South Viet Nam: Continued Progress

Before dawn on Sunday morning, four battalions of South Vietnamese troops moved up the road toward Saigon from the Mekong Delta. Spearheaded by armored cars and Jeeps carrying heavy machine guns, they first disarmed a police checkpoint on the outskirts of the capital, then set guards to forbid the movement of traffic in or out of the city. Without a fight, the rebels occupied communication centers in the capital, burst into the office of Premier Nguyen Khanh, and arrested several duty officers but found no trace of the Premier. It was the coup d’etat that many had dreaded but hoped would not happen.

Lean Phat. According to official Washington last week, the coup was hardly to be expected. Maxwell Taylor, U.S. Ambassador to Saigon, back in the U.S. for consultation, referred to an “upward trend” in the fighting. President Lyndon Johnson spoke of “continued progress” in embattled South Viet Nam. Hours later, the political balance in Saigon was being challenged by an array of dissatisfied soldiers.

The coup was at least partly due to the Catholic reaction against the concessions Khanh had been forced to grant the Buddhist majority in his strife—torn nation in the past few weeks. The coup leaders are officers who had either been fired by Khanh or were on the brink of being cashiered. Top man seemed to be Brigadier General Lam Van Phat, a lean, taciturn officer who last week was eased out of his job as Interior Minister in Khanh’s Cabinet. Under the murdered Roman Catholic President Diem, Lam Van Phat had been appointed 7th Division commander, but he was considered by U.S. military advisers to be a “mediocre” general.

Nevertheless, Phat was doing quite well at week’s end, and was supported by a handful of able officers, particularly Brigadier General Duong Van Due, commander of the IV Corps, and Co’onel Ba, chief of the 7th Division’s armored section. Soldiers gathered rapidly in front of a large U.S. communications center. Several U.S. advisers were chased away by their colleagues among the Vietnamese officers participating in the coup. As the rebel troops moved into the center of the city, Phat sat calmly in a civilian car. “We’ll be holding a press conference in town this afternoon at 4 p.m.,” he announced to reporters.

Whether the coup would stick was another question. As the rebels plunged into the heart of Saigon, worshipers who had attended early Mass at the Roman Catholic cathedral fled in panic. The Buddhists who earlier in the week had mounted a parade of 150,000 people for the burial of two “martyrs” in the recent religious riots, were evidently taken by surprise. Strangely, however, Buddhist army detachments were making no resistance to Phat’s takeover, and there was no sign of activity from the air force commander, who had pledged two weeks earlier that his planes would swiftly crush any uprising. Premier Khanh himself was still unheard from.

Since the coup took place shortly after sunrise, and Saigon, at least, does not begin to function as a city until after breakfast, no one could be sure how secure Phat’s new government would be. In the confusion, one South

Vietnamese official said placatingly, “All these preparations are the result of a big misunderstanding on both sides. I don’t think either group will start anything, but both think the other will.” Tough Tennis. In Honolulu, on his flight back to his political job in Saigon, Ambassador Taylor stepped perspiring from a tennis game to comment that Phat’s coup “certainly was unannounced and unheralded.” In view of developments, said Taylor, he would “get going as fast as we can get a crew together.” The news from Saigon was especially depressing to Washington, not only because Lyndon Johnson is in the midst of a presidential campaign, but because the U.S. has been counting heavily on Khanh to create a more stable situation in South Viet Nam and to lead a more effective prosecution of the war against the Communist Viet Cong, who last week were understandably content to let the U.S.-supported South Vietnamese army fight itself.