Teaching Vietnam from Eisenhower and Ridgway to Nixon and Kissinger

Background Information for Vietnam

I love frequently asked questions. They can save time. The reader can skim the questions and see if the answer is worth reading. In this spirit of saving your time, if you have decided to teach Vietnam, here are some FAQs and links to more information if you want to learn more about a topic. If you are a teacher who likes to have students evaluate documents and assess their point of view and credibility, the links to government documents in this chapter could be useful to your students. They will have more to evaluate in the entire memos and CIA reports than in the short excerpts I am using here.
As this post is several pages long, I remember using the Send to Kindle feature to send the text to your Kindle device rather than trying to read it online.

Who were the Vietnamese in the 1960s?

Captain Robert H. Whitlow writes, in the U.S. Marines in Vietnam: The Advisory And Combat Assistance Era, 1954-1964:
“Fundamentally, South Vietnamese society is rural and agrarian. Over the centuries the Vietnamese have tended to cluster in tiny hamlets strewn down the coastal plain and across the Mekong Delta. Usually composed of a handful of closely knit families whose ancestors settled the surrounding land generations earlier, the hamlet is South Vietnam’s basic community unit. Next larger is the village which resembles the American township in function in that it encompasses a number of adjacent hamlets. The Vietnamese people have naturally developed strong emotional ties with their native villages. ‘“To the Vietnamese,” it has been said without exaggeration, “the village is his land’s heart, mind, and soul.” Given the rural nature of the country it is understandable that the inhabitants of the villages and hamlets have retained a large degree of self-government. ‘The laws of the emperor,” states an ancient Vietnamese proverb, “are less than the customs of the village.”

Whitlow continued and explained how the war was changing Vietnamese society:

“The population of most of South Vietnam’s cities and towns has been swollen by the influx of refugees which occurred as the Vietnam War intensified in the middle 1960s. In 1965, for example, refugee population estimates for the three major cities were as follows: Saigon— 1.5 million; Da Nang— 144,000; Hue?105.000.”

Whitlow was also interested in the ethnic makeup of Vietnamese society:

“Slightly over 16 million people currently inhabit South Vietnam. Of these, over 13 million are ethnic Vietnamese. Primarily rice farmers and fishermen, the Vietnamese have tended to compress themselves into the country’s most productive agricultural areas—the Mekong Delta and the coastal plain. Chinese, numbering around one million, form South Vietnam’s largest ethnic minority. Concentrated for the most part in the major cities, the Chinese traditionally have played a leading role in Vietnam’s commerce. About 700,000 Montagnard tribesmen, scattered across the upland plateau and the rugged northern mountains, constitute South Vietnam’s second largest minority. Some 400,000 Khmers, closely akin to the dominant population of Cambodia, inhabit the lowlands along the Cambodian border.”

What did the CIA have to say about colonialism and nationalism in Asia and the Middle East at the end of World War II?

“World War II gave a tremendous impetus to the colonial independence movement. The UK withdrew from India-Pakistan and Burma, while the Dutch, and French, exhausted by war, appear unable to suppress the Indonesian and Indochinese nationalists by force, or, despite any temporary compromise solutions, to be able to arrest their eventual achievement of genuine independence. Growing nationalism in French North Africa threatens French hegemony. While the colonial issue in most remaining dependencies is not yet acute, native nationalism in many of these areas too will exert increasing pressure for autonomy or independence…
“… A weakened France was forced to recognize the independence of its Levant mandates, Syria and Lebanon. The US fulfilled its promise of freedom to the Philippines. Korea was freed from Japanese bondage. France and the Netherlands, unwilling to relinquish their rich Southeast Asian possessions to the native nationalists, became embroiled in an uneasy struggle with indigenous regimes established in these areas.”

How did the French become so involved Vietnam?

Like many European nations, France sought colonies in the 18th and 19th centuries. After years of resistance by patriotic Vietnamese, Vietnam finally came under French control as a French protectorate in 1884. “Now nearly 50 years of French administration were about to begin—a short span in comparison to the 1,000 years of Chinese occupation Vietnam had known earlier. But in their impact upon Vietnam’s future, those fifty years proved as fateful as the full 1,000.”

Why did the French leave Vietnam in 1954?

Like many people living in colonies after World War II, the Vietnamese sought their freedom from France in 1946. The French for reasons of prestige or a desire to continue exploiting the resources of Vietnam, resisted and an armed struggle broke out. The French lost this struggle despite massive aid from the US. After losing the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the French evacuated their armed forces and civilians from Vietnam. An international peace conference divided Vietnam temporarily until elections could be held.

Why did the US become so involved in helping the French maintain a colony in Asia in the 1950s?

Many accounts of the US involvement in Indochina mention the American desire to support anti-communist French politicians in France. France had an active communist party in the 1950’s. Remember that by now the Cold War had been raging in Europe in years, and fear of communist influence in Europe was powerful. Essentially, the US wanted to keep anti-communists in power throughout western Europe, and feared that the loss of Indochina might weaken its anti-communist allies in France.

Why did President Eisenhower decide not to send US troops into Indochina to prevent the French defeat?

As you would expect from a president with an exceptional military background, Dwight Eisenhower sought information about conditions in Vietnam as he considered French requests for American troops to intervene. He turned to General Matthew Ridgway, the US Army Chief of Staff for a report on the prospects for intervention in Vietnam.
Who was General Matthew Ridgway and what had he done to gain President Eisenhower’s trust?
In “The Best and The Brightest,” David Halberstam describes Ridgway as a “hard-nosed general of great simplicity and directness.”
“Organizer of the first American airborne division, the 82nd, he led the first American airborne into Sicily, and then jumped again in Normandy, and was the first commander of the 8th Airborne Corps in 1945. When the end of the war was near, he had been chosen to lead all airborne troops in the scheduled invasion of Japan. He had thus ended the war as a general with an enormous reputation, yet his career still very much in bloom, the top commander of elite units…
“He made a point of being a dramatic figure, aware that the men were always watching. Even as commander of the Eighth Army in Korea, he wore his paratrooper’s jump harness, a reminder to a trooper that he had been airborne, and on that harness his ever-present two grenades. Almost the first thing he did when he took over the Korean command was symbolic: he stopped all troops from riding in closed jeeps because he felt it gave them a false sense of warmth and security and thus made them more vulnerable to the enemy and the cold. When Truman finally fired MacArthur, Ridgway replaced him, and had systematically pulled the U.S. forces back together, and made his reputation even more enviable, both to soldier and civilian. He was by 1954 the most prestigious American still in uniform, an old-fashioned, hard-nosed general of great simplicity and directness.”
Ridgway, like President Franklin D. Roosevelt before him, thought that the United States had no business supporting France and the other European powers trying to maintain their wealth in Asia after World War II.
What did Ridgway recommend in his report on US intervention in Indochina?
In his memoir where he talks about his report on Indochina, Ridgway writes that while the “hard fighting French garrison” were gallant, US intervention would be difficult.
“Soon I was deeply concerned to hear individuals of great influence, both in and out of government, raising the cry that now was the time, and here, in Indochina, was the place to “test the New Look,” for us to intervene, to come to the aid of France with arms.
“At the same time that same old delusive idea was advanced—that we could do things the cheap and easy way, by going into Indochina with air and naval forces alone. To me this had an ominous ring. For I felt sure that if we committed air and naval power to that area, we would have to follow them immediately with ground forces in support.
“I also knew that none of those advocating such a step had any accurate idea what such an operation would cost us in blood and money and national effort. I felt that it was essential therefore that all who had any influence in making the decision on this grave matter should be fully aware of all the factors involved. To provide these facts, I sent out to Indochina an Army team of experts in every field: engineers, signal and communications specialists, medical officers, and experienced combat leaders who knew how to evaluate terrain in terms of battle tactics. They went out to get the answers to a thousand questions that those who had so blithely recommended that we go to war there had never taken the trouble to ask. How deep was the water over the bar at Saigon? What were the harbor and dock facilities? Where could we store the tons of supplies we would need to support us there? How good was the road net—how could supplies be transported as the fighting forces moved inland, and in what tonnages? What of the climate? The rainfall? What tropical diseases would attack the combat soldier in that jungle land?
“Their report was complete. The area, they found, was practically devoid of those facilities which modern forces such as ours find essential to the waging of war. Its telecommunications, highways, railways—all the things that make possible the operation of a modern combat force on land—were almost non-existent. Its port facilities and airfields were totally inadequate, and to provide the facilities we would need to require a tremendous engineering and logistical effort.
“The land was a land of rice paddy and jungle—particularly adapted to the guerrilla-type warfare at which the Chinese soldier is a master. This meant that every little detachment, every individual, that tried to move about that country, would have to be protected by riflemen. Every telephone lineman, road repair party, every ambulance and every rear-area aid station would have to be under armed guard or they would be shot at around the clock.
“If we did go into Indochina, we would have to win. We would have to go in with a military force adequate in all its branches, and that meant a very strong ground force—an Army that could not only stand the normal attrition of battle, but could absorb heavy casualties from the jungle heat, and the rots and fevers which afflict the white man in the tropics. We could not again afford to accept anything short of decisive military victory.
“We could have fought in Indochina. We could have won, if we had been willing to pay the tremendous cost in men and money that such intervention would have required—a cost that in my opinion would have eventually been as great as, or greater than, that we paid in Korea. In Korea, we had learned that air and naval power alone cannot win a war and that inadequate ground forces cannot win one either. It was incredible to me that we had forgotten that bitter lesson so soon—that we were on the verge of making that same tragic error.
“That error, thank God, was not repeated. As soon as the full report was in, I lost no time in having it passed on up the chain of command. It reached President Eisenhower. To a man of his military experience its implications were immediately clear. The idea of intervening was abandoned, and it is my belief that the analysis which the Army made and presented to higher authority played a considerable, perhaps a decisive, part in persuading our government not to embark on that tragic adventure.”

Did General Ridgway’s report on intervention influence presidents who followed Eisenhower?

Unfortunately, Ridgway’s influence faded with time. When President Lyndon Baines Johnson succeeded John Kennedy as president, Ridgway’s advice was not welcome in Washington, according to an advisor to Kennedy. In a letter to the editor of The New York Times, Roger Hilsman described the end of Ridgway’s influence in Washington:
“Matthew B. Ridgway, who died July 26 (front page, July 27), and George C. Marshall were the outstanding soldier-statesmen of our day. General Ridgway, after having distinguished himself as a combat commander in World War II, was called upon to repair the disaster following Chinese intervention in Korea, and he did so brilliantly.
“Later, as Army Chief of Staff, he saved the United States from a second disaster by almost single-handedly blocking the United States from intervening in Vietnam after the French defeat at Dienbienphu.
“In 1965, when the United States again considered intervening in Vietnam, the White House made no effort to seek General Ridgway’s advice. On the contrary, the White House made it clear he was not welcome either at the Pentagon or in Washington. “America’s tragedy was that there was no one else in America’s leadership who understood so well the relationship between political goals and military force.”6
Roger Hilsman was the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs in the Kennedy Administration.

After the French defeat in Indochina in 1954, how was Indochina divided?

According to the US State Department,
“After the end of the First Indochina War and the Viet Minh defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the countries meeting at the Geneva Conference divided Vietnam into northern and southern halves, ruled by separate regimes, and scheduled elections to reunite the country under a unified government. The communists seemed likely to win those elections, thanks mostly to their superior organization and greater appeal in the countryside.
“The United States, however, was dedicated to containing the spread of communist regimes and, invoking the charter of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (1954), supported the South Vietnamese leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, when he refused to hold the elections. Diem held control of the South Vietnamese Government, but he could not halt the communist infiltration of the South. By 1959, the Viet Cong, South Vietnamese communist guerillas, and the Viet Minh, began a large-scale insurgency in the South that marked the opening of the Second Indochina War.
“Ngo Dinh Diem failed to capture the loyalties of the people of South Vietnam the way that Ho Chi Minh had done among the population of North Vietnam. Despite U.S. support, Diem’s rural policies and ambivalent attitude toward necessary changes like land reform only bolstered support for the Viet Cong in the southern countryside. By 1963, Diem’s rule had so deteriorated that he was overthrown and assassinated by several of his generals with the tacit approval of the Kennedy Administration. Three weeks later, U.S. President John F. Kennedy was also assassinated, and the war continued under new leadership in both countries. Before his death, Kennedy had increased the U.S. advisory presence in South Vietnam in the hopes that a U.S.-supported program of “nation-building” would strengthen the new South Vietnamese government. However, South Vietnam continued to experience political instability and military losses to North Vietnam.”

What was the CIA’s assessment of the future of South Vietnam in 1954 after the Geneva agreements were signed temporarily dividing Vietnam into North Vietnam and South Vietnam?

“1. The signing of the agreements at Geneva has accorded international recognition to Communist military and political power in Indochina and has given that power a defined geographic base.
“2. We believe that the Communists will not give up their objective of securing control of all Indochina but will, without violating the armistice to the extent of launching an armed invasion to the south or west, pursue their objective by political, psychological, and paramilitary means.
“3. We believe the Communists will consolidate control over North Vietnam with little difficulty. Present indications are that the Viet Minh will pursue a moderate political program, which together with its strong military posture, will be calculated to make that regime appeal to the nationalist feelings of the Vietnamese population generally. It is possible, however, that the Viet Minh may find it desirable or necessary to adopt a strongly repressive domestic program which would diminish its appeal in South Vietnam. In any event, from its new territorial base, the Viet Minh will intensify Communist activities throughout Indochina.
“4. Although it is possible that the French and Vietnamese, even with firm support from the US and other powers, may be able to establish a strong regime in South Vietnam, we believe that the chances for this development are poor and, moreover, that the situation is more likely to continue to deteriorate progressively over the next year. It is even possible that, at some time during the next two years, the South Vietnam Government could be taken over by elements that would seek unification with the North even at the expense of Communist domination. If the scheduled national elections are held in July 1956, and if the Viet Minh does not prejudice its political prospects, the Viet Minh will almost certainly win.”

To what extent did Eisenhower realize that the US was supporting an unpopular government in South Vietnam?

See President Dwight Eisenhower’s memoir Mandate for Change, where he writes about the election that was to be held to reunite North and South Vietnam after the partition in 1954. According to Eisenhower, “…possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than the Chief of State Bao Dai.” Ho had led the battle against Japanese invaders during World War II and was a national hero in the eyes of many Vietnamese in the north and south. Ho also led the successful fight to evict the French from Vietnam.

What did Eisenhower fear from a communist takeover of South Vietnam?

Like many civilian and military leaders of the 50’s and 60’s, Eisenhower feared that if the communists succeeded in taking over South Vietnam, many other nations in the area would soon fall like dominoes one after another to the communists. This domino theory is cited time after time in the years before the escalation of the war in Vietnam.

What were the consequences of all of President Eisenhower’s policies toward Vietnam?

Historians at the University of Virginia criticize Eisenhower for keeping the US in Vietnam. They write:
“Eisenhower avoided a direct military intervention in Indochina in 1954, and the French went down to defeat to the Communist forces in northern Vietnam. But Ike was determined not to allow another such fiasco. Following the partition of Vietnam into a communist North and pro-western South, Eisenhower chose to invest huge sums of money and prestige in transforming South Vietnam into a showcase of a new “free Asia.” Spending billions of dollars, sending military advisers, supporting the increasingly brutal tactics of the South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem—all this effort would help create a pro-American bastion in Southeast Asia and halt Communism. Yet it also left a terrible decision for his successors, once South Vietnam faced a new war with Communist forces.
“Ike managed to avoid an American war in Vietnam during his two terms. But he invested so much American prestige and effort in the success of South Vietnam that by the end of the 1950s, America had become deeply invested in its fate. Eisenhower created an American Vietnam, and his successors would wage a bitter – and failed – war to keep it.”

What was the government of South Vietnam doing to improve its popularity in rural areas of South Vietnam with the support of President John F. Kennedy?

George K. Tanham, a director of American aid to rural Vietnam, describes why the efforts of the US supported government in Saigon failed to influence peasants on the farms of South Vietnam.
By the early 1960s, President Diem, “recognized the Viet Cong activities in the rural areas as a threat to their political base.” Diem then initiated the Strategic Hamlet Program to build secure hamlets in rural areas and separate the rural population from the Communists.
“This program aimed at providing security for the rural population by moving them when necessary to more compact clusters and constructing ditches and barbed-wire fences as protection. It also aimed at separating the Viet Cong from their base—the people—and thus stopping the flow of goods and food to the insurgents. There were also supposed to be social and economic improvements and responsible political organizations in the hamlets, so that the people would be willing and able not only to defend themselves but to participate actively and loyally in developing a viable and Communist-resistant society.
“Unfortunately, the program was pushed too fast and without regard for the people’s feelings or real needs. Peasants were forcibly and abruptly moved and were made to build defenses, often without compensation. They enjoyed few tangible improvements as a result of these hardships and labor; the follow-up programs for social, economic, and political improvements rarely materialized. Hamlets were deemed completed when fortifications were finished, hardly the criterion for real pacification and progress. Communist propaganda to the effect that the strategic hamlets were really concentration camps often fell on very fertile ground.”

How did the communist guerillas in South Vietnam—the Vietcong—maintain their control over the peasants in the fields of South Vietnam?

The Viet-Minh was the name of the army of North Vietnam which defeated the French in the 1950s. New names appeared after the partition of Vietnam in 1954. The Vietcong, the communist guerillas in South Vietnam, and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) fought the Army of South Vietnam (ARVN), and after 1965, U.S. forces.
It is essential to remember the political tactics and organization of the Vietcong in addition to their military capacity. The journalist Bernard Fall who was later killed in Vietnam wrote of the ability of the Vietcong to set up an entire government in rural areas parallel to the official government of South Vietnam. According to Fall, the Vietcong enforced their rule with assassinations and terror through an armed propaganda group known as the Dich-Van or DV.
Fall writes:
“It is the Dich-Van operations which create havoc in South Viet-Nam and which, for obvious reasons, neither American helicopters nor U.S. Special Forces can cope with; the DV’s make themselves felt at a specifically ‘Vietnamese’ level of fighting upon which the foreigner simply has no effect.
It will be a Dich-Van group that will capture the mayor of a recalcitrant village and cut his body to ribbons, or leave his head dangling from a bamboo pole in the middle of the village (with a note attached to it warning that anyone who takes it down will suffer the same fate); it will be a DV unit that will burst into a village meeting, call out the names of five boys who recently joined the South Vietnamese Government’s youth movement, and gun them down after the reading of a ‘death sentence’; it was a DV operation that, on January 10, 1962, captured 100 youth-group leaders in South Viet-Nam, brainwashed them for several weeks, and then released them.
Seven ‘incorrigibles’ were held back and probably murdered. It is that type of operation—the violent act for psychological rather than military reasons—which is the source of the success of the Viet-Minh against the French-Vietnamese forces of the 1940’s and 1950’s and against the American-Vietnamese forces of the 1960’s… In South Viet-Nam’s guerrilla war of the 1960’s, the DV’s role is not to defeat a Vietnamese division, with its American advisers and with U.S. Air Force planes on call, in a Dien Bien Phu type battle. The Dich-Van will simply go on murdering village chiefs, youth leaders, teachers, and antimalaria teams—thus isolating the Saigon government from the countryside. And in a revolutionary war, that is precisely what separates victory from defeat: the control of the rural population.”
The American journalist, Richard Hammer, also had opinions about the loyalty of the rural population. He wrote that land mattered to the farmers and that the Communists redistributed land much more frequently than the central government in Saigon:
“Those who stayed soon learned, both from the VC and by experience, that there would be no trouble from the VC if they cooperated. They might actually be better off than they had been (as long as the Americans and the ARVN did not actively contest the VC’s control). The lands of absentee landlords and of those who left were turned over to the hamlet councils and many of the landless were able to rent paddies at low prices; if they had the money, they could even buy them with the funds going into a hamlet treasury for the benefit of all.

How did the brief presidency of John F. Kennedy influence American involvement in Vietnam?

US troops or advisors, as they were then called, numbered 700 at the end of the Eisenhower presidency in 1960. Kennedy increased the number to more than 16,000 by the time of his assassination in 1963.14 Kennedy also popularized the idea of counterinsurgency in the belief that future struggles would be small-scale actions against communist guerillas rather than large scale conventional wars. Kennedy encouraged the expansion of the special forces and authorized the wearing of the green beret by Army Special Forces.

When Lyndon Johnson became president in 1963 after the assassination of John Kennedy, what were CIA assessments saying about the prospects for the success of the US supported government in South Vietnam?

Fortunately, many CIA documents from the era are now available online at-https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/vietnam-collection. These documents provide some information about what the US government knew from its largest intelligence service. Were the reports heeded is another question. Given that CIA director Richard McClone resigned in protest in April 1965, after being ignored so consistently, there are questions about whether pessimistic reports were welcome or carefully considered in the Lyndon Baines Johnson White House.
The content of the reports are interesting, as you might expect. A CIA report from 1964 before large scale US intervention is pessimistic. It starts with the problem, and then offers a conclusion:
THE PROBLEM
To assess the chances for the emergence of a stable non-Communist regime in South Vietnam
CONCLUSION
At present the odds are against the emergence of a stable government capable of effectively prosecuting the war in South Vietnam. Yet the situation is not hopeless: if a viable regime evolves from the present confusion it may even gain strength from the release of long-pent pressures and the sobering effect of the current crisis. Of the men on the scene, General Khanh probably has the best chance of mustering sufficient support to restore a reasonably stable and workable government.
Starting in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson increased the number of US troops in South Vietnam from the more than 16,000 advisors of his predecessor to a total of 549,500. What were the reasons for Johnson’s radical changes in American involvement?
As you might expect, explanations vary in the many accounts of his actions. Some writers stress his anti-communism. He witnessed Stalin’s thug behavior in Eastern Europe in the 1940’s and 1950’s, as well as during the Berlin crisis. He saw how China and Russia aided the North Koreans during the Korean conflict. Other writers explain how domestic politics shaped him. He saw his Democratic party suffer in the eyes of voters during the McCarthy era when Republican senator Joseph McCarthy accused Democrats of ‘being soft on communism.’ Losing Vietnam might have opened the Democrats up to a new round of ‘McCarthyism.’
Readers seeking details about escalation during the Johnson years can download free eBooks with copies of memorandum and telegrams written by war planners from the US State Department at https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/ebooks and text copies https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/johnson. The Pentagon Papers, with another look at the era, are available at https://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers

For more reading about why LBJ made Vietnam into an American war in 1965, you might direct students to the recent history of the war by H.R. McMaster. H.R McMaster, himself once a general and a former national security advisor explains how it happened in Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, and Joint Chiefs of Staff.
According to McMaster, LBJ had two goals. The first was not to lose the war. He feared the political consequences after seeing the uproar in Congress after the Communists took over China in 1948. The second goal was to keep the attention of Congress and the public on his Great Society legislation until all the legislation passed. The Great Society was to be his legacy. And in fairness to Johnson, there may have been some idealism left in his Great Society goals of assistance to the poor. Johnson was the last president to know privation as a youth. His family struggled during the Depression.
Today historians also blame Robert McNamara for the tragedy of Vietnam. McNamara, the whiz kid Secretary of Defense, essentially did whatever LBJ wanted done in Vietnam. LBJ did not want to lose the war. LBJ trusted few people, and planned the war with a group of McNamara and four or five other staffers. If LBJ wanted Congress and the Joint Chiefs of Staff excluded, McNamara did his best to exclude these institutions, regardless of the Constitution.
When the eventual defeat of the Army of South Vietnam became obvious in 1965, McNamara and his staff persuaded LBJ to start introducing American ground troops to prevent the collapse of South Vietnam. But as McMaster explains, there was not an overall strategy for the use of the new troops. McMaster repeatedly mentions LBJ’s desire for the troops “to kill Vietcong.” But there was no discussion of what victory in Vietnam would look like. Would stalemate be victory? Would a better negotiated settlement be victory? Would killing all the Vietcong and Northern Vietnamese Army (NVA) in the South be victory?
One idea which McMaster brings up repeatedly was the desire of the planners of the war to maintain American ‘credibility’ in the world. If I was teaching the war, I might ask students to look around the world at the time and decide where American credibility was at risk in the 1960’s. The US and the United Nations had prevailed in the defense of South Korea in the early 1950s; the Berlin airlift worked in the late 1940s; President Kennedy negotiated a solution to the Cuban missile in 1962; US soft power had helped contain communism in Asia after World War II, etc. Was this credibility going to disappear? Where did our allies have to go if America lost ‘credibility’? Since the idea of ‘credibility’ was so important in President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s later management of the war, it may be a topic worth investigating in your classes.

How was dissent about policies in Vietnam handled in the LBJ White House?

After the memo below questioning the war, and a speech on war, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey was excluded from any role planning the war.
“I served on the National Security Council as a matter of law, but Johnson held fewer of those regular meetings and began to discuss Vietnam in the informal sessions he preferred meetings staffed with his own, selected advisers. Beyond excluding me from substantive discussions, Johnson’s annoyance showed in a variety of ways,” Humphrey wrote in 1965.
What were the doubts about the war in Vice-President’s Humphrey’s memo to LBJ?
He cited a lack of public support:
“American wars have to be politically understandable by the American public. There has to be a cogent, convincing case if we are to enjoy sustained public support. In World Wars I and II we had this. In Korea we were moving under United Nations auspices to defend South Korea against dramatic, across-the-border, conventional aggression. Yet even with those advantages, we could not sustain American political support for fighting Chinese in Korea in 1952.
“Today in Vietnam we lack the very advantages we had in Korea. The public is worried and confused. Our rationale for action has shifted away now even from the notion that we are there as advisers on request of a free government, to the simple and politically barren argument of our ‘national interest.’ We have not succeeded in making this national interest interesting enough at home or abroad to generate support. The arguments in fact are probably too complicated (or too weak) to be politically useful or effective.”
He noted the “chronic instability” in South Vietnam, which made its government a grave risk to support:
“People can’t understand why we would run grave risks to support a country which is totally unable to put its own house in order. The chronic instability in Saigon directly undermines American political support for our policy.”
He argued that the situation in Vietnam was a civil war, and that US bombing in North Vietnam would not influence small scale terrorism by communists in South Vietnam.
“It is hard to justify dramatic 150 plane U.S. air bombardments across a border as a response to camouflaged, often non-sensational, elusive, small-scale terror, which has been going on for ten years, in what looks largely like a Civil War in the South.”
And he worried that growing domestic opposition to the war in the US would erode support for all of the international programs of the Johnson administration.
“If, on the other hand, we find ourselves leading from frustration to escalation and end up short of a war with China but embroiled deeper in fighting in Vietnam over the next few months, political opposition will steadily mount. It will underwrite all the negativism and disillusionment which we already have about foreign involvement generally—with serious and direct effects for all the Democratic internationalist programs to which the Johnson Administration remains committed: AID, United Nations, arms control, and socially humane and constructive policies generally. (AID is the Agency for International Development.)
“For all these reasons, the decisions now being made on Vietnam will affect the future of this Administration fundamentally. I intend to support the Administration whatever the President’s decisions. But these are my views.”
What was the legal justification for the US escalation in Vietnam?
According to the US State Department,
“In early August 1964, two U.S. destroyers stationed in the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam radioed that they had been fired upon by North Vietnamese forces. In response to these reported incidents, President Lyndon B. Johnson requested permission from the U.S. Congress to increase the U.S. military presence in Indochina. On August 7, 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing President Johnson to take any measures he believed were necessary to retaliate and to promote the maintenance of international peace and security in southeast Asia. This resolution became the legal basis for the Johnson and Nixon Administrations prosecution of the Vietnam War.”
Following the Johnson administration, Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968. About what percentage of the American deaths in Vietnam, took place during his presidency?
The University of Houston Digital History site says, “About a third of the Americans who died in combat were killed during the Nixon presidency.” See https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3464

What was the rationale for the President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s very slow withdrawal from the war?

As mentioned earlier, policy makers, especially Henry Kissinger, were concerned about maintaining American credibility in the eyes of the world. Kissinger thought that loyalty to an ally would reassure our other allies in Asia and deter our foes in Asia. At the time that Nixon and Kissinger took office, American war deaths had been reported on the web at two numbers – 31,00 and 34,000. As you will see below, the total number of American dead was over 58,000 at the end of the Nixon years in office.

Approximately, how many people, combatants and civilians, died in Vietnam?

A public TV station has published these numbers:
58,000 American troops
250,000 South Vietnamese troops
1 million+ North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops
2 million Vietnamese civilians
Tens of thousands in Laos and Cambodia
“Although the percent of soldiers who died in Vietnam is similar to other wars, amputations or crippling wounds were 300 percent higher than in World War II. Of the 2,500 American soldiers listed as missing in action in 1973, more than 1,600 were still unaccounted for in 2015.”19
A slightly higher number of US dead of 58,220 is listed by the National Archives at https://tinyurl.com/4z8yfnh8.

What are some sources of lesson plans about Vietnam?

I found this National Endowment for the Humanities lesson on Vietnam useful at
https://edsitement.neh.gov/sites/default/files/2018-08/teacher-guide-vietnam-lessons.pdf.
How can you market an elective on Vietnam to your principal or curriculum committee?
Given the over 1,000,000 Vietnamese deaths in Vietnam, the over 58,000 American deaths in Vietnam, and given the more recent disaster in Iraq, you and your History Department or American Studies Department may decide that your students should know more about American interventions around the world. While there have been several American interventions in the Middle East and South America, you may decide to concentrate on the by far largest conflict in terms of loss of life: Vietnam.
You may believe that there may be lessons to be learned from American experiences in Vietnam. Knowing about the past might be valuable. You might believe that with the past in mind, your students may have better questions to ask about the next intervention.
Your principal might justifiably ask, “What will students do in this new elective?” Note that fuzzy words like ’learn’ and ‘understand’ may not be acceptable in your principal’s eyes. Your principal should expect outcomes which students can demonstrate. In this spirit of demonstrable outcomes, let’s list a few that students should be able to complete at the end of your elective.

Outcomes

List at least two events of the Cold War in Europe in the 1950s that led to American distrust of Communism in the 1960s.
Describe American relations with Communist China in the 1960s. What major event influenced this relationship?
Describe how the Korean war might have influenced American attitudes toward a new war where the northern part of a country was trying to take over the southern part.
Describe the population of South Vietnam. Were they predominantly urban or rural? Catholic or Buddhist?
Describe economic conditions in South Vietnam. Agricultural? Industrial?
Describe the early political leadership of South Vietnam, which had been installed by the French. Urban or rural? Catholic or Buddhist? To what extent did the political leadership reflect the population of South Vietnam?
List the characteristics of a civil war.
At the end of the elective, after having read two first person accounts, students can write about the nature of the war.
Decide if the war in South Vietnam was a civil war or an invasion by outsiders from the North, as in the case of the Korean War?
Explain why you would or would not have recommended American involvement of US combat troops in large numbers.
As you will see as you read any book or article about Vietnam, a repeat of the appeasement at Munich in 1938 was much feared by American leaders. And the Domino Theory, that one fall of one nation to Communism would lead to a succession of states going communist also influenced American plans.
A more advanced outcome might be to be ask students to list differences between the Munich agreement of 1938, and an agreement that the United States might have signed with Ho Chi Minh, withdrawing from Vietnam and ending the Vietnam war. List some differences between 1938 Germany, and 1966 or 1968 North Vietnam in population, industrial capacity, and military history.
Decide if all communist regimes provide the same level of threat to the United States. Even if Vietnam went communist in the 60’s, were they going to be able to invade Hawaii or California? Was each communist nation equal in military capacity? And questions of history remain. Given its history of wars with China in its past, would North Vietnam immediately join China in campaigns against its neighbors?

More Sources

Intelligence Agencies and Vietnam.
See https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/archives/vol-40-no-5/why-cia-analysts-were-so-doubtful-about-vietnam/
1966 Fulbright Hearings on Vietnam. The video of the hearings is at https://www.c-span.org/video/?404584-1/1966-fulbright-vietnam-hearings-dean-rusk.

Free ebooks about Vietnam are available at this website at https://ebooksforstudents.org/category/militaryhistory/vietnam/. I especially recommend “One Soldier” by John H. Shook.