Word: sarit
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...three sessions together, Johnson and Sarit got down to brass tacks. At one point, the Vice President bemused the Premier by making a solid point with some corn-pone rhetoric: "My daddy taught me back in Texas what to do when you see a snake. We take a hoe off the wall and get him: Now, there are lots of snakes around here. We have our hands on the hoe handle. Are you going to grab the handle with us so we can get those snakes together...
When the Premier and the Vice President finally emerged from their ornate conference room, Sarit put his hands on the hoe by agreeing to send his Foreign Minister that night to the 14-nation conference on Laos in Geneva. The Thais had been disgustedly boycotting the meeting, because they felt-justifiably-that it was bound to give Laos to the Communists. Said a relieved U.S. State Department aide: "It's a lot more effective to have the Thais there spelling out the hopes and fears of the Asian nations than to have the U.S. trying...
Perched on gold-brocaded teakwood couches flanked by elephant tusks, the two men made an incongruous pair. But, as lanky Lyndon Johnson said, Texas fashion, "Now is the time to separate the men from the boys" in Southeast Asia. And in the squat, stern person of Premier Sarit Thanarat, 52, Thailand had a man. After he seized power in a bloodless coup in 1957, Field Marshal Sarit posed the problem for himself. "Anybody can stage a revolution," he said. "The snag, once the revolution is staged, is to win public approval." He has succeeded remarkably well...
...boss who had once shocked a dinner party at a Western embassy by slapping a bottle of cognac on the table and swigging from it all evening, explaining that his host's liquor was lousy. His sideline was running the lucrative national lottery. But after ousting Strongman Pibulsonggram, Sarit went off the bottle and then to work, house-cleaning Thailand from top to bottom. In La Guardia fashion, he roams the streets, checking on police and garbage men, dropping in on sidewalk cafés for a chat, handing out fines for tossing fruit peelings on the street...
...result, says one of his aides, Sarit's decisions "are not carried out the next day but immediately." A few months ago, when a pork shortage sent prices up, Bangkok's mayor at first tried persuasion; then Sarit went on the radio one night to announce that pork prices would be cut by 25%. Next morning they were. "He doesn't have to enforce his orders," explained one Bangkok citizen. "Sarit says the word and everybody obeys...