The Mood Turns Violent

The first week of South Viet Nam's presidential election campaign started off quietly enough. Supporters of President Nguyen Van Thieu, now the sole candidate in the Oct. 3 elections, blanketed the country with tens of thousands of posters advertising his "democracy slate." The President himself was in an expansive mood. In a meeting with supporters from the provinces, he declared that he would hesitate to remain in office if he received less than 60% of the votes; the week before he had put the figure at only 50%.

In a dinner interview with foreign correspondents, Thieu confidently discounted Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky's threats of a coup d'etat against his government. Although Ky himself was now silent, he did dispatch an aide to Washington to urge that the Nixon Administration cut off economic and military aid to force postponement of the one-man presidential race. U.S. diplomats in Saigon settled into a quiet cynicism over the no-contest race.

Frantic Calls. The calm proved shortlived. In what became the most violent week in Saigon since the 1968 Tet offensive, scores of antigovernment and anti-American demonstrations broke out, bringing a rash of firebombings and rock-throwing incidents. The first incident occurred when U.S. Senator George McGovern, a presidential candidate and vigorous opponent of the war, arrived at a Saigon church to attend a meeting of a prison reform committee.

Minutes after the group had gathered, rocks ripped through the church windows and fire bombs exploded eight motorcycles and a Jeep. McGovern and his aides took cover in the church office, but it required three frantic calls to the U.S. embassy, one of them to Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, before American MPs rescued the Senator.

Next day the Saigon police chief confirmed what many had already suspected: most of the mob outside the church had been government militiamen. In a crude attempt to justify the attack, he said that McGovern had been unwittingly meeting with "Viet Cong agents." The Senator's demand for an apology from Thieu went coldly unheeded.

Measure of Distrust. The violence quickly escalated. The following night, the popular Tu Do nightclub was blown up with a 15-lb. plastique charge, killing 15 and wounding 57. Though the attack appeared to be the work of Viet Cong terrorists, it was a measure of the distrust in which Thieu is now held that some observers thought that the President might even have engineered that. Their reasoning: any terrorist attack would be blamed on the Viet Cong, thereby strengthening Thieu's anti-Communist stand and silencing such antiwar critics as McGovern.

In the days that followed, Thieu's promise to give the opposition carte blanche to hold meetings and the press a free hand in covering them was shown to be hollow at best. First, police moved against a demonstration staged by a radical wing of the militant An Quang Buddhists, who had called for a boycott of the election. Next they broke up a gathering of opposition Deputies, who had called for Thieu's resignation. They also routed a group of foreign journalists observing the affair, chasing them down Saigon's streets for half an hour and firing tear-gas grenades at them. Thieu's apparent determination to quash every manifestation of opposition does not bode well for a peaceful election. Since he is widely viewed as a puppet of the U.S., opposition against him has increasingly focused on the American presence. Last week at least nine U.S. vehicles were burned, causing the Australian army to order that bright red kangaroo stickers be placed on their vehicles to distinguish them from American ones. The U.S. military command conceded that it might be forced to confine American G.I.s to their bases for their own safety.

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