No one in 1963, or later, doubted that Ngo Dinh Diem lacked the personality traits and the leadership skills to win the allegiance of the rural peasantry. A CIA report from 1963 stated the following about the Diem regime, “…[it] has been hampered by its lack of confidence in and its inability to engage the understanding and support of a considerable portion of the Vietnamese people – including large segments of the educated classes and the peasantry.”[1] Diem’s monopolization of power, his promotion of Catholics to positions of influence, and his reliance on his brother Nhu isolated him from the majority of South Vietnamese.
Diem certainly had his problems; but it was the Strategic Hamlet Program, and the peasant opposition to it, that caused his government to lose so much ground in 1962 and 1963. And President Kennedy, as much as Diem, held responsibility for the debacle that unfolded across rural South Vietnam in those years.
The Vietcong did not stand idly by while the Americans and South Vietnamese erected strategic hamlets across South Vietnam. From the beginning, the guerrillas sought to undermine the program. On June 23, 1962, only two months after the GVN initiated the program in Binh Duong Province, Hanoi radio urged its compatriots in the South to “…destroy the United States-Diem [My-Diem] strategic hamlets and free the people detained therein.”[1] After hearing this radio message, U.S. and GVN officials concluded that the Strategic Hamlet Program must be working, otherwise the Hanoi regime would not have brought attention to it.
Ngo Dinh Diem and his volatile brother Nhu viewed the rural hamlet, and its residents, as the primary impediment to the integration and modernization of South Vietnam.
