United States involvement in the Vietnam War

U.S. & Vietnam War

President Eisenhower said the U.S. should not become involved in a land war in Asia. President Johnson said we should not send American boys to fight Asian boys' war. Yet, the U.S. did become involved in a war in Vietnam. How and why did this happen? Why could the U.S. not win? What should the U.S. have learned from the war?

Fear: this is the main reason that the United States became involved in the Vietnam War. However, the fear was not just the fear of communism, despite the much-touted 'domino theory' that once a nation became communist, nearby nations would fall prey to communist infiltration. The fear was also rooted in the terror that by seeming weak on defense, a president would be subject to internal criticism about being 'soft on communism.' When the Maoists took control of China, the debate raged as to who had 'lost' China, as if China's self-determination as a nation was solely a product of U.S. policy. No president wanted to be accused of losing Vietnam. Ironically, the attempt to fight a land war in Vietnam led to the end of Lyndon Johnson's presidency and control over of the nation by leftist forces.

The military leaders of America thought in terms of false historical analogies: they thought that because Neville Chamberlain appeased Hitler by granting Hitler control over territories in Europe, America must not appease the Soviet Union. Harry Truman's establishment of the so-called Truman Doctrine to fight for free peoples every where and to contain the Soviet Union within the Warsaw Pact had created a mentality whereby every guerrilla war was seen as a fight for American freedom.

The native Vietnamese saw their struggle differently: they perceived their struggle as an anti-colonialist war, rather than a war of communism vs. freedom. The South Vietnamese anti-communist leaders were dictators, not democrats, and had been allied with the wildly unpopular French, then with the Americans. In contrast, the National Liberation Front (NLF) or 'Viet Cong' (as it was called by the Americans) had deep, longstanding support in the Vietnamese countryside. American military decision-makers proved unable to process this fact, given that they viewed Vietnam through its own biases, not through the eyes of the Vietnamese.

The method of America's military entry into Vietnam was also disastrous: Eisenhower and Kennedy's gradual increase of American advisors and military support enabled the public to ignore the gradual escalation, as well as America's political alliance with the unpopular anticommunist, South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem (who was ultimately assassinated). The American public also did not understand the situation in Vietnam as a compelling national security interest -- it was just a far-off land in the eyes of most individuals. The method of fighting the war was undertaken in an autocratic fashion. President Johnson never officially declared war in Vietnam, but the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed by Congress gave him unprecedented powers to manage and escalate American involvement.