Word: sarit
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...deathbed in a Bangkok hospital, Thailand's Premier Sarit Thanarat held his comely wife in his arms and sang to her the old Thai ballad that begins: "The love of 100 mistresses could not be compared to the love one has for his own wife." Sarit may have been altogether too modest. After his death last December (of cirrhosis and other ailments of hard living), Bangkok papers carried the names of more than a hundred women who claimed publicly to have enjoyed his favors and hoped to get a piece of his estate. Among an inner circle...
Indeed, thanks to the energetic strongman's flair for financial wheeling-dealing, his fortune turned out to be even more spectacular than his dalliance balance. Contesting Widow Thanpuying Vichitra's claim to the marshal's estate, Sarit's two sons by a previous wife estimated that their father was worth at least 2.8 billion tickels, or $143 million. That seemed a lot of baht for a career soldier. So, before allowing his estate to be distributed, Sarit's successor, Thanom Kittikachorn, appointed a five-man committee to see if any government funds had lodged...
...investigating committee published an interim report disclosing that it had unearthed 400 million tickels ($20 million) in various bank accounts maintained by the late strongman. Even that was peanuts compared with the total value of his nationwide commercial empire, which included a controlling interest-mostly in the names of Sarit's relatives-in at least 15 specially privileged companies. Among them: the only merchant bank allowed to import gold; the only sales agency for the government plywood monopoly; a brewery with a heady share of the government beer monopoly; two companies with concessions to print and sell tickets...
...poured across the border to train Pathet Lao troops in guerrilla and conventional warfare. In 1957 the U.S. grew alarmed, began casting about for a rightist leader to counter the Communists. It found him in General Phoumi Nosavan, a tubby but talented field commander whose cousin, the late Strongman Sarit Thanarat of Thailand, was a firm supporter...
Fear of the Future. Next, Thailand would be severely threatened. In Bangkok last week, the Great Emerald Buddha, Palladium of the Kingdom, had been dressed in his summer costume of emerald-encrusted gold filigree-a ritual uninterrupted by political tension following the recent death of Strongman Sarit Thanarat. Though a scandal involving Sarit's finances has been tossed into the lap of his successor, General Thanom Kittakachorn, and in the north a pocket of pro-Red outlaws persists, anti-Communist Thailand is still the stablest country in the neighborhood. But it would -have a hard time holding up amid...