Prelude to a Fiery Campaign

As South Viet Nam celebrated Armed Forces Day with a 10,000-man parade in Saigon last week, President Nguyen Van Thieu and Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky appeared together for the first time in several months. They were icily correct, exchanging formal handshakes and cool looks but never speaking to one another.

Veiled Threat. The President and his Vice President have never been the best of friends, but their enmity has rarely been more apparent than last week. The cause of the heightened ill feeling: a stinging speech by Ky that blasted the Thieu administration. In the speech, a prelude to next October's presidential election campaign, in which Ky would like to oppose Thieifs reelection, the Vice President described Thieu's regime as a "dictatorship"' and said that it was worse than a Communist dictatorship "because it is disguised." The armed forces, declared Ky, "cannot be strong because of the plague of corruption. The present military strength is a phony strength that can collapse at any moment." Then, in a thinly veiled threat against Thieu, Ky added: "Those Vietnamese who have the habit of being the servitors of the colonialists and who practice the policy of family dictatorship have to take my warning as a serious one."

The editions of fourteen Saigon newspapers that reported the speech were promptly confiscated by the government for carrying articles that were "a threat to national security." The seizure was an indication of how tough a time Ky is likely to have in challenging Thieu. Under a new election bill that Thieu will probably sign this week, Ky will be required to collect the signatures of either 40 Deputies and Senators or 100 provincial councilors. This will be no easy matter either for him or for General Duong Van ("Big") Minh, the only other major contender, who is soon expected to announce his "peace" candidacy.

In a separate development, TIME learned last week of a letter sent by 27 South Vietnamese majors and colonels to Ky and other top Saigon officials. The document accused General Ngo Dzu, commander of II Corps, one of the country's four military regions, of a long list of corrupt practices and falsification of battle reports and casualties. "The typical technique is to do badly but to report well," the officers declared with bitter sarcasm. "We wonder whether we are fighting Communism, or supporting it."

Despite his bold talk about combating corruption, Ky said that he doubted the document's authenticity and indicated that he would take no action. Dzu charges that the letter is the work of his enemies within the army. Whatever the truth of its accusations, the letter is a fair indication of the kind of charges and countercharges that are likely to roil Viet Nam's never calm political waters between now and October.

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