Ngô Đình Diệm and I, A Memoir by Bùi Công Văn

Edited and introduced by Tuong Vu, 522 pages, US-Vietnam Research Center and Nhân Ảnh Publisher, 2025

Book is available at Amazon. 

PREFACE

Tuong Vu, US-Vietnam Research Center

The US-Vietnam Research Center is pleased to publish the late Bùi Công Văn’s memoir which he had written decades ago before his passing in 1999. We are grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Nguyễn Đức Cường for their permission and their generous support for the US-Vietnam Research Center since the beginning. Mrs. Nguyễn Đức Cường whose maiden name is Marie Bùi Mỹ Dung, is the oldest daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Bùi Công Văn. She was a witness to much of the story Mr. Văn told in this memoir. Thanks are also due to Mrs. Lucie Bùi Mỹ Châu, Bùi Công Văn‘s second daughter who was also a witness and who typed up his handwritten manuscript and provided the long preserved family pictures for the book.

***

Born in Cần Thơ in 1919, Mr. Văn was one of the first Vietnamese recruited to work as announcers and translators for the Vietnamese language service of the Voice of America (VOA), back in 1951 when it was still located in New York. By virtue of living in New York City, Mr. Văn and his family got in touch with Ngô Đình Diệm who was living at the time in the Maryknoll Seminary in Ossining (north of New York City) and Lakewood, New Jersey. From then on, Văn’s career and life together with his family were profoundly shaped by their friendship with Ngô Đình Diệm, who in much of 1952 came to stay with them for weeks at a time in their apartment in New York City.

Mr. Văn was a patriot: he hated the French and wanted Vietnam to be independent. Unlike some other Vietnamese in New York or many visitors to his apartment who desired to meet and be friends with Diệm out of political curiosity or calculation, Mr. Văn was absolutely uninterested in politics. As he wrote,

We were not rich—on the contrary, we were heavily in debt—but happiness needed no money, at least in our case. With Mr. Ngô, we found meaning in our lives and we knew that we were doing a good thing for him. Despite my dislike for politics (or probably because of it), I did not see in Ngô Đình Diệm a future leader of Vietnam. I thought he was destined to go the way of unsuccessful revolutionaries who preceded him. Men like Cường Để, Phan Bội Châu, Phan Châu Trinh, Nguyễn Thái Học, and the like. Men of principles and courage; men who would rather die than compromise with the Frech colonialists and secure a phony independence for Vietnam. All Ngô Đình Diệm’s past spoke loudly of this, which was why my wife and I deeply respected him. We thought he was not going to please the French and consequently he would stick to his own demands: True Independence, Genuine Freedom for Vietnam. And of course, he would never have that chance. Nothing in the U.S. policy vis-à-vis Indochina at that time induced us to think otherwise.”

Ngô Đình Diệm turned out to be more than a friend to him and his family:

As far as my family was concerned, it was fun to be with Mr. Ngô. It was a great consolation for us expatriates to have in him someone close who was not unlike a blood relation or a foster father as it were. The fact that our children called him ‘Grandpa Maryknoll’ without any urging on either side or arrière pensée [ulterior motive], was proof enough of our sincere attachment to him... [T]he sentiments underlying our behavior with him were the same [as filial duty]. And Ngô Đình Diệm appreciated us.

Thanks to their family-like relationship, Ngô Đình Diệm was comfortable living with Mr. Văn‘s family, and the latter had a lot to say about the future president whose private thoughts and personality have not been known much to the public. What kind of person was Ngô Đình Diệm? Was he prone to engage in hours-long monologues that many (especially Americans) dreaded when talking with him? Was he a devout Catholic? Was he misogynous?

It turns out that Diệm‘s monologues were even worse than what is already known. Diệm routinely talked to Mr. Văn for whole nights, night after night, while smoking. As Mr. Văn revealed,

Ngô Ðình Diệm spoke for hours and hours on end. He attacked every subject under the sun, stopping only to sip some tea, or more rarely, to listen to a question or two I put to him. [My wife] would have disappeared to the kitchen as befitted Vietnamese women—at least according to tradition—but returned once in a while to refill the teapot then discretely tiptoe out. Whenever [she] opened the door, though, she had to step back a moment, the room was so smoky she could hardly see anything inside. The two men in there were deep in conversation, oblivious to the smoke, and never stopped their chain smoking. In winter, it was worse, as we shut the windows tight against the cold and [my wife] had to open them to let some fresh air in when she came with the tea.

How did Mr. Văn and his family handle these endless monologues that took place nightly over many months?

At first this was unbearable for us because Mr. Ngô never seemed to want to sleep and the later the night became, the more awake he looked. In the long run, we got used to it.

Not only did I stay up until the last minute before I had to leave for work on my night schedule, but I also enjoyed our chats.

And it was not just Mr. Văn. Ngô Đình Diệm behaved the same way toward guests and visitors whom he hardly knew.

[T]he visitor, hastily bought to my apartment to have a first meeting or to renew an old acquaintance with Diệm never expected to spend so many long hours, let alone an entire night, with him talking. Most of them arrived around 6 p.m., freshly disembarked after long hours on planes or days at sea or were exhausted from a long day of shopping and sightseeing. Some had not eaten anything, no doubt intending to enjoy some American food then resume exploring New York that night. Some others came in for a few hours’ visit planning to return to their hotels to rest their aching feet, and least for them, to call it a day.

Not so for Ngô Đình Diệm on a full or empty stomach, at 6 p.m. or midnight, he was as fresh as ever and unless pressed to eat, would go on and on and on. Oblivious to hunger or fatigue, he talked on and completely forgot whether the men opposite him needed food or rest. Why, they had especially come so far from home, and were so eager to meet with him, he owed them a long talk.

Perhaps some visitors enjoyed Diệm‘s all-night monologues, but no doubt many must have felt being tortured by them. It is interesting that Diệm felt he owed his visitors a long talk, and he talked out of care and responsibility to his partners in dialogue. At the same time, it is clear that his social skills were limited and he was not able to read cues from his conversational partners. One might even speculate that Diệm‘s monologues were symptoms of a mild form of autism.

What made up to some extent for the long hours guests must sit to listen to Diệm was that he was knowledgeable about politics and “had a wealth of personal details and peculiar knowledge about current and past personalities of Vietnam. He was full of humor and was particularly good at mimicking people he especially disliked.” Mr. Văn told us:

As I write, I can still clearly see in my mind’s eye the funny way that Ngô Đình Diệm often mimicked Lý Chánh Đức. He would stand with hands clasped and mouth twisted, then proceed to contort his back while commenting: “Đức is like an actress on stage, dancing to the music of castanets. His torso convulses and his hands jerk up and down as if pulled by puppet strings.”

The idea that Ngô Ðình Diệm could be funny is quite astonishing, given what has been written about him. Yet there is much more of the man revealed in the memoir. According to Mr. Văn, Ngô Ðình Diệm was not “above common gossip, shop talk, or reluctant to discuss ‘vulgar’ details about women.”

Once, for instance, I told him about Mme. Hoàng Xuân Hãn whom I had seen that day walking bras dessus [arm-in-arm] with [a man] near my bank … at 57th Street near the VOA offices.… Mr. Ngô laughed heartily and then explained to me that Mme. Hãn was ‘bisexual’ and despite her seeming intimacy—in public, too!—with [that man], the latter could not and would not do such a thing. It was pure shadow boxing as far as that lady was concerned, Ngô opined. There were little known details about Mme. Hãn, the wife of a renowned scholar from Hanoi and Mr. Ngô knew it and told it to us. I was pleased to see him as a quite normal human being, his reputation as a ‘woman-hater’ and ‘eternal virgin’ and the like notwithstanding.

Foreign journalists have described Diệm as being “misogynous” but the reality might have been more complex. Another common perception that Diệm possessed a deep religious devotion, which Mr. Văn believed to be wrong. Spending many Sunday mornings going to church with Diệm and observing his practices in public and at home, Mr. Văn told us,

Contrary to what was said about Ngô Ðình Diệm being a priest in civilian clothes or his extreme devotion to being a monk, I never once saw him receive Holy Communion or otherwise conducting himself any differently from us ordinary and not-so-devoted Catholics. In fact, Ngô did not carry a missal or rosary, and he never stayed any longer in church than my family and I did. For that matter, we never saw him pray or devote himself to any religious observances at home. If he was an especially fervent Catholic, he was unobtrusive about it, and I was at a loss from what sources came those observations about Ngô’s ‘monkish’ epithets attached to him. I would not be surprised to find out that those were insults invented by political foes aimed at turning Ngô into some moine manqué [failed monk] and thus unfit for statesmanship.

While we do not have to believe entirely in Mr. Văn‘s account of Ngô Ðình Diệm, we have no reason not to believe either, including the following remarks about Diệm in late 1952 not appearing to have a grand plan of action for the future:

On the future, however, Ngô Ðình Diệm was unsure. He did not know—and would not venture to predict—what was to happen to our country. As for his personal activities, he was quite sincere and stated that he did not, nor did he plan to, have anything important to accomplish nor did he really intend to act. Mr. Ngô’s favorite word was “study.” He was in the United States mainly to serve and to “study,” he said.

Yet it is possible that Diệm was still waiting for the course of history to change in his favor and did not want to speculate about the future, especially with someone like Mr. Văn who was not his close collaborator. We will perhaps never know.

***

Although Mr. Văn did not expect much from Diệm, after he became president, Diệm did return Mr. Văn‘s favor when he appointed the latter in 1956 to represent the Republic of Vietnam in Hong Kong. As the Consul of Hong Kong and an official who served under Diệm, Mr. Văn believed in the mission and integrity of the president, but he encountered many problems that have been reported about Ngô Ðình Diệm’s government, including corrupt officials, disloyal and arrogant family members who had too much power, and the president being surrounded by sycophants and inaccessible to those who could have told him the truth about his government. Again, we do not know to what extent Mr. Văn was fully informed of Saigon politics while living and working in Hong Kong. Yet he did not mince words when mentioning President Diệm‘s family, from his brothers Ngô Đình Nhu, Ngô Đình Thục, Ngô Đình Cẩn, and Ngô Đình Luyện, to Madame Nhu, her parents Trần Văn Chương and Thân Thị Nam Trân, and many other officials.

By 1960, Mr. Văn became deeply disillusioned when he came back to participate in a week-long conference for the Heads of Diplomatic Missions abroad. The purpose of this conference was to showcase what the government touted as “accomplishments” of Khu Trù Mật (Prosperity Zones), with trips to local sites having been hastily and incompletely developed. As he described in detail his feelings and observations,

The conference that began with a bang ended with a whimper. President Diệm thought that showing his ambassadors these ‘accomplishments’ would strengthen their dwindling optimism about his government’s efforts, but the contrary must have been produced. Not one mission head was fooled by what he saw, and they all returned to their posts, perhaps hoping never to be called back again.

After his wife was asked to give money by a man allegedly sent by Ngô Đình Nhu on a secret political mission in Hong Kong, Mr. Văn returned to Saigon to present this case of “extortion” to Diệm. He had a tense moment with the president who later sent him to see Nhu. This whole affair made Mr. Văn want to resign from his position although he retained his belief in Diệm:

A rush of being sick and tired of this whole business overcame me: of Vietnam under the U.S. umbrella, of Saigon-style government and politics, of Võ Văn Hải and Political Advisor Ngô Đình Nhu. The only redeeming shadow, although faint and tired, was Ngô Đình Diệm but he was kept inaccessible behind the ramparts of Independence Palace. I did not realize how close my thoughts were to the truth.

He eventually decided to stay. As he explained, “Looking at him a last time [before leaving the Palace] I felt: Here is the same Ngô Đình Diệm I knew. He may have changed but deep down, he remains my friend. I will stay on in my post because of him.“ Watching from afar the events in the last years of the First Republic before Ngô Đình Diệm was overthrown, Mr. Văn suspected that the president was being sidelined by his brother Nhu. He and his wife wished that Diệm would resign and come to live in exile with them in the US as in the old days. Diệm would be a grandfather to his children again. But history did not unfold that way as we already know.

***

Although the biography focuses mostly on Ngô Đình Diệm, it contains fascinating details about Mr. Văn‘s work for the VOA and his and his colleagues and friends’ lives and activities in the U.S. in the 1950s. They included vignettes about well-known politicians and scholars such as Đỗ Vạn Lý, Phan Huy Đán, and Huỳnh Sanh Thông, as well as many now forgotten figures. As all the individuals involved, including Mr. Văn, have long deceased, we are not able to verify any details and the personal stories must be taken with a grain of salt.

Mr. Văn did not simply tell a story but immersed it in deep thoughts and occasionally sprinkled it with poetic verses. This paragraph below gives a sense of his philosophy in presenting the story:

I took the liberty … to merge or amalgamate the present and the future, not through any impatience or lack of recognized methodological storytelling, but by a compelling sense of continuity and never ending even long after death. So present-past-future is nothing but eternity in a capsule, ready and colorful for whoever has a knowing eye to contemplate it.

Readers will appreciate Mr. Văn’s honesty and modest sense of himself and those around him:

We were certainly not revolutionaries. We were a starry-eyed bunch of kids inadequately and ineffectively trying to oppose the French colonials and their sycophants in Vietnam. Some of us were more ambitious but we were basically just a bunch of kids—inexperienced, ludicrous, and immature despite all of us approaching middle age.

Above all, readers will appreciate Mr. Văn’s great memory and his skills as an entertaining writer and storyteller. His memoir is rich in lively detail of things and people with a subtle sense of humor. An example is his description below of the apartment of a female graduate student at Cornell University:

I have yet to see a filthier apartment, especially the sink and pile of unwashed dishes filling it and stinking like carrion. The floor seemed to be a three-inch-thick pile of dirt caked into a slimy, malodorous carpet. And the beds hovering just above the unsavory damp rug, were jungles of pillows and sheets and blankets. A battlefield right after a skirmish when remnants of bloody encounters were not removed could not look any more distasteful.

And the resident of the apartment, Marjorie Weiner, who was

a not unpretty girl, but untidy from head to toe. Her light blue eyes were unwashed, and it was a real pity to see them cloudy, as if veiled by a thin mist, and the corners crusted with tiny lumps of dirt. Just a few years later, we were to meet her in Saigon, transformed into a totally different ripe fruit, so tantalizing a girl that the fairy tale image of Cinderella metamorphosed flashed into my head. Rosy-cheeked and gracious in every gesture, her curly locks fell in undulating golden waves over her shoulder, Marjorie was the picture of Madame Récamier in her salon, especially when she received visitors every Wednesday and Thursday afternoon in her tastefully furnished apartment on Bà Huyện Thanh Quan Street.

***

Although the story in this book is told by a single individual decades after the events, it will be of great interest to historians of Vietnam and students of Vietnamese history. Ngô Đình Diệm was among the most important figures in Vietnam’s modern history, yet not much has been known about him as a person, and what is known has been told mostly by foreigners. It is our hope that this memoir by a Vietnamese who lived for nearly nine months under the same roof with Diệm at an important moment in his life will contribute to our knowledge about him. As editor, I have left the author speak for himself while making sure the Vietnamese words are spelled correctly with their tonal marks, and adding a few footnotes where necessary. Those footnotes by the author are specifically marked by “(Au.).”

Tuong Vu

Professor, Department of Political Science

Director, US-Vietnam Research Center

University of Oregon