Diem’s main problem was that he had been trained to operate in a different era. Having refused to work with the French, he earned the respect of his peers in the intelligentsia, but he never acquired the knack of building trust and confidence among the wider public, as both Syngman Rhee and Kim Koo of Korea had. He expected to give orders, and they would be obeyed. But that wasn’t the government of the Republic of Viet Nam in his era. The difficulties he encountered encouraged him to confide mostly in senior members of his own family, in effect isolating himself even more. The one thing he needed to do was connect with the Vietnamese masses, and unfortunately his upbringing and education had not prepared him for that role. He simply did not know how to “work a crowd” and in the end that killed him.