South
Vietnam's unlikely leader
dies By Donald Kirk
PANAMA CITY, Florida - Here in the Florida
panhandle, looking over the Gulf of Mexico,
ruminating on old times covering the Vietnam War
with Don Tate, another correspondent from those
days, we had to have a few laughs over one of the
war's more colorful figures.
Could any of
the cast of characters we encountered then have
been a more unlikely leader of the country into
which American leaders were pouring blood and
treasure than Nguyen Cao Ky, the flyboy from Hanoi
who was actually the prime minister of South
Vietnam for two years in the mid-1960s?
"I
liked him," said Tate, who was covering Vietnam
for the Scripps-Howard newspapers while I was with
the old Washington
(DC) Star. "I liked those
purple scarves. He always seemed like he wanted to
win the war."
It was easy to make light of
Ky for what he was, the pampered puppet of the
American war machine, the opportunist who rose to
power after the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem
when, really, there was no one else around. Still,
when he died a few days ago at the age of 80, it
was hard to find anything really bad to say about
a man whose name conjured so many memories of
chance meetings with an amiable person who was
more a symbol of his times than an important
actor.
"I only really saw him once," said
Tate. "He was watching a doubles [tennis] match at
the Cercle Sportif [in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh
City]. I was playing with another American against
two of Vietnam's best players. He was there with
other Cercle members judging whether we should be
accepted as members. They were acting like they
didn't know a war was going on."
Somehow
that was Ky as I remembered him too. I first saw
him in September 1965 at a fetid refugee camp on
the outskirts of Saigon. He looked trim in his
black flyboy outfit, smart scarf, thin trimmed
black mustache, as he promised aid and comfort to
thousands trying to eke out an existences after
the loss of their homes in villages turned into
battlegrounds, caught in the crossfire, wiped out
in bombing or forcibly moved to make way for "free
fire zones".
If Ky at 34 was abstractly
aware of the suffering of millions of his
countrymen, as leader of the Saigon elite he
hardly seemed one of the people he was making a
show of leading. Rather, he preferred to distance
himself from cruel realities, raking in the perks
due one in his position while scheming against a
long list of rivals, notably an American favorite
named Nguyen Van Thieu.
Ky as a leader
wasn't so much a "dictator", though he did order
the execution of one Chinese businessman accused
of corruption, as an embarrassment. The Americans
had a problem trying to present him as a
democratic leader of a free world nation.
His great pronouncement, as prime minister
and a former pilot, born in Hanoi, trained to
fight the Viet Minh during the French colonial
era, one of millions who fled south after the
defeat of the French in 1954, was the South
Vietnamese should invade the North, wipe out the
forces of Ho Chi Minh and unite the country.
Ky's American sponsors found the rambling
of this playboy/flyboy more than a little
embarrassing. After putting up with him for a
couple of years as prime minister, the Americans
in 1967, in a great if useless exercise in
face-saving, got him to run as vice president on a
ticket led by Thieu, a more convincing figure
though doomed not by his own incompetence or
corruption but simply by the impossibility of
holding on after the US withdrew its last troops
six years later.
Life for Ky, after his
fling as prime minister, was mostly downhill.
Nonetheless, he had fun. I ran into him again at
the opening of some kind of art exhibition in
central Saigon. I'm not sure of the year, much
less the date, but the big question then was when
the US would begin withdrawing its forces, swollen
to more than 500,000 troops in 1968, the year of
the Tet, May and September offensives.
Lyndon Johnson, the hapless American
president, had already said he would not seek a
second term, and he had announced a bomb halt.
Spokespeople in Washington and Saigon were
supposed to make a simultaneous announcement on
troop withdrawals.
I asked Ky what they
were going to say. The US, he told me with a sly
smile, would begin pulling out troops. My story
made a banner headline across the top of the Star,
an afternoon paper, upstaging the announcement
that was expected in a few hours.
Ky was
around until the end of the war, getting out by
helicopter after the North Vietnamese swarmed over
Saigon at the end of April 1975, but loved to
talk. I interviewed him again after he wrote a
book, Twenty Years and Twenty Days,
published a year later in 1976.
Then with
the Chicago Tribune, I met him in Tribune Tower in
Chicago. I can't remember exactly what I wrote,
just that he was the same slyly smiling figure
whom I had seen now and then in the old days.
Basically, he believed the Americans had gone back
on their one-time South Vietnamese ally, and he
yearned for a return to the good old days when
nationalists would take over from communists.
I read about Ky from time to time after
that - about how he was running a liquor store in
California, organizing Vietnamese refugees, maybe
exploiting them, all that.
He was a
forgotten figure, as far as I was concerned, one
of a long line of former US friends who'd lost
their jobs and come to live off American largesse.
That was until April 30, 2005, when I
encountered him one last time. There he was, in a
fancy nightclub called Maxim's, still going strong
next to the Majestic Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City
where I'd lived for two years and written a book,
Wider War: The Struggle for Cambodia, Thailand
and Laos. I couldn't believe this one-time
anti-communist had not only made his peace with
the enemy but returned with his beautiful wife and
was living it up as in the old days.
Along
with other former Vietnam War correspondents, I
had to go over to his table, shake hands and ask
him what and how he was doing. I can't recall the
exact quote but the gist was simply, times have
changed, now we are at peace. He had returned, he
said, on business, to make deals with his former
enemies.
"How did he behave," Tate, the
author of Bravo Burning, about American
troops fighting and dying in Dak To, asked me here
in Panama City. "Was he having a good time as
always?" I had to say he was.
"He was one
of these guys you remember," said Tate. "He
sticks." True.
Donald Kirk covered the
war in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos for nine years
in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He wrote two
books about it, Wider War and Tell it
to the Dead, and hundreds of newspaper and
magazine articles. He served variously as Asia
correspondent for the Washington (DC) Star and Far
East correspondent for the Chicago Tribune.
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