s r + n ; a c o r s

Our System Demands the Supreme

Being: The U.S. Religious Revival and
the Diem Experiment, i,,,,,
In his popular survey of U.S. Cold War foreign policy, H. W. Brands concludes
a typically well turned passage on the Eisenhower administrations desire,
becoming by the mid-i,,os almost an obsession, for allies with the aside: It
was convenient, and not completely coincidental, that three of Americas
principal protges in Asia Chiang [Kai-shek], [Syngman] Rhee, and South
Vietnams Ngo Dinh Diem were Christians.
i
This is a provocative insight,
but Brands does not pursue it. Like most diplomatic historians, he seems loath
to posit a connection between U.S. religious history and foreign policy, for
reasons that may be guessed at. Americans are presumed to separate church
and state. Those realists who dominated U.S. policymaking during the fty-
year stando with the Soviet Union the Achesons, McNamaras, and
Kissingers would doubtless protest that religious ideals have no place in
statecraft.
z
If this were the case, however, Americans would only dare elect and
appoint irreligious public servants, a condition that did not obtain in the i,,os,
when over o percent of respondents to a Gallup poll claimed they would
refuse to vote for an atheist for president under any circumstances.

John Foster
Dulles, U.S. secretary of state for most of that pious decade, once responded to
mild criticismof Rhee and Jiang by declaring: Well, Ill tell you this. No matter
what you say about the President of Korea and the President of Nationalist
China, those two gentlemen are the equivalent of the founders of the Church.
They are Christian gentlemen who have suered for their faith.
,
Scholars
Dirroa+ic His+or\, Vol. z,, No. , (Fall zooi). zooi The Society for Historians of American
Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Blackwell Publishers, ,o Main Street, Malden, MA,
ozi,, USA and io Cowley Road, Oxford, OX, iJF, UK.
,,
i. H. W. Brands, The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War (New York, i,,), ,c.
z. Indeed, George Kennan once admonished John Foster Dulles: Let us keep our morality to
ourselves. . . . Let us not attempt to constitute ourselves the guardians of anyone elses virtue; we
have enough trouble to guard our own. Cited in John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A
Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York, i,z), iz. Wise counsel,
although it might be argued that Kennans words sat uncomfortably in the mouth of the man who
closed his famous i,,; X article by expressing a certain gratitude to . . . Providence. Kennan,
The Sources of Soviet Conduct, in The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the
Modern World, ed. James F. Hoge, Jr., and Fareed Zakaria (New York, i,,;), ic,.
. Cited in Douglas Miller and Marion Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were (New York,
i,;;), ,z.
,. Cited in Leonard Mosley, Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen, and John Foster Dulles and Their
Family Network (New York, i,;), z,c.
would do well not to dismiss such statements as hyperbole, and pay greater
heed to Dulless choice of analogy when, for example, he repeatedly compared
the communist menace to the tide of Islam [that] swept over much of
Christendom . . . in the tenth century after Christ.
,
While many historians and sociologists have addressed the theological
renaissance of the Eisenhower era,
c
the United Statess mid-century religious
revival has been absent from studies of Eisenhowers geopolitics. This is akin
to analyzing Lyndon Johnsons crisis management in Vietnamand the Domini-
can Republic without reference to the environing eects of the civil rights and
student movements. Policymaking does not occur in a vacuum. Michael Hunt
correctly notes that [w]hat goes on in the heads of policymakers is inseparable
from the social setting broadly understood,
;
and one of the outstanding
features of the U.S. social setting in the i,,os was its religiosity, a sentiment that
manifested itself, as Brands suspects, in alliances with Rhee, Jiang, and another
Christian gentleman who presided over an overwhelmingly non-Christian
nation on the front line of the Cold War. The U.S. commitment to preserve an
independent South Vietnam under the premiership of Ngo Dinh Diem
possibly the most fateful foreign policy decision of the postwar era is
inexplicable unless placed in the context of what William ONeill terms the
religious boom of the i,,os.

While religion alone cannot account for the

Eisenhower administrations launching of the so-called Diem experiment,
Diems Roman Catholic faith was a crucial factor in securing U.S. support for
his regime.
Religiousness, of course, is a slippery concept, but if statistics mean
anything the i,,os were the most religious decade of the twentieth century.
Whereas previous periods of revivalism had been largely restricted to lower-
and middle-class Protestants, all faiths and classes were inuenced in the i,,os:
Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, rich and poor, urban and rural, suburbanites
and city dwellers, black and white.
,
Year after year, throughout Eisenhowers
presidency, polls tracked greater numbers of Americans arming a belief in
God, an afterlife, the Bible as the literal word of God, the divinity of Jesus
,. John Foster Dulles, Faith of Our Fathers, in The Spiritual Legacy of John Foster Dulles:
Selections fromHis Articles andAddresses, ed. HenryP. VanDusen(Philadelphia, i,,,), ,; idem, World
Brotherhood through the State, in ibid., iii.
c. The most useful text, for my purposes, has been James Hudnut-Beumler, Looking for God in
the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dreamand Its Critics, :,,y:,vy (NewBrunswick, i,,,). A. Roy
Eckardt, The Surge of Piety in America: An Appraisal (New York, i,,), is an excellent contemporary
account of the religious revival of the i,,os. Will Herbergs Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in
American Religious Sociology (New York, i,,,) is indispensable reading. See also Donald Meyer, The
Positive Thinkers: Religion as Pop Psychology from Mary Baker Eddy to Oral Roberts (New York, i,o);
Mark Silk, Spiritual Politics: Religion in America since World War II (New York, i,c); and Robert
Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, i,).
;. Michael H. Hunt, Ideology, in Explaining the History of U.S. Foreign Relations, ed. Michael
J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson (New York, i,,i), i,c.
. William L. ONeill, American High: The Years of Condence, :,,y:,vo (New York, i,c), ziz.
,. Miller and Nowak, The Fifties, ;.
,,o : r i r r o a + i c n i s + o r \
Christ, and the power of prayer.
io
The percentage of Americans ocially
enrolled in a church or synagogue leapt from ,, percent in i,,o to ,, percent
in i,,o to a record c, percent in i,,,.
ii
Church membership rose twice as fast
as the general population.
iz
Theologians like Martin Buber, Karl Barth, Paul
Tillich, and especially Reinhold Niebuhr gained a prominence among the
intellectual elite that no religious thinkers had possessed since the Great
Awakening.
i
Religious kitsch saturated U.S. culture, as indicated by the popu-
larity of such songs as I Believe, Its No Secret What God Can Do, and Big
Fellow in the Sky. Films with religious themes like The Ten Commandments, The
Robe, and Ben-Hur played to packed houses. The sales of Bibles reached an
all-time record. Nearly half of the books on the nonction best-seller list were
religious texts, among them such curiosities as Pray Your Weight Away and The
Power of Prayer on Plants.
i,
Bishop Fulton J. Sheens Life Is Worth Living was the
countrys highest-rated television series.
i,
Henry R. Luce, the most inuential
publisher of the day, sawto it that Sheen, Oral Roberts, Norman Vincent Peale,
and other religious gures received a steady stream of favorable publicity in
his Time, Life, and Fortune magazines.
ic
Life triumphantly proclaimed in its
Christmas i,,, issue: [T]he sights and sounds of an unprecedented revival in
religious belief and practice were everywhere in the U.S. Religion was com-
manding the attention and energies of men as it had not since the days of the
countrys rst devout settlers.
i;
The reasons for this upsweep in at least the outward manifestations of
devoutness are far from clear. President Eisenhowers pastor, the Reverend
Edward Elson, opined that it was a consequence of the fruits of material
progress paid vacations, the eight-hour day, and time-saving appliances
that have provided the leisure, the energy, and the means for a level of human
io. See Hudnut-Beumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs, i,o; I Believe, Newsweek, zo Oc-
tober i,,z, ioc; Protestant Architect, Time, i, April i,,,, cz; and The Proof of God, Time, io
January i,,,, co.
ii. Leo P. Ribuo, God and Contemporary Politics, Journal of American History o (March
i,,): i,i;i.
iz. Growth of U.S. Churches, Time, z April i,,i, i.
i. George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since :,,y (Wilmington, i,,c),
,o;,.
i,. The Babbittish side of the i,,os revival is drolly explored by Miller and Nowak, The Fifties,
,io. See also J. Ronald Oakley, Gods Country: America in the Fifties (New York, i,c), iiz;; and
James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, :,,y:,, (New York, i,,c), z,.
i,. Charles R. Morris, American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built Americas Most Powerful
Church (New York, i,,;), zziz;.
ic. For the extent to which Luce shaped popular opinion in the earlyCold War years see James
L. Baughman, Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media (Boston, i,;); and Robert E.
Hertzstein, Henry Luce: A Political Portrait of the Man Who Created the American Century (New York,
i,,,).
i;. Mighty Wave over the U.S., Life, c December i,,,, ,,. Such Madison Avenue proselytism
inspired the Jewish theologian Milton J. Rosenberg to pen the couplet: Luce does more than
Niebuhr can/To justify Gods ways to man. Cited in Martin Marty, The New Shape of American
Religion (New York, i,,,), i;.
Our System Demands the Supreme Being : ,,i
and spiritual values never before reached.
i
Less blithesome analysts cited the
arms race with its implication that, yes, the world could end tomorrow and
the soulless jobs bureaucrats were obliged to perform in Lonely Crowd
corporations.
i,
Another possible motivation was the desire to belong on the
part of suburbanites in an age of rapid economic, social, and geographic
mobility; membership in a church, the sociologist Will Herberg contended,
satised this need for community, security, and stability.
zo
With characteristic
anti-triumphalism, Reinhold Niebuhr ascribed the marked increase of interest
in religion in the United States to the fact that the secular alternatives to
historic faiths Marxism, fascism, laissez-faire capitalism, and liberal visions
of human perfectibility have been refuted by history. World war, holocaust,
atomic destruction, and the division of the globe into two armed camps had, in
Niebuhrs view, convinced millions of Americans that [t]he old symbol of the
i. Cited in ONeill, American High, ziz.
i,. See, for example, Warren Weaver, Peace of Mind, Saturday Review, ii December i,,,, ii,
,;,o; A. Roy Eckardt, The New Look in American Piety, Christian Century, i; November i,,,,
i,,,; and Religion in Popular Culture, Commonweal, ; October i,,,, ,c.
zo. Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, ,,,;. See also Stanley Rowland, Jr., Suburbia Buys
Religion, Nation, z July i,,c, ;o.
The ,,ooo men, women, and children who attend Sunday school classes at Detroits Temple
Baptist Church and the sta of z, who teach them gather here in i,,, for probably the largest
Sunday school group picture ever taken. CREDIT: John Zimmerman/LIFE/TimePix.
,,z : r i r r o a + i c n i s + o r \
climax of history consisting of the engagement between Christ and anti-Christ
[is] strangely more relevant to our experience than all progressive, secular
interpretations.
zi
While scholars have advanced conicting explanations for the religious
revival of the i,,os and while many contemporaries questioned its sincerity
zz
the evidence is overwhelming that Eisenhower encouraged the nationwide
turn toward God. According to a press release by the Republican National
Committee shortly after the i,,z election, Eisenhower believed that, as chief
executive, he was obliged to serve not only as the political leader, but as the
spiritual leader of our times.
z
Although never much of a churchgoer before
he became president, Eisenhower made a show of joining the National Pres-
byterian Church and attending it often during his eight years in oce. He
opened his inaugural address with a prayer the only modern president to do
so
z,
supported the American Legions Back to God campaign, and signed
legislation adding the phrase under God to the Pledge of Allegiance and In
God We Trust to U.S. currency. In i,,c, as his rst term drew to a close,
Eisenhower endorsed a congressional resolution making In God We Trust
the national motto, replacing E pluribus unum.
z,
He established the tradition
of prayer breakfasts at the White House, obtained passage of a bill authorizing
construction of a prayer room for congressmen near the Capitol rotunda, and
regularly began cabinet meetings by asking for divine assistance.
zc
What
President Eisenhower wants for America, the journalist Stanley High declared
in Readers Digest, is a revival of religious faith. . . . He is determined to use his
inuence and his oce to make this period a spiritual turning point in America,
and thereby to recover the strengths, the values, and the conduct which a vital
faith produces in a people.
z;
Alook through Eisenhowers papers turns up thousands of pronouncements
on the importance of religion in U.S. life, from the fatuous Our government
makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith, and I dont
care what it is
z
to the coercive Our system demands the Supreme Being.
There can be no question about the American system being the translation into
zi. Reinhold Niebuhr, Varieties of Religious Revival, New Republic, c June i,,,, iic.
zz. Besides Herbergs seminal work, see Gibson Winter, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches:
An Analysis of Protestant Responsibility in the Expanding Metropolis (Garden City, i,ci); Peter L. Berger,
The Noise of Solemn Assemblies: Christian Commitment and the Religious Establishment in America (Garden
City, i,ci); and William Lee Miller, Piety Along the Potomac, Reporter, i; August i,,,, z,z.
z. Cited in Miller and Nowak, The Fifties, ,o.
z,. Inaugural address, zo January i,,, Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, :,y,
(Washington, i,,,), i. See also Hudnut-Beumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs, ,i.
z,. Paul Carter, Another Part of the Fifties (New York, i,), ii,,o.
zc. Oakley, Gods Country, zo.
z;. High, What the President Wants, Readers Digest, April i,,, z,. Fittingly, High was the
author of a best-selling biography of Billy Graham, the celebrity evangelist who often visited the
president at the White House and gave him advice.
z. Cited in Patterson, Grand Expectations, z,.
Our System Demands the Supreme Being : ,,
the political world of a deeply felt religious faith.
z,
Eisenhower spoke so often
in this vein that when Life rst published a double year-end issue in December
i,,, and chose as its sole subject Christianity, Henry Luce was able to
introduce the magazine with the words of the president taken from seven
speeches on the topic given in his rst three years in oce. Alongside a
photograph of Eisenhower praying on the historic battleeld of Gettysburg
ran the excerpt: Application of Christianity to everyday aairs is the only
practical hope of the world. . . . Either man is the creature whom the Psalmists
described as a little lower than the angels, or man is a soulless, animated
machine.
o
It is tempting to dismiss Eisenhowers rhetoric as Tartuan, a tool wielded
by a politician to mask his true intentions. The president did nothing to counter
that interpretation when, for example, he delivered a i,,, address instructing
the nation to celebrate Independence Day with penance and prayer and then
proceeded to spend his own Fourth of July shing and playing golf.
i
Michael
Hunt, however, makes the telling argument that
public rhetoric is not simply a screen, tool, or ornament. It is also, perhaps
even primarily, a form of communication. . . . To be eective, public rhetoric
must draw on values and concerns widely shared and easily understood by
its audience. A rhetoric that ignores or eschews the language of common
discourse on the central problems of the day closes itself o as a matter of
course from any sizable audience, limiting its own inuence.
z
Eisenhower repeatedly emphasized the religiosity of the U.S. people in his
speeches and press conferences because this theme had tremendous explana-
tory power for the audience he was addressing. Appeals to religion helped
reduce complicated problems to manageable proportions and marshal support
for government policies. Although Eisenhower himself cannot be characterized
as a devout man, his rhetoric is indicative of the climate of opinion during his
administration, and the president, a shrewd political animal, knew how to
exploit prevailing attitudes.
If Eisenhowers piety was more strategic than heartfelt, his chief cabinet
ocer indulged in no such duplicity. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was
the most unapologetically religious man to superintend U.S. foreign policy
since Woodrow Wilson. Virtually every text dealing with Dulles makes the
argument that any comprehension of the man and his policies demands
z,. Remarks to the cd Continental Congress of the National Society of the Daughters of the
American Revolution, zz April i,,,, Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, :,y,
(Washington, i,,,), ,o.
o. The Testimony of a Devout President, Life, zc December i,,,, .
i. Message to the mayor of Philadelphia for the Fourth of July ceremonies at Independence
Hall, , July i,,,, Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, :,y,, ci;. For Eisenhowers
post-oration activities see Miller, Piety Along the Potomac, z;.
z. Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, i,;), i,.
,,, : r i r r o a + i c n i s + o r \
consideration of his religious convictions and missionary zeal to extend Chris-
tian principles across the globe.

Dulless tendency to interpret international

tensions inreligious terms a rhetorical proclivitymuchremarked uponduring
his tenure in oce was no political ploy; it was an authentic expression of
who he was and what he felt was in the United Statess best interests. Even
Townsend Hoopes, author of a decidedly unattering biography of Dulles,
admits that [t]here is no reason whatsoever to doubt the passionate sincerity
of the secretarys faith; indeed, Hoopes argues, that was the weakness in Dulless
diplomacy: the unshakable convictions of a religious and theological order
that brooked no compromise even at the cost of nuclear annihilation.
,
Those convictions were shared by some of the most powerful molders of
U.S. popular opinion, which partially accounts for the almost unconditional
positive regard with which Dulles was treated by the mainstream press in the
early to mid-i,,os.
,
Media titans Henry Luce and DeWitt Wallace both sons
. Roscoe Drummond claims that Dulless political thinking could no more be separated
from his religion than a lighted bulb fromits current. . . . There is simply no understanding Dulles
without understanding the depths of his religious adherence. Duel at the Brink: John Foster Dulless
Command of American Power (New York, i,co), ;c;;. For similar assertions see Ole Holsti, Enemies
in Politics (Chicago, i,c;), z; and Mark G. Toulouse, The Transformation of John Foster Dulles: From
Prophet of Realism to Priest of Nationalism (Macon, i,,), xxi.
,. Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles (Boston, i,;), i,,, ,,i.
,. For the vicissitudes of Dulless reputationsee RichardImmerman, introduction, JohnFoster
Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War, ed. Immerman (Princeton, i,,o), .
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, First Lady Mamie Eisenhower, and pastor Edward L. R. Elson
in the doorway of the Eisenhowers home church, the National Presbyterian Church in Washing-
ton. CREDIT: Mark Kaufman/LIFE/TimePix.
Our System Demands the Supreme Being : ,,,
of Protestant ministers
c
found nothing objectionable in such sweeping Dulles
assertions as the great trouble with the world today is that there are too few
Christians.
;
In i,c,, with the U.S. troop buildup in Vietnamsnowballing, Luce
still felt no compulsion to qualify his publishing empires endorsement of
Dulless conduct of foreign policy a decade earlier. Dulles has been accused a
great deal of being too much the moralist, so forth and so on, Luce observed.
The answer to that is whether a mans or a countrys profoundest convictions
have anything to do with politics. If they dont, why then, its a very cynical
world and I would say to hell with it.

For Dulles, as for Luce and tens of

millions of Americans in the Eisenhower years, the conict with international
communism was in its quintessence a holy war. As the secretary pronounced
shortly before assuming oce: The terrible things that are happening in some
parts of the world are due to the fact that political and social practices have
been separated from spiritual content. Such conditions repel us. But it is
important to understand what causes these conditions. It is irreligion.
,
If the i,,os were a decade of unexampled religiosity, they were also, as H. W.
Brands notes, a period of obsessive alliance formation. No ally would do more
to undermine the prestige and power of the United States than Ngo Dinh Diem.
When Diem became prime minister of South Vietnam in June i,,,, there were
several dozen U.S. advisers in his edgling nation; by the time of his assassina-
tion in October i,c, U.S. personnel in country exceeded sixteen thousand.
France, the dominant Western military power in Vietnam for almost a century,
refused to endorse the United Statess Diem experiment and abandoned any
pretense of shared Franco-American responsibility for the security of non-
communist Southeast Asia within months of Diems assumption of oce.
Daniel P. OC. Greene has documented howFrench demands that Washington
choose between its desire to maintain a French military presence in Indochina
and its support for Diem led to a momentous decision in favor of the latter at
the i,,, Paris conference. In the future, Greene writes, if the ctional South
Vietnam failed to materialize or if eorts to make it safe for anti-communism
faltered, the Americans would have only themselves and no longer the French
to blame.
,o
Diems reign marked the U.S. crossover point from advice and
support to active cobelligerency in a Vietnamese civil war.
c. Walter J. Ong, Frontiers in American Catholicism: Essays on Ideology and Culture (New York,
i,,;), z. For Wallaces impact on popular opinion in the United States see John Heidenry, Theirs
Was the Kingdom: Lila and DeWitt Wallace and the Story of the Readers Digest (New York, i,,).
;. Untitled speech, zo May i,,i, John Foster Dulles Papers, box z,o, Seeley Mudd Library,
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey.
. Henry R. Luce interview, z July i,c,, John Foster Dulles Oral History Project, Seeley
Mudd Library.
,. Dulles Address on the Occasion of the i,oth Anniversary of the Founding of the Water-
town Church, , October i,,z, Dulles Papers, box o,.
,o. Daniel P. OC. Greene, John Foster Dulles and the End of the Franco-American Entente
in Indochina, Diplomatic History zo (Spring i,,c): ,,i;i.
,,c : r i r r o a + i c n i s + o r \
The details of howDiemsecured his designation as SouthVietnamese prime
minister remain shrouded due to a snail-like declassication process. Yet it is
unduly equivocal to argue, as several historians have, that the absence of a
smoking gun connecting the Eisenhower administration to Diems appoint-
ment means that the issue of U.S. contribution to this pivotal selection must
remain unresolved.
,i
In fact, Diem never would have been named premier had
he not been Washingtons candidate, and the available documentary record
makes this clear. Given Diems Francophobia, it is inconceivable that the
impetus for his premiership could have originated in Paris. As Donald Heath,
U.S. ambassador in Saigon, observed after his rst meeting with Diem: The
man charged with forming the new government of Vietnam is at an almost
insane pitch of hatred against the French.
,z
French Prime Minister Pierre
Mends-France opposed Diems installation, informing Ambassador Douglas
Dillon that he expected to have considerable diculty with the new Vietnam-
ese government. Diem was a fanatic much like Syngman Rhee, Mends-
France declared. He considered Vietnamese Emperor Bao Dais decision to
appoint Diem most unfortunate.
,
Furthermore, while it is true that Bao Dai
and not the Americans ocially bestowed the title of premier on Diem, this
gesture did not signify Vietnamese initiative. Bao Dai had long disliked Diem
intensely; a report from Ambassador Heath sent as early as z, January i,,i
referred to the emperors extreme antipathy toward Diem.
,,
As Bao Dai
recalled in his memoirs, Diem had a dicult temperament and messianic
tendencies. Nonetheless, the former seminarian possessed one virtue that, in
the emperors judgment, compensated for his many defects. He had known
some Americans who admired his intransigence, Bao Dai noted. Washington
would not spare him its support.
,,
Bao Dais gauging of the Eisenhower
administrations sympathies proved astute, as, between i,,, and i,cz, the United
States supplied Diem with more than $z billion in aid.
,i. For examples of this argument see David Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower
Administration and Vietnam, :,y,:,v: (New York, i,,i), ,z,;; Chester Cooper, The Lost Crusade:
America in Vietnam(NewYork, i,;o), izcz; Lloyd C. Gardner, Approaching Vietnam: FromWorld War
II through Dienbienphu (New York, i,), z,z,; and George C. Herring, Americas Longest War: The
United States and Vietnam, :,yo:,y, zd ed. (New York, i,c), ,,,o.
,z. Heath to Dulles, , July i,,,, Record Group ,,, ;,iG.oo/;-,,,, National Archives II,
College Park, Maryland.
,. The ambassador in France to the Department of State, zo June i,,,, Foreign Relations of the
United States, :,y.:,y, (Washington, i,z), i:i;zc. Maurice DeJean, former French commissioner
general in Indochina, characterized Diem as too narrow, too rigid, too unworldly, and too pure
to have any chance of creating an eective government in Vietnam. The charg in Saigon to the
Department of State, i June i,,,, FRUS, :,y.:,y, i:ic,. The archival record indicates that French
civilian and military authorities unanimously disapproved of Diems appointment.
,,. Embassy Saigon to the Department of State, z, January i,,i, FRUS, :,y: (Washington, i,;;),
c:,,.
,,. Cited in Anderson, Trapped by Success, ,,. See also Bui Diem, In the Jaws of History
(Bloomington, i,;), c; and Robert D. Schultzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam,
:,,::,y (New York, i,,;), ;.
Our System Demands the Supreme Being : ,,;
The policy that journalist Homer Bigart would later deride as sink or swim
with Ngo Dinh Diem is usually ascribed to the regnant anti-communist
ideology of the Cold War and the anonymity of most Saigon politicians. Diems
anticommunism, so the argument goes, made him the logical Free World
proxy for U.S. ideologues seeking to quarantine Soviet and Chinese inuence
behind Vietnams i;th parallel, especially insofar as Washington was unaware
of any credible rivals for the South Vietnamese premiership.
,c
Yet anticommu-
nism and ignorance of local political realities are insucient to explain why
the United States opted to sink or swim with Diem rather than some other
South Vietnamese. As the record of administrative deliberations in the mid-
i,,os makes plain, there were several popular, qualied, and irreproachably
anti-communist candidates in Saigon who presented alternatives to Diem, and
every member of Eisenhowers policymaking coterie was aware of their exist-
ence; indeed, one candidate, former Defense Minister Phan Huy Quat, came
close to unseating Diem, as J. Lawton Collins, Eisenhowers special repre-
sentative in Vietnam, relentlessly badgered Washington to eect such a change
in command.
,;
Quats nationalist and anti-communist credentials were impec-
cable.
,
In a representative cable, Collins described Quat as able, forceful, and
resourceful. . . . [I]f given [the] chance, he may succeed where Diem has
failed.
,,
Foreign Minister Tran Van Do was likewise a man who, in Collinss
opinion, could form and successfully head a national government.
,o
Collins
advised Eisenhower in April i,,, that each of these men [Quat and Do] has
far more exibility than Diem. . . . Diem cannot make mental adjustments and
has no knack for the solution of problems. Do and Quat do.
,i
Other popular
South Vietnamese politicians included Defense Minister Ho Thong Minh and
Minister for Plans Nguyen Van Thoai.
,z
All of these individuals had established
,c. Examples of this argument may be found in Thomas D. Boettcher, Vietnam: The Valor and
the Sorrow (Boston, i,,), i,i; Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York, i,), zi,; and Ellen J.
Hammer, A Death in November: America in Vietnam, :,v, (New York, i,;), ,o.
,;. The Collins mission is given its fullest treatment in Anderson, Trapped by Success, ;ii,.
See also idem, J. Lawton Collins, John Foster Dulles, and the Eisenhower Administrations Point
of No Return in Vietnam, Diplomatic History iz (Spring i,): iz;,; James R. Arnold, The First
Domino: Eisenhower, the Military, and Americas Intervention in Vietnam (New York, i,,i), z,,,; and
J. Lawton Collins, Lightning Joe: An Autobiography (Novato, i,;,), ;,ii.
,. In fact, Quat once complained to U.S. diplomat U. Alexis Johnson that many of Diems
supporters were neutralists of the Indian school and that neutralism was no answer to Commu-
nist attempts to take over Vietnam. Johnson to Dulles, zz June i,,,, RG ,,, ;,iG.oo/c-zz,,.
,,. Collins to Dulles, io December i,,,, J. Lawton Collins Papers, box z,, Dwight D.
Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas. Collinss papers teem with hundreds of approbatory
evaluations of Quat.
,o. Collins to Dulles, ; April i,,,, Collins Papers, box zc. See also Collins to Dulles, i, April
i,,,, RG ,,, ;,iG.oo/,-i,,,; and Collins to Dulles, i March i,,,, Collins Papers, box z,.
,i. Special representative in Vietnam tel. to Department of State, io April i,,,, FRUS, :,yy:,y
(Washington, i,,), i:zi.
,z. For instances of the special representative stumping for these two statesmen see Collins
to Dulles, z, March i,,,, RG ,,, ;,iG.oo/-z,,,; Collins to Dulles, zo April i,,,, RG ,,,
;,iG.oo/,-zo,,; and Collins to Dulles, i, April i,,,, Collins Papers, box zc.
,, : r i r r o a + i c n i s + o r \
their anticommunism, and all had greater political experience than Diem. Yet
none was able to secure the backing of the Eisenhower administration. Why?
Diem had a number of factors working in his favor. Although a Vietnamese
nationalist, he had never cooperated with the Viet Minh; indeed, he had
spurned Ho Chi Minhs oer of a government position in the early postwar
period and even called Ho a criminal to his face
,
a gesture bound to delight
U.S. Cold Warriors across the political spectrum, from Eugene McCarthy on
the left to Joe McCarthy on the right. Furthermore, Diems hostility toward the
French was as virulent as his anticommunism. He had resigned fromthe French
colonial administration in i, rather than be a puppet, and his absence from
Vietnam during the years of ercest Franco-Viet Minh combat spared him the
dilemma of having to choose sides, whereas those nationalists who stayed and
refused to join the Viet Minh were forced to collaborate with their longtime
colonial overlords. Diems advocates could thus feel condent that, in backing
him, they remained true to the frequently conicting U.S. creeds of anticom-
munism and anticolonialism.
,,
Several historians have also emphasized Diems
congeniality toward U.S. business interests and willingness to allow South
Vietnam to serve as a source of food, raw materials, and markets for Japan and
Western Europe.
,,
Equally important, the historian Joseph G. Morgan observes,
was the fact that Diem appealed to a long-held conviction that the United
States could do much to shape Asias future. Unlike other anticommunist
nationalists who sought to establish an alternative to Hos Leninist vision of an
independent Vietnam, Diem bypassed the right-wing political parties and
religious sects in his own country along with the decolonizing powers of
Western Europe to take his case directly to the United States. The symbolic
signicance of that gesture was profound; here was an Asian nationalist whose
choice of mentor seemed to conrmwhat many Americans had long believed.
Morgan, whose account of Diems early networking in the United States is
the most detailed in the literature, makes much of the future South Vietnamese
leaders appeal to [p]aternalistic assumptions that America had the duty and
the right to direct Asias destiny.
,c
All of the above considerations contributed to the United Statess choice of
proxy strongman in Southeast Asia. Diems trump, however, was his religion.
The inclusion of religion as a category of analysis in this case is not a gratuitous
,. See Karnow, Vietnam: A History, zici;; and Robert Shaplen, The Lost Revolution (New York,
i,c,), iio.
,,. For the clash between anti-communist and anti-colonialist policymaking agendas in the
Eisenhower administration see Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, :,,y:,,., ;th ed.
(New York, i,,), i,z,,.
,,. See, for example, WilliamS. Borden, The Pacic Alliance: United States Foreign Economic Policy
and Japanese Trade Recovery, :,,:,yy (Madison, i,,); Michael Schaller, The American Occupation of
Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (NewYork, i,,); and AndrewJ. Rotter, The Path to Vietnam:
Origins of the American Commitment to Southeast Asia (Ithaca, i,;).
,c. Joseph G. Morgan, The Vietnam Lobby: The American Friends of Vietnam, :,yy:,y (Chapel
Hill, i,,;), izi.
Our System Demands the Supreme Being : ,,,
embellishment, but an indispensable tool that opens a newwindowonthe Diem
experiment and the culture that gave rise to it. While it is not true, as some
historians have claimed, that Diem had no rivals for the premiership,
,;
it is true
that all other candidates were either Buddhists or members of the Cao Dai or
Hoa Hao religious sects. Diem was a devout Roman Catholic. His life, all of
it, is devoted to God, the New York Times noted during the premiers i,,; tour
of the United States.
,
Even as a boy, Diem stood out for his piety, arising every
morning before dawn to pray by oil lantern and ying into a rage if interrupted
by his siblings.
,,
At fteen, he entered a monastery and considered becoming
a priest, but dropped the notion because, one of his biographers concludes, he
found the church too pliable for his own unbending will.
co
Nonetheless, he
continued to observe the monks vow of chastity for the rest of his life.
ci
High
oce scarcely altered him. After his appointment as premier, another biogra-
pher observes, Diem lived an austere existence. He slept on a monastic narrow
cot . . . surrounded with a fewintimate possessions a wooden crucix, a picture
of the Blessed Mother.
cz
Not even Diems severest detractors questioned the authenticity of his
devoutness. Rather in an eerie anticipation of later critiques of Dulles they
emphasized what they saw as fanatical sanctitude in arguing for the premiers
deposal. Douglas Dillon, U.S. ambassador in Paris, reported after his rst
encounter with Diem: He impresses one as a mystic who has just emerged from
a religious retreat into the cold world, which is, in fact, almost what he has done.
He appears too unworldly and unsophisticated to be able to cope with the grave
problems and unscrupulous people we nd in Saigon.
c
Tran Van Do remarked
to Ambassador Donald Heath in late i,,, that Diemis a saint, but an austere saint
without communicative warmth.
c,
Guy La Chambre, French minister for the
associated states, implored the Eisenhower administration in January i,,, to
set up [a] government [in South Vietnam] which, if not as pure as [the] Diem
government, would actually accomplish something.
c,
After spending six mad-
dening months in Saigon trying to persuade Eisenhower to jettison Diem,
Collins returned to Washington to deliver a personal report in which he
condemned the premier as so completely uncompromising, ascetic, and mo-
nastic that he cannot deal with realities.
cc
,;. For examples of this argument see Joseph Buttinger, Vietnam: ADragon Embattled (NewYork,
i,c;), z: ,o; James S. Olson and Randy Roberts, Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam, :,,y:,,y
(New York, i,,c), co; and Paul M. Kattenberg, The Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign Policy,
:,,y:,, (New Brunswick, i,o), ,i,z.
,. New York Times, io May i,,;.
,,. The Beleaguered Man, Time, , April i,,,, z.
co. Denis Warner, The Last Confucian (Baltimore, i,c,), ,o.
ci. Karnow, Vietnam: A History, zi,.
cz. AnthonyTrawickBouscaren, The Last of the Mandarins: Diemof Vietnam(Pittsburgh, i,c,), z.
c. The ambassador in France to Department of State, z, May i,,,, FRUS, :,y.:,y, i:i;.
c,. Heath to Dulles, z, August i,,,, RG ,,, ;,iG.oo/-z,,,.
c,. Dillon to Dulles, c January i,,,, RG ,,, ;,iG.oo/i-c,,.
cc. Summary of Remarks of General J. Lawton Collins, z; April i,,,, FRUS, :,yy:,y i:z,.
coo : r i r r o a + i c n i s + o r \
This was as unequivocal a vote of no condence as the historian could expect
to nd in diplomatic correspondence. Allies have been abandoned for far less.
As David L. Anderson demonstrates in his treatment of the early U.S. forays
intoSoutheast Asia, however, Collins foundhis eorts toinstall another premier
checked at every turn by Dulles. In the long run, Anderson concludes,
Collins was right and Dulles was wrong. . . . The failure to heed Collinss
warnings had tragic results. . . . America became the guarantor not only of an
independent South Vietnam but also of a particular Vietnamese leader.
c;
Dulless attachment to Diem was undoubtedly a crucial factor in saving the
latters premiership, especially in view of the fact that Eisenhower was preoc-
cupied with the Quemoy-Matsu crisis during the debate over whether or not
to cashier Diem. Daniel Greene notes that Eisenhower set the limits of
Indochina policy but entrusted its management to his secretary of state.
c
Rarely did Dulles go to bat for an ally more energetically than he did for Diem
in i,,,. Dulless aide John W. Hanes recalls:
The secretary was very impressed by Diem. The secretary was almost alone
in this. . . . [V]ery few people in the American establishment really thought
that Diem . . . had the guts to do it or the ability. The secretary said This
guy, I think, has the guts to do it . . . and were going to back him. And he
rammed this one through single-handedly. . . . [W]e did back him, and he
survived. And he surprised absolutely everybody except the secretary, who
always thought that he would.
c,
Dulless admiration for Diem derived in large part, it seems, from the
premiers perceived religious militance. Walter Robertson, assistant secretary
of state for Far Eastern aairs at the time of the Diem commitment, noted in a
i,c, interview that Diem had many of the characteristics of Syngman Rhee. .
. . He had a fanatical religious opposition to communism.
;o
Unlike Collins,
Dulles did not interpret this as dangerous inexibility; rather, he took it to
indicate that Diem has virtues not easily replaced.
;i
Tellingly, Diems public
addresses with their scriptural allusions, Biblical imagery, and moralizing
often seemed cribbed from Dulless own speeches. The premiers i,,, New
Years Message to My People lamented the fact that in the world today
materialism is raging, destroying the spiritual heritage of various nations; he
vowed to destroy the regime of corruption entrenched in the countrys urban
c;. Anderson, Trapped by Success, ii.
c. Greene, Franco-American Entente, ,,;. Anderson concurs with this assessment, noting
that the administrative wrangle over Diemnever really diverted Eisenhowers attention from the
concurrent Formosa crisis. Trapped by Success, ii;.
c,. Interview with John W. Hanes, Jr., z, January and iz August i,cc, Dulles Oral History
Project.
;o. Interview with Walter F. Robertson, zz, July i,c,, Dulles Oral History Project. See also
interview with Roderic OConnor, z April i,cc, ibid.
;i. Ambassador in France tel. to Department of State, ii May i,,,, FRUS, :,yy:,y i:,;.
Our System Demands the Supreme Being : coi
centers and bring about a spiritual revolution.
;z
When South Vietnams
constitution was adopted a year after Diem assumed power, the premier
endorsed it as symbolizing . . . the Golden Rule of Christ. . . . [W]hat a
dierence between this rich and complex heritage and the sterile atheistic
philosophy of communism!
;
In i,,;, Diem responded to a U.S. reporters
question about whether his religion was a help or a hindrance in performing
the task of head of a country with the armation: I am a Roman Catholic.
The principles of my religion are a constant inspiration to me in all that I do.
If I succeed in my political career, I owe it all to those principles.
;,
Such
pronouncements could not fail to impress Dulles, whom Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr., has aptly dubbed the high priest of the Cold War, and they played
exceedingly well in a United States in the throes of a religious revival.
;,
Diems stature was further enhanced by the fact that one religion in particu-
lar enjoyed an eorescence in Eisenhowers United States. Charles Morris
observes in his recent study of American Catholicism: By the i,,os, the
Catholic Church was the countrys dominant cultural force. No other institu-
tion could match its impact on politics, unions, movies, or even popular
kitsch.
;c
The United Statess Catholic population almost doubled between i,,,
and i,c,, swelling from z., million to ,,.c million.
;;
The U.S. Census Bureaus
i,,; survey estimated that zc percent of the nations households were Catholic.
;
Much of the spectacular economic growth of the i,,os was concentrated in
cities like NewYork, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh longtime
Catholic bastions.
;,
Catholicism controls the urban centers with few excep-
tions outside the South, the theologian Martin Marty noted in i,,,, and
America is now a nation of urban dominance.
o
Depictions of Catholic priests
and nuns in the cinema were invariably positive, in contrast to the brutish
interpretations set forth in i,os lms like Little Caesar and Public Enemy.
Signicantly, the Hollywood Catholic priest of the Cold War era was a virile
gure, prepared to back up his principles with his sts; in the i,,, lm On the
Waterfront, Karl Maldens Father Barry attens a former prizeghter. Books with
Catholic themes Cardinal Spellmans The Foundling, Fulton Ourslers The
Greatest Story Ever Told, and Thomas Mertons The Seven Storey Mountain
;z. Premier Ngo Dinh Diems New Years Message to My People, i January i,,,, Douglas
Pike Collection, Unit IV Republic of Vietnam, box iz, Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University,
Lubbock, Texas.
;. The Constitution of the Republic of Vietnam, i,,c, Pike Collection, Unit IV Republic of
Vietnam, box i. See also Diem Victory Address, zc October i,,,, RG ,,, ;,iG.oo/io-zc,,; and
President Ngo Dinh Diems Message to the Free World and Christendom on the Balang Aair, z
January i,,,, RG ,,, ;,iG.oo/i-z,,.
;,. Cited in the St. Paul Catholic Bulletin, i May i,,;; and Catholic Universe-Bulletin, i; May i,,;.
;,. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History (Boston, i,c), ,,.
;c. Morris, American Catholic, z,;.
;;. Patrick W. Carey, The Roman Catholics in America (Westport, i,,c), ,.
;. David Caute, The Great Fear: Under Truman and Eisenhower (New York, i,;), io.
;,. Morris, American Catholic, zz.
o. Marty, The New Shape of American Religion, ;,.
coz : r i r r o a + i c n i s + o r \
numbered among the fties biggest best sellers. Bishop Sheens Life Is Worth
Living series not only captured the biggest television audience of the mid-
i,,os; it also won every major TV award, many of them several times.
i
Charles
The immenselypopular Bishop FultonSheeninduplicate, his magnied image on a TVmonitor
above himself as he delivers his weekly Life Is Worth Living sermon. CREDIT: Walter
Sanders/LIFE/TimePix.
i. James Hennesey, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United
States (New York, i,i), z,. See also Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from
Colonial Times to the Present (New York, i,,), ,z,.
Our System Demands the Supreme Being : co
Morris exaggerates, but only slightly, when he asserts: A team of alien anthro-
pologists would have reported that i,,os America was a Catholic country.
z
Catholic inuence on domestic and foreign policy was at its zenith during
the early Cold War, principally due to shifting U.S. attitudes toward the Soviet
Union. Patrick Allitt and other scholars have demonstrated that, while millions
of Americans underwent an about-face in the late i,,os and early i,,os away
from admiring the Soviets as gallant allies to condemning them as no better
than the Nazis, [f]or American Catholics . . . zealous anti-communism was
nothing new; Catholic schools had been teaching it for the best part of a century,
and the wartime alliance with Stalin had not eaced it.

Catholic Americans
beneted from being in the vanguard of the anti-communist zeitgeist. J. Edgar
Hoovers Federal Bureau of Investigation recruited heavily at Catholic colleges
like Fordham and Notre Dame; Catholic journals such as the Brooklyn Tablet
and Our Sunday Visitor supported the hunt for security risks in government;
and Joe McCarthy, the personication of the United Statess second twentieth-
century Red Scare, was himself a Catholic and won widespread Catholic
support.
,
For a group whose patriotism had long been considered suspect
because of their alleged subservience to Rome, these were halcyon days;
Catholicism was now synonymous with ioo percent Americanism. Warmly
recalling this moment when national political consensus fell in line with a
time-honored Catholic view, Daniel Patrick Moynihan writes: In the era of
security clearances, to be an Irish Catholic was prima facie evidence of loyalty.
Harvard men were to be checked; Fordham men would do the checking.
,
For
many U.S. policymakers, Diems Catholicism constituted prima facie evidence
that he would never betray U.S. Cold War objectives by reaching an accommo-
dation with the Viet Minh.
Moreover, there is considerable evidence in the U.S. media and the archival
record of intergovernmental wrangling that delimitation of what did and did
not constitute a real religion materially regulated the manner in which the
United States selected its anti-communist surrogate in Vietnam. For example,
Life magazines series The Worlds Great Religions which concluded with
the double-issue treatment of Christianity introduced by selections from
Eisenhowers speeches followed up its rst installment on Hinduism with an
examination of Buddhism. The Buddhism issue hit the stands while Eisen-
hower, Dulles, and other policymakers were weighing Collinss increasingly
z. Morris, American Catholic, ix.
. Patrick Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, :,yy:,:o (Ithaca, i,,),
z. See also George Sirgiovanni, An Undercurrent of Suspicion: Anti-Communism in America during
World War II (New Brunswick, i,,o).
,. See Donald Crosby, God, Church, and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church,
:,yo:,y (Chapel Hill, i,;); and Vincent P. DeSantis, American Catholics and McCarthyism,
Catholic Historical Review ,i (April i,c,): io.
,. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Patrick Glazer, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes,
Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, MA, i,c), z;i.
co, : r i r r o a + i c n i s + o r \
frantic pleas that Diem be replaced by either Quat or Do. A wretched piece of
scholarship even by the standards of the Luce publishing empire, Lifes ; March
i,,, issue is nonetheless an invaluable primary source particularly the epi-
logue, titled Troubled Time: Gentle Religion Faces Communist Threat.
Most intelligent Asians agree that Buddhism and communism are basically
incompatible and opposed, the anonymous author observed. To Buddhists
man is not primarily an economic creature. His purpose is spiritual. Like all
great religions, Buddhism postulates a life of the spirit that transcends the
human span. . . . It preaches self-discipline, not discipline from without. Thus
far, the tenets of Buddhism by way of Henry Luce could have been scripted
by John Foster Dulles in his capacity as chairman of the Federal Council of
Churches Committee on a Just and Durable Peace. But there was a sting in the
tail: Its avoidance of force and coercion makes Buddhism one of the worlds
most gentle religions and may be a weakness in its defense against communism.
. . . The question is whether the practical moral vigor of Buddhism goes deep
enough to make it Southeast Asias spiritual bulwark against communism. . . .
Buddhist passivity could be helpful to communism. This commentary ran
beneath a photograph of the Dalai Lama bowing toMaoZedong andpresenting
him with a ceremonial sash.
c
Luces Red-baiting provincialismhas been much ridiculed,
;
and if Life were
the only purveyor of such gaucherie it could be deemed an aberration. Yet even
the liberal New York Times observed in the days after the i,,, Geneva Confer-
ence that provisionally divided Vietnam at the i;th parallel: The communists
will have advantages not reected in comparative gures. The Viet Minh rebels
will have under their control the Northern Vietnamese, who are more tough
and vigorous than the easygoing Buddhists of Laos and Cambodia.

The
Atlantic concurred, noting that partly because of their passive Buddhist phi-
losophy, the Cambodians . . . are an easygoing people; the peasants would put
up with their lot a long time without revolting.
,
One wonders what aspects
of Laotian and Cambodian history which in the decade prior to Geneva had
witnessed insurgencies against rst the Japanese and then the French could
have induced the pundits at the Times and the Atlantic to ascribe a quality like
easygoing to these people. Nonetheless, the reexive association of Bud-
dhism with passivity received an extended showcase in the pages of the
United Statess newspaper of record when the Times covered the trial of accused
traitor John David Provoo a highly publicized event that concluded less than
a year before Diems installation as South Vietnams premier.
c. Buddhism, Life, ; March i,,,, iooio.
;. Perhaps most memorably by Paul Goodman, who opens Growing Up Absurd with the charge
that Eisenhower-era movies, TV, and Book-of-the-Month clubs are beneath contempt, but the
Luce publications make you sick to the stomach. Growing Up Absurd (New York, i,co), x.
. New York Times, zi July i,,,.
,. The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Cambodia, Atlantic, October i,,,, i.
Our System Demands the Supreme Being : co,
Provoo had been captured by the Japanese in i,,z when the Allied fortress
of Corregidor surrendered; he remained a prisoner of war until Japans defeat
in i,,,. The prosecution in Provoos trial contended that the former seaman
had been a willing accomplice in the maltreatment of U.S. prisoners in the camp
where he was incarcerated. One of the most damaging strikes against Provoo
was the commonly held but unsubstantiated notion that he was a follower of
the Buddhist faith. Naoko Shibusawa documents how throughout the nearly
four-month trial, the press made much of [Provoos] espousal of Buddhism . . .
and did so in ways that questioned his masculinity. Thus, the New York Times
returned repeatedly to the theme of Provoo delicately slip[ping] out of his
khakis and into the robes of a Buddhist priest. The Times referred to Provoo
as the fan-bearing Buddhist priest from Sausalito, California . . . a rangy,
slender man of , years with almost eeminate features. Trial correspondents
reported that Provoo helped other prisoners by doing their laundry for them;
that he frequently cried when subjected to criticism; and that he was touchy
on the subject of his unmarried status. Over the objections of Provoos lawyers,
the judge permitted the jury to hear evidence of Provoos homosexuality, which
prosecutors implicitly tried to connect to the defendants religious beliefs. The
conviction of Provoo for treason, and the judges statement upon passing
sentence that Provoo suered with [sic] certain deviations which, to say the
least, constitute a real . . . deviation from the normal served to reinforce some
of the dominant phobias of the United States in the i,,os: against gays, certainly,
and against Buddhists as well.
,o
The Provoo trials conjoined specters of unassertiveness and treason stalked
the image of Buddhism as promulgated by Supreme Court Justice William O.
Douglass i,, best-seller North from Malaya. This account of the justices
reconnaissance of the ve fronts of the Far Eastern Cold War contained a
tribute to Diem, whom Douglas lauded as a hero in Central and North
Vietnam, with a considerable following in the South, too. . . . Diem is revered
by the Vietnamese because he is honest and independent. Douglas followed
this up with a denunciation of the Buddhist Church as indeed remote from
the people and the country. . . . It is a passive institution. It concerns itself mostly
with devotions which women especially practice. . . . It exists strangely apart
fromthe conict that is tearing the nationapart.
,i
This assessment was dubious;
most members of the Viet Minh were Buddhist, andtheycouldhardlybe judged
passive or remote from the people and the country. Moreover, any nation
that manages to defeat Chinas Han Dynasty, the Mongol Empire, Frances
Fourth Republic, and the United States of America is not likely to have a
dominant church whose principal impact upon the citizenry is to induce
,o. I am indebted to Dr. Shibusawa for alerting me to this case. All of the press quotes are
from her Ph.D. dissertation Americas Geisha Ally: Race, Gender, and Maturity in Reconguring
the Japanese Enemy, i,,,i,,, (Northwestern University, i,,), ic,z.
,i. William O. Douglas, North from Malaya: An Adventure on Five Fronts (New York, i,,), io.
coc : r i r r o a + i c n i s + o r \
detachment and docility. Although Douglas would have denied it, his book
betrayed considerable ethnocentrism toward Buddhism.
Douglas was generally considered one of the most unhidebound men in
Washington. Nonetheless, much like his liberal colleague and fellow Diem
supporter Mike Manseld, he was imbued with the cultural insularity and
religious conformity of the i,,os. He was moreover the justice who authored
the famous opinion in the case of Zorach v. Clauson that We are a religious
people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.
,z
Buddhist institutions
did not presume such a gure, and, in the view of devout Americans like
Douglas, this put Buddhists beyond the pale of the truly religious. Douglas
would have found his judgment conrmed by one of the most up-to-date
studies of Buddhism available in the United States at the time of the Diem
commitment. Henri de Lubacs i,, monograph Aspects of Buddhism argued that
Buddhism lacks the only possible foundation: God. . . . All the insuciency
all the falsity, in fact of the Buddhist religion comes in the nal analysis from
this fact. Buddhism, according to de Lubac, looks upon existence as a
dream. . . . [T]he universe tends to be regarded as nothing more than one vast
illusion. Such an attitude would be a remarkable betrayal of Christianity,
annihilating its very substance.
,
Vietnams Cao Dai and Hoa Hao sects fared even worse than Buddhists in
the estimation of the U.S. third estate. The Hoa Hao, Time informed its readers,
is a rowdy sect of dissident Buddhists whose founder was sent to a lunatic
asylum. Commentarys Peter Schmid found a certain beauty in many Cao Dai
ideas, insofar as that sect has sedulously copied the Catholic Church;
otherwise, he snied, it is hard to overlook the absurdities that have crept into
this religion. America reported that these so-called religious sects are impelled
by no religious sentiment. They are capitalizing on hare-brained oshoots of
Buddhism and Ouija boards. U.S. News and World Report condemned the sects
for pos[ing] as popes and mak[ing] religion a racket; the Cao Dai were
dismissed as a pseudo-religious sect which follows a perverted form of Bud-
dhism whatever that meant while the Cao Dai worshipped a fantastic
assortment of gods ranging from Buddha and Confucius to Victor Hugo and
Charlie Chaplin.
,,
Given this level of reportage, it is hardly surprising that
Senator Mike Manseld (D-MT), one of Diems most intrepid champions on
the Hill, declaimed during the premiers i,,, campaign to crush the sects
politically and concentrate all power in his own hands: The opponents of the
Diem regime have power, but it is a power based largely on corruption. . . . It is
,z. Cited in Miller and Nowak, The Fifties, ,.
,. Henri De Lubac, Aspects of Buddhism (New York, i,,), ,i,z, ,,.
,,. The Beleaguered Man, Time, , April i,,,, zz; Peter Schmid, Free Indo-China Fights
against Time, Commentary, January i,,,, z,z,; Violence in Vietnam, America, , April i,,,, z;
U.S. in Middle of Gang War, U.S. News and World Report, i May i,,,, ,,i.
Our System Demands the Supreme Being : co;
the power of the Black Hand, the mercenary, the racketeer, and the witch
doctor.
,,
Mistrust of Vietnams principal religions as too passive and corrupt to serve
U.S. Cold War purposes was echoed in a number of governmental documents
produced during the Franco-Viet Minh conict and the spring i,,, dispute over
whether or not to replace Diem. In a February i,,, National Security Council
(NSC) meeting, CIA Director Allen Dulles complained that there was no
dynamism in the leadership of the Franco-Vietnamese forces. Eisenhower
interrupted to inquire if it would be possible to capitalize on the religious
issue. Given that most of the people of Vietnam were Buddhists, the
president wondered whether the United States might nd a good Buddhist
leader to whip up some real support. The source of the next remark is
unnamed, but he clearly voiced a shared sentiment. According to the minutes:
It was pointed out to the President that, unhappily, Buddha was a pacist rather
than a ghter. This led to laughter. Vice President Richard Nixon then
expressed some doubt as to the strength and conviction with which the people
of Vietnam clung to their religious views. Eisenhower replied that he still
believed that there was something in the idea of a religious motivation. While
conceding that Emperor Bao Dai was an unlikely rallying point for religious
passions, Eisenhower pointed out how Joan of Arc had managed to defeat a
large enemy and place a timid king upon his throne in France. Picking up on
the Joan of Arc theme, Secretary of State Dulles remarked that there were, of
course, a million and a half Roman Catholics in Vietnam, and these included
most of the best brains of the country. Eisenhower suggested that the Catho-
lics be enlisted.
,c
Twelve days after this NSC meeting, during an Executive Session of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell
Smith responded to Senator J. William Fulbrights protest that Bao Dai is not
any good by assuring the Democrat from Arkansas that a change in command
in Vietnam had been considered. I do not want to go into great detail, Bedell
Smith remarked, but volunteered that the administration was thinking of
providing a certain religious leadership or religious cause . . . to ght for.
,;
The undersecretary was probably alluding to Diem.
Still more compelling was a study prepared by a few government tacticians
who apparently took heed of the presidents injunction to capitalize on the
religious issue. The Operations Coordinating Board (OCB) was a new agency
set up by Eisenhower tocoordinate departmental executionof national security
,,. Untitled address, z, April i,,,, Mike Manseld Papers, Series XXI, box ;, Maureen and
Mike Manseld Library, University of Montana, Missoula, Montana. See also Manseld Address:
Foreign Policy in the Far East, zz May i,,,, Manseld Papers, Series XXI, box ;.
,c. Minutes of National Security Council Meeting, , February i,,,, FRUS, :,y.:,y, i:ioi,i,.
,;. U.S. Congress, Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Report on Indo-
china, d Cong., zd sess., ic February i,,, (Washington, i,;;), c:i,.
co : r i r r o a + i c n i s + o r \
policies.
,
According to James R. Arnold, the boards progress reports were
Eisenhowers principal source of information on Southeast Asia during the
second half of the i,,os.
,,
On i April i,,,, the OCB submitted Recommenda-
tions Concerning Study of Religious Factors in International Strategy, a
twenty-two-page plan of action remarkable for the insight it provides into the
religious dimension of policymaking. The OCB began by asserting that the
religious beliefs and usages of any given people aord the surest key to their
psychology, culture, and historical conduct. After a brief assessment of com-
munism as a religion, the major premise of the document was set forth:
[T]he conduct of men, especially in moments of crisis, is very largely
determined by what they believe. . . . [I]f we can discover what men really
believe, and how rmly they believe it, their behavior under given circum-
stances will become in some degree predictable. The importance of such
knowledge in the preparation of any world-wide strategic plan, and even in
the day-to-day conduct of diplomacy, hardly needs to be labored.
There will be hazards in any such venture, the OCB cautioned. In the
exigencies of the moment, someone professing certain religious beliefs may
engage in behavior irreconcilable with those beliefs. To illustrate this point, the
OCB seized upon an obvious example: It is often assumed that nearly all
Italians are Catholics; but if this were strictly true, it would be impossible to
explain the present power and prestige of the Communist party. The OCB
reconciled the Italian Catholic-communist paradox and the analogous situ-
ation in France by postulating that while a great majority of . . . people is
Catholic by both tradition and psychology[,] . . . great numbers . . . who are
counted as Catholics have long ceased to be such either in practice or ideologi-
cal armation. What was required, then, for evidence of genuine Catholicism
and its concomitant, anticommunism was practice and ideological arma-
tion. Although neither Diem nor any other U.S. ally was identied by name in
the report, the South Vietnamese premiers celibacy, Spartan lifestyle, daily
meditations in a private chapel, and repeated declarations of loyalty to the
Catholic Church conformed nicely to the OCBs stipulations.
According to the board, such godly mindedness was rare in the East, where
religion . . . has never been a great positive factor. . . . Taoism and even
Buddhism are regarded as philosophies rather than as theological systems. . . .
In recent decades, however, missionaries have reported an increasing respon-
siveness to Christianity. The board was more sanguine about the chances of
the United States enlisting the cooperation and support of Christians and
especially Catholics in nations already under communist domination than
they were about Buddhists, Taoists, and Confucians in countries that were still
,. Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, :,,y:,v: (NewYork,
i,,;), z,.
,,. Arnold, The First Domino, ,z.
Our System Demands the Supreme Being : co,
ostensibly part of the Free World. Virtually all witnesses have testied to the
profoundly religious character of the Russian people, the board reported.
Russia, in short, oers another illustration of the principle that religion thrives
upon persecution. The Buddhist monks who self-immolated in the streets of
Saigon to protest Diems rule would have concurred with that principle.
The boards concluding recommendation that an organization to under-
take the study be formulated around a nucleus of ve to eight chaplains, assisted
by a small technical and clerical sta, including translators was so depthless
as to conrm the unrealizability of the enterprise.
ioo
Although Eisenhowers
fondness for psychological warfare has been well documented,
ioi
there is no
evidence that this project was ever operationalized. But as Barbara Tuchman
observes with regard to another policy paper on Indochina gathering dust in
the archives: The fate of this document, whether discussed, rejected, or
adopted . . . does not matter, for the fact that it could be formulated at all reects
the thinking or what passes for thinking by government that . . . laid the path
for future American intervention in Vietnam.
ioz
The OCB generated another document that passed for thinking when its
Committee on Buddhism met in the summer of i,,c. This committee,
comprised of representatives of the State Department, Central Intelligence
Agency, and United States Information Agency, was charged with studying the
eectiveness of Buddhist organizations in several Southeast Asian countries
so as to discover ways and means to ensure that the inuence of Buddhist
monks and lay leaders is exerted in favor of U.S. interests, if possible, and not
against them.
io
The OCBs sta representative on the committee, Kenneth P.
Landon, furnished his fellow committee members with a list of fteen princi-
pal sub-topics around which to organize their research, including such ques-
tions as What knowledge does [sic] the Buddhist clergy and lay organizations
have of the dangers of communismand its potential threat to them?
io,
Kenneth
T. Young, director of the State Departments Division of Philippine and
Southeast Asian Aairs and, as several scholars have demonstrated, a key
player in rescuing the Diem premiership in the spring of i,,,
io,
warned the
ioo. Recommendations Concerning Study of Religious Factors in International Strategy, i
April i,,,, White House National Security Sta, Papers, i,,i,ci: OCB Central File Series, box
z, Eisenhower Library.
ioi. See, for example, Stephen Ambrose, Ikes Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment
(New York, i,o); and Blanche Weisen Cook, The Declassied Eisenhower: A Divided Legacy of Peace
and Political Warfare (New York, i,i).
ioz. Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (New York, i,,), zc,.
io. Proposals Regarding U.S. Relations with Therawada Buddhist Countries, early draft,
undated, White House National Security Council Sta, Papers, i,,,i,ci: OCB Central File
Series, box z. I am indebted to the archivists at the Eisenhower Library for their assistance in
facilitating the speedy declassication of documents relating to this committee.
io,. Memorandumof Meeting, Committee on Buddhism, i May i,,c, White House National
Security Council Sta, Papers, i,,,i,ci: OCB Central File Series, box z.
io,. See Anderson, Trapped by Success, io,; Arnold, The First Domino, z;o;,; and Shaplen,
The Lost Revolution, iziz.
cio : r i r r o a + i c n i s + o r \
board that Buddhism may not be a suitable channel for U.S. inuence. Many
of the priests of this religion, Young noted, are essentially reactionary and
their tenets are strongly inclined against the kind of competitive enterprise we
favor and towards neutralist pacism. These factors present obstacles to U.S.
eorts to utilize contacts with the Buddhist clergy for political purposes.
ioc
Despite several months of intensive study, the OCBs nal report did little
more than recapitulate Youngs views. Indeed, Outline Plan Regarding Bud-
dhist Organizations in Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, Laos, [and] Cambodia was,
for all practical purposes, a forty-three-page tally sheet of the eras Buddhist-
bashing, with the board variously arming: A few Buddhist monks are well-
known communists or fellow-travelers, and for some years have been actively
promoting communist causes; Buddhism, in Cambodia and elsewhere, is
essentially quietist and generally pacist . . . decidedly anti-Western; [T]he
intellectual preparation of most monks for instruction on the danger of com-
munism is seriously decient; [D]evotees of Christianity, Islam, and Hindu-
ism believe in gods to whom they pray, whereas Buddhismdoes not teach belief
in God but in mans own eorts to attain perfection; thus Buddhism is . . . a
philosophy and not a religion. This position relieves Buddhism of the Marxist
stigma of being an opiate of the people and makes it appear compatible with
communism.
io;
The OCB was not the only governmental agency either to stress the need
for religious dynamism in the Far East or to nd that requirement uniquely
fullled by Catholicism, especially as incarnated by Ngo Dinh Diem. One of
the earliest mentions of Diem as a potential Vietnamese commander-in-chief
is contained in a o January i,,i State Department memorandum in which
Dallas M. Coors, director of Indochinese aairs, synopsized his conversation
with the seraphic expatriate: Diem stated that the only truly anti-communist
group in Indochina was the Catholics. The nature of their religion and the
strength of their faith prevented inltration by other groups. . . . Catholic
leadership in the government is the only way to assure a national government
free of Viet Minh inuence.
io
Robert E. Hoey, ocer in charge of Vietnam-
Cambodia-Laos aairs, sounded a similar note, also in January i,,i. The
Catholic community in Vietnam is generally regarded as numbering between
one-and-one-half to two million people, he observed. Its importance is all
out of proportion to its number. . . . Ngo Dinh Diem is recognized as possibly
the most inuential lay Catholic leader in Indochina today. . . . Unless they can
be convinced immediately that their ultimate existence as Christians depends
ioc. Young to Landon, zc August i,,c, White House National Security Council Sta, Papers,
i,,,i,ci: OCB Central File Series, box z.
io;. Outline Plan Regarding Buddhist Organizations, nal draft, ic January i,,;, White
House National Security Council Sta, Papers, i,,,i,ci: OCB Central File Series, box z. See
also Proposals Regarding U.S. Relations with Therawada Buddhist Countries, undated, White
House National Security Council Sta, Papers, i,,,i,ci: OCB Central File Series, box z.
io. Coors memorandum for the record, o January i,,i, RG ,,, ;,iG.oo/i-o,i.
Our System Demands the Supreme Being : cii
upon their support of the anti-communist forces in being, we are concerned
that the forces of communism . . . may be ultimately successful.
io,
Such examples could be multiplied many times.
iio
The views expressed by
Coors and Hoey give some indication why, when on io May i,,, analysts in the
State Departments Division of Philippine and Southeast Asian Aairs pro-
duced a list of sixteen Vietnamese politicians whom they considered reliably
anti-communist and pro-American, Ngo Dinh Diem who had held no
political oce for twenty years and who had not participated in the struggle to
rid his homeland of colonialist oppression headed the list. The analysts
described Diem as [t]he most prominent Catholic leader in Vietnam, perhaps
the most popular personality in the country after Ho Chi Minh. They added:
May have Vatican support. At least six of the sixteen candidates for South
Vietnamese leadership were Catholics, an absurdly high percentage given that
Catholics comprised only about io percent of the population of Vietnam.
iii
General Collins, whom Eisenhower appointed the United Statess special
representative in South Vietnam during the height of Diems struggle to
consolidate power, received a dose of the administrations religious xenophobia
in the brieng book he was asked to peruse during the ight fromWashington
to Saigon. Opening with the observation that in Free Viet-Nam there is
political chaos, the book proceeded to list the reasons why the North Viet-
namese under Ho Chi Minh were in a much stronger position than the
representatives of the Free World in the South. In terms of being able to compel
loyalty and sacrice, Collins was informed, Ho and his ruling clique easily
surpassed South Vietnams tottering government: The administrators of the
Viet Minh regime are dedicated men imbued either by the spirit of nationalism
or of communism or a combination of both. They are possessed by what the
io,. Hoey memorandum for the record, i, January i,,i, RG ,,, Records of the Philippine and
Southeast Asia Division, Country Files, i,z,i,,, box ;.
iio. A vivid case in point albeit one that falls outside normal policymaking channels may
be found in Mike Manselds correspondence. Shortly before Diem assumed the premiership,
Manseld received a letter from Augustine Nguyen-Thai, a Catholic Vietnamese graduate
student at Cornell. Nguyen-Thai enclosed a copy of an article he had written the previous year
for the Catholic journal The Shield. Titled Colonialism, Communism, or Catholicism? imply-
ing that these were the only possible paths for Vietnam to take the piece was a paean to Diem,
whom Nguyen-Thai described as a nationalist leader whose integrity is beyond suspicion.
Nguyen-Thai claimed that the Vietnamese Catholics [are] one of the few minorities which has
a denite philosophy to oppose the materialist doctrine of communism. . . . Catholicism is
Vietnams only rm opponent to communism. Manseld agreed to meet personally with
Nguyen-Thai and assured him I have read the enclosure you sent me with great interest and am
in full accord with the views expressed therein. Nguyen-Thai to Manseld, i; March i,,,, plus
enclosed article from The Shield, i, October i,,, Manseld to Nguyen-Thai, i, March i,,,,
Manseld Papers, Series XIII, box . See also Du to Dulles, c January i,,, Dulles Papers, box
c,; Rusk to McGuire, z October i,,o, RG ,,, ;,iG.oo/io-z,o; Cory to Ross, zi July i,,i, RG ,,,
;,iG.oo/;-zi,i; secret memo: The Catholic Position in Indo-China, z, March i,,o, RG ,,,
;,iG.oo/-z,,o; Little to McCune, i September i,,o, RG ,,, Lot ,,Di,o; the acting secretary of
state to the legation at Saigon, z September i,,o, FRUS, :,yo (Washington, i,;c), c:,-c; the
charg in Saigon to the secretary of state, z, January i,,i, FRUS, :,y: c:co.
iii. Stuart to Hoey, io May i,,,, RG ,,, ;,iG.oo/,-ii,,.
ciz : r i r r o a + i c n i s + o r \
French call a mystique, which is almost completely lacking in Free Viet-Nam
with the exception of the Catholic Church.
iiz
It is unclear why the State
Department felt that only Catholic South Vietnamese could counter the
Norths spirit; most members of the Viet Minh were Buddhist, and this did
not preclude their being possessed by a mystique.
ii
Collins, however, had no
reason to question the accuracy of the departments portrayal, and there is no
record of him having done so.
ii,
South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem is applauded on his arrival at Maryknoll Seminary,
outside Ossining, NewYork, in May i,,;. Diemhad lived at the seminary and at Maryknoll Junior
Seminary in Lakewood, New Jersey, while in self-imposed exile from Vietnam during the years
i,,ii,,. With Diem is the Reverend John W. Comer, superior general of the Ossining seminary.
CREDIT: NewYork Times Pictures, The NewYork Times Company, zz, West ,rd Street, ,th Floor,
New York, NY iooc.
iiz. U.S. Policy for Post-Armistice Vietnam, i, August i,,,, Collins Papers, box z,.
ii. I am indebted to Gregory Allen Olson for pointing out the American/Christian bias in
Collinss brieng book in Manseld and Vietnam: A Study in Rhetorical Adaptation (East Lansing, i,,,),
,,,,.
ii,. For U.S. knowledge of Vietnamese language, culture, and history at the time of Collinss
posting to Saigon see Pruett to Edman, , August i,,, White House Central Files, Condential
File, Subject Series, Department of State, box c;.
Our System Demands the Supreme Being : ci
In a similar vein, a March i,,, progress report submitted to the NSC began
by sounding an alarm: [The c]ountry [South Vietnam] is in a state of turmoil;
people are generally apathetic toward the government and fear the Viet Minh.
. . . There is freedom of religion, but many people are drifting in their religious
beliefs, while others are more bound by the control of chieftains than they are
by religious convictions. Such a state of aairs was ripe for communist
exploitation, the authors warned. Traditional Buddhist and Confucian relig-
ious inuences, particularly the Confucian stress on family ties, have been
weakened. . . . Religion is taken for granted and not pursued as a conviction.
There was cause for hope, however. While [t]here is no organized Catholic
political party in Free Vietnam[,] . . . [t]here are . . . various groups of Catholics
loosely organized under several lay and religious leaders. Although bound only
by their common religious faith, the Vietnamese Catholic leaders exercise a
major political inuence. . . . Vietnamese clergy have demonstrated leadership
in organizing resistance among the Christians against communism.
ii,
The
inference was clear: if Free Vietnam was tobe saved, the Vietnamese Catholics
would save it, and the only prominent Vietnamese Catholic politician as
members of the NSC were aware was Ngo Dinh Diem.
The event that spurred the greatest amount of propaganda favorable toDiem
in the U.S. media and in policymaking circles was the inux of refugees from
North to South Vietnam beginning in the spring of i,,,. The Geneva Accords
specied that all Vietnamese who wished to relocate either north or south of
the i;th parallel would be permitted to do so for a period of three hundred days;
after that, the border would be sealed pending nationwide elections. While
several thousand South Vietnamese traveled north, almost a million North-
erners migrated to Diems State of Vietnam, nearly all of themCatholics from
the Hanoi Delta. The United States organized a task force of some fty ships
in what the navy dubbed Operation Passage to Freedom, and, along with
private charities, established reception centers oering food, clothing, and
medical care to the refugees.
iic
It was a heart-tugging story, andthe press leapt onit. The list of U.S. reporters
who led stories on the exodus reads like an honor roll of i,,os journalism:
Tillman and Peggy Durdin of the New York Times, Homer Bigart and Mar-
gueritte Higgins of the NewYork Herald-Tribune, John Mecklin of Time-Life, and
ii,. United States Information Agency, Application of Project Action Vietnam, z, May
i,,,, White House Oce, National Security Council Sta, Papers, i,,i,ci: OCB Central File
Series, box ,.
iic. This operation is covered in day-by-day detail in Viet-Nam, the First Five Years: An
International Symposium, ed. Richard W. Lindholm (East Lansing, i,,,), ,,io. Other useful
accounts may be found in Aaron Levenstein, Escape to Freedom: The Story of the International Rescue
Committee (Westport, i,), zo; Eric Thomas Chester, Covert Network: Progressives, the International
Rescue Committee, and the CIA (Armonk, i,,,), i,,c; Louis A. Wisner, Victims and Survivors: Displaced
Persons and Other War Victims in Vietnam, :,y,:,y (NewYork, i,), ii; and Eileen Egan, For Whom
There Is No Room: Scenes from the Refugee World (New York, i,,,), i;,,.
ci, : r i r r o a + i c n i s + o r \
John Roderick of the Associated Press all did tours of duty in Vietnam during
Passage to Freedom.
ii;
James Fisher has demonstrated how a young navy
doctor, Thomas A. Dooley, made this postwar Dunkirk live in the imagination
of millions of Americans with his account of assisting the refugees in Readers
Digest and subsequent best-selling book, Deliver Us from Evil.
ii
Dooley, like
virtually all Americans who covered the exodus, cast events in Vietnamin terms
of a modern-day Miracle Pageant, horrifying his readers with near-porno-
graphic tales of Viet Minh atrocities against eeing Catholics. He told of how
the Viet Minh pounded nails into the head of a Catholic priest a communist
version of the crown of thorns, once forced on the Saviour of Whom he
preached and jammed chopsticks into the ears of children to prevent them
from hearing the Lords Prayer.
ii,
These stories were certainly exaggerations
and perhaps outright fabrications
izo
but the young doctor tapped into power-
ful emotional currents in the United States, and Deliver Us from Evil became the
great early best-seller on Vietnam. Nothing until The Pentagon Papers received
comparable readership. Shortly after the books publication, a Gallup poll
identied Dooley as one of the ten most admired men in the world.
izi
Dooleys lurid prose and indelity to fact were hardly atypical, as Americans
following the refugee drama in newspapers and magazines were treated to a
mixture of sensationalism and bathos. Newsweek reported on Cardinal Spell-
mans visit to a refugee camp: Accompanied by Premier Ngo Dinh Diem of
South Vietnam, the Cardinal blessed the aged, the newly born, the seasick, the
dirty, the pathetically ragged refugees from Communist North Vietnam. One
wretched woman, carrying her child, thrust a broken image of the Virgin Mary
into Cardinal Spellmans hands. He blessed that, too. Readers Digest told of an
eight-year-old Catholic girl . . . crawling with vermin [and] fainting from
dehydration. . . . The only clean part of her was the path made by tears that had
rolled down her face. Fleeing Bishop Tran Sinh Van Atle was quoted by the
NewYork Times to the eect that, while his people were poor, and had no money
for food . . . they had fought their way out [of North Vietnam] for reasons they
can understand. They are here to seek freedom, to follow their religion. Life
ran a full-page photograph of armed Catholic teenagers in the Red River Delta
ii;. The Pentagon Papers, Gravel ed. (Boston, i,;i), i: ,i.
ii. James T. Fisher, Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, :,.:,v: (Amherst, i,,;). See also
idem, The Catholic Counterculture in America, :,,,:,v. (Chapel Hill, i,,), iizo,; Clive Christie,
The Quiet American and the Ugly American: Western Literary Perspectives on Indo-China in a Decade of
Transition, :,yo:,vo (Canterbury, i,,), ,,co; Randy Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming: Lesbians and Gays
in the U.S. Military from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf (New York, i,,), ziz;; and William Brownell,
The Vietnam Lobby: The Americans Who Lobbied for a Free and Independent South Vietnam
in the i,,os and i,,os (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, i,,), z;o,c.
ii,. Thomas A. Dooley, Deliver Us from Evil: The Story of Viet Nams Flight to Freedom (New York,
i,,c), i;;.
izo. Diana Shaw accuses Dooley of manufacturing his Indochinese Grand Guignol out of
whole cloth in The Temptation of Tom Dooley, Los Angeles Times Magazine, December i,,i, ic.
izi. Brownell, The Vietnam Lobby, z,,.
Our System Demands the Supreme Being : ci,
with the legend Last Line of Defense. Time reported from the Vietnamese
village of Nam Dinh that a bunch of Catholic teenagers strapped grenades to
their belts and vowed they would start a guerrilla war against the communists.
Under the headline Catholics Form Backbone of Resistance to Viet Minh,
Washington Sunday-Star correspondent Earl Voss reported: The core of anti-
communist resistance among Vietnamese is the Catholic population . . . Mon-
asteries have been converted into basic training camps, troop quarters, supply
centers, and ammunition dumps . . . People who have spent Christmas with
Catholic Vietnamese say that each soldier makes his own tiny manger and
worships at it in his foxhole or dugout.
izz
One would never gather fromreading
this that Catholics made up only a small percentage of anti-communist Viet-
namese, or that the Viet Minh considered the militantly anti-communist Hoa
Hao and Cao Dai a greater threat than any monastery-turned-bivouac.
iz
The excesses of Newsweek and Life were triing compared to the treatment
accorded Passage to Freedom in the American Catholic press. The St. Paul
Catholic Bulletin called the exodus one of the biggest stories simply as news
in human history . . . Some refugees drowned. Some were killed or
kidnapped by the communists. But the oo,ooo owed on in a tidal wave of
heroic devotion to the right of human beings to worship their Creator.
Jubilee waxed ecstatic as it described the welcome Diems government
extended to the exiles. The scene here was Biblical, correspondent Fred
Sparks proclaimed. I saw the Church here . . . playing an important ghting
role not duplicated since the Crusades. Catholic Digest carried a lengthy
photostory on Vietnams Flight to Freedom that explained the images of
huddled, half-starved Vietnamese with a series of captions: They leave
behind their homes, their land, and their wealth, to keep a lasting treasure
faith; Courage such as this makes saints of men; Premier Ngo Dinh
Diem, Vietnams leader in this dangerous hour, kneels with the refugees at
Mass; and, in one minimalist composition, the drawn, sobbing face of a
Vietnamese nun with the word SUFFERING blazoned beneath it. The
Ave Maria noted that traditionally, those who have suered much before
the world in the confession of their Faith have been given the title of
Confessor. It would seem that at the present time, the Church is being given
hundreds of thousands of candidates for that title in Vietnam.
iz,
izz. Pilgrims of the East, Newsweek, z, January i,,,, ,z; William J. Lederer, Theyll
Remember the Bayeld, Readers Digest, March i,,,, z; NewYork Times, zi December i,,,; Bug-Out
in the Delta, Life, iz July i,,,, i; Retreat from Nam Dinh, Time, iz July i,,,, z,; Washington
Sunday-Star, November zz, i,,,. A clipping of Vosss article may be found in Manseld Papers,
Series XIII, box ;.
iz. Ellen J. Hammer, The Struggle for Indochina, :,,o:,yy (Stanford, i,cc), ,.
iz,. Catholic Bulletin, zi May i,,,; Fred Sparks, Besieged Bishop, Jubilee, May i,,,, ,;
Vietnams Flight to Freedom, Catholic Digest, January i,,,, ,,ioi; Confession of the Faith, Ave
Maria, zc March i,,,, .
cic : r i r r o a + i c n i s + o r \
Passage to Freedom received daily front-page coverage in all of the United
Statess iii diocesan newspapers.
iz,
The most prolic chronicler of the operation
while it was ongoing was Patrick OConnor, a priest stationed in Hanoi by the
National Catholic Welfare Conference. OConnors dispatches for the
NCWCs News Service were syndicated to Catholic papers across the United
States, and were published in many secular papers as well.
izc
Although less
celebrated than Tom Dooley, OConnor outdid Dr. Tom in the number and
variety of his accounts of communist persecution of Catholics. In a typical
bulletin, he accused the Viet Minh of grabbing infants from their mothers
arms to prevent families fromleaving. Many an infant has been badly disgured
in such a grotesque tug-of-war. He asserted that Viet Minh prisons are a
graveyard for thousands of priests and nuns who have been tortured to death,
and that most refugees died of drowning when they tried to escape to the sea,
while others were machine-gunned to death on the beaches. OConnors
magnum opus was his nal report from the North Vietnamese capital, Good-
bye to Hanoi: Neck-Deep in Tears, in which he pounded home the tragedy
that had befallen a once Godly city:
Goodbye to Hanoi, . . . to the city pavements where I have seen men go down
on both knees to kiss the Bishops ring in public. . . . Goodbye to . . . the
hallowed gray cathedral, to all of the churches, none of which I have ever
seen without worshippers. Goodbye to the schools I have seen thronged with
Vietnamese youth, learning from Catholic Brothers and Sisters, schools I
later saw crowded with refugees who had left everything for their faith.
Goodbye to Hanoi, where young men who craved independence and reform
listened to Karl Marx and not to Christ, Hanoi to which they now return
with a Red ag. Goodbye to Hanoi, where prayer will not cease and grace
will not be wanting. Goodbye, Hanoi!
iz;
iz,. This is conrmed bya reviewof microlmholdings for i,,,,, at Notre Dames Hesburgh
Library, which contains the largest collection of American Catholic newspapers in the world.
izc. For OConnors work and inuence see Fisher, Dr. America, ,,,o. Frank A. Hall, director
of the Far Eastern Sta of the NCWC News Service, revealed in i,,, that OConnor has often
been chosen by the secular reporters to be their pool representative on one-man assignments to
stories. Thus he has represented all the worlds leading wire services. Cited in the Catholic
Universe-Bulletin, zo May i,,,; and Catholic Herald-Citizen, zi May i,,,.
iz;. New World, io December i,,,; Catholic Herald-Citizen, , December i,,,; Catholic Herald-
Citizen, z; November i,,,; Patrick OConnor, Goodbye to Hanoi: Neck-Deep in Tears, Catholic
Digest, October i,,,, ;,z. For more OConnor extracts fromNCWCreports see Terror in Vietnam:
ARecordof Another BrokenPromise, distributedbythe NCWCand located inManseld Papers, Series
XIII, box . See also Exodus Report on a Voluntary Mass Flight for Freedom, Manseld Papers, Series
XIII, box . The reports of OConnor and other journalists prompted the annual convocation in
Washington of Roman Catholic bishops to petition the administration for a public denunciation
of Viet Minh trickery, pressure, and the most brutal violence. The White House, State Depart-
ment, and Senate were deluged with telegrams protesting the treatment of Vietnamese Catholic
refugees. See Saltzman to AmEmbassies Saigon, Hanoi, Paris, Warsaw, New Delhi, Ottawa, and
New York, zc November i,,,, Collins Papers, box z; and memorandum of bipartisan brieng of
Our System Demands the Supreme Being : ci;
The eect of the medias blast of obfuscatory ink was to render the
Vietnamese civil war in American eyes not as a battle between communists
and non-communists, but as a battle between communists and Catholics. The
Progressives Far Eastern correspondent, O. Edmund Clubb, contributed to this
misperception with an article that set up Divided Vietnam as a showdown
between in the North, the communist Ho Chi Minh and in the South, the
Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem.
iz
Huge domains of Vietnamese culture were
omitted, and Clubbs readers were left with the impression that political parties
and constituencies in Vietnam were similar to those in Italy. According to
Cardinal Spellmans biographer, by the close of Passage to Freedom, many
Americans came to believe that Vietnam was a predominantly Catholic coun-
try.
iz,
This caricature of the polity immeasurably enhanced Diems chances of
becoming the United Statess Cold War vice-regent in Saigon.
The Eisenhower administration made great political capital out of Passage
to Freedom. Harold Stassen, Eisenhowers mutual security director, attested
that the operation was the biggest, fastest, and most humane mass movement
of civilians and military personnel in history . . . a graphic demonstration of the
United States real concern for the plight of unfortunate peoples.
io
Secretary
of State Dulles characteristically viewed events through a religious lens,
declaring: In Viet-Nam, a line was drawn at the Seventeenth Parallel. But
hundreds of thousands of refugees have crossed it, eeing to the South. . . .
[T]he driving force was a longing for religious freedom.
ii
Other conceivable
driving forces such as the United States laying out about $, for each refugee
in a country with an $, per year per capita income, the CIA distributing
thousands of leaets warning Hanois Catholics that the UnitedStates was about
to drop an atomic bomb on North Vietnam, or the fact that overpopulation in
the North had for generations pushed Vietnamese down to the underpopulated
South were not addressed by the secretary.
iz
The U.S. Embassy in Saigon
rationalized the overrepresentation of Catholics in South Vietnamese refugee
camps by concluding: Lack of religious freedommeans more to themthan the
average non-Christian.
i
congressional leaders on foreign policy, iz November i,,,, Ann Whitman File, Legislative
Meetings Series, box i, Eisenhower Library.
iz. O. Edmund Clubb, Divided Vietnam: Second Korea? Progressive, December i,,,, i,.
iz,. John Cooney, The American Pope: The Life and Times of Francis Cardinal Spellman (New York,
i,,), z,i.
io. Stassen to Eisenhower, c October i,,,, White House National Security Council Sta,
Papers, i,,i,ci: OCB Central File Series, box .
ii. Dulles, Principles of Foreign Policy, ii April i,,,, Dulles Papers, box ,.
iz. Useful coverage of the UnitedStatess campaign of psywar inNorthVietnamis provided
in Cecil Currey, Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American (Boston, i,), i,ccc. See also Lansdale
Teams Report on Covert Saigon Mission in i,,, and i,,,, The Pentagon Papers i:,;-; Bernard
Fall, The Two Viet-Nams: APolitical and Military Analysis (NewYork, i,c), i,,,; and B. S. N. Murti,
Vietnam Divided: The Unnished Struggle (London, i,c,), .
i. Kidder to Dulles, c December i,,,, RG ,,, ;,iG.oo/iz-c,,.
ci : r i r r o a + i c n i s + o r \
Certainly, the average non-Christian found Diems South Vietnam less
hospitable thandid the Catholic refugees. The government shamelessly favored
Catholics: a disproportionate share of U.S. aid went to the refugees; Northern
Catholics held privileged positions in the Vietnamese National Army (VNA)
and state bureaucracy; and refugee villages were founded by having the VNA
deforest entire regions and cultivate them, all but ensuring that the displaced
persons would never assimilate into the native Southern population. The
Catholic Church, unlike the Buddhist Church, enjoyed special rights to acquire
and own property. Diem even continued the French colonial policy of legally
dening Catholicism as a religion while Buddhists were designated members
of an association.
i,
These ordinances had the eect of exacerbating the
animus between Catholic and Buddhist Vietnamese at a time when special
representative Collins would have liked to see Diem building bridges among
i,. See Piero Gheddo, The Cross and Bo-Tree: Catholics and Buddhists in Vietnam, trans. Charles
Underhill Quinn (New York, i,;o), io;c,. See also Olson, Manseld and Vietnam, ,z,,; and
Graham Greene, Last Act in Indo-China, New Republic, , May i,,,, io.
South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem shakes hands with House Speaker Sam Rayburn
after delivering his , May i,,; speech to a joint session of Congress. Also pictured are Vice
President Richard M. Nixon, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, and Senator WilliamKnowland, among
others. CREDIT: AP/Wide World Photos.
Our System Demands the Supreme Being : ci,
anti-communist elements in his country. Collins later recalled that, when
prominent Catholics like Cardinal Spellman and Australias Cardinal Gilroy
visited Saigon, [t]he streets near the palace and the cathedral were hung with
signs of welcome to them. . . . These banners, which carried such slogans as
Long Live the Catholic Church . . . inevitably were attributed to Diems
Catholic government.
i,
No such state-sponsored pageantry attended the
ritualisms of Buddhism, Cao Daism, or Hoa Haoism, and, within a few months
of Diems installation as premier, rumors were rife in Saigon that the former
seminarian intended to turn Viet Nam into a Catholic land.
ic
Diem did little
to dispel such gossip; indeed, when Collins asked the premier to make a public
pronouncement guaranteeing religious freedom, Diem refused.
i;
American
policymakers ought not to have been surprised when, on the eve of the Battle
for Saigon, which gutted South Vietnams capital in late April i,,,, a Cao Dai
spokesman hissed to an embassy ocial: We are going to have a religious war
here. All we ever hear is Catholic-Spellman, Catholic-Spellman, Catholic-
Spellman, and we are sick of it!
i
Some writers with a penchant for conspiracy theory have gone so far as to
blame U.S. intervention in Vietnam on a Catholic bloc that gulled the Eisen-
hower administration and the U.S. press into supporting Diems regime. The
most notorious example of this argument appeared during the mid-i,cos in two
articles in the radical journal Ramparts. Journalist Robert Scheer, after detailing
many real and imagined activities on Diems behalf by American Catholics, got
o the appalling line: If the war continues, may it not one day be called
Cardinal Spellmans nal solution to the Vietnamese question?
i,
In fact,
Catholicism per se was less instrumental in the administrations ill-starred
covenant with Diem than the popular conceptualization of religion in Eisen-
howers United States. Religion in this context must be understood as a
narrow-gauged category encompassing only the major organized churches of
the West: Protestant-Catholic-Jew, to cite the title of Will Herbergs i,,,
best-seller. It did not include such purportedly Eastern faiths as Buddhism,
Taoism, or Confucianism. Eisenhower himself made this clear when he de-
clared to an audience in Harlem during his i,,z presidential campaign: I do
not care whether you be Baptists, whether you be Jews, whether you be
Catholics or Protestants. . . . There must be a feeling that man is made in the
i,. Collins, Lightning Joe, ,.
ic. Hoa Hao handbill: Here Is Premier Diems True Face, submitted by Kidder to Dulles,
i February i,,,, RG ,,, ;,iG.oo/z-i,,. See also Cao Dai handbill: Where Does Totalitarianism
Lead Us? submitted by Ainsworth to Dulles, iz February i,,,, RG ,,, ;,iG.oo/z-iz,,; and Cao
Dai dissidents to Diem, o December i,,,, RG ,,, ;,iG.oo/iz-o,,. For Cardinal Spellmans i,,c
visit to Saigon see Catholic Relief Services NCWC: Viet-Nam Mission: January i,,c, Mans-
eld Papers, Series XIII, box .
i;. Collins to Dulles, iz February i,,,, Collins Papers, box i.
i. Kidder to Dulles, i April i,,,, RG ,,, ;,iG.oo/,-i,,.
i,. Robert Scheer, Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley, Ramparts, JanuaryFebruary i,c,,
z. See also Robert Scheer and Warren Hinkle, The Vietnam Lobby, Ramparts, July i,c,, i,zz.
czo : r i r r o a + i c n i s + o r \
image of his maker.
i,o
The Republican candidate would have cared had his
listeners been atheists, had they subscribed to a creed like Buddhism that
deviated from a monotheistic core, or had the deity they worshipped borne
little resemblance to the Judeo-Christian God Eisenhower designated as indis-
pensable for the U.S. way of life. When Supreme Court Justice Douglas
authored his famous opinion to the eect that We are a religious people whose
institutions presuppose a Supreme Being, he implicitly endorsed Eisenhowers
view that presumption of a Supreme Being was the sine qua non of the
condition religious; any system of beliefs lacking that celestial protagonist
could at best be designated a philosophy or theory at worst, to borrow the
terminology employed by Senator Manseld, it was witchcraft.
U.S. ignorance of belief systems other than the three religious blocs
identied by Herberg was almost total. This is vividly demonstrated in
Harold Isaacss classic work of social science Scratches on Our Minds: American
Images of China and India. Fromearly i,,, through to the middle of the following
year a time frame that maps out almost perfectly onto the Eisenhower
administrations debate over whether to abandon Diem Isaacs conducted ii
interviews with individuals in the academic world, mass media, government,
ex-government, business, groups concerned withpublic opinion andeducation,
[and] church-missionary groups. Forty-nine of the interviewees had achieved
some distinction as Asia specialists by the time they spoke with Isaacs, almost
all considered themselves informed and well read, and only ten failed to
graduate from college. Yet, when Isaacs asked themto discuss their impressions
of China, India, and Asia in general, it became clear that a variety of unsup-
ported or unsupportable assumptions . . . oated around even in such relatively
schooled and orderly minds. Some of the most fascinating responses from
Isaacss subjects had to do with religion in the Orient. One man observed of
the people in Asia: They are heathen, people with other gods, dierent
religious concepts. A Catholic priest asserted: The Chinese is not spiritual in
outlook. . . . They . . . have no yen for religion, just for empty forms. A large
majority of . . . interviewees condemned Hinduism, often in extreme terms;
one subject called it a debased, hopeless sort of religion; a complicated, alien
mess; mystic nonsense, stupid taboos; horrible practices in a clutter of cultural
dead weight. This portrayal was weakly challenged by interviewees who
attempted to defend Hinduism as at least preferable to Islam: While Hindus
are superstitious and credulous, they generally remain pacic and courte-
ous. . . . Muslims are the direct opposite in character. They are insolent and
sensual, the very essence of their religion being hate and malignity. In fact, they
would . . . put all non-Muslims to death.
Isaacs closes his study with the question: How . . . do these images and
attitudes relate to politics, international relations, the making of government
policy, the shaping of public opinion? Although he makes no determination
i,o. Cited in Carter, Another Part of the Fifties, iz,.
Our System Demands the Supreme Being : czi
on the subject, he points out that I have never discovered any reason to credit
the government policy maker as a type with any superior mental discipline. . . .
I think of himas quite anordinaryman[who] has images oating aroundloosely
in his head, even as you or I.
i,i
With regard to Buddhism, the images oating
around in Eisenhowers head were limited to sketches like the one prepared by
the Operations Coordinating Board in June i,,c, titled Problem: To Deter-
mine the Advisability of a Presidential Message on the Occasion of the z,,ooth
Anniversary of Buddha. The OCB concluded that the president should deliver
a formal announcement, but cautioned Eisenhower that the Christian belief
that there is a higher lawthan that made by man alone would not be acceptable
to most Buddhists, especially those whom we wish to reach in Southeast Asia.
i,z
From Eisenhowers perspective, Buddhisms refusal to acknowledge any
such higher law was equally unacceptable to a United States engaged in a
duel to the death with godless communism. If we interpret the presidents
pronouncement Our system demands the Supreme Being broadly, as encom-
passing not just U.S. domestic institutions but the global network of alliances
forged by the United States in the early years of the Cold War, then the
signicance of this seemingly trite declaration becomes manifest. Eisenhower
announced in his rst inaugural address that [w]e sense with all our faculties
that forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before
in our history. . . . Freedomis pitted against slavery; lightness against the dark.
i,
In such a contest, with such stakes, the United States needed allies who
possessed a variant of what Dulles frequently termed the United Statess
righteous and dynamic faith.
i,,
Devout patriots like Eisenhower and Dulles
could not risk U.S. security on clients whose religions were described in ocial
documents and in the media as passive and fatalistic. As the president pro-
claimed to the World Council of Churches in i,,,: Our interest in religion is
sincere andgenuine, not merelytheoretical.
i,,
The United States would expect
the same evangelic earnestness from its allies.
There is evidence that Diem understood this. The South Vietnamese
premier acknowledged the role played by religion in U.S. policymaking in a
letter sent to Dulles two years after the Eisenhower administration made the
commitment to bankroll his despotism. On the eve of a triumphal tour of the
United States, Diem wrote: Mr. Secretary of State, it is the good fortune of
i,i. Harold Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds: American Images of China and India (Westport, i,,),
iizz, ,,, z, z,,, z;, ,oi,.
i,z. Landon to Eisenhower, Problem: To Determine the Advisability of a Presidential
Message on the Occasion of the z,,ooth Anniversary of Buddha, undated, White House Oce,
National Security Council Sta, Papers, i,,i,ci: OCB Central File Series, box z (emphasis
mine).
i,. Inaugural address, zo January i,,, Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, :,y,,
i.
i,,. See Van Dusen, introduction, The Spiritual Legacy of John Foster Dulles, xiv.
i,,. Address to the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, Evanston, Illinois,
i, August i,,,, Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, :,y,, ;c.
czz : r i r r o a + i c n i s + o r \
myself and my country that you and I have so much in common. We both
strongly believe in God; your son is a Priest and I have the honor of being a
Bishops brother; we both strongly believe in moral forces and the dignity of
man. . . . I propose a toast to Secretary of State Dulles, to President Eisenhower,
and to the noble American people!
i,c
Dulles would not live to witness the results of his Vietnam policy, but he
would see the winding down of the sociological phenomenon whose standard-
bearer he had been. The religious revival of the i,,os reached its peak in the
mid-fties and waned in the latter half of the decade. By the time Dulles died
of stomach cancer in i,,,, rock n roll had driven religious music from the
airwaves, the percentage of Americans attending church each Sunday had
leveled o, and books and articles critical of popular religion began to appear
in great numbers.
i,;
One of the most striking indications of the U.S. publics
reordering of priorities was the turn for the worse in Dulless own reputation.
In i,,, only , percent of Americans polled on their attitudes toward the
i,c. Diem to Dulles, , May i,,;, Dulles Papers, box ii,.
i,;. Oakley, Gods Country, z;.
South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower chat as
they sit in the rear of an open-air limousine at Washingtons National Airport. This is shortly after
Diems arrival in the capital on Eisenhowers private plane, the Columbine III. CREDIT: AP/Wide
World Photos.
Our System Demands the Supreme Being : cz
secretary of state registered a negative response; by the late fties, Richard
Immerman writes, Dulles had come to personify the shortcomings of Amer-
icas aairs of state, the symbol of misguided and mismanaged foreign policy.
In large part he owed his declining popularity to his public image, that of a
Presbyterian moralist ever ready and eager to do battle with the devil.
i,
Yet this was the same public image that made Dulles so respected and his
appointment as secretary of state such a foregone conclusion in the early fties.
Dulles never changed; the world around him did.
The same could be said of Ngo Dinh Diem. In late i,c, when Buddhist
monks were burning themselves alive to draw U.S. attention to religious
discrimination in South Vietnam and reporters in Saigon were clamoring for
an end to the Diem dictatorship, the South Vietnamese president made what
was for him a conciliatory gesture. He sent a U.S. journalist a quotation from
the teachings of Buddha: The Wise Man who fares strenuously apart/Who is
unshaken in the midst of praise or blame . . . /A leader of others, not by others led. A note
from one of the presidents attendants read: President Diem thought you
would be interested in the fact that an Oriental like Buddha had ideas about
the nature of a wise ruler that are not unlike his own.
i,,
This did not reassure the Kennedy administration as to Diems capacity to
defuse the Buddhist crisis, and, shortly thereafter, Washington gave the
go-ahead for the coup that toppled its former ally. After the drama of the Diem
era played itself out, all the United States had to show for nine years of support
was a whopping list of expenditures and a South Vietnamese republic in an
even greater state of chaos than it had been in during the early months of its
creation. The United States would struggle for another twelve years to bring
order to the chaos. Amid the recurrent cabinet realignments that followed
Diems downfall, there would be onlyone U.S.-sponsored chief executive whose
tenure in oce lasted nearly as long as the Diem experiment: Nguyen Van
Thieu. By the early i,;os, journalists stationed in South Vietnam joked that the
policy of sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem had given way to see it through
with Nguyen Van Thieu. Thieu, although a suppler politician than Diem and
less of a religious zealot, was also Catholic, a fact that to borrowH. W. Brandss
unimprovable choice of words was convenient and not completely coinci-
dental and suggests that the ethnocentrismand religious bigotry that informed
the United Statess support for South Vietnams rst president persisted, if in
muted form, well into the administration of its last.
i,o
i,. Immerman, introduction, John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War, .
i,,. Cited in Hammer, A Death in November, ,.
i,o. Bui Diem, In the Jaws of History, icc.
cz, : r i r r o a + i c n i s + o r \