SOUTH VIET NAM: Division & Indecision

The first rains of the monsoon showered down upon Saigon (pop. 2,000,000), cooling the weather but not the city’s jittery nerves. There were quiet Buddhist ceremonies in Chinese pagodas, a pink and white wedding at the cathedral, and an outward pose of calm. But heavily armed gangsters and cops of the Binh Xuyen sect, in their arsenic-green berets, patrolled the boulevards, ordering traffic, and blockading the city’s approaches so that they could control the price and supply of rice. Steel-helmeted nationalist paratroopers of Premier Ngo Dinh Diem were also out on patrol, but they were restrained from getting rid of the terrorists by an uneasy 17-day truce—enforced by the French army and supported by the U.S. French Commissioner General Paul Ely was counseling “a political settlement,” meaning that Diem should come to terms with the warlords and hoodlums, and take them into his nationalist government. Ely insisted that the Binh Xuyen could not be smashed without civil war. “Your attitude is helping them to survive when I could crush them,” replied Ngo Dinh Diem. U.S. Presidential Envoy J. Lawton Collins, a former U.S. Army chief of staff in mufti, echoed Ely’s plea for conciliation. “Nothing can be done with the Binh Xuyen controlling the police,” replied Diem. “Have you ever seen a Premier who did not control his own police?” The French, who have never been keen for Diem and have had long and profitable relationships with his enemies, spread the word in Paris and Saigon that U.S. support for Ngo Dinh Diem was beginning to wobble. The U.S. was in fact getting increasingly concerned over Diem’s capacity to survive, but it still regarded him as the only visible Vietnamese who was incorruptible and nationalist enough to challenge the Communist Ho Chi Minh. At week’s end the State Department thought it necessary to reaffirm its support of him. The trouble was, however, that such tokens were not in themselves decisive. “My true American friends want to help.” confided Ngo Dinh Diem to an adviser. “But they do it wrongly. In any case, they do not want to get involved themselves. What are they expecting? A miracle?”