The Vietnam War in two minutes
- Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam independent in 1945; after France's defeat, the 1954 Geneva Accords split the country at the 17th parallel, and Washington backed Ngo Dinh Diem in the South.
- The domino theory, the fear that one country's fall to communism would topple its neighbors, led Eisenhower and Kennedy to send aid and advisers, about 16,000 by the end of 1963.
- In August 1964 reports of a second attack on destroyers, which probably never happened, led Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution nearly unanimously, giving Johnson wide power to wage war.
- Johnson began sustained bombing and sent ground troops in 1965; a credibility gap grew between official optimism and events, and the 1968 Tet Offensive turned many Americans against the war.
- On March 31, 1968 Johnson limited the bombing and said he would not seek reelection; Nixon's Vietnamization cut American troops from about 543,000 to 24,000 while he widened the war into Cambodia.
- The Pentagon Papers appeared in 1971, the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973 ended American combat, and Congress passed the War Powers Resolution over Nixon's veto; more than 58,000 Americans died.
- On the exam: Questions ask about the causes of escalation and the war's effects on trust and presidential power, and link Vietnam to containment, Korea or the antiwar movement.
Topic 8.8 key terms
- Decolonization
After 1945, European colonies in Asia and Africa won independence. On September 2, 1945, Hồ Chí Minh declared Vietnam independent of France.
- Democratic Republic of Vietnam
The state proclaimed in Hanoi on September 2, 1945, with Hồ Chí Minh at its head. He opened its declaration with a line from the American Declaration of Independence.
- Viet Minh
The League for the Independence of Vietnam (Việt Nam Độc lập Đồng minh), led by Hồ Chí Minh. It fought Japan in 1945 and France after that. It was nationalist and Communist.
- Self-determination
The right of a people to choose their own government. The Atlantic Charter (August 1941) and the United Nations Charter, signed in San Francisco in June 1945, both stated it. Hồ Chí Minh asked the United States to apply it to Vietnam.
- Geneva Accords (1954)
The July 1954 agreements that ended France’s war in Indochina. They divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel, called the line “provisional,” and promised nationwide elections in July 1956. The U.S. and Saigon did not endorse the final declaration.
- Ngô Đình Diệm (1901–1963)
South Vietnam’s leader from 1954 to 1963. A Catholic, anti-Communist nationalist, he got U.S. money, arms and advisers. His government favored Catholics and jailed opponents, and many Buddhists and peasants turned against it.
- SEATO (1954)
The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, signed at Manila in September 1954. Modeled on NATO: the U.S., Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand and Pakistan promised to act together against aggression in the region. A protocol covered South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, which were not members. Later presidents cited it.
- Military advisers
American officers and sergeants sent to train South Vietnam’s army and to go into the field with it. Washington called them advisers, not combat troops. Kennedy’s buildup grew their number and added helicopter and support units.
- Viet Cong (National Liberation Front)
The Communist-led guerrilla movement in South Vietnam, organized as the National Liberation Front in December 1960. Most early fighters were southerners. Hanoi backed them with orders, supplies and, later, soldiers.
- Strategic hamlets
A 1962–63 program to move South Vietnam’s rural families into fenced, guarded villages, cutting the guerrillas off from the peasants. Many families were moved off their ancestors’ land against their will. The program fell apart after Diem did.
- covert operation
A government action carried out in secret so its role can be denied. The United States directed these raids and kept its part quiet.
- Commander in Chief
The President's constitutional role as head of the armed forces (Article II, Section 2). Johnson ordered the strikes on that authority before Congress voted.
- Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964)
An August 1964 law approving the President's use of “all necessary measures” to repel armed attack. Johnson later treated it as authority to fight in Vietnam without a declaration of war.
- declaration of war
Under Article I, Section 8, only Congress can declare war. Congress never declared war on North Vietnam; the Johnson administration treated this resolution as a substitute.
- Tet Offensive
A surprise attack by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces on cities and bases all over South Vietnam, launched during the lunar new year truce in January 1968. Allied troops beat it back, but it shattered Americans' belief that the war was almost won.
- The living-room war
Critic Michael Arlen's 1966 name for Vietnam on TV news: Americans watched the war from their sofas every night. Historians still argue over how much that changed minds.
- New Hampshire primary (1968)
The first primary of the 1968 election. Antiwar Senator Eugene McCarthy won about 42% against a write-in campaign for President Johnson's roughly 49%, a shock for a sitting president. Robert Kennedy entered the race soon after.
- Johnson ends escalation (1968)
After Tet, the Joint Chiefs asked for about 200,000 more troops. Instead, on March 31, 1968, Johnson limited the bombing of North Vietnam, offered to negotiate, and announced he would not run again.
- Vietnamization
Nixon's plan to train and equip South Vietnam's army to fight the ground war while U.S. troops withdrew. American air power and money kept flowing. The goal: end America's combat role without abandoning an ally.
- Nixon Doctrine
Announced on Guam, July 25, 1969: the United States would keep its treaty commitments and help its Asian allies with money and arms, but expected them to supply the troops for their own defense.
- Silent majority
Nixon's name for ordinary Americans who, he said, backed his Vietnam policy but did not join the protests. He used it in a televised speech on November 3, 1969, to answer the antiwar movement.
- My Lai massacre
The killing of hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese villagers by U.S. Army soldiers on March 16, 1968. The story reached the public in November 1969 and deepened doubts about how the war was fought. Only one soldier, Lt. William Calley, was convicted.
- Kent State
On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guard soldiers fired on students protesting the Cambodian invasion at Kent State University. Four students died and nine were wounded. Campuses across the country closed or went on strike.
- Pentagon Papers
The Defense Department's secret history of U.S. decisions in Vietnam, 1945–1967, officially the Report of the OSD Vietnam Task Force. Daniel Ellsberg copied it and gave it to newspapers in 1971.
- Prior restraint
A government order that blocks speech or publication before it happens. Under the First Amendment, courts presume such an order is unconstitutional.
- New York Times Co. v. United States (1971)
The Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that the government could not stop newspapers from printing the Pentagon Papers. Prior restraint is presumed unconstitutional, and the government had not met its heavy burden.
- Plumbers
A secret White House unit formed in July 1971 to stop leaks after the Pentagon Papers. Two of its members, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, later planned the Watergate break-in.
- Operation Linebacker II (1972)
Eleven days of B-52 and fighter raids on Hanoi and Haiphong, December 18–29, 1972, with a pause on Christmas Day. Nixon ordered them to press North Vietnam back to the table. Fifteen B-52s were shot down. Historians still argue over how much it changed the final terms.
- Paris Peace Accords (1973)
The January 27, 1973 agreement signed by the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam and the Viet Cong's Provisional Revolutionary Government. It set a cease-fire, U.S. withdrawal within 60 days and the return of prisoners. It did not require North Vietnamese troops already in the South to leave.
- Case–Church Amendment (1973)
A 1973 measure by Senators Clifford Case (R-N.J.) and Frank Church (D-Idaho) that barred spending on U.S. combat in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia unless Congress approved it. The funding cutoff took effect August 15, 1973. It is Congress using its power of the purse.
- War Powers Resolution (1973)
A law requiring the president to report to Congress within 48 hours of sending troops into combat and to withdraw them within 60 days, plus up to 30 more to pull out safely, unless Congress approves. Presidents of both parties have questioned whether it is constitutional.
- Domino theory
Eisenhower's 1954 image of the Cold War: if one country fell to communism, its neighbors would topple after it, one by one. It became a main reason for U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
- Credibility gap
The distance between what officials said about the war in public and what they knew in private. As it grew, Americans stopped believing what Washington told them.
- Containment
U.S. Cold War policy, from 1947: stop communism from spreading instead of rolling it back. It justified aid to France, then war in Vietnam.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
Created Equal
September 2, 1945
Key terms: Decolonization, Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Viet Minh, Self-determination
Hà Nội September 2, 1945
That morning, Japan had surrendered in Tokyo Bay. Now hundreds of thousands waited for a thin man in a khaki tunic and rubber sandals.
Hồ Chí Minh
Tất cả mọi người đều sinh ra có quyền bình đẳng.
Hồ Chí Minh
Tạo hóa cho họ những quyền không ai có thể xâm phạm được; trong những quyền ấy, có quyền được sống, quyền tự do và quyền mưu cầu hạnh phúc.
You know those words. He told the crowd where they came from: the American Declaration of Independence, 1776.
In the crowd stood a few American officers. That summer, American agents had trained Ho's guerrillas to fight Japan. A week earlier, a Vietnamese army band had played 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at their door.
Over the next months, Ho wrote to President Truman and the State Department at least eight times. There's no record of an answer.
Thirty years later, the last Americans left Vietnam by helicopter from a rooftop in Saigon. Why did the United States fight there for so long? And why did so many Americans stop believing their own government?
Advisers
1954–1963
Key terms: Geneva Accords (1954), Ngô Đình Diệm (1901–1963), SEATO (1954), Military advisers, Viet Cong (National Liberation Front), Strategic hamlets
The Geneva Accords split Vietnam at the 17th parallel. The line was “provisional.” Elections in 1956 were meant to reunite the country.
About 900,000 northerners, most of them Catholic, left for the South. U.S. Navy ships carried over 300,000 of them.
In the South, Washington backed Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic anti-Communist in a mostly Buddhist country.
In a 1955 vote to remove the former emperor, Diem claimed 98.2 percent. Saigon cast more than 600,000 votes. It had 450,000 registered voters.
Diem refused to hold the 1956 election, and Washington backed him.
Eisenhower later wrote that in a vote during the French war, possibly 80 percent would have picked Ho.
Kennedy sent thousands more Americans. By the end of 1963, about 16,000 advisers and support troops were in Vietnam.
Colin L. Powell
I was in one of the early groups of advisors that President Kennedy sent to Vietnam
Colin L. Powell
to help them fight the evil of Communism, as we saw it.
They trained Diem’s army against the Viet Cong, Communist guerrillas backed by Hanoi.
June 11, 1963 Saigon
On June 11, 1963, a Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc burned himself to death in Saigon. He was protesting Diem’s treatment of Buddhists.
The car that carried him is kept at this pagoda in Hue.
After the Buddhist crisis, Washington let Diem’s generals know it wouldn’t stand in their way. On November 2, they killed him.
November 22, 1963 Dallas
Twenty days later, Kennedy was dead too. Vietnam was Johnson’s now.
Contacts
1964
Key terms: covert operation, Commander in Chief, Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964), declaration of war
Johnson taped his phone calls. In May 1964, he told his national security adviser what he really thought.
Lyndon B. Johnson
I don't think it's worth fighting for, and I don't think we can get out. And it's just the biggest damn mess I ever saw.
That summer, South Vietnamese commandos, directed by Americans, raided North Vietnam's coast. Offshore, the destroyer Maddox was listening in on North Vietnamese radio.
On August 2, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the Maddox. American jets drove them off. The Maddox's damage: one bullet hole.
August 4, 1964 Gulf of Tonkin
Two nights later, the Maddox was back with a second destroyer, the Turner Joy.
In darkness and thunderstorms, their radar and sonar began reporting an attack.
Capt. John J. Herrick
Review of action makes many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful.
Capt. John J. Herrick
Freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonarmen may have accounted for many reports.
Capt. John J. Herrick
No actual visual sightings by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before any further action taken.
In the Pentagon, Herrick's message was handed to a new assistant on his first full day: Daniel Ellsberg.
Washington trusted radio intercepts instead, and Johnson ordered air strikes.
11:36 p.m. Washington · August 4, 1964
Lyndon B. Johnson
…renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply.
On August 7, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, backing “all necessary measures.” House, 416 to 0. Senate, 88 to 2. Critics would call it a blank check.
Sen. Wayne Morse
I believe that history will record that we have made a great mistake in subverting and circumventing the Constitution…
Two days before that vote, American planes bombed North Vietnam for the first time. Pilot Richard Sather was killed. Everett Alvarez was captured, and held for eight and a half years.
Campaigning in Akron that October, Johnson promised:
…we are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.
Tet
November 1967 – March 1968
Key terms: Tet Offensive, The living-room war, New Hampshire primary (1968), Johnson ends escalation (1968)
In November 1967, General Westmoreland told reporters in Washington:
Gen. William C. Westmoreland
We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.
Ten weeks later, during the truce for Tet, the lunar new year, Communist forces attacked. They hit thirty-six of South Vietnam's forty-four provincial capitals.
In Saigon, nineteen Viet Cong fighters blasted into the American embassy compound. They never got into the building. But the pictures went home.
The fight for Hue lasted about twenty-five days and wrecked the old city. Communist forces executed thousands of civilians there.
As a military attack, Tet failed. Politically, it worked. Americans didn't need secret papers to see the gap. They had Tet.
Opinion was already turning. By August 1968, after Tet, a majority called the war a mistake.
February 27, 1968. In Levittown, a family watches Walter Cronkite, just back from Vietnam. Their son was born the year they moved in. He's eighteen now.
Walter Cronkite
To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.
People quote Johnson: “If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America.” He was at a birthday dinner in Austin while it aired. He probably never said it.
March 12, 1968 New Hampshire primary
In New Hampshire's March 12 primary, antiwar senator Eugene McCarthy won about forty-two percent. Johnson, a write-in, won about forty-nine.
On March 31, Johnson limited the bombing and offered talks. Then:
Lyndon B. Johnson
I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.
Peace with Honor
1968–1970
Key terms: Vietnamization, Nixon Doctrine, Silent majority, My Lai massacre, Kent State
In 1968, the war's deadliest year for Americans, Richard Nixon won the presidency.
Nixon's plan was Vietnamization: South Vietnam's army would fight alone, and Americans would go home. Troops fell from about 543,000 to 24,000.
Richard Nixon
And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.
He also widened the war in secret. For fourteen months, B-52s bombed Cambodia. The official reports listed the targets as South Vietnam.
March 16, 1968 My Lai · Quảng Ngãi Province
In November 1969, Americans learned what had happened at My Lai.
American soldiers had killed hundreds of unarmed villagers, most of them women, children and old men.
Pilot Hugh Thompson landed his helicopter between the soldiers and the villagers. His crew saved some.
On April 30, 1970, Nixon announced that American troops were entering Cambodia.
Campuses erupted. Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State. Police killed two young men at Jackson State.
Congress began taking its power back. In June 1970, the Senate voted 81 to 10 to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
Nixon's administration had already said it had not relied on the resolution.
Top Secret
1967–1971
Key terms: Pentagon Papers, Prior restraint, New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), Plumbers
In June 1967, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara ordered a secret history of American decisions in Vietnam. The study ran to forty-seven volumes and about seven thousand pages.
Daniel Ellsberg, who had read Herrick's message in 1964, helped write part of the study. By 1969, he had turned against the war.
On October 1, 1969, Ellsberg and his friend Anthony Russo began copying the study at night. The place was a small advertising office on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles.
Ellsberg's thirteen-year-old son ran the Xerox machine.
On another night, his ten-year-old daughter cut "Top Secret" off the pages.
On June 13, 1971, the New York Times began printing the study.
The study ended before Nixon took office, but his chief of staff saw the danger anyway.
H. R. Haldeman
…out of the gobbledygook, comes a very clear thing: … you can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment…
A federal judge ordered the Times to stop printing. It was the first time a newspaper was barred in advance on grounds of national security.
On June 30, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 for the newspapers.
Justice Hugo L. Black
Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.
The White House formed its own team to stop leaks: the Plumbers. You'll meet them at the Watergate.
Peace Is at Hand
1972–1973
Key terms: Operation Linebacker II (1972), Paris Peace Accords (1973), Case–Church Amendment (1973), War Powers Resolution (1973)
Twelve days before the 1972 election, Henry Kissinger said:
Henry Kissinger
We believe that peace is at hand.
The talks broke down. Nixon sent B-52s over Hanoi and Haiphong for eleven days around Christmas. North Vietnam counted about 1,600 civilians dead.
On January 27, 1973, four sides signed the Paris Peace Accords. The last American troops left on March 29.
Everett Alvarez, shot down the day after Tonkin, came home on February 12. He had been gone 3,113 days.
That fall, the Nobel Peace Prize went to Kissinger and North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho. Le Duc Tho turned it down. The fighting between North and South never stopped.
August 15, 1973 The last day Congress would pay for U.S. combat in Indochina
Congress had already set a deadline. After August 15, no money could pay for combat in Indochina.
Congress wrote a new rule. Send troops into combat, and report to Congress within 48 hours. Bring them home within 60 days, unless Congress approves.
Nixon vetoed it as unconstitutional and dangerous. On November 7, Congress overrode him. In 1964, Congress gave Johnson a blank check. In 1973, it wrote a limit.
Dominoes
1975–1979
Key terms: Domino theory, Credibility gap, Containment, War Powers Resolution (1973)
Eisenhower's first domino did fall: South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, all in 1975. Burma, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia stayed standing.
In December 1978, Communist Vietnam invaded Communist Cambodia.
In February 1979, Communist China invaded Vietnam. The dominoes fell into each other.
More than 58,000 Americans died in the war.
Estimates of Vietnamese dead, soldiers and civilians on both sides, run from about one million to more than three million.
In 1995, Robert McNamara wrote:
…we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.
Continuity or change? Both. Containment went on. What changed was who Americans believed, and who gets to decide on war.