Ngo Dinh Diem - Presidency

Presidency

Madame Nhu, the wife of Diệm's younger brother Nhu, was South Vietnam's de facto First Lady, and a Catholic convert herself. She led the way in Diệm's programs to reform Saigon society in accordance with Catholic values. Brothels and opium dens were closed, divorce and abortion made illegal, and adultery laws strengthened. Diệm won a street war with the private army of the Bình Xuyên organised crime syndicate of the Cholon brothels and gambling houses who had enjoyed special favors under the French and Bảo Đại. He further dismantled the private armies of the Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo religious sects, which controlled parts of the Mekong Delta. Diệm was passionately anti-Communist. Tortures and killings of communist suspects were committed on a daily basis. The death toll was put at around 50,000 with 75,000 imprisonments, and Diệm's effort extended beyond communists to anti-communist dissidents and anti-corruption whistleblowers.

As opposition to Diệm's rule in South Vietnam grew, a low-level insurgency began to take shape there in 1957. Finally, in January 1959, under pressure from southern Viet Cong cadres who were being successfully targeted by Diệm's secret police, Hanoi's Central Committee issued a secret resolution authorizing the use of armed insurgency in the South with supplies and troops from the North. On 20 December 1960, under instructions from Hanoi, southern communists established the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF) in order to overthrow the government of the south. The NLF was made up of two distinct groups: South Vietnamese intellectuals who opposed the government and were nationalists; and communists who had remained in the south after the partition and regrouping of 1954 as well as those who had since come from the north, together with local peasants. While there were many non-communist members of the NLF, they were subject to the control of the party cadres and increasingly side-lined as the conflict continued; they did, however, enable the NLF to portray itself as a primarily nationalist, rather than communist, movement, despite being in almost direct control by the Northern regime. The cornerstone of Diệm's counterinsurgency effort was the Strategic Hamlet Program, which called for the consolidation of 14,000 villages of South Vietnam into 11,000 secure hamlets, each with its own houses, schools, wells, and watchtowers. The hamlets were intended to isolate the NLF from the villages, their source of recruiting soldiers, supplies and information.