Word: thieu
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...Saigon editor, once sympathetic to Thieu, had a plausible explanation for all the unfounded stories circulating about the elusive and enigmatic South Vietnamese President. "As the West has left Thieu," the editor said, "Thieu has increasingly abandoned the West to withdraw into a historical autocracy. He sees fewer and fewer people, trusts fewer advisers, believes fewer friends. He has come to rule as if government is more a personal affair between himself and his God than between himself and his people...
...current crisis has hit South Viet Nam during the President's tenth year in power. The son of a small landowner, Thieu, now 52, became a career soldier who fought for the French against the Communists in 1947-54 and played an important role in the overthrow of President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. Born a Buddhist, he converted to Roman Catholicism at the time of his marriage to Mai Anh, a doctor's daughter, in 1951. Because he was regarded as a moderate who could ease the differences between militant Catholic and Buddhist factions, Thieu in June...
...intervening years have served to create a perhaps inevitable barrier between Thieu and the people he leads. These days, he rarely uses the Presidential Palace on Cong Ly Boulevard, which is barricaded from the rest of Saigon by sentry boxes, steel barriers and tangles of barbed wire. He moves behind a curtain of almost total secrecy, constantly switching locations between a series of private addresses within and outside the city. Since the attack on Ban Me Thuot on March 10, he has not appeared in public or even been photographed...
Last week Thieu finally broke his long public silence, but he did so in a characteristically detached way. Just before he was due to make a national television speech of encouragement to his people, he spoke to General Ngo Quang Truong. ARVN commander in the northermost Military Region I. Perhaps realizing the seriousness of the military situation for the first time, Thieu first canceled the speech but then gave it a day later...
...urged his countrymen to maintain their "unfaltering anti-Communist determination." But he avoided any direct mention of his decision to abandon large portions of his country-or of the hundreds of thousands of newly created refugees who were already choking the nation's road ways. In previous times, Thieu has sometimes been criticized for postponing decisions. Last week's decision -surely one of the most agonizing of his career-was based on the new realities in both Saigon and Washington, and was made with surprising speed...