Word: diem
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Freedom Palace, once the residence of French Commissioners, Premier Diem met the challenge with unexpected decisiveness, just as the U.S. was about to give him up as ineffectual. While Saigon reverberated to the bursting of 81-mm. mortar shells in the showdown fight against the Binh Xuyen, Premier Diem proclaimed: "I believe I am on the side of justice. I will not give...
...four nationalist battalions and 18 armored cars were needed to send the Binh Xuyen reeling from Saigon (see below), exposing their potency as a myth, exposing too the myth of French neutrality. The French repeatedly blocked nationalist army movements, helped Binh Xuyen terrorists to escape. In Paris, just as Diem seemed to be getting things under control, Premier Edgar Faure brushed off the Diem government as "not adapted to the mission it faces." And on the French Riviera, fresh from a hard day's work shooting down 100 pigeons. Bao Dai, the puffy-faced Vietnamese Chief of State...
While the U.S. waited to see how Diem would fend for himself, Diem got busy. Suddenly a new group was heard from. Three hundred young men dubbed themselves "The General Assembly of Democratic Revolutionary Forces of the Nation," met at Saigon city hall, obviously with Diem's tacit approval. They denounced Bao Dai-"a puppet created by the French colonials . . . leading a dissolute life far from his people." They declared him "deposed," and tore his photograph from the wall and trampled on it. Claiming to speak for 18 nationalist parties, they urged Diem to repress the rebel sects...
That night in Freedom Palace, Diem's revolutionary committee drew a pistol on Bao Dai's favorite general, Nguyen Van Vy. With a .45 at his stomach, Vy promised that the pro-Bao Dai units in the Vietnamese army would support Diem's government. Some of the excited young rebels wanted Vy shot on the spot, but Diem eventually let him go untroubled into the night...
...showdown began at siesta time on a warm, summery day. Premier Ngo Dinh Diem was sitting down to a late lunch at Freedom Palace when nine 81-mm. mortar shells thumped down around the grounds, killing a civilian and wounding a couple of soldiers. The Premier rushed to the phone. "The palace is being shelled," he told French Commissioner-General Paul Ely, his voice disrupted on the line by adjacent explosions...