Vietnam War (1960–1975) CausesMilitary and Diplomatic CourseDomestic CoursePostwar ImpactChanging Interpretations
Vietnam War (1960–75): Causes Most American wars have obvious starting points or precipitating causes: the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, the capture of Fort Sumter in 1861, the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950, for example. But there was no fixed beginning for the U.S. war in Vietnam. The United States entered that war incrementally, in a series of steps between 1950 and 1965. In May 1950, President Harry S Truman authorized a modest program of economic and military aid to the French, who were fighting to retain control of their Indochina colony, including Laos and Cambodia as well as Vietnam. When the Vietnamese Nationalist (and Communist‐led) Vietminh army defeated French forces at Dienbienphu in 1954, the French were compelled to accede to the creation of a Communist Vietnam north of the 17th parallel while leaving a non‐Communist entity south of that line. The United States refused to accept the arrangement. The administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower undertook instead to build a nation from the spurious political entity that was South Vietnam by fabricating a government there, taking over control from the French, dispatching military advisers to train a South Vietnamese army, and unleashing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to conduct psychological warfare against the North.

President John F. Kennedy rounded another turning point in early 1961, when he secretly sent 400 Special Operations Forces–trained (Green Beret) soldiers to teach the South Vietnamese how to fight what was called counterinsurgency war against Communist guerrillas in South Vietnam. When Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, there were more than 16,000 U.S. military advisers in South Vietnam, and more than 100 Americans had been killed. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, committed the United States most fully to the war. In August 1964, he secured from Congress a functional (not actual) declaration of war: the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Then, in February and March 1965, Johnson authorized the sustained bombing, by U.S. aircraft, of targets north of the 17th parallel, and on 8 March dispatched 3,500 Marines to South Vietnam. Legal declaration or no, the United States was now at war.

The multiple starting dates for the war complicate efforts to describe the causes of U.S. entry. The United States became involved in the war for a number of reasons, and these evolved and shifted over time. Primarily, every American president regarded the enemy in Vietnam—the Vietminh; its 1960s successor, the National Liberation Front (NLF); and the government of North Vietnam, led by Ho Chi Minh—as agents of global communism. U.S. policymakers, and most Americans, regarded communism as the antithesis of all they held dear. Communists scorned democracy, violated human rights, pursued military aggression, and created closed state economies that barely traded with capitalist countries. Americans compared communism to a contagious disease. If it took hold in one nation, U.S. policymakers expected contiguous nations to fall to communism, too, as if nations were dominoes lined up on end. In 1949, when the Communist Party came to power in China, Washington feared that Vietnam would become the next Asian domino. That was one reason for Truman's 1950 decision to give aid to the French who were fighting the Vietminh.

Truman also hoped that assisting the French in Vietnam would help to shore up the developed, non‐Communist nations, whose fates were in surprising ways tied to the preservation of Vietnam and, given the domino theory, all of Southeast Asia. Free world dominion over the region would provide markets for Japan, rebuilding with American help after the Pacific War. U.S. involvement in Vietnam reassured the British, who linked their postwar recovery to the revival of the rubber and tin industries in their colony of Malaya, one of Vietnam's neighbors. And with U.S. aid, the French could concentrate on economic recovery at home, and could hope ultimately to recall their Indochina officer corps to oversee the rearmament of West Germany, a Cold War measure deemed essential by the Americans. These ambitions formed a second set of reasons why the United States became involved in Vietnam.

As presidents committed the United States to conflict bit by bit, many of these ambitions were forgotten. Instead, inertia developed against withdrawing from Vietnam. Washington believed that U.S. withdrawal would result in a Communist victory—Eisenhower acknowledged that, had elections been held as scheduled in Vietnam in 1956, “Ho Chi Minh would have won 80% of the vote”—and no U.S. president wanted to lose a country to communism. Democrats in particular, like Kennedy and Johnson, feared a right‐wing backlash should they give up the fight; they remembered vividly the accusatory tone of the Republicans' 1950 question, “Who lost China?” The commitment to Vietnam itself, passed from administration to administration, took on validity aside from any rational basis it might once have had. Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy all gave their word that the United States would stand by its South Vietnamese allies. If the United States abandoned the South Vietnamese, its word would be regarded as unreliable by other governments, friendly or not. So U.S. credibility seemed at stake.

Along with the larger structural and ideological causes of the war in Vietnam, the experience, personality, and temperament of each president played a role in deepening the U.S. commitment. Dwight Eisenhower restrained U.S. involvement because, having commanded troops in battle, he doubted the United States could fight a land war in Southeast Asia. The youthful John Kennedy, on the other hand, felt he had to prove his resolve to the American people and his Communist adversaries, especially in the aftermath of several foreign policy blunders early in his administration. Lyndon Johnson saw the Vietnam War as a test of his mettle, as a southerner and as a man. He exhorted his soldiers to “nail the coonskin to the wall” in Vietnam, likening victory to a successful hunting expedition.

When Johnson began bombing North Vietnam and sent the Marines to South Vietnam in early 1965, he had every intention of fighting a limited war. He and his advisers worried that too lavish a use of U.S. firepower might prompt the Chinese to enter the conflict. It was not expected that the North Vietnamese and the NLF would hold out long against the American military. And yet U.S. policymakers never managed to fit military strategy to U.S. goals in Vietnam. Massive bombing had little effect against a decentralized economy like North Vietnam's. Kennedy had favored counterinsurgency warfare in the South Vietnamese countryside, and Johnson endorsed this strategy, but the political side of counterinsurgency—the effort to win the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese peasantry—was at best underdeveloped and probably doomed. Presidents proved reluctant to mobilize American society to the extent the generals thought necessary to defeat the enemy.

As the United States went to war in 1965, a few voices were raised in dissent. Within the Johnson administration, Undersecretary of State George Ball warned that the South Vietnamese government was a functional nonentity and simply could not be sustained by the United States, even with a major effort. Antiwar protest groups formed on many of the nation's campuses; in June, the leftist organization Students for a Democratic Society decided to make the war its principal target. But major dissent would not begin until 1966 or later. By and large in 1965, Americans supported the administration's claim that it was fighting to stop communism in Southeast Asia, or people simply shrugged and went about their daily lives, unaware that this gradually escalating war would tear American society apart.
[See also Commander in Chief, President as; Counterinsurgency; Guerrilla Warfare; Peace and Antiwar Movements.]

Bibliography

George C. Herring , America's Longest War, 1979; 3rd ed. 1996.
Stanley Karnow , Vietnam: A History, 1983; rev. ed. 1991.
George M. Kahin , Intervention, 1986.
Andrew J. Rotter , The Path to Vietnam, 1987.
Lloyd Gardner , Approaching Vietnam: World War II Through Dienbienphu, 1988.
Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, 1988.
David Anderson , Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–1961, 1991.
Marilyn B. Young , The Vietnam Wars, 1991.
Lloyd Gardner , Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam, 1995.
John Prados , The Hidden History of the Vietnam War, 1995.
Robert Buzzanco , Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era, 1996.
Robert D. Schulzinger , A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975, 1997.

Andrew J. Rotter

Escalation.

By 1961, guerrilla warfare was widespread in South Vietnam. Communist‐led troops of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam, commonly referred to as Vietcong, were initiating hundreds of terrorist and small unit attacks per month. Saigon's military, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), was not able to contain this growing insurgency. During the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a small U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), never numbering more than 740 uniformed soldiers, had provided training and logistics assistance to the ARVN. The Kennedy administration determined that the size and mission of the U.S. advisory effort must change if the U.S.‐backed government of Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon was to survive. Some of Kennedy's aides proposed a negotiated settlement in Vietnam similar to that which recognized Laos as a neutral country. Having just suffered international embarrassment in Cuba and Berlin, the president rejected compromise and chose to strengthen U.S. support of Saigon.

In May 1961, Kennedy sent 400 U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Beret) troops into South Vietnam's Central Highlands to train Montagnard tribesmen in counterinsurgency tactics. He also tripled the level of aid to South Vietnam. A steady stream of airplanes, helicopters, armored personnel carriers (APCs), and other equipment poured into the South. By the end of 1962, there were 9,000 U.S. military advisers under the direction of a newly‐created Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), commanded by U.S. Army Gen. Paul Harkins. Under U.S. guidance, the Diem government also began construction of “strategic hamlets.” These fortified villages were intended to insulate rural Vietnamese from Vietcong intimidation and propaganda.

U.S. and South Vietnamese leaders were cautiously optimistic that increased U.S. assistance finally was enabling the Saigon government to defend itself. On 2 January 1963, however, at Ap Bac on the Plain of Reeds southwest of Saigon, a Vietcong battalion of about 320 men inflicted heavy damage on an ARVN force of 3,000 equipped with troop‐carrying helicopters, new UH‐1 (“Huey”) helicopter gunships, tactical bombers, and APCs. Ap Bac represented a leadership failure for the ARVN and a major morale boost for the antigovernment forces. The absence of fighting spirit in the ARVN mirrored the continuing inability of the Saigon regime to win political support. Indeed, many South Vietnamese perceived the strategic hamlets as government oppression, not protection, because people were forced to leave their ancestral homes for the new settlements.

While Vietcong guerrillas scored military successes, leaders of Vietnam's Buddhist majority protested against what they saw as the Diem regime's religious persecution. In June, a monk dramatically burned himself to death at a busy Saigon intersection. The “Buddhist crisis” and dissatisfaction with Diem by top Vietnamese Army leaders made U.S. officials receptive to the idea of a change in South Vietnam's leadership. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) did not interfere as a group of ARVN officers plotted a coup. On 1 November 1963, the generals seized power, and Diem and his unpopular brother Ngo Dinh Nhu were murdered. Three weeks later, President Kennedy was assassinated, and U.S. policy in Vietnam was again at a crossroads. If the new government in Saigon failed to show progress against the insurgency, would the United States withdraw its support from a lost cause, or would it escalate the effort to preserve South Vietnam as an anticommunist outpost in Asia?

Lyndon B. Johnson inherited the Vietnam dilemma. As Senate majority leader in the 1950s and as vice‐president, he had supported Eisenhower's and Kennedy's decisions to aid South Vietnam. Four days after Kennedy's death, Johnson, now president, reaffirmed in National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 273 that the U.S. goal was to assist South Vietnam in its “contest against the externally directed and supported communist conspiracy.” U.S. policy defined the Vietnam War as North Vietnamese aggression against South Vietnam. North Vietnam infiltrated troops and matériel into South Vietnam by sea and along the so‐called Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. Throughout his administration, Johnson insisted that the only possible negotiated settlement of the conflict would be one in which North Vietnam recognized the legitimacy of South Vietnam's government. Without such recognition, the United States would continue to provide Saigon as much help as it needed to survive.

The critical military questions were how much U.S. assistance was enough and what form it should take. By the spring of 1964, the Vietcong controlled vast areas of South Vietnam, the strategic hamlet program had essentially ceased, and North Vietnam's aid to the southern insurgents had grown. In June, Johnson named one of the army's most distinguished officers, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, then commandant of West Point, as commander U.S. MACV. Westmoreland immediately asked for more men, and by the end of 1964 U.S. personnel in the South exceeded 23,000. Increasingly, however, the U.S. effort focused on the North. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and other key White House aides remained convinced that the assault on South Vietnam originated in the ambitious designs of Hanoi backed by Moscow and Beijing.

Throughout 1964, the United States assisted South Vietnam in covert operations to gather intelligence, disseminate propaganda, and harass the North. On the night of 2 August, North Vietnamese gunboats fired on the USS Maddox, a destroyer on an intelligence‐collecting mission, in the same area of the Gulf of Tonkin where South Vietnamese commandos were conducting raids against the North Vietnamese coast. Two nights later, under stormy conditions, the Maddox and another destroyer, the Turner Joy, reported a gunboat attack. Although doubts existed about these reports, the president ordered retaliatory air strikes against the North Vietnamese port of Vinh. The White House had expected that some type of incident would occur eventually, and it had prepared the text of a congressional resolution authorizing the president to use armed force to protect U.S. forces and to deter further aggression from North Vietnam. On 7 August 1964, Johnson secured almost unanimous consent from Congress (414–0 in the House; 88–2 in the Senate) for his Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which became the principal legislative basis for all subsequent military deployment in Southeast Asia.

Johnson's decisive but restrained response to the Gulf of Tonkin incidents helped him win the 1964 election, but Saigon's prospects continued to decline. The president wanted to concentrate on his ambitious domestic program, the Great Society, but his political instincts told him that his leadership would be damaged fatally if America's client state in South Vietnam succumbed. Instability mounted in South Vietnam as rival military and civilian factions vied for power and as Vietcong strength grew. A consensus formed among Johnson's advisers that the United States would have to initiate air warfare against North Vietnam. Bombing could boost Saigon's morale and might persuade the North to cease its support of the insurgency. The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) favored a massive bombing campaign, but civilians in the State and Defense Departments preferred a gradual escalation.

Using as a pretext a Vietcong attack on 7 February 1965 at Pleiku that killed eight American soldiers, Johnson ordered retaliatory bombing north of the Demilitarized Zone along the 17th parallel that divided North and South Vietnam. Within a week, the administration began ROLLING THUNDER, a gradually intensifying air bombardment of military bases, supply depots, and infiltration routes in North Vietnam. Flying out of bases in Thailand, U.S. Air Force fighter‐bombers—primarily F‐105 Thunderchiefs and later F‐4 Phantoms—joined U.S. Navy Phantoms and A‐4 Skyhawks from a powerful carrier task force located at a point called Yankee Station, seventy‐five miles off the North Vietnamese coast in the Gulf of Tonkin. In 1965, U.S. aircraft flew 25,000 sorties against North Vietnam, and that number grew to 79,000 in 1966 and 108,000 in 1967. In 1967 annual bombing tonnage reached almost a quarter million. Targets expanded to include the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and factories, farms, and railroads in North Vietnam.

From the beginning of the bombing, American strategists debated the effectiveness of air power in defeating a political insurgency in a predominantly agricultural country. Despite the American bombs, dollars, and military advisers, the Vietcong continued to inflict heavy casualties on the ARVN, and the political situation in Saigon grew worse. By June 1965, there had been five governments in the South since Diem's death, and the newest regime, headed by General Nguyen Van Thieu and Air Marshall Nguyen Cao Ky, inspired little confidence. To stave off defeat, the JCS endorsed Westmoreland's request for 150,000 U.S. troops to take the ground offensive in the South. When McNamara concurred, Johnson decided to commit the forces. The buildup of formal U.S. military units had begun on 8 March 1965, when two battalions of Marines landed at Da Nang. In June, Marine and army units began offensive unit operations—“search and destroy” missions. On 28 July, Johnson announced that 50,000 U.S. troops would go to South Vietnam immediately. By the end of the year, there were 184,300 U.S. personnel in the South.

Although Johnson's actions meant that the United States had crossed the line from advising the ARVN to actually fighting the war against the Vietcong, the president downplayed the move. The JCS wanted a mobilization of the reserves and National Guard, and McNamara proposed levying war taxes. Such actions would have placed the United States on a war footing. With his ambitious social reform program facing crucial votes in Congress, the president wanted to avoid giving congressional conservatives an opportunity to use mobilization to block his domestic agenda. Consequently, he relied on other means. Monthly draft calls increased from 17,000 to 35,000 to meet manpower needs, and deficit spending, with its inherent inflationary impact, funded the escalation.

With U.S. bombs pounding North Vietnam, Westmoreland turned America's massive firepower on the southern insurgents. Johnson's choice of gradual escalation of bombing and incremental troop deployments was based upon the concept of limited warfare. Risks of a wider war with China and the Soviet Union meant that the United States would not go all out to annihilate North Vietnam. Thus, Westmoreland chose a strategy of attrition in the South. Using mobility and powerful weapons, the MACV commander could limit U.S. casualties while exhausting the enemy, that is, inflicting heavier losses than could be replaced.

Escalation of the air and ground war in 1965 provoked Hanoi to begin deploying into the South increasing units of the regular North Vietnamese Army (NVA), or People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), as it was called. In October, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the PAVN commander, launched a major offensive in the Central Highlands, southwest of Pleiku. Westmoreland responded with the 1st Air Cavalry Division (Air Mobile). Through much of November, in the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, U.S. and North Vietnamese forces engaged each other in heavy combat for the first time. The Americans ultimately forced the NVA out of the valley and killed ten times as many enemy soldiers as they lost. Westmoreland used helicopters extensively for troop movements, resupply, medical evacuation, and tactical air support. USAF tactical bombers and even huge B‐52 strategic bombers attacked enemy positions. The battle convinced the U.S. commander that “search and destroy” tactics using air mobility would work in accomplishing the attrition strategy. Soon after the PAVN departed the battlefield, however, so too did the American air “cavalry.” Clearly, control of territory was not the U.S. military objective.

During 1966 Westmoreland requested more ground troops, and by year's end the U.S. ground force level “in country” reached 385,000. These were organized into seven divisions and other specialized airborne, armored, special forces, and logistical units. With U.S. aid, the ARVN also expanded to eleven divisions, supplemented by local and irregular units. While MACV was getting men and munitions in place for large‐unit search and destroy operations, army and marine units conducted smaller operations. Although the “body count”—the estimated number of enemy killed—mounted, attrition was not changing the political equation in South Vietnam. The NLF continued to exercise more effective control in many areas than did the government, and Vietcong guerrillas, who often disappeared when U.S. forces entered an area, quickly reappeared when the Americans left.

In 1967, Westmoreland made his big push to win the war. With South Vietnam's forces assigned primarily to occupation, pacification, and security duties, massive U.S. combat sweeps moved to locate and destroy the enemy. In January, Operation Cedar Falls was a 30,000‐man assault on the Iron Triangle, an enemy base area forty miles north of Saigon. From February through April, Operation Junction City was an even larger attack on nearby War Zone C. There was major fighting in the Central Highlands, climaxing in the battle of Dak To in November 1967. U.S. forces killed many enemy soldiers and destroyed large amounts of supplies. MACV declared vast areas to be “free‐fire zones,” which meant that U.S. and ARVN artillery and tactical aircraft, as well as B‐52 “carpet bombing,” could target anyone or anything in the area. In Operation RANCH HAND, the USAF sprayed the defoliant Agent Orange to deprive the guerrillas of cover and food supplies. Controversy about the use of Agent Orange erupted in 1969 when reports appeared that the chemical caused serious damage to humans as well as to plants.

Late in 1967, with 485,600 U.S. troops in Vietnam, Westmoreland announced that, although much fighting remained, a cross‐over point had arrived in the war of attrition; that is, the losses to the NVA and Vietcong were greater than they could replace. This assessment was debatable, and there was considerable evidence that the so‐called “other war” for political support in South Vietnam was not going well. Corruption, factionalism, and continued Buddhist protests plagued the Thieu‐Ky government. Despite incredible losses, the Vietcong still controlled many areas. A diplomatic resolution of the conflict remained elusive. Several third countries, such as Poland and Great Britain, offered proposals intended to facilitate negotiations. These formulas typically called upon the United States and DRV to coordinate mutual reduction of their military activities in South Vietnam, but both Washington and Hanoi firmly resisted even interim compromises with the other. The war was at a stalemate.

De‐escalation.

The decisive year was 1968. In the early morning of 30 January, Vietcong forces launched the Tet Offensive, named for the Vietnamese holiday then being observed. In coordinated attacks throughout South Vietnam, the Vietcong assaulted major urban areas and military installations in an attempt to spark a popular uprising against the Saigon regime and its American backers. Heavy fighting ensued for three weeks, some of the most brutal at Hué. Westmoreland claimed victory because no cities were lost and thousands of casualties were inflicted upon the attackers. Indeed, the Vietcong lost so many soldiers that thereafter the PAVN took over much of the conduct of the war. The Tet Offensive, however, was a great strategic gain for North Vietnam and its southern adherents. U.S. and ARVN losses were high, and the fighting generated thousands of refugees that further destabilized the South. Most importantly, as a result of the massive surprise attack and the pictures from Saigon, the U.S. press and public began to challenge the Johnson administration's assurances of success and to question the value of the increasingly costly war.

At the same time as the Tet Offensive, the siege of Khe Sanh underscored the image of the war as an endless, costly, and pointless struggle. From 20 January to 14 April 1968, 30,000 to 40,000 NVA forces surrounded 6,000 U.S. Marines and ARVN at the remote hilltop outpost of Khe Sanh in the northwest corner of South Vietnam. Using artillery and air power, including B‐52 strikes, the United States eventually broke the siege and forced an NVA withdrawal. At the end of June, however, the Marines abandoned the base to adopt a more mobile form of fighting in the DMZ area. Once again, a major engagement left seemingly intangible results.

In March 1968, Johnson decided that the size of the U.S. effort in Vietnam had grown as large as could be justified. Prompted by a request from Westmoreland and JCS Chairman General Earle G. Wheeler for 206,000 more men, the president asked his new secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, for a thorough policy review. Johnson's sense that a limit had been reached seemed confirmed when the “Wise Men,” a group of outside advisers including such elder statesmen as former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Gen. Omar Bradley, recommended against further increases. The president authorized only 13,500 more soldiers and bluntly informed Thieu and Ky that their forces would have to carry more of the fighting. He then announced on television on 31 March 1968 that the United States would restrict the bombing of North Vietnam and pursue a negotiated settlement with Hanoi. Johnson also revealed that he would not seek reelection.

Meanwhile, combat raged in South Vietnam. Over 14,000 Americans were killed in action in Vietnam in 1968, the highest annual U.S. death toll of the war. The worst U.S. war crime of the conflict occurred on 16 March 1968 (although not revealed in the press until 6 November 1969) when American infantrymen massacred some 500 unresisting civilians, including babies, in the village of My Lai. In April and May 1968 the largest ground operation of the war, with 110,000 U.S. and ARVN troops, targeted Vietcong and NVA forces near Saigon. Peace talks began in Paris on 13 May but immediately deadlocked. On 10 June 1968, Gen. Creighton Abrams succeeded Westmoreland as MACV commander. In the fall Abrams began to shift U.S. strategy from attrition to a greater emphasis on combined operations, pacification area security, and what was called “Vietnamization,” that is, preparing the ARVN to do more of the fighting.

When Richard M. Nixon became president in 1969, the U.S. war effort remained massive, but the basic decision to de‐escalate had already been reached. Nixon owed his political victory to voter expectation that somehow he would end the war. He and his principal foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, rejected precipitate U.S. withdrawal. With the ground war stalemated, the new administration turned increasingly to air bombardment and secretly expanded the air war to neutral Cambodia. Publicly the White House announced in June the first withdrawal of 25,000 U.S. troops and heralded Vietnamization as effective. In fact, South Vietnam's armed forces remained problem‐plagued. To bolster the South, the administration leaked to the press dire threats of a “go for broke” air and naval assault on the North—possibly including nuclear weapons. Kissinger also began secret meetings with North Vietnamese representatives in Paris hoping to arrange a diplomatic breakthrough.

The morale and discipline of U.S. troops declined in 1969 as the futility of the ground war and the beginnings of U.S. withdrawal became more obvious. After an intense ten‐day battle in May, infantrymen of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Mobile) took a ridge in the A Shau Valley that they had dubbed Hamburger Hill. Having fought bravely and suffered significant losses, the soldiers were bitter when the site soon was abandoned. Such inability to see progress, and an awareness among the troops that politicians back home were giving up on the war, helped undermine military effectiveness. Simple survival of their twelve‐month tour of duty became the only motivation for many soldiers. Incidents of insubordination, mutiny, fatal assaults on officers, drug use, racial tensions, and other serious problems increased.

Faced with mounting public dissatisfaction, the slow pace of Vietnamization, and diplomatic frustration, Nixon boldly sent U.S. units into Cambodia in April 1970. U.S. military leaders had long complained about the sanctuary that neutral Cambodia provided Vietcong and NVA forces. This Cambodian incursion lasted until the end of June and provided some tactical gains, but it also sparked sharp controversy and demonstrations by the Vietnam antiwar movement in the United States over what seemed an expansion of the war to another country. U.S. troop reductions continued with only 334,600 in the South as 1970 ended.

Nixon stuck with more of the same in 1971. Responding to domestic critics, he continued to order U.S. troops home, leaving only 156,000 by December. To support Vietnamization, heavy U.S. air attacks continued against Communist supply lines in Laos and Cambodia, and so‐called protective‐reaction strikes hit military targets north of the Demilitarized Zone and near Hanoi and its port city of Haiphong. Tactical air support continued, with the heaviest coming in March during a South Vietnamese assault into Laos. Code named Lam Son 719, this operation ended in a confused retreat by the ARVN that further sullied the notion of Vietnamization.

During 1971, Kissinger made progress in the secret negotiations by offering to separate the arrangement of a ceasefire from discussion of the future of the Saigon government. In 1972 Nixon traveled to China and the USSR in diplomatic initiatives, trying to isolate Hanoi from its suppliers. With the shrinking American forces nearing 100,000 (only a small portion being combat troops), General Giap launched a spring 1972 offensive by Communist forces against the northern provinces of South Vietnam, the Central Highlands, and provinces northwest of Saigon. In most of the battles, the ARVN was saved by massive B‐52 bombing. Nixon also launched the heavy bombers against North Vietnam itself in a campaign called Linebacker, and the United States mined the harbor at Haiphong. Over the course of the war, total U.S. bombing tonnage far exceeded that dropped on Germany, Italy, and Japan in World War II.

Wearied by the latest round of fighting, the United States and North Vietnamese governments agreed in October on a ceasefire, return of U.S. prisoners of war (POWs), at least the temporary continuation of Thieu's government, and, most controversially, permission for NVA troops to remain in the South. Objections from Thieu caused Nixon to hesitate, which in turn led Hanoi to harden its position. In December, the United States hit North Vietnam again with repeated B‐52 attacks, codenamed Linebacker II and labeled the Christmas Bombing by journalists. On 27 January 1973, the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the Provisional Revolutionary Government representing the NLF signed the Paris Peace Agreements Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam, which basically confirmed the October terms.

By 1 April 1973, U.S. forces were out of Vietnam (except for a few embassy guards and attaches) and 587 POWs had returned home (about 2,500 other Americans remained missing in action). Congress cut off funds for the air war in Cambodia, and bombing there ended in August. Over Nixon's veto, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in November 1973. It limited presidential power to deploy U.S. forces in hostile action without congressional approval.

Nixon characterized the Paris Peace Agreements of 1973 as “peace with honor,” but primarily they allowed the U.S. military to leave Vietnam without resolving the issue of the country's political future. Without U.S. air and ground support, South Vietnam's military defenses steadily deteriorated. In the spring of 1975, an NVA thrust into the Central Highlands turned into an ARVN rout. On 30 April, as NVA and Vietcong soldiers entered the city, the last remaining Americans abandoned the U.S. embassy in Saigon in a dramatic rooftop evacuation by helicopters.

The United States failure in Vietnam raised important questions. Should the United States have fought the war at all? Did the United States fight the war the wrong way? Many analysts believe that the strategic importance of Vietnam was vastly exaggerated and, furthermore, that the nationalism driving Vietnam's history and politics could not be altered by U.S. military power, no matter how great. An alternative view is that even if the odds were poor for U.S. success, the United States had to make the effort to maintain its moral and strategic credibility in the world. On the question of how the war was fought, the debate centers on whether the United States used its military power adequately and effectively. Assuming that more is better, some critics argue that a greater use of U.S. force, either against North Vietnam or to isolate the battlefield in South Vietnam, would have produced victory. Throughout the conflict, however, the Saigon regime proved incapable of translating military success into political success. Also, massive U.S. assistance seemed to prove North Vietnam's and the Vietcong's claims that South Vietnam was not a Vietnamese but an American creation. Finally, a larger war would have risked a dangerous military conflict with China and the Soviet Union. Most scholars conclude that the Vietnam War was a tragic event whose costs far exceeded any benefits for the United States.

Bibliography

Raphael Littauer and Normal Uphoff, eds., The Air War in Indochina, 1972.
Edwin Hooper, et al. , The United States Navy and the Vietnam Conflict, 1976.
Harry G. Summers, Jr. , On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, 1982.
Stanley Karnow , Vietnam: A History, 1983.
Bruce Palmer, Jr. , The 25‐Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam, 1984.
John S. Bowman, ed., The World Almanac of the Vietnam War, 1985.
James William Gibson , The Perfect War, 1986.
Gary R. Hess , Vietnam and the United States, 1990.
David L. Anderson, ed., Shadow on the White House: Presidents and the Vietnam War, 1945–1975, 1993.
Ronald H. Spector , After Tet, 1993.
George Donelson Moss , Vietnam: An American Ordeal, 2nd ed., 1994.
George C. Herring , America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975, 3rd ed., 1995.

David L. Anderson

Bibliography

Robert Warren Stevens , Vain Hopes, Grim Realities: The Economic Consequences of the Vietnam War, 1976.
Lawrence M. Baskir and and William A. Strauss , Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War, and the Vietnam Generation, 1978.
P. Edward Haley , Congress and the Fall of South Vietnam and Cambodia, 1982.
Melvin Small , Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves, 1988.
Charles DeBenedetti with and Charles Chatfield , An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era, 1990.
Anthony S. Campagna , The Economic Consequences of the Vietnam War, 1991.
Christian P. Appy , Working Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam, 1993.
George Q. Flynn , The Draft, 1940–1973, 1993.
H. Bruce Franklin , M.I.A. or, Mythmaking in America, 1993.

Melvin Small

Bibliography

James F. Veninga and Harry A. Wilmer, eds., Vietnam in Remission, 1985.
John Hellman , American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam, 1986.
Nayan Chanda , Brother Enemy: The War After the War, 1986.
Ellen Frey‐Wouters and and Robert S. Laufer , Legacy of a War, 1986.
Bob Greene , Homecoming, 1989.
Bill McCloud , What Should We Tell Our Children About Vietnam?, 1989.

Harvard Sitkoff

Bibliography

George McT. Kahin and and John W. Lewis , The United States in Vietnam, 1969.
George C. Herring , America's Longest War, 1979; 3rd rev. ed. 1996.
Harry G. Summers, Jr. , On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, 1982.
Gabriel Kolko , Anatomy of a War, 1985.
George McT. Kahin , Intervention, 1986.
Robert J. McMahon , U.S.‐Vietnamese Relations: A Historiographical Survey, in Pacific Passage, ed. Warren I. Cohen, 1996.

Robert J. McMahon

Vietnam War

BACKGROUND

THE POLICE ACTION

THE ONSET OF WAR

THE WIND DOWN

THE AFTERMATH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Vietnam War has been permanently singed into the American consciousness, and its impact will be felt for years to come in foreign policy debates. The conflict produced four million killed or wounded Vietnamese—one-tenth of the combined population of North and South Vietnam at the onset of the war—and ranks as the United States’ longest and costliest overseas conflict, with the loss of 57,939 American lives and $150 billion in U.S. military spending. Moreover, Vietnam was a critical issue in the foreign policy of six successive U.S. presidential administrations.

BACKGROUND

A thorough understanding of the Vietnam War must begin with the end of World War II (1939–1945) and the onset of the cold war. To be sure, Communist Vietnam and the United States had interacted before 1946, notably when Ho Chi Minh requested Vietnamese self-determination at the 1918 Versailles Peace Conference ending World War I (1914–1918) and when he made his 1945 independence speech, which quoted the U.S. Declaration of Independence as a band played the “Star Spangled Banner.” But it was the specter of a strengthened Soviet Union threatening Asia that spurred U.S. involvement in Indochina, the French colonial holdings that comprised present-day Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In 1945 France had petitioned for the return of Indochina, which it had surrendered to the Japanese earlier in World War II. A year earlier, U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt, a fervent anticolonialist, had written to the British ambassador that he believed “Indochina should not go back to the French, but that it should be administered by international trusteeship.”

But by the summer of 1950, four years into the French Indochina War, Roosevelt was long dead, Harry Truman had assumed office, and the geopolitical landscape looked remarkably different: the Soviet Union had detonated an atomic bomb, Chinese communists had completed their conquest of the mainland, Senator Joseph McCarthy had initiated his now infamous campaign against “softness” toward communism, and the United States was involved in a full-scale war against a Soviet satellite in Korea. In such a political climate the United States regarded Ho Chi Minh and his organization the Viet Minh (the abbreviation for the Vietnam Independence League, formed in 1941) as part of a wider communist threat. The image of France in U.S. policy circles also had evolved with the changing times; the country was no longer a nation of greedy imperialists, but a stalwart opponent of the spread of the “red menace” in Asia. Thus, in much the same spirit as the Berlin airlift (1948–1949) and the postwar provision of monetary assistance to Greece and Turkey, the United States offered financial support to France in its quest for repossession of Vietnam. The allotment in 1950 started at $10 million, but it rapidly grew to $1.06 billion by 1954. In fact, a full 80 percent of the French war effort was paid for by the United States.

Despite the substantial U.S. support, the French were unable to prevail, and they eventually withdrew entirely after the battle of Dien Bien Phu in spring 1954. The resounding defeat (13,200 of the 16,000 French soldiers were either killed or captured) drove both sides to the bargaining table (along with, among others, the United States, China, and Soviet Union) at the 1954 Geneva Conference, where an agreement was reached to temporarily partition the country at the seventeenth parallel. A demilitarized zone (DMZ) now divided two governments: the communist North (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam) led by the Viet Minh, and the anticommunist South (the Republic of Vietnam) under the emperor Bao Dai.

The seeds of war were sown in the very language of the Geneva Accords, which called for an election to take place in July 1956 to choose the government of a reunified Vietnam. There was considerable consternation that a Communist government could prevail in a democratic election: Ho Chi Minh had become a popular revolutionary figure throughout Vietnam and, more importantly, no southern leaders had emerged with the charisma to best him in an election. Certainly, few Vietnamese would be willing to support an emperor who owed his very position to French colonialism. A Communist win would pose a setback to Eisenhower’s global strategy of “rolling back” the Communist threat, and U.S. officials warned that the loss of Vietnam would cause a chain reaction, much like the falling of dominoes, as other Southeast Asian nations succumbed to Communist pressures. Recent scholarship has refuted this “domino theory” by arguing that the United States’ military advantage over the Soviet Union at that time demonstrates that important U.S. policymakers such as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles were less afraid of fending off Communist insurgencies and more interested in projecting U.S. power in the region.

Eventually the United States chose to throw its support behind Ngo Dinh Diem, the prime minister of South Vietnam, who was nominated in 1954 by Emperor Bao Dai in the midst of the Geneva Conference. Although he possessed staunch anticommunist credentials, Diem was handicapped by his Catholicism (a religion shared by only 15% of the country’s population), his residence in the United States during the war against the French (which prevented him from capitalizing on the nationalist fervor), and his lack of many political allies other than his own powerful family. He needed help to build a political base and popular support before he could possibly succeed in an election. The United States was willing to offer that assistance, in part because of Diem’s cultivation of important political figures such as intelligence officer Colonel Edward G. Lansdale, and it began channeling aid through Diem, informing all potential rivals that future assistance hinged on Diem’s position at the helm. The gamble to support Diem until he could consolidate power and institute democratic reforms was the means by which the United States found itself inextricably linked to the southern regime.

THE POLICE ACTION

The issue of which side first violated the Geneva Accords will forever remain the fault line dividing historians of the war. Did South Vietnam violate the accords by postponing the elections, claiming (with U.S. support) that free and fair elections could never take place under a Communist government? Or did North Vietnam violate the terms of the accords through its military assistance to Communist guerrillas in the South, the National Liberation Front (NLF)? Although some have claimed that the NLF (also called the Vietcong ) was always composed of northern agents and controlled by Hanoi, and not an indigenous popular movement of the South, there was no clear political relationship between the northern government and the growing insurgency in the South until northern leaders decided in May 1959 that they needed to take control of the movement.

Whatever the answer, the South found itself embroiled in a deadly conflict with the NLF, which had entrenched itself in the Mekong Delta as early as 1957 and in the central highlands by 1958. Afraid that Diem’s power might be threatened by the conflict, the United States almost immediately lent him military assistance. The first deaths recorded on the U.S. Vietnam War Memorial are from 1957, but for the most part the U.S. military’s role remained minor until May 1959, when U.S. military advisors were placed with South Vietnamese regiments as part of a police action. Although the United States described this move as aiding an anti-Communist ally, North Vietnam interpreted the assistance as a continuation of the Western colonialism begun by the French.

The U.S. commitment to Vietnam expanded under the Kennedy administration at the end of 1961 after a series of incidents (most notably the Bay of Pigs) allowed the Republican opposition to portray him as soft on Communism. Consequently, Kennedy chose to take a hard line against the advance of Communism in Southeast Asia, expanding the number of military advisers from 900 to 3,200 by the end of 1961 and then to 11,300 by the end of 1962. Despite these large increases in advisers and despite optimistic Defense Department reports to the contrary, little progress was being made in quelling the insurgency. Prominent U.S. officials began to blame this failure on Diem, claiming that rampant corruption by his friends and family, lack of progress on land reform, and, above all else, an anti-Buddhist policy, were causing him to lose favor with Vietnamese citizens. Diem’s relationship with Buddhists was highlighted by a May 1963 incident in Hue when a deputy provincial chief gave orders to fire on 20,000 Buddhists at a religious celebration. Nine people were killed, and the Buddhist monk Quang Duc was prompted to burn himself a month later, calling for Diem to “show charity and compassion to all religions.” Photographs of his self-immolation appeared in U.S. newspapers and were thought to undermine support for the war effort. Small-scale opposition to the war, mainly on U.S. college campuses, erupted not long after the incident.

Putting pressure on Diem, the United States called for South Vietnamese military leaders to act against Diem’s excesses. How much the United States knew of the southern military’s true plans is a matter of intense debate, but on November 2, 1963, Diem was overthrown in a coup and executed, and General Duong Van Minh (or Big Minh) came to power. (Minh lasted less than two months before another military coup installed Nguyen Khanh.) The overthrow of Diem was followed by an announcement on November 15 that the United States would begin withdrawing 1,000 troops. The withdrawal never happened because a week later Kennedy was assassinated and Vice President Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency. More optimistic about the potential for U.S. victory, Johnson increased the number of U.S. advisers to 21,000.

THE ONSET OF WAR

The Gulf of Tonkin incident served as the catalyst to full U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. On August 2, 1964 the USS Maddox was conducting a routine reconnaissance mission in the gulf when it was fired on by North Vietnamese coastal defense forces. The Maddox easily repelled the attack with air support from the nearby USS Ticonderoga, destroying one torpedo boat in the encounter. President Johnson, who was mired in a tough election campaign, chose a firm but restrained response, rejecting reprisals against the North but warning Hanoi that “grave consequences” would result from further unprovoked military attacks. Then, on August 4, the Maddox and USS Turner Joy picked up radar signals of an apparent torpedo attack from North Vietnamese vessels, and for two hours the ships responded with a torrent of fire against radar targets and took a series of evasive actions. Johnson ordered retaliatory air strikes on North Vietnamese targets and used the event to persuade Congress to pass the August 7 Gulf of Tonkin resolution that authorized the president “to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force.”

Recent scholarship has examined whether the North Vietnamese ever actually attacked during the Tonkin incident. Maddox captain John J. Herrick conceded that the radar signal may have been nothing more than an “overeager sonar man” who “was hearing the ship’s own propeller beat.” The National Security Agency admitted to translation errors in intercepted Vietnamese transmissions that were used as grounds for the second attack. Senator William Fulbright confessed that he felt hoodwinked by the information presented in the 40-minute Senate debate. Most importantly, the scholar Gareth Porter in Perils of Dominance (2005) claimed that important information that cast doubt on the attack may have been concealed from Lyndon Johnson by Robert McNamara, his own secretary of defense.

Thus began the Vietnam War. The United States convinced Australia and New Zealand to contribute troops and material support, and in March 1965 began a series of bombing raids on North Vietnam known as “Rolling Thunder,” with the intention of bringing the Hanoi leadership to the bargaining table. An initial 3,500 ground troops were designated for combat rather than advisory duty in Vietnam; through incremental escalation, the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam grew to 184,000 by the end of 1965 and to 429,000 by the end of 1966.

As the United States geared up for war, young Americans sensed that there would be a return to the draft lottery. The National Committee to the End the War in Vietnam staged the first burning of a draft card in the United States in October 1965. After the Tonkin incident there was also turmoil in South Vietnam, where Nguyen Khanh tried to exploit the new situation with a series of repressive decrees that led to riots in the street and a series of plots and counterplots until Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky grabbed power in the spring of 1965.

North Vietnam attempted to match the U.S. escalation with incursions by its regular army into the central highlands, but a setback with the battle of Ia Drang Valley in November 1965 curtailed the use of their regular army in favor of guerrilla tactics. Even so, at Ia Drang 240 Americans were killed and 450 wounded, sending a shocking signal to the United States that the war would not be won easily or on the cheap.

Most U.S./South Vietnam military activity after Ia Drang focused on three areas. First, search and destroy missions, a favorite of General Westmoreland, the head of U.S. forces in the country, were part of his attrition strategy to kill and capture Vietcong forces in the South. Second, “pacification” was the securing of the South Vietnamese countryside by means of a combination of military protection and development assistance. Finally, efforts were made to cut the Vietcong’s supply line that came down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a dense network of forest paths running through Laos into South Vietnam. Although the CIA began to pick up evidence of enemy activity along the trail as early as 1959, the route was of limited value to the North until 1963, when at the behest of Colonel Bui Tin it was expanded to accommodate trucks and large movements of North Vietnamese regulars. The original intention of Rolling Thunder was to disrupt traffic on the trail, but the bombing raids did not have the desired effect because the North Vietnamese showed remarkable ingenuity in repairing damaged roads and bridges. Moreover, the United States’ use of toxic chemical defoliants such as napalm and Agent Orange along the trail and in other areas to cut back the dense brush and expose Northern forces had devastating effects on Vietnamese civilians; news of this bolstered the antiwar movement in the United States, and protesters and police clashed violently at the University of Wisconsin in October 1967.

The United States attempted again to disrupt the supply network in January 1968 by setting up a fire base along the Laotian border near the town of Khe Sanh. The U.S. marines at the base soon found themselves under heavy attack from North Vietnamese regulars. Only in April did the siege finally end, after an incessant barrage of U.S. artillery and air strikes equivalent to five Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. Khe Sanh served to distract U.S. attention from North Vietnam’s preparations for its largest and best coordinated operation of the war, lasting from January 1968 to July 1969. Known as the Tet Offensive because it occurred during the Tet Nguyen Dan (the Vietnamese name for the Chinese New Year), the operation had North Vietnamese troops driving to the center of South Vietnam’s seven largest cities and attacking thirty provincial capitals from the deep South to the DMZ. The goal of the attacks was to ignite a popular uprising that would result in the overthrow of the South Vietnamese government and withdrawal of U.S. forces. In the first days of the offensive several cities were overrun and a nineteen-man suicide squad managed to seize the U.S. embassy in Saigon for six hours before they were routed. In most areas the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces repulsed the attacks immediately, but in Saigon the fighting lasted almost a week and in Hue bloody house-to-house combat consumed the two sides for over a month. Eventually, Hue was recovered, and Westmoreland declared that allied forces had killed more enemy troops in the last seven days of fighting than the United States had lost since the beginning of the war.

Although North Vietnam’s military objectives had not been achieved in the Tet Offensive, the psychological impact on the American home front was considerable. Many U.S. citizens who had supported the war were shocked by the ferocity of the attack and concluded that the government was misleading them. Members of Johnson’s own cabinet began to turn against the war and resisted calls for more troops. Soon Westmoreland was replaced in Vietnam by Creighton Adams, and that same year, 1968, Johnson announced an “October surprise”—a complete cessation of all air, naval, and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam north of the twentieth parallel as a symbolic gesture to encourage the peace talks taking place in Paris. The Paris talks broke down eventually, as did Johnson’s fortitude. He chose not to run for president in the 1968 election, which was marred by intense antiwar protests at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and eventually won by the Republican candidate Richard Nixon, in part because of his “secret plan” to remove the United States from the war with honor.

THE WIND DOWN

Nixon’s secret plan rested on two pillars. First, “Vietnamization” consisted of the gradual strengthening of the South Vietnamese military until they could hold their own against the NLF and North Vietnamese Army. It was hoped that reducing the combat load of U.S. troops would lessen popular opposition to the war stateside. Second, Nixon’s foreign policy of rapprochement with both China and the Soviet Union, in the midst of the Sino-Soviet split, had the effect of limiting their assistance to North Vietnam.

The diplomatic success was undermined by the negative publicity surrounding two notorious events: the 1968 My Lai massacre, which occurred when a platoon led by William Calley killed several hundred Vietnamese women and children and burned a small town to the ground; and the bombing of Cambodia in 1969, which was intended to destroy NLF sanctuaries and supplies hidden along the Cambodian border. The latter action prompted more protests on U.S. college campuses—four students were shot and killed by National Guard troops during demonstrations at Kent State University in Ohio. On the warfront, one unintended effect of the bombing campaign was to push Communist forces deeper into Cambodia, which destabilized the country and in turn may have encouraged the rise of the Khmer Rouge, who seized power in 1975.

In an effort to help assuage opposition to the war, Nixon announced on October 12, 1970 that the United States would withdraw 40,000 more troops before Christmas. But on October 30th, the worst monsoon to hit Vietnam in six years caused large floods, killed close to 300, left 200,000 Vietnamese homeless, and brought the war effort to a standstill. On January 15, 1973, citing progress in peace negotiations, President Nixon suspended offensive operations in North Vietnam, then followed with a unilateral withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. The Paris Peace Accords were signed on January 27, 1973, officially ending U.S. involvement in the Vietnam conflict. For their efforts, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese lead negotiator Le Duc Tho were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But the fighting in Vietnam continued unabated. In December 1974 the U.S. Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974, thereby cutting off all military funding to the Saigon government and rendering the peace terms negotiated by Kissinger unenforceable. By 1975 the South Vietnamese army stood alone against the powerful North Vietnamese, and Saigon famously fell on April 30, 1975 when two tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace as South Vietnamese who had cooperated with the United States desperately tried to flee the country.

THE AFTERMATH

Vietnam became a unified nation after the war, but at a great cost in terms of human lives and infrastructure, and in 1975 it was one of the world’s poorest countries. Although the population still suffers effects of Agent Orange and unexploded ordinance, economic reform (Doi Moi ) begun in 1986 has drastically reduced poverty from over 70 percent of the population to less than 20 percent and spurred impressive long-term growth throughout the nation. Foreign investment also has played a major role in Vietnam’s economic upturn, with an increasing amount coming from the United States after the normalization of relations in 1995. For South Vietnamese connected with the former regime, the end of the war was a time of fear and resentment. Many highly skilled and educated South Vietnamese fled the country at the fall of Saigon and for years after, severely depleting the nation’s human capital. The new Communist government promptly sent connected South Vietnamese to hard-labor camps for “reeducation,” many for several years. Persecution and poverty prompted an additional two million people to flee Vietnam as “boat people” over the fifteen years following unification. To deal with the severe refugee crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, the United Nations established refugee camps in neighboring countries to process them. Many of these refugees resettled in the United States, forming large Vietnamese American emigrant communities with a decidedly anticommunist viewpoint.

In the United States the war had profound psychological effects, dividing the American public over the contentious issues of the humiliating withdrawal, perceived inequities in the draft, the schism in society created by the antiwar movement, knowledge of the devastation wrought on an impoverished country, and, most importantly, a profound sense of distrust in government, as many Americans believed their elected officials had not been forthcoming about the difficulties of the encounter while young citizens died in unprecedented numbers. Civil military relations were damaged because many soldiers and officers believed a winnable war had been undermined by civilian leadership and politics, and politicians felt that a runaway military had supplied it with misleading reports about the success of operations (particularly pacification). Finally, the role of the media was forever altered by reporters, photographers, and television crews who delivered coverage of the war into American living rooms. Some would hold the media up as heroic truth-tellers; others would blame it for supplying fodder to unpatriotic war protesters.

SEE ALSO Anticolonial Movements; Bay of Pigs; Communism; Coup d’Etat; Domino Theory; Guerrilla Warfare; Imperialism; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Kennedy, John F.; Khrushchev, Nikita; Peace; Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bowman, John S. 2005. The Vietnam War Almanac. New York: Barnes and Noble.

Economist. 2005. Vietnam: Changing Gear. November 26: 49–50.

Ely, John Hart. 1993. War and Responsibility: Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and Its Aftermath. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Herring, George C. 1996. America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Levy, David W. 1995. The Debate over Vietnam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Marr, David G. 1945. Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Miguel, Edward, and Gerard Roland. 2005. The Long Run Impact of Bombing Vietnam. National Bureau of Economic Research working paper no. 11954. Washington, DC.

Porter, Gareth. 2005. Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Scott, Shane. 2005. Vietnam War Intelligence “‘Deliberately Skewed,’” Secret Study Says. New York Times, December 2.

Van Arkadie, Brian, and Raymond Mallon. 2003. Vietnam: A Transition Tiger? Canberra: Asia Pacific Press at Australia National University.

Edmund J. Malesky

Vietnam War

After France withdrew its troops from Indochina in 1954, its former colony was partitioned by the Geneva Accords into North and South until elections could be held to determine the leadership of a united Vietnam. Fearing that Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969)—leader of the North who with the Viet Minh had defeated French troops at Dien Bien Phu—would succeed in uniting the nation as a communist state, the United States supported the South. Over the next decade, US military support for the South escalated, culminating in 1964 air strikes over North Vietnam and the deployment of ground troops the following year. Although the conflict was never officially declared as a war, it was represented and fought as such. By 1975, when the last remaining Americans were airlifted from Saigon, the United States had used in Vietnam over twice the amount of military force that it expended in World War II in both the European and Asian theaters; despite its efforts, North and South Vietnam were united as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1976.

Through advanced firepower and chemical weaponry deployed during more than a decade of military involvement in the region, the United States and its allies succeeded in transforming Vietnam's political, economic, and social realities. But this transformation was not the one envisioned by US political leaders; nor was it the one communicated to the American people when they embarked upon military action in the area. A conflict that had a lasting effect on both the American culture and the Vietnamese culture, the Vietnam War as portrayed in US cinema bears witness to the difficulty the government had in promoting the cause of this war during the conflict and its problematic status in US popular culture for decades to come. Ultimately, the Vietnam War demonstrated both the terrible power and the limitations of America's political aims and national ideology as they were deployed by military action and promoted by the fantasy-making apparatus of cinema.

AMERICAN CINEMA AND THE CHALLENGE OF VIETNAM: 1964–1975

In contrast to the central role played by Hollywood in World War II, representations of the Vietnam War were rare in mainstream American cinema while US troops occupied Southeast Asia. Although a variety of fiction films referenced or showed the influence of the war, few combat films were made about Vietnam during the period of actual combat. Instead, the primary media representation of combat was television news coverage. Because Vietnam was the first "television war," some critics have surmised that an excess of and explicitness in television coverage made the combat film unappealing to audiences—just as some government leaders accused the news media of turning the population against the cause of war. Some vivid, even horrifying, images of the war appeared in print and on television; yet content analyses of television news has shown that, on the whole, war coverage was neither as plentiful nor as sensational as its critics have suggested.

Other factors, both industrial and ideological, appear to have had a more direct effect on the production of war films during the period. Hollywood studios were suffering in the late 1960s from a recession brought on by post-World War II industrial and cultural changes and by their consequent investment in some disastrously unsuccessful blockbuster films. Likewise, there was some difficulty in finding appropriate means to communicate the goals of America's action in Vietnam, as the US government discovered in its failed attempt to utilize techniques drawn from World War II documentary for its first Vietnam-era production, Why Vietnam? (1965). Its title and style deliberately echo Frank Capra's Why We Fight series (1943–1945), as did its rhetorical methods: it attempted to bring a clear moral purpose to the US role in Southeast Asia by comparing Ho Chi Minh to Hitler and Mussolini, thereby representing US action as primarily defensive. It was publicly criticized in 1967, and in 1971 the US Department of Defense report United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967 (also known as the Pentagon Papers) revealed that it had included deliberate misrepresentations. Troubled in its reception, the documentary never achieved its hoped for audience; and, although it continued to be shown to troops, it was pulled from civilian distribution. Similarly unsuccessful in its effort to present the nobility of the American cause, the US Information Agency documentary Vietnam! Vietnam! (1971), a full-color feature-length film executively produced by Hollywood veteran John Ford, was made for international distribution that it never achieved; its clear-cut representations of good versus evil were no longer, considered relevant by the time of its release. Thus for economic and political reasons, both Hollywood studios and the US government were hesitant to put this new war on screen. As a result, by 1970 a number of otherwise successful screenwriters, such as Samuel Fuller, Sy Barlett, and Stanley Kramer, had scripts in circulation that focused on the Vietnam War, but they found no support from studios or from the Pentagon. At the Pentagon, the Department of Defense Motion Picture Production Branch supported only one film during the war, with an estimated $1 million worth of military hardware and expertise: John Wayne's The Green Berets (1968). Studio and governmental reluctance to support projects dealing with Vietnam highlighted what appeared to be the particular difficulty of telling its story—or at least the difficulty of applying the generic formulae that had worked for previous wars, whereby the cause of America is transparently good, the enemy undeniably evil, combat goals clearly defined, and failure unthinkable.

The few combat films made about the Vietnam War during the conflict reflect these difficulties: The Green Berets as well as A Yank in VietNam (1964), Operation C.I.A. (1966), and To the Shores of Hell (1965) made an effort to fit America's complex relation with Vietnam within the parameters of the classic Hollywood narrative and the combat genre, by focusing on a well-defined mission or target; and, each is marked with its own type of ambiguity. Most notable in these terms is the The Green Berets, which applied generic elements of both the World War II combat film and the western in its effort to depict the heroism of the Special Forces and their struggle to protect Vietnamese peasantry from the hostile "Cong." An attempt to garner support for the war when, according to a 1967 poll, public opinion was beginning to move in opposition, it tells the story of a cynical journalist who is swayed to the cause of the war when he witnesses enemy atrocities. In doing so, the film dramatizes the notion that only eyewitnesses can really understand America's war in Vietnam, a war unlike previous wars because its nature and purpose are effectively unrepresentable. The difficulty of understanding and representing Vietnam and its consequent difference from previous wars are themes that persisted in its fictional—and documentary—representations. Films such as the Oscar^®-winning documentary feature La Section Anderson (The Anderson Platoon, 1967) and A Face of War (1968) underplayed political explanation and contexts to focus instead on the day-to-day experiences of war and privileged the "grunt" point of view as the primary site of knowledge about the war.

VETERANS AND ALLEGORIES: 1964–1975

For many critics, the failure of The Green Berets to tell an accurate story of the war and to find and persuade an audience signaled the end of the combat film as a genre. For the duration of the war, Vietnam was represented on screen not by images of battle but by images of the war's veterans. Films focusing solely on individuals tended to depoliticize and personalize the conflict. The earliest of these were low-budget, independently produced "exploitation" pictures that incorporated Vietnam veterans into narratively simple, sensationalist, and action-oriented biker, blaxploitation, and horror films designed to capitalize on the topicality of Vietnam. Later these films would be joined by a few independent features, studio-produced exploitation pictures, and made-for-television melodramas. Taken together, they demonstrate the way that Vietnam was first imagined on screen as primarily a domestic problem for the United States and as a violent disruption of the status quo—another thematic trope that continued in representations of the war well after 1975.

Biker films produced by companies such as American International Pictures (AIP) featured violent veterans, often characterized as former Green Berets whose fighting skills are used in and against the United States. In such films, war's violence comes home with the veteran who fights against the police, the establishment, and other gangs, as in Angels from Hell (1968) or The Hard Ride (1971); or veterans may take over the role of the police as dispensers of vigilante justice, as in The BornLosers (1967) and Chrome and Hot Leather (1971). Although such films had little to say about the war directly, their emphasis on the rage and violence of veterans is worth noting—particularly given the fact that they were most heavily distributed in those rural and urban areas of the United States where the draft hit hardest. Of particular interest in these terms are black-themed action or blaxploitation films that featured black veterans who return to battle the mob, drug dealers, and murderers of their family and friends. In the way that such films as Slaughter (1972), Black Gunn (1972), and Gordon's War (1973) focused on black communities and families alienated from white lawmakers and official sources of power, they blended references to the Vietnam War with representations of militant black power. In doing so, they obliquely referenced the politicization of black soldiers and civilians and their opposition to a war viewed as irrelevant to the needs and priorities of black America.

In addition to these action-oriented films, low-budget horror films likewise featured violent veterans as a metonym for war brought home to America. Such films as Psycho a Go-Go (1965) and The Crazies (1973) associated the war with psychosomatic transformations that produce monsters. The low-budget Canadian-produced Deathdream (also known as Dead of Night, 1972) voiced tacit criticism through its graphic horror, as an undead veteran systematically takes revenge on the family and community members who sent him to war.

Outside of generic exploitation formats, other low-budget independent productions dealt with many of the same tropes of war invading the home through the figure of the veteran. Such films offered space for directors blocked from mainstream production to comment on the war and its effects, for the low-budget milieu of the domestic melodrama or the art cinema feature allowed them to circumvent Pentagon support and the large-scale, studio-based funding required for films in the combat genre. For instance, when Elia Kazan was unable to obtain studio backing for his Vietnam War screenplays, he shot what he called a "home movie," using his own home as a set and a script written by his son, Chris. In The Visitors (1972), which mixes family melodrama with graphic violence, veterans visit an old buddy who testified against them for war crimes, kill his dog, and rape his wife before leaving. Brian De Palma's Greetings (1968) and Hi, Mom! (1970) work for more comic effect with draft dodgers and psychotic veterans who blend in with the generally surreal landscape that is De Palma's vision of America during the war years.

By 1971 low-budget films featuring violent vets had become lucrative enough to attract the interest of Hollywood, in particular, the sequel to Born Losers, Billy Jack (1971), which by 1973 had grossed $60 million and attracted a family audience with its fight-for-peace vigilantism. Just as in the 1960s Hollywood studios had borrowed aspects of European art cinema to win over younger and more educated audiences no longer interested in its standard family entertainment fare, in the 1970s they imported plotlines, marketing strategies, and exhibition techniques from exploitation pictures. Along with simplified plots and sensational violence, they took up the theme of returned veterans-turned-violent vigilantes: in 1973 Magnum Force and The Stone Killer and their stars Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, respectively, ushered in a new generation of action heroes. By the mid-1970s the figure of the violent, often psychotic, veteran was so familiar that in Taxi Driver (1976) a brief mention of Vietnam provides ample motivation for the psychosocial and physical transformations experienced by its troubled protagonist, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro).

At the same time that the combat genre was replaced by films that represented the war indirectly in the person of the returned Vietnam veteran, and low-budget exploitation films capitalized on Americans' emotional responses to Vietnam, some mainstream productions appeared to offer covert criticism of the war. The western, like the combat film, had long served as a vehicle for America's perception of itself and its history, offering mythic representations of the frontier, Manifest Destiny, the relation between civilization and wilderness, and the nature of heroism and masculinity. Released after revelations of the My Lai massacre in 1969, revisionist westerns like Little Big Man (1970), Soldier Blue (1970), and Ulzana's Raid (1972) appeared to reference such atrocities in their representation of violence between Native Americans and white settlers; in doing so, they critically reconsidered the mythic basis of American identity and offered a tacit critique of US policies in Southeast Asia. Such allegorical representations notwithstanding, explicitly antiwar films were as rare in American mainstream cinema as combat films were during the conflict. However, the year after US troops were withdrawn, the antiwar documentary Hearts and Minds (1974), which combined archival footage and interviews with veterans to excite emotional responses against the war, was widely distributed throughout the United States and won an Academy Award^® the same year.

AMERICAN CINEMA AFTER THE WAR

Fewer representations of Vietnam veterans appeared on screen for several years after the withdrawal of troops, but this changed with a series of films, such as Who'll Stop the Rain (1978), Coming Home (1978), and Birdy (1984), that featured violent or victimized veterans who stand in for the war's effects on America. Coming Home, for example, narrowly focuses its antiwar message on the damage inflicted on the bodies and minds of American soldiers. It seeks to resolve the problems of war—which it imagines primarily as problems of masculine identity—within the conventions of melodrama, by working through a love triangle that includes two veterans with very different perspectives on the war and their role as soldiers, along with the political-but-bankable star, Jane Fonda.

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA
b. Detroit, Michigan, 7 April 1939

Francis Ford Coppola is an independent whose career has undergone wide fluctuations both in critical and popular reception and in financial resources. A major figure of the so-called "movie brat" generation, he emerged in the 1960s among the wave of filmmakers who had studied film formally before making them. Known primarily for The Godfather trilogy—The Godfather (1972), The Godfather: Part II (1974), and The Godfather: Part III (1990)—Coppola's greatest achievement in film may be his Vietnam war epic, Apocalypse Now (1979).

Raised in a family involved in the arts, in the early 1960s Coppola studied film at UCLA, a program that has produced a number of other important filmmakers. While still in film school he worked on several films, including his first feature, Dementia 13 (1963) for B-movie king Roger Corman. Coppola's thesis project, the youth comedy You're a Big Boy Now (1966), was distributed theatrically by Warner Bros. He established his own production company, American Zoetrope, in 1969, but the company foundered financially and eventually filed for bankruptcy. The Conversation (1974), about a troubled surveillance expert, which he wrote and directed, garnered both Oscar^® nominations and a Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival; the film displayed Coppola's art-film aspirations, but the commercial success of The Godfather—at one point it ranked as the most successful film of all time—was more influential on Coppola's career.

Apocalypse Now, loosely based on Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, is the story of a Special Forces captain (Martin Sheen), who is assigned to travel up the Nung river in Cambodia during the Vietnam War in search of an infamous rogue officer (Marlon Brando), who has established his own violent cult society somewhere upriver, and "terminate him with extreme prejudice." The making of the film was plagued by a number of legendary difficulties (as well as a ballooning budget); as a result of long delays in production, the film loses a degree of narrative coherence but gains in its place an almost hallucinatory power in evoking the absurdity and confusion of a war that few Americans understood.

Coppola's career since Apocalypse Now has been uneven. One from the Heart (1982), his first film after Apocalypse Now, is fascinating as a stylish musical set entirely in an expressionist Las Vegas, but it failed to connect with audiences. The overblown Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) was more successful at the box office; his two adaptations of S. E. Hinton's novels about youth growing up in 1960s Oklahoma, Rumble Fish (1983) and The Outsiders (1983), are among his most interesting work. Coppola also has produced films by other important directors such as Wim Wenders and Akira Kurosawa and been involved in a number of publishing ventures.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), The Godfather: Part II (1974), Apocalypse Now (1979), Gardens of Stone (1987), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

FURTHER READING

Chown, Jeffrey. Hollywood Auteur: Francis Coppola. New York: Praeger, 1988.

Kolker, Robert Philip. A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Phillips, Gene D. Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004.

——, ed. Francis Ford Coppola: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004.

Schumacher, Michael. Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker's Life. New York: Crown Publishers, 1999.

Barry Keith Grant

The most notable change in the cinematic representation of Vietnam after the war was that mainstream filmmakers

appeared to feel confident enough in their audience to put Vietnam combat on screen for the first time. Late 1970s war films reflected Americans' ambivalence about—and its exhaustion from—the war. The Boys in Company C (1978) and Go Tell the Spartans (1978), both relatively modest but carefully scripted encounters with the madness of that war, attracted little critical response. By contrast, Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978) and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) both won multiple awards for their epic treatments of the war and its insanity. Cimino's film portrayed the effects of war on a community of second-generation Ukranian-American steelworkers, employing a blend of naturalism (in setting, acting, cinematography) and fantasy (motifs of the "one shot" of Russian roulette) designed to evoke an emotional response to its image of shattered innocence and belief. The stylistic excesses of Coppola's film, offering a nearly surrealist image of the war, were used in a similar way to evoke a subjective sense of the war's losses. Garnering praise for their style, performances, and direction, both films were also strongly criticized for their lack of historical specificity. Instead of a historically accurate depiction of the war, they offered a mythic space in which national and personal ideals were explored and challenged. Rather like Hollywood's representation of the West in frontier days, such representations were best understood not according to their historical veracity, but in terms of their applicability to the contemporary values and beliefs of the audience.

The films that followed in the early 1980s likewise constructed a mythic Vietnam: the POW/MIA revenge films Uncommon Valor (1983), Missing in Action (1984), and Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) all combined the spectacular elements of action cinema with right-wing nationalistic fantasy to refigure the vigilante of 1970s exploitation cinema as a lone veteran who returns to Vietnam, this time "to win." In each case the focus of the veteran/soldier's quest is the MIA/POW: soldiers unaccounted for after the repatriation of POWs in 1973 were, according to the logic of these films, still alive; likewise, the Vietnam War had never ended. A complex figure, despite the simplicity of its film treatment, the MIA/POW of these films stands in for all that was lost during the turbulent period of the war, including trust in the government in the wake of the revelations of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. The vigilante heroes of these films fight as much against government corruption as they do against evil communists; the films offer narrative engagements with the numerous conspiracy theories that circled around America's conduct of the war and its treatment of its own soldiers.

During the latter half of the 1980s, a more recognizable war returned to the screen in such films as Platoon (1986), Hamburger Hill (1987), Full Metal Jacket (1989), Casualties of War (1989), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and 84C MoPic (1989). These works made a stylistic shift from the action-adventure films that preceded them in the first part of the decade; they were marketed and praised for the realism, authenticity, and verifiability of their presentation of war. Employing the generically familiar traits of the World War II combat film, they reference extra-cinematic authorities, eyewitness accounts, and real historical events to buttress their claims to historical truth. They provided a sense of authenticity in their settings, with 1960s fashions, consumer goods, and recognizable locations. They were perhaps most persuasive—and influential on the war film—in their representation of the visual and aural texture of battle; We Were Soldiers (2002), which depicts the war's first major battle of 1965, is evidence of their ongoing influence. While a film like Apocalypse Now affected viewers with the surreality of its image of Vietnam, these films focused instead on its visceral character: their sense of verifiability was confirmed by camera movement that referenced combat and documentary reportage; and their soundtracks heightened the effect with period rock music, bone-shaking weapons' fire, and the slap-thud of Hueys.

Yet, at the same time that they offered a Vietnam never before seen—or heard—on screen, the representations of combat in these 1980s films were indebted to earlier representations of the war that likewise invoked the individual, eyewitness experience as the key to understanding it. Similar in these terms was the TV-documentary Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam (1987), made for HBO and later given theatrical release. Featuring dramatic readings of letters from soldiers, their families, and their loved ones, it emphasizes personal experience over politics and ideology to produce a therapeutic text of remembrance. Its critics viewed it as a profoundly political film, however, for the way that it forestalled any critical or oppositional stance toward the war via its emotional engagement with the soldiers' experience.

In the 1990s and 2000s, following the American victory in the Cold War and its—somewhat anticlimactic and short-lived—triumph in the Persian Gulf, the Vietnam War was less prevalent on screen, despite the fact that documentaries such as Daughter from Danang (2002)—which recounted the reunion of an Amerasian woman and her Vietnamese mother—served as a reminder of the ongoing effects of war on both soldiers and non-combatants. Some critics observed that the popularity of Forrest Gump (1994) signaled the end of America's struggle with this chapter of its history: its slow-witted protagonist's affability and ignorance effectively smoothed the edges of every major event of the 1960s in which he unwittingly participated—including the Vietnam War. Nevertheless, Coppola's remixed and restored Apocalypse Now Redux (2001) seems as relevant as its 1979 predecessor as a film that recognizes and confronts the madness and excess of war: Vietnam was not the first—or last—conflict to inspire such films, but they are an important part of its legacy in American cinema.

SEE ALSO Genre;Historical Films;Violence;War Films

FURTHER READING

Adair, Gilbert. Hollywood's Vietnam: From "The Green Berets" to "Apocalypse Now". New York: Proteus, 1981.

Anderegg, Michael, ed. Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1991.

Auster, Albert, and Leonard Quart. How the War Was Remembered: Hollywood and Vietnam. New York: Praeger, 1988.

Berg, Rick. "Losing Vietnam: Covering the War in an Age of Technology." Cultural Critique 3 (1986): 92–125.

Dittmar, Linda, and Gene Michaud, eds. From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

Hansen, Miriam. "Traces of Transgression in Apocalypse Now." Social Text 3 (Fall 1980): 123–135.

Howell, Amanda. "Lost Boys and Angry Ghouls: Vietnam's Undead." Genders 23 (1996): 297–334.

James, David. "Rock and Roll in Representations of the Invasion of Vietnam." Representations 29 (1990): 78–98.

Smith, Julian. Looking Away: Hollywood and Vietnam. New York: Scribner's, 1975.

Springer, Claudia. "Defense Department Films from World War II to Vietnam." Cultural Critique 3 (Spring 1986): 151–167.

Studlar, Gaylyn, and David Desser. "Never Having to Say You're Sorry: Rambo's Rewriting of the Vietnam War." Film Quarterly 42, no.1 (1988): 9–16.

Walker, Mark. Vietnam Veteran Films. Metuchen, NJ and London: Scarecrow Press, 1991.

Amanda Howell

Vietnam War

█ JUDSON KNIGHT

The Vietnam War was a struggle between communist and pro-western forces that lasted from the end of World War II until 1975. The communist Viet Minh, or League for the Independence of Vietnam, sought to gain control of the entire nation from its stronghold in the north. Opposing it were, first, France, and later the United States and United Nations forces, who supported the non-communist forces in southern Vietnam. In 1975, in violation of a 1973 peace treaty negotiated to end United States military involvement in South Vietnam and active war against North Vietnam, North Vietnamese forces and South Vietnamese communist sympathizers seized control of South Vietnam

and reunited the two countries into a single communist country.

American involvement in Vietnam has long been a subject of controversy. The fighting depended, to a greater extent than in any conflict before, on the work of intelligence forces. Most notable among these were various U.S. military intelligence organizations, as well as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Early stages. Led by Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969), the Viet Minh aligned themselves with the Soviets from the 1920s. However, they configured their struggle not in traditional communist terms as a class struggle, but as a war for national independence and unity, and against foreign domination. Vietnam at the time was under French control as part of Indochina, and World War II provided the first opportunity for a Viet Minh uprising against the French, in 1940. France, by then aligned with the Axis under the Vichy government, rapidly suppressed the revolt. Nor did the free French, led by General Charles de Gaulle, welcome the idea of Vietnamese independence.

After the war was over, de Gaulle sent troops to resume control, and fighting broke out between French and Viet Minh forces on December 19, 1946. On May 7, 1954, the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu fell to the Viet Minh after an eight-week siege. Two months later, in July 1954, the French signed the Geneva Accords, by which they formally withdrew from Vietnam.

The Geneva Accords divided the country along the 17th parallel, but this division was to be only temporary, pending elections in 1956. However, in 1955 Ngo Dinh Diem declared the southern portion of the nation the Republic of Vietnam, with a capital at Saigon. In 1956, Diem, with the backing of the United States, refused to allow elections, and fighting resumed. The conflict was now between South Vietnam and the communist republic of North Vietnam, whose capital was Hanoi. Fighting the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) were not only the regular army forces of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), but also Viet Cong, guerrillas from the South who had received training and arms from the North.

American involvement. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had already sent the first U.S. military and civilian advisers to Vietnam in 1955, and four years later, two military advisers became the first American casualties in the conflict. The administration of President John F. Kennedy greatly expanded U.S. commitments to Vietnam, such that by late 1962 the number of military advisers had grown to 11,000. At the same time, Washington's support for the unpopular

Diem had faded, and when American intelligence learned of plans for a coup by his generals, the United States did nothing to stop it. Diem was assassinated on November 1, 1963.

Under President Lyndon B. Johnson, U.S. participation in the Vietnam War reached its zenith. The beginnings of the full-scale commitment came after August 2, 1964, when North Vietnamese gunboats in the Gulf of Tonkin attacked the U.S. destroyer Maddox. Requesting power from Congress to strike back, Johnson received it in the form of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted the president virtual carte blanche to prosecute the war in Vietnam.

High point of the war. As a result of his strengthened position to wage war, and still enjoying broad support from the American public, Johnson launched a bombing campaign against North Vietnam in late 1964, and again in March 1965, after a Viet Cong attack on a U.S. installation at Pleiku. By June 1965, as the first U.S. ground troops arrived, U.S. troop strength stood at 50,000. By year's end, it would be near 200,000.

General William C. Westmoreland, who had assumed command of U.S. forces in Vietnam in June 1964, maintained that victory required a sufficient commitment of ground troops. Yet by the mid-1960s, the NVA had begun moving into the South via the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and as communist forces began to take more villages and hamlets, they seemed poised for victory. Johnson pledged greater support, but despite growing number of ground troops and intensive bombing of the North in 1967, U.S. victory remained elusive.

The turning point in the U.S. effort came on January 30, 1968, when the NVA and Viet Cong launched a surprise attack during celebrations of the Vietnamese lunar new year, or Tet. The Tet Offensive, though its value as a military victory for the North is questionable, was an enormous psychological victory that convinced Americans that short of annihilation of North Vietnam—an unacceptable geopolitical alternative—they could not win a Korea-like standoff or outright victory in Vietnam. In March 1968, Johnson called for an end to bombing north of the 20th parallel, and announced that he would not seek reelection. Westmoreland, too, was relieved of duty.

Withdrawal (1969–75). The administration of President Richard Nixon in 1969 began withdrawing, and instituted a process of "Vietnamization," or turning control of the war over to the South Vietnamese. In 1970, the most significant military activity took place in Cambodia and Laos, where U.S. B-52 bombers continually pounded the Ho Chi Minh Trail in an effort to cut off supply lines.

Despite the bombing campaign, undertaken in pursuit of Vietnamization and the goal of making the war winnable for the South, the North continued to advance. On January 27, 1973, the United States and North Vietnam signed the Paris Peace Accords, and U.S. military involvement in Vietnam ended.

During the two years that followed, the North Vietnamese gradually advanced on the South. On April 30, 1975, communist forces took control of Saigon as government members and supporters fled. On July 2, 1976, the country was formally united as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and Saigon renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

The intelligence and special operations war. Behind and alongside the military war was an intelligence and special operations war that likewise dated back to World War II. At that time, the United States, through the Organization of Strategic Services (OSS), actually worked closely with Viet Minh operatives, who OSS agents regarded as reliable allies against the Japanese. Friendly relations with the Americans continued after the Japanese surrender, when OSS supported the cause of Vietnamese independence.

This stance infuriated the French, who sought to reestablish control while avoiding common cause with the Viet Minh. They attempted to cultivate or create a number of local groups, among them a Vietnamese mafia-style organization, that would work on their behalf against the Viet Minh. These efforts, not to mention the participation of one of the world's most well-trained special warfare contingents, the Foreign Legion, availed the French little gain.

Special Forces, military intelligence, and CIA. In the first major U.S. commitment to Vietnam, Kennedy brought to bear several powerful weapons that together signified his awareness that Vietnam was not a war like the others America had fought: the newly created Special Forces group, known popularly as the "Green Berets," as well as CIA and a host of military intelligence organizations.

Though Special Forces are known popularly for their prowess in physical combat, their mission in Vietnam from the beginning had a strong psychological warfare component. In May 1961, Kennedy committed 400 of these elite troops to the war in Southeast Asia, and more would follow.

Alongside them, in many cases, were military intelligence personnel, whose ranks in Vietnam numbered 3,000 by 1967. Most of these were in two army units, the Army Security Agency (ASA) and the Military Intelligence Corps. The work of military intelligence ranged from the signals intelligence of ASA, one of whose members became the first regular-army U.S. soldier to die in combat in 1961, to the electronic intelligence conducted by navy destroyers such as the ill-fated Maddox. In addition, military aircraft such as the SR-71 Blackbird and U-2 conducted extensive aerial reconnaissance.

As for CIA, by the time the war reached its height in the mid-to late 1960s, it had some 700 personnel in Vietnam. Many of these operated undercover groups that included the Office of the Special Assistant to the Ambassador (OSA, led by future CIA chief William Colby), which occupied a large portion of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

Cooperation and conflict. These three major arms of the intelligence and special operations war—Special Forces and other elite units, military intelligence, and CIA—often worked together. When Kennedy sent in the first contingent of Special Forces, they went to work alongside CIA, to whom the president in 1962 gave responsibility for paramilitary operations in Vietnam.

Unbeknownst to most Americans, CIA was also in charge of paramilitary operations in two countries where the United States was not officially engaged: Cambodia and Laos. Long before Nixon's campaign to cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail with strategic bombers, CIA operatives were training a clandestine army of tribesmen and mercenaries in Laos. Ordinary U.S. troops were not involved in this sideshow war in the interior of Southeast Asia: only Special Forces, who—in order to conceal their identity as American troops—bore neither U.S. markings nor U.S. weaponry.

CIA and army intelligence personnel worked on another notorious operation, Phoenix, an attempt to seek out and neutralize communist personnel in South Vietnam during the period from 1967 to 1971. CIA claimed to have killed, captured, or turned as many as 60,000 enemy agents and guerrillas in Phoenix, a project noted for the ruthlessness with which it was carried out. In this undertaking, CIA and the army had the nominal assistance of South Vietnamese intelligence, but due to an abiding U.S. mistrust of their putative allies, the Americans gave the Saigon little actual role in Phoenix.

The military and CIA debacles. In other situations, CIA and military groups did not so much intentionally collaborate as they found themselves thrown together, often at cross-purposes, or at least in ways that were not mutually beneficial. While U.S. Navy destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin were monitoring North Vietnamese electronic transmissions, CIA was busy striking at Viet Minh naval facilities with fast craft whose South Vietnamese (or otherwise non-American) crews made CIA involvement deniable. But North Vietnamese intelligence was as capable as its military, and they fired on the Maddox in direct response to this CIA operation.

The U.S. military became involved in another CIA debacle when, in 1968, army intelligence tried to resume a failed effort by CIA's Studies and Observation Group (SOG), another cover organization. From the early 1960s, SOG had been attempting to parachute South Vietnamese agents into North Vietnam, with the intention of using them as saboteurs and agents provocateur. The effort backfired, with most of the infiltrators dead, imprisoned, or used by the North Vietnamese as bait. CIA put a stop to the undertaking, but army intelligence tried to succeed where CIA had failed—only to lose several hundred more Vietnamese agents.

The U.S. Air Force had to take over another unsuccessful CIA operation, Black Shield, which involved a series of reconnaissance flights by A-12 Oxcart spy planes over North Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. Using the A-12, which could reach speeds of Mach 3.1 (2,300 m.p.h. or 3,700 k.p.h.), Black Shield gathered extensive information on Soviet-built surface-to-air missile (SAM) installations in the North. To obtain the best possible photographic intelligence, the Oxcarts had to fly relatively low and slow, and in the fall of 1967 North Vietnamese SAMs hit—but did not down—an A-71. In 1968, the U.S. Air Force, operating SR-71 Blackbirds, replaced CIA.

Assessing CIA in Vietnam. Despite the notorious nature of Phoenix or the CIA undertakings in Cambodia and Laos, as well as the occasions when CIA overplayed its hand or placed the military in the position of cleaning up one of its failed operations, CIA involvement in Vietnam was far from an unbroken record of failure. One success was Air America. The latter, a proprietary airline chartered in 1949, supplied the secret war in the interior, and also undertook a number of other operations in Vietnam and other countries in Asia. That Air America was only disbanded in 1981, long after the war ended, illustrates its effectiveness.

The popular image of CIA operatives in Vietnam as fiends blinded by hatred of communism—an image bolstered by Hollywood—is as lacking in historical accuracy as it is in depth of characterization. Like other Americans involved in Vietnam, members of CIA began with the belief that they could and would save a vulnerable nation from Soviet-style totalitarianism and provide its people with an opportunity to develop democratic institutions, establish prosperity, and find peace. Much more quickly than their counterparts in the military and political communities, however, members of the intelligence community came to recognize the fallacies on which their undertaking was based.

Intelligence vs. the military and the politicians. Whereas many political and military leaders adhered to standard interpretations about the North Vietnamese, such as the idea that they were puppets of Moscow whose power depended entirely on force, CIA operatives with closer contact to actual Vietnamese sources recognized the appeal of the Viet Minh nationalist message. And because CIA recognized the strength of the enemy, their estimate of America's ability to win the war—particularly as the troop buildup began in the mid-1960s—became less and less optimistic.

CIA appraisal of the situation tended to be far less sanguine than that of General Westmoreland and other military leaders, and certainly less so than that of President Johnson and other political leaders far removed from the conflict. In 1965, for instance, CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) produced a joint study in which they predicted that the bombing campaign would do little to soften North Vietnam. This was not a position favored by Washington, however, so it received little attention.

Whereas Washington favored an air campaign, General Westmoreland maintained that the war would be won by ground forces. Both government and military leaders agreed on one approach: the use of statistics as a benchmark of success or failure. In terms of the number of bombs dropped, cities hit, or Viet Cong and NVA killed, American forces seemed to be winning. Yet for every guerrilla killed, the enemy seemed to produce two or three more in his place, and every village bombed seemed only to increase enemy resistance.

The lessons of Vietnam. In the end, the United States effort in Vietnam was undone by the singularity of aims possessed by its enemies in the North; the instability and unreliability of its allies in the South, combined with American refusal to give the South Vietnamese a greater role in their own war; and a divergence of aims on the part of American leaders.

For example, the Tet Offensive, which resulted in so many Viet Cong deaths that the guerrilla force was essentially eliminated, and NVA regulars took the place of the Viet Cong, is remembered as a victory for the North. And it was a victory in psychological, if not military, terms. The surprise, fear, and disappointment elicited by the Tet Offensive—combined with a rise of political dissent within the United States—punctured America's will to wage the war, and marked the beginning of the end of American participation in Vietnam.

For some time, U.S. college campuses had seen small protests against the war, but in 1968 the number of these demonstrations grew dramatically, as did the ranks of participants. Nor were youth the only Americans now opposing the war in large numbers: increasingly, other sectors of society—including influential figures in the media, politics, the arts, and even the sciences—began to make their opposition known. In the final years of Vietnam, there was a secondary war being fought in the United States—a war concerning America's vision of itself and its role in the world.

By war's end, Vietnam itself had largely been forgotten. Despite earlier promises of a liberal democratic government, the unified socialist republic fell prey to the exigencies typical of communist dictatorship: mass imprisonments and executions, forced redistribution of land, and the banning of political opposition. Forgotten, too, were Laos and even Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge launched a campaign of genocide that killed an estimated two million people.

The Vietnamese invasion in 1979 probably saved thousands of Cambodian lives, but in the aftermath, Vietnam came to be regarded as a colonialist power. The nation once admired by the third world for standing up to America now became a pariah, supported only by Moscow—which had gained access to a valuable warm-water port at Cam Ranh Bay—and its allies in Eastern Europe.

During the remainder of the 1970s, America was in retreat, its attention turned away from the fate of countries that fell to communism or, in the case of Iran, to Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship. Americans focused their anger on those they regarded as having led them astray during the war years: politicians, the military, and CIA, which came under intense scrutiny during the 1975–76 Church committee hearings in the U.S. Senate. Only in the 1980s, under President Ronald Reagan, did the United States return to an activist stance globally.

█ FURTHER READING:

BOOKS:

Allen, George W. None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001.

Conboy, Kenneth K., and Dale Andradé. Spies and Commandos: How America Lost the Secret War in North Vietnam. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2000.

Kissinger, Henry. Years of Renewal. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999.

Shultz, Richard G. The Secret War against Hanoi: Kennedy's and Johnson's Use of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.

Sorley, Lewis. A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999.

Wirtz, James J. The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.

ELECTRONIC:

Vietnam War Declassification Project. Gerald R. Ford Library and Museum. <http://www.ford.utexas.edu/library/exhibits/vietnam/> (February 5, 2003).

SEE ALSO

CIA (United States Central Intelligence Agency)
Cold War (1950–1972)
Cold War (1972–1989): The Collapse of the Soviet Union
Johnson Administration (1963–1969), United States National Security Policy
Kennedy Administration (1961–1963), United States National Security Policy
Nixon Administration (1969–1974), United States National Security Policy

VIETNAM WAR

VIETNAM WAR, fought from 1957 until spring 1975, began as a struggle between the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) supported by the United States and a Communist-led insurgency assisted by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). Eventually, both the United States and North Vietnam committed their regular military forces to the struggle. North Vietnam received economic and military assistance from the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. The Republic of Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the Philippines furnished troops to the U.S.–South Vietnamese side. With 45,943 U.S. battle deaths, Vietnam was the fourth costliest war the country fought in terms of loss of life.

The Vietnam War was a continuation of the Indochina War of 1946–1954, in which the Communist dominated Vietnamese nationalists (Viet Minh) defeated France's attempt to reestablish colonial rule. American involvement began in 1950 when President Harry S. Truman invoked the Mutual Defense Assistance Act of 1949 to provide aid to French forces in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Early U.S. aims were to halt the spread of Communism and to encourage French participation in the international defense of Europe.

Even with U.S. aid in the form of materiel and a Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), the French could not defeat the Viet Minh use of both guerrilla warfare and conventional attacks. Ending the Indochina War, the Geneva Accords of 1954 divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel with a three-mile Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). The partition in effect created two nations: the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north with its capital at Hanoi, and the Republic of Vietnam in the south with its capital at Saigon. Vietnam's neighbors, Laos and

Cambodia, became independent nations under nominally neutralist governments.

The administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower provided aid and support to the government of Ngo Dinh Diem. The MAAG, which grew in strength from 342 personnel to nearly 700, helped Diem to build up his armed forces. In 1956, with Eisenhower's concurrence, Diem refused to participate in the national elections called for in the Geneva Accords, asserting that South Vietnam had not acceded to the agreement and that free elections were impossible in the north, and declared himself president of the Republic of Vietnam.

During the first years of his rule, Diem, assisted by the MAAG, American civilian advisers, and by $190 million a year in U.S. financial aid, established effective armed forces and a seemingly stable government. He defeated or co-opted South Vietnamese rivals, resettled some 800,000 Catholic refugees from North Vietnam, initiated land reform, and conducted a campaign to wipe out the Viet Minh organization that remained in the south. Although strong on the surface, however, Diem's regime was inefficient and riddled with corruption. Its land reform brought little benefit to the rural poor. Commanded by generals selected for loyalty to Diem rather than ability, the armed forces were poorly trained and low in morale. The anti–Viet Minh campaign alienated many peasants, and Diem's increasingly autocratic rule turned much of the urban anticommunist elite against him.

Anticipating control of South Vietnam through elections and preoccupied with internal problems, North Vietnam's charismatic leader, Ho Chi Minh, at first did little to exploit the vulnerabilities of the southern regime. Nevertheless, Ho and his colleagues were committed to the liberation of all of Vietnam and had accepted the Geneva Accords only with reluctance, under pressure from the Russians and Chinese, who hoped to avoid another Korea-type confrontation with the United States. In deference to his allies' caution and to American power, Ho moved slowly at the outset against South Vietnam.

Beginning in 1957, the southern Viet Minh, with authorization from Hanoi, launched a campaign of political subversion and terrorism, and gradually escalated a guerrilla war against Diem's government. Diem quickly gave the insurgents the label Viet Cong (VC), which they retained throughout the ensuing struggle. North Vietnam created a political organization in the south, the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF), ostensibly a broad coalition of elements opposed to Diem but controlled from the north by a Communist inner core. To reinforce the revived insurgency, Hanoi began sending southward soldiers and political cadres who had regrouped to North Vietnam after the armistice in 1954. These men, and growing quantities of weapons and equipment, traveled to South Vietnam via a network of routes through eastern Laos called the Ho Chi Minh Trail and by sea in junks and trawlers. At this stage, however, the vast majority of Viet Cong were native southerners, and they secured most of their weapons and supplies by capture from government forces.

Building on the organizational base left from the French war and exploiting popular grievances against Diem, the Viet Cong rapidly extended their political control of the countryside. Besides conducting small guerrilla operations, they gradually began to mount larger assaults with battalion and then regimental size light infantry units. As the fighting intensified, the first American deaths occurred in July 1959, when two soldiers of the MAAG were killed during a Viet Cong attack on Bien Hoa, north of Saigon. By the time President John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, it was clear that America's ally needed additional help.

Kennedy viewed the conflict in South Vietnam as a test case of Communist expansion by means of local "wars of national liberation." For that reason, as well as a continuing commitment to the general policy of "containment," Kennedy enlarged the U.S. effort in South Vietnam. He sent in more advisers to strengthen Diem's armed forces, provided additional funds and equipment, and deployed American helicopter companies and other specialized units. To carry out the enlarged program, Kennedy created a new joint (army, navy, air force) headquarters in Saigon, the Military Assistance Command,

Vietnam (MACV). The number of Americans in South Vietnam increased to more than 16,000 and they began engaging in combat with the Viet Cong.

After a promising start, the Kennedy program faltered. Diem's dictatorial rule undermined South Vietnamese military effectiveness and fed popular discontent, especially among the country's numerous Buddhists. An effort to relocate the rural population in supposedly secure "strategic hamlets" collapsed due to poor planning and ineffective execution. With support from the Kennedy administration, Diem's generals overthrew and assassinated him in a coup d'etat on 1 November 1963.

Diem's death, followed by the assassination of President Kennedy on 22 November 1963, did nothing to improve allied fortunes. As a succession of unstable Saigon governments floundered, the Viet Cong began advancing from guerrilla warfare to larger attacks aimed at destroying the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN). To reinforce the campaign, Hanoi infiltrated quantities of modern Communist-bloc infantry weapons, and in late 1964, began sending units of its regular army into South Vietnam. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, during 1964 increased American military manpower in South Vietnam to 23,300 and tried to revive the counterinsurgency campaign. However, political chaos in Saigon and growing Viet Cong strength in the countryside frustrated his efforts and those of the MACV commander, General William C. Westmoreland.

Johnson and his advisers turned to direct pressure on North Vietnam. Early in 1964, they initiated a program of small-scale covert raids on the north and began planning for air strikes. In August 1964, American planes

raided North Vietnam in retaliation for two torpedo boat attacks (the second of which probably did not occur) on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. Johnson used this incident to secure authorization from Congress (the Tonkin Gulf Resolution) to use armed force to "repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to repel further aggression." That resolution served as a legal basis for subsequent increases in the U.S. commitment, but in 1970 after questions arose as to whether the administration had misrepresented the incidents, Congress repealed it.

Committed like his predecessors to containment and to countering Communist "wars of national liberation," Johnson also wanted to maintain U.S. credibility as an ally and feared the domestic political repercussions of losing South Vietnam. Accordingly, he and his advisers moved toward further escalation.

During 1964, Johnson authorized limited U.S. bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In February 1965, after the Viet Cong killed thirty-one Americans at Pleiku and Qui Nhon, the President sanctioned retaliatory strikes against North Vietnam. In March, retaliation gave way to a steadily intensified but carefully controlled aerial offensive against the north (Operation Rolling Thunder), aimed at reducing Hanoi's ability to support the Viet Cong and compelling its leaders to negotiate an end to the conflict on U.S. terms.

At the same time, Johnson committed American combat forces to the fight. Seven U.S. Marine battalions and an Army airborne brigade entered South Vietnam between March and May 1965. Their initial mission was to defend air bases used in Operation Rolling Thunder, but in April, Johnson expanded their role to active operations against the Viet Cong. During the same period, Johnson authorized General Westmoreland to employ U.S. jets in combat in the south, and in June, B-52 strategic bombers began raiding Viet Cong bases. As enemy pressure on the ARVN continued and evidence accumulated that North Vietnamese regular divisions were entering the battle, Westmoreland called for a major expansion of the ground troop commitment. On 28 July, Johnson announced deployments that would bring U.S. strength to 180,000 by the end of 1965. Westmoreland threw these troops into action against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese's large military units. Taking advantage of their helicopter-borne mobility, U.S. forces won early tactical victories, but the cost in American dead and wounded also began to mount and the enemy showed no signs of backing off.

Additional deployments increased American troop strength to a peak of 543,400 by 1969. To support them, MACV, using troops and civilian engineering firms, constructed or expanded ports, erected fortified camps, built vast depots, paved thousands of miles of roads, and created a network of airfields.

Desiring to keep the war limited to Vietnam, President Johnson authorized only small-scale raids into the enemy bases in Laos and Cambodia. As a result, in South Vietnam, General Westmoreland perforce fought a war of attrition. He used his American troops to battle the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong regular units while the ARVN and South Vietnam's territorial forces carried on the pacification campaign against the Viet Cong guerrillas and political infrastructure. As the fighting went on, a

stable government emerged in Saigon under Nguyen Van Thieu. These efforts, however, brought only stalemate. Aided by Russia and China, the North Vietnamese countered Operation Rolling Thunder with an air defense system of increasing sophistication and effectiveness. In South Vietnam, they fed in troops to match the American buildup and engaged in their own campaign of attrition. While suffering heavier losses than the U.S. in most engagements, they inflicted a steady and rising toll of American dead. Pacification in South Vietnam made little progress. The fighting produced South Vietnamese civilian casualties, the result of enemy terrorism, American bombing and shelling, and in a few instances—notably the My Lai massacre of March 1968—of atrocities by U.S. troops.

In the U.S., opposition to the war grew to encompass a broad spectrum of the public even as doubts about America's course emerged within the administration. By the end of 1967, President Johnson had decided to level off the bombing in the north and American troop strength in the south and to seek a way out of the war, possibly by turning more of the fighting over to the South Vietnamese.

Late in 1967, North Vietnam's leaders decided to break what they also saw as a stalemate by conducting a "General Offensive/General Uprising," a combination of heavy military attacks with urban revolts. After preliminary battles, the North Vietnamese early in 1968 besieged a Marine base at Khe Sanh in far northwestern South Vietnam. On the night of 31 January, during the Tet (Lunar New Year) holidays, 84,000 enemy troops attacked seventy-four towns and cities including Saigon. Although U.S. intelligence had gleaned something of the plan, the extent of the attacks on the cities came as a surprise.

Viet Cong units initially captured portions of many towns, but they failed to spark a popular uprising. Controlling Hué for almost a month, they executed 3,000 civilians as "enemies of the people." ARVN and U.S. troops quickly cleared most localities, and the besiegers of Khe Sanh withdrew after merciless pounding by American air power and artillery. At the cost of 32,000 dead (by MACV estimate), the Tet Offensive produced no lasting enemy military advantage.

In the United States, however, the Tet Offensive confirmed President Johnson's determination to wind down the war. Confronting bitter antiwar dissent within the Democratic Party and a challenge to his renomination from Senator Eugene McCarthy, Johnson rejected a military request for additional U.S. troops and halted most bombing of the north. He also withdrew from the presidential race to devote the rest of his term to the search for peace in Vietnam. In return for the partial bombing halt, North Vietnam agreed to open negotiations. Starting in Paris in May 1968, the talks were unproductive for a long time.

Taking office in 1969, President Richard M. Nixon continued the Paris talks. He also began withdrawing U.S. troops from South Vietnam while simultaneously building up Saigon's forces so that they could fight on

with only American advice and materiel assistance. This program was labeled "Vietnamization."

Because the Viet Cong had been much weakened by its heavy losses in the Tet Offensive and in two subsequent general offensives in May and August 1968, the years 1969–1971 witnessed apparent allied progress in South Vietnam. The ARVN gradually took on the main burden of the ground fighting, which declined in intensity. American troop strength diminished from its 1969 peak of 543,400 to 156,800 at the end of 1971. The allies also made progress in pacification. American and South Vietnamese offensives against the enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia in April and May 1970 and an ARVN raid against the Ho Chi Minh Trail in February 1971 helped to buy time for Vietnamization. On the negative side, as a result of trends in American society, of disillusionment with the war among short-term draftee soldiers, and of organizational turbulence caused by the troop withdrawals, U.S. forces suffered from growing indiscipline, drug abuse, and racial conflict.

In spring 1972, North Vietnam, in order to revive its fortunes in the south, launched the so-called Easter Offensive with twelve divisions, employing tanks and artillery on a scale not previously seen in the war. In response, President Nixon, while he continued to withdraw America's remaining ground troops, increased U.S. air support to the ARVN. The North Vietnamese made initial territorial gains, but the ARVN rallied, assisted materially by U.S. Air Force and Navy planes and American advisers on the ground. Meanwhile, Nixon resumed full-scale bombing of North Vietnam and mined its harbors. Beyond defeating the Easter Offensive, Nixon intended these attacks, which employed B-52s and technologically advanced guided bombs, to batter Hanoi toward a negotiated settlement of the war. By late 1972, the North Vietnamese, had lost an estimated 100,000 dead and large amounts of equipment and had failed to capture any major towns or populated areas. Nevertheless, their military position in the south was better than it had been in 1971, and the offensive had facilitated a limited revival of the Viet Cong.

Both sides were ready for a negotiated settlement. During the autumn of 1972, Nixon's special adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, and North Vietnamese representative Le Duc Tho, who had been negotiating in secret since 1969, reached the outlines of an agreement. Each side made a key concession. The U.S. dropped its demand for complete withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam. Hanoi abandoned its insistence that the Thieu government be replaced by a presumably Communist-dominated coalition. After additional diplomatic maneuvering between Washington and Hanoi and Washington and Saigon, which balked at the terms, and after a final U.S. air campaign against Hanoi in December, the ceasefire agreement went into effect on 28 January 1973.

Under it, military prisoners were returned, all American troops withdrew, and a four-nation commission supervised the truce. In fact, the fighting in South Vietnam continued, and the elections called for in the agreement never took place. During 1973 and 1974, the North Vietnamese, in violation of the ceasefire, massed additional men and supplies inside South Vietnam. Meanwhile, the Nixon administration, distracted by the Watergate scandal, had to accept a congressional cutoff of all funds for American combat operations in Southeast Asia after 15 August 1973.

Early in 1975, the North Vietnamese, again employing regular divisions with armor and artillery, launched their final offensive against South Vietnam. That nation, exhausted by years of fighting, demoralized by a steady reduction in the flow of American aid, and lacking capable leadership at the top, rapidly collapsed. A misguided effort by President Thieu to regroup his forces in northern South Vietnam set off a rout that continued almost unbroken until the North Vietnamese closed in on Saigon late in April. On 21 April, President Thieu resigned. His successor, General Duong Van Minh, surrendered the country on 30 April. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops entered Saigon only hours after the U.S. completed an emergency airlift of embassy personnel and thousands of South Vietnamese who feared for their lives under the Communists. Hanoi gained control of South Vietnam, and its allies won in Cambodia, where the government surrendered to insurgent forces on 17 April 1975, and Laos, where the Communists gradually assumed control.

The costs of the war were high for every participant. Besides combat deaths, the U.S. lost 1,333 men missing and 10,298 dead of non-battle causes. In terms of money ($138.9 billion), only World War II was more expensive. Costs less tangible but equally real were the loss of trust by American citizens in their government and the demoralization of the U.S. armed forces, which would take years to recover their discipline and self-confidence. South Vietnam suffered more than 166,000 military dead and possibly as many as 415,000 civilians. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong deaths amounted to at least 937,000. To show for the effort, the U.S. could claim only that it had delayed South Vietnam's fall long enough for other Southeast Asian countries to stabilize their noncommunist governments.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrade, Dale. America's Last Vietnam Battle: Halting Hanoi's 1972 Easter Offensive. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001.

Berman, Larry. Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam. New York: Norton, 1982.

Duiker, William J. The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996.

Halberstam, David. The Best and the Brightest. New York: Random House, 1972.

Herring, George C. America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2002.

McMaster, H. R. Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam. New York: Harper Collins, 1997.

McNamara, Robert S. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Vintage, 1996.

Oberdorfer, Don. Tet! Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Palmer, Bruce. The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984.

Thompson, Wayne. To Hanoi and Back: The U.S. Air Force and North Vietnam, 1966–1973. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.

Turley, William S. The Second Indochina War: A Short Political and Military History, 1954–1975. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1987.

Westmoreland, William C. A Soldier Reports. New York: Da Capo, 1989.

Graham A.Cosmas

See alsoAgent Orange ; Cambodia, Bombing of ; Domino Theory ; Pentagon Papers ; andvol. 9:The Christmas Bombing of Hanoi Was Justified ; The Pentagon Papers ;Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam ; Letter to Nguyen Van Thieu ; Pardon for Vietnam Draft Evaders ; President Lyndon B. Johnson's Speech Declining to Seek Re-election ; Vietnamization and the Silent Majority ; Statement by Committee Seeking Peace with Freedom in Vietnam ; The Fall of Saigon .