Nguyen Cao Ky Quotes
After Watergate, America was a ship without a rudder. Vietnam was left to its own devices, drifting along towards its fate.
Ky, Nguyen Cao. Twenty Years and Twenty Days. Stein and Day, 1976.
In the Vietnam War, America and her allies were defending the South Vietnamese from the Communist and Nationalist incursions of the North Vietnamese. However, the South Vietnamese government was itself a very fragile democracy which provided rights little better than the Ho Chi Min lead government of the North. Further, the South Vietnamese rulers and governments while claiming to be democracies, were little more than in name only and were very corrupt. As with many unstable and weak governments, South Vietnam had experienced a succession of coups, with some of his advisors favoring the coups and a few actualy supporting them. Johnson was continually frustrated by this and this expression was his own inimitable style.
In 1921 when Harding took office, the nation was in the midst of a major depression which was to get worse before it got better.
Nguyễn Cao Kỳ was a Vietnamese military officer and politician who served as the chief of the Republic of Vietnam Air Force in the 1960s, before leading the nation as the prime minister of South Vietnam in a military junta from 1965 to 1967. Then, until his retirement from politics in 1971, he served as vice president to bitter rival General Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, in a nominally civilian administration.