Word: diem
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Mecklin was in the thick of the skirmishes between the U.S. press, the Saigon government and the U.S. embassy, and very much in the midst of the bitter political battles that ended the career and the life of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Yet "Meek the Knife" emerged from his difficult tour of duty to write an excellent account of the South Vietnamese war which he called Mission in Torment (see BOOKS). Author Mecklin had unique credentials for the task, having reported the .disastrous French campaign against the Communists and the establishment of the Diem regime for TIME between...
...overthrow and subsequent murder of President Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963 opened a political Pandora's box in Saigon. Since that angry day, the government has changed hands seven times; the war against the Communist Viet Cong has grown even tougher; the U.S. has been forced to escalate the conflict by bombing North Viet Nam and nearly doubling its own forces in the south. Most important, Diem's fall brought to an end nearly a decade of political stability in Viet Nam. Was Diem's downfall inevitable or even imperative, the product of immutable historical forces...
Author Mecklin, a veteran TIME correspondent who served (on a leave of absence) from 1962 to 1964 as USIS chief in Saigon, watched the drama of Diem's last days from close range. The portrait of Diem that emerges from this bitter but balanced account is of a dedicated patriot flawed by hubris and hamstrung by scheming relatives...
...Turning Point. Diem stubbornly insisted on running the war against the Communist Viet Cong his own way. To Mecklin and others in the U.S. Mission this rigid recalcitrance surpassed that of "a whole platoon of De Gaulles." What Viet Nam needed, in Mecklin's view, was someone like the Philippines' late President Ramon Magsaysay, who broke the back of his country's Communist Huk rebellion by offering the malcontents "total friendship or total war." Diem offered neither. Tax col lectors, not aid officials, followed his troops into liberated villages. Suspicious of his own generals, Diem rarely committed...
...chips on Diem," Mecklin writes. "We were stuck with an all-or-nothing policy. It had to work, like a Catholic marriage or a parachute." But when the Buddhist crisis ignited in May 1963, the policy went up in flames. What began as a seemingly simple dispute over the display of religious flags soon became a cleverly conducted campaign to unseat Catholic Diem. U.S. reporters fanned the flames with pro-Buddhist stories that enraged Diem, who refused to believe that Washington did not control the press in the same...