The Wreck of the Majestic

At cockcrow one day last week, loudspeaker trucks began to cruise slowly through Saigon's streets. "Countrymen," they blared, "come to the popular meeting to protest against the Geneva agreements. This is the 20th of July, a national mourning day. One year ago at Geneva our country was partitioned against our will."

Soon, convoys of army and civilian trucks were jamming the square in front of the rococo city hall, bringing load after load of Vietnamese--schoolboys, peasants, silk-robed girls, civil servants in their Sunday best. Before long there were about 100,000 people in the vast square, and the crowd began to stir with an ominous restlessness.

At 9 o'clock the loudspeakers told the crowd to split into three groups. One moved along broad Nguyen Hue Boulevard. The second marched to Doc Lap Palace to cheer Premier Ngo Dinh Diem.

The third column proceeded down Catinat Street to the Majestic Hotel, Saigon's best, where members of the International Armistice Commission (Indian, Canadian and Polish) make their headquarters. Led by a gang of khaki-clad youngsters, refugees from North Viet Nam, armed with Tonkinese machetes, the crowd broke the closed gates of the bar and poured into the lobby like a tidal wave. Madame Genevieve Tardy, busy at the switchboard, fell bleeding under the blow of a chair.

The rioters sacked the lobby with picks and axes, then moved upstairs. Soon furniture and mattresses were dropping from windows. They were bent on breaking, not looting, and destroyed everything they could lay hands on.

Hostess Mesta. On the second floor, in one of the Majestic's air-conditioned suites, was globe-circling Washington Hostess Perle Mesta, onetime Minister to Luxembourg. She never played hostess to a more difficult crowd. "One of the men," she said later, "sprayed me all over with tear gas. I went back to my own room and closed the door. It was very frightening, because stones were coming through the windows. In a few minutes they were pounding on my door and starting to make a hole in it with their knives. There was only one thing to do. I flung open the door and went right out into their midst. I put out my hand, saying, 'I am an American, just a plain American, and we're your friends.' One boy looked at me and said, 'You hate Communists?' I said, 'Yes, I hate Communists.' He slashed his hand across his throat as if it were a knife and said, 'My mother, father, sister killed by Communists.' "

After two hours under siege, Hostess Mesta and her luggage were rescued by the U.S. charge d'affaires, but 50 other Americans in the hotel lost all their belongings. The Majestic was left without a pane of glass, a bed or a bidet intact.

Meanwhile, a mile away, the Gallieni Hotel, where most of the Armistice Commission staff were living, was mobbed.

As a jeep crashed through the Gallieni's doors, the commission's members, along with two Communist Viet Minh liaison officers, retreated to the roof, blocking the stairs with beds and desks. The rioters assaulted the barricade, but fell back before police-thrown tear bombs.

Next day Premier Diem scolded the demonstrators for the "regrettable incidents" and warned his people to refrain from more "unbecoming gestures." Said one of the hotheads who had participated in the rioting, "What are we to do? Are we to wait while the Communists--the Viet Minh and the Poles--and the Indians, with their damnable sanctimoniousness, palaver about our fate?"

Protests & Counterprotests. In New Delhi, India's Nehru fired off cables to Britain's Eden and Russia's Molotov in Geneva asking for protection for the Armistice Commission. Calling a press conference, he demanded that Diem negotiate with the Communists about all-Viet Nam elections next year. According to Geneva's terms, both sides were supposed to begin discussing elections provisions on July 20, but the "two sides" at Geneva last year were the Communists and the French; Diem does not feel bound by a pledge his government did not sign. Last week, under pressure from India. Britain and France, Diem said that he would enter election talks only when Communist Boss Ho Chi Minh frees Vietnamese prisoners, allows non-Communist Vietnamese to leave North Viet Nam, and cuts off support for the Pathet Lao Communists, who are busily violating the Geneva armistice across the border in Laos (TIME, July 25).

From Geneva, scene of another and more propitious East-West conference, came a joint note from the British, French and the U.S., urging Diem to preserve order in his country. It was the first time the U.S. had joined in such a rebuke to Diem.

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