A Vote for the Future
(See Cover)
Western democracy was centuries in the creating. Teaching its fragile forms and subtle exercises to an alien culture would be a difficult experiment in the best of circumstances. To try to transplant democracy to Viet Nam in the year 1967 would seem a rash and reckless enterprise in the worst of places at the worst of times. Yet this year, South Viet Nam has promulgated a constitution written by a popularly elected Constituent Assembly. Voters in more than 4,000 villages and hamlets have gone to the polls to choose their own local officials. And last week the people of South Viet Nam chose a President, Nguyen Van Thieu, a Vice President, Nguyen Cao Ky, and 60 Senators in a free election that confounded the fledgling nation's friendly critics and its mortal enemies. In the U.S. and Viet Nam, by word and by bullet, it was an election conducted under fire.
An Echo in the U.S. Well aware that a successful turnout would destroy their claim to represent the South Vietnamese people, the Viet Cong condemned the election weeks in advance as a "hoax." It was so rigged, they said, that its results would be on U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker's desk days before the actual balloting. By clandestine radio, furtive pamphlet and whispered word of mouth, they warned the peasants to boycott the polls on pain of death. To make sure that their message was understood, during election week Viet Cong terrorists killed 190 civilians, wounded 426 and kidnaped another 237.
Certain that they had scant chance of beating the ticket of Chief of State Thieu and Premier Ky, the ten civilian candidates for President claimed fraud almost from the moment the campaign started. A dozen U.S. Senators, led by Robert Kennedy and Jacob Javits, echoed their claim that the election campaign was a "farce" and a "charade." It was to counter such senatorial critics that President Johnson hastily assembled 22 U.S. observers and dispatched them to Viet Nam as poll watchers.
On the basis of what they were able to see from the necessarily limited vantage point of a VIP tour, the observers reported that the elections were surprisingly unsullied (see THE NATION). But their report was merely corroborative evidence. It was the election results that provided the most eloquent and telling testimony to the integrity of the voting.
Courageous Choice. On election day, 4.7 million South Vietnamese flocked to 8,800 red-and-yellow-bannered polling stations throughout the narrow nation. They constituted a remarkable 83% of the registered voters. Even though no attempt was made to register or poll those people Irving in Viet Cong-dominated regions, the total represented 60% of South Viet Nam's voting-age population--surprisingly close to the 63% turnout of U.S. voters in the 1964 U.S. presidential election. By any measure, it was an impressive and meaningful ballot cast in favor of representative government. Though many of the voters went to the polls because the government urged them to, from crowded Saigon to remote hamlets it still required a courageous choice to defy the massive Viet Cong threats of reprisals.
It was also a clear repudiation of the loud charges of fraud, for the South Vietnamese know all too well what rigged voting amounts to; in the country's two previous presidential "elections," Ngo Dinh Diem won by 98% and 88% of the ballots cast.
Since they commanded the loyalty of the army, the resources of the government, and had the almost certain prospect of victory to use as leverage in making deals for votes with the country's large sects--the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai--Thieu and Ky had counted on taking more than 50% of the vote. Privately, however, U.S. analysts in Saigon had calculated that in an absolutely free and unpressured vote, the Thieu-Ky ticket would probably garner between 30% and 50% of all votes cast. Thieu was actually elected President with 34.8%.
Rhetorical Invective. The electorate also had some other surprises for the experts. By everyone's reckoning, the two top civilian candidates were Tran Van Huong, 64, the rigidly honest onetime mayor of Saigon, and Phen Khac Suu, 62, former chief of state and present Speaker of the Constituent Assembly. But both men were left in the dust by Truong Dinh Dzu, a plump 50-year-old lawyer with a fiery McCarthylike gift of rhetorical invective. In fervent measure, Dzu attacked both Thieu and Ky as he campaigned on a peace platform. Coming in second, he pulled 17% of the vote, as against Suu's 13% and Huong's 12%.
Perhaps the most striking proof of the election's essential honesty was the contest for the 60-seat Senate. With the 480 candidates blocked off in groups of ten to a slate, the voters had to choose six from among the 48 slates. On the theory that it would ensure him a loyal majority in the Senate, the complex system was devised by Ky himself last spring when he expected to be the presidential candidate. But the voters were not amenable. Ky personally backed eleven slates, and all but one of them lost. Thieu promoted two slates, and both lost. Huong promoted two; both lost. Runner-Up Dzu backed five; all lost. Indeed, the six triumphant slates look something like a political scientist's dream of incipient democracy come true: two are likely to support the Thieu government, two are in stout opposition, and two are independent.
A U.S. Dove. When all the returns were in, it seemed clear that the balloting procedures had not hindered voters so much as they had contributed to an honest election. Each voter presented his yellow registration card at the polls and had its corner snipped off so that he could not use it to vote again. He then picked up one envelope and eleven separate ballots, each bearing the symbol of a ticket and photographs of its presidential and vice-presidential candidates. Election officials carefully instructed him to enter the polling booth, select the ticket he wanted to vote for, insert it in the envelope and then drop the sealed envelope in the ballot box. The voter was to tear the other ten tick ets in half and insert them in a refuse box. The same procedure was followed with the Senate slates, except that the voter had to choose six ballots out of the 48 available.
It was neither a quick nor an easy process. Voting in Saigon's baroque city hall, Thieu timed himself and found it took three minutes. Candidate Huong nearly invalidated his own vote, and was caught just in time by a peeking poll watcher as he started to insert his ballot in the box without its envelope.
The stylized symbol atop each ticket was the first and last eye-stop for many voters. In the hamlet of Dieu Ga, ten miles outside Saigon, a mother with babe on hip voted for the rice-stalk symbol of Ha Thuc Ky because, she said, she "liked rice very much." An old woman chose Dzu's white-dove ticket thinking it was a chicken. Dzu used the dove symbol to dramatize his peace platform, but in fact only highly educated Vietnamese were likely to have made the connection: the dove as an emblem of peace is a notion largely unfamiliar to the Vietnamese. Dzu took it from a Christmas card mailed to him from the U.S. by a fellow Rotarian.
All Too Honest. Everywhere, skeptics were alert for signs of a fix, but hard evidence of dishonesty was hard to come by. In the village of Thai Hiep Thanh in Tay Ninh province on the Cambodian border, a reporter watched suspiciously as Warrant Officer Le Van Thanh marched his platoon of armored troops into the school-house voting station. Had he told his men how to vote? he was asked. No, he replied, why should he? He himself had voted for Civilian Huong. On the outskirts of the Delta city of Can Tho, Farmer Ly Van Tarn found the procedures all too honest for his liking. "My wife is ill and cannot come," he explained, "so I brought her voting card, her identity papers and a family picture to prove I am her husband. But still they would not let me vote for her." It cost Thieu an extra vote, he added, because "Thieu and Ky have shown they can work, not just talk."
Brown-robed Buddhist Monk Thich Hanh Dao said that the monks in his Delta pagoda had discussed the candidates before voting, "and we all agreed to vote for the same person." That person was Huong, the monk hinted, but he admitted that he would not have been surprised if some of his colleagues had changed their minds. "When you walk into that little black room," he said, "you suddenly become aware that you really are free to pick whomever you want. It makes you stop and think."
A Vote for Ky. A surprising number of Vietnamese seemed to do just that --think for themselves. And those who did vote to order were not necessarily backers of the government ticket. In the ancient imperial capital of Hue, for example, Thich Tri Quang, the militant Buddhist monk, sent out word to vote for Suu. As a result, Suu not only carried Hue but nearby Danang and Thua Thien province as well. Huong, as expected, carried his old mayoralty of Saigon. Peace Candidate Dzu won five provinces, all longtime, hard-core bases for Viet Cong activity; he was runner-up to Thieu in 26 provinces honeycombed with Viet Cong cadres. Inevitably, the suspicion arose that the Viet Cong had quietly passed the word to voters to support Dzu. The accusation drew from Dzu an angry but logical rejoinder: Thieu, after all, beat him in 26 V.C.-infested provinces--"Why not say Thieu got the V.C. votes there?"
It was the vote from the countryside that swept Thieu into the presidency as he took 38 provinces to bolster the lead he piled up in the cities of Dalat, Vung Tau and Cam Ranh. In the process, Ky was an invaluable running mate. Out in the countryside, only two Vietnamese political figures are likely to be known by the peasants: Ho Chi Minh and Nguyen Cao Ky. By no means rare was the peasant on election day who, when asked if he had voted for Thieu, adamantly shook his head and said that he had voted for Ky.
Eminently Credible. There was also another large group of voters who knew Thieu and Ky very well and were likely to vote for them as their once and future employers. That group included the 620,000 men in the armed forces and their 270,000 dependents, the police and civil servants, the strongly nationalist, anti-Communist religious sects of the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai, and sizable numbers of Catholics. All told, they represented a potential block of over 2,000,000 votes. The fact that Thieu's winning total was only 1,600,000 votes virtually nullified any claims of fraud, even though Dzu and six other civilian candidates kept their promise and served notice last week that they will ask the watchdog Constituent Assembly to invalidate the elections and order new ones. Thieu's winning margin was so eminently credible that the Assembly is unlikely to take any heed.
Occasional irregularities there surely were, just as the U.S. has its West Virginia presidential primaries and predictable voting patterns in Cook County, Ill. But among the Vietnamese, the overwhelming feeling about their own election last week was that it was as honest as they have ever known, more honest than anyone expected. That feeling promises much for the future of Viet Nam--and for the new mandate of President-elect Nguyen Van Thieu.
Quick Awakening. At 44, the President's boyish face and unfurrowed brow belie a lifetime intertwined with the travails of his country. Thieu, whose name means "one who ascends," was born in the village of Ninh Chu on the South China Sea. His father was a farmer and fisherman, but his brother Hieu, 16 years his senior and now his Ambassador to Rome, was a Paristrained lawyer and the family's chief meal ticket. It was Hieu who sent Thieu to school in Saigon and Hue. Thieu had just finished high school when World War II began and the Japanese came. His first contact with the U.S. was inauspicious: American planes bombed Ninh Chu by mistake in a raid on Japanese coastal installations. Moreover, he recalls, "everyone at the time believed that the Japanese had grven us our liberty" from the French.
When the French came back in 1945, Thieu, like so many of his countrymen, chose patriotism over ideology and enlisted in the Viet Minh, the forerunners of the Viet.Cong. He was a district chief, but his awakening came quickly: "By August of 1946, I knew the Viet Minh were Communists. They shot people. They overthrew the village committee. They seized the land." Thieu decided that the Communists were Viet Nam's real enemy, and he sneaked off to Saigon. There he tried the merchant marine and won an officer's rating, but he turned down a billet on a ship when he found the French owners proposed to pay him less than their French officers.
The Chicken Vendor. The French were just then opening up their first officer class for the newly created Vietnamese army. Thieu enlisted and graduated at 26 with a second lieutenant's commission and orders to take command of an infantry platoon in the Delta. It was Viet Minh country, and the platoon got a hostile reception. For two weeks, the peasants would not even sell it any food. Then one day the Viet Minh mortared Thieu's little camp. After the bombardment, an old man suddenly appeared with eggs and chickens to sell. "I knew why he had come," says Thieu. "I said, 'Don't believe I am stupid, father. You came to check the accuracy of your mortar fire. I could kill you, but I won't!' " Instead he bought the chickens.
Thieu was neither stupid nor sentimental in the field. In 1954, promoted to major, he found himself leading an attack on the Viet Minh in his own village, Ninh Chu. The Communists retreated into Thieu's old home, confident that he would not fire on his own house. Says Thieu with grim satisfaction: "I shot in my own house." The only cause for criticism the young officer ever gave his superiors was an innate caution that made him less aggressive than they sometimes would have preferred--a reluctance to commit his troops to battle unless he felt absolutely sure he could win. It was a trait Thieu was to carry into politics.
Meanwhile, he moved steadily up the army ladder. In 1956, and again in 1960, he was sent to the U.S. for specialized military training. He put in four years as commandant of the National Military Academy at Dalat, a period that to this day continues to provide him with a reservoir of support among many middle-grade officers who look up to him as their teacher. His entree into politics came in December, 1962, when Diem assigned him to the command of the 5th, or Anti-Coup, Division, strategically positioned just north of Saigon. Thieu was put there because Diem did not trust the previous commander, Nguyen Due Thang, now Thieu's Minister for Revolutionary Development and one of the ablest Vietnamese officials around.
Diem's trust in Thieu was misplaced. Only eleven months later, the young colonel led one of the 5th Division's regiments in the coup against Diem. In the wake of Diem's overthrow, Thieu won his general's stars and the secretary-generalship of the junta that took over.
Love at First Snapshot. Canny, cautious and quiet through all the intrigue of the seven governments that came and went until he and Ky took power in June 1965, Thieu stayed close to the shifting center of control. Though he was chief of state in the military government that ruled Viet Nam until last week, and thus was nominally No. 1, Thieu was overshadowed by the flamboyant Nguyen Cao Ky, who as Premier visibly ran things. Thieu seemed a man more private than public.
His private life was distinguished by something still rare in Asia: a marriage not of convenience but of love. As a young officer he had been attracted by a snapshot carried by a colleague of a pretty Delta girl; he sought her out, fell in love, and in 1951 married her. Nguyen Thi Mai Anh was a Catholic, Thieu a Confucian Buddhist, but for her he promised to convert to Catholicism. He finally did in 1958--just in time, his detractors say, to help his army career under the Catholic Diems.
The Thieus have two children: 14year-old Anh is in a convent school in Dalat; six-year-old Loc lives at home in the family's modest military quarters near Saigon's Tan Son Nhut airport. There Thieu, who likes flowers, dabbles some evenings with a trowel, or walks through the compound with an air rifle, shooting birds that are cooked and served to dinner guests. His real love is weekend fishing with cracked crab bait in the Saigon River or in the South China Sea.
By Vietnamese standards, Thieu is considered remarkably free of corruption, but there is little doubt that he has occasionally accepted the shadowy perquisites that go with high office throughout most of Asia. On his lieutenant general's salary of $509 a month (the President's salary has not yet been fixed), he has reportedly managed to accumulate considerable acreage, and can afford to send Mme. Thieu to Paris now and then for a shopping spree.
As President, Thieu now gives every sign that this time he intends to be No. 1 in fact as well as in title. Whether Ky can gracefully accept Thieu's dominance remains to be seen, and a balky Vice President could well prove the most difficult problem that the President will have to face. Ky wanted the top job himself and openly campaigned for it while Thieu went around quietly gathering support among the other generals and officers. It was only after an emotional two-day showdown meeting of the ruling military group that Thieu forced Ky to stand aside. Ky's public explanation of what happened is that "I stepped down to protect my country when I saw friction develop between Thieu and me and I thought it would do great damage to the military and the Vietnamese people."
Last week the friction between the two was still evident. At a lavish election-eve reception, for which invitations had been issued in both Thieu and Ky's names, Ky pointedly did not appear. NBC had arranged for both men to appear on its Meet the Press program this week, but when it came time for the taping, Thieu told NBC that he would not appear with Ky. Thieu's press officer coolly explained why: since most of the questions would deal with "policy matters, if General Ky sits through the program, there would be no questions directed at him." Thieu appeared alone.
Checks & Balances. Whether by accident or design, the powers of Ky's vice-presidential post under the nation's new constitution are virtually nil. Unlike his counterpart in the U.S., Ky is not even assured of becoming President if something happens to Thieu before his four-year term is up. Only if the President dies in his last year does the Vice President take over. If the President dies before that, the Vice President merely takes over for three months to organize the election of a new President and Vice President.
The constitution is a remarkable document in other ways. Haunted by the specter of Diem's dictatorship, the drafters created a check-and-balance system of an executive, a bicameral National Assembly and a judiciary in which most of the checks are on the power of the executive. Thus, though the President determines national policy and commands the armed forces, his decrees, even in times of emergency, must be approved by the National Assembly; his vetoes of legislation may be overridden by a simple majority of both the Senate and House of Representatives. (The 137-man House will be elected Oct. 22, to complete the nation's constitutional government.)
The House and Senate have the power to impeach the President and Vice President; they can amend the constitution by a two-thirds vote, and they have the power to declare war and make peace. The Assembly also will choose the nine to 15 judges who will make up South Viet Nam's Supreme Court.
An amalgam of U.S. and European democratic structures, the constitution is American in its provision for a popularly elected President, European in the predominance of power it gives to the legislature. Even so, the fact that his country is at war, plus the power of the army at his back, inevitably gives Thieu a leverage in the legislature that is greater than a mere reading of the constitution might indicate.
Free from Lottery. Just how much that leverage will amount to depends in large part on Thieu's political skills, which are likely to be sorely tested--as they ought to be in a democracy--in his dealings with the legislature. Most Vietnamese politicians believe the six elected Senate slates will soon form into three groups--pro-government, opposition and swing-vote blocs--that will become solid nuclei for the development of two or three future nationwide political parties. Sure to cause trouble with Tri Quang and his militant Buddhists is the fact that half the new Senators are Catholic, although Catholics represent only 10% of the population.
But in fact the House, not the Senate, is the stronger of the two houses of the National Assembly, and the situation there promises to be far different. The House election will be along strictly representational lines, free from the lottery of slates. Candidates must run in their own localities and, in an astonishing show of vitality, some 1,500 are doing just that in the 137 election districts--302 are campaigning for Saigon's 15 seats alone. Some candidates will be disqualified before the official House campaign gets under way Oct. 6, but it will almost surely be a free-swinging campaign. A good many candidates, having observed the unexpected success of Truong Dinh Dzu, are likely to try to emulate it by turning into little Dzus, hitting hard at Thieu and plumping for peace at almost any price.
The Dzu Story. Basking in the sudden attention generated by his surprising finish, Dzu himself is already claiming the right to lead a coalition of the civilian opposition. But there has been no rush to fall into the ranks behind him; even by the devious standards of Vietnamese politics, Dzu is a maverick and a jumble of contradictions. Born in Binh Dinh province, he was schooled in Hanoi, moved to the Delta city of Can Tho to practice law in 1944, then on to Saigon in 1945. He soon demonstrated an ability to work with anybody.
One of his partners and good friends was Nguyen Huu Tho, a onetime Saigon lawyer who now heads the Viet Cong's National Liberation Front. That friendship lent some credence in voters' minds to Dzu's claim to be able to negotiate with the Communists. Another law partner was Mme. Nhu's brother, Tran Van Khiem. It was a profitable alliance for both men since the Diem family connections gave them an inside track with judges and the police. Along the way, Dzu visited the U.S. and became such a fervent Rotary Club member that he served a stint as Rotary director for all southeast Asia. He always wears his Rotary Club tie.
Earlier this year, several Americans in jail on currency-violation charges accused Dzu of promising to spring them if they paid him $10,000 to bribe their judges. The investigation was dropped to allow Dzu to run for the presidency. The most energetic and eloquent of the eleven candidates, he daily unleashed a barrage of invective at Thieu and Ky, all the while claiming plots and sabotage meant to damage him. Consistency was no hobgoblin; he first said that he had met with Tri Quang to join forces, then denied it. He said Viet Cong sympathizers had been encouraged by the N.L.F. to vote for him, then he denied that. Everywhere he "demanded" an end to the war, pushing peace like a patent medicine. In fact, his peace proposals differed little from those of the other candidates. Dzu merely shouted his louder and more often.
Not Ministrable. Dzu's very energy made Suu and Huong seem old and tired in comparison. His catcalling at the vested authorities, Ky and Thieu, undoubtedly struck a gleeful chord in a country where, as Henry Cabot Lodge observed in Newsday, "a Vietnamese proverb says that five evils afflict mankind: fire, flood, famine, armed robbery and central government."
Dzu's showing dramatized the essential honesty of the election, but it has not made Thieu's task of transition from military to constitutional rule any easier. Thieu's first job as President is to pick a Premier who, under the constitution, presides over the daily running of the government. Then Thieu must select a Cabinet. The Premier is likely to be his campaign manager, Saigon Lawyer Nguyen Van Loc, or perhaps Suu's running mate, Dr. Phan Quang Dan. In the effort to broaden the base of the government, a goodly number of the Cabinet posts are slated for civilians; Thieu and the U.S. had hoped Huong and Suu would be among those chosen. Even if they do come into the Cabinet now, their prestige is badly tarnished. And Dzu himself, as the French saying goes, is not ministrable. Thieu would not have him, and Dzu would probably not accept, even if asked.
A Thick Prospectus. Next on Thieu's agenda is the follow-up on his own campaign promise of a bombing pause and an effort to talk with Hanoi about peace. The U.S. is willing to accede to a brief bombing pause that does not endanger U.S. lives in the battlefield, provided that Hanoi, as Dean Rusk said last week, comes through with "some response, some reciprocal action." But Hanoi has already publicly lambasted the notion of dealing with President-elect Thieu; privately, Washington has seen no alteration in the Communists' mood. Thieu himself has little faith that Hanoi will reply favorably and, in any case, he does not intend to call for a pause until "a week or ten days" after his inauguration next month.
The U.S., anxious that none of the momentum of Viet Nam's promising start in legitimate government be lost, has a thick prospectus of recommendations and reforms it hopes the new government will undertake. Among the most important: the elimination of corrupt and incompetent officers, and the army's reorganization so that it can fulfill its assigned mission of security and pacification in the countryside; the elimination of corruption throughout the government, and an influx of able civilians into government.
Less Leverage. Thieu's own list for what he calls his "first six months" is virtually the same. Fifty military officers, from generals down to second lieutenants, will be disciplined or cashiered, he says. The armed forces will be reorganized and troops transferred from divisional commands to province-chief control for use in pacification. Probably half of the country's 44 province chiefs will be replaced, as corruption is punished, performance rewarded, and the general quality of these key positions upgraded. Finally, "something" will be done to deliver on the Manila Conference's promise of "national reconciliation" for Viet Cong who defect to the government's side.
The U.S. is well aware that its leverage and influence in Saigon are likely to diminish under an elected government. Thieu will not be dealing with a rubber-stamp congress any more than Lyndon Johnson does. Some measures that both he and the U.S. want may be rejected by the Vietnamese legislature, particularly if Thieu fails to mobilize a majority in the Senate and the House. But given U.S. determination to help South Viet Nam create a viable nation, that is a small price to pay.
The Vietnamese, in all their long and agonized history, have never had a government they could truly call their own, or even one that responded to their needs and listened to their complaints. Last week's election was a fairer and surer step in that direction than most had dared hope.
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