Country at Peace

Four years ago, the guard towers spindled out from Saigon mile after mile along the main roads, outposts of frightened men in a teeming darkness of shadowy figures and shadowy hate. One such guard tower was a central factor in Graham Greene's Quiet American, a semi-novel purporting to display the hopeless struggle of French colonialism to save the truncated country from the onrushing tide of the Communist Viet Minh. As late as two years ago, touring Columnist Joseph Alsop pronounced South Viet Nam doomed. And the French, embarrassed at seeing the U.S. succeed with South Viet Nam's Ngo Dinh Diem where they had failed, whispered that it was only a matter of time.

In Saigon last week to make a film of Greene's book, Hollywood Director Joe Mankiewicz was having trouble. He searched all the roads for miles around Saigon, could find not a single guard tower. Most towers have been dismantled; the rest have fallen into dilapidated ruins (Mankiewicz had to order one built). Greene's scruffy waterfront slum had also disappeared; Mankiewicz had to rebuild its shacks and dirty up the streets before he could begin filming.

Seven-Storied Hope. For President Diem, slowly and almost unnoticed by the outside world, has brought to South Viet Nam a peace and stability few would have dared predict when his country was dismembered at Geneva three years ago. Last week a traveler could journey from one end of the country to the other, by day or night, with never a worry about Viet Minh bandits. At night, villages that once huddled fearfully in the darkness are brightly lighted, with no fear of a grenade lobbing out of the shadows. In Saigon the exquisite bordellos run by the sinister Binh Xuyen sect were gone. But a new restaurant offered excellent French food, and a more conventional nightclub did a roaring business. The expensive perfume and lingerie shops that catered to rich French colonists and their ladies have been replaced with more modest Vietnamese shops selling sewing machines. Even the French have taken heart. This year, for the first time in ten years, French rubber planters put out new trees. A French-financed hotel, planned for three stories, has already risen to seven.

Outside Saigon, thriving new villages testify to Diem's success (with massive U.S. financial help) in the tremendous job of resettling 900,000 refugees from the Communist North. In the Great Caisan project, 40,000 refugees were hard at work reclaiming abandoned paddies, each family working on its own three hectares with its own government-supplied water buffalo; two years ago the refugees' only interest was in how soon they could move on to somewhere else.

Happy New Year. Taking a day off for the first time in three months, Diem sat on the porch of his beach house in Longhai last week. The Communists were having more trouble in the North, he noted: fresh uprisings in Nghean "are certainly more serious than simple passive resistance by poor Catholic peasants." Diem himself was a man of peace. On a recent inspection trip, he discovered that the mountain tribes of Annam have no calendar, simply use the planting of the new rice crop to mark the new year. Diem decided it was a shame, picked Feb. 22 for the inauguration of an annual mountain New Year's party that will last for three days. The tribesmen will stage swordfighting contests, race on elephants. Diplomats flown up from Saigon will hunt tigers and wild buffalo.

One further testimonial to Diem's progress came fortnight ago from the Communists. After years of insisting that South Viet Nam was just an illegitimate clique and not a government (they talk the same way about South Korea), the Russians gave up their insistence that the Communist governments in Viet Nam and Korea are the only true regimes, and proposed that both halves of each country be admitted to the U.N.

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