1 gen 1963 anni - Ngo Dinh Diem assassinated in South Vietnam

Descrizione:

When Kennedy became president, he inherited American involvement in Vietnam. Truman had sent aid to the French, and in the wake of French defeat Eisenhower had molded South Vietnam into an American client state. Like his predecessors, Kennedy understood Vietnam as another front of the Cold War. But the nuclear brinksmanship of the Cuban missile crisis led this time to a more moderate interventionism. In 1961, he increased military aid to the South Vietnamese and expanded the role of U.S. Special Forces (“Green Berets”), who would train the South Vietnamese army in unconventional, small-group warfare tactics.

But the corrupt and repressive Diem regime, propped up by Eisenhower since 1954, was losing ground in spite of American support. By 1961, Diem’s opponents, with backing from North Vietnam, had formed a revolutionary movement known as the National Liberation Front (NLF). The Vietcong, as the NLF’s guerrilla fighters were known, found allies among peasants harmed by Diem’s “strategic hamlet” program, which had uprooted entire villages to break up support for the NLF. Furthermore, members of the country’s Buddhist majority charged Diem, a Catholic, with religious persecution. Starting in May 1963, militant Buddhists staged dramatic demonstrations, which in June came to include self-immolations (burning to death) recorded by reporters covering the activities of the 16,000 U.S. military personnel then in Vietnam.

These gruesome protests, broadcast on television for a shocked global audience, illustrated the dilemma of American policy in Vietnam. To ensure a stable government in the South and check Ho Chi Minh and the North, the United States had to support Diem’s authoritarian regime. But the regime’s repression of its political opponents destabilized South Vietnam as a whole. The turmoil escalated with Diem’s assassination on November 2, 1963. American involvement in Vietnam would massively expand, but the elemental paradox remained unchanged: in its efforts to achieve victory, the United States took actions that brought defeat ever closer.

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