LAST OF THE MANDARINS

THE tragedy took place in the subtropical greenery of Southeast Asia, but it conveyed some of the pity and terror of the ancient Greek stage. A national hero, who had fought long and courageously against great odds, had finally been brought down by fate--fate in this case being a combination of his avowed enemies, his former friends and, undoubtedly, his own flawed nature. When he took office nine years ago, Ngo Dinh Diem told his people, "Follow me if I advance! Kill me if I retreat! Revenge me if I die!" In whatever manner and for whatever reason Diem died, it was not because he retreated.

Man with a Gun. At the beginning, few thought Diem would last nine months, much less nine years. The Geneva partition of 1954 condemned Viet Nam to be divided into a Communist state in the north and a state of almost total anarchy in the south. The capital city of Saigon was run by bandits. Control of the countryside was split among the private armies of two religous sects and almost anyone else who had a gun.

Into this seemingly doomed situation stepped a scholarly, introverted and humorless man of 53, whose major qualification for the job was that he was one of the few South Viet Nam leaders who had not already failed. A convinced nationalist and an intense Roman Catholic, Ngo Dinh Diem came from a mandarin family long accustomed to rule. Diem himself nearly became a priest but decided against it because, says his brother, Archbishop Thuc, "the church was too worldly for him."

So was nearly everything else. Because he distrusted their motives, Diem refused his support to the French colonialists, the Japanese invaders and the local Communists. He went into self-exile in the U.S. and Belgium, living in Roman Catholic monasteries. In 1954, needing a scapegoat for their collapsing policies in Asia, France offered Diem the premiership of South Viet Nam.

Smashed Gangsters. All his early opponents underestimated him. An army commander, who boasted that he had only to lift a phone to stage a coup, soon found himself out of a job and out of the country. Playboy Emperor Bao Dai challenged Diem at the polls, and found his throne voted out of existence by 98% of the citizens. Diem smashed the gangsters who ran Saigon and routed the armies of the religious sects--with the help of the general who last week supplanted him. He also launched a comprehensive land reform program and, on a grass-roots tour of central Viet Nam in 1954, was nearly trampled by thousands of wildly cheering peasants. This high point of his reign was never matched again.

Henceforth, Diem's path was increasingly beset by missed opportunities and aborted chances. To some extent, he became a captive of his own close-knit family. Brother Nhu, without holding elective or appointive office, became the intellectual power behind the regime, as well as the organizer of its secret police. Brother Can supplied muscle, running central Viet Nam like a warlord. Brother Thuc, Archbishop of Hue, offered spiritual guidance, undismayed by occasional, barely concealed reproofs from the Vatican. To the band of brothers was added the indomitable sister-in-law, Mme. Nhu, whose dedicated feminism resulted in a series of laws that made adultery a prison offense, outlawed polygamy, prostitution, contraceptives, abortion and taxi dancing.

Inevitably, the concentration of family power evoked hostility and even hatred. But talk of revolts and assassination attempts only increased Diem's reliance on his family. After the abortive coup against his regime three years ago, he said with icy calm: "It was nothing--a handful of adventurers." He grew less and less willing to delegate authority. In the war against the Communist Viet Cong, Diem took personal charge of army units as small as a battalion. Often, able field commanders were switched to desk jobs in Saigon where, as potential rivals, they could be carefully watched.

Magnified Pride. Diem's virtues of honesty, courage and bone-deep anti-Communism remained. But his faults--stubbornness, nepotism, suspicion, a mandarin pride--became magnified. Once his mind was made up, Diem would not budge. His meetings with foreign officials degenerated into monologues--one Western ambassador estimated that he had been able to speak only 500 words in a four-hour interview with Diem.

A man of short stature (5 ft. 4 in.), expressionless and aloof, Diem seldom stirred from his palace. Though devoted to raising the living standards of the peasants, Diem was ill at ease among the people and uninterested in grass-roots opinion. In the 1930s, Diem had quit as a minister under the French because, he said, "we had to have democratic reforms, or it was clear even then that the Communists would win." In the 1960s, that was the line the U.S. took with Diem, but now he argued that ordinary standards of democracy could not apply in a country fighting a "hot cold war." What finally persuaded the U.S., rightly or wrongly, that it could no longer win that war with Diem, was not so much that his regime was repressive, but that it had lost its ability to command the nation. By the unhappy standards of the mid-20th century world, Diem's treatment of the Buddhists may not have been spectacularly cruel, but it was thoughtlessly clumsy. The mandarin in the palace somehow seemed to have lost touch with reality--a reality that included the Buddhist self-immolations, perhaps the grisliest of history's propaganda gestures.

No one may ever know his last words or thoughts. To judge from the record of his life, he must have felt betrayed, and convinced to the end that he was right.

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