Too Good to Be True

President Nguyen Van Thieu saw it as "a very good achievement of our people and our nation." The results of South Viet Nam's one-man election were very good indeed--in fact, too good. According to the government, fully 87.7% of the 7.4 million qualified voters went to the polls last week, and only 5.5% mutilated their ballots to indicate no confidence in the Thieu regime. The President's swollen 94.3% vote ran absurdly far ahead of the 35% that he won in 1967 and the 50% that he had said he would regard as an adequate expression of popular support in this year's balloting. It even surpassed the 89% vote claimed in 1961 by Ngo Dinh Diem, boss of the tough, autocratic regime that was toppled two years later by, among others, a young colonel named Nguyen Van Thieu.

The bloated Thieu vote was clearly unnecessary; without any jiggery-pokery, American observers in Saigon reckoned last week, Thieu could easily have come out of the election with 60% or 70% of the vote. "Maybe Thieu didn't want the results to be so blatantly in his favor," said a Western diplomat in Saigon. "Maybe his province chiefs just got carried away. But if you measure American policy in Viet Nam by that election, it flunked badly."

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the election was the widespread acceptance of the results. Or was it a resigned indifference? Spokesmen for the militantly anti-Thieu, antiwar An Quang Buddhists charged that Thieu had "killed democracy and given birth to dictatorship." Supporters of Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky urged the Vietnamese "not to recognize the faked results." But never before had Thieu seemed more firmly in command. Before the election, when Ky's people were raising ominous visions of post-election catastrophe, the CIA estimated that there was a 40% chance of a post-election coup attempt; now the estimate is closer to zero.

Ready to Die. Thieu is not quite home free yet. Though Ky's supporters have filed a taxpayer's suit charging that the election was an unconstitutional fraud, there is little likelihood that the returns will be invalidated by the Supreme Court; after all, Thieu can usually count on the loyalty of six of its nine appointees. Ky's men say that he is "ready to die in the struggle." Since the election, he has been cloistered in his heavily guarded mansion at Saigon's Tan Son Nhut airbase, where he is doubtless trying to map out his uncertain future. On Oct. 31, Thieu will be inaugurated along with his new Veep, Former Senator Tran Van Huong, and Ky will be out of a job.

Meanwhile. Thieu has his own troubles. In coming weeks, decisions will have to be taken on a number of long-delayed measures, including a possible devaluation of the piaster, as the regime faces up to the hard economic realities posed by the U.S. withdrawal. Thieu can only hope that his second term will live up to the incredibly ingenuous assessment delivered by the State Department on his unhappy second election: "a Vietnamese solution to a Vietnamese problem." It was as if the U.S. had never been involved.

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