Ngo Dinh Diem presidential visit to Australia

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Ngo Dinh Diem visited Australia and the United States in 1957
Ngo Dinh Diem visited Australia and the United States in 1957

The Ngo Dinh Diem presidential visit to Australia from September 2 to September 9, 1957 was an official visit from the first President of the Republic of Vietnam.[1] It was part of a year of travelling for Diem who also made an official visit to the United States and other liberal countries that same year.[2] Like his American trip, Diem was warmly and lavishly received during the height of the Cold War by his allies.

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[edit] Development

According to P. Edwards, "Everywhere he was feted as a man of courage, faith and vision", and he noted that Diem was received with "more ceremony and pageantry" than the the visit of Queen Elizabeth II in 1954.[1] A guard of honour and a 21-gun salute was given in Sydney, Melbourne and the capital of Canberra, where large crowds cheered the arrival of his motorcade.[1]

Diem visted the Royal Military College Duntroon in the nation's capital, where he watched and addressed a parade of Australian cadets who were training to become military officers. Diem told the students that they were "comrades of the Free World".[1]

[edit] Support

The Australian media wrote uniformly glowing reports heaping praise on Diem. The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that Diem was "One of the most remarkable men in the new Asia. . .authoritarian in approach but liberal in principle".[1] The Herald showed photographs of the South Vietnamese President eating cheese, visiting a housing estate and inspecting the foliage at the Botanic Gardens. The Melbourne Age compared Diem favourably against Chiang Kai-shek and Syngman Rhee, the Presidents of the Republic of China and South Korea respectively. They were the three leaders of the anti-communist halves of the three countries in Asia that had been divided along communist and anti-communist lines. The Age opined that Diem was not "morally equivocal" but "incorruptible and intensely patriotic" compared to his anti-communist counterparts.[1]

Robert Menzies, Australian Prime Minister for 18.5 years, cheered and decorated Diem
Robert Menzies, Australian Prime Minister for 18.5 years, cheered and decorated Diem

The strongest support for Diem came from the Australian Catholic media.[1] Diem was a Catholic in a majority Buddhist country, and he had close religious links with the Vatican who had helped him rise to power. He had stayed in a seminary run by Cardinal Francis Spellman during a stay in the United States in the early 1950s before his elevation to power. Diem's elder brother, Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc was the leading Catholic figure in Vietnam and a former colleague of Spellman when the pair studied in Rome. Spellman was widely regarded as the most powerful Catholic figure in the United States; and he helped organise support for Diem among American politicians, particularly among Catholics.[3] In 1957, Diem dedicated his country to the Virgin Mary and ruled the country on the basis of a Catholic doctrine known as personalism. His younger brother Ngo Dinh Nhu ran the secret and Catholic Can Lao Party (Personalist Labor Party), that provided a clandestine network of support for Diem's rule. It counted many leading public servants and military officers among its membership.[4] Diem also maintained land policies that were preferential to the Roman Catholic Church. Their land was exempt from land reform; and the construction of Buddhist temples was restricted, while army and civil service promotions were given preferentially to Catholics.[5]

The Catholic Weekly described Diem as "his nation's saviour from Red onslaught. . .an ardent patriot of great courage and moral integrity and an able intellectual".[1] The paper also praised Diem's Catholic links, pointing out that Thuc was a former Rome classmate of the current Archbishop of Sydney.[1]

Diem's achievements and support for Catholics was particularly praised by Bob Santamaria, leader of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP). The DLP was a breakaway party from the Australian Labor Party, the main centre-left social democratic party in the country. This had occurred in the 1950s during the McCarthyism scares, with the Catholic factions of the ALP breaking away to form the DLP on the basis that the ALP was too lenient towards communists.[1]

The government of Prime Minister Robert Menzies strongly backed Diem, one reason for this was to gain further favour with the DLP and to divide further his left wing opponents. Menzies called for three cheers for Diem at an official parliamentary function. He further bestowed on Diem an honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George, one of the highest imperial honours that had been bestowed on someone who was not a British subject. P. Edwards, a historian at the Australian War Memorial specialising in the Vietnam War said of the trip:"Australia had now associated Diem's survivial with its national interest, publicly and without restraint", something that was to later extend to military support against Vietnamese communists.[1]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Ham, p. 57.
  2. ^ Jacobs, pp. 100–104.
  3. ^ Jacobs, pp. 27–32.
  4. ^ Jacobs, pp. 86–88.
  5. ^ Jacobs, pp. 91–96.

[edit] References