The Year of the Hare:
America in Vietnam, January 25, 1963–February 15, 1964
By Francis X. Winters
University of Georgia Press, 292 pages, $29.95
Until the publication of this provocative book, there existed a reasonably solid consensus that the ill-fated American involvement in Vietnam passed through three decisive chapters: first, in 1945-46, when President Harry Truman supported France’s effort to recover its colonies in Indochina; second, in 1955, when President Dwight Eisenhower decided to replace the French as the main Western force opposing communism in the area after their defeat at Dien Bien Phu; and third, in 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson agreed to commit sizable numbers of American troops to the war.
Whether we think of these discrete chapters as links in the chain, or perhaps as nails in the coffin, we now need to add another propitious moment when a different decision would have averted the tragedy. The moment is the summer and fall of 1963, and the decision is the removal of Ngo Dinh Diem as president of South Vietnam.
The nearly day-by-day account of this episode in “The Year of the Hare” draws on recently declassified documents, plus interviews with most of the surviving participants, to make a thoroughly convincing case that Diem, for all his faults, was our last best hope for an independent, non-communist South Vietnam. The American-sponsored coup that produced Diem’s assassination also led eventually to the lengthy lists of names poignantly enshrined on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Previous histories have acknowledged the cold-blooded character of the decision to eliminate Diem, but scholarship has tended to focus on the sloppiness of the operation, which led to Diem’s death, and President John Kennedy’s personal regret at this development. Until now, the standard interpretation has accepted the view of Diem as an autocratic mandarin out of touch with the Vietnamese villagers in the countryside. This was the verdict of the Kennedy administration at the time, as well as of the American press in Saigon, including David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan. Diem’s rule was symbolized by the self-immolations of protesting Buddhist monks and the “Dragon Lady” demeanor of Diem’s imperious sister-in-law, Madame Nhu.
The story Winters tells is quite different. Diem was, as much as Ho Chi Minh, a devoted Vietnamese nationalist with impeccable credentials as an anti-French defender of Vietnamese independence. The North Vietnamese feared him as the one South Vietnamese leader capable of claiming the Confucian “mandate of heaven.” Moreover, Diem’s chief drawback from the perspective of the American mission in Saigon was his aversion to excessive dependence on American advisers. While the coup against him was being plotted, Diem was negotiating a political compromise with Ho, who was just as troubled by his dependence on Chinese support in the North as Diem was by the growing American presence in the South. In retrospect, the elimination of Diem destroyed the only realistic prospect for a negotiated settlement and the honorable withdrawal of the U.S. from the conflict.
If this were a film, the plot line would be part Greek tragedy, part John le Carre spy novel and part Marx Brothers comedy. The chief villain would be Henry Cabot Lodge, the American ambassador in Saigon, whose combination of duplicity, stupidity and self-importance sealed Diem’s fate. In general, the State Department supported the coup, with the exception of former Ambassador Frederick Nolting, and the CIA opposed it, arguing that Diem’s failure to resemble George Washington or Thomas Jefferson ought not obfuscate his Asian effectiveness. Kennedy wavered between these factions until the very end. And his own assassination in Dallas shortly after Diem’s murder effectively blunted any critical assessment of the coup at the time.
The evidence Winters has assembled is more than sufficient to clinch his case that Diem’s removal ranks as one of the most flagrant blunders in America’s 30-year crusade in Southeast Asia. A secondary theme, which in some ways has even more explosive implications, asks us to revise our understanding of Kennedy’s motives for investing American prestige in Vietnam in the first place.
Winters argues that Kennedy had decided, early in his presidency, that the Cold War needed to find a non-European theater. Earlier accounts of Kennedy’s foreign policy have noted his dismay in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and his personal chagrin after the disastrous meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961 over the status of Berlin. In this rendering, Kennedy’s decision to increase American support for South Vietnam represented an effort to make a potent statement of American resolve after these humiliating defeats.
But Winters now adds a major strategic variable to this explanation, namely, Kennedy had decided that a confrontation with the Soviets in Europe would mean nuclear war and casualty rates of such monstrous proportions that no rational American president could push the button. American nuclear strategy in Europe, therefore, was based on a bluff.
Vietnam appeared on the White House radar screen at just the moment when Kennedy was searching for a safer venue in which to project American resolve. This is why a region of virtually no strategic significance was suddenly transformed into the strategic crucible for our Cold War policies. And this is why we tried to plant the seeds of Jeffersonian democracy in a country that had never conducted a popular election above the village level.
If Winters is right about Kennedy’s motives, and the evidence here is inherently more elusive than his authoritative treatment of the Diem debacle, those whose names appear on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial might not have died in vain. They may represent a costly but plausible diversion that helped reduce the likelihood of a much more costly war in Central Europe. This is a rather novel way to think about the most misbegotten war in American history, a way that my own mind finds difficult to digest. But like so much else in “The Year of the Hare,” it makes you think about old questions in new ways. More heavily promoted books about the Vietnam War have appeared in recent years, but none packs this kind of intellectual wallop.
