The Diem Coup after 50 Years

Someone wrote of Marc vs Ed on this subject--this not true. I agree with Ed Miller that the coup was a Vietnamese project. I thought I made it clear that Emerson's remarks were a reflection of her conviction, not mine. As for "in a restaurant," I did not say she said that--what she actually said was Conein and the generals were dining--as it happens--in the Hotel Continental, when she overheard the conversation in question. Does that make it more likely to be true? Prados' evidence suggests that Conein acted out in hotels!

If Emerson's remarks were true, they suggest that the signals from US leaders seem to be clearer, as Prados suggests, than previously thought.

But does that mean the coup was any less a Vietnamese project? Or the US was more culpable? By itself, I do not think so, either way, but I also do not think such considerations should preclude us from investigating what we can. For Emerson doubters, the next step would be to see if Emerson was actually in Saigon before the coup.

My sincere thanks to Ed Miller--I did not recall that previous discussion, but this interation has been valuable to me as it better enables me to teach students about the different approaches to agency in modern Vietnamese History.

Best,

Marc

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Great discussion here, folks, and especially from Edward whom I was pleased to meet & chat with at September's "Vietnam 1963" Conference at the National Archive in DC.

I was going to jump right onto Mark J Gilbert's quoting of Gloria Emerson questioning not only its veracity but that she was somehow actually in Saigon in the lead-up to the November 1963 coup. The quote just didn't ring true. Perhaps she had been there earlier, but Gloria only joined the Saigon Press Corps after 1970.

So thanks to Ed for backgrounding the old veteran including an earlier insiders role she certainly never talked about and perhaps explains a lot about her later perspective and writings.

So, as an journalist myself, all I can advise you academics is to be a lot more cautious in how you treat what you hear from us! We are quite a flawed lot.

Best regards,

Carl Robinson

USOM/USAID South Vietnam, 1964-68

Associated Press, Saigon 1968-75.

On Sun, Nov 3, 2013 at 11:12 PM, Edward G. Miller <Edward.G.Miller@dartmouth.edu> wrote:

John:

You are quite right, of course, that Conein was an ill-tempered drunk. But Emerson's story about the restaurant episode remains highly implausible, for several reasons. First, Emerson was neither "fresh in Saigon" nor unknown to Conein in 1963. As Joyce Hoffman documents extensively in "On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American Experience in Vietnam," Emerson's first visit to Vietnam took place in 1956, when she lived with a CIA operative named John Monteith Gates, who was actually a member of Lansdale's team (as was Conein). According to Hoffman (p. 38), Emerson was well known to Conein and his wife at that time. Second, I am not aware of any credible evidence showing that Emerson was actually in Saigon in 1963. According to the accounts provided by Hoffman and others about Emerson, she departed Vietnam with Gates in late 1956 and did not return to the country until 1970, when she worked as a NYT reporter. There is no mention of her being in Saigon during 1963 in her book "Winners and Losers"--which would be a strange omission, given that the book was about Vietnam, and she does make reference to her earlier and later stints there. Finally, it is clear Conein and the generals were extremely careful about arranging their various meetings during 1963. Except for an initial contact in the bar of the Caravelle Hotel between Tran Van Don and Conein in July, all of these meetings took place in private places, with elaborately constructed cover stories prepared in advance. Moreover, if Conein really had in fact exploded at the generals in public as Emerson described--thus risking the exposure of the plot--one would expect that at least one of the generals would have mentioned it in his memoirs. But it doesn't appear there, or anywhere else. Emerson's tale is a good story but its not true--one little piece of the elaborate mythology that was embroidered around the history of the 1963 coup in later years and decades.

Best,

Edward Miller

Associate Professor of History

Dartmouth College

6107 Carson Hall, Hanover, NH 03755

Edward.Miller@Dartmouth.edu

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~history/faculty/emiller.html

From: ellen.pinzur@verizon.net <ellen.pinzur@verizon.net>

Sent: Saturday, November 02, 2013 2:06 PM

To: hhtai@fas.harvard.edu; Edward G. Miller

Cc: vsg@u.washington.edu

Subject: Re: Re: [Vsg] From National Security Archive, Washington, D.C.: THE DIEM COUP AFTER 50 YEARS

Conein re Diem Apocryphal? Maybe--but maybe not :

I've got no horse in this race of Ed vs Marc. But there are a number of factors to evaluate here. First, in 1963 Gloria--whom I also knew (full disclosure)--was fresh in

Saigon and might not have been known to Conein. More important, Lucien Conein was indeed a character and this behavior might not have been beyond him. According to Joe

Redick, Conein's colleague on Lansdale's CIA team in 1954-1956, "Lou was a thug." Redick recalled that "salaud" and "con" were "relatively friendly descriptions" from Conein. Redick

thought that Conein hated Diem even in 1954. Conein was also a notorious drunk. Nelson Brickham, another CIA colleague who had known Conein from service together in Teheran,

said Conein could be extremely diplomatic, but "Luigi's only problem was that he was too blunt and direct." Brickham, too, asserted that "he was a great boozer." In 1966 there was an

incident in III Corps, where Conein had become the senior CIA officer at Bien Hoa, when he got drunk one night and began dropping flowerpots off his porch at the Duc Hotel on

passing pedestrians. Saigon station had to intervene and the deputy station chief was sent to pull Conein out, after which he was demoted to provincial officer in Phu Bon. In short Conein

was a particular sort of "seasoned CIA officer"--the kind who were known in the agency as "knuckledraggers." We're not talking about a suave, sophisticated secret agent here. All this

does not prove anything about the 1963 incident at issue, but it does suggest that the alleged outrage was quite in character for Lucien Conein.

--John Prados

_________

For news about John Prados see http://johnprados.com

Visit the National Security Archive website at http://www.nsarchive.org/.

Read the National Security Archive blog "Unredacted" at http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/.

On 11/02/13, Tai, Hue-Tam<hhtai@fas.harvard.edu> wrote:

I had the same reaction as Ed Miller upon reading the Emerson anecdote: incredulity. That a

seasoned operative like Conein would shout for all to hear in a restaurant with no less than

Gloria Emerson nearby is really difficult to swallow.

Hue Tam Ho Tai

Sent from my iPad

On Nov 2, 2013, at 10:04, "Edward G. Miller" <Edward.G.Miller@dartmouth.edu> wrote:

Dear Marc:

Thanks much for your post on Emerson, and for the link to the commentary by McCoy. As I believe you and I have discussed on this list before, I think that Emerson's story about Conein yelling at the generals about coups is problematic for many reasons, not the least of which is the notion that it took place in a restaurant. (There is ample documentation in contemporary sources about the great care that Conein took during 1963 to keep his contacts with the generals confidential. He was, after all, a veteran intelligence operative.) There is also the overwhelming evidence which shows that General Minh et. al. were far from reluctant participants in the coup--in fact, as many historians (including myself) have shown, they proposed the idea to the U.S. (through Conein) in July 1963, and they were careful thereafter to hold operational control of the coup strictly to themselves. During the Cold War era, there were of course many coups in Third World nations that were effectively organized and implemented by the CIA (Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, among others). The 1963 coup in South Vietnam was *not* one of those coups. It was a putsch that was initiated, planned, led, and executed by the ARVN generals. The generals definitely would not have gone ahead without the Kennedy administration's blessing, so in that sense U.S. encouragement was important. But the notion that Conein had to browbeat the generals into action flies in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Many of McCoy's claims are also problematic. Some of the problems have to do with factual errors that are only incidental to his main argument--such as his claim that Diem in 1955 "ended the Vietnamese monarchy after a millennium." (As is well known, the Vietnamese monarchy ended in 1945, not 1955, and it was Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh who ended it.) McCoy also invokes well-worn interpretive chestnuts which I think have been undermined or refuted by recent research (such as the notion that Diem was "installed" in power by Washington in 1954, that the efforts of Lansdale were the decisive factor in Diem's consolidation of power during 1954-1956, or that the U.S. "sanctioned" Diem's assassination in 1963). But the most significant problem, in my view, is McCoy's suggestion that Diem was a leader who "had little choice but to make Washington's demands his top priority" and that he was adhering to "an American political agenda on civil and military matters." As I have argued in the book on Diem that I published earlier this year, and as recent work by other scholars demonstrates, the notion that Diem felt obliged to follow U.S. prescriptions on anything is contradicted by a vast and detailed documentary record. Diem had his own nation building ideas and agenda, and he pursued these vigorously and ruthlessly, frequently disregarding the contrary advice and admonitions of U.S. officials in the process. This is not to say that U.S. policies in South Vietnam before or during 1963 were wise or justified--clearly, a great many U.S. decisions were deplorable and disastrous. But to portray Diem as a mere appendage of American strategic designs is to return to an outdated and reductive interpretation which doesn't hold up to scrutiny. If we are to really understand the historical roots of America's past and present foreign policy debacles in places such as Vietnam and Afghanistan, we need to move beyond such simplistic representations.

Cheers,

Edward Miller

Associate Professor of History

Dartmouth College

6107 Carson Hall, Hanover, NH 03755

Edward.Miller@Dartmouth.edu

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~history/faculty/emiller.html

From: mailto:vsg-bounces@mailman1.u.washington.edu <vsg-bounces@mailman1.u.washington.edu> on behalf of Marc J. Gilbert <mgilbert@hpu.edu>

Sent: Friday, November 01, 2013 7:50 PM

To: Daniel C. Tsang; Vietnam Studies Group

Subject: RE: [Vsg] From National Security Archive, Washington, D.C.: THE DIEM COUP AFTER 50 YEARS

When I was taking to Gloria Emerson on the phone in the mid-1990s, she told me that she was a few tables away from one in which Lucien Conein and several ARVN generals were having dinner, and overheard Conein yelling at them that if they would not “overthrow Diem, the U.S. would!” I asked her why she never made that conversation public. She replied that she was afraid of what Conein might do to her and that he would in any event deny he said it. When I asked her if I could quote her, she said “Not as long as Conein is alive.” He died in 1998, but by then I had already written what I wished on that subject (in what became “The Cost of Losing the Other War” in Why the North Won the Vietnam War) and had no reason to return to it (and Emerson was battling health problems that led her to take her own life in 2004).

Al McCoy, who is of the same opinion on the war as Emerson was, has just posted a piece at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/04/15-7 which runs in part “Lansdale's CIA understudy Lucien Conein met regularly with Saigon's generals to hatch an elaborate plot that was unleashed with devastating . . . ..”

I am not sure that throwing Lansdale in the mix is correct (I would ask Rufus Phillips first before making such as claim) nor do I see any of the above as conclusive, but my thanks to John and the National Security Archive for revisiting a subject that still has resonance today, not only because it is an opportune time in terms of its anniversary, but also because it serves as a cautionary tale alongside those of the Najibullahs of the past and the present and future Hamid Karzais of this world.

Thanks to the National Security Archive, it would at least appear that the adage “one should never settle affairs of state over a weekend,” was later advanced to explain the coup, holds even less water now than it did among the war critics of Emerson and McCoy’s generation.

Marc

mgilbert@hpu.edu

From: mailto:vsg-bounces@mailman1.u.washington.edu [mailto:vsg-bounces@mailman1.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Daniel C. Tsang

Sent: Friday, November 01, 2013 7:52 AM

To: Vietnam Studies Group

Subject: [Vsg] From National Security Archive, Washington, D.C.: THE DIEM COUP AFTER 50 YEARS

FYI...

-------- Original Message --------

Subject: THE DIEM COUP AFTER 50 YEARS

Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2013 08:47:01 -0400

From: National Security Archive <archive@GWU.EDU>

Reply-To: National Security Archive <archive@GWU.EDU>

To: NSARCHIVE@hermes.gwu.edu

THE DIEM COUP AFTER 50 YEARS JOHN F. KENNEDY AND SOUTH VIETNAM, 1963 National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 444 An update to EBB No. 302 Posted -- November 1, 2013 Edited by John Prados For more information contact:John Prados 202/994 7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu Washington, D.C., November 1, 2013 -- Continued investigation of the presidency of John F. Kennedy further strengthens the view that the origins of U.S. support for the coup which overthrew South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem 50 years ago today traces directly to President Kennedy, not to a "cabal" of top officials in his administration. As the documents posted by the National Security Archive in 2009 and new material posted today indicates, the often-told story that a "cabal" of senior officials, in combination with U.S. ambassador to Saigon Henry Cabot Lodge, were responsible for the coup is a myth. The 2009 posting (below) used the then-newly released audiotapes of President Kennedy's discussions on South Vietnam in late August 1963, combined with the declassified documents on the same meetings, and the State Department cables to Saigon bearing instructions for Ambassador Lodge, to show that Washington officials acted in unison in determining the U.S. approach. Additional evidence presented here supports this conclusion. The additional evidence combined with the 2009 evidence demonstrates: * Senior officials who, in a widely-held standard view, were supposed to have come together to excoriate the "cabal" for making an "end-run" around the bureaucracy in securing approval for the coup policy, did not act any differently after revelation of the maneuver than before. If anything, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), by the traditional account the most steadfast opponent of a coup, cooperated more closely with State Department members of the cabal after the NSC meeting where the coup policy had supposedly been denounced. At that meeting John McCone, the CIA director, said nothing. * The pro-coup sentiment at the administration's highest levels. Notes that national security assistant McGeorge Bundy wrote on a CIA report during a crucial 28 August 1963 meeting indicate the degree of pro-coup thinking. The notes include Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara's statement that the problem was "how to make the thing work" and Undersecretary of State George Ball's advice to "let it go as it is." According to Bundy's notes, the "worst thing we can do is leave it [the Saigon political situation] that way." The notes include a "Principle of Action," which was "we should never encourage them [the South Vietnamese generals] and then let it fail.". * No official disagreed with the observation, made by Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Roger A. Hilsman, at a National Security Council (NSC) meeting on August 26, 1963, that "we are all in agreement that Nhu must go," referring to Ngo Dinh Diem's brother and chief operative. President Kennedy wanted to guarantee a coup would work. "We just want to be sure," Kennedy said. * When the NSC decided, on August 27, to hold off on U.S. action, it was in possession of new information from the CIA that the South Vietnamese generals themselves had decided to delay their maneuver. The Kennedy administration used the additional time to take measures designed to ensure U.S. capability to act in the Saigon political situation. * All the U.S. measures taken subsequently-to include preparation of an evacuation plan for U.S. personnel in South Vietnam, positioning of U.S. Marines offshore for possible emergency intervention, actions to halt certain aid to Diem's forces, preparation of lists of South Vietnamese who could potentially substitute for Diem, and the dispatch of senior U.S. officials on a mission to Saigon to induce Diem to rid himself of Nhu-had been discussed in these initial NSC meetings. * The original cable of instructions to Ambassador Lodge had not been the product of an end-run. Michael Forrestal, NSC staffer for Southeast Asia, one of the supposed cabal, had given President Kennedy two opportunities to stop action on the initiative. He informed JFK that the cable was being drafted, even telling him that Lodge and his predecessor, Frederick Nolting had both advised a go-slow approach, and asked if the president wished to proceed. Forrestal then advised Kennedy when the draft had been completed, sent him the text, and told the president of what was being done to inform other U.S. agencies. CIA officers were heavily involved in all the action. Had Director McCone opposed the "cabal," this degree of cooperation would not be expected. Roger Hilsman's diary shows him meeting or in contact with CIA's Far East operations chief, William E. Colby, more than twice as often in the days after the August 26 NSC session as in the preceding week. In fact immediately after returning from the White House that day, Hilsman met with Colby at the State Department. The following day Colby returned to Hilsman's office with other CIA officers. The pattern of this August 27 contact strongly suggests that Colby rehearsed for Hilsman the briefing with which the CIA would open a new White House meeting that afternoon. The CIA also prepared a "Cast of Characters in South Vietnam," that was ready on August 28 and that it introduced during the briefing to the NSC that same day. The Agency provided this report in direct response to earlier conversations with President Kennedy, where one of the concerns had been that Washington did not know who was who in Saigon. National security adviser McGeorge Bundy annotated his copy of the paper and his notes should be viewed in conjunction with the audiotape and memos recording this meeting. President Kennedy resolved to modify his instructions to Ambassador Lodge, not to end U.S. backing for the South Vietnamese generals, but rather to ensure Washington lent the weight of its support to a coup that would succeed. The text below introduces this electronic briefing book in its original form, including notes on John F. Kennedy's audiotape recording system, the context in which Kennedy made his decision on the coup against Diem, and the byplay of the Washington deliberations. Check out today's posting at the National Security Archive's website - http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB444/ Find us on Facebook - definitefraudstart "http://www.facebook.com/"definitefraudend http://www.facebook.com/NSArchive Unredacted, the Archive blog - http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/ ________________________________________________________THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). 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