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Prickly Sensitivity. So far the collegium has been happy to let Ky have the headlines-and do the public honors that professional military men often find onerous. Ky has become the closest thing to a national hero cynical South Viet Nam has, is often besieged by admiring youngsters when he goes out in the streets. Sometimes Ky's flair still gets the better of him. On a recent visit to a village just liberated from the Viet Cong, Ky and his wife Mai intended to show their interest in the peasants. Snipers were firing, and it would have worked well, except that Ky and Mai arrived in matching jet-black flight suits, purple scarves, flight boots and blue flying caps. The villagers were struck dumb. "Good God," said a watching American, "they look like Captain and Mrs. Midnight."
Some U.S. officials in Saigon fear that Ky's flair, and above all his rapport with Americans, may well prove his undoing. It was probably no accident that yet another spate of coup rumors began to float through Saigon behind the news of Ky's impressive confrontation with Johnson in Hawaii. "We killed Khanh that way," ruminates one U.S. old hand in Saigon, recollecting how the U.S. Mission backed Khanh even when it was clear that the Young Turks had lost faith in his leadership. "And we are in real danger," he adds, "of killing Ky the same way." Ky, at least, is well aware of the prickly sensitivity of South Vietnamese pride, and indeed shares some of it. "For better or worse," Ky often insists, "it is up to me and others like me to create a new society in South Viet Nam. You cannot do it for us. We must do it ourselves."
Calm in the Dark. Ky was just as frank in Honolulu with Johnson. He publicly urged the U.S. to bomb the port of Haiphong, insisted Saigon would never negotiate with the Viet Cong, rejected the Geneva accords as a basis for negotiations-all points on which Johnson disagrees with him. "I know," said Ky, "that at times your advisers lose patience with us. But I don't think it is any secret that at times we lose patience with your advisers." It is a frankness the U.S. appreciates and needs in Viet Nam politics-not least because it is a guarantee of honesty. Nonetheless, said Ky, "we are making progress," and proceeded to tick it off in terms of classrooms built, land reform, medical centers, housing starts. "When you speak of building hospitals and schools and rural electrification programs," responded John son, "you are speaking our language."
But it was the President's private sessions with Ky and Chief of State Thieu that put muscle on the skeleton of public rhetoric in Honolulu. Sitting in the overstuffed chairs of Johnson's living room in the Hotel Royal Hawaiian, the President urged acceptance by the Vietnamese of a U.S. blueprint for curbing the nation's runaway inflation-and got it. He urged reform in tax administration, citing as an example Argentina, which had increased its income by a third through collection reforms alone. "That is what we want to do," said Ky: develop new cadres of honest young men who would collect taxes properly.