 Despite the fact that South Vietnam by 1964 was receiving a sum of American economic and military aid that ran to $2 million per day, the South Vietnamese state was falling apart with corruption reaching such a point that most South Vietnamese civil servants and soldiers were not being paid while the projects for "rural pacification" that the United States had paid for had collapsed as the money had instead been stolen.The advice that McNamara and other American officials gave to the South Vietnamese to make reforms to crackdown on corruption and make the government more effective were always ignored as by this point the South Vietnamese government knew very well that the Americans having repeatedly promised in public that they would never permit the "loss" of South Vietnam were now prisoners of their own rhetoric.The threats to withhold aid were bluffs, which the South Vietnamese exposed by simply ignoring the American advice, leading to a situation whereas Stanley Karnow, the Vietnam correspondent for the "Time" noted