Nguyen Van Hao’s Missing Visa

Only one senior official in the U.S.-supported government of Nguyen Van Thieu was kept on by the Communists as an advisor after their takeover of South Vietnam in 1975. He is Nguyen Van Hao, a Western-educated economist who was deputy prime minister in charge of economic development in the final year of the Thieu regime. In the summer of 1982, after his advice had been ignored for seven years, Hao was allowed to leave Vietnam, legally, for France. Either because he cooperated with the Communists and was never asked to undergo a course of “re-education,” or because he was instrumental in blocking a scheme that would have shipped South Vietnam’s gold reserves to the U.S. in the closing days of the war, the State Department has rejected his request to Join his wife and four children in Houston. Whatever the merits of his appeal for a visa, Hao is the only person who operated at or near the highest levels of both the anti-Communist and Communist governments in Vietnam. What follows is the story of a Vietnamese nationalist who found it morally insupportable to flee the sinking ship that the Republic of Vietnam had become in April 1975.

“The people of Saigon have three dreams now,” Nguyen Van Hao (pronounced “how”) told me in his apartment in a Paris suburb last summer: “They dream that tomorrow the earth will collapse, swallowing up the leaders in Hanoi along with themselves. Or they dream that anyone from the pre-1975 governments—no matter how bad—-will come back and deliver the country from the Communists. There would be accounts to settle, but they could wait until after the Communists were beaten. Finally, they dream that something might change when the old leadership in Hanoi dies. This is the most tragic hope, because it means that the people in fact understand that the Communists are there now for generations.”

DB

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David Butler

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Only one senior official in the U.S.-supported government of Nguyen Van Thieu was kept on by the Communists as an advisor after their takeover of South Vietnam in 1975. He is Nguyen Van Hao, a Western-educated economist who was deputy prime minister in charge of economic development in the final year of the Thieu regime. In the summer of 1982, after his advice had been ignored for seven years, Hao was allowed to leave Vietnam, legally, for France. Either because he cooperated with the Communists and was never asked to undergo a course of “re-education,” or because he was instrumental in blocking a scheme that would have shipped South Vietnam’s gold reserves to the U.S. in the closing days of the war, the State Department has rejected his request to Join his wife and four children in Houston. Whatever the merits of his appeal for a visa, Hao is the only person who operated at or near the highest levels of both the anti-Communist and Communist governments in Vietnam. What follows is the story of a Vietnamese nationalist who found it morally insupportable to flee the sinking ship that the Republic of Vietnam had become in April 1975.

“The people of Saigon have three dreams now,” Nguyen Van Hao (pronounced “how”) told me in his apartment in a Paris suburb last summer: “They dream that tomorrow the earth will collapse, swallowing up the leaders in Hanoi along with themselves. Or they dream that anyone from the pre-1975 governments—no matter how bad—-will come back and deliver the country from the Communists. There would be accounts to settle, but they could wait until after the Communists were beaten. Finally, they dream that something might change when the old leadership in Hanoi dies. This is the most tragic hope, because it means that the people in fact understand that the Communists are there now for generations.”