History Of The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War (1954-1975) was, and continues to be, a contentious issue around the world. Many analysts of the war attribute it to Lyndon B. Johnson, who was president of America from 1963 until 1969, because under his administration, the American Army became involved in combat in Vietnam. Although there were many facets that lead Johnson to make his decision and there were three other presidents, in power during the course of America’s involvement in Vietnam, who also played key roles, it was Johnson who made the decision to escalate US intervention in Vietnam.

The war in Vietnam began as a civil war which dated back long into Vietnamese history. Although it was a communist revolution, it was first and foremost a people’s war, in which the people of South Vietnam were revolting against the right-wing dictatorship of their government. The Vietnam War was the second of the two Indochina Wars, where the first was fought and lost by France. American intervention, because of the policy of containing communism, had already begun during the First Indochina War, under President Eisenhower. Although Eisenhower had refused to commit US troops to the war, he supplied military support to the French. And when they lost the war, he continued to supply aid to the anti-communist government in Saigon, the capital of the South Vietnam. The end of the First Indochina War resulted in the Geneva Conference of 1954 between France and the Viet Minh, who decided to split Vietnam in to the communist North and the pro-western South. This therefore recognised North Vietnam, known as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), as an independent state. However, an insurgency in the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), led by the National Liberation Front (...

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...with America, safely. US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, as well as Nixon’s successor, President Gerald Ford were placed in a situation where they had to continue to aid Saigon in order to prolong its fall for long enough to evacuate. Thus the war came to an end in 1975, and Vietnam was unified a year later.

The Vietnam War was a difficult experience both for the US military as well as its foreign policy. It was unique geographically, ethnically, politically, militarily and diplomatically. Although Johnson inherited a difficult problem from his predecessors, he did step into a trap essentially of his own making. His decision to go to war was reached from hard thought-out reasoning but he did not factor in the environment in Vietnam or the opinion of the American public, resulting in a disastrous war, for the Empire of Liberty, that lasted for over two decades.