Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam's First Republic, looms large in almost all studies of America's Vietnam War. Yet historians have too often understood him through the eyes of US officials who found him frustratingly obtuse. In Misalliance, Edward Miller makes a significant contribution to the fields of both US foreign relations and Vietnam studies by delving deeply into Vietnamese sources to take Diem seriously on his own terms. Miller reveals the thinking behind all of Diem's major political moves, including his sojourn to the United States before becoming prime minister, his crackdown on domestic political opponents during his first two years in office, his land resettlement, Agroville, and Strategic Hamlet programs, and his seemingly incomprehensible reaction to the Buddhist crisis that sounded the death knell of his regime. The picture that springs from the pages of this book is that of a true misalliance between Diem and his American advisors. As Miller makes clear, the allies’ shared commitment to anticommunism was enough to bind them together for nine years, but it could not prevent them from disagreeing and quarreling often over how to contain that common enemy.

For Miller, “the politics of nation building shaped the entire history of the US-Diem alliance, from its creation to its demise” (17). He casts Diem as “an aspiring modernizer and nation builder” who frustrated American advisors not because he was stubborn and out of touch, as many have argued, but because his nation-building vision often clashed with developmentalist ideas coming from Washington (15). That vision was based in the philosophy of personalism (nhan vi), which Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu borrowed from a group of interwar French Catholic philosophers led by Emmanuel Mounier. The brothers attempted to reconcile French personalism with both Confucian thought and an array of modernizing ideas born out of Vietnam's early twentieth-century anticolonial politics. As Miller explains, the Ngos were so wedded to the “personalist revolution” they sought for South Vietnam that they were unwilling to compromise their vision to accommodate American designs.

What was the essence of this personalist revolution? Diem, Miller explains, was committed to establishing a personalist democracy, which he defined as a “social ethos based in a certain sense of moral duty.” His vision “was a far cry from the standard meaning of democracy favored by postwar American theorists, most of whom thought of democracy as a form of political pluralism” (137). To Diem, democracy was a “process of collective improvement” rather than a set of civil liberties. Miller writes, “Diem viewed democracy as dependent less on the protection of political rights than on the assertion of moral duties” (139). Following this definition, Diem pursued a number of markedly antidemocratic practices in the name of personalist democracy. His government rigged the vote in the 1955 referendum following the logic that his moral standing was vastly higher than chief of state Bao Dai's. When criticized by his American allies as well as many of his fellow citizens for sacrificing democratic principles to political expedience, he remained “adamant that the outcome was entirely consistent with his view of democracy as the citizenry's embrace of a common moral ethos” (142). Diem used the same reasoning to justify severely restricting the participation of nongovernment candidates in the 1956 National Assembly elections.

Diem's belief that an ethos of communal responsibility among citizens constituted the essence of democracy also rested at the heart of his rural policies. He was preoccupied with maintaining order and internal security, which Miller argues was not simply about shoring up his own power. Rather, imposing order was a prerequisite for the process of social change Diem envisioned, making internal security “an integral component of his nation-building designs, in a time of peace no less than in a time of war” (188). This thinking rested at the heart of the southern leader's approach to rural poverty, exploitation, and communist infiltration. He believed that by moving people rather than redistributing land he could at once address issues of overpopulation, encourage agricultural expansion, and promote the regime's internal security objectives by constructing “a ‘human wall’ against communist infiltration” (163). Perhaps most importantly, he hoped to use resettlement to promote his ideological objectives. By encouraging settlers to be hard working and self-sufficient, compelling them to “earn the right to land ownership by demonstrating their willingness to participate in the settlement of the wilderness on a communal basis,” Diem sought to inculcate a sense of communal solidarity and responsibility consistent with his personalist ideals (176). Unsurprisingly, this clashed with American ideas about rural development, leading US officials to criticize the RVN for “its apparent indifference to the material well-being of its settlers” and to suspect that Diem's rhetoric about self-sufficiency was just a smokescreen for the government's plan to extract labor from the rural population (165). US–RVN conflicts over resettlement would only intensify with the Agroville program, initiated in 1959, which was more explicitly linked to counterinsurgency.

While Miller makes a persuasive case that Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu's antidemocratic political practices and rural resettlement programs fit within a coherent vision for national revolution, flawed as it may have been, his efforts to cast their harshly oppressive and authoritarian internal security measures as part of that same program are less convincing. Miller concedes that the Ngos’ policies designed to root out and destroy their communist and noncommunist enemies “produced a rising tide of fear that washed across all segments of South Vietnamese rural society,” helped create the conditions that would fuel the communist party's comeback, and brought about the uprising they had hoped to prevent (200). Yet even as the antigovernment insurgency gained strength, their own generals sought to oust them, their relationship with American advisors grew strained, their army suffered a serious rout at Ap Bac, and a small Buddhist protest blossomed into a sustained countrywide antigovernment movement, they refused to see signs of trouble. In the face of all of these setbacks, Miller argues, the Ngo brothers grew increasingly confident that victory was nigh, believing that their enemies’ very boldness served as evidence that they were in their death throes. They remained convinced that they would soon vanquish their opponents, and that when they did, the United States would surely rally by their side as they had following the 1955 Battle of Saigon. On the eve of the US-supported generals’ coup that ended their regime and their lives in November 1963, Miller claims, “more than ever before, Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu believed that the realization of their grand designs for South Vietnam was within their grasp” (278). While this gross misperception may have been fueled, as Miller claims, by their conviction that “the building of popular support and the eradication of the enemy would go hand in hand,” the evidence overwhelmingly seems to support Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge's frustrated conclusion that the Ngos were “simply unbelievably stubborn” or “cut off from the present” (188, 317).

Miller strains to argue that the Ngo brothers’ seemingly delusional optimism after 1960, and especially during the critical year 1963, was rational and in keeping with a coherent nation-building vision. Some of these stretches seem to result from his intense focus on Diem and Nhu's own thinking at the expense of the larger political context that they apparently failed to grasp. While he does address the wide-ranging sources of opposition to Diem's government (including but not limited to Buddhists, communists, Cao Dai and Hoa Hao followers, disaffected rural residents, RVN generals, and some of Diem's own cabinet members), with few exceptions he does not focus on what motivated them, how they reacted to RVN policies, and most importantly what bound this disparate array of disgruntled citizens together into what amounted to a mass movement that Hanoi could exploit. Instead, he trains his attention, sometimes too narrowly, on how Diem and Nhu tried to square this antigovernment activity with their rigid ideological commitment to personalism. Miller concludes that Diem's destiny “turned on his willingness to grapple with the range of nationalist imaginings within South Vietnam—especially those espoused by other noncommunist leaders and groups. Diem's shortcomings in this regard were the most glaring and most consequential of all his weaknesses” (326). Ironically, Miller's failure to place the Ngo brothers’ thinking in earnest conversation with this full range of nationalist imaginings may well be the greatest shortcoming of his book. However, that criticism in no way diminishes my great appreciation for this rich, nuanced, and prodigiously researched book. Miller has produced an excellent study of Diem that advances our understanding of the South Vietnamese leader and his strained relationship with the United States tremendously. Misalliance is a must-read for any serious student of modern Vietnam and the Vietnam wars.