Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group
Encyclopedia
The Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group (commonly known as the Michigan State University Group and abbreviated MSUG) was a program of technical assistance
provided to the government of South Vietnam
as an effort in state-building
by the U.S. Department of State
.
From 1955 to 1962, under contract to the International Cooperation Administration
in Washington and the Vietnamese government in Saigon, faculty and staff from Michigan State University
consulted for agencies of the Ngo Dinh Diem
regime. The group advised and trained Vietnamese personnel in the disciplines of public administration, police administration, and economics. MSUG worked autonomously from most U.S. government agencies, had unmatched access to the presidency, and even assisted in writing the country's new constitution. Several of its proposals were undertaken by the Vietnamese government and had positive results for the people of Vietnam. However, the group had limited influence on Diem's decision-making and on the course of events in Vietnam, and publications by dissatisfied faculty led to Diem's termination of the contract.
When implications later arose that the Central Intelligence Agency
had infiltrated MSUG as a front for covert operations, the technical assistance program became a cause célèbre
in the early years of the anti-war movement
.
During his self-imposed exile in the early 1950s, Ngo Dinh Diem
met and befriended Wesley R. Fishel, a former military language specialist with a doctorate in international relations from the University of Chicago
. Fishel was "impressed [by] Diem's anticommunist and sociopolitical reform views, and the two men corresponded frequently". When Fishel was hired in 1951 as an assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University
, he invited Diem to join him. Two years later, as assistant director of the university's Governmental Research Bureau, Fishel appointed Diem as the bureau's Southeast Asian consultant.
The result was symbiotic: Diem's visit to the United States enabled him to build up the political support he needed to be installed as the prime minister of South Vietnam
in July 1954; in turn Fishel became one of Diem's closest advisors and confidants. At Fishel's suggestion, and already well aware of MSU's capabilities, Diem requested that part of his aid package from the U.S. International Cooperation Administration include a "technical assistance" contract with Michigan State. MSU was thereby asked to use its expertise to help stabilize Vietnam's economy, improve the government bureaucracy, and control an ongoing communist insurgency.
Michigan State, the pioneer land-grant university
, had since its founding believed in turning theory into praxis; for example, its agricultural extension service made the results of its research available to farmers throughout Michigan for their practical use. Because of this emphasis on practical education and community involvement, the school justifiably claimed that "the state is our campus". University President John A. Hannah
in particular was a major proponent of the so-called service-oriented institution; to him, it was a logical next step to expand that role internationally, and declare without intended hyperbole that "the world is our campus".
When the request for assistance came through U.S. government channels, the staunchly anticommunist Hannah was deeply interested in pursuing the contract. He sent a small evaluation contingent to Vietnam, consisting of three department chairmen that would be involved—Edward W. Weidner (political science), Arthur F. Brandstatter (police administration), and Charles C. Killingsworth (economics)—along with James H. Dennison, head of university public relations and Hannah's administrative assistant. After a brief, two-week visit, the quartet reported in October 1954 that a state of emergency existed in Vietnam, and recommended that the project should be immediately undertaken. The report stated that although the short preparation time could lead to mistakes, it was "important... to get a program under way that ha[d] at least a reasonable chance of success". Hannah approved the contract, forming the Michigan State University Group, which would operate under the authority of the U.S. Embassy's United States Operations Mission (USOM). Hannah also confirmed Weidner's recommendation that Fishel be appointed project head, a position Fishel held from the start of the project until early 1958.
MSUG personnel had a variety of reasons for volunteering for this overseas service, each a reflection of the university's motivations for the entire MSUG project: as a moral obligation, to support a struggling young nation; as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy, to stanch the growth of "communist imperialism"; and as an academic exercise, to test their theoretical notions in a real-world "laboratory". A "hardship" pay incentive and other allowances that nearly doubled a professor's salary (tax free), along with the prospect of personal advancement within the ranks of academia, were also persuasive.
forces, with shelling and street fighting that threatened not only Diem's official residence
but also the hotel where MSUG personnel were temporarily housed. At the height of the disturbances, hotel rooms were ransacked and looted, and some professors lost all of their possessions. MSUG's intended academic programs were put on hold and their focus quickly turned toward improving regional government administration and police services.
. This massive influx required both resettlement and infrastructure-building services, which were provided by the government agency known as COMIGAL (Commissariat of Refugees; the acronym is from its French name). MSUG consulted for COMIGAL to such an extent during the first months of the program that other pursuits fell by the wayside.
One of MSUG's proposals with positive results was the idea of decentralized bureaucracy for COMIGAL. By scattering small offices throughout the villages, COMIGAL was able to improve the responsiveness of those offices; funding for infrastructure projects was generally approved by Saigon in less than two weeks. Decentralization also enabled the offices to work directly with local leaders, who as a result felt that their input and participation were important.
On the other hand, MSUG was unable to convince Diem of the validity of the land claims made by the Montagnards
, indigenous tribesmen in Vietnam's central highlands
. Thousands of refugees—with government approval and encouragement—became permanent squatters on land "already cleared by highlanders for planting". Part of Diem's intent with this placement was to create a "human wall" of sympathetic, mostly Catholic settlers against communist infiltration from North Vietnam and nearby Cambodia. However, both the Montagnards and the majority Buddhists resented being governed by a Catholic regime, a minority religious group that they saw as unabashedly colonial. This opposition and Diem's ruthless suppression pushed these groups toward further insurgency and, ultimately, communist rule.
Along with its assistance in developing the new Saigon campus and teaching classes, MSUG was instrumental in a substantial expansion of the NIA library, which by 1962 held more than 22,000 books and other documents. The library was considered one of MSUG's greatest successes, and the NIA affiliation was the longest-lasting of the MSUG projects. However, the library's usefulness suffered from the simple fact that most of its documents were in English, rather than Vietnamese or French; and by the end of the MSUG contract the library was threatened by restricted accessibility, poor maintenance, and a lack of qualified Vietnamese personnel to staff it.
MSUG then trained Vietnamese personnel in the use and maintenance of this equipment. In general, MSUG trained instructors, who could then teach others; direct instruction, except in special cases like revolver training for the presidential guard, "was done only as a temporary expedient". The police administration project was largely successful in this, since the training was based in hands-on demonstration and thus much more immediate and tangible. Also, the MSUG-taught Vietnamese instructors rapidly assumed training themselves. At the same time, classroom sessions in the principles of police procedure and theory suffered from a number of problems that limited their success. Few MSUG professors spoke Vietnamese or French, leading to a translation delay and information loss. In addition, American-style lectures were a source of dissonance for a student body raised on the French juridical system. (This was also an issue in NIA classes taught by MSUG staff.)
Police administration consultation and training was most effective with the Sûreté, Vietnam's national law enforcement agency, in part because the majority of equipment was delivered to this agency. By the same token, municipal police departments (who received less equipment) were less affected—the greatest local improvement was in traffic control in Saigon. With regard to the civil guard, there was almost no effect.
The civil guard was a 60,000-man paramilitary organization that MSUG hoped to reform into something resembling a U.S. state police
outfit, an organization familiar to the professors. This would have entailed a primarily rural organization whose members would live in the communities they served. However, Saigon and the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group
preferred that the civil guard be a more heavily armed paramilitary force, organized into regiments and living in garrisons, that could exercise national police duties and support the national army. As a result of this impasse, very little of the equipment that MSUG had planned for the civil guard was distributed until 1959, leaving the civil guard unprepared when major communist insurgency action began that same year.
. This was the case throughout MSUG, and the group was obliged to hire extensively outside the university to fulfill its contract with Vietnam, often giving the new staffers academic rank (generally assistant professor or lecturer). The staffing issue had perhaps its most significant ramifications in the police administration division. Although Michigan State's School of Police Administration and Public Safety was "internationally recognized during the cold war era", it lacked experience in the much-needed areas of counterespionage and counterinsurgency, and department head Arthur Brandstatter hired new personnel accordingly. At the height of the police administration project, only four of its thirty-three advisors had been Michigan State employees prior to MSUG, and many had never even visited the East Lansing campus.
As it turns out, several of these police advisors also worked for the Central Intelligence Agency
. They formed a separate group, establishing their own office apart from the rest of the police administration staff in MSUG's Saigon headquarters, "and were responsible only to the American Embassy in Saigon". The CIA members worked closely with a special security unit of the Sûreté between 1955 and 1959. Although they were nominally under the aegis of MSUG, the specifics of their activities remained unknown to MSUG throughout. (MSUG files "support [the] contention that the agents were not spies"; CIA records remain classified to this day.)
The existence of the CIA group was not hidden from MSUG staff; on the contrary, it was common knowledge to the professors, if not openly discussed. A 1965 overview of the project was quite matter-of-fact about it: when MSUG "compelled USOM to establish a public safety division of its own in July, 1959[,] USOM also absorbed at this time the CIA unit that had been operating within MSUG". This almost parenthetical statement would later provide the impetus for a sensational exposé.
After 1958, the police administration role was almost entirely advisory, as the MSUG-trained Vietnamese instructors "by then were running their own show". As advisors, MSUG helped the Sûreté—which by this time had been renamed the Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation, in an attempt to lessen the negative public image of that special police agency—to establish a national identification card, a program launched in 1959.
The 1959 contract renewal also contained a clause that illustrates Diem's increasing sensitivity to criticism: it stated that MSUG staffers' personal records and notes would not be used "against the security or the interests of Vietnam". This stipulation ran contrary to the notion of academic freedom, and some professors chose to ignore it. For example, Robert Scigliano, an MSU political scientist who served as assistant project chief during 1957–1959, wrote an article in 1960 concerning the political parties of South Vietnam that called attention to Diem's suppression of the opposition. Diem was sufficiently irked by the article that he saw fit to mention it to MSU President Hannah when the latter visited Vietnam in early 1961, saying it "was not the kind of thing he liked to see MSU personnel writing".
The NIA, in early 1961, made a formal request for a three-year extension past June 30, 1962, the end of the third MSUG contract. MSU expressed its willingness to pursue a small project focused solely on the Institute, but this was not to be.
magazine in 1961 and led to the end of MSUG.
The first, by Adrian Jaffe, visiting professor of English at the University of Saigon, and Milton C. Taylor, an MSUG economist, was titled "A Crumbling Bastion: Flattery and Lies Won't Save Vietnam" and appeared in June 1961. It was a scathing indictment of the Diem regime. Although Jaffe and Taylor played coy in the article by not naming Fishel or MSU—as if their academic affiliations as stated in a first-page sidebar were not a dead giveaway—they pulled no punches when it came to Diem and his family. "The Vietnamese Government is an absolute dictatorship, run entirely by the President, with assistance of his family.... [It] sets a modern-day record for nepotism."
Then Frank C. Child, an MSUG economist who spent two years as a consultant on the project while traveling extensively throughout South Vietnam, wrote "Vietnam—The Eleventh Hour", published in December 1961. It went a step further from Jaffe and Taylor by suggesting openly that "a military coup may be the only means" of saving Vietnam.
These articles enraged Diem, who demanded that the professors be censured by Michigan State. The university administration was reluctant, since to do so would be an infringement on academic freedom. On the other hand, MSU did not want to lose the lucrative contract with South Vietnam, so it offered that MSUG would be more cautious in its staff selection, choosing only those who promised to abide by the terms of the contract, and who would only "write scholarly, scientific studies and not sensational, journalistic articles."
Diem, however, would not be swayed, and demanded the termination of the project. The group left Vietnam in June 1962.
Four years after MSUG was disbanded, an exposé titled "The University on the Make" appeared in Ramparts
magazine. Editors Warren Hinckle, Robert Scheer
, and Sol Stern
wrote the article in collaboration with economist Stanley K. Sheinbaum, who had served as MSUG's home-campus project coordinator from 1957 until his departure from the university "for various reasons" in 1959. Drawing from the Jaffe–Taylor articles and Sheinbaum's disenchantment with the project, the article painted a vivid portrait: Fishel as an ambitious "operator" with more power and influence with Diem than the U.S. Ambassador; MSU as a "parvenu institution" willing to trade academic integrity for a prominent role on the world stage; and MSUG as a knowing—and willing—conspirator with the CIA.
The Ramparts article, though heavily based on the 1965 book Technical Assistance in Vietnam, for the most part ignored the academic-study and instructor-training aspects of the police administration project. Rather than mention the establishment of the National Police Academy and the Sûreté high command school, where MSUG staff "planned curricula and served as classroom lecturers", instead it implied that the project entailed little more than firearms training and handcuffs disbursal. It also focused closely on the CIA connection, and extrapolated the line "the University group refused to provide cover for this unit [after 1959]" to mean that MSUG had previously provided cover for "cloak-and-dagger" work. In its conclusion, the article effectively reduced the entire MSUG project to a single incendiary line: "what the hell is a university doing buying guns, anyway?"
The Ramparts article was deliberately muckraking, and distorted and dramatized many of its "facts"; some of these were later admitted to be untrue. Nevertheless, it reached its intended audience, and offered powerful fodder for the nascent anti-war movement. Along with the glaring issue of the CIA operating under the guise of a university, an increasing number of American students and faculty began to question the use of institutes of higher learning as the instruments of U.S. foreign policy.
, Brazil
, and Okinawa). In 1964 the office received a new home, today known as the International Center; the building cost approximately $1.2 million and was financed with a portion of the $25 million that MSUG received from the U.S. government during its seven-year Vietnam contract (most of which went toward matériel, salaries, field expenses, and administrative costs).
Amid increasing anti-war protest, President John Hannah departed MSU in 1969 to head the United States Agency for International Development
—the successor to the International Cooperation Administration that had initiated the MSUG contract. Although his abrupt departure from MSU might suggest otherwise, Hannah did not doubt the project's propriety; years later, he stated, "We never felt any need for the University to apologize... for what we tried to do in Vietnam. I think that if Michigan State were to face the same choice again in the same context, it might well agree to assist the U.S. Government as we did then." Hannah's interim replacement as president was economics professor Walter Adams
, who had long questioned the efficacy of university technical assistance programs and who in 1961 had encouraged Jaffe and Taylor to publish "A Crumbling Bastion".
Professor Wesley Fishel was demonized at MSU for his role in the project. Although by 1962 he had become "disenchanted by Diem's dictatorial policies", Fishel could not live down a strongly pro-Diem article he had written in 1959 titled "Vietnam's Democratic One-Man Rule". Campus protesters singled him out in their placards and chants, and disrupted his classes. Fishel's notoriety and the strain of constantly defending his actions was speculated to have contributed to health problems, and he died in April 1977 at the age of 57.
Development aid
Development aid or development cooperation is aid given by governments and other agencies to support the economic, environmental, social and political development of developing countries.It is distinguished...
provided to the government of South Vietnam
South Vietnam
South Vietnam was a state which governed southern Vietnam until 1975. It received international recognition in 1950 as the "State of Vietnam" and later as the "Republic of Vietnam" . Its capital was Saigon...
as an effort in state-building
State-Building
State-building is a term used in state theory. It describes the construction of a functioning state. This concept was first used in connection to the creation of states in Western Europe and focused on the power enforcement of state in society ....
by the U.S. Department of State
United States Department of State
The United States Department of State , is the United States federal executive department responsible for international relations of the United States, equivalent to the foreign ministries of other countries...
.
From 1955 to 1962, under contract to the International Cooperation Administration
International Cooperation Administration
The International Cooperation Administration was established by the U.S. State Department Delegation of Authority 85, June 30, 1955, pursuant to EO 10610, May 9, 1955. The predecessor to this administration was the Foreign Operations Administration . Both oganizations coordinated foreign...
in Washington and the Vietnamese government in Saigon, faculty and staff from Michigan State University
Michigan State University
Michigan State University is a public research university in East Lansing, Michigan, USA. Founded in 1855, it was the pioneer land-grant institution and served as a model for future land-grant colleges in the United States under the 1862 Morrill Act.MSU pioneered the studies of packaging,...
consulted for agencies of the Ngo Dinh Diem
Ngo Dinh Diem
Ngô Đình Diệm was the first president of South Vietnam . In the wake of the French withdrawal from Indochina as a result of the 1954 Geneva Accords, Diệm led the effort to create the Republic of Vietnam. Accruing considerable U.S. support due to his staunch anti-Communism, he achieved victory in a...
regime. The group advised and trained Vietnamese personnel in the disciplines of public administration, police administration, and economics. MSUG worked autonomously from most U.S. government agencies, had unmatched access to the presidency, and even assisted in writing the country's new constitution. Several of its proposals were undertaken by the Vietnamese government and had positive results for the people of Vietnam. However, the group had limited influence on Diem's decision-making and on the course of events in Vietnam, and publications by dissatisfied faculty led to Diem's termination of the contract.
When implications later arose that the Central Intelligence Agency
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...
had infiltrated MSUG as a front for covert operations, the technical assistance program became a cause célèbre
Cause célèbre
A is an issue or incident arousing widespread controversy, outside campaigning and heated public debate. The term is particularly used in connection with celebrated legal cases. It is a French phrase in common English use...
in the early years of the anti-war movement
Opposition to the Vietnam War
The movement against US involvment in the in Vietnam War began in the United States with demonstrations in 1964 and grew in strength in later years. The US became polarized between those who advocated continued involvement in Vietnam, and those who wanted peace. Peace movements consisted largely of...
.
Project instigation and inception
Ngo Dinh Diem
Ngô Đình Diệm was the first president of South Vietnam . In the wake of the French withdrawal from Indochina as a result of the 1954 Geneva Accords, Diệm led the effort to create the Republic of Vietnam. Accruing considerable U.S. support due to his staunch anti-Communism, he achieved victory in a...
met and befriended Wesley R. Fishel, a former military language specialist with a doctorate in international relations from the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
. Fishel was "impressed [by] Diem's anticommunist and sociopolitical reform views, and the two men corresponded frequently". When Fishel was hired in 1951 as an assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University
Michigan State University
Michigan State University is a public research university in East Lansing, Michigan, USA. Founded in 1855, it was the pioneer land-grant institution and served as a model for future land-grant colleges in the United States under the 1862 Morrill Act.MSU pioneered the studies of packaging,...
, he invited Diem to join him. Two years later, as assistant director of the university's Governmental Research Bureau, Fishel appointed Diem as the bureau's Southeast Asian consultant.
The result was symbiotic: Diem's visit to the United States enabled him to build up the political support he needed to be installed as the prime minister of South Vietnam
State of Vietnam
The State of Vietnam was a state that claimed authority over all of Vietnam during the First Indochina War, and replaced the Provisional Central Government of Vietnam . The provisional government was a brief transitional administration between colonial Cochinchina and an independent state...
in July 1954; in turn Fishel became one of Diem's closest advisors and confidants. At Fishel's suggestion, and already well aware of MSU's capabilities, Diem requested that part of his aid package from the U.S. International Cooperation Administration include a "technical assistance" contract with Michigan State. MSU was thereby asked to use its expertise to help stabilize Vietnam's economy, improve the government bureaucracy, and control an ongoing communist insurgency.
Michigan State, the pioneer land-grant university
Land-grant university
Land-grant universities are institutions of higher education in the United States designated by each state to receive the benefits of the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890....
, had since its founding believed in turning theory into praxis; for example, its agricultural extension service made the results of its research available to farmers throughout Michigan for their practical use. Because of this emphasis on practical education and community involvement, the school justifiably claimed that "the state is our campus". University President John A. Hannah
John A. Hannah
John Alfred Hannah was president of Michigan State College for 28 years, making him the longest serving of MSU's presidents. He is credited with transforming the school from a little-known, regional agricultural college into a large national research institution...
in particular was a major proponent of the so-called service-oriented institution; to him, it was a logical next step to expand that role internationally, and declare without intended hyperbole that "the world is our campus".
When the request for assistance came through U.S. government channels, the staunchly anticommunist Hannah was deeply interested in pursuing the contract. He sent a small evaluation contingent to Vietnam, consisting of three department chairmen that would be involved—Edward W. Weidner (political science), Arthur F. Brandstatter (police administration), and Charles C. Killingsworth (economics)—along with James H. Dennison, head of university public relations and Hannah's administrative assistant. After a brief, two-week visit, the quartet reported in October 1954 that a state of emergency existed in Vietnam, and recommended that the project should be immediately undertaken. The report stated that although the short preparation time could lead to mistakes, it was "important... to get a program under way that ha[d] at least a reasonable chance of success". Hannah approved the contract, forming the Michigan State University Group, which would operate under the authority of the U.S. Embassy's United States Operations Mission (USOM). Hannah also confirmed Weidner's recommendation that Fishel be appointed project head, a position Fishel held from the start of the project until early 1958.
MSUG personnel had a variety of reasons for volunteering for this overseas service, each a reflection of the university's motivations for the entire MSUG project: as a moral obligation, to support a struggling young nation; as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy, to stanch the growth of "communist imperialism"; and as an academic exercise, to test their theoretical notions in a real-world "laboratory". A "hardship" pay incentive and other allowances that nearly doubled a professor's salary (tax free), along with the prospect of personal advancement within the ranks of academia, were also persuasive.
Phase One: 1955–1957
The initial two-year contract commenced when the first contingent of professors and staff arrived in Saigon on May 20, 1955. They found a city embroiled in a dissident uprising by Binh XuyenBinh Xuyen
Bình Xuyên, often linked to its infamous leader, General Le van "Bay" Vien, was an independent military force within the Vietnamese National Army whose leaders once had lived outside the law and had sided with the Viet Minh...
forces, with shelling and street fighting that threatened not only Diem's official residence
Reunification Palace
Reunification Palace formerly known as Independence Palace , built on the site of the former Norodom Palace, is a landmark in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. It was designed by architect Ngô Viết Thụ and was the home and workplace of the President of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War...
but also the hotel where MSUG personnel were temporarily housed. At the height of the disturbances, hotel rooms were ransacked and looted, and some professors lost all of their possessions. MSUG's intended academic programs were put on hold and their focus quickly turned toward improving regional government administration and police services.
Commissariat of Refugees
Of immediate concern to Diem was the social upheaval caused by some 900,000 people fleeing the communist North during the 300-day "free movement" period set by the 1954 Geneva AccordsGeneva Conference (1954)
The Geneva Conference was a conference which took place in Geneva, Switzerland, whose purpose was to attempt to find a way to unify Korea and discuss the possibility of restoring peace in Indochina...
. This massive influx required both resettlement and infrastructure-building services, which were provided by the government agency known as COMIGAL (Commissariat of Refugees; the acronym is from its French name). MSUG consulted for COMIGAL to such an extent during the first months of the program that other pursuits fell by the wayside.
One of MSUG's proposals with positive results was the idea of decentralized bureaucracy for COMIGAL. By scattering small offices throughout the villages, COMIGAL was able to improve the responsiveness of those offices; funding for infrastructure projects was generally approved by Saigon in less than two weeks. Decentralization also enabled the offices to work directly with local leaders, who as a result felt that their input and participation were important.
On the other hand, MSUG was unable to convince Diem of the validity of the land claims made by the Montagnards
Degar
The Degar are the indigenous peoples of the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The term Montagnard means "mountain people" in French and is a carryover from the French colonial period in Vietnam. In Vietnamese, they are known by the term thượng - this term can also be applied to other minority ethnic...
, indigenous tribesmen in Vietnam's central highlands
Tây Nguyên
Tây Nguyên, translated as Western Highlands and sometimes also called Central Highlands, is one of the regions of Vietnam. It contains the provinces of Đắk Lắk, Đắk Nông, Gia Lai, Kon Tum, Lâm Đồng....
. Thousands of refugees—with government approval and encouragement—became permanent squatters on land "already cleared by highlanders for planting". Part of Diem's intent with this placement was to create a "human wall" of sympathetic, mostly Catholic settlers against communist infiltration from North Vietnam and nearby Cambodia. However, both the Montagnards and the majority Buddhists resented being governed by a Catholic regime, a minority religious group that they saw as unabashedly colonial. This opposition and Diem's ruthless suppression pushed these groups toward further insurgency and, ultimately, communist rule.
National Institute of Administration
Even as its time was monopolized by refugee assistance, the MSU Group pursued a portion of its academic goals. As the "public administration" facet of its contract, MSUG designed, financed, and implemented an expansion of the National Institute of Administration (NIA), a civil servant training school. NIA had started out as a two-year training school in the resort city of Da Lat in January 1953. Under MSUG recommendation, the school was moved to Saigon and gradually extended into a four-year program.Along with its assistance in developing the new Saigon campus and teaching classes, MSUG was instrumental in a substantial expansion of the NIA library, which by 1962 held more than 22,000 books and other documents. The library was considered one of MSUG's greatest successes, and the NIA affiliation was the longest-lasting of the MSUG projects. However, the library's usefulness suffered from the simple fact that most of its documents were in English, rather than Vietnamese or French; and by the end of the MSUG contract the library was threatened by restricted accessibility, poor maintenance, and a lack of qualified Vietnamese personnel to staff it.
Police administration
The most influential—and ultimately, controversial—aspect of MSUG technical assistance was in the field of police administration, where the group supplied not only consulting and training services, but also material aid. In general, MSUG was responsible for distributing U.S. aid, provided through USOM, until 1959 when USOM established its own police staff. MSUG staff acted as consultants to determine the needs of the police groups—and then tranacted the procurements themselves. The matériel included "revolvers, riot guns, ammunition, tear gas, jeeps and other vehicles, handcuffs, office equipment, traffic lights, and communications equipment".MSUG then trained Vietnamese personnel in the use and maintenance of this equipment. In general, MSUG trained instructors, who could then teach others; direct instruction, except in special cases like revolver training for the presidential guard, "was done only as a temporary expedient". The police administration project was largely successful in this, since the training was based in hands-on demonstration and thus much more immediate and tangible. Also, the MSUG-taught Vietnamese instructors rapidly assumed training themselves. At the same time, classroom sessions in the principles of police procedure and theory suffered from a number of problems that limited their success. Few MSUG professors spoke Vietnamese or French, leading to a translation delay and information loss. In addition, American-style lectures were a source of dissonance for a student body raised on the French juridical system. (This was also an issue in NIA classes taught by MSUG staff.)
Police administration consultation and training was most effective with the Sûreté, Vietnam's national law enforcement agency, in part because the majority of equipment was delivered to this agency. By the same token, municipal police departments (who received less equipment) were less affected—the greatest local improvement was in traffic control in Saigon. With regard to the civil guard, there was almost no effect.
The civil guard was a 60,000-man paramilitary organization that MSUG hoped to reform into something resembling a U.S. state police
State police
State police are a type of sub-national territorial police force, particularly in Australia and the United States. Some other countries have analogous police forces, such as the provincial police in some Canadian provinces, while in other places, the same responsibilities are held by national...
outfit, an organization familiar to the professors. This would have entailed a primarily rural organization whose members would live in the communities they served. However, Saigon and the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group
Military Assistance Advisory Group
Military Assistance Advisory Group is a designation for American military advisers sent to assist in the training of conventional armed forces of Third World countries. Before and during the Vietnam War, there were three of these groups operating in Southeast Asia...
preferred that the civil guard be a more heavily armed paramilitary force, organized into regiments and living in garrisons, that could exercise national police duties and support the national army. As a result of this impasse, very little of the equipment that MSUG had planned for the civil guard was distributed until 1959, leaving the civil guard unprepared when major communist insurgency action began that same year.
Staffing issues
One of MSUG's drawbacks was that in many cases the university lacked the manpower to staff the project and continue its scheduled classes in East LansingEast Lansing, Michigan
East Lansing is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan. The city is located directly east of Lansing, Michigan, the state's capital. Most of the city is within Ingham County, though a small portion lies in Clinton County. The population was 48,579 at the time of the 2010 census, an increase from...
. This was the case throughout MSUG, and the group was obliged to hire extensively outside the university to fulfill its contract with Vietnam, often giving the new staffers academic rank (generally assistant professor or lecturer). The staffing issue had perhaps its most significant ramifications in the police administration division. Although Michigan State's School of Police Administration and Public Safety was "internationally recognized during the cold war era", it lacked experience in the much-needed areas of counterespionage and counterinsurgency, and department head Arthur Brandstatter hired new personnel accordingly. At the height of the police administration project, only four of its thirty-three advisors had been Michigan State employees prior to MSUG, and many had never even visited the East Lansing campus.
As it turns out, several of these police advisors also worked for the Central Intelligence Agency
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...
. They formed a separate group, establishing their own office apart from the rest of the police administration staff in MSUG's Saigon headquarters, "and were responsible only to the American Embassy in Saigon". The CIA members worked closely with a special security unit of the Sûreté between 1955 and 1959. Although they were nominally under the aegis of MSUG, the specifics of their activities remained unknown to MSUG throughout. (MSUG files "support [the] contention that the agents were not spies"; CIA records remain classified to this day.)
The existence of the CIA group was not hidden from MSUG staff; on the contrary, it was common knowledge to the professors, if not openly discussed. A 1965 overview of the project was quite matter-of-fact about it: when MSUG "compelled USOM to establish a public safety division of its own in July, 1959[,] USOM also absorbed at this time the CIA unit that had been operating within MSUG". This almost parenthetical statement would later provide the impetus for a sensational exposé.
Phase Two: 1957–1959
The two-year contract was renewed in 1957. This second phase of MSUG was marked by an increased scope of operations, especially in the educational program, while its security commitments grew as well. "This was the period of the ubiquitous Michiganders." Yet even as its operations increased, with a staff that included a project-wide peak of fifty-two Americans and about 150 Vietnamese, MSUG operated under a level of reduced influence. In early 1958, Wesley Fishel concluded his tenure as program chief and returned to the United States. With Fishel's departure came the end of the three-a-week breakfasts at the president's home that the professor had enjoyed with Diem; without such direct access to the presidential ear, MSUG's sway with the administration was significantly curtailed. At the same time, the Vietnamese government had begun to solidify its power over the country, and as such it "lost much of its ardor for innovation".After 1958, the police administration role was almost entirely advisory, as the MSUG-trained Vietnamese instructors "by then were running their own show". As advisors, MSUG helped the Sûreté—which by this time had been renamed the Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation, in an attempt to lessen the negative public image of that special police agency—to establish a national identification card, a program launched in 1959.
Phase Three: 1959–1962
The third contract encompassed a fraction of the previous contracts; MSUG work was almost exclusively related to the NIA and academic pursuits. In part this was because USOM initiated its own police advisory unit and took over this role from MSUG, especially the work with the civil guard, which had its hands full fighting communist guerrillas.The 1959 contract renewal also contained a clause that illustrates Diem's increasing sensitivity to criticism: it stated that MSUG staffers' personal records and notes would not be used "against the security or the interests of Vietnam". This stipulation ran contrary to the notion of academic freedom, and some professors chose to ignore it. For example, Robert Scigliano, an MSU political scientist who served as assistant project chief during 1957–1959, wrote an article in 1960 concerning the political parties of South Vietnam that called attention to Diem's suppression of the opposition. Diem was sufficiently irked by the article that he saw fit to mention it to MSU President Hannah when the latter visited Vietnam in early 1961, saying it "was not the kind of thing he liked to see MSU personnel writing".
The NIA, in early 1961, made a formal request for a three-year extension past June 30, 1962, the end of the third MSUG contract. MSU expressed its willingness to pursue a small project focused solely on the Institute, but this was not to be.
Dissent and dismissal
As the project progressed, the professors' initial optimism gave way to pragmatic considerations that often left them frustrated and disillusioned. MSUG frequently found its well-intentioned advice either ignored outright, or co-opted in practice; in one example among many, Diem used the Sûreté's national identification card registry to crack down on his dissenters. As a result, some professors returned home from their tours of duty and began to write articles critical of the Diem regime and U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Two appeared in The New RepublicThe New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
magazine in 1961 and led to the end of MSUG.
The first, by Adrian Jaffe, visiting professor of English at the University of Saigon, and Milton C. Taylor, an MSUG economist, was titled "A Crumbling Bastion: Flattery and Lies Won't Save Vietnam" and appeared in June 1961. It was a scathing indictment of the Diem regime. Although Jaffe and Taylor played coy in the article by not naming Fishel or MSU—as if their academic affiliations as stated in a first-page sidebar were not a dead giveaway—they pulled no punches when it came to Diem and his family. "The Vietnamese Government is an absolute dictatorship, run entirely by the President, with assistance of his family.... [It] sets a modern-day record for nepotism."
Then Frank C. Child, an MSUG economist who spent two years as a consultant on the project while traveling extensively throughout South Vietnam, wrote "Vietnam—The Eleventh Hour", published in December 1961. It went a step further from Jaffe and Taylor by suggesting openly that "a military coup may be the only means" of saving Vietnam.
These articles enraged Diem, who demanded that the professors be censured by Michigan State. The university administration was reluctant, since to do so would be an infringement on academic freedom. On the other hand, MSU did not want to lose the lucrative contract with South Vietnam, so it offered that MSUG would be more cautious in its staff selection, choosing only those who promised to abide by the terms of the contract, and who would only "write scholarly, scientific studies and not sensational, journalistic articles."
Diem, however, would not be swayed, and demanded the termination of the project. The group left Vietnam in June 1962.
Exposé
Ramparts (magazine)
Ramparts was an American political and literary magazine, published from 1962 through 1975.-History:Founded by Edward M. Keating as a Catholic literary quarterly, the magazine became closely associated with the New Left after executive editor Warren Hinckle hired Robert Scheer as managing editor...
magazine. Editors Warren Hinckle, Robert Scheer
Robert Scheer
Robert Scheer is an American journalist who writes a column for Truthdig which is nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate in publications such as The Huffington Post and The Nation...
, and Sol Stern
Sol Stern
Sol Stern is a senior fellow with the conservative Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to its quarterly magazine City Journal. He is the author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice , and has written extensively on education reform...
wrote the article in collaboration with economist Stanley K. Sheinbaum, who had served as MSUG's home-campus project coordinator from 1957 until his departure from the university "for various reasons" in 1959. Drawing from the Jaffe–Taylor articles and Sheinbaum's disenchantment with the project, the article painted a vivid portrait: Fishel as an ambitious "operator" with more power and influence with Diem than the U.S. Ambassador; MSU as a "parvenu institution" willing to trade academic integrity for a prominent role on the world stage; and MSUG as a knowing—and willing—conspirator with the CIA.
The Ramparts article, though heavily based on the 1965 book Technical Assistance in Vietnam, for the most part ignored the academic-study and instructor-training aspects of the police administration project. Rather than mention the establishment of the National Police Academy and the Sûreté high command school, where MSUG staff "planned curricula and served as classroom lecturers", instead it implied that the project entailed little more than firearms training and handcuffs disbursal. It also focused closely on the CIA connection, and extrapolated the line "the University group refused to provide cover for this unit [after 1959]" to mean that MSUG had previously provided cover for "cloak-and-dagger" work. In its conclusion, the article effectively reduced the entire MSUG project to a single incendiary line: "what the hell is a university doing buying guns, anyway?"
The Ramparts article was deliberately muckraking, and distorted and dramatized many of its "facts"; some of these were later admitted to be untrue. Nevertheless, it reached its intended audience, and offered powerful fodder for the nascent anti-war movement. Along with the glaring issue of the CIA operating under the guise of a university, an increasing number of American students and faculty began to question the use of institutes of higher learning as the instruments of U.S. foreign policy.
Aftermath
Michigan State University, like many American universities, continued to contract for overseas technical assistance programs, but never again on the scale of the Michigan State University Group. In the end, MSU saw very little academic benefit from its "Vietnam adventure". No new courses or special study programs were started at the home campus, and out of eighteen professors that were assigned from East Lansing, five did not return to the campus, and four others left within two years of their return. One indirect result was the Office of International Studies and Programs, created in 1956 to provide campus coordination and administrative support for the Vietnam project (as well as projects in ColombiaColombia
Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...
, Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
, and Okinawa). In 1964 the office received a new home, today known as the International Center; the building cost approximately $1.2 million and was financed with a portion of the $25 million that MSUG received from the U.S. government during its seven-year Vietnam contract (most of which went toward matériel, salaries, field expenses, and administrative costs).
Amid increasing anti-war protest, President John Hannah departed MSU in 1969 to head the United States Agency for International Development
United States Agency for International Development
The United States Agency for International Development is the United States federal government agency primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid. President John F. Kennedy created USAID in 1961 by executive order to implement development assistance programs in the areas...
—the successor to the International Cooperation Administration that had initiated the MSUG contract. Although his abrupt departure from MSU might suggest otherwise, Hannah did not doubt the project's propriety; years later, he stated, "We never felt any need for the University to apologize... for what we tried to do in Vietnam. I think that if Michigan State were to face the same choice again in the same context, it might well agree to assist the U.S. Government as we did then." Hannah's interim replacement as president was economics professor Walter Adams
Walter Adams (economist)
Walter Adams was an American economist and college professor. He served as the 13th President of Michigan State University and served as an expert witness before 36 congressional committees.-Early life:...
, who had long questioned the efficacy of university technical assistance programs and who in 1961 had encouraged Jaffe and Taylor to publish "A Crumbling Bastion".
Professor Wesley Fishel was demonized at MSU for his role in the project. Although by 1962 he had become "disenchanted by Diem's dictatorial policies", Fishel could not live down a strongly pro-Diem article he had written in 1959 titled "Vietnam's Democratic One-Man Rule". Campus protesters singled him out in their placards and chants, and disrupted his classes. Fishel's notoriety and the strain of constantly defending his actions was speculated to have contributed to health problems, and he died in April 1977 at the age of 57.
External links
- MSUG-produced documents available through the U.S. Agency for International Devleopment’s Development Experience Clearinghouse