America's Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia, 1950-1957 (review)

In America's Miracle Man in Vietnam, Seth Jacobs examines the role that the religious and racial attitudes of the mid-twentieth-century United States played in influencing America's decision to support the autocratic government of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem. Jacobs argues that this action was shaped not only by pervasive anticommunism in 1950's America, but also by "a particular body of ideas about religion and race" that "helped cement the Eisenhower administration's alliance with Diem" (p. 5). "America's experiment with Diem," Jacobs asserts, "rested on an ideological tripod" of anticommunism, religion, and race (p. 19).

Jacobs examines the network of American support that Diem created in a milieu of religious and racial prejudice that predisposed American policymakers, academics, and religious leaders to back Diem's leadership of South Vietnam. Diem's appeal to Americans rested not only on his anticommunist record, but because his "Catholic faith stamped him as a mortal enemy of communism who could never betray U.S. cold war objectives" (p. 85). Moreover, his authoritarian policies seemed to be appropriate for an Asian environment that many Americans regarded as "an ignorant, heathen place, peopled, figuratively and literally, by children" (p. 96). Jacobs pays close attention to three episodes that solidified American support by the late fifties: Dr. Thomas Dooley's work with nearly a million (and mostly Catholic) Vietnamese refugees in 1954–1955, General J. Lawton Collins' abortive efforts to turn the Eisenhower administration against Diem, and the lionization of Diem by the "Vietnam Lobby"—the American Friends of Vietnam. In each of these case studies, Jacobs focuses on the religious and racial assumptions that deepened America's commitment to the Vietnamese president—beliefs that "predisposed" policymakers "to rule out abandonment of their ill-starred surrogate" (p. 274).

America's Miracle Man in Vietnam directly addresses the issue that racial and religious prejudices played in guiding American policy in Vietnam. Many works make passing references to this matter, and the writings of James T. Fisher have been noteworthy for their discussion of American Catholic involvement in promoting support for the Diem regime. Jacobs, however, looks at a broader framework by discussing the role that Protestants, especially Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, played in backing Diem. His treatment of American racial attitudes concerning Asia and Vietnam complements Mark Bradley's study of earlier American perceptions in Imagining Vietnam and America. Jacobs effectively uses a rich variety of source materials in his book. In addition to consulting government archives, he has turned to private correspondence, press accounts, and popular literature and film. The book also reflects a fine knowledge of the principal secondary works concerning foreign policy and cultural life in the Eisenhower years.

Some of the points that Jacobs makes will undoubtedly be subject to debate. His critical portrait of Dulles differs considerably from more sympathetic treatments by Richard Immerman and Frederick W. Marks III. His picture of an apparently uniform religious life in the fifties contradicts the arguments of some works, such as Robert Ellwood's The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace, which place a greater emphasis on the pluralistic and centrifugal forces of the period. America's Miracle Man in Vietnam is also occasionally marred by factual errors. Most are not significant, but in one case the book describes an important luncheon meeting that Justice William O. Douglas organized for Diem and Senators Mike Mansfield and John F. Kennedy and states that Cardinal Spellman and Representative Clement Zablocki also attended the luncheon (p. 43). Spellman and Zablocki both enthusiastically backed Diem, but contemporary records of the meeting, including a list of guests that Douglas sent to Diem, indicate that neither man was present.

America's Miracle Man in Vietnam is nevertheless a valuable contribution to the story of America's fateful commitment to the government...