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aid a) el ed iv et Xa HISTORY OF UNITED STATES INVOLVEMENT IN VIETNAM | 47° full and unstinting American backing would make him moré cooperative in such matters proved totally illusory. Critically im- portant social and economic reforms urged by the United States were either not carried out or were attended by so much corrup- tion and inefficiency that they resulted in even greater alienation of the population. Diem’s program of “agrarian reform” could hardly have been expected to secure him significant political sup- port. Even the modest redistribution of land for which it provided did not get underway unti! 1958. The program was restricted to rice-growing lands; and even with regard to these holdings, land- lords were permitted to keep up to 284 acres. Where rice proper- ties in excess of this amount were made available for redistribution, the peasant had to pay for the land in full, and he received title to it “only after he had paid the last of six installments. For those many landless peasants in the South who had been given such lands by the Vietminh in the period before Geneva, the right to purchase what they regarded as already their own did not make them particularly grateful to the government in Saigon. The stra- tegic hamlet program, for which American officials initially made such extravagant claims, turned out to be in most areas a tragic failure that worked great hardship upon and further alienated the rural population. Its objective was to resettle peasants in larger and more easily protected concentrations where they were to benefit from new or improved sacial services. In fact, most of the peasantry affected were significantly worse off than before. Apart from the trauma of being uprooted from their homes and ancestral lands, they were usually quite inadequately compensated for the property they had been forced to abandon, They were often harshly treated, generally unable to discover the new social services they had been promised, and usually no better protected than before from the ravages of guerrilla warfare. Despite repeated optimistic pronouncements by American mili- tary and civilian officials, by 1963 it had become clear to President Kennedy that Diem and his family were incapable of stemming - the rapid political and military disintegration of the South Vict- namese regime. The massive build-up of American aid to the South Vietnamese anny had proved ineffective, for the Victcong