How South Vietnam Defeated Itself - Part 2 Sean Fear

Moreover, contrary to the notion that Tet marked an irrevocable defeat for the southern communists, the aftermath was a fluid and protracted affair. Through much of 1968, the Communists strengthened their position in large swathes of the countryside, pinning American and South Vietnamese ground troops in bases and cities. Initial losses were balanced by ramped-up infiltration from the North, albeit at the cost of mounting regional tensions within the ranks. Only the following year, after an American counterattack characterized by indiscriminate firepower and heavy civilian casualties, did the military balance gradually turn — and even then, the Communist retreat was tactical as much as imposed.

Responding to waning civilian morale after their promises of imminent victory proved hollow, Communist partisans ruthlessly applied the stick, intensifying conscription and assassinating those who dared side with the Saigon regime. But they also took care to dangle carrots. In Phuoc Tuy province, for instance, cadres went door-to-door collecting lists of required medications, which they procured on the black market and distributed to grateful villagers.

In part through such efforts, the Communists’ political network stayed intact even as the military laid low. Income taken in by the South covered barely 30 percent of expenses, but Communist tax collection continued apace. After Tet, the C.I.A. reported, the Communists remained able to “mobilize from within South Vietnam most of the funds and nonmilitary supplies needed to support the Communist insurgency.” The Viet Cong “exercise considerable control over the production, processing and movement of many commodities essential to South Vietnam’s economy,” while its “tax system draws revenues from virtually every segment of the” South’s economy. Even France’s Michelin rubber plantations, clustered in the nearest province west of Saigon, made regular payments to Communist coffers.

Years after the attacks, the Communist presence around the capital remained formidable. In Long An province, immediately south of Saigon, American intelligence conceded that nearly half of the Communists’ village-level revolutionary committees were as effective as the South Vietnamese state in supplying goods and services. The Viet Cong, it went on, “have been able to organize regular schools in certain areas and have even staged public spectacles.”

Fighting a losing political battle, the South Vietnamese government acknowledged that sweeping reforms were required if it was to stand any chance of wooing the disaffected rural majority. But as usual, progress was delayed for years by perennial political infighting.

President Thieu’s archrival, the flamboyant Vice President Ky, seized on Tet as a chance to turn the tables on his nemesis. Ky charged Thieu with inaction, promising dramatic responses of his own, including the liberation of the North by force. Behind the scenes, he worked to assemble backing for a military coup. But when word of Ky’s plotting reached the American Embassy, he was summoned for a dressing-down, with the deputy ambassador, Samuel Berger, pounding his fists on the table in frustration.

Assured of American backing, Thieu quietly made his move, relieving Ky’s military loyalists of their duties, including some of the army’s most capable commanders.

Paranoid and reclusive, Thieu continued lashing out at rivals, real and imagined, including Tran Ngoc Chau, an esteemed counterinsurgency specialist. Chau’s unconstitutional arrest, however, provoked howls of protest in the National Assembly, which retaliated by delaying Thieu’s signature Land Reform program for well over a year.

To his credit, Thieu was the driving force behind that initiative, called “Land to the Tiller,” overcoming American reservations through the tireless efforts of his agriculture minister, Cao Van Than. But while South Vietnam’s proponents then and since have seen land reform as a panacea for the government’s enduring unpopularity, the results at the time were far more mixed.

The breakthrough came from Saigon’s de facto recognition of the Communists’ own wildly popular land redistribution efforts, implemented across the South years or even decades earlier. To avoid eruptions of animosity when absentee owners attempted to reclaim requisitioned land, the government sagely bestowed legal title to beneficiaries of previous Communist land reform campaigns.

However sound a policy, this approach enraged the government’s beleaguered rural loyalists, who accused the state of betrayal for rewarding those who had backed the other side. Military veterans, often forced to abandon their land after impressment, also greeted the news with dismay.

Worse still, implementation proved slow, uneven and plagued by corruption. For years to follow, pockets of farmers continued paying rent on land that neither the government nor former landlords deigned to inform them they now owned. Refugee beneficiaries complained that their allotments were inaccessible or unsafe due to military disinterest in providing security, while communities in arid Central Vietnam bemoaned land valuations based on those of the more fertile Mekong Delta. Loans for sorely needed farm equipment were all too often siphoned off by unscrupulous local officials, and recipients among the country’s ethnic minorities despaired at systematic Vietnamese encroachment.

While land reform was a welcome effort that achieved some qualified success, it did little to diminish Communist influence, or alleviate soaring inflation and corruption. In areas once held by the Communists, the impact was titular rather than transformative, with farmers awarded title to lands they assumed they had already long since owned. If anything, absentee landlords were the primary beneficiaries, granted generous American-subsidized compensation for property they had little prospect of recovering.

Back in the urban centers, meanwhile, the burst of post-Tet solidarity gave way to anger over plummeting living standards and corruption. Starved of government attention, let alone funding, pan-religious coalitions like the nominally state-backed National Social Democratic Front descended into scheming and bickering, while provincial enthusiasts waited in vain for leadership from the capital. In fact, as President Thieu’s private secretary later revealed, covert C.I.A. subsidies to the N.S.D.F. were instead pocketed for personal use by high-ranking officials. Absent official backing, these promising stabs at political unity died on the vine.

Instead, fresh from re-election after his opponents withdrew in protest, Thieu was busy preparing his own decidedly unpluralistic political vehicle: “the Democracy Party.” In reality, the party was anything but democratic, with its compulsory civil service participation and clandestine military cells earning unfavorable comparisons with the Communist Party. But Thieu, who had long since tired of opposition and resistance to his agenda, envisioned the Democracy Party as a means of binding anti-Communists together from above. Ramming through decrees that all but proscribed any other party, he then coerced bureaucrats and military officers into joining Democracy Party ranks.

But rather than rallying southern society behind his rule, as Thieu had implausibly gambled, the Democracy Party further alienated the country’s most committed anti-communists, who instead pledged to uphold their previous allegiances. The political party decrees also dealt a death blow to the Senate, by now the South’s last independent political institution. In 1967, a new generation of sincere, enthusiastic politicians had won seats; by 1973, when Thieu replaced the Senate with his own handpicked politicians, the institution’s resistance had been broken.

On the eve of the Senate’s 1973 replacement, an onlooker recorded the despondent remarks of a departing member: “‘The noble experiment at constitutionalism launched in 1967 was turning sour.’ He had been surprised in 1967, [the senator] said, ‘at the number of qualified people who engaged themselves enthusiastically in the experiment by running for office that year’ … ‘These good people are retreating once again,’ the senator concluded, ‘once more waiting for some watershed before engaging themselves.’”

During the final years of the war, even ferociously anti-Communist northern Catholic groups, long the state’s staunchest proponents, lost faith in the state’s ability to address the nation’s cascading crises. The prevailing sense of dread was a far cry from the energy and purpose that had invigorated the anti-Communist South after Tet. And it took its toll on the military, whose rank and file likewise lost faith in the country’s unresponsive leaders. Drained of discipline and confidence by the spring of 1975, the South’s lavishly equipped military was once again set on its heels by the first Communist skirmishes, with retreating soldiers commandeering frantic civilians’ escape crafts.

Still, belief in the notion of a non-Communist-led South Vietnam was always substantial, if also fragmented and disorganized. For all its flaws, the state was no mere puppet, and as a generation of American statesmen discovered, control of Saigon’s purse-strings in no way bestowed control over its politics. Far more than any decision in Washington, it was the government’s own failure to unite and inspire core constituents, or to secure a rural base, which provided the knockout blow.