The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam: A History by Christopher Goscha

Author:Christopher Goscha
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780141946658
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-06-29T23:00:00+00:00

10

A Tale of Two Republics

INTRODUCTION

In July 1963 Nguyen Tuong Tam received a summons to report to a nearby military police station to answer questions about his role in a failed coup attempt against the southern republic’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem. Tam was one of Vietnam’s best-known anticommunist politicians and a cultural giant from the 1930s, better known by his nom de plume, Nhat Linh. He had led a cultural revolution based on the liberation of the individual and the renovation of Vietnamese society. In the 1940s, he had helped to revive and lead the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, the VNQDD, which was opposed to both French colonialism and Vietnamese communism. While Tam had briefly worked with Diem to build a non-communist Vietnam during the Indochina conflict, he now despised the man for what he and his family were doing to the country. Instead of unifying non-communists, Diem was attacking anyone who defied him and in so doing, Tam was convinced, ensuring that the cherished republic would fail. Tam was not alone in his hostility to Diem. A Buddhist protest movement against the Ngo family was gathering strength as well.

Nguyen Tuong Tam had no intention of joining Diem’s long list of non-communist victims. On the auspicious seventh day of the seventh month of 1963, he sat down with his sons in their home in Saigon to enjoy their customary family chat. It was to be their last one, for their father had mixed a lethal dose of barbiturates into his own drink, a glass of his favorite Johnnie Walker Scotch whisky. The champion of individual liberty had decided to take his life to make a political point. In words strangely reminiscent of Nguyen Van Thinh’s suicide note of November 1946, Tam wrote a similar message: ‘Let history be my judge. I refuse to accept any other judgment. The arrest and detention of nationalist opposition elements is a serious crime, and it will cause the country to be lost into the hands of the communists. I oppose these acts, and sentence myself to death […] as a warning to those who would trample upon freedom of every kind’. Radio services, newspapers, and friends beamed the message far and wide as thousands of people gathered to watch Tam’s funeral cortège file by a few days later. Ngo Dinh Diem’s security forces carefully monitored the procession as it paused for a prayer service at the Xa Loi Buddhist pagoda before it moved on to Tam’s final resting place. (This temple had become the nerve center for Buddhist protests against Ngo rule.) A month later, Ngo Dinh Diem’s forces occupied the pagoda in a harsh clampdown on the opposition. As one officer fighting communists in the provinces expressed his anger at the Ngo family to an American friend: ‘I’m a Buddhist now.’1 He was not, but his point was clear, nevertheless.

Things could have been different. Many nationalists who were opposed to Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 had placed their faith in this man only a few years earlier.

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