(5 of 9)
Triple Negative. During World War II and its aftermath, the Japanese, the French and Ho Chi Minh's Communists all fought one another for Indo-China (TIME, Nov. 22); all three wanted support from Nationalist Diem but he refused them all because none of them stood for "true independence."
In 1945, Ho's Communist troops struck at the nationalist Ngo Dinh clan, raiding the mansion at Hue and burning Diem's collection of 10,000 books. The Communists arrested Diem; they took hold of Diem's respected elder brother, Ngo Dinh Khoi and buried him alive. But only four months later Ho Chi Minh, concluding that he needed the backing of some pure nationalists, summoned Ngo Dinh Diem from prison. "Come and live with me at the palace," Ho put it to him.
Diem: You killed my brother. You are a criminal.
Ho: I know nothing about your brother . . . You are upset and angry. Stay with me. We must all work together against the French.
Diem: I don't believe you understand the kind of man I am. Look me in the face. Am I a man who fears?
Ho: No.
Diem: Good. Then I will go now.
Ho let him free.
Dilemma in Washington. In December 1946, when Ho and the French broke into the Indo-China war, Diem proclaimed himself against both sides. In April 1947 he started his first positive, political movement, a third-force, nonviolent outfit called the "National Union Front." The French promptly banned it. Three years later Ngo Dinh Diem turned to the outside for friends of Vietnamese independence, and took off for Europe and the U.S. For the best part of two years (1951-53) he made his home at the Maryknoll Junior Seminary in Lakewood, N.J.. often going down to Washington to buttonhole State Department men and Congressmen and urge them not to support French colonialism. "The French may be fighting the Communists," Diem argued, "but they are also fighting the people."
Perhaps, in hindsight, the advice should have been taken more to heart. But the U.S. dilemma was that the French were in charge in Indo-China. A shooting war was on, and the central problem was to save the land from Communist absorption. While the tragedy played toward its climax, disappointed Ngo Dinh Diem sadly took himself off to a monastery, in Belgium, there to live and wait in a cell. "We must continue the search for God's Kingdom and His justice," Diem wrote home, "all else will come of itself."
The Deluge. What came was the crash of Dienbienphu. During that decisive battle, Diem discerned that his time to serve might be at hand. He quit the monastery and moved into a garret in Paris. The French, in part because they needed someone on whom to unload catastrophe, offered Diem the Viet Nam premiership, with their first acceptable promise of independence. On June 15, 1954, Ngo Dinh Diem took the job and headed back to Saigon. "We don't know where we're going," said one of his aides, contemplating chaos, "but the captain is reliable and our boat is clean."