u.s. involvement in vietnam war essay pdf

United States War in Vietnam, 1954–1975

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This essay includes material from Griffen, W.L., and Marciano, J. (1984) Lessons of the Vietnam War: A Critical Examination of School Texts and an Interpretive Comparative History Utilizing the Pentagon Papers and Other Documents; and Marciano, J. (2016) The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration?

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Marciano, J. (2021). United States War in Vietnam, 1954–1975. In: Ness, I., Cope, Z. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29901-9_49

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Studying the Vietnam War

How the scholarship has changed..

Two American soldiers in Pleiku, South Vietnam, home to an American airbase in May 1967.

—Everett Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

These are boom times for historians of the Vietnam War. One reason is resurgent public interest in a topic that had lost some of its salience in American life during the 1990s. At that time, the end of the Cold War and surging confidence about U.S. power seemed to diminish the relevance of long ago controversies and the need to draw lessons from America’s lost war. But then came the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: grueling conflicts that, in key respects, resembled the war in Southeast Asia three decades earlier. Critics complained that George W. Bush had mired the nation in “another Vietnam,” and military strategists focused anew on the earlier war for clues about fighting insurgents in distant, inhospitable places. For their part, historians seized the opportunity to reinterpret Vietnam for a younger generation and especially to compare and contrast the Vietnam conflict with America’s new embroilments.

Soldiers of The Army of the Republic of Vietnam in 1968.

—Gado Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Marine D. R. Howe treats PFC. D. A. Crum's wounds during the battle for Hue on June 2, 1968.

—US Marines Photo / Alamy Stock Photo

More recently, intense public interest in the war has been sustained by fiftieth anniversaries of the war’s most harrowing years for the United States. Publishers have used these occasions to release high-profile histories, including Mark Bowden’s widely reviewed  Hue 1968 , a sprawling account of the largest battle between U.S. and Communist forces during the 1968 Tet Offensive. The media are taking part as well. During 2017 and early 2018, the  New York Times  is publishing an online series of approximately 130 op-eds focused on the events of 1967. The biggest moment of all is due in late September: the premiere of the much anticipated 18-hour documentary on the war from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, an event certain to inspire new waves of commentary about Vietnam and to rekindle debate in living rooms across the nation.

But there is another, less noticed reason for renewed attention to the Vietnam War: Spectacular new source material has transformed the possibilities for writing about the subject. Some of this new documentation has emerged from U.S. archives as a result of declassification in the last decade or so. Records from the Nixon and Ford presidencies (1969–1977), especially, are making it possible for historians to write with more confidence and in greater detail about the final stages of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, long a relatively neglected era of the war.

Indeed, the last phase of U.S. military operations has recently spawned an especially contentious debate on one of the most fundamental controversies about Vietnam: Could the United States and its South Vietnamese allies have won the war if the American public had not turned against it? Provocative new works by Lewis Sorley and Gregory Daddis lead the way in arguing for and against, respectively, the notion that the U.S. military could have secured overall victory, if not for crumbling political support within the United States.

Meanwhile, writing about every phase of American decision-making has been enhanced by the release of audio recordings that U.S. presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon made of important meetings, telephone conversations, or both. Because these often convey the mood and emotions of senior policymakers, they are invaluable in helping historians gain a richer understanding of the motives that underlay decision-making about the war. It is now possible, for example, to hear Lyndon Johnson’s anguish about escalating the U.S. role in 1964 and 1965. LBJ’s doubts, along with his obvious awareness of the problems that would beset U.S. forces if he escalated the war in Vietnam, have led many historians to scrap the once dominant idea that leaders in Washington, ignorant of Vietnamese politics and blinded by Cold War assumptions about the dangers of communism, walked step-by-step into a “quagmire” that no one had anticipated. The old question—How could Americans have been so ignorant?—has been replaced by a new one: Why did U.S. leaders commit the nation to war despite abundant doubts and accurate knowledge of the obstacles they would confront?

The most impressive new source material, however, has emerged from countries other than the United States. As recently as 30 years ago, historians were limited to U.S. and West European sources, making it impossible to write with authority about Vietnam itself or decision-making by North Vietnam’s allies, China, the Soviet Union, and Eastern European nations. Everything changed with the end of the Cold War. East European nations went furthest in opening their archives to researchers. For its part, the Russian government opened some Soviet-era records, most notably the records of the Communist party. China and Vietnam, where the end of the Cold War did not produce dramatic political change, lagged behind, yet even those governments gradually permitted access to some records from the Cold War years. Most strikingly, the Vietnamese government opened troves of material amassed by the defunct regime in Saigon that ruled below the seventeenth parallel during the heyday of U.S. involvement.

The result has been a large and growing body of new work by ambitious and linguistically skilled scholars eager to explore fresh dimensions of the war. Historians Mark Philip Bradley, Robert K. Brigham, William J. Duiker, Christopher Goscha, David S. Marr, and Sophie Quinn-Judge led the way in examining Vietnam’s experience, drawing on newly available Vietnamese sources to produce pathbreaking studies around the turn of the century. A younger generation of scholars, most of whom wrote dissertations rooted in extensive research in Vietnam, has built on those accomplishments and even, for the first time, begun delving into decision-making by the Communist government in Hanoi. Meanwhile, historians of Soviet and Chinese foreign policy, most notably Ilya Gaiduk, Chen Jian, and Qiang Zhai, have used new documentation to examine the complex relationships between the Vietnamese Communists and their superpower patrons.

Unquestionably, archival openings in Russia and China, just as in Vietnam, remain partial and selective, leaving studies rooted in newly accessible material—stunning as it may be—highly susceptible to debate and revision as more documentation becomes available. Yet, measured against the near impossibility of doing this kind of work just three decades ago, historians have made remarkable progress toward rethinking the Vietnam War as an episode not just in U.S. history but also in Vietnamese and world history. Historians, in short, increasingly appreciate the war for what it was at the time: a multisided conflict involving numerous Vietnamese and international actors and driven by extraordinarily complicated and shifting motives. 

What precisely has this new research in non-U.S. sources revealed thus far? Three examples point to the variety and significance of the new discoveries. First, studies of Chinese foreign policy have revealed details of North Vietnam’s dependence on its mighty neighbor to the north in the years before the Cultural Revolution, which greatly diminished China’s ambitions abroad. Despite historical tensions between Vietnam and China, newly available sources show definitively that Chinese military helped train and advise Vietnamese Communist forces from as early as 1950 and played an especially pivotal role in the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the Vietnamese victory that ended French colonialism and dealt a major blow to the West in the Cold War.

More strikingly, new documents clarify the vast amounts of equipment and even manpower that China provided to North Vietnam during the later fighting that involved U.S. combat forces. According to historian Qiang Zhai, China sent everything from military gear and weapons to table tennis balls, playing cards, sewing needles, and vegetable seed under a series of agreements with North Vietnam. At the same time, Qiang Zhai asserts, a total of 320,000 Chinese soldiers served in North Vietnam between June 1965 and March 1968, peaking at 170,000 during 1967. To be sure, Chinese forces were not assigned combat roles. But Zhai observes that they enabled North Vietnam to send more of its own forces to southern battlefields by performing valuable functions such as repairing bridges and rail lines, building and relocating factories, and manning antiaircraft guns. Such tasks could, of course, be hazardous, not least because of U.S. bombing of some parts of North Vietnam. According to Zhai’s sources, 1,100 Chinese soldiers died in North Vietnam and another 4,200 were wounded.

President Lyndon B. Johnson visits with U.S. troops on his trip to Vietnam in October 1966.

—LBJ Library

Second, new sources from Vietnam are exposing the complexity of decision-making among Communist leaders in Hanoi. For many years, historians assumed that North Vietnamese leaders marched in lockstep and permitted no dissent. This view was sustained in part by the belief that the regime in Hanoi was totalitarian to its core and utterly subservient to its most powerful leaders, above all Ho Chi Minh. Recent discoveries have, however, called all of this into question. For one thing, historians Lien-Hang Nguyen and Pierre Asselin have revealed that Ho Chi Minh—long assumed to have been the preeminent North Vietnamese leader all the way to his death in 1969—in fact, lost a great deal of influence around 1960.

The pivotal figure thereafter was Le Duan, a Southern-born revolutionary who remained relatively obscure to Western historians until recent years. Thanks to recent publications, though, it’s clear that Le Duan, a firebrand eager to throw enormous blood and resources into the effort to reunify his country under Communist leadership, dominated decision-making in Hanoi during the peak years of American involvement. Understanding the importance of Le Duan and the hawks who surrounded him helps enormously to appreciate the escalatory pressures that operated on the Vietnamese side, even as Lyndon Johnson and his aides stepped up the American commitment in the mid 1960s. We can now see that leaders on both sides rejected diplomacy and banked on military victory, a tragic convergence of hawkishness that fueled escalation.

The dominance of the hawks in Hanoi does not mean, though, that there were no contrary voices once they were in the driver’s seat. Scholars working with Vietnamese sources have discovered evidence of substantial factionalism within the Hanoi regime throughout the late 1950s and 1960s. Broadly speaking, some high-ranking North Vietnamese leaders, including Ho Chi Minh, prioritized consolidation of Communist rule above the seventeenth parallel and were wary of major expenditures of lives and treasure to bring about reunification. Others, including Le Duan, strongly favored reunification—even at the cost of a major war likely to draw in the United States—over all other North Vietnamese priorities. New studies of the war show that North Vietnamese policy flowed from the interplay of these two points of view. During the late 1950s, the moderate faction held sway, and the result was a period of relative peace in Vietnam. With the triumph of the hawks, however, Hanoi embraced a new war and transformed North Vietnam into a full-fledged police state in order to keep the skeptics at bay.

Third, the new scholarship has shed valuable new light on the nature of the South Vietnamese state that endured from its beginning in 1954 to its collapse in 1975. Was South Vietnam merely a puppet of the United States, an artificial creation doomed to fall apart whenever Washington withdrew its economic and military assistance? Or was it a viable nation with a legitimate government that, absent the onslaught by northern Communists, could have endured as a stable, pro-Western entity into the indefinite future? For many years, the debate was more a matter of polemics than historical inquiry. Opponents of the war argued that the United States hitched itself to a hopeless Potemkin experiment led by venal, authoritarian leaders, while supporters saw South Vietnam as a beleaguered young nation that, for all its faults, was doing its best to resist Communist aggression.

Unsurprisingly, much of the new scholarship rooted in Vietnamese sources has argued for a gray area between these two extremes. Historians such as Edward Miller and Jessica Chapman focus especially on the late 1950s and early 1960s, suggesting that the South Vietnamese government headed by Ngo Dinh Diem possessed a degree of legitimacy and popular support unrecognized by Diem’s critics at the time or since. To be sure, they also point out the government’s inability to expand its base further among the South Vietnamese population. But they show that the South Vietnamese state possessed a remarkable amount of agency that its leaders might have exercised differently. All in all, these historians have helped restore the Vietnamese to the center of their own history.

What do all these revelations mean for how we should understand the Vietnam War in its totality? Clearly, the new work in non-American sources holds implications for primordial questions about the U.S. role in Vietnam. Was the U.S. commitment to Vietnam justified by any genuine security interests in the region? Why did the United States fail to achieve its objectives despite monumental effort? Might different decisions by American leaders have led to a different outcome? Knowing more about the international and Vietnamese contexts makes it far more possible than ever before to form authoritative opinions about questions that cannot logically be answered fully on the basis of U.S. sources alone. But the new work also underscores the possibility of addressing questions that transcend the American experience and viewing the Vietnam War within the context of, for example, decolonization, the international Communist movement, and the Sino-Soviet split. The good news is that, given the range of new and still-to-be-released source material and robust interest in the war four decades after it ended, historians are sure to move forward energetically on both tracks. The boom times may stick around for a while.

Mark Atwood Lawrence teaches at the University of Texas in Austin. He is author of Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam and The Vietnam War: A Concise International History .

Funding information

In addition to a  $1 million production grant  to GWETA for  The Vietnam War , NEH has supported, with a  $300,000 grant , public discussions nationwide of this difficult subject and the epic documentary from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. NEH has also funded numerous projects on the Vietnam War as a subject of ongoing scholarship, including the work of two scholars mentioned in this article: Edward Miller, a professor at Dartmouth who received a  summer stipend  supporting research and writing based on field work conducted in Vietnam, and Lien-Hang Nguyen, who received a  Public Scholar grant  to support work on a book for a general audience about the Tet Offensive of 1968. As major anniversaries of the Vietnam War appear on the calendar, NEH has also supported a number of projects documenting oral histories of the Vietnam War, including a project at the  Catawba County Library  in North Carolina interviewing Hmong immigrants who were refugees from Laos during the Vietnam War and a project with the Maryland Humanities Council working with students who learn to take oral histories from Maryland veterans of the Vietnam War. “LBJ’s War,” a series of podcasts from Public Radio International that has been praised recently in the media, was supported by a  $150,000 grant .

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Course: US history   >   Unit 8

• John F. Kennedy as president
• Bay of Pigs Invasion
• Cuban Missile Crisis
• The Cuban Missile Crisis
• Lyndon Johnson as president
• Vietnam War

The Vietnam War

• The student movement and the antiwar movement
• Second-wave feminism
• The election of 1968
• 1960s America
• The Vietnam War was a prolonged military conflict that started as an anticolonial war against the French and evolved into a Cold War confrontation between international communism and free-market democracy.
• The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in the north was supported by the Soviet Union, China, and other communist countries, while the United States and its anticommunist allies backed the Republic of Vietnam (ROV) in the south.
• President Lyndon Johnson dramatically escalated US involvement in the conflict, authorizing a series of intense bombing campaigns and committing hundreds of thousands of US ground troops to the fight.
• After the United States withdrew from the conflict, North Vietnam invaded the South and united the country under a communist government.

Origins of the war in Vietnam

Lyndon johnson and the war in vietnam, richard nixon and vietnam, what do you think.

• For more on the origins of US involvement, see Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) and Mark Atwood Lawrence, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
• See William S. Turley, The Second Indochina War: A Concise Political and Military History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009); Lawrence, The Vietnam War , 71-73.
• The exact circumstances of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and the extent to which US officials may have misrepresented the incident, remain in dispute. Tonkin Gulf Resolution; Public Law 88-408, 88th Congress, August 7, 1964; General Records of the United States Government; Record Group 11; National Archives.
• For more on Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, see Michael H. Hunt, Lyndon Johnson’s War: America’s Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945-1968 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997).
• Paul S. Boyer, Promises to Keep: The United States since World War II (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 283-284.
• Lawrence, The Vietnam War , 143.

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THE VIETNAM WAR: CAUSES, CONSEQUENCES, AND LESSONS

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DR.ABDUL ZAHOOR KHAN

Heinz Duthel

This dissertation addresses the subject of noncommunist political and cultural ideology in urban South Vietnam during 1950-1975. It contributes to the historiography of the Vietnam War, specifically on the long-neglected Republic of Vietnam (RVN) that has received greater attention in the last decade. It makes the argument that the postcolonial ideological vision of most urban South Vietnamese diverged greatly from that of the Vietnamese communist revolutionaries. This vision explains for the puzzling question on why the communist revolutionaries were far more effective in winning the minds and hearts of Vietnamese in countryside than in cities. At the same time, this vision was complicated by the uneasy relationship with the Americans. The dissertation examines four aspects in particular. First is the construction of anticommunism: Although influenced by Cold War bipolarity, anticommunism in urban South Vietnam was shaped initially and primarily by earlier differences about modernity and post-colonialism. It was intensified through intra-Vietnamese experiences of the First Indochina War. The second aspect is the promotion of individualism. Instead of the socialist person as advocated by communist revolutionaries, urban South Vietnamese promoted a petit bourgeois vision of the postcolonial person. Much of the sources for this promotion came from the West, especially France and the U.S. But it was left to urban South Vietnamese writers to interpret and promote what this person ought to be. The third one concerns the development of nationalism. Urban South Vietnam continued to uphold the views of nationalism developed during late colonialism, such as the elevation of national heroes and the essentialization of Vietnamese civilization. Noncommunist South Vietnamese urbanites were influenced by ethnic nationalism, although they also developed the tendency to look towards other newly independent nations for nationalistic inspiration and ideas about their own postcolonial nation. The last aspect has to do with the relationship with Americans: The views of urban South Vietnamese on the U.S. were generally positive during the early years of the RVN. But there was also wariness that burst into resentment and anti-Americanism after Washington Americanized the war in 1965. The dissertation looks into two very different urban groups in order to extract the variety of sources about anti-Americanism.

James J Wirtz

H-Diplo Roundtable on the Myths of Tet

Pierre Asselin

In the aftermath of the Tet Offensive of early 1968, Hanoi agreed to dialogue with American representatives in Paris. As it turned out, it used the resulting talks with the Johnson administration not to negotiate in any traditional sense but to probe the intentions of Washington and to manipulate domestic and world opinion. Hanoi continued this charade for approximately one year, after which time domestic and international circumstances forced a meaningful reassessment of its position on a negotiated settlement of the war with the United States. This article explores that reassessment, as well as the evolution of Hanoi’s diplomatic strategy thereafter. Specifically, it considers those factors that conditioned the thinking and policies of Vietnamese communist leaders, including the so-called “balance of forces” below the seventeenth parallel and the behavior of close allies in Beijing and Moscow vis-à-vis the United States. The article proposes that military and economic setbacks in the South and in the North combined with recognition of the limits of socialist solidarity forced Hanoi first to talk secretly and then to negotiate seriously with the Nixon administration and, ultimately, to accept a peace settlement that fell far short of the goals set by the communist leadership at the onset of the Vietnamese-American War.

Gotthard Bechmann

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Essay on The US Involvement in The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was one of the worst wars in the United States history. The reason for the United States involvement was due to the start of communism in North Vietnam. The citizens in South Vietnam feared the control of North Vietnam and were worried that the north would take control of the south. The communist North Vietnam had support from the Soviet Union and China, making the South Vietnamese vulnerable to the north. In their time of struggle the South Vietnamese were able to receive aid from the United States. The North Vietnamese had set up a series of radar stations along bays and islands on the Gulf of Tonkin. On August 1, 1964 the U.S.S. Maddox was posted on a surveillance mission to study the North Vietnamese defenses …show more content…

The destroyers found no trace of a ship. President Johnson was convinced that the destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy had been attacked by the North Vietnamese and decided that the United States must react quickly. Around midnight on August 4, 1964 American aircrafts began sixty-four sorties (one plane attacks) over North Vietnamese patrol boat bases and a major oil storage depot. During the sorties more than twenty Vietnamese vessels were destroyed, while the oil depot became an inferno of flame and smoke. The events that took place in the Gulf of Tonkin added to years of tension between the United States and North Vietnam. United States Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy had spent millions of dollars to aid the non-communist South Vietnamese. Before 1964 thousands of American military advisers were training and assisting the South Vietnamese army. President Lyndon B. Johnson ’s decision to bomb North Vietnam put the United States in the center of the longest war in the nations history. The Vietcong (North Vietnamese) grew more aggressive after the incident at the Gulf of Tonkin. On November 1964, they attacked the American base at Bien Hoa and destroyed five B-57 jets while damaging twenty more. Since the increase of tension with the Vietcong continued, draft calls had increased substantially in the United States and American casualties were being felt across the country. On Christmas Eve 1964 the Vietcong set off a bomb in the

How The United States Lost The Vietnam War

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“In August of 1964, in response to the American and GVN espionage along its coast, the DRV launched a local and controlled attack against C. Turner Joy and the U.S.S. Maddox , two American ships on call in the Gulf of Tonkin” (Brigham 2). This resulted in the United States government giving Lyndon Johnson the ability to make war under the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. President Johnson then gave orders to perform air raids on Northern Vietnam pushing the United States further into the war. Compared to 1962 when only 9,000 soldiers supported the South Vietnamese, by June 1965 82,000 soldiers occupied the country. The number only continued to rise exponentially, and by 1966 370,000 soldiers had been sent in to prop their South Vietnam allies. President Richard Nixon withdrew American soldiers from Vietnam and as part of the “vietnamization” of the war. Over and 60,000 American soldiers had been lost in a war to preserve the status quo, not to win.

His/135 Week 5 Assignment Vietnam War

The Vietnam War is one of America’s longest lasting wars beginning in 1955, and lasting until 1975. The United States became involved in the Vietnam War because of its efforts to stop communism in Southeast Asia. The United States feared that if communist took over Southeast Asia it would cause a domino effect around the world. The United States began sending financial aid and military advisors to South Vietnam to help stop a communist takeover. North Vietnam was run by communist leader Ho Chi Minh, and the South had a non-communist government. An election to unify Vietnam would be held in 1955, fearing that Ho Chi Minh would win the elections South Vietnam president Ngo Dinh Diem refused to hold an election that would unify the country.

Causes Of The Gulf Of Tonkin Incident

The Gulf of Tonkin incident was a series of reported confrontations between the USS Maddox on August 2nd and August 4th, 1964. The second of the two confrontations, on August 4th, was later proven to have never happened, and the legitimacy of the first confrontation on August 2nd is in question. The USS Maddox reported that on August 2nd, while patrolling in international waters, it was attacked by three North Vietnamese Torpedo Boats. President Johnson went on live television on August 4th saying that the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy were attacked again by Vietnamese boats. He used these attacks as reason to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that granted him the use of conventional military force in Southeast Asia without a formal

Tonkin Incident Research Paper

We responded immediately. And we took out one of their boats and put the other two running. And we're puttin' our boats right there, and we're not running on in." is what President LBJ tells secretary McNamara to say to Senate Majority Leader Mansfield. Later President Johnson consequently approved a move under which the destroyer Maddox was reinforced by the C. Turner Joy, and both ships entered the Gulf together. With the American warships in a state of hyperalert, on the night of August 3/4 the warships recorded a series of sound (sonar) and electronic (radar) readings interpreted to be attacking torpedo boats. Although the commander on the scene, Captain John D. Herrick, quickly amplified the initial, excited reports with one stating he doubted the reality of the attacks, Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp nevertheless proceeded as if the attacks were genuine. This is a clear reference to the OPLAN-34A raids, confusion about which had been a factor in the initial Tonkin Gulf engagement on August 2. Here LBJ suggests a measure that would actually increase Hanoi's incentives to fight. A little over an hour later, at 10:53 AM., McNamara has a second conversation with the president in which Johnson's concern centers on the details of the supposed combat in the Gulf. McNamara tells LBJ that the U.S. aircraft carrier Ticonderoga sent out

President Lyndon Johnson And The Vietnam War

President Lyndon Johnson asked U.S Congress for permission to increase the U.S military in Indochina, because two U.S destroyers called in that they had been fired on by North Vietnamese forces. President Johnson received authorization to proceed any actions that is necessary to get revenge and to encourage the repairs of security and worldwide peace, he was granted approval when Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The Johnson Administration believed that increasing the U.S military presence in Vietnam was the only answer, the South Vietnamese troops stayed generally ineffective. In supporting South Vietnamese raids and applying a U.S program for the Lao border to disturb supply lines, U.S military started supporting South Vietnamese raids of the North Vietnamese coast. In the Gulf of Tonkin two destroyers by the name of the Maddox and the Turner Joy, were stationed to strengthen these action by The United States Navy. The commander on the Turner Joy reported being attacked by North Vietnamese Patrol boats twice, once on August 2 and the second on August 4. However, doubts later occurred as to whether or not the Turner Joy was attacked. Under those circumstances, Johnson instantly asked permission from Congress to defend U.S militaries in Southeast Asia. The Senate passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution with just two restricting votes, and the House of Representatives passed it collectively. Congress upheld the determination with the supposition that the president

Compare And Contrast The Gulf Of Tonkin

In August 1964, two US destroyed that were positioned in the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam claimed that they had been “attacked” by North Vietnamese forces. President Lyndon B. Johnson demanded authorization from the United States Congress to augment US military presence in Vietnam. As a result, congress ended up passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which authorized President Jonson to act any way to retaliate against the Vietnamese. Later on, many would question if either attacks had taken place. Key leaders included Barry Goldwater, William Westmoreland who was the US general who advocated aggressive strategies against Viet Cong and NVA using large numbers of US forces. Lastly, another key leader was Ho Chi Minh who was a North Vietnamese communist

Gulf Of Tonkin Research Paper

The Gulf of Tonkin was known as the USS Maddox incident. It happened on August 2, 1964. It was the international confrontation that led to the United States engaging more directly in the Vietnam War. The original American report blamed North Vietnam for both incidents. It became very controversial with widespread claim that either one or both incidents were false.

Should The United States Have Gone To War In Vietnam Essay

Vietnam was a divided country with the North supporting communism and the South opposing it. The United States was an ally to South Vietnam, with the goal of assisting them to avoid a communist takeover. The United States involvement may have started out with an honorable intention; however, there are many reasons the United States should not have become involved in the conflict, such as it was no business of the United States, it was very costly, many lives were lost, there was no victory in sight, and it went against the United States ethics and standards. Many would argue that the U.S. involvement was crucial, but many more would

The United States ' Involvement During The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War took place in between 1947- 1975. It consisted of North Vietnam trying to make South Vietnam a communism government. The United States later joined this conflict because of the stress North Vietnam was putting to South Vietnam to become a government that America did not want. The main reason why America joined was because of a theory called the Domino Effect. America and Russia were going through what has been dubbed the Cold War. The Domino Effect is the theory that communism will spread form one country to another. United states does not want this because our

What Are The Reasons For The Us Involvement In The Vietnam War

The Gulf of Tonkin resolution was set as an attempt to contain communism in 1964 after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. This incident gave the U.S authority to join in the Vietnam war to try to seize communist aggression. Whether the United States should have been in the Vietnam war or should have stayed out is a very controversial issue. The United States however should not have been part of the Vietnam war due to political reasons.

Us Involvement In The Vietnam War Essay

attack on South Vietnam by the North Vietnamese on the first day of Tet-Vietnam's Lunar New

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution on August 7

Up until this event Johnson’s foreign policy was quite similar to Kennedy’s, whereas after the resolution his new foreign policies deepened the U.S. involvement in Vietnam to a much larger extent. The effects could be seen shortly after the resolution, as immediate increases in military assistance were ordered, causing some 25,000 American combat troops in Vietnam by 1964. Additionally, by the spring of 1965 there were constant American aerial raids on North Vietnam, which was a part of an operation, called “Rolling Thunder”. Johnson and his advisors greatly supported this operation in the hope of damaging North Vietnam’s war-making infrastructure and its lines of supply. This operation which emerged from the Tonkin resolution also set Johnson’s foreign policy apart from Kennedy’s. It was the first sustained U.S. military operation in Vietnam, which demonstrated Johnson’s greater military commitment to Vietnam. This trend of continuously sending more and more American troops continued, which can be clearly seen when Johnson finally decided in July of 1965 for an open-ended military commitment. Johnson was able to completely Americanize the war and rush thousands of ground troops into Vietnam. This can be especially seen when comparing the maximum number of Kennedy’s military advisors of 16,000 by November 1963 with Johnson’s 500,000 American troops in Vietnam by 1968. Although

The Unwinnable Quagmire Analysis

The escalation of US involvement in Vietnam was due to several decisions that were inherited, and subsequently exasperated, by the Johnson administration. The Gulf of Tonkin in 1965 played a large role in the justification to escalate the war and served as an opportunity for Johnson to show that he was tuff and could be trusted to protect

Explain Why Was The Vietnam War Bad

The Gulf of Tonkin was passed in 1964 and gave President Johnson authorization. It launched America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. It was a negative because citizens wouldn’t agree on it, and because of this there was not a lot of funding for the war. Operation Rolling Thunder is a bombing campaign over North Vietnam to soften up the enemy, but it has also killed a lot of kids and women and animals and also destroyed a lot of jungle and native plant life. The tunnels and traps (also known as rat

The War Of The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War, deploying 2.5 million troops and lasting 10 years made it one of the largest wars in United States history. Allegedly, the war started after two navy ships were fired at off of the banks of Vietnam. The questionable attack would foreshadow a very misunderstood and questioned war to come. The United State’s army would be tested in just how strong they were, some 58,000 men were killed and almost double that were severely disabled. This was humiliating to the United States, a great world power at the time, and tensions grew as the war went on. Robert F. Kennedy mentioned the severity of the war in one of his speeches, “For years we have been told that the measure of our success and progress in Vietnam was

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Subscriber Only Resources

Access this article and hundreds more like it with a subscription to The New York TImes Upfront  magazine.

LESSON PLAN

The vietnam war.

Pairing a Primary & Secondary Source

Read the Article

Fifty years ago, the U.S. ended direct military involvement in a war that tore the nation apart and fueled distrust in government.

Before reading.

1. Set Focus Pose these essential questions: Why do countries go to war? How do wars affect countries?

2. List Vocabulary Share some of the challenging vocabulary words in the article (see below) . Encourage students to use context to infer meanings as they read.

• protracted (p. 18)
• ideologies (p. 18)
• disillusioned (p. 19)
• conscripted (p. 20)
• stalemate (p. 20)
• reconciliation (p. 21)

3. Engage Have students examine the map on page 18. Ask: What did the demilitarized zone divide? Why do you think Vietnam divided into North and South Vietnam? Why do you think the two Vietnams reunified? Why do you think what used to be called Saigon is now called Ho Chi Minh City? Explain that the article answers these questions.

Analyze the Article

4. Read and Discuss Ask students to read the Upfront article about the Vietnam War. Review why the article is a secondary source. (It was written by someone who didn’t personally experience or witness the events.) Then pose these critical-thinking questions and ask students to cite text evidence when answering them:

• Which central ideas does the author introduce in the first section? Which of these ideas is developed in the first few paragraphs of the next section, “Fighting Communism”? (In the first section, the author introduces the ideas that the U.S. had been involved in Vietnam for nearly 20 years, that the involvement had turned into a war, that both North Vietnam and the U.S. were looking to end the war, and that the war had become very unpopular with Americans. The next section explains how U.S. involvement in Vietnam began.)
• What is the connection between the Cold War and the Vietnam War? (The Cold War was a conflict between the democracies of the West and the Communist nations led by the Soviet Union to spread their ideologies. President Dwight D. Eisenhower feared that if South Vietnam fell to Communist North Vietnam, then there would be a domino effect of Communist regimes taking control of the Asian continent. So he sent U.S. advisory troops to support South Vietnamese soldiers. Later presidents increased involvement.)
• What does the section header “The War at Home” indicate the section will be about? What caused the war at home? What effects did it have? (The section header indicates that the section will discuss some sort of conflict back in the U.S. related to the Vietnam War. The conflict was that more and more people were becoming critical of the war. Effects include protests against the war and a youth movement.)
• The last section explains that in Vietnam, the conflict is called the American War. Why do you think this is? (Responses will vary, but students should support their ideas with evidence, such as the text details about millions of U.S. soldiers being sent to fight in Vietnam, the anger Le Duc Tho expressed at the Paris Peace Accords, and North Vietnamese forces quickly overrunning the South after the cease-fire.)

5. Use the Primary Sources Use the Primary Source: Project, distribute, or assign in Google Classroom the PDF A Vietnam Veteran Remembers , which features excerpts from a personal essay published in 2017 by Phil Gioia about his experiences fighting in Vietnam. Discuss what makes the essay a primary source. (It provides firsthand evidence concerning the topic.) Have students read the excerpts and answer the questions below (which appear on the PDF without answers).

• How would you describe the tone and purpose of these excerpts from Gioia’s personal essay? (The tone can be described as reflective and straightforward as well as critical in certain parts. The purpose is to describe what it was like to fight during the Vietnam War and to provide a perspective on the effectiveness of U.S. efforts in Vietnam.)
• In the first paragraph, Gioia says “Very lofty.” What does he mean? What was the reality he encountered? (By “very lofty,” Gioia means that the goal of preventing South Vietnam from falling to Communism was noble but difficult to achieve. The reality he encountered was that most soldiers were fighting to simply survive and return home.)
• What is Gioia’s assessment of the North Vietnamese army? Which details help show why he thinks this? (Gioia saw the North Vietnamese army as the enemy because that was his job, but he also respected their skill and determination. His descriptions of them as being “good light infantry” and having an ability to “control the tempo of the war” shows that he recognized their skill. His commentary that their “ability to move troops and equipment south never seemed to slack” and that they ignored truce periods to strategic advantage shows he viewed them as determined.)
• What ideas does Gioia convey through the three questions he asks and answers at the end of his essay? (Through his three questions and responses, Gioia conveys the idea that it was very unlikely that the U.S. would have succeeded—no matter what it tried—in preventing South Vietnam from being defeated by North Vietnam and falling to Communism. He also conveys the idea that the war was so complex that even today it’s hard to recognize what lessons we should have learned from it.) 
• Based on the Upfront article and the excerpts from Gioia’s personal essay, why do you think there were so many student protests against the war in the late 1960s and early 1970s? (Students’ responses will vary but should be supported by evidence from both texts.)

Extend & Assess

6. Writing Prompt Read “Escape From Cuba” in the previous issue of Upfront . Based on that article and this one, why do you think one embargo on a Communist country was lifted but not the other one? Explain in a brief essay. 

7. Quiz Use the quiz to assess comprehension.

8. Classroom Debate Should the U.S. reinstate the military draft?

9. Speaking With Meaning Display a photo of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Ask: Why do you think the design for the memorial was originally criticized? Then have students research the memorial and Maya Lin’s vision for it. Bring the class together to discuss why today the memorial is seen as a powerful tribute to those who died in the war.

Download a PDF of this Lesson Plan