The following article is based on excerpts taken from an essay originally published in CovertAction.
Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam’s premier from 1954 to 1963, was a Cold War version of Volodymyr Zelensky, an American-subsidised ruler who was fawned upon by leading U.S. politicians and the U.S. media despite causing the ruin of his own country.
Lyndon B. Johnson at one point compared Diem to Winston Churchill—though privately admitted: “Shit, Diem’s the only boy we got out there.”
Diem’s disastrous rule set the stage for the escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War. His repressive policies fuelled the growth of the National Liberation Front (NLF) guerrillas—aka Vietcong—which U.S. troops were sent to fight against.
Wesley R. Fishel, a political science professor at Michigan State University (MSU) in the early 1950s, with a background in U.S. military intelligence, developed a close relationship with Diem and served as a key lobbyist for him and liaison between him and the U.S. government. For many years, Fishel headed an MSU programme that trained South Vietnam’s police to help bolster Diem’s regime and provided training to South Vietnamese civil servants in government administration.
Fishel’s crucial role in leading the United States into the Vietnam War is chronicled in a book by historian Joseph G. Morgan, Wesley Fishel and Vietnam: A Great and Tragic American Experiment (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021).
Morgan is a historian at Iona University who previously wrote a book on the American Friends of Vietnam (AFV), a lobby group that Fishel helped found which supported expanded U.S. aid to Ngo Dinh Diem in the 1950s. Financed in part by the CIA, the lobby’s members included prominent political figures of the era, including John F. Kennedy.
Morgan wrote that the AFV “had a lot to do with getting the U.S. into the Vietnam War.” Besides lobbying for U.S. aid to Vietnam, it “created an ideological framework justifying America’s intervention in Vietnam and the Saigon government’s harsh treatment of political opponents as a necessary reaction to the communist menace.”
Fishel, identifying as a Cold War liberal, was a mover and shaker in the AFV. For most of Diem’s time in power, Fishel was his chief American publicist. He wrote many articles in prominent U.S. journals supporting him, including one in the CIA-subsidised liberal anti-communist New Leader with the tortured title “Vietnam’s Democratic One-Man Rule.”
In that piece, Fishel claimed that Diem enjoyed all the powers of a dictator but had chosen to rule democratically, establishing a government that “now is assuredly one of the most stable and honest on the periphery of Asia.”
Fishel went on to complain how many Western critics applied Western standards when “the people of Southeast Asia are not, generally speaking, sufficiently sophisticated to understand what we mean by democracy and how they can exercise and protect their own political rights.”
These remarks reflected a blatant colonial mentality and provided an apologia for heavy-handed U.S. political interference in South Vietnam and Diem’s jailing and assassination of political opponents, some after he had passed a law that allowed for secret military tribunals followed by the death penalty.
Stocky in build, clean-shaven and short (he was 5’4” tall), Fishel grew up in a Jewish family in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1920s and 1930s, and studied international relations at Georgetown and Northwestern with a speciality in Asian affairs.
In 1941, Fishel joined the U.S. Naval Reserve and began military intelligence training in Japanese languages, taking up a post as an analyst at the Joint Intelligence Center, Pacific Ocean areas, where he worked under Admiral Chester W. Nimitz translating Japanese tactical documents and planting loudspeakers in front of Japanese positions at Iwo Jima in an effort to persuade the Japanese to surrender.
After the war, Fishel earned a Ph.D. in international relations at the University of Chicago, where he wrote a dissertation on the termination of America’s extraterritorial privilege in China.
In a 1950 essay published in The Western Political Quarterly, Fishel ironically stated that Viet Minh leader Ho Chi Minh had “severed his connection with international communism” and that his Viet Minh movement “reflected the strength of Vietnamese nationalism.”
Fishel subsequently changed his view, however, in depicting Diem as a representative of a viable anti-communist nationalism that he believed the U.S. should try to nurture.
Fishel was introduced to Diem in Japan in 1950 by his mentor Komatsu Kiyoshi, whom he met while participating in a UCLA programme involving the education of U.S. military personnel based in Japan. Komatsu had written a book advocating for an independent Vietnam under Japanese tutelage and formed a close friendship with Cuong De, a member of the Vietnamese royal family who promoted an anti-communist alternative to the Viet Minh and knew Diem.
Morgan points out that various historians suggest that Fishel was acting as an agent of the CIA in his initial meetings with Cuong De and Diem.
Morgan states that Fishel is known to have willingly collaborated with the CIA and acted as an intelligence operative for the U.S. Army in the summer of 1950 when he was assigned as a lieutenant to the military intelligence section of the General Headquarters of the Far East Command.
Fishel at this time carried out military assignments of a “secretive nature,” including reporting on the activities of Cuong De and Diem for U.S. intelligence.
Dallas Coors of the U.S. embassy in Saigon referred to Fishel as the “source of the very interesting intelligence reports submitted by the Embassy in Tokyo of Prince Cuong De and his conversations with Bishop Thuc and Ngo Dinh Diem.”
As Fishel progressed in his academic career, he received grants to carry out research for the U.S. State Department and military in the service of the Cold War on psychological warfare, information programmes, and atrocity propaganda.
Morgan says that, in the early 1950s, Fishel approached the CIA about the possibility of compiling an annotated bibliography of material concerning the Chinese economy, and carried out a study of alleged communist atrocity propaganda accusing American forces of employing germ warfare in the Korean War—which recent historical investigations have shown to be true.
Fishel co-wrote an article with another MSU faculty member, Herbert Garfinkel, expressing doubt about the truth of the germ warfare accusations, falsely claiming that communist authorities refused to let outside groups enter their territory to judge the merits of their allegations.
Fishel became especially close to Diem after the latter became South Vietnam’s prime minister following his appointment by French puppet emperor Bao Dai and victory in rigged elections overseen by the CIA.
Vietnam was temporarily divided under the 1954 Geneva Accords—which the U.S. never signed—that called for elections in 1956. However, the Eisenhower administration never followed through on these elections because, as Eisenhower stated in his memoir, Ho Chi Minh would have received at least 80% of the vote.
As the U.S. pumped in millions of dollars in military and economic aid to try to entrench Diem’s rule in South Vietnam, Fishel served as Diem’s unofficial adviser, having breakfast with him and members of his entourage in the presidential palace many mornings.
Fishel worked out of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon with Edward Lansdale, another key adviser to Diem, who specialised in psychological warfare.
The MSU project that Fishel headed was publicly exposed in a 1966 Ramparts magazine article that was featured on the magazine’s cover with Madame Nhu—Diem’s sister-in-law and a power-broker in his regime—in an MSU cheerleader’s uniform.
After conducting interviews with disaffected MSU faculty members, notably economist Stanley K. Sheinbaum, Ramparts writers Warren Hinckle, Sol Stern and Robert Scheer displayed how Fishel and MSU had compromised their academic integrity by functioning as technical advisers and publicists for a sordid dictatorship that had come about because of the U.S.
Hinckle, Stern and Scheer quoted an MSU professor who said that Fishel was “the closest thing to a proconsul that Saigon had.”
Most pernicious was the MSU police training programme, which introduced new methods of fingerprinting, helped South Vietnam’s police force develop an identity card programme to monitor political activity, and provided firearms and other policing technologies used in a repressive campaign against Diem’s opponents and the nascent guerrilla movement.
The most controversial aspect of the programme involved the university’s decision to allow CIA personnel to be hired as faculty to give counter-espionage and counter-insurgency training to the Sureté, a repressive personal instrument of Diem’s controlled by his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu.
The use of the MSU programme as a cover for the CIA had been set up by the White House and makes further clear Fishel’s CIA affiliation.
In a June 1961 article in The New Republic, “A Crumbling Bastion: Flattery and Lies Won’t Save Vietnam,” two disaffected MSU faculty, Milton Taylor and Adrian Jaffe, charged that Fishel, as MSU’s chief adviser, lived extravagantly in Saigon in a pretentious home guarded by a sentry box and that served as a venue for hosting lavish parties.
Fishel thus emerges as a character right out of Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer’s novel, The Ugly American, which criticised Americans who lived like colonials in Third World countries and interacted mostly among themselves, causing them to become detached from the lives of the Third World natives they were supposed to be helping.
When Fishel returned to the United States after Diem’s assassination in 1963, he continued as a Cold War liberal academic, fighting in the ideological trenches of the war of ideas. He remained a staunch advocate for the U.S. intervention in Vietnam and a strong critic of those who questioned the war’s legitimacy.
His support for the Saigon government would have a lasting impact. Fishel played a role in shaping the argument that the U.S. was engaged in a noble fight against the spread of communism, even as the humanitarian disaster and loss of life in Vietnam continued to escalate.
Morgan points out that Fishel’s support for Diem and his regime also reflects the broader failure of the U.S. Cold War intellectuals who could not foresee the long-term consequences of such deep entanglements in the internal politics of other countries.
