452 ChaPter^9
hundreds of military advisors in the RVN. Ho and his representative for the
South, Le Duan, also still hoped that Vietnam could be unified peacefully, that
Diem’s harsh ways would motivate the southerners themselves to get rid of
him. And it was true that Diem was creating a huge number of enemies with
his cruel repression, but the southerners still wanted to do more, to take
action against Diem’s government rather than wait for him to implode. So
the people were moving ahead of the northern leadership, and, on 20
December 1960, at a meeting in Tay Ninh Province near Saigon on the
Cambodian border, representatives of various southern Vietnamese political,
social, religious, and ethnic groups established the National Liberation Front,
or the NLF. Almost all the delegates at Tay Ninh were native. As the conflict
dragged on, the U.S. would justify its growing role in the war by saying it
was supporting the South, which had been “invaded” by the North. This was
simply not true.
The NLF was created by southerners, because of Diem’s repression in the
South, and the North actually was reluctant to support it until people in the
South themselves forced Hanoi to act. There was no invasion. Vietnam
remained one country artificially divided with a fictional country, invented
and paid for by the U.S., below the 17th parallel. The creation of the NLF
came just as a new president was coming into office in Washington D.C.–John
Kennedy. Kennedy, despite later claims [such as in Oliver Stone’s movie JFK]
that he was a man of peace who would not have gone into war in Vietnam,
in reality dramatically increased U.S. participation in the war. Kennedy
believed that the preservation of “South Vietnam” was crucial to American
credibility–the opinion that other nations held of the U.S., the idea that the
U.S. was a reliable friend and would also help defend against common ene-
mies–and so he began immediately to raise the stakes in Vietnam. He sent
more money to the RVN so it could add 20,000 troops to its Army in 1961,
and then added funds for another 30,000. He also paid to increase the Civil
Guard–a national unit like a police force–from 32,000 to 68,000 troops. To pay
for this, the U.S, already sending about $250 million a year to the RVN, sent
Diem an additional $42 million [a combined total of over $2 billion in today’s
dollars]. And in May, Kennedy sent Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson to
Vietnam as a public relations measure. Johnson told the media that Diem was
“the Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia,” but he privately admitted later that
“shit, man, he’s the only boy we got out there.”