Dr.

Robert Hickson

25 January 2016
The Conversion of St. Paul

How Diplomats Without Honor Make War:

The Perfidious Path to the Killing of President Diem and His Brother
A Review of G. D. T. Shaw's The Lost Mandate of Heaven (2015)
EPIGRAPH
The American foreign policy of the anti-Nazi epoch [1933-1945], which has
carried over to the early anti-communist age [1944-1953], has another
characteristic that bears on the possibility of effective political warfare
[POLWAR]. The policy has been conducted without honor. There are
some who say that honor in politics went out with feudalism, and breathed its
last when faithless Louis XI beat the chivalric Charles of Burgundy. Surely
there has been a post-Renaissance honor that lasted, if with deviations, well into
the 19th century, and has not yet [as of 1952-1953] wholly disappeared from the
world. The recent directors of American foreign policy do not seem to
recognize the claims of honor. [James Burnham, the author, then first gives
on his pages 211-213several trenchant examples in support of his contention
about the conduct of dishonor; and then adds some words of summary. For
example:]....And [there is then the case of] Chiang Kai-shek, who, longer than
any other of the world's leaders, has held out against communist imperialism,
and who resisted as America's ally every blow and every blandishment of
Japanese imperialism, smeared [now in 1953] with lies and filth in the [U.S.]
State Department's official White Paper.... Machiavelli insisted that states are
not run by prayer-books, and I do not wish to pretend that a modern
government in the complex modern world can act like Don Quixote on the
bright field of honor. But honor still has a place in the relations among human
beings. You can buy agents, but not friends or allies or comrades; and when
you buy you always risk being outbid. If the United States is to succeed in
political warfare against Soviet [or Asian] communism, it must have friends
that are firm under all circumstances, even the blackest, who are ready to
go through to the end. Surely a man of honor is most likely to find such
friends. If we do not ourselves honor our own words, who will honor
them? (James Burnham, Containment or Liberation?An Inquiry into the
Aims of United States Foreign Policy (New York: The John Jay Company,
1952 and 1953, Pages 211-213italics in the original; my bold emphasis
added.))
The momentous theme of honor in foreign policy presented by James Burnham in his incisive
book, Containment or Liberation? (1953), will also be found pervading Geoffrey D.T. Shaw's recent
book of excellence, The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem,
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President of Vietnam (2015). Shaw's book could, and should, now also evoke the memory and content
of another searching and well-documented book, which was published exactly a hundred years earlier
and during World War I itself, namely Francis Neilson's How Diplomats Make War (1915).1
Dr. Shaw's recent book further elucidatesand should also fittingly recallMarguerite Higgins'
own clear and candid and farsighted book, Our Vietnam Nightmare (1965), which was published not
long before she died at the age of forty-five in January of 1966. And she was to die of a disease she had
contracted in the Delta of South Vietnam.2 In September of 1965 she had departed for her tenth visit to
Vietnam, and she was by then all too aware of many of the ill consequences of the perfidious conduct
that was earlier and cumulatively practiced against President Diem and his brother Nhu, leading to their
cruel slayings together on All Souls' Day, 2 November 1963. Like Geoffrey Shaw, Marguerite Higgins
was not herself a Roman Catholic, but both of them admired the character of President Diem and
deeply understood his purposes, as well as the nature of his gathering enemies. Higgins even entitled
her book's Chapter 9 Ngo Dinh Diem: The Case of the Misunderstood [Catholic] Mandarin. Whereas
she called Diem's implacable and subversive Buddhist adversary, Thich Tri Quang, a Machiavelli with
Incense (Chapter 2), who was later so treacherously to be given protection and asylum in the
American Embassy by Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge.
As the successor to Ambassador Nolting, Lodge, no sympathizer for Diem the traditional
Catholic, was himself John F. Kennedy's carefully chosen Republican representative in Vietnam, even
though (and perhaps because) Lodge was likely to become his political rival in the upcoming 1964
Presidential election. However, by being in Saigon amidst the ongoing war, Lodge would now have to
be more responsible and finally accountable, as well. Therefore, the following top secret and personal
cable from Democratic President Kennedy to Ambassador Lodge two months before the coup and
killings of Diem and Nhu will be more illuminating in view of Geoffrey Shaw's own introductory
words and quotation:
Regardless of Nolting's efforts [on Diem's behalf], and regardless of Kennedy's
willingness to listen to his former ambassador [who had made his last farewell
to President Diem on 14 August 1963], there is no evidence that the White
House made any attempt to stop the coup. In fact, from what can be discerned
1 Geoffrey D.T. Shaw, The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of Vietnam (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2015), 314 pp.; and Francis Neilson (with Albert Jay Nock), How Diplomats Make War (New
York: B.W. Huebsch, 1915), 382 pp.
2 Marguerite Higgins, Our Vietnam Nightmare (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1965), 315 pp.

in a top secret telegram Kennedy sent to Lodge on August 29, 1963, Kennedy
approved of the go-ahead for an overthrow of Diem's civilian government by
his [Diem's own, but still unspecified,] generals:
Top Secret, Eyes Only,
Emergency Personal For The Ambassador From The PresidentNo
Department or Other Distribution Whatever
I [JFK] have approved all the messages you are receiving from others today,
and I emphasize that everything in these messages has my full support.
We will do all that we can to help you conclude this operation successfully.
Nevertheless, there is one point on my own constitutional responsibilities as
President and Commander in Chief which I wish to state to you in this entirely
private message, which is not being circulated here beyond the Secretary of
State [Dean Rusk].
Until the moment of the go signal for the operation by the Generals, I must
reserve a contingent right to change course and reverse previous instructions.
While fully aware of your assessment of the consequences of such a reversal
[and apparent vacillation?], I know from experience that failure is more
destructive than an appearance of indecision. I would, of course, accept full
responsibility for any such change as I must bear also the full responsibility
for this operation and its consequences. It is for this reason that I count on
you for a continuing assessment of the prospects of success [sic] and most
particularly desire your candid warning if current course begins to sour [sic].
When we go, we must go to win, but it will be better to change our minds
than fail. And if our national interest should require a change of mind, we must
not be afraid of it.3

Showing that he fully understood the President's intent and meaning, Ambassador Lodge wrote
his own message back to the Department of State, as Geoffrey's Shaw's careful documentation and
words reveal:
On August 29, 1963, Ambassador Lodge followed up on President Kennedy's
cable with a momentous one of his own, wherein he declared: We are
launched on a course from which there is no respectable [sic] turning back: The
overthrow of the Diem Government.4

Two days after Henry Cabot Lodge had taken over the post of U.S. Ambassador to South
3 Geoffrey D.T. Shaw, The Lost Mandate of Heaven, pp. 257-258my bold emphasis and inserted brackets added.
Henceforth, all page references to this book will be placed in parentheses above in the main body of this Review.
4 Ibid., pp.259-260. Lodge's Cable was to The Department of State.

Vietnam and had first set foot in Saigon on the night of August 22, 1963, there had been an earlier
shock:
[Roger] Hilsman [himself an oppositionist to Diem and Nhu] sent a fateful
telegram [from the Department of State] to involve the Kennedy administration
in the direct planning of a coup. Hilsman's transmission, in some ways a
reaction to earlier [anti-Diem?] queries Lodge had sent from Saigon, was
despatched to the U.S. Embassy on the weekend of August 24, 1963, when
President Kennedy was out of town....[It] was Drafted by Hilsman and Cleared
by [Michael] Forrestal, and [George] Ball. Approved by [Averell] Harriman for
transmission and classification. Signed 'Ball'.....
[Frederick] Nolting saw this telegram [in Washington D.C.] just a short time
after it was sent as he stood in Hilsman's office at the State Department, and he
perceived that the impact of the cable would be far-reaching, certainly beyond
the combined imaginations of the group of men who were behind its content.
[In Nolting's own later words,] the telegram of August 24 turned out to be a
decisive factor in leading our country into the longest and most unnecessary
war in American history. (251-252)5
By way of clarifying contrast to A. Harriman, R. Hilsman, M. Forrestal, and J.K. Galbraith and
their likes, Geoffrey Shaw's book presents a Diplomat with Honor: the deeply learned and loyal
American Ambassador (from July 1961-15 August 1963), Frederick Ernest Nolting. Along with a few
others (General Edward Lansdale, William Colby, and Sir Robert Thompson), Frederick Nolting is also
one of the main (and exceptional) figures in the book; and he is unmistakably presented as a great hero
who, like Ed Lansdale, also admired and honored and deeply understood President Diem and his
purposes and his self-sacrificial efforts for his people and his nation, for example, as was to be seen in
and through the concept and reality of the Strategic Hamlet program.
Because of neighboring Laos' strategical-geographical importance in Indochina and Southeast
Asia as a strategic whole (87)and especially in the sustained Strategic Logistics of the combined
enemies of Diem's South VietnamGeoffrey Shaw wisely considers the country of Laos and the
dubious (if not deceitful) 1962 Averell Harriman Accords concerning the purported neutrality of
Laos (and, derivatively, of Cambodia). This matter is all examined in Shaw's Chapter 4, entitled The
Continuing Laotian Question. Because (as General Eisenhower had earlier said) Laos was, indeed,
the strategic linchpin to the theatre of operations, these historical and strategic considerations are, in
my view, one of the especially important parts of Shaw's bookalong with his detailed and thoroughly
5 Ambassador Frederick Nolting's quoted words come for his own 1988 book, entitled From Trust to Tragedy: The
Political Memoirs of Frederick Nolting, Kennedy's Ambassador to Diem's Vietnam (New York: Praeger, 1988), p. 124.

documented presentation of the diplomatic maneuvers of certain progressive members of the U.S.
Department of State and key persons in the Liberal John F. Kennedy Administration, some of whom
we have already mentioned. We may even come to understandthough bitterlywhy we who were in
Vietnam (and nearby) called the Ho Chi Minh Trail The Averell Harriman Memorial Highway. This
formidable conduit of infiltration certainly enhanced the enemy's Strategic Logistics and gave them
much more freedom of maneuver, to the great disadvantage of South Vietnam, which was now
effectively kept on the strategic defensive.
Even before the new President Kennedy (inaugurated on 20 January 1961) had to deal with the
aborted Cuban Bay of Pigs Invasion in April of 1961 and the later building of the Berlin Wall after his
weakly vacillating June Summit Meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961, he had to face the
stark matter of Laos and its then-current political status and desirable future neutrality in Indochina.
For, Laos was unmistakably part of the legacy which President Eisenhower had of necessity passed on
to Kennedy. The landlocked country of Laoslike Afghanistan laterwas an important piece of
strategic topography for the Revolution on the Mekong (as Ho Chi Minh called it), but its location
provided many logistical difficulties for the United States militarily, even if we had strategic access
through Thailand or dubiously and dangerously resorted, once again, to nuclear weapons. Nonetheless,
a Laos that would come to be under the effective control of expansionist Communism from North
Vietnam or elsewhere would be a strategic nightmare for the Republic of South Vietnam. And
President Diem knew this very well. But could a true Neutrality in Laos be attained and retained and
sustained? Could it become, with Cambodia, a sort of Switzerland in Asia? Could an energetic and
expansionist Communism be contained by a professed neutrality? Could there realistically be a cooperation with the Soviet Union so as to preserve the neutrality, as part of a germinating dtente?
Apparently President Kennedy's Ambassador at Large, W. Averell Harriman (1891-1986) thought so.
On 23 July 1962, Harriman, representing the U.S., officially presided over the Declaration and Protocol
on the Neutrality of Laos which the United States signed in Geneva, Switzerland. President Diem's
Republic of South Vietnam was also a signatory to those Accords, though somewhat under pressure. A
little over a year after Diem signed that weak (and soon violated) agreement on neutrality, Diem was to
be slain.
Geoffrey Shaw's book introduces us a little more to this Matter of Laos:
Not the least of these [larger, long-standing strategic] problems to be
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considered was the crisis in Laos, which was a strategic nightmare for the U.S.
policy planners. As early as 1957, in meetings with American officials, Diem
had pointed out that Laos was going to prove critical to the security of South
Vietnam and that the Communist insurgency there had to be countered with
firmness and resolve. As the soldierly instincts of Eisenhower had discerned,
however, Laos was a linchpin: on the one hand, it would secure the
Southeastern theatre; on the other, it would open it up to assault. The Laotian
border not only ran the entire length of North Vietnam and much of the length
of South Vietnam, but also abutted China, Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia.
Kennedy, though not a soldier, was a formidable politician [sic] and recognized
that attempting to defend Laos had the makings of a political disasterquite
apart from the military concerns that would only be compounded after his
[April 1961] Bay of Pigs fiasco....[In footnote 21, as the U.S. House of Armed
Services then reported it:] Kennedy would have had Eisenhower's support if he
decided to fight in Laos. But the young president was chastened by one disaster
the rout of the invasion he had authorized against Fidel Castro at the Bay of
Pigs [April 1961]and he did not want to risk another. When Kennedy put the
question to his [military] chiefs of staff, he found them ready to go to war in
Laos but unable to promise an easy victory, or any victory at all, without the
right to use nuclear weapons. (75-76)
Amidst this set of difficulties, what did President Kennedy decide to do? Shaw expresses the
decision he made and some of the risks he abidingly feared:
As a result of his reluctance to be further involved in a land war in Asia,
Kennedy's political estimation was that Laos would have to be declared neutral.
But this presented some substantial problems. Neutrality would be extremely
embarrassing and perhaps costly for the United States in Southeast Asia,
because it would involve abandoning a non-Communist leader, Phoumi
Nosavan, who had come to power with the help of the United States [apparently
through a CIA-Backed coup]. To abandon Phoumi for a neutralist
government would place the Kennedy administration in an excruciatingly
awkward position. After neutrality was temporarily imposed upon Laos in 1962
[as of 23 July 1962], American fickleness toward toward Phoumi was never
fully compensated for by Washington's attempts to assuage the fears of other
Southeast Asian governments [such as Prince Sihanouk's Cambodia, for sure!],
including Diem. (76-77my bold emphasis added)
When Geoffrey Shaw later cites and quotes the trustworthy scholarship of another knowledgeable
womanrecalling Marguerite Higgins herselfhe says:
In her research on South Vietnam, Anne Blair asked a fundamental question:
How did Kennedy [in 1963] become so divorced from what was really
going on in South Vietnam so as to get behind the coup? Her answer
coincided, for the most part, with those offered by Nolting and Colby. She
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identified the [Media] power of the Halberstam-Sheehan group of reporters to

draw attention to and to amplify the Buddhist crisis at Kennedy's political
expense. She highlighted the fact that Halberstam, Sheehan, and other reporters
had made clear their support for an [anti-Diem] coup. In Blair's assessment,
Kennedy was so driven by domestic concerns related to bad publicity over
Diem and South Vietnam [and the conduct of the war] that he made
himself prey to a flawed and inexpert group headed by the powerful
Averell Harriman. In turn, these domestic concerns [to include the upcoming
1964 Presidential Election and the matter of favoring Catholics, such as Diem]
prevented him from seeing or hearing what the most experienced Southeast
Asian experts were saying: Stay the course with Diem....According to Blair,
During the Summer of 1963, Kennedy seems to have conceptualized
Vietnam as a political and public relations issue rather than war. He
consulted only with a select few from State, especially Harriman and
Hilsman. Representatives of the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
and the CIA were not included in these discussions. (259-260my emphasis
added)
Amidst all these ideological self-absorptions and evasions and seemingly exclusionary
negligence, Ambassador Nolting himself was increasingly isolated (as was Diem). Shaw thus adds:
Owing to his continued defense of Diem, Nolting became a persona non
grata within the Kennedy administration and was invited to fewer and
fewer meetings. He was conspicuously absent at an important 10 September
[1963] meeting at DOS [the Department of State]....This meeting revealed the
chasm that had grown between the Harriman faction and Diem's remaining
supporters within the Kennedy administration....[To Robert Kennedy's own
effective depreciation of Diem,] Secretary [of Defense] McNamara
immediately disagreed: He believed our present policy not viable. He thought
that we had been trying to overthrow Diem, but we had no alternative to
Diem that we knew about. Therefore, we were making it impossible to work
with Diem on the one hand and, on the other hand, not developing an
alternative solution.....Ironically the military coup was being demanded
by American diplomats and resisted by American generals. (263-264my
emphasis added)
As we draw closer to the end of Diem's earthly life and of that of his brother Nhu, as well,
Geoffrey Shaw's prose starts to pierce the reader even more:
Regardless of the meetings, the reports, and the fact-finding missions during the
late summer and early fall of 1963, President Kennedy did nothing to halt
the plot against Diem that he had set in motion. It is therefore remarkable
[and quite flagitious and malodorously vile!] that Averell Harriman later [in a
1965 interview] blamed its [the coup's] forward movement on Ambassador
Lodge: I don't think we could have [prevented Diem's overthrow]. Now it is
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true, at the end there, Lodge did not try to stop it. You would have to try to stop
it. There was nothing we did that I know of that encouraged the coup.
Making Lodge, a Republican, the fall guy for the coup was perhaps
planned at the time of his appointment as ambassador to Vietnam.
According to Anne Blair, Kennedy welcomed [Dean] Rusk's nomination of
Lodge. Lodge, he thought, would serve admirably as Republican asbestos
against the heat of possible future criticism of his foreign policy....As history
was to show, the Lodge appointment did achieve the goal of deflecting criticism
from Kennedy's involvement in Vietnam, although ultimately [sic] with great
cost to America's reputation [for honor?] in the foreign relations field. (266267my emphasis added)
What a cautious understatement. But, it further reveals how diplomats make warand
exacerbate it, too. And it illustrates the long-term strategic costs (270)and the long-term moral
costs, as well.
Now we must face the end, as we consider Shaw's somewhat limited account:
The coup took place on November 1, 1963 [All Saints' Day and a Catholic
Feast]....The coup leaders discovered that Diem and Nhu had escaped [from the
presidential palace] during the night. The brothers had fled to the house of a
friend in Cholon [the Chinese section of Saigon]. Early on November 2 [All
Souls' Day] they attended Mass at the local Church of Saint Francis Xavier and
spent some time afterwards in prayer, according to Father Clement Nguyen Van
Thach, an eyewitness. The brothers were outside the church, in the Grotto of
the Virgin Mary, when General Big Duong Van Minh's soldiers arrived with
a couple of American jeeps and an armoured personnel carrier. Sometime
during the morning, General Minh, the leader of the coup, had been informed
that the Ngo Dinh brothers were at the church. He made the plan to capture
both brothers there and gave a direct order to his body guard to murder them.
Once Diem and Nhu were secured in the hold of the personnel carrier, Minh's
[execution] order was carried out promptly as the vehicle was driven away. The
executioner, Major Nguyen Van Nhung, cut out their gallbladders while they
were still alive and he shot them [with their hands tied behind their backs,
according to the photos].
Years later [in 1994], visibly distraught at recalling the murder, General
Nguyen Khanh [who had been involved in the coup] said [to his interviewer,
Geoffrey Shaw]: Nhu was alive when they put the knife in to take out some of
the organs...the gallbladder. And in the Orient [?] when you are a big soldier,
big manthis thing is very important [how so?]....They do [sic] it against Nhu
when Nhu was alive....And Diem had this happen to him, and later on they kill
[sic] him by pistol and rifle. This is murder....It's very savage...trs savage!
[trs sauvage!] (267)
In 1964, Frederick Nolting resigned from the State Department in protest over the coup in South
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Vietnam (270) and later publicly said: Even worse than the practical consequences of the coup were
the moral effects. (270) He poignantly had learned how diplomats without honor make war.
CODA
In this context of Ambassador Nolting's perceptions about Insurgent-Guerrilla Warfare, President
Diem and the dishonorable coup against him, we may now learn something more about the aftermath
of guerrilla warfare, not from Sir Robert Thompson on the Malayan Insurgency this time, but from
another British strategist and military historian: B.H. Liddell Hart. In 1967, in the second revised
edition of his classic book, entitled Strategyand just after his brilliant chapter 22 on the concept and
reality of Grand Strategy, Liddell Hart added an entirely new chapter on Guerrilla War (Chapter
XXIII).6 In this new and well-pondered chapter, he discerningly and profoundly says something about
the dangerous aftermath of guerrilla warfare, also in light of Churchill's (and others') adverse
experience with irregular warfare in World War II:
The material damage that the guerrillas [and especially British guerrilla warfare
itself] produced directly, and indirectly in the course of [often justly
provoked] reprisals, caused much suffering among their own people and
ultimately became a handicap to recovery after liberation.
But the heaviest handicap of all, and the most lasting one, was of a moral
kind. The armed resistance movement attracted many bad hats. It gave them
licence to indulge their vices and work off their grudges [as with General
Minh against Diem7] under the cloak of patriotism, thus giving fresh point to
Dr. Johnson's historic remark that patriotism is the last refuge of a
scoundrel. Worse still was the wider effect on the younger generation as a
whole. It taught them to defy authority and break the rules of civic morality
in the fight against the occupying forces [or the cunning masters of a coup, with
its perfidious usurpation?] This left a disrespect for law and order that
inevitably continued after the invaders [or subverters] had gone.
Violence takes much deeper root in irregular warfare than it does in regular
warfare. In the latter it is counteracted by obedience to constituted authority,
whereas the former makes a virtue of defying authority and violating rules. It
becomes very difficult to rebuild a country, and a stable state, on a
foundation undermined by such experience.
A realisation of the dangerous aftermath of guerrilla warfare came to me
in reflection upon [T.E.] Lawrence's campaigns in Arabia [during World
6 B.H. Liddell Hart, Strategy (London, England: Faber & Faber, Ltd., 1967the Meridian Paperback Edition of 1991).
7 See G.D.T. Shaw, The Lost Mandate of Heaven, pp. 267-268especially footnote 67 on page 268: General 'Big'
Duong Van Minh harboured a grudge against the Ngo Dinh brothers [Diem and Nhu] for three reasons et al.

War I] and in our discussion on the subject.8

A reader of Geoffrey Shaw's own recent book, The Lost Mandate of Heaven, will be grateful for
his patient and candid presentations, and thereby come to learn many important and lesser known truths
from this period of history and the multiple consequences of perfidy and an intimately broken trust .
We especially cherish Shaw's presented glimpses of honorin the loyal character of Ambassador
Nolting, as well as in the deeply rooted noble character and Catholic Faith of President Diemand we
are still understandably stunned by the displays of dishonor and duplicity (hypocritical cunning) that
we must also unflinchingly behold as General Lansdale, R. Thompson, and W. Colby, as well as
Ambassador Nolting faced the likes of Harriman, Forrestal, Hilsman et al.
May we at least come to see the difficulties President Diem (and his brother Nhu) had to face in
concurrently fighting a revolutionary war on so many frontsto include on the inner front of South
Vietnamwhile also, under pressure, trying to build a more representative democratic order in a
largely Confucian and Buddhist Culture; and while being keptespecially after Harriman's July 1962
Laos Neutrality Agreementlargely on the strategic defensive, unable even to seize, retain, and
exploit the initiativeat least so as to sever permanently the continuous strategic logistics flowing
down the Ho Chi Minh Trail all the way down to, and through Cambodia, to the port of Sihanoukville.
If I may now conclude with a brief personal note, I would like to try to convey one insight that I
have especially come to consider only after reading, and deeply savoring, Dr. Shaw's excellent and
searching book. This reflection has also germinated in light of my own experience while moving
throughout Southeast Asia and East Asia during the years 1964-1969, when I was a young military
officer.
For, it seems to me to be the case that, once the United States made its 1961-1962 strategic
decision about tolerating (or effectively denying) the false neutrality of Laosand also the
growing danger all along the strategic Mekong River itself, including in ThailandSouth Vietnam was
to become strategically cramped and left with very constricted terms and rules of engagement and
insufficient freedom of action and resourceful thought. The Principle of War of The Offensive
8 B.H. Liddell Hart, Strategy (1967), pp. 368-369my emphasis added. The gifted North Vietnamese General Vo
Nguyen GIAP (1911-2013) greatly admired, and learned very much from,T.E. Lawrence, especially from Lawrence's
profound and eloquent book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926, 1935)

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to seize, retain, and exploit the initiativewas not easy to implement, much less sustain. Therefore,
the United States was left with a two-fold compensatory strategic alternative: to depend on its
technological resources (especially of air power) and resort more and more to its covert assets of
special operations forces and the like, in order to harass and, if possible, to interdict the Averell
Harriman Memorial Highway; and also to attempt Strategic Deception and Diversion Operations
some of which are still not known widely (nor accurately)so that North Vietnam and its allies would
be kept off balance and more hesitant, and even led to a sort of strategic paralysis or indecisive
operational catatonia. (For example, were the North Vietnamese worried, if not convinced, that U.S.
Maritime Assets would be reciprocally employed along the North Vietnamese seacoast and then move
inland?) These latter deployments of covert military-and-intelligence assets were thus really a strategic
economy of force initiative trying to compensate for the often disproportionately adverse
correlation of forces we had to acknowledge much of the timeand sometimes even in our
distributed, but hampered, reconaissance-strike-complex (often known as the RUKwhich is also
the Soviet acronym).
It is my hope, moreover, that many thoughtful readers of varied political and religious
backgrounds will read and savor Dr. Shaw's The Lost Mandate of Heavenalso to reflect on many
unexpected and deeper things, to include the fuller meaning of the more-or-less Confucian title of
Shaw's book. What is the source of the Mandate? By what Authority? How was such a mandate
lost? Was it really lost? Or, was that mandate not really lost, but, rather, usurped and unjustly
subverted and betrayed? And what was the Catholic source of that purported mandateespecially
in the mind of President Diem as a faithful Roman Catholic himself? For, according to Dr. Geoffrey
Shaw's book (35)and especially drawing on Charles Keith's 2012 scholarly book, Catholic Vietnam:
A Church from Empire to Nation9President Diem himself, as well as his even more well-educated
brother Nhu, both:
Admired the French [Liberal Catholic] thinker Emmanuel Mounier and his
ideas concerning the need for Catholics to take an active role in the world while
maintaining the vision of their true destiny in the heavenly Jerusalem [i.e., in
Eternal Life, in Beatitude]. Mounier called his philosophy personalism as set
forth in his book Be Not Afraid, and the Ngo Dinhs attempted to incorporate it
into their political thought. (35)
And, so, in order to understand better the religious and resistant political culture of Vietnam, the
9 Charles Keith, Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

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reader is now invited also to read Charles Keith's book on Catholic Vietnam, as well as Nguyen Du's
great 19th-century, enduring classic of Vietnamese Literature, the narrative verse epic, Kim Van Kieu.10

As the traditional, sacred Latin Language compactly expresses an important underlying truth
about the Mandate of Heaven: Sine Auctoritate, Nulla Vita (Without Authority there is No Life).
--Finis- 2016 Robert D. Hickson

10 See also Tran Van Dinh, Why Every American Should Read Kim Van Kiew, in We the Vietnamese: Voices from
Vietnam, edited by Francis Sully (New York: Praeger, 1971), pages 236-237. This cherished and still popular work of
national literature, suffused with a Buddhist and Confucian ethos and atmosphere, is also called The Tale of Kieu (or
Truyen Kieu in Vietnamese).

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