Author Description

For the first time, Voices from the Second Republic of South Vietnam (1967-1975) is available fully translated into Vietnamese, providing critical documentation of the diverse careers of ten South Vietnamese officials, in their struggles to build and defend a constitutional democracy in the last years of the Vietnam War.The Republic of (South) Vietnam is commonly viewed as a unified entity throughout the two decades (1955-75) during which the United States was its main ally. However, domestic politics during that time followed a dynamic trajectory from authoritarianism to chaos to a relatively stable experiment in parliamentary democracy. The stereotype of South Vietnam that appears in most writings, both academic and popular, focuses on the first two periods to portray a caricature of a corrupt, unstable dictatorship and ignores what was achieved during the last eight years.The essays in Voices from the Second Republic of South Vietnam (1967-1975) come from those who strove to build a constitutional structure of representative government during a war for survival with a totalitarian state. Those committed to realizing a noncommunist Vietnamese future placed their hopes in the Second Republic, fought for it, and worked for its success. This book is a step in making their stories known.This new edition presents the original ten essays plus introduction by Keith W. Taylor fully translated into Vietnamese.