Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
CONFIDENTIAL
At the table, he shows that he enjoys eating (and usually has a good appetite). His smile is shy and infrequent. Usually he is serious and becomes passionately so when he talks about his true love, Vietnam. Age lines show around his eyes, particularly on those mornings when he has stayed up most of the night reading, which is often. He reads in English, French, and Vietnamese. While he speaks and understands English rather well, he is embarrassed over his pronunciation and is reluctant to use it. In his official contacts with Americans, he uses French.
Diem was born in Hue, the ancient capital in central Vietnam, on 13 January 1901. His 60 years have been full of sharp tests of his moral courage, of devotion to a highly-principled ideal of patriotism. This is worth understanding, particularly since the truth has been hidden by decades of "character assassination" by his bitterest enemies, the Communists and the French colonialists. Much false information has stuck, by sheer repetition. The truth is even more interesting.
For example, in the Spring of 1955 the Presidential Palace was under artillery fire from the Binh Xuyen forces, who opened up on his bedroom wing with 81-mm. mortars at midnight. The French colons in the Saigon bars told a story with great glee of how Diem had hidden under his bed quivering with fear. What he actually did was typically different. He went out in his night-shirt into the Palace grounds where some of the Guard Battalion had abandoned their artillery to take cover, and drove them back to their guns with a tongue-lashing while paddling round the yard in a pair of old slippers.
When someone describes him as an aloof mandarin. I recall how he cried on my shoulder when our close friend, Trinh Minh The, was killed, his anguish over the loss of Phat Diem province in the North to the Communists, and the agony he went through in his final break with Chief of State Bao Dai. He simply doesn't parade his feelings for everyone to see, particularly when things are going wrong.
President Diem has been criticized for his "family," meaning primarily the influence of his younger brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu (pronounced as "No Din New"), and Madame Nhu. This younger brother
CONFIDENTIAL
