national reunification election was scheduled. Actually there was even less time than that. Ngo Dinh Diem’s authority at first was so tenuous that, if he did not show immediate success, he would lose the support not only of local power brokers but also of his primary outside sponsors, France and the United States, which somehow expected South Vietnam to develop virtually overnight the kind of strong and responsive central government that had taken centuries to emerge elsewhere. Even as he was supervising the movement of refugees from North Vietnam and trying to subvert the Hanoi regime, Edward
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