1963 The Fall of The House of Ngo Dinh Vietnam Coup - 7-Page Vintage Article

Description

1963 The Fall of The House of Ngo Dinh Vietnam Coup - 7-Page Vintage Article
Original, vintage magazine article
Page Size: Approx. 10 1/2" x 13 1/2" (27 cm x 34 cm) each page
Condition: Good
THE FALL
OF THE HOUSE OF
NGO DINH
At the French mission church of St. Francis
Xavier in Cholon, Saigon’s shabby China-
town, the early-morning Mass had celebrated
All Souls’ Day, the day of the dead. A few min-
utes after the congregation had gone, two men in
dark-gray suits walked quickly through the shaded
courtyard and entered the church. South Viet-
nam's President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother
Nhu, both haggard after a sleepless night, were
fugitives in the capital they once commanded.
In the remote church they prayed and took Com-
munion, and it was their ultimate sacrament.
Within less than an hour their bloody, crumpled
corpses lay ignominiously on the deck of an ar-
mored car rumbling through the Saigon streets.
Thus ended the fragile reign of the Ngo Dinh
family—a stubborn, self-righteous oligarchy that,
in its eight years of rule over South Vietnam, had
degenerated from clumsy.paternalism into almost
insane tyranny. When, after careful plotting, a
host of Vietnamese officers rose against it, Diem’s
rotted regime fell apart with surprising ease.
Not long after the smoke of rebellion had
cleared away, the chief of South Vietnam’s new
military junta invited me into his spacious, map-
lined office. Gen. Duong Van Minh, known
among Americans in Saigon as Big Minh, is a
heavy, fierce-looking soldier whose single tooth
is a proud badge of the Japanese torture he suf-
fered during World War II. He is a deceptively
gentle man, and when he spoke of the coup d'etat
that lifted him into office, there was a discernible
tone of apology in his voice.
“We sincerely wanted to work with Diem,” he
said. “But the guerrilla war we are waging must
be fought with the hearts of the people. Diem had
lost the people. Army discipline was disintegrat-
ing, morale was low. If we had been winning the
war, we wouldn’t have staged the coup d'etat. We
overthrew Diem in order to restore unity to the
country and give a new spirit to the army—so we
can beat the Communists.”
Whatever future problems the new junta faces—
and they will be considerable—their coup d'etat
was the only alternative to the Diem regime. For
Diem’s government had. in effect, ceased to func-
tion long before it completely collapsed.
An austere, inflexible autocrat, Diem could not
cope with the double threat of a Communist
guerrilla enemy and a growing internal opposi-
tion. Like the flawed hero of a Shakespearean
tragedy, he succumbed to his own worst instincts.
He withdrew from reality and, more and more,
abdicated power to his neurotic, conspiratorial
brother Nhu and his beautiful, arrogant >sister-
in-law, Madame Nhu. In the process, he gradu-
ally alienated his country’s army, its intelligentsia
and a significant mass of its common people.
At the same time, he estranged himself from
his main foreign supporters. Mindful of its own
image, Diem’s own Roman Catholic Church
strove to disassociate itself from a regime de-
scribed by a high Vatican official as “medieval
and reactionary." More important, in giving free
rein to his brother’s repressive policies, Diem
provoked the hostility of the United States...
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