Bullets & Ballots

INDOCHINA

All over war-racked Viet Nam, from secure Saigon to tiny towns barely out of sound of Red gunfire, stevedores, coolies, wealthy rice merchants and civil servants jammed into polling places last week and in local elections gave Emperor Bao Dai's anti-Communist government a thumping vote of confidence. The Reds tried to scare off the voters with Sten guns; in one region they even kidnaped five candidates. But 80% of the registered voters turned out, and in some cases waited two and three hours to vote in Viet Nam's first elections.

The balloting was free and unbossed, and in sharp disproof of Communist charges that it was a French-sponsored fraud. In Hanoi, for instance, 17 of the 18 winners were strongly anti-French nationalists; the biggest vote went to a candidate who had spent six years in a French political internment camp on Madagascar. "Even in my dreams I didn't expect such popular success," said Viet Nam's Premier Nguyen Van Tarn.

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