The political crisis that destroyed the Diệm regime opened on the 8th of May 1963 in the central Vietnamese imperial city of Huế and ran across the next six months through the assassination of Diệm on the 2nd of November 1963 — a chronology so compressed and so visually documented that it remains one of the best-recorded political collapses of the post-war period. The proximate cause was the regime's response to a Buddhist religious procession in Huế celebrating the 2,527th anniversary of the Buddha's birth; the underlying causes were the cumulative alienation of the regime from the country's Buddhist majority, the regime's increasing dependence on the Catholic minority (approximately 10 per cent of the population, over-represented in the regime's political-military leadership), and the diminishing patience of the American Kennedy administration with the regime's authoritarianism and operational failures.
Huế, the 8th of May
The 8th of May 1963 was the Buddha's birthday (the second-most important Vietnamese Buddhist festival). The Huế Buddhist congregation, organised by the senior Mahayana Buddhist clergy of the imperial city, had assembled at the riverside Buddhist banner-pole site for the traditional procession. The regime — under a directive promulgated by Ngô Đình Nhu's apparatus the previous week, prohibiting the public display of religious flags — had moved to prevent the procession. The local ARVN garrison commander Major Dang Sy ordered the crowd to disperse; when the crowd refused, gunfire and explosions killed nine and wounded fourteen. The cause of the casualties was disputed: the regime claimed Viet Cong agents had detonated explosives within the crowd; subsequent investigation by the American press, the Buddhist organisations, and (in 1963-64) the post-coup Vietnamese tribunals indicated that ARVN troops had fired on the unarmed crowd and that an armoured personnel carrier had run over several protesters. The regime's refusal to acknowledge responsibility, conduct a credible investigation, or compensate the families produced the political mobilisation that followed.
The summer of the bonzes
The Buddhist mobilisation across May, June, July and August 1963 was the largest sustained non-Communist political opposition the Diệm regime ever faced. The Buddhist demands were modest: end of the religious-flag restrictions, equal treatment under the personal-status laws (which had given Catholic religious institutions privileges denied to Buddhist ones), compensation for the Huế victims, and investigation of the events of the 8th of May. The regime's response was a sequence of escalating refusals. The Buddhist movement, principally under the leadership of Thich Tri Quang and the Saigon-based Bonze hierarchy, escalated through ritual public self-immolations. The first, on the 11th of June 1963 in Saigon at the intersection of Phan Dinh Phung and Le Van Duyet streets, was the self-immolation of the seventy-three-year-old monk Thích Quảng Đức; the Associated Press photographer Malcolm Browne, alerted by the Buddhist organisation, was present and photographed the immolation. The photograph — Quang Duc seated cross-legged in the meditative lotus position, motionless as the flames consumed him — was published in newspapers across the world the following day. It became the most consequential single photograph of the war.
Five further public self-immolations followed across June, July and August 1963. Madame Nhu — Ngô Đình Nhu's wife, who functioned as de facto first lady of the regime and who was the principal spokesperson for its Catholic-conservative positions — gave an interview in which she called the immolations "barbecues" and offered to provide gasoline. The remark, repeated in international press coverage, damaged the regime's remaining American support. The Kennedy administration, having broadly supported Diệm since 1955, began across August 1963 to reconsider its position; the new American Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, who arrived in Saigon on the 22nd of August, was instructed to convey to Diệm that the family's policies were intolerable.
The pagoda raids
On the night of the 20th-21st of August 1963, Nhu — believing he could decisively suppress the Buddhist movement through a comprehensive operation against the pagodas — ordered the ARVN Special Forces (the elite presidential-guard unit under Colonel Le Quang Tung) to raid the Xa Loi Pagoda in Saigon, the Tu Dam Pagoda in Hue, and approximately a dozen other principal Buddhist establishments across the country. Approximately 1,400 monks and Buddhist activists were arrested. The Xa Loi pagoda was destroyed. The raids — conducted in the early hours by uniformed soldiers driving vehicles marked as regular ARVN — were the immediate trigger of the political-military collapse: sections of the ARVN officer corps, who had not been informed of the operation in advance, regarded the use of the regular army to suppress religious practice as professionally unacceptable. The American Embassy, hearing of the raids overnight, sent the famous Cable 243 on the 24th of August advising the senior generals that the United States would not oppose a coup against the Diệm regime. The cable was authorised by Roger Hilsman and Averell Harriman at the State Department over Robert McNamara's reservations at Defence; its substantive consequence was to remove the principal external constraint on coup planning.
The coup of the 1st of November
The coup itself, planned across September and October 1963 by Generals Dương Văn Minh ("Big Minh"), Tran Van Don, Le Van Kim, Tran Thien Khiem and others, opened at approximately 1.30 p.m. On the 1st of November 1963 with the seizure of the central post office, the major ARVN headquarters at Cholon, and the radio station in Saigon. Diệm and Nhu, alerted in the morning, refused initial offers of safe-conduct and took refuge in the Gia Long Palace, then in a Catholic church in Cholon, where they were captured by the coup forces on the morning of the 2nd of November. They were placed in an armoured personnel carrier for transport to ARVN Joint General Staff headquarters; both were shot and killed inside the vehicle during the transport — by Captain Nguyen Van Nhung, on orders that were variously attributed to General Mai Huu Xuan or to General Big Minh personally. President Kennedy in Washington, learning of the deaths, was reportedly shocked; the assumption among the coup-supporting officials in Washington had been that Diệm would be exiled rather than killed.
Kennedy himself would be assassinated in Dallas three weeks later, on the 22nd of November 1963. The two assassinations, falling within a single month, set the political stage for the escalated American military commitment that would follow under Lyndon Johnson. That escalation is the next chapter.
The photograph
On the morning of the 11th of June 1963 an Austin Westminster stopped at the junction of Phan Đình Phùng and Lê Văn Duyệt in Saigon. Thích Quảng Đức, a monk of sixty-six, got out with two companions, sat down in the lotus position, and was doused in petrol. He struck a match himself.
He did not move or make a sound while he burned. Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press had been tipped off and was the only Western photographer present; his picture ran on front pages around the world within a day. Kennedy is reported to have said that no news picture in history had generated so much emotion.
Madame Nhu's response — that she would clap hands at another monk barbecue, and would supply the petrol — did more damage to the Diệm government in Washington than any action of its opponents.
Six more monks and nuns immolated themselves before November. The government's answer was the Xá Lợi raids of the 21st of August, in which Nhu's special forces stormed pagodas across the country in the night, arresting some 1,400 monks and killing an unknown number. The raids were carried out by units wearing regular army uniforms, which turned the generals against Diệm as well.
End of Chapter IV