Involvement: 1954-1975

Combat: 1965-1973

A. Vietnam Beginnings

1. French war w/Indochina

Pres. Eisenhower sent $$$

(domino theory); paid for about
80% of war

2. Leaders

Ho Chi Minh North Vietnam

communist leader
Ngo Dinh Diem South Vietnam
leader

 3. Dien Bien Phu (1954)

French lost battle

4. Geneva Accords divided

Vietnam along 17th parallel

B. US Steps In

1. 1956 elections uniting Vietnam canceled

2. Vietcong South Vietnamese communists
supported by Ho Chi Minh Trail
3. JFK increased troops
4. Assassination of Diem

C. Pres. LBJ Expands Conflict

1. Tonkin Gulf Resolution
(1964)

Gave Pres. war-making powers

(blank check)
Created after unprovoked
attack by N. Vietnam

 2. Operation Rolling Thunder (1965)

Bombing raid of N. Vietnam

A. Gradual Escalation

1. Sec. of Defense Robert McNamara

2. Sec. of State Dean Rusk
3. Gen. William Westmoreland

B. Fighting in the Jungle

1. elusive enemy

Vietcong had extensive tunnels

Looked like the general pop.
Booby traps, land mines

2. war of attrition

 3. Battle for hearts and minds

Napalm jellied gasoline
Agent Orange - defoliant
Search-and-destroy missions

C. The War at Home

1. Great Society programs lost $$$
2. first living room war
3. credibility gap can we really believe
what the govt tells us?
Fulbright Hearings on TV

A. Working Class Goes to War

1. avoiding the draft
Medical exemption
Flee to Canada
Enroll in college

2. 80% soldiers from lower class

3. Afr-Amers. & women (noncombat)

. . . it became clear to me that the war was

doing far more than devastating the hopes of
the poor at home. It was sending their sons
and their brothers and their husbands to fight
and die in extraordinarily high proportions
relative to the rest of the population. We were
taking the black young men who had been
crippled by our society and sending them
eight thousand miles away to guarantee
liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not
found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.

. . . Even as the last of the Cambridge contingent was

throwing its urine and deliberately failing its colorblindness tests, buses from the next board began to
arrive. These bore the boys from Chelsea, thick,
dark-haired young men, the white proles [members
of the working class] of Boston. Most of them were
younger than us, since they had just left high school,
and it had clearly never occurred to them that there
might be a way around the draft. They walked
through the examination lines like so many cattle off
to slaughter. I tried to avoid noticing, but the results
were inescapable. While perhaps four out of five of
my friends from Harvard were being deferred, just
the opposite was happening to the Chelsea boys.

B. The New Left

1. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

restore participatory democracy
Led to terrorist group The Weathermen

2. Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley

There's something happening here

What it is ain't exactly clear
There's a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
I think it's time we stop, children, what's that
sound
Everybody look what's going down
There's battle lines being drawn
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind
I think it's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
What a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side
It's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

Paranoia strikes deep

Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away
We better stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, now, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

C. The Antiwar Movement

1. teach-ins at colleges
2. songwriters
Bob Dylan & Joan Baez
Peter, Paul, & Mary

D. Hawks vs. Doves

1. 70% of Americans
believed protests were
acts of disloyalty

A. Tet Offensive (Jan.)

1. Vietcong attacked SV cities

2. Impact?

US lost support for war (credibility gap)

March LBJs abdication; no reelection

C. Democrats Divided

1. March no reelection for LBJ

2. Robert F. Kennedy dove, assassinated
3. Eugene McCarthy dove
4. VP Hubert Humphrey hawk

D. Chicago Democratic Convention (1968)

1. antiwar protestors clashed w/police
2. televised

E. 1968 Election
1. Richard Nixon won Repub. Hawk
Promised to restore law and order

2. George Wallace American Independent

Party

A. Richard Nixon (1969-1974, R)

1. Vietnamization gradually replace US

troops with SV troops
2. Natl Security Advisor Henry Kissinger
3. peace with honor

B. Trouble on the Home Front

1. Nixon appealed to silent majority

moderate Americans who quietly supported
the war
2. My Lai Massacre 200 innocent
Vietnamese killed

 3. Cambodian Invasion (1970)

a. clear out supply lines
b. led to campus shootings

Kent State (OH) & Jackson State (MS)

 4. Tonkin Gulf Resolution repealed (1970)

5. Pentagon Papers (1971)
Released by Daniel Ellsberg
Evidence that JFK & LBJ misled public on
Vietnam

C. End of War

1. 1973 cease-fire
2. 1975 Fall of Saigon

NV invaded SV to unite it as one communist

nation

D. Legacy of Vietnam War

1. 58,000 Americans killed

Veterans faced indifference/hostility back home

2. Cambodia fell to communism (Pol Pot &

Khmer Rouge)
3. War Powers Act (1973)
Pres. can send troops anywhere for 60 days
w/48 hr. notice to Congress

 4. 26th Amendment 18 yr. old vote

5. 1982 Vietnam War Memorial in D.C.