A Taste for Tulips

At dinner before giving a speech on the Stanford University campus, Vu Van Thai, Saigon's ambassador to Washing- ton, declined a third martini. "I do not," he explained, "want to add to the confusion about Viet Nam." Leaving that function to U.S. politicians, Ambassador Thai has done as much to clarify the elusive character and aspirations of his country for Americans as any official of either nation since the initial U.S. commitment to aid Viet Nam in 1954.

Since he presented his credentials at the White House four months ago, Thai, 47, has set himself a marathon speaking schedule that would tax the energies of a Hubert Humphrey. He has given 42 speeches, held countless press conferences, exposed himself to student and faculty flak at colleges from coast to coast, and plans tours this spring through Canada and the South (where he is scheduled to become Viet Nam's first honorary Cherokee chief). Says the ambassador: "We Vietnamese must make our own case."

Daniel in Berkeley. Last week, undeterred by a stubborn flu virus and the prospect of equally stubborn antiwar audiences, Thai was making the case in an exhausting California tour. "I like," he says, "to ride tigers." A veritable Daniel in the den of the University of California Berkeley campus, he returned cool, candid answers that even disarmed his Vietnik hecklers. Later, in (of all places) the Colonial Room of San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel, he dealt frankly with the troubled issue of increasing American influence in his nation's affairs. As to the possibility that the U.S. may be requested to withdraw its forces from South Viet Nam, Thai allowed: "Some Vietnamese may argue that neutrality is the right position for South Viet Nam. We will accept a free expression of opinion--but it has to be free."

Hanoi-born Thai is the son of a fire-eating Vietnamese nationalist who led peasant revolts against the French in the '30s, and was murdered for his pains in Ho Chi Minh's postliberation purge of non-Communist nationalists in 1947. A brilliant product of elite Parisian schools, Thai married a chic, red-haired French girl, stayed on in Paris to become a topflight engineer. For a short time during the round of Vietnamese-French conferences from 1946 on, he was an adviser to Ho, whose Communist commitment was then--like Castro's in a later era--dismissed as simple "nationalism."

Capital Efficiency. After the 1954 Geneva accord that divided Viet Nam, Thai was invited back to Saigon as the Diem government's chief finance and budget officer. In one of that capital's few interludes of bureaucratic efficiency, he imported IBM computers, taught himself to use them, then trained his employees, many of them illiterates, to run the machines with Pentagonian efficiency. Despite his high position with Diem, Thai became increasingly outspoken in his criticism of the government. "The Diem regime turned progressively into personal power and personal dictatorship, using the same means as the Communists," says Thai. He broke with Diem for good in 1960, narrowly escaping execution, for Saigon's traditional form of exile, a U.N. post. Premier Ky tapped him for the ambassadorship last year.

Since the summer of 1963, when aging Tran Van Chuong, father of Viet Nam's contentious Dragon Lady Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, resigned in protest against the Diem regime, Saigon in effect had had no representation in Washington. The Vietnamese embassy, a handsome, four-story structure in northwest Washington, had become rundown and dirty. One of Thai's first projects was to have the building cleaned and refurbished from attic to basement.

Ready & Willing. Despite the political upheaval in Saigon, Thai is confident about his country's future. Quoting a French maxim, he observes: "The optimist says that the onion derives from the tulip, and the pessimist says that the tulip derives from the onion. It seems that in the case of Viet Nam the pessimist has often come close to being right, but has always been proved wrong in the end. The optimist, by contrast, has never proved himself right--but has yet to be proved wrong."

The ambassador observes quietly that he would never have accepted his present post if he were not convinced that the regime in Saigon is "sincere about its program of social revolution." His own taste for tulips is reflected in the sober belief that after years of volatile protest and vacillating regimes, his people "are now willing and able to participate" in what Vu Van Thai sees as South Viet Nam's new and significant "emergence of leadership." Says he: "I believe that we shall overcome."

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