50 Years Ago This Week: War and Democracy in Vietnam

Milestone moments do not a year make. Often, it’s the smaller news stories that add up, gradually, to big history. With that in mind, in 2017 TIME History will revisit the entire year of 1967, week by week, as it was reported in the pages of TIME. Catch up on last week’s installment here. Week 37: Sept. 15, 1967 The man on this week’s cover, Nguyen Van Thieu, had just been elected President of South Vietnam — and his victory represented more than just a change of power in the war-torn nation. Thieu, 44, was the son of a farmer/fisherman who had once joined the Viet Minh to combat French colonialism in Vietnam, but had an anti-Communist awakening in the wake of World War II and ended up moving to Saigon to join the Vietnamese army there. He was quickly promoted and, after a high-ranking job at the National Military Academy, entered politics in the early 1960s after a coup to overthrow the government of Ngo Dinh Diem. In the military government that filled the space between the coup and the election, the private Thieu found himself in charge of his nation. That position was affirmed by the election. Thieu (and his Vice President, the powerful Nguyen Cao Ky) quickly came under fire from opponents who saw his rise as rigged, though U.S. observers deemed the election to have been relatively fair and democratic. With voter turnout at a whopping 83% — and with the U.S. having a vested interest in demonstrating that the nation was moving in a direction ...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Media Vietnam War Source Type: news