid-1962 at least a million people lived under the complete control of the Viet Cong; by mid-1963 the number was about 700,000.

The Viet Cong hold their own

In the critical Mekong delta, it was obvious that there had been great improvement in organization among the anti-Communist forces. But in the Camau Peninsula, at the extreme tip of the Mekong delta, the Vietnamese government controlled little but the provincial and district capitals. By day and by night the Viet Cong had the rest. Within an hour’s drive of Saigon, the rice and vegetable fields and the coconut plantations and mangrove swamps of Kien Hoa Province harbored 20,000 Viet Cong, or more than three times the number of armed Communists involved in the 1950s in the campaign in Malaya, to which the Vietnam war is often, and so unwisely, compared. The Viet Cong had their own munitions factory and hospital and propaganda units, which turned out highly sophisticated propaganda leaflets in English. Here and elsewhere, the growing size of the Communist forces was less reason for concern than their growing capability. “Every day in every way the Viet Cong are getting better and better,” said the chief American adviser in one of the more hard-pressed provinces.

After an indifferent start, the strategic-hamlet program went well for a time in the delta. Egged on by the dynamic Nhu, province chiefs competed with one another to build fences around their hamlets. They fenced in the villages along the main lines of road communication, but the vital waterways and the land between the main roads remained in Viet Cong hands. In this area the population is Concentrated along wooded and serpentine canals. The people live on rice, on fish from the canals, and on fruit from trees growing on the banks, and they can be resettled only where an alternative source of food is available.

Since many villages have no access roads and are entirely surrounded by water, no one has yet found a solution to this problem, and the lateral hamlets needed to complete the delta scheme have not been built. Unless and until they are, the Viet Cong will continue to enjoy their current freedom to operate in large and regular formations everywhere. from the outskirts of Saigon to the end of road communications. This is not to suggest that all is lost. Yet it is not easy to be confident that the will to continue the struggle has not been gravely injured by the crisis in human relations between the Confucian oligarchy and its Buddhist subjects.