Ngo Dinh Diem – Cindy A. Nguyen

Miller, Edward Garvey. Misalliance Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013.

In Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam, Edward Miller contributes a Vietnam-centric perspective to understand the making of 1950’s and 1960’s South Vietnam. Miller argues that the ‘politics of nation building’ informed the United States and Diem government’s ‘misalliance’ or diplomatic relationship from its beginning to demise. Using Vietnamese and American government documents, newspapers, and the MSUG archives, Miller examines the similarities and differences in US and Diem approaches to political centralization, economic development, counterinsurgency, and suppression of political threats. In this way, Miller demonstrates the complexity of nation building as both a discourse and practice that in fact encompassed debates on democracy, community, security, and social change. (325) Most importantly in his narrative, Miller centers Vietnamese agency and attempts to restore Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu as rational, calculated politicians.

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Historian-Artist

Cindy Nguyen is a UC Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in the departments of History and Literature at University of California, San Diego. She previously worked at Brown University. She earned her Ph.D. in History at University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in the history of Vietnam, Southeast Asia print culture, and digital humanities. Her book manuscript, "Bibliotactics: Social Life of Libraries and Colonial Control in Vietnam, 1865-1958" examines the cultural and political history of libraries and a state sponsored public in colonial to postcolonial Vietnam.

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