The Overthrow and Killing of Ngo Dinh Diem
The coup of 1-2 November 1963 is the point at which the United States stopped supporting a Vietnamese government and started disposing of one. Its cause was a religious crisis that the regime turned into a political one. In May 1963 troops in Hue fired on Buddhists celebrating the Buddha's birthday in defiance of a ban on flying their own flag, killing nine; in June an elderly monk sat down at a Saigon intersection, was doused in petrol by fellow monks and burned to death without moving, and the photograph went around the world; in August the president's brother sent special forces into pagodas across the country and arrested some 1,400 monks. Ten days later, on a August weekend when the president, the defence secretary and the secretary of state were all out of Washington, a cable was cleared and sent to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge telling him that if Diem would not remove his brother the United States would not stand in the way of his removal. That cable was never quite retracted, and Lodge treated it as policy. The generals, who had sounded out the Americans twice before and been rebuffed, understood that this time they would not be. They moved on the afternoon of 1 November, took the ministries and the radio station, and besieged the palace. Diem and his brother escaped through a passage to the Chinese quarter, telephoned their surrender the next morning on a promise of safe conduct into exile, and were put into the back of an armoured personnel carrier and shot and stabbed on the way into the city. Kennedy, told at a meeting, left the room; three weeks later he was dead himself. The consequence was the opposite of the one intended. The junta that replaced Diem lasted three months before it was overthrown in turn, and South Vietnam ran through nine governments in the following eighteen months, none of them able to prosecute a war or command a countryside. Having removed a government it could not control, Washington had made itself responsible for whatever followed, and the argument that no Vietnamese administration could hold the line alone became the argument for sending American ground troops in 1965. The regime the United States had spent nine years and a billion dollars building was destroyed in thirty-six hours on its own instructions.
- Year: 1963 CE
- Category: Political
