Word: diem
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...smoke lifted quickly from the broad avenues surrounding Saigon's Gia Long palace. In the bright sunlight, the pattern of violence came clear-raw shell holes, the black tongue-traces of flamethrowers, and the fine detail of the coup that overthrew and killed President Ngo Dinh Diem...
...August. Serious talk about an uprising had first started in August, after Diem raided the Buddhist pagodas. Lieut. General Tran Van Don, then acting chief of the Joint General Staff, got word that a coup seemed imminent, and felt (as he now explains it) that the moment was not right. He feared that whoever was planning the affair might not be able to control things, that the Communist Viet Cong might move in on it and take over Saigon. So Don supported Diem's imposition of martial law, and the August coup never surfaced...
...Duong Van ("Big") Minh grew troubled. Egged on by the disturbed U.S. official community, Don, Minh and most of the key generals prepared a 20-page paper outlining proposed reforms, mostly aimed at getting the war against the Viet Cong back on the move, and presented it to President Diem. The President, said one officer, "agreed to every clause," but did nothing whatever to put the reforms into practice. Diem's determined inaction, say the generals, more than anything else, sealed his fate...
...school classmate and drinking buddy, Major General Ton That Dinh, 36. A cocky, ambitious palace insider who affected a gold bracelet and a cotton camouflage uniform, Dinh was commander of the III Corps, which controlled Saigon. He also affected-longer than any other coup leader-a loyalty to President Diem that he did not feel. Over Scotch at the Caravelle, and later in a small nightclub called La Cigale, Don and Dinh began to discuss plans to topple the government...
...Friday, largely because the top generals met each Friday morning with Diem's brother Ngo Dinh Nhu to review progress in the strategic-hamlet program. Then the generals customarily broke for lunch together at the Joint General Staff headquarters, near Saigon airport, which the plotters by then had well under control...