VIET NAM: Offer from Ike

“I have been following with great interest the course of developments in Viet Nam,” wrote President Eisenhower to Premier Ngo Dinh Diem of South Viet Nam. Acknowledging the difficulties of presiding over a country “weakened by a long and exhausting war,” Eisenhower nonetheless urged Diem to undertake “needed reforms.” In return, he held out the prospect of U.S. aid “given directly to your government”— in other words, aid that did not first pass through French hands. It was a friendly, mild-seeming note, yet behind it lay a gathering quarrel between the U.S. and France.

The U.S. supports Diem, for all his shortcomings and despite the fact that he has shown a tendency to be highhanded as well as high-principled. The French insist that they also support Diem (who consistently opposed their colonial rule), but U.S. officials suspect the French of trying to hold on to their colonial influence in the rubber-rich South by encouraging a pro-French clique of Vietnamese officers in intrigues against Diem. As a result of the intrigue, Diem is more or less locked up inside his Saigon capital by the forces of Army Chief of Staff General Nguyen Van Hinh, a graduate of the French air force academy, who has a French wife.

The pattern, at least, is familiar: during the seven years of the Indo-China war, French officials intrigued against Vietnamese governments so cleverly that no genuinely nationalist movement could emerge to challenge the Communists. Unless some kind of order is soon installed in South Viet Nam, said a sad-faced Vietnamese last week, “the Communists need only sit on their chairs and wait for our country to fall.”