International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest

Extract

The younger brother of Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam from 1955 to 1963, Ngo Dinh Nhu was his brother's closest confidant, serving as minister of the interior until they were both assassinated in 1963. Ngo Dinh Nhu was born in 1910, in Hue. His father, Ngo Dinh Kha, was an important figure at the Vietnamese Imperial Court. Nhu, the fourth of the six Ngo Dinh brothers, was educated in France where he attended university and became interested in the French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier (1905–50), who had developed his own political concept of “personalism,” which would later become the state ideology of South Vietnam – although some of Mounier's adherents were to decry any connection between the French philosopher and the concept of personalism in Vietnam. On his return to Vietnam, Nhu became active as an organizer of the Vietnamese Federation of Christian Workers, the Catholic labor union movement. With the rise to power of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1955, Nhu became the driving force behind the new government, managing to engineer the sacking of General Nguyen Van Hinh as commander of the South Vietnamese Army. Nhu, as minister of the interior, also helped establish the Personalist Labor Party, the Can Lao Nhan Vi – a secret party which was closely organized along the cell structure design of the Communist Party, its bitter enemy. Nhu was also the man most closely associated ... log in or subscribe to read full text