The President adopted a middle path designed to put off immediate US military intervention while at the same time placing this possibility in the public domain. His four preconditions for intervention were: clear objectives had to be met; intervention had to be restricted to air and sea; Congress had to support action; and France had to agree to full independence for Vietnam. Lacking Congressional support, Eisenhower kept US forces out of the battle.
The resulting Geneva peace conference temporarily divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel. The Viet Minh were given control of North Vietnam, while a capitalist state was created in the South. Formal unification elections were scheduled to take place in 1956. The response from the US was mixed. On the one hand, it represented the first time land had been voluntarily ceded to Communism; it allowed the US to develop South Vietnam into a shining example of a non-communist and non-colonial state in South East Asia; the two year period until unification elections would provide sufficient time to develop the vote and build support for the Diem regime.
After the division of Vietnam, the US took responsibility for South Vietnam from the French, and set itself the goal of making the country politically stable, economically self-sufficient, capable of providing for its own internal security, and dealing with an invasion from North Vietnam. To achieve these goals, it implemented a three-pronged strategy. Firstly, it established the South East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), a regional defence grouping consisting of the US, Great Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Philippines, and Pakistan. Although SEATO’s focus was on protecting a very wide area across South East Asia, the Treaty’s protocol identified Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam as areas of possible conflict, and that member states would ‘act to meet the common danger’ should these territories be threatened.
The second element of the strategy was targeted at the communist State above the 17th parallel, and was based on CIA subversion. Colonel Edward Lansdale, based in Saigon, controlled all efforts to undermine the Hanoi Government. The tactics deployed to achieve this goal were largely based around a campaign of psychological warfare against the North. This included such diverse actions as emptying sand into the petrol tanks of buses, bombarding the northern population with pornographic images (intended to entice them to support the South) and fake astrological charts predicting a troubled future for the North.
The third and most important strand of the US campaign in the regions, was the ‘nation-building’ project in South Vietnam. Between 1955–60, the US provided nearly $7 billion in aid, making South Vietnam the fifth largest recipient of US aid in the world. In spite of repeated warnings, Prime Minister Diem ignored demands to broaden his power base by cultivating popular support. Instead, he maintained a repressive regime, knowing that US fears about communist expansion in the region, heavily outweighed any other fears they may have had about the nature of the regime operating in the South.
In order to develop the military capabilities of South Vietnam, the US created the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), and despatched 750 advisors to train it in counter-subversion techniques. However, while they were giving Diem the means to create what was in effect a dictatorship, the US ignored the concerns of ordinary South Vietnamese villagers, who blamed Diem’s corrupt regime for denying them land ownership and poor living standards.
Placing the future of Indochina into the context of the wider Cold War, Eisenhower arguably committed future US Presidents to maintaining the security of an anti-communist State in the South. Furthermore, he had authorized a repressive, military-based approach to tackling the communist threat in the region at the expense of building a popular, democratic government. These measures therefore created a ‘quagmire’ which US was neither able to extricate herself from nor make any effective progress with. While Eisenhower had not committed any troops or bombers to the area, he left a commitment which became inextricably linked to US credibility in the Cold War, yet offered little hope of long-term success in its war against Communism.
Building South Vietnam, 1954–63
The aftermath of the Geneva peace conference saw Ngo Dinh Diem appointed Prime Minister by Head of State, Bao Dai, and one million refugees flee south from above the parallel. With Vietnam partitioned at the 17th parallel, US settled on a policy of turning the southern State into a permanent bulwark against the rising tide of Asiatic communism, with Diem at the helm.
However, several obstacles were in the way of achieving this goal. For a start, Diem faced opposition from Bao Dai who gave Diem little authority, and only used him as a source of income from the US, and the main South Vietnamese sects: Binh Xuyen, a large militia with strong links to the criminal underworld; the Cao Dai; and the Hoa Hao. External powers also posed potential problems for Diem, with the French retaining 160,000 troops in the country, and a large concentration of communist agitators remaining around the Mekong Delta. Furthermore, the Geneva Accords included an agreement to hold a unification election in 1956. Using a combination of bribery, CIA counter-insurgency, and brute force, Diem was able to subdue the sect’s rebellion by June 1955. By October 1955, Diem annihilated Bao Dai in a rigged referendum (Diem won 98.2 per cent of the vote) over who should run the country, and transformed the monarchy into the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). As a result of concerted US pressure, the French were finally persuaded to leave Vietnam by April 1956. Regarding the unification elections, neither Diem nor his US supporters showed any willingness to participate. The US pointed to a legal technicality in that they had not signed the Accords, therefore were not bound by them, and suggested that as the North was effectively a one-party communist State, the elections there would, in no sense, be free.
Vietnamese Air Force pledging its support for President Ngo Dinh Diem after a political uprising, Saigon, South Vietnam, March 1962
NARA
Diem’s regime was not based on popular consent, nor did it aspire to win the support of the Vietnamese people. The government was dominated by Catholics, in a country where only 10 per cent were of a similar faith, and the major offices of State were placed in the hands of Diem’s own family. His youngest brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, held a variety of powerful positions: Minister of the Interior, Diem’s main advisor, and chief of the Can Lao secret police. Another brother, Ngo Dinh Thuc was also appointed the Catholic archbishop of Hue. The regime was the embodiment of political corruption, and consequently there was no meaningful attempt to introduce political, economic or social reforms. The US response was to ignore Diem’s failure to establish a mandated government in the South, while sending clear signals that he was on the right track.
Eisenhower’s government provided military aid at a ratio of 4:1 to that of general economic aid. In all public meetings with Diem, successive US politicians praised him and held him up as a bastion of anti-Communism. Diem’s 1957 visit to the US saw him extolled by President Eisenhower for his ‘heroism and statesmanship’, while he was given a ticker tape parade through New York. Four years later, Vice President Johnson hailed Diem as the ‘Churchill of Asia’. The main reason why the US chose to tolerate a dictator who appeared, in the longer term, to be harmful to their chances of building a stable republic below the 17th parallel is that, above all else, Diem’s credentials as an anti-communist were impeccable. He had made a name for himself as a hard-line opponent while serving as governor in Binh Thuan Province during the 1920s and early 30s. As leader of the RVN he instigated a brutal campaign against suspected and actual communists. Over 50,000 political opponents were sent to labour camps, and 12,000 executed during 1955–59, with a further 2,000 killed by the ARVN during the small uprising in 1957. The impact on the southern Communists was severe: of the 10,000 or so members of the Vietnam Workers Party who remained in the South after partition, an estimated 5,000 remained by 1959. However, the effect on the population at large was to further alienate Diem from the people.
As well as opposition from the communists, several other groups – Buddhists, nationalists, religious sects, and intellectuals – coalesced under the broad banner of the National Liberation Front (NLF) in 1960. Although it was dismissed as a communist front by the US, who referred to it as the Viet Cong communist party, it illustrated the