From Diem to Tonkin: US Steps into Vietnam, 1954-64

Why Vietnam, and Why 1954?

In May 1954 a French army of 13,000 men surrendered at Dien Bien Phu in northern Vietnam after a fifty-six-day siege by the Vietminh, the communist-led independence movement under Ho Chi Minh. The defeat ended French colonial rule in Indochina, which had begun in the 1880s. The peace conference that followed in Geneva produced the Geneva Accords: Vietnam was partitioned at the seventeenth parallel pending nationwide reunification elections in 1956. The communists held the north (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi); a US-backed government held the south (the State of Vietnam under Bao Dai in Saigon, which became the Republic of Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem in 1955).

President Eisenhower’s administration would not accept that Indochina might fall to communism. In April 1954, even before Dien Bien Phu, Eisenhower had explained the danger in a press conference using a metaphor that would shape American policy for fifteen years. ‘You have a row of dominoes set up,’ he said, ‘you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.’ If Vietnam fell, Laos and Cambodia would follow; then Thailand, then Burma, then potentially India and Australasia. The domino theory presented the war as a single piece of a global containment strategy.

Eisenhower’s Man in Saigon: Ngo Dinh Diem

Ngo Dinh Diem took power as prime minister of South Vietnam in 1954 and, after a rigged 1955 referendum, declared himself president of a republic. Diem was Catholic, French-educated, anti-communist and a member of the small Mandarin landlord class in a country roughly 80 per cent Buddhist and roughly 80 per cent peasant. Eisenhower committed the United States to keeping Diem in power. Between 1955 and 1961 around $1.6 billion in US aid flowed to Saigon.

The weaknesses of the Diem government were obvious to almost everyone except Diem himself. He refused to hold the 1956 reunification elections promised at Geneva (President Eisenhower privately conceded he would have lost them). His government was openly nepotistic: his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu ran a network of secret police, and Nhu’s wife Madame Nhu acted as the regime’s public spokeswoman. Land reform, which the Vietminh had used to win peasant support in the north, was reversed in the south — landlords who had fled were brought back and rents reimposed. Catholic refugees from the north received preferential treatment in the south, including land grants and government jobs. In 1963 the regime’s repression of Buddhist demonstrations, including the self-immolation of the monk Thich Quang Duc on a Saigon street in June 1963, photographed by Malcolm Browne and printed on front pages worldwide, destroyed Diem’s remaining international standing.

Kennedy: Strategic Hamlets and 16,000 Advisers

When John F. Kennedy entered the White House in January 1961, around 800 US military ‘advisers’ were stationed in South Vietnam. By the time of his assassination in November 1963 the figure was over 16,000. Kennedy expanded covert action, helicopter support and special forces, and signed off on a counter-insurgency project copied from British operations in Malaya: the Strategic Hamlets Programme. Vietnamese peasants were forcibly relocated into fortified hamlets ringed with barbed wire and ditches to deny the Vietcong food, shelter and recruits. Around 8 million people were moved into around 8,000 such hamlets between 1962 and 1963.

The programme was a disaster. Peasants resented being uprooted from ancestral village land, often at gunpoint. Hamlets were poorly supplied and frequently overrun; the Vietcong simply waited until the relocation was complete and then walked through the wire. By late 1963 most of the hamlets had been abandoned or had effectively become Vietcong recruiting bases. Kennedy’s strategy of fighting an Asian guerrilla war on the cheap with American advisers and a Vietnamese client army had failed.

The November 1963 Coup

By the autumn of 1963 the Kennedy administration concluded that the war could not be won with Diem in power. On 1 November 1963, Saigon generals supported by US ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge launched a coup against Diem. Diem and his brother Nhu were captured the following morning and murdered in the back of an armoured personnel carrier. Three weeks later Kennedy himself was assassinated in Dallas. The new Johnson administration inherited a South Vietnam that was now politically more unstable than it had been under Diem — nine successive juntas would govern it in the first eighteen months after the coup — and a war that the United States was visibly losing.

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, August 1964

On 2 August 1964, in international waters off the North Vietnamese coast, the destroyer USS Maddox exchanged fire with three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The Maddox was supporting covert South Vietnamese commando raids on the North Vietnamese coast. Two days later, in heavy weather, the Maddox and the destroyer USS Turner Joy reported a second engagement. The second incident never happened. Sonar operators on the Turner Joy had picked up echoes off their own propellers; no North Vietnamese boats were ever within range. The Johnson administration, deciding the truth did not matter, presented the August 4 ‘attack’ to Congress as unprovoked aggression.

On 7 August 1964 Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. It authorised the president ‘to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack’ against US forces and to assist any Southeast Asian state under attack. The resolution passed 416-0 in the House and 88-2 in the Senate. Without ever declaring war, Johnson now had the legal authority to fight one. Within seven months he had ordered the bombing of North Vietnam (Operation Rolling Thunder, March 1965) and committed the first US ground combat units to South Vietnam.