Word: indo-china
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...leap into stereotype on a hundred printing presses. The cold-war machine comes equipped with a Parliament-Persuader that brings out Communist hecklers in Rome, Paris and Tokyo, a Double-Meaning Coding Machine for use during U.N. debates, an Automatic Truce Violator with wave lengths set for Korea and Indo-China. But of all the mechanisms, the most carefully calibrated is the squeezer known as the Berlin Blockade. It is so sensitive that it can register cold-war pressure by the raising or lowering of a road barrier, or by a sudden slowdown in the Berlin elevated railway...
...progress, slow but clearly discernible, represents an almost personal triumph for single-minded Nationalist Diem. It also represents a tentative endorsement of the judgment of the U.S., the voluntary heir to the disorder left by France and the pledged defender of what remains of Indo-China. Though Washington did not choose him, it has invested its hopes, its experts, and some $400 million a year of its money in South Viet Nam. The U.S. is convinced that Ngo Dinh Diem, a man with his share of imperfections, is the best fitted to lead Vietnamese to true independence...
Triple Negative. During World War II and its aftermath, the Japanese, the French and Ho Chi Minh's Communists all fought one another for Indo-China (TIME, Nov. 22); all three wanted support from Nationalist Diem but he refused them all because none of them stood for "true independence...
Dilemma in Washington. In December 1946, when Ho and the French broke into the Indo-China war, Diem proclaimed himself against both sides. In April 1947 he started his first positive, political movement, a third-force, nonviolent outfit called the "National Union Front." The French promptly banned it. Three years later Ngo Dinh Diem turned to the outside for friends of Vietnamese independence, and took off for Europe and the U.S. For the best part of two years (1951-53) he made his home at the Maryknoll Junior Seminary in Lakewood, N.J.. often going down to Washington to buttonhole...
Perhaps, in hindsight, the advice should have been taken more to heart. But the U.S. dilemma was that the French were in charge in Indo-China. A shooting war was on, and the central problem was to save the land from Communist absorption. While the tragedy played toward its climax, disappointed Ngo Dinh Diem sadly took himself off to a monastery, in Belgium, there to live and wait in a cell. "We must continue the search for God's Kingdom and His justice," Diem wrote home, "all else will come of itself...