Each week, The Gaggle Book Club recommends a book for Gagglers to read and—most important—uploads a pdf version of it.

Our practice is that we do not vouch for the reliability or accuracy of any book we recommend. Still less, do we necessarily agree with a recommended book's central arguments. However, any book we recommend will be of undoubted interest and intellectual importance.

Today's book club selection is "Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States and the Fate of South Vietnam," by Edward Miller. Published in 2013 by Harvard University Press, the book is an attempt to reassess the career and legacy of South Vietnam's much-maligned first president, Ngo Dinh Diem. As Miller tells the story, Diem was never a puppet or a stooge of the United States. Instead, he was a leader with his own vision for Vietnam who unfortunately got entangled in an alliance with Washington that soon became a “misalliance.”

The “misalliance” lay in the fact that Washington and Saigon never truly shared the same objectives, even though they appeared aligned together against Communism. This mismatch of goals and expectations destabilized South Vietnam and set the stage for the U.S.-sanctioned overthrow of Diem and the eventual collapse of South Vietnam.

Diem pursued a nation-building project for South Vietnam based on his own ideas of “personalism,” Vietnamese nationalism and state centralization.

Personalism was concept that originated in French Catholic thought during the 1930s and 40s, especially in the writings of Emmanuel Mounier. It advanced a third way between liberal individualism (seen as selfish and materialist) and collectivist communism (seen as dehumanizing), emphasizing spiritual renewal and a disciplined, moral state. According to this philosophy, the person is the irreducible unit of human dignity, but persons only thrive in a community. Individual rights alone are insufficient. However, the social order of the community should be moral, spiritual and oriented toward the “common good.”

In South Vietnam, personalism was intended to be anti-Communist (Communism was seen as materialist and atheistic) and anti-liberal (liberal democracy was seen as morally shallow and politically unstable. Diem sought to establish modern Vietnamese nationalism on a solid spiritual and moral foundation. Society needed to be organized hierarchically, guided by moral elites such as Diem and his mandarins. Authority was necessary to cultivate virtue and unity. It was the responsibility of government to reform society, discipline citizens and instill virtue.

From 1954 to 1963, Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, promoted personalism as the official state ideology of South Vietnam. The Americans, needless to say, found personalism baffling. They dismissed it as vague, mystical or irrelevant. They wanted Diem to adopt Western democratic reforms instead. The concept of personalism only served to deepen the “misalliance” that is the theme of Miller's book. Diem saw himself as building a moral community, while the U.S. thought he should build a modern liberal democracy.

Born in 1901, Diem came from a prominent Catholic mandarin family in central Vietnam. He worked in the imperial bureaucracy until 1933 when resigned protesting colonial domination. He spent the wartime years in semi-exile making contacts with American Catholic leaders, Asian anti-communists and French critics of colonialism.

After the Geneva Accords of 1954, which divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel, the French backed Emperor Bao Dai, while the Americans were searching for a stronger, anti-communist nationalist. Thanks to the influence of the Catholic lobby, the U.S.decided to throw their weight behind Diem, who was seen as both anti-French colonial and anti-communist. In 1955, with U.S. support, Diem staged a dubious referendum ousting Bao Dai.

Diem used the army to centralize power and moved to suppress rival factions: Gone was the Binh Xuyen gang in Saigon and the he Hoa Hao and Cao Dai religious sects. Far from being inert or reactionary, Diem during the late 1950s and early 1960s had reformed South Vietnam. There was redistribution of land and expansion of education and infrastructure.

According to Miller, Diem was engaging in a serious, indigenous projects of nation-building. It was rooted in Diem’s worldview and was not dictated from Washington. For Diem, the war was political before it was military: the task was to mold a new national community with moral cohesion.

By 1960, U.S. officials increasingly saw South Vietnam through the lens of modernization theory and counterinsurgency. They wanted quantifiable reforms: faster land redistribution, greater political liberalization, more aggressive military action. They were frustrated by Diem’s insistence on slow, moral reform. Miller emphasizes that the Americans misread Diem’s intentions: what Washington viewed as obstinacy or “Oriental mysticism” was actually a coherent attempt to construct a viable postcolonial polity.

Miller offers a revision of the standard view of the Strategic Hamlet Program that Diem initiated in 1961. This program is usually dismissed in U.S. histories as a top-down failure. Miller challenges this view. Strategic hamlets were designed to secure villages against communist infiltration by resettling peasants into defensible, community-oriented spaces. They were linked to Diem’s vision of communitarian personalism, in pursuit of moral education and solidarity. For Diem, the hamlets were about slow nation-building; for the U.S., they were a counterinsurgency tactic. The two sides talked past each other.

As the war against the Viet Cong intensified, Diem came increasingly into conflict not only with the Americans but with the country's Buddhists. As Miller describes it, the Buddhist crisis in the summer of 1963, which was to precipitate Diem's downfall later that year, was in large part a creation of the United States, driven by the desire to demonstrate to South Vietnam's president that he had lost the populace's "hearts and minds" and that he needed to step down.

To the surprise of the Americans, Diem's government proved to be resilient and survived the Buddhist crisis. The Americans decided on something far more drastic. Diem had grown resentful of U.S. interference and lecturing; he believed the Americans neither understood Vietnam’s cultural-political realities nor respected his sovereignty. The U.S. saw Diem as stubborn, uncooperative and incapable of winning the war against the Communists.

Whatever his flaws, Diem was building a viable state, and his government was not on the verge of collapse. The United States began plotting with South Vietnamese generals to stage a military coup against Diem. Diem and Nhu were duly toppled and brutally assassinated.

Far from liberating South Vietnam, the coup destabilized it permanently and deepened U.S. entanglement. The 1963 coup destroyed the most coherent leadership South Vietnam ever had, leaving a vacuum the U.S. would never be able to fill. Diem's overthrow led to total political collapse in Saigon, and the U.S. had to rush forces in to salvage the situation. Thus the Vietnam quagmire came into being.

In "Misalliance," Miller portrays Diem as an intelligent, determined, if rigid leader, whose project was distinct from U.S. priorities — and who was undone not because he was doomed, but because Washington chose to remove him. "Misalliance," now widely regarded as one of the most important of recent revisionist histories of the Vietnam War, recasts Diem as a Vietnamese nationalist with his own state-building project. The tragedy of South Vietnam was that Washington and Saigon were bound together but never truly aligned—hence, a “misalliance.”