On May 11, 1962, a forty-two-year-old American named Albert J. Fraleigh stepped off a cargo plane in Saigon. This was only his latest posting in a long career for the U.S. government and the United Nations. In World War II, Fra-leigh had supervised the construction of airfields in Alaska and on the Aleu-tian Islands before working as part of U.S. Navy civic action teams persuading Japanese civilians to refrain from committing suicide after the defeat of their armed forces on Saipan and Okinawa. Managing UN port facilities in Shanghai after the war, Fraleigh become a close friend of future Chinese Communist premier Zhou Enlai. When the Communists took over the city in 1949, he was held under house arrest and harshly interrogated, escaping only with the aid of Zhou. Fraleigh then moved to Taiwan, where he worked for an American aid mission and became an adviser to future Taiwanese president Chiang Ching-kuo. Recognized as a result of this experience as the U.S. Agency for Interna-tional Development’s “most experienced man in civic action, rural develop-ment and Asian communism,” Fraleigh had now been summoned to Saigon to help strengthen Diem’s embattled government. It was his first time in South Vietnam.73
When Fraleigh arrived in South Vietnam in May 1962, the Diem regime was floundering. The Communist movement had reconstituted its politico-military infrastructure and spread its influence across much of South Vietnam, and was taking the armed offensive. A few weeks after Fraleigh arrived, NLF attacks reached an all-time high, targeting “health workers, teachers, and minor officials as well as village guards, local militia and the regular military.” These attacks on anyone associated with the regime were forcing the retreat of GVN authority from much of the countryside, prompting military counteroffensives that did little to restore it. American officials were anticipating a long war against what they conceded to be “experienced, well-organized, and competently led guerrilla fighters.”74
In response to this challenge, Fraleigh and his partner, a former CIA officer named Rufus Phillips, created the framework around which the wartime nation-building effort would eventually be built.75 In late 1961, President Kennedy had dispatched former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Maxwell Taylor and deputy national security adviser Walt Rostow to the country to assess the U.S.
effort there. One of their recommendations was for a new push to develop links between the Diem regime and the rural population by strengthening and legiti-mizing local governments. The United States Operations Mission (USOM) was to be the vessel for this effort, and Fraleigh and Phillips—who had worked on a similar program in Laos—its catalysts.76 As so often throughout the war, this
new nation-building push accompanied an increase in the U.S. military effort.
The Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) was created in 1962 to coordinate military activity in the country, and American military advisers were assigned to all ARVN units of battalion size and above, and also to South Viet-namese province chiefs.77
The extension of a permanent official American presence into the South Viet-namese countryside, where it would remain until the American withdrawal in 1973, dates from the Taylor-Rostow report. Although USOM had deployed per-sonnel to the provinces to help with the resettlement of refugees from North Vietnam in the 1950s, Diem had forced its withdrawal in 1958.78 It was only the deteriorating military situation that led the president to reverse his stance. From late 1961 onward, the number of Americans deployed throughout the coun-try increased steadily, their involvement in its political life growing along with the military presence. Phillips and Fraleigh’s USOM personnel jostled for attention alongside Americans from other agencies, especially the CIA, who also began to become increasingly involved in rural affairs in the Diem period. This diffusion of agencies led William Colby to complain that Americans operated in
“autonomous baronies,” with little coordination between their activities. “Like the blind men around the elephant” he later wrote, “the [Americans] . . . gathered about the Diem Government, each dealing with different pieces and sections of its problems and defining the animal accordingly.”79 This was problematic not only because it made it difficult for the Americans to speak with a single voice to the GVN, but also because each American agency had its own ideas about what that voice should be saying. This diffusion of effort and lack of agreement over the correct approach to nation building would continue to afflict U.S. efforts until the creation of CORDS.
The Washington policy makers who directed this nation-building effort provided little guidance on specifics. The Kennedy administration was full of officials who claimed expertise on guerrilla warfare and nation building in the abstract without having much knowledge of Vietnam in particular. One such official was Roger Hilsman, a close Kennedy adviser who served as head of the State Department’s intelligence arm and afterward as assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs. During World War II, Hilsman participated in guerrilla operations behind Japanese lines in Burma. He then returned to the United States and obtained a PhD in international relations before holding a series of academic posts. He met Kennedy while working in a senior position at the Congressional Research Service and was brought into the new administration in February 1961.
Regarded as an expert on guerrilla warfare because of his service in Burma, Hils-man was called on to contribute to the administration’s understanding of the emerging insurgency in Vietnam.
In a major report in 1962, Hilsman assured his colleagues that the basic desire of the peasants was that the GVN provide “security” against the NLF. But this was a simplistic view that ignored the extent to which many Vietnamese peas-ants viewed the GVN and not the NLF as the primary threat to their security and socioeconomic interests. A misunderstanding of how deeply the conflict was rooted in Vietnam’s colonial legacies also led American officials to produce wildly inaccurate estimates of the strength of NLF support. Hilsman wrote that the organization had only one hundred thousand “supporters and sympathiz-ers,” but both the documented reach of the Viet Minh and the fact that the GVN claimed to be killing twenty thousand members of the NLF a year indicated this number was undoubtedly too low.80
Lacking clear guidance from Washington, American nation builders diverged in their approaches. American attempts at nation building in South Vietnam in this period can be split into three broad categories. The first category of project addressed itself to the central institutions of the Saigon regime. These nation builders took a top-down perspective, working on national plans for internal security forces, the training of civil servants, and the running of government min-istries. Personnel concerned with these issues were drawn from the U.S. Agency for International Development (known locally as the United States Operations Mission, or USOM) and from a group of experts and technicians from Michigan State University (MSU) who operated under a contract with USOM. Diem had met the leader of the MSU group, Wesley Fishel, while in exile and had subse-quently requested that Fishel head up a program of technical assistance to GVN ministries. The MSU group provided advice on public and police administration to the regime, as well as helping to run the NIA.
The MSU team’s ability to have a meaningful impact on nation build-ing was limited both by the narrowness of its aims and the approach that it brought to its work. MSU team members were experts in public administra-tion in the abstract and not Vietnam itself; furthermore, their expertise lay specifically in Western public administration. This led them to attempt to graft lessons from the United States inappropriately onto the Vietnamese context, as historian Jessica Elkind has shown.81 Dang, who frequently received their advice, complained that although their reports “were written by experts, some of whom had long practical administrative experience, in most cases their value was largely academic, because they brought out theoretical and techni-cal problems, and lacked factual knowledge of the Vietnamese context.”82 The MSU team was constantly frustrated by its inability to persuade the Diem regime to introduce what it considered professional standards into the GVN civil service. Eventually, after a falling out with Fishel, Diem ejected MSU from the country altogether.
The second group of Americans who worked to strengthen the Diem regime were CIA officials who worked with province chiefs to attempt to increase the efficiency and legitimacy of GVN rule. Agency personnel had a keen interest in what they called “political action,” the countering of the Communist movement’s rural apparatus and the building of support for the GVN in its place. Colby, who served as deputy chief and then chief of station in Saigon between 1959 and 1962, was typically bullish about the CIA’s expertise in this area. “Uniquely in the American bureaucracy,” he later wrote, “the CIA understood the necessity to combine political, psychological, and paramilitary tools to carry out a strategic concept of pressure on an enemy or to strengthen an incumbent.” Colby and his colleagues closely studied both the deficiencies of the GVN and the organi-zational strengths of the Communist movement and modeled their remedies accordingly. Colby believed that the GVN needed to copy the Communist model by “organizing the population into political groups, articulating a cause that would attract their participation and support, developing leadership and cohe-sion at the local rural community level, etc.”83 This was in contrast to MSU, who focused on pushing the central regime in Saigon into economic and political reforms. Instead, CIA officers began to work with local South Vietnamese offi-cials on a joint rural nation-building agenda.
Tran Ngoc Chau, a former Viet Minh battalion commander and political offi-cer who had rallied to the anti-Communist cause, did more to influence the CIA’s efforts than any other individual. Born in 1924 into a mandarin family in Hue, Chau had joined the Viet Minh to oppose the Japanese occupation of Vietnam in the 1940s and then participated in the war against the French. Taken in by the Viet Minh’s front policy, it was only as he was promoted through the ranks that he came to understand—and despise—the Communist ideology that lay at the core of the movement. After being the subject of repeated unsuccessful attempts to recruit him into the Communist Party, he defected to Bao Dai’s pro-French government in 1949. He transferred his allegiance to the GVN when it was created in 1955, and by the early 1960s had attained the rank of major in the ARVN.84
In 1962, Diem appointed Chau chief of Kien Hoa, a province in the Mekong Delta. Chau’s sympathetic participation in the Viet Minh had given him a largeness of vision that was unusual among other individuals in his class, as Americans who met him soon realized. Chau had seen firsthand how the Communists operated and how they responded to the genuine grievances of the rural population to win support for their movement. While he had been turned off when he realized that the Communists ultimately planned to establish a “dictatorship of the proletariat”
that would abolish all property and religion—something rarely mentioned in their propaganda to the peasantry—he continued to see the value of their approach to
local mobilization and politics. He also felt sympathy and “compassion” for rural villagers who felt it necessary to take up arms against their own government, “peo-ple whose duties were to provide them security and peace.” This “villager-enemy”
was one who should be won over to the GVN’s cause rather than targeted in a brutal security crackdown, as the Diem regime did. “Since I always preferred to win over a living person than a dead one,” Chau later wrote, “my ideas basically were aimed at converting the enemy, thus eliminating the need to kill him.”85
To convert the enemy, Chau drew heavily on his experiences in the Viet Minh.
His nation-building idea was based around the concept of the cadre, and what Stuart Methven, one of the Americans who learned from him, would later call
“parapolitics.” In the Viet Minh and the NLF, the word “cadre” (can bo) referred to an operative in a revolutionary organization, not necessarily a party member.
While cadres had different functions, Chau focused on those through whom the Communist movement attempted to solidify its influence among the rural popu-lation. Mobile groups of specialist agitprop cadres toured the countryside, mak-ing contact with sympathetic villagers and combinmak-ing to orchestrate the over-throw of the old village authorities and the installation of ones allied with the front. They had been instrumental in consolidating the revolutionary wave that swept South Vietnam in the early 1960s. Because of their temporary but decisive political presence, Methven referred to their activity as parapolitical, or “politi-cal action.”86 A witness to the same methods when they had been deployed on behalf of the Viet Minh, Chau now hoped to replicate them for the benefit of the GVN. “It was, in my understanding,” he later wrote, “a revolutionary process to build the power from the grassroot peasants to change the colonial and mandarin system that most of the Vietnamese leaders, military and civilian inherited.”87
Chau set about recruiting mobile cadre teams from among the local peasantry.
This made a stark contrast to Diem’s rural mobilization teams which were usually composed of moonlighting civil servants.88 Chau’s cadres formed what he called Census-Grievance (CG) teams. Like the NLF agitprop teams, they roamed the vil-lages of the province, inquiring about rural grievances. Chau was adamant that the teams inquire about grievances caused by local GVN officials as well as the NLF, and in the early stages of the program about 70 percent of complaints concerned the Saigon regime. Chau could then use his power as province chief to address GVN abuses, and USOM contributed material aid in response to grievances. In addition, the CG teams also took a census in the villages, attempting to discover who was working for the NLF. A mixture of persuasion, cajolery, and attempted compromise would then be used to persuade them to defect to the GVN. In the last analysis, “counter-terror” teams could be sent to kidnap or assassinate them.89
Chau’s methods were based on an assumption that the traditional GVN bureaucracy would never be able to win over and mobilize the peasantry as
effec-tively as the Communist movement did. This was a belief shared by the CIA officials who learned from his methods and later attempted to replicate his pro-gram beyond Kien Hoa.90 The paradox of Chau’s position was that although he denigrated the GVN bureaucracy and hence constructed parapolitical structures to circumvent it, his influence depended on his position as province chief within this same bureaucracy. For the Americans, it hardly constituted a nation-build-ing strategy to hope that similarly talented leaders amenable to American advice would emerge in all forty-four of South Vietnam’s provinces. As Daniel Ells-berg, another American influenced by Chau, ruefully recalled, there were barely a handful of like-minded individuals across the GVN.91 Chau complained that
“the Saigon generals ignored my success in Kien Hoa,” and without the involve-ment of higher-ups in the GVN, the program could not be extended to other provinces.92 Neither did Chau possess the resources or personnel to have a deci-sive impact even in Kien Hoa, where the Communist movement continued to advance. Both the replicability of Chau’s efforts and their ability to have a decisive impact were in doubt, and as late as 1964, the CIA’s efforts consisted of only a few dozen officers trying to do “something, anything” to bolster local government.93
The third group of Americans who worked toward nation-building goals in South Vietnam under the Diem regime were those who worked out in the villages in daily contact with Vietnamese peasants, often focusing on economic devel-opment projects. The first Americans to do so on a sustained basis were those working for International Voluntary Services (IVS), an NGO that placed young Americans into development projects throughout the world. While MSU focused on the GVN’s central institutions, IVS volunteers—or “IVSers,” as they were known—lived and worked deep in the South Vietnamese countryside. Although the IVS presence in South Vietnam was fully funded by the U.S. government, many of those working for it saw their mission as separate from that of both the United States and the GVN. Don Luce and John Sommer, two prominent IVSers, were so focused on stimulating economic development for the sake of rural inhabitants that “even as late as 1963 and 1964 it often seemed” to them “as though the war itself hardly existed.” They likewise felt remote from the Diem regime, seeing themselves as “more observers than participants in the affairs of the Vietnamese government.”94 IVS personnel worked on tasks such as helping villagers build agricultural improvements and spreading improved seed and crop strains. Many IVSers did not perceive their work as political, while those who did were often surprised to find that their assistance and material aid rarely trans-lated into support for either the GVN or the U.S. presence. Such small efforts might help individual farmers, but they did nothing to address the reality of systemic political and socioeconomic repression that fueled resentment of the GVN and support for the NLF.95
After the 1962 arrival of Fraleigh and Phillips, USOM itself began to develop an official network of American representatives that would match and eventually exceed the reach of the IVSers. Prior to that year, USOM had run a “traditional”
economic aid mission that focused on advising central political and economic policy-making institutions in Saigon, much like MSU. Even though the local gov-ernments that actually had contact with the rural population seemed to be the GVN’s weakest link, USOM officials resisted involvement in the provinces. As for the guerrilla crisis, they believed that was best left to the military.96 Instead, Fra-leigh and Phillips pushed for the permanent deployment of American representa-tives in each province of South Vietnam, where they could act as conduits for U.S.
influence over province chiefs. Although Diem had previously been opposed to having American representatives influencing civil government in the provinces, the deepening guerrilla crisis eased his reservations. Diem was also reassured by his trust in Phillips, whom he had met when the latter was deployed in Saigon as a military adviser in 1954.97 Phillips and Fraleigh’s efforts amounted to a revolu-tion in the way USOM operated. When the pair arrived in Saigon, USOM had 120
influence over province chiefs. Although Diem had previously been opposed to having American representatives influencing civil government in the provinces, the deepening guerrilla crisis eased his reservations. Diem was also reassured by his trust in Phillips, whom he had met when the latter was deployed in Saigon as a military adviser in 1954.97 Phillips and Fraleigh’s efforts amounted to a revolu-tion in the way USOM operated. When the pair arrived in Saigon, USOM had 120