54. Memorandum From Michael V. Forrestal of the National Security Council Staff to the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Harriman)1
SUBJECT
- Conversation with Ambassador Tran van Chuong of Vietnam
I had lunch today with Ambassador Tran van Chnong. After lunch the Ambassador said he had something very important and private to tell me.
He began by saying that he had great difficulty in assessing the political importance of the Mansfield report. He said that his own estimate of public opinion in the United States was that it was 99% against the Diem Government, and that sooner or later the political [Page 143] effect of this report would be felt on U.S. efforts in South Vietnam. The Mansfield report, he believed, was just another manifestation of this feeling, and it would no doubt be followed by worse reports.
He then said that he had been in this country for eight years and. under normal circumstances would have resigned as Ambassador a long time ago. The reason he didn’t was that he did not see how he could return home as a private citizen and live in any security. He said he did not dare even to write to his brother, who is still living in Vietnam.
As a Vietnamese patriot, he said he strongly disapproved of the Diem regime, which was not only a dictatorship, but worse-an inefficient one. He said he realized the United States had brought all sorts of pressures on Diem to liberalize the regime but that such pressures were doomed to failure, since running a totalitarian regime was like riding a tiger—you could not get off its back.
The Ambassador said he knew Mr. Nhu very well, since he was his son-in-law. Nhu was the intellectual force behind Diem and would never give up his political power willingly. Indeed it was largely because of Nhu that the Vietnamese Government was deprived of the services of its most able people. There has been a deliberate policy of forcing any person of competence out of his job and into exile. As a result, no matter how much American aid is poured into the country, it will not be managed properly. He estimated that within six months it would become obvious that the Diem regime could not possibly win the war against the Viet Cong. The Ambassador fervently maintained that the United States could not and should not withdraw from his country. To do so, he said, would condemn all Southeast Asia to Communist control. On the other hand, we could not win with Diem. Therefore there was only one course open to us and that was to bring about a change in government, which could probably only be done with violence.
The conversation was almost entirely one-sided, and I was sufficiently non-plussed that I contributed very little to it myself. I protested some of the Ambassador’s statements in the early part of the conversation, but this only served to make him more emotional. Although it occurred to me that the Ambassador might be provoking a reaction, I am inclined to think that he believed what he was saying. He asked that our conversation not be reported.2
“I regime and his son-in-law, Mr. Nhu. I received an hour’s run-down from General Joe Collins, formerly Chief of Staff of the Army, who has known the Ambassador well during his Saigon days. I passed this on to the boys working on Viet Nam and they told me that they had been thoroughly familiar for some time with the Ambassador’s feelings. He has evidently talked this way to a number of people and to each one has asked that the conversation ‘not be reported’.” (Ibid.) have been thoroughly alive to the emotional views of the Ambassador, both about the Diem