Word: diem
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...South Viet Nam of the novel is governed by "President Cung," who is the double of the late Ngo Dinh Diem; an army coup against him is brewing. It is Amberley's job to bring the fiercely independent Cung and his policies under U.S. control or, failing that, to back the army coup. After open negotiations and private appeals with an obbligato of CIA skulduggery, Amberley does fail with President Cung; the coup does take place exactly along the lines of the one that deposed and murdered Diem...
Religious Alarums. Almost from the beginning, the reader is writhing in doubt too, but of another kind. Author West is an Australian, widely traveled in the Far East, who knew Ngo Dinh Diem and came to admire him. "Cung," visualized as a remote and complex man, is a half-created shadow who is nonetheless the only real hero of the book...
...excepting the amoral, opportunistic CIA chief-are not merely questioning U.S. policy in Viet Nam and probing for the causes of failure, but are convinced at heart that the U.S. course is wrong. Whatever else it may be, West's novel is clearly a celebration of the dead Diem, and a political tract reflecting a strong viewpoint...
...tract, the novel's message is that U.S. connivance at the ousting and murder of Diem was immoral, unwise, and possibly fatal to all further hope of saving South Viet Nam for the West. All these points are certainly arguable and may well even be true. But West does not argue them. The crippling difficulty with the book is that it assumes what it pretends to prove, offering the illusion but not the substance of illumination...
...refusal to allow the Vietnamese people to choose their own path to change. President Eisenhower in his memoirs admits that "had elections been held as of the time of the fighting possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh." Therefore Diem with U.S. backing did not permit these elections to take place in 1956 as provided for by the Geneva accords. Can we then believe that President Johnson's offer to reaffirm old agreements or to strengthen them with new ones is anything less than an attempt to appease the growing chorus...