Vietnam War- heaviest U.S. involvement (1965-73) (jan 1, 1955 – jan 1, 1975)

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vietnamization:A U.S. policy, devised under President Nixon in the early 1970s, of delegating the ground fighting to the South Vietnamese in the Vietnam War. American troop levels dropped and American casualties dropped correspondingly, but the killing in Vietnam continued.


My Lai: Vietnamese village where U.S. Army troops executed nearly five hundred people in 1968, including a large number of women and children


detente: The easing of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Nixon administration, which was achieved by focusing on issues of common concern, such as arms control and trade.


As the accelerating rights revolution shook the Democratic coalition, the war in Vietnam rattled the entire country. In a CBS interview back in September 1963, Kennedy had remarked that it was up to the South Vietnamese whether “their war” would be won or lost. But the young president had already placed the United States on a course that could not easily be reversed. Like previous Cold War presidents, Kennedy believed that giving up in Vietnam would weaken America’s “credibility” against the spread of communism. American withdrawal would likely mean victory for North Vietnam, and “would be a great mistake,” he said.

It is impossible to know how JFK would have managed Vietnam had he lived. What is known is that by the fall of 1963, Kennedy was frustrated with Ngo Dinh Diem, the dictatorial leader of South Vietnam whom the United States had supported since 1955 (see “Making a Commitment in Vietnam” in Chapter 24). The Catholic Diem’s tenuous support among the Buddhist South Vietnamese majority had eroded during his eight years in power, and he embraced more and more repressive means to silence his critics. His failed land reform policies fueled detractors as well, turning the loyalty of many peasants to the South Vietnam National Liberation Front (NLF), or Vietcong, which was supported by North Vietnamese communists. Hoping to replace the deeply unpopular Diem with a government strong enough to repel the Vietcong and stabilize the country, Kennedy encouraged Diem’s opponents to stage a coup.


It was a miscalculation. Emboldened by Kennedy’s approval, a handful of South Vietnamese generals overthrew Diem on November 1, and then brutally killed him and his brother. Rather than stability, the coup brought chaos. South Vietnam fell into even deeper turmoil, with both cities and the countryside increasingly ungovernable. Kennedy himself would not live to see the long-term outcome of the coup: increasing American engagement in a long and costly, perhaps even unwinnable, war in the name of fighting communism.

Just as Kennedy had inherited Vietnam from Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson inherited Vietnam from Kennedy following the latter’s assassination. Johnson’s inheritance proved increasingly burdensome, because it became evident that only massive American intervention could prevent the collapse of South Vietnam (Map 27.2). Johnson, like Kennedy, believed in the Cold War tenet of global containment. “I am not going to lose Vietnam,” he vowed just days after taking office. “I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”


To neutralize criticism at home, Nixon decided to turn the ground fighting over to the South Vietnamese. Under this new policy of Vietnamization, American troop levels dropped from 543,000 in 1968 to 334,000 in 1971 and to just 24,000 by early 1973. American casualties dropped correspondingly, although the overall bloodshed continued. As Ellsworth Bunker, the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, noted cynically, it was just a matter of changing “the color of the bodies.” But even with the troop drawdown, American bombers continued, and even intensified, their aerial assault on North Vietnam.

The war was far from over, and the antiwar movement, far from abating, intensified. In November 1969, half a million demonstrators gathered in Washington, D.C., for the Vietnam Moratorium, one of the largest protests ever held in the capital. On April 30, 1970, Nixon announced that American forces would attack suspected enemy targets in neutral Cambodia where a secret bombing campaign had been going on for a year already. The invasion of Cambodia touched off a new wave of outrage on American campuses — and for the first time in the antiwar movement, students were killed. On May 4, 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio, panicky National Guardsmen fired into an antiwar rally, wounding nine students and killing four; of the 13 people hit, the nearest was 60 feet from the Guardsmen. Nationwide student protests led more than 450 colleges and universities to close, some for a day or two, others for weeks. Less than two weeks later, during a protest march at Jackson State College in Mississippi, Guardsmen opened fire on a dormitory, killing two black students. The Jackson State incident received slim coverage in the national media, but it was no less tragic an outcome of the escalating tensions between youth and authorities.

Under a sea of American flags, construction workers in New York City march in support of the Vietnam War. Wearing hard hats, tens of thousands of marchers jammed Broadway for four blocks opposite City Hall, and the overflow crammed the side streets. Working-class patriotism became a main source of support for Nixon’s Vietnam policy.


Though unrelated, one of the worst atrocities of the war had become public about six months before the protests at Kent State and Jackson State. On March 16, 1968, U.S. Army troops killed close to five hundred South Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai, including a large number of women and children. For the better part of a year, the massacre was effectively kept secret within the military, until journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story in November 1969 in the St Louis Post-Dispatch, with photos of the massacre appearing in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. My Lai discredited the United States in the eyes of the world. Americans, Time observed, “must stand in the larger dock of guilt and human conscience.” Although high-ranking officers participated in the My Lai massacre and its cover-up, only one soldier, a low-ranking second lieutenant named William Calley, was convicted. Many believed that Calley was made a scapegoat for failed U.S. policies that made civilian deaths an inescapable part of the war.

Disillusionment with the war was mounting. Notably, the disillusionment now included Americans who had served in the military. A group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War publicized other atrocities committed by U.S. troops. In a controversial protest in 1971, they returned their combat medals at demonstrations outside the U.S. Capitol, literally hurling them onto the steps of the building. “Here’s my merit badge for murder,” one vet said. Supporters of the war derided these veterans as disloyal, but their heartfelt antiwar protest reflected the deep personal torment that Vietnam had caused for many soldiers.

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