Cold War Monks

Among the most horrific images of the Vietnam War were those of a Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duch, deliberately immolating himself in Saigon to protest Catholic President Ngo Dinh Diem’s discrimination against Buddhists in South Vietnam. His action and that of several other Vietnamese monks who emulated him—as did several American and Japanese antiwar activists—shocked observers around the world, including the photographer who recorded the event and President John F. Kennedy. Chinese and North Vietnamese Communists hailed his suicide as proof of the intolerable evils of U.S. imperialism, distributing millions of copies of the gruesome photographs across Asia and Africa. Eugene Ford’s excellent study of U.S. efforts to use Buddhism as a force to counter the appeal of Communism in Southeast Asia details how, in late 1964, Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, told Thai foreign minister Thanat Khoman that he hoped Thailand’s Buddhists would influence their peers in South Vietnam to be less obdurate. As a new Buddhist crisis erupted in early 1966, the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok dispatched two prominent Thai Buddhist laymen to meet with top Vietnamese Buddhist clergy and leaders. Princess Poonphitsamai Ditsakun, president of the World Federation of Buddhists and a Thai royal family member, assessed this initiative’s results as fruitless. A few weeks later, Thai officials in the government’s Department of Religious Affairs were notably unenthusiastic when a South Vietnamese delegation of ten monks seeking outside support in their battle with their own government stopped over in Bangkok, after attending a World Buddhist Sangha Council meeting in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Thailand’s Buddhist patriarch and Princess Poon, religious conservatives both, refused to meet them.

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