Stately, plump Ngo Dinh Diem was a most peculiar American client, the kind of local eccentric who springs seemingly from nowhere to vex the great powers.

When he stepped off the plane in Saigon in June 1954 to assume his new duties, he had been in exile for four years and out of political office for twenty. In younger years, Diem—pronounced Ziem—had held important positions as a promising member of the mandarinate, a corps of high-end civil servants who ran the machinery of Vietnam on behalf of the Paris-based factory owners. He became the colony’s interior minister at thirty-two but was stunned to discover that the French had no intention of ceding real power or opening the way to Vietnamese autonomy. In an act of principle that became part of his early identity, Diem withdrew from public life. He rejected offers to be prime minister twice, once by the French and once by the Japanese, who had occupied Vietnam with Vichy connivance during World War II. The third time Diem found it propitious to accept. He always believed that he had the “mandate of heaven” to lead his country—a Confucian concept.

Diem’s ambitions—his calling, as he saw it—to return as the providential leader of an independent Vietnam had been undisguised during his years in self-imposed exile. The United States, for its part, was drawn not just to his anti-Communist credentials and plausible political credibility but to his religious faith. Diem was a Roman Catholic from a long line of prominent Vietnamese Catholics and was himself a onetime seminarian with a monastic bent. Two of his years of exile had been at Maryknoll Seminaries in New Jersey and New York, where he joined the other adepts in prayer, and in such menial tasks as washing floors and taking out the garbage. Only months before he returned to lead Vietnam, Diem took steps to enter a Benedictine monastery in Belgium, more evidence to his acolytes of his self-abnegation and humility.

There was an otherworldly quality to Ngo Dinh Diem. For a nationalist, he was a singular figure. “Of his own choice he had denied himself a normal family life, seeking emotional satisfaction instead in an extreme form of religious contemplation which . . . isolated him from the world,” said an American who first met him in the mid-1950s. “He had never fired a rifle in anger, never fought with his hands for anything, however strong his principles, yet he came to a country torn by war. He had no organized popular support. A vast majority of his countrymen had never heard of him.”

Diem was highly educated, strictly principled, personally ascetic, divinely inspired, pseudodemocratic. Strange as he was, and there being no viable alternatives who could be agreed upon, Diem was anointed the man destined to lead postcolonial Vietnam into self-sufficiency and self-government and, for good measure, military victory against the latent Communist insurgency.

Strange as he was, and there being no viable alternatives who could be agreed upon, Diem was anointed the man destined to lead postcolonial Vietnam into self-sufficiency and self-government and, for good measure, military victory against the latent Communist insurgency.

With significant American help, Diem established power in the supposedly temporary southern zone, quickly orchestrating a plebiscite to replace the feckless emperor. He garnered 98 percent of the vote, including two hundred thousand more votes in Saigon than there were registered voters. More boldly yet, he set about crushing religious sects and gangsters that had flourished in the fading years of the French presence. He surprised even his detractors, who were numerous, and who had included the US secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. Shortly thereafter Diem abrogated the Accords to hold elections throughout Vietnam in 1956, knowing he would lose them to Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh by hook or crook. Washington, all realpolitik, didn’t see things differently and looked the other way.

Diem had guts and wile, it seemed, but to an American journalist in Saigon at the time, and to many more later, “he revealed himself quickly as a humorless, egotistical, incredibly stubborn perfectionist, who refused to act on any question, however trivial, without exhaustive meditation and ideal conditions. He was neurotically suspicious of everyone except his family, refused advice, refused to delegate power. He was a messiah with a persecution complex.” The deputy chief of the US mission in Saigon in 1954, Robert McClintock, put it slightly differently. He called him “a messiah without a message.”

Among the journalists and writers who flocked to Saigon to learn more about this postcolonial struggle was the novelist Graham Greene. One of the articles he published about his 1955 visit painted this indelible and prescient portrait of the new leader:

Diem is separated from the people by cardinals and police cars with wailing sirens and foreign advisers when he should be walking in the rice fields unprotected learning the hard way how to be loved and obeyed—the two cannot be separated. One pictured him sitting there in the Norodom Palace, sitting with his blank, brown gaze, incorruptible, obstinate, ill-advised, going to his weekly confession, bolstered up by his belief that God is always on the Catholic side, waiting for a miracle. The name I would write under his portrait is Patriot Ruined by the West.

John F. Kennedy was not alone among American politicians, and leading Catholics, who were well acquainted with Diem and became his influential champions. Those drawn with Kennedy into the influential domestic lobby called American Friends of Vietnam included Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas; Francis Cardinal Spellman, archbishop of New York; historian Samuel Eliot Morison; publishing moguls Henry Luce and Whitelaw Reid; and a bipartisan host of prominent US politicians.

The deputy chief of the US mission in Saigon in 1954, Robert McClintock, put it slightly differently. He called him “a messiah without a message.”

Diem was that rare chief of state, especially from an undeveloped country of just fourteen million people, accorded full honors on a visit to the United States, in May 1957. President Eisenhower met him at the airport, an exceptional honor, and rode into Washington with him in an open car as crowds cheered the motorcade. Diem spoke (in his imperfect English) before a joint session of Congress. A ticker-tape parade in New York drew 250,000 spectators. The Saturday Evening Post dubbed him the “mandarin in a sharkskin suit who’s upsetting the Reds’ timetable.” Life magazine captured the moment, and America’s eternally rosy optimism, with a long and admiring feature that proclaimed Diem “The Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam”—just the encomium President Eisenhower had bestowed.

Through this visit Diem was anointed as a symbol of the new battlefields in the Cold War, the conjunction of postcolonial independence movements and strategic alliances in zones of revolutionary conflict. American support for the Diem regime was not merely rhetorical and symbolic. By 1957, the United States was shouldering the entire cost of the South Vietnamese armed forces, most other government spending, and nearly 90 percent of all imports. This led one group of analysts to the grim conclusion that South Vietnam was becoming “a permanent mendicant” wholly dependent on foreign assistance rather than popular support: “American aid had built a castle on sand.”

(…)

For the United States, there was no treating with Diem without appreciating the spell his brother cast. Brother Nhu, as the Americans called him, had been at Diem’s side during the wilderness years, and then in the passage to power, as his political fixer, his house theoretician, his spine-stiffener, his Rasputin. A French-trained intellectual and former archivist at the Central Library in Hanoi, over the years he had developed grandiose ideas and a governing philosophy, “personalism,” adapted from French antecedents to Vietnamese purposes, that sought to reconcile the tension between collective action and individual autonomy. No one quite understood personalism, though many serious people have tried.

To go with his ineffable construct, Nhu accumulated and wielded real power, the kind for which Diem had no time, taste, or skill. Nhu was a supple political operator with working ties to the CIA dating from the 1940s. Under Diem he ran Vietnam’s Republican Youth, the Blue Shirts, modeled on Hitler’s Brown Shirts, who could be used as spies and enforcers. He ran the president’s political party, Can Lao, where initiation ceremonies included kneeling and kissing a portrait of Diem. Most significantly for the events to follow, Nhu closely oversaw the CIA-funded secret police. Though he had no title other than “Counselor to the President,” at one time Nhu commanded thirteen different security agencies with extrajudicial powers to arrest, imprison, or execute, and a record of repression that included secret gulags and the torture and elimination of political opponents.

The Americans had reason to believe Brother Nhu was also mixed up in criminal syndicates, and probably addicted to opium too. By his proximity to Diem and his exercise of power behind the curtain, Nhu could not be ignored. His weekly séances with the US CIA station chief were a mutually useful arrangement, though the exclusive channel was a sensitive one for an ambassador, and the station chief, to manage.

Though he had no title other than “Counselor to the President,” at one time Nhu commanded thirteen different security agencies with extrajudicial powers to arrest, imprison, or execute, and a record of repression that included secret gulags and the torture and elimination of political opponents.

For the broader public, however, and the US government, Ngo Dinh Nhu crystallized the uncomfortable fact that President Diem headed a family clan with virtually autocratic powers in a newly, and still ostensibly, democratic Republic of Vietnam. The clan’s alienation from the population was underscored by its adhesion to Catholicism, a religious minority predating the French colonial era in Indochina but much enhanced by it. Another Ngo brother was Archbishop of Hue. Yet another brother was the political capo of central Vietnam. A fourth one was Vietnam’s ambassador in London.

Finally, Ngo Dinh Nhu had married Tran Le Xuan (Tears of Spring), a high-born northern Buddhist who had once been imprisoned by the Viet Minh, and who converted to Catholicism upon her marriage into the Ngo family. Now, as the bachelor president’s sister-in-law, Madame Nhu served as the First Lady of South Vietnam. She, her husband, and their four young children lived with Diem in the vast presidential palace that once housed French governors-general. There they took their meals together, and Madame Nhu served as the hostess at official functions. She cultivated a political identity of her own as a member of parliament and head of the Women’s Solidarity Movement (to go with her husband’s Republican Youth movement of male Diem devotees and thugs). Extending the reach of the extended royal family, Madame Nhu’s father and mother were, respectively, the South Vietnamese envoys in Washington and at the United Nations.

By 1960 Madame Nhu had become notorious in Saigon for blue laws she championed and browbeat her brother-in-law into promulgating. Like the convert of caricature, she was determined to be more “Catholic” than anyone. Her decrees prohibited such familiar bêtes noires as prostitution and gambling, contraception and divorce. But also cockfights, fortune- telling, fighting fish, underwire bras, dancing, “sentimental” songs, and “fraternizing” (it was Americans she had in mind). These statutes also proscribed polygamy in a country where it was common, and “spiritualism and occultism” in a country where religious sects and practices pro- liferated. Saigon, a cosmopolitan city ruled and made laissez-faire by the French for a century, was unaccustomed to such official standards of prudence.

Madame Nhu, aka the “Dragon Lady,” kept a high profile with her public screeds and harangues, and American correspondents found her reliably quotable and vicious, to say nothing of photogenic. Her gender in a day when women were still a novelty in the circles of statecraft—Eva Perón had only just preceded her on the stage—also made her irresistible copy. In the peculiar context of Ngo Dinh Diem, who had taken a vow of chastity and was said never to have had sexual relations with anyone, Madame Nhu’s intimacy with the chief of state, and power over him, was all the more absorbing.

Excerpted from Diplomats at War published by University of Virginia Press ©2024