Still No. 1

South Viet Nam's presidential election campaign formally opens this week, and most of the eleven candidates are taking to the air with prerecorded campaign speeches. At week's end the candidates will collect at Quang Tri, less than 20 miles from the Demilitarized Zone, to begin a series of public meetings that will end in Saigon Sept. 1, two days before the voting. There will be an amount of togetherness unheard of in most political campaigns. The South Vietnamese have planned the campaign so that all candidates will have the opportunity to speak on the same day in each of 23 towns, and the candidates will be ferried from place to place in a fleet of airplanes provided by the government. Saigon has also allotted each candidate $50,000 from a special election fund to help cover expenses (though hardly enough to conduct a national campaign), has allotted each candidate an equal number of posters and will also give each campaigner equal time on radio and TV to address the country.

Of the eleven, only three are rated as having a real chance of winning: Chief of State Nguyen Van Thieu, whose vice-presidential running mate is Premier Nguyen Cao Ky; former Premier Tran Van Huong; National Assembly Speaker Phan Khac Suu. The Thieu-Ky ticket is still strongly favored because both men are well known, and they have army backing. Tran Van Huong is considered the leading civilian candidate. A Southerner with a large following in the Mekong Delta, Huong as Premier won considerable sympathy for his efforts to stabilize the government before the military replaced him in 1965. Says he: "The people have confidence in me."

A Fair Exchange. Ky and Thieu have already begun campaigning with a number of "nonpolitical" public appearances, mixing visits to the troops with barely disguised politicking with villagers. Since Ky suddenly and unexpectedly stepped aside in favor of Thieu as the military candidate (TIME, July 7), he has carefully stayed in Thieu's shadow, even walking a pace or two behind him at public gatherings. He is trying to project the image of a generous man bested by his colleague in an inner struggle for power and accepting it gracefully. But so far, Ky remains very much "No. 1" in Saigon.

Ky himself tries to make sure that this is understood by insiders. Within hours of his decision to run second to Thieu, he assured Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker that he, not Thieu, would continue to wield most of the power. Privately he warned skeptical newsmen that "those who have written that I sustained a stunning defeat will very soon be proved completely wrong." By last week things seemed to be working out as Ky had said. An inner group of generals (including Thieu) formed a military affairs committee, which from now on is to be the armed forces' decisionmaking body on both military and political questions. The committee's undisputed leader, the man who calls the meetings and runs the show, will be Ky. The prospect, then, is that even if Thieu is elected President, Ky will in fact be in charge. It is an arrangement Thieu seems willing to accept as a fair exchange for the honor of the presidency--for the time being, at least.

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