Word: quang
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Auspicious to Attack. South Viet Nam's Buddhists last week worked themselves into their most auspicious political position since the fall of Diem. Under Tri Quang's leadership, they wrested from Ky and the military government every concession that the angry street mobs had been demanding: elections for a constitution-making assembly by September at the latest, an amnesty for arrested rioters, the resignation of the present government as soon as elections take place. It hardly seemed to matter that it was a triumph more of timing than of substance. After all, it was Premier Ky who, in a speech...
...Quang, timing is everything, and there were many reasons why he may have felt the time ripe to attack the government and force the election date to be advanced. The war was going extremely well, and before long the Ky government might have become entrenched beyond uprooting. More likely, he correctly judged that if the election process was lengthy, his opponents, notably the Catholics, would have time to get organized. As it stands, only the Buddhists can be ready for elections as early as September. In fact, Tri Quang has at his disposal the only organized political force in Viet...
...that he has largely hand-tooled himself, using it adroitly to control the pitch and tone of events ever since last March 10, when the Directory fired his friend and ally in the north of South Viet Nam, General Nguyen Chanh Thi, commander of the I Corps. Tri Quang had been looking for a pretext to move, and he found it in the dismissal of Thi, who was popular enough among Buddhists and his soldiers to provide an opening wedge of discontent. In a welling tide of violence, in which cars were burned, windows broken and the police and army...
Then, abruptly, Tri Quang called the mobs off and early last week summoned the press to the ramshackle five-acre compound of buildings that comprises the Vien Hoa Dao. While his spokesmen read a statement threatening "a civil war that will take tens of thousands of lives because of the short sightedness, irascibility and irresponsibility of the present government," Thich Tri Quang, hardly a bead of perspiration blotting his unfurrowed brow in the 105° heat, silently looked...
...keep the pressure on Ky and the congress, Tri Quang had scheduled for that night a protest march of "many, many men," and all Saigon was braced for the worst. With their point won, the Buddhists instead sent word out from Vien Hoa Dao to cool it. In an astonishing display of their power to turn the masses off and on at will, the demonstration was transformed into a peaceful, highly organized march. The 15,000 faithful that assembled at the institute left behind their plastic-bag gas masks and clubs and grenades. As they marched out to demonstrate, burly...