Word: diem
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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KENNEDY ON TROOP COMMITMENTS. During the early months of his Administration, President John F. Kennedy tried to maneuver the South Vietnamese into requesting assistance from American troops. Kennedy dispatched then-Vice President Johnson to Viet Nam in May 1961 with orders to "encourage" President Ngo Dinh Diem to ask for U.S. ground troops. Two months before, Kennedy had authorized secret raids against North Viet Nam. Diem resisted American pressure at first, arguing that the presence of American troops would violate the 1954 Geneva Agreements and open his administration to criticism as a puppet government. But in October. Diem made...
...classified documents, but paraphrased or quoted briefly from them. The papers, it reported, absolved the U.S. of any complicity in preventing elections throughout North and South Viet Nam in 1955, despite a Geneva agreement calling for them. According to the study, it was South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem who, fearing a Communist victory, blocked the election...
...conservative students including virtually all of Harvard's fledgling chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and the right-wing elements of the Harvard-Radcliffe Young Republican Club. Their announced list of speakers forced the "Teach-in" into the forefront of the community's consciousness, for it included Bui Diem, South Vietnam's Ambassador to the United States, Dolf Droge, a White House advisor on Indochina, and Anand Sandering Ham, Royal Thai Ambassador to the U. S. Campus radical groups-particularly SDS-had made half-hearted attempts to disrupt a liberal antiwar teach-in a month earlier. The stage seemed...
...human misery-of the corruption in Viet Nam today. The massive U.S. presence has grotesquely distorted the traditional system. It has given the Vietnamese too many opportunities for profiteering, and inflation has aggravated the situation. One statistic helps explain why so many yield to the temptation: since Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown in 1963, civil service salaries have doubled, while the piaster has fallen to an eighth of its former value (officially the rate is 275 piasters to the dollar; the black-market rate is about...
...such figures do not explain the rise of high-level profiteering. Under Diem, corruption was relatively restrained and furtive. Today it permeates the hierarchy, in large part because President Nguyen Van Thieu has made no convincing moves to curtail it. His supporters point out that he is restrained from effective action by the fact that his political base includes a number of high-ranking officers who are deeply involved in profiteering. With a presidential election coming up in November, they say, he is in no position to start swinging a political ax at influential backers. His opponents, on the other...