The Foreign Service Journal, June 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2016 37 power its critics and enemies allege it to be. … I believe that the more representative government which is emerging in Viet-Nam must be the vehicle for eliminating the social evils which beset the people. I do not think we can or should do this job for them.” The issue came down to the relationship of the United States to South Vietnam. There was a basic tension, never resolved, between helping the South Vietnamese and compelling them to accept American solutions. Or as a CIA analysis later sum- marized the conflict in American objectives: “The GVN [Viet- nam Government] must be invigorated and reformed, and the peasantry must be won over to the government side, but all of this must be done without disturbing the political, social and economic structure bequeathed by the French colonial regime.” Put another way, corruption was not incidental to the political system of South Vietnam; it was an integral and defining char- acteristic of that system. Komer sought less intrusive means of encouraging action— regular liaison with South Vietnamese officials, review of plans and budgets, and the threat or action of withholding resources. The most effective measure seems to have been the gradual accumulation of information on corrupt or incompetent offi- cials, providing that information to both the South Vietnamese and the American chains of command. The expectation was that the South Vietnamese would eventually act, if sufficient evidence could be found to justify a dismissal. The original proposal for this program included suspending assistance if the South Vietnamese failed to react to the infor- mation, but this was a step Komer was unwilling to take—weak- ening support for allies in a theater at war was a very difficult course of action to propose. Ultimately, Komer succeeded in persuading the South Vietnamese to dismiss a limited number of officers, but with no guarantee that their successors would be any improvement. Setting Good Governance Aside The Tet Offensive in early 1968 changed the war in every respect. For the communists, the successive waves of the offen- sive cost them dearly, the losses concentrated among the Viet Cong. Increasingly the war fell to North Vietnamese soldiers, infiltrating down the Ho Chi Minh trail. On the American side, the offensive ultimately persuaded President Lyndon Johnson not to run for a second term, and to seek a negotiated settlement. Incoming President Richard Nixon had an entirely different perspective on the nature of the war than his predecessor. Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, were classic realists. In part due to their basic outlook on power, and in part due to the change that the Tet Offensive had had on the war, Nixon and Kissinger were not so much interested in winning “hearts and minds,” as they were on ensuring physical control of the population. Similarly, they were more interested in ensuring a stable and acquiescent South Vietnamese government than in abstract notions of good governance. As Nixon summarized it in a conversation with British coun- terinsurgency expert Robert Thompson, he thought that Thieu was “getting an undeservedly bad reputation.” Nixon com- mented that while some people wanted the administration to pressure Thieu to “crack down on corruption, broaden the base and go forward with land reform, he, the president, didn’t care what Thieu did as long as it helped the war.” The emphasis on good government as a means of ensuring popular support for the GVN dissipated, as did the willingness to expend political capital on encouraging South Vietnam to combat corruption. In late 1971 Deputy National Security Advisor Al Haig, on a fact-finding mission to South Vietnam, noted: “Thieu’s actions against corruption have been inadequate. He has not spoken out against corruption as strongly as he should, and he has not removed the more notoriously corrupt officials.” This was one of a litany of problems Haig identified in the South Vietnamese government, and like most of the others, was never effectively addressed. In the end, the Nixon administration’s implicit tolerance for corruption served as other elements of its policy toward Vietnam to maintain a short-term stability in the government at the expense of its long-term prospects. The fall of South Vietnam stemmed from a range of causes. But, among those closest to the events, corruption was considered the most damaging, “largely responsible for the ultimate collapse of South Vietnam.” n There was a basic tension, never resolved, between helping the South Vietnamese and compelling them to accept American solutions.