Ngo Dinh Diem

Biography

Ngô Đình Diệm was born in Huế in 1901 into one of Vietnam's oldest Catholic families; his father was a senior mandarin at the imperial court. After graduating at the top of his class in 1921 he entered the civil service and rose quickly, becoming a province chief in Ninh Thuận and in 1929 governor of Bình Thuận.

In 1933 Emperor Bảo Đại made him interior minister, but he resigned after about three months when France rejected his reform proposals, and he denounced the emperor as a French instrument. He spent the following years as a private citizen under surveillance, a Catholic anti-communist nationalist, and from 1950 lived abroad in Japan, the United States and Europe, building support among American officials.

Bảo Đại appointed him prime minister of the State of Vietnam in June 1954, just before the Geneva Conference divided the country. With his brother Ngô Đình Nhu he consolidated power in the south, won a 1955 referendum against Bảo Đại with an implausible majority, and proclaimed the Republic of Vietnam with himself as president. His government relied on American support and faced a growing communist insurgency, which he tried to counter from 1962 with the Strategic Hamlet Program.

His favouritism towards Catholics and repression of Buddhists led to the Buddhist crisis of 1963. On 1 November 1963 the army's senior generals overthrew him with the backing of the CIA; he and Nhu were captured the next day and killed on the orders of Dương Văn Minh.