After Vietnam’s partition in 1954, the fledgling republic in South Vietnam received a new ruler, Ngo Dinh Diem. His rise to power and eventual overthrow is going to illustrate some of the key internal problems of Southern Vietnam and how its relationship to the US was strained and complex from the very beginning. In this forum, we are going to evaluate the rule of Diem to see how it exemplifies theproblems that Vietnamese had among themselves, how Western politicians were unable to fully fathom how politics was “done” in thispart of the world, and how the relationship between the US and the Republic of Vietnam developed.