Ramparts, April 1966
The University on the Make,
or how MSU helped arm Madame Nhu
Introduction by Stanley K. Sheinbaum
During the
summer of 1958, I cut my vacation short and rushed off to San Francisco to meet the four leading police figures of South Vietnam. Among them they controlled the Saigon
police, the national police and the VBI, South Vietnam's equivalent of the FBI.
Within
an hour of their arrival the youngest, a nephew of [SouthVietnam's
president] Ngo Dinh Diem, conspiratorially drew me
aside and informed me that one of the others was going to kill the eldest of
the group. The story he told possessed plot and counter-plot. In essence, Michigan State University was being used to invite these men to the United States under the auspices of its foreign aid contract in Vietnam. The dirty deed was to be done prophylactically
in the States, uncluttered by any complicating factors in Saigon.
At
a time when relations between Diem and the U.S. were already strained, the whole story might have been
a trick to embarrass Washington. Or else my informant's facts could have been
straight, and failure to take action would have been equally embarrassing. The
upshot was some nocturnal maneuvers and a cross-country flight designed to
separate the quartet by forcibly hospitalizing the supposed target on the
pretext he showed signs of T.B.
Nothing
ever came of the episode. The intended target lived long enough to be executed
by Diem's successors for having assassinated a variety of political prisoners
himself.
The
question is, why was I, of the Department of Economics
at MSU, involved in such ugliness?
I was
coordinator of the Vietnam Project at Michigan State University, and I am no less culpable of the charges I make
herein, or those made in the following article, than are any of my former
colleagues. Looking back, I am appalled at how supposed intellectuals (aren't
academicians supposed to be intellectuals?) could have been so uncritical about
what they were doing. There was little discussion and no protest over the
cancellation of the 1956 elections. Nor were any of us significantly troubled
by the fact that our Project had become a CIA front. (The University is still
denying this in an odd mixture of embarrassment and loyalty.) On the campus a
pitiful handful of faculty -- usually mavericks and often some of the best
teachers -- questioned MSU's role in assisting U.S. foreign policy. (One of these became an enthusiast
when the opportunity arose for him to make a leisurely trip to Saigon
on behalf of the Project.) From Saigon some professors did write popular and troublesome
articles criticizing Diem's oppressions. Good, but even these bold ventures
accepted U.S. policy as given with no questions asked.
The Michigan State professors performed at all levels. They advised on
fingerprinting techniques, on bookkeeping, on governmental budgeting and on the
very writing of South Vietnam's Constitution. One was even instrumental in choosing
the President of South Vietnam. But in all this they never questioned U.S. foreign policy, which had placed them there and which,
thereby, they were supporting.
The
following article on MSU's involvement in Vietnam is merely a case study of two critical failures in
American education and intellectual life today. The first and more obvious is
the diversion of the university away from its functions (and duties) of
scholarship and teaching. The second has to do with the failure of the academic
intellectual to serve as critic, conscience, ombudsman.
Especially in foreign policy, which hence forth will bear heavily on our very
way of life, is this failure serious.
For this
failure has left us in a state of drift. We lack historical perspective. We
have been conditioned by our social science training not to ask the normative
question; we possess neither the inclination nor the means with which to
question and judge our foreign policy. We have only the capacity to be experts
and technicians to serve that policy. This is the tragedy of the Michigan State professors: we were all automatic cold warriors.
On every
university campus, from Harvard to Michigan State, the story is the same. The social science professor,
trained (not educated) to avoid the bigger problems, is off campus expertising for his government or industry client whose assumptions
he readily adopts. His students are mechanistically led through the same social
science materials by a less competent instructor or graduate assistant, and
they will be as little exposed to questions of judgment and the application of
wisdom as was the professor in the first place.
No doubt
the problem is far more advanced at parvenu institutions like Michigan State than in the Ivy League. The struggle for status,
recognition and money is an irresistible lure; the glamorous project is grabbed
and sometimes even invented. Within the university only the exceptional faculty
member seeks reward and promotions via scholarship and teaching. The easier and
even more prestigious route is that of the new-breed professor with his
machine-stamped Ph.D. who orbits in the university's stratosphere of
institutes, projects and contracts. The student is lowest among his priorities.
The work he emphasizes is of dubious value -- by reason of his bias against
considerations of value.
Where is
the source of serious intellectual criticism that would help us avoid future Vietnams? Serious ideological controversy is dead and with it
the perspective for judgment. Our failure in Vietnam was not one of technical expertise, but rather of
historical wisdom. We at Michigan State failed to take a critical stance a decade ago. This
was our first responsibility, and our incapacity gave rise to the nightmare
described in the following pages.
by Warren Hinckle, Robert Scheer
and Sol Stern
The Vietnamese soldier in the
sentry box stood at attention as the chauffeured limousine bearing license
plate No.1 from the government motor pool roared down the long driveway of the
French villa, picked up speed and screeched off along the road towards the
palace where the President was waiting breakfast.
The year was 1957, the city
was Saigon, and the man who lived in the huge villa with its own
sentry box was no Batman of the diplomatic corps. He was only Wesley Fishel of East Lansing, Michigan, assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University.
Peasants who scrambled off
the road to make way for the speeding professor might have wondered what was
happening, but Fishel's academic compatriots could
have no doubt: he was "making it." To make it, in the new world of
Big University politics, was no longer as elemental as publishing or perishing.
You needed "contact" with the outside world. You had to get a
government contract. You had to be an operator. And some people viewed
Professor Fishel in South Vietnam in the mid-1950s as the Biggest Operator of them all.
Some professors on the make
have had a bigger press, but none deserves notoriety more than Wesley Fishel. Eugene Burdick, for instance, got a lot of
publicity out of his quickie novels and underwater beer commercials on
television. But no academician has ever achieved Fishel's
distinction in getting his school to come through with enough professors,
police experts and guns to secure his friend's dictatorship.
That was what Wesley Fishel was about on that humid Saigon
morning, burning rubber to visit Ngo Dinh Diem. The
presidential palace was known informally and with some degree of jealousy by
the United States Mission in Saigon as the "breakfast club," because that was
where Diem and Fishel and Wolf Ladejinsky,
the agricultural expert left over from the New Deal, ate morning melons several
times a week and discussed the state of the nation.
Leland Barrows, the United
States Mission chief, was disturbed because he couldn't get to see Diem
anywhere near that often. And Fishel was particularly
closed-mouthed about his regular morning conferences. Saigon
in the early days of the Diem regime was a status-minded city, and Fishel had a bigger villa than Barrows, bigger, even, than
the American ambassador's. This residential ranking attests to Fishel's importance as head of the Michigan State
University Group in Vietnam, an official university project under contract to
Saigon and Washington, with responsibility for the proper functioning of Diem's
civil service and his police network, shaping up the 50,000 man
"ragamuffin" militia, and supplying guns and ammunition for the city
police, the civil guard, the palace police and the dreaded Sûreté
-- South Vietnam's version of the FBI. No small task for a group of professors,
but one which Michigan State took to as if it were fielding another national
championship football team.
One less-known and perhaps
more unpleasant task of the MSU professors was to
provide a front for a unit of the United States Central Intelligence Agency.
This is a role that both Professor Fishel and Michigan State University have now chosen to forget. It is described here as a
specific, if shocking, documentation of the degree of corruption and abject
immorality attending a university which puts its academic respectability on
lend-lease to American foreign policy.
John A. Hannah, the President as Coach
The decay of traditional
academic principles found in the modern university on the make may well be
traced to Harold Stassen and Clark Kerr, but it is
best exemplified by President John A. Hannah of Michigan State University. Stassen, in the
International Cooperation Administration, was responsible for the concept that
American universities should be tapped as "manpower reservoirs" for
the extension of Americanism abroad, and Clark Kerr, the embattled Berkeley savant, first came up with the vision of the large
university as a "service station" to society. Hannah, an Eisenhower
liberal with a penchant for public service, has made these concepts the raison
d´être of MSU.
Hannah, in a blustery way,
represents the best traditions of the American Success Story. The son of an Iowa chicken farmer, he took a degree in poultry husbandry
from Michigan Agricultural College in 1922. Then, like the football hero who works for
30 years in the college book store because he can't bear to leave the campus,
Hannah stayed on in East
Lansing. He
taught chicken farming, married the president's daughter, got his first taste
of public service during a stint with the Department of Agriculture as an NRA
administrator, came back to campus and in 1941 succeeded his father-in-law as
president.
MSU, under President Hannah's
tutelage, is more service oriented than the average Standard Oil retail outlet.
MSU's School of Agriculture aids farmers, its School of Hotel Management turns
out educated room clerks, its School of Police
Administration
graduates cops sophisticated in the social sciences. MSU once offered a
Bachelor of Science degree with a major in Mobile Homes under a program
financed by the trailer industry.
But it is in the field of
international service that Michigan State has really made it. A shiny new building on campus
houses MSU's Center for International Programs -- an
edifice built, incidentally, with funds from the administrative allowance on
the seven-year Vietnam contract. The University has over 200 faculty members
every year out in the boondocks of the world running "educational
projects" in 13 countries including Columbia, Taiwan, Turkey, Brazil and Okinawa. Time magazine recently acknowledged the MSU
president's extensive influence on the role of American universities overseas
by recording Hannah's boast that he can "tap his campus specialists, get
an answer to most any question for government or research groups within 30
minutes." Now that is service.
The list of countries MSU is
presently "helping" is lopsided with military dictatorships, but it
is not President Hannah's style to question the assignment his country gives
him. A former assistant secretary of Defense under General Motors' Charles
Wilson, Hannah sees the military, like football, as an important
character-building element in life. His view of the modern university is tied
to the liberal concept of America as the defender of the free world. That the
university must prepare young citizens to assume this proud task, and to be a
leader abroad in areas chosen for it by the government, is Hannah's educational
credo.
Despite Hannah's obvious
pride in the work his University is doing overseas, he is particularly reticent
in discussing its most extensive foreign operation. In a colorful brochure
about MSU's international programs, given away free
to visitors, there is only one sentence about the Vietnam Project -- despite
the fact that this was the largest single project ever undertaken by an
American university abroad, a project that spent the incredible amount of 25
million in American taxpayers' dollars giving "technical assistance"
to the Republic of South Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem.
This one-sentence treatment of MSU's Vietnam
operation is like reducing to a photo caption in the school yearbook the story
of the prize-winning basketball team -- because the coach was caught taking
bribes.
A key to MSU's
apparent official desire to forget about the Vietnam experience, dubbed the
"Vietnam Adventure" by some professors who worked on the Project,
might be found in the unexpressed fear that the details of the University's
"cover" for the CIA may become public knowledge. If pressed for an
answer, Fishel denies any such role and so does
President Hannah. "CIA agents were not knowingly on our staff -- if that
were true we didn't know about it," Hannah said recently in his office,
sitting beneath the portrait that hangs above his desk. But this assertion of
innocence is flatly contradicted by the disclosures of other professors who
held administrative positions in the Project. Indeed, the weight of evidence is
that MSU finally had to ask the CIA unit to go elsewhere because its presence
had become such embarrassing general knowledge in Saigon
and East Lansing.
Economist Stanley K. Sheinbaum, the campus coordinator of MSU's
Vietnam operation for three years, was flabbergasted by
Hannah's denial: "If John Hannah can make up something like that, he calls
into question his competence as a university president," he said.
Wesley Fishel,
the Professor as Proconsul
One indication of Wesley Fishel's power in Saigon in the heyday
of the Diem era was provided by a veteran of that period who recently paid a
return visit to Saigon. "I heard people talking about what 'Westy' would think," he said,
"and for a minute I thought that Wesley was back."
"Westy,"
in the Saigon vernacular, is General William Westmoreland, but
those in the know used to talk about "Wesley" in the same awe-struck
fashion. There is one public reminder of the transfer of power. "Westy" is now running the war out of the same office
building, a reconverted apartment house at 137 Pasteur Street, that used to be "Wesley's" headquarters.
Like most fateful alliances,
the Diem-Fishel axis had humble beginnings. The pair
met in Tokyo in July of 1950 when each was going nowhere in his
chosen field. Diem was an exiled Vietnamese politician with a mandarin
personality and a strong sense of predestination but few tangible hopes of
assuming power in his war-ravaged country. Fishel was
just a run-of-the-mill academician, a young political scientist from UCLA who
had written a nondescript thesis on Chinese extra-territoriality and was about
to accept a position at Michigan State.
Both were ambitious, looking
for an angle, and Napoleon-sized. Diem was 5' 4" tall; Fishel,
a well-built, curly-haired man with the stance of a bantam rooster, appears to
be about the same size. The men became friends and a relationship developed by
extensive correspondence over the ensuing year. They exchanged favors early. Fishel had his friend appointed consultant to Michigan
State's Governmental Research Bureau and helped arrange a long stay in the
United States, where Diem picked up substantial backing among prominent
Americans from Cardinal Spellman to Senator Mike Mansfield [Ramparts,
July 1965]. In return, Diem in 1952 asked the French to let Michigan State furnish technical aid to Vietnam at United States expense, but the French refused.
Fishel, however, had ultimate faith. An East Lansing colleague recalls that one day Fishel
cornered him in the faculty lounge and, with the exuberance of one who could no
longer restrain himself, whispered excitedly, "My friend Diem is going to
be Premier of Vietnam one of these days!" The prediction was taken
lightly; Fishel had neither the swagger nor the
stripes of a kingmaker.
But when Diem was named
Premier in July 1954, one of his first official acts was to request Washington to send Wesley to Saigon
to advise him. Fishel arrived within weeks, and just
weeks later Diem asked for the second time that MSU set up a technical
assistance program in Vietnam. The request, this time, had smooth sailing.
With Fishel
already in Saigon, there was virtually no one on the East Lansing campus with any knowledge about Vietnam when Diem's assistance request was relayed through
official Washington channels. President Hannah, not one to let the
possibility of a substantial contract go by, tapped four faculty members for an
"inspection team" and put them on a plane to Saigon
in almost whirlwind fashion.
The four were Arthur Brandstatter, an ex-MSU football hero who now heads the
Police Administration School; James Dennison, the University's public relations
man; Edward Weidener, then chairman of the Political
Science Department; and Economics Department Chairman Charles Killingsworth. None of these men had any experience in
academic or technical assistance roles overseas, nor did they have any
expertise in Far Eastern affairs, a deficiency they attempted to repair by
reading newspaper clippings about Vietnam during the plane ride. The first time they met as a
group was when they fastened their seat belts.
Saigon was a city in ferment in September 1954, when MSU's "inspection team" arrived. Diem was
nominally in power, but he had no real support except among a small number of
middle-class Catholics and Saigon merchants. The French were preparing to pull out, the
Saigon police were controlled by the Binh
Xuyen pirate sect, the private armies of the
religious sects were in substantial control of the Vietnamese lowlands, the
Vietnamese Army was in fledgling revolt against Diem, and the civil service
machinery was in a state of stagnation.
The professors found their
colleague Fishel and General Edward Lansdale of the
CIA maneuvering furiously to consolidate Diem's support, an effort that
culminated in the endorsement of Diem by the United States [National] Security Council in the spring of 1955.
The professors also learned that Diem was suspicious of the members of the
United States Mission in Saigon, many of whom, he felt, held
pro-French sentiments. The one American Diem really trusted was Wesley Fishel, and this trust was reflected two weeks later when
the MSU inspection team returned to East Lansing and recommended a massive technical assistance
contract, unprecedented in the history of university operations overseas. This
contract committed Michigan State to do everything for Diem, from training his police
to writing his Constitution.
Contract negotiations bogged
down over technical matters, but the jam was broken in the early spring of 1955
by a telephone call from Washington
to Hannah requesting that the red tape be cut and MSU involve itself in Vietnam -- in a hurry. Fishel once
indicated in an interview that the request came from former Vice President
Nixon, but he now denies this, and so does President Hannah. The phone call,
Hannah told the Detroit News, came from an authority "even higher
than Nixon." This leaves a choice of John Foster Dulles; his brother, CIA chief Allen Dulles; or Eisenhower himself. At any rate,
President Hannah did his duty as he saw it. The first MSU professors joined
Wesley Fishel in Saigon
in late May of 1955.
In 1956 Fishel
abandoned his role as "advisor" to Diem, and assumed the title of
Chief of Mission of the MSU Group. For the next four years, he was the most
important American in Vietnam. "Wesley was the closest thing to a proconsul
that Saigon had," said one of the MSU professors. The
assistant professor of political science entertained frequently and lavishly in
his opulent villa, and if his parties got a little out of hand the Saigon
police obliged by cordoning off the street. No professor had ever made it so
big; in the academic world, Fishel was sovereign.
But if the proconsul lived
well, so did his lieutenants. East Lansing is hardly a midwestern Paris, and for most of the professors the more exotic and
free-wheeling life in Saigon was the closest thing to the high life they had
known. Academicians and their families, at first a little uncomfortable,
assumed the easy ways of the former French colonial masters. They moved into
spacious, air-conditioned villas, rent-free, in the old French section of
Saigon, bought the better Scotches at the American commissary at $2 a bottle,
hired servants at $30 a month, were invited to all the better cocktail parties
because they knew "Wesley," went tiger hunting for laughs and, with
various "hardship" and "incentive" salary hikes, made close
to double their normal salaries. (A professor earning $9000 for teaching class
at East Lansing got $16,500 a year for "advising" in Vietnam -- tax free.)
The "Vietnam
Adventure" also did wonders for the professors' tenure. Despite the
activist nature of their work in Vietnam and the lack of any substantial
scholarly research during the Project, two-thirds of the MSU faculty who went
to Saigon got promotions either during their tour of duty or within a year of
their return. Professor Fishel, in particular, scored
points. His published work was virtually nonexistent and he was absent from his
classes for years at a time. But in 1957 MSU promoted him to the rank of full
professor.
Hear-No-CIA, See-No-CIA
Central Intelligence Agency
men were hidden within the ranks of the Michigan State University professors. They were all listed as members of the
MSU Project staff and were formally appointed by the University Board of
Trustees. Several of the CIA men were given academic rank and were paid by the
University Project.
The CIA agents' instructions
were to engage in counterespionage and counterintelligence. Their
"cover" was within the police administration division of the Michigan
State Group. The CIA unit was self-contained and appeared on an official organization
chart of the MSU Project as "VBI Internal Security Section." This
five-man team was the largest section within the police administration division
of the MSU Vietnam operation. The police administration division in turn was by
far the largest of the three divisions of MSUG.
"VBI" was Michigan State shorthand for "Vietnamese Bureau of
Investigation," the new name the professors had given the old Sûreté, the Vietnamese special police. The head of
the "Internal Security Section" of the VBI under the Michigan State operation was Raymond Babineau
who was in Saigon from the outset of the MSU Project. The other men
were hired later by the University and listed on its staff chart as
"Police Administration Specialists." All four -- Douglas Beed, William Jones, Daniel Smith and Arthur Stein -- gave
their previous employment as either "investigator" or "records
specialist" in the Department of the Army.
The CIA contingent, despite
the continued denials of Fishel and Hannah, was
identified by two former Project officials -- Stanley Sheinbaum
and Professor Robert Scigliano, an MSU political
scientist who was assistant project chief of the MSU Vietnam Group from
1957-1959. It is also confirmed, in writing, by Scigliano
and Professor Guy H. Fox, a former MSU Project chief, in a book titled Technical
Assistance in Vietnam: The Michigan State University
Experience, published by Praeger in 1965.
Sheinbaum, as part of his duties as campus coordinator, hired
Stein, Smith and Jones. At the time, all he knew about the men was that they
came from the "Department of the Army." Sheinbaum
recalls that he was proceeding to investigate the backgrounds of the three
applicants before accepting them when he was told "that it wouldn't be
necessary to check out these guys." The message came from Professor Ralph Smuckler, a former Vietnam Project head.
Sheinbaum said he was on the job for 18 months before he was
taken into the administration's confidence and told about the CIA men. "Smuckler pulled me aside one day and told me that I should
know that these CIA guys were there, but that we didn't talk about them,"
he said.
Professor Scigliano's
first brush with the CIA came during his first meeting with the police advisory
group in Saigon. He said that Babineau,
whom he knew from the organizational chart as head of the VBI Internal
Security, was introduced as a CIA man. The other CIA agents were also
introduced, and Babineau made a short speech in which
he expressed hope that the professors and his people would get along well. Scigliano recalls Babineau
saying, "We hope we don't get in your way."
A professor and his wife
became friends with one of the CIA men and his wife, and the couples often
dined together. "We talked about books and music," he said, but there
was an unspoken rule that they would never mention the CIA. The entire unit
operated on an identical hear-no-CIA, see-no-CIA basis. They worked out of
offices in one corner of the police administration floor of the beige,
converted apartment building that housed the MSU Project. The CIA men came in
early in the morning, stayed for about an hour and then locked their offices
and left for the day. They all drove their own cars and their French was the
most fluent on the Project.
If the CIA men got nothing
else from their fraternization with Michigan State University, they became the first persons in the spy business to
gain academic recognition. "Some of the CIA guys attained faculty status
at MSU -- some as lecturers, some as assistant professors, depending on their
salaries. I know, because I remember signing the papers that gave them faculty
rank," Sheinbaum said.
The CIA unit operated within
its Michigan State "cover" until 1959. Scigliano
and Fox state in their book, in what must rank as one of the more terse statements
of the decade: "USOM [United States Operations Mission] also absorbed at
this time [1959] the CIA unit that had been operating within MSUG [Michigan
State University Group]."
In plain language, Michigan State threw the CIA men out. One of the principal factors
leading to the MSU decision was that by 1959 just about everybody in the know
was cognizant of the CIA operation. This was not only embarrassing to the
legitimate professors, but it served to taint the reputation of the limited
amount of solid academic work that was done during the Project. For instance,
an anthropologist working far out in the Vietnamese flatlands was flabbergasted
to find a local police chief interrupt his work on the grounds that he was
digging up bones on behalf of the United States Central Intelligence Agency.
The decision to terminate the CIA unit was brought to Professor Scigliano by Smuckler. Babineau was not in Saigon
at the time, so Professor Scigliano gave Jones the
bad news. He recalls that Jones was "quite upset," as was the United
States Mission which wanted the CIA unit to stay right where it was --
sheltered by the groves of academe.
Within weeks, the entire
"VBI Internal Security Section" had moved over to the offices of the
United States Mission to operate, presumably, more in the open. By 1959, the United States was making little pretense of following the Geneva
Accords anyway.
Academics in Armored Cars
In the Spring
of 1955, Diem gained control of the Army. The United States, which was (and still is)
providing the entire South Vietnam Army payroll, said it wouldn't give out any
more checks unless the Army played ball with our boy. Diem then used the Army
to crush the sect that had controlled the Saigon
police and elements of the far-flung Sûreté.
The gargantuan task of rebuilding the entire Vietnam police apparatus, from traffic cop to
"interrogation expert," as a loyal agency of the Diem government then
fell to Michigan State University.
Diem, lacking popular
support, could only retain power through an effective police and security
network. The American Embassy urgently signaled the MSU contingent to
concentrate on this problem, and, like good team players from a school with a
proud football tradition, the professors went along.
The professors not only trained
Diem's security forces but, in the early years of the Project, actually
supplied them with guns and ammunition. In doing so, the East Lansing contingent helped to secure Diem's dictatorship and
to provide the base and the arms for the "secret police" which were
to make Madame Nhu and her brother infamous. [For a
brief sketch of Madame Nhu's "career" see her
Wikipedia entry.]
If not academic, the
professors were at least professional. Many supplies -- revolvers, riot guns,
ammunition, tear gas, jeeps, handcuffs, radios -- were requisitioned by the
East Lansing School of Police Administration from stocks left over from America's aid to the French Expeditionary Corps. These
supplies were then turned over to the Vietnamese who would strive to achieve
Diem's own form of "consensus" government -- a consensus gained
largely by hauling the dissenters off to jail. Despite the largess left by the
French, the professors found it necessary to order some $15 million in
additional "equipment" from the United States Mission.
Listen to some of the
official progress reports sent home to East Lansing by the professors:
November 8, 1955: "During the month of October we received notice
of Washington's approval of the recommended expanded police program.
. . . Conferences were held at USOM on October 10 and the Embassy on October 23
and 24, trying to coordinate Internal Security Operations in Vietnam in which our government has an interest."
April 17, 1956: "The training of the commando squads of Saigon-Cholon police in riot control formations has continued
during the month. . . . A report on riots and unlawful assembly is nearing
completion.
June 5, 1957: "Training of the Presidential Security Guard in
revolver shooting began during the month. Thirty-four VBI agents completed the
revolver course."
September 11, 1957: "Eight hundred pairs of Peerless handcuffs
arrived in Saigon, but distribution is being delayed pending arrival of
400 additional cuffs."
February 17, 1958: "The training of 125 military and Civil Guard
fingerprint technicians at the VBI proceeds satisfactorily. The Palace Guard is
being put through another class in revolver training, with 58 men receiving
instruction. Forty members of the VBI completed firearm training."
As befits a university project,
many of the professors indulged in their academic specialties. Ralph Turner, a
professor of police administration, feels that one of the Project's most
singular achievements was the program whereby every Vietnamese citizen would be
given an identification card -- with a special American touch. The cards were
laminated so the poor, plastic-less Viet Cong would have difficulty forging
them.
Dean Brandstatter
did not move lock, stock and pistol to Saigon,
but he managed frequent "inspection trips" -- as did some 11 of the
University officials, including President Hannah, all of course at government
expense. Brandstatter, a former military policeman,
utilized his expertise to immediate effect during one of his first trips.
Rumors of a coup against Diem were escalating, and the East Lansing official personally inspected the Palace Guard to see
that they had enough guns to meet the threat.
Brandstatter, a large, jovial man in his early fifties, and a
devoted follower of MSU's football fortunes, played
talent scout for the police operation. The services that the MSU team was
called upon to perform for Diem's security apparatus were so esoteric that even
its heralded School of Police Administration wasn't up to the job. Brandstatter had to recruit specially trained cops from all
over the country. Fingerprint experts, small arms experts and intelligence
experts came from the Detroit police force, the New York police force, the FBI
and even the Department of Defense. Other professors, doing civil service work,
felt a little left out and labeled the onslaught of police experts
"mercenaries." This might seem a little unkind, but the term seems
somewhat applicable since, at one point in the Project, only four of the 33
police advisors had roots at the Michigan campus; the others were nomads. The
Project, of course, still bore the name -- or the "cover" -- of the
MSUG, since these "mercenaries" were all put on the MSU payroll and
provided with faculty status. In the action-filled world of the service station
university, not only do the professors become activists, but the cops aspire to
professorships.
Decline and Fall
Ngo Dinh
Diem was a nice man to buy guns for, but in other areas of human endeavor, the
professors discovered that he could be a tough man to do business with. Even
Wolf Ladejinsky, who broke bread regularly with Diem,
was subject to occasional indignities. When an issue of the New Republic
appeared in Saigon containing an article mildly critical of the Diem
regime, the President sent Ladejinsky packing off
from the palace to buy up all the copies from the dozen English language kiosks
in Saigon.
The game in Saigon
was to cater to Diem's pettiness and paranoia, and for the most part the men
from Michigan State played it. There appeared to be a conscious effort
within the Project administration to prepare reports pleasing, or at least
palatable, to the President. Milton Taylor, an MSU economics professor who went
to Vietnam as a tax advisor, said that his reports were often rewritten by the
Project head. When he questioned this practice he was told that there were
"higher considerations" at stake; other universities were in hot
pursuit of the juicy Vietnam contract.
It became necessary to
forsake principles for the good of the Project. At times, in the Saigon of the
late 1950s, that must have been difficult. Professor Adrian Jaffe of the MSU
English Department, one of the most persistent critics of his University's
"Vietnam Adventure," recalls some vivid street scenes. Each morning,
men, and more often than not women and children, were hauled out of the jail
directly across from his office at the Faculty of Letters of the University of
Saigon, handcuffed, thrown into a van, and driven away to an island
concentration camp known as a sort of Devil's Island à
la Diem. Professors in the Project, because of their intimacy with the
Vietnamese security apparatus, knew this was happening, Jaffe said, but his
colleagues said and did nothing.
The moral question raised by
Jaffe is dismissed by many veterans of the Project as
"unprofessional." Perhaps more professional was the work of Wesley Fishel, who, as late as the fall of November 1959, wrote an
article in the New Leader with the obfuscating title, "Vietnam's One-Man Democratic Rule." The text requires no
recounting, except to observe that Fishel uses
adjectives for Diem that only Jack Valenti might dare
use for Johnson.
The failure of the MSU
professors to bear witness against what are now known to be Diem's outrageous
violations of civil liberties raises serious questions about them as men. But
their failure as professionals to exercise the traditional role of the
independent scholar as critic accounted in large part for the general ignorance
of the United States public about the true nature of Diem's regime. Professors,
presumed to be men of principle, were on the scene in Vietnam and had to be
accepted as the best unprejudiced source of information. David Halberstam, after all, simply could have been mad at Madame
Nhu.
The same disastrous vacuum of
information occurred in this country only a decade before when the China experts, almost to a man, were purged as Reds and comsymps, and yahoos were all the public had left to hear.
In Vietnam, at least, there was a Buddhist monk with the
fortitude to burn himself -- and the public suddenly wondered how what they had
been reading about Diem for six years could have been so wrong. But the
professors, by this time, were long back in East Lansing. The MSU Vietnam
Project ended rather abruptly in 1962. The University claims
that it terminated the arrangement in the name of academic freedom -- but the
truth is, unfortunately, more complex.
Diem, painfully aware of the
slightest criticism, was infuriated by the modicum of critical material
published in the United States in the early '60s by veterans of the MSU
"experience." Professor Jaffe and economist Milton Taylor wrote an
essay for the New Republic in 1961 that set Diem's paranoia percolating. The
author dared to suggest that the President rid himself of the Nhu's. The contract between Diem and Michigan State stipulated that members of the Project could not use
materials gathered on the job "against the security or the interests of Vietnam." In other words, they were to keep quiet. Taylor recalls that many of his colleagues in Vietnam felt he was being "disloyal" in publicly
criticizing Diem.
The President was also miffed
that in 1959 MSU had drastically curtailed its police work after being urged by
both Diem and the United States Mission to plunge more deeply into paramilitary
work than it already had. MSU's reluctance was
understandable, since a greater degree of involvement would just about require
its professors to shoot off howitzers and drill troops in the jungle.
Nevertheless, the University
genuinely believed that its contract would be renewed in 1962. President Hannah
even sent a special envoy, Alfred Seelye, dean of the
Business College, to Saigon to smooth things out by telling Diem that the
University was prepared to weed out any future troublemakers in the Project by
selecting personnel more likely to "write scholarly scientific studies and
not sensational journalistic articles." Diem, however, surprised
everybody. He was adamant: no more MSU.
With no deal in sight, the
business dean proceeded to make a strong declaration in defense of the academic
freedom of MSU professors and beat Diem in announcing that the contract would
not be renewed.
The Ruins
Like a factory that has
contracted for a job and then completed it, there is little evidence on the MSU
campus that it was ever involved in Vietnam. Thousands of pages of mimeographed reports and
documents sent from Saigon have been piled haphazardly in out-of-the-way files
in the University library, uncatalogued and unused.
MSU has not a single course, not even a study program, to show for its six
years in Vietnam.
Professor Wesley Fishel still flies in and out of East Lansing, but now he goes to Washington and advises the administration on Vietnam, a role which allows him to visit Saigon
occasionally -- where he has the look of a man who would like another try. But
there is nothing for him to do. Fishel has been
careful to exclude the infamous New Leader article from the otherwise
thorough 64-page bibliography on Vietnam and Southeast
Asia which he distributes to
his students.
MSU is still big on police.
There are, literally, policemen all over the campus, almost beyond the wildest
expansion of the human retina. There are the campus police -- a complement of
roughly 35 men in blue uniforms. Then there are the professors and visiting
firemen at the School of Police Administration. Finally, it is hard to find a parking spot on campus
since so many police cars are occupying the stalls; state police headquarters
adjoins MSU.
With all this protection, the
University officials should feel safe. But they do not. President Hannah has
lately been publicly worried about the possibilities of what he terms a
"Berkeley-style" revolt. The vice-president of student affairs
bluntly stated that MSU had been "selected" as the "next Berkeley." Hannah, fearful of "outside
agitators," has suggested that there is an "apparatus" at work
on campus that is a "tool for international communism." The
University police have a special detail charged with keeping tabs on student political
activities, especially anything "radical." Several years ago a member
of this "Red squad" endeared himself to the student daily newspaper
by trapping homosexuals in a state-built bathroom.
These conditions would be
sufficient enough for the light-hearted to suggest that MSU is a Lilliputian
police state, but that is silly. Professor Alfred Meyer of the Political
Science Department, during his course on the Soviet political system, always
gets a good laugh by telling the students to take a good look around campus if
they want to know what the Soviet system is like.
Hannah's concern over Berkeley is more than apocryphal. If the Berkeley experience meant any one thing, it meant that the
University wasn't doing its job. It had lost its sense of purpose; it no longer
had meaning to the students. In that sense East Lansing is, assuredly, another Berkeley. The university on the make has little time for
nonconforming students and rarely enough for conforming students. Its service
function is the first priority. The students are, in Clark Kerr's idiom, only
the "raw material" that has to be processed. That was the cause of
the Berkeley revolt, and the ingredients are available in excess
portions at Michigan State.
Acting dean of international
programs, Ralph T. Smuckler, is perhaps the one
person at MSU who got something lasting out of the "Vietnam
Adventure." He derived an ideology, and it is an ideology that goes Clark
Kerr one better. Smuckler sees the future of the
social sciences in the world-wide scope of the "action" projects he
is now directing -- in Formosa as he did in Vietnam. "Classroom teaching is a tame business,"
said Smuckler, "and anybody who doesn't see how
his discipline fits into the overseas operations of the University is already
obsolete."
To question the assumption
that the academician of tomorrow must be an operator is to ask but part of the
essential question about MSU's "Vietnam
Adventure." And to ask whether the University officials are liars, or
whether the MSU Project broke the spirit of the Geneva Accords, is also
neglecting the primary question.
The essential query, which must
be asked before the discussion of Michigan State's behavior can be put into any rational perspective,
is this: what the hell is a university doing buying guns, anyway?