'Sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem': Religion, Orientalism, and United States intervention in Vietnam, 1950--1957

This dissertation seeks to explain one of the most ruinous foreign policy decisions of the postwar era: America's commitment to preserve an independent South Vietnam under the premiership of Ngo Dinh Diem. The so-called "Diem experiment" is usually ascribed to U.S. anti-communism and the absence of other candidates for South Vietnam's highest office. This study employs religion and Orientalism as categories of analysis to argue, on the contrary, that this alliance cannot be understood apart from America's mid-century religious revival and policymakers' perceptions of Asians. Diem's Catholicism and the extent to which he violated notions of "Oriental" passivity and moral laxity made him a more attractive ally to Washington than many non-Christian South Vietnamese with greater administrative experience and popular support.; An ideological history that fuses domestic culture with foreign policy, this dissertation contends that policymakers in the 1950s conceived of the Cold War as a crusade in which Americans needed to combine with fellow Judeo-Christians against an adversary dangerous as much for its atheism as its military might. Bias against "Eastern" creeds mandated U.S. adoption of a Catholic South Vietnamese strongman over any Buddhist, Cao Dai, or Hoa Hao, alternative. Policymakers viewed Vietnam's dominant religions as submissive, ethically relativistic, and therefore susceptible to communism. The Catholic Diem, however, seemed committed by his faith to advance America's cause in the Cold War.; The study further shows how assumptions that Asians were culturally, and perhaps racially, unready for democratic self-government predisposed Americans to excuse Diem's dictatorship as necessary in "the Orient." Diem won praise from the Eisenhower administration and the American press as a "Miracle Man" despite his authoritarianism---or, rather, because of it. Americans' inability to imagine democracy in Asia led them to support a regime that could maintain itself only by suppressing all opposition. The policy of "sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem" alienated South Vietnamese from their government, increased the nation's vulnerability to communism, and ultimately drew America into the longest war in its history.