Ngo Dinh Diem Quotes

What exactly was the role of the U.S. government in the coup that overthrew Ngo Dinh Diem?” Trumbull stared for a moment at Foley’s rigid back. Then he said to Patchen, “Tell him.” “I think you already know, Paul,” Patchen said. “In simple terms, we countenanced it. We knew it was being planned. We offered advice. We provided support. We encouraged the plot. We welcomed the results.

Try as U.S. officials might to get him to broaden his government, to show more sensitivity to the needs of his people, to show greater tolerance for the expression of political opposition, they got nowhere. Instead Diem, his utter confidence in his own political instincts wholly unimpaired, turned increasingly inward, relying almost exclusively on an ever-shrinking circle of confidants headed by his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. More than ever, personal loyalty, rather than ability and efficiency, became the criterion for promotion and reward.

It’s no surprise that many later analysts, in judging these and other actions and statements by Diem in the course of 1955, depicted him as a power-hungry and hypocritical autocrat, a reactionary mandarin, a pliant U.S. puppet, and nothing more. But this is insufficient. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, Diem was a modernizer of sorts, a man who had his own vision for Vietnam’s future and who sought to strike a balance between progress and Vietnam’s cultural traditions. “We are not going to go back to a sterile copy of the mandarin past,” Diem told journalist Marguerite Higgins. “We are going to adapt the best of our heritage to the modern situation.”15 Along with his brother and chief adviser Ngo Dinh Nhu, he embraced the ideology of personalism, which was rooted in the efforts of humanist Roman Catholic intellectuals in interwar France to find a third way to economic development, between liberal democracy and Communism. A key figure was philosopher Emmanuel Mounier, who expounded his ideas in books and in the journal Esprit. For Nhu, an intellectual and a graduate of France’s L’École des chartes, personalism’s emphasis on the value of community, rather than individualism, while at the same time avoiding the dehumanizing collectivism of socialism, held tremendous appeal and could complement the traditional concern of Vietnamese culture with social relationships.

Karzai stands in relation to the Afghanistan War as Ngo Dinh Diem stands in relation to the Vietnam War: His credentials as a nationalist untainted by corruption but with a Western orientation made him in Washington’s eyes a seemingly ideal partner. In the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration had sought to use President Diem as its agent in creating a Republic of Vietnam compatible with U.S. national security interests. In the 2000s, the Bush administration sought to use Karzai for similar purposes. Much to their subsequent consternation, U.S. military and civilian officials soon enough discovered, as they had four decades earlier with Diem, that Karzai had a mind of his own.

Ngo Dinh Diem was a selection and creation of the CIA, as well as others such as Admiral Arthur Radford and Cardinal Spellman, but the primary role in the early creation of the “father of his country” image for Ngo Dinh Diem was played by the CIA—and Edward G. Lansdale was the man upon whom this responsibility fell. He became such a firm supporter of Diem that when he visited Diem just after Kennedy’s election he carried with him a gift “from the U.S. Government,” a huge desk set with a brass plate across its base reading, “To Ngo Dinh Diem, The Father of His Country.” The presentation of that gift to Diem by Lansdale marked nearly seven years of close personal and official relationship, all under the sponsorship of the CIA. It was the CIA that created Diem’s first elite bodyguard to keep him alive in those early and precarious days. It was the CIA that created the Special Forces of Vietnamese troops, which were under the tight control of Ngo Dinh Nhu, and it was the CIA that created and directed the tens of thousands of paramilitary forces of all kinds in South Vietnam during those difficult years of the Diem regime. Not until the U.S. Marines landed in South Vietnam, in the van of the escalation in 1964, did an element of American troops arrive in Vietnam that were not under the operational control of the CIA.

Vietnam was not so much a goal as it was a refuge and backlash of everything that had gone wrong in a quarter-century of clandestine activities. There can be no questioning the fact that Vietnam inherited some of the Korea leftovers; it inherited the Magsaysay team from the Philippines with its belief in another Robin-Hood-like Magsaysay in the person of Ngo Dinh Diem; it fell heir to the Indonesian shambles; it soaked up men and materials from the Tibetan campaign and from Laos in particular, and it inherited men and material, including a large number of specially modified aircraft, from the Bay of Pigs disaster. In its leadership it inherited men who had been in Greece in the late forties or during the Eisenhower era and who felt that they knew Communist insurgency when they saw it. The nation of South Vietnam had not existed as a nation before 1954, rather it was another country’s piece of real estate. South Vietnam has never really been a nation. It has become the quagmire of things gone wrong during the past twenty-five years.

Mr. Kennedy had become disenchanted with the Vietnamese President, Ngo Dinh Diem, and Diem distrusted Kennedy.

It was the CIA that created Diem’s first elite bodyguard to keep him alive in those early and precarious days. It was the CIA that created the Special Forces of Vietnamese troops, which were under the tight control of Ngo Dinh Nhu, and it was the CIA that created and directed the tens of thousands of paramilitary forces of all kinds in South Vietnam during those difficult years of the Diem regime. Not until the U.S. Marines landed in South Vietnam, in the van of the escalation in 1964, did an element of American troops arrive in Vietnam that were not under the operational control of the CIA.

The division, as most people know, was specifically not intended to be a permanent political boundary but to serve only as a cease-fire line until free elections, under international supervision, could reunify the country in 1956. However, Ngo Dinh Diem, who became premier of South Vietnam under Bao Dai while the Geneva Conference was going on, and who subsequently, with strong American support, deposed his chief and became president, refused to permit these elections to be held.

The world first began to give real consideration to the Vietnamese problem and the role of the Buddhists only after the Venerable Thich Quang-Duc burned himself on Phan-dinh-Phung Street in Saigon on June 11, 1963, to call the attention of the world public to the sufferings of the Vietnamese people under Ngo Dinh Diem's oppressive regime.

The idea of Buddhism as a national religion did not take shape in the 1940s but much earlier—in the days of the Truc Lam Zen set on Mount Yen Tu. But the idea crystallized during the hardship and suffering that the Buddhists had to endure under the French occupation and the regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem. The campaign to overthrow the Ngo Dinh Diem regime in 1963 not only succeeded in mobilizing the people to the defense of Buddhism but also awakened the nationalistic consciousness of the masses. In every Buddhist the idea of Buddhism and nationalism are intertwined and cannot be easily separated.

Three weeks before Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem was ousted and then murdered in a coup that Kennedy had authorized.

In 1963, the Kennedy administration got wind of the fact that the government of Ngo Dinh Diem it had installed in South Vietnam was trying to arrange peace negotiations with the North. Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were trying to negotiate a peace settlement. So the Kennedy liberals determined that they had to be thrown out. The Kennedy administration organized a coup in which the two brothers were killed and they put in their own guy, meanwhile escalating the war. Then came the assassination of President Kennedy. Contrary to a lot of mythology, Kennedy was one of the hawks in the administration to the very last minute. He did agree to proposals for withdrawal from Vietnam, because he knew the war was very unpopular there, but always with the condition of withdrawal after victory.

But privately, the ongoing struggle in Indochina filled him with dread. “I feel just like I grabbed a big juicy worm,” he told an aide, “with a right sharp hook in the middle of it.” The president had opposed the coup that overthrew and murdered Ngo Dinh Diem, fearing it would make a bad situation worse. It had.

The Geneva Accords called for elections in 1956 to reunite the country. But as it became apparent that Ho’s Communist government had overwhelming popular support—Eisenhower later estimated that if the elections had been held in 1954, Ho would have captured 80 percent of the vote13—South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem, reneged on the election. The United States, which had not been a party to the Geneva Accords, continued to back Diem,