, Research Paper

Andrew J. Rotter

Most

American wars have obvious get downing points or precipitating causes: the Battles of

Lexington and Concord in 1775, the gaining control of Fort Sumter in 1861, the onslaught on Pearl

Harbor in 1941, and the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950, for illustration.

But there was no fixed beginning for the U.S. war in Vietnam. The United States entered

that war incrementally, in a series of stairss between 1950 and 1965. In May 1950, President

Harry S. Truman authorized a modest plan of economic and military assistance to the Gallic,

who were contending to retain control of their Indochina settlement, including Laos and Cambodia

every bit good as Vietnam. When the Vietnamese Nationalist ( and Communist-led ) Vietminh ground forces

defeated Gallic forces at Dienbienphu in 1954, the Gallic were compelled to submit to the

creative activity of a Communist Vietnam North of the 17th analogues while go forthing a non-Communist

entity South of that line. The United States refused to accept the agreement. The

disposal of President Dwight D. Eisenhower undertook alternatively to construct a state from

the specious political entity that was South Vietnam by manufacturing a authorities at that place,

taking over control from the Gallic, despatching military advisors to develop a South

Vietnamese ground forces, and unleashing the Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA ) to carry on

psychological warfare against the North.

President John F. Kennedy rounded another turning point in early 1961, when he in secret

sent 400 Particular Operationss Forces-trained ( Green Beret ) soldiers to learn the South

Vietnamese how to contend what was called pacification war against Communist

guerillas in South Vietnam. When Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, there were

more than 16,000 U.S. military advisors in South Vietnam, and more than 100 Americans had

been killed. Kennedy & # 8217 ; s replacement, Lyndon B. Johnson, committed the United States most

to the full to the war. In August 1964, he secured from Congress a functional ( non existent )

declaration of war: the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Then, in February and March 1965, Johnson

authorized the sustained bombardment, by U.S. aircraft, of marks north of the 17th analogue,

and on 8 March dispatched 3,500 Marines to South Vietnam. Legal declaration or no, the

United States was now at war.

The multiple starting day of the months for the war complicate attempts to depict the causes of

U.S. entry. The United States became involved in the war for a figure of grounds, and

these evolved and shifted over clip. Chiefly, every American president regarded the

enemy in Vietnam & # 8211 ; the Vietminh ; its 1960s replacement, the National Liberation Front ( NLF ) ;

and the authorities of North Vietnam, led by *Ho Chi Minh & # 8211 ; as agents of planetary communism.

U.S. policymakers, and most Americans, regarded communism as the antithesis of all they

held beloved. Communists scorned democracy, violated human rights, pursued military

aggression, and created closed province economic systems that hardly traded with capitalist

states. Americans compared communism to a contagious disease. If it took clasp in one

state, U.S. policymakers expected immediate states to fall to communism, excessively, as if

states were dominoes lined up on terminal. In 1949, when the Communist Party came to power in

China, Washington feared that Vietnam would go the following Asiatic Domino. That was one

ground for Truman & # 8217 ; s 1950 determination to give assistance to the Gallic who were contending the

Vietminh,

Truman besides hoped that helping the Gallic in Vietnam would assist to shore up the

developed, non-Communist states, whose destinies were in surprising ways tied to the

saving of Vietnam and, given the Domino theory, all of Southeast Asia. Free universe

rule over the part would supply markets for Japan, reconstructing with American aid

after the Pacific War. U.S. engagement in Vietnam reassured the British, who linked their

postwar recovery to the resurgence of the gum elastic and Sn industries in their settlement of

Malaya, one of Vietnam & # 8217 ; s neighbours. And with U.S. assistance, the Gallic could concentrate on

economic recovery at place, and coul

vitamin D hope finally to remember their Indochina officer

corps to supervise the rearmament of West Germany, a Cold War step deemed indispensable by

the Americans. These aspirations formed a 2nd set of grounds why the United States became

involved in Vietnam.

As presidents committed the United States to conflict spot by spot, many of these

aspirations were forgotten. Alternatively, inactiveness developed against retreating from Vietnam.

Washington believed that U.S. backdown would ensue in a Communist triumph & # 8211 ; Eisenhower

acknowledged that, had elections been held as scheduled in Vietnam in 1956, “ Ho Chi

Minh would hold won 80 % of the ballot ” & # 8211 ; and no U.S. president wanted to lose a state

to communism. Democrats in peculiar, like Kennedy and Johnson, feared a right-wing

recoil should they give up the battle ; they remembered vividly the accusative tone of the

Republicans & # 8217 ; 1950 inquiry, “ Who lost China? ” The committedness to Vietnam itself,

passed from disposal to disposal, took on cogency aside from any rational

footing it might one time hold had. Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy all gave their word that the

United States would stand by its South Vietnamese Alliess. If the United States abandoned

the South Vietnamese, its word would be regarded as undependable by other authoritiess,

friendly or non. So U.S. credibleness seemed at interest.

Along with the larger structural and ideological causes of the war in Vietnam, the

experience, personality, and disposition of each president played a function in intensifying the

U.S. committedness. Dwight Eisenhower restrained U.S. engagement because, holding commanded

military personnels in conflict, he doubted the United States could contend a land war in Southeast Asia.

The vernal John Kennedy, on the other manus, felt he had to turn out his resoluteness to the

American people and his Communist antagonists, particularly in the wake of several

foreign policy bloopers early in his disposal. Lyndon Johnson saw the Vietnam War as

a trial of his heart, as a Southerner and as a adult male. He exhorted his soldiers to “ nail

the coonskin to the wall ” in Vietnam, comparing triumph to a successful hunting

expedition.

When Johnson began bombing North Vietnam and sent the Marines to South Vietnam in early

1965, he had every purpose of contending a limited war. He and his advisors worried that

excessively munificent a usage of U.S. firepower might motivate the Chinese to come in the struggle. It was

non expected that the North Vietnamese and the NLF would keep out long against the

American military. And yet U.S. policymakers ne’er managed to suit military scheme to

U.S. ends in Vietnam. Massive bombardment had small consequence against a decentralised economic system

like North Vietnam & # 8217 ; s. Kennedy had favored pacification warfare in the South

Vietnamese countryside, and Johnson endorsed this scheme, but the political side of

counterinsurgeny & # 8211 ; the attempt to win the “ Black Marias and heads ” of the Vietnamese

peasantry & # 8211 ; was at best developing and likely doomed. Presidents proved loath to

mobilize American society to the extent the generals thought necessary to get the better of the

enemy.

As the United States went to war in 1965, a few voices were raised in dissent. Within

the Johnson disposal, Undersecretary of State George Ball warned that the South

Vietnamese authorities was a functional nonexistence and merely could non be sustained by the

United States, even with a major attempt. Antiwar protest groups formed on many of the

state & # 8217 ; s campuses ; in June, the left-of-center organisation Students for a Democratic Society

decided to do the war its chief mark. But major dissent would non get down until 1966

or subsequently. By and big in 1965, Americans supported the disposal & # 8217 ; s claim that it was

contending to halt communism in Southeast Asia, or people merely shrugged and went about

their day-to-day lives, unaware that this bit by bit escalating war would rupture American society

apart.

From The Oxford Companion to American Military History. Ed. John Whiteclay

Chambers II. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Copyright? 1999 by Oxford UP.