Quote Originally Posted by stanleywinthrop View Post
My main beef is that you initally played this passage as Moyar's main belief about why western media did not like Diem. He clearly states in other places (which I will reference when I get my book back,if you desire) the reasons he thinks they disliked Diem (which I explained above), which have nothing to do with the Social Purification Law.
Apologies if my snarky tone led you to interpret it in that fashion. My main intent was to mock Moyar's unironic belief in the effectiveness of Madam Nhu's Social Purification Law, of a piece with his generally unskeptical attitude toward many of Diem's policies.

Because his main mission was not as a propoganda officer, you think Moyar should take his communications at face value? Where does Moyar say that Pham behaved stupidly enough that SVN intelligence should have suspected him?
Moyar says that Pham influenced journalists like Karnow, Halberstam, and Sheehan, whom he largely blames for Diem's downfall, in an anti-Diem direction without providing any evidence except that Pham was a Communist agent. That Pham might have acted in the opposite direction to preserve his more important mission as intel operative and analyst is not credited or discussed. See pg. 215 of Moyar.

Skimming over a bit more of pg. 215, I also see that Moyar apparently believes that Confucianism is a religion, that being a member of the Confucian "religion" means one cannot be a Buddhist or harbor Buddhist beliefs, and that Vietnamese peasants approved of governments that crushed public demonstrations with force.