Word: saigon
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...South Viet Nam's major cities only Saigon has so far been spared mass panic, though nerves were frayed by the news from the north. The only clear sign of unease was the precautionary actions taken by many people. Hoarding pushed up the price of rice by some 10%. Housewives were stashing away three-month supplies of Nuoc Mam, the redolent fish sauce. Businessmen were transferring piasters from Vietnamese banks to the local branches of U.S. banks, hoping they would prove safer if the Communists came...
Close enough, it seemed, for some extraordinary political events to take place in Saigon. On Wednesday a group of leading anti-Communists met for tea at the officers' club at Tan Son Nhut Air Base. Their host was Nguyen Cao Ky, the flamboyant airman who was Prime Minister from 1965 to 1967. Among Ky's 30-odd guests were such prominent figures as Dr. Tran Van Do, former Foreign Minister and head of the South Vietnamese delegation to the Geneva Convention of 1954, and Father Tran Huu Thanh, leader of the Catholic anticorruption movement that has sponsored several...
Still, given the collapse of the military effort, opposition to Thieu's government is bound to increase, especially among Saigon's strongly non-Communist conservative groups. The day after the arrests, Ky and Father Thanh held a news conference to announce the formation of an Action Committee for National Salvation that would press Thieu to relinquish his near absolute power. None of the action committee sponsors favored an overthrow of Thieu; indeed, they seemed to believe that a coup would only further lessen public confidence in the government. But the conservative opposition argued that South Viet...
...emergence of Ky's action committee and the arrests of right-wing oppositionists helped start a flurry of coup rumors in Saigon. But in fact there is only an outside chance of Thieu being removed by his present opponents. For one thing, the action committee is still not united with Saigon's other main non-Communist opposition force, the most militant Buddhists, who favor entering directly into a coalition government with the Communists. Neither Ky nor General Duong Van ("Big") Minh, an ex-chief of state who now leads the Buddhist opposition, seems to have enough...
Thus most military experts predicted that Saigon - and South Viet Nam - would not fall this year. "But its long-term future is not promising," said a U.S. Government expert...