Ngo Dinh Diem
Ngo Dinh Diem (Vietnamese Ngô Đ́nh Diệm, Chinese 吳廷琰 January 3, 1901 - November 2, 1963) was the first President of South Vietnam (1955-63).
Dinh Diem was born in Huế, the original capital of the Nguyen Dynasty of Vietnam. The Ngo family is a Catholic noble family in Vietnam. He was a civil servant in the government of Emperor Bao Dai before World War II but resigned after accusing the Emperor of being a "tool" of the French. He was a strong nationalist and anti-Communist; his elder brother (Dinh Thuc) was archbishop of Hue.
In 1945 he was imprisoned and exiled to China following conflicts with anti-French Communist forces that were gaining power in Vietnam. After his release, he refused to join in the brief post-war government of Ho Chi Minh and went into exile in the USA. He returned to be appointed Prime Minister of South Vietnam by Emperor Bao Dai in 1954 following the French withdrawal. He rejected the Geneva Accord (which called for unification and elections in 1956); on October 26, 1955, in a disputed nationwide referendum, the people voted to remove the emperor Bao Dai as head of state and elect Diem the first President of the Republic of Vietnam.
When the referendum was held, Diem's troops guarded the polls and those who attempted to vote for the Emperor were assaulted. Diem's detractors say that the fraud was obvious. In Saigon, for example, Diem claimed more votes than there were registered voters in the entire area. Emperor Bao Dai was forced to abdicate rather than divide the country further and issued one last appeal for the country to unite under a democratic government. Diem's American advisors were frustrated by this, as no one believed the long-absent former monarch could have posed much of a popular threat from his chateaux in France.
His rule was firm, puritanical and nepotistic. His most trusted official was his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, leader of the primary pro-Diem political party. His wife, Madame Nhu, led the way in Diem's programs to reform Saigon society according to his own Catholic values. Brothels and opium dens were closed, divorce and abortion made illegal and adultery laws were strengthened. Diem also won a street war with the forces of the gangster Le Van Vien, the notorious ruler of the Cholon brothels and gambling houses who had enjoyed special favors under the French and Bao Dai. Ngo Dinh Diem was also passionately anti-communist and the formation of the National Liberation Front, or Viet Cong, was a direct result of his rule.
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U.S. ties
Diem forged a relationship with the United States for support in retaining his despotic and minority Catholic control over the Buddhist majority. The Judeo-Christian United States agreed with his conservative politics, but supported Diem out of concern that the North's communist influence (growing in popularity) would spread to the South. US planners were worried that corruption in a democratic referendum would only lead to installation of communist government, and hence calculated that Diem's dictatorship, despite its unpopularity, would be better to support. This case is among the examples cited by some historians regarding the U.S. support ("propping up") of puppet regimes. Others cite this as an example of U.S. support for struggling democratic regimes in opposition to the encroaching Soviet Empire.
Eager to hold onto power, it is said that Diem had unwittingly made a bargain with the devil. Some biased observers say the U.S. had privately decided to use Diem as a pawn in a wider strategy, whereby they would inflame the existing conflicts to larger proportions, in the hope that a conventional conflict in Vietnam would be a way to forestall direct nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. In a twist on the "take the war to the enemy" strategy, the U.S. sought to "export" its conflict to the war-torn peasant-agrarian countries in Southeast Asia as a proxy battleground. To others, this conflict was a demonstration of the universality of the worldwide conflict with expanding Soviet power. Ho Chi Minh had long sworn to unify Vietnam by force; it is thought that without responding to this promised takeover, Diem would have simply been swept away by pure military force.
Diem's ineffective land reforms are thought to have contributed to increasing popular support in the South for Ho Chi Minh and his more successful reforms in the North. The enforcement of his moral values was often unpopular and the Buddhist community resented the favor he showed to his fellow Catholics. While the U.S. had supported Diem's rise to power, they had grown frustrated by his desire for independence, complaining that he was a puppet who wanted to "pull his own strings". The nominal U.S. support he retained was based on a situational allegiance only, and the U.S. was increasingly wary of Diem's ineffectiveness in his role.
The U.S. had originally hoped that Diem could be the charismatic equivalent of Ho Chi Minh, but their opinions began to change in the 1960s. They were annoyed that Diem had not implemented land reforms to compete with the highly popular Communist program, and U.S. planners agreed that the nepotism and corruption in his government was hurting the Southern cause. Despite what was publicly stated, the U.S. was not interested in democratic process in Vietnam, as they feared that the popularity of the North's communist program would quickly take root in the South.
Coup and assassination
When the regime turned on a protest by Buddhist monks in June 1963, the U.S. stopped giving aid. A small number of monks had immolated themselves in public protest, and the U.S. grew intensely annoyed with Diem's unpopular public image. In their defense, Diem and Nhu claimed that the Communists had infiltrated the Buddhist groups, and that their crackdown was in accordance with the agreed-upon anti-Communist policy. Madame Nhu infamously referred to the incident as a 'barbequeing'.
U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge refused to meet with Diem and began to encourage ARVN military officers to overthrow him. The U.S. tacitly supported (or did not interfere with) a military coup d'etat of ARVN generals that overthrew the government and executed Diem, his younger brother (Dinh Nhu) and others, on November 1, 1963. General Dương Văn Minh then took over on November 6.
The U.S leadership had publicly expressed shock and disappointment that Diem had been killed, but records show that they made no attempts to dissuade the plotters from such an action, and were not surprised with the coup. It could be said that America's reticence to intervene in the coup gave lie to the idea that the US was wantonly propping up such 'puppet regimes'. When news reached Madame Nhu, who was travelling in the U.S., she said, "Whoever has the Americans as allies does not need enemies" and predicted that the trouble in Vietnam was only beginning. These bitter utterances came with her complete loss of political power.
U.S. President John F. Kennedy was soon after assassinated as well. While the new U.S. President Lyndon Johnson pronounced the late Diem as "the Churchill of Asia," in private, he had held Diem and his regime in contempt. Johnson would pursue the strategy of creating a "proxy war" in Vietnam with far more gusto than Kennedy had shown (although records indicate Kennedy had plans to expand the war much further, had he survived), confirming Nhu's predictions.
Quotes
- "If Your Majesty ever has cause to be dissatisfied with my handling of our country's affairs, you have but to speak the word and I will step down."
- "The Communists will defeat us, not by virtue of their strength, but because of our weakness. They will win by default."
Further Reading
Frances Fitzgerald. 1972. Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and Americans in Vietnam. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 0-31-615919-0, ISBN 0-67-972394-3, ISBN 0-31-628423-8.
Robert Mann. 2001. A Grand Delusion: America's Descent into Vietnam. New York: Perseus. ISBN 0-46-504370-4, ISBN 0-46-504369-0.
See also: Vietnam War
External links
- JFK and the Diem Coup (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB101/index.htm) - Provided by the National Security Archive.
de:Ngo Dinh Diem [[ja:ゴ・ディン・ジェム]] vi:Ngô Ðình Diệm zh-cn:吴庭艳
Categories: 1901 births | 1963 deaths | Vietnam War people