#4: The suicide that changed American policy in Vietnam

This post is part of a series of narrative articles I wrote for Nearpod, an interactive classroom tool for students. My essays were incorporated into high school history and social studies classes.

Just before 10 am on the morning of June 11, 1963, over 300 monks and nuns marched down a busy Saigon street. A 73-year-old monk named Thich Quang Duc emerged from a car at a crowded intersection, and sat down in the lotus position on a cushion. Two fellow monks doused him in petrol from a five-gallon can. As the fuel was emptied over his head, Duc chanted, “Nam mo amita Buddha,” — “return to eternal Buddha.”

There was a charged silence; Duc said a final prayer, struck a match, and then dropped it on his robes.

People wailed and sobbed around him, and the monks watching dropped to their knees in prayer; others lay down before the wheels of a fire truck, not allowing it to pass through. Duc did not move, or make a sound. There was an overwhelming smell of incense in the air. In a strangely modern rendering of this archaic act, a young priest repeated into a microphone as Duc burned: “A Buddhist priest burns himself to death. A Buddhist priest becomes a martyr.”

The media exploded. The film for the now-famous photograph was sent from Saigon to the Associated Press on the first commercial flight, and published immediately on front pages all over the world. John F. Kennedy was forced to order an immediate re-evaluation of American foreign policy in Vietnam. “No news picture in history,” Kennedy would later say, “has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.”

Thich Quang Duc was born in the village of Hoi Khanh in Central Vietnam. At the age of seven, he left home to study Buddhism, becoming a novice at 15 and a monk at 20. After spending three years in solitary contemplation, he became a significant part of the Buddhist movement in the country, and supervised the construction of several temples.

Duc’s self-immolation was an act of protest against the oppressive anti-Buddhist regime in South Vietnam at the time. The South Vietnamese government, led by U.S.-backed President Ngo Dinh Diem, a French-educated Catholic, and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, the head of the secret police and his most trusted advisor, passed a number of discriminatory policies against the Buddhist majority in the country, including severely limiting their access to employment opportunities. Many Buddhist soldiers often had to convert in order to get access to resources or have a chance at promotion.

Diem also launched attacks on legal campaigns of the Vietcong, a communist guerrilla peasant group. But his policies to counter the Vietcong only alienated the South Vietnamese, even non-Communists, further, and many began to sympathize with this group of insurgents.

On May 8, 1963, a few months before Duc set himself ablaze, the government banned the Buddhist flag from being flown publicly on Buddha’s birthday — despite the fact that it had recently flown Vatican flags. Protesters marched on the government-controlled radio station in Hué, and nine protesters, including children, were killed with live ammunition; another 14 were injured.

Diem blamed the killings on the Vietcong, which triggered further protests, and what came to be known as “the Buddhist crisis” took shape. Many U.S. agencies began to believe that they could not achieve their objective in Southeast Asia while they supported Diem and his brother, both of whom were becoming devastatingly unpopular.

Diem’s initial popularity with Washington had begun over a decade earlier: he had visited the United States at the most strategic time, in 1950, at the height of the Red Scare — in the summer of that year, North Korean tanks made by the Soviet Union had rolled across the border and within a few months had captured most of South Korea, despite desperate attempts by American forces to hold them off.

A few months before this, McCarthy had given his infamous speech, claiming that the blasphemy of communism and atheism could only be overcome “when the whole sorry mess of twisted warped thinkers are swept from the national scene.” Suspected communist sympathizers in the State Department were already beginning to be hunted.

Diem was not an impressive figure — he walked jerkily, “as if on strings,” had little social skill, and was profoundly boring to listen to. But the enthusiasm he garnered in Washington despite his lack of charisma is only an indication of the desperation the United States felt to contain the threat of communism’s spread.

Four years after Diem’s visit to the United States, Eisenhower had him installed as the Prime Minister of the State of Vietnam, with full civil and military powers. When Diem won the national referendum in 1955 with 50 percent more votes than there were registered voters, Washington acted as though nothing had happened. Diem’s crackdown on the communists in the countryside — who later organized as the Vietcong — was welcomed by the United States and they poured aid into Saigon to help the offensive.

With the persecution of Buddhists under Diem’s regime, Thich Quang Duc suggested self-immolation to Buddhist leaders. The Buddhist Church initially tried to prevent this, believing that sacrifice should not be a part of the Buddhist struggle in Vietnam, but the regime only grew more repressive. Finally, the Buddhist leaders relented.

Before his suicide, Thich Quang Duc left a letter to the government and to the public. “Before closing my eyes and moving towards the vision of the Buddha,” it read, “I respectfully plead to President Ngo Dinh Diem to take a mind of compassion towards the people of the nation and implement religious equality to maintain the strength of the homeland eternally.”

Duc was by no means the first or the only person to use self-immolation as a strategy; Christians persecuted by Roman policy in Nicodemia in 300 AD threw themselves into a fire they had set in the emperor’s palace in protest; in 17th-century Russia, Orthodox Kapitonists locked themselves in churches to protest the Tsar’s state-centralizing reforms, and burned the churches down — a second baptism that would save them from the sins of atheist government. In most of the many cases of self-immolation that have taken place over history and around the world, though, it is the sense of moral superiority that is appealed to in the face of the oppressor.

Duc’s followers had managed to publicize his plan beforehand, and some international press was there that morning; Malcolm Browne, of the Associated Press, and David Halberstam, of the New York Times, were among them. Malcolm Browne caught the whole incident on film, and the photographs instantly became an international sensation. And it was the beginning of the end for Ngo Dinh Diem.

The Kennedy administration was in shock. “How could this have happened?” Kennedy stormed to Michael Forrestal, one of National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy’s aides. “Who are these people? Why did we not know about them before?” John Mecklin from the U.S. embassy said that the photo “had a shock effect of incalculable value to the Buddhist cause, becoming a symbol of the state of things in Vietnam.”

The publicity of the incident increased pressure on Diem’s government to deal with the crisis, but he did not take the incident seriously enough. His response to the death was an announcement on the radio later that day that wildly missed the point: “The state of affairs was moving forward so smoothly,” he said, bizarrely, “When this morning, acting under extremist and truth-concealing propaganda that sowed doubt about the goodwill of the Government, a number of people got intoxicated and caused an undeserved death that made me very sorry.” Still, he made a weak statement promising reforms.

Diem’s brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, his chief political advisor and informal head of Saigon’s secret police, in charge of silencing Diem’s critics, had no such interest in diplomacy. “If the Buddhists want to have another barbecue,” Nhu said, “I will be glad to supply the gasoline.”

Nhu’s wife, Madame Nhu, the dictatorial de facto First Lady, was worse. She hoped that others would follow Duc’s example. “Let them burn,” she said, “And we shall clap our hands.” She was furious with her brother-in-law for even considering negotiating with the protesters. “You have lost to a few miserable unarmed bonzes,” she raged at him. “You are a coward.”

“You do not understand this affair,” Ngo Dinh Diem implored. “It has international implications. We had to settle it.” His sister-in-law’s response was a tureen of chicken soup thrown at his head.

The South Vietnamese government failed every step of the way to recognize and address the full implications of what had happened. Only a few hours after Thich Quang Duc’s death, the police arrested over 30 monks and nuns for praying on the street, which did nothing but worsen the situation.

At the end of the summer, just after midnight on August 21, the situation neared climax. Fed up with the unrest, Ngo Dinh Nhu had pagodas all over Vietnam ransacked and looted, their monks and nuns beaten. About 30 were wounded and over 1,400 more arrested. Diem accused the nation’s Buddhist monks of being in league with Communist insurgents.

As the Vietcong insurgency grew, relations between Washington and Saigon worsened further. Diem had become so hated by now that U.S. officials knew if he remained in power long the Vietcong would win their battle easily.

Diem, a particularly paranoid and undemocratic political leader who did not trust anyone but his immediate family, did not like the growing American presence in Vietnam, even though the military aid was for suppressing the Communists. “All these soldiers I never asked to come here,” he complained to the French ambassador. “They don’t even have passports.” But because of the interfering they had already done in Vietnam by that point, the United States had to take a certain amount of responsibility for the new regime.

Three days after the pagoda raids, a cable was sent from Washington to the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, ordering a withdrawal of support for Ngo Din Diem. The response to the cable was that South Vietnamese generals were planning a coup against Diem and Nhu. The U.S. ambassador was told not to interfere. On November 2, Diem and Nhu were kidnapped while trying to escape and assassinated.

In 1971, a secret study by the Pentagon was conducted which claimed that after the coup, some officials in Washington suggested completely disengaging from Saigon — but “non-Communist SVN was too important a strategic interest to abandon.”

“Our complicity in his overthrow heightened our responsibilities and our commitment,” it said; so the United States just became further entangled in the mess it had created. A few years after Diem was assassinated, the United States had over 30 times more troops in Vietnam than it had under Diem.