South Vietnam: Autopsy of a Compound Crisis

Abstract

The brief twenty-year existence of the Government of Vietnam (GVN) (1956–1975) actually comprised two still briefer periods: the formative era of Ngo Dinh Diem’s presidency (1956–1963) during which civil war was sporadic and the U.S. presence limited, and the full-fledged wartime era (1963–1975) from Diem’s death to the fall of the South Vietnamese government, during which the U.S. presence was very large. Perceptions of the Government of Vietnam as a tyranny grew in direct proportion to the severity of the war, the size of the American presence, and the U.S. domestic interest in South Vietnam that flowed from both. For the most part, these perceptions reflected a superficial understanding of conditions in Vietnam, and the distortions of political partisanship in and around the antiwar movement.