The Post-War Impact

The Postwar Impact of Vietnam -- Harvard Sitikoff

Following the end of America’s combat role in Vietnam in 1973, and the subsequent fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) in 1975, the often prophesied and much feared resurgence of McCarthyite Red-baiting, the bitter accusations of "who lost Vietnam?" barely transpired. Rather than massive recriminations, a collective amnesia took hold. The majority of Americans, it appeared, neither wanted to talk or think about their nation's longest and most debilitating war--the only war the United States ever lost. That forgetfulness gave way in the early 1980s to a renewed interest in the war: Hollywood, network television, and the music industry made Vietnam a staple of popular culture; and scholars, journalists, and Vietnam veterans produced a flood of literature on the conflict, especially concerning its lessons and legacies. Much of it, emphasizing the enormity of the damage done to American attitudes, institutions, and foreign policy by the Vietnam ordeal, echoed George R. Kennan's depiction of the Vietnam War as "the most disastrous of all America's undertakings over the whole two hundred years of its history."

Initially, the humiliating defeat imposed by a nation Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had described as "a fourth-rate power" caused a loss of pride and self-confidence in a people that liked to think of the United States as invincible. An agonizing reappraisal of American power and glory dampened the celebration of the Bicentennial birthday in 1976. So did the economic woes then afflicting the United States, which many blamed on the estimated $167 billion spent on the war. President Lyndon B. Johnson's decision to finance a major war and the Great Society simultaneously, without a significant increase in taxation, launched a runaway double-digit inflation and mounting federal debt that ravaged the American economy and eroded living standards from the late 1960s into the 1990s.

The United States also paid a high political cost for the Vietnam War. It weakened public faith in government, and in the honesty and competence of its leaders. Indeed, skepticism, if not cynicism, and a high degree of suspicion of and distrust toward authority of all kind characterized the views of an increasing number of Americans in the wake of the war. The military, especially, was discredited for years. It would gradually rebound to become once again one of the most highly esteemed organizations in the United States. In the main, however, as never before, Americans after the Vietnam War neither respected nor trusted public institutions.

They were wary of official calls to intervene abroad in the cause of democracy and freedom, and the bipartisan consensus that had supported American foreign policy since the 1940s dissolved. Democrats, in particular, questioned the need to contain communism everywhere around the globe and to play the role of the planet's policeman. The Democratic majority in Congress would enact the 1973 War Powers Resolution, ostensibly forbidding the president from sending U.S. troops into combat for more than ninety days without congressional consent. Exercising a greater assertiveness in matters of foreign policy, Congress increasingly emphasized the limits of American power, and the ceiling on the cost Americans would pay in pursuit of specific foreign policy objectives. The fear of getting bogged down in another quagmire made a majority of Americans reluctant to intervene militarily in Third World countries. The neo-isolationist tendency that former President Richard M. Nixon called "the Vietnam syndrome" would be most manifest in the public debates over President Ronald Reagan's interventionist policies in Nicaragua and President George Bush's decision to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. Despite the victorious outcome of the Persian Gulf War for the United States and its allies, and President Bush's declaration in March 1991--"By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!"--the fear of intervention would reappear in the public debate over President Bill Clinton's commitment of U.S. peacekeeping forces in Somalia and Bosnia. Quite clearly, for at least a quarter of a century after the Vietnam War ended, that conflict continued to loom large in the minds of Americans. Accordingly, a new consensus among foreign policy makers, reflecting the lessons learned from the Vietnam War, became manifest: the United States should use military force only as a last resort; only where the national interest is clearly involved; only when there is strong public support; and only in the likelihood of a relatively quick, inexpensive victory.

Another consensus also gradually emerged. At first, rather than giving returning veterans of the war welcoming parades, Americans seemed to shun, if not denigrate, the 2 million-plus Americans who went to Vietnam, the 1.6 million who served in combat, the 300,000 physically wounded, the many more who bore psychological scars, the 2,387 listed as "missing in action," and the more than 58,000 who died. Virtually nothing was done to aid veterans and their loved ones who needed assistance in adjusting. Then a torrent of fiction, films, and television programs depicted Vietnam vets as drug-crazed psychotic killers, as vicious executioners in Vietnam and equally vicious menaces at home. Not until after the 1982 dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., did American culture acknowledge their sacrifice and suffering, and concede that most had been good soldiers in a bad war.

Yet this altered view of the Vietnam veterans as victims as much as victimizers, if not as brave heroes, was not accompanied by new public policies. Although most veterans did succeed in making the transition to ordinary civilian life, many did not. More Vietnam veterans committed suicide after the war than had died in it. Even more--perhaps three-quarters of a million--became part of the lost army of the homeless. And the nearly 700,000 draftees, many of them poor, badly educated, and nonwhite, who had received less than honorable discharges, depriving them of educational and medical benefits, found it especially difficult to get and keep jobs, to maintain family relationships, and to stay out of jail. Although a majority of Americans came to view dysfunctional veterans as needing support and medical attention rather than moral condemnation, the Veterans Administration, reluctant to admit the special difficulties faced by these veterans and their need for additional benefits, first denied the harm done by chemicals like Agent Orange and by the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) afflicting as many as 700,000, and then stalled on providing treatment.

Although diminishing, the troublesome specter of the Vietnam War continued to divide Americans and haunt the national psyche. It surfaced again in 1988 when Bush's running mate, Dan Quayle, had to defend his reputation against revelations that he had used family political connections to be admitted into the Indiana National Guard in 1969 to avoid the draft and a possible tour of duty in Vietnam. It emerged four years later when Bill Clinton, the Democratic candidate for president, faced accusations that he had evaded the draft and then organized antiwar demonstrations in 1969 while he was a Rhodes scholar in England. In each instance, such charges reminded Americans of the difficult choices young Americans had to make in what many saw as at best a morally ambiguous war.

Mostly, remembrances continue to be stirred by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the most visited site in the nation's capital. Its stark black granite reflecting panels, covered with the names of the more than 58,000 American men and women who died in Vietnam, is a shrine to the dead, a tombstone in a sloping valley of death. Lacking all the symbols of heroism, glory, patriotism, and moral certainty that more conventional war memorials possess, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a somber reminder of the loss of too many young Americans, and of what the war did to the United States and its messianic belief in its own overweening virtue.

The Military & Diplomatic Course

The Military and Diplomatic Course of the Vietnam War -- David L Anderson

The Vietnam War was the longest deployment of U.S. forces in hostile action in the history of the American republic. Although there is no formal declaration of war from which to date U.S. entry, President John F. Kennedy's decision to send over 2,000 military advisers to South Vietnam in 1961 marked the beginning of twelve years of American military combat. U.S. unit combat began in 1965. The number of US. troops steadily increased until it reached a peak of 543,400 in April 1969. The total number of Americans who served in South Vietnam was 2.7 million. Of these, more than 58,000 died or remain missing, and 300,000 others were wounded. The US. government spent more than $140 billion on the war. Despite this enormous military effort, the United States failed to achieve its objective of preserving an independent, noncommunist state in South Vietnam. This failure has led to searching questions about why and how the war was fought and whether a better diplomatic and military outcome was possible for the United States.

Escalation. By 1961, guerrilla warfare was widespread in South Vietnam. Communist-led troops of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam, commonly referred to as Vietcong, were initiating hundreds of terrorist and small unit attacks per month. Saigon’s military, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), was not able to contain this growing insurgency. During the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a small U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), never numbering more than 740 uniformed soldiers, had provided training and logistics assistance to the ARVN. The Kennedy administration determined that the size and mission of the U.S. advisory effort must change if the U.S.-backed government of Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon was to survive. Some of Kennedy's aides proposed a negotiated settlement in Vietnam similar to that which recognized Laos as a neutral country. Having just suffered international embarrassment in Cuba and Berlin, the president rejected compromise and chose to strengthen U.S. support of Saigon.

In May 1961, Kennedy sent 400 U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Beret) troops into South Vietnam's Central Highlands to train Montagnard tribesmen in counterinsurgency tactics. He also tripled the level of aid to South Vietnam. A steady stream of airplanes, helicopters, armored personnel carriers (APCs), and other equipment poured into the South. By the end of 1962, there were 9,000 U.S. military advisers under the direction of a newly-created Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), commanded by U.S. Army Gen. Paul Harkins. Under U.S. guidance, the Diem government also began construction of "strategic hamlets." These fortified villages were intended to insulate rural Vietnamese from Vietcong intimidation and propaganda.

U.S. and South Vietnamese leaders were cautiously optimistic that increased U.S. assistance finally was enabling the Saigon government to defend itself. On 2 January 1963, however, at Ap Bac on the Plain of Reeds southwest of Saigon, a Vietcong battalion of about 320 men inflicted heavy damage on an ARVN force of 3,000 equipped with troop-carrying helicopters, new UH- I ("Huey") helicopter gunships, tactical bombers, and APCS. Ap Bac represented a leadership failure for the ARVN and a major morale boost for the antigovernment forces. The absence of fighting spirit in the ARVN mirrored the continuing inability of the Saigon regime to win political support. Indeed, many South Vietnamese perceived the strategic hamlets as government oppression, not protection, because people were forced to leave their ancestral homes for the new settlements.

While Vietcong guerrillas scored military successes, leaders of Vietnam's Buddhist majority protested against what they saw as the Diem regime's religious persecution. In June, a monk dramatically burned himself to death at a busy Saigon intersection. The "Buddhist crisis" and dissatisfaction with Diem by top Vietnamese Army leaders made U.S. officials receptive to the idea of a change in South Vietnam's leadership. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) did not interfere as a group of ARVN officers plotted a coup. On 1 November 1963, the generals seized power, and Diem and his unpopular brother Ngo Dinh Nhu were murdered. Three weeks later, President Kennedy was assassinated, and U.S. policy in Vietnam was again at a crossroads. If the new government in Saigon failed to show progress against the insurgency, would the United States withdraw its support from a lost cause, or would it escalate the effort to preserve South Vietnam as an anticommunist outpost in Asia?

Lyndon B. Johnson inherited the Vietnam dilemma. As Senate majority leader in the 1950s and as vice-president, he had supported Eisenhower's and Kennedy's decisions to aid South Vietnam. Four days after Kennedy's death, Johnson, now president, reaffirmed in National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 273 that the U.S. goal was to assist South Vietnam in its "contest against the externally directed and supported communist conspiracy." U.S. policy defined the Vietnam War as North Vietnamese aggression against South Vietnam. North Vietnam infiltrated troops and materiel into South Vietnam by sea and along the so-called Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos. Throughout his administration, Johnson insisted that the only possible negotiated settlement of the conflict would be one in which North Vietnam recognized the legitimacy of South Vietnam's government. Without such recognition, the United States would continue to provide Saigon as much help as it needed to survive.

The critical military questions were how much U.S. assistance was enough and what form it should take. By the spring of 1964, the Vietcong controlled vast areas of South Vietnam, the strategic hamlet program had essentially ceased, and North Vietnam's aid to the southern insurgents had grown. In June, Johnson named one of the army's most distinguished officers, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, then commandant of West Point, as commander U.S. MACV. Westmoreland immediately asked for more men, and by the end of 1964 U.S. personnel in the South exceeded 23,000. Increasingly, however, the U.S. effort focused on the North. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and other key White House aides remained convinced that the assault on South Vietnam originated in the ambitious designs of Hanoi backed by Moscow and Beijing.

Throughout 1964, the United States assisted South Vietnam in covert operations to gather intelligence, disseminate propaganda, and harass the North. On the night of 2 August, North Vietnamese gunboats fired on the USS Maddox a destroyer on an intelligence-collecting mission, in the same area of the Gulf of Tonkin where South Vietnamese commandos were conducting raids against the North Vietnamese coast. Two nights later, under stormy conditions, the Maddox and another destroyer, the Turner Joy, reported a gunboat attack. Although doubts existed about these reports, the president ordered retaliatory air strikes against the North Vietnamese port of Vinh. The White House had expected that some type of incident would occur eventually, and it had prepared the text of a congressional resolution authorizing the president to use armed force to protect U.S. forces and to deter further aggression from North Vietnam. On 7 August 1964, Johnson secured almost unanimous consent from Congress (414-0 in the House; 88-2 in the Senate) for his Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which became the principal legislative basis for all subsequent military deployment in Southeast Asia.

Johnson's decisive but restrained response to the Gulf of Tonkin incidents helped him win the 1964 election, but Saigon's prospects continued to decline. The president wanted to concentrate on his ambitious domestic program, the Great Society, but his political instincts told him that his leadership would be damaged fatally if America's client state in South Vietnam succumbed. Instability mounted in South Vietnam as rival military and civilian factions vied for power and as Vietcong strength grew. A consensus formed among Johnson's advisers that the United States would have to initiate air warfare against North Vietnam. Bombing could boost Saigon's morale and might persuade the North to cease its support of the insurgency. The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) favored a massive bombing campaign, but civilians in the State and Defense Departments preferred a gradual escalation.

Using as a pretext a Vietcong attack on 7 February 1965 at Pleiku that killed eight American soldiers, Johnson ordered retaliatory bombing north of the Demilitarized Zone along the 17th parallel that divided North and South Vietnam, Within a week, the administration began ROLLING THUNDER, a gradually intensifying air bombardment of military bases, supply depots, and infiltration routes in North Vietnam. Flying out of bases in Thailand, U.S. Air Force fighter-bombers--primarily F-105 Thunderchiefs and later F-4 Phantoms--joined U.S. Navy Phantoms and A-4 Skyhawks from a powerful carrier task force located at a point called Yankee Station, seventy-five miles off the North Vietnamese coast in the Gulf of Tonkin. In 1965, U.S. aircraft flew 25,000 sorties against North Vietnam, and that number grew to 79,000 in 1966 and 108,000 in 1967. In 1967 annual bombing tonnage reached almost a quarter million. Targets expanded to include the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and factories, farms, and railroads in North Vietnam.

From the beginning of the bombing, American strategists debated the effectiveness of air power in defeating a political insurgency in a predominantly agricultural country. Despite the American bombs, dollars, and military advisers, the Vietcong continued to inflict heavy casualties on the ARVN, and the political situation in Saigon grew worse. By June 1965, there had been five governments in the South since Diem’s death, and the newest regime, headed by General Nguyen Van Thieu and Air Marshall Nguyen Cao Ky, inspired little confidence. To stave off defeat, the JCS endorsed Westmoreland's request for 150,000 U.S. troops to take the ground offensive in the South. When McNamara concurred, Johnson decided to commit the forces. The buildup of formal U.S. military units had begun on 8 March 1965, when two battalions of Marines landed at Da Nang. In June, Marine and army units began offensive unit operations—"search and destroy" missions. On 28 July, Johnson announced that 50,000 U.S. troops would go to South Vietnam immediately. By the end of the year, there were 184,300 U.S. personnel in the South.

Although Johnson's actions meant that the United States had crossed the line from advising the ARVN to actually fighting the war against the Vietcong, the president downplayed the move. The JCS wanted a mobilization of the reserves and National Guard, and McNamara proposed levying war taxes. Such actions would have placed the United States on a war footing. With his ambitious social reform program facing crucial votes in Congress, the president wanted to avoid giving congressional conservatives an opportunity to use mobilization to block his domestic agenda. Consequently, he relied on other means. Monthly draft calls increased from 17,000 to 35,000 to meet manpower needs, and deficit spending, with its inherent inflationary impact, funded the escalation.

With U.S. bombs pounding North Vietnam, Westmoreland turned America’s massive firepower on the southern insurgents. Johnson's choice of gradual escalation of bombing and incremental troop deployments was based upon the concept of limited warfare. Risks of a wider war with China and the Soviet Union meant that the United States would not go all out to annihilate North Vietnam. Thus, Westmoreland chose a strategy of attrition in the South. Using mobility and powerful weapons, the MACV commander could limit U.S. casualties while exhausting the enemy, that is, inflicting heavier losses than could be replaced.

Escalation of the air and ground war in 1965 provoked Hanoi to begin deploying into the South increasing units of the regular North Vietnamese Army (NVA), or People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), as it was called. In October, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the PAVN commander, launched a major offensive in the Central Highlands, southwest of Pleiku. Westmoreland responded with the 1st Air Cavalry Division (Air Mobile). Through much of November, in the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, U.S. and North Vietnamese forces engaged each other in heavy combat for the first time. The Americans ultimately forced the NVA out of the valley and killed ten times as many enemy soldiers as they lost. Westmoreland used helicopters extensively for troop movements, resupply, medical evacuation, and tactical air support. USAF tactical bombers and even huge B-52 strategic bombers attacked enemy positions. The battle convinced the U.S. commander that "search and destroy" tactics using air mobility would work in accomplishing the attrition strategy. Soon after the PAVN departed the battlefield, however, so too did the American air "cavalry." Clearly, control of territory was not the U.S. military objective.

During 1966 Westmoreland requested more ground troops, and by year's end the U.S. ground force level "in country" reached 385,000. These were organized into seven divisions and other specialized airborne, armored, special forces, and logistical units. With U.S. aid, the ARVN also expanded to eleven divisions, supplemented by local and irregular units. While MACV was getting men and munitions in place for large-unit search and destroy operations, army and marine units conducted smaller operations. Although the "body count"--the estimated number of enemy killed--mounted, attrition was not changing the political equation in South Vietnam. The NLF continued to exercise more effective control in many areas than did the government, and Vietcong guerrillas, who often disappeared when U.S. forces entered an area, quickly reappeared when the Americans left.

In 1967, Westmoreland made his big push to win the war. With South Vietnam's forces assigned primarily to occupation, pacification, and security duties, massive U.S. combat sweeps moved to locate and destroy the enemy. In January, Operation Cedar Falls was a 30,000-man assault on the Iron Triangle, an enemy base area forty miles north of Saigon. From February through April, Operation Junction City was an even larger attack on nearby War Zone C. There was major fighting in the Central Highlands, climaxing in the battle of Dak To in November 1967. U.S. forces killed many enemy soldiers and destroyed large amounts of supplies. MACV declared vast areas to be "free-fire zones," which meant that U.S. and ARVN artillery and tactical aircraft, as well as B-52 "carpet bombing" could target anyone or anything in the area. In Operation RANCH HAND, the USAF sprayed the defoliant Agent Orange to deprive the guerrillas of cover and food supplies. Controversy about the use of Agent Orange erupted in 1969 when reports appeared that the chemical caused serious damage to humans as well as to plants.

Late in 1967, with 485,600 U.S. troops in Vietnam, Westmoreland announced that, although much fighting remained, a

cross-over point had arrived in the war of attrition; that is, the losses to the NVA and Vietcong were greater than they could replace. This assessment was debatable, and there was considerable evidence that the so-called "other war" for political support in South Vietnam was not going well. Corruption, factionalism, and continued Buddhist protests plagued the Thieu-Ky government. Despite incredible losses, the Vietcong still controlled many areas. A diplomatic resolution of the conflict remained elusive. Several third countries, such as Poland and Great Britain, offered proposals intended to facilitate negotiations. These formulas typically called upon the United States and DRV to coordinate mutual reduction of their military activities in South Vietnam, but both Washington and Hanoi firmly resisted even interim compromises with the other. The war was at a stalemate.

De-escalation. The decisive year was 1968. In the early morning of 30 January, Vietcong forces launched the Tet Offensive, named for the Vietnamese holiday then being observed. In coordinated attacks throughout South Vietnam, the Vietcong assaulted major urban areas and military installations in an attempt to spark a popular uprising against the Saigon regime and its American backers. Heavy fighting ensued for three weeks, some of the most brutal at Hué. Westmoreland claimed victory because no cities were lost and thousands of casualties were inflicted upon the attackers. Indeed, the Vietcong lost so many soldiers that thereafter the PAVN took over much of the conduct of the war. The Tet Offensive, however, was a great strategic gain for North Vietnam and its southern adherents. U.S. and ARVN losses were high, and the fighting generated thousands of refugees that further destabilized the South. Most importantly, as a result of the massive surprise attack and the pictures from Saigon, the U.S. press and public began to challenge the Johnson administration's assurances of success and to question the value of the increasingly costly war.

At the same time as the Tet Offensive, the siege of Khe Sanh underscored the image of the war as an endless, costly, and pointless struggle. From 20 January to 14 April 1968, 30,000 to 40,000 NVA forces surrounded 6,000 U.S. Marines and ARVN at the remote hilltop outpost of Khe Sanh in the northwest corner of South Vietnam. Using artillery and air power, including B-52 strikes, the United States eventually broke the siege and forced an NVA withdrawal. At the end of June, however, the Marines abandoned the base to adopt a more mobile form of fighting in the DMZ area. Once again, a major engagement left seemingly intangible results.

In March 1968, Johnson decided that the size of the U.S. effort in Vietnam had grown as large as could be justified. Prompted by a request from Westmoreland and JCS Chairman General Earle G. Wheeler for 206,000 more men, the president asked his new secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, for a thorough policy review. Johnson's sense that a limit had been reached seemed confirmed when the "Wise Men," a group of outside advisers including such elder statesmen as former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Gen. Omar Bradley, recommended against further increases. The president authorized only 13,500 more soldiers and bluntly informed Thieu and Ky that their forces would have to carry more of the fighting. He then announced on television on 31 March 1968 that the United States would restrict the bombing of North Vietnam and pursue a negotiated settlement with Hanoi. Johnson also revealed that he would not seek reelection.

Meanwhile, combat raged in South Vietnam. Over 14,000 Americans were killed in action in Vietnam in 1968, the highest annual U.S. death toll of the war. The worst U.S. war crime of the conflict occurred on 16 March 1968 (although not revealed in the press until 6 November 1969) when American infantrymen massacred some 500 unresisting civilians, including babies, in the village of My Lai. In April and May 1968 the largest ground operation of the war, with 110,000 U.S. and ARVN troops, targeted Vietcong and NVA forces near Saigon. Peace talks began in Paris on 13 May but immediately deadlocked. On 10 June 1968, Gen. Creighton Abrams succeeded Westmoreland as MACV commander. In the fall Abrams began to shift U.S. strategy from attrition to a greater emphasis on combined operations, pacification area security, and what was called "Vietnamization," that is, preparing the ARVN to do more of the fighting.

When Richard M. Nixon became president in 1969, the U.S. war effort remained massive, but the basic decision to de-escalate had already been reached. Nixon owed his political victory to voter expectation that somehow he would end the war. He and his principal foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, rejected precipitate U.S. withdrawal. With the ground war stalemated, the new administration turned increasingly to air bombardment and secretly expanded the air war to neutral Cambodia. Publicly the White House announced in June the first withdrawal of 25,000 U.S. troops and heralded Vietnamization as effective. In fact, South Vietnam's armed forces remained problem-plagued. To bolster the South, the administration leaked to the press dire threats of a "go for broke" air and naval assault on the North--possibly including nuclear weapons. Kissinger also began secret meetings with North Vietnamese representatives in Paris hoping to arrange a diplomatic breakthrough.

The morale and discipline of U.S. troops declined in 1969 as the futility of the ground war and the beginnings of U.S. withdrawal became more obvious. After an intense ten-day battle in May, infantrymen of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Mobile) took a ridge in the A Shau Valley that they had dubbed Hamburger Hill. Having fought bravely and suffered significant losses, the soldiers were bitter when the site soon was abandoned. Such inability to see progress, and an awareness among the troops that politicians back home were giving up on the war, helped undermine military effectiveness. Simple survival of their twelve-month tour of duty became the only motivation for many soldiers. Incidents of insubordination, mutiny, fatal assaults on officers, drug use, racial tensions, and other serious problems increased.

Faced with mounting public dissatisfaction, the slow pace of Vietnamization, and diplomatic frustration, Nixon boldly sent U.S. units into Cambodia in April 1970. U.S. military leaders had long complained about the sanctuary that neutral Cambodia provided Vietcong and NVA forces. This Cambodian incursion lasted until the end of June and provided some tactical gains, but it also sparked sharp controversy and demonstrations by the Vietnam antiwar movement in the United States over what seemed an expansion of the war to another country. U.S. troop reductions continued with only 334,600 in the South as 1970 ended.

Nixon stuck with more of the same in 1971. Responding to domestic critics, he continued to order U.S. troops home, leaving only 156,000 by December. To support Vietnamization, heavy U.S. air attacks continued against Communist supply lines in Laos and Cambodia, and so-called protective-reaction strikes hit military targets north of the Demilitarized Zone and near Hanoi and its port city of Haiphong. Tactical air support continued, with the heaviest coming in March during a South Vietnamese assault into Laos. Code named Lam Son 719, this operation ended in a confused retreat by the ARVN that further sullied the notion of Vietnamization.

During 1971, Kissinger made progress in the secret negotiations by offering to separate the arrangement of a ceasefire from discussion of the future of the Saigon government. In 1972 Nixon traveled to China and the USSR in diplomatic initiatives, trying to isolate Hanoi from its suppliers. With the shrinking American forces nearing 100,000 (only a small portion being combat troops), General Giap launched a spring 1972 offensive by Communist forces against the northern provinces of South Vietnam, the Central Highlands, and provinces northwest of Saigon. In most of the battles, the ARVN was saved by massive B-52 bombing, Nixon also launched the heavy bombers against North Vietnam itself in a campaign called Linebacker, and the United States mined the harbor at Haiphong. Over the course of the war, total U.S. bombing tonnage far exceeded that dropped on Germany, Italy, and Japan in World War II.

Wearied by the latest round of fighting, the United States and North Vietnamese governments agreed in October on a ceasefire, return of U.S. prisoners of war (POWs), at least the temporary continuation of Thieu's government, and, most controversially, permission for NVA troops to remain in the South. Objections from Thieu caused Nixon to hesitate, which in turn led Hanoi to harden its position. In December, the United States hit North Vietnam again with repeated B-52 attacks, code-named Linebacker II and labeled the Christmas Bombing by journalists. On 27 January 1973, the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the Provisional Revolutionary Government representing the NLF signed the Paris Peace Agreements Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam, which basically confirmed the October terms.

By 1 April 1973, U.S. forces were out of Vietnam (except for a few embassy guards and attaches) and 587 POWs had returned home (about 2,500 other Americans remained missing in action). Congress cut off funds for the air war in Cambodia, and bombing there ended in August. Over Nixon's veto, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in November 1973. It limited presidential power to deploy U.S. forces in hostile action without congressional approval.

Nixon characterized the Paris Peace Agreements of 1973 as "peace with honor," but primarily they allowed the U.S. military to leave Vietnam without resolving the issue of the country's political future. Without U.S. air and ground support, South Vietnam's military defenses steadily deteriorated. In the spring of 1975, an NVA thrust into the Central Highlands turned into an ARVN rout. On 30 April, as NVA and Vietcong soldiers entered the city, the last remaining Americans abandoned the U.S. embassy in Saigon in a dramatic rooftop evacuation by helicopters.

The United States failure in Vietnam raised important questions. Should the United States have fought the war at all? Did the United States fight the war the wrong way? Many analysts believe that the strategic importance of Vietnam was vastly exaggerated and, furthermore, that the nationalism driving Vietnam’s history and politics could not be altered by U.S. military power, no matter how great. An alternative view is that even if the odds were poor for U.S. success, the United States had to make the effort to maintain its moral and strategic credibility in the world. On the question of how the war was fought, the debate centers on whether the United States used its military power adequately and effectively. Assuming that more is better, some critics argue that a greater use of U.S. force, either against North Vietnam or to isolate the battlefield in South Vietnam, would have produced victory. Throughout the conflict, however, the Saigon regime proved incapable of translating military success into political success. Also, massive U.S. assistance seemed to prove North Vietnam's and the Vietcong's claims that South Vietnam was not a Vietnamese but an American creation. Finally, a larger war would have risked a dangerous military conflict with China and the Soviet Union. Most scholars conclude that the Vietnam War was a tragic event whose costs far exceeded any benefits for the United States.

The Domestic Course

The Domestic Course of the War -- Melvin Small

When President Lyndon B. Johnson made the war in Vietnam an American war in 1965, he worried about the impact of his policies on the home front. He could have rallied support for his decisions to bomb North Vietnam and assume the dominant ground combat role by telling the nation that it faced a crisis vital to its national security. But he feared that in response to such a message, the public would demand a full-scale, no-holds-barred war that could have led to Chinese and Russian intervention. For Johnson and his advisers, the Vietnam War was the prototype for future limited wars in the Third World that would have to be fought without arousing public passion. However, by underselling the war, the president presented an opening to critics who asked why he was expending so much human and material treasure in such a remote conflict.

Johnson had another motive for playing down the commitment in Southeast Asia. After the Democrats won by a landslide in the 1964 election, the president believed he had a two-year window of opportunity to push through Congress legislation for his Great Society, the most ambitious set of reforms since the New Deal. He was painfully aware of what happened to Woodrow Wilson's and Franklin D. Roosevelt's comparable reform programs when they fell victim to "guns-over-butter" decisions. Escalating by stealth in Vietnam, Johnson was able to have "guns and butter" without increasing taxes to pay for both projects. This irresponsible decision had a profound impact on the American economy.

Johnson's failure to rally the public around the commitment in Vietnam led to the growth of the largest and most effective antiwar movement in American history. Beginning in 1966, through mass demonstrations, petitioning, teach-ins, electoral politics, civil disobedience, and countless other individual and collective forms of protests, millions of Americans challenged administration policies. Although a majority of the population found aspects of the campus-based movement repellent, it did attract support in many important sectors of the society and contributed to the collapse of the bipartisan Cold War consensus that had held since 1947.

Moreover, on at least two occasions, the antiwar movement dramatically affected policy. After 35,000 mostly young people besieged the Pentagon on 21-22 October 1967, Lyndon Johnson launched a public relations campaign that emphasized how well the war was going. When the Communists launched their seemingly successful nationwide Tet Offensive on 30 January 1968, most Americans felt that they had been deceived by their own government. That widespread public disaffection led to Johnson's decision on 31 March 1968 not to escalate further and not to stand for reelection. He also faced serious challenges for the nomination from antiwar senators Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.) and Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.).

A little more than a year later, Republican president Richard M. Nixon sent an ultimatum to Hanoi to alter its bargaining position at the Paris Peace Talks by 1 November or confront a major escalation. The North Vietnamese called Nixon's bluff, and he did not escalate, in good measure because of the depth and breadth of antiwar sentiment reflected in the largest antiwar activity of the period, the 15 October 1969 Moratorium, a peaceful and dignified protest involving many middle-class adults. Nixon's decision was also influenced by his advisers' determination that no matter what form the proposed escalation (Operation Duck Hook) took, it was unlikely to end the war.

Finally, both Johnson and Nixon were convinced that the perceived popularity of the antiwar movement influenced the Vietnamese Communists. Thus, both presidents' policies were affected, to some degree, by how they thought Hanoi interpreted the success of the movement. That relative success led Johnson, and especially Nixon, to take extralegal and illegal actions against antiwar critics and organizations. Some of those actions became part of the Watergate scandal, the series of crimes and misdemeanors that ultimately led to Nixon's resignation. For example, Nixon first authorized illegal wiretaps in May 1969 to find the leaker who told a New York Times reporter that the United States was secretly bombing Cambodia.

Johnson and Nixon also confronted spirited challenges to their foreign policymaking authority on Capitol Hill. Beginning in the winter of 1966 with hearings held by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.), and increasing to a crescendo after 1968 when the Democratic legislature confronted a Republican president, Congress began to rein in what had come to be called the "imperial presidency." It was true that 95 percent of those legislators present and voting approved of war-related appropriation bills from 1965 through 1972. Nevertheless, during the invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970, the Senate voted to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and to cut off funds for the operation after 30 June. Moreover, from 1973 through 1975, Congress passed several resolutions that restricted the use of troops and airpower in Southeast Asia and rejected presidential requests for further aid to South Vietnam. Most important, in 1973 it passed, over Nixon's veto, the War Powers Resolution, which sought to restrict the president's ability to send American troops into combat without informing Congress or obtaining its approval for an extended commitment.

The war affected as well the presidential elections of 1968 and 1972. In 1968, the candidacy of Hubert H. Humphrey was significantly weakened by the bloody confrontations in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention between youthful critics of the war and the police. In addition, Lyndon Johnson announced a complete bombing halt one week before the election in an "October Surprise," which aided his vice president. For his part, Richard Nixon suggested obliquely that he had a plan (it did not exist) to end the war. In a law and order campaign, he also appealed to those who abhorred antiwar and other unruly demonstrators.

After Nixon was unable to end the war on his terms during his first year in office, he and his aides encouraged the growth of the POW-MIA movement, which was concerned about the treatment of the known prisoners of war (POWs) in Communist captivity and the whereabouts of those classified as missing in action (MIA), some of whom were also suspected to be among those languishing, undocumented, in camps in North and South Vietnam and Laos. Nixon then contended from 1970 through 1972 that during the extended public and secret peace talks, the North Vietnamese were recalcitrant on the emotional POW-MIA issue. Undoubtedly, the president was concerned about how the sort of peace he obtained in Vietnam would affect his prospects in his reelection campaign.

One week before the 1972 election, Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, offered a Republican "October Surprise" when he announced that "peace is at hand." The North Vietnamese forced Kissinger to make this statement when they announced on 25 October that they and the Americans had finally agreed on terms for ending the war. Hanoi went public with the arrangements because it feared, correctly, that Washington and especially Saigon were reneging on the provisional agreement reached on 21 October. What the national security adviser did not reveal then—or even after the election--was that he had been unable to convince the South Vietnamese government to accept the terms he had negotiated with the North Vietnamese. Nonetheless, Kissinger's announcement effectively took away Democratic antiwar candidate George McGovern's most important issue. McGovern had obtained the nomination in good measure because of reforms adopted by his party in the wake of the Chicago riots.

Some of those who opposed the war were driven by the fact that as Johnson's policy escalated, more and more young people were drafted into the armed services and sent to Vietnam. By 1967, almost 50 percent of the enlisted men in the army were draftees. By 1969, draftees comprised over 50 percent of all combat deaths and 88 percent of army infantrymen in Vietnam.

No war since the Civil War produced so much opposition to the draft. Part of the problem had to do with its perceived unfairness. Undergraduates and, until 1968, graduate students could defer military service until they completed their programs, In addition, many young men, often from the middle class, joined the National Guard and Reserves on the likely gamble that they would not be called up for duty in Southeast Asia. Consequently, the Vietnam War appeared to many to be a "working-class war," with draftees and enlisted men coming disproportionately from blue-collar backgrounds. At first, from 1965 through 1967, African Americans especially served and died in Vietnam in disproportionate numbers. By the end of the war, however, they accounted for 12 percent of the combat deaths, a figure close to their actual percentage in the population.

Of the 27 million men eligible for conscription during the Vietnam era, 8,720,000 enlisted, often to beat the draft; 2,215,000 were drafted; and almost 16 million never served. Of that 16 million, 15,410,000 were deferred, exempted, or disqualified, and an estimated 570,000 were draft offenders. Of that number, over 209,517 were accused of draft violations, 8,750 were convicted, and 3,250 were imprisoned. The number of violators swamped the judiciary system.

During the war, the Selective Service System, prodded by the Supreme Court, relaxed its definition of conscientious objection. As a consequence, 170,000 men received that status, of whom close to one-third evaded alternate service. Between 60,000 and 100,000 young men chose exile to avoid the draft, with Canada and Sweden the favorite sanctuaries. The prospect of the draft also affected millions of eligible males' decisions to marry, have children, or continue their education.

Widespread draft resistance--including flamboyant acts of civil and not so civil disobedience that impeded the operation of the system--and severe discipline problems posed by obstreperous and poorly motivated draftees in the field led to dramatic reform. First, on the eve of the Moratorium in October 1969, Nixon removed the unpopular Gen. Lewis B. Hershey, who had been in charge of the Selective Service System since World War II. The president instituted a lottery system two months later in an attempt to make the system somewhat fairer. In September 1971, Congress passed his proposal for an All-Volunteer Force, and in July 1973, Nixon terminated the draft.

As important as these reforms were to the American military and society in general in the years from 1973 to the present, the impact of the Vietnam War on the economy during the same period was even more important. For many economists, the last truly good years for the economy were 1962-65, with almost full employment; very low inflation; respectable growth in productivity, gross national product, and national income; and a favorable balance of trade.

On the last issue, an increasingly unfavorable balance of trade, related in part to spending for the war abroad, contributed to an international monetary crisis involving a threat to U.S. gold reserves in 1967-68. That threat helped convince some administration officials and Wall Street analysts that the United States could no longer afford the war.

As early as the winter of 1965, Lyndon Johnson's economic advisers, who worried about the imminent overheating of the economy, recommended a tax increase to help pay for the increasingly expensive war and to hold down inflation. For domestic political reasons, Johnson refused to accept their advice until 1968, when he introduced a 10 percent income tax surcharge, which, economists now claim, was too little and too late.

For most of Johnson's term, however, the inflation figures remained relatively low, reaching 4 percent in 1968. Nixon had to deal with the economic problems caused in part by war spending. His attempts to solve the unique "stagflation," rising inflation and rising unemployment, included a variety of fiscal and monetary adjustments, and ultimately wage and price controls in August 1971 through April 1973. That Democratic solution, which was influenced by Nixon's decision to end the convertibility of the dollar to gold, was one way to stabilize the economy until the 1972 election.

As early as the Johnson administration, the Vietnam War, which civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., called "America's tragic distraction," began significantly to affect domestic reform. Although critics continue to disagree about the design and relative success of the vast array of Great Society programs, there is no doubt that Johnson would have spent more on them had he not had to pay for the war. In fact, Congress would not give him his 1968 surcharge until he agreed to cut $6 billion from non-defense programs.

Inflation, sparked by the war, contributed to the rise in oil prices in 1973 because of the impact of the devaluation of the dollar on oil producers. It also led to the real estate boom of the 1970s, and because of the built-in expectation of inflation, the introduction of variable interest rates and certificates of deposit by banks and offshore banking.

The Department of Defense placed the direct costs of the Vietnam War at $173 billion. To that could be added potential veterans' benefits costs of $220 billion and interest of $31 billion. Of course, veterans did receive educational and other benefits; research and design in certain fields were enhanced; and expenditures in the defense industry provided jobs for millions that might not have been there in other circumstances.

Despite its limited scope, in many ways the Vietnam War influenced the future course of events on the home front as dramatically as the two world wars. Whether the focus is on domestic politics, the economy, the armed services, or even the way presidents have thought about future military interventions, the war profoundly affected all aspects of American life.

The Anti-War Movement

The Anti-War Movement in the United States -- Mark Barringer

Along with the Civil Rights campaigns of the 1960s, one of the most divisive forces in twentieth-century U.S. history. The antiwar movement actually consisted of a number of independent interests, often only vaguely allied and contesting each other on many issues, united only in opposition to the Vietnam War. Attracting members from college campuses, middle-class suburbs, labor unions, and government institutions, the movement gained national prominence in 1965, peaked in 1968, and remained powerful throughout the duration of the conflict. Encompassing political, racial, and cultural spheres, the antiwar movement exposed a deep schism within 1960s American society.

A small, core peace movement had long existed in the United States, largely based in Quaker and Unitarian beliefs, but failed to gain popular currency until the Cold War era. The escalating nuclear arms race of the late 1950s led Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review, along with Clarence Pickett of the American Society of Friends (Quakers), to found the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) in 1957. Their most visible member was Dr. Benjamin Spock, who joined in 1962 after becoming disillusioned with President Kennedy's failure to halt nuclear proliferation. A decidedly middle-class organization, SANE represented the latest incarnation of traditional liberal peace activism. Their goal was a reduction in nuclear weapons. Another group, the Student Peace Union (SPU), emerged in 1959 on college campuses across the country. Like SANE, the SPU was more liberal than radical. After the Joseph McCarthy­inspired dissolution of Communist and Socialist organizations on campuses in the 1950s, the SPU became the only option remaining for nascent activists. The goal of the SPU went beyond that of SANE. Unwilling to settle for fewer nuclear weapons, the students desired a wholesale restructuring of American society. The SPU, never an effective interest group, faded away in 1964, its banner taken up by a more active assemblage, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

SDS formed in 1960 as the collegiate arm of an Old Left institution with an impressive heritage-the League for Industrial Democracy. Jack London had been a member, as had Upton Sinclair, but the organization had long lain dormant until Michael Harrington, a New York socialist, revived it late in the 1950s as a forum for laborers, African Americans, and intellectuals. Within a single year, however, SDS was taken over by student radicals Al Haber and Tom Hayden, both of the University of Michigan. In June 1962, fifty-nine SDS members met with Harrington at Port Huron, Michigan, in a conference sponsored by the United Auto Workers. From this meeting materialized what has been called the manifesto of the New Left-the Port Huron Statement. Written by Hayden, the editor of the University of Michigan student newspaper, the 64-page document expressed disillusionment with the military-industrial-academic establishment. Hayden cited the uncertainty of life in Cold War America and the degradation of African Americans in the South as examples of the failure of liberal ideology and called for a reevaluation of academic acquiescence in what he claimed was a dangerous conspiracy to maintain a sense of apathy among American youth.

Throughout the first years of its existence, SDS focused on domestic concerns. The students, as with other groups of the Old and New Left, actively supported Lyndon Johnson in his 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater. Following Johnson's victory, they refrained from antiwar rhetoric to avoid alienating the president and possibly endangering the social programs of the Great Society. Although not yet an antiwar organization, SDS actively participated in the Civil Rights struggle and proved an important link between the two defining causes of the decade.

Another bridge between Civil Rights and the antiwar crusade was the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at the University of California at Berkeley. Begun in December 1964 by students who had participated in Mississippi's "Freedom Summer," the FSM provided an example of how students could bring about change through organization. In several skirmishes with University President Clark Kerr, the FSM and its dynamic leader Mario Savio publicized the close ties between academic and military establishments. With the rise of SDS and the FSM, the Old Left peace advocates had discovered a large and vocal body of sympathizers, many of whom had gained experience in dissent through the Civil Rights battles in the South. By the beginning of 1965, the antiwar movement base had coalesced on campuses and lacked only a catalyst to bring wider public acceptance to its position.

That catalyst appeared early in February, when the U.S. began bombing North Vietnam. The pace of protest immediately quickened; its scope broadened. In February and again in March of 1965, SDS organized marches on the Oakland Army Terminal, the departure point for many troops bound for Southeast Asia. On 24 March, faculty members at the University of Michigan held a series of "teach-ins," modeled after earlier Civil Rights seminars, that sought to educate large segments of the student population about both the moral and political foundations of U.S. involvement. The teach-in format spread to campuses around the country and brought faculty members into active antiwar participation. In March, SDS escalated the scale of dissent to a truly national level, calling for a march on Washington to protest the bombing. On 17 April 1965, between 15,000 and 25,000 people gathered at the capital, a turnout that surprised even the organizers.

Buoyed by the attendance at the Washington march, movement leaders, still mainly students, expanded their methods and gained new allies over the next two years. "Vietnam Day," a symposium held at Berkeley in October 1965, drew thousands to debate the moral basis of the war. Campus editors formed networks to share information on effective protest methods; two of these, the Underground Press Syndicate (1966) and the Liberation News Service (1967), became productive means of disseminating intelligence. In spring 1967, over 1,000 seminarians from across the country wrote to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara advocating recognition of conscientious objection on secular, moral grounds. In June, 10,000 students wrote, suggesting the secretary develop a program of alternative service for those who opposed violence. A two-day march on the Pentagon in October 1967 attracted nationwide media attention, while leaders of the war resistance called for young men to turn in their draft cards. The movement spread to the military itself; in 1966, the "Fort Hood 3" gained acclaim among dissenters for their refusal to serve in Vietnam. Underground railroads funneled draft evaders to Canada or to Sweden; churches provided sanctuary for those attempting to avoid conscription.

Perhaps the most significant development of the period between 1965 and 1968 was the emergence of Civil Rights leaders as active proponents of peace in Vietnam. In a January 1967 article written for the Chicago Defender, Martin Luther King, Jr. openly expressed support for the antiwar movement on moral grounds. Reverend King expanded on his views in April at the Riverside Church in New York, asserting that the war was draining much-needed resources from domestic programs. He also voiced concern about the percentage of African American casualties in relation to the total population. King's statements rallied African American activists to the antiwar cause and established a new dimension to the moral objections of the movement. The peaceful phase of the antiwar movement had reached maturity as the entire nation was now aware that the foundations of administration foreign policy were being widely questioned.

As the movement's ideals spread beyond college campuses, doubts about the wisdom of escalation also began to appear within the administration itself. As early as the summer of 1965, Undersecretary of State George Ball counseled President Johnson against further military involvement in Vietnam. In 1967 Johnson fired Defense Secretary McNamara after the secretary expressed concern about the moral justifications for war. Most internal dissent, however, focused not on ethical but on pragmatic criteria, many believing that the cost of winning was simply too high. But widespread opposition within the government did not appear until 1968. Exacerbating the situation was the presidential election of that year, in which Johnson faced a strong challenge from peace candidates Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, and George McGovern, all Democrats, as well as his eventual successor, Richard M. Nixon. On 25 March Johnson learned that his closest advisors now opposed the war; six days later, he withdrew from the race.

As with the bombing of North Vietnam in 1965, which had touched off an explosion of interest in peace activities, another Southeast Asian catalyst instigated the most intense period of antiwar protest early in 1968. The Tet Offensive of late January led many Americans to question the administration's veracity in reporting war progress and contributed to Johnson's decision to retire. After Tet American public opinion shifted dramatically, with fully half of the population opposed to escalation. Dissent escalated to violence. In April protesters occupied the administration building at Columbia University; police used force to evict them. Raids on draft boards in Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Chicago soon followed, as activists smeared blood on records and shredded files. Offices and production facilities of Dow Chemical, manufacturers of napalm, were targeted for sabotage. The brutal clashes between police and peace activists at the August Democratic National Convention in Chicago typified the divided nature of American society and foreshadowed a continuing rise in domestic conflict.

The antiwar movement became both more powerful and, at the same time, less cohesive between 1969 and 1973. Most Americans pragmatically opposed escalating the U.S. role in Vietnam, believing the economic cost too high; in November of 1969 a second march on Washington drew an estimated 500,000 participants. At the same time, most disapproved of the counterculture that had arisen alongside the antiwar movement. The clean-cut, well-dressed SDS members, who had tied their hopes to McCarthy in 1968, were being subordinated as movement leaders. Their replacements deservedly gained less public respect, were tagged with the label "hippie," and faced much mainstream opposition from middle-class Americans uncomfortable with the youth culture of the period-long hair, casual drug use, promiscuity. Protest music, typified by Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, contributed to the gulf between young and old. Cultural and political protest had become inextricably intertwined within the movement's vanguard. The new leaders became increasingly strident, greeting returning soldiers with jeers and taunts, spitting on troops in airports and on public streets. A unique situation arose in which most Americans supported the cause but opposed the leaders, methods, and culture of protest.

The movement regained solidarity following several disturbing incidents. In February 1970 news of the My Lai massacre became public and ignited widespread outrage. In April President Nixon, who had previously committed to a planned withdrawal, announced that U.S. forces had entered Cambodia. Within minutes of the televised statement, protesters took to the streets with renewed focus. Then, on 4 May, Ohio National Guardsmen fired on a group of student protesters at Kent State University, killing four and wounding sixteen. Death, previously distant, was now close at hand. New groups-Nobel science laureates, State Department officers, the American Civil Liberties Union-all openly called for withdrawal. Congress began threatening the Nixon administration with challenges to presidential authority. When the New York Times published the first installment of the Pentagon Papers on 13 June 1971, Americans became aware of the true nature of the war. Stories of drug trafficking, political assassinations, and indiscriminate bombings led many to believe that military and intelligence services had lost all accountability. Antiwar sentiment, previously tainted with an air of anti-Americanism, became instead a normal reaction against zealous excess. Dissent dominated America; the antiwar cause had become institutionalized. By January 1973, when Nixon announced the effective end of U.S. involvement, he did so in response to a mandate unequaled in modern times.

Causes of the Vietnam War

The Causes of the Vietnam War - Andrew J. Rotter

Most American wars have obvious starting points or precipitating causes: the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, the capture of Fort Sumter in 1861, the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950, for example. But there was no fixed beginning for the U.S. war in Vietnam. The United States entered that war incrementally, in a series of steps between 1950 and 1965. In May 1950, President Harry S. Truman authorized a modest program of economic and military aid to the French, who were fighting to retain control of their Indochina colony, including Laos and Cambodia as well as Vietnam. When the Vietnamese Nationalist (and Communist-led) Vietminh army defeated French forces at Dienbienphu in 1954, the French were compelled to accede to the creation of a Communist Vietnam north of the 17th parallel while leaving a non-Communist entity south of that line. The United States refused to accept the arrangement. The administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower undertook instead to build a nation from the spurious political entity that was South Vietnam by fabricating a government there, taking over control from the French, dispatching military advisers to train a South Vietnamese army, and unleashing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to conduct psychological warfare against the North.

President John F. Kennedy rounded another turning point in early 1961, when he secretly sent 400 Special Operations Forces-trained (Green Beret) soldiers to teach the South Vietnamese how to fight what was called counterinsurgency war against Communist guerrillas in South Vietnam. When Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, there were more than 16,000 U.S. military advisers in South Vietnam, and more than 100 Americans had been killed. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, committed the United States most fully to the war. In August 1964, he secured from Congress a functional (not actual) declaration of war: the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Then, in February and March 1965, Johnson authorized the sustained bombing, by U.S. aircraft, of targets north of the 17th parallel, 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 dates for the war complicate efforts to describe the causes of U.S. entry. The United States became involved in the war for a number of reasons, and these evolved and shifted over time. Primarily, every American president regarded the enemy in Vietnam--the Vietminh; its 1960s successor, the National Liberation Front (NLF); and the government of North Vietnam, led by Ho Chi Minh--as agents of global communism. U.S. policymakers, and most Americans, regarded communism as the antithesis of all they held dear. Communists scorned democracy, violated human rights, pursued military aggression, and created closed state economies that barely traded with capitalist countries. Americans compared communism to a contagious disease. If it took hold in one nation, U.S. policymakers expected contiguous nations to fall to communism, too, as if nations were dominoes lined up on end. In 1949, when the Communist Party came to power in China, Washington feared that Vietnam would become the next Asian domino. That was one reason for Truman's 1950 decision to give aid to the French who were fighting the Vietminh,

Truman also hoped that assisting the French in Vietnam would help to shore up the developed, non-Communist nations, whose fates were in surprising ways tied to the preservation of Vietnam and, given the domino theory, all of Southeast Asia. Free world dominion over the region would provide markets for Japan, rebuilding with American help after the Pacific War. U.S. involvement in Vietnam reassured the British, who linked their postwar recovery to the revival of the rubber and tin industries in their colony of Malaya, one of Vietnam's neighbors. And with U.S. aid, the French could concentrate on economic recovery at home, and could hope ultimately to recall their Indochina officer corps to oversee the rearmament of West Germany, a Cold War measure deemed essential by the Americans. These ambitions formed a second set of reasons why the United States became involved in Vietnam.

As presidents committed the United States to conflict bit by bit, many of these ambitions were forgotten. Instead, inertia developed against withdrawing from Vietnam. Washington believed that U.S. withdrawal would result in a Communist victory--Eisenhower acknowledged that, had elections been held as scheduled in Vietnam in 1956, "Ho Chi Minh would have won 80% of the vote"--and no U.S. president wanted to lose a country to communism. Democrats in particular, like Kennedy and Johnson, feared a right-wing backlash should they give up the fight; they remembered vividly the accusatory tone of the Republicans' 1950 question, "Who lost China?" The commitment to Vietnam itself, passed from administration to administration, took on validity aside from any rational basis it might once have had. Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy all gave their word that the United States would stand by its South Vietnamese allies. If the United States abandoned the South Vietnamese, its word would be regarded as unreliable by other governments, friendly or not. So U.S. credibility seemed at stake.

Along with the larger structural and ideological causes of the war in Vietnam, the experience, personality, and temperament of each president played a role in deepening the U.S. commitment. Dwight Eisenhower restrained U.S. involvement because, having commanded troops in battle, he doubted the United States could fight a land war in Southeast Asia. The youthful John Kennedy, on the other hand, felt he had to prove his resolve to the American people and his Communist adversaries, especially in the aftermath of several foreign policy blunders early in his administration. Lyndon Johnson saw the Vietnam War as a test of his mettle, as a Southerner and as a man. He exhorted his soldiers to "nail the coonskin to the wall" in Vietnam, likening victory to a successful hunting expedition.

When Johnson began bombing North Vietnam and sent the Marines to South Vietnam in early 1965, he had every intention of fighting a limited war. He and his advisers worried that too lavish a use of U.S. firepower might prompt the Chinese to enter the conflict. It was not expected that the North Vietnamese and the NLF would hold out long against the American military. And yet U.S. policymakers never managed to fit military strategy to U.S. goals in Vietnam. Massive bombing had little effect against a decentralized economy like North Vietnam's. Kennedy had favored counterinsurgency warfare in the South Vietnamese countryside, and Johnson endorsed this strategy, but the political side of counterinsurgeny--the effort to win the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese peasantry-- was at best underdeveloped and probably doomed. Presidents proved reluctant to mobilize American society to the extent the generals thought necessary to defeat the enemy.

As the United States went to war in 1965, a few voices were raised in dissent. Within the Johnson administration, Undersecretary of State George Ball warned that the South Vietnamese government was a functional nonentity and simply could not be sustained by the United States, even with a major effort. Antiwar protest groups formed on many of the nation's campuses; in June, the leftist organization Students for a Democratic Society decided to make the war its principal target. But major dissent would not begin until 1966 or later. By and large in 1965, Americans supported the administration's claim that it was fighting to stop communism in Southeast Asia, or people simply shrugged and went about their daily lives, unaware that this gradually escalating war would tear American society apart.