Erin ’s Reviews > Kennedy's Coup: A White House Plot, a Saigon Murder, and America's Descent into Vietnam > Status Update

For Kennedy, South Vietnam was becoming a bigger political headache with each passing day.

Kennedy couldn't contain his dislike for "this bitch" Madame Nhu.

A sure sign that an administration is in the throes of bureaucratic infighting is a wave of leaks to the press.

Just 46 years old in the summer of 1963, Kennedy was the peak of his powers.

Time, was one of the most the most influential magazines in America with a nationwide circulation in 1963 of nearly 3 million copies a week.

The South Vietnamese government was too clumsy and inefficient to be as ruthlessly totalitarian as Ho's but there were strong similarities.

Signs of the expanding U.S. presence were hard to miss in Saigon.

JFK had paid only intermittent attention to Vietnam during the first 2 years of his presidency.

The top military brass had no interest in digging wells and building schools for peasants and they thought the regular troops under their command could handle a few thousand ill equipped guerrillas just fine. 👀

Many Buddhist never forgot Madame Nhu's sponsorship of the 1958 "family law" banning divorce, polygamy, and concubinage, which they viewed as an attempt to impose rigid Catholic morality on more tolerant Buddhist.