South Viet Nam: Remaking a Revolution

Premier Nguyen Khanh is like a kid’s bell-bottom punch toy. No sooner is he knocked flat than he’s up and grinning, ready for another foul blow. Last week the swat of a rebellious fist seemed to knock Khanh cockeyed, but within moments he was back on his feet—ready to be knocked down again.

For the third time since last November, when General Duong Van (“Big”) Minh ousted President Ngo Dinh Diem, tanks and troops swept into Saigon with the intent of remaking a revolution. And indeed the rebels had a cause: Khanh had ad-libbed his role as leader of a war-torn nation for too long. His only ideological offerings were weary anti-Communism and vague nationalism. Meanwhile, the war went poorly, and in defeat Buddhists and Catholics found their historical hatreds coming to a boil. When Khanh dismissed Roman Catholic Interior Minister Lam Van Phat, a dour, desiccated brigadier general who felt the Premier had given in too easily to Buddhist reform demands, the situation reached flash point.

To the Rescue. The revolt was short lived, and what put Phat in the fire was simply bad organization. His was one of two groups that had been plotting a coup and, of the pair, the least likely to succeed. Composed largely of Roman Catholic “outs,” Phat’s men were strong in their denunciation of Khanh as a “traitor” but weak on rallying tactical military support. Phat’s only triumph lay in convincing Major General Duong Van Due to send elements of his Mekong Delta-based IV Corps north to Saigon. Ironically, Due thought he was joining another coup—that of a group of younger officers headed by Air Commodore Nguyen Cao Ky—and when Due found out he had been duped, he quickly defected.

That left Ky in a strong position. A hotshot, American-trained aviator of 34, Ky affects orange coveralls, pearl-handled revolvers and political dash.

When he realized that Phat’s “coupette” had failed, he quickly sent his U.S.-built jets circling low over the capital to threaten the rebels. Meanwhile, a pair of C-47s (lent to him by the U.S. Air Force) whipped down to Cap St. Jacques, where two companies of South Vietnamese marines loyal to Khanh were waiting. Several battalions of loyal army troops were also ferried into Saigon, and the coup quickly dissolved.

Heads on a Pole. Khan found himself suddenly in the debt of another aspirant to his thankless job. Ky’s group demands that Khanh clean house on all “corrupt, dishonest and counterrevolutionary” army officers, civil servants and profiteers—and threatens Khanh’s ouster if those rather sweeping conditions are not met. But who is to say who, in all of South Viet Nam, is “corrupt, dishonest and counter-revolutionary”? Now, in addition to the steady pressures exerted on him by Catholics and Buddhists, Punch Toy Premier Khanh faces the even more random fists of self-seeking Young Turks.

Though his position remains precarious, Khanh was apparently standing sturdily enough to permit the Viet Cong to resume fighting. The Communists had held off during the days following the coup attempt for fear that renewed combat might push popular support back to Khanh. But last week Radio Hanoi urged an immediate “rise against the Americans and their lackeys.” Hanoi’s hyperbole reached a crescendo over the latest incident involving U.S. destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf (see THE NATION).

In the Mekong Delta, the Viet Cong went just as quickly on the offensive, and by week’s end the war was as grim and bloody as ever before. In one fire fight near Canduoc, a popular South Vietnamese corporal was killed by a bullet through the head. His buddies retaliated by decapitating three of the Viet Cong. The grisly trophies, mounted on a pole, were marched back into town.