604 Vietnam

First  viewed : 25  April  1983

This  was  a  long  documentary  series  on  Channel  4  about  the  post-war  history  of  the  South  East  Asian  country  in  which  the  U.S.  became  so  fatally  involved. The  episode  I  watched  concerned  the  ill-fated  President  Diem  who  tried  to  hold  South  Vietnam  against  the  Communist  threat  from,  the  North  in  the  fifties  and  early  sixties.

What  gave  this  story  human  interest  was  that  Diem  increasingly  relied  on  his  family to  operate  his  government  including  his  younger  brother  Nhu  and  his  colourful  wife  Madame  Nhu  who  could  always  be  relied  on  to  make  a  bad  situation  worse  with  her  intemperate  remarks.

Eventually  Diem  and  Nhu  were  assassinated  in  a  military  coup in  1963; the  culpability  of  Kennedy's  administration  in  this  has  always  been  a  contentious  issue. Madame  Nhu  was  not  in  the  country  at  the  time  and  had  to  live  out  the  rest  of  her  days  in  exile  in France. She  died  in  2011.