Word: viets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...above all, Diem's enemy is a coalition of Communists and the calendar. With no personal political organization, a civil service that is amateur and an army still in training, the Premier of South Viet Nam is charged with building a government and a popularity strong enough to overcome the strength and skill of Ho Chi Minh's Communist regime in North Viet Nam. Under the Geneva pact, which sliced the country in two, the South Vietnamese have only 15 months to prepare to meet Ho's Communists in a nationwide test at the polls, winner take...
Neither mathematically nor politically is free Viet Nam remotely ready for the contest and, with Ho assured of a population edge over the South, it may never be. Unless the Communists agree to open the north to full and free campaigning and voting, the contest may never come...
...question of South Viet Nam's survival will then press even more harshly. Less than six months ago, Western diplomats were gloomily pronouncing South Viet Nam a sure-to-be-lost cause; a quick survey in the hinterlands showed that Diem's nationalist regime could count on the electoral support of no more than a fourth of the villages. The rest leaned for Communism, or at least leaned against the unknown, unproved regime in Saigon. But by last week, the song of surrender was fainter and there were many who had ceased to sing it. A fresh survey...
...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...
...such is Viet Nam, disgusted with colonialism and its vices, frustrated in its yearning for freedom, that a leader's integrity is more important than his ability. Communist Ho has built popular support not altogether with wiliness and Communist doctrine, but also with incorruptibility and his undeviating enmity for French colonial rule. Ngo Dinh Diem brings into the battle an incorruptibility even greater and his own record of a lifetime's opposition to French rule and influence. "There are only two real leaders in Viet Nam," Ho's chief of staff, General Vo Nguyen Giap, recognized some...