8.8 The Vietnam War

Vietnamese nationalist and communist Ho Chi Minh declared independence from France in 1945. France fought to keep its colony, and the U.S., seeing Ho as part of a communist bloc, paid most of France's war costs by 1954. After the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the Geneva Accords temporarily divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel, with elections to unify the country planned for 1956.

The U.S. backed Ngo Dinh Diem's anti-communist government in South Vietnam, which refused to hold the elections, fearing Ho would win. Eisenhower explained U.S. policy with the domino theory: if one country fell to communism, its neighbors would follow like a row of dominoes. Kennedy increased U.S. military advisers to about 16,000. Diem's corrupt, repressive rule and his persecution of Buddhists made him unpopular, and he was killed in a 1963 coup that U.S. officials had allowed to go forward.

In August 1964 President Lyndon Johnson reported that North Vietnamese boats had attacked U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. (The first clash happened; the reported second attack very likely did not.) Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, 416–0 in the House and 88–2 in the Senate, authorizing the president to take 'all necessary measures'. Johnson treated it as a blank check.

In 1965 Johnson began a sustained bombing campaign (Operation Rolling Thunder) and sent combat troops. By 1968 more than 500,000 Americans were in Vietnam, many of them draftees, including disproportionate numbers of working-class and minority young men, since college students could get deferments. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong (communist guerrillas in the South) fought a war of attrition, and U.S. officials kept claiming progress.

In January 1968, during the Vietnamese New Year (Tet), communist forces attacked cities across South Vietnam, even the U.S. embassy grounds in Saigon. The Tet Offensive was a military defeat for the communists, but a political victory: it showed that official claims of progress were false. This 'credibility gap' between what officials said and what Americans saw deepened. CBS anchor Walter Cronkite told viewers the war seemed to be a stalemate.

Johnson announced in March 1968 that he would not seek reelection. That year also saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy and clashes between police and antiwar protesters at the Democratic convention in Chicago. Richard Nixon won the presidency promising 'peace with honor'. In 1969 Americans learned that U.S. soldiers had massacred hundreds of unarmed villagers at My Lai in 1968.

• Vietnamization: Nixon gradually withdrew U.S. troops and shifted the fighting to South Vietnamese forces, while increasing bombing.
• Expansion: Nixon secretly bombed Cambodia and sent troops there in 1970, sparking campus protests. National Guard troops killed four students at Kent State in Ohio, and police killed two at Jackson State in Mississippi.
• Pentagon Papers (1971): a leaked secret history showed that officials had misled the public about the war for years. The Supreme Court allowed newspapers to publish them.
• The 26th Amendment (1971) lowered the voting age to 18, partly because young men could be drafted but not vote.
• The Paris Peace Accords (January 1973) ended direct U.S. involvement; the last U.S. combat troops left in March 1973, and the draft ended. North Vietnam conquered the South in 1975. About 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians died.
• The War Powers Resolution (1973), passed over Nixon's veto, requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of sending troops into combat and to withdraw them within 60 days (plus 30 for withdrawal) unless Congress approves.