Word: ho
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...Room for Both. Ngo Dinh Diem seems at first glance an improbable man for a fight against Ho Chi Minh, the wispy, twisting onetime chef's assistant who is so resolutely Communist, yet so clever that much of Asia still toys with the notion that he is really just a Vietnamese patriot. Diem's career has grown mostly out of negative decisions. He is a sparsely gifted administrator, and of politics he says: "Clever maneuvers only betray, demoralize and divide the people." To some of the more sophisticated in the game, he rates as a marginal...
...such is Viet Nam, disgusted with colonialism and its vices, frustrated in its yearning for freedom, that a leader's integrity is more important than his ability. Communist Ho has built popular support not altogether with wiliness and Communist doctrine, but also with incorruptibility and his undeviating enmity for French colonial rule. Ngo Dinh Diem brings into the battle an incorruptibility even greater and his own record of a lifetime's opposition to French rule and influence. "There are only two real leaders in Viet Nam," Ho's chief of staff, General Vo Nguyen Giap, recognized some...
...reserved, talk too much by nuance. We ought to learn to be rude in our talk like the Americans, and get things done." Diem rarely speaks harshly of fellow Vietnamese who are Communists, because he hopes to convert them; he intends to oppose the twisted dialectic of Ho Chi Minh with the lotus of morality. Yet he recognizes that Communists are not creatures to be toyed with. "You must be sure to kill when you hunt tigers," he once said. "A wounded tiger becomes a mankiller to get food...
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...
...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...