A Separate Peace?

During September and October 1963, an Indian diplomat named Ramchundur Goburdhun hosted a series of private dinners at his residence in Saigon. As chairman of the International Control Commission for Indochina (ICC), Goburdhun knew many foreign ambassadors and government officials in South Vietnam. He was also on good terms with Ho Chi Minh and other senior North Vietnamese leaders, whom he met regularly during official ICC visits to Hanoi. But his closest Vietnamese friend was Ngo Dinh Nhu, whom he had known since the 1930s, when both men were students in France. In Saigon, Goburdhun and his wife socialized frequently with Nhu’s family; they also arranged dinner parties for Nhu at their home.

While many of these gatherings were designed simply to provide Nhu with a chance to converse informally with a particular diplomat or foreign official, the sessions Goburdhun arranged during the fall of 1963 had a different purpose. According to an ARVN captain who worked on Nhu’s security detail, Goburdhun and Nhu were joined at these dinners by just one other guest, a Vietnamese man of medium build with an “intellectual” demeanor. The captain never learned the mysterious guest’s name, but he noticed that the chest pocket of the man’s suit bore a patch with a yellow star on a red field— the flag of the DRV. Although the captain was not privy to the conversations that took place during the dinners, he later overheard Nhu explain to an associate that he had decided to meet with a communist representative because “the Americans are giving us a lot of trouble.” “The northerners are contemplating peace with us,” Nhu remarked. “We should talk peace with the north for a period of time and see what happens.”

Is the ARVN captain’s story credible? Were the fiercely anticommunist Ngo brothers really “talking peace” with their communist archenemies? Throughout the summer and fall of 1963, Saigon was rife with rumors that the palace was negotiating with North Vietnam. Ngo Dinh Nhu encouraged these rumors by confirming that he had received messages from Hanoi via secret channels and by telling U.S. officials and others that he had met with NLF leaders. But because Nhu refused to disclose any details about these exchanges, his statements only deepened the mystery. Years later, several South Vietnamese reported that Nhu had in fact held a series of conclaves with enemy leaders. But none of these accounts has ever been convincingly corroborated by other sources; moreover, many of them were clearly colored by hindsight and by their authors’ latter-day agendas. For example, the story of the ARVN captain and the alleged meetings at Goburdhun’s house did not appear until 1971, in a sensational book about the Diem regime entitled How Does One Kill a President? Because the book was coauthored by Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen, many readers found its claims dubious.

Since 1963, assessments of the conflicting and fragmentary evidence about the alleged contacts between the Ngos and communist representatives have focused on two opposite theories. The first theory holds that the brothers were never serious about an accommodation with their communist rivals. Instead, they aimed to use the threat of a deal with Hanoi to gain leverage with Washington. The second theory suggests that by 1963 the Ngo brothers were so exasperated with the United States that they were ready to make a separate peace with their enemies. In some versions of this theory, Diem and Nhu were planning a dramatic volte-face in which they would sever ties to Washington, adopt a neutralist foreign policy, and share power with the NLF. According to this view, the Ngos’ secret plan was a lost chance for peace that might have prevented the post-1963 escalation of the Vietnam War if only they had lived to implement it.

The arguments over these two theories have largely overlooked a third possibility: Diem and Nhu might have viewed talks with communist leaders neither as a bargaining ploy nor as an opportunity for a compromise peace, but as a chance to proclaim victory over the NLF. Although many Vietnamese and Americans perceived the regime to be lurching toward its own destruction during the summer and fall of 1963, Diem and Nhu did not. By early September, they believed they had crushed the Buddhist movement and checked the generals’ coup plot. They were also optimistic about their ability to “manage” Henry Cabot Lodge and repair their strained relations with Washington. Most important of all, they were firmly persuaded that the Strategic Hamlet Program was working and that the NLF, as Nhu put it, had been “practically defeated.” Given these convictions— and given their faith in their ability to guide Vietnam to its national destiny— it is likely that the brothers would have treated any meetings with communist officials as a prelude to Hanoi’s capitulation. The Ngo brothers had a plan to end the Vietnam War in 1963, but neutralism and compromise were not at all what they had in mind.

On its face, the notion that Diem and Nhu would ever agree to parley with VWP leaders appears utterly inconsistent with their reputations as staunch anticommunists. Since 1954, Diem had seemed determined to have no truck with North Vietnam. In addition to refusing to collaborate with the DRV on national reunification elections, he had repeatedly rebuffed Hanoi’s repeated proposals for talks on issues such as family reunions and postal exchanges. This seemingly absolutist position, along with his frequent denunciations of the “error” of neutralism, hardly seemed to bode well for rapprochement with the north.

But Diem had not always been so categorical in his dealings with communist leaders. Following his famous 1946 meeting with Ho Chi Minh, Diem remained in contact with senior Viet Minh leaders for at least two years; his interlocutors at that time included Pham Van Dong, later the DRV premier. While Diem’s main objective was to keep the communists guessing about his ultimate objectives, he and Nhu appear to have come away from these exchanges with at least a modicum of respect for their rivals. One of Nhu’s associates remarked privately in 1963 that “the ties between Ho and Dong on the one side and Nhu and Diem on the other are not the relations between enemies, but the ties between friend-enemies [amis-ennemis].”  Whatever reasons the Ngos had for avoiding dialog with Hanoi after 1954, they were not avoiding it on principle.

If and when the Ngos were ready to talk, communist leaders were ready to hear what they had to say. In the years after Diem became leader of South Vietnam, Hanoi had floated the possibility of dialog with the Saigon government on several occasions. In 1955, DRV officials tried to coax Diem into negotiations on nationwide elections by offering to make him the vice chairman of a Vietnamese unity government. Although Diem rejected this, North Vietnamese leaders left open the possibility of future discussions. In mid-1962, communist officials tried to signal Diem that negotiations were possible under certain conditions. In July, the NLF stated it would work with “concerned parties” to bring about the neutralization of South Vietnam— an apparent softening of its previous stance that Diem would have to be removed from power before a neutral government could be established in the south. Two months later, Ho made a point of referring to Diem as a “patriot” during a meeting with ICC representatives in Hanoi. “Shake hands with him for me if you see him,” Ho told Goburdhun. In May 1963, Ho publicly declared that a ceasefire and talks with Diem’s government were possible once the United States withdrew its military personnel from South Vietnam. It is likely, of course, that Ho hoped his remarks would exacerbate U.S.-RVN tensions. But even if this was the case, his comments still suggested that some DRV officials were open to talks with Saigon under certain conditions.

The signals emanating from Hanoi during 1962 and early 1963 marked an important preliminary step toward an RVN-DRV dialog. But it fell to foreign diplomats to try to open the first actual channel of communication. Roger Lalouette, the French ambassador to South Vietnam, had been quietly exploring the prospects for such a channel since his arrival in Saigon several years earlier. Diem dismissed Lalouette’s initial inquiries about talks with Hanoi, declaring that it was “too soon for an exchange of views.”  But in the spring of 1963, Lalouette concluded that Diem’s growing frustration with his U.S. allies, in tandem with Hanoi’s recent declarations about a possible ceasefire, had opened a window of opportunity. A north-south dialog, Lalouette believed, could lead to the neutralization of the two Vietnams and to the expulsion of U.S. forces from the south. It might also allow France to regain a measure of the influence in Indochina it had lost after 1954. Throughout the spring and summer, Lalouette worked behind the scenes to facilitate an exchange of messages.

Lalouette’s unlikely collaborator was Miecyzslaw Maneli, a Polish academic who had recently become Warsaw’s representative on the ICC. Maneli shared Lalouette’s interest in an RVN-DRV dialog; moreover, his ICC duties allowed him to shuttle between Saigon and Hanoi. In the north, Maneli spoke often with Pham Van Dong, who told him that Diem would eventually have no choice but to participate in an international conference on the neutralization of Vietnam. In May 1963, Dong asked Maneli to inform Saigon that the DRV wanted to establish cultural and trade ties with the RVN, including the exchange of southern rice for northern coal. Since the Polish Foreign Ministry had ordered Maneli not to try to mediate between Hanoi and Saigon, he was initially reluctant to do as Dong asked. But in July, after DRV leaders offered to recognize Diem as the head of a neutralist southern government, Maneli decided to seek an audience with Nhu, whom he had not previously met.

Lalouette and other European diplomats in Saigon arranged for Maneli to be introduced to Nhu during an official reception on August 25. A week later, Nhu invited Maneli to Gia Long Palace for a private meeting. Except for a few strange turns in conversation— at one point, Maneli was stunned to hear Nhu declare that the Strategic Hamlet Program would fulfill Marx’s famous prediction about the withering away of the state— the session was cordial and uneventful. Nhu claimed to be “studying” Ho Chi Minh’s recent ceasefire proposal and denied that he had entered into direct talks with the north. He also declared that his long-term objective was an “independent Vietnam” that would be neutral and have no foreign troops on its soil.

Meanwhile, Lalouette was working with his colleagues in Paris to secure broader international support for the idea of a neutral South Vietnam. On August 29— just four days before Maneli’s private session with Nhu— the French president, Charles de Gaulle, announced that his government was ready to host talks on Vietnam’s reunification and neutralization. Although lacking in specifics, de Gaulle’s statement was widely viewed in Washington and elsewhere as a criticism of U.S. efforts to maintain South Vietnam as an anticommunist bulwark. Lalouette was optimistic that de Gaulle’s offer would encourage Diem and Nhu to respond favorably to Maneli and “to demand the withdrawal of the Americans.”

But the Ngo brothers had no interest in pursuing de Gaulle’s neutralization proposal. They also rejected Maneli as an intermediary. Although Maneli later insisted that Diem and Nhu had embraced his offer to act as a go-between with Hanoi, his secret reports to his superiors in Warsaw tell a different story. In those reports, he noted that Nhu had avoided discussing the de Gaulle initiative. Nhu also failed to offer any proposals that Maneli could take back to Hanoi— possibly because he hoped “that the bridges with the U.S. have not yet been burned.”

The Lalouette-Maneli initiative was effectively killed in mid-September, when Nhu revealed it to the conservative American journalist Joseph Alsop. According to Nhu’s version of events, Maneli had delivered a message from Hanoi that “begged” for ceasefire talks. Nhu piously insisted that he turned down this request, even though Maneli implored him to reconsider. Because of the delicate position in which Maneli had placed himself— his meeting with Nhu lay outside the scope of his ICC duties and violated his official instructions from Warsaw— Alsop’s column greatly embarrassed the diplomat. His furious superiors insisted that he publish a formal denial. The hapless Maneli later admitted that he had been manipulated, noting ruefully that Nhu “was playing on many instruments at the same time.”

Nhu’s rejection of Maneli’s proposals stands in stark contrast to the interest the Ngos displayed in a second possible channel of communication with Hanoi. The idea for this second channel apparently originated with Goburdhun, the ICC chair. Like Lalouette and Maneli, Goburdhun believed that recent developments in Vietnam had made a neutralization deal possible. However, he did not expect that the Ngos would be compelled to make a deal with Hanoi because the war was going badly for the RVN; on the contrary, he had been convinced by his friend Nhu that the Strategic Hamlet Program was a success and that DRV leaders realized that their plans to conquer the south had failed. Goburdhun also believed Nhu’s assurances about expelling all U.S. military advisors from South Vietnam and adopting a neutralist foreign policy. Under these conditions, Goburdhun concluded, DRV leaders would have no choice but to come to terms with Saigon. To facilitate this outcome, he proposed that the two governments hold secret talks in New Dehli, where both maintained diplomatic missions.

Diem and Nhu’s choice to represent the RVN in the proposed New Dehli talks was Tran Van Dinh, a veteran South Vietnamese diplomat. A native of Hue, Dinh was a loyal Diem supporter and a longtime Can Lao member. But he was also a former Viet Minh supporter who had once helped to smuggle weapons to revolutionary forces in Laos during the early stages of the war against the French. Dinh eventually rallied to the Bao Dai government and then rose rapidly through the South Vietnamese diplomatic hierarchy after 1954, thanks to his close ties to the Ngos. He later claimed that a DRV diplomat had approached him in Burma in 1958 to discuss forming a committee on Vietnamese reunification. Nothing came of the proposal, but Diem apparently deemed it significant that the DRV had chosen to communicate through Dinh.

When Goburdhun put forward his proposal for Indian-brokered talks in the spring of 1963, Tran Van Dinh was serving at the RVN embassy in Washington. According to Dinh, Diem summoned him to Saigon in September and again in October to discuss the planned talks in New Dehli, which were set to begin in mid-November. “While Hanoi wants a period of real nonalignment, we can profit from it too,” Diem told him. Although Diem’s remarks to Dinh cannot be confirmed, other sources show that Diem issued orders for Dinh’s transfer from Washington to the RVN mission in India.

Some authors have treated Dinh’s story as proof that the Ngo brothers were planning to turn their backs on Washington and forge a separate peace with North Vietnam. But this interpretation is undermined by Dinh’s account of Diem’s instructions to him. According to Dinh, Diem told him in late October that his first task was to return to Washington, where he would announce that the RVN government and Ambassador Lodge had negotiated agreements regarding “changes in both personnel and policies.” However, Dinh was not authorized to provide any actual details about these changes— not even to President Kennedy. Instead, he was to proceed directly to New Dehli, where he would begin talks with DRV representatives on “constructive matters such as trade relations with the South and stopping infiltrations.” The mysterious quality of these instructions aside, they are not consistent with the idea that Diem was anticipating either a rupture in his relations with Washington or an agreement on neutralization with Hanoi. It is more likely that he saw the New Dehli channel as a way to explore the DRV negotiating position while Saigon continued to repair its damaged ties to Washington.

Even if Diem and Nhu were planning to use the New Delhi channel to communicate with Hanoi, they likely did not expect to rely solely on that connection. The Ngos usually preferred to handle high-stakes negotiations with their rivals themselves rather than delegating responsibility to subordinates. As we have seen, the brothers typically viewed such face-to-face negotiations as a means to co-opt, isolate, or otherwise manipulate their rivals. It was precisely because Diem and Nhu believed so strongly in their ability to impose their will on others that they would have insisted on being personally involved in some way in any discussions with communist leaders.

On several occasions during 1963, Nhu told Vietnamese and foreign officials that he had been meeting covertly with prominent NLF leaders. According to him, these discussions took place in his office at Gia Long Palace, under a flag of truce. In separate conversations with Nolting and with British officials, Nhu explained that he had been seeking to persuade revolutionaries of the “Dien Bien Phu generation” to defect to the RVN. He denied that these contacts constituted a “secret channel” to senior DRV leaders in Hanoi; they were, he insisted, an attempt to weaken the NLF by recruiting some of its most capable commanders.

While Nhu claimed that his encounters with NLF leaders took place in Saigon, other sources refer to clandestine meetings elsewhere in South Vietnam. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, South Vietnamese journalists and former Diem government insiders described ultrasecret sessions that allegedly brought Nhu face-to-face with some of the VWP’s most senior cadres, including members of its Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN). In some accounts, the clandestine conferences were held in remote mountain or jungle locations, so that Nhu could attend under the pretense of a hunting trip. In other versions, the rendezvous took place in Hue, Dalat, or Phan Rang. Nhu’s interloctutors were variously identified as Nguyen Van Linh, secretary of COSVN; VWP Politburo member Pham Hung; and Tran Buu Kiem, the NLF’s future commissioner of foreign affairs.

Unfortunately, none of the stories detailing these encounters has ever been convincingly corroborated by other sources. Until the relevant VWP and DRV archival materials are made available to scholars, key questions about these meetings— including whether they actually took place, who participated in them, and what was said— will remain unanswered. It is highly unlikely, however, that the Ngo brothers ever intended to use these meetings as an opportunity to pursue the kind of neutralization agreement that communist leaders wanted to discuss. As their own words make clear, Diem and Nhu were convinced that they were en route to victory. Negotiations would serve not as an avenue to compromise but as a means to compel the DRV to accept their terms for peace. Nhu expected the war to be “greatly advanced” in favor of the RVN by the end of 1963, at which point Saigon and Washington would be able to negotiate with Hanoi “from a position of strength.” Given this attitude, any talks between Nhu and his communist counterparts that did take place in 1963 were not likely to be productive.

Of the many ex post facto attempts to explain Nhu’s thinking about matters of war and peace during 1963, one of the most illuminating was provided by the woman who knew him best. In an interview with a Paris newspaper in February 1964, Madame Nhu looked back on the events of the previous year. In characteristically bombastic fashion, she denounced those Vietnamese and Americans who had plotted against the Ngos and swore to take vengeance against them. (The family of Henry Cabot Lodge, she predicted, would be punished “until the sixth generation” for his scheming.) Her interviewer was surprised, however, when Madame Nhu readily admitted that her husband had been in contact with NLF leaders in the months before his death. The insurgents had initiated these contacts, she asserted, because they realized that the Strategic Hamlet Program was succeeding and the Ngos were only “two fingers away from victory.” The enemy “knew that we could not only corner him but also bleed him white,” she boasted. Yet she also insisted that Nhu’s meetings with enemy leaders had been conducted in a “fraternal” spirit and that thousands of insurgents had accepted the government’s offer of amnesty. In fact, she remarked, Nhu was so admired by the guerrillas that he had considered going to the maquis to rally them in person.

In hindsight, Madame Nhu’s claims about mass defections and her husband’s popularity with his enemies seem far-fetched, if not downright delusional. But her comments were perfectly in tune with the triumphalist thinking inside Gia Long Palace during 1963. The Ngos believed that their vision of rural social transformation, embodied in the Strategic Hamlet Program, was being realized in the South Vietnamese countryside. They also believed that the ARVN had gained the upper hand over the NLF and that the insurgency was on the verge of defeat. They therefore expected their communist enemies to sue for peace. This expectation only reinforced their conviction that that they would prevail over their other opponents inside South Vietnam, including the Buddhists and the generals, and in their ongoing struggles with the United States. Such thinking did not incline the Ngos to pay heed to those who warned that the fall of their regime was imminent. Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu had never previously opted for compromise in a situation in which they perceived a chance to win outright victory. They were not about to do so now.

Miller, Edward (2013). Misalliance (pp. 302-311). Harvard University Press.