Tran Thien Khiem, 1925-2021 – Yahoo News

In the aftermath of the first Persian Gulf War, an exultant President George H.W. Bush told an audience of U.S. legislators that “by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.”

Bush was right that the 1991 objective of reversing Saddam Hussein’s aggression against his neighbor was achieved with a speed, efficiency, and (comparatively) low cost that contradicted most predictions of prolonged failure. But the death last week of Gen. Tran Thien Khiem, the last premier of an independent, non-communist South Vietnam, reminds us of the Vietnam Syndrome’s persistence.

At 95, Khiem was one of the last surviving members of the military hierarchy that governed the Republic of Vietnam before its collapse under assault from the communist People’s Republic in the north. And his long life was lived in the shadow of modern Indochina’s chaotic history. Born in Saigon in 1925 into a comfortable landowning family and destined for the army, Khiem’s military education was initially delayed by the brutal Japanese occupation of France’s Indochinese colony. After studying at the National Military Academy, he was commissioned in the Vietnamese army in 1948 and fought beside French forces in the postwar struggle to resist the insurgent Ho Chi Minh’s campaign to end French rule and establish an independent, communist Vietnam.

Khiem was a major at the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu, in which Ho’s Viet Minh forces decisively defeated the French. After the 1955 Geneva accords, in which Vietnam was divided along the 17th parallel into a communist north and a southern republic, Khiem emerged as a colonel in the new South Vietnamese army and, identified as a potential leader, studied at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Khiem’s subsequent prominence owed more to his administrative skills and mastery of intrigue than to military talent. A convert to Roman Catholicism in largely Buddhist Vietnam, he was a trusted subordinate to South Vietnam’s Catholic strongman Ngo Dinh Diem, and when, in November 1960, he helped put down a coup attempt, he was rewarded with a promotion to general rank and, two years later, appointment as chief of staff of the armed forces.

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In the early 1960s, South Vietnam was harried in the north by Ho’s guerrilla forces, aided by a network of supporters in the south, and increasing social and political conflict between the south’s Buddhist majority and the Diem regime’s largely Catholic hierarchy. In due course, Khiem came to recognize the necessity of overthrowing Diem and was an active supporter of the November 1963 coup d’etat that, with tacit U.S. blessing, deposed Diem and his close relatives and colleagues and replaced them with a military junta.

Khiem’s support for the coup had been based, in part, on assurances that Ngo Dinh Diem, who was his godfather, would be sent into exile like the figurehead Emperor Bao Dai in the 1950s. But of course, Diem and his brother-in-law Ngo Dinh Nhu were shot out of hand, which, in turn, persuaded Khiem during 1964-65 to support a series of subsequent coups designed to minimize political opposition, especially from the Buddhist clergy, and, not least, persuade the United States to intervene decisively in the growing conflict with North Vietnam.

America intervened, the Saigon leadership was roughly stabilized under Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu and his deputy, Air Force chief Nguyen Cao Ky, and while Khiem was out of favor, his diplomatic skills and close ties to Americans were put to use as ambassador in Washington. In 1969, Khiem returned to Saigon as Thieu’s premier where he controlled the police and civil service and routinely appointed family members to prominent posts.

By the 1970s, however, the U.S. was swiftly withdrawing from Vietnam and, when Saigon fell to the communists in 1975, Khiem managed to escape to America where he lived in comfort, first in suburban Washington and later in Orange County, California, where he resolutely kept his thoughts about the Vietnam Syndrome to himself.

Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.

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Tags: Obituaries, Vietnam, Vietnam War

Original Author: Philip Terzian

Original Location: Tran Thien Khiem, 1925-2021

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