The first question is would you describe Ngo Dinh Diem for us. You talked about him when you first got there.

Well as I remember Ngo Dinh Diem, he was a physically short, pudgy little man who hated to be viewed or photographed from the back because he kind of waddled like a duck, a rather higher than normal voice level, who spoke a funny central Vietnamese dialect, that was rather hard for most Vietnamese to understand, a zealot, very religious person, scrupulously honest, and a mandarin in every sense that Vietnam has produced mandarins.

Alright, you told me a story, if you would answer that once again, including, I remember a story you told me about how people couldn't even understand his speech and you would have people going, what, what? And Americans having to translate.

That's true. I observed him on numerous field trips after he got into the idea of going out into the field and visiting the rural people, that he would make a speech over a public address system in this central Vietnamese dialect.

And as I would stand in the crowd, I would hear people saying, what is he saying or looking at each other for an explanation and if there was anyone there in the crowd who understood what he was saying, they became an interpreter and we had a rather interesting professor from Temple University, who went through the funny experience of trying to explain to a group of peasants in one particular village what the president was saying in their own language.

You want to be sure to keep your head...

Yeah, alright.

Can we stop for just a moment?

Just a moment. Right

Could you describe Ngo Dinh Diem for us at the beginning?

As I remember Ngo Dinh Diem, he was a slightly overweight, pudgy, short, dark Vietnamese who spoke Vietnamese with a central accent. The accent was very difficult to be understood by some of his southern compatriots. And he had a peculiar gait he waddled like a duck when he walked, objecting to being photographed from the back and was a mandarin in every sense of the word of the Vietnamese, ah that's...

Stop for a moment.

Alright.

Your description of Ngo Dinh Diem again.

Well, the Diem... yes?

I think I see him pause, let me finish.

Alright.

Go.

The Ngo Dinh Diem, start again. The... the Ngo Dinh Diem I remember was an imperial Vietnamese, a man from a mandarin family, short, pudgy, dark-complected gentlemen, who spoke Vietnamese with a central accent. Other than his native area of Hue, many Vietnamese in the rural areas especially found it exceedingly difficult to understand his spoken Vietnamese. We have the funny situation of him speaking before huge crowds as he visited rural areas in which the listeners maintained they could not understand him.

Now, one rather interesting trip in the Delta area, near Can Tau, an American professor who spoke Vietnamese found himself in a crowd acting as an interpreter for some of the southern Vietnamese who maintained that they could not understand what their president was saying.

He objected to being photographed from the back, from the rear, because he waddled like a duck as he walked, and was different from many Vietnamese in that he was an extremely well educated man, highly motivated, scrupulously honest, and a personality that was extremely ah similar to the old mandarins of a hundred years ago in that country.

That was very nice. Um. Can you tell us what Diem felt about the Americans coming in, you described him as being amazed at their brashness?

I think when we descended upon him in numbers, he was a, quite a surprised president. Now he had lived in this country, if you remember, but from my recollection of his reaction to us, he really did not understand us, nor did he spend his time in the United States trying to understand us.

And I think he objected to our brashness, our directness, our lack of deference to him as a Vietnamese leader, and our informality. And, in fact, I think this last part- this informality- was even funny to them.

On one occasion, I had an assignment to photograph him in working situations according to the rocket I had gotten from my home office, and I had photographed him in his suit, as he preferred to be shown, in his office and then I worked him around to where I got him to take off the suit and loosen his tie in the American style.

And after this was over, he made two remarks to his compatriots in the office that here is this fellow who comes in, who orders me around, I'm the president of this country. He tells me what to do, I have to talk off my coat, I have to loosen my tie.

Will people respect me when they see me without my coat? In a way, we were great big children to him and while he respected us because of our power and the assets that we brought to his country, as people he really never understood us.

Did you make it?

No, no.

Go ahead.

One situation which I remember that might illustrate how he felt about us was an occasion when I had been asked to get some informal working shots of the new president. I went to his office, took the usual pictures of him in his suit and tie. But then, to show him more as a working president, someone who works long hours as he did- I asked him to remove his coat.

Eventually, I got him to roll up his sleeves of his shirt and to loosen his tie. After this shooting sequence was over, he began to talk to his compatriots in the office and indicated that he was amused that here this person had come in and been ordering the president of Vietnam to do all of these rather unorthodox things, unorthodox for him.

And he wondered and frowned on the idea of having his people see him without his coat on, of seeing him in less than an imperial state. I think he looked upon us as great big children, well intentioned, powerful, with a lot of technical know-how, but not very sophisticated in dealing with him or his race or his country's problems.

Can you describe for us a little bit about the kinds of Americans coming into Vietnam with this can-do, we-know-the-best-way attitude?

In those early days, the decision had already been made that Vietnam and its future was important to the United States, so when we 'gan—began sending people into Vietnam after the French period, after they were withdrawing, we were sending in people who had very little background in Indochina. Many people, until they had been assigned there, found it hard to find it on the map. There did not exist, in English, a very large repertory of material, written or in any other form, on Indochina, on the war there.

Um. My own experience was that a 1952 National Geographic article on the dragon in Indochina was the best thing in English that I could find at the time. All of the Americans coming in found that they had to search out information about the country, its customs, its history, the history of the war, and French documents, talking to French people who were leaving or foreigners who had lived there a long time, American missionaries who had quite a store of information- some correct, some incorrect, we found out later on- concerning the Highland people.

It was a time of getting into the country by by mostly a young group of Americans. Many of the people there were quite young, starting their careers in the foreign service or at mid career point, uh having a mission, being absolutely sure that we could do the job, but not knowing how, but not knowing enough about the country to have a basis for making uh professional judgments.

Could you talk just a little more about the kind of idealism that this is, this kind of sense of, we're sure we can make a democracy out of this little patched together country?

I think most Americans who came there and fell in love with Vietnam , fell in love with the Vietnamese, found themselves in a political situation, the likes of which they had never encountered, felt that the answers to Vietnam's problems were in some way comparable, comparable to the American experience and that all of the complaints that the people had against the French and against a centralized government could be alleviated by leading him somehow in the direction of a democratic uh form of government for them, that this would solve the political problem, they had the right of expression, they had social justice, that the communist appeal would decline and that Ngo Dinh Diem and the new government, which we supported strongly, would begin to take hold and grow much in the way that Ho Chi Minh's reputation and his government had grown and the resistance against the French.

Cut for a moment.

Would you give us that sense of time that we're talking about?

At that particular time when the decision had been made by Washington that it was important to us what happened in Vietnam, a number of Americans, a group of Americans, came to Vietnam that were highly idealistic. I think all of us felt that we had been giving a job and we could do it in the American way, that we had the know-how, the expertise, had the will to succeed where the French had not succeeded.

I had many conversations with Frenchmen on the way out in front of the Majestic Hotel sitting enjoying their citron and soda, who told us that if we couldn't do it, you can't do it. This kind of infuriated you. It kind of challenged you because everyone there knew that we could work this out and we could make this new government of Ngo Dinh Diem succeed.

That's much more than what I wanted. Uh, cut for a moment.

One has this image of a stream of Americans going in and out of the palace, giving Ngo Dinh Diem advice? Could you talk about this?

In the early days, just after his installation, when he took over, we had this group of Americans, all of whom had tremendous ideas of how to further uh the efforts of the country, of how to get this thing rolling, of how to get the country started, get the government organized, formed, and going. Here you have a president of the old cloth who is uh quite formal, but having to put up with an endless stream of Americans taking up his time.

At my very low level in those days, I had about a thirty minute access to the president. If I wanted to do something in the way of written material, photographs, movies, it took about thirty to forty minutes within this scope of his schedule to get over to the palace and to get in touch with him and get what I wanted. This same thing is magnified by many other Americans, military, political, advisors in all fields of economic and uh embassy interests.

How much influence did they actually have on Diem?

It's hard to say how much real influence that we had on him. He gave us a lot of time, but on the critical issues, eventually he could be convinced to do it our way, to try it. In the early days, he didn't want to go out into the countryside. He didn't feel that the Vietnamese wanted to touch him and see him and be up close, in the American style.

We convinced him that he was not too well known, in the southern part of the country especially, and that Ho Chi Minh was very well known by everybody and therefore that he should build up his popularity and his notoriety.

Eventually, uh he decided to do it our way. He made a series of long trips throughout the countryside, got big receptions, numbers of people came to see him. There was, of course, an organized claque to get them enthusiastic. And he began to believe in this, that this was a good public relation ploy and that he could succeed in being a popular president.

Uh after a while, he began to like this. He made more trips than we really wanted him to make, spending a lot of time away from the palace and the directing of the programs which we had given him or fostered upon him.

And in one situation that I'll never forget, coming back from Tuy Hoa, in one of Bao Dai's airplanes, he was looking at his shoes. I was in the aisle next to him and I looked over and asked him, "Mr. President, do your feet hurt?” He said, "No, no, my shoes are all dirty, they're all dusty, and people stepped on them. Isn't that interesting?” He found that to be an experience he could never have conceived in the days before the Americans.

It's an example of the mandarin style that he was surprised, he would never have had that in the old system, that is, the old mandarin system. And Americans kept trying to get him to reform, to be more democratic, but perhaps was his authoritarian or non-democratic style more in keeping with Vietnamese society?

Could you include here what a mandarin is because people might not know?

Uh alright. You have to remember that Vietnam was governed for many years before the French and during the French time by a level of leaders who were called mandarins. A mandarin is a very autocratic leader who rules almost by inherited and divine rights.

You might liken it to the king and queens of England before the reform in the government occurred there. An awful lot of power, highly revered, tremendously powerful, a singular ruler in his domain.

We came in wishing to popularize him and wishing to spread his influence over a group of people who do not know him and we pushed him to go the American political process, political speeches, getting out among the people, stopping and asking them questions, making pronouncements on the scene, supervising his middle and lower level employees, personally, the type of thing that American politicians have always done.

It's very hard for a mandarin, for a Vietnamese schooled in the old ways, who is bound by thousands of years of culture and thousands of years of, of the Vietnamese way of doing things, from a highly centralized distant relationship with his subjects. Uh...

Okay.

It was very difficult for Ngo Dinh Diem to understand why he should mingle with the people and break the traditional method of dealing with subordinates.

We convinced him because Ho Chi Minh was very well known throughout the country that he had to really establish himself on a, on a uh close basis with the population he was going to rule or he simply was not going to be able to extend his power down to the lower elements. On a peculiar trip we had into Tuy Hoa, an area in central Vietnam, pressing crowds, thousands of people surrounding him, numerous walks through crowds, speeches before them, hopping back on the airplane on the way to Saigon.

I was sitting in the aisle across from the president and looked over and he was watching his, his feet, looking down towards his feet. I studied him for a while. I leaned across and said, "Mr. President, have you hurt your feet? Are your feet hurting?"

He says, "No," he says, "No, my shoes are all dirty, the people stepped on them. They were so close, they were stepping on my shoes, they were right next to me." And he found that extremely difficult to understand in terms of his traditional way of governing- that he was doing something more in the American style.

However, later on he fully accepted this and just couldn't get enough of these trips. It began to exhilarate him that he was actually getting to be well known in that country.

Okay. Stop, please.

Tell me about the Agroville program?

One of the early security programs in the countryside was the Agroville Program. This was an idea, an early idea of the government, to bring people into a secure area to provide them with protection and a better economic life. Twenty odd such large villages were envisioned the beginning, and they began to go out into the countryside, into, in secure areas, and round up the people who lived beyond the capability of the army to provide protection for them, and to move them in.

Inherent in this idea uh were some basic flaws. In Saigon, in the central area, the government was still trying to resettle a million refugees from the north, having trouble with the Binh Xuyen and some of the dissident groups that were fighting for power, palace coups.

As a result, there was not an awful lot of time left for the management of uh this new idea. They selected some terrible sites- sites that had no long term uh economic advantages for the people. Some places that were almost impossible to defend because of a uh logistical considerations.

And, the implementers, the people who were sent out there to implement these programs, to act as leaders, quite often were ruthless. In an autocratic system, if the order comes down that says everybody, every able bodied man and woman works, they would even take people who were quite sick and make them work.

During my visits to several of these places and through Vietnamese friends, it came to understand that some people who were sick actually worked and fell dead building a fence or building a dike or one of the community houses.

This alienated the population inside because of inse—insecure areas the Viet Cong were still able to attack them, the government forces were unable to make it uh totally secure for the people and because of a lack of aid and a lack of logistical uh help to the people to better their lives economically, their lives were much worse inside of these Agrovilles in the beginning days than they were where they used to live in relatively, in relative peace but under Viet Cong domination.

Could you talk about that period in the late '50s, when Diem was so successful in wiping out the communists only to have it backfire on him?

You have to understand that in the early years, in spite of Diem's terrible problems at the national level- resettling a million refugees- problems with the dissident sects who were fighting for power at the Saigon level, of training a group of people to carry out his programs, he had the added duty of trying to secure the countryside from the stay-behind Viet Minh, the stay-behind Viet Cong, who had stayed in place after the Geneva conventions.

In order to wipe out their influence, Ngo Dinh Diem gave the police almost unlimited powers and as they created the Agrovilles and created security nets to pick up these people, and to eliminate their influence on the peasants, they were quite often quite ruthless.

I must say that after about two years of police work they were quite effective. They had, in some provinces, eliminated most of the stay-behind political agents- the ones that expose themselves and proselytize the people- and began to complain against the government.

But in doing this, with this heavy handed police apparatus that he had set up, they also harmed and incarcerated and eliminated a lot of people who were not uh involved with the communist movement. And this was to come back in later years to haunt him because he was making enemies as he destroyed enemies.

Could you compare this heavy handedness of the Diem's police with the kind of sophisticated use of terror or other tactics that the Viet Cong had?

In many early police operations, you would find the police going in and harassing, arresting and eliminating the influence of anyone who had a relative in the Viet Minh, or what later became the Viet Cong.

And at one point, in the ideology of this, Diem and Nhu, his brother Nhu, had the idea of physically separating all the people of Vietnam. If you had never had any connection with the communist, you lived in one village or one area and if you had relatives in the Viet Cong, in the communist movement, you lived in another area to try to physically separate the people.

This became quite impossible because the man he gave the job to implement his idea would have had to live in the communist hamlet because he, himself, had relatives that had gone over and followed the communists. This produ—idea was never really implemented because it was deemed to be infeasible early on.

But it gave you some insight into the mentality of how they wanted to separate the loyal from the disloyal. The police, way down at the end of the chain of command, without too much supervision, would harass the families of the Viet Cong to the extent that there was no other alternative but to go off and join the enemy forces.

But he left them no alternative. That uh his tactics made their life unbearable in a physical sense, physical security sense, threat of being incarcerated uh without trial, and uh also uh, did not allow them a just participation in the economic life of the village or the hamlet.

Can you talk a little bit about Nhu and Madame Nhu. Can you tell me Madame Nhu and her using her beauty and her making his brother uncomfortable?

I think that without his brother Nhu and his wife Madame Nhu, President Diem might have been successful. That he was beyond reproach in terms of his personal life and his personal dealings in the country. He was scrupulously honest, and his worst enemies never intimated that he was anything but.

But his brother and wife tended to be very Machiavellian in their approach to politics and almost everything that I can now look back upon as harming Diem's image and eventually causing his downfall could be attributed, in part at least, to things that they instituted or their influence upon the president.

Madame Nhu was a tremendously strong-willed woman. Vietnam has a history of that, the two Trung sisters, that were actually generals of the army against the French, so that's not out of character- against the Chinese. We'll have to go back.

Okay.

Strong willed woman are not unknown in Vietnam. The two Trung sisters were actually generals of the Vietnamese army that defeated the Chinese back in the history several centuries ago. She used her influence in a way that undermined the good things that Diem was doing.

She was a friction point between the Americans and the President and the President's brother Nhu, instituted or was partially for responsible for almost everything that I think that went wrong with the Diem government that eventually led to his downfall.

Had they not been as powerful as they were, had he not sought their advice, or accepted their advice as readily as he did, that whole era, I think, stood a good chance of turning out in a different way.

Let's jump ahead a bit.

Madame Nhu was a very beautiful woman. She was a gorgeous person and in a way this aided her in some of her dedication, getting her way, of getting programs that she was interested in.

I noticed, personally and especially on a Sunday morning when I had gone to see the president to photograph him, that he felt uncomfortable around her, that on occasion, she came on so hard and, and was so demanding that he seemed to acquiesce to things that she asked quickly just simply to get back to his own quarters or back to his own study.

Let's change the subject and go on and talk about the discipline of the Communists?

Just a second.

I've mentioned that the government...

Okay.

I've mentioned that the government had a problem of implementing its programs for security for the people. They were ill trained and sent to the countryside hastily to do a job they didn't relish in an insecure area. They were not disciplined.

On the other hand, the Communists had years of training, superb leadership, were the most disciplined force in Vietnam and today, in my memory stands as a group of people totally motivated by a political ideal as opposed to financial gain or any other tie.

Quite often when you got a bad recruit, they did not take to the training and he broke the very strict rules of behavior among the peasants, and he committed a crime against the people, people would complain, he would be ferreted out and brought before the people, in the people's court, and if it was a serious crime such as rape, he would be punished- sometimes shot- in front of the people.

This contrasted greatly to the police, to the regular army, and the local forces that mis—misbehaved badly all through the war, stole from the people, bullied them, and lived apart from them actually in, in spirit.

Tell me also about the tenacity of the Communists particularly during the years when Ngo Dinh Diem doing well? The story about the one guy left over?

The Viet Cong went through a very, very difficult period in the first two years. After the Geneva Convention, the leadership thought after a decent interval, there'd be an election and they would win. It was stacked in their favor.

This did not happen. As a result, they began to re-activate their political apparatus, to agitate to get their paramilitary units, their guerrillas operative again.

The Diem forces made some heavy gains in some areas. In one area where we captured some documents and talked to the local people at length and did a rather extensive report in those early days over on the Cambodian border, the military forces and the police actually had reduced the infrastructure, the governing political body in that whole jurisdiction, quite a large jurisdiction, a province, uh down to one or two people and they were absolutely broken in terms of operative capability, but their training and their tenacity saved them. They held on, called to the next higher echelon for help, and eventually rebuilt themselves and this became later in the war one of the most insecure areas for the government in the entire country.

I want to jump ahead to the JFK years when you come back from Laos and you describe a changeover where before you had to worry about Geneva and suddenly they said, anything you want, go ahead and do it. Can you describe those conditions?

Beginning in 1961, when we promised the Vietnamese government increased aid, when the Coral Sea arrived in Vietnam with helicopters, we increased the military advisoryship there, where we no longer really took serious the Geneva Convention and its accords to where we felt that we were now operating on a par with the enemy who had broken his promises in the Geneva Accords.

Uh. We had an increased backing from the government, increased logistics, uh a tremendous buildup in Americans who would uh form a parallel chain with the Vietnamese government apparatus in order to execute programs... again?

Stop. This has gotten very...

Alright.

Why did counterinsurgency not work?

In the early days, the Vietnamese attempted counterinsurgency, did not work very well, actually failed because of a number of points. The principle point, I would say, is in concept. It started out without really a good concept as to how one involves the people in their own defense, in their own well being.

The early concept was to do everything for them, to protect the people, and this is impossible because the enemy can always concentrate his strength and undermine eh your protective military forces, if that's an external force.

You have to involve the people and the strategic hamlet policy did not really get down to where the Vietnamese peasant felt this was his program, that he would take sides, he would change his mind and take sides against the Viet Cong, and support the government.

The very idea of the strategic hamlet, of having a fence around the entire hamlet, going for kilometer after kilometer, was kind of ridiculous because all the enemy had to do was to make a slight incursion into the hamlet, cut the fence, and therefore signify to everyone his ability to reach his target, the man who did not support him, simply by a cutting of a piece of barbed wire.

And there is not enough military power in the entire country to secure all the hamlets simultaneously without the people themselves taking up arms and taking sides. It did not require them to commit ideologically. It was being done to them.

Why did we think we could do it?

The reason we thought it could be done was because the Vietnamese had borrowed this idea, or most of the idea, from the situation in Malaysia, which was implemented by the British and which was successful.

They tried to adapt it to their own standards and within the confines of their own economy and geography, and in great numbers- thousands of strategic hamlets, as oppose—opposed to, ah, dozens- and just hundreds of new life villages in Malaysia, which were huge six, seven, eight thousand man, um, um... areas that could be protected, and, ah, could be, um uh... secured.

Could you tell us about how for a while counterinsurgency did work in terms of influx of materiel and helicopters.

After the introduction of larger numbers of helicopters, which meant that you could support logistically, ah, many strategic hamlets, or many hamlets that were fortified. And the introduction of almost unlimited logistical material: barbed wire, stakes, radios for emergency use, ah, flares, all kinds of things that had not been introduced before.

In the most secure areas, where the people were already committed, where they were Catholics, Hoa Hao, or of some denomination that already were anti-Communist, it worked quite well. And because we perceived all the Vietnamese as essentially the same, if you do the same program to all Vietnamese, all Vietnamese will respond in a like manner, uh we misled ourselves.

The already convinced needed the material and the organization. They were ready to do what we wanted them to do. But the uncommitted, and those who actually had, ah, all their relatives on the other side were never willingly going to do this sort of thing. They were not going to get off of the middle road unless pushed off.

And as a result, treating both groups of people the same failed in that when the crunch came, ah, the strategic hamlet ah, comprised of, ah, fence sitters and the enemy families simply do not respond in the same way.

Stop.

Saigon normally, ah... was a city, ah... rampant rumor of a good story every day of intrigue, counter-intrigue...uh the things that spy thrillers are made of. And it was that way every day. During the last days of the Diem regime all of this intensified. It intensified in terms of the volume of discontent.

Ah, the amount of discontent at high levels in Diem's own retinue. The amount of discontent in the military, and after the attacks on the Buddhist pagodas in Da Nang, literally everyone in the street had a, had a story to tell and demanded and expected a change in government. This had a pronounced effect upon all the Americans who were there making decisions.