Word: diem
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Just as things seemed to be going better in his struggle to save South Viet Nam (pop. 10.5 million), Nationalist Premier Ngo Dinh Diem last week ran into serious trouble. He was caught in an ambush set by the discredited but still powerful rearguards of his country's past-feudal warlords, religious fanatics and big-city hoodlums, with French colonials hovering indistinctly in the background. About 30,000 well-armed troops of the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao and Binh Xuyen sects (long subsidized by the French) were out in coalition against Diem's national government, lobbing mortar shells...
French Commissioner General Paul Ely supports Ngo Dinh Diem loyally, but his influence back home is not great. The French government of Faure is working, fundamentally, to maintain "the French presence" in both halves of divided Viet Nam: in the North, the French hope with declining prospects to wheedle a deal out of Communist Ho Chi Minh; in the South, they hope to replace Nationalist Diem with a man they feel they can trust -Bao Dai's cousin, Buu Hoi, 39, a leprosy expert who has not lived in Viet Nam for 20 years...
...Diem's chief claim to fame is that he is an incorruptible nationalist unstained by liaisons with the French. That is why the French dislike him; it is also why he is the first Vietnamese politician (outside of Communist Ho, who also rose to power by stressing not his Communism but his anti-Frenchness) to attract any measure of popular support...
...This is not just medicine for the body that you offer, but medicine for the spirit," said South Viet Nam's Premier Diem. "We thought we were alone in Viet Nam. Now we see that we're not." Happily, Oscar Arellano responded: "By golly, it's working...
...Cambodia came next day; there he listened attentively to complaints against French interference by young, popular King Norodom Sihanouk.* In the afternoon, back in his Constellation, Dulles took off for the intrigue-ridden South Viet Nam capital of Saigon to promise U.S. support to doughty little Premier Ngo Dinh Diem. From Saigon he flew to Manila for a round of diplomatic calls and a two-hour-and-ten-minute (without notes) briefing of U.S. Far Eastern ambassadors on the policy he had been preaching all along the line. Principal points...