Ngo Dinh Diem and the American News Media
KEN BURN’S VIETNAM SERIES: Episode 2
By Dr. Geoffrey DT Shaw
Perhaps the most startling omission in Burns’ Vietnam series (episode 2) has to be the inexplicable casting-aside of what real counter-insurgency expertise was telling the Americans and the inclusion of non-expert, young news-reporters opinion on such warfare; an opinion, one must add, spoon-fed to said reporters by a veteran US soldier from the Korean conflict but, himself, no accomplished expert in the area of countering insurgency: one Lt. Col. John Paul Vann.i This is puzzling on multiple levels because in other time-periods covered in the Burns epic, a relatively deft, albeit left-leaning, hand was employed in the handling of the historical evidence yet in the case of Ngo Dinh Diem, the old nail-laced club came out to bash the viewer over the head with the worn-out and demonstrably false denigration of the late, and most Vietnamese would claim, great Vietnamese nationalist leader. Of course, the overwhelming question remains: why? Why did Burns follow, unchallenging, in the foot-steps of a false narrative engineered by very young and inexperienced reporters? Why follow a lib/left fantasy concerned with ‘religious persecution’ of radical Buddhists that even a UN investigation proved did not exist? Why follow the public protestations of the Viet Cong that were concerned with the Strategic Hamlet Program: i.e., claiming that this war-winning strategy was alienating the people from the GVN and that these hamlets were nothing much more than concentration camps – especially when we now have the Communist history admit that the SHP (Strategic Hamlets Program) was destroying their insurgency in the South? Even at the time Wilf Burchett, the leftist Australian reporter who travelled with the VC in the south, admitted that 1962 was Diem’s year of victory because the SHP had seized the Communist insurgency by the throat and was strangling the life out of it. Why listen to a gung-ho soldier, Vann, who seemed to be enamored with fighting his last war, Korea, in Vietnam and in a manner that was anathema to sound COIN practice and, all the while, detesting the Vietnamese President and his ‘softly-softly’ approach to killing even Viet Cong?
There are several answers to all of these questions but there is only one that seems to stand out above all the others: and that most salient of answers is to acknowledge that the false-narrative about Diem was, and remains, false is to admit that the entire leftist premise for attacking America’s good efforts in the support of the first and only truly legitimate government of the Republic of Vietnam was wrong and catastrophically so. For, the murder of Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, caused the collapse of the SHP which was followed immediately with the Communists making successful advances all over South Vietnam. In turn, the illegitimate coup officers devolved into petty infighting amongst their various factions while the country collapsed under their venal political and military paralysis. This became the case so manifestly that had the US not intervened with its own troops the country would have been forfeited in 1965 and the Communists would have been in power ten years before their eventual seizure of power in 1975. Even the standard-fare histories, written by the like of Stan Karnow, et al. readily admit that South Vietnam had reached a point of collapse just before the massive US armed forces intervention. But then they attempt to draw a screen over the whole debacle by claiming in various, and not very subtle ways, that Diem was responsible for this and, of course, they fall back on pile of demonstrable nonsense that they have convinced themselves and others must be true: i.e., the Strategic Hamlets alienated the people, or Diem alienated the people and then compounded this alleged error by persecuting the Buddhists. Nevertheless, the lie is put to these false-claims by the Communists themselves when they universally stated that they could not believe the Americans would be so stupid as to get rid of Diem. The Communists admitted, from Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap on down to the senior Viet Cong leader in captivity in the South, that Diem was a great and true Vietnamese nationalist who had to be discredited in propaganda because he would not bow to the Party’s will. They knew he was not corrupt and that he had earned the admiration and Confucian respect of most common Vietnamese in rural Vietnam while the American people heard only of a corrupt and vile dictator who oppressed peaceful Buddhists. The great paradox here being that the Vietnamese Communist Party had a far greater and healthier understanding of just who Ngo Dinh Diem was than did his would-be allies, the Americans back in Washington, DC. So, or as I mightily suspect, the ‘official’ American history, as dictated by inexperienced newsmen who, in turn, were manipulated by an US soldier who had titanic-sized blinkers on (i.e., John Paul Vann) as he was still fighting the Korean War, had within its lie the bigger lie of compulsion: - to undo the lies now would expose the greatest of calamities that the New York Times, the Washington Post and all the leftist ‘intelligentsia’ of America could not survive with even a cursory blip of believability left unto them and that is that it was they who caused America’s great travail all those years ago in Southeast Asia and so marked American history in the post 1945 era with dark stain that, even now, it has yet to recover from in 2017.
There is only one way to expiate the great stain on America that the liberal left caused by baying for, and then receiving, the blood of a good man and great Vietnamese leader, and that is to admit they were wrong and that, in many ways, they caused the deaths and suffering that followed for all those years after Diem’s murder; and this they will not do because it requires a moral courage that has fled from them long ago. And so the lies and unanswerable questions will continue and so the moral interest will compound on American efforts until this singular lie is exorcized from American memory by a simple telling of the most painful truth. There is nothing new under the sun in the liberal/left’s clinging to this falsehood that they keep swirling around the memory of Ngo Dinh Diem, best expressed in the lies perpetrated by David Halberstam of the New York Times; as, indeed, such a conscience-forsaken mentality was noted several centuries before by, perhaps, the English language’s greatest writer and thinker on moral calamity, William Shakespeare:
Stepp'd in so far, that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.”
--Macbeth, Act III, scene iv