Land reform in South Vietnam

Land Reform in South Vietnam

Date	26 March 1970
Location	South Vietnam
Type	Land to the Tiller
Theme	Capitalist Land Reform
Budget	U.S.President Richard Nixon gave his support to new land reform measures in June 1969 in the Midway communiqué, judging it favourable to the Vietnamization of the conflict. In total, the United States financed $339 million of the total $441 million the reform cost.[1]
Organised by	Nguyen Van Thieu & Roy Prosterman
Outcome	By the end of 1973, 953,000 land titles had been distributed to poor or landless farmers and 1,198,000 hectares of land—nearly 40 percent of cultivated land in South Vietnam—had been distributed. By the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, the U.S. estimated that land tenancy had practically disappeared in South Vietnam and that the living standard of farmers had increased by 30 to 50 percent.[2]

Background of Land Reform in Vietnam during the 20th Century

Modern Land reform in Vietnam dates back to the political turmoil that followed World War II. A civil war pitted the communist Viet Minh (the predecessor of Viet Cong) against the French colonialists and their local supporters (mainly landowners). During that early stage, a large percentage of agricultural land was owned by powerful landowners and the majority of the rural population of Vietnam owned only small plots of land (with little legal assurance) or were simply landless peasants.^[3] The early success of the land reform program under the Viet Minh (and their successors, the Viet Cong), gave the communists a strong base of support among the 80% of the Vietnamese people who lived in rural areas.^[4] The support gained by the communists by the large section of rural dwellers, due to their newly obtained ability to have their own land, was an important factor in determining the public orientation, plot and outcome of the Vietnam War.

From 1954 to 1975 the land reform in Vietnam was pursued on two separate channels and regions as the country was provisionally divided into two parts: South Vietnam (The Republic of Vietnam) and North Vietnam (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam), resembling the current partition of Korea according to conflicting ideologies. Communist North Vietnam and its southern supporters, the Viet Cong, adopted a policy of confiscating the land of landlords and rich peasants by force and redistributing it to poor and landless peasants and hence organizing the rural population into collectives.

The Capitalist South Vietnam however failed in several land reform endeavors before finally achieving some success with a Land to the Tiller program in the early 1970s that was almost fully devised and supported by the United States. The conquest of South Vietnam by North Vietnam during 1975 and the unification of Vietnam ended the program. The land reform in South Vietnam nevertheless was instrumental to enhancing the success of the Vietnamese economy in the following years, although its role has been arguably underrated within scholarship and governmental narrative.^[5] A land reform program called Land to the Tiller was implemented in South Vietnam on March 26, 1970 by the president Nguyen Van Thieu, at the height of the Vietnam War. The reform intended to solve the problem of land tenancy by taking land from the landlords who are not laboring to the tenant farmers; the landlords are then compensated. Individual land holding was limited to 15 hectares. Legal title was extended to peasants in areas under control of the South Vietnamese government to whom land had previously been distributed by the Viet Cong.^[6]

Profile: Nguyen Van Thieu

Born in Ninh Thuan Province, Vietnam, in November 1924 (later changing his birthday to April 5, 1923), Nguyen Van Thieu joined the French-supported Vietnam National Army in 1948. As a member of the South Vietnamese army in the fight against the communist North, Thieu rose in importance. He was elected president of South Vietnam in 1967 but his government only lasted two years after the U.S. withdrawal. As the war's unpopularity in the U.S. grew strong, and following the Paris Peace Talks, the U.S. agreed to withdraw its forces in April 1973. Thieu's government survived only two more years. With the North Vietnamese Army encircling Saigon, Thieu officially resigned on April 21, 1975, and fled South Vietnam five days later. He turned the government over to Vice President Tran Van Huong, but Huong resigned seven days later, turning the office over to Duong Van Minh, who was considered acceptable to the North Vietnamese. Minh officially surrendered as North Vietnamese tanks rammed through the gates of the presidential palace on April 30, 1975. Thieu was forced to flee Vietnam in 1975.^[7]

Vietnamization of the War

The reform was highly advertised three months prior to its application and a holiday marked it (Farmer's Day). The initiative was backed by the American government; Richard Nixon gave his support in June 1969 in the Midway communiqué, judging it favorable to the Vietnamization of the conflict.^[8] Vietnamization of the war was a policy of the Richard Nixon administration to end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War through a program to "expand, equip, and train South Vietnam's forces and assign to them an ever-increasing combat role, at the same time steadily reducing the number of U.S. combat troops." In total, the United States financed 339 millions US dollars of the total 441 millions the reform cost. ^[9]

Profile: Richard Nixon

Born on January 9, 1913, in Yorba Linda, California, Richard Nixon was a Republican congressman who served as vice president under Dwight D. Eisenhower. Nixon ran for president in 1960 but lost to charismatic Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy. Undeterred, Nixon return to the race eight years later and won the White House by a solid margin. In 1974, he resigned rather than be impeached for covering up illegal activities of party members in the Watergate affair. He died on April 22, 1994, at age 81, in New York City.^[10]

Importance of the 1970 Land Reform

According to Trung Dinh Dang, a scholar at the Cornell School of Government and Politics Of Asia and The Pacific, the Vietnamese Communist Party struggled to carry out the socialist transformation of agriculture in the south of Vietnam. The contemporary party leaders initially considered land reform to be a temporary measure toward mass collectivisation.^[11]

In his article (2010) “Post-1975 Land Reform in Southern Vietnam: How Local Actions and Responses Affected National Land Policy”. Dang puts out how it turned out be a source of long-term problem and turned into a conflict between the party and Southern Vietnamese. The land reform encountered unexpected difficulty in the Southern Region and its implementation could not be achieved for many years, and the result was quite different from the party's original objectives. The article argues that villagers and local landlords were two key actors who contributed to the poor performance of the land reform. Also, in order to defend their land, villagers in the Southern Region engaged not only in forms of everyday resistance (denial of basic rules etc.) but also in some confrontational resistance.

Bernard B. Fall a prominent war correspondent, historian, political scientist, and expert on Indochina during the 1950s and 1960s, had once claimed that delayed land reform in South Vietnam had indeed a fundamental role in the Vietnam War as much as "ammunition for howitzers." South Vietnam's ally and financial supporter, the United States, either failed to realise the importance of land reform in a timely fashion or was not able to persuade the South Vietnamese government of its importance.^[12]

In the words of an American official, Robert Samson "The Americans (lost the war because) they offered the peasant a constitution; the Viet Cong offered him his land and with it the right to survive”.^[13]

The Clashing Ideologies

It is inevitable that the land reform of South Vietnam is closely linked, affected by and formed within the decades long Vietnam War: a conflict that shaped 20th Century. The Vietnam War has generated a very significant amount of controversy regarding its general plot and outcome, and hence scores of expert scholars and dedicated literature. Especially in the aftermath of the war, many scholars were harshly critical of the United States’ intervention in Vietnam and other mainland Southeast Asian countries such as Cambodia and Laos.

Within a heated and at times rather belligerent atmosphere, it can be observed that three rather distinct scholarly ideologies have arisen that present differing frameworks of the tumultuous war:

1. Scholars that are currently widely regarded as “Orthodox” tend follow the doctrine that America’s involvement in the war was inherently a lost cause and unjust. According to the orthodox scholars, the war was inherently doomed from the start and the strategies of multiple US administrations that changed throughout the decades were little more than insignificant.^[14]

2. The “revisionists” however, believe that the war was indeed a noble and necessary initiative but the policies that were employed by the US and its unsuitable military tactics throughout the conflict were simply not properly managed. Revisionists tend to frame the war through a focus on the losses within the battlefield due to inept strategical decisions, mostly due to a general (societal, administrative) lack of attention (enthusiasm and motivation) towards the lingering war.^[15]

3. There is also an emerging “Vietnam Studies” approach in the field of reading the Vietnam War, arguably led by Edward Miller. In “Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the fate of South Vietnam”, (2013) Edward Miller pursues a rather local-centric perspective. The book lays down the fundamentals of the political motivations & abilities regarding the Land to the Tiller reform within a chronological order of events. Miller puts forward that the politics of nation building resulted in the United States and Diem government’s ‘misalliance’ (the demise of allegiance). Using Vietnamese and American government documents and newspapers Miller examines the similarities and differences in US and Diem approaches to political centralisation, economic development, counterinsurgency and suppression of political threats. Hence Miller demonstrates the complexity and challenges of nation building in practice that in fact influences debates on democracy, community, security, and social change.

Miller attempts to restore Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu as rational, calculated politicians. Challenging the usual narrative of the South Vietnamese government as puppets to the US, Miller brings the discussion of nation building to a reality check. For example, Miller’s meticulous reading of governmental reports shows the different perspectives and shifting relationship between Diem and American officials of the time. Hasty and not-so well-thought through economic development strategies such as the Cai San project, land development program and Agrovilles described in Chapter 5: “Settlers and Engineers” exemplifies the patchy of economic experiments on the Vietnamese landscape and society.^[16]

What is important to note in order to have a general understanding of the context of the Land Reform in Vietnam is not the whole story behind these ideological divisions, but rather the importance of bearing in mind the overarching context they create regarding history writing on the land reform in South Vietnam.

Profile: Diem

Ngô Đình Diệm (3 January 1901 – 2 November 1963) was a South Vietnamese politician. A former mandarin of the Nguyễn dynasty, he was named Prime Minister of the State of Vietnam by Head of State Bảo Đại in 1954. In October 1955, after winning a heavily rigged referendum, he deposed Bảo Đại and established the first Republic of Vietnam (RVN), with himself as president. He was a leader of the Catholic element and was opposed by Buddhists. In November 1963, after constant Buddhist protests and non-violent resistance, Diệm was assassinated, along with his brother, Ngô Đình Nhu, by Nguyễn Văn Nhung, the aide of the leader of the Army of Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) General Dương Văn Minh during a coup d’état.The assassination led to the end of the U.S.-Diệm alliance and the collapse of his regime as well as the first Republic of Vietnam.^[17]

Legitimacy of Diem & the US involvement: Debates of Intentions behind the Land Reform in South Vietnam

The general debate over the Vietnam War can be said to have focused on two central issues: 1) The nature, legitimacy and results of Ngo Dinh Diem and his reign over South Vietnam, which directly concerns the historiography of his land reform, and 2) The consequences of the varying styles of leadership by multiple American presidents and top Western officials that changed over the decades of war.

Given that the South Vietnam land reform was almost completely subsidised and openly encouraged by the contemporary US administration that at the time sided with Diem, the general commentary on the Vietnam War is bound to have clear links to the agrarian reform era.

Orthodox scholars depict Diem as a rather corrupt and tyrannical puppet of the US. Revisionists however tend to believe and portray Ngo Dinh Diem as more of an independent, or at least a truly local leader (with legitimate public support), who was the only significant actor who the West could depend upon within that context (Post-1960s South Vietnam).^[18]

There has also been some revisionist scholars who even go to the lengths of arguing the US actually won in many levels, arguing that the American involvement in the Vietnam War saved Southeast Asia from becoming completely Communist — hence the containment strategy worked out through different means.

The debate over the legitimacy of the South Vietnamese Diem leader continues on to our day and considering the recent reevaluations may present an opportunity to how the history writing shaped over the decades. Keith Taylor, a prominent revisionist within the Vietnam War scholarship, sparked the reevaluation of the role of Diem in the Vietnam War in an article written during 2004, entitled “How I began to Teach About the Vietnam War”. In this piece, Taylor aims to debunk three readily accepted truths regarding the war by many scholars. The first rhetoric he attacks is the idea that the widely accepted idea that there was no the noncommunist government in Saigon under Diem. Taylor explains that Diem was actually a competent leader with significant public support — hence, not a mere American puppet as he was depicted over the years. According to Taylor, Diem was actually a scapegoat for the frustrations over mismanagement of Americans within the conflict.

Diem, according to this a clearcut revisionist understanding, knew what had to be done for the South Vietnam’s survival, but his U.S. sponsored assassination cut this leadership era short from bringing actual results. The second axiom he takes aim at is the popular belief that the United States had no legitimate reason to be involved in the Vietnam War, putting emphasis on the international political context (Cold War and its repercussions) as a significant reason that must be analysed within a realist understanding. The third focus in his article is on the assumption that the United States could not have won the war under any circumstance, which Taylor frames almost as a nihilist perspective in hindsight.^[19]

Taylor’s depiction of Diem and the US administrations clearly address orthodox scholars like Robert Buzzanco. In one of his articles (1973), “How I Learned to Quit Worrying and Love Vietnam and Iraq”, Buzzanco argues that Diem’s rule was full of corrupt activities that included promoting his family into high political positions, letting the black market of goods grow, and purging more than 6,000 army officers to replace them with loyal cadres. He claims that Diem has imprisoned over 40,000 political prisoners and executed more than 12,000, and his land reform was actually a takeover of 650,000 hectares of land, which denied peasants of their livelihoods. Buzzanco suggests that in fact, the South Vietnamese did not want American support especially regarding the assortment of their land and that the United States’ sole motivation was using the Vietnamese in an imperialist proxy war.^[20]

Historian Edward Miller, in his work (2006) “War Stories: The Taylor—Buzzanco Debate and How We Think About the Vietnam War” evaluates both sides of the debate within the framework of the results of Diem’s rule. Miller disagrees with Buzzanco’s harsh depiction of Diem as a mere American puppet with no local agenda other than upholding Western imperialism. Miller depicts how Diem actually lacked interest in the American proposal of the land reform and pushed for his own ideas of land distribution in South Vietnam.

Contrary to the American proposal of completely dispensing landlord’s property, Diem planned to redistribute land to his people by transporting thousands of peasants to Land Development Centers in less populated areas of South Vietnam. Miller, within his work shows that, Diem, however sponsored from abroad, was indeed genuinely trying to modernise South Vietnam and had less dependency upon the United States than it is widely accepted. Framed within a “Vietnam Studies” notion, Miller’s work does not completely endorse Taylor’s given that it does not clearly aim to legitimise the American involvement in the conflict.^[21]

Land Reform on the Mekong Delta: Understanding The Landscape

As a prominent scholar on the Mekong Delta in general, Andrew Biggs has studied Vietnam’s environmental history at the University of Washington from 1996 to 2004.^[22] His first book “Quagmire” examines the social and environmental dimensions of water policy within the Mekong Delta, an area that, he argues clearly, was plagued with colonialism and the following wars in the twentieth century. With “Quagmire: Nation-building and Nature in the Mekong Delta”, Biggs takes the issue out of the war context and explores the intersections of politics and nature on the Mekong Delta from the days of the French colonial conquest in the 1860s to the decades long conflict of the Vietnam War from 1960s onwards. Biggs’ scholarship brings about a deeper appreciation and a wider framing of the how “mother nature” fits into efforts of nation-building and independence. He depicts how often schemes fall short of their intended social or political goals, only to leave ecological devastation behind.

Many academic reviews see “Quagmire” as an overarching and ambitious book, which successfully includes all precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial interventions of different state agents in the Mekong Delta. Biggs shows how “the activities and politics of nation-building were connected to the historically and environmentally complex places where they occurred”. Biggs vividly demonstrates how the environment itself has a role to play regarding political transformations and failures. The book has a wide perspective on the “land” of the Mekong Delta, the theatre of all the events concerning the Vietnam War.^[23]

Biggs thoroughly reminds that there are the people who live in the Mekong Delta, using the rich resources available but employing quite different methods and notions than the canal builders or land reforms of the state. Besides the demographic factors, Biggs shows that the material environment (geography/landscapes) itself does have a role to play when it comes to the success of nation building practices. As the state is illustrated as a main actor; the environment strikes back: for example, the tidal movements in Mekong Delta affects canals, effectively blocking them very soon after being dug.

This notion has not been much discussed in such an explicit manner in related research. Hence Biggs’ work therefore serves many new dimensions of environmental history of sociology and technology — all of which critical concepts and phenomena to present a complete picture of the land reform in South Vietnam.

Biggs throughout his work basically argues that the whole “Land to the Tiller” program of the early 1970s was too little too late to swing the war in the favour of the US.

Land to the Tiller: The Proposal & Results

The Land to the Tiller project carried out in Vietnam from 1970 to 1973 was fundamentally based on the proposal of Roy Prosterman, a prominent American “land-rights-activist”, who the US government of the time recruited within its efforts against Viet Cong in South Vietnam. Prosterman originally practiced as an associate at the New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell for six years. He left private practice for a teaching post at the University of Washington in 1965.^[24]

In 1966 Prosterman came upon a law review article that promoted land confiscation as an acceptable tool for land reform in Latin America and the idea apparently seemed utterly dangerous to him. Prosterman responded with a law review article called “Land Reform in Latin America: How to Have a Revolution without a Revolution”, in which he urged democratic and market-friendly land reform which included full compensation for land acquisitions. Prosterman’s article got the attention of the US government who saw the potential of his ideas – particularly in South Vietnam. Prosterman was called to testify before the American Congress and was eventually recruited to carry out his ideas in Vietnam during the later part of the war.^[25]

An excerpt from his interview for the New York Times contextualises his project: “I ended up as a land-law consultant for a U.S.A.I.D.-commissioned study of the land-tenure situation in South Vietnam, as the Vietnam War was raging. It didn’t take much research or fieldwork to see that the Vietcong were drawing their support largely from the tenant farmers who were the great bulk of the rural poor, promising them land of their own if they won. I ended up doing the basic formulation of a land-to-the-tiller law, and then advocating for it in the U.S. and South Vietnam. The law was adopted in 1970, and a million tenant-farmer families became owners of the land they tilled. The original landlords were paid a decent price, though partly in bonds that had not all matured when the communists took over.The twin results of this reform were that rice production went up by 30 percent and indigenous Vietcong recruitment in the South went down from a range of 3,500 to 7,000 men a month to 1,000 a month”.^[26]

Prosterman’s “Land Reform in South Vietnam A Proposal for Turning the Tables on the Viet Cong” proposal (1967) therefore, presents the fundamental ideology and methodology of land reform in South Vietnam.. Drawing on (mostly failing) experiences in other countries (particularly Latin America), Prosterman proposed a "land-to-the-tiller" program to compete with the Viet Cong for the allegiance of the peasants. The plan had two main feature where first of all agricultural land in South Vietnam was to be owned by the farmers actually tilling the land, including land previously distributed by the Viet Cong and secondly landlords would be compensated fully for the land taken from them with payment guaranteed by the United States government.

On 26 March 1970, with the war still underway, the government of South Vietnam began implementation of the Land-to-the-Tiller program, in a quite similar fashion to what Prosterman had proposed. The reform aimed to expropriate land from landlords not personally cultivating the land and giving it to tenant farmers; the landlords were compensated.It is noteworthy that the footnotes of Prosterman’s article are larger than most of the content within the pages, serving as important source of demographic and economical data regarding the time.^[27]

Prosterman’s following work, “Land to the Tiller in South Vietnam” (1970), is a chapter from the Asian Survey that investigates the Land-to-the-Tiller program in South Vietnam that was implemented beginning 1970. It is a contemporary article to when the program occurred and uses a number of journal articles but also presents significant amount of data and on-the-ground research, especially regarding the demographic realities of the country at the time. Prosterman’s introduction of his article decorated by President Thieu’s words “This is the happiest day of my life” sets the tone for an optimistic perspective on how the land reform will “gut” the Viet Cong through substituting their major propaganda channel (offering land to peasants) and will accelerate peace in Vietnam.^[28]

According to Prosterman’s own NGO Landesa, the scheme was indeed a clear success and “(his) land to the tiller program in Vietnam from 1970 to 1973 gave land rights to 1 million tenant farmers. Rice production increased by 30 percent while Viet Cong recruitment decreased by 80 percent. A New York Times article called the land reform law that Prosterman had authored the most ambitious and progressive non-Communist land reform of the 20th century.” ^[29]

Profile: Roy Prosterman

Professor Prosterman practiced as an associate to the New York firm of Sullivan & Cromwell for six years before coming to the University of Washington in 1965. His research and teaching focus on legal issues of land reform, development, international, and property law fields, with a seminar in Legal Problems of Economic Development. He is also the director of the LL.M. Program in Law of Sustainable International Development. He has published Surviving to 3000: An Introduction to Lethal Conflict, (with Jeffrey Riedinger) Land Reform and Democratic Development, and (with Timothy Hanstad) Agrarian Reform and Grassroots Development. He has done field work in 27 developing countries. He received UW's coveted outstanding Public Service Award in 1990, and was appointed the University's first Corbally Professor in Public Service in Fall 1991.

He has twice been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In April 2003 he received the Gleitsman Foundation International Activist Award at Harvard University, honoring achievement in alleviating world poverty. He was selected for the award by a Board of Judges that included: former United Nations Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar and Nobel Peace Prize laureates Shimon Peres, Mairead Maguire, Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu and Adolfo Perez Esquivel. He and three other Gleitsman honorees share a $100,000 prize and received an original sculpture by artist May Lin, creator of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.^[30]

Post-1975: Politics & The Fate of South Vietnam

Trung Dinh Dang’s “Post-1975 Land Reform in Southern Vietnam: How Local Actions and Responses Affected National Land Policy” (2010) explains the reasons why after 1975, the Vietnamese Communist Party struggled to carry out the socialist transformation of agriculture in South Vietnam — given that the party leaders initially considered land reform to be a temporary measure preceding mass collectivisation. Dang puts out how it turned out be a source of long-term problem and turned into a (passive aggressive in general or at times direct) conflict between the party and Southern Vietnamese: “…agrarian reform was supposed to benefit and bring land to landless and land-poor rural households. However, after a decade of reform, many villagers remained landless and land-poor. Instead of facilitating solidarity among peasants, the reform perpetuated inequality, sowed discord among peasants, and created unrest in rural areas. Instead of eliminating permanent land-based exploitation, it somehow created “a new class of exploiters”—local cadres who abused their power to take much fertile land for themselves and their relatives”.^[31]

The author argues that villagers and local landlords were two key actors who contributed to the poor performance of the land reform. Also, in order to defend their land, villagers in the Southern Region engaged not only in forms of everyday resistance (denial of rules etc.) but also in some confrontational resistance against government officials. The paper is an important source to round up the land reform with a wholistic and sober approach, written decades after the issue has settled down.

Moving beyond the political and historical context that Miller provides with “Misalliance”, this paper enables the reader to exclusively assess the specific challenges that complicated the land reform. Also the interviews conducted in order to truly understand the mindset and problems of the contemporary villagers are priceless accounts serving as on the ground insight — critical for gaining a different level of perspective into the issue: “a landless man who received a few công from an acquaintance decided to return it, saying: ‘The land had to be returned to its owner. It was so weird to take another person’s land. Everyone did the same. We accepted being poor rather than stealing someone else’s land to make a living”.^[32]

Land Reform within a Proxy War: The Debate Continues

It is apparent, especially from the contemporary publications, that the contentious debate over the Vietnam War and all the aspects of it including the land reform is far from over. As historian Huynh Kim Khanh argues, Vietnam is regarded as“a battlefield or a piece of real estate to be fought over” and its people are “passive bystanders in a historical process engineered elsewhere” — resonating the contemporary Syrian Civil War. Newly declassified information along with fresh and wider views on the scope, implications and the legitimacy of land reform in South Vietnam will continue to raise questions among historians, which holds a key area within the history of Southeast Asia.^[33]

See also

• Land reform in North Vietnam
• Land reform in Vietnam
• Viet Cong
• Land reform
• Vietnam War
• South Vietnam
• Roy Prosterman
• Nguyen Van Thieu

References

Biggs, David. “Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta”. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010.

Burr, J. M. “Land-To-The-Tiller: Land Redistribution in South Vietnam 1970– 1973”. PhD thesis, University of Oregon, 1976.

Buzzanco, Robert “How I Learned to Quit Worrying and Love Vietnam and Iraq.” Counterpunch and David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1973).

Dang, Trung Dinh. “Post-1975 Land Reform in Southern Vietnam: How Local Actions and Responses Affected National Land Policy”. University of California Press. Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3 pp. 72–105. Fall 2010. FitzGerald, Frances, Noah Rothman, Claire Lehmann, Max Boot, Eric Cohen & Aylana Meisel, Andrew Ferguson, Christine Rosen, Matthew Continetti, Tevi Troy, and Terry Teachout. "Last Reflections on a War, by Bernard B. Fall." Commentary Magazine. N.p., 27 Mar. 2017. Web. 20 Apr. 2017.

Khanh, Huynh Kim. “The Making and Unmaking of ‘Free Vietnam,’” Pacific Affairs 60 (Fall 1987): 474.

Kleinen, John. “Facing the Future, Reviving the Past: A Study of Social Change in a Northern Vietnam”. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1999.

"Richard Nixon." Biography.com. A&E Networks Television, 13 Nov. 2014. Web. 20 Apr. 2017.

"Roy Prosterman." UW School of Law. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Apr. 2017.

Summers, Harry G. “On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War” (California: Presidio Press, 1983).

"Land reform in South Vietnam." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 23 Mar. 2017. Web. 19 Apr. 2017.

"Land reform in Vietnam." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 22 Mar. 2017. Web. 19 Apr. 2017.

Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (New York: Harvest Book Harcourt, 1999).

"Nguyen Van Thieu." Biography.com. A&E Networks Television, 02 Apr. 2014. Web. 20 Apr. 2017.

"Ngo Dinh Diem." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 19 Apr. 2017. Web. 20 Apr. 2017.

Miller, Edward. “Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam” Cambridge, Harvard University Press. 419. 2013.

Miller, Edward. “War Stories: The Taylor-Buzzanco Debate and How We Think About the Vietnam War,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, no. 1-2 (2006): 453-484.

Prosterman, Roy L. Land reform in Latin America: “How to have a revolution without a revolution”. Seattle: Washington Law Review Association, 1966. Print.

Prosterman, Roy L. “Land Reform in South Vietnam A Proposal for Turning the Tables on the Viet Cong”. Cornell Law Review. Volume 53 Issue 1 November 1967.

Prosterman, Roy L. "Land-to-the-Tiller in South Vietnam : The Tables Turn". Asian Survey. 10 (8): 751-764. August 1970.

Taylor, Keith. “How I Began to Teach about the Vietnam War,” Michigan Quarterly Review 43 no.4 (2004): 637-647.

Vora, Shivani. “A Conversation With: Landesa Founder Roy Prosterman” - New York Times: September 25, 2012.

Notes

External links

• JFK and the Diem Coup – Provided by the National Security Archive.
• The Pentagon Papers, Vol. 2 Ch. 4 "The Overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, May–November, 1963", pp. 201–76