SOUTH VIET NAM: Problem of One Man

A prominent youth leader, Lieut. Colonel Nguyen Van Bong, drove last week along a highway north of Saigon. His car was riddled and set afire by a fusillade from a Communist ambush. Each month, from 250 to 300 government officials and supporters are brutally murdered by Red guerrillas. "It's like trying to swat mosquitoes," grumbled a soldier. "While you're hitting one, you're being bitten by another."

South Viet Nam is clearly the target of a new Communist offensive in South east Asia. President Ngo Dinh Diem has doughtily faced crises before. Bolstered by $1 billion in U.S. aid, Diem courageously saved a nation that had been written off by the experts when it was created in 1955. He smashed the "armies" of the militant religious sects, welcomed and resettled nearly a million refugees who had fled Communist North Viet Nam, embarked on ambitious projects in road building, railways, land reform and agricultural credit. A start has been made in safeguarding the peasants by moving them from scattered villages into self-contained "agrovilles," each with its own school, dispensary and home-defense force.

Nightly Visitors. But as South Viet Nam faced the new Communist assault, Western observers were uneasy at Diem's failure to win enthusiastic support for his regime. The dissatisfaction is not organized, and it has no outstanding spokesmen. It takes the form of grumbling and snide criticism around Saigon's café tables, a sense of apathy among the peasants. Much of it centers on the character of Diem himself.

No one questions Diem's courage, his personal honesty or his great achievements. But he is an aristocrat by birth, has no real contact with ordinary citizens or confidence in their judgments. Since an assassination attempt three years ago, Diem is constantly surrounded by police; he has neither the desire nor the ability to be a folksy man of the people. The peasants, who blame the government for a one-third fall in the price of rice this year, view Diem as a remote and austere figure, while they must contend with nightly raids by Red terrorists. To the city intellectuals, Diem's one-man rule is increasingly galling. They argue that his administration could be more liberal without impeding economic progress or exposing itself to Communist infiltration.

Diem, they charge, has a phobia about any criticism. In last year's rigged elections, one opposition candidate unexpectedly won a seat in the National Assembly. As he walked up the steps of the Assembly building to attend his first parliamentary meeting, he was arrested and accused of such infractions of the law as starting his campaign too early and making "false promises" to the voters. In April, a group of 18 former officials, ranging from the president of the Vietnamese Red Cross to the brother of the Ambassador to the U.S., petitioned Diem to liberalize his regime. Diem ignored them and, perhaps as a warning, ordered the arrest of 30 doctors, journalists and students suspected of "affiliation with the Communists" and sent them to join some 30,000 others in political re-education camps. To protests, Diem has a stubborn answer: "Security must come before liberty."