, the President of South Vietnam from 1955 to 1963.|alt=A portrait of a middle-aged man, looking to the left in a half-portrait/profile. He has chubby cheeks, parts his hair to the side and wears a suit and tie. Khánh had long been regarded as an ambitious and unscrupulous officer. Khánh parleyed with the rebels long enough for loyal forces to arrive from the outside the capital to suppress the uprising, but his critics contended that he was waiting to see which side would gain the upper hand and was not committed to Diệm. In any case, Diệm then promoted him to be the commander of
II Corps. In his younger days, Khánh had joined the
Việt Minh but then defected to the French colonial army after a year. Khánh claimed that he had left the Viet Minh because of its communist inclinations, but critics claimed that he was simply switching sides because the French-backed
State of Vietnam offered him more opportunities for advancement. Khánh participated in the
1963 South Vietnamese coup that deposed Diệm, playing a minor role, although he claimed to be a key player. This was contrary to Khánh's request for a transfer to the
IV Corps in the
Mekong Delta close to Saigon, where most of the fighting was taking place. In an interview with journalist
Robert Shaplen, Khánh made no attempt to hide his annoyance at not being given a more important job. With respect to the
1963 coup that overthrew and killed Diệm, he cryptically commented "It is too soon yet to tell the whole story, but someday I will tell it to you". Most notable among his supporters was the US commander, General
Paul Harkins, who regarded Minh and his colleagues as "political generals" and thought poorly of them, in contrast to Khánh, who he regarded as a serious soldier. Harkins prepared quarters for Khánh next to his own when the Vietnamese officer visited the capital. Harkins also mistakenly believed that Khánh was happy to have been posted to I Corps and content to focus on military matters rather than politics, unaware of Khánh's anger at being sidelined from Saigon. The US commander thought that Khánh had done an effective job in I Corps, restoring it to normality after the
upheavals of Diệm's final months in power. In a report to US President
Lyndon Baines Johnson in December 1963, McNamara claimed that "The Country Team is the second major weakness [after the Minh government]. It lacks leadership and is not working to a common plan...Above all Lodge has virtually no official contact with Harkins. Lodge sends in reports with major military implications without showing them to Harkins." Aside from Harkins, General
Maxwell Taylor, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was also known to regard Khánh as the nation's foremost general, while Undersecretary of State
George Ball told Lodge that "Our [the State Department's] impression is that Khánh is one of the best of the generals, both courageous and sophisticated." The junta was paralyzed because all twelve generals in the MRC had equal power. Each member of the MRC had the power of veto, enabling them to stonewall policy decisions. The press strongly attacked Thơ, accusing his government of being "tools" of the MRC. On January 1, 1964, a Council of Notables comprising sixty leading citizens met for the first time. Its job was to advise the military and civilian wings of the government with a view towards reforming human rights, the constitution and the legal system.
Ineffective junta rule The provisional government lacked direction in policy and planning, resulting in it quickly losing control. Minh was criticized for being lethargic and uninterested in running the country. The number of rural attacks instigated by the Viet Cong surged in the wake of Diệm's deposal, partly due to the displacement of troops into urban areas for the coup. The increasingly free discussion generated from the surfacing of new and accurate data following the coup revealed that the military situation was far worse than what was reported by Diệm. The incidence of Viet Cong attacks continued to increase as it had done during 1963, the weapons loss ratio worsened and the rate of Viet Cong defections fell. The units that participated in the coup were returned to the field to guard against a possible major communist offensive in the countryside. The falsification and inflation of military statistics by Diệm's officials had led to miscalculations, which manifested themselves in military setbacks after Diệm's death. Khánh claimed that "After the November coup, there was much relaxation, wining and dining, and little prosecution of the war effort." Khánh claimed that he had built up intelligence infrastructure to weed out the Viet Cong under Diệm's rule, but that the other generals had disbanded it and released communist prisoners.
The junta's policy conflicts with the US Aside from non-military problems facing the junta, it also came into conflict with the Americans over political strategy, most notably as to whether armed force or politics should be the focus of efforts to end the communist threat to South Vietnam. Minh, the leading generals and Tho, favored a politically oriented solution, feeling that the deposal of Diệm and Nhu had created new possibilities for ending the insurgency of the
National Liberation Front, or Viet Cong, mainly through an outreach program. They thought that military force would not be sufficient for Saigon, and that political means were more effective than using American firepower in making up for this. Minh and his closest supporters tended to view regard
Huỳnh Tấn Phát,
Nguyễn Hữu Thọ and the other nominal NLF leaders as "former bourgeois colleagues" and moderate, nationalist non-communists who were uncomfortable with a foreign presence in South Vietnam, and whose political views had remained largely unchanged since their departure for the jungle a few years before. At the same time, in accordance with the political strategy, Minh's junta was reluctant to carry out large-scale offensives, which concerned the Americans, particularly Harkins, Taylor and CIA chief
John McCone. While Harkins and Taylor had opposed Diệm's ouster, the junta's policies also disappointed many supporters of the anti-Diệm coup as they saw regime change as necessary to their hopes of a more aggressive anti-communist war. During the latter part of Diệm's rule, a centerpiece of the rural pacification campaign was the large-scale construction of
strategic hamlets, whereby villagers were compelled to move into fortified camps in an attempt to lock out insurgents. However this failed as many were able to infiltrate the settlements, whereas a previous implementation of such principles in Malaya had been successful as the local communists were ethnic Chinese who were physically distinguishable from the anti-communist ethnic majority. It also angered the peasants, who were forced to abandon their ancestral lands and homes, and build new dwellings in the new villages. Many of these hamlets were subsequently overrun in communist attacks, something many villagers found to their liking. General
Lê Văn Kim oversaw the future of the program for Minh and it was decided to liberalize the system to try to win over the peasants. They forecast that they could reduce the insurgency's support by 30% alone through these less restrictive arrangements, citing more cooperative attitudes in Mekong Delta regions heavily populated with Hòa Hảo and Cao Đài. Minh's administration also opposed a proposed increase to US military and civilian advisers into district and village level, maintaining that this would give the impression of colonialism and that a low-key approach was more advisable and would not provoke resentment. In December McNamara and McCone visited Vietnam and wrote a very pessimistic report to Washington expressing concern at the effectiveness of the current policies in Saigon with respect to military gains and rural consolidation, and whether it would lead to a communist takeover. Đôn said that under orders from Harkins, the US officers attached to the four corps commanders had been vigorously trying to convince them of the need to bomb North Vietnam, and by implication, the need to have a coup due to the incumbent government's refusal to allow a bombing campaign. Đôn claimed that such lobbying was influential in convincing some officers to join the coup. Most notably the Saigon junta opposed US proposals to escalate the war with a large-scale bombing campaign against North Vietnam, as advocated by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. This plan called for the use of American resources badged as South Vietnamese. This was objected to on the grounds that it would lose moral capital for Saigon as they promoted their cause as just and compatible with the physical safety of fellow Vietnamese, as well as fears that it would provoke a communist land invasion from the north. The Americans became increasingly worried about the growing chasm in the outlook towards the war, and on advice from his advisers, Johnson described neutralism as "another name for a Communist takeover" in a New Year's message to Minh. As Minh remained adamant about these policies,
Roger Hilsman and Lodge, the main proponents of removing Diệm, began to lose confidence in the junta, joining the military establishment, who had opposed the coup against Diệm in the first place. The Australian historian Anne E. Blair identified this meeting as sealing Minh's political "death warrant" because when Lodge reported the meeting to Washington, the leading generals in the US military lobbied McNamara claiming that it was no longer feasible to work within the parameters laid out by Saigon and that the US should simply take control of anti-communist military policy. Minh publicly opposed Sihanouk's ideas and similar plans mooted by French President
Charles de Gaulle, but discussion of the concepts continued to grow. == First moves ==