Sinking with Ngo Dinh Diem: Race, Religion, and the Early American War in Vietnam

Seth Jacobs. America's Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. x + 381 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $79.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).

By now all of us have seen references to the ongoing war in Iraq as "another Vietnam." Some of the statements have been enlightening and informed; others, to put it charitably, have not. Yet one feature that virtually all such references have shared is their nearly exclusive focus on the U.S. experience in Vietnam only after 1961. For many, it seems, there was no America in Vietnam prior to that time—or at least not one worth pondering. Such ignorance among most Americans is tragic but perhaps understandable. As numerous studies have revealed, Americans remain largely ignorant of their collective national past. But for those who should know better—the editors at the Los Angeles Times, for example, who in a recent article inexplicably allowed "the start of American involvement in Vietnam" to be dated to the 1960s—the amnesia surrounding the history of the United States in Vietnam is astounding.¹

In the context of such ignorance it was refreshing to hear Seth Jacobs, an assistant professor of history at Boston College, forcefully make the case at a recent conference that the incessant analogizing between the American experiences in Iraq and Vietnam has focused on the wrong decade. While one can certainly find similarities between Vietnam in 1968 and Iraq in 2005, he suggested, the most revealing parallels can be deduced only by shifting our attention to the 1950s.² It was during this decade that a deeply religious presidential administration, already skeptical of the ability of non-whites to govern themselves, embraced a number of Christian strongmen in Asia as America's best hope in checking alleged Communist expansionism. The parallels with Iraq, Jacobs argued, are abundant. Just as American racial preconceptions in the 1950s precluded Asians' capacity for self-rule, so too did commentators in the early-twenty-first century rhapsodize on the Iraqis' unsuitability for democracy. And just as a religious revival colored the conduct of American foreign relations in the Eisenhower administration, so too has the religious right influenced the Bush administration's view of America's role in the world.

Jacobs's remarkably engaging, brilliantly researched, and fundamentally important new book, America's Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia, does not address recent American foreign policy in the Middle East. However, readers cannot help but be struck by its echoes to the present. A religious revival. A White House overwhelmed by a messianic vision. Theological distinctions between good and evil. Views of the Third World as incapable of democracy and self-government. Substitute a few words here and there and one could be reading a primer on the current administration.

Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of the Republic of Vietnam ("South Vietnam") from 1955 until his assassination in 1963, found a grateful American audience for his anti-Communist nationalism as Vietnam's war with France ground to a halt. But Diem was hardly alone in his hostility to Ho Chi Minh and the revolutionary leadership in Hanoi. There were far more capable leaders in southern Vietnam after 1954. What made Diem unique was that he was a Catholic in an overwhelmingly Buddhist Vietnam. For most Vietnamese his religious affiliation was a political liability, but for Saigon's American benefactors it was what positively set Diem apart, the "organizing principle that [Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles and other policymakers seized upon in solving the riddle of Vietnam." American ethnocentrism, according to Jacobs, linked Buddhism "to certain assumed traits, including passivity, weakness, selfishness, depravity, impracticality, and cowardice" (p. 12). Christianity, American officials believed, was free of such flaws. Diem...