Vietnam's Lost Revolution: Ngô Đình Diệm's Failure to Build an Independent Nation, 1955–1963 by Geoffrey C. Stewart (review)

One of the hallmarks of Republic of Vietnam President Ngô Đình Diệm's regime (1955–63) was its concerted effort to bring about a Personalist Revolution (Cách Mạng Nhân Vị) throughout the Vietnamese nation. Geoffrey Stewart's first book chronicles how this revolution was "propagated at the grassroots … across the South Vietnamese countryside" (p. 2) through the work of the Special Commissariat for Civic Action (Đạc Ủy Phủ Công Dân Vụ). Stewart's monograph represents the first dedicated scholarly treatment of this important state institution in either English or Vietnamese. Thorough engagement with Vietnamese and American archival documents relating to the subject informs its comprehensive account both of the political vision of the commissariat's leader Kiều Công Cung and of the activities of its thousands of cadres. Beyond making a valuable contribution to a burgeoning historiography of nation-building in the Republic of Vietnam, Stewart builds on the recent work of Daniel Immerwahr (2015) to gesture at a crucial transnational context for Ngô Đình Diệm's revolution. He argues that the concept of "harnessing local human resources to a self-help effort" that provided the basis for the work of the Special Commissariat was "consistent with ideas underpinning a broad rural development movement that was circulating throughout the Third World known as community development" (p. 27).

The six chapters of Stewart's book chronologically trace the evolving relationship between the Special Commissariat and these ideas of community development.

Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the genesis of the Special Commissariat in a plan developed by Ngô Đình Diệm and Kiều Công Cung to garner support for the government in preparation for the 1956 elections mandated by the Geneva Accords and its restructuring in the wake of the former's consolidation of power in late 1955. That restructuring saw the commissariat become a means of "extending the reach of the government down to the countryside to counter the communist presence" (p. 72). In conceiving of civic action in such instrumental terms, however, Kiều Công Cung was, Stewart contends, still "not discussing community development" (p. 72).

Chapters 3 and 4 elucidate the evolution of the Special Commissariat from 1957 onwards into a "full-fledged community development agency" (p. 129). On the basis of the two central tenets of "Raising the People's Intellectual Standards" (Nâng Cao Dân Trí) and "Welfare Improvement" (Cải Thiện Dân Sinh), Kiều Công Cung now sought to create "morally just peasants, willing to sacrifice their personal pursuits for the betterment of the community" (p. 100). Through the voluntary labour of those peasants, he also sought to establish in villages "local infrastructure that would form the basis for an economically diverse and modern nation-state" (p. 100). The emphasis placed in these new initiatives on "individual self-sacrifice" and "communal self-help" not only "lay at the heart of the community development ideal" (pp. 137–38), Stewart suggests, but also "resonated … strongly with the central tenets of the Ngô's Personalist Revolution" (p. 110).

Chapters 5 and 6 then turn to the commissariat's departure, at least in some measure, from this revolutionary agenda from 1959 onwards. It became increasingly "reactionary" (pp. 163, 194), in Stewart's assessment, as Civic Action cadres became involved in security operations in response to the pressures of a growing southern insurgency.

Some issues in the book could be clarified. Perhaps most frustrating among these is Stewart's puzzling claim in his introduction that he "reveal[s] the agency of South Vietnamese actors" by exploring how the "global community development movement … came to the Republic of Vietnam by way of a variety of sources including American advisers" (p. 7). In his presentation of these relationships, Stewart seems at times to be suggesting...