In 1961, President Kennedy sent a team to Viet Nam to report on conditions in the South and to assess future American aid requirements. The report, now known as "December 1961 White Paper", argued for an increase in military, technical, and economic
aid, and the introduction of large-scale American "advisers" to help stabilize the Diem regime and crush the NLF. As Kennedy weighed the merits of these recommendations, some of his advisers urged the president to withdraw from Viet Nam altogether, claiming that it was a "dead-end alley". In typical Kennedy fashion, the president chose a middle route. Instead of a large-scale military buildup as the White Paper had called for or a negotiated settlement that some of his advisers had long advocated, Kennedy sought a limited accord with Diem. The United Stales would increase the level of its military involvement in South Viet Nam through more machinery and advisers, hut would not intervene whole-scale with troops. This arrangement was doomed from the start, and soon reports from Viet Nam came in to Washington attesting to further NLF' victories. To counteract the NLF's success in the countryside, Washington and Saigon launched an ambitious and deadly military effort in the rural areas, called the Strategic Hamlet Program. Through much of Diem's reign, rural Vietnamese had viewed the GVN as a distant annoyance, but the Strategic Hamlet Program brought the GVN to the countryside. The Saigon regime's reactive politics ironically produced more cadres for the NLF.
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