Word: diem
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JUST after the 11 p.m. curfew, a convoy of green and white police vans slid into a small alley off Phat Diem Street in Saigon's Second District. Policemen toting M-16 rifles and wooden clubs jumped out and sealed off the alley at either end. Pushing brusquely into each apartment, they demanded identity cards. Suspected Viet Cong sympathizers, draft dodgers or army deserters were hustled...
Ackermann seems to have entered politics with the motto "carpe diem". When a political opportunity comes along, she grabs it. As she said, "I didn't think of going into politics until it happened." In this way she has progressed from member of the PTA, to School Committee, to City Council to mayor. Will she go on for higher office? "Of course I'm interested in something on the statewide level," she says. "It just depends what opens...
...have used the war to exploit the Montagnards in other ways. Under the French, the hill people were protected against being overrun by the South Vietnamese. In 1954 there were only about 20,000 Vietnamese living in the highland provinces. But during the late '50s, President Ngo Dinh Diem directed more than 200,000 Vietnamese, including many Catholic refugees from North Viet Nam, into the area...
Soon Vietnamese legal codes superseded the traditional Montagnard court system, highland languages were banned from Montagnard schools, and highland villages were given new Vietnamese names. When the Montagnards objected, Diem curbed the possibility of insurrection by confiscating their hunting crossbows...
...down the tragedy of Viet Nam policy, showing it in slow motion. In fact, at first it all went deceptively slowly, a careless drift into a game of "counterinsurgency and special forces." To support a policy that was no policy, only a momentum, the Kennedy Administration, Halberstam charges, "invented Diem and his country," then became captive to its own myth. Escalation was only the logical extension of an original departure from reality. Perhaps the most sobering Halberstam homily concludes thus: "The best way for civilians to harness generals" is to "stay out of wars...