Vietnam War

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n.

A protracted military conflict (1954-1975) between the Communist forces of North Vietnam supported by China and the Soviet Union and the non-Communist forces of South Vietnam supported by the United States.

Vietnam war refers to the US political and military continuation of the French Campaign in Indochina that followed the signing of the 1954 Geneva agreements, which divided Vietnam along the 17th Parallel, and which ended when the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) occupied Saigon on 30 April 1975. A continuation of the Vietminh's effort to free Vietnam from foreign domination, this isolated conflict was slowly transformed into the bloodiest battleground of the Cold War.

Following the Genesva accords, relative calm descended on Vietnam. In Hanoi, the Vietminh, who had come under the control of the Vietnamese Lao Dong (Communist) Party by the time of the French defeat, consolidated their power under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, collectivized agriculture in the north (which sparked a bloodily suppressed peasant uprising in 1956), and debated how to gain control of South Vietnam. In Saigon Bao Dai, the French-backed emperor, was deposed in a referendum by the US-supported Ngo Dinh Diem in late 1955. Diem, a Catholic in a predominantly Buddhist country, was a committed anti-communist. Bolstered by increasing economic and covert aid from the USA, Diem launched an anti-communist sweep of South Vietnam. By the late 1950s, the hard-pressed Vietminh cadres who had remained in the South, derisively dubbed Vietcong by Diem, appealed to Hanoi for reinforcement and greater support.

Although Hanoi had ordered the formation of Vietcong military units in the Mekong Delta as early as 1957, North Vietnamese leaders debated if the time was ripe to intervene more directly in the South. At a May 1959 meeting of the Lao Dong Party, they decided to support ‘armed revolution’ against Saigon: 4, 500 ‘regroupees’ (a southern communist cadre who had come to North Vietnam following the Geneva accords) began to stream down the ‘Ho Chi Minh Trail’ between North and South Vietnam to help form Vietcong units. In December 1960, Hanoi announced the creation of the National Liberation Front (NLF), a collection of southern groups opposing the Diem regime, to bolster the North Vietnamese contention that the revolt against Saigon was an indigenous movement.

This reversed the military situation and by the early 1960s Saigon was under enormous pressure. Diem's campaign against the communists increasingly was directed against all political dissent, bringing local and US calls for him to reform his government. In November 1960, Diem narrowly avoided being overthrown in a military coup. Vietcong terrorist incidents against the regime surged. In 1959 the Vietcong killed about 1, 200 government representatives, in 1961 this had risen to 4, 000. Vietcong units also began inflicting a string of defeats on the Army, Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). Diem, who generally turned to family members for their political reliability, now relied increasingly on his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu to eliminate political opposition.

The Ngos overstepped the bounds of US patience in 1963 when they forcefully suppressed a series of Buddhist protests against their regime. Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu's characterization of a Buddhist monk's self-immolation as a ‘barbecue show’ only increased the Kennedy administration's disenchantment with Diem. The Ngos had undertaken a delicate balancing act between receiving enormous quantities of US economic and military aid to the civil power (15, 000 US military advisers were in South Vietnam at the end of 1963) while resisting what they perceived as US meddling in South Vietnamese affairs. By 1963 many officials in the Kennedy administration had come to perceive Diem and his brother Nhu as obstructionists. The US diplomatic mission in Saigon gave tacit approval to, if it did not actually orchestrate, a November 1963 coup d'état that resulted in the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu.

The coup caught Hanoi by surprise, but the removal of Diem, recognized as a nationalist throughout Vietnam, invited further North Vietnamese intervention. After his murder, Saigon was rocked by a series of military coups, which produced political instability and battlefield lethargy. Hanoi quickly capitalized on this opportunity: by the end of 1964, Vietcong units had been organized into division-size formations and entire PAVN regiments had infiltrated into South Vietnam. As Vietcong/PAVN activity spread, more US personnel became casualties in the conflict. On 3 February 1964, the Vietcong attacked the US advisers' compound in Kontum City. On 7 February, a bomb blew up in a Saigon theatre, killing three Americans. In May, the USS Card was sunk by Vietcong commandos in a Saigon harbour. In November, the Vietcong attacked the US airbase at Bien Hoa and on 24 December they claimed credit for a bombing at the Brinks Hotel in Saigon where US officers were billeted.

A controversial incident in the Gulf of Tonkin would have a profound impact on the war. Early in the morning of 2 August 1964, the US destroyer Maddox, while patrolling along North Vietnamese territorial waters, was attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The Maddox returned fire and was quickly supported by aircraft from the USS Ticonderoga. During the night of 4 August, the Maddox, now joined by the destroyer C. Turner Joy, initially reported a renewed attack, although officers at the scene quickly determined that the North Vietnamese vessels were nowhere to be found and that inexperienced crewmen had simply responded to sonar and radar anomalies. The Johnson administration, uninterested in validating initial reports and indifferent to the probability that Hanoi might have been responding to South Vietnamese amphibious attacks (30-1 July OPLAN 34A raids) against the North Vietnamese coast, ordered retaliatory air strikes against the torpedo-boat base at Vinh. The Johnson administration also gained congressional approval for increased US military action in South-East Asia. Although critics have long believed that the Johnson administration manipulated public and congressional sentiment by not divulging complete details of the incident, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution provided the administration with carte blanche to take military action to defend US personnel and interests in South-East Asia.

By 1965, the nature of the war was changing. No longer just a Vietcong effort to overthrow the Saigon regime through a ‘People's war’, the conflict became a deadlock between the USA and North Vietnam, which was backed by its Soviet and Chinese allies. Hanoi hoped that the USA would not resist a PAVN invasion of South Vietnam; while Washington hoped that Ho Chi Minh and his followers would be deterred by a demonstration of US military might. The 7 February 1965 Vietcong attack on the US airbase at Pleiku prompted US retaliatory air raids against North Vietnam (FLAMING DART) ; on 13 February Pres Johnson ordered a ‘program of measured and limited air action’, against North Vietnam, which came to be known as ROLLING THUNDER.

To protect the US airbase at Da Nang from Vietcong retaliation for US air strikes against North Vietnam, the Johnson administration dispatched two battalions of US Marines to guard the base. More US troops soon followed, initially to protect other US installations, but US military commanders viewed this initial ‘enclave’ strategy as ineffective. On 27 June 1965, Gen Westmoreland, Commander of the US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), ordered the first US offensive ground operation of the war. The ‘Big-Unit war’ had begun.

As US troops streamed into the country, Westmoreland faced his first major challenge: preventing the collapse of South Vietnam and a successful PAVN occupation of the northern sections of the country. In November 1965, the battle was joined in the Ia Drang valley in the Western Highlands, a hard-won victory for the US 1st Cavalry Division. As US troop strength grew, Westmoreland went on the offensive. Launching a series of large-scale ‘Search and Destroy’ operations, US and Allied forces targeted Vietcong operating bases. Vietcong and PAVN units often managed to evade Allied forces by fading into Cambodian and Laotian sanctuaries, but continuous attacks took their toll, especially on Vietcong forward-supply bases.

The Vietnam war, 1959-75.
(Click to enlarge)

By mid-1967, the war had reached a turning point and officers at MACV began to proclaim ‘light at the end of the tunnel’. US attrition objectives were being achieved: Vietcong and PAVN units were apparently losing more forces in South Vietnam than could be replaced through recruitment or infiltration. Policy-makers in Hanoi also came to the conclusion that the war was stalemated and that battlefield trends were not in their favour. In response, they called for a ‘Tong Cong Kich, Tong Khai Nghia’ (General Offensive, General Uprising). Known in the USA as the Tet offensive, because it occurred during the celebration of the Chinese lunar New Year, the countrywide attacks were intended to spark an insurrection among South Vietnamese civilians and military forces, destroying the Saigon regime. The North Vietnamese hoped to leave US forces isolated along the South Vietnamese border, forcing the Johnson administration to negotiate an end to the war. Hanoi even planned to re-enact the siege of Dien Bien Phu; by January 1968, 40, 000 PAVN soldiers were laying siege to the firebase at Khe Sanh and its garrison of 7, 000 US Marines.

The Tet attacks failed to prompt a southern uprising and military mutiny. With the exception of the battles of Saigon and Hué, Allied forces quickly repelled attacking Vietcong units. At Khe Sanh, the US Marines, supported by thousands of air sorties, stood firm and inflicted enormous casualties on PAVN. But the Tet offensive was a brilliant political success for Hanoi. Believing that progress was being made in the war, the Johnson administration and the US public were shocked by the scope and intensity of the offensive. On 31 March 1968, Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election as his administration reassessed its policies toward South-East Asia.

Following Tet, US policy-makers became increasingly determined to devise an exit strategy that would not simply abandon South Vietnam to PAVN. In terms of diplomacy, US and North Vietnamese negotiators began meeting in Paris in May 1968, but their talks made little progress. On the battlefield, the Nixon administration implemented a policy, called ‘Vietnamization’, to bolster ARVN. The USA began turning the war over to ARVN while gradually withdrawing US combat troops from South Vietnam.

Vietnamization came none too soon. Domestic opposition to the war mounted in the aftermath of the Tet offensive, reaching a peak in May 1970 following a US-ARVN raid into Cambodia. Launched to buy time for Vietnamization by destroying PAVN base areas, the Cambodian raid sparked nationwide student protests and tragedy at Kent State University when four students were shot and killed by the Ohio National Guard. In South Vietnam, morale among US troops plummeted as soldiers became preoccupied by the prospect of becoming the last casualty in a war that was winding down. By 1971, over 7, 000 troops in Vietnam faced charges related to heroin (out of a force that numbered about 225, 000), insubordination, and fragging incidents (attacks against officers and NCOs), and courts martial soared. Vietnamization continued, but ARVN remained incapable of holding its own against PAVN: in spring 1971, ARVN launched Lam Son 719, a raid into Laos to destroy PAVN base areas, but was saved from disaster only by the massive use of US air power. In the spring of 1972, during the so-called ‘Easter-Offensive’, Saigon was again saved from disaster by a massive US air effort. Although PAVN, which by now resembled a conventional military force complete with armoured vehicles and ample large-calibre artillery, suffered devastating casualties, it succeeded in bringing western portions of South Vietnam under complete communist control.

By late 1972, Hanoi and Washington, moved along by secret negotiations conducted by Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, were near agreement on a negotiated end to the fighting in South Vietnam. When South Vietnamese Pres Nguyen Van Thieu objected to several portions of the proposed agreement, particularly that North Vietnamese troops would be allowed to stay in South Vietnam, Hanoi began back-pedalling on previously settled issues. The Nixon administration, seeking to break this diplomatic impasse, informed the Thieu regime that the USA would sign the agreement; the only hope of continued US military support to Saigon was in response to Hanoi's violation of the peace accord. To persuade Hanoi, Nixon initiated LINEBACKER II, also known as the ‘Christmas Bombing’. Although aircraft loses were significant, the USA dropped over 20, 000 tons of bombs on the North between 18 and 29 December 1972, causing enormous damage and completely exhausting North Vietnam's air defences. This surge in military-diplomatic pressure finally produced agreement: ceasefire accords were formally signed in Paris on 27 January 1973. The Paris agreement turned out to be a short-lived truce. Saigon forces collapsed in the face of an eight-week offensive launched by PAVN in March 1975. Americans, who had mostly come to the conclusion that US involvement in the war had been a mistake, were in no mood to intervene to prevent Hanoi's victory.

Military victory against the total war waged by North Vietnam was only attainable with US economic and military mobilization, but the decision was taken instead to sell the war in small increments. To minimize the political fallout, the National Guard was not engaged (except to put down domestic disorders) and the children of the influential were exempted from conscription. Secretary of Defense McNamara devised a process of feeding troops in and rotating them out again as individuals, directly attacking unit cohesion and esprit de corps, while the military high command devalued the honour of combat medals by awarding them to non-combatants, and put careerism ahead of combat effectiveness by allowing senior officers to ‘ticket punch’, that is to rotate in and out of combat commands too quickly to bond with their men or to lead them effectively. The impact of the media was twofold, at once feeding domestic outrage at what was being done and demoralizing the troops in Vietnam by showing them the contempt with which veterans were being treated back in ‘the world’. In particular, the effect of live TV coverage of the race riots in the late 1960s on African-American troops was devastating. And, as always, the promises of the air power enthusiasts proved over-optimistic. Bombing the jungle is possibly the least cost-effective form of warfare ever devised by man.

Twenty-five years after the fall of Saigon, much has changed in the world. Relations between reunited Vietnam and the USA are slowly improving, complicated by the issue of MIAs but helped along by tension with China that briefly erupted into a shooting war in 1978. The USSR got into its own Vietnam in Afghanistan and finally could no longer sustain the costs of the Cold War. In South-East Asia the dominos did not fall, although it was only the armed intervention of PAVN that put an end to the genocide of Pol Pot in Cambodia after it was hopelessly destabilized by the neighbouring war. There are 58, 000 names inscribed on the immensely moving war memorial in Washington, while over 2 million dead Vietnamese are largely forgotten. The US military has not yet come to terms with the loss of the war, preferring to nurture a ‘stab in the back’ explanation, but in due course it undertook a reformation of organization and doctrine that was stunningly effective in the Gulf war. Just as the full social and political significance of the American civil war took nearly a century to be appreciated, it may well be that by the middle of the 21st century the Vietnam war will be seen to have been just as important a turning point in the development of the USA.

Bibliography

• Herr, Michael, Dispatches (New York, 1991).
• Herring, George, America's Longest War (New York, 1996).
• Lewy, Gunter, America in Vietnam (Oxford, 1978).
• Lind, Michael, Vietnam: The Necessary War (New York, 1999).
• MacLean, Michael, The Ten Thousand Day War (New York, 1981).
• Palmer, Dave R., The Summons of the Trumpet (Novato, Calif., 1978)

— James J. Wirtz

(1960 – 1975)

Causes
Military and Diplomatic Course
Domestic Course
Postwar Impact
Changing Interpretations

The Vietnam conflict triggered constitutional controversies that split the nation and confronted the Supreme Court with some of the most difficult issues that it faced between 1965 and 1975. The Court ducked the toughest of these questions: the constitutionality of the war itself. While declining to order an end to the fighting, however, it provided a surprising degree of protection to antiwar protestors. The Court also expanded significantly the number of men who could gain exemption from military service as conscientious objectors.

Although benefited by many of its decisions, opponents of the war were deeply disappointed in the Supreme Court because of its persistent refusal to rule that American military involvement was unlawful. Article I, section 8 of the Constitution provides that “Congress shall have Power … [t]o declare war”; but no congressional declaration preceded President Lyndon Johnson's commitment of half a million men to combat in Southeast Asia. Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon, insisted that the August 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution, in which Congress urged the commander in chief to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression” and the many appropriations acts in which the legislature provided funds for the armed forces, gave them whatever congressional authorization they needed to conduct combat operations in Vietnam. Critics of their policies countered that because Congress had not declared war, they were behaving unconstitutionally. Some also accused the United States of waging a war of aggression in Vietnam and argued that anyone who participated in this conflict would be subject to punishment under principles established at the Nuremberg war crime trials.8

The Supreme Court evaded these issues. Beginning with the cases of Mora v. McNamara (1967) and Mitchell v. United States (1967), the Court persistently employed its discretionary authority to determine which cases it would hear to exclude from consideration all constitutional challenges to the war and all cases raising the Nuremberg defense. In Massachusetts v. Laird (1970), it even spurned what amounted to a request from the Massachusetts legislature to decide the constitutionality of the war. Outraged by his colleagues' refusal to confront this issue, Justice William O. Douglas (joined sometimes by Justices Potter Stewart and John M. Harlan) took the unusual step of filing lengthy written dissents from his colleagues' denials of writs of certiorari, but his protests did no good. The Supreme Court would not even allow a federal district judge to halt the bombing of Vietnam's neutral neighbor, Cambodia, which Nixon initiated without any authorization from Congress. Unwilling to precipitate a conflict with the Executive, the Court protected its institutional interests by leaving the question of the legality of the war to be resolved in the political arena.

But the Court did assist those struggling in that realm to bring American involvement in South‐east Asia to an end. In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg, a “think tank” employee who had formerly worked at the Pentagon, turned against the war. He set out to discredit it by handing over to several newspapers photocopies of a documentary history, prepared by the Defense Department itself, that revealed a number of embarrassing facts concerning the origins of the Vietnam conflict. The Justice Department immediately sought injunctions, forbidding the press to publish what came to be known as the “Pentagon Papers.” The Supreme Court prevented the government from suppressing this official history by ruling in New York Times Co. v. United States (1971) that the government had failed to meet the heavy burden necessary to justify prior restraint. In a related case, Gravel v. United States (1972), the Court held that the Speech and Debate Clause protected a senator who read the purloined papers at a congressional committee hearing and an aide who had helped him prepare for this exposé.

While willing to safeguard those who made the Pentagon Papers public, the Supreme Court proved reluctant to shield dissidents from the military. In Laird v. Tatum (1972), it affirmed a district judge's dismissal of a suit brought by antiwar activists, who alleged that army surveillance of civilian protesters was chilling the exercise of First Amendment rights, announcing that the case raised issues that were not justiciable (see Justiciability). The justices also joined the military legal system and lower civilian courts in withholding meaningful constitutional protection from members of the armed forces who wished to protest the war. In Parker v. Levy (1974), it ruled that the army had violated neither the First Amendment nor the Fifth when it convicted a dissident captain of conduct prejudicial to the discipline and good order of the service and conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman for urging enlisted men not to serve in Vietnam. The Court, however, was not totally insensitive to the interests of citizen‐soldiers. In O'Callahan v. Parker (1969), it held that members of the armed forces, many of whom were conscripts or draft‐induced volunteers, could not be tried by courts martial for ordinary crimes that were not service connected (see Military Justice; Military Trials and Martial Law).

And while unwilling to undermine military discipline by sanctioning protest in the ranks, the Supreme Court did provide constitutional shelter to civilian critics of American involvement in Vietnam. Initially, the Court appeared to be no more protective of dissent than it had been during World War I. In United States v. O'Brien (1968), the Warren Court held that a federal statute that criminalized one of the most popular means of expressing opposition to the war—draft card burning—did not violate the First Amendment. O'Brien proved to be quite unrepresentative. Even before that highly controversial decision came down, the Warren Court had held in Bond v. Floyd (1966) that the First Amendment precluded the Georgia legislature from denying an African‐American man the seat to which he had been elected because of his affiliation with an organization that had issued a statement condemning the war and endorsing draft resistance. After O'Brien, Warren and his colleagues held in *Tinker v. Des Moines School District (1969) that it was unconstitutional for a pubic school to expel students who wore black armbands to class to protest American involvement in Vietnam.

When Warren *Burger became chief justice the Court continued to protect dissent. Although holding in Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner (1972) that the management of a shopping mall might exclude demonstrators who wanted to hand out antiwar leaflets from its property without violating the First Amendment, in another case it ruled that the Constitution protected from punishment a man who wore a real military uniform in a protest skit. In Flower v. United States (1972), the Burger Court took the position that the armed services could not exclude antiwar activists from bases or parts of bases that were otherwise open to the public. Such rulings reflected the mood of an American public growing increasingly disaffected with the Vietnam conflict. The Supreme Court joined the rest of the federal judiciary in using the First Amendment to protect agitation aimed at bringing an end to the fighting.

The Court also made it easier for young men who did not wish to participate in the war to gain exemption from military service as conscientious objectors. Section 6(j) of the Universal Military Training and Service Act exempted from combatant duty in the armed forces anyone who, by reason of religious training and belief, conscientiously opposed participation in war. The statute defined religious training and belief as “an individual's belief in relation to a Supreme Being. …” The defendants in United States v. Seeger (1965) and Welsh v. United States (1970) were both denied classification as conscientious objectors because they were agnostics. Although neither man appeared to meet the requirements of section 6(j), the Supreme Court held that both Welsh and Seeger were entitled to be classified as conscientious objectors. Apparently convinced that if the statute were read literally, it would have to be invalidated as a violation of the First Amendment's prohibition against the establishment of religion, the Court interpreted religious beliefs as including moral and philosophical tenets held with the strength of traditional religious convictions. While Seeger and Welsh blatantly distorted the intent of Congress, they did preserve the exemption for those to whom the legislature had wanted to give it. These rulings also increased the number of men who could avoid serving in an increasingly unpopular war. The Court refused, however, to allow those opposed only to fighting in Vietnam to claim conscientious objector status. In Gillette v. United States (1971), it held that denying the exemption to those, such as Catholics, whose religious views precluded only participation in unjust military conflicts, did not violate the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. The Court feared selective conscientious objection could not be administered fairly and might “corrode the spirit of public service and the values of willing performance of citizen's duties that are the very heart of free government” (p. 460).

Yet the war itself ate away at all those things. By using the First Amendment to prevent suppression of antiwar protest, the Court legitimated the expressions of disillusionment, anger, and alienation that eventually pressured the political branches into withdrawing from Southeast Asia.

See also Conscientious Objection; Speech and the Press; War; War Powers.

Bibliography

• W. Taylor Reveley, War Powers of the President and Congress: Who Holds the Arrows and Olive Branch (1981).
• Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (1973).
• Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong, The Brethren (1979)

— Michal R. Belknap

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

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

From the perspective of the present sovereign state of Vietnam, the Vietnam War began during the Second World War as a ‘national liberation struggle’ against Japanese occupation and only ended in 1975, after a series of victories over different adversaries, with the forcible incorporation of the state of South Vietnam into North Vietnam. The first victory came with the collapse of Japan in 1945. But a new enemy soon appeared in the form of France which sought to reimpose colonial rule on all of Indochina. By the early 1950s, however, the French were starting to wilt in the face of Vietnamese guerrilla resistance and were only with difficulty persuaded by the United States to stay in contention (even though 1945 the Americans had urged the European colonialists to grant independence to Asian territories occupied by Japan). By the early 1950s, however, the Americans had been converted to the view that the anti-colonial forces in Indochina were communist-led and would, if successful, join the Soviet camp in the Cold War. Moreover the Americans came to fear that a domino effect would ensue throughout South-East Asia with incalculable consequences for the Western policy of attempting to ‘contain’ communism.

1954 the French indicated their intention to withdraw from Indochina following the symbolic fall to Vietnamese guerrillas of the fortress of Dien Bien Phu. The Americans were fatally divided about their response. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles wished to intervene militarily to prevent any concession to communism, even if that meant that the United States had to act alone. President Eisenhower, on the other hand, insisted that such intervention must take a multilateral Western form. This left the British with the decisive voice, which Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden used, in association with the Soviet Union, to convene an international conference held in Geneva. Indochina was divided into four independent sovereign states: North and South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Of these, one, North Vietnam, was handed over to the communist-led insurgents who had defeated the French. Eisenhower disapproved of this arrangement but lacked the resolution to use armed force to prevent it.

In the circumstances few believed that non-communist South Vietnam would survive for long. But its regime, encouraged by Washington, reneged on a promise given at Geneva for all-Vietnam so-called free elections to be held. And gradually successive US Presidents were drawn into taking South Vietnam under their wing as an insurgency, sponsored by North Vietnam, gathered momentum. Economic aid was presently supplemented with a degree of military support. 1964 President Johnson, apparently reacting to a naval incident between US and North Vietnamese forces, obtained overwhelming support in Congress for the so-called Tonkin Gulf Resolution. This in effect authorized the US administration to render large-scale military assistance to South Vietnam and to wage an undeclared war against North Vietnam.

By 1968 it was apparent that the Americans had failed to defeat the insurgency in South Vietnam and that most other countries, even those belonging to NATO, had no enthusiasm for American policies. Facing much opposition at home and mounting evidence of low morale and indiscipline among US troops, Johnson decided not to seek re-election.

His successor, Richard Nixon, was elected in November 1968 on a platform of seeking to wind down the US presence in Vietnam but simultaneously to seek an honourable outcome in negotiations with North Vietnam. These aims proved to be incompatible but, as Nixon could not bring himself to admit this, the upshot was many more years of warfare. Only 1973 did the North Vietnamese, under pressure from Moscow, consent to a negotiated settlement that enabled Nixon to order a withdrawal of all US forces and somewhat unconvincingly to claim that South Vietnam's independence had been saved. For the Americans, though not for the Vietnamese, the conflict was over.

Two years later South Vietnam's supposed independence disappeared as North Vietnamese forces marched into Saigon. The United States simply acquiesced in the take-over and hence in effect conceded that its longest war had ended in humiliation.

— David Carlton

For more information on Vietnam War, visit Britannica.com.

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.

On 2 September 1945 at Hanoi's Ba Dinh Square, Ho Chi Minh issued the historic Vietnamese proclamation of independence with words borrowed from the American Declaration of Independence: "We hold the truth that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Ho Chi Minh—who four years earlier had founded the League for Revolution and Independence, or Vietminh—had been preparing his entire life for the opportunity to rid Vietnam of colonial rule, both Japanese and French. Crowds marched from one end of Saigon to the other chanting, "Do Dao de quoc, Do Dao thuc dan phap." (Down with the Imperialists, Down with the French Colonialists.) Throughout Vietnam banners proclaimed "Vietnam for the Vietnamese."

Ho Chi Minh requested support for his cause from nations that recognized the principles of self-determination and equality of nations. President Franklin D. Roosevelt seemed to favor an international trusteeship for Vietnam to be followed by independence, but new pressures would soon change the situation for Ho and the Vietnamese. As the Cold War developed, Washington became more sensitive to the colonial interests of its allies than to the decolonization of Indochina. Ho was defined as being pro-Moscow. U.S. Cold War policy was guided by the containment of a perceived Soviet aggression. Containment was composed of economic, political, and military initiatives that sought to maintain stability in the international arena. The bitter recriminations in the United States over "who lost China?" after 1949 led the Truman administration to do what it could to prevent a Vietminh victory in Vietnam or anywhere else in Indochina. Vietnam was valued not for its own merit, but was seen rather as a test of America's global position and credibility. In December 1950, the United States joined France and the French-controlled governments of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in signing the Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement. The United States agreed to provide military supplies and equipment through a military advisory group. This small contingent of U.S. advisers provided limited logistical services; all supplies and equipment were dispensed through the French Expeditionary Corps. U.S. aid to the French military effort mounted from $130 million in 1950 to $800 million in 1953.

In May 1953 the French government appointed General Henri Navarre commander in Vietnam and charged him with mounting a major new offensive against the Vietminh. One of Navarre's first moves, late in 1953, was to dispatch French troops to Dien Bien Phu, the juncture of a number of roads in northwestern Indochina about 100 miles from the Chinese border. On 7 May 1954 the French forces were defeated there. Shortly thereafter the Geneva Conference was held, bringing together representatives of Vietminh-controlled territory and Bao Dai's French-controlled government—which would later evolve into North and South Vietnam, respectively—the other emerging Indochinese states of Laos and Cambodia, and the major powers of France, Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China. The Geneva Accords, formally known as the Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference on the Problem of Restoring Peace in Indochina, essentially settled military but not political issues.

The Vietminh controlled most of Vietnam and sought a political settlement at Geneva that would lead to the withdrawal of French forces and the establishment of an independent government led by Ho Chi Minh. But at the Geneva Conference, Anthony Eden of the United Kingdom, Pierre Mendès-France of France, Vyacheslav Molotov of the Soviet Union, and Chou En-lai of China pressured the Vietminh, through its representative, Pham Van Dong, to accept much less than it had won in battle. Under great pressure in particular from the Chinese and Soviets, who feared American military intervention under Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Ho made two major concessions—a provisional demarcation line drawn at the seventeenth parallel and free nationwide elections for unifying the country supervised by an international commission scheduled for 1956. The election was intended to settle the question of political control over Vietnam. Externally, the accords provided for a neutral Vietnam, meaning that no military alliances were to be made by either side.

Three months after Dien Bien Phu, President Dwight D. Eisenhower convened the National Security Council (NSC) to review U.S. policy in Asia. The president was already on record as claiming that

strategically South Vietnam's capture by the Communists would bring their power several hundred miles into a hitherto free region. The remaining countries in Southeast Asia would be menaced by a great flanking movement. The freedom of 12 million people would be lost immediately and that of 150 million others in adjacent lands would be seriously endangered. The loss the Republic of Vietnam, or South Vietnam, would have grave consequences for us and for freedom.

Eisenhower had also articulated the line of reasoning that came to be known as the domino theory, that the fall of one state to communism would lead to the next and the next being knocked over. Not losing Southeast Asia thus became the goal of the United States.

In an October 1954 letter to the president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, President Eisenhower was exceedingly clear:

I am, accordingly, instructing the American Ambassador to Vietnam to examine with you in your capacity as chief of Government, how an intelligent program of American aid given directly to your Government can serve to assist Vietnam in its present hour of trial, provided that your Government is prepared to give assurances as to the standards of performance it would be able to maintain in the event such aid were supplied. The purpose of this offer is to assist the government of Vietnam in developing and maintaining a strong, viable state, capable of resisting attempted subversion or aggression through military means.

By 1961 Vietnam loomed as a test of President John F. Kennedy's inaugural commitment "to pay any price, to bear any burden, in the defense of freedom." But Diem's government had evolved into a family oligarchy that ruled through force and repression. Opposition grew from a wide range of political, social, and religious groups. Protests raged, including the quite dramatic self-immolations by Buddhist monks. On 1 November 1963, Diem was removed from office and murdered in the back of a U.S.-built personnel carrier. The coup was planned and implemented by South Vietnamese military officers; U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were involved. Kennedy, given the opportunity to instruct Lodge that the coup be stopped, issued no such order.

Diem's death was followed by a period of great political instability in Saigon, while three weeks after the coup Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. His successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, assumed office with the belief that the United States had to ensure the stability and security of South Vietnam. Momentum was building in favor of action that might reverse the disintegrating political conditions in South Vietnam, which was under military pressure from the North Vietnamese–backed National Liberation Front (NLF), or Vietcong (VC). One form of new activity involved U.S. Navy patrols up the Gulf of Tonkin for intelligence-gathering purposes. On 2 August 1964 the destroyer Maddox was returning from one of these DeSoto electronic espionage missions when North Vietnamese torpedo boats fired on the ship. Rather than withdrawing U.S. ships from the danger zone, the president ordered another destroyer, the C. Turner Joy, to join the Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. On 4 August both the Maddox and the C. Turner Joy reportedly came under attack. The president later met with congressional leaders and sought assurance that his response would be supported.

On 10 August 1964, Congress passed the Southeast Asia Resolution, also known as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which authorized Johnson "to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." The president later used the resolution to justify his escalation of American involvement in Vietnam. With the 1964 presidential election against Republican conservative Barry Goldwater less than three months away, however, he had no desire to be portrayed as planning for war. Instead, he left the rhetoric of war to Goldwater and the planning to his military advisers. "Peace candidate" Johnson won the election in a landslide.

Americanizing the War

Rolling Thunder, the commitment of marines in March 1965, and the deployment of other troops all before June 1965 provided ample evidence that the war was already on the road to being Americanized. Throughout June and July of 1965, the question of "Americanizing" the war was at the center of all foreign policy discussions. Undersecretary of State George Ball tried to warn Johnson of the dangers ahead. In an 18 June memo titled "Keeping the Power of Decision in the South Vietnam Crisis," Ball argued that the United States was on the threshold of a new war:

In raising our commitment from 50,000 to 100,000 or more men and deploying most of the increment in combat roles we were beginning a new war—the United States directly against the VC. The president's most difficult continuing problem in South Vietnam is to prevent "things" from getting into the saddle—or, in other words, to keep control of policy and prevent the momentum of events from taking command.

The president needed to understand the effect of losing control:

Perhaps the large-scale introduction of U.S. forces with their concentrated firepower will force Hanoi and the VC to the decision we are seeking. On the other hand, we may not be able to fight the war successfully enough—even with 500,000 Americans in South Vietnam we must have more evidence than we now have that our troops will not bog down in the jungles and rice paddies—while we slowly blow the country to pieces.

Ball tried to review the French experience for Johnson, reminding the president that

the French fought a war in Vietnam, and were finally defeated—after seven years of bloody struggle and when they still had 250,000 combat-hardened veterans in the field, supported by an army of 205,000 South Vietnamese. To be sure, the French were fighting a colonial war while we are fighting to stop aggression. But when we have put enough Americans on the ground in South Vietnam to give the appearance of a white man's war, the distinction as to our ultimate purpose will have less and less practical effect.

Ball's arguments had little influence on policymakers. On 26 June, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara circulated his "Program of Expanded Military and Political Moves with Respect to Vietnam." McNamara argued that North Vietnam was clearly winning the war and "the tide almost certainly cannot begin to turn in less than a few months and may not for a year or more; the war is one of attrition and will be a long one." McNamara defined winning as "to create conditions for a favorable settlement by demonstrating to the VC/DRV that the odds are against their winning. Under present conditions, however, the chances of achieving this objective are small—and the VC are winning now—largely because the ratio of guerrilla to antiguerrilla forces is unfavorable to the government." The secretary recommended that ground strength be increased to whatever force levels were necessary to show the VC that they "cannot win."

The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) urged Johnson to call up the Reserves and the National Guard and seek public support on national security grounds. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy proposed that the president go before a joint session of Congress or make a statement in the form of a fireside address. But Johnson decided that there would be no public announcement of a change in policy. Instead, he simply called a midday press conference for 9 July. The content as well as the forum of Johnson's presentation downplayed its significance. The expected call-up of the Reserves and request for new funds were absent. In announcing a troop increase, Johnson did not fully reveal the levels he had now authorized: 175,000 to 200,000. Instead, he noted only the immediate force increment of fighting strength from 75,000 to 125,000. Nor did he tell the U.S. people that just a few days earlier, Clark Clifford had privately warned against any substantial buildup of U.S. ground troops. "This could be a quagmire," the president's trusted friend had warned. "It could turn into an open-ended commitment on our part that would take more and more ground troops, without a realistic hope of ultimate victory." Instead, Johnson chose to walk a thin line of credibility. "Additional forces will be needed later, and they will be sent as requested," Johnson observed at his afternoon press conference. His seemingly passing remark correctly indicated that the U.S. commitment had become open-ended: "I have asked the Commanding General, General Westmoreland, what more he needs to meet this mounting aggression. He has told me. We will meet his needs."

Having made the fateful decision, Johnson traveled in February 1966 to Honolulu for a firsthand assessment of the war's progress and to secure additional commitments for political reform from South Vietnam. Johnson utilized his favorite exhortation, telling Westmoreland to "nail the coonskin to the wall" by reaching the crossover point in the war of attrition by December 1966. This so-called light at the end of the tunnel was to be achieved primarily by inflicting losses on enemy forces. Johnson and his advisers expected the enemy to seek negotiations when this ever-elusive crossover point was reached. A fixation on statistics led to use of such terms as "kill ratios," "body counts," "weapons-loss ratios," "died of wounds," and "population-control data" to show that progress was being made. The computers could always demonstrate at least the end of the tunnel; statistically, the United States was always winning the war. In the words of Senator J. William Fulbright, the Great Society had become the "sick society." Disenchantment with the war manifested itself in the growing anti-war movement that began organizing massive protests and moratoriums against U.S. policy.

The Tet Offensive

While the American people had been told repeatedly that there was a light at the end of the tunnel in Vietnam, the deployment of some 525,000 troops had brought the United States no closer to achieving its limited political goals, and there would soon be a call for major new increases in troop deployments. In effect, the United States faced a stalemate in Vietnam because the enemy controlled the strategic initiative. During the early morning hours of 31 January 1968, the Vietnamese New Year, known as Tet, approximately 80,000 North Vietnamese regulars and NLF guerrillas attacked more than one hundred cities in South Vietnam. The military goal was to spark a popular uprising and, as captured documents revealed, "move forward to achieve final victory." This final victory was not achieved, but psychological and political gains were made. The front page of the 1 February New York Times showed a picture of the U.S. embassy in Saigon under assault. Guerrillas had blasted their way into the embassy and held part of the embassy grounds for nearly six hours. All nineteen guerrillas were killed, as were four MPs, a marine guard, and a South Vietnamese embassy employee.

The enemy sustained major losses at Tet, from which it would take years to recover. But Tet also demonstrated the enemy's great skill in planning, coordination, and courage. North Vietnamese regulars and NLF forces had successfully infiltrated previously secure population centers and discredited Saigon's claims of security from attack.

On 27 February, Johnson received JCS chairman Earle Wheeler's report on military requirements in South Vietnam. The document contained a request for 206,000 additional troops. To some, this was proof of the bankruptcy of the army's strategy in Vietnam. Despite the large enemy losses during Tet, the United States was no closer to achieving its goal in Vietnam than it had been in 1965. There appeared to be no breaking point in the enemy's will to continue the struggle indefinitely. The new reinforcements would bring the total American military commitment to three-quarters of a million troops. It was becoming increasingly evident that no amount of military power would bring North Vietnam to the conference table for negotiations.

That same evening CBS news anchorman Walter Cronkite told the nation that the war was destined to remain deadlocked:

We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds…. For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.

Bombing Halt

The president appointed a task force, under the direction of Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, to evaluate a request for 206,000 troops. The president's final instructions to Clifford were "give me the lesser of evils." For weeks Johnson wavered between a bombing halt and sending another 206,000 troops. Within the White House, Clifford led the cabal to convince their president that he ought to stop the bombing and thereby start negotiations that might end the war. "Is he with us?" a phrase from the French Revolution, became the code for those working toward a bombing halt.

Johnson's instincts told him that the North Vietnamese could not be trusted, and his fears made him worry that a bombing halt would be exploited by domestic political opponents. Still, in the end Johnson listened to those who urged that he stop the bombing. Addressing the nation on 31 March 1968, the president spoke of his willingness "to move immediately toward peace through negotiations." Johnson announced that "there is no need to delay talks that could bring an end to this long and this bloody war." He was "taking the first step to deescalate the level of hostilities" by unilaterally reducing attacks on North Vietnam, except in the area just north of the demilitarized zone, known as the DMZ. "The area in which we are stopping our attacks includes almost 90 percent of North Vietnam's population and most of its territory," said Johnson. "Even this very limited bombing of the North could come to an early end if our restraint is matched by restraint in Hanoi."

Johnson called on North Vietnam's leader, Ho Chi Minh, to respond favorably and positively to these overtures and not to take advantage of this restraint. "We are prepared to move immediately toward peace through negotiations." The United States was "ready to send its representatives to any forum, at any time, to discuss the means of bringing this ugly war to an end." To prove his sincerity, Johnson named the distinguished American ambassador-at-large W. Averell Harriman as his "personal representative for such talks," asking Harriman to "search for peace."

Then, in a dramatic gesture toward national unity, the president announced that he would not seek reelection, declaring, "I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome partisan causes of this office—the presidency of your country. Accordingly, I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president."

Three days later, Radio Hanoi broadcast the news that the DRV had accepted Johnson's offer and would agree to establish contact with representatives of the United States. This was the first time that Hanoi had said publicly that it was willing to open talks with the United States. Hanoi was careful to stipulate that these initial contacts would focus first on bringing about the unconditional end to American bombing and other acts of aggression against Vietnam.

On 3 May 1968 President Johnson announced that both sides had agreed to hold preliminary talks in Paris, but he cautioned that "this is only the first step. There are many, many hazards and difficulties ahead." The talks were scheduled to begin on 10 May. President Johnson knew that the government of South Vietnam (GVN), headed by President Nguyen Van Thieu, opposed any bilateral discussions with the North Vietnamese on issues that would effect the South. Thieu believed that North Vietnam would use these initial contacts to demand direct negotiations between the GVN and the NLF in the hope of creating the conditions for a coalition government. Thieu also feared the election of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a Democratic president hopeful, who was slowly distancing himself from Johnson's position.

President Thieu believed that a Humphrey victory would bring a coalition government and a U.S. withdrawal. "A Humphrey victory would mean a coalition government in six months. With Nixon at least there was a chance," recalled Thieu. This view was shared by Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky, who remembered that "we had little desire to sit down with the communists at all, and no intention of sitting down with, and thereby recognizing, the National Liberation Front." Thieu thus decided he would not go to Paris even if there were a bombing halt.

President Thieu had two contacts in Washington: Anna Chennault, the widow of Flying Tigers hero General Claire Chennault, and Bui Diem, the respected South Vietnamese ambassador. Chennault was a central figure in the China lobby, a vehement anticommunist, and chair of Republican Women for Nixon. During the 1968 campaign Nixon, the Republican candidate for president, asked her to be "the sole representative between the Vietnamese government and the Nixon campaign headquarters." With Nixon's encouragement, Chennault encouraged Thieu to defy Johnson. The latter knew all about it, but his information had been obtained from illegal wiretaps and surveillance, so he could not do much with it.

Nixon's Peace With Honor

Prior to 5 May 1968, Nixon spoke of seeking a "victorious peace" in Vietnam. But on that day, speaking in New Hampshire, the nation's first primary state, he used the term "honorable peace" for the first time. Crucial to his plan was the concept of linkage—using the Soviet Union to get the North Vietnamese to negotiate seriously.

In what Nixon believed was an off-therecord discussion with southern delegates at the 1968 Republican Convention, the nominee described another way to end the war:

How do you bring a war to a conclusion? I'll tell you how Korea was ended. We got in there and had this messy war on our hands. Eisenhower let the word get out—let the word go out diplomatically to the Chinese and the North Koreans that we would not tolerate this continued round of attrition. And within a matter of months, they negotiated.

When Nixon took office in January 1969, the United States had been involved in combat operations in Vietnam for nearly four years. U.S. military forces totaled 536,040, the bulk of which were ground combat troops. More than 30,000 Americans had lost their lives to then and the war cost $30 billion in fiscal year 1969. In 1968 alone, more than 14,500 U.S. troops were killed.

Richard Nixon was determined that Vietnam would not ruin his presidency, as had been the case with Lyndon Johnson. The Nixon plan was to "de-Americanize" the war, an approach that became known as Vietnamization. It involved building up the South Vietnamese armed forces so that they could assume greater combat responsibility while simultaneously withdrawing U.S. combat troops. The U.S. military role would shift from fighting the DRV and VC to advising the South Vietnamese and sending in a massive influx of military equipment and weaponry. Perhaps most important, Nixon changed the political objective of U.S. intervention from guaranteeing a free and independent South Vietnam to creating the opportunity for South Vietnam to determine its own political future. Vietnamization along with negotiation were Nixon's twin pillars for achieving an honorable peace.

During the first weeks of his presidency, Nixon also began to consider options for dealing with Cambodia, including the feasibility and utility of a quarantine to block equipment and supplies coming from that nation into South Vietnam. Under code name MENU, B-52 strikes began on 18 March 1969 against enemy sanctuaries in that country. They were kept secret from the American public, in part because Cambodia was a neutral country, but even more important because Nixon had not been elected to expand the war after just three months in office.

Halfway through Nixon's first year in the White House, President Thieu requested that a meeting be held in Washington, D.C., but Nixon, fearful of demonstrations, selected Honolulu, which the Vietnamese rejected because they did not want to meet on a U.S. resort island. Nixon next suggested the remote island of Midway, where Nixon won Thieu's public acquiescence for Vietnamization. When Nixon proposed that secret or private contacts be started between Washington and Hanoi in an effort to secure a negotiated settlement, Thieu asked that he be kept fully informed on the details of these meetings and that he be consulted on any matters internal to South Vietnam. He received assurances that this would most certainly be the case. By January 1972 the United States had conceded on almost every major point, including, at least implicitly, that any cease-fire would be a cease-fire in place, which meant that North Vietnamese troops then in the South would stay there. What came next was predictable: The North Vietnamese could not get the United States to dispose of Thieu for them. They did not intend to stop fighting until they regained the South. Thus, they had one obvious strategy: stall the peace, pour forces into the South, and strike a deal only when a cease-fire in place virtually amounted to a "victory in place." In an announcement made on national television on 25 January 1972, President Nixon revealed that Henry Kissinger had been holding private talks with the North Vietnamese starting in August 1969 and that every reasonable American proposal to end the war had been turned down. Nixon offered the details of a secret proposal made on 11 October 1971 that called for internationally supervised free elections in which the communists would participate and before which President Thieu would resign.

On 30 March 1972, Easter Sunday, the North Vietnamese began their biggest attack of the Vietnam War. It was a conventional military assault, designed to inflict a crippling blow against the army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and would last six months. On 8 May, President Nixon met with the NSC and told of plans for mining Haiphong harbor and resuming the bombardment of Hanoi and Haiphong. He also told the council that he would inform the public of his decision in a televised speech that evening.

After the NSC meeting Nixon brought his cabinet together and stated frankly, "We've crossed the Rubicon." As Nixon would put it to Kissinger the next day, he wanted to "go for broke" and "go to the brink" to "destroy the enemy's warmaking capacity." He wanted to avoid the previous mistakes of "letting up" on the bombing that he and Johnson had made in the past. "I have the will in spades," he declared. Nixon was determined not to repeat LBJ's mistakes. "Those bastards are going to be bombed like they've never been bombed before," gloated Nixon. What followed, starting in May, was the most successful use of airpower during the Vietnam War and one of the largest aerial bombardments in world history—Operation Linebacker. Targeting roads, bridges, rail lines, troops, bases, and supply depots, the attack was the first large-scale use of precision-guided laser bombs in modern aerial warfare.

In the short term, the offensive was clearly a military defeat for the North Vietnamese and would cost General Vo Nguyen Giap his job as chief strategist. On the other hand, although Hanoi never retained control over a provincial capital, the North Vietnamese did gain ground along the Cambodian and Laotian borders and the area just south of the DMZ. Hanoi remained in control of this territory for the rest of the war, and in 1975 would use it to launch a successful attack on Saigon.

A week before the 1972 presidential election, Kissinger stated that "peace is at hand," but again the talks stalled and Nixon turned to "jugular diplomacy." Nixon decided that no treaty would be signed until after the November 1972 election, when his position would be strengthened by what most observers expected to be an overwhelming election victory over Democratic challenger and antiwar leader George McGovern. Reelected by just such a landslide, Nixon moved swiftly against North Vietnam.

On 13 December the peace talks broke down, and on the following day Nixon ordered that the bombing be resumed. Now his only goal was to bring Hanoi back to the bargaining table. On 18 December, Linebacker II—widely known as the Christmas bombing—began with B-52 bomber sorties and fighter-bomber sorties on the Hanoi-Haiphong area. The day prior to the start of the Christmas bombing, Nixon told Admiral Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "I don't want any more of this crap about the fact that we couldn't hit this target or that one. This is your chance to use military power effectively to win this war, and if you don't, I'll consider you responsible." Admiral Moorer called for expanded air attacks with an objective of "maximum destruction of selected military targets in the vicinity of Hanoi/Haiphong." He ordered that B-52s carry maximum ordnance with preapproved restrikes of targets. Kissinger wrote later that "the North Vietnamese committed a cardinal error in dealing with Nixon, they cornered him." The B-52s were his last roll of the dice.

The Peace Agreement

The basic elements of the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam—signed at the International Conference Center in Paris on 27 January 1973—provided for the end of the fighting and the withdrawal of American forces. The United States committed itself to ending all air and naval actions against North Vietnam and to dismantling or deactivating all mines in the waters of North Vietnam. Within two months after the signing of the agreement, all forces of the United States and of U.S. allies would depart Vietnam. The United States was barred from sending new war materials or supplies to South Vietnam and was required to dismantle all military bases there. The armed forces of the GVN and the NLF were allowed to remain where they were, but the cease-fire barred the introduction of new troops, military advisers, military personnel—including technical military personnel—armaments, munitions, and war material from North Vietnam or anywhere else. The disposition of Vietnamese armed forces in South Vietnam would be determined by the two South Vietnamese parties in a spirit of "national reconciliation and concord." In addition, the accord required the return of all captured military personnel and foreign civilians during the same two-month period. The two South Vietnamese parties would handle the return of Vietnamese civilians. The United States and North Vietnam promised to uphold the principles of self-determination for the South Vietnamese people, which included free and democratic elections under international supervision.

Even more unusually, the treaty called for a Four-Party Joint Military Commission to be constituted by the four signatories for implementing and monitoring compliance with the provisions on withdrawal, cease-fire, dismantling of bases, return of war prisoners, and exchange of information on those missing in action. An International Commission of Control and Supervision (ICCS), consisting of Canada, Hungary, Indonesia, and Poland, would oversee the agreement and report violations. In No Peace, No Honor (2001), Larry Berman utilized recently declassified records to show that Nixon had little faith in the Paris accord and expected that the accord would be violated, which would trigger a brutal military response. Permanent war (air war, not ground operations) at acceptable political cost was what Nixon expected from the signed agreement. President Thieu received repeated assurances that when the communists violated the accord, the B52s would return to punish Hanoi, but the Watergate scandal prevented such a retaliation.

Not a moment of peace ever came to Vietnam. Following the return of the American POWs, there was little adherence to the Paris agreements from either North or South Vietnam. The U.S. troops departed Vietnam sixty days after the Paris agreement was signed, but the level of violence had not significantly declined. Watergate was about to destroy the Nixon presidency and a new antiwar Congress had little interest in continuing economic support to the South. Faced with funding a $722 million supplement to stave off a collapse of South Vietnam, Congress refused to act. For many Americans, the last image of Vietnam was that of ambassador Graham Martin carrying a folded American flag during the final evacuation. This bitter aftermath left Americans searching for explanations as to what had gone wrong and who was responsible for failure.

Lessons and Legacies

There may be no phrase more overused in foreign policy discussions and analyses since the 1960s than "the lessons of Vietnam." Nonetheless, exactly what those lessons are have been hotly debated. The debate has also been played out in the larger field of American politics, splitting the Democratic Party for more than two decades and fueling the political appeal of Ronald Reagan in 1980. It has framed U.S. policy toward a number of other countries, most notably Central America in the late 1970s and the 1980s and later in the Persian Gulf, where the Vietnam analogy was invoked with regularity. And time and again the debate has come back to heated arguments about the Vietnam War itself, as scholars and former policymakers have continued to reflect, lecture, and write about it. Former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, in his In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (1995), broke his own long silence on the subject with the provocative admission that while "we acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation … we were wrong, terribly wrong."

In 1975 the Vietnamese economy lay in shambles and it would take decades to rebuild. Most of the population of fifty-five million was unemployed, impoverished, and suffering from the emotional and physical ramifications of the war. Over two million had been killed and 300,000 were reported missing and presumed dead. The number of Vietnamese who lost loved ones and family members was many times more. The loss of so many adults made Vietnam by the 1990s one of the youngest nations on earth.

Lacking an industrialized base and highly lucrative mineral or agricultural products, Vietnam found one immediate solution by exporting over $1 billion in abandoned American military equipment and scrap metal. The new regime also sold rice and other essential goods at below market prices for ten years. But a war against Cambodia beginning in December 1978 strained the economy. Large defense expenditures to fight the Khmer Rouge and conduct a war with the People's Republic of China in 1979, along with low consumer prices, combined to unleash widespread famine and hyperinflation that lasted into the 1980s.

Economic reforms improved conditions in Vietnam beginning in the mid-1980s. The benefits of peace with Cambodia after 1989 were balanced by the loss of economic aid from the declining Soviet Union. Impatient at the slow pace of economic change and heartened by the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, over seventy-five thousand Vietnamese fled the nation in 1989 for Australia, the United States, and other nations willing to accept them. Vietnam continued privatization reforms, known as dau man hade, that transformed it into the third-largest rice producer in the world.

Another long-term impact of the Vietnam conflict entailed the presence of toxic chemicals in the soil and water. Between 1961 and 1970 the United States sprayed over nineteen million gallons of herbicides containing hazardous dioxins over the forests and farmlands of Vietnam, poisoning the people and contaminating the soil to the present day. A special U.S. Air Force program known as Operation Ranch Hand employed a fleet of C-123 airplanes to spread defoliants across the inland and coastal areas of South Vietnam in order to reduce tree cover and render crops unfit for consumption by North Vietnamese troops. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese suffered a range of illnesses from varying levels of chemical poisoning, in some cases leading to cancer and birth defects that have passed through three generations.

Many species of animals disappeared from heavily sprayed regions, while others adapted to a new environment and returned to their former habitats slowly over time. By the late 1980s the inland forests had recovered, but the more delicate mangrove coastal zone still had not returned to its former health. Today, the vestiges of chemical pollution are still apparent in altered vegetation patterns and cancer clusters in some areas of Vietnam. Although it became accepted scientific fact by the late 1960s that herbicides and dioxin were harmful to humans and the environment, the spraying of chemicals like Agent Orange continued until 1971, when the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to stop using biological weapons.

A large number of returning veterans on both sides of the war developed cancer and unknown illnesses during the 1970s as a result of contact with dioxins in Vietnam. When the last herbicides were destroyed by the U.S. military in 1977, veterans were already mounting a vigorous campaign to make the government more aware of their plight; some even sued the chemical industry. In 1984 the Dow Chemical Company and other chemical companies that had manufactured Agent Orange made a $180 million out-of-court settlement with veterans and their families (for an average payment of $1,000 per veteran). The following year the federal government funded $1 billion to conduct research on the chemical poisoning of veterans. In 1992 the Department of Defense declared that Vietnam veterans exhibiting Hodgkin's disease, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, soft-tissue sarcoma, chloracne, and birth defects could claim contamination by herbicides in Vietnam.

The economy of Vietnam revived in the early 1990s when political relations with the United States began to thaw. In February 1994 the United States lifted a twenty-year embargo of Vietnam, enabling American companies to resume business with the communist nation. Incentives for companies to invest in Vietnam included cheap wages and abundant natural resources. The Vietnamese welcomed this development. By 1996 foreign investment, most of it from neighboring Asian "tiger" nations, had topped $20 billion. American holdings in Vietnam also had increased from a few million into billions of dollars. But policies by the Vietnamese government slowed foreign investment by 1997, making some analysts cautious about Vietnam's economic turn toward the West. Foreign investment took a downward spiral from $2.8 billion in 1997 to a mere $500 million by 1999. Tourism, however, continued to increase, as did student and cultural exchange programs that funneled foreign influences and dollars into Vietnam.

Improved relations with Vietnam also enabled more Vietnamese Americans to reunite with family members. When college-educated Vietnamese granddaughters met their elderly Vietnamese grandmothers living in rural villages for the first time, emotional healing, cultural exchange, and an improved financial situation for some Vietnamese were the consequences. Reflecting the impact of the war on so many different groups of people, American and Vietnamese veterans and war widows from both nations traveled thousands of miles to Vietnam to participate in private and officially sponsored exchange groups. They often searched for missing remains, shared their pain, and tried to understand the loss of their loved ones in the devastating conflict.

The communist government memorialized the war primarily through several public museums, as at the hidden Vietcong southern base within the Cu Chi tunnels outside of Ho Chi Minh City, or at Dien Bien Phu, where the French were finally defeated in 1954. Both have become major tourist destinations for war-fixated foreigners and patriotic and proud Vietnamese. To some extent the government utilized the successful prosecution of the war as propaganda to keep Vietnam a socialist state. The hero worship of Ho Chi Minh reflects a conscious decision on the part of the government to create a cult of personality for the father of modern Vietnam at a time when the overwhelming majority of the Vietnamese population was born after his death.

Vietnamese Veterans

For Vietnamese veterans on both sides of the conflict, the violence of war remained firmly with them for the rest of their lives. For the victorious communist troops, the end of the war meant a return home to participate in village life and the rebuilding of a united nation. Compared to South Vietnamese veterans, many northern veterans suffered long isolation from their families whom they had not seen in some cases since the mid-1960s. The communist government forbade the returning veterans to fully take part in village politics due to fears that ex-soldiers would take on increased power through their enhanced status as war heroes. Over the next two decades the veterans fared poorly and received paltry rations of rice, meat, and cigarettes in compensation for their war service. Even more so than for American veterans, Vietnamese veterans were largely forgotten by the government, and the service of women was utterly ignored. Only near the end of the twentieth century did the Vietnamese government fully honor the women who fought as front-line troops during the war.

The five million ARVN veterans (including 500,000 disabled vets) faced difficult choices at the war's end. Of the 145,000 Vietnamese refugees who fled Vietnam in 1975, approximately 33 percent were South Vietnamese veterans who, with their families, chose to immigrate to the United States. Most South Vietnamese veterans who fought with the Vietcong were, along with their families, forced into land redevelopment projects, or New Economic Zones, established in the rural countryside to increase land productivity. They comprised nearly half of the one million Vietnamese detailed to the rural projects. Those who survived malaria and malnutrition drifted back to major southern cities when food supplies dissipated. There, many reentered Vietnamese urban society as cab drivers. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, many of these veterans and their families swelled the tide of "boat people" seeking refuge in the United States. Approximately 100,000 South Vietnamese veterans entered the United States in this fashion, though an unknown number perished at sea.

Other South Vietnamese veterans deemed more dangerous were sent to reeducation camps located in rural areas. The estimate of the number sent to the camps was over 300,000 and included army officers, civil servants, teachers, Catholic clergy, journalists, doctors, engineers, and political activists. The system of reeducation involved regular confessions of "crimes" against Vietnam, coupled with readings on American imperialism and Vietnamese socialism. Higher officials and those who resisted were sometimes tortured. Terms of service ranged from a few months to several years. Those prisoners viewed as the most threatening were sent to camps in northern Vietnam, where slave labor was not uncommon. Some of these prisoners were held until 1989, when the camps finally disbanded. The United States estimated that at least fifty camps existed in the 1970s and 1980s, with an average population of four thousand people each. An unknown number of the war veterans perished from disease, starvation, and overwork. Family members who attempted to smuggle food to the prisoners endured great suffering by having to support themselves while they made long trips to the camps. American and Vietnamese efforts led to the release of most of the sixty thousand veterans by 1990.

Vietnamese veterans who fought for South Vietnam and immigrated to the United States secured political asylum beginning in 1988 through the official Orderly Departure Program. By 1997 tens of thousands of veterans had used the program. Many remained bitter, however, over alleged abandonment by Vietnamese and American officials, who failed to provide adequate financial support once the veterans arrived in the United States. Many Vietnamese veterans suffered from substance abuse, joblessness, and underemployment.

Refugees and "boat People"

The immigration of thousands of people from Southeast Asia in the 1970s and 1980s impacted American-Vietnamese relations and gave rise to new communities of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong Americans in the United States. Known as boat people for escaping Southeast Asia by sea, the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians (predominantly Vietnamese) generated a political and humanitarian firestorm for the international community, the United States, and Vietnam.

The first wave in 1975 included 140,000 South Vietnamese, mostly political leaders, army officers, and skilled professionals escaping the communist takeover. Fewer than a thousand Vietnamese successfully fled the nation. Those who managed to escape pirates, typhoons, and starvation sought safety and a new life in refugee camps in Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. For many, these countries became permanent homes, while for others they were only waystations to acquiring political asylum in other nations, including the United States.

During the administration of President James Earl Carter, Vietnamese immigration to the United States became a prominent political issue. The number of refugees fleeing Vietnam by sea increased to nearly six thousand in 1976 and twenty thousand the following year. Officials estimated that nearly one-third of this total perished at sea from starvation, drowning, and pirates, problems that increased when some Asian countries began turning away boat people.

The Vietnamese government began to institute socialist reforms by the late 1970s, including the confiscation of businesses and farmland. Many ethnic Chinese business owners who had lived in southern Vietnam for generations came under attack. The Chinese, or Hoa as the Vietnamese called them, were suspected of sympathizing with China, profiting from the poverty of the Vietnamese people, and betraying Vietnam during the conflict with the United States. As a result, they were officially encouraged to leave the country. Adults could pay a bribe and a departure fee to arrange their deportation. In at least one case, a Hoa man paid for the passage of himself and his large family with a bag of gold bars obtained from the liquidation of his estate. Other Vietnamese took advantage of the black market trade in selling passage outside of the country, which developed into a lucrative business in Vietnam between 1977 and 1979.

International attention to the plight of Vietnamese immigrants escalated in 1979, when the human tide of boat people increased to an unprecedented level of 100,000. Public alarm outside of Asia increased when Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and the Philippines (known as ASEAN countries) declared that they could no longer accept immigrants into their overcrowded camps. But from ten thousand to fifteen thousand immigrants were still leaving Vietnam each month. United Nations secretary general Kurt Waldheim called a conference in response to the impending catastrophe. Sixty-five nations attended the meeting in Geneva, voting to increase funding to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Utilizing an executive order to raise immigration quotas, President Carter doubled the number of Southeast Asian refugees allowed into the United States each month. Agreements were also reached with Vietnam to establish an orderly departure program. These developments combined to slow the exodus of refugees in 1980 and 1981. By 2000, more than two million Vietnamese had left the nation of their birth to start new lives in foreign lands.

Ethnic minorities in Vietnam confronted difficult choices in the wake of the Vietnam conflict. Hundreds of thousands of Hmong and Montagnard people, who supported the United States and South Vietnam during the conflict, migrated to refugee camps in the late 1970s to evade the violence and instability left in the wake of American withdrawal. Many of the Hmong, natives of Laos, became political refugees and finally settled in communities in California and Minnesota, where they continued to practice their culture and adjust to new circumstances as hyphenated Americans. Until 1990 many Hmong funded attempts to retake Laos from communist control. Many Montagnards, who inhabited the Central Highlands of Vietnam, continued resisting the Vietnamese until the close of the Cold War in the early 1990s. By then, most of the one-half million Montagnards had either fled to refugee camps in Cambodia or resettled in the United States.

The political plight of Amerasian children embodies one of the most fundamental and lasting legacies of the Vietnam conflict. The offspring of American men and Vietnamese women, Amerasian children could not immigrate to the United States until the late 1980s. Following the end of the war in 1975, the Vietnamese government refused to meet with American officials to arrange for the immigration of these children. In turn, the United States refused to deal directly with the new communist regime. The children languished in uncertainty, held political hostage by two nations over a war long over.

Although the children were viewed as half-castes, they were not officially targeted for discrimination. But the Vietnamese government viewed their mothers as traitors and called the children bui doi (dust of life). Local officials often targeted Amerasian families for forced migration to New Economic Zones, where the surplus urban population resettled. Some Amerasian children suffered abandonment by families that did not want them for the shame and fear it brought upon their families. As a result, the children were sent to orphanages, and many became street urchins in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. For children of African-American soldiers and Vietnamese women, ethnic discrimination was even more intense.

The children allowed to leave between 1975 and 1982 included those who could prove U.S. citizenship. Vietnamese mothers and refugee organizations attempted to contact the fathers, who would be in a position to arrange for the immigration of the children through government agencies in their home nation. Yet citizenship itself did not guarantee safe passage. Bribes and exit fees were necessary to leave Vietnam legally during the era of massive emigration from 1977 to 1980.

Amerasian children received renewed hope in 1982 when Congress passed the Amerasian Immigration Act, which applied to children throughout Southeast Asia, not just Vietnam. The act had substantial limitations and only a small number of children successfully immigrated. The Vietnamese government announced in 1986 that over twenty-five thousand cases still awaited processing; it then stopped the processing of new cases, causing a steep decline of Amerasian immigration by 1987.

Abandoned and unwanted by the Vietnamese and American governments, the struggle of Amerasian children received widespread publicity, prompting renewed congressional action. The Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1988, sponsored by U.S. Representative Robert Mrazek, facilitated the immigration of Vietnamese Amerasians and certain members of their families. The act successfully broadened Amerasian immigration so that by 1994, refugee watch groups had declared that only a few thousand Amerasian children remained in Vietnam. The by-then grown children and their families had adapted to life there and had chosen to stay.

Despite setbacks and challenges, many Amerasian children became prosperous. Those who adjusted most successfully were usually children who accompanied their Vietnamese mothers to America. Some of these children received assistance through the Big Brother and Big Sister programs. By 1995, however, all Amerasian children had reached adulthood, and all federal programs to assist their assimilation and adjustment were terminated.

Another group of children from Vietnam also grew to adulthood in the United States. As communist forces closed on Saigon in early April 1975, President Gerald Ford began Operation Babylift, the evacuation of 2,600 Vietnamese orphans for adoption by American parents. Twenty years later, many of the children had adjusted successfully to living in the United States. Some became part of the tide of temporary migration back to Vietnam to find missing relatives.

By 1995 over 480,000 Vietnamese had chosen to immigrate to the United States. Another 210,000 lived in other countries around the world. But 46,000 still remained in the refugee camps in ASEAN nations. Many of these countries began to close the camps, forcing dislocated refugees to contemplate returning to Vietnam. By early 1996 more than 39,000 Vietnamese still remained in the camps. That year the United Nations began to withdraw funding of the refugee installations, and soon after closed the camps. Most of the Vietnamese refugees, including children who had never seen Vietnam, returned to an uncertain fate in their home country.

Vietnam and the United States

Foreign relations between the United States and Vietnam soured after 1975. They did not fully recover until the mid-1990s, when economic, political, and cultural ties revived, leading to a vibrant period of political reconciliation by the year 2000. Following North Vietnam's victory in 1975, the U.S. attitude toward Vietnam was antagonistic. In the Paris Peace Accords, the United States had agreed to provide $3.3 billion over five years to help rebuild the shattered infrastructure of Vietnam. Rather than meeting its obligations, the United States extended to all of Vietnam the trade embargo against communist North Vietnam that had been ratified under the Trading with the Enemy Act passed during the early years of the conflict. The United States further marginalized Vietnam by halting credits and loans from monetary institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Asian Development Bank. Seeking acceptance in the international arena, Vietnam attempted several times to join the United Nations, only to be halted by American vetoes.

Relations with the United States began to soften during the first year of the Carter administration, though war wounds still ran too deep to permit a relationship of cooperation and agreement between the two nations. President Carter and Congress indicated that relations could be normalized if the vexing issues surrounding prisoners of war (POWs) and soldiers missing in action (MIAs) were resolved. Approximately 2,500 U.S. service personnel continued to be reported as missing in the jungles of Vietnam, and Americans desperately wanted an accurate assessment of their numbers and of whether any of them were still alive in Vietnamese camps. Optimism grew in 1977 and 1978 as the two nations discussed preliminary issues.

President Carter sent Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke in May 1977 to meet with Vietnamese officials. The talks broke down, however, when Vietnam demanded several billion dollars in payment for war damages, which the United States rejected because the Vietnamese had allegedly violated the 1975 Paris Accords by invading South Vietnam. President Carter indicated that the United States would provide aid, but that funding could not be linked to normalization or the POW-MIA issue.

When the Vietnamese finally relented on their demands for reparations, they failed to receive a corresponding overture from the United States. This stemmed from official and public alarm over Vietnamese immigration, a Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, and an increasingly powerful Soviet presence in the region (epitomized by the Soviet base at Cam Ranh Bay, the largest military installation of the USSR outside of its borders). After the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, the United States sent covert aid to noncommunist Cambodian guerrillas who were fighting Vietnam.

Meanwhile, as relations between China and Vietnam worsened, U.S.–Chinese relations improved, culminating in the establishment of full diplomatic ties between the two nations in 1978. This development, combined with Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia in 1978, its treaty of alliance with the Soviet Union the same year, and a border war with China in 1979 gave more impetus to American hostility toward Vietnam. During the final years of the Cold War, Vietnam found itself strongly aligned with anti-American forces that helped offset billions of dollars lost from the American trade embargo.

At the heart of the inability of American and Vietnamese leaders to reconcile national interests in the 1970s and 1980s lay the troublesome POWMIA issue. Although the number of MIAs in World War II and the Korean War (80,000 and 8,000, respectively) was much greater than MIAs in the Vietnam War, the small number of missing American soldiers in the latter conflict (1,992 in all of Southeast Asia, 1,498 in Vietnam) captured the national psyche. They became the focus of a national crusade that retained its fervor into the twenty-first century. The plight of MIAs received much greater attention in the aftermath of the conflict as national leaders and the media fed public alarm over the fate of missing veterans. Although the Department of Defense declared the MIAs deceased, it could not stop the issue from growing to national importance. Unconfirmed public sightings of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam by refugees and others led to expeditions by American veterans to find their missing comrades. As of 2001 no sightings had been confirmed, although human remains were repatriated from Vietnam to the United States as part of an ongoing plan of cooperation between the two nations. More than $5 million were spent annually by the United States on attempts to find and return the remains of missing servicemen in Southeast Asia.

During the 1980s President Ronald Reagan kept the MIA issue at the forefront of American relations with Vietnam. Supported by the National League of POW/MIA Families, Reagan harnessed a national crusade to hinge the normalization of relations with Vietnam on the fate of the MIAs. In July 1985 Vietnam finally allowed an American inspection team to visit alleged MIA burial sites. The return of the remains of several dozen pilots that year eased tensions and led to further investigations. In 1987 and 1989 Vietnam allowed General John Vessey, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to visit with Vietnamese leaders as an emissary of Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

Realizing that further concessions would help improve a stagnant economy, Vietnam assisted in returning the remains of more than two hundred American soldiers between 1985 and 1990 and also provided access to archives, war files, and cemetery records. They also allowed the United States to establish a Hanoi office to oversee MIA investigations. Between 1993 and 2001, joint ventures by the United States and Vietnam generated thirty-nine official searches that yielded 288 sets of remains and the identification of another 135 American servicemen previously unaccounted for in Vietnam. In a move to further pacify American political leaders, Vietnam announced in 1995 that its continuing cooperation regarding American MIAs and POWs did not depend on an accurate accounting by the United States and its allies of the whereabouts of the 330,000 Vietcong and North Vietnamese MIAs.

Kindled by the MIA issue, relations between the United States and Vietnam grew closer during the 1990s. As the Cold War came to a close in 1989, Vietnam finally agreed to withdraw all of its troops from Cambodia, ending its long and costly period of isolation from the United States. The Cold War's termination also improved relations by ending the Soviet-Vietnamese partnership. To further ease foreign antagonism toward Vietnam and to increase foreign investment, the communist government removed from the Vietnamese constitution unflattering characterizations of Western countries.

Other agreements between Vietnam and the United States centered upon the issue of Vietnamese political refugees. To improve relations with many of its southern people, the Vietnamese government in September 1987 released more than six thousand military and political prisoners, many of them senior officials in the former government of South Vietnam. Under the Orderly Departure Program in 1990, Vietnam agreed to assist the United Nations in helping refugees utilize official channels rather than leaky boats to immigrate to America. Another agreement, signed in 1990, enabled former South Vietnamese officials and army officers to immigrate to America.

Under the administration of President William Jefferson Clinton during the 1990s, Vietnamese-American relations continued to improve. With the lifting of the U.S. trade embargo in 1994, economic relations opened and American companies increased their investments in Vietnam. Clinton fostered educational and cultural exchange, enabling veterans, students, and the expatriate sons and daughters from Vietnam to cement family ties. Humanitarian aid to Vietnam from the American government and private associations increased and tourism became a vibrant element of the national economy. In a sign of growing political ties, Vietnamese officials in January 1995 signed an agreement with the United States providing for an exchange of diplomats and other officials as a prelude to full normalization of relations. As expected, President Clinton overrode Republican conservative critics and MIA stalwarts to extend full recognition to Vietnam in July 1995.

One month later the American flag was raised over the new U.S. embassy in Hanoi while Secretary of State Warren Christopher looked on. Over the next two years, President Clinton established the diplomatic structures necessary to bring the two nations closer together. He nominated U.S. Representative Douglas "Pete" Peterson, a former POW, to represent the United States as the first envoy to a united Vietnam. Soon after Peterson took up his post in the summer of 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright visited Vietnamese officials in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. The first U.S. secretary of state to visit Vietnam since the end of the war, Albright participated in ceremonies dedicating a new site for an American consulate.

Beginning in the late 1990s a number of steps further enhanced economic relations between the United States and Vietnam. After Vietnam joined the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in 1998, the United States jettisoned the Jackson-Vanick Amendment that had capped U.S. investment programs in Vietnam. In 1999 the two nations finally agreed on the outlines of a trade agreement to help Vietnam open its markets to world investors. American investment support programs then poured in, reversing the decline of world economic interest in Vietnam that had begun to worry investors in 1997, when the Vietnamese government enacted political and economic policies of retrenchment that retarded the growth of capitalism and capital investment in Vietnam. President Clinton further thawed U.S.–Vietnamese relations during the waning days of his administration. In July 2000 the two countries signed an unprecedented bilateral trade agreement reached between the two nations. The agreement mandated that Vietnam halt quotas on all imported goods over the following seven years, cut tariffs, and handle American imports in the same manner as domestic products.

Four months later President Clinton traveled to Vietnam, the first president to do so since President Nixon touched down in South Vietnam in 1969. The visit closed a sad chapter of violence and strained political relations between the two nations, and ushered in a new era of economic boom in Vietnam that was unparalleled in its tragic history of successful resistance against foreign military intervention. Vietnamese analysts predicted that Vietnamese exports to the United States, hovering near the $800 million mark in 2001, could top $3 billion in 2005 and $11 billion by 2010. U.S. investment in Vietnam had already increased from $4 million in 1992 to $291 million in 1999, providing hope that this trend would continue well into the twenty-first century. In late July 2001, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who had been a soldier in Vietnam, returned there for the first time in thirty years in an historic attempt to put the past to rest.

During the first six months of his administration in 2001, President George W. Bush pledged to continue Clinton's policy of economic liberalization toward Vietnam, and took active steps to support the American diplomatic mission based in Hanoi. In one of his first actions as president, Bush reappointed as ambassador Pete Peterson, who in the Clinton years had been instrumental in helping to negotiate the bilateral trade agreement. Although Bush was associated with a conservative Republican bloc that in the past had voiced criticism of American reconciliation with Vietnam, the new administration recognized the potential economic windfall awaiting U.S. investors in Vietnam.

American Veterans

The Vietnam conflict impacted veterans in a variety of ways. Most combat soldiers witnessed violence and lost friends to the horrors of war. The dedication of eight new names to the Vietnam War Memorial on 28 May 2001 brought the American death toll to 58,226, a number that will continue to rise as the classified casualties of the covert war in Laos and Cambodia continue to surface. Some American veterans bore emotional and physical injuries that they would carry for the rest of their lives. Most remained proud of their service and of the role of the United States in the conflict. During the war approximately twenty-seven million American men dealt with the draft; 11 percent of them served in some fashion in Vietnam. As a consequence of college deferments, most U.S. soldiers in Vietnam came from minority and working-class backgrounds. The average age of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, nineteen, was three years lower than for American men during World War II and Korea.

In contrast to World War II, American soldiers in Vietnam served individualized tours of duty rather than remaining attached to their units throughout the war. This sometimes produced difficulties in adjusting to life back at home. A minority of soldiers in Vietnam also became drug addicts who continued their self-medication because of the difficulties of transitioning to a peacetime existence, the availability of drugs in the United States, and the lack of federal programs to help veterans cope with postwar life at home.

Whether or not they felt proud of their service or sustained war injuries, returning Vietnam veterans received a lukewarm welcome for their service. A vocal section of the public vented its frustration with racism, the federal government, and the war on the returning veterans. While most Americans viewed World War II as the "good war," a majority of the American public viewed the Vietnam conflict as a disaster. Only the POWs generated postwar sympathy for the suffering they endured.

Some veterans wrote about their war experiences to educate the nation as well as improve their own understanding of their participation in the conflict and the public reception they received. Ron Kovic, a disabled veteran who served two tours of duty in Vietnam with the marines, wrote Born on the Fourth of July (1976), which explained his participation in the war and the difficulties of coming home in a wheelchair to an angry and hostile American public. Oliver Stone transformed the book into a successful film in 1989. Stone, who served in Vietnam, also produced the film Platoon (1986).

Despite the myth of the chronically impaired Vietnam veteran, most vets married, found jobs, and successfully reintegrated into American society. Many became successful businessmen and politicians whose experiences in the war shaped subsequent U.S. policy toward Vietnam. They became the point men leading the nation to a complex but more hopeful phase of Vietnamese-American relations. Yet veterans like Senator Bob Kerrey continued to face the fallout from their actions in Vietnam, revealing that the American people were still unable to unburden themselves from the political context of the conflict. Reminiscent of many veterans who have come under fire for their participation in the war, Kerrey rationalized his participation in a firefight that left twelve women and children dead as a response to orders followed in a chaotic and unconventional military engagement.

Although most veterans were not permanently damaged by the war, some 15 to 25 percent of Vietnam veterans (between 500,000 and 700,000) suffered from a stress-related impairment known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a psychological disease brought on by acute combat experience. Some of the 11,500 women who served in the war—90 percent of them as nurses—also returned exhibiting PTSD. This condition can occur in combat soldiers or other individuals suffering from violent trauma and can manifest itself years after the initial experience. Also known as shell shock or combat fatigue, the disorder is vaguely defined and was overused in diagnosing the psychological reactions to war of Vietnam veterans. Some of the 11,500 women who served in the war (90 percent as nurses) also returned exhibiting PTSD.

Reflecting the changing mood of the American public toward both the war and the veterans, memorials and other commemorations of the Vietnam conflict began to surface in the mid-1980s. They revealed a national desire to "welcome home" vets who had not received domestic support when they most needed it—immediately after the war.

The Pow and Mia Crusade

A national obsession over the fate of the approximately two thousand American soldiers missing in Southeast Asia became one of the most unexpected and permanent legacies of the war. To many Americans, perpetuation of the search for the POWs and MIAs provided the opportunity to extend belated thanks and honor to all Vietnam veterans.

The return of POWs became a heated political and military issue during the Paris peace talks that culminated in 1973. Both sides attempted to use it to their advantage over the next two years. The Americans claimed that the freeing and returning of the veterans was taking too long, though most of the men were later returned. During the administration of President Jimmy Carter in 1977, more than one thousand of the two thousand listed as MIA were reclassified as killed in action, although no credible reports existed that any missing service personnel not declared prisoners of war were still alive.

In the late 1970s the POW-MIA issue resurfaced as a result of lobbying by the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia. In 1979 Congress reclassified the fate of the soldiers killed in action as POW-MIA. President Ronald Reagan kept the issue alive three years later by stating publicly that he felt some Americans were still being held in Vietnam. His belief was supported by international humanitarian workers and Vietnamese immigrants who reported seeing Americans still held under guard.

Public passion for the return of MIAs increased following a spate of films in the mid-1980s, such as Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), starring Sylvester Stallone as a lone American freeing American POWs under intense enemy fire. MIA supporters soon began wearing bracelets and dog tags that listed a missing American veteran as a hero to be remembered and located. During his failed bid for the presidency in 1992, Ross Perot also fueled the MIA cause by declaring that he not only believed that Americans were still held, but that he had funded covert forays to locate and free the missing men. Because of contradictory and late-arriving information from the Vietnamese and U.S. governments, many Americans remained suspicious of the POW-MIA issue and came to believe it had declined as an issue of national importance.

Furthering national support for the controversial cause, President Reagan in 1988 ordered a black and white POW-MIA flag designed by the National League to fly one day each year at the White House. It stands as the only other flag besides the Stars and Stripes that has ever been hoisted at the White House. A Massachusetts state law passed in 1990 mandated that the flag be flown above one or more public buildings in every Massachusetts town. In April 2001, the state of Virginia passed similar legislation. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts organized the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs in 1992. Congressional prodding soon led the Postal Service to issue a POW-MIA stamp. Eventually, all fifty states officially recognized National POWMIA Recognition Day to commemorate the missing veterans.

Commemorating the War

The Vietnam Memorial, like the POW-MIA flag, stands as the physical embodiment of the desire of the American people to understand the meaning of the Vietnam conflict and remember the men and women who took part in it. During the late 1970s both public and private efforts began to congeal around the idea of establishing a monument to the 58,000 American dead in Vietnam. Influenced by the film The Deer Hunter (1978), Jan Scruggs, a Vietnam veteran, teamed up with two other servicemen in 1979 to create a non-profit organization known as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund.

The location and design of the memorial generated intense political controversy over an issue still raw in the American national consciousness. Maya Lin, a young Chinese-American architectural student at Yale University, won the competition with a design based on a sunken 500-foot, V-shaped wall of polished black granite bearing inscriptions on fourteen panels of all the names of the American men and women who died in Vietnam between 1959 and 1975.

Controversy immediately erupted over the political message conveyed by the wall. Some detractors saw it as a thinly veiled criticism of American motives in the war. Lin, who was also attacked by American racists who saw her Chinese heritage as implicated in her interpretation of the war and design of the memorial, effectively kept critics at bay and successfully preserved the inclusion of a chronological listing of the names of the deceased. Conservative critics influenced Secretary of the Interior James Watt to delay construction, however, until agreement was reached adding three life-sized bronze casts of American soldiers in more heroic form near the wall. This new addition reflected the desires and needs of a more conservative segment of the American population, personified by Ross Perot, who felt that the memorial should also recognize the positive aspects of the war and American service in Southeast Asia.

The wall, once unveiled, induced some veterans to feel guilt about surviving a conflict that their friends had not. Others discovered friends had not perished, and reconnected with former friends in the armed services who were at the wall to do the same. Thousands of flowers, cards, and other mementos have been left at the wall, a tradition that serves as a constant reminder that the conflict remains firmly imbedded in the memories of most Americans. A sacred shrine to many, over 2.5 million people visit the wall each year; it is the most visited memorial in Washington, D.C. The Korean War Veterans Memorial, established in 1995, owes its existence in part to a heightened sense of sympathy toward veterans by the American people in the wake of the Vietnam conflict.

On Veterans Day 1993 the Vietnam Women's Memorial Project unveiled a monument to the participation of women in the Vietnam War. Diane Evans, a Vietnam veteran who served as a nurse in hospitals and transport planes along with thousands of other women, pushed the project forward with tireless effort. In ways similar to the inclusion of a black male soldier in a bronze statue installed near the Vietnam Memorial in 1984, the women's memorial—built by sculptor Glenna Goodacre—reflected the inclusiveness of the war and the shared experiences of participants across race and ethnicity. The statue depicts two female nurses (one black and one white) assisting a fallen soldier. The Vietnam War elevated the visibility of military women within the armed services, leaving a lasting legacy that helped later women achieve even greater gains in rank, job participation, and benefits.

Political Lessons

The meaning of the Vietnam War for American foreign policy remains a hotly contested and unresolved issue. Most aspects of the war remain open to dispute, ranging from the wisdom of U.S. involvement to the reasoning behind continued escalation and final withdrawal.

The political legacies of the war began to surface even before North Vietnam's victory in 1975. A powerful domestic antiwar movement that arose in the mid-1960s influenced a bipartisan group of U.S. congresspersons who by 1970 began to question openly the commitment of American troops to conflicts of uncertain national importance. Their doubts were enhanced by the fact that Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon sent U.S. forces into Vietnam with little regard for congressional approval. Passage of the War Powers Resolution by both houses of Congress and over President Nixon's veto in 1973 signaled that American politicians and the public would no longer allow presidents to single-handedly dictate military policy as commander in chief of the armed forces.

The War Powers Resolution mandated that U.S. presidents inform Congress within forty-eight hours of a troop commitment in the absence of a declaration of war. If Congress does not declare war within sixty days of the commitment, the president must terminate the use of U.S. military forces, unless he has sought in writing a thirty-day extension of the deadline. Since its passage, however, the War Powers Resolution has made little impact on presidential warmaking because creative ways have been found to circumvent its limitations.

More important as a brake on presidential war policy is the Vietnam syndrome, a catchall phrase that describes the public's impatience for protracted American wars based on vague policy goals. Most pronounced from the American withdrawal in 1973 to the Gulf War in 1991, the Vietnam syndrome congealed after the war as the public mood slid toward isolation and the belief that troops should be committed only in cases of national invasion. This sentiment handcuffed President Jimmy Carter's ability to use military force to free American hostages in Iran in 1979 and 1980, and deterred President Ronald Reagan from seeking congressional approval to fund the Nicaraguan contras in the early 1980s.

During his first term in office, President Ronald Reagan assured the nation that there would be "no more Vietnams," a refrain also echoed by George H. W. Bush during his presidency. To conservatives, this meant that U.S. troops would never again fight a war without the necessary full political support to win it. To others, it meant that popular opinion would now limit any extensions of American military power across the globe. The public would not support a troop commitment to another war against communists, even in the Western Hemisphere. Mistrust spawned by the Vietnam conflict led Reagan's foreign policymakers to cover up arms deals during the Iran-Contra affair.

American invasions of Grenada and Panama in the 1980s were short-lived partly because of executive fears of escalating military involvement without strong public support. The deaths of more than two hundred marines at a base in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983 threatened to rekindle the nightmare of Vietnam once again. But the victorious Gulf War of 1991 did much to remove the enormous burden of the Vietnam conflict from the back of American foreign policy.

In the invasion plan to oust the Iraqi forces occupying Kuwait, General Norman Schwarzkopf, a Vietnam veteran, remembered lessons of Southeast Asia. He helped to limit the information released about the conflict (to prevent another "living-room" television war) and patiently built up his forces to maximum strength before attacking Iraqi troops. The architects of the Gulf War also relied on precision bombing rather than ground troops in order to minimize casualties and preserve public support for the war. President Bush successfully mollified the public's post-Vietnam fears of wasteful wars fought by poor men by pledging to do away with college draft deferments, if the draft was reinstated, and by calling for unqualified patriotic support to honor the 500,000 servicemen sent to the Gulf.

Following the Persian Gulf War the American public showered returning troops with a level of adulation not witnessed in the United States since 1945, and cracks became visible in the Vietnam syndrome. But hesitation in committing troops to Bosnia and the withdrawal from Somalia stemmed in part from Clinton administration fears that the conflicts there would escalate and damage American credibility, as with Vietnam. Strong domestic support for a precision bombing campaign over Kosovo in 1999, however, demonstrated how far the American public had drifted from the antiwar fervor of the early 1970s.

As time healed the wounds of violence and bloodshed, the impact of the Vietnam conflict still lingered for the Vietnamese and American people. But a new phase began, characterized by hope, new friendships, and cultural and political exchange unprecedented in the history of two nations once at war.

Bibliography

Andrade, Dale. Trial by Fire: The 1972 Easter Offensive, America's Last Vietnam Battle. New York, 1995. Using official records, interviews with participants, and captured North Vietnamese documents, this important book covers the entire scope of the Easter offensive.

Berman, Larry. Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam. New York, 1982. A detailed archival-based account of the crucial July 1965 decision that Americanized the war in Vietnam.

——. Lyndon Johnson's War: The Road to Stalemate in Vietnam. New York, 1989.

——. No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam. New York, 2001. Drawing on new declassified documents, the case is presented that Nixon and Kissinger viewed the Paris accords as a vehicle for prolonging indefinitely American involvement in Southeast Asia.

Brigham, Robert K. Guerrilla Diplomacy: The NLF's Foreign Relations and the Viet Nam War. Ithaca, N.Y., 1999. The very best account of the NLF's activities during the war. The author utilizes many primary source documents from Hanoi archives and interviews with many Vietnamese leaders.

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Clodfelter, Mark. The Limits of Air Power: The American Bombing of North Vietnam. New York, 1989. The most comprehensive account on the subject of U.S. airpower and strategy during the war.

Diem, Bui, and David Chanoff. In the Jaws of History. Boston, 1987. Diem, the former Vietnam ambassador to the United States, offers a gripping personal and political account of his life and the struggle for democracy in Vietnam.

Dillard, Walter Scott. Sixty Days to Peace: Implementing the Paris Peace Accords, Vietnam 1973. Washington, D.C., 1982.

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Engelmann, Larry. Tears Before the Rain: An Oral History of the Fall of South Vietnam. New York, 1990. A stunning series of more than seventy oral history interviews with those who were there for the fall of South Vietnam.

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Hung, Nguyen Tien, and Jerrold L. Schecter. The Palace File. New York, 1986. Based on more than thirty previously unpublished letters between South Vietnam's President Thieu and U.S. Presidents Nixon and Ford, the book documents the broken promises that resulted in the fall of South Vietnam.

Isaacs, Arnold R. Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia. Baltimore, 1983.

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Logevall, Fredrik. Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam. Berkeley, Calif., 1999. The first truly comprehensive examination of the making of the war in Vietnam from 1963 to 1965. Develops an international context for the author's analysis and documents that at every step American decision makers chose war over disengagement.

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— Larry Berman and Jason Newman

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).

This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.

The Vietnam War was a twenty-year conflict in Southeast Asia (1955-1975) between the government of South Vietnam and the Communist government of North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese sought the reunification of the two countries under its form of rule. The United States, determined to prevent Communist aggression, supported the government of South Vietnam and became increasingly involved militarily in the conflict in the early 1960s. By 1965 U.S. involvement had escalated, and U.S. armed forces had been introduced. Opposition to the war in the United States grew steadily, resulting in one of the most divisive periods in U.S. history. The United States ultimately withdrew its forces in 1973. Within two years the North Vietnamese defeated the South Vietnamese armed forces and took control of the country.

The War in Vietnam

During World War II, the Viet Minh, a nationalist party seeking an end to French colonial rule of Vietnam, was organized. After the defeat of the Japanese and their withdrawal from what was then known as French Indochina, the Viet Minh, under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, formally declared independence. France refused to recognize Vietnamese independence, and war broke out between the French and the Viet Minh. In 1954 the French withdrew after suffering a devastating defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.

After the French withdrawal, participants at an international conference in Geneva, Switzerland, divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel. The Viet Minh were given control of the north, which became known as North Vietnam, while the non-Communist southern half became South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese government was headed by Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem, who refused to allow free elections on reunification in 1956 as agreed by the Geneva Accords. Diem rightly feared that Ho Chi Minh and the Communists would win the election. The United States supported Diem's defiance, which led the North Vietnamese to seek unification through military force.

The Diem regime, which soon proved to be corrupt and ineffective, had difficulty fighting the Viet Cong, a South Vietnamese army of guerrilla soldiers who were trained and armed by the North Vietnamese. The Viet Cong became part of the National Liberation Front (NLF), a Communist-backed insurgent organization. In 1961 President John F. Kennedy began to send more U.S. military advisers to South Vietnam, and by the end of 1962, their number had risen from 900 to 11,000. Kennedy, however, was dissatisfied with the Diem regime and allowed a military coup to occur on November 1, 1963. Diem was assassinated during the coup, but none of the lackluster military leaders who followed him was able to stop the Communists from gaining more ground.

Direct U.S. military involvement in Vietnam began in 1964. On August 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that North Vietnamese ships had attacked U.S. naval vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin. Johnson asked Congress for the authority to employ any necessary course of action to safeguard U.S. troops. Based on what turned out to be inaccurate information supplied by the Johnson administration, Congress gave the president this authority in the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (78 Stat. 384).

Johnson used this resolution to justify military escalation in the absence of a congressional declaration of war. Following attacks on U.S. forces in February 1965, he authorized the bombing of North Vietnam. To continue the protection of the South Vietnamese government, Johnson increased the number of U.S. soldiers fighting in South Vietnam from 20,000 to 500,000 during the next three years.

U.S. military leaders had difficulty fighting a guerrilla army, yet repeatedly claimed that Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces were losing the war. On January 30, 1968, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese made a surprise attack on thirty-six major cities and towns during the Tet (lunar new year) festival. Though U.S. troops repelled these attacks, the Tet offensive undermined the credibility of U.S. military leaders and of Johnson himself, who had claimed the war was close to being won. Antiwar sentiment in the United States grew after Tet as the public became skeptical about whether the war could be won and, if it could, how many years it would take to achieve victory.

The 1968 presidential campaign of Minnesota antiwar Senator Eugene McCarthy gained popularity after Tet. On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced that the United States would stop bombing North Vietnam above the 20th parallel and that he would not seek reelection to the presidency. Johnson ordered a total bombing halt in October, when North Vietnam agreed to begin preliminary peace talks in Paris. These discussions dragged on during the fall election campaign, which saw Republican Richard M. Nixon elected president.

Nixon sought to preserve the South Vietnamese government while withdrawing U.S. troops. He began a policy of "Vietnamization," which promised to gradually transfer all military operations to the South Vietnamese. During this process the United States would provide massive amounts of military aid. In 1969, when the number of U.S. military personnel in South Vietnam had reached a high of 540,000, Nixon announced a modest troop withdrawal. During 1969 the Paris peace talks continued with the NLF, North Vietnamese, and South Vietnamese, but little progress was made.

In the spring of 1970, Nixon expanded the war as U.S. and South Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia to destroy North Vietnamese military sanctuaries there. The Cambodian action created a firestorm on U.S. college and university campuses, where antiwar protests led to the closing of many institutions for the remainder of the spring. Nevertheless, Nixon persevered with his policies. He authorized the bombing of Cambodia and Laos by B-52 bombers, destabilizing the Cambodian government and destroying large sections of both countries. By late 1970 the number of U.S. military personnel in South Vietnam had declined to 335,000. A year later the number had dropped to 160,000 military personnel.

In March 1972 the North Vietnamese invaded the northern section of South Vietnam and the central highlands. Nixon responded by ordering the mining of Haiphong and other North Vietnamese ports and large-scale bombing of North Vietnam. In the fall of 1972, a peace treaty appeared likely, but the talks broke off in mid-December. Nixon then ordered intense bombing of Hanoi and other North Vietnamese cities. The "Christmas bombing" lasted eleven days.

The peace talks then resumed, and on January 27, 1973, the parties agreed to a cease-fire the following day, the withdrawal of all U.S. forces, the release of all prisoners of war, and the creation of an international force to keep the peace. The South Vietnamese were to have the right to determine their own future, but North Vietnamese troops stationed in the south could remain. By the end of 1973, almost all U.S. military personnel had left South Vietnam.

The conflict in the south continued in 1974. The United States cut military aid to South Vietnam in August 1974, resulting in the demoralization of the South Vietnamese army. The North Vietnamese, sensing that the end was near, attacked a provincial capital sixty miles north of Saigon in December 1974. After the city of Phouc Binh fell in early January 1975, the North Vietnamese launched a full-scale offensive in the central highlands in March. The South Vietnamese army fell apart and a general panic ensued. On April 30 the South Vietnamese government surrendered. On July 2, 1976, the country was officially united as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

More than 47,000 U.S. military personnel were killed in action during the war, and nearly 11,000 died of other causes. Approximately 200,000 South Vietnamese military personnel were killed, and 900,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers lost their lives. The civilian population was devastated by the war. An estimated one million North and South Vietnamese civilians were killed during the war. Large parts of the countryside were destroyed through bombing and the spraying of chemical defoliants.

The War and U.S. Law

The war provoked many legal and constitutional controversies in the United States. Though the U.S. Supreme Court refused to decide whether the war was constitutional, it did rule on several war-related issues. In United States v. O'Brien, 391 U.S. 367, 88 S. Ct. 1673, 20 L. Ed. 2d 672 (1968), the Court upheld the conviction of David Paul O'Brien for violating a 1965 amendment to the Selective Service Act (50 U.S.C.A. App. § 451 et seq.) prohibiting any draft registrant from knowingly destroying or mutilating his draft card. The Court rejected O'Brien's contention that his burning of his draft card was symbolic speech protected by the First Amendment. In Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503, 89 S. Ct. 733, 21 L. Ed. 2d 731 (1969), however, the Court ruled that high school students had the First Amendment right to wear black armbands to school to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

In Welsh v. United States, 398 U.S. 333, 90 S. Ct. 1792, 26 L. Ed. 2d 308 (1970), the Court held that a person could be exempted from compulsory military service based on purely moral or ethical beliefs against war.

One of the most significant Court decisions of the Vietnam War period involved the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a highly classified government report on the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The Nixon administration sought to prevent the New York Times and the Washington Post from publishing excerpts from the study on the ground that publication would hurt national security interests. In New York Times v. United States, 403 U.S. 713, 91 S. Ct. 2140, 29 L. Ed. 2d 822, the Supreme Court, by a 6-3 vote, held that the government's efforts to block publication amounted to an unconstitutional prior restraint.

See: Cold War; Communism; Conscientious Objector; New York Times v. United States.

(vee-et-nahm, vee-et-nam)

A war in Southeast Asia, in which the United States fought in the 1960s and 1970s. The war was waged from 1954 to 1975 between communist North Vietnam and noncommunist South Vietnam, two parts of what was once the French colony of Indochina. Vietnamese communists attempted to take over the South, both by invasion from the North and by guerrilla warfare conducted within the South by the Viet Cong. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy sent increasing numbers of American military advisers to South Vietnam in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Kennedy's successor, President Lyndon Johnson, increased American military support greatly, until half a million United States soldiers were in Vietnam.

American goals in Vietnam proved difficult to achieve, and the communists' Tet offensive was a severe setback. Reports of atrocities committed by both sides in the war disturbed many Americans (see My Lai massacre). Eventually, President Richard Nixon decreased American troop strength and sent his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, to negotiate a cease-fire with North Vietnam. American troops were withdrawn in 1973, and South Vietnam was completely taken over by communist forces in 1975.

The involvement of the United States in the war was extremely controversial. Some supported it wholeheartedly; others opposed it in mass demonstrations and by refusing to serve in the American armed forces (see draft). Still others seemed to rely on the government to decide the best course of action (see silent majority).

A large memorial (see Vietnam Memorial) bearing the names of all members of the United States armed services who died in the Vietnam War is in Washington, D.C.

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