Book Review: Seth Jacobs, America's Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia, 1950-1957

I highly recommend Seth Jacobs' book, America's Miracle Man in Vietnam. Jacobs takes something that I already knew, that the US supported Diem primarily because he was a Catholic, and uncovers the world behind that action. He demonstrates how the Eisenhower administration and others prominent Americans were so blinded by their own religious and racial prejudices that they supported Diem despite the seemingly obvious fact that he was the worst possible person to lead South Vietnam.

Jacobs reconstructs the support group that pushed Diem into power. In 1954, Diem was a poor South Vietnamese nationalist who hadn't visited his country in several years. He had no support at home. But he did have a vision of himself as South Vietnam's leader and the only alternative to Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. He managed to convince important Washington policy makers, including Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Montana Senator Mike Mansfield, as well as people such as Time publisher Henry Luce, of his suitability for the job not because he was strongly anticommunist, though of course this was a prerequisite for such of a position. Rather, he sold these powerful men on the fact that he was Catholic and that Catholics were particularly suited to stop Vietnam from turning communist. Jacobs takes this remarkable job of self-salesmanship and puts it into context of the times. There were 2 important themes of 1950s America that made Diem's rise possible. First, the US underwent an intense religious revival. Religion dominated the period, with over 95% of Americans claiming they believed in God. Men such as Billy Graham became prominent at this time and the Eisenhower administration took on the nation's religious tone. This was particularly true with the loathesome Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. Dulles' religious moralizing assumed that Christianity was necessary to defeat communism, and thus he supported Diem simply because he was a Catholic alternative to other, and better, Buddhist leaders.

Dulles' policies lead us to our second point, racism and the utter ignorance of Southeast Asia by American policymakers. Men like Dulles and the other leading Catholic conservatives who rallied behind Diem had a lot of preconceived notions about Buddhism. Buddhists were lazy, emotional, childlike, irrational, irresponsible, prone to communism, passive, witch doctors, etc., etc. Thus, any Buddhist was entirely unable to lead South Vietnam and provide a strong ally to the US in the global war against communism. This racism turned up again and again, from Dulles' correspondance to Tom Dooley's writings about his experiences as a doctor in Southeast Asia to the widely-read and influential novels of James Michener. Diem, hardly a stupid man when it came to promoting his own self-interest, took advantage of these widespread ideas, saying that his people were far from able to accept democracy and that they needed a strong Christian leader at that key time in their development. Even American liberals such as Mike Mansfield and William O. Douglas accepted this logic and actively supported Diem, despite knowledge of his brutality. These racist stereotypes were easy in an America that knew virtually nothing about this new front against communism. Mansfield was so respected because he had taught Asian history before becoming a Senator. Diem's star rose dramatically when he got the approval of Congress' Asian expert. But Mansfield himself admitted that he knew nothing of Southeast Asia, or any part of Asia outside of China and Japan. The State Department had few experts as well, and those they did have either shared Dulles' views or were ignored, such as General J. Lawton "Lightning Joe" Collins, who was sent as a special envoy to Vietnam in 1954 and 1955. Collins saw Diem for what he was and repeatedly urged Eisenhower, Dulles, and Mansfield to dump him in favor of someone who could actually garner support in South Vietnam. But they refused to listen to Collins and by the end of 1955, Diem's position was stronger than ever.

Jacobs argues in his conclusion that Diem's decline in the early 1960s coincided not coincidentally with the rise of the American civil rights movement and the decline of the 1950s religious revival. The death of Dulles and the election of Kennedy led to a decreased religious influence in American foreign policy. When Buddhist monks started burning themselves to protest Diem's repression of the 90% of South Vietnamese who were Buddhists, many Americans made the connection between the struggles of the monks and the struggles of African-Americans in the South who also fought non-violently for their rights. In any case, Diem's position became increasingly untenable at home and his support fell apart in the US, leading to his assassination in 1963.

Jacobs sums up the failure of the American effort in Vietnam by paraphrasing Robert E. Lee. Lee once said about defeating George McClellan, "McClellan brought the mightiest army ever mustered on North American soil to the gates of Richmond. But he also brought himself." Jacobs writes:

"American policymakers brought the might of history's greatest economic and military superpower to the task of creating and preserving a noncommunist nation in South Vietnam. Five presidential administrations pumped billions of dollars into America's Southeast Asian client and sent thousands of experts to tutor the South Vietnamese on every aspect of national superintendence. The American military performed logistical miracles, constructing airfields and harbors and distributing tons of equipment to field U.S. and native forces. In terms of material wealth and brute force, the United States overshadowed North Vietnam as completely as one belligerent has ever dwarfed another. But American policymakers also brought themselves to Vietnam--their ethnocentrism and parochialism, political arrogance and cultural blindness, all the mental baggage that had accumulated in their minds since childhood. Specifically, they brought interdependent ideologies of religion and race that, analyzed in conjunction with the anticommunist hysteria of the early cold war, can help historians answer Robert Wiebe's anguished question of why 'sophisticated advisors...thought they could create a nation of South Vietnam through a puppet Catholic in Saigon and forced relocation in the countryside. To respond to Wiebe according to his convention: those advisers--Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Senator Mike Mansfield, and others--though they could accomplish this feat because they believed a puppet Catholic was preferable to any non-Christian Vietnamese with indigenous support. Moreover, they viewed Asians as malleable naifs who accomodated, indeed invited, Western management of their national destiny, even if this entailed abandoning ancestral homelands, surrendering previously sacrosanct privilges of village autonomy, and enduring a succession of human-rights abuses that no U.S. policymaker would have tolerated if inflicted on the citizenry of a European ally." (263-64)

What I find remarkable are the similarities between the stories of South Vietnam in the 1950s and Iraq in this decade. In both cases, policy makers fell victim to their own ill-informed and preconceived notions of what a particular part of the world was like and in both cases this led to disastrous consequences for both the United States and the country that US policy was inflicted upon. Both cases saw religious prejuidice and ideology substituted for understanding of the given country. The US was ignorant about both Vietnam and Iraq when it got involved and the nation and particularly policy makers were slow to respond. While we don't yet know the ultimate outcome in Iraq, there is little reason to think that it will end any better than Vietnam did and there is significant reason to believe that this is the worst setback to US prestige in the world since Vietnam. I'd like to think that American policymakers will learn from Iraq, but those in the Bush administration clearly only learned what the wanted to from Vietnam and they ignored the valuable lessons that war could and should have taught.