Word: diem
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Communists & Calendar. The man who has to do the job is Premier Ngo Dinh Diem,† a resilient, deeply religious Vietnamese nationalist who is burdened with the terrible but challenging task of leading the 10.5 million people of South Viet Nam from the brink of Communism into their long-sought state of sovereign independence. No man in troubled Asia is confronted by more obstacles on the road to order and justice. The sects, in control of a third of the southern portion of the country, threaten not only his control but his life. The refugees from the Communist half...
...above all, Diem's enemy is a coalition of Communists and the calendar. With no personal political organization, a civil service that is amateur and an army still in training, the Premier of South Viet Nam is charged with building a government and a popularity strong enough to overcome the strength and skill of Ho Chi Minh's Communist regime in North Viet Nam. Under the Geneva pact, which sliced the country in two, the South Vietnamese have only 15 months to prepare to meet Ho's Communists in a nationwide test at the polls, winner take...
...question of South Viet Nam's survival will then press even more harshly. Less than six months ago, Western diplomats were gloomily pronouncing South Viet Nam a sure-to-be-lost cause; a quick survey in the hinterlands showed that Diem's nationalist regime could count on the electoral support of no more than a fourth of the villages. The rest leaned for Communism, or at least leaned against the unknown, unproved regime in Saigon. But by last week, the song of surrender was fainter and there were many who had ceased to sing it. A fresh survey...
...progress, slow but clearly discernible, represents an almost personal triumph for single-minded Nationalist Diem. It also represents a tentative endorsement of the judgment of the U.S., the voluntary heir to the disorder left by France and the pledged defender of what remains of Indo-China. Though Washington did not choose him, it has invested its hopes, its experts, and some $400 million a year of its money in South Viet Nam. The U.S. is convinced that Ngo Dinh Diem, a man with his share of imperfections, is the best fitted to lead Vietnamese to true independence...
Last week, Ho's propagandists publicly recognized their difficulties by calling for "a resumption of normal . . . economic relations" with the South Viet Nam government of Premier Ngo Dinh Diem-in plainer terms, for some of Diem's 400,000 tons of surplus rice...