control to divert the nationalist revolution from Communist objectives (Scheer 21). During the first year of the new government, Diem crushed all sources of opposition left over from the Viet Minh (Scheer 21). By 1959, in the North, the Viet Minh had written off the possibility of the elections that they were supposed to get and turned to military means. This ended the illusory stability of the Diem regime (Scheer 46).Diem was aware that his government could not survive without the massive aid from the United States so he based his whole appeal on anti-communism (Scheer 56). But then, with the “Communist danger” the basis for assuring continued American aid, the “secure” countryside suddenly was overrun with “Communist terrorists” (Scheer 56). At the end of April 1960, eighteen Vietnamese nobles petitioned Diem to liberalize his regime. The petition said continual arrests had filled prisons to overflowing and asserted that a swollen Government bureaucracy was corrupt and inefficient (Scheer 59). In 1961 Edward Landsdale was sent to Vietnam to make an over-all study of the situation. He reported that the situation was near total collapse and that if the policies of the Diem government and its advisers continued to be pursued the country would soon be lost (Scheer 60). It was then decided to increase the Vietnamese Army from 150,000 to 250,000, which was a direct violation of the Geneva Accords, to concentrate its training on counter-insurgency (Scheer 62).The final incidents that led to the coup were a train of abuses, no single one of which was necessarily more important than any other, even though the dramatic Buddhist crisis is frequently cited as the final straw; it was one straw, a dramatic on. On November 1, the generals staged a coup and in the end Diem was killed (Trager 179).In the spring of 1961, the magazine press began to revise its picture of Diem’s government (Scheer 66). ...
