Undone by a Coup

MISSION IN TORMENT By John Meek-I'm. 318 pages. Doubleday. $4.95.

The overthrow and subsequent murder of President Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963 opened a political Pandora's box in Saigon. Since that angry day, the government has changed hands seven times; the war against the Communist Viet Cong has grown even tougher; the U.S. has been forced to escalate the conflict by bombing North Viet Nam and nearly doubling its own forces in the south. Most important, Diem's fall brought to an end nearly a decade of political stability in Viet Nam. Was Diem's downfall inevitable or even imperative, the product of immutable historical forces, or merely of foolish diplomacy?

Author Mecklin, a veteran TIME correspondent who served (on a leave of absence) from 1962 to 1964 as USIS chief in Saigon, watched the drama of Diem's last days from close range. The portrait of Diem that emerges from this bitter but balanced account is of a dedicated patriot flawed by hubris and hamstrung by scheming relatives.

The Turning Point. Diem stubbornly insisted on running the war against the Communist Viet Cong his own way. To Mecklin and others in the U.S. Mission this rigid recalcitrance surpassed that of "a whole platoon of De Gaulles." What Viet Nam needed, in Mecklin's view, was someone like the Philippines' late President Ramon Magsaysay, who broke the back of his country's Communist Huk rebellion by offering the malcontents "total friendship or total war." Diem offered neither. Tax col lectors, not aid officials, followed his troops into liberated villages. Suspicious of his own generals, Diem rarely committed his reserve forces to battle when needed largely because he wanted to guard against a coup.

"The U.S. had bet all its chips on Diem," Mecklin writes. "We were stuck with an all-or-nothing policy. It had to work, like a Catholic marriage or a parachute." But when the Buddhist crisis ignited in May 1963, the policy went up in flames. What began as a seemingly simple dispute over the display of religious flags soon became a cleverly conducted campaign to unseat Catholic Diem. U.S. reporters fanned the flames with pro-Buddhist stories that enraged Diem, who refused to believe that Washington did not control the press in the same way he did.

Smoldering distrust of the U.S. became defiance. When U.S. Charge d'Affaires William Trueheart formally threatened Diem with the statement that the U.S. would "dissociate" itself from the Saigon government's actions unless anti-Buddhist repressions ceased, Diem's brother Ngo Dinh Nhu respond ed by raiding the Buddhist pagodas. That, in Mecklin's informed opinion, was the turning point. "The pagoda raids made it categorically impossible for the U.S. to try to go on with the regime," he writes. "Its handling of the Buddhist issue conclusively discredited the regime's claim to the political savvy that would be essential in the long run to defeat the Viet Cong."

Out from Washington flew a new ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge. "For application of the new policy," says Mecklin, "the President had found exactly the right man. Ambassador Lodge proved to be an able executioner."

"Desperate Surgery." Mecklin's account of the coup and of the murder of Diem and Nhu is colorful but carefully subjective--he reports only what he saw. Although he states categorically that Lodge was intent on getting rid of Diem and that he knew the coup was planned--indeed had spoken with the coup leaders--Mecklin does not charge that the U.S. Mission was directly involved.

Still, the deed was done. Was it justified? Mecklin thinks not. "A coup d'etat in such circumstances," he writes, "was desperate surgery. The odds against success were comparable with, say, a kidney transplant." And indeed the graft didn't take. Diem's successors proved unable to halt the "relentless deterioration, confirming in dreary succession all the black predictions of those who had opposed the coup."

"Unalterable Obligation." The lessons that emerge from Mecklin's account are sad but simple. Highhanded as he was, Diem deserved greater understanding from the U.S. Writes Mecklin: "Just as the U.S. should insist on effective action against a guerrilla enemy, we should rigidly limit our interference to this objective. We should accept almost any extreme of public embarrassment, even at the expense of our 'dignity,' to permit the host government to enjoy the trappings of independence."

Having failed with Diem, the U.S. compounded its error by failing as well in its handling of Diem's successors. The next step was inevitable: "It was a bitter reality that in Viet Nam our central enemies, the Russians and Chinese, once again had found somebody else to fight their battles for them. It was now our unalterable obligation to send our own fighting men to defend our vital interests, just as we had through all our history. There was no cheap way, no easy way out."

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