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That was in 1933. For the decade that followed, Diem steered clear of politics, mostly read and studied at his home in Hué. It was a crucial time, for the revolutionary spirit was incubating swiftly. While developing the country, the French were extracting every possible sou in profits; every salt worker had to sell his output to the French-controlled monopoly, which sold the salt back to the Vietnamese at a handsome markup; each village was required to buy its rice liquor at fixed prices from the French distillers; as for reform and freedom, there was not a word. "I saw the danger from the Communists," said Diem. "We had to have democratic reforms or it was clear even then that the Communists would win."
Murder Mistake. When World War II came, Ngo Dinh Diem withheld his support from all three of the forces tusseling for control of the country—the Japanese, the French and Ho Chi Minh's Communists, although they all sought his cooperation. At war's end, Ho's agents arrested Diem and hauled him off to the mountains of the north. For good measure, they shot Diem's older brother, Khoi, a provincial chief who had fought the Reds. Months later, Ho personally summoned Diem, demanded that he take a post in the new national government that Ho had set up in defiance of the returning French colonial administration. "Why did you kill my brother?" asked Diem. "It was a mistake," replied Ho. "The country was all confused. It could not be helped." Angrily, Diem turned on his heel and walked out.
Fitfully, Diem once again began playing on the fringes of politics. After the Communists and the French had started their Indo-China shooting war in 1946, he formed a resistance movement against them both; it never amounted to much. The French offered to back him as head of a provisional government at one stage, but they balked when he demanded dominion status for Viet Nam. Finally, amid the bloody fighting, Ngo Dinh Diem packed up and left with an older brother, Ngo Dinh Thuc, a Catholic priest, for a trip around the world. Reaching the U.S., Diem paused to rest and meditate at Maryknoll Junior College in Lakewood, N.J. While there, he made trip after trip to Washington to harangue Congressmen and Government officials in the cause of Vietnamese independence. "The French may be fighting the Communists," he insisted, "but they are also fighting the people."
A Few Friends. But the U.S. could not drop its French allies in the midst of a shooting war. Disheartened, Ngo Dinh Diem departed for Belgium to take up a monk's bleak life as a lay member of a Benedictine monastery in Bruges.
Then came disaster at Dienbienphu. Suddenly the defeated French needed peace—and desperately reached for an "independent" who could rally the demoralized Vietnamese and perhaps salvage something out of the shambles. Diem already had moved down to Paris from Bruges, took a hotel room and began dickering with Bao Dai, the young puppet Emperor who was lolling on the Riviera. Finally Premier Joseph Laniel's government authorized Bao Dai to meet Diem's basic demand: independence for Viet Nam.