South vietnamese rebels against the regime of ngo dinh diem were known as

The Geneva Accords had stipulated that the country would quickly be reunited after national elections. Diem and his brother Nhu, head of the secret police, were overthrown and assassinated in a military coup directed by the CIA and U. Diem’s removal from power set off over a year of political instability that would eventually lead to the direct U. Despite the removal of Diem, the Saigon government remained on the verge of collapse.While military coups wracked Saigon throughout 19, a much deeper crisis was brewing in South Vietnam. These villages were essentially concentration camps designed to separate the peasant population from the guerrillas. administrations tried to do this by first supporting the French in their failed effort to reconquer their former colony, which, under the leadership of the Viet Minh, had declared independence following the end of the war. propaganda in support of its intervention in Vietnam "cast Vietnamese who lived and worked north of the 17th parallel as more foreign to South Vietnam than the Americans, for the Americans were invited as guests, while North Vietnam was an enemy country." While this strategy was initially successful, by the early 1960s it was in complete disarray, as the population of South Vietnam turned increasingly to open rebellion against the Diem regime. One was a rapidly deteriorating situation in South Vietnam, with an NLF victory on the immediate horizon. Among these advisers were Defense Secretary William Mc Namara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisers Walt Rostow and Mc George Bundy.By mid-1964 the various military and political strategies developed by the U. Where they were not torn apart by internal dissention, they were overrun by NLF fighters.Ky would hold onto power until 1967, when elections excluding anyone holding "pro-communist" or "neutralist" views delivered Ky’s position to Thieu, who won with only 35 percent of the vote. If this wasn’t enough to prove their loyalty to the Americans, they pledged, on March 1, 1965, that they would never negotiate with the NLF or the North Vietnamese. insisted on calling the nationalists–controlled 40—50 percent of the countryside. S.-sponsored counter-insurgency tactics, rather than strengthening the regime, were turning the mass of the peasantry against it.Joe Allen is a union activist in Teamsters Local 705 in Chicago. FROM THE end of the Second World War to 1965, the United States attempted to prevent the triumph of the nationalist forces in Vietnam without the large-scale use of its own troops. Following the defeat of the French at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the U. strategy was to partition Vietnam along the 17th parallel and create an anti-communist puppet state in the southern half of the country around the figure of Ngo Dinh Diem. policy aimed at making the 17th parallel a permanent dividing line. By the end of 1963, the Kennedy administration decided that Diem had to go in order to forestall the collapse of the Saigon government. Despite the removal of the Diem family, who were a political liability, the Saigon government continued to spiral downward and the revolutionary movement led by the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF) continued to move forward. Regime changes in Saigon The emergence of an exceptional leader could improve the situation and no George Washington is in sight. The second was a coterie of advisers who had presided over America’s deepening involvement in Vietnam and who were now arguing for an even more dramatic escalation of U. These were the men who would eventually take the U. into total war in Vietnam, but in the meantime they struggled with finding the "right man" to lead the Saigon government.Minh infuriated the Americans by making a rapprochement with the Buddhist forces that organized massive demonstrations against the Diem regime.In fact, the CIA learned that Khanh had contacted the NLF in December 1964, and had had more serious contacts with them in January and February 1965. The leading figure was Ky, who became prime minister (Thieu became chief of state). by working for the CIA in covert operations against North Vietnam in the early 1960s. Ky and Thieu were both trained by the French and had fought against their own people in the First Vietnam War.Soon after, the Americans spearheaded another military coup, this time organized by the Military Assistance Command-Vietnam, the main body that U. military aid and "advisers" were organized through in Vietnam. However, he immediately ran into a renewed wave of antiwar activity from the Bhuddists and radical students of South Vietnam. Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, a retired general who returned to government service under Kennedy, brought enormous pressure to bear on Khanh, who subsequently left Vietnam for exile in France.They also made it clear that they would follow the lead of Washington on all military, political and diplomatic affairs. The Strategic Hamlet program, in which peasants were forcibly uprooted from their traditional villages and burial grounds and concentrated into walled camps, was a disaster.This coup, at the end of January 1964, has gone down in the history books as the "Pentagon Coup," and it brought to power General Nguyen Khanh. He was committed to fighting the war against the NLF, and seemed whole-heartedly to accept military and political strategies emanating from the U. Khanh was completely thrown off balance by this and began to talk about a negotiated end to the war. Power now passed to the military triumvirate of Generals Nguyen Cao Ky, Nguyen Chanh Thi and Nguyen Van Thieu. by telling reporters that his only real hero was Hitler.It was plagued by a series of military coups following Diem’s assassination, sponsored by the U.Minh also began to describe his government as "non-communist" as opposed to "anti-communist" and raised the possibility of his government adopting a diplomatic position of "neutrality" in world affairs.

He began talking about possibly opening talks with the NLF.