Word: diem
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ruling family of South Viet Nam is both long enduring and long talking. Correspondent Charles Mohr has had interviews of five hours at a stretch with President Diem, of two or three hours with Brother Nhu, and for this week's cover, one five-hour and one three-hour session with Mme. Nhu. The males in the family tend to lecture; Mohr found Mme. Nhu a vastly more fascinating talker. She seemed to enjoy the process, too: "You know, I have told you things I have never told anyone else." Mohr found her candor both pleasing and formidable...
...cedes. Instead of swords, her weapons are bottomless energy, a devastating charm, a tough, relentless mind, an acid tongue, a militant Roman Catholi cism ? and, most important, the power of the family into which she married. She is Mme. Ngo Dinh Nhu, wife of President Ngo Dinh Diem's younger brother and closest brain-truster. In ad dition to acting as official First Lady for the bachelor President, she is in her own right one of the two or three most powerful people in the country and in a sense embodies all its problems...
Most Vietnamese nevertheless believe that Diem's Catholic ruling family has shown bias. Primarily middle-class landowners, Vietnamese Catholics are economically far more advanced than the Buddhists. Thousands of Buddhists have become converts to Catholicism in the hope that this would help them professionally or economically. Buddhists claim that the government gives Catholics better land for schools and church buildings and discriminates against Buddhist students in granting state scholarships. Unlike other religious groups, Buddhists must have special government permits to hold large meetings. "This puts us in the same category as the trade unions," says one Buddhist priest. With...
...public apology, which is the Buddhists' chief demand, along with such practical matters as freedom of assembly, the right to fly their flag, Buddhist chaplains in the army. But Brother Ngo Dinh Nhu has always urged a hard line. What he fears-with some reason-is that if Diem gives in even slightly to the Buddhists, it would only cause new demands that would eventually threaten the government's whole power structure. By week's end, however, in a belated attempt to ease tensions, the government ordered the release of 267 Buddhists arrested during the demonstrations...
Though Head Priest Thich Tinh Khiet said that he has lost confidence in Diem's "high virtue," no top Buddhist has yet openly asked for the overthrow of the Diem government. But a new type of Buddhist leader is emerging-young, well-educated, tough, and impatient with the older men's relative restraint. As passions mount and the police crack down harder, Buddhists are being pushed into a dangerous attitude of martyrdom. "We don't want a police state," says a Buddhist priest. "We do not want terror or discrimination or state control. We are loyal Vietnamese...