Nguyen Van Thieu, the former president of South Vietnam who led his nation through most of its war against North Vietnam until it was finally overrun by a Communist offensive in 1975, died late Saturday at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center here, a hospital spokesman said. He was 76.
The hospital would not release the cause of death, but the spokesman said Mr. Thieu had collapsed at his home in suburban Foxboro on Thursday and was taken to the hospital, where he was kept on a respirator.
Since the end of the war in April 1975, when Mr. Thieu, like many Vietnamese, believed that his American allies had abandoned him, he had lived quietly, first in London and later in Boston, avoiding politics.
As a colonel in the South Vietnamese army, Mr. Thieu first came to prominence in helping to organize the coup that ousted President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. He moved up swiftly, becoming chairman of the ruling military junta's National Directory, then chief of state in 1965. He won the presidency in 1967, beating the more flamboyant air force officer, Nguyen Cao Ky. He won the presidency again in 1971 in a rigged election and remained in the post until April 21, 1975, when he resigned and fled the country as North Vietnamese troops rushed toward Saigon.
For a succession of American ambassadors to Saigon like Ellsworth Bunker and Graham Martin and American commanders in Vietnam like Gen. William C. Westmoreland, Mr. Thieu became the Vietnamese they depended on to represent the people of South Vietnam. But Mr. Thieu, in the eyes of many Vietnamese, was an extremely cautious man who despite having a million-man army and a large secret police apparatus presided over a balance of weakness.
As the Vietnamese saying had it, he ''only jumped when the tide mounted to his toes.''
Loyalty and Betrayal
In the end, what counted for Mr. Thieu was personal loyalty, and so generals in the South Vietnamese army and provincial chiefs in the South Vietnamese government tended to be promoted based on their allegiance to Mr. Thieu, rather than merit. It was an old-fashioned, Confucian system, often greased by corruption, that had great difficulty competing against the better organized and motivated Communists, despite the support of 500,000 American troops and billions of dollars in aid.
Correction: October 2, 2001, Tuesday A front-page headline yesterday on the obituary of Nguyen Van Thieu, former president of South Vietnam, misstated his place in the sequence before that country fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975. He served almost until the end, but the last president was Gen. Duong Van Minh. The obituary also referred incorrectly at one point to the year of the coup he helped organize against President Ngo Dinh Diem. It was 1963, not 1965.
