Introduction

The Nation-Building Metaphor

Shortly before noon on April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks crashed into the South Vietnamese Presidential Palace in Saigon. South Vietnam’s last president, Duong Van “Big” Minh, had only just begun his fourth day on the job, and it now fell to him to greet the invaders. As the North Vietnamese attack intensified and long-serving strongman President Nguyen Van Thieu fled to Taiwan with suitcases full of gold, Saigon’s elite had turned to Minh in the hope that he might be able to negotiate a cease-fire with the Communists. But with complete military victory at hand, the North Vietnamese saw no need to parley.

Many of the top officials of the Saigon regime had already fled or committed suicide. Those who remained were now seated on two rows of chairs inside the palace, waiting for the inevitable. When the first North Vietnamese soldiers appeared, Minh announced that he was ready to hand over power. One of the Communist officers retorted that this was impossible. Minh’s regime had already collapsed, and he could not hand over what he did not possess. In case there remained anyone in South Vietnam who was unclear on this point, the North Vietnamese conveyed Minh to the headquarters of Radio Saigon later that day to announce that the Government of Vietnam (GVN) had been formally dissolved at all levels.¹ Finally released by his president from the impossible task of further resistance, Nguyen Khoa Nam, commanding general of GVN forces around Saigon, impassively shot himself dead in front of the North Vietnamese soldiers who arrived to take his surrender.²

As American forces were no longer engaged in fighting the war in Vietnam after the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, some have argued that the fall of Saigon was not technically a military defeat for the United States. But there is no mistaking the fact that it was a dramatic failure of U.S. nation building. The Saigon regime would never have lasted for so long if it were not for U.S. support and aid; in fact, it might never have existed at all, so reliant was it on its “American power source.”³ American currency, military hardware, and combat troops flowed into the country for over twenty years, sustaining the Saigon regime. But this flow was foreordained to one day stop. When it did, the GVN would need to be able to mobilize its own population and national resources to survive the continued battle with the Vietnamese Communist movement at a much-reduced level of American support. Successive generations of Americans and their counterparts in the South Vietnamese regime worked to address this problem of nation building even as their comrades prosecuted a brutal war. In the words of American president Lyndon B. Johnson, their goal was grandiose, even noble—it was “to build as well as to destroy.”⁴

For good or ill, this is an impulse that has continued to animate the military ventures of the United States. The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan highlight both that the United States continues to involve itself in wars where nation building is necessary for victory and that success remains elusive. But for all the casual analogies to Vietnam that are drawn during debates over U.S. military intervention today, these discussions have been impoverished by the lack of any recent comprehensive analysis of the American experience of wartime nation building in South Vietnam.⁵ Drawing on thousands of pages of previously untapped archival collections and new developments in our understanding of the war from the Vietnamese perspective, this book provides such an account.⁶ It stands both as a contribution to the history of the Vietnam War and as a case study of nation building that ought to guide future strategists in how they analyze and think about the problem. Whether as historians attempting to understand a recurring pattern in the history of U.S. foreign relations, as officers in staff colleges around the world grappling with the issues raised by contemporary conflict, or simply as citizens concerned with the wars of our time, we have much to gain from a fresh look at wartime nation building in South Vietnam.

Wartime Nation Building in South Vietnam

Measured by the scale of its ambition or the quantity of resources expended, the Vietnam War saw the largest U.S. wartime nation-building effort in history. Its size was determined by the magnitude of the problem at hand. When South Vietnam came into existence in 1954, it was what modern theorists would refer to as a “weak state,” one unable to exercise administrative control over much of its own territory. Like many other newly independent countries across Africa and Asia, South Vietnam contained central state institutions of limited power and reach. South Vietnam’s first president, Ngo Dinh Diem, faced a dizzying array of problems even before the Vietnamese Communist insurgency got seriously off the ground. The GVN’s very weakness created the conditions in which the Vietnamese Communist movement could flourish. It also made it difficult for the GVN to combat the movement once it began to claim control of large parts of South Vietnam for itself. When the insurgency did get seriously under way in the early 1960s, the challenges faced by the regime only multiplied.

Drawn into supporting Vietnam as part of the broader policy of Cold War containment of communism, the United States set about trying to help the GVN overcome this legacy of state weakness and enable it to remain an independent, non-Communist nation. Given that the governance of South Vietnam was the central issue in the conflict, viewing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War as an exercise in nation building greatly aids our understanding of the war. The fact that the GVN was unable, because of its own weak institutions, to mobilize the domestic resources to battle the National Liberation Front (NLF, also often labeled “Viet Cong” by their Vietnamese opponents and later the Americans) and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) had led directly to the Americanization of the war in 1965. From that point onward the United States faced not just a military challenge but also the task of aiding the GVN to develop its own domestic institutions and base of popular support in rural South Vietnam. These institutions not only had to be effective while the United States was expending significant quantities of its own resources to battle the GVN’s enemies, but also had to be self-sustaining in the period after the U.S. withdrawal. Just as in later wars, nation building was the only U.S. exit strategy available.

The main scene of this struggle was South Vietnam’s two-thousand-odd villages, divided into some twelve thousand hamlets and concentrated in the southern Mekong Delta and the coastal plain along the east side of the country. Although the population of South Vietnam living in urban areas rose sharply throughout the 1960s as many fled the ravages of war and sought new economic opportunities in the cities, over half of South Vietnam’s population still lived in the countryside in 1971.⁷ South Vietnam’s predominantly agrarian economy meant that the countryside also contained the majority of the country’s productive resources, whereas the urban economy was kept afloat largely by American largesse. Combined with the limited ability of the Vietnamese Communist movement to develop infrastructure and support in urban South Vietnam, this meant the battle for the control and allegiance of these rural citizens of South Vietnam was the cutting edge of the nation-building effort.

From 1967, the main weapon that the United States deployed in this effort was the Office of Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS). CORDS was a part of the U.S. military mission under the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), but incorporated staff from civilian agencies such as the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). CORDS had a presence all over the country, from the Presidential Palace in Saigon down to each of the rural provinces and districts of South Vietnam. In Saigon and regional capitals across the country, its officials worked with South Vietnamese officials to design policies and programs aimed at developing the GVN’s institutions. In the villages and hamlets lower down the chain of command, CORDS personnel then tried to implement these policies and programs in unison with GVN province, district, and village chiefs. In sheer size and influence, CORDS was the largest and most comprehensive agency of its type in American history. From 1967, CORDS took charge of all U.S. efforts to bolster the GVN’s position in the villages of South Vietnam, including the raising and development of local security forces, village economic development, the reform of village politics, and efforts to root out the NLF’s guerrilla and political infrastructure at the grassroots level. CORDS did the work of trying to help the GVN extend its administrative reach and win the allegiance of its citizens—the key tasks of nation building as defined in this book.

Much of the literature on nation building in the Vietnam War has focused on the years 1954–1963, when Diem still ruled South Vietnam, or at most on the period before the Tet Offensive of 1968.⁸ But the largest and most consequential U.S. nation-building effort in South Vietnam took place not before but after the commitment of American combat troops to the country in 1965. CORDS came into existence in 1967, and it was only after the Tet Offensive of 1968 that it was at its most influential and effective. There were two primary reasons for this: the Vietnamese Communist movement suffered a severe blow in the offensives of 1968, while President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to begin the process of U.S. withdrawal from the war gave an immediate impetus to both Americans and South Vietnamese who worried about the future durability of the GVN.

Some revisionist authors claim that U.S. nation building in South Vietnam after 1968 was a success that was thrown away when the United States “abandoned” South Vietnam during the 1975 Communist offensives.⁹ Such views have had an influence not only in academia but also in policy circles. Yet it is only the lack of a detailed archival study of nation building in the latter years of the war that has allowed this mistaken view to take root. The revisionist argument is based on claims that, as this book shows, are simply not backed up by the historical evidence.¹⁰ While it is true that the period 1969–1972 was the GVN’s high-water mark, this study demonstrates that the fundamental weaknesses of the Saigon regime were far from being addressed. Despite the eerie peace that settled over the South Vietnamese countryside during this period, true nation building was not achieved. There is little reason to suspect that the GVN’s weaknesses would ever have been resolved, even had the United States given it another chance by intervening in 1975. With American patience in the Vietnam War always limited, the GVN had simply not been able to reform and strengthen itself fast enough to outrun the clock. This book shows why.

From the Halls of Montezuma

Although of recent vintage, the concept of nation building exists in the context of the broader stream of the history of U.S. foreign relations and Western imperial history. American soldiers and civilians have been using American power to shape foreign societies since the time of the frontier. During the foreign occupations the country carried out from the nineteenth century onward and in the colonies it acquired at the turn of the twentieth, the United States sought to influence local political, economic, and social structures in ways that furthered its ends.

Early American expansion across the frontier was based on the idea that the North American continent was a vast “unpeopled” area that could be settled without moral compunction. The U.S. Army sometimes imposed short-lived military rule in territories, such as Florida and Louisiana, that had previously been under the jurisdiction of European empires and contained culturally distinct populations. But as Anglo-Saxon settlement spread, these areas quickly became self-governing territories and, in time, equal states in the Union. A belief in the unique genius of the Anglo-Saxon people for self-government allowed Americans to reconcile the acquisition of a vast continental empire with their desire to maintain and extend republican forms of rule.¹¹ Insofar as they figured at all in this vision, the role of the existing inhabitants of the continent was to be submerged and eventually drowned in the Anglo-Saxon tide. Militarily overpowered and vastly outnumbered, Native Americans were subjected to brutal policies of relocation and concentration. U.S. policy swung toward assimilation in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but these efforts were focused not so much on the reordering of existing indigenous society as on its destruction and incorporation into the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture. It was simply the case, as one federal Indian commissioner noted in 1881, that “the few must yield to the many.”¹² This was not nation building, but nation destroying.

When American armies of occupation traveled farther afield from the 1840s onward, it was they who became the few among the many. Surrounded by a foreign populace, they could not always expect to be greeted as liberators—a lesson that would have to be relearned again and again up to the present day. But nor could the American occupiers avoid involving themselves in the affairs and grievances of the local population, as Secretary of War William L. Marcy realized when he ordered Colonel Stephen Kearney to establish temporary governments in such parts of California and New Mexico as he might conquer during the Mexican-American War. “It is foreseen that what relates to civil government will be a difficult and unpleasant part of your duty,” Marcy wrote, “and much must necessarily be left to your discretion.”¹³ His comments proved prescient. American proconsuls up to the present day have found their duties both “difficult and unpleasant,” while their superiors in Washington have been frustrated by their inability to manage events from such a great distance.

During the Mexican-American War, U.S. forces under General Winfield Scott landed in the port city of Veracruz and struck overland to occupy Mexico City itself. The fabled “halls of Montezuma” that U.S. forces captured in the city are still celebrated in the United States Marines’ Hymn as the scene of a foundational American military experience. But it was also from within these same halls that the U.S. administered its first extended foreign occupation. Scott held Mexico City, Veracruz, and points between for nearly ten months. Lacking the expansive goals of later American nation builders, he aimed only to maintain order and American control so as to bolster U.S. leverage in peace talks with the Mexican government. Although the United States was not aiming to transform Mexican institutions or society, American cultural influence was spread by the merchants, printers, and theater companies who followed in the wake of the occupying army. This roused in at least one American observer the belief that the war was “rapidly converting the people over to American notions”—the sort of cultural and societal conversion that would become a key ingredient of future nation-building efforts.¹⁴

In the possessions that America conquered in the Spanish-American War of 1898, the idea of spreading American notions became central rather than merely being regarded as a side-effect of the American presence. The U.S. victory in the war immediately raised the question of the political relationship between the United States and the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Would the “constitution follow the flag,” as the contemporary phrase went, with the islands annexed as states in the Union and the inhabitants granted citizenship? This ultimately proved out of the question. Almost all American opinion regarded Filipinos, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans as racially inferior and “unfit for self-government.” Just as American Indians had been denied membership of the national political community, thus it was for inhabitants of America’s new insular empire. As historian Paul Kramer has noted, the Constitution ultimately followed only the race, not the flag.¹⁵

Yet U.S. policy makers still aspired to cling to their new possessions. The result was the country’s first foray into overseas empire building. Like so many empire builders before it, the United States lacked the resources or the will to rule the islands entirely on its own without the help of cooperative local elites. American rule hence operated through colonial states, which relied on local collaborators. To have attempted to do otherwise would have undermined the ostensible purpose of the new U.S. empire, which was to educate these elites to one day take over from their American tutors. Meanwhile, the Americans and their local allies directed repressive violence against those who resisted the new colonial order, especially in the Philippines, where perhaps over 250,000 Filipinos perished in the initial years of the American presence alone.¹⁶ In its focus on building administrative and coercive structures for local elites and in the “dialectic of violence and attraction” used to encourage acquiescence to them, U.S. colonial policy resembled future nation-building efforts.¹⁷ But there were also crucial differences.

For one, although the United States technically promised future independence to its colonies, this was usually conceived as possible only after a generations-long work of education made them fit to govern themselves. Given that the international norms of the day legitimized colonies and that there were even times when Filipino elites themselves seemed to equivocate on the issue of independence, the United States was able to get away with usurping Filipino sovereignty seemingly indefinitely. But in the post-1945 world, with empires on the decline and nationalism in the ascendant, the United States could afford neither the reputational costs of usurping a country’s sovereignty nor the material costs of doing so in the face of widespread armed resistance. This meant that even though many Americans might have thought the Vietnamese just as unfit for self-government in the 1960s and ’70s as their forebears did the Filipinos in the early 1900s, they had to work within the established fact of South Vietnamese sovereignty.¹⁸

They also could not count on having generations in which to explore the dialectic of violence and attraction. American empire builders, like their European counterparts, often conceived of imperialism as a charitable act performed for the benefit of the “natives.” Spreading the benefits of civilization to those less fortunate was seen as a way for the United States to claim its rightful place among the foremost nations of the world, but it did not respond to an urgent security need.¹⁹ Considered alongside U.S. nation-building efforts in South Vietnam and later in Iraq and Afghanistan, where victory in important wars was dependent on a nation-building effort bearing fruit in a relatively short period of time, it was a comparatively leisurely business. “Whereas nineteenth-century imperial ventures were conceived as indefinite in duration,” write two recent analysts, modern intervenors “want to rebuild self-supporting but politically and economically acceptable state structures and then leave as quickly as feasible.”²⁰ And although violence simmered in most American colonies, it never matched the prolonged intensity of the Vietnam War, which produced levels of casualties that the American public would not tolerate for long. U.S. nation builders in South Vietnam hence faced a task not only much more difficult than that faced by their forebears, given the need to respect South Vietnamese sovereignty, but also one much more urgent.

The post–World War II occupations of Japan and Germany also presented only imperfect parallels with later U.S. nation-building efforts. In both cases, there were powerful—indeed, overly powerful—administrative and coercive state structures in existence with which the American occupation authorities cooperated. Rather than attempting to build the infrastructure of a state from the ground up as in South Vietnam, the U.S. task was to reform and reorient existing Japanese and German state structures into more democratic, peaceful forms. Both countries proved remarkably pliable in the face of military defeat. But even more significantly, as the 1940s rolled on and the Cold War began, the United States found it prudent to back off from trying to push dramatic change on the elites of these two countries and instead focused on winning them over to the global battle against communism. The precise ordering of their domestic politics and societies became a secondary issue.

American nation builders in South Vietnam could have profited from studying what their predecessors learned in Mexico and the Philippines. Some aspects of the mission overseas—the need to maintain good relations with the population and the inevitability of involvement in local politics—remain the same through the ages. But there is little evidence of Americans in Vietnam drawing extensively on studies of earlier U.S. interventions while designing their nation-building efforts in Vietnam; if anything, discussion of earlier conflicts is conspicuous by its absence. The same seems to be true of the Americans who went to Iraq or Afghanistan without a true understanding of the much stronger parallels between their own mission and that of their forebears in Vietnam. This was even more unfortunate, because in these cases the parallels are so strong and the potential for learning is so great. Even though acknowledging the similarities between contemporary and future wars and America’s defeat in Vietnam may be unpopular, it is nevertheless necessary if we are to understand the place of nation building in modern conflict and the difficulties of achieving it.

The Nation-Building Metaphor

Despite enjoying widespread usage, the term “nation building” is the subject of competing definitions. Its very ubiquity, and the fact it is used to describe a wide range of activity, have contributed to watering down its meaning and making it highly context specific. As a consequence, “nation building” as a term has been used to describe activities as diverse as America’s exit strategies from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, United Nations peacekeeping missions in the aftermath of civil war, and the domestic policies of countries that seek to develop their national identity through educational programs.²¹ Practices as diverse as educating children to forcibly herding their unfortunate parents into resettlement camps have fallen under the label.²²

This lack of definitional clarity has been enabled by the fact that nation building is ultimately a metaphor rather than a description of a particular, concrete set of processes or actions. Any action that can plausibly be construed as developing either the institutions of a state or the sense of national identity and cohesion among its population can be classed as nation building. The term is malleable enough to refer to either wartime, peacetime, or a postwar period. As a metaphor, the idea of “building” implies a programmatic course of action that unfolds predictably according to a blueprint. It elides the fact that the shaping of state institutions and the molding of national identity are fundamentally political projects that unfold in messy and unpredictable ways, not according to a predetermined plan. The building of physical objects unfolds predictably because the material being worked with has no agency, whereas politics involves a multitude of unpredictable actors. The metaphor of nation building hence obscures the political nature of the actual processes and activities that it describes and gives a false impression of tractability and predictability.²³

This is especially true when nation building involves an attempt by outsiders to shape the state institutions and national identity of a country. This understanding of the term is of Cold War vintage, and its widespread usage dates only from the Vietnam War. As Henry Kissinger has argued, U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War “spawn[ed] a new concept not previously found in the diplomatic vocabulary … the notion of ‘nation-building.’ ”²⁴ The “notion” Kissinger was referring to was the idea that the United States could radically reshape the domestic politics, society, and economy of a foreign country as part of a military intervention.

The emergence of this understanding of nation building at this historical juncture served an important function. America’s involvement in the Vietnam War occurred as European empires in the so-called Third World were disintegrating. As part of the broader Cold War, a struggle was beginning between the United States and the Soviet Union to shape the political development of the newly independent countries. The perceived necessity felt by American policy makers to control the political processes of the postimperial space made them highly receptive to the idea of nation building as something the United States could perform in the Third World.²⁵ This led to a shift in the term’s usage. In the early years of decolonization, nation building was understood as a process that was occurring domestically within the new countries. Many postcolonial states possessed weak institutions and divided populations who did not share a sense of unified nationhood, and the attempts of their new rulers to overcome these legacies had been labeled “nation building.” As late as 1962, a key reference work by leading political scientists on the topic of “nation-building” made no mention of the idea that it might be something accomplished by outside intervention.²⁶ Only with the Vietnam War did the concept as we understand it today take its place among the foreign policy tool kits of the United States and others, from where it has never subsequently been removed for long.

Understood as a metaphorical label for a broad range of foreign policy practices by the United States and others, the exact scope of activity defined as nation building requires careful definition in a historical study such as this. Three aspects of the term “nation building” as used in this book require clarification. The first is the extent to which nation building should be understood as a domestic or international process. The second is what the difference is, if any, between nation building and state building. The third is what activities fall under the definition of nation building as used in this book.

First, although nation building is now more routinely used to refer to international rather than domestic practices, this does not mean that it has lost meaning as a term used to refer to domestic policies aimed at strengthening state institutions and developing a unified national consciousness. In the case of South Vietnam, the GVN’s colonial inheritance left it with understaffed, illegitimate, and ineffective state institutions and the absence of a South Vietnamese national identity except among some of the educated and urban classes of the population. Although they addressed these problems with varying degrees of wisdom and urgency from the time of President Ngo Dinh Diem onward, the GVN’s ruling class had to constantly struggle to strengthen state institutions and establish the legitimacy of their rule. Attempts to inculcate a specifically “South Vietnamese” national identity often formed part of their efforts. Thus, alongside American attempts to reshape South Vietnam through nation building, the country’s own rulers were engaged in nation building of their own.

Throughout this work, the term “nation building” is thus used to refer both to certain U.S. policies in South Vietnam and also the domestic program of the South Vietnamese government toward the same ends. This is justified because the use of a single term to refer to the policies and actions of both Americans and Vietnamese focuses attention on the fact that they shared the same goal of creating a viable and sustainable GVN that would eventually be able to survive at a much-reduced level of American support. It also highlights the fact that there was so much disagreement between—and also within—these two sets of actors on how to bring about this result. This disagreement about what historian Edward Miller has called “the politics of nation-building” forms the central subject matter of this book.²⁷

A second point requiring clarity is about the difference between nation building and state building. Whether to differentiate between the two at all is a point of contention. Where a differentiation is made, state building is generally taken to refer to the development of the state’s administrative and coercive functions, allowing it to effectively control both its territory and population, and defeating rival entities that would seek to deny it the monopoly on the use of legitimate force. Nation building, on the other hand, refers to the formation of a sense of national identity among the population of a country. State institutions thereby come to be seen as legitimate across a country’s territory and population groups because they represent the nation. In one representative definition, state building is said to refer to the creation of “a political entity or set of institutions,” while nation building involves “the creation of a political community.”²⁸ Other works combine both sets of activities—strengthening institutions and developing political community—under the sole rubric of either state building or nation building.²⁹

This book makes sole use of the term “nation building” for two reasons. The first is that in practice, the distinction between the development of state institutions and attempts to ensure that these institutions are regarded as legitimate is an artificial one. Even the most repressive state cannot function for long if its institutions of rule—its police, courts, economic ministries, and local governors, among others—are not regarded as legitimate by a sufficient portion of the population. The GVN was attempting to impose and consolidate its rule in the face of a Communist movement that enjoyed widespread popularity and legitimacy among much of country’s population. This made its own struggle to be recognized as legitimate even more crucial. Secondly, as a country that had only come into existence in 1954, the development of a specifically “South Vietnamese” political identity seemed like a prerequisite for the functioning of the South Vietnamese state. When the U.S. aid that had supported the Saigon regime for so long was withdrawn, the GVN would need to be able to draw on its own resources, both economic and human, to sustain itself. It would need not just the strong sinews of a coercive and administrative state, but also the support of a sizable section of its citizenry. The extent to which the development and use of the raw coercive power of the South Vietnamese state undermined its legitimacy was a key point of contention both within and between the separate camps of American and South Vietnamese nation builders. But only the use of the term “nation building” to encompass the development of both effective and legitimate state institutions fully captures the hubris of what they set out to accomplish.

A third issue that requires clarification is to define precisely what activities fall under the rubric of nation building. Rather than applying an abstract definition, this book takes a goal-oriented approach to defining nation building. Those activities that Americans or South Vietnamese undertook with the purpose of strengthening either the effectiveness or legitimacy of the GVN fall under the heading. It acknowledges, as thoughtful contemporary observers did also, that the basic problem for the Saigon regime was to establish mutual ties of obligation with its rural citizens that would allow the GVN to survive at a much-reduced level of American support. As Roger Hilsman, an adviser to President Kennedy, put it in 1962, the GVN needed to “tie the villages into the network of government administration and control” so that “information of the villagers’ needs and problems can flow upward and government services can flow downward.”³⁰ The desired outcome was a country in which a sufficient portion of the rural citizenry would align themselves with the GVN, providing the manpower, resources, and allegiance necessary to defeat the Communist movement. All U.S. and GVN programs that were oriented toward this result hence fall under the rubric of nation building. This way of defining what constituted nation building allows for the fact that the individuals working toward this end, both American and South Vietnamese, often had radically different and contradictory ideas about how to achieve it—and even what to call what they were doing.

Nations and Nation Building

Few Americans in Vietnam consistently used the term “nation building” themselves, preferring to talk about “pacification” or “the other war.”³¹ The usage of these terms was highly contested, not least because they reflected different perceptions of the best way to strengthen the effectiveness and legitimacy of the GVN. “The other war” seemed to relegate the political struggle in the villages to the sidelines of the primary war, the one fought with artillery, aircraft, and divisions of infantry. It defined rural nation building in the negative, without positive content of its own.³²

Pacification, on the other hand, was a term with a well-established lineage. Inherited from French colonial vocabulary, to pacify implied the extension of the GVN’s physical control into hamlets and villages formerly governed by the NLF. Soldiers of the Saigon regime would occupy a hamlet, arrest any Communist cadres they could find, and provide a security screen behind which GVN administrators, landlords, and police could return. In theory but not always in practice, pacification was combined with efforts to bring social or economic benefits to the rural population through small aid projects and the provision of services such as schools and clinics. Once local Communist cadre and guerrillas showed no further sign of resistance, the soldiers would then move on to another hamlet. This approach simply restored the old political and socioeconomic order in the hamlet while doing nothing to address the underlying drivers of support for the NLF; in fact, by returning landlords and abusive officials to the positions of power from which the revolution had driven them, it often only undermined the image of the GVN. While pacification aimed to strengthen the GVN by creating zones of security in which GVN administrators and police could govern effectively, it was often actively harmful to the regime’s legitimacy. While the establishment of physical control by regime forces and the ejection of the armed elements of the Communist movement constituted nation building in its most limited form, such measures usually produced only ephemeral gains. One American critic described it as “like throwing a giant rock into the ocean. Big splash, then nothing.”³³ And once Saigon’s soldiers departed, the remaining administrators and police were left to face the wrath of the local Communist apparatus alone.

Many of the Americans and South Vietnamese whose story is told in this book rejected the concept of pacification and sought instead to actively build ties of mutual obligation between the GVN and the regime. Through thorough reform of the GVN, they hoped to create a solid reservoir of support for the regime that would outlast the presence of outside forces. To an extent that has been underappreciated by previous historians of the conflict, their attempts at nation building often drew on their understanding of the ways in which the Vietnamese Communist movement mobilized and motivated its own cadres and soldiers. A group of Americans including William Colby, John Paul Vann, Stuart Methven, and Frank Scotton worked with former Viet Minh like Tran Ngoc Chau and Nguyen Be to decentralize power over village affairs to the people themselves. Their ideas were most influential after Colby became head of CORDS in 1968 and implemented what was called the “village system.” Aiming to create a participative experience of self-rule for villagers, much as the Communist movement did, the village system aimed to provide them with the authority and resources to implement the “three selfs”—self-government, self-defense, and self-development. An analysis of the village system allows us to move beyond the focus on development and modernization discourses that has marked much of our previous understanding of U.S. nation building in the Vietnam War.³⁴ Based as it was on Communist inspiration, the nation-building policy of CORDS in the later years of the war owed more to Lenin’s ideas on political organization than Walt Rostow’s vision of modernization.

Figure 1. Members of the 101st Airborne Division join children in a game of baseball north of Hue during pacification operations, 1970. Such short-term goodwill rarely translated into long-term support for the GVN.

National Archives identifier 531465, Photographs of American Military Activities, Record Group 111, National Archives II at College Park, Maryland.

The village system also sought to overcome one of the most significant problems for American nation builders in South Vietnam, which was the historical novelty of the idea of a “South Vietnamese” nation. Both the regimes in Hanoi and Saigon claimed to be the legitimate embodiment of the Vietnamese nation, which was generally recognized as encompassing the entire Vietnamese people who lived on the territory from the Gulf of Siam to the Chinese border. Yet from 1954, Vietnam was divided into two halves, north and south. While North Vietnam shortly set about attempting to unify the country by force, the regime in Saigon was occupied with attempting to establish legitimate rule in the south. This proved difficult, for although regional rivalry was a strong part of Vietnamese politics, the country created south of the seventeenth parallel at the end of the French period had never been considered the object of a specifically “South Vietnamese” nationalism. On the other hand, from the 1930s onward, the Vietnamese Communist movement had been gradually carving out its place as the most significant embodiment of Vietnamese nationalism by leading the struggle against the French and sidelining, often brutally, its Vietnamese rivals. The Communist movement had always been weakest in the territory that became South Vietnam, but it still enjoyed substantial support. Even more important, leaders like Ho Chi Minh and rank-and-file fighters in the villagers were widely recognized as national heroes for their resistance to the French. Even if this perception was not universal, given the violence with which the Communists often dealt with their enemies, it was shared by a critical mass of rural citizens in South Vietnam. It is true that there were differences in the cultural, political, social, and economic legacies of North and South Vietnam, as there were within many decolonizing countries in this era. But the pull of unity, centered on both the historical basis of Vietnamese civilization in the Red River Delta of North Vietnam and the record of the resistance fighters against the French, was also strong—at least strong enough to cause the Saigon regime substantial problems in establishing its own claim to separateness, and probably strong enough to doom it from the beginning. A poem written by a North Vietnamese Army soldier in his notebook captured the essence of a Vietnamese nationalism that existed despite regional differences: “But I am here on foreign soil,” two lines read. “And yet the South too is still our country.”³⁵

The Saigon regime could never pose a direct threat to this nationalist appeal or offer a unified vision of the future to the entire national space. Many of the generals, police, and officials of the Saigon regime had collaborated with the French colonists, and after 1965 they stayed in power only with the assistance of hundreds of thousands of foreign troops.³⁶ Most Americans were unreflective about this problem, and seemed to work on the assumption that the creation of state institutions would over time lead inexorably to the creation of national sentiment attached to those institutions. This accorded with then-current theories of development and “modernization,” which held that nationalism was an inevitable product of the shift from traditional to modern, impersonal forms of governance as represented by modern state bureaucracies.³⁷ But these theories held an excessively materialistic view of what a nation is. As Benedict Anderson explained in his own famous theory of nationalism, a nation is not the product of purely material forces but is more accurately seen as a cultural construct based on a shared belief of membership in the same “imagined community.”³⁸ Such a shared imagined community was sorely lacking in South Vietnam.

This book explores attempts by American and South Vietnamese nation builders to overcome this problem by drawing on the lessons of the Communist movement’s success. In its own efforts to organize and inspire South Vietnam’s rural citizens, the Communist movement drew on the imagined community of the Vietnamese nation without solely relying on it. In fact, in its appeals to the rural population in the South, it usually focused on the population’s concrete interests within their village communities. This principle—which historian Jeffrey Race calls “communalism”—accorded with the fact that in a fragmented society such as rural South Vietnam, politics was overwhelmingly local.³⁹ Especially later in the war, American and South Vietnamese nation builders took the same approach to building support for the GVN. Rather than attempting to appeal to a South Vietnamese nationalism that had no meaning in most rural communities, Colby and his allies tried to address the concrete political and socioeconomic grievances of rural villagers so that they identified their self-interest with the continuation of GVN rule.

Yet the Americans and South Vietnamese who worked to try to tie the GVN’s citizens into bonds of mutual obligation with their government were always struggling against the tide. They faced an entrenched system of patronage and corruption that was extremely difficult to undo, not least because it served the interests of so many GVN officials and officers even while being detrimental to the interests of the peasantry. High officials in the Saigon regime personally profited from this structure and also relied on it to ensure their own rule over the longer term. They frequently worked to sideline the influence of those South Vietnamese who were most focused on empowering the country’s rural citizens. The influence of those working to establish a sense of identification and trust between those citizens and their government hence always ran up against sharp limits, and their goal remained unachieved at the time of American withdrawal in 1973.

Structure of the Book

This book is divided into seven chapters. Its narrative stretches from the corridors of power in which the framework of nation-building policy was formulated in Washington and Saigon down to the individual villages of South Vietnamese in which it was implemented. This provides a comprehensive overview of how the challenge of nation building appeared to policy makers and practitioners at all levels.

Chapter 1 examines the legacies of French colonialism for South Vietnam and the role of these legacies in shaping both the GVN and the Vietnamese Communist movement. It then examines attempts by Americans and South Vietnamese to strengthen the Diem regime through nation building both in Saigon and out in the countryside, exploring the different approaches they took to nation building. The chapter brings the narrative to Diem’s overthrow in 1963.

Chapter 2 examines the evolution of President Lyndon Johnson’s relationship to the problem of nation building in South Vietnam. It argues that Johnson entered office with little interest in the problem, but soon came to realize both how important it was for the war effort and how it allowed him to portray the war as a constructive rather than a destructive activity. Although his initial interest was in large-scale development projects, Johnson eventually came to recognize that a bottom-up approach based on the provision of local security was most appropriate at this stage in the war. As a result, he decided to create CORDS and sent his aide Robert Komer to lead it in May 1967.

Chapter 3 returns the narrative to South Vietnam itself, considering the impact of Johnson’s two most consequential decisions for nation building: the dispatch of American combat troops in 1965 and the establishment of CORDS in 1967. It explores the initial functioning of CORDS and the problems that arose in Komer’s approach to leveraging change from the GVN. By the end of 1967, CORDS seemed to have achieved little, and the fundamental weaknesses of the GVN and drivers of support for the Communist movement remained unaddressed.

Chapter 4 considers the impact of the series of offensives that wracked South Vietnam in 1968, beginning with the Tet Offensive. It demonstrates how President Nguyen Van Thieu used the offensive as an opportunity to consolidate his authority, a process in which CORDS was instrumental. By allying himself with the Americans, Thieu not only eclipsed his rivals but also created the conditions for CORDS to finally have greater influence over the GVN.

In chapter 5, the narrative switches back to Washington to explore the Nixon administration’s outlook on nation building in South Vietnam. Nixon and his key national security aide Henry Kissinger were skeptical of the possibility of bolstering the legitimacy of the GVN but had a keen interest in its ability to exercise control over its territory and population. Such control, they believed, would strengthen their hands in the peace talks that had been opened in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive. Kissinger also established a sophisticated system for assessing the progress of nation building in South Vietnam, one that far surpassed anything the Johnson administration had constructed. The results of its assessments suggested the GVN would struggle to maintain its position after U.S. withdrawal.

Chapter 6 explores the evolution of the village system in the period 1969–1972. It investigates the lineage of the ideas that came to animate CORDS under Colby, and the Thieu regime’s attitude toward them. While the Nixon administration was not as interested as its predecessor in the reform of the GVN, this period of the war saw the most effective and comprehensive attempt by the United States to develop an effective and legitimate GVN.

Finally, chapter 7 explores how the village system unfolded in practice. It starts with a consideration of the general problems faced by CORDS advisers in understanding and influencing rural South Vietnam. It then examines the effects that CORDS was able to have across each of the “three selfs”—self-government, self-defense, and self-development. In each case it concludes that the impact of CORDS was ephemeral and did not amount to the genuine establishment of ties of mutual obligation between the GVN and its rural citizens. As a result, the Saigon regime would not be strong enough to stand up to the challenge of the Vietnamese Communist movement in the future.