Word: thieu
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...resulted in a long and memorable interview with Nikita Khrushchev. On three subsequent tours to Asia and Eastern Europe, participants met Marshal Tito, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Indonesian President Suharto, Pakistan's then-President Ayub Khan, Generalissimo and Mme. Chiang Kai-shek and South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu...
WASHINGTON was relieved. The embarrassing one-sided presidential election in South Viet Nam was finally over. Whatever the condition of democracy in that battered land, President Nguyen Van Thieu, the man whom the U.S. considers the best bet for stability, seemed firmly in charge. The Nixon Administration was only too eager to turn its attention from Saigon's problems to other more portentous matters: post-freeze economic plans and the return of National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to Peking late this month to make final arrangements for Richard Nixon's visit to that long-forbidden city...
Unfortunately, Thieu's hig-handed re-election tactics botched the Administration's plan for a graceful exit from Viet Nam. Nixon had hoped to be able to point to the election as evidence that democracy is taking hold in South Viet Nam. Now, almost no one in Washington believes Saigon's figures on either the high voter turnout (87.7%) or Thieu's vote of confidence (94.3%). Nixon merely noted that "the road toward democracy and contested elections is a long and hard one." Almost apologetically, he argued that Thieu's unchallenged victory was no reason...
President Nguyen Van Thieu saw it as "a very good achievement of our people and our nation." The results of South Viet Nam's one-man election were very good indeed-in fact, too good. According to the government, fully 87.7% of the 7.4 million qualified voters went to the polls last week, and only 5.5% mutilated their ballots to indicate no confidence in the Thieu regime. The President's swollen 94.3% vote ran absurdly far ahead of the 35% that he won in 1967 and the 50% that he had said he would regard as an adequate...
...bloated Thieu vote was clearly unnecessary; without any jiggery-pokery, American observers in Saigon reckoned last week, Thieu could easily have come out of the election with 60% or 70% of the vote. "Maybe Thieu didn't want the results to be so blatantly in his favor," said a Western diplomat in Saigon. "Maybe his province chiefs just got carried away. But if you measure American policy in Viet Nam by that election, it flunked badly...