Word: ky
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...been seen in a South Vietnamese leader since Ngo Dinh Diem, whose downfall the ascetic bonze triggered in 1963. Since then he has added the scalps of three more governments. Last week he scored another triumph, this time over the Directory of generals headed by Premier Nguyen Cao Ky. It was no small feat, since the generals comprise the combined armed might of South Viet Nam, but Tri Quang is armed with his own powerful weapons: an unerring instinct for politics, a perfect sense of timing and a control over his followers that borders on the charismatic...
Auspicious to Attack. South Viet Nam's Buddhists last week worked themselves into their most auspicious political position since the fall of Diem. Under Tri Quang's leadership, they wrested from Ky and the military government every concession that the angry street mobs had been demanding: elections for a constitution-making assembly by September at the latest, an amnesty for arrested rioters, the resignation of the present government as soon as elections take place. It hardly seemed to matter that it was a triumph more of timing than of substance. After all, it was Premier Ky who, in a speech...
...Quang, timing is everything, and there were many reasons why he may have felt the time ripe to attack the government and force the election date to be advanced. The war was going extremely well, and before long the Ky government might have become entrenched beyond uprooting. More likely, he correctly judged that if the election process was lengthy, his opponents, notably the Catholics, would have time to get organized. As it stands, only the Buddhists can be ready for elections as early as September. In fact, Tri Quang has at his disposal the only organized political force in Viet...
Faced with this threat, Ky and the generals then invited nearly 200 representatives scattered across the Vietnamese political spectrum to a national political congress in Saigon. Its purpose: to discuss means by which a democratic process could be organized. Ky also hoped that the delegates would provide a counterweight to the Buddhists, a hope that seemed considerably encouraged when the Buddhists boycotted the meeting and only 117 delegates showed up. But to hedge his bet and avoid further violence in the streets, Ky also quietly began negotiating directly with the Buddhist leaders...
What emerged was a typically Vietnamese solution: complex, murky and bafflingly illogical. Ky and the Buddhists reached a secret accord in which the Directory bowed to the bonzes' demands. Then, to everyone's surprise, the supposedly anti-Buddhist congress adopted as its own program the Buddhist demands that Ky had already accepted in private. Thus, Chief of State Nguyen Van Thieu and Ky appeared before the congress to decree themselves, in effect, a caretaker government. Clearly not happy about it, Ky warned that "I will fight any government that will not secure the people's happiness and fight Communism...