Word: dinh
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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NAIVETÉ ABOUT DIEM. The Pentagon papers reflect Washington's shallow perception of the complexity of South Viet Nam's problems and the U.S.'s limited ability to deal with them. Shortly before the 1963 coup that overthrew President Ngo Dinh Diem, the White House cabled to then Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge a lengthy set of instructions. Tidily organized under points A through M, the missive loftily proposed solutions for a country riven by political and religious strife and on the verge of military collapse. According to the cable's ungainly prose, Lodge was directed...
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...
...allowed the coup to take place. In the summer of 1963, officials in Saigon and Washington, D.C., debated whether or not to coax Diem into instituting reforms or to support a military coup. Kennedy and his advisers had come to view Diem and his brother, Secret Police Chief Ngo Dinh Nhu, as corrupt mandarins whose brutal oppression of Buddhists and political opponents was an embarrassment...
...reprinting the 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...
...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...