Saigon at War: South Vietnam and the Global Sixties (Cambridge Studies in US Foreign Relations)

During South Vietnam's brief life as a nation, it exhibited glimmers of democracy through citizen activism and a dynamic press. South Vietnamese activists, intellectuals, students, and professionals had multiple visions for Vietnam's future as an independent nation. Some were anticommunists, while others supported the National Liberation Front and Hanoi. In the midst of war, South Vietnam represented the hope and chaos of decolonization and nation building during the Cold War. U.S. Embassy officers, State Department observers, and military advisers sought to cultivate a base of support for the Saigon government among local intellectuals and youth, but government arrests and imprisonment of political dissidents, along with continued war, made it difficult for some South Vietnamese activists to trust the Saigon regime. Meanwhile, South Vietnamese diplomats, including anticommunist students and young people who defected from North Vietnam, travelled throughout the world in efforts to drum up international support for South Vietnam. Drawing largely on Vietnamese language sources, Heather Stur demonstrates that the conflict in Vietnam was really three wars: the political war in Saigon, the military war, and the war for international public opinion. "It was a tense week in Saigon in October 1974, when a South Vietnamese university student slipped into the office of the city's archbishop to deliver a letter addressed to North Vietnamese youth. Archbishop Nguyen Van Binh was headed to the Vatican for an international meeting of Catholic leaders, and he promised the student he would hand the letter off to his Hanoi counterpart when he saw him at the conference. The letter implored North Vietnamese students to join southern youth in demanding an end to the fighting that the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement was supposed to have halted. Both the archbishop and the student risked arrest for circulating the letter. Authorities had raided the offices and shut down the operations of four newspapers that had published it. That the leader of South Vietnam's Catholics would be involved in clandestine communication between North and South Vietnamese students would have been surprising in the early 1960s, but by the mid-Seventies, many Vietnamese Catholics had grown weary enough of the war that they saw peace and reconciliation, even if under Hanoi's control, as the better alternative to endless violence."-- Provided by publisher Cover 1 Half-title 3 Series information 4 Title page 5 Copyright information 6 Dedication 7 Contents 9 List of Figures 11 Acknowledgments 13 Introduction 17 1 The Heart of South Vietnam: Saigon in the Sixties 41 Saigon's Political Revolving Door 43 Life for Americans and Vietnamese in Saigon 48 Urban Terrorism 56 2 A Tradition of Activism 68 3 South Vietnam's Sixties Youth 93 4 South Vietnam and the World 128 Regional Responses 147 Vu Van Thai 158 5 Building Connections between the People and the Government 168 Women, the Government, and South Vietnam's Future 170 Letters to National Government Agencies 177 6 Saigon after Tet 190 7 The Catholic Opposition and Political Repression 211 South Vietnam's Catholics 213 Chan Tin, Ðối Diện, and Political Prisoners 217 Ngo Cong Duc: Politician, Journalist, Catholic, Anti-Thieu 232 8 Saigon in the Seventies 239 Saigon's Political Scene 243 International Relations 263 1975: The Lead-Up to the Fall 269 Conclusion 276 Select Bibliography 287 Archives 287 Vietnam 287 United States 287 Published Sources 287 Index 293 South Vietnamese activists, intellectuals, students, and professionals had multiple visions for Vietnam's future as an independent nation. In expressing their views in the press and in public demonstrations, they performed democracy even as the Saigon government and US intervention stymied the development of democratic institutions.