The Saigon Political Elite: Focus on Four Cabinets

By David Wurfel, University of Missouri
in Asian Survey, August 1967

The character of the present political elite in South Vietnam is crucial for the success of American policy there and will be a major determinant of the way in which the new constitution is implemented. A study of this elite is, therefore, timely. It is also consistent with a growing interest among political scientists in such research as a means to better understand the development process.

The makeup of the Saigon elite will be examined here with special reference to four cabinets, those led by President Diem and by Premiers Tho, Huong, and Ky. Some data on members of other cabinets in the 1962-65 period will also be included. It will be the theme of this paper that, in so far as top civilian office-holders are representative of the group, this elite has not substantially changed its character in the last few years. It is true that since 1962 at least two important new groups have entered the elite of power: the military and the Buddhists. Political parties and Southern sects that were active in the mid-1950’s have also reappeared and have been given an institutional base in the 1966 election of the Constituent Assembly. But most indications point to the conclusion that their leaders come from educational and social backgrounds very similar to those of cabinet members. The extent to which this is also true of the Buddhists and military men needs further research. In any case, there can be no claim here that the cabinet provides a cross-section of the entire political elite.

The Saigon elite has been the product of colonialism, war and revolution. It is composed of factions warring on the basis of region, religion and other less obvious considerations. But these factions also have qualities in common. The predominance of French education, either in Vietnam or in France, is noticeable. Separation from rural life is a consequence of the most frequent career patterns. Robert Shaplen has emphasized the psychological isolation of the elite from the peasantry.1

Its emergence from a Confucian tradition has given the Vietnamese elite some common as well as distinct characteristics.2Vietnam is alone in Southeast Asia in having been ruled by a mandarin bureaucracy before the coming of the West. This pattern of government, borrowed from China, seems to have been adequate for the needs of a traditional society. Independence and a modicum of internal order were maintained for centuriesuntil the intrusion of the modern West. Nor were Confucian ideas and institutions immediately set aside upon the arrival of the French. Mandarinal examinations were not abolished until 1922; the traditional bureaucracy was only gradually displaced by the French administrative system. In the 1950’s Ngo Dinh Diem tried to revive public obeisance to The Sage.

Indications are strong that in Ching China there was a high degree of self-perpetuation within the mandarinate. About 80% of those who obtained mandarinal degrees in the last Chinese dynasty were offspring of degree holders, despite the ideal of open access to the examinations.3Though no comparable research has been done for Vietnam, preference elsewhere in elite recruitment for sons of mandarins has also been noted.4It would be natural to assume that status and educational opportunity correlated highly throughout the French period also.

Educational facilities under colonialism were not extensive. In the early 1930’s, less than 1,000 attended universities. Nearly two-thirds of this number were in the single Indochinese university at Hanoi, and most of the rest were in France.5 As late as 1939, only about 6,000 Vietnamese were in secondary schools of all types, i.e., beyond the 10th grade. In the population as a whole, literacy was variously estimated at between 5 and 20 percent, thus differentiating a well-educated elite even more sharply from the ordinary citizen. Robequain has pointed out that in the 1930’s some young men of modest means gained access to the intellectual elite through higher education, but emphasized that it was the exception rather than the rule.7 Nearly twenty years later, Scigliano reiterated: “Secondary and higher education has been the preserve of the well-off.”8

In more recent years, of course, the educational gap between elite and mass has narrowed. Literacy is now attributed to nearly two-thirds of the population. By 1964, secondary school (10th to 12th grade) enrollment in South Vietnam had reached 62,000 and there were more than 20,000 in universities and higher technical schools.9Thus, with only slightly less population than all of Vietnam in the 1930’s, educational opportunity in South Vietnam beyond the 10th grade was available to about 10 times more people than in the previous generation.

The political elite which attracts our attention is, as in most late-developing countries, a part of a very small upper class. No reliable survey of the structure of South Vietnamese society as a whole is available today, though we are fortunate in having some data from a recent sample drawn by the Opinion Research Corporation of Princeton.10 This sample is admittedly skewed toward an over-representation of urban areas, but only 1% of the population is classified as “professionals” and only 8% as “white-collar workers,” a category which undoubtedly includes a large percentage that would, on income criteria, not even qualify as middle-class. The economic elite has been, at least until recently, dominated by the French and the Chinese, while the political elite has been confined to ethnic Vietnamese. Formerly, only among the great landlords were there those who held significant amounts of both political and economic power; grandiose corruption may have allowed others to attain that distinction in recent years.

With this very inadequate introduction to Vietnamese society and the place of the political elite within it, let us focus more directly on the cabinet. Since this is an interim report on a long-term study, the data are still quite incomplete and the figures can only be suggestive of characteristics. The decision to concentrate on the four cabinets is itself a result of data limitations. The author has had to rely primarily on a collation of published data: books, newspapers and Viet Nam Press. Some information has also been obtained from interviews.

The cabinet has not in recent history been the exclusiveor even primary locus of power within the Vietnamese political system. The Diem cabinet without Nhu, the Huong cabinet without General Khanh, and the Quat cabinet without General Ky are merely three of the most patent instances of supreme political power lying outside the cabinet. Nguyen Thai has described how President Diem often treated his cabinet members as errand boys. Professor Fishel chose words which seem to best describe the situation when he said that the Quat cabinet was “in charge of the civil administration.”11 Yet while the cabinet was subordinate to the Ngo family until 1963 and under military direction since then, not to mention growing American influence, it is still the most significant civilian political institution within the South Vietnamese government and thus deserves our close attention. No policy decision can be implemented without the full cooperation of its members.

The first of the four cabinets on which we will focus is that of Ngo Dinh Diem, as constituted in 1962. This was after Diem had weathered two unsuccessful coups, the second of which resulted in the bombing of the palace, and the defection of some of the outstanding young men in his administration, most notably Vu Van Thai, Director of the Budget and Foreign Aid. The second cabinet was headed by Nguyen Ngoc Tho, formerly Diem’s vice-president, who was appointed to do the bidding of the junta headed by Gen. Duong Van Minh from November 1963 to January 1964. General Khanh’s cabinet followed. Incomplete data prevents its inclusion in the detailed tables; however, four members of Khanh’s government help to make up the total of some fifty cabinet members about whom there is sufficient information to make certain generalizations. The Tran Van Huong cabinet, formed in November 1964, marked an unsuccessful attempt to restore civilian government while ignoring the Buddhists. It was followed in February 1965 by the Phan Huy Quat cabinet, which, while more sensitive to religious currents, was weakened by factional quarrels and toppled in June by pressures from the military. (Again, data on this cabinet are very incomplete.) The cabinet then formed was headed by General Nguyen Cao Ky, still premier today after at least three governmental reshuffles.

Since only the transition from the Quat to the Ky cabinet was not marked by a fundamentaland sometimes violentchange in the top elite of power, one might have expected important differences among the various ministerial line-ups. In regard to educational background, however, there was very little change. Since the Diem regime, all civilians on which we have data have attended university and nearly one-fourth in each cabinet have had a doctor’s degree of some kind (Table I) . This is in contrast to only 1.5% of the civil bureaucracy having university education as of 1961.12

Nor has there been a change in the locale of higher education. The two cabinets on which data are most comparable, the first and the last, seem to be very similar in make-up, with approximately the same ratio of U.S. to European to Vietnamese schools (Table II). An analysis of forty ministers in six cabinets since 1962 indicates that little more than one-third had all their advanced training in Vietnam, whereas 40% took all or part of their university work in France and a full 60% were included in a broader category of those educated in Europe and America.

The relative impact of foreign and domestic university training is a significant influence on the pattern of political development and is receiving increasing attention among scholars.13It has been correctly pointed out that under a colonial regime a modern university tends to be an alien institution, even if located within the colony. Certainly Hanoi University, staffed largely by Frenchmen, was patterned closely on the Gallic model. Nevertheless, thecultural experiences that accompany extended residence abroad while attending university cannot help but affect one’s values more greatly than attendance at an almost identical institution within one’s own cultural milieu. The plurality of cabinet members who attended French universities in France are likely to be more westernized than their colleagues who did not. (They are also likely to be more disdainful of American culture.)

Vietnamese cabinets, in fact, appear to be among the most westernized in Asia. Comparison with Korea in this regard is noteworthy: a study of political leadership there revealed that only about 25% of university graduates had attended Korean schools, while 35% had gone to Japan and 20% to Europe and America.14 But Japanese universities, while alien, were not Western. In Nehru’s 1956 cabinet, only 7 out of 26 had European degrees.15 A much smaller proportion of Philippine cabinet members have studied abroad.

The National Liberation Front constitutes a counter-elite to Saigon’s leadership. Though data are neither complete nor entirely trustworthy, it is clear that a French education in Europe is rare among NLF Central Committee members; only 3 out of 27 report studying in France.16 In contrast, in a comparable setting, a higher percentage of the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930’s had educational experience in Europe and America than did the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang.17 It appears that foreign education in itself is neither a decisive help nor hindrance to leaders attempting to build a mass political base. Other kinds of experience must be more crucial.

The average age of Saigon cabinet members stabilized from 1962 to 1964 at around 47; then, following a slight upswing in the Quat cabinet, it dropped to nearly 41 with Ky, whose own youth was certainly a factor in bringing down the average (Table III). In Korea, a similar pattern was evident: the average age of civilian cabinet members was over 50; in General Park’s government which followed, it was under 42. In both South Korea and South Vietnam, then, the ages were well below the average of 57.7 years which obtained in Nehru’s India and which probably reflects the long history of the pre-independence nationalist movement there. In the even greater stability of Japanese society and politics, cabinet members have averaged nearly 60 years of age.18

While a concentration on average age shows considerable stability from Diem until the appearance of Ky, the spread of ages within each cabinet is also important. All of the four cabinets studied included one or more members born before 1909 and one or more born in the 1930’s. This constitutes a spread of approximately 25 years, or the difference of a generation. The spread from the oldest to the youngest in the 3-year period is 35 years. This is comparable to the spread for Japanese cabinets from 1954 to 1961, reported by Ward19 to be 39 years, but considerably more than that in the Indian cabinet of 1956, only 23 years.20 In any case, given the traditional respect for age in Vietnamese society and the great difference in life experiences between those born during the Russo-Japanese War and those born following the Great Depression, this age spread must be an important barrier to easy communicationlet alone true consensuswithin the cabinet. And certainly lack of cohesion within the Vietnamese decision-making elite is an important phenomenon to explain.

With data on less than forty persons, the link between age group and place of higher education is not decisively established, but the trend is clear. The percentage of foreign trained increases in the younger age brackets. Given the conditions existing in Vietnam since 1941, there were obviously many advantages to studying abroad. And as might be expected, foreign study other than in France is a recent phenomenon. These distinctions reinforce generational gaps.

The lower age of the Ky cabinet might be significant in terms of basic attitudes to national problems. But we cannot be confident that youth creates a more revolutionary spirit. The Ky government seems no closer to stamping out corruption or to giving land to the landless than were its more elderly predecessors. The NLF Central Committee members, on the other hand, had an average age of 49 in 1965; 59% of them were born before 1920, compared to 13% of Ky’s first cabinet.

Regional affiliation in Vietnam is an important level of identity which has been overlayedbut not replaced by nationalism. One’s regional origins are immediately evident in the type of Vietnamese spoken. Reference to regional differences is part of everday conversation; each region stereotypes the others.21Regionalism was a problem even for the 19th Nguyen dynasty, the period of greatest Vietnamese national unity. Regional differences were further sharpened by the varying impact of French colonialism in each of the three ky. The competition among the elites from all three regions in Saigon politics today makes the problem more intense than ever.

Since 1966, regional differences in Vietnamese politics have come to the attention of the press and of many American government officials, especially with the cabinet crisis that preceded the 1966 Manila conference and the subsequent assassination of Tran Van Van. Scholars have been aware of the potency of regional sentiments for some time.22 Scigliano’s check of 186 higher civil servants in 1961 revealed the combined dominance of Northerners (57) and those from the Center (62) over Southerners (67) , though about two-thirds of the population were in the South, i.e., the former Cochin-China. At the cabinet level, Diem first included no Southerners, but 40% were from the South by 1962. Subsequent cabinets did vary somewhat in the matter of regional composition (Table IV). No successor to Diem gave as many cabinet posts to those from the Center, Diem’s own region, as he did. Premier Tho’s cabinet was overwhelmingly Southern in its composition, a reaction to Diem. And Ky, himself a Northerner, gave greater representation to the North than was true in any other cabinet. Northerners also dominated top military leadership. If resentment against Northerners was so intense that it helped bring down the Diem government in 1963, it was unlikely that it had disappeared in 1965, for the South continues to be under-represented at the highest decision-making levels. That three-quarters of the NLF Central Committee is made up of Southerners seems well-designed to exploit the discontent, even though the Central Committee may be no more powerful in its camp than the cabinet is in Saigon.

Regional differences within a cabinet are important especially insofar as they coincide with the pattern of other cleavages. Much has been written about religious antagonisms. Precise religious breakdown of cabinets in this study is not possible without further data. (Religious affiliation is not usually part of published biographies.) Our study does show, however, some correlation between regional and educational backgrounds (Table V) . Over half the Southerners on whom we have data studied in France, while less than 15% of the Northerners did so. In fact, less than half of the Northerners had any foreign study, and two out of four of those who did go abroad went to the U.S. No Southern cabinet member reports an American educational background. This begins to give some substance to the Northern image of the Southerner as being too gallicized and the Southern complaint that Northerners are too closely identified with the Americans.

A study of career backgrounds is, of course, one of the most significant approaches to the analysis of elite composition. The career histories of over fifty ministers reveal some clear patterns. Government servicecivilian and military, career and politicalwas the main occupation of 47.1% of the population in the 1949-54 period and 52.9% during the Diem regime (Table VI) . What is particularly interesting is that despite the net return of over 20% of future cabinet members from abroad, mostly in 1954 and 1955.only one-fourth of this number was added to those in government service after 1955. This confirms the impression that many Vietnamese returned from overseas when Diem came to power, often with the intention of serving their nation in government, but then were wary and did not join the Ngo family regime. It is the professions of education, law and medicine that seem to have gained most from those returning from abroad. Pre-cabinet careers in all business and professional categories jumped from 25.5% before 1954 to 43.4% afterwards. Within that grouping, education made the largest absolute gain from one period to the next. While most educators were in government institutions, receiving government salaries, their political values and attitudes were probably closer to the free professions than to those of the bureaucrat. One measure of the degree to which Vietnamese teachers identify with the Saigon government may be found in the fact that their profession is better represented in the membership of the NLF Central Committee than is any other occupation.

In Nehru’s India, recruitment to the cabinet was along different channels; party and legislative careers were more important than either the civil service, business, or the professions. In the Philippines, business and the professions, along with professional politics, are the main avenues to the cabinet. In both countries political leadership is chosen through elections. However, despite the fact that Japan also has elected governments, Japanese cabinets have been somewhat more like those in Vietnam. In 1954, 35% of cabinet members in Tokyo had risen through the bureaucracy and only 34% through business and the professions, the rest coming through political parties.

It is not surprising that the greatest similarity to South Vietnam is to be found in the country most like it in terms of ancient history and culture, colonial experience, and recent political developments, South Korea. The military role in Vietnamese cabinets has been somewhat less than in South Korea in the 1952-1962 period, since the Vietnamese military has preferred usually to rule from outside the cabinet. More than one-fourth of 119 Korean cabinet members had military careers, compared with less than 15% of 53 in Saigon.23The career civil servant, on the other hand, was less dominant in Korea; only 18.6% of Korean cabinet members studied were career civil servants, compared to one-third in South Vietnam. However, an almost identical proportion (65%) of Korean and post-1965 Saigon cabinet members came up from military, civil service and educational careers.

It is important to note that the military men in post-Diem cabinets all served under French command before 1954. Although General Park and other Korean officers served in Japanese forces, that service ended nearly ten years earlier than for comparable Vietnamese, nor was it primarily directed to the suppression of Korean nationalists. Neither can the Vietnamese officer corps be compared with that in Indonesia, which won its medals fighting against European colonialism.

When one compares the career histories of different cabinets, the presence (under Tho, Quat or Ky) or absence (under Diem or Huong) of the military is the only important contrastand in the case of Huong even this difference is more apparent than real (Table VII). What is more impressive is that four or more members of each cabinet served under Bao Dai and the French in a civil or military capacity. In the Tho cabinet, more than two-thirds of the members were in that category. Biographical data on only one person lists service with the Viet Minh, though there are probably more. At least two persons in all the cabinets except Tho’s spent all or part of the Bao Dai period abroad. It is easy to understand, therefore, how an ardent Vietnamese nationalist could view many recent cabinet members as ex-collaborationists or, at least, as ex-attentistes.

One of the most important findings which we may derive from these data is the degree of similarity among the four cabinets. This is partly the result of overlapping membership, which involves only two persons from the Diem to Tho cabinets, but five each from Tho’s to Khanh’s and from Quat’s to Ky’s. (The Oanh “caretaker cabinet” of 1964 was excluded from consideration precisely because it largely duplicated the previous Khanh ministry and lasted such a short time.) Carry-overs in the Khanh, Huong and Ky cabinets involved more than 25% of all posts (Table VIII).

Overlapping membership does not extend much beyond adjacent cabinets, however. No member of the Diem or Tho cabinets appears under either Quat or Ky. Nor did the first Ky cabinet include anyone from Khanh’s, and only one from Huong’s. Characteristic similarities which extend from 1962 to 1965 need to be explained by the continuing presence in the cabinets of an elite with common traits rather than simply by continuity of membership.

The important segment of the South Vietnamese elite of power which the cabinet constitutes is clearly made up of intellectuals. They are the highly westernized intelligentsia classified as “the new intellectuals” by Professor Benda.24 But this does not mean, despite the tendency that Benda notes, that the Saigon elite is composed of social revolutionaries. In fact, these latter-day mandarins have combined the status of bureaucrat and intelligentsia in a conservative style unique in Southeast Asia. It is true that some of the revolutionary leadership in Vietnam came out of this elite, but that very defection seems to have hardened the attachment of the remainder to the status quo. Though in part the military leadership comes from different social strata, it seems despite some verbal innovation to accommodate quickly to much of the value system of the older elite, hoping perhaps to overcome the resentment against the nouveau arrive.

Benda explains the radicalism of the intelligentsia in the new states in terms of the unemployed or underemployed graduate. This is certainly an important part of the historical picture in many places. It was undoubtedly one of the factors spurring a revolutionary nationalist movement in Vietnam in the 1930’s.25World War II and the Indo-China War which followed changed the situation in two important respects, however. In the first place, the educational output in Vietnam was held down, at least at the university level. Secondly, though the number of Vietnamese students in France and the U.S. grew rapidly in the late 1940’s and 1950’s, this did not mean an increase in the supply of graduates in Vietnam. Conditions were so bad that almost everyone who could stayed abroad. The ardent nationalist who would not work for the French was often averse to guerrilla warfare as well. Thus, despite the snail’s pace at which the French nationalized the bureaucracy, the number of Vietnamese applicants did not grow very much faster. And those who felt most comfortable about entering the civil service were those whose families were already part of the bureaucratic-intellectual elite. By the early 1950’s they saw radicalism, in the form of the Viet Minh, as a threat to their own position. The present political elite is the legacy of those developments. (The great expansion of university education within South Vietnam in the last decadewithout a corresponding increase in appropriate jobscould change the pattern in the near future, however.)

In sum, the South Vietnamese cabinets and perhaps most of the rest of the political elite have been constituted by a highly westernized intelligentsia. Though the people of South Vietnam seem to be in a revolutionary mood, this elite is hardly revolutionary. Whereas the Indonesian government suffered for years from an excess of “agitators” and “symbol manipulators” in its elite,26Saigon today is witnessing the disadvantages inherent in rule by post-Confucian administrators. It seems unlikely that the solution to Vietnam’s ills is simply, as one cabinet member put it, “better administration.”

TABLE I: Level of Education of Cabinet Members

CABINET Diem Tho Huong Ky All Cabinets==*== %
Highest Level of Education
Vietnamese Classical Studies 1 0 0 0 1 1.9%
Technical School 7 5 9 10 30 56.6
M.D., Ph.D. or LL.D. 4 3 4 4 17 32.1
Total 12 11 13 16 53 100.1%==**==
Data Not Available 3 4 2 1 26
TOTAL Persons in Cabinet 15 15 15 17 79

* This column is not the sum of the four preceding columns, since a few persons from the Khanh and Quat cabinets are included and there is some overlap of personnel among the four cabinets covered above.

** Total may be more than 100%, due to rounding.

TABLE II: Place of Higher Education of Cabinet Members

Place of Higher Education Diem Tho Huong Ky All Cabinets==*==
Vietnam 3 3 3 3 15 37.5%
France, or Vietnam and France 4 5 5 4 16 40.0
Part in USA 2 2 1 2 7 .17.5
Japan, Britain 0 0 1 1 2 5.0
Total 9 10 10 10 40 100%
Data Not Available 6 5 5 7 39
TOTAL Persons in Cabinet 15 15 15 17 79

* Those in the Diem, Tho, Khanh, Huong, Quat or First Ky cabinets.

TABLE III: Age Distribution of Cabinet Members and Average Ageby Cabinet

CABINET
Age Diem Tho Huong Ky All Cabinets==*==
1900-1904 2 0 1 0 3
1905-1909 1 1 2 1 4
1910-1914 3 5 3 1 13
1915-1919 4 4 3 0 8
1920-1924 1 0 3 6 12
1925-1929 0 3 1 5 10
1930-1934 1 1 1 1 3
1935-1940 0 0 0 1 1
TOTAL 12 14 14 15 54
Data Not Available 3 1 1 2 25
Number of Persons in Cabinet 15 15 15 17 79
Average Age on Taking Office 47.9 45.2 47.6 41.4

* Those in the Diem, Tho, Khanh, Huong, Quat or First Ky cabinets.

TABLE IV: Place of Birth of Cabinet Members

CABINET
Region Diem Tho Huong Ky All Cabinets==*== %
South 6 11 8 6 28 50%
Central/South 3 2 1 2 9 16.0
Central/North 1 0 0 0 2 3.6
North 3 1 4 6 16 28.6
Elsewhere (Loas) 0 0 0 1 1 1.8
Total 13 14 13 15 56 100%
Data Not Available 2 1 2 2 23
Total Persons in Cabinet 15 15 15 17 79

* Persons in the Diem, Tho, Huong, Khanh, Quat and First Ky cabinets.

TABLE V: Correlation Between Place of Education and Place of Birth

Place of Birth
Place of Higher Education South (28) North (16) Total
Vietnam 4 7 11
All or Part Foreign 15 4 19
Total 19 11 28
Data Not Available 9 5

TABLE VI: Career Histories of Cabinet Members[a]

nbsp; 1949-1954 Diem Period
Cabinet Member 3 0
National Assembly 0 2
Sub-total: Political Office 3 (5.9%) 2 (3.8%)
Educator 4 8
Judge, lawyer 3 6
Sub-total:Professionals (including government employees) 7 (13.7%) 14 (26.4%)
Journalist 1 0
Doctor and dentist 2 5
Banker and businessman 3 4
Sub-total: Business and Free Professions 6 (11.8%) 9 (17.0%)
Exile, or study abroad 13 (25.5%) 2 (3.8%)
With the Viet Minh 1 (2.0%) 0 (0.0%)
TOTAL 51 (100%) 53 (100.1%)==*==
Data Not Available 28 26

fna. For Diem cabinet members, this indicates pre-1960 position.
* Total may be more than 100%, due to rounding.

TABLE VII: Pre-Diem Career History of Cabinet Members, by Cabinet

\2. DIEM THO HUONG KY
\2.Secretary-General, Director-General, etc. 1 3 1 1
\2.Lower rank civil servant 3 3 3 1
\2.Military officer 0 3 0 3
\2.Educator 1 0 2 1
\2.Judge, lawyer 0 1 1 1
\2.Journalist 1 0 0 0
\2.Doctor, dentist, pharmacist 0 1 0 1
\2.Banker, businessman 0 1 1 1
\2.Exile, study abroad 4 2 2 2
\2.With Viet Minh 0 0 1 0
\2.TOTAL in cabinet 15 15 15 17
\2.Data not available 5 1 4 6

TABLE VIII: Members of Five Cabinets From Previous Cabinets

  Diem Tho Khanh Huong Quat Ky
DIEM * 2 0 0 0 0
THO * 5 2 0 0
KHANH * 2 1 0
HUONG * 1 1
QUAT * 5
KY *
Total Positions 15 15 18 15 19 17 99
Total Carry-overs - 2 5 4 2 6
Percent of Carry-overs 13.3 27.8 26.7 10.5 35.3

DAVID WURFEL is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri.

Notes

I wish to thank the Research Center of the School of Business and Public Administration, University of Missouri, and the Center for South and Southeast Asia, University of Michigan, for assistance which helped make this study possible.

1 Robert Shaplen, The Lost Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 253ff.

2 Nguyen Thai, Is South Vietnam Viable? (Manila: Carmelo and Bauermann, 1962), 31ff.

3 See Robert Marsh, The Mandarins (Glencoe: Free Press, 1961), 82ff.

4 See Roy Jumper and Nguyen Thi Hue, Notes on the Political and Administrative History of Vietnam (Saigon: Michigan State University, 1962, mimeo).

5 See Vu Tam Ich, “A Historical Survey of Educational Developments in Vietnam,” Bulletin of the Bureau of School Service (Lexington, Kentucky), XXXII (Dec. 1959), 69ff.; also Virginia Thompson, French Indo-China (New York: Macmillan, 1937), pp. 284-307.

6 Great Britain, Naval Intelligence Division, Indo-China (London: HMSO, 1943), 250ff. It must be remembered that French lycees in Vietnam, though here included in the category “secondary” schools, provided up to the equivalent of American junior college education.

7 Charles Robequain, The Economic Development of French Indo-China (London: Oxford University Press, 1944) , p. 87.

8 Robert Scigliano, South Vietnam: Nation Under Stress (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), p. 50.

9 Republique du Viet-Nam, Secretariat d’Etat a L’Education Nationale, Annuaire Statistique de L’Enseignment (Saigon, 1965) , pp. 80-81.

10 Opinion Research Corporation, The People of South Vietnam: How They Feel About the War (Princeton: Opinion Research Corporation, March 1967), p. 46.

11 Wesley R. Fishel, “Vietnam: The Broadening War,” Asian Survey (Jan. 1966), p. 51.

12 Scigliano, op. cit., p. 48.

13 See M. Brewster Smith, “Foreign vs. Indigenous Education,” in Post-Primary Education and Political and Economic Development, Piper and Cole, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1964), pp. 48-74.

14 Bae-ho Hahn and Kyo-taik Kim, “Korean Political Leaders (1952-1962) : Their Social Origins and Skills,” Asian Survey (July 1963), pp. 305-323. In this sample, which covered many leaders in addition to cabinet members, only 74% had college or university education; 14% attended military academy.

15 Robert North, “The Indian Council of Ministers: A Study of Origins,” in Leadership and Political Institutions in India, Richard Park and Irene Tinker, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 110. Among the pro-Western elite of Nigeria, only one-third had been educated in Europe or America and only half had attended university at all. See Hugh H. Smythe and Mabel M. Smythe, The New Nigerian Elite (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960) , p. 76.

16 See Douglas Pike, Viet Cong (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966), pp. 422-435. “Harold Lasswell and Daniel Lerner, World Revolutionary Elites (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965) , p. 382.

17 Robert Ward, “Japan,” in Modern Political Systems: Asia, Ward and Macridis, eds. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1963), P. 85.

18 Ibid.

19 North, op. cit., p. 113.

20 See George Tanham, “Nationalism and Revolution,” in Asia, No. 4 (Winter 1966), pp. 35-36.

21 Scigliano, op. cit., 51ff.

22 Harry Benda, “Non-Western Intelligentsias as Political Elites,” in John Kautsky, Political Change in Underdeveloped Countries (New York: Wiley, 1962), 234ff.

fn23.Ibid.

24 Joseph Buttinger, Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled (New York: Praeger, 1967) , pp. 198-99.

25 See Herbert Feith, The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962) .




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