The Viet Nam Campaign

Where Viet Nam is concerned, politics does not stop at the water's edge. For months Hanoi and Saigon have taken an understandable if unduly partisan interest in the U.S. presidential campaign. Hanoi's newspapers and radio have, of course, always referred to President Nixon as "an odious character of wicked blood," "an imperialist bandit," "a mad dog." Hanoi has not endorsed George McGovern, but because of his pledge to withdraw U.S. forces unilaterally has reported his campaign with respect. In Saigon, evidently with President Thieu's approval, radio and television stations have been broadcasting editorials calling McGovern "mad dog" and "an enemy of the South Vietnamese people who has crawled to the bloodthirsty Communists on trembling hands and feet." The attacks were so vitriolic that the U.S. embassy in Saigon brought pressure on the South Vietnamese, and the invective soon stopped. Such peculiar long-distance politicking is another example of the strange symbiosis in which the fates of Americans and Vietnamese have become so intimately locked.

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