Bao Bows Out

Through Saigon's streets rolled a float depicting a swinish Emperor Bao Dai swilling cognac with one hand, clutching a nude blonde with the other, while an overbearing French rascal stuffed the royal pockets with gold. The question before the people in South Viet Nam's first free national election was in effect a choice between Premier Ngo Dinh Diem as their head of state or Bao Dai, their absentee playboy sovereign.

So put, there could be little doubt of the answer. Diem's supporters, exuberantly forecasting a 99-to-1 victory for their

Premier, were dismayed at Western observers for suggesting that a less lopsided triumph, say 85% of the votes, might be a more credible reflection of Vietnamese opinion. One top Vietnamese official was scandalized: "Eighty-five percent better than 99%? Impossible!"

Painful Silence. Almost no one took the streets to say anything in Bao Dai's favor. What was there to say? On election day, even his mother voted against the fat, foolish emperor. Reporters, touring the polls, could find no evidence of chicanery. There was no need for any. Premier Diem got his 98.2% of the vote. Only a few thousand among the 5,828,000 ballots were found to be invalid, a crushing defeat for the Communists, who had urged that defaced ballots be cast as a gesture of protest.

One day after his 42nd birthday, Bao Dai found himself overwhelmingly repudiated by the people he had sometimes meant to serve, but only fitfully did, while his torn country lived through the intersecting agonies of poverty, war, colonialism and Communism. When he got the news of his repudiation in Paris last week, Bao Dai sent word through his Chef de Cabinet: "His Majesty adopts silence."

Text for Democracy. The victor in the elections was far from silent. Ngo Dinh Diem, a bachelor under a self-imposed oath of celibacy and a Roman Catholic among a predominantly Buddhist people, proclaimed South Viet Nam a republic and himself its first President. To the boom of a naval cannonade and amid a torchlight procession and fireworks, 54-year-old Diem spoke from the steps of Saigon's Independence Palace, flanked by his Cabinet, a battery of generals, two Catholic bishops and two Buddhist prelates. Said the new President: "Democ racy is not a group of texts and laws . . . It is essentially a state of mind, a way of living with the utmost respect toward every human being, ourselves as well as our neighbors."

The French government, having done its considerable best to discredit and destroy Diem, now granted him its official recognition. So did Britain. He already had U.S. blessing and he quickly got U.S. diplomatic recognition. For Diem, the road to respect among the world's powers had been an uncharted, chuckholed, booby-trapped and lonely right of way, along which he had had to fight off the French, the Communists, obstreperous religious sects, pirate syndicates, and an indifferent and suspicious people. He had come a long way in 16 months.

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