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Stern Tactics. All Vietnamese recognize that unbending President Ngo Dinh Diem is the father of his country, acknowledge that without him the whole nation would have fallen to the Communist Viet Minh. With more than $1 billion in U.S. aid to help, he has policed the 17th parallel border with Communist North Viet Nam, resettled nearly a million refugees from the north, started ambitious road, railway and land-reform projects.
But he has not solved the problem of Communist terrorism. A fortnight ago an American police adviser was gunned down in broad daylight on a main road near the sea resort of Cap Saint-Jacques; he was one of the 800 soldiers and civilians who fall to the Communist terrorists every month in South Viet Nam. Three weeks ago emboldened Viet Minh guerrillas struck into South Viet Nam by way of chaotic Laos, engaged Diem's army in pitched fighting for a week. Pleading the Communist threat, Diem has ruled with rigged elections, a muzzled press, and political re-education camps that now hold 30,000. His key—and prosperous—advisers are four brothers and a pretty sister-in-law. The twin frustrations of dictatorship and an unending war eventually turned the paratroopers to revolt.
Diem seems to have won out again. The conditions that brought on the revolt remained.