392. Memorandum of a Conversation, Saigon, August 1, 1957, 8:15–11:20 a.m.1
PARTICIPANTS
- President Ngo Dinh Diem
- Vice President and Secretary of State for National Economy Nguyen Ngoc Tho
- [Name and title deleted]
- Wolf I. Ladejinsky, Land Reform Adviser to the Government of Vietnam
- Wesley R. Fishel, Chief Adviser of the Michigan State University Group
The President was in a good mood. After the usual introductory remarks and discussion of the teletype reports of the day, he made a few flippant comments about the possibility of his marrying a Lao [Page 832] princess, and discussed briefly (a) the weakness of the Cambodian Government, (b) the fact that he does not know the new Cambodian Prime Minister at all but doesn’t think very highly of him, and (c) the apparent solution of the Chinese problem as evidenced by the small numbers of Chinese who were actually leaving the country.
. . . . . . .
He then mentioned that General Oai was being replaced provisionally as Director General of the Civil Guard by Mr. Vu Tien Huan, who will continue also as Assistant for Internal Security to the Secretary of State for Interior. He commented that General Oai had made a number of statements, that he talked well, that he was not too bad a soldier, but that he had not, shall we say, “produced.” That is to say, he had promised to make several changes in the Civil Guard, he had told the President he was making those changes, and he had then told the President he had make them. However, the President now learned that the changes had not in fact been made, that General Oai had simply talked a lot and had done nothing along those lines.
The changes in question involved the mass tranfer of Civil Guard units from their home provinces, that is, the provinces in which their members were recruited, to other provinces in order to develop a sense of national unity on the part of the Guardsmen. As it was, the Civil Guardsman felt loyalty to only his province, and when there was trouble in an adjacent province, he and his officers felt no urge to accept the call for assistance which came from that other province, go over there and clean up whatever mess existed. This, the President said, must stop. We are a nation; we are not a conglomeration of independent provinces, and regardless of all that General Oai had said, he had not carried out these Presidential orders.
It should be noted that this constituted a 180-degree reversal of the President’s earlier expressed opinions concerning General Oai, his abilities, his vigor, his dynamism, the fact that he was one of the most promising young men and would clean up and reorganize the Civil Guard. It also is interesting to tie these remarks to the comments made to me2 by General Oai at dinner when we were together last Sunday evening (July 28) when General Oai commented that his Deputy, Colonel Cuong, whom he had left in charge of the Civil Guard when he went to take over the Fifth Military Region, was trying to give him a “kick in the tail” in an effort to get him out of the job of Director General and take it over himself. And the General was quite concerned that his colonel might succeed. He claimed the [Page 833] colonel was painting a bleak picture of what had been accomplished, when, in point of fact, he, the general, had accomplished a great deal and intended to be given credit for it. The President’s remarks would indicate that the colonel’s words carried more weight than had the general’s.
Virtually the rest of the morning was devoted to a discussion of administration in Vietnam and a justification, quite defensive for the most part, by the President of his continual interference in the affairs of his ministers and his tendency to go around them rather than through them, to check up on them by talking with their underlings, and so on. (He became even more defensive when Mr. Ladejinsky observed that it was commonly assumed that the President made all government decisions himself.) Present at the the breakfast also with the President, Mr. Ladejinsky, and myself, were Vice President Tho and [name and title deleted]. The President praised Mr. Tho several times during the course of the breakfast and seemed to have complete confidence in him, both as an individual and as an administrator. Mr. Tho agreed whole-heartedly with probably 95% of what the President said and commented after the breakfast that we had heard the true views of the President, rather than some of the things which he occasionally said for publication or just to be nice; that these were indeed the President’s innermost thoughts. (As a matter of fact, I had heard the President express many of these thoughts before, but this was the first time that I had heard him express them all in such a steady stream for so long a time, and indeed so defensively. At one point, he even referred to criticisms I had made of his administrative methods, which I had made to his face, nearly three years ago when I was new in Vietnam and was trying to get him to delegate authority and responsibility to lesser officials in his Government.)
Generally speaking, he said, the quality of my ministers is very poor. They are, for the most part, honest men, but you understand that in Vietnam in the last ten years we have had no training of fonctionnaires which has been sufficient to turn out men who understand even the routine of their jobs. The average fonctionnaire is incompetent. He is a man who may have had the proper cultural training to turn him into a good civil servant, or he may not. He has, in all probability, very little real capacity to do or to understand the work which he should be doing. He is sometimes intelligent, sometimes less intelligent, but whether he is a good man or not he is, generally speaking, untrained, and this is true of the ministers, even as it is of the lesser members of the bureaucracy.
Accordingly, the President feels compelled to spend much time dictating this and that; instructing his officials in the rudiments of administration. He cited the lack of control and understanding manifested by some of his ministers vis-à-vis administrative problems [Page 834] which came before them. In particular, he mentioned an incident involving Secretary of State for Finance, Mr. Ha Van Vuong, as an illustration of the weakness of members of his cabinet, with the obvious exception of Mr. Tho and the occasional exception of Mr. Nguyen huu Chau. (See terminal note.3) In discussing the shortcomings of Secretary of State Vuong, the President noted that when he himself had been a young man he had been the scourge of wrongdoers. He gave a specific example of how a good education, sharp eyes, and a clear head made it possible for him to catch a district judge in a falsification which rendered him unfit for office. Briefly, the story was as follows.
[Here follow two paragraphs recording Diem’s detailed description of this episode.]
However, said he, some of the present day civil servants don’t show as much energy and initiative as he remembers himself showing in his youth. Province chiefs sometimes do not get out and see all the people in their provinces; district chiefs often do not know what goes on in villages with [within] their districts; and in the ministries in Saigon there are civil servants who never get out in the country to learn about the services which they head within their ministries in Saigon.
This brought the President to the question of briefings given him by his ministers during cabinet sessions or privately and of reports which were requested or expected of provincial chiefs, district chiefs, and other field officers. By and large, the quality of such briefings and reports was extremely poor. As a matter of fact, I might note here that in March of this year, just before my departure for the United States, the President had made similar statements to me and had asked if the MSUG could prepare a guide for briefings for his ministers and a report guide for his provincial chiefs, provided he made available to us some of the briefing materials which his ministers and reports which his chiefs of province had submitted to him. I agreed that we could and would, and subsequently MSUG prepared a sample report form for the provinces; however, the President never made available the briefing and report materials he had promised, and the matter stood thus until this day. And when the President brought up the question of the poor quality of the briefings and reports that he received from his officials, I reminded him of this earlier incident which apparently had escaped his memory.
He took this occasion to point out how few civil servants really understood how to present a report to a superior. At this point also, many of his prejudices against northerners and southerners and for people of the center, who are, in his opinion and in that of [name [Page 835] deleted], far superior either to northerners or southerners, came to the surface as they often do. He remarked, as is his wont, that the northerners are facile of tongue, are good pedagogues, write very well—indeed often beautifully—and are by all odds the most skillful writers, lecturers, professors in Vietnam. When they write a report, however, they are not content to report the facts—they embroider them, they make beautiful literature out of them, and in so doing they often lose sight of their objective. They become infatuated with the beauty of their prose and the result is that their report reads beautifully, sounds eloquent when read aloud, but very often doesn’t make the points it should. Northerners are extremely didactic and very clannish—where you find one northerner, you find very soon five northerners, and where these five are then you will find 50, and so on.
The southerner, by contrast, does no writing, generally speaking; he has no eloquence of tongue, and in most respects is the reverse of the northerner. But the man from the central provinces embodies the best virtues of north and south. He is more direct, he is more honest, he is not quite so eloquent, but he is more reliable in most respects than either his northern or southern compatriots.
This in turn, led the President to review the development of administrative training and education in Vietnam since the earliest days of the Vietnamese emperors on through the French colonial period and up to the present time. The only new statements he made were with respect to the training of the past ten years, which he said had been virtually nonexistent. Whereas during the imperial days and during the period of French rule young civil servants were taught how to write reports, how to make out a form, how to do all the routine practical things which a civil servant should know, in the past years such techniques had been lost. Most of the civil servants of today, he repeated, didn’t even know how to prepare, for example, an order of service. He, the President himself, frequently had to edit, to correct, to rewrite orders of service which had been prepared by lesser officials. This was true of almost every form he could think of, and he had himself created new forms for the civil servants because they didn’t seem to have any judgment of their own. Therefore, he felt that the curriculum of the National Institute of Administration, which was the hope of future in respect to the training of civil servants, should be more practical than it had been in the past, less legalistic and more practical, less philosophical and more practical.
The sine qua non of a good administrator is a good formal education. One of the troubles with the Institute was that most of the professors came from the north. And like all northerners, they were eloquent; they taught the students philosophy; they taught the students all sorts of nice metaphysical things, but they didn’t teach [Page 836] them how to think, and they didn’t teach them the practical things which an administrator should know when he goes out into the field. An administrator should be able on his own to order supplies, to report a crime, to write an order of service, to arrest a man and fill out the forms properly, and to write a decision in a case over which he is presiding as judge, and so on. The quality of the professors at the Institute (and by this he made clear that he meant the Vietnamese professors) was very poor, but it was very difficult to find men from the center or from the south to serve on the faculty. When he found such men who were capable, it was more important that they go into positions in the administration than that they spend their time teaching at the Institute. Therefore, it was more necessary than ever that we form good young professors to teach at the Institute.
Throughout this discussion, he referred again and again to the fact that he found it necessary as a result of the shortcomings that he had noted among his ministers and other civil servants, to go down into the administration himself and pull out people and get them to report to him personally so that he could be sure of having the facts, because his ministers didn’t know how to get the facts and he had to teach them. He had given them all the responsibility and all the authority they needed. He had delegated, and delegated, and delegated, but they had proved unworthy of the delegation of authority and responsibility time and again, and this was why he felt constrained to step into the breach which existed and bring order out of the chaos. Several times during the conversation, the word chaos attracted him, and he spoke of the chaos of Taoism, the fact that the philosophy of many of the people of Vietnam, both of the north and of the south, was Taoist. These people felt that out of the chaos which reigned about them order would inevitably and spontaneously arise and then everything would be beautiful. However, he commented, “Unfortunately, I am not content to wait for the chaos around me to turn into order of its own accord. I am going to try to bring order out of chaos myself.”
Again, at one point, he referred to the willingness of people on the outside, such as those he refers to as Dai-Viet types and Viet-Minh, to criticize officials within the Government who are trying to do a good job, and the person who is the brunt of most of the criticism these days is Secretary of State for National Economy and Vice President Nguyen Ngoc Tho. Mr Tho, he said, was an examplary civil servant, and yet, look at the scurrilous treatment to which he is subjected by citizens of Vietnam. Mr. Tho nodded approvingly during this discussion and seemed quite amused by the fact that he receives every week many dozens of letters, all, it seems, anonymous, many scurrilous, all pointing out shortcomings in the administration of the National Economy Department or other departments. In response [Page 837] to my questioning, he said he personally read every single letter and had found that many of them contained elements of truth but the large majority were totally false. He seemed unconcerned by the criticism, however, indicating that his shoulders were broad and he could take it.