Diem's Final Failure: Prelude to America's War in Vietnam (Modern War Studies (Hardcover)) Hardcover – January 17, 2003

Diem's Final Failure, which has drawn extensively on Vietnamese language materials, takes issue with traditional anti-war views of Diem as some U.S. installed, reactionary, corrupt `last Confucian' emperor deserving no more than a footnote in an American war, which of course was nothing of the sort. As Catton's title makes clear, he is not out to whitewash Diem, but rather to separate historical fact from the polemical sound-bites of their time.
According to Catton, it wasn't the Americans who chose Diem, but Emperor Bao Dai, who viewed Diem as someone who could rally the non-Communist nationalists while gaining needed backing from the U.S. Founded upon fear of a common enemy, Catton characterizes the resulting alliance as a shotgun wedding. Relations between the imperious Diem and his equally imperious U.S. backers soon degenerated. Initially unknown in the Vietnamese countryside, Diem was well known among the Vietnamese elite. He was personally honest, energetic, puritanical, and driven, but he lacked the give and take political skills needed to gain support among Vietnam's common classes, or forge long lasting alliances among her fractured anti-Communist elites. Diem relied upon a small core of trusted advisers, mostly within his family, and expected that orders alone would trigger results. He viewed Ho Chi Minh as a Communist puppet who would turn Vietnam into a mere southern state of China, while the Communists reciprocated by painting Diem as a puppet of the Americans. The latter's success in spreading that view both in the countryside and international press engendered a knee-jerk sense of nationalism and sovereignty that further complicated U.S.-RVN relations, both during Diem's and subsequent governments.
Diem's vision of a non-communist Vietnam was backed up a supporting nation building effort centered upon redistribution of land titles, settlement of vacant lands, and `Agrovilles', mostly in the Mekong Delta, the breadbasket of pre-war Vietnam. The chapter Catton devotes to it is an overview of a subject some aspects of which neither government fully understood, partly because land title registries in the Mekong region never reflected realities on the ground, particularly land clearing and informal ownership recognition practices. Land development resettled an influx of northern refugees into both the Delta and Highland lands, executed with `utmost speed' that encouraged local officials to use coercive measures, and the amount of land allocated to refugees was not always sufficient to local conditions. Agrovilles attempted to regroup peasants from threatened RVN areas into more secure regions by offering them lands within settlements at low prices while allowing them to retain title to lands they'd left. It was a program that looked far better on paper than in the field. Suffice it to say that both the Diem and U.S. governments made some positive contributions to nation building, but Diem's success in suppressing the Southern communists resulted in Hanoi raising their stake in the insurgency while opposition to his rule increased among Southern elites. (Of note: Mekong Delta agriculture was also the rock upon which post-1975 plans for collectivization foundered. Those interested in what those realities were might start here: [...]
For most readers, the meat of Catton's book lies in his coverage of the origins, theory, and practices of the Strategic Hamlet Program, and its aftermath, which marked the increase in U.S. military advisors from 1,000 at the beginning of 1960 to more than 11,000 by the end of 1962. This increased American presence exacerbated the mutual distrust between both sides. American attempts to remain neutral in anti-palace coup plotting was read by all sides as a lack of support for Diem. In the end, that proved fatal, sparking the "not a coup in the usual sense, but a collapse." to paraphrase the author's quote of Douglas Pike. "Diem's poor leadership was now replaced with `no leadership at all."
Diem's Final Failure is a necessary book for anyone interested in the Diem years, or how the U.S. finally ended up in Vietnam. Unfortunately, those who most need to read it, i.e., the self-righteous anti-war crowd who eschew history in favor of polemical tracts, never will. In that sense, Catton's book is too much, too late.

This book has very detailed information regarding three major POLITICAL blunders that contributed to the collapse of the Diem regime, but omits some of the more important reasons that the American supported Coup eventually ousted him, and led to his and his brother's death.

The Buddhist crisis of 1963 and the constant antagonizing overtures made by his brother, Nhu against the American's, were breezed over, despite them being prominent reasons for America finally giving up on his leadership skills.

Great read! A very fine history of a little known era in American History. Lot's of good information on the early
days of the Vietnam War. Most histories of Ngo Dien Diem tend to be of a one dimensional cardboard character
type . This book puts flesh on his historical bones. Good read, especially for the serious Vietnam reader.

This is the first book that I have read about this period that really puts the Vietnamese side of this drama in center stage. I happened to serve in Vietnam during a couple of years while Diem's was President and had the advantage of speaking fairly fluent Vietnamese and have always thought that the 'Last Mandarin' image of Diem was quite off base. Catton actually manages to explain 'Personalism' , something that Diem himself had trouble doing to the people of Vietnam. The book does not attempt to whitewash any of Diem's many faults but does show Diem to actually be a modern nationalist who was determined to follow his own own agenda for nation building . It was this determination to follow his own agenda that was the major source of friction with his American backers. This book is a must read for any serious student of the war as it was the overthrow of Diem that really brought about the Americanization of the war.

This is probably the definitive book on the reign of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam. Every serious student of the American involvement in Vietnam should find this background on how we got into that mess in the first place well worth reading. It describes Diem's background, character and personality and explains why not only Diem himself but also the vast cultural differences between the Americans and the Vietnamese made for an extremely difficult relationship.
It also has current value as the United States searches for leaders we can work with in parts of the world that are as new to intense American involvement as Vietnam was in the 1950s and 60s. A better understanding of what we did wrong in Vietnam may help us to avoid repeating those same mistakes. My personal opinion, reinforced by this book, is that if we have only a lame horse to bet on then we would be better off not betting in that particular race.
Catton's many examples show how out of touch the Ngo family was with the majority of the Vietnamese people. Diem was an arrogant, opinionated bachelor, a Catholic in a nation that was 93 percent Buddhist. One of his brothers was a Catholic bishop and Catton describes "the sectarian character of the Diem regime." Another brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, served as "Political Counselor"--and enforcer. Catton describes him as the regime's "Rastputin." Nhu's wife was probably the worst female government spokesman since Marie Antoinette. Madame Nhu referred to the suicides of burning bonzes as "barbecues." When I first arrived in Vietnam in 1966 she was still infamous as "The Dragon Lady."
The author expanded what was originally a graduate student paper about the Strategic Hamlet program in 1961-1963 into a doctoral dissertation that was more focused on Diem, his government, and their developing relationship with the Americans. With that background, we should expect excellent documentation and indeed the 203 pages of text are backed up by 59 pages of notes.
However, it is still possible for a nitpicker to find a few gaps. For example, his bibliography includes the U.S. Army's Military History Institute but not its Center of Military History. "The Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group" is mentioned three times but we are not told what it was. My local guide in Plieku in 1999 spoke excellent English because he had spent a year at Michigan State University. (The downside was that it earned him a year in jail after the communist takeover.) What was the Michigan connection? Faced with being dumped by his American allies "Diem won a dramatic reprieve with a military victory over the Binh Xuyen (a mafia type crime organization) at the end of April 1955." How could he win "a military victory" over a bunch of civilian gangsters?
Catton apparently speaks and reads Vietnamese, which undoubtedly provides advantages in research and opens doors for him that are not available to most American authors of books about Vietnam. Even though the English language literature on Vietnam is vast, some of the information he provides from the many referenced books and articles in Vietnamese may well be published here for the first time
Diem continually carped and complained about the type and amount of U.S. aid but resisted doing the things the Americans wanted in return. In Stilwell and the American Experience in China, Barbara Tuchman relates Stilwell's complaints about our government's failure to demand a quid pro quo from our Chinese allies in return for the aid we provided them. We had the same problem in Vietnam. The more we did for them the less the Vietnamese did for themselves. I read Stilwell in the spring of 1972 during my second tour as an advisor to a Vietnamese Army unit in the field. Our failure to demand, and Vietnamese failure to provide, a quid pro quo was still a problem nine years after Philip Catton described this exchange between Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and Diem in 1963:
"`Isn't there some one thing you may think of that is within your capabilities to do and that would favorably impress U.S. opinion[?]" Lodge asked finally. Diem gave the ambassador `a blank look and changed the subject.'"