Seth Mydans

His death was confirmed by Chai Chidchob, a senior lawmaker in the National Assembly, which observed a minute of silence in Prem’s honor.

Without facing a general election, Prem held the prime minister’s post with the backing of the king from 1980-88, shuffling cabinets five times and weathering two coup attempts.

He left much of the day-to-day administration to bureaucrats, weakening the influence of political parties and the military.

As prime minister and in his subsequent close connection with the palace, Prem often acted as a proxy for King Bhumibol Adulyadej, a constitutional monarch who had no direct political power but enormous moral influence.

“The king trusted Prem absolutely,” wrote political scientist Duncan McCargo, “seeing him as an incorruptible figure who shared his soft and understated approach, but who was a skilled alliance-builder and wielder of patronage.”

Prem never joined a political party, and his power as prime minister rested on the support of the king, who backed his selection for office by Parliament and protected him from political challenges.

During the “April Fools’ Day” coup attempt in 1981 by a group of officers known as the Young Turks, Prem hurried to the northeastern city of Korat, where the royal family was in residence. This demonstration of royal favor won him the support of regional military commanders, and the rebellious officers were quickly rounded up.

Using horse racing as a metaphor, he once described the king as the “owner” of Thai political power, which is wielded by others on his behalf.

“In this country, we consider that we belong to the king,” he said in 2006, shortly before supporters of the monarchy staged a coup.

“In horse racing, they have the stable, and the owner of the stable owns the horse,” he said. “The jockey comes and rides the horse during the race, but the jockey does not own the horse.”

On the Privy Council, which he headed beginning in 1998, Prem was a mainstay of a ruling class that included conservative royalists, the military, senior bureaucrats and big business. He was a powerful player behind the scenes even into his 90s, particularly as the king’s health failed.

After the king’s death on Oct. 13, 2016, Prem served as regent pro tempore until the installation of the new king, Maha Vajiralongkorn Bodindradebayavarangkun, who reappointed him to head the council.

Thailand’s hierarchical order was shaken in early 2001 by Thaksin Shinawatra, a telecommunications billionaire who was elected prime minister by appealing to the aspirations of a politically marginalized, mostly rural poor majority.

With strong electoral backing, Thaksin began a populist movement that challenged the primacy of the monarchy and military as well as the scope of Prem’s power.

When Thaksin was ousted in the 2006 coup, his supporters accused Prem of being the mastermind and controlling the military-backed junta that took office, a charge the junta denied.

In a widely reported speech at the Naval Academy before the coup, Prem seemed to be referring to Thaksin when he said: “Only good people have ethics and morals. Bad people don’t. People who work in public office or those who are commanders or leaders, in particular, must embrace ethics and morality; otherwise things will collapse.”

Prem Tinsulanonda was born Aug. 26, 1920, in Songkhla province in southern Thailand, one of eight children of Bueng Tinsulanonda, warden of the Songkhla prison, and Ord Tinsulanonda. He remained single throughout his life and once described himself as married to the army.

Throughout his career, Prem benefited from a reputation for honest dealing, untainted by the scandals and corruption that characterize much of Thai politics.

According to his website, he studied at military academies including the U.S. Army Armor School at Fort Benning, Georgia. He enlisted in the military as a platoon leader in the Armor Department, rising through the ranks to become a general and commander in chief of the Royal Thai Army in 1978.

He entered politics and served in the Senate and National Assembly before being named deputy minister of the interior and then minister of defense in 1979 in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Kriangsak Chamanand.

After taking power in 1980, he retained control of the military as defense minister. Early in his administration, he offered amnesty to members of the Communist Party of Thailand, which had waged a jungle insurgency. Many Communist Party members, including thousands of students, returned home, helping to bring the guerrilla movement to an end.

Under political pressure, Prem dissolved Parliament and stepped down as prime minister in April 1988, declaring, “I have had enough.” Later that year, the king appointed him to the Privy Council.

Prem’s last public act took place early this month at King Maha Vajiralongkorn’s official coronation, where he was one of eight people to pour holy water on the king.

Prem Tinsulanonda, former Thai premier and adviser to king, dies at 98

BANGKOK — Prem Tinsulanonda, an army commander in chief who served as prime minister of Thailand and later became head of the influential Privy Council of the king, died Sunday in Bangkok. He was 98.

His family said the cause of death was lung disease.

A man who never accepted defeat, Tong considered it his personal mission to take back his country from the Communists, who have ruled it since winning the Vietnam War in 1975.

“I have the duty to liberate my country!” he exclaimed in an interview more than 30 years later. “You cannot enjoy yourself when your whole country is in pain, in torture.”

Tong became a hero to many Vietnamese refugees in 1992, when he hijacked a commercial airliner after takeoff from Bangkok, ordered the pilot to fly low over Ho Chi Minh City — known as Saigon, South Vietnam’s capital, before the Communist victory — and dumped thousands of leaflets calling for a popular uprising.

He then strapped on a parachute and followed the leaflets down to certain capture. He was released six years later in an amnesty and returned to the United States, where he had become a citizen after the war.

In 2000, under the guise of taking flying lessons in Thailand, Tong made a second trip over Ho Chi Minh City, sending down a new cascade of leaflets, which he had signed “Global Alliance for the Total Uprising Against Communists.”

He was arrested on his return to Thailand and spent six years in prison for hijacking. He was not armed, and no one was hurt on either of his flights.

“The only thing that matters is the Communists still control my country,” he shouted through a double screen of wire mesh during an interview at Bangkok’s central jail. “I’m a pilot. This is what I can do.”

He timed his second flight to coincide with President Bill Clinton’s historic visit to Vietnam, the first by a U.S. president since the end of the war. Soon after Tong scattered his leaflets, Clinton was in Hanoi, the capital, where he delivered a very different message: “The history we leave behind is painful and hard. We must not forget it, but we must not be controlled by it.”

As the years passed and a new generation of Vietnamese-Americans accepted the unsentimental facts of history, the veterans’ fantasies of liberation became relics of that distant war.

But at the end of his life, it became clear that the legend of Ly Tong — who proved time and again his loyalty to a country that no longer existed — still compelled devotion.

As word spread that his health was failing, visitors converged on his hospital room in San Diego — as many as 200 people on one recent weekend.

His most devoted followers were former soldiers like himself, liberated from years in Communist labor camps under an agreement with the United States and arriving by the tens of thousands in the 1990s, the last and saddest wave of refugees.

“They have come prepared to show the courage of the former soldiers of South Vietnam, but they are showing themselves only as a group of misfit people,” said Yen Ngoc Do, who was then editor of the Vietnamese-language newspaper Nguoi Viet. “Their political and military past has been totally forgotten.”

Broken in health and spirit, too old or tired to start over again, many of the veterans lapsed into listlessness and despair.

“I survived the war, I survived prison,” Phan Nhat Nam, a former paratrooper and wartime journalist, said in a 1995 interview in the Little Saigon area of Orange County, California.

“Now I must survive my freedom, and it is very hard,” he said. “We are old men now. We have lost the ability to adapt and renew.”

For people like these, Tong offered an alternate reality — a vision of courage and action, a tragic hero in the tradition of Vietnamese history.

Tong was born Le Van Tong on Sept. 1, 1945, in the central Vietnamese city of Hue, according to his family. (Other accounts have said that he was born in 1948.) He was the son of a well-to-do farmer who was executed as a revolutionary.

Tong joined the South Vietnamese air force and served in its elite Black Eagle fighter squadron. As the war neared its end, he was shot down and sent to a re-education camp.

His postwar story began in 1980, with his escape and a 17-month trek to freedom through five countries. He picked his way through minefields, he said, broke out of jails, dodged security patrols and crawled through jungle to avoid border posts.

He was accepted as a refugee in the United States, where he worked as a security guard and earned a degree in political science from the University of New Orleans. He published a 300-page autobiography, “Black Eagle,” which made him a celebrity among overseas Vietnamese.

In early 2000, years after his first flight over Ho Chi Minh City, Tong burnished his anti-Communist credentials with a flight over Havana, the capital of Cuba, in a rented plane, scattering leaflets as he had in Vietnam. He was commended on his return by Cuban-Americans in Florida, who gave him a victory parade. His second foray into Vietnam came later that year.

In his final and most bizarre act of defiance, in 2010 in California, Tong assaulted a Vietnamese singer whom he deemed sympathetic to the government of Vietnam. Disguised as a woman, he walked to the edge of the stage, reached up as if to hand the singer a bouquet and squirted a liquid, which may have been pepper spray, in her face. He was sentenced on multiple charges to six months in jail and three years’ probation. He appeared at his trial in drag.

Tong lived out his final years quietly in San Diego. He is survived by a half brother, a half sister, three daughters and several nieces and nephews.

Ly Tong, Vietnamese pilot who hijacked planes to fight communism, dies at 74

BANGKOK — Ly Tong, a South Vietnamese air force veteran who dropped anti-Communist leaflets over Vietnam from hijacked planes long after the war’s end, playing out the fantasies of many defeated soldiers of the south, died Saturday in San Diego. He was 74.

His death was reported Monday by his newspaper, The Cambodia Daily, which quoted family members as saying the cause was heart failure.

In a long career that included 13 years as Tokyo bureau chief for Newsweek magazine, Krisher became a fixture of Asia journalism, specializing in exclusive interviews with figures like President Sukarno of Indonesia and Emperor Hirohito of Japan.

He founded The Daily in 1993, one year after the founding of its rival, The Phnom Penh Post, which was originally published every two weeks before becoming a daily years later.

The newspapers were a sign of a new openness and optimism in Cambodia as it was struggling to its feet after decades of mass killings and civil war. That hopefulness has faded, however, amid a crackdown on the free press by Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has been in power for 34 years and who has also targeted independent agencies and opposition politicians.

The Daily pledged to report “all the news without fear or favor,” bringing it into continuing conflict with Hun Sen. The newspaper was forced to close its print edition last year under government legal pressure.

“Bernie believed passionately in journalism and what good journalism could achieve,” said Kevin Doyle, who worked for the paper for 15 years, most of them as editor-in-chief. “He believed professional journalism served a higher, more important purpose in society than politics or even law at times.”

Krisher would often say, “Persistence, energy, enthusiasm are the key essentials of this profession, and the main enemy is cynicism.”

Although his newspaper had a circulation of just a few thousand, it wielded outsize influence as an important source of local and international news for diplomats and aid workers. It hired young Cambodian and foreign journalists, many of whom would go on to significant careers.

The paper also carried a daily insert translated into Cambodian, and its special weekend editions presented magazine-quality journalism.

“Bernie taught his local reporters how to stand up to those in power by reporting the truth,” said Mu Sochua, an opposition politician who has fled overseas to avoid government reprisals. “Bernie was a tough man and demanded justice for those without a voice.”

The newspaper was part of a personal project by Krisher to help the country recover from years of war and violent persecution. His philanthropy included the construction of more than 550 schools, financed by private donors, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.

His prized achievement was the founding of the Sihanouk Hospital Center of Hope, which provides free medical care to the poor. He also established an education center for orphans and foster children from remote villages.

The Daily also sponsored frequent drives to raise money for the distribution of tens of thousands of mosquito nets to poor Cambodians, and Krisher raised money to provide rice to schools and orphanages when the World Food Program stopped a feeding program.

“I am in awe of what he was able to accomplish, as one person with two long careers,” his daughter, Deborah Krisher-Steele, said by email. “He had both the tenacity and optimism to make it possible.”

Not everybody loved Krisher. He could be obstinate, demanding and confrontational.

“He could be unrelenting against personal enemies and those who he felt had crossed him,” Doyle said. “So there existed a quite polarized view of Bernie. I spent many years working with Bernie, and I saw both sides.”

Ker Munthit, a former reporter for The Associated Press in its Cambodia bureau, said in an email that Krisher “was pushy and insisting in whatever he had in mind that he wanted to advance or be done, and that could be a bit annoying.”

“However,” Munthit added, “regardless of the misgivings one might have about him — me included — it is undeniable that he has done some great things for the good of the country.”

Bernard Krisher was born Aug. 9, 1931, in Frankfurt, Germany. His father, a Polish Jew, owned a fur shop. The family fled Nazi Germany in 1937 and passed through France, Spain and Portugal before heading for the United States and settling in New York City, in Queens.

His daughter said his humanitarian work was inspired by the help he and his family had received from strangers when they were fleeing persecution. He believed, she said, “that a true humanitarian act is to help a stranger, not one of your own.”

Krisher attended Queens College and was drafted into the Army in 1953. He spent two years in Germany as a reporter for Stars and Stripes, the Army newspaper. He then worked for the New York World-Telegram and The Sun in New York and studied journalism at Columbia University.

He joined Newsweek in 1962 after moving to Japan, where he became its Tokyo bureau chief in 1967. He later left Newsweek for Fortune magazine.

In Japan, he met his future wife, Akiko, who survives. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by a son, Joseph, and two grandsons.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/20/obituaries/bernard-krisher-dead.html" id="cca4c67b-09ab-3308-a18a-0bbc9f07288a">The New York Times</a>.

Bernard Krisher, an idealistic, driven journalist who founded Cambodia’s first English-language daily newspaper and, as a philanthropist, established a hospital, an orphanage and hundreds of schools around Cambodia, died March 5 in Tokyo. He was 87.

Bernard Krisher, Free Press Champion in Cambodia, Dies at 87

Politics

Local

World

News

Celebrities

Music

Movies

Entertainment

Sports 

Fashion

Beauty & Health

Relationships & Weddings

Food & Travel

Lifestyle

Domestic

International 

Business

About

Highlights

Selection Criteria

Jury

Terms And Conditions

FAQs

Pulse Influencer Awards

Courses

Careers

Explore categories

Read the latest news across entertainment, sports, business and more. Be first to receive exclusive updates with your free subscription straight to your phone. 

Seth Mydans

Articles written by the author

Prem Tinsulanonda, former Thai premier and adviser to king, dies at 98

Ly Tong, Vietnamese pilot who hijacked planes to fight communism, dies at 74

Bernard Krisher, Free Press Champion in Cambodia, Dies at 87