Word: pibulsonggram
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...nearly 20 years the most agile, deft and eely politician in Southeast Asia's luxuriant political quagmire had been Thailand's steel-willed, soft-voiced Dictator Pibulsonggram. Pibul's favorite color is green, and he found it attractive in everything from U.S. dollars to neckties and the flashy Ford Thunderbird and Mercedes-Benz sports cars in which he liked to hot-rod it along Thailand's highways and byways. In the tinseled and temple-dotted capital of Bangkok, Westerners liked to dismiss Pibul as just another crooked politician. But he was much more than that...
Everybody agrees that the most powerful politician in Thailand is astute Premier Pibulsonggram, but there has long been dispute as to just which of the Premier's closest cronies, his Army field marshal, Sarit Thanarat, or his police chief, General Phao Sriyanond, is the second most powerful. This uncertainty has always suited Pibul just fine...
...ears. In Thailand, as in the neighboring kingdom of Cambodia and to a lesser extent even in Diem's own homeland of South Viet Nam, neutralism and anti-Americanism have shown a marked and steady increase during the past 18 months. Bangkok diplomats just smiled when Thai Premier Pibulsonggram, one of the shrewdest politicians in Southeast Asia, observed blandly of Diem's visit: "Politics won't be discussed. This is a state visit." The fact is that, though Pibulsonggram's public statements are often almost embarrassingly pro-American, he and two of his closest political cronies...
...benign, sometimes malevolent dictatorship whose inner-circle corruption is legendary even in an area where corruption is taken as a matter of course. President Diem's own South Viet Nam regime has its share of corruption, and Diem has autocratic inclinations, but he is personally austere and moralistic. Pibulsonggram rarely if ever sets himself forth as a political philosopher...
Hardest campaigner of all was Pibulsonggram himself. An ardent admirer of U.S. political methods, the 59-year-old Premier zipped about the country in his green Thunderbird, handing out boxes of "Pibul matches" and replicas of his personal Buddha charm. Since Pibul's countrymen reckon that any man who has survived one kidnaping, two attempted assassinations by snooting and one by poisoning must have supernatural luck, the charm went over...