Nguyen Van Thieu - Life in Exile

Life in Exile

In his farewell speech, Thiệu said, “I resign, but I do not desert”, but he fled to Taiwan on a C-118 transport plane five days later. According to Morley Safer, the CIA was involved in the flight of Thieu, his aides, and a "planeload of suitcases containing heavy metal".

He settled in London, having obtained a visa there as his son was studying at Eton College. Thiệu kept a low profile, and in 1990 even the Foreign Office claimed to have no information on his whereabouts. In the early 1990s, Thiệu took up residence in Foxborough, Massachusetts, where he lived reclusively. He never produced an autobiography, rarely assented to interviews and shunned visitors. Neighbors had little contact with him or knowledge of him, aside from seeing him walking his dog.

Thiệu's aversion to public appearances was attributed to a fear of hostility from South Vietnamese who believed that he failed them. He acknowledged his compatriots’ low esteem of his administration in a 1992 interview, but said, “You say that you blame me for the fall of South Vietnam, you criticize me, everything. I let you do that. I like to see you do better than I.” The Vietnamese-American community heckled Thiệu at a rare speech he delivered in Orange County, California, the area with the most Vietnamese-Americans in the United States in the early 1990s. Thiệu continually predicted the demise of the Vietnamese Communist Party’s grip on power and warned against the United States establishing diplomatic relations with the communist regime. (Relations between the U.S. and the communist regime in Hanoi were formally established in 1995.) Thiệu said that when the communists were deposed and when “democracy is recovered” that he would return to his homeland, but their hold on Vietnam remained unchallenged during his lifetime. He futilely offered to represent the refugee community in reconciliation talks with Hanoi to allow exiles to return home.