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Sharing a Cell. Big Minh's "Military Revolutionary Committee" decided it would look better to have a civilian at least nominally at the head of the government, but they did not want another President. Named Premier was Nguyen Ngoc Tho, Diem's figurehead vice president since 1956, the highest-ranking Buddhist in Catholic Diem's regime. Like Minh, Tho is a southerner in a nation where regional loyalties are strong, and has been a close friend of Minh since the two shared the French prison cell.
Born in Longxuyen province 55 years ago, Tho joined the French civil service at 22, entered the Diem government in 1954 as Interior Minister. A modest, easygoing type who habitually sits in the front seat of his official limousine beside the driver, Tho has a reputation as a negotiator. Last June Tho negotiated a compromise pact between Buddhists and Diem, but the regime spurned it. Chances are that Premier Tho will remain as much of a figurehead as was Vice President Tho.
The first acts of Minh & Co. were to declare martial law, with an 8 p.m. curfew and censorship of press messages abroad. Dispatches discussing the fate of Diem and Nhu were carefully cut, forcing correspondents—at least for a while—to use precisely the same ruse they had employed against Diem's martial law period last summer: smuggling their files out to the cable offices in Hong Kong and Bangkok via cooperative airline passengers.
The Best Weapon. Minh's junta also suspended the constitution, dissolved the National Assembly. Yet, declared Minh's men, they were well aware of the fact that the best weapon to fight Communism is democracy and liberty. But at the same time they were aware of the fact—which Diem also knew—that total freedom in time of war is impossible. So the junta added somewhat nervously that it had no intention of establishing a "disorderly democratic regime."
What Minh, like so many soldiers who had seized power in other nations, was looking for was a form of democracy within the discipline of war. Few doubted his intentions, but few forgot the paths of other soldier-leaders after the first pure bliss of revolution. "For a moment, imagine that another government replaced this one," Diem once ruminated in one of his endless soliloquies. "It could not help but result in civil war and dreadful dictatorship."
U.S. policymakers are not disturbed by such gloomy prophecy. "We know General Minh, and we think we can work with him," was the word in Washington last week. For better or for worse, Minh is now Washington's man, and his success or failure in the terrible war against the Viet Cong will be America's success or failure.