New Directions

Just before South Viet Nam's doughty President Ngo Dinh Diem set off last week on a four-day state visit to neighboring Thailand, he was tactially informed that his favorite white sharkskin suit would not be proper at the Royal Thai court. He dispatched an aide on an emergency trip to Hong Kong, but when Diem took one look at the Western-style cutaway, striped pants and grey top hat that the aide brought back, he snorted in disgust and refused to wear them.

Next day when Diem's C-47 touched down at Bangkok's spick-and-span military airport, the President disembarked to review the waiting honor guard, clad instead in his national Vietnamese dress: blue silk mandarin gown and black Tonkinese turban. The mandarin gown reflected more than a mere impulsive presidential whim: it symbolized a complicated and many-faceted change that has come about in President Diem's political thinking in recent months.

Asia for Asians. Put simply, Diem is still taking U.S. money by the millions ($197 million last year), but less and less U.S. advice. One example of this was a decision not even to use the phrase "antiCommunism" in any speeches in Thailand. Diem remains a Roman Catholic and a staunch antiCommunist, but he has become convinced that Communism is best fought in Asian terms, and from a non-Western base. The next stop, as Diem sees it (and as he hopes to convince other Southeast Asian leaders), is the creation of such a base through a revival and reappraisal of Asian culture and Asian values.

On the practical political side, Diem believes that this goal can be best attained through bilateral defense pacts and cultural exchanges with his Southeast Asia neighbors. He wants to keep the shield of Western political protection, e.g., SEATO, U.S. military training missions, but believes they should be de-emphasized as much as possible in the public mind.

In Bangkok last week, there was a good chance that this kind of appeal might fall on receptive ears. In Thailand, as in the neighboring kingdom of Cambodia and to a lesser extent even in Diem's own homeland of South Viet Nam, neutralism and anti-Americanism have shown a marked and steady increase during the past 18 months. Bangkok diplomats just smiled when Thai Premier Pibulsonggram, one of the shrewdest politicians in Southeast Asia, observed blandly of Diem's visit: "Politics won't be discussed. This is a state visit." The fact is that, though Pibulsonggram's public statements are often almost embarrassingly pro-American, he and two of his closest political cronies either own or control 13 of the most violently anti-American newspapers in Thailand. Sample recent headlines:

AMERICA DESTROYS THAILAND. AMERICANS LORD IT OVER THAIS. YANKEE CREATES DISORDER.

Something Like Nehru. There is a world of difference between the two leaders. The Thai Premier runs a sometimes benign, sometimes malevolent dictatorship whose inner-circle corruption is legendary even in an area where corruption is taken as a matter of course. President Diem's own South Viet Nam regime has its share of corruption, and Diem has autocratic inclinations, but he is personally austere and moralistic. Pibulsonggram rarely if ever sets himself forth as a political philosopher.

In the long run, though some U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia are apprehensive about the course Ngo Dinh Diem is taking, it might be a healthy thing for Southeast Asia, and for U.S. interests there. The misgivings stem partly from a worry that Diem may have his course charted farther out into the unknown than he prudently should--partially through the influence of his ambitious brother Ngo Dinh Nhu and Nhu's dynamic and attractive 28-year-old wife.

Brother Ngo Dinh Nhu returned recently from India, obviously impressed with what he had heard from Jawaharlal Nehru. Ngo Dinh Nhu, Saigon observers say, has been won over to a Nehru-style thesis that North and South Viet Nam can eventually be unified if Red China can be talked into accepting the concept of neutral, buffer states in Southeast Asia.

Ngo Dinh Nhu, like Nehru, seems happily unaware that in the Communist lexicon the words "buffer" and "satellite" are synonyms. One Saigon theory is that Communist Ho Chi Minh should get all he can from the Russians and Chinese, while Diem gets all he can from the U.S., in the hope that in about five years North and South may be reunified outside the world power blocs.

There is still no conclusive evidence that Ngo Dinh Diem is heading that way. even if his current downplaying of his dependence on his U.S. ally can be made to sound so. His new direction is sure to prove agreeable to his Thai neighbor, Pibulsonggram; and if his heart is in the right place, the words do not matter so much, for the reality that the U.S. hopes for in Southeast Asia is not for weak U.S. satellites, but nations that are strong and independent, even strong in their independence.

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