Triumph & Decay

INDOCHINA

In Hanoi, Viet Minh officials, all correctness and efficiency, moved into city offices as if they had always owned them. Viet Minh propagandists set up scores of "centers of political education for the people." Past fluttering banks of gold-starred flags, wispy Ho Chi Minh returned triumphantly to the city from which he fled in 1946 to hide in the jungle and mastermind Communism's war for Indo-China.

Ho moved into the old French governor general's palace. His eight years of exile at an end, he grandly wined and dined India's Premier Nehru. They ate off plates once used by Emperor Bao Dai.

To the south, in the non-Communist half of Indo-China, the story was dismally different. In Saigon, Premier Ngo Dinh Diem struggled against heavy odds to keep his shaky government alive. Every petty chieftain and palace politician with a few friends and a few guns seemed to be demanding a share of power. Diem had few friends and no guns.

Many Guns. Emperor Bao Dai had dipped a negligent finger into the troubled waters, sent orders to Diem from his comfortable villa in Cannes to take three bit ter rivals into his Cabinet. One was General Le Van Vien, whose principal qualification for office was that he headed the Binh Xuyen, a "religious" sect which controls the city's police and also Saigon's gambling (last spring Bao Dai gave him control of the national "surete," too). Another was General Nguyen Van Xuan. who had been Premier of Viet Nam in 1946. The third was General Nguyen Van Hinh, chief of staff of the army, who was still defying Diem's orders to quit his command and leave Indo-China.

For three weeks Diem stalled while

Hinh went around Saigon's cafes boasting that he could bring off a coup d'etat any time. "Diem doesn't know the people, and the people don't like him," Hinh said. "He has two good qualities. He's honest and pure. So is my daughter."

Frittering Away. Scrupulous to avoid any show of interference, U.S. diplomatic officials watched in helpless silence last week as the squabbling Vietnamese frittered away the few months' pre-election "breathing space" that was the only asset anyone in the non-Communist world could claim for the Geneva settlement. But Montana's able Senator Mike Mansfield, returning from a two-month survey of Indo-China, said publicly what officials could only mutter privately.

The outlook in Viet Nam, reported Mansfield bluntly, is "grim and discouraging." Diem is a virtual prisoner in his residence, the victim of "an incredible campaign of subversion by intrigue." His "constructive program . . . remains largely a paper program. It is kept that way by a kind of conspiracy of noncooperation and sabotage by those who oppose him." The army "is on the way to being converted into the private army of its commander" for political use, said Mansfield. "The petty-power groups in South Viet Nam appear completely oblivious to the overhanging shadow of the Viet Minh, which before long may envelop them all unless they put aside their factionalism. Even now. there is little to stand in their way."

Mansfield saw only a dim chance of a free Viet Nam government capable of beating the Reds in the 1956 elections, which will decide the fate of Indo-China. The Defense Department agreed with Mansfield's assessment. If free elections were held today, one official conceded, "the Communists would win in a sweep."

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