Many, if not most, of Harvard's younger faculty members have become increasingly vocal during the past year in their opposition to the war in Vietnam. One who has not is Samuel P. Huntington, the new chairman of the Government Department, who came back two months ago from a six-week State Department-sponsored tour of South Vietnam.

He came home optimistic--about progress in the war, about the effect of the election, about the prospects for an eventual stable peace.

Huntington, an expert on political development whose course, Government 109, stresses the importance of order in developing countries, was asked by the State Department to study long-term political trends in South Vietnam. Planning his own agenda, he traveled through 15 provinces in the country's four regions, usually in the company of U.S. embassy personnel.

He interviewed villagers and, from Saigon and the countryside, observed the national election campaign. He left the country ten days before the election.

Huntington has not yet submitted his report to the State Department and when he does it will be classified. But he recently discussed some of his preliminary personal observations and conclusions.

The four years since his first trip to Vietnam--in the last year of the Diem regime--have seen an "opening up of political process" in Vietnam, Huntington says. The September 3 election, in which the winning Thieu-Ky ticket received 35 per cent of the votes, was "very beneficial" in increasing national political consciousness, which Huntington found to exist in a high degree even in rural areas.

He thinks that the closely observed, hotly contested election was a political necessity, saving the country from what could have been a "very difficult situation had it not been held. Huntington thinks that the election was a fair one commenting that "we had as much at stake in a fair election as the Vietnamese did." The U.S. government, he said, was prepared to accept any result in the election, in which the "peace platform" Dzu-Chieu ticket received a surprising second-place 17.2 per cent. But he notes that the South Vietnamese army would probably have attempted a coup had the first and second place results been reversed.

The election, he feels, indicated to the average Vietnamese that there is something to be gained through politics. For proof Huntington contrasts last year's elections to the Constituent Assembly with next Sunday's elections for the 137-member lower House. In 1966, he says, "people didn't run because they didn't think it would be important." This year, 2000 candidates have filed for the election "because they feel it's going to count."

Huntington sees several reasons for the rising level of political life in South Vietnam, and one of them is Nguyen Cao Ky. In Huntington's previous studies of developing countries, he has often found in the military a primary source of modernizing influence. In the case of Vietnam, he says, Diem was "really the centralizer and the modernizer" but he was unsuccessful in trying to unify a diverse country "from the top down." Ky, Huntington feels, has "natural political flair. He flies planes, he wears purple scarves, everyone has heard of him; he has made a deep impression on the public conscience."

Style is more relevant than content in this stage of politics, Huntington thinks. He attributes peace candidate Dzu's strong 800.000-vote showing to a rabble-rousing political style similar to Ky's, which impressed the voters more than his platform.

Whatever the value, or lack of value, of Ky's leadership in more substantive terms, Huntington feels that he performs a useful function. 'If you're trying to impose democracy on a society you have to expect the rabble-rousers to play their part," he says.

Another reason for increased South Vietnamese political awareness, Huntington thinks, is rapidly increasing urbanization due to the war economy. When he was in Vietnam four years ago, the country was no more than 15 per cent urban; now about 40 per cent of the people live in cities. Saigon and most other cities have "turned into real boom towns, hit hard by the Honda revolution," Huntington remarks. Saigon's economy is booming, there is no unemployment, and urbanization is snowballing.

The primary danger from this heightened level of politics is that, as the country as a whole begins to make political demands, so will each of South Vietnam's many ethnic, religious, and communal factions.

It was these factions that impressed Huntington most strongly about Vietnam. "Most people don't appreciate the complexity and variety of this society," he comments. Almost half the population is composed of different minority groups, and it is this half that is most immune to Viet Cong influence and most strongly supports the government--now. Thieu and Ky's majorities on September 3, for example, came from the strongly tribal area of the Third Core.

Hunting estimates that about 90 per cent of the Viet Cong's support comes from the other half, the "normal garden variety Vietnamese." This is the mass, unorganized population, and in the vacuum between the village level and the remote national government the appeal of the Viet Cong is very strong. On the other hand, the ethnic groups like the Cambodians, Chinese, and Montagnards have tightly organized communal organizations, with hierarchies of their own which fill the vacuum and make Viet Cong penetration unlikely.