After the Geneva Accords of 1954, French influence in South Vietnam was rapidly replaced by a growing US role. But the US had limited direct experience with Vietnamese politics and politicians. As American officials sought to shape South Vietnam into a viable state that could compete with the communist North, they cast about for a leader to sponsor. The choice proved fateful. US officials settled upon a non-communist politician named Ngo Dinh Diem, who was maneuvered into the post of Prime Minister (appointed by Bao Dai) with the assistance of the CIA. A saying often heard in the State Department at the time was: "Sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem" (if you pronounce "Diem" correctly, it almost rhymes). Although Eisenhower would call Diem a "miracle worker" in 1957 and compare him with America's own founding fathers, Diem ultimately proved a disastrous choice who almost capsized the ship of state in fledgling South Vietnam.

    Diem possessed several qualities that recommended him to the Eisenhower Administration. Diem had served as a provincial official in the 1930s, but resigned in protest over disagreeable orders from his French superiors (thus establishing some credibility as a nationalist). He spoke English and spent time in the US. Most of all, he was known as an ardent anti-communist. In his first months in office, Diem appeared to justify US hopes. Against long odds, he crushed a number of opponents (including a major criminal network that had virtually controlled Saigon) and established a semblance of order in the chaotic turmoil that accompanied the end of French rule.

    Over time, however, Diem's liabilities came to outweigh his strengths:

    - Diem had remained aloof from his nation's struggle to free itself of French colonial rule. Indeed, he spent a portion of the war years cloistered at a monastery in New Jersey. He took office as a relative unknown.

    - Diem was a fervent Catholic in a country that was 90% Buddhist. Remember that Catholics were often regarded with suspicion as many had been favored by the French. Worse, Diem actively persecuted Buddhist leaders, closing temples and arresting monks. By the early sixties, Buddhist monks were literally setting themselves on fire in the streets of Saigon in acts of protest and defiance of Diem and his anti-Buddhist policies.

    - Diem was no democrat. In 1955, he organized a referendum asking people to choose between himself and Bao Dai as South Vietnam's first president. Diem won with close to 100% of the vote. More votes were cast in Saigon than there were registered voters. The election was transparently fixed, as was each subsequent vote in South Vietnam during the Diem era. Diem saw himself as a father figure to the people (his children) in the confusianist tradition.

    - This family metaphor extended to nepotism. Diem filled top posts in his administration with family members and close friends. Most conspicuous was Diem's brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, who headed the secret police and acquired a reputation for brutality and corruption.

    - The most pressing issue for South Vietnam's peasant majority was land reform. Yet Diem rejected American pleas that he implement reforms designed to create a fairer distribution of land in the countryside. Indeed, Diem reversed the land reforms that had been carried out by the Vietminh in areas they controlled during the war against the French. Land was often returned to former landlords. Also, several million Catholics fled from North to South after the 1954 partition left the North in communist hands. Diem distributed land to these fellow Catholics, ignoring the needs of impoverished peasants in the South. Along with urban dwellers dependent upon government jobs and US aid, landlords and Catholics constituted the core of Diem's narrow political coalition.

    - In the late fifties, Diem carried out a program of arrests and assassinations against suspected communists which led to the deaths of 50,000 people.

    - The top echelons of Diem's military forces were filled with officers who had served in the puppet army created by the French before 1954. Military promotions were based not upon competence, but upon perceived loyalty to Diem. After surviving an attempted coup de etat in 1961, Diem diverted his best forces away from the fight against the communists that had by then resumed and stationed these forces near Saigon in hopes that they might come to his aid the next time that his rule was challenged.

    US officials became increasingly unhappy with Diem. He ignored their advice to fight corruption and to carry out genuine reforms that might broaden his political base of support. Yet the US was reluctant to cut off the massive aid that sustained Diem's regime precisely because it appeared so weak. A visible weakening of US support would have emboldened Diem's many enemies. The US feared that the resulting chaos would work to the advantage of the communists. Thus, oddly, Diem was immune to pressure despite his dependence upon US military and economic aid.

    In the end, the Kennedy Administration began to planning for a clean break - a military coup that would sweep away Diem with a minimum of turmoil. US officials conspired with coup planners in Saigon over a period of months, although disagreement among Kennedy's advisors meant that US enthusiasm for a coup rose and fell numerous times during this period. In 1963, the coup planners finally acted in the belief that they had US support. Diem and his brother were hunted down and murdered (this had not been part of the US plan - it had been hoped that Diem would agree to leave the country).

    US aid continued to flow to the new government, but the political stability that US officials hoped for did not materialize. While Diem had been brutal and unpopular, he was at least strong and decisive. What followed his death was a revolving door of coups and counter-coups. US officials grew impatient (it is said that President Johnson reacted to one report of political instability in Saigon by banging his fist on his desk and shouting: "I don't want to hear any more about this coup shit!"). With no stable government in place, the communist gained strength until, by 1964, South Vietnam was on the verge of collapse, prompting the US to send its own combat troops to salvage the situation in early 1965.

    The period between 1954 and the resumption of warfare in 1960 was a golden opportunity for the US and South Vietnam's leadership to build a popular, democratic and reformist alternative to the communist North. Had a strong, well governed state emerged, the South could perhaps have fended off the communists with modest US support and without the necessity to send US combat troops. Alas, "nation-building" is not so easy, especially in a divided society emerging from a century of colonial oppression and a decade of war. No amount of US aid could compensate for the weakness of the non-communist political class in South Vietnam. When political solutions failed, the US ultimately resorted to military might. This delayed by a decade the reunification of Vietnam under communist rule. But South Vietnam's long term survival proved undoable.