Why did the USA become involved in Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s?
Why did the USA become involved in Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s?
The Vietnam War, like any other war, was extremely ugly. But unlike other wars, there were many soldiers involved in the fighting who opposed it. There was also a tremendous cross-section of the American public that came to oppose it - not on the grounds that they were going to lose - but on the grounds that it was immoral and just plain wrong. This gathering of people from all walks of life and economic backgrounds together in cities all across the country to oppose immoral governmental foreign policy was, a fantastic exercise of real democracy, and may well have been the most blatant exercise of democracy to occur in this century.
The reason repeatedly given to the American people was the "domino theory" - if Vietnam fell to Communism, countries across Southeast Asia down through Australia and New Zealand would fall like dominoes. The 1950s and 1960s were times of great fearfulness in the West of the threat of Communism - the McCarthy trials, House Un-American Activities Committee, missile bases in Cuba, etc.
By 1954, the U.S. was giving France over $1 Billion a month to help in their fight in Vietnam. It was all to no avail. The French were fighting a people who were fighting for their freedom, for their independence, and the French eventually lost. In 1954, after the decisive French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the French finally surrendered. In the peace treaty that was signed in Geneva Switzerland in 1954, called the Geneva Accords, France agreed to gradually remove all their troops from Vietnam.
The U.S. by this time, however, was not willing to accept a French surrender that would mean that another Asian country would fall to the communists, so they manuvered things around to where the Americans took responsibility for the southern part of Vietnam while the Viet Minh took responsibility for the northern part. Originally, the Geneva Accords, recognizing that there were two completely different political systems involved (communism and capitalism) stated that the communists would be allowed to consolodate their positions in the north and the capitalists would do the same in the south. Then, in two years, ...
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The U.S. by this time, however, was not willing to accept a French surrender that would mean that another Asian country would fall to the communists, so they manuvered things around to where the Americans took responsibility for the southern part of Vietnam while the Viet Minh took responsibility for the northern part. Originally, the Geneva Accords, recognizing that there were two completely different political systems involved (communism and capitalism) stated that the communists would be allowed to consolodate their positions in the north and the capitalists would do the same in the south. Then, in two years, in 1956, there would be a national election which would determine what form of government the entire country would have. In effect, the Geneva Accords gave both sides a two year breathing spell. This two year period though, proved disastrous for Vietnam. The U.S. backed government in the south (not a national government yet, just a bureaucracy to take care of necessary business) refused to sign the Geneva Accords (France and the Viet Minh did). Thus, because they did not sign, the southern Vietnamese leaders felt (with U.S. encouragement) that they were not obliged to live up to the terms of the Accords.
Then, with U.S. military and economic help, a U.S. picked southern Vietnamese leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, assumed the leadership of a U.S. sponsored Republic of Vietnam The U.S. even wrote the constitution for the new "country." All with the idea that they were saving at least a part of Vietnam from falling to the communists. From 1956 until his assassination in 1963 (just weeks before John F. Kennedy's assassination) Diem ran South Vietnam (SVN) as a tyrant, with the U.S. backing his every move. The U.S. also kept increasing the numbers of U.S. servicemen serving in SVN, ostensibly as "advisors" to the SVN Army (ARVN). These numbers rose from a few hundred in 1956 to over 15,000 in 1963. But what of the Viet Minh? After all, they HAD won the war. Well, Ho Chi Minh spent most of the period from 1954-1959 consolidating his hold on North Vietnam, all the while hoping that the international community would force the South Vietnamese and the Americans to live up to the Geneva Accords.
When this didn't happen, he, first, encouraged the communists still living in SVN to actively combat the Diem government. This was the start of the guerrilla war in SVN with the southern communists--which came to be called the Viet Cong--fighting the ARVN troops. Americans were not yet involved in the day-to-day fighting except as advisors. In 1959, North Vietnam started infiltrating Northern Vietnamese Army (NVA) troops into SVN and the government of SVN started to fall apart at the seams. To keep the SVN government from collapsing, the U.S. had to keep increasing its aid to SVN. When Diem was assassinated by his own generals in a coup in November 1963, SVN was very close to falling to the Viet Cong and NVA forces. In short order, the U.S. government decided that if SVN was to be saved, it would have to be done through the use of American troops, thus, in March, 1965, Lyndon Johnson sent the Marines into SVN, which began the US's military part of the war.
According to Tuchman, this threat was very real, who nevertheless maintains that the U.S. committed serious folly in getting involved in war where she says that the U.S. erroneously misread the Communist world as united, and tragically misread the Vietnamese desire for independence from all exploiters including the Chinese.
Tuchman does not condemn all war, but says some wars seem just or inevitable - America's entry into World Wars I and II, for example. And she refrains from using hindsight to judge the US involvement in Vietnam. Rather, she finds compelling evidence that the five Presidents ignored the advice of many respected experts who strongly opposed U.S. intervention in Vietnam - including Army Chief of Staff General Matthew Ridgeway, Marine Corps Commandant General David Shoup, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and Edwin O. Reischauer (Asia expert and future U.S. Ambassador to Japan.)
Many experienced leaders believed strongly at the time that this was a vital and necessary war. Hindsight, of course, is always clearer than sight during the heat of battle. In his 1995 book, Robert McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defense under both Kennedy and Johnson, makes the devastating admission that the U.S. involvement in war with Vietnam was a mistake. He writes, "Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."
