Office of Rural Affairs (South Vietnam)

The U.S. Office of Rural Affairs (South Vietnam), commonly referred to as Rural Affairs, was an office of the United States Operations Mission (USOM) in South Vietnam that began in 1962. It was created by the Kennedy administration to serve as a focal point for coordinating American civilian assistance to South Vietnam's rural areas as part of the counterinsurgency efforts of the Kennedy administration. It was headed by Rufus Phillips, one of the first U.S. government agencies to put civilians at the province level throughout South Vietnam. The organizational practices and personnel of the Rural Affairs Office would be a major precursor to the organization of the CORDS established in 1967.

By the year 1961, U.S. civilian foreign assistance to South Vietnam was largely centralized in the headquarters of the U.S. Operations Mission in Saigon. Programs were developed and implemented at the national level with little adaptation or focus at the province and district levels. In addition to this centralized nature of assistance programs, the Strategic Hamlet Program was launched by the Government of South Vietnam in 1962 with substantial U.S. financial and technical support. The program was designed to consolidate rural populations in fortified hamlets in order to protect them from communist insurgents and to develop local government capacity. However, in order to implement the Strategic Hamlet Program, there needed to be a type of civilian advisory presence at the local level that the U.S. Operations Mission did not currently possess.

Following a review by the Kennedy administration of how USAID could make greater contributions to counterinsurgency, the U.S. Operations Mission in Saigon was reorganized in 1962. A new special office, the Office of Rural Affairs, was created and given the authority to appoint civilian advisors to each of South Vietnam's provinces, and to fund projects at the local level without needing approval from Saigon Headquarters.^[1]

Rufus Phillips, who had been a CIA officer and had previously worked with Edward Lansdale in the Philippines and in earlier assignments in Vietnam, was appointed as assistant director of USOM Saigon for Rural Affairs; thus he became the de facto head of the new office. He was assisted by Albert "Bert" Fraleigh, a senior foreign assistance official with considerable experience in Taiwan and Laos.

Each province was assigned a civilian representative, whose responsibility it was to collaborate with the Vietnamese province chief, the local MACV military advisor and the officials at the district level. Spending on rural development programs was determined by joint Vietnamese-American committees at the provincial level based on a consensus decision-making process, rather than being imposed from Saigon.

This type of decentralized model was an intentional deviation from the standard procedure for providing foreign aid.

Many of the civilian representatives in the provinces were young Foreign Service officers assigned to their first overseas duty. Two of the best known were Richard Holbrooke and Vladimir Lehovich, who would go on to hold senior positions in the U.S. Department of State. The office also hired short-term contractors as volunteers to work in remote provinces. Many of these volunteers were willing to accept limited living conditions and potentially hazardous situations in order to live and work in the provinces.^[2]

The Office of Rural Affairs invested the local currency equivalent of about $10 million in Strategic Hamlet programs nationwide, and funded:

• Physical improvements in hamlets (wells, schools, hospitals)
• Training and equipping hamlet militias
• Hamlet elections and training of local elected officials
• The Chieu Hoi defection program, which provided amnesty and resettlement to Viet Cong deserters
• Extension services and crop diversification for agricultural producers

The Chieu Hoi component received a great deal of attention in the press and public circles. Phillips stated that the program filled a hole in the existing counterinsurgency plan and the Office of Rural Affairs actively expanded the program during 1962–63 with some successful results in terms of the number of Viet Cong desertions.^[3]

Some of the agricultural activity occurred in several provinces. Fraleigh and his field teams worked with farmers to grow non-rice crops such as pigs, corn, and soybeans that can raise household incomes, and they introduced high-yield rice varieties that substantially increased yields per acre. Michael Benge, who would become a USAID provincial development officer in the Central Highlands before his capture in 1968, worked in the same provincial assistance framework as Rural Affairs during 1965–68.

• Rufus Phillips — Director (assistant director for Rural Affairs, USOM Saigon)
• Albert "Bert" Fraleigh — Deputy director
• Richard Holbrooke — Representative to the provinces (first overseas post)
• Vladimir Lehovich — Representative to the provinces (first overseas post)

In September 1963, Phillips gave a presentation to President John F. Kennedy regarding the status of the Rural Affairs program and its contribution to the failure of the Strategic Hamlet Program and the declining political situation in South Vietnam. The presentation presented conflicting views of the situation in South Vietnam compared to those of the military chain of command and represented another example of Kennedy's increasing dissatisfaction with the U.S. role in South Vietnam.^[4]

Phillips and his office had an antagonistic relationship with the CIA station in Saigon. The CIA station viewed the Rural Affairs model unfavorably and Phillips had disagreements with CIA Chief of Station John H. Richardson, concerning the relative importance of province-level civilian programs as opposed to intelligence-directed operations.

When the U.S. Operations Mission in Saigon was restructured and the functions of the Rural Affairs Office were consolidated into the evolving civilian-military pacification structure, the Rural Affairs Office ceased to exist as a separate entity. The CORDS structure established in May 1967 directly incorporated the model of placing a senior civilian in each of South Vietnam's provinces and districts, integrating the civilian and military components of pacification under a single command for the first time.^[5]

Historical accounts of the pacification effort, including those authored by Lewis Sorley and Dale Andrade, credit the Rural Affairs Office for demonstrating that local, decentralized civilian programs that are tailored to local needs and manned by individuals who are willing to reside in the provinces can achieve quantifiable results where standardized foreign-aid models cannot. During the late 1960s, John Paul Vann, who would eventually be the senior CORDS adviser for II Corps, referenced the Rural Affairs model when advocating for a return to smaller unit, province-based models of pacification. Rufus Phillips's description of the Rural Affairs model is contained in his 2008 book Why Vietnam Matters, and remains the most complete primary account of the experiment.

• Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support
• Rufus Phillips
• Bert Fraleigh
• John Paul Vann
• John H. Richardson
• Strategic Hamlet Program
• Chieu Hoi
• United States Agency for International Development
• Richard Holbrooke

• Phillips, Rufus C. Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lessons Not Learned. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2008. ISBN 978-1591146742
• Moyar, Mark. Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0521869119
• Andrade, Dale. Ashes to Ashes: The Phoenix Program and the Vietnam War. Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1990. ISBN 978-0669209655