Signs of Improvement

"No amount of American aid can guarantee the freedom of Viet Nam," said U.S. Presidential Envoy Joseph Lawton Collins last month, "unless the Vietnamese are determined to be free." Last week General Collins flew back to Washington bearing news of considerable Vietnamese determination. "Things are looking up in South Viet Nam," reported the New York Herald Tribune's Homer Bigart at the same time. "The odds on holding the place, quoted at no better than one in ten a month ago, are now reduced to one in five." One of the reasons for the changing odds--adverse though they still are--is a series of indications that Nationalist Premier Ngo Dinh Diem is beginning to get across to his people. Last week Diem: P: Reviewed 15,000 loyal Vietnamese troops--not one French colonial among them--in an hour-long parade in Saigon. P: Reached agreement that the U.S. would start training a 100,000-man Vietnamese army, plus a reserve of 150,000 men. The necessary funds would be transmitted through a new Vietnamese (not French) bank. P: Accepted the allegiance of 8,000 troops of the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao religious sects, whose hostile private armies were thereby reduced by about one-third. P: Started proceedings against wealthy Phan Van Giao, onetime Vice Premier and business manager for Chief of State Bao Dai, accusing him of misappropriating 5,650,000 piasters ($169,500).

The previously reticent Premier is showing more self-confidence and political skill. He is also getting stronger and more popular, partly because he is now the sole dispenser of U.S. aid in South Viet Nam, but more importantly because Diem is developing a novel formula that is catching Vietnamese imagination: a nationalist, puritanical revulsion from the corruption and immorality that most Vietnamese associate with the discredited French colonials.

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