The Vietnam War: Why It Was Impossible for the U.S. to Stay Uninvolved

President John F. Kennedy confronted a deteriorating situation in South Vietnam from the moment he took office in 1961. In Laos, U.S. friend Phoumi Nosavan was losing ground to a pro-Communist group supported by the Soviet Union. Rioting Buddhists and students were tearing apart South Vietnamese cities while terror squads murdered South Vietnamese officials, and U.S. military advisers died in battles half-heartedly fought by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) against the Viet Cong.

South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem believed, like the former emperors of China, that he possessed a ‘mandate from heaven,’ and he expected the people to follow him as a leader by divine right. Diem’s leadership was limited by his use of his family to maintain power. His brother Ngo Dinh Nhu ran the secret police force, and other family members exercised dictatorial control over various provinces. In addition, Diem’s practice of forcing military commanders to work in concert with provincial leaders who were primarily politicians was a disaster.

Early in February 1962, the Kennedy administration replaced the Military Assistance Advisory Group in Saigon with a new umbrella agency, the Military Assistance Command Vietnam, which coordinated U.S. military policy and assistance in South Vietnam. American advisers had indeed improved the situation of the ARVN, but Diem tended to punish military success rather than reward it–fearing the rise of a general who might take his place.

In May 1963, conditions began to deteriorate rapidly. Early in the month, government officials in Hue allowed Roman Catholics to fly religious flags in celebration of the birthday of the city’s archbishop (Diem’s brother), but on June 3 the traditional flags to mark the birth of Buddha were banned. Local Buddhists, some 80 percent of Hue’s population, complained that the act was discriminatory and, when city officials refused to lose face by admitting their error, took to the streets in protest. The result was nine Buddhists killed by government troops. Rioting soon spread from Hue to Saigon. Although the U.S. government urged Diem to take responsibility, he allowed his Catholic sister-in-law Madam Ngo Dinh Nhu to denounce the protestors as traitors and Communist sympathizers. The rioting spread and became a full political crisis.

In August and October 1963, according to the so-called Pentagon Papers, the United States gave its support to a cabal of army generals bent on removing the controversial Diem, whose rise to power Kennedy had backed and who had been the anchor of American policy in Vietnam for nine years. For weeks, with the president informed every step of the way, the American mission in Saigon maintained secret contacts with the plotting generals through one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s most experienced and versatile operatives, Lt. Col. Lucien ‘Lulu’ Conein. An eccentric yet thoroughly professional agent, Conein inspired confidence in his Vietnam contacts, who, in accord with Asian tradition, placed more faith in personal ties than in formal relationships.

Born in Paris, Conein had been raised in Kansas by his aunt but retained his French citizenship. He enlisted in the French army at the outbreak of World War II in 1939, and deserted when France surrendered a year later. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) recruited him to parachute into France with a French Resistance unit. When the war ended in Europe, Conein joined a company of French and Vietnamese commandos harassing Japanese posts in northern Vietnam. He entered Hanoi in 1945 with the OSS team that worked with Ho Chi Minh, and returned in 1954 on a mission to sabotage the Communist transportation system.

In violation of the Geneva Accords, Conein and his team formed secret’stay-behind’ squads of Vietnamese, which were composed of about 200 anti-Communist political activists and code-named the ‘Hoa’ and the ‘Binh.’ This mission was his one failure. The team accomplished little. Most team members were eventually compromised and captured. A star performer in the CIA’s department of ‘dirty tricks,’ Conein also infiltrated covert agents into Eastern Europe and trained paramilitary forces in Iran.