Vietnam War Overview

The Vietnam War, 1954 – 1975, originated from a long time battle between the French and Vietnamese over the rule of Vietnam. Vietnam was ruled as a colony of the French for one hundred years, but was forced to leave. In 1954, France and Vietnam signed the Geneva Peace Accords, which divided the communist northern Vietnam and the republican southern Vietnam at the 17th parallel. This division was only supposed to last until the elections of 1956. The U.S. and John Foster Dulles had other plans however because they felt that the Geneva Accords granted too much power to the Communist Party of North Vietnam.

In 1955, the Eisenhower administration provided massive amounts of support to help form South Vietnam. The following year, Ngo Dinh Diem, a strong anti-Communist figure from the South, won presidency and almost immediately claimed that the North was attacking. He began a counterattack and passed repressive laws. Citizens were upset about these laws. Many people in the Kennedy administration were split on the question whether or not Diem was the right man for the position that he filled. From 1956 – 1960, the Communist Party of Vietnam desired to reunify the country using only political means. They tried to get Diem to collapse by applying a tremendous amount of internal political pressure. In 1959, and again in 1960, Communists convinced the Party to use revolutionary violence to overthrow Diem. A broad based united front to help mobilize those that opposed the South’s government resulted. It was called the National Liberation Front and was formed at the end of 1960. Anyone that opposed Diem and wanted to unify the country could join the NLF.

In December of 1961, Kennedy sent a team to Vietnam to report on conditions and to asses how much American aid the South would need. Some advised Kennedy suggested sending more help to stabilize the Diem regime and destroy the NLF, while others suggested withdrawing all together. He decided to take the middle road and sent some aid of machinery and weapons, but would not intervene entirely by sending whole-scale troops. The NLF continued to win however and the Strategic Hamlet was formed to help separate the villagers from the NLF. By 1963, Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, had caused large scale upsets amongst many of their own supporters. Several people protested, such as the Buddhists whom would publically burn themselves to death. Diem and Nhu were later captured and killed. Kennedy was assassinated three weeks later and Lyndon B. Johnson became President of the United States, and as problems continued to worsen in Vietnam, Johnson wanted to get more involved in the war. He asked for more expansive war powers. In 1964, a U.S. ship in the Gulf of Tonkin was supposedly shot at on multiple occasions. Johnson used this as a way to get the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed to gain more power in the war and to get more involved. In 1965, he sent the first combat troops to Vietnam.

By 1968 however, things had deteriorated for the Johnson administration. The North launched coordinate attacks on all major southern cities. These attacks later became known as the Tet Offensive in the West, and they had forced Johnson to bargain with the Communist Party. He began hinting that he would not seek re-nomination as president and that he would compromise with the Communists to end the war. In 1968, secret negotiations to end the war began in Paris and Richard Nixon became president. Nixon had secret plans to end the war. He wanted to bring American troops home, to rely more on air attacks, and have the South’s army take care of more of the ground attacks. During the Nixon years, war also expanded into neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia, causing great upset all over. The air war did not deter the Communist Party however, and it made for hard demands in Paris.

By 1972, a preliminary peace draft had been drawn up. This peace treaty was rejected and though, and things were only made worse when Nixon bombed the North’s largest cities. These air raids brought immediate condemnation on the international level and forced the Nixon administration to review its tactics and negotiation strategies. In early 1973, the Nixon White House convinced the South that they would not abandon them if they signed on to the peace accord. Therefore, the final draft was signed and open hostilities between the U.S. and North Vietnam ended. The Paris Peace Agreement did not end the conflict in Vietnam however. The North and South continued to fight until 1975 when the North captured the South’s presidential palace. The North had won despite the attempts the South made to keep from political and military collapse.




Here is the website that I got the information from, but there is much more to be found. Use this link and the other information on this page to accomplish the following tasks.

http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/history/index.html

Do you agree with the U.S.’s involvement in Vietnam? Why or why not? Use the timeline feature on the PBS web page to choose what you think are the three most important events and explain why you chose the ones that you did.

Tim Tavenner
Period 4