Big Minn: The Patient Conciliator

The man considered most likely to take charge of dismantling the Saigon regime was one of that regime's principal architects: General Duong Van ("Big") Minn. Nearly twelve years ago, Minh helped usher in the period of South Vietnamese history that is now rushing to a close. He and a group of fellow officers began it all by toppling the unpopular, autocratic President Ngo Dinh Diem. If Minh is now chosen to preside over the transfer of effective political power to the Communists, it will be largely for one reason: the past dozen years have left him relatively untainted by either the fervent anti-Communist politics of the Saigon leadership or too close an association with the Americans. In fact, he has consistently advocated a conciliatory, neutralist policy toward the Communists.

Minh, 59, has long been one of South Viet Nam's most durable and well-liked leaders. A southerner, born in My Tho, 35 miles southwest of Saigon, and a Buddhist, he was educated in a French lycee and served in the French colonial army. He was once a student of President Tran Van Huong, whom he generally addresses by the respectful term "Master." Imprisoned by the Japanese during World War II, Minh had half of his teeth yanked out by torturers. He now wears a bridge.

Under the Diem regime, Minh gained renown as a brave "soldier's soldier" in the campaign he led in the 1950s against the notorious Binh Xuyen bandits, a kind of Vietnamese Cosa Nostra (also known as the "whorehouse gang") that pillaged the countryside and controlled vice in Saigon. Blunt, athletic and honest, he was given the sobriquet "Big" by U.S. military advisers because he was unusually large for a Vietnamese--nearly 6 ft. tall and 200 Ibs. Minh impressed Diem and in 1958 was appointed the first boss of a field-operations command that coordinated the mounting war against the Viet Cong guerrillas. While in this post, Minh gradually became critical of Diem's arbitrary ways; he also noted a lack of popular support in the struggle against the Communists.

After Diem was executed in the 1963 coup, Minh became chief of state. He was ousted a mere three months later, having proved himself to be an ineffective administrator, and went into exile in Thailand. When he attempted to return in 1965, the tower at Saigon's Tan Son Nhut airport refused to grant his plane landing clearance; he had to return, humiliated to Bangkok. Three years later, Thieu--in what he described as part of a move toward national reconciliation--invited Minh back to Saigon. There Minh bided his time, tending the orchid garden at his spacious villa and meeting regularly with many of South Viet Nam's dissident politicians and religious leaders.

Only rarely did Minh speak out. An exception was in June 1971, when Minh said that reconciliation between Communists and non-Communists in South Viet Nam had to be "based on a formula of peaceful coexistence, denying either side the right to exterminate the other." Minh was careful to avoid provoking the Thieu regime into taking any action against him. Nonetheless he remained high on any list of possible leaders of a neutralist faction--especially after the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 specifically called for the participation of a "third force" (representing the middle ground between the Saigon regime and the Communists) in a national council of conciliation and concord. Should he now be called upon to become South Viet Nam's conciliator, he might wield real power even more briefly than he did the last time.

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