The first nine years of the Republic of Vietnam — from Ngo Dinh Diem's consolidation of power against Bao Dai in October 1955 to his assassination in November 1963 — are the period of the Catholic-mandarin Diem dictatorship. Diem himself was an austere Catholic conservative of central Vietnamese mandarin family background, a former civil servant under the French and the Bao Dai government, an exile in the United States during the early 1950s (where he had established the connections with American Catholic political networks — particularly Cardinal Spellman of New York, Senator Mike Mansfield, and Senator John F. Kennedy — that would prove decisive in his political rise), and a fluent reader of Catholic-conservative European political theory. His political programme combined an aggressive anti-communism, a project of Vietnamese national reconstruction along Catholic-personalist lines (his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, the principal political theorist of the regime, drew on the Personalism of Emmanuel Mounier), a substantial centralisation of authority around his family, and a substantial commitment to American military, economic and administrative aid. The combination produced a regime that achieved substantial early successes (consolidation of central authority by 1956, defeat of the Binh Xuyen and Hoa Hao paramilitary groups, agrarian reform in the central highlands) but that progressively alienated its own population across the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The 1955 referendum
The October 1955 referendum that replaced Bao Dai with Diem as head of state of the Republic of Vietnam was administered by Diem's brother Nhu under conditions of substantial intimidation, ballot manipulation, and supervised voting. Diem's official 98.2 per cent victory was implausible on its face — he received, in Saigon alone, more votes than there were registered voters. The American advisers had advised against the rigging on the grounds that a 60-65 per cent legitimate vote would have been comfortably sufficient and would have preserved international credibility. Diem and Nhu calculated that the comprehensive victory had its own political weight that would be useful for the consolidation of central authority across the next year. They were partially correct in the short term and substantially wrong in the long term: the implausibility of the 1955 referendum became the foundational reference of every subsequent challenge to the regime's legitimacy.
The constitutional foundation followed in October 1956. The constitution provided for a strong presidency (six-year term, eligible for re-election once), a unicameral National Assembly, an independent judiciary, and the enumeration of civil rights. The application of the rights was uneven: the press was substantially controlled by family relationships and patronage; the courts were politically supervised; the National Assembly was elected under conditions that excluded any organised opposition. The Constitution was, in practical effect, a framework for personal-family rule rather than for constitutional government.
The military-political consolidation
Diem's consolidation of central authority in 1955-56 required the suppression of three rival paramilitary forces that had emerged under the French period: the Binh Xuyen criminal organisation that controlled the gambling, prostitution and opium economy of the Saigon-Cholon urban area; the Hoa Hao Buddhist sect militia in the western Mekong delta; and the Cao Dai religious-syncretist militia in the eastern Mekong delta. Diem, with the strategic advice of Edward Lansdale (the CIA officer assigned to assist his consolidation), used the residual French-trained Vietnamese army units against each of these forces in sequence. The Binh Xuyen were defeated in street fighting in Cholon in April 1955; the Hoa Hao were dismantled across 1955-56 with the execution of their commander Le Quang Vinh ("Ba Cut") in July 1956; the Cao Dai was substantially absorbed into the government's administrative structure by 1955. Central authority was consolidated across the southern territory.
The Strategic Hamlet programme
The Strategic Hamlet programme of 1962 — the principal counterinsurgency initiative of the late Diem period — was an attempt to defeat the renewed Viet Minh-orchestrated insurgency in the southern countryside (the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, formed in December 1960, generally known as the National Liberation Front or NLF, derided by the regime as Viet Cong) by physically relocating the rural population into fortified compounds where the regime could monitor and protect them and from which the NLF could be isolated. The programme was modelled on British counterinsurgency experience in Malaya in the 1950s; the implementation was conducted under Diem's brother-in-law Ngo Dinh Nhu's political-administrative direction. The principal weakness was that the programme required the dislocation of rural populations from ancestral village sites — a substantial cultural-religious offence in a country where the village ancestral site was the locus of family religious practice — and was implemented at a pace and on a scale that overwhelmed the regime's administrative capacity. Approximately 3,000 strategic hamlets were nominally created across 1962-63; many were poorly constructed, weakly defended, and substantially infiltrated by NLF cadres. The programme had a contested record of operational success but a substantial record of political alienation of the affected rural population.
The 1962 inflection
By 1962 the Diem regime was, by its own internal documents, increasingly conscious of its political-military vulnerability. The American advisory presence had increased from approximately 700 in 1960 to approximately 16,000 by late 1963 under the early Kennedy administration. The South Vietnamese army (ARVN) had been substantially expanded and re-equipped with American materiel. The first significant ARVN-NLF engagements of the new insurgency had produced uneven results: the Battle of Ap Bac on the 2nd of January 1963 — in which an NLF battalion of approximately 350 defeated an ARVN force of 1,500 supported by American helicopter and armoured assets, with three American helicopter crewmen killed — was the first widely publicised demonstration that the ARVN's superior firepower and American support did not guarantee tactical success against an experienced guerrilla opponent. The American advisory mission's frustration with ARVN command performance became, across 1963, a substantial irritation in Washington-Saigon relations.
The substantive political crisis that would destroy the regime was about to begin. It would be triggered, in May 1963, by the regime's response to a Buddhist religious procession at Hue. That episode and its consequences are the next chapter.
End of Chapter II