should have been an unequivocally good thing. The problem was that that
pesky Cold War was going on—a global religious war between the capitalist,
liberal Western powers and the Communist Eastern Bloc. And when it turned
out that Ho Chi Minh, the guy who gave the French the ass-kicking, was a
Communist, well, everyone kind of freaked out and thought this could spark
World War III.
Terrified of a major war, a bunch of heads of state sat down at a fancy
table somewhere in Switzerland and agreed to skip the nuclear annihilation
part and go straight to slicing Vietnam in half. Why a country that didn’t do
anything to anybody deserved to be cut in half, don’t ask me.^17 But
apparently everyone decided that North Vietnam would be Communist, South
Vietnam would be capitalist, and that’s that. Everyone would live happily ever
after.
(Okay, maybe not.)
Here was the problem. The Western powers put a man named Ngo Dinh
Diem in charge of South Vietnam until proper elections could be held. At
first, everyone seemed to like this Diem guy. A devout Catholic, he was
French educated, had spent a number of years in Italy, and was multilingual.
Upon meeting him, U.S. vice president Lyndon Johnson called Diem “the
Winston Churchill of Asia.” He was practically one of us!
Diem was also charismatic and ambitious. He impressed himself not only
on the Western leaders but also on the former Vietnamese emperor. Diem
declared confidently that he would be the one to finally bring democracy to
Southeast Asia. And everyone believed him.
Well, that’s not what happened. Within a year of taking power, Diem
outlawed every political party in South Vietnam other than his own. And
when it came time for the country to have its referendum, he put his own
brother in charge of managing all electoral sites. And you’ll never believe
this, but Diem won the election! With a mind-blowing 98.2 percent of the
vote!
It turned out this Diem guy was a total piece of shit. Ho Chi Minh, the
leader of North Vietnam, was a total piece of shit, too, of course. And if I
learned anything in college, it’s that the first rule of geopolitical theory is that
when you have two total pieces of shit living next door to each other, millions
of people die.^18
And just like that, Vietnam spiraled back into civil war.
I’d love to tell you something surprising about Diem, but he kind of
became your run-of-the-mill tyrant. He filled his administration with family