Nguyen Cao Ky, South Vietnam Leader, Dies at 80

Nguyen Cao Ky in 1965, the year he became prime minister. (Associated Press)

July 23, 2011
By SETH MYDANS
The New York Times

Nguyen Cao Ky, the flamboyant former South Vietnamese Air Force commander who served for two years as his country’s wartime leader, then fled to the United States when Saigon fell to the Communists, died Saturday at the age of 80.

Mr. Ky died at a hospital in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where he was being treated for a respiratory infection, a nephew, Peter Phan, told The Associated Press.

After serving in both the Communist and French colonial armies, he rose through the ranks of South Vietnam’s fledgling air force, then led Vietnam as prime minister from 1965 to 1967 before serving as vice president under his bitter rival, Nguyen Van Thieu.

As Communist troops closed in on Saigon, the city now called Ho Chi Minh City, in April 1975, Mr. Ky piloted a helicopter to one of the American naval ships that were refuge to those high-ranking officers who managed to flee.

He settled in Southern California, where he tried his hand at business with little success, declaring bankruptcy after running a liquor store from 1977 to 1984, then failing in a shrimp fishing venture in Louisiana.

He re-emerged in the news in 2004 when he became the highest-ranking former South Vietnamese official to return to Vietnam, at the invitation of the Communist government.

In government, he relished a bad-boy reputation, striking a vivid figure in his purple scarf, thin mustache and cigarette and appearing on occasion with his glamorous wife, both wearing matching black flight suits.

“American diplomats, generals and journalists nattered about my preference for purple socks, noted that I wore my hair longer than a U.S. Marine Corps drill instructor or reported, erroneously but often, that I packed a pearl-handled’ revolver,” Mr. Ky wrote in his 2002 memoir, “Buddha’s Child: My Fight to Save Vietnam.”

With evident delight, he quoted a description of him by the Vietnam War historian Stanley Karnow as “looking like a saxophone player in a second-rate nightclub.”

Born in 1930 near Hanoi and raised by an aunt, Nguyen Cao Ky joined the Communist resistance to French colonial rule at the age of 16, inspired by Ho Chi Minh. He fell ill with malaria, and when he recovered he was drafted by the French-controlled government, which sent him abroad to train as a pilot, though he never saw combat.

When the country was divided in 1954 after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, he fled south along with hundreds of thousands of others and joined the American-backed South Vietnamese Air Force.

In 1965, when he was 34 and a commander of the air force, he was chosen by his fellow military officers to lead the country as prime minister, ending a cycle of coups and countercoups that followed the 1963 assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem. In his book, Mr. Ky quotes an assessment of him by the State Department official William Bundy that he was “the bottom of the barrel” and the last choice for the job.

In power, he made a show of cracking down on corruption, executing one businessman accused of war profiteering, and he threatened to kill dissidents, opponents and bomb units led by rival officers, and he suppressed a Buddhist-led uprising in 1966.

After fleeing to the United States, Mr. Ky fended off accusations of corruption himself. Responding in 1984 to the columnist Jack Anderson, who accused Mr. Ky of being involved with criminal gangs, he said: “If I had stolen millions of dollars I could live like a king in this country, but obviously I don’t live like a king.”

In his book he made light of his struggles to make a new life in America.

“When a former national leader becomes a storekeeper, it is news,” he wrote. “Journalists of every sort visited my store. One day a bus driver came in to ask if his passengers, German tourists, could enter and see me. I discovered that my business was a standard stop on his tour, which ended at Disneyland.”

In 1990, he was still advocating the overthrow of the Communist government in Vietnam, but speaking in more moderate tones.

“I think Americans and Vietnamese can achieve today what we could not achieve during the Vietnam war: a final victory over the Communists,” he told The New York Times.

His position mellowed further as the years passed. By the time of his visit to Vietnam 14 years later, he had turned against Vietnamese hard-liners.

“I think it’s very wrong that some — especially some Vietnamese overseas in America — today are asking and demanding that Vietnam has to adopt some sort of democracy like they have in America,” he said. “It’s not fit for Vietnam in the present situation.”

His return to Vietnam was both politically symbolic and personally sentimental.

“Last night, I thought, 30 years ago I cried because I left my homeland,” he told a news conference in Ho Chi Minh City, a place he had last seen from his helicopter as he fled in defeat. “And today I cried once again because I found my homeland.”