Rural Government Advisers in South Vietnam and the U.S. War Effort, 1962–1973
2021; The MIT Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1162/jcws_a_00984
ISSN1531-3298
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis
ResumoIn the mid-1960s, as the U.S. effort to bring widespread change to the social, economic, and political fabric of rural South Vietnam was getting under way, a representative of the United States Official Mission (USOM) in that country stumbled across evidence of large-scale corruption among officials of the South Vietnamese government (known in U.S. terminology as Government of Vietnam, or GVN). The USOM official was stationed in the Mekong Delta, which crammed some 70 percent of the South Vietnamese population into 25 percent of its land area and was a key base of support for the Communist insurgents that made up the National Liberation Front (NLF). The official worried that the corruption he had uncovered "had implications all over the Delta," but he did not feel he had the authority to intervene directly in the GVN's affairs. Instead he made discreet inquiries to try to learn the facts and report them to his superiors in USOM. One night, after being invited by the local chief of police to take a ride to inspect a pro-government outpost, he felt a gun pressed against the back of his neck. The police chief, far from wanting to uproot corruption, wanted to intimidate the U.S. official and put an end to his questions. Afterward, the U.S. mission in Saigon took no action against the police chief and instead offered to transfer the badly shaken representative to another province. This episode was typical of U.S. attempts to transform a foreign society in which loyalties were opaque, power dynamics were never quite as they seemed, and individual U.S. reformers often found themselves alone.1From the formation of an Office of Rural Affairs in 1962 until the final winding down of the U.S. presence in 1973, thousands of U.S. civilians traveled to the provinces and villages of South Vietnam. Acting as advisers to provincial and district governments throughout the country, they were supposed to strengthen these vital links between the GVN and the people of South Vietnam. From the time South Vietnam was formed in 1954, it had been a quintessential weak state. Unable to extract human resources and taxes from its own rural population, the GVN had been reliant on infusions of U.S. aid. The only way the South Vietnamese government could have overcome its reliance on what one historian has called its "American power source" was by developing administrative institutions that were both locally effective and responsive to the center.2 Working with—or sometimes against—their South Vietnamese counterparts, U.S. personnel were charged with imparting this type of government to the country.To explore the U.S. nation-building project in South Vietnam from the perspective of the thousands of advisers who worked in it, this article introduces a new source base into the literature: a collection of official debriefings of rural advisory personnel found in the Allan E. Goodman Papers at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.3 The debriefings were conducted in Honolulu at the Asia Training Center of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and include not only USAID officials but also personnel from other civilian agencies and U.S. military advisers who were involved in the rural advisory effort in South Vietnam. Although the interviews do not provide exhaustive coverage of field advisory personnel, they cover all regions of South Vietnam and stretch from 1963 to 1973. The issues discussed here reflect viewpoints found across a broad section of the debriefings. When taken together with archival material from other sources—including additional oral histories, personal letters, and government documents from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, the Vietnam Center and Archive at Texas Tech University, and the U.S. National Archives—this collection provides an unparalleled look into the challenges of nation-building as viewed from the ground up.The documents give new insight both into the nuances of U.S.-Vietnamese relations in the nation-building program and into the way the United States attempted to generate on a crash basis the thousands of skilled personnel needed to carry out such a program. Dispatched to a foreign country of which they knew little, advisers struggled with a lack of linguistic ability and an incomplete understanding of the political, cultural, and social context within which they operated. Training programs designed to overcome these problems proved of dubious use. Even if advisers had possessed perfect information, they had limited ways to act on it. The regime they were charged with reforming often worked at cross-purposes with U.S. goals. Although the United States fielded hundreds of thousands of soldiers in South Vietnam and unleashed massive firepower on the country, this formidable military might was of little use in achieving reform on the part of a corrupt and inefficient South Vietnamese government.This basic non-fungibility of military power meant that rural advisers could not achieve their goals by relying on the violence and coercion that one author has claimed was characteristic of the "real American war in Vietnam."4 Instead, faced with the necessity of nation-building in South Vietnam and the uselessness of military force for this task, the United States tried to construct a network of rural advisers knowledgeable about South Vietnam and skilled in the arts of persuasion, cajolery, and manipulation.The need to recruit, train, and deploy thousands of rural advisers as the war intensified—and to do so quickly—had ramifications both for the quality of advisers' preparation and the extent to which they worked according to a grand, unified plan. Historians of Cold War nation-building efforts have often focused on the efforts' ideological wellsprings, and students of the impact of modernization theory have examined thinkers and policymakers in the metropole while recognizing that more work remains to be done on how U.S. nation-building programs actually operated on the ground.5 Responding to that call, this article argues that "high modernist" projects—such as President Lyndon Johnson's plan for a "TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] on the Mekong"—were difficult to implement in the chaotic, confusing, and menacing environment that rural advisers confronted in Vietnam.6 Neither the GVN nor the U.S. personnel in South Vietnam were able to mobilize the power and resources for such sweeping transformations. Instead, when the nation-building effort is viewed from the perspective of the individual advisers, their defining experience was a lack of power—either the power to understand their environment or the power to change it. The same held true for the U.S. reform project in Vietnam writ large. Given these factors, the precise ideas and principles that underlay the design of U.S. reform efforts recede in importance because they could rarely be implemented as intended.7To relate the story of the U.S. rural advisory network in South Vietnam, the article proceeds in three sections. The first sketches the growth of the network aimed at solidifying the South Vietnamese regime by improving its ability to administer its rural population. This section demonstrates how the field advisory network grew from a small, jerry-rigged expedient into a vast bureaucracy consisting of specially trained personnel. The second section uses oral histories and archived training materials to examine the quality of the advisers' training and the impact it had on their ability to understand and influence rural South Vietnam. The final section then uses oral histories and a range of other archival materials to explore how effective U.S. personnel were at accomplishing this task once in the field.8U.S. personnel who worked as rural government advisers in South Vietnam were part of an effort that became larger, more militarized, more bureaucratized, and more urgent as U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War deepened. What started out in 1962 as a few dozen young men following the example of the Peace Corps and reading The Ugly American became by 1968 a force of thousands of older, more experienced, and more cynical civilian and military officials. What drove this transformation was the need for results in a nation-building effort intended to facilitate U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam by fostering a self-sufficient GVN. The odd mixture of Peace Corps idealists and hard-nosed Cold Warriors who coexisted in the rural advisory network in South Vietnam at various times during its history makes for a fascinating case study relevant to the broader history of Cold War development initiatives.Various U.S. agencies were active in South Vietnam before the Americanization of the war in 1965. These included the U.S. military under the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), the USAID officials whose mission made up USOM, State Department officers in the embassy, and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) personnel. None of these agencies had an extensive presence in the provinces and villages of South Vietnam, and they rarely worked together to make the best use of their resources. Although USOM had deployed personnel to the provinces to help with the resettlement of refugees from North Vietnam in the 1950s, President Ngo Dinh Diem, ever sensitive to Vietnamese nationalism, had forced their withdrawal in 1958.9 Some U.S. officials in USOM also resisted the idea that their personnel should be deployed into the provinces to support local government, believing instead that USAID should run a "traditional" mission that focused on the GVN's central political and economic policymaking institutions in Saigon. They felt that the guerrilla crisis could best be handled by the military.10 The MAAG remained focused on preparing South Vietnam's armed forces (Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or ARVN) to fight a conventional war. Finally, although the CIA saw counterinsurgency warfare and the strengthening of GVN local governments as within its sphere of competence, the agency's efforts amounted to not even two dozen officers by late 1964.11In 1962, the Kennedy administration gave impetus to a transformation of the USOM mission and the creation of the Office of Rural Affairs. That year, the administration dispatched former CIA officer Rufus Phillips to oversee the creation of a rural advisory effort. He soon requested that Albert S. Fraleigh, a USAID official, join him. Together, the two men, who had already worked on establishing a similar program in Laos, laid the foundations of what became the largest U.S. wartime nation-building effort in history. According to Fraleigh, the impetus for the expansion came in the aftermath of a visit to South Vietnam by the soon-to-be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Maxwell Taylor and deputy National Security Adviser Walt Rostow in late 1961. Fraleigh remembered that the goal of the new effort was to "help the government of Vietnam decentralize and become more effective and responsive to the needs of its people."12Phillips published a memoir of his experiences, but Fraleigh is less well-known to historians despite playing as crucial a role in the early leadership of the Office of Rural Affairs.13 Born in Toronto, he was a naturalized U.S. citizen who described himself as a connoisseur of "rough and wild areas." During World War II he served with the U.S. Navy in the Pacific, working to persuade Okinawan civilians to refrain from committing suicide after the Battle of Saipan and instead to accept U.S. resettlement assistance. Shipwrecked on Okinawa by a typhoon in October 1945 and living in poverty on the beaches until he could be recovered, Fraleigh remembers being struck by the "sad conditions" of the Okinawans. He recalled: "I felt that we couldn't have these two very different standards of living—what we enjoyed and what the Asian peoples were forced to accept—and have world peace very long." Driven more by this concern over North-South relations than by the incipient Cold War, he went to work for the United Nations (UN) relief program in Shanghai in 1946, when China was embroiled in a civil war. In Shanghai, Fraleigh formed a friendship with Zhou Enlai, who later became foreign minister of the newly formed People's Republic of China (PRC). During the civil war, Zhou was responsible for collecting supplies from the UN relief mission to distribute in areas under Chinese Communist rule. Following the entry of Communist forces into Shanghai in 1949, Fraleigh remained in the PRC for nearly two years and was harshly interrogated and subjected to Communist-mandated indoctrination sessions, which he later credited with honing his fluent Mandarin. After finally escaping the mainland through an appeal to Zhou, Fraleigh went to work with USAID in Taiwan in 1952 for nine-and-a-half years, during which time he met his Chinese wife. During a brief assignment in Laos, he met Phillips, and both worked to establish a field role for USAID in that country. When Phillips wanted to establish a similar program in South Vietnam, he summoned Fraleigh from Taiwan.14Determined to overhaul what they saw as a hidebound and traditionalist mission, Fraleigh and Phillips recommended that USOM representatives be stationed permanently in the provinces of South Vietnam to advise province chiefs on local officials and to act as a conduit through which the local actors could request resources from the United States. Although Diem had previously been opposed to having U.S. representatives influencing local governments in the provinces, the deepening guerrilla crisis and his trust in Phillips eased his misgivings.15 For the United States, the aim of the program was not only to attempt to reform local organs of GVN power and make them more responsive to the people of South Vietnam but also to allow U.S. personnel to gather more information about what was happening in the South Vietnamese countryside. This goal was even more important after the overthrow of the Diem regime in November 1963, when it became obvious that U.S. officials had been misled by the GVN over the true state of affairs in the countryside. One Saigon-based official who arrived in mid-1964 remembered that all the United States knew about GVN performance at that point was "what the government of Vietnam knew that we wanted [to know]." This information gap made it impossible to know whether U.S. policy was helping to win the war and build a sustainable GVN.16Phillips's and Fraleigh's efforts amounted to a revolution in the way USOM operated. When the pair arrived in Saigon, USOM had 120 employees, but only three were stationed outside the capital.17 The two men set about recruiting a new breed of provincial representatives who would act as external eyes and ears in the provinces and give advice to province chiefs on matters of civil government. Unable to elicit volunteers from within USOM, Phillips and Fraleigh recruited a diverse bunch of experts from outside the agency. The group included former military officers, personnel from other U.S. agencies, and Peace Corps volunteers who had served in other countries. The first provincial representative was a former International Voluntary Services volunteer who was dispatched to Phu Yen, a province on the central coast, in September 1962. Another early recruit was David Hudson, a free-lance journalist who was willing to have a try at rural reform. Duly hired, he was dispatched to the southern tip of the delta, a redoubtable NLF stronghold.18 Some of the U.S. personnel in the program went on to storied careers in the executive branch, including Richard Holbrooke, John Negroponte, Hamilton Jordan, and Anthony Lake.The eclectic background of recruits reflected the hostility that Fraleigh and Phillips felt toward the career USAID bureaucracy and their belief that amateur outsiders would be more pragmatic and energetic. This early group of young, idealistic representatives became known as "the Tigers" because of Fraleigh's stock motivational phrase, "You can do it, Tiger!"19 This phrase encapsulated Fraleigh's belief that energetic youngsters would outperform more experienced bureaucrats. He explicitly modeled what he wanted in a recruit on the young "BA generalists" favored by the Peace Corps, which Fraleigh later claimed to have had a hand in founding.20 Although some of the recruits had specific technical skills, especially in agriculture, most did not. As in the Peace Corps, Fraleigh and Phillips did not believe that representatives should go into the field with rigid and formulaic instructions; rather, they should listen to the problems of their local government counterparts and take a pragmatic approach to helping them. Fraleigh would later approvingly remember the "Peace Corps type of feeling" among his early recruits.21If what Fraleigh sought in the Tigers were young men animated by the ideals of the Peace Corps and possessing a globetrotting spirit and cultural curiosity similar to his own, he openly disdained the unadventurous and even downright cowardly attitude that he believed was typical of career USAID employees in South Vietnam. In 1966 he wrote in a letter to a friend: "Among so many of our civilians there is apathy, unwillingness to accept a hard life and hard conditions or to make prompt decisions. Yet, a few miles away, less lucky American men die in battle."22 Fraleigh compared the USOM employees' luxurious living conditions, lack of local understanding, and "big lunches" to the eponymous "ugly Americans" of Eugene Burdick and William Lederer's novel.23 By contrast, the Tigers received only a small per diem, could go months without seeing another Westerner, and were often exposed to danger. Unlike later generations of U.S. personnel in South Vietnam, they lived off the local economy rather than relying on lavish logistical support. If the career bureaucrats were the "ugly Americans," the Tigers were supposed to be real-life incarnations of Homer Atkins, the hero of the Burdick-Lederer book who lived plainly among the local people, not presuming to impose some set program of change and instead listening to their problems and helping solve them with adapted know-how.To the dismay of Fraleigh and Phillips, the "ugly Americans" did not take this attempt to revolutionize USOM lightly. In the summer of 1964, career USAID official James "Big Jim" Killen was appointed head of the mission. Killen questioned whether the provincial agents tended to sap the autonomy of GVN local government by "institutionalizing an excessive dependence on the USOM representative to do things they should be doing for themselves?" Apparently believing the answer to be yes, he accordingly took steps to reduce the importance and influence of USOM representatives by removing their ability to control the release of funds and commodities to provincial governments, which had formerly been used as a means of influence over their GVN counterparts.24 Killen was a traditionalist who was averse to the Peace Corps spirit of the Office of Rural Affairs and had little faith in young college generalists. He also believed that U.S. citizens should maintain a distance from the Vietnamese, and he even launched security investigations against some of the Tigers on the spurious grounds that they had homosexual relationships with the Vietnamese with whom they lived and worked in the provinces.25 At the same time, Killen took aim at the principle of giving provincial representatives a per diem to live off the local economy and insisted that they be provided with a higher standard of living as a means of inducing respect from the Vietnamese.In late 1964, Killen had Fraleigh recalled to Washington and ejected more than 30 of the Tigers, believing they should be replaced by older and more experienced advisers from within USAID. Fraleigh launched a bitter attack on Killen in interviews conducted as part of his debriefing, arguing that Killen's tenure marked the bureaucratization of the Office of Rural Affairs and a departure from the idealism and adaptability he believed were necessary for the success of the program.26 Fraleigh eventually resigned from USAID altogether in 1967, disgusted by what he viewed as the gutting of the program he had helped establish. Back in Washington, one Tiger wrote a ballad titled "The Legend of James D. Killen" to lament the changes. "The moral of the story, is plain with A-I-D," it read, "You don't work for the people, you work for bureaucracy!"27Alongside these disagreements within USAID were the inevitable tensions between any program based on the idealistic and non-prescriptive approach of the Peace Corps and The Ugly American and the grim necessity that drove a nation-building effort in a war zone. Secretary of State Dean Rusk had argued that the Peace Corps could not be viewed as "an instrument of foreign policy," because to do so would rob it of its usefulness "to foreign policy."28 Instead, the value of the Peace Corps supposedly lay in the image of thousands of idealistic young Americans toiling selflessly for the benefit of others rather than for themselves or their own country. The process itself was more important than any concrete results.29 The Peace Corps did not have a presence in South Vietnam precisely because of a desire to maintain the distinction pointed out by Rusk. However, the ranks of the Tigers included former Peace Corps volunteers who were ready to work more directly for the benefit of U.S. foreign policy aims. Some, as Fraleigh remembered approvingly, even hitchhiked their way to the country to sign up.30 But as the situation in South Vietnam deteriorated in the run-up to the Americanization of the war in 1965, many U.S. officials in South Vietnam began to question whether the attitude that these hitchhiking Tigers brought with them was commensurate to the task at hand. The core of their critique was that the rural advisory effort, which was so crucial for U.S. objectives in the war, was indisputably an instrument of U.S. foreign policy and hence could not operate the way the Peace Corps did. Most of all, it had to show results.As the stakes in South Vietnam grew higher, the Peace Corps mantra that there was no one better for an undefined task than an undefined person seemed less and less convincing as a way to deliver results.31 The growth in the size and importance of the rural advisory effort attracted the attention of other government agencies, causing many to question whether "BA generalists" in their 20s from the Peace Corps or IVS could effectively advise South Vietnamese province chiefs. In the mid-1960s almost all province chiefs were field-grade officers with decades of experience fighting the war and surviving the byzantine politics of the ARVN. "[Y]ou couldn't get a province chief to listen to a boy of 22 or 23," said one USOM official who served in South Vietnam in 1966, summing up a common perspective. "He knew he wouldn't have the experience."32 Tran Ngoc Chau, the chief of Kien Hoa Province, remembered that his reaction to seeing the freckled young American who was supposed to serve as his adviser was to think, "I don't need any babies down in this province; I've got enough problems."33 Long-serving agricultural experts in USOM agreed that young generalists without a technical or vocational background had little to offer.34 Although Fraleigh thought younger personnel were less rigid in their thinking and more open to foreign cultures, others detected a youthful arrogance. Some U.S. critics felt that the Tigers' zeal did not make up for their deficiency in maturity and cultural sensitivity, meaning they did not have "enough patience to find out what the situation is before they have all the answers."35 One adviser even wrote a ditty mocking the pretensions of his youthful colleagues. "Now Colonel, you're forty, I'm just twenty-two," it began, "but I've been to college, so I'll advise you"!36Killen's belief that the Office of Rural Affairs should not apply pressure on South Vietnamese local governments to force them to reform was also contrary to the general trend of U.S. activity in South Vietnam. His tenure coincided with the Americanization of the war in 1965, which ultimately transformed the rural advisory effort. Not only did the influx of U.S. troops and assets from 1965 onward provide an as-yet-undreamed-of level of potential resources to direct toward aiding South Vietnamese local governments, it also dramatically raised the stakes in the conflict. Simply hoping that the GVN would start acting properly was no longer sufficient when U.S. soldiers were dying to protect the Saigon regime. Furthermore, the eventual withdrawal of these soldiers presupposed that the GVN would attain the effectiveness and autonomy needed to stand up to the Vietnamese Communists on its own. This in turn was necessary for the United States to declare victory in a war in which its own credibility was now at stake. "If we lose in Vietnam," the authors of an influential U.S. Army report commented, "we pay the price no matter how carefully American officials rationalize the need to respect Vietnamese sovereignty."37The strategic need to strengthen the GVN prompted a series of reorganizations of the rural advisory effort by the Johnson administration.38 The first step was the formation of the Office of Civil Operations (OCO) in late 1966, which created a much larger U.S. presence in each locality. Under this new setup, about half a dozen civilians served under a province representative. The few Tigers left in the country found themselves no longer qualified for such a senior position, and those who were not forced to leave became assistants and deputies to the new breed of representatives.39 Where the Tigers remained, they were submerged into larger organizations. The new province representatives typically were experienced USAID employees, Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) with decades of experience, or senior ex-military personnel. Still unhappy with the rural advisory effort, the Johnson administration took the dramatic move in May 1967 of placing it under the auspices of the military with the creation of the Office of Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS). Although OCO was still headed by a civilian, roughly half of the field personnel in the rural advisory network were drawn from the military from this point onward. The transfer of jurisdiction to the military had become inevitable given the vast quantity of U.S. military personnel and resources pouring into South Vietnam from 1965 on, compared to the relatively paltry contributions of the civilian agencies. It also represented an attempt by the Johnson administration to kick-start the program and enhance its ability to influence local governments in South Vietnam. Henceforth, the chief adviser in each province was known not as a provincial representative but as a province senior adviser (PSA), and each district of the province likewise had a district senior adviser (DSA). At the time CORDS was created, roughly half of PSAs and nearly all DSAs were drawn from the military.The new titles of the organizations and postings reflected a new focus on advising and influencing the GVN at all levels. CORDS personnel lacked the freewheeling autonomy of the Tigers, but they were united into one organization that could apply pressure up and down the GVN hierarchy. Many advisers believed this was the only way to achieve results. "The guy that's operating as a representative of the United States government to the senior representative of the Vietnamese government," commented one USAID official who served in 1967, "packs a lot more weight with his suggestions than some guy who identifies himself with the Peace Corps."40 Under CORDS, U.S. provincial organizations were about 30 to 70 individuals strong, and the district teams subordinate to them were about eight strong. The PSA was in charge of a large organization that included U.S. personnel, local Vietnamese, and third-country nationals.Although historians have tended to regard CORDS as an all-American organization, it in fact by 1970 employed more Vietnamese and third-country nationals than it did Americans.41 Many of the non-Americans worked in administrative support roles, but two elite groups of them worked for CORDS. The first were English-speaking Filipinos who were hired by USAID as community development officers (CDOs). The Filipinos served longer tours than their U.S. counterparts, and some advisers saw them as providing vital continuity and community development expertise that they had gained working in their own country.42 The Tigers had begun to employ CDOs in 1964, and by the late 1960s many of them had been in the country for four or five years. By May 1969, 106 CDOs were working in South Vietnam, averaging more than two per province.43 "It was what I really wanted to get into when I got over there," remembered one U.S. adviser who arrived in 1967, "but I found that the Filipinos really have it sewed up. You just about have to be a Filipino to get the job."44 While keeping would-be U.S. community workers out of a job, the CDOs had linguistic and cultural skills that were highly prized by the PSAs for whom they worked. "Area specialists," another holdover from the Tigers, constituted the second important group of non-Americans working for CORDS. PSAs employed these locally hired Vietnamese as translators, guides, and fixers, as well as executive agents who could be sent to pressure lower-level GVN officials and integrate into Vietnamese rural life in a way that Americans could not.CORDS existed from 1967 to 1973, reaching peak size from 1969 to 1971. As the United States began to withdraw from South Vietnam under President Richard Nixon and the policy of Vietnamization proceeded, the organization shrank rapidly in 1971, undermining its influence. At the same time, its work became all the more important as
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