Politician from the Pagoda

South Viet Nam

(see cover)

The stench of cordite and the sour-sweet smell of tear gas--the incense of South Viet Nam's political crisis--was missing in Saigon last week for the first time in more than a month. The frail, elegant hands of the Buddhist bonze who had ignited the trouble gestured--and the mobs went home, the air cleared. The crisis itself had not ended, but its course had been changed and channeled, sometimes subtly, sometimes imperiously, by one of South Viet Nam's most extraordinary men. As a result of the power and discipline he displayed in last week's events, one thing became eminently clear: South Viet Nam's political future for some time to come will be very much influenced by a servant of Buddha, the Venerable Tri Quang.

Lean, well-muscled, with a sensual electricity, in every gesture and blazing eyes that can mesmerize a mob, Thich Tri Quang, 42, has long been South Viet Nam's mysterious High Priest of Disorder. (Thich, pronounced tick, is a title meaning "venerable"; Tri Quang is pronounced tree kwong.) Wily and ruthless, Delphic and adept, he is the best of breed of a new kind of back room bonze. In the murky world of Oriental mysticism and Saigon's immemorial intrigue, these robed and shaven men have emerged as the new Machiavellis of the Vietnamese political scene. Tri Quang is unquestionably their prince.

Like the legendary crane of Chinese mythology, Tri Quang throughout his career has largely managed to shroud himself from mortal view, appearing only now and then as an exclamation point to specific events. A master of means whose ends are obscure, he is, in maddening succession, devious, enigmatic, contradictory and blandly opaque. The only thing self-evident about him is his burning desire for power, his urgent ambition not only for himself but, presumably, for his people --the Buddhists of South Viet Nam.

Saint or Seer? To his mission, Tri Quang brings an intelligence and a toughness that have not 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.

Naturally, he inspires wildly conflicting responses. To some seasoned Saigon observers, he is by far "the most dangerous man in South Viet Nam." To a young American girl who works near him in Saigon's Buddhist Institute for the Propagation of the Faith, Vien Hoa Dao, he seems "affable, fallible and lovable." U.S. officials who must deal with him are both awed and appalled. Former U.S. Ambassador Maxwell Taylor in exasperation once called him "the Makarios of Southeast Asia"--though he is far more retiring and ascetic than Makarios. One of his Buddhist rivals insists that he is an anarchist. The Catholics are certain that he is a Communist. He has been variously described as a demagogue, a saint, a puppetmaster, a seer and "the mad monk."

Perhaps the most important thing about Thich Tri Quang at this juncture in Vietnamese affairs is that he is a genuine political animal of the true native species. Unlike any of his rivals or predecessors in independent Viet Nam, he is untouched by Western tradition or training, proudly parochial, untainted by the embrace of the lycee mandarins. Fiercely nationalistic and xenophobic, he dreams of a return to the golden age of the Ly dynasty (1009-1225), composed of those ardent Buddhists who formed Viet Nam's first stable government and, by pushing out Chinese influence, created a Viet Nam for the Vietnamese.

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 last January, first proposed elections for a constituent assembly, though he had had in mind a date no earlier than 1967. And though Tri Quang's mobs artfully milked the mild anti-Americanism among some Vietnamese by hinting that the U.S. opposed elections, the U.S. in fact has always wanted them, provided that they were truly representative and not rigged by the Viet Cong in the countryside districts. Moreover, in Honolulu the U.S. had pledged itself to give as much help toward "nationhood" as any outsider could.

But to Tri 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 Nam other than the Viet Cong.

Pitch & Tone. That force is one that he has largely hand-tooled himself, using it adroitly to control the pitch and tone of events ever since last March 10, when the Directory fired his friend and ally in the north of South Viet Nam, General Nguyen Chanh Thi, commander of the I Corps. Tri Quang had been looking for a pretext to move, and he found it in the dismissal of Thi, who was popular enough among Buddhists and his soldiers to provide an opening wedge of discontent. In a welling tide of violence, in which cars were burned, windows broken and the police and army baited, the Buddhist mobs forced the government toward capitulation.

Then, abruptly, Tri Quang called the mobs off and early last week summoned the press to the ramshackle five-acre compound of buildings that comprises the Vien Hoa Dao. While his spokesmen read a statement threatening "a civil war that will take tens of thousands of lives because of the short sightedness, irascibility and irresponsibility of the present government," Thich Tri Quang, hardly a bead of perspiration blotting his unfurrowed brow in the 105DEG heat, silently looked on.

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."

To keep the pressure on Ky and the congress, Tri Quang had scheduled for that night a protest march of "many, many men," and all Saigon was braced for the worst. With their point won, the Buddhists instead sent word out from Vien Hoa Dao to cool it. In an astonishing display of their power to turn the masses off and on at will, the demonstration was transformed into a peaceful, highly organized march. The 15,000 faithful that assembled at the institute left behind their plastic-bag gas masks and clubs and grenades. As they marched out to demonstrate, burly Boy Scouts ranged themselves abreast as a vanguard, staves held waist high, to keep the crowd in line. In two short hours, the promenade was over, as smoothly orchestrated in its tranquillity as the previous week's mobs had been in their mayhem.

Riffling Reports. For Tri Quang, it had been a satisfying week's work. Receiving and dispatching emissaries in Room 12-F in the Duy Tan maternity clinic, his customary quarters in Saigon, riffling through reports with the practiced eye of a corporation executive, he took time out at week's end to talk to TIME Correspondents Frank McCulloch and James Wilde, and made some of the most intriguing statements of his career (see box opposite). For a man famed for his elusiveness and enigmatism, his answers seemed remarkably reasonable--and encouraging to the U.S. He condemned Communism, not only welcomed the continued assistance of U.S. troops in Viet Nam but suggested that his government might enhance their value and use. He insisted that the Buddhists do not want predominance in the elections or the assembly; that was Diem's mistake, and the Buddhists do not intend to repeat it.

Whether Tri Quang is as reasonable as he sounds is, of course, debatable on the basis of his past history. He has said several things on several sides of many subjects, and he does not scruple to stretch the truth. Still, he would not be the first politician to discover that imminent power can alter and enlarge a range of responsibility. What was transparently clear was Tri Quang's goal of backstage power for himself. He covets no public post, disdains such titles as president and premier as Western innovations imposed on Viet Nam's ancient traditions. But even if the Buddhists do not gain a predominant grip on the elected assembly, he knows well that the next civilian government will be beholden to him and more vulnerable to Buddhist pressure tactics than any military government.

Real Danger. All the while that Tri Quang has been battering the central government, the war has been carried on, with effectiveness where the enemy can be found but inevitably at a reduced rate because of the Vietnamese army's involvement in the crisis. The real danger so far has been not so much a slackening of the war against the Viet Cong as the ever present threat that Saigon's internecine bickering might explode into a full-fledged civil war that would engulf the Americans in Viet Nam. The possibility of such violence seems to disturb Tri Quang no more than did the task of sending his stone-throwing gangs of town toughs and slum children into the streets to riot.

Encouraging twelve-year-old boys to mix Molotov cocktails hardly seems appropriate for a priest of the Buddha, who preached reverence for life and recommended to monks an eightfold path to nirvana. Nor is overthrowing governments exactly the middle road along which Gautama enjoined his disciples to escape from worldly desires. But then Thich Tri Quang is hardly a copybook example of the Sarvastivadin's Book of Discipline for Buddhist monks, whose tenth admonition forbids a monk "to persist in trying to cause divisions in a community that lives in harmony, and in emphasizing those points that are calculated to cause division." Part of the explanation is that Buddhism in Viet Nam is largely Mahayana, a branch of Buddha's teachings emphasizing social concern for others as well as the withdrawal of self. Even more, Thich Tri Quang is not only a Buddhist bonze but peculiarly a child of his times in Viet Nam.

Helping Ho. Tri Quang is his adopted name, and it means "brilliant mind." He was born Pham Bong on Dec. 31, 1923, in Diem Dien, a village in central Viet Nam now under Hanoi's rule. One of three sons of a well-to-do farmer, he was sent at the age of 13 to the Bao Quoc pagoda in Hue to train for monkhood. Wild and fond of practical jokes at first, he was expelled, then given a second chance. He matured into a student with a photographic memory and a searching intellect. His teacher at Bao Quoc, Thich Tri Do, who now heads the tame Buddhist church of North Viet Nam, guided the impressionable novice into the winds of nation alism sweeping the then French colony.

In 1946 the young monk, possessing nothing but his begging bowl, his robe and a pair of rubber sandals, went with Tri Do to Hanoi. There he caught sight of Ho Chi Minh and was swept by the fever for freedom from the French. In the years of war against Paris, the French suspected, probably rightly, that the lithe bonze with the burning eyes was helping Ho's Viet Minh front. They once jailed him for ten days on suspicion that he was a Communist, but they could not prove it--nor has anyone since, despite the taint of suspicion that still lingers in many quarters. More probably, like many a loyal South Vietnamese of that day, Tri Quang aided Ho's campaign not for love of Communism but for hatred of colonialism.

"The Perfect Conspirator." When the French were thrown out and President Ngo Dinh Diem took over in 1955, Tri Quang, in common with many of his brother monks, was hardly over joyed. For 80 years under the French, Catholicism had been nurtured at the expense of Buddhism, and a Catholic church occupied the choice site in every town. Catholic schools provided education that the Buddhists could not afford to match, and Catholic merchants and civil servants, thus equipped, inevitably prospered. To Tri Quang, the Catholic Diem was merely an extension of the worst ills of French rule. In the monk's mind, Buddhism and nationalism were inextricably mixed and Diem was a blasphemy on Viet Nam's true destiny. Coolly and quietly, Tri Quang set out to destroy him.

It took him seven years--years in which ostensibly he lived the life of an ordinary, if exceptionally austere, bonze. Abstaining from meat, cigarettes and liquor, he lived in a cramped cell in Hue's Tu Dam pagoda, rising with the "first sun on a man's hand," spending a third of his waking day in prayer, a third in activity, a third in contemplation of his mistakes. Twice he served as president of the Hue Buddhist Association, his stints interrupted by a total absence from public view from 1959 to 1961. His life has been filled with such disappearances, but then, even his appearances are deceiving.

In Hue, all during the Diem years, Tri Quang was building up a Buddhist movement modeled after the Communist organizations that he had seen Ho employ against the French. To combat Diem's police, he organized special teams of young monks with flit guns filled with vinegar and red pepper. He had spies tucked neatly inside every fold of the Diem administration. He penetrated the regime's elite Cong Hoa youth, often got possession of top secret documents within 24 hours after they had been issued. One such paper was by Diem's brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu: Communique No. 3 on how to deal with the Buddhists. Later Nhu was to describe Tri Quang bitterly as "almost the perfect conspirator. In the future, his name will be synonymous with conspiracy. It deserves to be."

No Can Lao. Tri Quang's conspiracy against Diem finally flowered in blood in the spring of 1963. When the government refused to let the Buddhists in Hue fly the Buddhist flag on Gautama's birthday, Tri Quang led a demonstration to the radio station. He delivered a spellbinding speech, the crowds surged toward the station and Diem's troops replied with grenades--giving Tri Quang both the martyrs and momentum he needed. Soon Buddhists were immolating themselves on street corners, the protesting crowds grew in number and violence, and on Nov. 1, Diem and Nhu were overthrown and shot in the rear of an army truck. Ironically enough, Tri Quang sat out the last two months of Diem's tragedy in the U.S. embassy, where he had been given sanctuary from the presidential police. The Buddhists, reported the late Marguerite Higgins when she interviewed Tri Quang during that long, hot summer, wanted "Diem's head wrapped in an American flag." In one sense, they got it.

There followed a dizzying succession of governments, eroding the war effort and sapping Vietnamese credibility about any regime in Saigon. General Duong Van Minh took over after Diem, to last just three months. Then came General Nguyen Khanh, who gave way to Harvard-trained Economist Nguyen Xuan Oanh ("Jack Owen") seven months later. Oanh had six days in office before Khanh bounced back in through the revolving door. Khanh gave way again, to Saigon Mayor Tran Van Huong, then whipped back in for a third-time rule of one month. Dr. Phan Huy Quat and his "Medicine Cabinet" had a final, halfhearted try at civilian rule before asking Ky and the generals to take over ten months ago.

In all the changes, the Buddhist-controlled government that the monks felt they had earned in ousting Diem eluded the grasp of the pagodas. Tri Quang in particular felt robbed of his right to rule. He set to work systematically destroying Saigon's control in central Viet Nam by organizing a witch hunt against former members of Diem's semisecret Can Lao, which nearly all civil servants and government officials had been obliged to join. Tri Quang's committees of national salvation, created for the purpose, mobbed suspected Can Laos and chased them from office. Then he and I Corps Commander Thi together replaced them, packing the provincial administrations in I Corps with men loyal to them.

The Equal Fear. A master of the big lie, Tri Quang had triggered crises against the Khanh, Huong and Quat governments by claiming that the Buddhist faith was in danger--a lie given superficial credence by two abortive Catholic coup attempts. Actually, none of the three regimes were anti-Buddhist. But Tri Quang, convinced that the Buddhists had been cheated, seemed driven by an almost nihilistic desire to destroy national order to achieve his goal of power.

Only the Viet Cong benefited from the turmoil he helped create. By May 1965, Viet Nam was virtually lost. The Vietnamese army's reserves were in tatters, the nation nearly cut in half, the enemy roaming almost at will as Saigon's will to fight was sapped by instability at the center. Only the massive introduction of U.S. troops prevented a Communist takeover. Tri Quang was far from happy at the time to be saved at the last minute by American troops. Said he: "The Americans are exploiters of the anti-Communist struggle. We are against these people."

Illogical? Not to Tri Quang. To him, the West is synonymous with colonialism, Catholic domination, the humiliation of the Buddhist church for a century, the rape of Asia--sentiments shared by many Vietnamese. Though he understands both French and English, he refuses, in a touch of arrant nationalism, to speak anything but Vietnamese. He has traveled outside Viet Nam only once in his life, on a 28-day trip to a Buddhist congress in Japan. Though well aware of what he calls "the destructive forces" in Communism and openly contemptuous of the kept Buddhists in North Viet Nam, he clearly feels that Communism may not be the worst enemy. "The main concern of the Vietnamese," he once explained, stabbing a delicate forefinger into a visitor's chest for emphasis, "is that as much as they fear Communist domination, they have an equal fear of alien domination."

Candy Kisses. In pursuit of his own goal in Viet Nam, Tri Quang has shucked off nearly every other mortal desire. He likes neither ease nor luxury. He is not attracted by colors, painting, women, wine or sensuality of any kind. He is indifferent to food, wears robes of the cheapest cloth. When he travels about in Viet Nam, he carries only a towel and a bar of soap. Other than power, his only weakness is candy, usually Hershey's chocolate kisses.

His room in the maternity clinic is nearly bare save for a Japanese transistor radio and his canvas sleeping cot, ranged alongside the big brass hospital bed. He stays in the clinic because of his recurrent asthma. His room hums with a Kelvinator air conditioner, a taste he acquired during his sojourn in the American Embassy.

He seldom goes out. People come to him in a steady stream with reports, requests, gossip, rumors, intelligence. Clearly reveling in his game of political chess, he dispatches a Buddhist plenipotentiary to the resort city of Dalat, sends one of his attendant courier-monks with a message to the Vien Hoa Dao. Thich Tam Chau, secretary-general of the institute and nominally the senior monk in Viet Nam, comes by for lunch. Tam Chau, 44, once considered Tri Quang's rival, likes such creature comforts as his chauffeured Mercedes sedan. Tri Quang twits him about it, himself takes pedicabs about town. In and out is Thich Thien Minh, Tri Quang's former schoolmate who is now his first lieutenant and boss of the Bud dhist Youth, which provides the backbone of Tri Quang's demonstrations.

No sooner had last week's crisis been resolved than out to the 48 Buddhist chapters in the provinces went a cable: "Stop the struggle movement because the demands of the Buddhists of Viet Nam have been met by the authorities." Tri Quang, Tam Chau and Thien Minh all signed it. To the more militant chapter at Hue, a special message was sent: "Hold any action until the arrival of Thich Tri Quang." Then, hunkering down on the floor, Tri Quang personally reined in a delegation of monks pressing for more action. "We must honor our words," he said loftily, adding as a pragmatic postscript: "Otherwise we will all be dead."

Next the Catholics? For South Viet Nam and the U.S., Tri Quang's triumph may well produce a painful time of testing until elections are held sometime between July and September. For one thing, it is the time of the monsoons, the season for the enemy's annual offensive, when the weather protects him from airpower. U.S. firepower is more than adequate to blunt any major Red drive, but a Vietnamese army embroiled in political maneuvering is less than the best ally. Moreover, fully 50% of the army's officers are Catholic, and already the Catholics are restive over Ky's concessions to the Buddhists. If, in their drive for elections, the Buddhists gain too much favor or show too much fer vor, the Catholics could well come out fighting into the streets on their own.

Nor is the nation's loss of momentum all military. The whole decision-making process in the government, from pacification programs to much needed economic reforms, is slowly grinding to a halt. At first officials were simply mugwumping to see who came out on top--and which way to lean. Now, since Ky has promised to step down, they are out looking for new jobs. The crisis has badly shaken the cohesion of the generals' Directory, enhancing the chances of yet another military coup before the caretakers retire.

The Hunger. Beyond that is the question of what Tri Quang will do if, as seems likely, a Buddhist-based government emerges from the elections. For all he says today, the specters of Communism and neutralism still hover over him from the past. The U.S. is inclined to take him at his word, let him prove his much avowed concern for the people of Viet Nam. Twenty years of war have left the Vietnamese with a desperate hunger for national identity, that no government since independence in 1954 has been able to provide. If he chooses to, Tri Quang has the combination of political skills that might bring off the beginnings of a genuine civilian government with popular support.

The testing of Tri Quang may come sooner than that. At week's end 2,500 rioters, ignoring the Saigon accord, swept through Danang and publicly burned the Ky proclamation for elections. They demanded that the generals step down immediately. With ousted General Thi openly agreeing and much of I Corps in rebellion against Saigon's control, Thich Tri Quang prepared this week to fly back home as a "peace envoy" to Hue, where lies his chief strength. Whether as peace envoy or missionary of discontent, he will more and more bear on his slim and restless shoulders the welfare and continued viability of South Viet Nam.

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