Word: dinh
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Fueled by Communist North Viet Nam with supplies and men smuggled through Laos over the clandestine Ho Chi Minh Trail, this wasting war has been going on for seven years. Its object is the destruction of South Viet Nam's stubby, stubborn President Ngo Dinh Diem, 60, who runs the war, the government, and everything else in South Viet Nam from a massive desk in his yellow stucco Freedom Palace in Saigon. President Diem had fought the Communists in his country long before World War II. At war's end, he was arrested by them; his brother was shot...
Once the decision was made that the line must be drawn at South Viet Nam, the Kennedy Administration acted vigorously. Vice President Lyndon Johnson was dispatched to Saigon to assure President Ngo Dinh Diem that the U.S., though it had retreated in Laos, could be depended on to help South Viet Nam defend its freedom. In Washington, a special Viet Nam task force was set up in the State Department. Last week a committee headed by Stanford Research Institute Economist Eugene Staley, back from a four-week study of South Viet Nam, submitted an inch-thick secret report to President...
...Dinh Diem is no democrat by instinct; he remains aloof from the masses in the tradition of a mandarin who follows the ancient Confucian code of a divinely guided prince. "A sacred respect is due the person of the sovereign. He is the mediator between the people and heaven as he celebrates the national cult," he once wrote. A chain-smoking bachelor, he runs things his way, taking advice only from a few aides and his tight-knit family; his closest adviser is a brother who has an office in the palace. All departmental reports go to Diem's office...
...this atmosphere of smoldering resentment that Ngo Dinh Diem grew to manhood. His father, Ngo Dinh Kha, was a cultured, educated mandarin whose family had been converted to Catholicism by missionaries in the 17th century. He was called to serve as administrative adviser to Emperor Thanh Thai in central Viet Nam's imperial capital of Hué, but quit in a huff when the French, interfering constantly in the affairs of the court, decided to depose the Emperor. Penniless ("We did not even have enough to pay for school," recalls Diem), Kha resigned himself to life as a farmer, borrowed enough...
Diem operates under a democratic constitution, and holds elections; they are always carefully controlled. When one outspoken critic ran for the National Assembly and won, he was denied his seat on the ground that he had made "false promises" in his election campaign. Bitterly, Ngo Dinh Diem's critics label his system "Diemocracy" ? democracy in form but not substance. Diem merely shrugs. The U.S., concerned with his rigid inflexibility atop an insecure nation, also presses for a change in policy. But Diem is a stubborn man, and the U.S. is wary of the charge of "interference in internal affairs...