Thieu: Between Himself and His God

All week long, Saigon was buzzing with rumors about President Nguyen Van Thieu. One air force officer, after swearing his family to secrecy, told them that the President was under house arrest. Some said that the President was preparing to flee the country. Others heard that he was ready to resign.

A Saigon editor, once sympathetic to Thieu, had a plausible explanation for all the unfounded stories circulating about the elusive and enigmatic South Vietnamese President. "As the West has left Thieu," the editor said, "Thieu has increasingly abandoned the West to withdraw into a historical autocracy. He sees fewer and fewer people, trusts fewer advisers, believes fewer friends. He has come to rule as if government is more a personal affair between himself and his God than between himself and his people."

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The current crisis has hit South Viet Nam during the President's tenth year in power. The son of a small landowner, Thieu, now 52, became a career soldier who fought for the French against the Communists in 1947-54 and played an important role in the overthrow of President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. Born a Buddhist, he converted to Roman Catholicism at the time of his marriage to Mai Anh, a doctor's daughter, in 1951. Because he was regarded as a moderate who could ease the differences between militant Catholic and Buddhist factions, Thieu in June 1965 was chosen by his fellow officers to head South Viet Nam's tenth government within 19 months. But he won a reputation as a tough military man who could unite his countrymen in the war against the Communists. In 1967 he was elected President after South Viet Nam's first Western-style political campaign; and four years later, amid charges of harassment of other parties, he was re-elected unopposed.

The intervening years have served to create a perhaps inevitable barrier between Thieu and the people he leads. These days, he rarely uses the Presidential Palace on Cong Ly Boulevard, which is barricaded from the rest of Saigon by sentry boxes, steel barriers and tangles of barbed wire. He moves behind a curtain of almost total secrecy, constantly switching locations between a series of private addresses within and outside the city. Since the attack on Ban Me Thuot on March 10, he has not appeared in public or even been photographed.

Last week Thieu finally broke his long public silence, but he did so in a characteristically detached way. Just before he was due to make a national television speech of encouragement to his people, he spoke to General Ngo Quang Truong. ARVN commander in the northermost Military Region I. Perhaps realizing the seriousness of the military situation for the first time, Thieu first canceled the speech but then gave it a day later.

In the address he urged his countrymen to maintain their "unfaltering anti-Communist determination." But he avoided any direct mention of his decision to abandon large portions of his country--or of the hundreds of thousands of newly created refugees who were already choking the nation's road ways. In previous times, Thieu has sometimes been criticized for postponing decisions. Last week's decision --surely one of the most agonizing of his career--was based on the new realities in both Saigon and Washington, and was made with surprising speed.

Despite the current troubles in South Viet Nam, Thieu's leadership does not appear to be in immediate jeopardy. His power base remains firmly rooted in the army, which, according to one Western diplomat. Thieu has successfully "neutralized" through his shrewd handling of promotions and assignments. Thieu is no longer obliged to listen to the views of the U.S. embassy as he once was. "The Americans have less control these days," says a senior diplomat in Saigon. "They are pretty much out of the business of advising." Nonetheless, many South Vietnamese assume that Thieu is still the Americans' favorite and that whatever U.S. aid the country receives in the future would be contingent upon his remaining in power.

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Still another reason for Thieu's durability in office is that he has no political opponents who are taken seriously as individuals--although the opposition movement has many followers (TIME, Feb. 17). "They are a lot of little men squabbling," says one European observer in Saigon. "A so-called 'third force' in politics simply doesn't exist." This is partly true because of Thieu's knack of alternately ignoring and circumventing the National Assembly set up 7 1/2 years ago. He has managed to stalemate the Assembly for months over two important bills--one that would guarantee press freedom, another that would recognize political parties besides Thieu's own. In the meantime, five of Saigon's 14 newspapers remain banned and all 24 opposition parties are illegal, as they have been for the past three years.

As both soldier and politician, Nguyen Van Thieu has fought the Communist menace from the North, and it remains his abiding passion today. "We must be as patient as the Communists are," he mused last January. "My son, my grandson, my great-grandson must be patient." As for himself, Thieu added: "I will never desert. I may be overthrown, but I will never desert."

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