Ngô Đình Diệm and the Legacy of the First Indochina War

The South Vietnamese nation that Ngô Đình Diệm would attempt to fashion over the course of his tenure had its origins in the Geneva Accords. They represented the international complexities occasioned by the intersection of the forces of decolonization with the global Cold War. The Accords were the result of an international conference convened in the Swiss city to try to bring the bloodletting between the French and Việt Minh forces on the Indochinese peninsula to a halt. By the summer of 1953 it was evident that neither side could deliver the knock-out blow to the other to achieve a decisive victory while significant war-weariness was setting in on both sides. Complicating the matter was the fact that the Việt Minh and the French had courted international support for their respective causes from the two camps of the Cold War. The Việt Minh’s government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had been recognized as the legitimate government of the entire territory of Vietnam by the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, while the French-backed State of Vietnam had received the same recognition from the United States and Great Britain. With recognition came military and economic aid and a commitment of international credibility, increasing the potential stakes of this war of decolonization considerably. Rather than see the conflict in Southeast Asia spin out of control and risk triggering a superpower confrontation in an area considered peripheral to the Cold War, leaders from the Great Powers – Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union – agreed at an international summit in Berlin in early 1954 to add the matter to a conference scheduled to be held in Geneva to try to resolve outstanding matters arising from the armistice that had recently ended the Korean War.Footnote ⁵

The Indochinese portion of the conference opened in May 1954 and was chaired by Great Britain and the Soviet Union. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam was represented by Pham Văn Đồng, while France was represented by Georges Bidault and Pierre Mendès France.Footnote ⁶ The outcome of the deliberations reflected the realities on the ground. A day before the conference started the French received a staggering blow to their fortunes in Indochina when their airbase at Điện Biên Phủ fell to Việt Minh forces after more than three months of intense, bloody fighting.Footnote ⁷ A significant psychological defeat for the French Union, it was not decisive for their military effort. The French still maintained a significant military presence in northern Vietnam while the Việt Minh presence in the south was quite weak. Moreover, the DRV’s best forces were exhausted from the battle of Điện Biên Phủ and needed time to recover.Footnote ⁸ Months of grueling combat would still be needed to achieve victory on the Việt Minh’s terms. There was considerable doubt within the government of the DRV that the Vietnamese people could sustain this. The French, for their part, were well aware that a majority of the people in the metropole were resigned to abandoning their Southeast Asian colonies and simply wanted an end to what was now considered la geurre sale, or dirty war.Footnote ⁹

After six weeks of hard bargaining, facilitated to a great degree by Zhou En-Lai of the People’s Republic of China, who was in attendance due to his nation’s position as the largest power in the region,Footnote ¹⁰ both sides agreed to halt the fighting and temporarily divide Vietnam into two regroupment zones for forces representing either side at the seventeenth parallel. Soldiers fighting for the Việt Minh would regroup to the north of the demarcation line, while the armed forces of the French Union would move to the south. Within two years, a referendum would be held to determine under which government Vietnam would be reunified, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam located in Hà Nội or the State of Vietnam in Sài Gòn. Civilians were also allowed 300 days following the signing of the Accords to move across the seventeenth parallel in order to live under the government of their choice.Footnote ¹¹

For the new premier of the State of Vietnam, the outcome of the Geneva Conference was extremely disappointing. Ngô Đình Diệm was a fierce nationalist and vehemently opposed to communism. As far as he was concerned, his was the legitimate government of the entire territory of Vietnam and it had been betrayed by the French. He refused to recognize either the Accords or the existence of the DRV. This stance represented the independent position he was attempting to carve out for Vietnam between the perpetuation of the colonial apparatus and adoption of the communist system maintained by the leadership of the Việt Minh. This position, in turn, was a reflection of Diệm himself.

Ngô Đình Diệm (see Figure 1) had been born to a prominent Catholic family in 1901. His father, Ngô Đình Khả, had been a member of the Imperial Court at Huế and instilled both Confucian and Catholic values in his children. Diệm had originally intended to dedicate his life to the church, but found monastic life to be too rigid and pursued a career in the civil service. A driven, energetic and studious individual, Diệm rose quickly through the colonial administration, becoming a provincial governor by the age of twenty-eight. In May of 1933, Vietnam’s young emperor, Bảo Đại, made Diệm the Minister of the Interior. His service as a member of the Imperial Cabinet was short-lived, however. After a period of only three months, Diệm resigned in protest when his request to the French for more political autonomy for the Vietnamese government went unfulfilled. This courageous act of defiance demonstrated a stubborn, self-righteous integrity that bordered on obstinacy and enhanced his reputation as an incorruptible nationalist.Footnote ¹²

Figure 1 Ngô Đình Diệm reading the proclamation of the Republic of Vietnam, 1955.

Bettmann, Getty Images

During World War II, Diệm engaged in various anti-French intrigues which nearly got him arrested by the Sûreté. He was saved by his efforts to exploit the sympathies of some of Vietnam’s more “idealist” Japanese occupiers who bristled at the fact that Tokyo, despite its stated aim of an “Asia for Asians,” permitted the Vichy French colonial government to maintain control over Vietnam. The Japanese Consul in Huế helped him escape to Sài Gòn where he remained politically active.Footnote ¹³ In early 1946, Diệm was brought before Hồ Chí Minh, the founder of the Việt Minh, who asked him to join them. Diệm refused, apparently citing as reason the death of his older brother at the hands of the Việt Minh the year before and a suspicion that he would not be a full partner in any future government.Footnote ¹⁴ In the short run, Diệm’s opposition to both the Việt Minh and the French did him few favors. Once World War II ended and the war with the French commenced, Diệm’s refusal to support either side garnered him the reputation as an attentiste, or fence-sitter.Footnote ¹⁵

Over the next few years, Diệm shrewdly used this opportunity to try to establish an independent position between the two poles of communism and colonialism. He approached other like-minded leaders and groups to join him, including members of the Việt Minh who were not enamored with some of its communist inclinations. When the Elysée Accords were announced in June 1949, Diệm publicly denounced them, releasing his own statement that indicated he possessed an alternative vision for Vietnam to that of the French or the Vietnamese communists that was tantamount to a “social revolution.” Though this was only a protean vision, it would evolve, as we shall see, and form the basis of his platform for national development.Footnote ¹⁶ Just as importantly, it reflected Diệm’s remarkable confidence in himself and his abilities, suggesting that he saw himself as holding the key to the creation of a viable, independent Vietnamese state. Unfortunately, at the time it only earned Diệm the enmity of both the Việt Minh and the French. He found himself on a Việt Minh hit-list and, without the protection of the colonial government, he was forced to leave Vietnam in 1950.

Even though Diệm’s exile removed him from direct engagement with the political scene in Vietnam, his time away proved to be extremely important for his political fortunes. During this period, Diệm spent time in Japan, Europe and the United States. In the two-and-a-half years he spent in the United States, he made several entreaties to various officials in the State Department. Unfortunately, officials there showed little interest in what Diệm had to say. Diệm did, however, earn points with other prominent officials in the United States including Francis Cardinal Spellman, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, former Office of Strategic Services chief William Donovan and Justice William O. Douglas. While these individuals could relate to Diệm’s adherence to a Western religion and laud his opposition to communism – especially at a time when they were mired in their own devastating efforts to root out alleged domestic subversives – they were particularly impressed by Diệm’s pleas for a “Third Force” in Indochina between communism and colonialism. Many American officials worried that French efforts to cling to their colonial possessions were only aiding the communists, who could use this to their advantage by claiming they were the true champions of national liberation. Diệm was a refreshing alternative whose credentials appeared to match their desires for a postcolonial leader.Footnote ¹⁷

In the meantime, members of Diệm’s family worked behind the scenes to further his political prospects in Vietnam. A key player was his immediate junior in the family, his brother Ngô Đình Nhu.Footnote ¹⁸ Nhu was the family intellect, having attended France’s École de Chartes. In the early 1950s, Nhu promoted Diệm’s cause among the Vietnamese noncommunist intelligentsia through the journal Xã Hội (Society). At the same time, he proved to be quite adept at political organization, forming a Trade Union movement and the nucleus of a political party based on Diệm’s nascent ideas for nationhood. This latter organization, initially created to lobby on Diệm’s behalf, became the Đảng Cần Lao Nhân Vị (The Vietnamese Personalist Labor Party), more commonly known as the Cần Lao – a semi-secret party whose members were organized into cells that, once Diệm assumed power, infiltrated the state bureaucracy to better control it.

By 1953, Nhu was able to seize on rising impatience among noncommunist nationalists toward Bảo Đại’s gradualist approach to acquiring outright independence from the French. He manipulated the situation to force the emperor to consider appointing an individual with Diệm’s anti-French and anticommunist stature to command a prominent role in his cabinet to quell the rising discontent. Neither Diệm nor Bảo Đại held each other in very high regard. Diệm saw Bảo Đại as a weak leader, readily willing to supplicate himself to the French and the trappings of his exalted position at the expense of the Vietnamese people. For Bảo Đại, Diệm was too high-minded and stubborn. Nevertheless, both could use the other to achieve what he wanted. Diệm could finally attain a position of power through which he could begin the process of realizing his nationalist vision for an independent noncommunist Vietnam. Bảo Đại could use Diệm for both his nationalist credentials and his American connections, which the emperor deemed increasingly important as France’s imperial forces in Indochina continued to wane at the hands of the Việt Minh. On June 16, 1954, the two entered into a marriage of convenience when Diệm formally agreed to Bảo Đại’s request that he form a cabinet.Footnote ¹⁹ Even with the emperor’s endorsement, however, Diệm found himself at a decided disadvantage in the impending contest to lead an independent Vietnam.

By compelling the French forces to sue for peace and, by extension, recognize Vietnamese independence above the seventeenth parallel, Hồ Chí Minh, the leader of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, had legitimized his nationalist credentials in the eyes of many of the Vietnamese people and seized the upper hand. Diệm viewed Hồ Chí Minh as a communist dupe who was interfering in Vietnam’s progression from colonial state to sovereign nation. If Hồ was allowed to succeed, Diệm feared, Vietnam would disappear as an independent political entity and become nothing more than “a southern province of Communist China.”Footnote ²⁰ However, for Diệm to have any chance of countering Hồ Chí Minh’s appeal he would need to contend with the myriad challenges to his authority that were a product of Vietnam’s colonial experience and produce some semblance of a national vision of his own to rival that of Hồ’s socialist republic. But before he could even do that, he needed to find a way extend his political reach beyond the capital city of Sài Gòn and the other locations where his regime enjoyed a modicum of political control.

Expanding his government’s writ into the countryside was crucial for Diệm to have any chance of advancing his national vision of an independent, noncommunist Vietnam, much less winning the elections scheduled for July 1956. This would be difficult as seven-and-a-half years of war with the French had left significant portions of the countryside devoid of any government presence. Moreover, the countryside contained a population that was in ferment. Individual members of the peasantry were wrestling with their own questions about the state, society and what an independent Vietnam might look like.Footnote ²¹ The new premier would have to find a means to fill the gap between the government and the people and try to respond to their needs as quickly as possible.

Kiều Công Cung and the Origins of Civic Action

With only two years to establish a firm presence throughout the countryside before the national elections, the Sài Gòn government needed to work quickly. Of particular concern were the so-called “liberated areas.” These were two areas in central and southern Vietnam that had been administered by the Việt Minh during the war with the French that were now to be placed under the control of the southern government as stipulated by the Geneva Accords.Footnote ²² The Sài Gòn government needed to fill the administrative vacuum left by the departing Việt Minh and counter what Diệm saw as Việt Minh efforts to “embarrass” his new regime through tax moratoriums, land redistribution and construction projects, such as new schools, to improve the lot of the peasantry.Footnote ²³

The government was in a poor position to fill this void. The central government had failed to reach beyond the towns under the French colonial system, resulting in the neglect of the villages where the mass of the people lived.Footnote ²⁴ Eighty percent of government employees were concentrated in the Sài Gòn-Chợ Lớn area alone.Footnote ²⁵ Many of what the Diệm regime referred to as “modern public services,” such as those of the Ministries of Public Works and Information, failed to reach beyond the provincial capitals.Footnote ²⁶ This scenario perpetuated itself because many members of the administrative organizations Diệm had inherited had been trained in accordance with the old colonial methods and regulations and maintained the same hierarchical structure that concentrated services and staff in the provincial centers. Those that had entered the bureaucracy after the French returned in 1945, Diệm believed, had learned to defer to French judgment and rarely attained any position that required meaningful decision-making. This “fonctionnaire spirit” made them little more than appendages of the colonial state.Footnote ²⁷ Consequently, Diệm did not hold them in high regard, questioning their moral acumen.Footnote ²⁸ With such poor and dysfunctional leadership, the government believed, the rural population remained in a politically, socially and culturally backward and benighted state.Footnote ²⁹ Their loyalties had “been extended to whatever party, religious sect or local warlord … seemed to care for their welfare,” while the lack of public services in the villages had prevented the local population from being kept abreast of “the social and economic changes which have taken place in larger towns and cities.”Footnote ³⁰

To make matters worse, the Diệm regime was acutely aware that the departing Việt Minh were leaving undercover “stay-behind” agents in their wake to agitate on behalf of the communist government in Hà Nội in preparation for the upcoming elections. It saw itself at a decided disadvantage in this competition. Communist agents could easily exploit the rural poverty caused by seven-and-a-half years of war and roughly eighty years of French colonial rule to highlight the inability of the Sài Gòn government to help its citizens. The central government feared these communist agitators would also be able to capitalize on the limited presence of the government administrators at the local level to more easily infiltrate anti-regime elements into the ranks of the village community.Footnote ³¹

As David Hunt has shown, much of the South Vietnamese peasantry was grappling with the question of how best to “safeguard their lives and futures” at the mid-point of the twentieth century.Footnote ³² They were dependent on “fragile” household economies for survival that were often based on subsistence farming, low wage jobs or trade in marketplaces that could be far away. In some cases, they were the products of single-parent families that had endured the disruption of the French war and lost relatives in the fighting.Footnote ³³ In the wake of the Geneva Accords, Hunt continues, many in the province of Định Tường (Mỹ Tho),Footnote ³⁴ frustrated with what they felt to be the confines of this rural existence, took it upon themselves to “control their own destiny” and set out for the more urban centers in the hopes of a “better life.” For some, the district capitals offered a way out. Others found an insurmountable gulf existed between the rural ways they were accustomed to and the urban demands they were met with. Rather than material gain and social justice, these peasants encountered alienation and hardship. As Hunt argues, these positive and negative encounters with the urban centers broadened the consciousness of a generation of the Định Tường peasantry, providing them with a greater awareness of the urban–rural divide and the multiple possibilities it offered for alternative ways of living that escaped those who had only been exposed to life in the towns and cities.Footnote ³⁵

At the same time, Hunt demonstrates that a generational shift was at work as a new youth culture began to emerge among the peasantry. Encouraged by the development of a consumer culture and the opportunities it offered for “self-transformation,” youth challenged what they saw as antiquated patterns of filial piety, choosing their own partners rather than entering into arranged marriages or finding an alternative source of livelihood from the family farm.Footnote ³⁶ All of this restiveness produced a potentially fertile environment for opponents of the regime to sow the seeds of revolt.Footnote ³⁷

To address this situation, Ngô Đình Diệm issued a directive on national security action for the Vietnamese Army on December 31, 1954 that placed all of the unsecured provinces in South Vietnam under military authority. This program, also known as “pacification” by the Americans, was drafted with the assistance of Rufus Phillips, a second lieutenant in the US Army detailed to the Central Intelligence Agency. It would be run through the South Vietnamese Ministry of Defense and was initially intended to use Groupes Administratifs Mobiles (GAM) to try to establish a governmental administrative presence in the districts and villages of the liberated zones. The GAM portion of this directive, however, was never implemented as Diệm realized shortly thereafter that during the Franco-Vietnamese War the French had attempted to use GAMs in their effort to defeat the Việt Minh in the north and central provinces to no avail.Footnote ³⁸

Ironically, Diệm’s concern was not motivated by the fact that the GAMs were attempting to extend the reach of a foreign occupier down to the village level. As he saw it, the Việt Minh, under the control of the communists, were simply puppets of Moscow or Beijing and therefore attempting to do much the same. His opposition to the plan stemmed from the perceived strategic and administrative shortcomings of the GAMs. For one thing, their presence in the villages had been so fleeting compared to that of the Việt Minh, who were already entrenched there, that the Việt Minh could easily reassert themselves once the GAMs had left. For another, the strictly administrative nature and organizational structure of the GAMs was inadequate for the task as Diệm conceived it. He felt it had been too top-heavy and therefore incapable of forging any meaningful and lasting connection with the villagers on a personal level. The GAMs had not allowed the French to extend the base of their administrative organization to the grassroots level, making the effort largely ineffective as far as Ngô Đình Diệm was concerned.Footnote ³⁹

Americans on the ground in Vietnam supported Diệm’s proposed pacification plan. One of the most prominent was Rufus Phillips’ boss, Colonel Edward Lansdale, an Air Force officer detailed to the Central Intelligence Agency. A close confidant of Diệm’s and self-proclaimed expert on psychological and unconventional warfare, Lansdale had been sent by Washington to help the South Vietnamese premier thwart the perceived communist threat. Many of the ideas presented in the pacification plan had been drawn from Lansdale’s experiences in the Philippines where he had helped the Secretary of Defense, Ramon Magsaysay, defeat the communist-led Huk insurgency in the early 1950s. Lansdale hoped he could work the same magic in South Vietnam and strongly endorsed the “National Action” Plan as an “integral part” of the larger effort to “establish government” and its “benefits” below the seventeenth parallel.Footnote ⁴⁰

The United States Operations Mission (USOM) – the International Cooperation Administration’s (ICA) representative organ in Sài Gòn – showed similar support. They pushed strongly for American aid for the program. A draft document entitled “Re-establishing Civil Administration in Liberated Areas of Central Vietnam” articulated the hope that this effort would “have long-range significance as a step in broadening the democratic base of the national government.” Pacification, the document argued, could improve the line of communication between Sài Gòn and the countryside that the highly centralized French colonial apparatus had weakened. This improved communication, in turn, could have a “significant effect on the local sense of participation in, and responsiveness to, the national government and upon the Regional and National Government’s knowledge of and responsiveness to local needs and desires.” Such coordination and improved governance, it concluded, were “necessary prerequisites for the effective implementation of Foreign Operations Administration projects in all fields that involve local participation.”Footnote ⁴¹

In the interim, a former member of the Việt Minh, Kiều Công Cung, was approached by Hồ Thông Minh, the South Vietnamese Minister of Defense, to study the problems in the countryside and come up with a new pacification plan to replace the defunct GAM proposal. The Diệm government had been directed to Cung by Edward Lansdale. According to Lansdale, Cung approached the CIA operative at his Sài Gòn quarters in January 1955. During this encounter, Cung told Lansdale that he had heard the American “was trying to help Vietnam and that he [Cung] had some ideas of what needed doing.” As Lansdale recalls, Cung began outlining a plan he had conceived to train members of South Vietnam’s civil service to go out into the villages, dress like the peasantry and engage in manual labor to “serve the people” and help establish “self-government.” This plan was intended to help lay a foundation of rural support for South Vietnamese premier Ngô Đình Diệm in preparation for the national elections scheduled to be held in the summer of 1956. Lansdale records that he was intrigued about the plan and its potential and brought it to the attention of Diệm.Footnote ⁴²

Cung’s personal history encapsulates the complexities of life in postcolonial Vietnam. At the outbreak of World War II Cung had been a lieutenant in the French Army. Following the French surrender he resigned his commission. In June 1945 he became the director of police and security for Sài Gòn-Chợ Lớn under the pro-Japanese government of Trần Trọng Kim. After the war he joined the Việt Minh as a nationalist. When the French returned in 1946 Cung became the leader of a resistance unit that opposed them. By 1951 he had attained the rank of Brigadier General within the resistance forces, but refused to join the communist party. This refusal bred suspicion and he was ultimately placed on a list of noncommunists to be purged. Catching wind of this, Cung deserted from his command located near the border with China and managed to escape with his family. Over the following year he and his family slowly made their way southward evading both the French and the Việt Minh, using forged papers that identified him as a peasant farmer. Between 1952 and 1954 he and his family remained underground in a Mekong Delta village where his wife had relatives. With the end of the Franco-Việt Minh War, Cung emerged from hiding and, impressed with Diệm’s nationalism, offered to assist the new government in reasserting its control over the countryside.Footnote ⁴³

Cung’s ideas, experience with the Việt Minh and his loyalty as a nationalist certainly made him an appealing candidate to orchestrate the Diệm government’s effort to reach out to the countryside. But despite all this experience he proved to need some guidance in formulating a feasible plan. The initial approach he devised for the government was so broad and affected so many different ministries that Diệm asked Trần Trung Dung, Secretary of State to the Presidency and later Minister of Defense, to take over and use Cung as his assistant. Together they incorporated ideas from Lansdale’s experiences in the Philippines and American economic and information officers in Sài Gòn into a more modest program that would accelerate central government assistance to regional and provincial officials and help counter communist influence over the villages. This plan, viewed as a temporary expedient, essentially attempted to place the resources of the South Vietnamese state behind an effort to duplicate the tactics of the communist agents at the village level and beat them at their own game.Footnote ⁴⁴ It called for the creation of a flexible, mobile civilian organization drawn from the existing pool of civil servants that would go out into the countryside and fill the vacuum that was present between the central government ministries and the village population.Footnote ⁴⁵

The activities of this mobile organization, as envisioned by its creators, would be coordinated by commissars serving alongside their governmental counterparts at the regional, district, and provincial levels, but under the authority and control of a Commissioner General. This parallel structure, it was hoped, would facilitate relations between the local authorities and the central government by promoting greater cooperation and mediating conflicts that might arise between the members of the mobile organization and the regional, provincial or district governments.Footnote ⁴⁶ The mobile groups would establish a grassroots connection with the people by living and working alongside villagers to recruit local cadres and guide them in carrying out useful local projects to improve their overall welfare, something the GAMs had failed to do.Footnote ⁴⁷ As we shall see, the concept of harnessing local human resources to a self-help effort was quite consistent with ideas underpinning a broad rural development movement that was circulating throughout the Third World known as community development.Footnote ⁴⁸

The Civic Action program, unfortunately, met with resistance from all sides. At a series of inter-ministerial conferences held throughout January and February, many province chiefs objected to it on the grounds that it would usurp their power, despite arguments to the contrary. As far as they were concerned, they believed the central government should simply provide them with money and allow them to carry out the program as they saw fit.Footnote ⁴⁹

Interested American observers, such as President Eisenhower’s Special Representative to Vietnam, General J. Lawton Collins and his assistant Lieutenant Colonel John E. Dwan, were equally concerned. Though they were encouraged Civic Action’s effort to extend the Sài Gòn government’s presence down to the village level, they were slightly disturbed by the fact that the American Mission received no advanced word of the new National Action Plan developed by Cung and Dung prior to its hotly contested presentation to the province chiefs.Footnote ⁵⁰ Moreover, they bristled at the extent of the program’s organizational structure, which they perceived to be far too ambitious for the national budget of the State of Vietnam to sustain, while needlessly creating a parallel system of government.Footnote ⁵¹ Concerned that this duplication of effort could lead to “creation of another ministerial empire,” Dwan suggested that the plan be revised so Civic Action would be implemented through the existing government agencies.Footnote ⁵²

Undaunted by this lack of overwhelming support for the National Plan, Diệm went ahead and on March 7, 1955 established within the Office of the Prime Minister a provisional Special Commissariat for Civic Action (Đặc Ủy Phủ Công Dân Vụ or CDV) with Kiều Công Cung as its Commissioner General.Footnote ⁵³ The Special Commissariat consisted of two parts. One was the Central Services, which were responsible for liaising with the relevant ministries and services, drawing up plans and training the cadres for field work. It was originally housed in a temporary headquarters provided by the Ministry of Defense along with furniture, materiel, vehicles, equipment and military recruits on loan as administrative staff. The other part of the CDV was made up of the mobile provincial groups assigned to carry out the work of civic action and win the peasantry over.Footnote ⁵⁴

The Commissioner General set out immediately to recruit and train candidates for field duty to assist in the ongoing pacification operation following Việt Minh regroupment in the Cà Mau peninsula.Footnote ⁵⁵ Cung hoped to find his first volunteers in the civil service, most likely assuming that current government employees would exhibit the spirited patriotism such a role warranted. When no volunteers appeared forthcoming he turned to a small group of young, university-trained men who had recently left the north as part of the post-Geneva resettlement.Footnote ⁵⁶ These initial recruits were rapidly trained in the dissemination of propaganda; communal organization; and proper conduct, which meant dressing in the “calico noir” of the farmers and laborers and helping the people in their daily activities.Footnote ⁵⁷

Despite the rapid training of this first group of Civic Action cadres, the Cà Mau operation never materialized. The Prime Minister’s Office did not deem the political situation in the region “favorable,” most likely because of the threat the entrenched presence of “stay behind” elements posed to the security of the newly minted CDV cadres. The first group of cadres was instead deployed on April 15, 1955 to the province of Gia Định, which surrounded Sài Gòn, followed subsequently by groups dispatched to Bình Định and Biên Hòa provinces on completion of their training.Footnote ⁵⁸

These initial deployments became part of a three-month pilot project intended to gain practical experience in coordinating the activities of the various ministries for subsequent CDV teams.Footnote ⁵⁹ Their work consisted mainly of demonstrating the government’s interest in the well-being of its citizens. Such tasks included providing gifts from the government for the people, establishing information rooms in the villages in order to propagandize on the behalf of the government, investigating the political allegiances of the various rural communities, and distributing desperately needed medicine and medical equipment from the Ministry of Health.Footnote ⁶⁰

Over the next six weeks, the CDV continued to expand and by the beginning of June, 117 cadres had been trained. Of these new cadres, 100 were divided evenly into ten mobile groups, while the remaining seventeen were given staff and supervisory roles in the Central Services. As the number of CDV cadres began to grow, it became readily apparent that it would need a larger infrastructure to manage its constituent elements more efficiently. In the Central Services, Civic Action staff attempted to coordinate their work with representatives from the Ministries of Information and Propaganda, Education, Youth and Social Action, and Health. These ministries sent some of their own specialized cadres to join the CDV cadres in the villages.Footnote ⁶¹

While a Vietnamese organization in design and execution, the Special Commissariat for Civic Action did receive some initial support from American sources. Lansdale provided valuable input to Cung regarding how the program should be conceived and obtained some additional “seed money” for training cadres from the Central Intelligence Agency.Footnote ⁶² At the same time, the Central Services liaised with the American-directed Training Relations and Instruction Mission (TRIM), USOM, the United States Information Service (USIS), and CARE (the Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere) in order to keep them informed of their work and obtain whatever financial and material support they could.Footnote ⁶³ Rufus Phillips was assigned by Lansdale to facilitate this process. According to Phillips, USIS was very cooperative, loaning movie projectors to the Civic Action teams and helping them train projectionists. USOM, however, was far less amenable. USOM officials bristled at what they saw as the program’s potential for a wasteful duplication of effort. They were far more interested in working directly with existing Vietnamese ministries in Sài Gòn.Footnote ⁶⁴

Where Phillips did have a more positive impact was in training the Civic Action cadres. A protégé of Lansdale, Phillips was well-versed in what he and Lansdale called “military civic action” – ensuring that members of the military adhered to an ethical code of conduct with regard to their relations with the civilian population using the armed forces to carry out activities that would contribute to the people’s overall well-being, such as distributing blankets and mosquito nets or using army engineers to repair bridges and roads. Phillips had accompanied the South Vietnamese Army to help in this capacity during the reoccupation of the Việt Minh regroupment zones.Footnote ⁶⁵ With these experiences in hand, Phillips personally assisted Cung in establishing a training and operations program for the cadres.Footnote ⁶⁶ More specific training involved instruction by specialists from the Ministries of Information and Propaganda, National Education, Youth and Social Action, and law enforcement from the Ministry of Interior to educate the cadres about the tasks of their respective sphere. The ideological aspect of this training was designed to mimic that of the communist cadres. Each member of the team was “instructed in the major political lines of the government” – such as Diệm’s views on communism, colonialism and an independent Vietnam – and how to “cope with the subversive maneuvers of the adversary.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Given the limited budget for the program and the perceived demand for cadres to act in the field (initial estimates put the need at 6,340 people) they could only afford to be trained for two-week terms. To help ease the burden the Ministry of Defense provided the CDV with an additional and much larger building at Tân Sơn Nhứt airport to serve as both a headquarters and a new cadre training school. With this new school they anticipated being able to train anywhere from 300 to 400 students every two weeks, but contended that to be really effective they should be increasing the number of training classes to be able to start one each week.Footnote ⁶⁸

The evolution of the Central Services allowed the Commissariat to more clearly define the cadres’ roles and responsibilities in the field. At the village level, they were operationally responsible to the province chief and instructed to get close to the community in order to gain their trust: living, eating, sleeping and working alongside the peasantry in the fields when necessary during the harvest season. Initially their efforts remained focused on demonstrating the government’s benevolence. This continued to take the form of dispensing gifts, medical supplies and political tracts. Over time, the responsibilities were broadened to holding popular education classes, explaining the mission of the government ministries and how they could help the village population, and re-establishing administrative councils in areas that had been abandoned by the Việt Minh.

As part of their role, the Civic Action cadres were expected to ensure each village had a primary school, village hall for the village council to meet, a medical dispensary and information rooms where news and information about the government and its programs and policies would be available for members of the community to access easily. Where such facilities were unavailable, one of the cadres’ first orders of business was to construct them with local materials and whatever volunteers were forthcoming.Footnote ⁶⁹ Additionally, the cadres were also expected to bring a measure of security and order to the villages by convincing the community to accept some responsibility for its own self-defense and, more ominously, investigating the political allegiance of individual village members and their families and reporting on the activities of suspected communist agents or other dissident elements.Footnote ⁷⁰ All of this was aimed to make the people realize that the leadership in Sài Gòn was attentive to their needs, with the hope that, when compared to the clandestine efforts of the communists, they would see that the new government in Sài Gòn was genuinely concerned about their interests.Footnote ⁷¹

Early Assessments

The first reports on the work of Civic Action were quite optimistic about the potential of the program. They offered an upbeat picture of measured success, contending that while the cadres were received with initial suspicion by the villagers, after realizing the nature of the mission they quickly warmed to the cadres’ presence.Footnote ⁷² In each village the cadres passed through they made the people realize that the government was concerned with their welfare and sincerely looking for ways to help them.Footnote ⁷³ According to one report, the people began to realize that they were being “exploited” by “the cunning propaganda of the Việt Minh” that claimed the Sài Gòn government was ineffective.Footnote ⁷⁴ In some cases, the cadres’ actions instilled new confidence in the national government, encouraging the members of the village councils in their jobs and injecting new life into the local authorities.Footnote ⁷⁵

Despite these buoyant reports there were some fundamental weaknesses that needed to be addressed for the program to demonstrate any lasting success. First, the cadres were still very inexperienced. As the program was new, they had very little practical experience to draw upon in their training; consequently, much of what they learned was theoretical. Second, a lack of the financial and material means to recruit, train and employ cadres on the scale they envisioned severely limited the scope of the program.Footnote ⁷⁶ Third, most of the cadres recruited were from the north of Vietnam and possessed dialects, accents and mores that were unfamiliar to the population in the south, making the communication and transmission of ideas difficult.Footnote ⁷⁷ Finally, power struggles and disagreements between some regional authorities and their Civic Action counterparts over the course of action remained a hindrance to cooperation in areas where cadres were active.Footnote ⁷⁸ In many cases, the local officials still resented having to share some of their authority with outsiders sent down from Sài Gòn and viewed the Civic Action cadres with suspicion.Footnote ⁷⁹ According to one report, provincial authorities refused to recognize Civic Action personnel as government representatives due to their “plebian dress.” It was not until Cung himself dressed in the same manner and toured the provinces as “a high functionary close to” Diệm that the program began to gain some acceptance.Footnote ⁸⁰

These clashes were most likely the result of the greater autonomy Vietnamese officials had received in running the country just prior to the departure of the French. Throughout the colonial period a glass ceiling had existed for the Vietnamese members of the colonial apparatus. These officials were denied posts as administrators in Sài Gòn and permitted only to rise as high as district chief within the provincial governing system. As Roy Jumper observes, that began to change during the French-Indochina War, when Vietnamese officials were finally “promoted to the top rungs of the administrative ladder.”Footnote ⁸¹ Vietnamese officials who replaced the retreating French were able to enjoy much of the same autonomy and power that the Administrateurs had before them.Footnote ⁸²

Unfortunately, they were also the products of a system that stifled initiative, exhibiting the fonctionnaire spirit Diệm so derided. Rather than be perceived as a system for governance, administration was primarily viewed as a means for “ensuring accountability of bureaucratic transactions and the control of both government officials and the subject population.”Footnote ⁸³ As Diệm saw it, the bureaucracy was filled with “automatons” who were “slaves of routine.” Civic Action offered him a means to inject it with a new vitality. Naturally, such moves encountered resistance as they threatened the status quo.Footnote ⁸⁴ Ironically, Diệm contributed directly to this problem. In order to quell the “storm of protest” that had initially greeted the program when it was introduced in early 1955, Diệm had compromised and placed the Civic Action teams under provincial jurisdiction. This meant that many of the “working-level supervisors” who were holdovers from the system Diệm inherited from the French retained authority over the Civic Action cadres despite the fact that the “ineffectiveness” of these functionaries was something the CDV teams were intended to “circumvent.”Footnote ⁸⁵ In such a tense environment, Diệm’s efforts to enlist the help of the various ministries and regional authorities in facilitating the work of Civic Action only served to further threaten these individuals who were already on the defensive; and they sought to protect their turf.Footnote ⁸⁶

Many of these underlying problems were discussed in a May 20, 1955 report of a recent trip to a village in Biên Hòa province by Randall Frakes, a Field Representative with USOM stationed in the Mekong Delta city of Cần Thơ. Although he saw great potential in the program as a means to reach many villages in a minimum period of time, Frakes contended that there had been little cooperation provided by the various government ministries and noted the “problem of duplication of effort.” According to his report, the Civic Action cadres had established a dispensary and begun training a first-aid worker, but the village already had a fully trained first-aid worker along with a complete first aid kit. He also did not feel qualified personnel could be trained within the fifteen days the cadres were in the village to be able to continue the teaching and health work. More generally, he felt it would be very difficult for the CDV to be able to obtain enough qualified volunteers to fill the anticipated number of Civic Action teams, which he stated to be 100. Finally, he doubted that there would be enough funds or equipment available to pay their salaries and carry out the proposed activities once the cadres moved on.Footnote ⁸⁷

Frakes’ final observation proved to be the most enduring problem of the Civic Action program: maintaining continuity in the areas where the cadres had been active. As the USOM Field Representative observed, cadres were only assigned to villages for two- to four-week periods. One of the most pressing concerns was the training of appropriate individuals at the village level to serve as regional cadres who would continue the work of the Civic Action mobile group once it had moved on.Footnote ⁸⁸ These individuals were selected for their enthusiasm and devotion to the national cause and were rewarded with minor seats on the village councils and exemption from local taxes. They were trained through oral instruction, the use of printed texts, and by working closely with the Civic Action cadres prior to their departure. Civic Action cadres would return periodically to check on the progress being made in their absence. Despite this backing, the perks and the training, these regional cadres were ostensibly volunteers and, in order to be willing to serve the Sài Gòn regime, they needed to be instilled with a sense of “self-sacrifice” that would ultimately require an iron faith in the benevolence of the government and its ability to lead.Footnote ⁸⁹

This proved to be a formidable task. In some areas where the cadres had managed to get close to the peasants and earn their trust, they found their efforts to maintain this bond were hampered by a chronic shortage of resources and a lack of trained personnel.Footnote ⁹⁰ In a number of other places that had formerly been under Việt Minh control, the cadres found very little support. The local administration was either nonexistent, or still in exile. The communist members of the Việt Minh who remained behind still managed to wield enough influence to effectively prevent the Civic Action cadres from establishing any meaningful government presence amongst the population.Footnote ⁹¹ Compounding this was the fact that despite the efforts of the Civic Action cadres Diệm, for the most part, remained an unproven commodity to much of the peasantry. Members of the rural population looking for some semblance of stability in their lives and hoping for a better future were hesitant to throw their support behind the South Vietnamese premier, as he had yet to demonstrate that he was capable of providing for their needs. The communists, on the other hand, had already proven their nationalist mettle as members of the Việt Minh and could point to having defeated the French as evidence of what they were capable of.Footnote ⁹² For Civic Action to succeed and show the people of South Vietnam that they had more to gain by supporting the Sài Gòn government than Hồ Chí Minh in Hà Nội before the 1956 elections it was imperative that it overcome the shortcomings that emerged in these early assessments.