In Good Faith by Sergio Miller

Author:Sergio Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472838452
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Overturning the chess board was easy. Picking up the pieces and starting again proved much harder. In Washington, the news of the murders was received with dismay. Kennedy especially was deeply shocked and spent the rest of the day in a somber mood. He had been woken at 3am when news of the coup broke. Like the dead brothers, he had attended mass to mark All Souls Day. He consequently arrived late at the National Security Council meeting at which Michael Forrestal later announced that the brothers had been assassinated. It was difficult not to draw the conclusion that a US government had been complicit in a dishonorable act, as Nolting later put it. Johnson would always rue the assassination of Diem as America’s biggest mistake in the war, and in one important sense he was right. With Diem, South Vietnam stood as a credible, independent nation. Without Diem, South Vietnam became an artificial political entity held together by a clique of generals and American firepower. For the communists, the demise of the Ngos was proof of the rottenness of the regime. The National Liberation Front reacted with alacrity, issuing a policy statement with eight demands, the majority of which the new government intended to implement anyway. Across the countryside, Viet Cong attacks spiked, an eventuality predicted by MACV.

The hand-wringing in Washington, however, was short-lived. On November 2, Lodge was instructed to inform “GVN [Government of Vietnam], at your discretion, but not earlier than Monday Washington time that US prepared to resume CIP [Commodity Import Program valued at $25 million] … in order to prevent disruption of war effort and economy and avoid hardships on population.”113 In a follow-on telegram, State remembered, almost as an afterthought, “We have impression generals unfamiliar with it [the economy], and may need some guidance” – an understatement of the unpreparedness of the coup plotters to assume the reins of government. The biggest challenge, addressed two days later at a White House meeting, was a barrage of complaints from Latin American countries protesting hypocrisy over US recognition of a government established by coup. Bundy half-jokingly riposted that Saigon had feted the soldiers with garlands of flowers, and that “Latin American generals” would do well to learn the lesson.114 Ball was less amused, viewing Saigon’s top brass as “a flabby coterie … which didn’t constitute a government in any real sense.”115

The fall of Diem diminished rather than increased support for the National Liberation Front. With “American-Diem” dead, a previously united opposition splintered again, in the traditional Vietnamese way. Hanoi recognized this confusion at the 9th Plenum of the Central Committee of the Lao Dong, held later that year in December. Cautious voices argued for a policy of intensified guerrilla warfare and political agitation in the South. Impatient speakers only saw a protracted and inconclusive struggle in a southern “people’s war.” The real enemy was the armed forces of South Vietnam, and these could only be beaten by the regular forces of North Vietnam. In a mirror

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