HANG DOWN YOUR HEAD TOM DOOLEY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00149R000200350011-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 14, 2010
• Sequence Number: 11
• Publication Date: January 1, 1965
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

RAMPARTS ? .1MARY - ?RMIRIJARY 1955
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/05/14: CIA-RDP75-00149R000200350011-3
SUSPECT THAT MANY American
Catholics were secretly relieved
last October at the demise of Ngo
Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu. The
reports of their "Catholic Despotism"
had threatened to get out of hand. It is
one thing to spread the faith and have
the Church prosper, and quite another
to cause Buddhist monks to burn
themselves and little school children
to riot. American Catholics have
come to understand well that a
minority survives only through
tolerance, and in a nation where
Catholic politicians make it a point
to show up at Bar Mitzvahs, it would
he unnatural if they did not come to
despise Diem for the sheer incompe-
tence of his politics. Diem, it might
have been reasoned, should not have
had the Buddhists shot for carrying
the flag of their Church, but rather he
should have carried one himself and in
the front line of every major procession.
But all this is excessively cynical.
There is, of course, the moral dimen-
sion. Ngo Dinh Diem was after all the
man who provided a sanctuary for millions of refug ,
ees
who worked with young Dr. Toni Dooley to give these
people medical aid, and who helped them to new inde-
pendence and dignity with the aid of Catholic Relief
Agency funds. Was it not all this that the student body
of Fordham University had in mind when it gave a
standing ovation for the embattled Mme. Nhu? It is a
tortured connection that these students must have had
with Vietnam, for they very likely had been raised to
hope that in that country at least the missionary pro-
ra
f
h
Ch
g
m o
t
e
urch had an idealism that was modern
and clean. And then one day they find that it too could
be used to taunt them. It was good, then, to read Clare
Boothe Luce in the National Review and find out that
the bad things had never happened, or that, when they
did, they were necessary and therefore not really bad.
This com lex sense f :i
o
d
Jesuit weekly America. Casual
readers of that publication may
have thought it odd that its
cover this past October 3, was
a stark black background for
the white heading "Marguerite
Higgins on Vietnam' Miss
Higgins, who had gone to bat
for Diem in the last months of
his regime, was now back to
tell us about- how bad things
were in Saigoq with her man,
Diem, long gone.
This article was featured so
prominently in America be-
cause over the years that
magazine had bought deeply
of the Ngo Dinh Diem myth
and now, after the fall, it
was out to recoup some of
its losses.
Before his demise, America
had referred to Diem as "the
courageous little President of
South Vietnam" and had an-
swered his critics with the fol-
lowing: "If the government is
in some respects authoritarian, it is because the task it
had in hand demanded authority. . . . It is significant
that the opposition within Vietnam to Ngo Dinh Diem
does not come from the grassroots. The peasantry has
given the President its full support. The discontented
are usually disappointed, would-be politicians."
This was written just before the fighting in the
countryside began and it is now clear that Diem's
estrangement from the peasantry is the key element in
the continued success of the Viet Cong campaign. But
how did America come to work itself into a position
of such total wrongheadedness? The answer is that it
Ro1SERT SCHEER is co-author (with Maurice Zeitlill) of
Cuba: Tragedy In Our Hemisphere (Grove Press,
1963). He is currently preparing a study of U. S. rela-
gm t an
ach3 evement as re- ttolls zutth, Vtetllaif or #7~e Cz z er f
na: t' , #r r
., ? tti S }.h, ? iif"'i"~?rY~?~}~ h.'?# i~l.:;u ... i5: i i dt.a. ' ?.y:? . _ 3 ~'~', t-t.~ZIC~N ~i~
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/05/14: CIA-RDP75-00149R000200350011-3