Word: diem
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Even the participation of a slate backed by the antigovernment An Quang Pagoda Buddhist faction was expected to work in Thieu's favor. One of the faction's leaders is Thich Tri Quang, who helped overthrow the Diem regime in 1963. The militant group had previously scorned participation in the present government. The fact that they fielded a slate of candidates on the ballot, with the lotus blossom for their symbol, was regarded in Saigon as a return to the legitimate fold. It would support Thieu's claim that electoral democracy is becoming a reality in South...
...began making a name for himself in the mid-1950s, when he was a young lieutenant colonel commanding a paratroop unit in Saigon. When word came that three top generals were being detained in the presidential palace by one of the factions backing the late President Ngo Dinh Diem, Tri telephoned a brash ultimatum: "Free the generals in one half-hour or I will destroy the palace and everything inside it." One of the rescued generals was Nguyen Van Vy, now South Viet Nam's Defense Minister...
...needs it most, a President often finds himself least equipped with information. A former member of the Kennedy Administration contends that in the year before the Tonkin Gulf incident, the Administration found itself helpless when it needed to weigh the Buddhist uprisings that preceded the fall of Ngo Dinh Diem. In the pressure of crisis, the Government could find no experts who were capable of appraising why such an apparently trivial series of events came to have such overwhelming importance. While U.S. sophistication about Southeast Asia has inevitably grown since then, intelligence is still based on an uneven apparatus...
...Hanoi, speaks Vietnamese, so there was hopeful speculation that he could explain their noncombative role as journalists. In fact, each of the three has criticized U.S. military involvement in Indochina. In 1963 Dudman was even refused a visa by South Viet Nam after he wrote articles unfavorable to the Diem regime...
...keep large portions of land worked by their tenants. When Thieu wanted to stem inflation, he felt that the only way to do so was by going over the heads of the elected lawmakers. Accordingly, he invoked a law left over from the days of the autocratic Ngo Dinh Diem to decree a massive austerity program that sought to soak up cash surpluses by sharply increasing taxes. Honda motorcycles quickly leaped in price from $200 to $400 and American cigarettes from $2.10 to $2.80 a carton...