SOUTH VIET NAM: The Revolt That Failed

Revolution swept the sunny, tropical Vietnamese city of Saigon last week, shaking and straining the antiCommunist, anti-French government of Premier Ngo Dinh Diem. The Binh Xuyen gangster sect, supported by French colonials, started a bloody uprising and was put down. While the fires of civil war guttered out in the refugee-crowded streets of Saigon (pop. 2,000,000), a Vietnamese general, supported by French colonials, tried a midnight coup d'état and almost succeeded. Locked in this squalid conflict were the precarious hopes of Vietnamese nationalism, the ambitions of French colonials and the committed prestige of the U.S. Government.

In his Freedom Palace, once the residence of French Commissioners, Premier Diem met the challenge with unexpected decisiveness, just as the U.S. was about to give him up as ineffectual. While Saigon reverberated to the bursting of 81-mm. mortar shells in the showdown fight against the Binh Xuyen, Premier Diem proclaimed: "I believe I am on the side of justice. I will not give in."

Lowering the Mask. In two days of sputtering street fighting, only four nationalist battalions and 18 armored cars were needed to send the Binh Xuyen reeling from Saigon (see below), exposing their potency as a myth, exposing too the myth of French neutrality. The French repeatedly blocked nationalist army movements, helped Binh Xuyen terrorists to escape. In Paris, just as Diem seemed to be getting things under control, Premier Edgar Faure brushed off the Diem government as "not adapted to the mission it faces." And on the French Riviera, fresh from a hard day's work shooting down 100 pigeons. Bao Dai, the puffy-faced Vietnamese Chief of State who obeys his French protectors, peremptorily summoned Diem to the Riviera, obviously intending to dismiss him. French officialdom told newsmen that Diem was a washout and should be dropped. "The sequence of [the French] reasoning seems to be thus," one Vietnamese official wrote to the New York Times. "To get rid of Premier Diem, one must sell the idea to the U.S. first . . . One must prove that Mr. Diem is inefficient. To prove that . . . one must stir up troubles."

While the U.S. waited to see how Diem would fend for himself, Diem got busy. Suddenly a new group was heard from. Three hundred young men dubbed themselves "The General Assembly of Democratic Revolutionary Forces of the Nation," met at Saigon city hall, obviously with Diem's tacit approval. They denounced Bao Dai—"a puppet created by the French colonials . . . leading a dissolute life far from his people." They declared him "deposed," and tore his photograph from the wall and trampled on it. Claiming to speak for 18 nationalist parties, they urged Diem to repress the rebel sects and get rid of the 90,000-man French expeditionary force.

That night in Freedom Palace, Diem's revolutionary committee drew a pistol on Bao Dai's favorite general, Nguyen Van Vy. With a .45 at his stomach, Vy promised that the pro-Bao Dai units in the Vietnamese army would support Diem's government. Some of the excited young rebels wanted Vy shot on the spot, but Diem eventually let him go untroubled into the night.