TO BUILD AS WELL AS DESTROY TO BUILD AS WELL AS DESTROY American Nation Building in South Vietnam Andrew J. Gawthorpe CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. To use this book, or parts of this book, in any way not covered by the license, please contact Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gawthorpe, Andrew J., author. Title: To build as well as destroy : American nation building in South Vietnam / Andrew J. Gawthorpe. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018022112 (print) | LCCN 2018022514 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501709456 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501712098 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501712807 | ISBN 9781501712807 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Nation-building—Vietnam (Republic) | Vietnam (Republic) — Foreign relations—United States. | United States—Foreign relations—Vietnam (Republic) | Vietnam (Republic)—Politics and government. | United States. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. Office of Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support. | United States. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. Civil Operations and Rural Development Support. Classification: LCC DS556.9 (ebook) | LCC DS556.9 .G38 2018 (print) | DDC 959.704/31—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022112 Cover photograph (VA002099) courtesy of the Douglas Pike Photograph Collection, the Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University. To my parents Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Nation-Building Metaphor 1 1. The Diem Years 19 2. The Johnson Administration and Nation Building 49 3. Setting Up CORDS 66 4. The “Opportunity” 94 5. The Nixon Administration and Nation Building 114 6. CORDS and the Village System 129 7. Implementing the Village System 149 Conclusion: Humility and Nation Building 185 Abbreviations 191 Notes 193 Bibliography 225 Index 235 vii Acknowledgments A book, and especially one’s first book, would not be possible without the assistance of countless individuals. Many individuals helped give shape to this work. I would like to thank Greg Kennedy, Geraint Hughes, Jeffrey Michaels, Anatol Lieven, and Patrick Porter at King’s College London and Fredrik Logevall, Steven Miller, and Steve Walt for their input at the Harvard Kennedy School. Anne Miles, Brian Shaev, and Oliver Elliott read sections of the manuscript and provided valuable food for thought. I also wish to thank the staff of Cornell University Press, and especially Michael McGandy, for believing in this project and helping to see it to fruition. Several passages from chapters 1, 3, and 7 were previously published in the Journal of Cold War Studies. The students and staff of the Joint Services Command and Staff College at Shrivenham shared with me their own experiences of nation building and counterinsurgency and pushed me to engage with the realities of these theoretical concepts. Quite against the intention of the British taxpayers who funded my time as a teaching fellow there, I think it was I who learned more from them. I was fortunate enough to present this work at conferences and seminars, including those of the MIT Security Studies Program, the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Sir Michael Howard Seminar at King’s College London, the Transatlantic Studies Association, the Canadian Historical Association, the Texas Tech Vietnam War Center and Archive, and the Harvard Belfer Center’s International Security Program. On each occasion I received valuable feedback, and I would like to thank the organizers and convenors for making these presentations possible. Grants from the Lyndon Johnson Foundation and from King’s College London made research trips possible. Special thanks go to the staff of each of the archives I visited, especially those who had to wade through my hundreds of declassification requests. Outside the archive, Douglas C. Dacy provided me with a valuable trove of research materials, which considerably shaped the direction of my research. Thanks are also due to my parents, who have supported me in ways that only they will ever know. None of this would have been possible without the loving support of my wife, Janice, with whom I share this journey of discovery through life, along with, in ix x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS the words of Arendt, an intense “wonder at what is as it is” in the world. I could truly ask for no better companion along the way. Credit for finding the images used in the book is also due to her. Having received such abundant assistance, I can only conclude by noting that whatever errors or omissions remain could do so only through some fault of my own. TO BUILD AS WELL AS DESTROY Introduction THE NATION-BUILDING METAPHOR Shortly before noon on April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks crashed into the South Vietnamese Presidential Palace in Saigon. South Vietnam’s last president, Duong Van “Big” Minh, had only just begun his fourth day on the job, and it now fell to him to greet the invaders. As the North Vietnamese attack intensified and long-serving strongman President Nguyen Van Thieu fled to Taiwan with suit- cases full of gold, Saigon’s elite had turned to Minh in the hope that he might be able to negotiate a cease-fire with the Communists. But with complete military victory at hand, the North Vietnamese saw no need to parley. Many of the top officials of the Saigon regime had already fled or committed sui- cide. Those who remained were now seated on two rows of chairs inside the palace, waiting for the inevitable. When the first North Vietnamese soldiers appeared, Minh announced that he was ready to hand over power. One of the Communist officers retorted that this was impossible. Minh’s regime had already collapsed, and he could not hand over what he did not possess. In case there remained anyone in South Vietnam who was unclear on this point, the North Vietnamese conveyed Minh to the headquarters of Radio Saigon later that day to announce that the Government of Vietnam (GVN) had been formally dissolved at all levels.1 Finally released by his president from the impossible task of further resistance, Nguyen Khoa Nam, com- manding general of GVN forces around Saigon, impassively shot himself dead in front of the North Vietnamese soldiers who arrived to take his surrender.2 As American forces were no longer engaged in fighting the war in Vietnam after the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, some have argued that the fall of Saigon was 1 2 INTRODUCTION not technically a military defeat for the United States. But there is no mistaking the fact that it was a dramatic failure of U.S. nation building. The Saigon regime would never have lasted for so long if it were not for U.S. support and aid; in fact, it might never have existed at all, so reliant was it on its “American power source.”3 American currency, military hardware, and combat troops flowed into the country for over twenty years, sustaining the Saigon regime. But this flow was foreordained to one day stop. When it did, the GVN would need to be able to mobilize its own population and national resources to survive the continued battle with the Vietnamese Communist movement at a much-reduced level of American support. Successive generations of Americans and their counterparts in the South Vietnamese regime worked to address this problem of nation build- ing even as their comrades prosecuted a brutal war. In the words of American president Lyndon B. Johnson, their goal was grandiose, even noble—it was “to build as well as to destroy.”4 For good or ill, this is an impulse that has continued to animate the military ventures of the United States. The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan highlight both that the United States continues to involve itself in wars where nation build- ing is necessary for victory and that success remains elusive. But for all the casual analogies to Vietnam that are drawn during debates over U.S. military interven- tion today, these discussions have been impoverished by the lack of any recent comprehensive analysis of the American experience of wartime nation build- ing in South Vietnam.5 Drawing on thousands of pages of previously untapped archival collections and new developments in our understanding of the war from the Vietnamese perspective, this book provides such an account.6 It stands both as a contribution to the history of the Vietnam War and as a case study of nation building that ought to guide future strategists in how they analyze and think about the problem. Whether as historians attempting to understand a recurring pattern in the history of U.S. foreign relations, as officers in staff colleges around the world grappling with the issues raised by contemporary conflict, or simply as citizens concerned with the wars of our time, we have much to gain from a fresh look at wartime nation building in South Vietnam. Wartime Nation Building in South Vietnam Measured by the scale of its ambition or the quantity of resources expended, the Vietnam War saw the largest U.S. wartime nation-building effort in history. Its size was determined by the magnitude of the problem at hand. When South Vietnam came into existence in 1954, it was what modern theorists would refer to as a “weak state,” one unable to exercise administrative control over much THE NATION-BUILDING METAPHOR 3 of its own territory. Like many other newly independent countries across Africa and Asia, South Vietnam contained central state institutions of limited power and reach.