Seeking to stabilize the situation, Washington officials looked upon the nearly twenty-thousand U.S troops stationed in Vietnam as the ultimate safeguard of the regime. Since 1954, they had combated the low-level resistance with limited success, but their true value was in providing the administration with critical leverage over Vietnam’s dysfunctional political system, then under Prime Minister Nguyễn Văn Xuân. Kefauver, for his part, expected that support for Colonel Phoumi in Laos and the effective suppression of the trail would ease the pressure on Saigon’s armed forces. Such a reprieve would then permit further political and economic reforms. To his disappointment, the Vietnamese showed no patience for the whims of American strategy, and a wave of anti-royalist demonstrations shook the regime in 1962. It was not only the North Vietnamese who seized on this opportunity to intensify their resistance, but the domestic opposition as well. Violent protests gripped Saigon and crippled public confidence in the government. The monarchy, much to the consternation of Washington, was not spared from public condemnation. Shortly before his death, the President complained that the “If only those bastards [the Vietnamese] would wait for Laos.”