do you think the american people would have supported Ngo Dihn Diem if they knew of his opperessive tactics...

Question

list some of his opperessive tactics

thanks...

Answer 1

The point of US involvement in Vietnam was to install a government that would support the US. This is also why US foreign policy failed - you don't install a head of state in a country that the locals don't like, they will rebel against it.

Read the Pentagon Papers, or Kissinger, or the Ten Thousand Day War. Not only did the US support Diem, they banked him (CIA finance) and they trained him and his army in tactics (murder, torture, forced removals, conscription) that soon drove the ordinary Vietnamese further from the Americans and to the North Vietnamese. The choice was between an oppressive Diem openly supported by Washington and rule by Vietnamese. American foreign policy in Vietnam as in Iraq is decided by the number of Americans killed,not by the behavior of puppet regimes installed by Washington (Chile is another example).

I'm not sure where you get this sort of question, it is so far off the history as we know it and is far removed from the press reports of the day.

Answer 2

That depends on whom the American people would believe -- their own propaganda: Ngo Dihn Diem was on the cover of Time Magazine three times, and was chosen as 1965's "Man of the Year."

OR

Historian Luu Doan Huynh: "Diem represented narrow and extremist nationalist coupled with autocracy and nepotism."

Take a look at Boston College Magazine Spring, 2005 - "Our Man Diem: How America Came To Back South Vietnam's Doomed President."