Word: dinh
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Revolution swept the sunny, tropical Vietnamese city of Saigon last week, shaking and straining the antiCommunist, anti-French government of Premier Ngo Dinh Diem. The Binh Xuyen gangster sect, supported by French colonials, started a bloody uprising and was put down. While the fires of civil war guttered out in the refugee-crowded streets of Saigon (pop. 2,000,000), a Vietnamese general, supported by French colonials, tried a midnight coup d'état and almost succeeded. Locked in this squalid conflict were the precarious hopes of Vietnamese nationalism, the ambitions of French colonials and the committed prestige...
...showdown began at siesta time on a warm, summery day. Premier Ngo Dinh Diem was sitting down to a late lunch at Freedom Palace when nine 81-mm. mortar shells thumped down around the grounds, killing a civilian and wounding a couple of soldiers. The Premier rushed to the phone. "The palace is being shelled," he told French Commissioner-General Paul Ely, his voice disrupted on the line by adjacent explosions...
Twenty-five minutes later, more mortar shells dropped into the palace, and the private army of the Binh Xuyen, 2,000 terrorists in arsenic-green berets, opened concerted fire against three main Vietnamese Nationalist strongpoints. Ngo Dinh Diem, long criticized for pacifism and procrastination, first ordered counterfire against the Binh Xuyen defenses. One hour later he sharply raised the stakes, and told the army to clear the Binh Xuyen out of the city...
...third-floor bedroom at Freedom Palace, Ngo Dinh Diem still talked wistfully of his aspirations: "My doctrine is to fight Communists. The experience of the Indo-China war showed that it was impossible to defeat the Communists without the people's support. How do you get it? By freeing the people from oppression by colonialism and the warlords of the sects . . . Yet the French military no longer wishes to leave Viet Nam and the U.S. grants financial aid to them.* The French want to get the best part of the cake and if they cannot get it, they...
...Dinh Diem, his country's leading nationalist, has bodyguards outside his bedroom and a .45-cal. pistol in his desk. It is getting late in the Freedom Palace of Saigon, and Diem can sometimes be seen at his window on sultry nights, a chunky silhouette, staring at the moon...