Aid under Fire

Jessica Elkind's Aid under Fire examines the attempts of American civilians to create a viable anticommunist state in South Vietnam from the time of Ngo Dinh Diem's ascent to power in 1954 to the American escalation of the Vietnam War a decade later. In doing this, she focuses on three groups that became deeply involved in this project: the U.S. Operations Mission, which was the aid agency of the U.S. embassy in Saigon; the Michigan State University Group (MSUG), whose faculty and staff worked on the problem of refugee relief, the teaching of public administration, and the training of the South Vietnamese police; and the International Voluntary Services (IVS), whose men and women worked in agricultural and educational assistance programs. Elkind concludes that despite tremendous efforts, the labors of all three groups failed because of cultural clashes with the Vietnamese, bureaucratic infighting among U.S. and Vietnamese agencies, and an increasingly perilous security situation within Vietnam. Ultimate failure, however, rested on the American goal of creating an anticommunist South Vietnam, “a geopolitical outcome that the majority of the Vietnamese people did not support” since they believed that “neither their own government nor its American supporters had their best interests in mind” (pp. 3, 193

Administration (probate law · Agency (philosophy · Bureaucracy · Economic growth · Geopolitics · Government (linguistics · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Refugee · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science · Vietnam War · Vietnamese · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Public Administration · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies