Word: dinh
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Reports that South Viet Nam's Premier Ngo Dinh Diem is about to resign "may be a bit premature," said a State Department official carefully. Returning from Saigon to report to Dwight Eisenhower, the President's special envoy, General J. Lawton Collins, would only say that "We are behind the legal government of Viet Nam," and he didn't mention Premier Ngo Dinh Diem. The French government, wise in such subtleties of omission, concluded that General Collins had perhaps given way to them, and was recommending Diem's replacement...
...tremors of such uncertainty in the U.S.-upon which South Viet Nam now depends almost solely for support-did much last week to undermine Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon. An unmistakable deterioration was taking place on the scene as well. Several junior Cabinet ministers and civil servants resigned, and the administration ground to near-standstill. Vietnamese army staff officers, anxious to come out on the winning side, sent greetings to Bao Dai, whom they expect to come back from the French Riviera as his country's "arbiter." There was much talk of the Premier's possible replacements: Phan...
...pose of calm. But heavily armed gangsters and cops of the Binh Xuyen sect, in their arsenic-green berets, patrolled the boulevards, ordering traffic, and blockading the city's approaches so that they could control the price and supply of rice. Steel-helmeted nationalist paratroopers of Premier Ngo Dinh Diem were also out on patrol, but they were restrained from getting rid of the terrorists by an uneasy 17-day truce-enforced by the French army and supported by the U.S. French Commissioner General Paul Ely was counseling "a political settlement," meaning that Diem should come to terms with...
...midnight in Saigon. The windows of Freedom Palace were open, and Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, in grey striped pajamas, was pacing his third-floor bedroom. Suddenly, through the sultry night, Diem heard the clatter of machine-gun fire, the cries of wounded men. In the next instant, half a dozen mortar shells exploded beneath Ngo Dinh Diem's open window. "We never believed they would dare attack us!" said one of Diem's aides, aghast. But on Diem's shabby desk in Freedom Palace lay the confirmation: "All South Viet Nam will be put to blood...
Next morning, wearied and frustrated, Ngo Dinh Diem went back to negotiation with the sects, while the Binh Xuyen resumed its arrogant patrolling and called up reinforcements. "Vietnamese anger is mounting," TIME Correspondent Dwight Martin cabled from Saigon, "and many foreign observers sympathize completely. It is probably too strong to say, as some are saying, that the French have a Machiavellian master plan to subvert the anti-French Nationalist Diem and with him the U.S. effort to save South Viet Nam from the Communists. But most Americans here conclude, nevertheless, that French actions and policies will have that effect unless...