Reporters: Under a Cloud in Saigon

Brooding over the Viet Nam war last September, Newsweek's Saigon Bureau Chief Everett G. Martin had some harsh words for the Vietnamese. In a two-page piece for his magazine, Martin charged that the Vietnamese troops performed so poorly on their own that they should be completely integrated with U.S. forces. The U.S., he went on, should also take a much more active role in governing South Viet Nam, from channeling all economic aid to ousting corrupt Vietnamese officials. "What right do the Vietnamese have to expect full sovereignty," he asked, "while depending for their very survival on U.S. support?"

Although Martin's recommendations are almost completely opposite to U.S. plans or inventions, the Saigon government and press took great offense. Saigon newspapers charged Martin with being a "colonialist," and demanded his expulsion. One paper ran a poem accusing him of every known vice and concluding: "You s.o.b., and your father and your mother and all your family and all your ancestors." More direct action was also threatened. Getting word that ARVN soldiers planned to sack the villa in which Newsweek is quartered, Martin had bars put on the windows.

The attack never came, but last week another sort of retaliation did. After his return from a vacation, Martin was told that his visa would not be renewed. Though a few journalists have been denied entrance visas, he was the first correspondent to be seriously threatened with expulsion since the fall of the Diem regime in 1963. But by week's end, under pressure from the U.S. embassy, the government reversed the order and indicated that it would let Martin stay. As a reminder of its displeasure, though, it refused to clear the latest issue of Newsweek, forcing the distributor to withhold all 3,000 copies.