"The USA got out of Vietnam because of the unpopularity of the war with the US electorate" To what extent do you agree with this interpretation? (1965-73)

Authors Avatar

“The USA got out of Vietnam because of the unpopularity of the war with the US electorate” To what extent do you agree with this interpretation? (1965-73)

Some describe the Vietnam conflict as a promise “to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia...” (Martin Luther King), but instead Martin Luther King’s other description of the war as a “…cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on the TV screen as they kill and die together for a nation that cannot even seat them together in the same schools…” can be seen as more relevant. The US public carried a strong voice throughout this conflict and were able to change decisions and inevitably cause the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam.

The unpopularity of the war can be split into a number of sections. Unpopularity came about through the media coverage given to the actions of US troops and the barbaric acts that were being carried out in Vietnam. Examples of these were the development of napalm and Agent Orange. Napalm was jellied petroleum which was used to burn anything which came into contact with it; it had a devastating effect and often destroyed whole parts of the forest killing everything within it. Agent Orange was a chemical which was designed to kill plants, including tree’s and crops, and this didn’t have a positive effect on the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese peasants, the people who were in the firing line for Communism. After these events the war became increasingly dirty and barbaric. Events such as such as the CIA’s Operation Phoenix in 1968, which consisted of VietCong suspects, often on bad evidence and the torture of them. Most famously, for the wrong reasons, the incident in My Lai in 1968 where US troops wiped out an entire village with extreme brutality. With households commonly having TV sets in their homes in America it was there to be seen by the US public, who no matter how anti-communist they were, were shocked and disgusted by the actions their troops had committed. This set the ball rolling for the tide of anti-war feeling within the USA. During this period half of the American public were against the war and wanted to pull out.

Join now!

It was all members of US society who wee beginning to feel the tide of anti-war feeling. 1968 signalled the start of when black people began to demonstrate against a blatantly unfair draft system. The draft system was meant to call up young Americans to fight in the war; however it always seemed to pick a disproportional amount of black Americans. With the civil rights movement at the time and the emergence of prominent black figures such as Martin Luther King it meant there were demonstrations against the government. This meant that the government had to deal with a group ...

This is a preview of the whole essay