#historic decade

[your-instructions-from-moscow]

STRIFE IN INDOCHINA

Battle of Dien Bien Phu brings end of French rule

Nervous peace ruled war-torn Indochina in 1960 after a decade of turbulence that rewrote the map of this Southeast Asian land.

At Geneva, on July 12, 1954, the French signed away more than 60 years of control over the Associated States of Indochina. For almost five months 14,000 crack French troops had withstood a siege by overwhelming numbers of Communist-led Viet-minh forces at the fortress of Dien Bien Phu in Laos.

U.S. planes airlifted French paratroopers into the battle, but the aid was too little and too late.

By June, 1954, Dien Bien Phu had fallen, and French power with it. After the Geneva capitulation Red troops poured into North Vietnam.

The Geneva agreement split Indochina into four nations. Laos and Cambodia emerged as independent kingdoms, while Vietnam was divided into Korea-like halves — the Communists in the north and a Western-supported regime in the south.

Yet peace did not come after eight years of war. South Vietnamese strongman Ngo Dinh Diem was threatened by Red guerrillas, bandits, and power-hungry religious sects. In Laos, Communist-supported rebels fought Royal Laotian troops in the mountainous northern provinces. Cambodia, its wary eye on Red China, wavered toward "neutralism."

By late 1960, trying to stand on its own feet, Indochina was at a truce, but a truce which was at best uneasy.

Historic Decade 1950-1960 (Year/News Front, 1960)

I’m interested that they don’t say more about Ngo Dinh Diem, except to refer to him as a “strongman”. Diem was still mostly well-regarded in the US press at this time — within three years, however, the Kennedy administration was willing to countenance a coup against him that ended with Diem’s assassination.

[your-instructions-from-moscow]

SHAH OUSTS MOSSADEGH Pro-West Ruler settles oil crisis, takes third bride

Historic Decade 1950-1960 (Year/News Front, 1960)

On 19 August 1953, Mohammad Mosaddegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, was overthrown in a coup covertly backed by Britain and the United States. At issue was Iran’s oil resources, which Mosaddegh and the Iranian parliament had moved to nationalize. The CIA admitted its involvement in the coup sixty years later, in August 2013.

[your-instructions-from-moscow]

PERSONAL TRIUMPHS in the U.S.-USSR cultural exchange program were won by Soviet ballerina Galina Ulanova (L) and U.S. pianist Van Cliburn (above). Ulanova was hailed a “true wonder of her time” by U.S. critics. Cliburn’s Moscow triumph brought him a New York ticker-tape welcome, the first time that honor had ever been extended to a musician.

Historic Decade 1950-1960 (Year/News Front, 1960)

Two books on Van Cliburn and his role in the cultural Cold War have come out recently – Stuart Isacoff's When the World Stopped to Listen: Van Cliburn’s Cold War Triumph, and Its Aftermath and Nigel Cliff's Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story — How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War. You can read a review of them here.