Tony Coelho: the Dem Tom DeLay?

Two conditions were important to the new push: (1) conservative and business fears that the Democrats were about to embark on a new round of liberal economic and social policies, and (2) GOP fears of permanent minority status. The party's concern reached fever pitch after the Watergate hearings and President Nixon's resignation. Guy Vander Jagt, named chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee in 1975, grasped the nature of the perceived crisis and understood that it could be turned to advantage.

Stung by their loss of the presidency and control of the Senate in 1980, the Democrats decided to seek corporate PAC contributions aggressively. Rep. Tony Coelho (D Calif.) persuaded big Democratic financiers to contribute to the party's congressional fund and at the same time helped the Democrats to organize more effectively to solicit corporate PAC donations.

Both major parties and politicians within each party established "clubs" to facilitate interaction between wealthy contributors and politicians.

"Access. Access," [Coelho] told columnist Elizabeth Drew, "that's the name of the game. They meet with the leadership and with the chairmen of the committees. We don't sell legislation: we sell the opportunity to be heard."

...Democratic challengers and candidates for open seat races greatly increased their share of contributions from corporate, trade, and "nonconnected" PACs, while maintaining their near monopoly on labor PACs. Democratic candidates' share of corporate contributions rose from only 8 percent in 1984 to 28 percent in the 1986 off-year elections.

1. There was also a criminal investigation into his doings as commissioner general of the United States Pavilion at the 1998 World Expo.

Excellent piece on Murrow

1. Lemann says Murrow made the point in his speech to the RTNDA on October 15 1958. I've skimmed the speech: he refers to

   the fact that the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission publicly prods broadcasters to engage in their legal right to editorialize.

   but the prodding was clearly ineffective:

   It is much easier, much less troublesome, to use the money-making machine of television and radio merely as a conduit through which to channel anything that is not libelous, obscene or defamatory.

   In a largely despairing effort (this was pretty much the height of the quiz craze), he says, on the predominance of dross on screen,

   The only remedy for this is closer inspection and punitive action by the F.C.C. But in the view of many this would come perilously close to supervision of program content by a federal agency.

   Rather a sad valedictory.

The Herb Morrison Hindenburg recording

and I can count on my fingers the other times that NBC broadcast recordings--knowingly and unknowingly--until the middle of WW II.

Democratic skeletons: William Jefferson?

1. The leading case on the point is, I think, the Mike Espy case, Sun-Diamond Growers v US.

2. I'm pretty sure that salience is damned low at the moment for Congressional ethics scandals in general and Abramoff in particular. Which may explain why the VRWC hasn't yet majored on the Jefferson case.

Truthiness - 'sup?

LBJ and the FCC - still just scraps

Citing alleged interference with San Antonio's clear-channel WOAI at 1200 and Texas A&M station at 1150, KTBC, backed with Johnson's political clout, sought and obtained a reallocation from the [FCC] to an uncluttered area at 590 AM, and in the late 1940s it increased its power to 5,000 watts, making it the most powerful station in the Austin area by far, with a daytime coverage area that blanketed thirty-eight countries, extending from Dallas to Corpus Christi.

During the closing months of 1952, a number of new stations received a go-ahead. Among the first was KTBC-TV, Austin, Texas, licensed to Mrs Lyndon B Johnson, wife of the US Senator from Texas; before it even reached the air, advertising sales were such that Broadcasting magazine reported: "AUSTIN'S BRINGING IN A GUSHER."

That Diem closing still elusive

He instructed his representatives in Europe to contact American diplomats, and he decided to appoint Diem as the SVN's prime minister since "Washington would not spare him its support."

[State Department] records make no mention of direct American involvement in Diem's selection until May 1954. At that time, Ngo Dinh Luyen, a brother of Diem who claimed he was acting on behalf of Bao Dai, told American diplomats in Geneva of the emperor's intention to appoint Diem as premier if the United States supported Bao Dai's decision.

...met with Diem in the following weeks and told Washington that Diem's "apparent sincerity, patriotic fervor and honesty are refreshing." He nevertheless expressed doubts about Diem's abilities, calling Diem a "yogi-like mystic" who "may have little to offer other than to reiterate that the solution to the Vietnamese problem depends on the assumption of increased responsibilities by [the] US."

Members of the Eisenhower administration nonetheless favored Diem's candidacy. A military cable in early June reported that "Diem has received support and encouragement from American official quarters and this may be a reason why Bao Dai is considering him for the post."

John W Hanes, one of Dulles's assistant, later claimed that the secretary of state's support for Diem was "rammed through single-handedly, through our intelligence and military communities." In his memoirs, Bao Dai mentioned a conversation he had with Dulles before asking Diem to act as premier, and in The Lost Crusade, Chester Cooper writes of a meeting between Dulles and Bao Dai that dealt with the role Diem would play in preventing a Viet Minh takeover of Vietnam.

Robert Amory, who served as the CIA's deputy director of intelligence in the 1950s, asserted that Justice Douglas had initially sparked the agency's interest in Diem. Another senior CIA officer, Richard Dissell, later recalled that the VIA was "deeply involved" in winning support for Diem. A few accounts have noted that Ambassador William J Donovan, the founder of the OSS, and Lieutenant Colonel Edward G Landsdale, a CIA operative, appeared in Saigon shortly after Ngo Dinh Nhu, another of Diem's brothers, organized the Front for National Salvation [2], a group that promoted Diem's candidacy.

1. Someone who had actually fought against the Viet Minh, for example!

2. No sign online of this organisation; or National Salvation Front or Front de salut national either, as relevant to Vietnam in 1954.

3. It's interesting to note that NSC 5405, United States Objectives and Courses of Action with respect to Southeast Asia dated January 16 1954, contemplates the possibility of the French suing for peace, but (so far as I can see) suggests no action to take if US persuasion against that course chanced to fail. I'm not clear at what date NSC 5405 ceased to be operative.

4. The Jacobs may have better information on the subject, but GB deems I've seen too much of the book already, and has barred me from looking at it!

China Reporting interesting but mostly off the point

The American China romance - the Madame Chiang factor

Another icon bites the dust?

A personal note (don't ask!)

That Diem selection process

As David Anderson notes, the Eisenhower administration's most crucial Vietnam decisions were made after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. For all his circumspection when it came to committing US forces to a land war in Asia, Eisenhower had no intention of allowing Ho Chi Minh to seize all of Vietnam.

In [an NSC] meeting on 4 February 1954, over three months before the red flag was hoisted over Dien Bien Phu, CIA Director Allen Dulles complained that "there was no dynamism in the leadership of the Franco-Vietnamese forces." Eisenhower "interrupted" to "inquire if it would be possible to capitalize on the religious issue." Given that "most of the people of Vietnam were Buddhists," the president wondered whether the United States might "find a good Buddhist leader to whip up some real fervor." The sources of the next remark is unnamed, but he clearly voiced a shared sentiment. According to the minutes, "It was pointed out the president that, unhappily, Buddha was a pacifist rather than a fighter." This led to laughter. Vice President Richard Nixon then "expressed some doubt as to the strength and conviction with which the people of Vietnam clung to their religious views." Eisenhower replied that "he still believed that there was something in the idea of religious motivation. While conceding that Emperor Bao Dai was an unlikely guiding star for religious passions, Eisenhower "pointed out how Joan of Arc had managed to defeat a large enemy force and place a timid king upon his throne in France." Picking up on the Joan of Arc theme, Secretary of State Dulles remarked that "there were, of course, a million and a half Roman Catholics in Vietnam, and they included some of the best brains of the country." Eisenhower "suggested the Catholics be enlisted."

an organization the historian James Arnold Calls Eisenhower's "principal source of information" on Southeast Asia in the second half of the 1950s

Although neither Diem nor any other American ally was identified by name in the report, the South Vietnamese premier's celibacy, Spartan lifestyle, and repeated declarations of loyalty to the Catholic Church conformed nicely to the OCB's stipulations.

The views expressed by the OCB and other government authorities give some indication why, when on 10 May 1954, analysts at the State Department's Division of Philippine and Southeast Asian Affairs produced a list of sixteen Vietnamese politicians whom they considered reliably anticommunist, Ngo Dinh Diem - who had held no political office for over two decades and who had not participated in the struggle to rid his homeland of colonial oppression - headed the list. The analysts described Diem as "[t]he most prominent Catholic leader in Vietnam, perhaps the most popular personality in the country after Ho Chi Minh." They added, "Probably has Vatican support." At least six of the sixteen candidates for South Vietnamese leadership were Catholics, a high number given that Catholics made up only about 10 percent of the population of Vietnam.

1. I think that should be 1954!

The American romance with China

From 1900 to 1930, Millard wrote seven books and reported for the New York Times, New York World, New York Herald, New York Herald Tribune, Scribner's, Nation, and others. Because it was a time of political transition in China characterized by disorder and lack of authority, Millard and those associated with him were able to engage effectively in advocacy journalism. But he quickly realized that the American public was not very interested in China, that editors stood in the way of getting the word out and educating the public. So he sought to influence the foreign policy elite, and in this task he was helped by friends with influence and money, such as Charles Crane, an influential Chicagoan who, after making a great deal of money, devoted his life to pushing the concept of a special US relationship with China and Asia. Millard was often subsidized by Crane to the tune of $500 a month, and at times by various Chinese governments. Besides writing, Millard went to Washington to try to influence the State Department and constituent groups such as missionaries and businessmen, relentlessly propounding the idea of a special relationship with China.

Millard failed in part because China was not a central concern to American interests. But in terms of influence on other journalists, Millard was more successful. It is interesting to see how many journalists from the Midwest in later periods developed similar motivations. Many had that same sense of mission, a willingness to advocate a particular view and a particular role for the United States and China. Not really understanding China very deeply, Millard used China as an instrument, as an object for achieving what he believed to be American goals.

Americans in quest of renewal...found primitives in virtually all parts of the world to fulfill their psychic needs and longings. For some questers, Chinese peasants afforded the proper models.

1. According to this bio,

   On March 2, 1931, John Day published Buck's second novel, The Good Earth. The book became an overnight sensation after Will Rogers lauded it on the front page of the New York Times as "not only the greatest book about a people ever written but the best book of our generation."

   The Japanese attack on Manchuria came on September 18 1931.

Stetson Kennedy was a fabulist

Motherlode of 1959 US media pablum on SVN

VVA comes through on Colegrove

A snappy treatment of the US/Diem farrago

1. The relative contributions of Diem, the CIA and Tom Dooley - if the two last can be separated - I wouldn't guess at.

Not forgetting China

1. If CJCS Radford had had his way over bombing to relieve Dien Bien Phu in April 1954, things would have been rather different. I recall reading somewhere that Radford was at one stage proposing US bombers cross PRC airspace over Hainan Island (at the north of the Gulf of Tonkin) the sooner to reach their targets. No sign of this online, though, that I can see, so...

Michigan State, police state

Meany: save us from lily-white unions

Both President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were opposed to including an FEPC section because they thought it would kill the bill, but George Meany pressed for it. He did so for a simple reason. The AFL-CIO is a federation of affiliates which retain a relatively high degree of autonomy. The parent body can urge compliance with its policies, but the decision to act is left up to the affiliates. Meany felt that the only way the AFL-CIO could deal effectively with unions practicing discrimination would be to demand compliance with the law of the land. He testified before the House Judiciary Committee that the labor movement was calling for "legislation for the correction of shortcomings in its own ranks." And the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act greatly speeded the process of this correction.

VN: The Willard Hotel shindig

Except for Diem's tour of the United States in 1957, the AFV's greatest propaganda masterstroke was a conference titled "America's Stake in Vietnam" held at the Willard Hotel in Washington in June 1956". [Leading AFV member Joseph] Buttinger volunteered to set a "top-level" agenda. Over the next few weeks, according to his reports, he courted "representatives from leading national civic, public, veterans, and foreign-affairs organizations; ...representatives of the diplomatic corps in Washington; [and] the press."

The response was overwhelmingly positive. State Department officer Paul Kattenburg met with AFV coordinator Gilbert Jonas to advise him that the department looked "quite favorably" upon the conference and would permit [ASS for Far Eastern Affairs] Walter Robertson to be a featured speaker.

Robertson was eager to participate, calling the conference "an excellent opportunity to focus public attention on the excellent progress the Republic of Vietnam has been making." Equally keen to speak at the conference was Senator Kennedy, who was contacted at the eleventh hour when his more prominent colleague Mike Mansfield became indisposed. The late substitute Kennedy would deliver the conference's most oft-quoted address.

The purpose of "America's Stake in Vietnam," according to the AFV's press release, was "to focus American attention on the nature of the current threat posed by communist demands for holding all-Vietnamese elections." This seemed a timely concern, given that less than a month after the conference was held, Saigon and Hanoi were to confer under the Geneva Accords to arrange unification. No US policymaker gave Diem a chance against Ho Chi Minh in a nationwide election. Diem, however, had declared he had no intention of abiding by the accords, and Ambassador Reinhardt counseled Secretary of State Dulles that it was "unwise...to focus attention" on the election issue. Reinhardt urge the State Department to persuade the AFV to "concentrate instead on means of expanding US-Vietnamese relationships." Young met privately with O'Daniel and convinced the general that the focus of the conference should be changed.

Lack of a unifying theme did not prevent "American's Stake in Vietnam" from being a public relations tour de force. The Willard Hotel had rarely seen a more star-studded panel. Luminaries from a variety of professions and organizations lent their voices to Diem's cause; from the military, O'Daniel; from academe, Professor Hans Morgenthau of the University of Chicago; from the Catholic Church, Monsignor Joseph Harnett; from the medical profession, Doctor Tom Dooley; from Capitol Hill, Senator Kennedy; and from the State Department, Assistant Secretary Robertson. The roughly two hundred people who attended the conference came from an equally broad spectrum: representatives of business firms, church groups, and labor and educational associations rubbed shoulders with academics, diplomats and military officers.

O'Daniel's welcome sounded the note that would echo throughout the conference. "from the very beginning, first as premier and then as president of South Vietnam," the general declared, "Ngo Dinh Diem has shown great courage and determination...This conference has been called to emphasize the progress made by President Diem and his people, Progress which inspires admiration and respect." Kennedy then praised Diem in extravagant terms, citing his "amazing success in meeting firmly and with determination the major political and economic crises which had heretofore continually plagued Vietnam." The senator strung together a sequence of metaphors that would become famous, appearing in most treatments of the Vietnam War: "Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike." In an expression of staggering paternalism, Kennedy asserted, "If we are not the parents of little Vietnam, then surely we are the godparents. We presided at its birth, we gave assistance to its life, we have helped to shape its future...This is our offspring. We cannot abandon it." Assistant Secretary Robertson also lauded Diem's accomplishments. "The free world owes President Diem a debt of gratitude," Robertson declared. "In him, his country has found a truly worthy leader." There was "no more dramatic example" of Diem's "moral fortitude," Robertson attested, than his "battle against the parasitic politico-religious sects in the spring of 1955."

1. To the extend the Accords were ever implemented, that is.

1. Search on "America's Stake in Vietnam" and "book on vietnam".

Calling International Rescue...

...the leading figures in the AFV - Buttinger, Cherne, Oram and the diplomat Angier Biddle Duke - had spent many years working for the IRC, the largest nonsectarian refugee organization in the world.

The IRC gained international renown in the 1930s and 1940s for saving European Jews from Hitler's tyranny, and its anticommunist credentials were certified in the 1950s with well-publicized fund-raising drives to rescue East German and Hungarian victims of Soviet repression. An IRC résumé conferred enormous moral authority upon its possessor and tended to place that individual beyond suspicion of legally questionable activity. Moreover, even if such suspicion were piqued, there was little chance of harassment by the US Justice Department, as Oram pointed out in an interview with the historian William Brownell. "Even by 1962, there were only four lawyers to oversee the Foreign Agents Registration Act for the entire United States," Oran recalled. Hence, no one raised the issue of conflict of interest when Oram's firm received money from Diem's government while Oram continued to serve on the board of directors of the AFV. More important than lack of legal oversight was the vacuum of Vietnam expertise in the United States at the time of the AFV's emergence. Cherne remarked to Brownell that the AFV had "a clear field of fire...There was no alternate body of information on Vietnam."

she kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm.

James Fisher also notes that the crazy-quilt pluralism of the AFV's membership also worked in the group's favor, serving to distinguish it from other one-issue lobbies whose rosters featured only hard-line conservatives or liberal/leftists. The national committee of the AFV, Fisher observes, "comprised perhaps the most ecumenical coalition of opinion-makers ever witnessed," including [Mansfield and JFK], the Republicans Walter Judd and Clement Zablocki, [Luce and Hearst], the liberal academics Samuel Eliot Morison and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, the war heroes Audie Murphy and Mike O'Daniel, the Oscar-winning director Joseph Mankiewicz, the author and "celebrity saint" Tom Dooley, and even Norman Thomas, the president of the American Socialist Party.

...with the proviso that "my interest in Viet-Nam does not extend to automatic endorsement of American participation in war to that end."

Thomas's signature on a letter arguing that Diem was justified in refusing to permit the scheduled elections was doubly effective; if the socialist leader believed that holding a single election in both parts of Vietnam could "only be regarded as an imperialist endeavor contrary to the will of the South Vietnamese people," then, it appeared, the AFV was not merely spouting a party line.

When William Donovan, an early chairman of the AFV, wrote to President Eisenhower to protest communist Chinese premier Chou En-lai's call for compliance with the Geneva Accords, Eisenhower responded personally within two days, assuring Donovan that he "completely agreed" with the chairman's position and that he would "instantly" take up the matter of Chou's "impertinence" with the State Department. "As you know," the president wrote, "I consider that President Diem is the most potent force we have in South Viet Nam to halt the arrogant march of communism."

Diem: the media Hall of Shame

President Ngo Dinh Diem is one of the great statesmen of Asia and of the world...In honoring him we pay tribute to the eternal values which all free men everywhere are prepared to defend with their lives.

It was a Life headline that tagged Diem "The Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam," and the world "miracle" became indelibly associated with Diem's name.

The [Times] "salute[d] President Ngo Dinh Diem" for carrying out a "five-year miracle" in South Vietnam.

In a radio interview in 1956, Murrow asserted, "Diem...has made so much progress in the past six months that some people use the overworked word 'miracle' in describing improvements in South Vietnam.

[It] presented a photograph of Diem surrounded by a cheering mob; alongside the photo ran the caption: "Ngo Dihn Diem, South Vietnam's president, has sought and gained popular support. The success of Diem's leadership has surprised the skeptics and aroused the anger of the communists.

Scholarly publications proved no less susceptible to the miracle legend. The prestigious journal Foreign Affairs asserts, "History may yet judge Diem as one of the great figures of twentieth century Asia." The author William Henderson claimed that prior to Diem's assumption of the premiership, South Vietnam "seemed certain to sink into the abyss of bloody internecine strife ending in complete collapse." Yet a mere two years later, "South Vietnam is very much in business...In short, a wholly unexpected political miracle has taken place in South Vietnam...[T]he principal credit should be given to [Diem].

The liberal press was most lavish in its praise, a development that seems counterintuitive give Diem's conservatism and religious zealotry. These traits were more than offset, however, by his uprightness and apparent independence. Whereas Asian Allies like Bao Dai and Chiang Kai-shek had, either through corruption or sloth, earned the label of puppet, Diem appeared immune to such obloquy. Self-denying in his lifestyle, he did not visibly profit from the aid America funneled into his regime. Further more, his determination to steer his own course, even if that meant initiating war with the Bihn Xuyen against the wishes of Eisenhower's personal representative, seemed to demonstrate his freedom from superpower coercion. The phrases "nobody's puppet" and "nobody's pawn" recurred frequently in the stories run on Diem in the American media. If Diem were no puppet, it followed that the United States was not practicing neocolonialism by supporting him, and cold war liberals like [Mansfield] and [Justice Douglas] could be secure in their own righteousness and confident that America would not repeat France's failure in Vietnam. The Miracle Man's appeal to the messianic liberalism of the early cold war - as distinguished from the more jaded liberalism of post-Vietnam America - ensured that, in James Fisher's words, "Diem was lionized...as beacon of non-communist Left internationalism in the 1950s.

...none...was a consequence of any programs initiated by Diem as leader of the Republic of Vietnam. On the contrary, Diem moved swiftly after consolidating power to transform his country into a police state structurally indistinguishable from the most oppressive dictatorships on either side of the Iron Curtain.

1. Close - my recall from Prime Time is that See It Now lost its sponsor - Alcoa - in 1955, and lost its regular slot to The $64,000 Question. This, this, and this are useful.

   Oh - and: Golden Agers, prepare yourself for a nasty shock downpiece.

Step forward Lawton Collins...

Although a Catholic himself, Collins correctly identified Diem's religious militance as tending to undermine indigenous support for his government...For over six months in 1954-55, the general furnished Washington with dozens of reports arguing for Diem's replacement by another South Vietnamese: a Buddhist, a coalition builder, a practical politician with experience in Vietnamese affairs.

Enter Dr Dooley...

If the United States had aboard more ambassadors Like Thomas A Dooley, I think it not only would be better off, but it would be better understood in the countries which are underdeveloped.

1. Much biographical info on this page. (I'm presently not interested in Dooley. But there's evidently no shortage of material there.) The murky details of the great move south are explored in a piece by John Prados.

What do you do for children who have had chopsticks driven into their ears? Or for old women whose collarbones have been shattered by rifle butts? Or for kids whose ears have been torn off with pincers? How do you treat a priest who has had nails driven into his skull to make a travesty of the Crown of Thorns?

highly stylized account of the events [which] could have been written by one of Ed Lansdale’s CIA propaganda experts...

American ignorance of Vietnam ensured that no one noticed when Dooley got his facts wrong. "My story is a story of Viet Nam, a country just a few miles wide and fewer miles long," he proclaimed in a Chicago address...In another speech, he claimed that the "tragedy in Vietnam was partly...of American's making, because we failed to completely crush the Chinese armies in Korea to the point where they could never have moved down...to Southeast Asia and taken over."

The Catholic mafia in America

With strength in numbers, improved schooling, and crescendoing economic power came political clout. The Catholic grip on local political machinery in some states, notably Connecticut, was nearly absolute. By 1960, twelve Catholic senators and nine-one representatives served in Congress - a representation greater than American Catholics had achieved previously, albeit one in proportion to their numbers. In terms of orientation on the left-right political spectrum, Catholic legislators ranged between two McCarthys, Eugene on the left and Joseph on the right, most tending to cluster the conservative pole. Even liberal cold war congressmen like John F Kennedy and Mike Mansfield were spirited in their hawkishness, while Senator Patrick McCarran of Nevada frequently out-McCartheyed McCarthy in his red-hunting exertions and in the Internal Security Act of 1950 that bore his name.

Some Americans were alarmed by what they perceived as political and cultural aggression by Catholics. Martin Marty, professor of history at the University of Chicago, noted with dismay the media's tendency to refer to "our" cardinal and "our" pope. Christian Century, a mainstream Protestant journal, ran an eight-part series that asked, "Can Catholicism Win America?" and concluded that, yes it could...

...Charles Morris notes, "[b]y the 1950s, the Catholic Church was the country's dominant cultural force. No other institution could match its impact on politics, unions, movies, or even popular kitsch." Books with explicitly Catholic themes like Francis Spellman's The Foundling and Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain numbered among the biggest best-sellers of the fifties. Red Foley's song "Our Lady of Fatima" made the Hit Parade in 1950 and was recorded a dozen times throughout the remainder of the decade by artists as diverse as the Ray Charles Singers and Andy Williams. In 1959, the Catholic Press Association reported a record total of over twenty-four million subscribers to 580 Catholic newspapers in the United States. That same year, more than 150 radio stations carried "The Catholic Hour" to an estimated four million listeners. Bishop Fulton Sheen's "Life Is Worth Living" series not only captured the largest television audience of the mi-1950s, with over thirty million viewers per week, but also won every major TV award, many of them several times...hugely popular television personalities - Jackie Gleason, Ed Sullivan, and Perry Como, to name but three - made no effort to disguise their identity as Catholics, as they might have in an earlier time; on the contrary, they spoke openly of their devotion to the Church. Depictions of Catholic priests and nuns in the movies were overwhelmingly favorable, in sharp contrast to the brutish interpretations set forth in films from the thirties like Little Caesar and Public Enemy. Significantly, the Hollywood Catholic priest of the cold war era was a virile figure, prepared to back up his principles with his fists. In the film On the Waterfront (1954), Karl Malden's Father Barry flattened a form prizefighter. After viewing this multiple Academy Award-wining movie, Marty noted, "Catholicism tends to dominate the mass media."

As in other spheres of American life, the Church's influence on foreign policy was at its zenith during the early cold war, principally owing to shifting US attitudes toward the Soviet Union. Patrick Allitt has demonstrated that while millions of Americans did an about-face in the late 1940s and early 1950s and went from admiring the Soviets as gallant allies to condemning them as no better than the Nazis, "[f]or American Catholics...zealous anti-communism was nothing new; Catholics schools had been teaching it for the best part of a century, and the wartime alliance with Stalin had not effaced it." During the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations, American Catholics led the fight against US recognition of the Soviet Union. They also protested Roosevelt's closeness to the anticlerical and leftist Mexican regime of the 1930s and supported Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War, viewing Franco as the champion of Spain's Catholic Church against the Moscow-backed Republicans. While Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini divided up Europe, and Japan carved out an empire on the Chinese mainland, it was common for Catholic spokesmen in the United States to express a preference for fascism over communism as the lesser of two evils. Hence at war's end, when American public opinion turned against Russia, the nation's Catholic population was already fully prepared, and American Catholics benefited from being in the vanguard of the anti-red zeitgeist.

Warmly recalling this watershed moment when national political consensus fell in line with a time-honored Catholic view, Daniel Patrick Moynihan writes, "In the era of security clearances, to be an Irish Catholic became prima facie evidence of loyalty. Harvard men were to be checked; Fordham men would do the checking." Catholics became increasingly visible in the late 1940s and 1950s in organizations like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where J Edgar Hoover recruited agents who were, in the words of an FBI historian, "young, aggressive, and - not coincidentally - alumni of Catholic colleges, particularly Notre Dame. They were holy terrors."

1. Pure supposition, this. Except that this dissertation seems to support the idea (I've just glanced at it).

A dedicated Diem book!

...anticommunism and ignorance of local political realities are insufficient to explain why America opted to sink or swim with Diem rather than some other South Vietnamese. As the record of administrative deliberations in the mid-1950s makes plain, several popular, qualified, and irreproachably anticommunist politicians in Saigon presented attractive alternatives to Diem, and every member of President Dwight Eisenhower's policy -making coterie was aware of their existence; indeed, one aspirant, former defense minister Phan Huy Quat, come close to unseating Diem, as J Lawton Collins, Eisenhower's "special representative" in Vietnam, relentlessly badgered Washington to effect such a change in command. Other suitable candidates included Foreign Affairs Minister Tran Van Do and General Nguyen Van Hinh. These men had all established their anticommunism, and all had greater political experience than Diem. Yet none was able to secure the backing of the Eisenhower administration.

Moreover, the contention that Diem initially governed South Vietnam as a liberal reformer and become an autocrat only in the final months of his reign - a narrative that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations promulgated in the early to mid-1960s - is simply false. Evaluations composed by American observers during Diem's first days in office identified the very same qualities that would bring about his assassination nine years later: discrimination against non-Catholics, refusal to share power, and easy resort to violence to quell dissent. None of these idiosyncrasies ought to have come as a surprise to Eisenhower, his chief advisers or those molders of American public opinion - the press lords Henry Luce and DeWitt Wallace, Senators Mike Mansfield and John F Kennedy, "celebrity saint" Tom Dooley, and others - who championed Diem in the 1950s and helped bankroll his despotism. Diem never pretended to be anything other than what he was, and he never changed.

I propose to demonstrate how a particular body of ideas about religion and race helped cement the Eisenhower administration's alliance with Diem.

...Catholicism endeared him to elite figures in the Eisenhower administration and made him stand out among possible candidates for America's cold war surrogate in Saigon. Moreover, widespread assumptions that Asians were culturally, and perhaps racially, unready for democratic self-government predisposed US policymakers to excuse Diem's overtly dictatorial ambitions as appropriate for Vietnam.

Diem first set foot on American soil in late August 1950...he came with impressive references. Edmund Gullion of the American embassy in Saigon informed [Acheson] that Diem was "the chief leader of the Vietnamese Catholics" and speculated that his visit might heighten Catholic awareness of "the communist danger to Viet-Nam."

James Webb, acting secretary of state, cabled the Saigon embassy, "We were impressed that Thuc, through the Catholics, might be [an] important figure in [the] present IC [Indochina] complex...The [i]nfluence of Thuc's clerical background and position[,] with its evident bearing on his thinking[,] was apparent." Diem on the other hand, struck officials as "less precise, realistic, and authoritative...He fits more into [the] mold of [a] present-day Vietnamese politician, steeped in Oriental intrigue."

[The Ngos] were...incapable of advancing any strategy whereby the United States could displace the French in Indochina without damaging the recently inaugurated [NATO], and proved similarly unable to explain how American forces, nearly expelled from the Korean peninsula just weeks before, could fight two land wars in Asia at the same time. Diem in particular irritated Webb with his "resort to generalities." "Like other prominent Vietnamese," the acting secretary complains, "Diem is...either incapable or unwilling to [sic] offer any constructive solution to [the] current dilemma other than vague and defamatory ref[erence]s to Fr[ance] and implications that only [the] US can solve [the] problem, thru him of course."

associating primarily with clergymen and other individuals active in Catholic circles.

valuable allies in our common endeavor to preserve the rights of free men in Indochina.

expressed themselves eager...to remain in touch with the Catholic clergy of the United States.

No American newspaper mentioned Diem's visit...

individuals active in Catholic circles

a hero in Central and North Vietnam, with a considerable following in the South, too...Diem is revered by the Vietnamese because he is honest and independent.

Nicknamed "China Mike," Mansfield was Congress's foremost authority on Asia, having been a professor of Far Eastern history before his election to the House of Representatives in 1942. The war in the Pacific generated a demand for individuals with Mansfield's academic background, and he acquired a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee despite his lack seniority. In 1944, [FDR] sent him on a fact-finding trip to India, Burma, and China. Although FDR subsequently showed little interest in Mansfield's report, and despite the fact that Mansfield's criticism of Chiang Kai-shek left him vulnerable to attacks from McCarthyites after the Chinese communists won their civil war, the Montanan gained notoriety from this junketing.

I do not know too much about the Indochina situation. I do not think that anyone does.

at a luncheon hosted by Douglas at the Supreme Court Building on 7 May 1953 [which] may have been one of the most fateful encounters of the postwar era. Also present at Douglas's luncheon were Senator John F Kennedy, Cardinal Spellman, Gene Gregory of the State Department, and Representative Zablocki, soon to become chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. When asked years later about the apparent religious homogeneity of the gathering, Mansfield insisted, "It wasn't a question of religion - the fact that we were all Catholics was just coincidental."

The same, however, could be said for Douglas who followed up his tribute to Diem in North from Malaya with a denunciation of the Buddhist church of Vietnam...

It teaches very little social or community responsibility.

1. Vietnamese names are tricky.

2. Formerly Office of Far Eastern Affairs - both colloquially known as FE - Richard Weigle's oral history interview explains. The post-doctoral grade at Dean Acheson's Cowardly College of Communist Containment; Truman-era witchhunt firings there supposedly explain (in part) the subsequent pisspoor performance of US Vietnam policy.

   Who got at the guys at State even before Diem arrived? The UW list of online FRUS volumes does not include Vol VI of 1950 - East Asia and the Pacific - full list.

3. The celebrations for whose 25th anniversary of ordination sparked the Buddhist crisis of 1963, as related here.

4. Jacobs gets in an anachronistic PC jibe at Mansfield:

   ...his greater familiarity with the big powers of Asia did not preclude Mansfield from referring to the Japanese as "these small, myopic, buck-toothed sons of Nippon" or declaring that 'the Chinese smile and mean it; the Japanese smile and do not mean it. The Chinese are reasonable; the Japanese fanatical."

   I'd be fairly certain that this would have been said during or shortly after WW2. Jesus!

   (If his point is that the learned shouldn't stereotype, I'd tend to agree with it. If it is they did, but no longer do, I'd doubt he'd got the evidence.)

5. Provo is remarkably small of online footprint. This says

   The most famous person to be caught under the sodomy law was John Provoo, a former Army sergeant who had his treason conviction overturned because his homosexuality had been injected into the trial by the prosecution. In 1958, he received three years in a reformatory for a "morals charge" involving an 18-year-old "boy."

   A footnote gives the dead-tree references to the treason cases.

   There is also this (PDF).

Mansfield and Diem

While the period of confusion that followed Geneva was reflected in the public debate, the thrust of where different groups wanted the United States to go remained clear. On May 15, 1955, the Times told its readers that the United States had no alternative to supporting Diem in Vietnam. Only the Chicago Tribune espoused an anti-administration position, charging on May 3, 1955, that US aid was being wasted in Vietnam.

As for Congress, in early 1955 two senators, Mike Mansfield and Hubert Humphrey, along with prominent public personages such as Francis Cardinal Spellman, initiated a save-South-Vietnam drive by supporting the Diem campaign. Mansfield said the United States had no choice but to support Diem. Humphrey accused US policymakers of "wavering," saying that this was no time for "weakness," and that the fall of the South would threaten the rest of Asia.

No legislator and none of the elite press raised on word in protest when the July 1956 date for holding these elections passed. The backing for the anti-Communist Saigon regime even seemed to convert such former skeptics as Senator Knowland, who now urged support of Diem to avoid a "continental Dien Bien Phu."

And into 1959, as conservatives began to charge misuse and waste of Americans funds by the Diem government, Senator J William Fulbright rose to the defense, saying that although the aid may have been misused, it was still vital to continue in the long-term interests of the Free World.

It was the burgeoning crisis in Laos in 1959, however, that once again brought the American stakes in Indochina into full scope. Since early 1958 the elite press had been building up the Laos story, portraying Laos as the victim of Communist violations of the Geneva accords of 1954. In an editorial on May 10, 1961, the New York Times called it a "stepping-stone" for a Communist takeover and added in an editorial on May 12 that the situation "involved not merely Laos and South Vietnam but the danger that all Southeast Asia will fall to the Communists and that general war will be ignited. After the signing of the Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos on July 23, 1962, in Geneva, the establishment press closed ranks behind the President's settlement, but with no expressions of congratulations. The position of the elite press and the liberal senators, similar to that of many conservatives, was that a coalition government and neutralization meant losing. And when the Laotian accords quickly broke down and fighting resumed, the air was filled with "I told you so's." But as the Washington Post editorialized on April 15, 1963: "Is Laos worth the risk or the cost of a Viet-Nam?"

Congressional comment about the situation shifted from the serious questioning of 1954 to mildly questioning acceptance of the US involvement. On September 4 1959, Mansfield lamented that Laos was teetering on the brink of collapse and asked "What is the answer?" The administration's answer was more of the same, for these countries had to be saved from Communist control. The next day Democratic Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut went further: "We will do whatever becomes necessary to defend Laos, including armed intervention." On September 7 Mansfield asked the questions about Laos that were soon to become popular with respect to Vietnam as well. Who is running American policy in Laos? Have the Dense Department and the CIA been given too much responsibility? Where are the President and the State Department? The Conservatives, again, were not interested in these questions…

1. Some pols in each category, some of the time.

1. Mildly curious, I go to the 'Times Select' page to find that those who pony up their fifty bucks are only allowed 100 archive pieces per year! I'd be pushed to limit myself to that per day...

2. I think back to the 04 campaign and newshole-packing ephemera such as the Kerry roorbacks (Swiss cheese on cheesesteak, looking French, the Swifties) and the Killian memos.

Air America - tedious as ever, apparently

1. My supposition. Even basic Arbitrons are held more closely than state secrets, let alone that depth of demo analysis!

2. Try the Crystal Ball for sketches and forecasts.

Alger, I mean Adlai on the Powell Amendment

Here among these intense young liberals it missed its mark. Evidently what they want to hear about is civil rights, minorities and Israel, and little else, and certainly no vague futures.

I will do everything I can to bring about national unity even if I have to ask some of you to come about it gradually.

Bill Lawrence of The New York Times, standing beside me in the back of the jam-packed hall, exclaimed, "He's blown it"...

On the word-of-mouth level, Kefauver's people are undoubtedly making hay with the ain't-nobody-here-but-us Confederates approach to segregation...In the cracker country the standard technique is a broad wink and the question, 'Who do you think can handle them niggers better, a city fellow from Illinois or a country boy from Tennessee?'

1. Ashmore was a journo who took leave to work for Adlai's '56 campaign. Interview and review.

2. A snippet previously unknown to me: Kefauver's non-signature of the Manifesto was assumed to be a plus point for him over Stevenson.

   Ashmore

   ...asked Senator Olin Johnson of South Carolina if he couldn't at least urge his colleague to delay release of the manifesto[. H]e replied, 'It's no use trying to talk to Strom. He believes that shit.'

   The quote is well known, of course; the context, less so, I suspect.

   Of course, Kefauver was loathed by Southern pols generally; Stevenson, on the basis of the enemy of my enemy, ought to have got some sympathy from that quarter.

   Is Johnson to be believed? Thurmond is usually evaluated, and condemned, on his record on race. His political acumen is much less argued over, is my impression.