Word: ngo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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MISSION IN TORMENT, by John Mecklin. The author, who was USIS chief in Saigon from 1962 to 1964, takes a balanced second look at U.S. policy toward Viet Nam and especially toward the late Ngo Dinh Diem. Mecklin feels that the U.S. measured Diem only by his intransigence and overlooked his legitimate sovereignty, thereupon condoning the coup that unleashed warring factions and led to six more coups...
...French colonialists" to neutralize South Viet Nam. When Quat tried to reshuffle his Cabinet, Suu, who backed Quat's foes, vetoed the shifts. The Catholics took to the streets, and Quat feared that he might soon be faced with madness comparable to the Buddhist riots that led to Ngo Dinh Diem's downfall in 1963. At midweek he called on the country's 19 top generals to "mediate" the crisis...
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...
...overthrow and subsequent murder of President Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963 opened a political Pandora's box in Saigon. Since that angry day, the government has changed hands seven times; the war against the Communist Viet Cong has grown even tougher; the U.S. has been forced to escalate the conflict by bombing North Viet Nam and nearly doubling its own forces in the south. Most important, Diem's fall brought to an end nearly a decade of political stability in Viet Nam. Was Diem's downfall inevitable or even imperative, the product of immutable historical forces...
Smoldering distrust of the U.S. became 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...