Word: diem
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...rejoiceful about the overthrow of the Diem regime, as many are. However, as wrong as the Nhus might have been, they believed in their cause...
...slogan used by Premier Diem-"Follow me if I advance! Kill me if I retreat! Revenge me if I die!"-is the literal translation of what Benito Mussolini said some 30 years...
Mussolini and Diem owe the slogan to its originator, the Royalist La Rochejaquelin, who shouted the same enjoinder-in French-to his Catholic followers during the Wars of the Vendee (1793), a vain counterrevolution against anticlerical republican revolutionaries...
Magnified Pride. Diem's virtues of honesty, courage and bone-deep anti-Communism remained. But his faults-stubbornness, nepotism, suspicion, a mandarin pride-became magnified. Once his mind was made up, Diem would not budge. His meetings with foreign officials degenerated into monologues-one Western ambassador estimated that he had been able to speak only 500 words in a four-hour interview with Diem...
...short stature (5 ft. 4 in.), expressionless and aloof, Diem seldom stirred from his palace. Though devoted to raising the living standards of the peasants, Diem was ill at ease among the people and uninterested in grass-roots opinion. In the 1930s, Diem had quit as a minister under the French because, he said, "we had to have democratic reforms, or it was clear even then that the Communists would win." In the 1960s, that was the line the U.S. took with Diem, but now he argued that ordinary standards of democracy could not apply in a country fighting...