Bao Dai Ordered Ngo Dinh Diem to Embrace His Enemies or Face a Coup
By Roy Castellano ·
A secret cable from 1954 shows a government on the brink, where a single refused order could have turned the South Vietnamese premier into a "rebel" and triggered a military stroke.
Ngô Đình Diệm nearly lost his government over a single weekend in October 1954. One wrong word to his Chief of State could have labeled him a rebel and handed the keys of Saigon to his most hated rivals.
According to a telegram dated October 1, 1954, sent from the Chargé in Vietnam, Cameron, to the Department of State and marked "secret niact," the premier was caught in a vice. The Chief of State, Bao Dai, had issued instructions that Diệm found intolerable: he was to invite three of his sworn enemies—Generals Nguyễn Văn Hinh, Lê Văn Vien, and Nguyễn Văn Xuan—into his cabinet. Xuan was to be named Vice Premier.
For a man attempting to consolidate a fragile state, this was not a request for coalition-building; it was a demand for surrender.
"Lose Too Much Face"
The diplomatic cables make the stakes clear. The Vietnamese emissary of General Xuan speculated that Bao Dai’s true intention was to "force Diem to resign." If Diệm accepted the arrangement, the record suggests he would "lose too much face" and be rendered "obviously powerless." In the world of high-stakes governance, face is not a vanity; it is the currency of authority. Once a leader is seen as a puppet, the street and the barracks take notice.
The danger was not merely political, but kinetic. The telegram warns that if Diệm refused or even hesitated too long, Bao Dai might dismiss him immediately and appoint General Xuan as President. This would provide a veneer of "legality" for a coup d'état. General Hinh and the Binh Xuyen—the organized crime syndicate that held significant power in Saigon—were described as being "only too glad" to enforce such an order.
Cameron’s report is blunt about the timeline: "Unless Diem promptly releases Bao Dai’s telegram to him together with his own temporizing reply we believe there is danger sudden stroke of force against Diem over this weekend."
Daridan's Game
Watching this collapse from the sidelines was the French, represented by Daridan. The exchange between the American Chargé and the French official reveals the friction between the two powers as they navigated the wreckage of Indochina. When Cameron argued that accepting Bao Dai’s literal instructions would leave Diệm "completely powerless," Daridan replied with a sneer: "but that is what you people have been talking about for some time isn’t it? You want Diem but don’t mind if he is a powerless figurehead."
It is a classic piece of diplomatic deflection. The French were content to see Diệm neutralized, perhaps preferring a government they could more easily manipulate or one that would succumb to the internal pressures of the military and the Binh Xuyen. The Americans, meanwhile, were attempting a precarious balancing act. They wanted Diệm to lead a broad government, but they did not want him to be a "prisoner" of the forces supporting him.
The American strategy, as detailed in the cable, was one of tactical delay. Cameron informed Daridan that the U.S. had counseled Diệm "under no circumstances refuse flatly but to play for time." This is the basic tradecraft of survival for a besieged leader: avoid the definitive "no" that triggers the fuse, and wait for the wind to shift.
A Question of Authenticity
By 5:00 p.m. on October 1, the pressure reached a fever pitch. Generals Hinh, Xuan, and representatives of the Binh Xuyen held a press conference. Xuan, acting as spokesman, released the texts of Bao Dai's telegrams to Hinh and Vien. Their public message was a warning: they had received their orders and would take no action for now, but if Diệm failed to comply, he would be branded a "rebel."
In the final hours of the day, a new variable entered the equation. Fishel, reporting from the Palace at 6:45 p.m., noted that Wintrebert had raised a critical question with Diệm: were the telegrams from Bao Dai even authentic?
If the orders were forged or manipulated by rivals to goad Diệm into a fatal mistake, the entire crisis was a trap designed to force his resignation. The record shows that Diệm was "favorably inclined" to take the advice to temporize and was considering a private inquiry into the messages' authenticity via his brother, Luyen, who was then in France.
The telegram ends there, leaving the premier in a state of suspended animation. He was forced to treat his own Chief of State's orders as potential forgeries while knowing that a failure to respond could result in his removal by force within forty-eight hours. Whether the telegrams were genuine or a sophisticated piece of disinformation remains an open question in the record.