Word: bunkers
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Following a private meeting with General Minh several months ago, I tried to tell Mr. Kissinger what he should have known anyway: that Minh would not accept his assigned role in a Kissinger-produced, Ellsworth Bunker-directed charade. Minh happens to be an honest man as torn inwardly as his country is torn outwardly by an endless, American-made war. Mr. Kissinger and Ambassador Bunker bear full responsibility for blocking South Vietnamese self-determination and destroying the best chance for peace since the war began...
Atop a grand piano and on a coffee table were autographed color photographs of Richard Nixon, looking flushed, happy and youthful. Abstractions come easily in such surroundings, and Bunker, looking tired but still trim and sage at 77, was nothing if not abstract as he fielded the questions of the testy, aggressive reporters, and discussed his reaction to the political trauma of the past fortnight. ∙ The reporters asked many of the right questions, and felt that they received almost none of the right answers. Had he offered Minh and Ky millions of dollars to run? Had he urged Thieu...
...Bunker's replies were largely unresponsive and uninformative. He reminded the reporters that he had had a long lifetime of experience, that he had seen and done too much ever to be surprised, too much to be disappointed by the failure of a single election. It was almost as if it were 1959, as if Bunker had been discussing whether the U.S. should become involved in Viet Nam. It was as if the past ten years had never happened...
...Bunker is winding up his Viet Nam assignment, and his best hopes, and those of the Administration he represents, have been dashed by Nguyen Van Thieu. Bunker will leave South Viet Nam with an even less viable government than it had when he arrived. That cannot but have weighed heavily on him as the correspondents asked their impertinent, necessary questions. It must have pained him to go through the motions of answering...
Slander and Insolence. None of the principals seemed to appreciate Bunker's efforts to salvage the wrecked election. The ambassador reportedly complained to newsmen that both Ky and Big Minh had told him that they would run only if the U.S. stepped in and bent the election in their favor; Minh noisily denied the story, accusing Bunker of "slander and insolence." For their part, Ky's aides said that the Vice President would go all out to destroy Thieu and "all his clique...