Word: viets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...mother still lives behind a wall to keep off evil spirits), he is of the upper class, and he talks without self-consciousness of "the little people." He is proud of his Vietnamese heritage: "We are a country of principles, an old country, a country built village by village. Viet Nam is a solid thing . . ." And he is reluctant to change it, but: "Sometimes I think we Asians are too reserved, talk too much by nuance. We ought to learn to be rude in our talk like the Americans, and get things done." Diem rarely speaks harshly of fellow Vietnamese...
...Vietnamese against invaders from China. In the zyth century, the Ngo Dinh clan was converted to Roman Catholicism, and they held to their faith at a grisly price: as recently as 1870, no fewer than 100 of the Ngo Dinh were surrounded in their church and burned alive. (Today Viet Nam, essentially Buddhist, has about 2,000,000 Catholics...
...What came was the crash of Dienbienphu. During that decisive battle, Diem discerned that his time to serve might be at hand. He quit the monastery and moved into a garret in Paris. The French, in part because they needed someone on whom to unload catastrophe, offered Diem the Viet Nam premiership, with their first acceptable promise of independence. On June 15, 1954, Ngo Dinh Diem took the job and headed back to Saigon. "We don't know where we're going," said one of his aides, contemplating chaos, "but the captain is reliable and our boat...
...fantastic time-consuming pettiness. Samples: recently he took over himself the granting of all entry and exit visas and the scrutiny of all currency exchange applications. But the U.S. military, diplomatic and technical experts, while noting the shortcomings, have not let them dull the conviction that Diem is Viet Nam's soundest hope. "After some doubts about Premier Diem," said one high U.S. official, "I think that they have been resolved in his favor and that he is entitled to full and unqualified support...
...They Don't Lie." An Asian tradition has it that if one saves a man's life, one is thenceforth responsible for his destiny. The U.S. in a sense is lumping those two missions into one simultaneous undertaking in South Viet Nam. In addition to its millions and its prestige, Washington invested the talents of 1,000 Americans in the country, with the ex-Army chief of staff, General J. Lawton Collins, as the top U.S. emissary. Among them: for land reform, Wolf Ladejinsky, the celebrated Agriculture Department expert who did the land reform job in postwar Japan...