Often portrayed as an inept and stubborn tyrant, South Vietnamese
president Ngo Dinh Diem has long been the subject of much derision
but little understanding. Philip Catton's penetrating study
provides a much more complex portrait of Diem as both a devout
patriot and a failed architect of modernization. In doing so, it
sheds new light on a controversial regime.
Catton treats the Diem government on its own terms rather than
as an appendage of American policy. Focusing on the decade from
Dien Bien Phu to Diem's assassination in 1963, he examines the
Vietnamese leader's nation-building and reform efforts-particularly
his Strategic Hamlet Program, which sought to separate guerrilla
insurgents from the peasantry and build grassroots support for his
regime. Catton's evaluation of the collapse of that program offers
fresh insights into both Diem's limitations as a leader and the
ideological and organizational weaknesses of his government, while
his assessment of the evolution of Washington's relations with
Saigon provides new insight into America's growing involvement in
the Vietnamese civil war.
Focusing on the Strategic Hamlet Program in Binh Duong province
as an exemplar of Diem's efforts, Catton paints the Vietnamese
leader as a progressive thinker trying to simultaneously defeat the
communists and modernize his nation. He draws on a wealth of
Vietnamese language sources to argue that Diem possessed a firm
vision of nation-building and sought to overcome the debilitating
dependence that reliance on American support threatened to foster.
As Catton shows, however, Diem's plans for South Vietnam clashed
with those of the United States and proved no match for the
Vietnamese communists.
Catton analyzes the mutually frustrating interactions between
Diem and the administrations of Eisenhower and Kennedy,
highlighting personality and cultural clashes, as well as specific
disagreements within the American government over how to deal with
Diem's programs and his hostility toward American goals. Revealing
patterns in this uneasy alliance that have eluded other observers,
he also clarifies many of the problems, setbacks, and
miscalculations experienced by the communist movement during that
era.
Neither an American puppet, as communist propaganda claimed, nor
a backward-looking mandarin, according to Western accounts,
Catton's Diem is a tragic figure who finally ran out of time, just
a few weeks before JFK's assassination and at a moment when it
still seemed possible for America to avoid war.
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