From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DISPATCH
A Salute to Thieu
He was on the side of freedom. He deserved better from America.
With all the compelling news cascading from the front pages this week, the dispatch I found myself thinking about over and over was the obituary for the penultimate president of the Republic of Vietnam, Nguyen Van Thieu, who died Saturday in exile at Massachusetts. He fled South Vietnam after Congress halted further military aid to his country at an hour when it was under attack by one of the most murderous communist armies in history. In the remaining decades of his life, both in England and America, he bore himself with dignity.
This was all the more impressive given the dismissiveness and even derision with which he was treated by the liberal elites and even some of those elites who weren't so liberal. He was set down variously as aloof and out of touch and both corrupt and intransigent, though the last two would seem oxymoronic. But to those who believe that Vietnam really was a struggle between freedom and communism, and that the South Vietnamese republic, for all its flaws, was on the right side of that struggle, Thieu's resistance against what was happening while his country was being negotiated away deserves at least some show of respect ere the caissons are quiet.
Yet Thieu participated in the 1963 coup that overthrew--and murdered--President Ngo Dinh Diem. The Kennedy administration countenanced, even encouraged, the coup, in what can only be seen as a colossal error of judgment or failure of character. Eventually Thieu himself emerged as president, and he was the leader of South Vietnam during the years when President Nixon and Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser, were trying to negotiate what was called "peace with honor." In hindsight, of course, the negotiations brought peace to no one and honor, in a portion, to no one other than Thieu.
Walter Isaacson's biography of Mr. Kissinger provides an excruciating glimpse of how Thieu was treated. Mr. Isaacson tells of how, after concluding most of a deal with the North Vietnamese as the 1972 presidential election approached in America, Kissinger finally flew to Saigon "to present what he had done," which was, after all, to sketch a pact that would permit communist soldiers to remain on the soil of free Vietnam. Mr. Kissinger had not told Thieu of the terms. But, Mr. Isaacson reports, Thieu had obtained a draft of the treaty that had been captured in the underground command post of a Viet Cong commissar in Quang Tin province.
"Suddenly, I realized that things were being negotiated for us behind my back and without my approval," Mr. Isaacson quotes Mr. Thieu as recalling. Thieu realized that Mr. Kissinger was coming to Saigon to demand his approval of a done deal, Mr. Isaacson explains. When Mr. Kissinger showed up at the presidential palace in Saigon, he was famously kept waiting for 15 minutes, "as press photographers recorded the insult." As the president of South Vietnam smoked a Schimmelpennick cigar, Mr. Isaacson relates, Mr. Kissinger tried to get the betrayal past him. Unknown to Mr. Kissinger, Mr. Isaacson says, Thieu was actually thinking "I wanted to punch Kissinger in the mouth."
Even after Mr. Kissinger's notorious pronouncement that "peace is at hand" and Nixon's victory in the 1972 election, the Vietnamese peace talks were at an impasse. Then came the Christmas bombing. Then came the final agreement and then the encounter that Mr. Kissinger relates in the first volume of his autobiography under the heading "Thieu Relents." The problem was that, as Kissinger puts it, "we did not have the agreement of that doughty little man in Saigon, President Thieu." But, he recalls, Nixon was determined to prevail. So General Haig was sent to Saigon to tell the president of Vietnam that America would sign the "peace" without him.
"Brutality is nothing," Mr. Kissinger quotes Nixon as saying. "You have never seen it if this son-of-a-bitch doesn't go along, believe me."
In "The White House Years," Mr. Kissinger quotes a crucial passage of a letter to Thieu from Nixon: "I have therefore irrevocably decided to proceed to initial the Agreement on January 23, 1973 and to sign it on January 27, 1973 in Paris. I will do so, if necessary, alone. In that case I shall have to explain publicly that your Government obstructs peace. The result will be an inevitable and immediate termination of U.S. economic and military assistance which cannot be forestalled by a change of personnel in your government. I hope, however, that after all our two countries have shared and suffered together in conflict, we will stay together to preserve peace and reap its benefits."
Thieu, as Mr. Kissinger tells it, "relented with dignity." And Mr. Kissinger insists that he believed then, as later, that the agreement could have worked. Then came Watergate, and historians will debate the matter for decades. Many analysts, including many conservatives, credit Messrs. Nixon and Kissinger for doing what they could under a difficult situation. In the end, Congress called the final halt to American support for the dream of a free Vietnam, with a vote that precipitated the retreat from the Central Highlands early in 1975 and the rout that cast Vietnam's 70 million people into a generation of darkness.
I have written about the episode in several editorials over the years, always with a sense of sadness and humility. And at this moment, when America is on the brink of what may be a new world war, at a moment when it is--rightly--demanding of foreign governments that they must decide whether they are on the side of freedom or its enemies, our leaders could do worse than pause to snap a final salute to that "doughty little man from Saigon."
Mr. Lipsky is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Wednesdays.
