Word: diem
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...optimism. When Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara returned from a conference with service chiefs in Pearl Harbor last week, the Pentagon said "the corner has definitely been turned toward victory." No one was setting any timetable, but U.S. military chiefs and South Viet Nam's President Ngo Dinh Diem say that the war should be won "within three years." There are many soldiers in South Viet Nam who consider this wildly optimistic; some believe that the war may never be won. But almost everyone agrees that things have improved. Today there is little danger that the Viet Cong will...
...more than a year, the U.S. has been urging South Viet Nam's President Ngo Dinh Diem to declare a general amnesty for Communist Viet Cong guerrillas in order to encourage wholesale desertions from the Red cause. Diem was in favor of the idea. But he always replied that as Abraham Lincoln waited two years after the beginning of the Civil War before issuing his Emancipation Proclamation, he, too, would wait for a propitious moment so that the move could not be interpreted as a desperate gesture by a sinking government to round up popular support. Last week, confident...
...Diem finally proclaimed an "open arms" clemency program...
...Diem's declaration was speeded by the encouraging results of an informal government clemency program in effect since February that has caused the defection of more than 2,700 Viet Cong followers, including several minor Red officials. Under the terms of the new proclamation, Red defectors "will be given the opportunity to reform and redeem themselves by deeds, and depending on these deeds, will be entitled to lighter sentences or be absolved of past offenses." But the offer of amnesty applies only to Viet Cong sympathizers and not to hard-core Communist cadres, who, Diem feels, are incapable...
...Diem's announcement came on the first anniversary of the start of his government's strategic hamlet program, under which 59% of the South Vietnamese people have been brought into villages surrounded by moats and bamboo fences. As if in celebration of the event, government forces beat back a violent Viet Cong attack against a network of villages around the city of Quangngai, some 250 miles northeast of Saigon, where the government set up a successful fortified village complex in an area that the Reds had previously controlled. Departing from the usual Communist hit-and-run tactics...