Cold War Mandarin:
Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of America's War in Vietnam, 1950-1963

Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006.

Seth Jacobs, Associate Professor, History Department.

“For almost a decade, the tyrannical Ngo Dinh Diem governed South Vietnam as a one-party police state while the U.S. financed his tyranny. In this new book, Seth Jacobs traces the history of American support for Diem from his first appearance in Washington as a penniless expatriate in 1950 to his murder by South Vietnamese soldiers on the outskirts of Saigon in 1963.

Drawing on recent scholarship and newly available primary sources, Cold War Mandarin explores how Diem became America's bastion against a communist South Vietnam, and why the Kennedy and Eisenhower administrations kept his regime afloat. Finally, Jacobs examines the brilliantly organized public-relations campaign by Saigon's Buddhists that persuaded Washington to collude in the overthrow--and assassination--of its longtime ally.”

- Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

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Seth Jacobs is a political and cultural historian of the United States in the twentieth century, especially the period since World War II, and his research interests focus on the connection between U.S. domestic culture and foreign policy.

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