Nguyễn Ngọc Thơ

The son of a wealthy southern landowner, Thơ was born in the province of Long Xuyên in the Mekong Delta. He began his bureaucratic career in 1930,[2] serving the French colonial authorities as a low-profile provincial chief.[3] During World War II, the Japanese invaded Vietnam but left a Vichy regime in place. Thơ rose to become the first secretary of the Resident Superior of Annam, the French governor of the central region of Vietnam. During this time, he crossed paths with Ngô Đình Diệm, a former Interior Minister under the French regime in the 1930s. The French thought that Diệm was working with Imperial Japan and tried to have him arrested, but Thơ tipped off Diệm and the Kempeitai, resulting in their escape.[4]

In March 1945, Japan, which had invaded and occupied French Indochina in 1941 during World War II, decided to take direct control and overthrew the French colonial regime. Thơ was thrown into a crowded cell with several other prisoners that had no light or toilet and filled with their own excrement.[2] One of his cellmates was Dương Văn Minh, then a junior officer in the French military forces with whom he would work over the next two decades. Thơ was released first and lobbied to have Minh released as well and the pair remained close friends.[2]

Following World War II, Thơ became Interior Minister in the French-backed State of Vietnam under former Emperor Bảo Đại. Following the withdrawal of France from Indochina after the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ, Vietnam was partitioned into a communist north and anti-communist south. Following the proclamation of the Republic of Vietnam—commonly known as South Vietnam—by President Ngô Đình Diệm, who had dethroned Bảo Đại in a fraudulent referendum, Thơ was appointed the inaugural ambassador to Japan. Despite spending most of his time in Tokyo confined to his bed by a fractured hip, Thơ secured reparations from Japan for its imperial occupation of Vietnam during World War II.[5]

In 1956, Diệm recalled him to Saigon to help deal with the Hòa Hảo, a religious sect equipped with a private army. The Hòa Hảo was effectively an autonomous entity in the Mekong Delta, as its private army enforced a parallel administration and refused to integrate into the Saigon administration. While the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) General Dương Văn Minh led the military effort against the Hòa Hảo, Thơ helped to weaken the sect by buying off its warlords.[5]

However, one Hòa Hảo commander, Ba Cụt, continued to fight, having had a personal history of bad blood with Thơ's own family. The orphaned, illiterate Cụt's adopted father's rice paddies were confiscated by Thơ's father, which purportedly imbued Cụt with a permanent hatred towards the landowning class.[6] Cụt was eventually surrounded and sought to make a peace deal so he sent a message to Thơ asking for negotiations so that his men could be integrated into mainstream society and the nation's armed forces. Thơ agreed to meet Ba Cụt alone in the jungle, and despite fears the meeting was a Hòa Hảo trap, he was not ambushed. However, Cụt began asking for additional concessions and the meeting ended in a stalemate.[7] Cụt was captured on 13 April 1956 and guillotined after a brief trial and his remaining forces were defeated in battle.[8][9]

During this period, Thơ was the Secretary of State for the National Economy.[5] In November, Diệm appointed Thơ as vice president in an effort to widen the regime's popular appeal. The appointment was endorsed by the National Assembly in December 1956, in accordance with the constitution.[10] The move was widely seen as an attempt to use Thơ's Mekong Delta roots to increase the government's popular appeal among southern peasants, because Diệm's regime was dominated by family members, Catholics from central Vietnam.[5]

Ngô Đình Diệm (pictured), the President of South Vietnam.

Despite the importance of his title, Thơ rarely appeared with Diệm in public and was a figurehead with little influence. The real power lay with Diệm's younger brothers, Nhu and Cẩn, who commanded private armies and secret police, as well as giving orders directly to ARVN generals. Nhu reportedly once ordered a bodyguard to slap Thơ because he felt Thơ had shown him a lack of respect.[5] Diệm held Thơ in contempt and did not allow him to take part in major policy decisions, despite theoretically being the second most powerful man in the country.[11] Thơ had a rapport with the military officers, having befriended Minh years earlier.[5] He was regarded as a genial and affable administrator with a reputation for making compromises.[2]

Thơ was charged with overseeing South Vietnam's land reform program, because the minister of agrarian reform, Nguyễn Văn Thời, answered to him. As both men were wealthy landowners, they had little incentive for the program to succeed. The U.S. embassy received angry criticism of Thoi's lack of enthusiasm towards implementing the policy, stating, "he is most certainly not interested in land distribution which would divest him of much of his property".[12]

Thơ also retained a degree of influence over domestic economic policies, which ran far behind Diệm's priorities of absolute control over the military and other apparatus through which he maintained his rule. Despite never having been trained in economic matters, Thơ had a prominent hand in the administration of the Commodity Import Program, an American initiative akin to the Marshall Plan, whereby aid was funnelled into the economy through importing licenses rather than money, in order to avoid inflation. However, Thơ's administration of the program led to the vast majority of the imports being consumer goods for the upper classes, rather than capital goods to develop South Vietnam's economic capacity. Under Thơ's watch, the foreign trade deficit hovered between 150 and 200%, and the gap between the urban elite and the peasant majority grew. American advisers thought Thơ and the Ngô brothers continually went against their counsel because they were either incompetent or simply distrustful and thus did the opposite of what was recommended.[13]

Thơ also clashed with Interior Minister Nguyễn Hữu Châu over economic strategy. Châu was married to Madame Nhu's sister and appointed due to nepotism, but was later expelled from the Ngô family due to his dissent.[14] The Americans claimed Thơ, who was trained in public security, "knew more about political control than the 'basic laws of the market place'".[14] In mid-1961, after a visit by U.S. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and pressure from leading American officials, Diệm relieved Thơ of his economic duties.[15]

Thơ then began to put try to put pressure on the Americans to influence Diệm. During a fact-finding mission by General Maxwell Taylor, the chief of the U.S. military, and Walt Rostow, Thơ and Minh complained of Diệm's autocratic ways and religious favoritism towards his fellow Catholics to the disadvantage of the majority Buddhist populace.[16] In 1962, he told senior U.S. Embassy official Joseph Mendenhall that Diệm's military subordinates invented arbitrary and falsely inflated figures of Viet Cong fighters.[17]

Despite being a Buddhist, Thơ had a reputation for heaping praise on Diệm's Roman Catholic government. On Diệm's 62nd birthday, Thơ paid tribute, saying, "thanks to the Almighty for having given the country a leader whose genius was outweighed only by his virtue".[18] (Buddhism is a Dharmic religion which does not recognise a supreme being in a theistic sense.) Thơ later accompanied Diệm to the Roman Catholic Redemptorist Church to pray for the President. Thơ had little public following, with American Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell Taylor calling him "unimpressive",[18][19] while prominent State Department official Paul Kattenberg derided Thơ as a "nonentity".[18][19]

In another project, the village of La Vang in Quảng Trị Province near the border with North Vietnam, was the scene of a female apparition in the late 19th century.[20] Buddhists claimed that the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara (also known as Kuanyin; Vietnamese: Quan Âm) performed the miracle. Diệm's brother, Ngô Đình Thục, was the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Huế and the foremost religious figure in South Vietnam's nepotistic regime. Thục declared that the apparition was the Virgin Mary, and ordered that a cathedral be built in place of the makeshift Buddhist pagoda that occupied the site. Thơ made notable financial donations to the project for political reasons.[21]

In June, as the Buddhist crisis escalated, Diệm appointed Thơ to lead a government committee to deal with grievances raised by the Buddhist community following the Huế Vesak shootings in which eight Buddhists were killed by government forces while protesting a ban on the flying of Buddhist flags.[22][23] The committee concluded the Việt Cộng was responsible for the deaths, despite eyewitness accounts and amateur video showing that the government had fired directly at protesters. The committee's whitewash caused Buddhist protests to escalate.[24] When de facto First Lady Madame Nhu (herself a Buddhist convert to Catholicism) mockingly described the self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức as a "barbecue", Thơ refused to condemn her remarks, saying they were "personal opinions".[25]

Thơ was part of an Interministerial Committee, a group of government officials that negotiated a Joint Communique with the Buddhists to end the civil disobedience. An agreement was signed, but never implemented. Thơ was later criticised by the Nhus through their English language mouthpiece, the Times of Vietnam, for the deal.[26] Despite the general amnesty granted to arrested Buddhist activists, on 13 August, Thơ gave a press conference during which he vowed to prosecute the Buddhist victims of the Huế Vesak shootings, and revoking the amnesty and vowing to jail Buddhist demonstrators.[27]

At a farewell dinner for U.S. ambassador Frederick Nolting in July, Thơ called for the Buddhists to be "crushed without pity".[28][29] He derisively said that Buddhism was not a religion and further claimed that while anybody could become a Buddhist monk, it took years of training to become a Catholic priest. When the Thai ambassador disagreed, citing his own previous monastic training, Thơ taunted him in front of other diplomats.[28]

With the pressure on the Diệm regime increasing during the Buddhist crisis, Nhu and Diệm began to shun their cabinet members because they presented arguments contrary to the thinking of the Ngô family. Many ministers attempted to resign, but Thơ was credited with persuading them to stay in office. Finding the situation increasingly intolerable, Thơ also considered resigning but the dissident generals urged him to remain. They were worried that mass resignations would arouse suspicion of a coup plot.[30]

The corpse of Diệm after his assassination

In private, Thơ expressed his displeasure with Diệm's rule to U.S. officials. He complained of Diệm's reliance on Nhu in the running of the country, Nhu's attempt to run a police state through his secret Cần Lao apparatus and the lack of success against the Việt Cộng.[18] During the McNamara Taylor mission to South Vietnam, Thơ confided his belief that the country was heading in the wrong direction to the American delegation, imploring them to pressure Diệm to reform his policies.[31] He privately revealed his belief that of the thousands of fortified settlements built under Nhu's Strategic Hamlet Program, fewer than thirty were functional.[32] Years after, Tho stated that neither Diem and Nhu, nor the American political figures that made policy on Vietnam, understood one another.[33]

Joseph Mendenhall, a senior Vietnam adviser in the US State Department, advocated the removal of Diệm in a military coup and his replacement with Thơ.[34] Thơ was privately aware that he was the choice of the generals to run the government after the planned overthrow of Diệm.[35] By this time, Diệm and Nhu realized a plot was afoot against them, but did not know that General Tôn Thất Đính, a palace favourite was involved.[36] Nhu ordered Đính and Colonel Lê Quang Tung, the ARVN Special Forces commander,[37] to plan a fake coup against the Ngô family.

One of Nhu's objectives was to trick dissidents into joining the false uprising so that they could be identified and eliminated.[38] Another objective of the public relations stunt was to give a false impression of the strength of the regime.[36] The first stage of the scheme would involve loyalist soldiers, disguised as insurgents, faking a coup and vandalising the capital.[39] A "revolutionary government" consisting of opposition activists who had not consented to being named in the regime would be announced, while Diệm and Nhu would pretend to be on the run. During the orchestrated chaos of the first coup, the loyalists and Nhu's underworld contacts would kill the leading plotting generals and their assistants, such as Thơ, CIA officer Lucien Conein, and U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.[40] A fake "counter-coup" was to follow, whereupon the loyalists would triumphantly re-enter Saigon to restore the Diệm regime. However, the plot failed because Đính was part of the coup plot and sent the loyalist forces out of the capital to open the door for the rebels.[39][41]

After the coup on 1 November 1963, in which Diệm and Nhu were killed the following day, Thơ was appointed Prime Minister by Minh's military junta five days later, on 6 November 1963. He was the leading civilian in the provisional government overseen by the Military Revolutionary Council (MRC).[42] Minh had earlier promised U.S. officials that the civilians would be above the generals in the hierarchy.[43] In addition, he was minister for finance and the economy.[44] Thơ's appointment was not universally popular, with some leading figures privately lobbying for a clean break from the Diệm era.[45]

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