"We must take one step backward in order to take 100 steps forward," declared tough, chunky Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, 51, and with that convenient philosophy in mind last October, he took over Thailand's government, abrogated the constitution, dissolved the Parliament, abolished political parties, and set up martial law. Since most of the democratic trappings of the country were more apparent than real, Thailand did not seem to mind such highhandedness at all. Weeks ago, as the Buddhist Lenten season of Purima Pansa began. Thai temples gleamed with new coats of gold in keeping with the old adage. "When the temples shine, the country is prosperous."
For more than a year before his quiet coup, Sarit was Thailand's absentee strongman, with an obedient Premier in office and a contented young King Phumiphon staying regally above politics. But Sarit was spending so much time in Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C. because of his liver—the result of a lifetime of high living—that some of the country's tolerated bad habits had become intolerable. To break up the entrenched corruption and to ward off the increasing appeal of Communism, Sarit decided to take on the premiership in person. He liked to think of himself as the Thai Charles de Gaulle, but with Oriental variation he had also about him a good deal of Manhattan's late effervescent Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.
Nuts & Taboos. Sustaining himself on a diet of nuts and oranges (he had quit drinking) and working until all hours of the night, Sarit became not only Premier but the nation's chief fireman, policeman and garbage collector. He commanded housewives to hang their laundry out of sight, abolished pushcarts, opened sheltered markets, dispatched dredges to the silted canals, bought 60 new garbage trucks for Bangkok, ordered pedicabs off the street. When a rash of fires broke out in the business district last winter. Sarit raced to the scene one night, ordered four Chinese merchants shot on the spot—a brutal but effective reminder that the annual custom of burning down shops to collect insurance for the Chinese New Year celebration was thenceforth taboo. Fortnight ago. prowling La Guardia-style about the streets of Bangkok in his chauffeur-driven car, Sarit drew up behind an automobile in which a woman sat eating fruit and throwing the peels out the window. The Premier characteristically took her license-plate number, ordered the police to pick her up and fine her 100 bahts ($5) for littering.
Sarit himself has traveled far from the days when he headed the national lottery, with all the temptations that that involved. "If I make mistakes," he says, "it's because of ignorance rather than ill will." Today the nation's top politicians, including six ex-Premiers, are serving as his advisers, drafted into the job.