Nguyễn Ngọc Thơ (; 26 May 190812 June 1976)VietBao Daily News OnlineLife Vice President Nguyen Ngoc Tho was a South Vietnamese politician who was the first vice president of South Vietnam, serving under President Ngô Đình Diệm from 1956 until Diệm's overthrow and assassination in 1963. He also served as the first prime minister of South Vietnam, serving from November 1963 to late January 1964. Thơ was appointed to head a civilian cabinet by the military junta of General Dương Văn Minh, which came to power after overthrowing and assassinating Diệm, the nation's first president. Thơ's rule was marked by a period of confusion and weak government, as the Military Revolutionary Council (MRC) and the civilian cabinet vied for power. Thơ lost his job and retired from politics when Minh's junta was deposed in a January 1964 coup by General Nguyễn Khánh.
The son of a wealthy Mekong Delta landowner, Thơ rose through the ranks as a low-profile provincial chief under French colonial rule, and he was briefly imprisoned by Imperial Japan when they invaded and deposed the French during World War II. During this time he met Minh for the first time as they shared a cell. Following World War II, he became the interior minister in the French-backed State of Vietnam, an associated state in the French Union. After the establishment of the Republic of Vietnam in 1955 following the partition in 1954, Thơ was sent to Japan as ambassador and secured war reparations. Recalled to Vietnam within a year, he helped to dismantle the private armies of the Hòa Hảo religious sect in the mid-1950s. Thơ led the political efforts to weaken the Hòa Hảo leadership. While Minh led the military effort, Thơ tried to buy off Hòa Hảo leaders. One commander, Ba Cụt, was personally hostile to Thơ, whose father had confiscated the land of Ba Cụt's family decades earlier. The stand-off could not be ended peacefully in this case, and Ba Cụt was captured and executed.
This success earned Thơ the vice presidential slot in December 1956 to widen the popular appeal of Diệm's nepotistic and sectarian regime. It was reasoned that Thơ's southern heritage would broaden the regime's political appeal—Diệm's family was from central Vietnam and most administrators were not from South Vietnam. Thơ was not allowed to take part in policy decisions and had little meaningful power, as Diệm's brothers, Nhu and Cẩn, commanded their own private armies and secret police, and ruled arbitrarily. Thơ oversaw South Vietnam's failed land reform policy, and was accused of lacking vigour in implementing the program as he was himself a large landowner. He was noted for his faithful support of Diệm during the Buddhist crisis that ended the rule of the Ngô family. Despite nominally being a Buddhist, Thơ defended the regime's pro–Roman Catholic policies and its violent actions against the Buddhist majority.
Thơ turned against Diệm and played a passive role in the coup. Upon the formation of the new government, he struggled to keep the nation under control as the MRC and civilian cabinet often gave contradictory orders. Media freedom and political debate were increased, but this backfired as Saigon became engulfed in infighting, and Thơ had a series of newspapers shut down after they used the new-found freedom to attack him. During that time, South Vietnam's military situation deteriorated as the consequences of Diệm's falsification of military statistics and the misguided policies that resulted were exposed. Minh and Thơ had a plan to try to end the war by winning over non-communist members of the insurgency, believing that they constituted the majority of the opposition and could be coaxed away, weakening the communists. As part of this policy, which the US opposed, the government chose to take a low-key military approach in an attempt to portray themselves to the Vietnamese public as peacemakers. However, they were deposed in Khánh's US-backed coup before they could pursue their strategy.
Early career 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, serving the French colonial authorities as a low-profile provincial chief.Lentz, p. 831 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.Dommen, p. 56
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.Tai, p. 196 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.Lansdale, p. 322 Cụt was captured on 13 April 1956 and guillotined after a brief trial and his remaining forces were defeated in battle.Doyle, p. 131Moyar, p. 65
During this period, Thơ was the Secretary of State for the National Economy. 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.Buttinger, p. 944 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.Jones, pp. 99–100, 258
Diệm era
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. 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.Buttinger, p. 954 Thơ had a rapport with the military officers, having befriended Minh years earlier. He was regarded as a genial and affable administrator with a reputation for making compromises.
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 US 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".Jacobs, p. 95
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.Jinkins, pp. 156–57.
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. The Americans claimed Thơ, who was trained in public security, "knew more about political control than the 'basic laws of the market place'".Jinkins, p. 169 In mid-1961, after a visit by US Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and pressure from leading American officials, Diệm relieved Thơ of his economic duties.Kaiser, pp. 74–75.
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 US 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.Kaiser, p. 103. In 1962, he told senior US Embassy official Joseph Mendenhall that Diệm's military subordinates invented arbitrary and falsely inflated figures of Viet Cong fighters.Kaiser, p. 157
Role in Buddhist crisis