Diem's Final Failure: Prelude to America's War in Vietnam (review)

The United States in the Third World during the 1950s wanted to find a "third force" between Communism and colonialism. Philip Catton's book tries to develop a third view of Ngo Dinh Diem and his regime, somewhere between Diem's admirers who claim that only the unjustified withdrawal of American support doomed his regime and opened the way to Communist victory (such as Ellen Hammer, William Colby, and Richard Nixon), and those such as Stanley Karnow and myself, who concluded that Diem could never have prevailed against the Communists and fell because of his own mistakes. To make his case Catton focuses upon Diem and his brother Nhu's ideology. He shows convincingly that they were not traditional mandarins, but had a variety of original ideas (embodied, as is well known, in the philosophy of "Personalism") designed to promote South Vietnamese development. But while awarding the Nhu regime a B+ for intellectual originality, his account gives them no better than a D for political effectiveness. Again and again, he shows how they failed to translate their ideas into effective action, and often made matters in the South Vietnamese countryside worse from their point of view. No one who believes that misguided American liberalism threw away a possible victory in South Vietnam in 1963 is going to draw any comfort from this book.

Catton has been able to use extensive South Vietnamese archives in Ho Chi Minh City to provide a new and thorough picture of the Diem regime's policies. The real focus of the book is actually their attempts to pacify, organize, and mobilize the countryside, including four different programs: land reform, which never made much headway against the opposition of landowners; Land Development, an attempt to settle empty parts of the country and bring the South Vietnamese Montagnards under control; Agrovilles, an attempt to consolidate the huge and far-flung population of the Mekong Delta; and the Strategic Hamlet program, which Catton shows clearly to have been a Vietnamese rather than an American or British initiative. The last two programs both aimed (for Diem and Nhu) to create a mobilized, self-sufficient peasantry, but the heavy-handed approach of local officials, focusing mainly on resettlement and compulsion, almost certainly reduced the regime's support. Catton shows quite clearly that the Strategic Hamlet program was falling apart in the second half of 1963, although he pays relatively little attention to the Viet Cong military campaign against it.

While Diem's Final Failure certainly provides us with the best account yet of the Diem regime and the countryside, it hardly touches on two other critical aspects of its rule. First, it pays almost no attention to Diem's non-Communist urban opposition, or to American attempts to promote it and find it a role. Episodes like the Caravelle manifesto of 1960, in which Vietnamese intellectuals called (with covert American encouragement) for more freedom, or General Edward Lansdale's suggestion to Diem in 1961 that he allow an opposition party, or Diem's consistent rigging of elections, get no real treatment. Wesley Fishel of Michigan State reported in 1962 that of 118 South Vietnamese he had spoken to on a recent visit—nearly all of them strong regime supporters in the 1950s—only three now expressed any enthusiasm for Diem. Such progressive alienation surely played an important role in Diem's final failure. Another area not addressed here is the South Vietnamese Army—not only Diem's chronically bad relationship with its leadership, but its strategy against the Viet Cong and its response to American advice. American sources make clear that military strategy was another topic of chronic disagreement between Americans and South Vietnamese in 1962-63, and here, too, one would have...