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But, above all, Diem's enemy is a coalition of Communists and the calendar. With no personal political organization, a civil service that is amateur and an army still in training, the Premier of South Viet Nam is charged with building a government and a popularity strong enough to overcome the strength and skill of Ho Chi Minh's Communist regime in North Viet Nam. Under the Geneva pact, which sliced the country in two, the South Vietnamese have only 15 months to prepare to meet Ho's Communists in a nationwide test at the polls, winner take all.
Neither mathematically nor politically is free Viet Nam remotely ready for the contest and, with Ho assured of a population edge over the South, it may never be. Unless the Communists agree to open the north to full and free campaigning and voting, the contest may never come off.
The question of South Viet Nam's survival will then press even more harshly. Less than six months ago, Western diplomats were gloomily pronouncing South Viet Nam a sure-to-be-lost cause; a quick survey in the hinterlands showed that Diem's nationalist regime could count on the electoral support of no more than a fourth of the villages. The rest leaned for Communism, or at least leaned against the unknown, unproved regime in Saigon. But by last week, the song of surrender was fainter and there were many who had ceased to sing it. A fresh survey showed that Premier Ngo Dinh Diem's nationalists are picking up, that they now stand about 50-50 with the Communists in the minds of the people of South Viet Nam. They are still gaining.
The progress, slow but clearly discernible, represents an almost personal triumph for single-minded Nationalist Diem. It also represents a tentative endorsement of the judgment of the U.S., the voluntary heir to the disorder left by France and the pledged defender of what remains of Indo-China. Though Washington did not choose him, it has invested its hopes, its experts, and some $400 million a year of its money in South Viet Nam. The U.S. is convinced that Ngo Dinh Diem, a man with his share of imperfections, is the best fitted to lead Vietnamese to true independence.
No Room for Both. Ngo Dinh Diem seems at first glance an improbable man for a fight against Ho Chi Minh, the wispy, twisting onetime chef's assistant who is so resolutely Communist, yet so clever that much of Asia still toys with the notion that he is really just a Vietnamese patriot. Diem's career has grown mostly out of negative decisions. He is a sparsely gifted administrator, and of politics he says: "Clever maneuvers only betray, demoralize and divide the people." To some of the more sophisticated in the game, he rates as a marginal man.