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Red and Green Ballots: How the CIA Poisoned Vietnam’s 1955 Presidential Elections

Today is National Vietnam War Veteran’s Day, set on March 29th because in 1973 it was the last day American combat troops were in the Republic of Vietnam. The White House in 2012 gave a Presidential Proclamation to create a national day for Vietnam War veterans.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 29, 2012, as Vietnam Veterans Day.

Congress then wrote a “Vietnam War Veterans Day Act” for March 29 recognition, which in 2017 was signed into law.

The bipartisan bill was sponsored by Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and Sen. Joe Donnelly, D-Ind. The bill passed the Senate last month and the House last week.

In an odd twist the a man who signed it was gifted five deferments from service, four academic and one by lying about his fitness.

“They were spurs,” he said. “You know, it was difficult from the long-term walking standpoint.”

He played football, tennis, squash and golf; he even boasted about his health as “perfection” yet somehow was granted a 1-Y “disability” deferment (qualified for service only in time of war or national emergency) after the infamous 1968 Tet offensive (and a year before the lottery draft system began).

The 1-Y status kept him out of the draft until 1971 when that classification was abolished generally. He was then given a 4-F “disability” (unable to meet physical, mental or moral standards) and no longer eligible.

This is the same guy who in 2018 at the Aisne-Marine American cemetery, where 1,000 Marines killed in Battle of Belleau Wood were to be remembered, cancelled attending with no warning because allegedly he didn’t want to be in the rain.

They died with their face to the foe and that pathetic inadequate [long-term walking spur] couldn’t even defy the weather to pay his respects to the Fallen./blockquote>

Anyway, today got me thinking about presidential election tampering, and in particular reminded me of the corrupted 1955 national referendum in Vietnam that arguably is what set America on a path to war. A man named Ngo Dinh Diem was chosen by Americans in 1954 to lead the country, his access to foreign aid helping him get appointed Prime Minister by the ruling “French Puppet” Bao Dai.

Diem was no champion of representative democracy. His political philosophy was a not entirely intelligible blend of personalism (a quasi-spiritual French school of thought), Confucianism, and authoritarianism. He aspired to be a benevolent autocrat…Diem’s idea was to create a cult of himself and the nation. “A sacred respect is due to the person of the sovereign,” he claimed. “He is the mediator between the people and heaven.” […] To secure his winnings, Diem called for a referendum to determine whether he or Bao Dai, the former Emperor, should be head of state. Diem won, supposedly with 98.2 per cent of the vote. He carried Saigon with 605,025 votes out

of 450,000 registered voters. [CIA’s Major General Edward] Lansdale’s main contribution to the campaign was to suggest that the ballots for Diem be printed in red (considered a lucky color) and the ballots for Bao Dai in green (a color associated with cuckolds)… this simplified Nhu’s instructions to his poll watchers: he told them to throw out all the green ballots.

On top of that, Diem had used legal threats to prevent his opposition running any campaign material, while his own campaign mostly ran personal attacks and smears including false claims (“preference for gambling, women, wine, milk, and butter“).

And if all that wasn’t enough, apparently 150,000 more votes were cast in capital city Saigon than the actual number of people listed on the electoral roll.

Diem declared himself President as a result of this “election” and South Vietnam slid into a rather undeniable totalitarian state.

Thousands of Vietnamese suspected of disloyalty were arrested, tortured, and executed by beheading or disembowelment. Political opponents were imprisoned. For nine years, the Ngo family was the wobbling pivot on which we rested our hopes for a non-Communist South Vietnam.

President Eisenhower in 1955 had ordered the first military advisers into South Vietnam to train their conventional Army, and the French prepared to exit completely.

Four years later the first American casualties were two advisers (Maj. Dale Ruis and Master Sgt. Chester Ovnand) killed while watching a movie at Bien Hoa.

In 1960 JFK defeated Nixon (Eisenhower’s Vice President) at the polls and expanded strategy away from the centrist government control and conventional Army training towards counter-insurgency and working with rural communities in Vietnam.

By 1963 Diem’s ruthless regime was deposed and he was assassinated. The American government even had met with Vietnam’s military leaders and encouraged the coup. JFK was assassinated shortly after.

The dramatic power shift in both countries thereafter led to an escalation of American involvement and even more direct military intervention in 1964 that eventually would lead to 58,220 U.S. military fatal casualties, over 150,000 wounded…and the March 29, 1973 withdrawal.

As a footnote, the war could have ended five years earlier had Nixon not intentionally interfered with peace talks to increase American deaths as his secret strategy to win the presidential election of 1968.

Once in office he escalated the war into Laos and Cambodia, with the loss of an additional 22,000 American lives, before finally settling for a peace agreement in 1973 that was within grasp in 1968.

Election interference is definitely not new territory for the US, whether it be abroad or at home or some combination of the two. This National Vietnam War Veteran’s Day is perhaps a good time to reflect on it.