Ngo Dinh Diem
South Vietnamese president
Ngo Dinh Diem was the scion of a noble family whose ancestors in the
17th century were among the first Vietnamese to convert to Roman
Catholicism. In 1933 he served Emperor Bao Dai as interior minister but
resigned in the face of French resistance to his reforms. He lived in
Hue until 1945 when he was captured by Viet Minh operatives who invited
him to join them to garner Catholic support. Diem refused and went into
exile abroad until 1954 when he returned as prime minister of Bao Dai's
U.S.-backed South Vietnam regime. After an October 1955 referendum
declared a republic in the south, Diem ousted Bao Dai and made himself
president.
The 1954 Geneva Accords, which ended French control and partitioned
Vietnam, called for free elections to be held in 1956 to establish a
single government. In the face of political and social unrest, however,
Diem refused to hold the elections, constructed an authoritarian
government and installed members of his family to run it. With U.S.
help Diem resettled hundreds of thousands of refugees from North
Vietnam, but his blatant favoritism of Catholics angered the Buddhist
majority. This, along with his failure to produce land reforms, sent
many South Vietnamese into the ranks of the Communist Viet Cong, and
guerrilla attacks increased. Diem's ruthless tactics against the
insurgents further alienated his regime from the people.
U.S. officials lost their patience with Diem in 1963 when Americans
were startled by news images of Buddhist monks protesting Diem's
persecution of Buddhists by setting themselves aflame in public
suicides. With the tacit blessing of the Kennedy administration, Diem's
own generals staged a coup d'etat on November 1-2, 1963, in which Diem
and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu were assassinated.
A series of military regimes followed Diem that were marked by coups
and counter-coups. In 1965 three generals, Nguyen Van Thieu, Duong Van
Minh and Nguyen Cao Ky, took charge of the government. Ky was the
leader for awhile, but in 1967, after much internal opposition to the
regime's repressive policies, he and others agreed to stage an election
in which Thieu became president and Ky vice president. Ky soon parted
ways with Thieu over the latter's administration and eventually
returned to his command of the air force. Thieu continued as president
and was re-elected in 1971 without opposition. He resisted the Paris
cease-fire in 1973 but soldiered on in the wake of the U.S. pullout. In
April 1975 he resigned in the hope his exit might lead to a negotiated
settlement with the Communists. Thieu fled the country soon after and
eventually settled in England. Ky also fled and now lives in the United
States.
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