The History of the South Vietnamese Coup

The Orthodox narrative really glosses over the period of 1962 and 1963, when there's actually a remarkable turnaround in the war effort. President Xi'am stands for it for a while, but eventually gets to the point where his own generals are telling him, you really can't allow this to continue. And so Ambassador Henry Cabot-Lauch decides that, well, why don't we get the generals to overthrow President Xi’am and have them run the country? But the opposite happens, and the new generals purge a lot of the leadership out of suspicion about their loyalty. By all accounts, the war effort goes into a nosedive.