Loon - Jack McLean [37]
The President talked a lot, and Mrs. Rockefeller managed him, so I wasn’t too pressed to make conversation, but he gave me a great speech on how much he had admired Daddy (who had an interview with him with interpreter when we first arrived) so I was very proud. His name, by the way, was Diem, and he is regarded as a great hero here for the wonderful things he has done in South Vietnam since the Geneva Conference, when North Vietnam was given to the Communists.
There was lots of fighting before that, but now all is very peaceful, and while out in the country we saw tall stone guard posts along the road, most of the villages looked peaceful, with flowers, vegetable gardens, water buffalo hard at work and people hurrying busily all around. We visited a refugee center about fifty miles north, and saw many others along the way. They are all built around a big Catholic church. When the Communists took over North Vietnam it was the local priest in every town who led his villagers to safety across the border. They brought only what they could carry, and burnt all their houses behind them so the Communists wouldn’t get them! Then walked, most of them, hundreds of miles. This country is only 10% Christian, but of course the priest let anyone who wanted come with him, and now each village has set up its own schools in the south.
All of them, men and women from the North wear black silk trousers and dark red tunics, so you can always tell which ones they are. Everyone starts the day very early, when it’s a bit cooler, and then siesta for three hours at noon, and no afternoon school for any children! Dinner isn’t until about nine in the evening when it’s almost cool enough to be a little hungry. We can’t eat any salad or fresh things here, except fruit that has the skin on, and we have little pills we have to put into the water, but mostly we drink wine and beer.
The Tet celebrations involved wonderful doings, with a great colored paper dragon the main attraction, and boys beating drums, and dancing round going through furious whirlings up on high poles, his long flowing silk tail twitching around behind him. Everyone gathers around shouting, and it seems the point is for the demon to catch the evil spirit, so all will have good luck for the New Year.
Now we are in a plane again, flying to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, just one hour away. The country under us looks hot, and wet, and flat with lots of rice paddies and only a hazy sign of the mountains far to the north in the Communist part of the country. We are flying north, so maybe it will be an hour cooler at least.
While we were there a Hollywood group was at our hotel making a movie called “The Quiet American.” There were a lot of them with Audie Murphy being the star. We watched them “shooting” two evenings—once in the market place where they had a great parade with dragon, lanterns and things, and another time right in front of the hotel, with Audie himself driving up in a jeep and coming into the lobby. The time of the movie is during the war against the French, so they had to hang French flags up everywhere.
We also had the “Fairless Committee” (Mr. Fairless is the ex-president of General Motors) investigating the American Aid program. They had eight Cadillacs—all numbered—to take them around the city.
Then just as we were leaving this morning an American military mission arrived to look into that side of the affaire but they looked rather dull by comparison.
Love,
Mom
Ngo Dinh Diem, my mother’s dinner partner at the palace banquet that February evening in 1957, was assassinated on November 2, 1963, in a military coup that had the tacit approval of the United States. Three short weeks later, U.S. president John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. On that day there were sixteen thousand American military advisers in Vietnam.
When my parents visited Asia, the flight from Hawaii