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Yet such is Viet Nam, disgusted with colonialism and its vices, frustrated in its yearning for freedom, that a leader's integrity is more important than his ability. Communist Ho has built popular support not altogether with wiliness and Communist doctrine, but also with incorruptibility and his undeviating enmity for French colonial rule. Ngo Dinh Diem brings into the battle an incorruptibility even greater and his own record of a lifetime's opposition to French rule and influence. "There are only two real leaders in Viet Nam," Ho's chief of staff, General Vo Nguyen Giap, recognized some time ago. "One is Ho Chi Minh. The other is Ngo Dinh Diem. There is no room in the country for both."
Chastity & Stuffed Cabbage. Diem is a stocky (5 ft. 4 in., 143 Ibs.), young-looking man of 54, with thick black hair and a penchant for white Western-style sharkskin suits. His eyes peer out distantly from beneath heavy lids. He is a lonely man, unused to self-expression, who lets others bring up the subject and then blurts, interminably and at random, not always expressively. He is a man of contrasts. Monkish and inward-looking, fascinated by Gandhi, the Christian saints and by books (he assembled a personal library of 10,000), he long ago pledged himself to chastity; he is so uncomfortable around women that he has none on his personal staff and he once put a sign outside his office: WOMEN FORBIDDEN. Yet Diem is also— indulgent and demonstrative, downs huge breakfasts of such dishes as stuffed cabbage, and sometimes at formal receptions he handles his chopsticks like a coolie, shoving bowl to mouth and shoveling. He likes to hunt (duck and tiger). He may erupt into sudden violence. Considering someone he dislikes, he will sometimes spit across the room and snarl, "dirty type!"
Though Diem was born in a straw hut on his father's estate near Hue (where his ailing, 87-year-old mother still lives behind a wall to keep off evil spirits), he is of the upper class, and he talks without self-consciousness of "the little people." He is proud of his Vietnamese heritage: "We are a country of principles, an old country, a country built village by village. Viet Nam is a solid thing . . ." And he is reluctant to change it, but: "Sometimes I think we Asians are too reserved, talk too much by nuance. We ought to learn to be rude in our talk like the Americans, and get things done." Diem rarely speaks harshly of fellow Vietnamese who are Communists, because he hopes to convert them; he intends to oppose the twisted dialectic of Ho Chi Minh with the lotus of morality. Yet he recognizes that Communists are not creatures to be toyed with. "You must be sure to kill when you hunt tigers," he once said. "A wounded tiger becomes a mankiller to get food ..."
Fingernails & Farmers. Ngo Dinh Diem comes from a clan of leaders who for 1,000 years defended the Vietnamese against invaders from China. In the zyth century, the Ngo Dinh clan was converted to Roman Catholicism, and they held to their faith at a grisly price: as recently as 1870, no fewer than 100 of the Ngo Dinh were surrounded in their church and burned alive. (Today Viet Nam, essentially Buddhist, has about 2,000,000 Catholics.)