Word: mecklin
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...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...
...from Washington flew a new ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge. "For application of the new policy," says Mecklin, "the President had found exactly the right man. Ambassador Lodge proved to be an able executioner...
...Desperate Surgery." Mecklin's account of the coup and of the murder of Diem and Nhu is colorful but carefully subjective-he reports only what he saw. Although he states categorically that Lodge was intent on getting rid of Diem and that he knew the coup was planned-indeed had spoken with the coup leaders-Mecklin does not charge that the U.S. Mission was directly involved...