Word: minh
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...news. The two World Wars and the Korean conflict, for instance, all started during the warm months. Last summer it was the Middle East skyjackings. In 1969 there was a news eruption: the first moon landing, Chappaquiddick, the original Woodstock, the Sharon Tate murders, the death of Ho Chi Minh. The year before that, the Democrats, the police and the protesters had their uproar in Chicago, L.B.J. nominated his old friend Abe Fortas for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and the Russians marched on Prague...
...about the script for South Viet Nam's presidential elections in October. Authored in part by U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, the plan called for an earnestly contested race among three candidates-President Nguyen Van Thieu, Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky and retired four-star General Duong Van ("Big") Minh. If Thieu won a reasonably honest election, the scenario went, the Administration could declare Vietnamization a resounding success and step up the pace of its withdrawal from the longest war in U.S. history...
...popular Big Minh, Thieu's only real rival for the presidency, abruptly pulled out of the campaign, charging that the election was a "disgusting farce" blatantly rigged by the Presidential Palace. The only other potential rival, Ky, had already been shut out-at least "provisionally"-by a highly restrictive election law. Then, after a palace showdown between Bunker and Thieu following Big Minh's withdrawal, the nine justices of South Viet Nam's Supreme Court met and ruled that Ky could qualify as a candidate after all. Ostensibly, what had started as a three-man campaign...
...Days. Even if Ky were to throw all his energies into a campaign, such a race could only have a grotesquely one-sided result. Ky's support is mainly among the military, northern Catholic refugees, and some Buddhists, plus whatever votes he might pick up from Minh's anti-Thieu supporters. Deprived of any chance of unseating Thieu by political means, South Viet Nam's voters could well turn to other methods. Last week, a crippled war veteran doused himself with gasoline and set himself ablaze on a downtown street to protest Ky's earlier provisional...
...electoral debacle pointed up the U.S.'s declining leverage in Saigon. The U.S. embassy in Saigon badly underestimated what Ky acidly describes as Thieu's "excessive attachment to power"-a syndrome that is not unknown to Ky and Minh, who have both held power with U.S. backing in the past. The flaw in the U.S. thinking was that no one foresaw how far Thieu was willing to go to ensure his own reelection...