MISSION IN TORMENT By John Meek-I’m. 318 pages. Doubleday. $4.95. The overthrow and subsequent murder of President Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963 opened a political Pandora’s box in Saigon. Since that ...

Few events of the Vietnam War are more contentious than the Kennedy administration’s role in the fatal coup d’état against South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. In ...

To PRESIDENT Ngo Dinh Diem and his family, the Buddhist crisis last summer was a cleverly contrived political conspiracy designed to bring down the government by a coup d’etat. They blamed the ...

Saigon, South Vietnam, 1963: A Vietnam marine celebrates on the streets after the successful coup deposing president Ngo Dinh Diem on Nov. 1, 1963, by a group of Army of the Republic of Vietnam ...

THE smoke lifted quickly from the broad avenues surrounding Saigon’s Gia Long palace. In the bright sunlight, the pattern of violence came clear—raw shell holes, the black tongue-traces of ...