A little more forward.

You want me to move forward?

No, no, it's the...

He was talking to me.

Oh, I see.

This is your mug shot.

One second. I'm going to reach over...

Okay. I'm making myself light.

Stan, I don't think you'd actually finished this question, there was "Were there any flaws in Diem..."

Yeah, I'm going to go on to that.

All right. Any time you're ready.

Ready?

Go.

If you could, Ed, project a little forward. Could you talk a little about what were the flaws in Diem, what were the shortcomings and weaknesses that contributed to his eventual downfall?

The main weakness of Ngo Dinh Diem in the early days of his holding office, the highest office in the land, was that he didn't trust his subordinates to get a job done correctly. In other words, he wasn't a good executive. He tended to want to do most of the work himself and instead of delegating it to a cabinet member to a member of his personal staff or someone...part of the executive department, a consequence of that was that he had so much on his plate that he could just get one thing done at a time and do it rather slowly because there were other pressures on him, other interruptions all the time and he tended to put something to one side, then hold it till he could come to a resolution of the problem and to do the actual signing of things and make the final disposition of things.

This of course left a cabinet and a group of sometimes able, sometimes not so able Vietnamese, not doing their jobs, wanting to and becoming a little resentful of being left to one side. Another thing that happened was he knew a tremendous amount about the history and topography and resources, economic resources of his land.

I have never met another Vietnamese that knew as much about those subjects as he did personally. When something would happen, he would tell me not only who had been involved but go into a family history, telling who the man's father was, why he had handled something the way he had, and usually go back about 200 years in history about a particular little place in Vietnam to tell me why the people felt the way they did about things and why this man who hadn't known that had gotten in and it was too bad that he'd done what he'd done but his father had also taught him this, and he'd go into the history. Amazing detail.

So that the end result was that a fascinating person to talk to, but the talk would go on and on while the kettle was boiling with political problems coming up and crisis situations and so forth which he wasn't meeting at the time. Then he finally became busy doing his job of delegating some things and getting the papers off of his desk and working things through, but as he did that, there were suddenly missing from his life a lot of gossip about the people to keep him current with all those families that he knew and other people. And the person who supplied that was his brother Nhu.

Now his brother Nhu had organized intelligence services to serve the country, initially to be focused against the enemy up in Hanoi but increasingly so, political gossip about rivals and opponents and some supporters throughout the country in South Vietnam. And I noticed after I'd left Vietnam in '56 and coming back on visits in later years briefly that the gossip about people became a little more biting when Diem would tell me, and a little more vicious about people than had ever been known before.

And as a friend I had warned him not to just rely on one source of information, but to spread it out, and turn to friends as well as his brother and get different viewpoints of what was happening up in areas. And if the views became too contradictory, to get up and see something for himself. I think that towards the end of his life, he was relying a great deal on his brother Nhu for information about a situation, to get a political feel of the feelings of the people in the area, or a group.

And ah, perhaps his brother Nhu was a little bit captive of his own intelligence agents, and people out gathering information, who were sometimes self-serving. So that a wrong view came up of a, like the situation in Hue that caused the final...his actions against Buddhists up there that caused his final downfall.

And his reactions were those of a man at the end of a long pipeline of information, and seeing things only from an office and a capital city, and from a background that he had never had before. And that if he had gone up and eyeballed these things himself, had gone up and seen for himself and talked to people for himself...he was making decisions that I don't think he ever would have if this had been his own, from first-hand views.

What was your impression of his brother Nhu? What kind of a man was Nhu?

His brother Nhu was, first of all, a very handsome person. He could have made a career as a leading man in Hollywood. Clean-cut, sort of a boyish charm to him. Extremely bright. Masterfully intelligent person. Very charming smile, and one to turn the heads of any woman that saw him, because this was happening to some of the American gals were in Vietnam that I knew who used to tell me how good-looking the man was.

Bright, in that he had a good education. He was intellectually ahead of most of the people that he was around at the time, and with that of course came an ego that let him look at whatever he said and came to conclusions about as being practically infallible. And I think he was deceiving himself there. He needed an ego to be in the position that he was in but it finally ran away with him. I think finally he probably thought he was smarter than his brother and knew best for the country what to do more than his brother did and I think that the family relationship broke down somewhat at that point.

I suspect that the long loyalties between the two have become somewhat abraded at that time. Not terribly so but it was fraying at the time. I last saw the two of them in 1961 and ordinarily I had just seen Diem alone, at least for a period. And Diem had asked me to come in and see him at the palace and his brother sat there, his brother Nhu sat there in our conversation and I would ask Diem a question and his brother would answer.

And I'd say, "I didn't ask you, I asked your brother here." And I was begging Diem to respond directly his own feelings. I'd ask him questions about the situation and about some of the rival political figures and some who had been loyal to the government but opposed Diem personally so that I could talk about them freely with Diem.

And I was quite surprised that the relationship between the two had disintegrated a bit. Now, Diem had been charged by his father to take care of his younger brother Nhu. So they...and he was very happy to do so, very proud of looking out for him, very proud of Nhu's intellectual abilities and boastful a bit about it as you would be of a younger brother you felt was really getting ahead. But...(cough) pardon me...this had changed somewhat in '61. Of course the overthrow took place two years later so all I can presume is that this situation must have continued to grow of a little difference between the brothers.

What about Madame Nhu?

Madame Nhu is perhaps one of the most tragic figures of our day and age in that she was a lovely lady who had grown into the image of the tiger lady, of a person of tremendous emotioonal bitterness, of unguarded tongue, and almost a vicious manner towards others. Madame Nhu came from a very prominent social and political economic family from North Vietnam and from...central North Vietnam...who was brought up by a beautiful mother, a socially elite father, group, family group in which his daughters were trained to make very good marriages, financially and socially.

And she knew all of the social graces of a hostess in a household of wealth and culture. So that her training was to be the gracious lady who invites people and knew how to make conversation at a dinner table, could entertain at the grand piano in a salon, and live a life of quiet charm.

She married a man who looked as though this was going to be his life in a colonial Vietnam. But in her more mature days she started to have children as life became more interesting to a gal, she would come in to ask if anybody would like to hear her play the piano in a salon. Her husband was busy with his brother, there was some terrible problem taking place, there might be military types come running in with their problems and there might be an alarm that the palace was about to be bombed or something very unladylike taking place, something very unsocial.

And the men would say no, no, you leave us alone now. So she couldn't act her true role that she was trained for in life. So she tried to move over into their field, to be closer to them. And as such she loomed into the limelight more and more, she attracted much malevolence in public opinion and so forth, with herself as the target. And I recall talking to her in later years and what she told me of how much it hurt her all the time to be hated.

And she had emotional problems with feeling of hatred and this was being expressed in ways that you would see in the press, in conversations, in journalistic talks with her and so on. And this hurt her very deeply inside and I think that a lot of her responses that seemed so ugly to us in their context, were her attempts to use words that she didn't know quite their fine meanings.

I think her talks about barbequing monks came as she was trying to use American slang with American reporters...it was was terribly out of place. And she had been hurt by some of the American diplomats' wives who had become rather catty in the presence about what she was up to. Even her personal sex life was being maligned all the time that she was sleeping with this, that or the next general or person in the Vietnamese army. Or in the cabinet and so on. But instead of doing such activity, she was in the nursery with the kids and so on. This hurt.

Some of the Vietnamese generals spread these stories themselves. And we know some...

To boast! It could be. The generals found it, originally, possibly to their liking and some of them, some of the Vietnamese generals also looked like Hollywood movie idols, you know, and it helped her image a bit.

Do you think there was nothing to those stories?

I think there might have been friendships between some of these people and Madame Nhu. I'm not an expert on whether...on what happened when I wasn't around but when I was there the behavior was completely acceptable socially. I didn't see any side glances or touching going on, you know, of hands or hips or whatnot. I really don't believe it was anything more to that for the gal.

One thing we tend to overlook is that there were other brothers in that family and for example would you say that the influence of some of the other brothers was very strong on Diem, the bishop for example.

Some of the other brothers did have influence and the bishop, the oldest brother in particular. Some of them were out of the country most of the time because Diem trusted them and he would send them on diplomatic missions. One was at the Court of St. James as the Vietnamese ambassador.

Another was in France as the very important buffer between the French government and the absentee emperor Bao Dai who was now in the Riviera, and Saigon. And one brother who...the youngest of them all who stayed up and stayed with Mama and kept the family home going up in Hue.

But the bishop, Thuc...a person first of all whose activities were out in the countryside and then in later days he was down in the South in the Mekong delta and frequently in the midst of fighting between the VC and the Vietnamese army. But a man with a very wide acquaintance with the people in the villages and the farmers in the countryside who would bring the knowledge with him when he'd talk to his brother and was very blunt in talking to his brother about what people felt.

Sometimes when I was a little worried about too much information one-sidedly coming from brother Nhu, I would urge him to get the bishop and late archbishop and ask him what was happening, or to let him go and visit a part of the country and find out his own views on the thing and come back and tell him.

One point about, that you haven't mentioned, and that was that...you mentioned Diem had in many ways a mandarin outlook, the other thing that he was a catholic, which was not a majority religion in Vietnam. Do you think really that he was the kind of man to govern a country that was in a revolutionary situation?

Was Diem a man who, catholic, of a minority group...a man to lead a country in a revolutionary situation? Ah, Let me answer it this way. He was a man who had been in public life before, which few other Vietnamese had been. He had made a name for himself as, early on, while he was part of the court at Hue, urged the French to give independence and freedom of action to Vietnamese to govern themselves.

This was a very courageous stand that he had taken and one that was well known throughout the country. For that reason Ho Chi Minh had urged him to join Ho's government and it wanted him as a very independent, highly patriotic person. So, in Vietnamese eyes here was a patriot, heading the country in times of stress.

Now there surely is nothing wrong with a patriot heading up a government in a revolutionary system...situation. When...almost everybody in Vietnam knew that Ho Chi Minh had wanted him in a very important post in the early coalition government that the Communists had formed.

His short comings were those of practically any Vietnamese at the time, since none of them had really held high administrative or executive posts in the country. Many of the Vietnamese who later became ministers or chiefs of departments or bureaus in their government had to sit down practically at the door during French time and be the receptionist.

And some of them knew that in this bureau or in this department a main piece of work was to stamp papers. Now this is what the French had trained them to do, not to run a department, not to run programs but to sit there and be clerks. And they had a great deal to learn about handling their own affairs and running a government.

One observer in Vietnam or an American...Doug Pike once referred to Vietnam as the land of the double cross in which all Vietnamese are maneuvering against each other with very little cohesion in South Vietnam. What, could you comment on that?

Well, Vietnam was...had its major social problems out of the lack of cohesiveness and its society. There were families, and it's basically a family structure, but once you leave the confines of a village, which is not only the basic unit in Vietnam politically and socially, but it's perhaps the only place where there is some cohesion where elected rulers, executives, actually reflect the will of the people and are accepted by the people.

Once above that level, there are rivalries afoot, and the xenophobia of a village, of even people from ten miles away of being dirty foreigners certainly extends in their...or did extend in their national political life. So that the mistrust of the foreigner, meaning someone from another province or another city or another town or village is very evident in their attempts at political organization.

Political parties have always had a hard time. They no sooner start organizing than they get splinter groups branching off. The political party that brother Nhu had and tried to put together, the Can Lao, became splintered but held together principally because there were civil servants who were members and one person in the civil service would tend to accept another person in the civil service as somebody who was known and not a foreigner.

So that that was its main strength and also its main weakness in that to be a member of the club meant that you weren't fired from a government job because you were a member so that it became, in its membership a little bit too self-serving, of members rather than of the public and that's where some corruption started in the Diem days.

The real tragedy of Vietnam was that the Vietnamese were never able to get together and rule themselves by accepting others long enough to let them take over the executive job and being accepted by people, even though they elected people. The very last day I was in Saigon in 1968 in the summer, a lot of the small town provincial politicos had wanted to come and say goodbye to me.

And a lawyer friend of mine, a Vietnamese, had invited them into his home in Saigon. He lived in a very small home on a dirt street and so many people showed up that there was to be a luncheon in his house and the meeting couldn't take place in his house. It was too small so we sat along the curb of this dirt street and talked to each other. And there were several hundred of these politicians from all over the country. And the neighbors came in and brought soft drinks and food for the lunch to us, they were cooking at all these different homes around.

And the theme of my farewell to them was for God's sake learn to work with each other and unless you unify, you're going to lose your country, lose your homes and probably you could lose your lives. But during the thing I would ask a man what he believed about the something. And he would tell me what he believed. Usually very idealistic, highly principled and several others would be looking at him and would say I never knew you believed in that. That's what I believe in.

And I said that's the trouble with you. You never talk to each other enough to discover that you share a great deal in common. I got back to my house to finish packing and come back home and the phone was ringing and it was then President Thieu and he wanted to see me right away...I went over to the palace to see him and he told me that the police, his police had reported to him that I was fomenting a revolution out in the streets with all these politicians from all over the country.

And I said, "no, I'm doing something I'm very angry at you about." And he said, "why are you mad at me?" I said, "it’s your job as president of the country to talk to all these people and get them in and get their views and somehow or other get them working together." I said, "that is a leader's job" and I said, "don't let a foreigner, don't let an American like myself do it. I'm leaving and they were saying goodbye. I'll never see them again I don't think.

So how about you starting to act like a president for a change." And he was quite taken aback by that. And incidentally, he turned around then and gave me the painting as a farewell gift. But he said, "I thought you were starting a revolution to overthrow me and I wasn't going to give you this painting until now." So he changed his mind.

Let's go back to the early period. One of Diem's big achievements, maybe it was your achievement too, was how he managed to defeat all these different sects and groups that were trying to overthrow him in the mid 50s. What were these groups?

The sect troubles which ran a little bit in 1954 late and then got to their climax in the spring of 1955 were two religious sects and one underworld organization, of an underworld social type of group in the urban area of Saigon, Cho Lon. The religious groups were the Cao Dai from along the border of Cambodia about due west of Saigon and the Hoa Hao who were a group where a recent...just below the so-called parrot's beak, down near the Gulf of Thailand, southwest of Saigon.

And then in the city itself a sect of the Binh Xuyen who had originally organized a sort of a democratic social club in welfare and so on, but whose leadership had taken over controlling all of the narcotics traffic, mostly opium, all of the prostitution, the commercial prostitution and the gambling in the city, and had obtained from Bao Dai the right to select the secret police of the city, allegedly for a large sum of money.

But they essentially felt that they should control the city and control the country and elect their own people to move in and take charge and run things rather than a man whom they looked upon and...in the form Diem, a Puritan, of a goody-goody, of a person that was really acting against their own personal self-interest.

So they met secretly and decided on which one was going to be the boss when they overthrew this man and who was going to have jurisdiction over what. But they started in first of all by trying to negotiate with him and when Diem wouldn't trust them at all and essentially threw them out of the office and wouldn't talk with them, they decided to use force to force him out.

Now a lot of people were involved in what happened next. The French still had armed forces in the area and moved some more in as this discussion started getting hot. The troops that belonged to the sects...they all had armed forces, an army...were militia in the French army and had been under control of the French almost entirely. There were some exceptions.

And the main thought on the other side was that if they could get rid of Diem physically by blowing him up, by killing him, they could move in and take over. They moved their troops into the city, positioned mortars to shell the palace and while both the French forces and the Americans who were there were trying to defuse the situation, trying to bring about a peaceful solution to the thing and resolve some of the claims that the sect forces were making which included some things that happened at very unfortunate timing.

The French said we are giving our independence to South Vietnam which means that we can no longer pay militia which they did at this critical moment. And they...the sect said well, somebody's got to pay us. We've got armed forces to help defend the country and why don't you make me the commander of all the armed forces, one of them said and we'll take over the defense of Vietnam and others said make us part of the Vietnamese Army and pay us the same and we'll take over and run the thing.

To all of which of course Diem said nothing doing. But the French were trying to come up with solutions and General Ely who was the commander of the French expeditionary forces in Indochina asked me along with the US ambassador, General Taylor at the time, to...excuse me, it wasn't General Taylor...General Collins asked me to head up a French-American group to come up with solutions to this problem which included what do you do with demobilized troops, how do you get them into gainful employment, how do you resolve some of the economic needs of the areas where these people come from and turn them from being belligerents into peaceful citizens.

About the time we were wrestling with coming up with the answers to these problems, the Binh Xuyen who were in Saigon and owned, essentially, Cho Lon as a gangster territory of theirs, opened fire with mortars on the palace, hoping to catch Diem in the place and kill him. I talked to Diem just before and I'd gone up to give him a message from both the...General Ely and Ambassador Collins that we hadn't come up with solutions yet but we were very hopeful and we wanted him to hold up precipitating any fight and Diem was laughing at me. We're out on the front porch and he said you are standing about where I think the first shell is going to hit and it's going to be coming in in about twenty minutes and you better get out of here and I'm not initiating, I'm receiving here.

So sure enough twenty minutes later the fire broke out against him and he told me on the phone, he said, "listen to my orders" and he got General Ely on the phone and had him listen and he said, "listen to this incoming shells and I'm giving some orders here for counter-fire." And with that he gave orders to his artillery to open up the mortars that were firing.

(Cough) Just a minute...were you...so he just, it was just a battle...did they actually fight it out in the streets?

There was fighting in the streets. This took place and started in the evening and went on until almost midnight that day, in the dark. And the French had moved forces in to try to control the situation but what was happening was the Vietnamese army which by French estimates at the time and by estimates that some of the Vietnamese in the cabinet even or that the Vietnamese army wouldn't fight and they had rushed in to Saigon, the Vietnamese army, and I remember seeing one group in front of...in the school yard getting ready to move down a few blocks and I asked them how they were feeling and they were grabbing their rifles and throwing them up in the air and "lets go, lets go" attitude and just the reverse of what the diplomatic corps had observed and which the French headquarters had said they were. They had said they wouldn't fight and didn't want to but they were eager to get in and settle the problem.

Were you, did, were you acting as an obs..Were you acting as an advisor to Diem on how to handle the sects?

No, I was seeing Diem about once a twice a week at his invitation and once in a while I would go in when our ambassador would ask me to go in and convey something to him. He knew that I was trying...working on the sect problem, trying to resolve it. He knew that I was a close friend to one of the sect leaders who was Trinh Minh Tay who was head of the Cao Dai dissident group that had split away from the regular Cao Dai, and a close friend of the commander in chief of the Cao Dai armed forces, General Phuong.

And I had asked them not to participate with the which they pulled out and didn't do. But on this problem of the thing, I had very strict orders from the US and from our ambassador to not be in the palace when any fighting started and not to give any military advice on how to cope with the enemy, but to pull out.

And Diem was very much aware of this and I think that was one of the reasons he was teasing me, that I was standing where the first shell was going to hit and he told me where the batteries were lining up...excellent intelligence from his brother Nhu.

I mean, it's been assumed that the French at that stage were trying to get rid of Diem. Is that true?

The French had a feeling about Diem that was exacerbated by their having lost the war and by their having to give up the colony and to pull out of a country. And they felt that by having a nationalism, a patriot if you will, such as Diem heading the government that was supplanting them, that this was sort of rubbing salt into the very sore wound of theirs.

And they felt and said frequently that Diem was arousing the people against the French and a lot of that rubbed off on me, that they also said that I was the one that was trying to arouse the revolutionary spirit among the Vietnamese to be anti-French. And this simply wasn't so, at all. I had to remind the French that they had been fighting against the Vietnamese eight years before I ever showed up on the scene and that I hadn't started that war or been a part of it and that this was just a natural consequence of combat and...

You had some disagreements, it's been reported that you had some disagreements with the American ambassador, General Collins. What was...what were these disagreements about?

Well, the only one that was sort of...

I'm sorry, would you repeat that you had disagreements?

My only disagreement with Ambassador Collins, General Collins, concerned the matter of the feelings of the Vietnamese on given problems. And one of the times was when the first night of fighting, the sects against the government of Diem along about ten or eleven at night, the ambassador asked me to come over to his residence and see him immediately.

And I drove in past much of the fighting then going on, the French were bringing us armor to hold strong points of the town, and blocking off Vietnamese army units who were going in to reinforce some people who were...their own army units who were holed up in a police station in Cho Lon and needed reinforcements badly.

And the French tanks were blocking the way and I drove on past that on up to the ambassador's residence and started telling him that the French were interfering one-sidedly in this fight that was going on and the ambassador told me that he and General Ely had come to an agreement and the French had the forces there to reinforce and make the decision stick of a truce. And cease fire immediately.

Everybody to stay in their positions where they were and that he'd gone along. I felt that he had a very misinformed view of what was going on in the town because he still believed that the Vietnamese army wouldn't fight, that this in essence of the truce would give the government of the country, Diem and his people, a chance to sort things out and maybe come up with some viable, workable peaceful solution of compromise with the other side, when actually the army and Diem had a very viable thing going for them if they'd let them alone.

Was Ambassador Collins cool to the idea of supporting Diem?

I would say so. He didn't...

I'm sorry, could you repeat the...

General Collins looked upon Diem much as the French did. He was a...had a close friendship with many of the French officers then in Vietnam, that is, General Collins did. He grew to adopt and accept their viewpoint of Diem as a nationalist who would put his head down and go against anybody's grain just to have his own way and had no real chance to know him.

Usually when they met personally to talk, Diem would catch something in the ambassador's tone or words that he'd use that led him to think that this man doesn't know the country or the people or the situation and at which point Diem would become the professor and educator and take time out to start telling him what the situation really was.

And sometimes Diem would talk for hours on this thing and get carried away with a lecture. So that he would lose the attention and interest of a man who wanted to come to a decision quickly and to get something done. So that there was a personal difference between our ambassador and the prime minister as well as sharing and sympathizing with the French views of it.

Do you think that Diem was...was...

We're cutting to change tapes.

Oh.