Word: mecklin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Mecklin was in the thick of the skirmishes between the U.S. press, the Saigon government and the U.S. embassy, and very much in the midst of the bitter political battles that ended the career and the life of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Yet "Meek the Knife" emerged from his difficult tour of duty to write an excellent account of the South Vietnamese war which he called Mission in Torment (see BOOKS). Author Mecklin had unique credentials for the task, having reported the .disastrous French campaign against the Communists and the establishment of the Diem regime for TIME between...
...Author Mecklin, a veteran TIME correspondent who served (on a leave of absence) from 1962 to 1964 as USIS chief in Saigon, watched the drama of Diem's last days from close range. The portrait of Diem that emerges from this bitter but balanced account is of a dedicated patriot flawed by hubris and hamstrung by scheming relatives...
...Turning Point. Diem stubbornly insisted on running the war against the Communist Viet Cong his own way. To Mecklin and others in the U.S. Mission this rigid recalcitrance surpassed that of "a whole platoon of De Gaulles." What Viet Nam needed, in Mecklin's view, was someone like the Philippines' late President Ramon Magsaysay, who broke the back of his country's Communist Huk rebellion by offering the malcontents "total friendship or total war." Diem offered neither. Tax col lectors, not aid officials, followed his troops into liberated villages. Suspicious of his own generals, Diem rarely committed...
...chips on Diem," Mecklin writes. "We were stuck with an all-or-nothing policy. It had to work, like a Catholic marriage or a parachute." But when the Buddhist crisis ignited in May 1963, the policy went up in flames. What began as a seemingly simple dispute over the display of religious flags soon became a cleverly conducted campaign to unseat Catholic Diem. U.S. reporters fanned the flames with pro-Buddhist stories that enraged Diem, who refused to believe that Washington did not control the press in the same...
...defiance. When U.S. Charge d'Affaires William Trueheart formally threatened Diem with the statement that the U.S. would "dissociate" itself from the Saigon government's actions unless anti-Buddhist repressions ceased, Diem's brother Ngo Dinh Nhu respond ed by raiding the Buddhist pagodas. That, in Mecklin's informed opinion, was the turning point. "The pagoda raids made it categorically impossible for the U.S. to try to go on with the regime," he writes. "Its handling of the Buddhist issue conclusively discredited the regime's claim to the political savvy that would be essential...