Two Days in June by Andrew Cohen

Author:Andrew Cohen [Cohen, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7710-2388-0
Publisher: Random House Inc.
Published: 2014-11-11T05:00:00+00:00

Before the burning monk, there had been no reason to discuss Vietnam with Rusk that morning. Although the Buddhists had been protesting there for weeks, Kennedy had not thought the situation was grave. Neither had the State Department. Kennedy asked Michael Forrestal: “How could this have happened? Who are these people? Why didn’t we know about them before?” What he’d seen that morning was disorienting, not just because the images themselves were shocking, but because it revived persistent doubts in Washington about Diem as an ally. Kennedy was acutely aware of the relationship between the civil rights movement at home and the fight for freedom abroad. He had made that association pointedly in his speech at American University. “But wherever we are, we must all, in our daily lives, live up to the age-old faith that peace and freedom walk together,” he had said. “In too many of our cities today, the peace is not secure, because the freedom is incomplete.” He had long known that segregation at home undermined his appeal for freedom abroad. Realistically, how could he denounce Communism in Albania when the United States tolerated racism in Alabama? Now he had to explain, or rationalize, his ally’s repression in Vietnam. In fighting Communism in Southeast Asia, the United States accepted that it was in league with an authoritarian regime. As Thomas Delworth observed, Vietnam was not a “New England town-hall democracy.” But a system so odious that it drove monks to set themselves ablaze?

“The situation [in Vietnam] is deteriorating,” Rusk warned Kennedy. The immediate question: given the Buddhist Crisis, as it came to be known that spring, how long could the United States tolerate Diem? A cable on June 11 from the State Department to the U.S. Embassy in Saigon was unsparing: “In our judgment, the Buddhist situation is dangerously near the breaking point. Accordingly, you authorized to tell Diem that in the United States’ view it is essential for the GVN [Government of Vietnam] promptly to take dramatic action to regain confidence of Buddhists, and that the GVN must fully and unequivocally meet Buddhist demands.…” This must be done, it said, in “a public and dramatic fashion” to be effective. “You further authorized to tell Diem that unless the GVN is willing to take effective action … the US will find it necessary publicly to state that it cannot associate itself with the GVN’s unwillingness to meet the reasonable demands of the Vietnamese Buddhist leaders.”

The cable warned that “the international repercussions of the Buddhist troubles cannot help but affect US world-wide responsibilities.” To maintain support for the Vietnamese regime, the US needed the support of Congress and the American people. It might crumble amid a tableau of repugnant images from Saigon, in much the same way that public opinion was changing in the face of the brutal images of racial violence in the South. Kennedy was worried that maintaining popular consensus in support of a dictatorship would be untenable as he went to Berlin to criticize the Soviets for building a wall to keep in East Germans.

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