Word: nam
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...Paris, Mendesès-France told reporters: "I have reason to smile." The only arguments left, said the British, were 1) whether the French would be allowed to keep a right of access to the port of Haiphong, and 2) how soon elections should be held in Viet Nam. The Communists wanted them soon, confident that electoral victory would win them the parts of Viet Nam that they had not got around to taking by force of arms. The French wanted elections late, hoping that in, say, 18 months, a stronger independent government might win the support of the Vietnamese...
...Communists-was in the air. From India, Nehru cabled Britain's Anthony Eden after his meeting in New Delhi with Red China's Chou Enlai. Little now divided the French from the Chinese, Chou had told Nehru. There would be a line drawn across Viet Nam. Laos and Cambodia would be independent but "neutral." These terms, Chou said, had been accepted by Mendeès-France...
...their U.S.-made carbines whenever French officers passed by, but they would not salute the Vietnamese. And the French, bent on a settlement in Indo-China, were quick to snub the Vietnamese delegates in conference; they unquestioningly accepted such Communist terms as "People's Democratic Republic of Viet Nam" instead of the customary "Viet Minh"; they did not protest when the Communists spoke only of the "French Union command" instead of the "Franco-Vietnamese command." The French and the Communists had so rigged Trunggia's ground rules that the Vietnamese were entitled to speak only through the senior...
...years before World War II, the French invested $2 billion in Indo-China, almost all of it in Viet Nam. They built 13,800 miles of roads, railroads and canals; they reduced infant mortality by 50%; their irrigation projects brought 13 million more acres under cultivation. But they were frequently overbearing, took excessive profits out of the country, and were slow about granting any kind of independence to the Vietnamese...
...Indo-China war's third year, the French installed Bao Dai, playboy descendant of old Annamite kings, as Viet Nam's chief of state. But Bao Dai usually complied with French demands, and therefore got almost no public support, while Moscow Servant Ho Chi Minh was often admired simply because he was anti-French. Not until last month did Viet Nam get a genuinely nationalist Prime Minister, Ngo Dinh Diem - probably too late to make up for France's long refusal to prepare the Vietnamese for self-government and self-defense, probably too late to save...