Vietnam War (1965–75) the most domestically divisive and least militarily decisive overseas campaign ever fought by the U.S. Given the slow and hesitant commitment to the war, its ambiguous results may not be that surprising. From 1950 to 1965, U.S. presidents gradually increased military and economic aid, first to French Indochina and then to South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in an effort to halt the spread of Communism. President
Harry S. Truman first authorized aid in 1950 to help France maintain control of its colony. In 1954, the French were defeated at
Dien Bien Phu by the Communist-led Vietnamese Nationalist Army, leading to the
Geneva Agreement on Indochina, which set up terms and a timetable for Vietnamese independence. The U.S. did not sign the treaty and though it agreed to abide by its spirit, it quickly began to undermine it by sending military advisers and the CIA to help create South Vietnam, eventually installing a pro-U.S. leader,
Ngo Dinh Diem, who had little Vietnamese backing. And though President
Dwight D. Eisenhower's military experience made him reluctant to step up the involvement, President
John F. Kennedy did increase it in 1961 by sending arms, military advisers, and
Green Beret forces in order to equip and train the South Vietnamese for counterinsurgency tactics against Communist guerrillas. To justify these commitments, American foreign policymakers relied upon the
domino theory, which posited that if one country succumbed to Communism, the rest would fall too. Vietnam—that is, the
Vietminh (later the National Liberation Front) and
Ho Chi Minh's government—was seen as the domino in line after China, and thus had to be stopped. Of course, there were economic motives, too, as the U.S. hoped to widen its Pacific trade. But perhaps the most important factor was the commitment itself, as each president feared looking weak both at home and abroad. Democrats, under whose watch, the Republicans famously claimed, Americans hadlost China to Communism, were particularly vulnerable. And for Kennedy, the failure to stop Cuban Communism was an even more recent debacle. On an international level, all administrations from Truman's through Nixon's were concerned about the negative impression a de-escalation might make on other nations, considering that the U.S. had pledged its support to South Vietnam. It is quite certain that few policymakers, at least until the latter half of the 1960s, foresaw the extent of American involvement,let alone the possibility of failure.Not just the gradual escalation, but the lack of a formal declaration of war makes it hard to determine its precise beginning. Conventionally, it is dated to the
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, issued by Congress at the behest of President
Lyndon B. Johnson in August 1964, which authorized the U.S. military to retaliate against the North Vietnamese for what was most probably a nonexistent attack against U.S. ships. The resolution functioned as a legislative basis for all subsequent deployment, which was quickly heightened when Johnson authorized a bombing campaign of North Vietnam in early 1965. During the next three years, the number of ground deployments, air force sorties, and bombing tonnage rose dramatically, and the targets spread throughout North Vietnam and into Laos, as well. What Johnson had intended to be a limited war, particularly because he feared Soviet and Chinese involvement, was no longer so limited. In response, Hanoi began sending more units of the North Vietnamese Army into the South, launching a major offensive in the Central Highlands in October 1965. The U.S. won the ensuing Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, a campaign from which it concluded that airborne “search and destroy” tactics could win what appeared to be awar of attrition. But while U.S. estimations of enemy body counts, which were regularly reported to the media, continued to rise, the intensity of North Vietnamese military engagement was not waning. In early 1967, Gen.
William C. Westmoreland mounted
Operation Cedar Falls near Saigon and
Operation Junction City in the Central Highlands in an attempt to win the war. These operations saw the introduction to Vietnam of carpet-bombing, which had originated in the Pacific theater in
World War II, and of
Agent Orange, the now-notorious toxic defoliant. Still, the enemy did not disappear, and with third-party negotiations rejected by both Hanoi and Washington, the war reached a stalemate.In January 1968, the Vietcong successfully launched the
Tet Offensive, a series of coordinated attacks on urban centers and military posts in South Vietnam that were intended to foment a widespread rebellion against Saigon and the U.S. Although no cities succumbed, both sides suffered heavy casualties, and the result was astrategic victory for the North and its Southern followers. Roughly at the same time, the North Vietnamese three-month siege of
Khe Sanh was rebuffed by the outnumbered Marines, but again, U.S. victory was ambiguous. In the face of the exacting casualtytoll, the inconclusive results, and increasingly intense public and political scrutiny, Johnson declared in March that bombing of North Vietnam would be restricted and policies would concentrate on a negotiated settlement. This was the same month in which U.S. soldiers committed numerous atrocities in the
My Lai Massacre, an incident that was covered up from the press and the public until late 1969.What Johnson's de-escalation policies meant was an increasing development of
Vietnamization, an effort to train Saigon's army to take over the bulk of the fighting. President
Richard M. Nixon elaborated upon this goal by mounting a campaign of secret bombings of Cambodia in early 1969, while also starting to withdraw U.S. troops. Soldier morale sapped further as the futilityof what was rapidly becoming limited ground action, such as was evident at
Hamburger Hill, sank in. The public at home was no more satisfied with the slow-moving withdrawal, which still left over 150,000 troops in Vietnam by late 1971. American aircraft continued to strafe Laos and Cambodia in support of Saigon's ground forces, who were not so efficiently completing the process of Vietnamization. Indeed, by the final official bombing campaigns, which included the
Linebacker and
Linebacker II raids on North Vietnam in late 1972 and early 1973, total U.S. bomb tonnage had far exceeded the total dropped in World War II.On January 27, 1973, the U.S., North and South Vietnam, and the NLF's provisionary government signed the
Paris Peace Agreements, confirming terms of a ceasefire agreed to but not enforced three months earlier. By April 1, almost all U.S. forces had left Vietnam. Shortly afterwards, Congress stopped funding the bombing campaign in Cambodia, and in November, it overcame Nixon's veto to pass the
War Powers Resolution, which restricted the president's power to deploy forces without Congressional approval. This act culminated pressure to stop what had been labeled the “imperial presidency” since early in the war. Nixon, who had declared the treaty to be “peace with honor” was perhaps lucky to already be out of office when the
Vietcong captured Saigon in 1975, forcing a dramatic rooftop evacuation by the U.S. embassy staff. This episode underlines the notion that, on a military level, the motivations to fight the war were exaggerated and the military strategies ill-conceived. Some maintain that in the midst of the
Cold War, U.S. global credibility was at stake, and that an increased number and efficiency of the attacks should have been formulated. Still, that would have probably drawn Chinese and Soviet involvement, and perhaps escalated the tragedy beyond its already significant proportions.Worse still was that the war not only severely damaged the American economy, but also appeared to have torn the even larger fabric of American society in two. War-related spending had produced high inflation, high unemployment, an unfavorable balance of trade, and insufficient tax increases. These factors contributed to the oil crisis in 1973, as well as to the speculation-driven real estate boom of the 1970s, and also led to the creation of variable interest rates. And during the war itself, the staggering economy did little to improve Johnson or Nixon's standing, most notably among the lower and lower-middle classes. Johnson's underselling of the war which stripped his more popular Great Society programs of necessary funding, quickly came back to haunt him. Not only did he fail to garner public support for the war, but the strength of the antiwar movement contributed considerably to running him out of office. In 1968, the bloody riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago maimed George McGovern's campaign, even if the protesters were not, in the final analysis, primarily responsible for the violence. Draft dodging, draft resistance and conscientious objectors pervaded the war effort, especially as the system seemed to discriminate in favor of the middle and upper class. While Nixon tried to placate resistance by instituting the lottery in December 1969, it did not cease until he terminated the draft in July 1973. Still, like Johnson, Nixon generally believed that the antiwar movement bolstered North Vietnamese hopes and thus considered the protesters treacherous. And while de-escalation quelled the protests, the 1970 revelation of the secret campaigns in Cambodia re-ignited them, including the tragedies at Kent State and Jackson State Universities. Further down the road, some of Nixon's extralegal and illegal inquiries into antiwar protesters became part of the
Watergate scandal.On the whole, then, the war cost America dearly. A depressed economy, decreased global credibility, loss of faith in the government, and an overwhelming loss of pride were only some of the longer-term effects. A renewed commitment to isolationism, as well as a popular image of the deranged Vietnam Veteran, have combined to throw doubt on foreign policy commitments in the past three decades. And while scholarly and military interpretations of the war have continued to change over that same time, from soul-searching to anti-government to anti-liberal and back again, the consensus appears to remain that, in the sometimes mirage-making heat of the Cold War, the U.S. fatally mistook the ardency of Vietnamese nationalism for a fervent commitment to Communism.
