Remora
Blues for President Thieu

He dead, as they said of Kurz. Except that he was not, like Kurz, a product of
some Western power shipped out to one of the dark places of the earth, as the colonial officers put it pretentiously on their various veranda.

What he was -- an obituary can't tell us that. In fact, in his adopted home town, Boston, the obituarist in the Globe has a surprisingly distant knowledge of where Nguyen Van Thieu came from. Here's an astonishing graf:
Boston Globe Online / Obituaries / Nguyen Van Thieu, 78

"Born April 5, 1923, the youngest child of a struggling farmer, Mr. Thieu worked in rice fields as a boy and went to a French Catholic high school. At 23, he briefly joined Ho Chi Minh's anticolonial struggle, but he left the movement that would become his enemy and joined the army of South Vietnam."
Simple math should have made the Globe deadhead re-read his factsheet. How could he have briefly joined the Viet Minh in 1946, and then joined the army of South Vietnam, a nation which emphatically didn't exist until ten years later? It is, perhaps, appropriate that in his passing, America add one more white lie to the pile we graciously bestowed upon him when he was the "democratically' elected ruler of our protectorate. America suffered from short term memory loss in Vietnam. We kept forgetting the pasts of the leaders we would periodically dredge up to lead our forces against the alien Ho Chi Minh -- we had that problem with Marshal Key, our favorite for a bit, who had the embarrassing habit of praising Hitler in public; and we certainly had that problem with Thieu. Thieu didn't really have a problem with his own place in the world. He had no quarrel with democratic theory, he just didn't see how it applied to him. In another time and place, he might have made a passable dictator. He wasn't overly brutal; I'd put him in the mid-brutal range. If he disappeared political opponents, didn't the PRI, in Mexico, do the same? Hell, didn't even Mayor Daley want to? Certainly among our allies he wasn't even in the league with, say, Sukarno. He simply wasn't the knight to lead our crusade, so the American government lied about it. They lied stenuously, they lied foolishly, and they even came up with prop elections, wonderfully managed even as we were supporting the Phoenix program in the villages. The cognitive disconnect was total. He wasn't lionhearted. He was instinctively anti-communist, and he was uncomfortably allied with some of the shabbiest persons (Nixon and the ever unbearable Kissinger) to ever run an American administration, which in the end undid him.