Ngo Dinh Diem's 'irreplacability' to South Vietnam?

[Pelranius]

I've read that Ho Chi Minh and the rest of the North Vietnamese leadership apparently regarded Ngo Dinh Diem and his family as being perhaps the most effective leader (in terms of providing stability) that South Vietnam had and that America made a mistake by not stopping the November 1963 coup.

However, I find that somewhat hard to believe, given how widely resented and hated he and his family were in South Vietnam.

So essentially, what I'm asking is if Ngo had continued to rule South Vietnam, how would the Vietnam War have turned out, i.e. would there be some sort of independent government in South Vietnam today, or would the corruption of his family and discrimination against the Buddhist majority eventually ended up hurting the war effort as much as the lack of a cohesive Saigon leadership?

[Sea Skimmer]

Whatever people hated about the Diem; everyone who came after him was worse and South Vietnam never had another credible leader. Even had a similar character appeared; they would have to jump into the job in the middle of an intensive war while the Diem had been building personal power since before independence. The fact that the other leaders were products of a coup did not help. His persistence alone made him important, and the fact was only someone willing to murder the communists at every chance was going to work in a war like that (remember is it communist policy to kill all local government officials and replace them with a shadow communist government in the first place). This is rather how South Korea was turned into a stable state too; any and all suspected communists everywhere. Don't like it? Then the communists are going to win.

If he’d not been killed its possible the US and ARVN might have bludgeoned the VC sufficiently that the Tet Offensive never takes place and South Vietnam is able to eeak out some kind of ceasefire, but more likely the war would just last a few extra years. South Vietnam could not have an effective economy as long as it had a mass insurgency and so the whole war was a rather hopeless struggle to win before the US congress got tired of it and killed funding. The US fighting in the most ass backwards ways possible of course also amounted to being worse then doing nothing at many points, but it’s pretty impressive what a massive and sort of credible force the ARVN eventually became. A military victory was possible, but damn unlikely simply because like in Afghanistan today, the enemy was already fighting for decades and saw no pressing reason to stop.

[Pelranius]

I don't suppose that Ngo could hold out long enough so that Sino-American rapprochement could potentially lead to China cutting off supplies to North Vietnam and if Haiphong somehow gets mined?

Of course, I know that China is probably not going to shut down the supply line to the NVA completely.

[TC Pilot]

I've read that Ho Chi Minh and the rest of the North Vietnamese leadership apparently regarded Ngo Dinh Diem and his family as being perhaps the most effective leader (in terms of providing stability) that South Vietnam had and that America made a mistake by not stopping the November 1963 coup.

However, I find that somewhat hard to believe, given how widely resented and hated he and his family were in South Vietnam.

Those two points aren't neccesarily mutually exclusive. Though Diem was corrupt, repressive, and ineffective, his successors were even worse. A South Vietnamese state was always a long shot, all but doomed from the start, and it really isn't a coincidence that the number of American troops present skyrocketed. Diem had the advantages of a local power base (Catholics), a veneer of legitimacy (being "elected," after all) and a certain stubborness to not just bow to every whim and order coming from Washington, whereas the string of generals after him were little more than American puppets. Any hope of a South Vietnamese state not founded on a mountain of corpses (as oppossed to, say, a hill) died with Diem.

So essentially, what I'm asking is if Ngo had continued to rule South Vietnam, how would the Vietnam War have turned out, i.e. would there be some sort of independent government in South Vietnam today, or would the corruption of his family and discrimination against the Buddhist majority eventually ended up hurting the war effort as much as the lack of a cohesive Saigon leadership?

I doubt it. The U.S. wanted Diem to be the next Magsaysay, but the country's specific conditions made it significantly different than either the case of the Phillipines or even South Korea. Unlike either of those places, where the U.S. was at least indirectly responsible for their national independence, Vietnam's effort to become independent after it had fought and won was directly foiled by the U.S. not once, but twice. Diem, who basically owed his position to American meddling, simply could not stack up against Ho Chi Minh, who was both vastly more popular and vehemently hostile to him.

[thejester]

So essentially, what I'm asking is if Ngo had continued to rule South Vietnam, how would the Vietnam War have turned out, i.e. would there be some sort of independent government in South Vietnam today, or would the corruption of his family and discrimination against the Buddhist majority eventually ended up hurting the war effort as much as the lack of a cohesive Saigon leadership?

Mark Moyar's been pretty vocal in arguing that Diem was the RVN's best hope and that he was doing a better job in fighting the insurgency than the Americans believed at the time and has been reported since. The former is convincing, albeit overstated; the latter seems a pretty shady reading of the information coming out of Vietnam in 1963.

While the coup was clearly disastrous in its destabilising effect and led to huge gains for the NLF, it's also hard to swallow that Diem was winning in 1963. He nearly wiped the communists out in the late 50s; but the reinfiltration of the northern cadres and the beginning of 'open' insurgency had almost destroyed the position of the GVN in the country. The Strategic Hamlet program was Diem's attempt to reverse that trend and it didn't work, both because of the immense corruption in the RVN and because it ran up against the structural contradictions within the RVN itself.