LBJ and the Vietnam War
Overview
Statewide Dual Credit Modern World History: Unit 15, Lesson 13
A discussion of the key events in the Vietnam War, focusing on the escalation of U.S. involvement under President Lyndon B. Johnson and the subsequent withdrawal under President Richard Nixon, highlighting the domestic and international factors that influenced the course of the war.
A little over a year after the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a disgruntled former marine and defector named Lee Harvey Oswald (1939-1963) assassinated President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Baynes Johnson (1908-1973), proved a key figure in the Cold War. A Texas native, admirer of Franklin Roosevelt, and former Senate majority leader, Johnson, had little foreign policy experience. After being sworn in as president, LBJ primarily concentrated on domestic issues, using the death of JFK to push through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, and declaring war on poverty with an expansive set of social welfare programs known as the Great Society.
Initially, Johnson continued to uphold the foreign policy initiatives of his predecessors. In 1964, the People’s Republic of China detonated its first nuclear bomb and edged closer to displacing Taiwan as the official representative for China on the UN Security Council. The Johnson administration responded by increasing U.S. military and economic assistance to Ngo Dinh Diem’s South Vietnamese government. However, Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Cong movement, supplied by both the USSR and the PRC, only continued to increase in manpower and popularity. Relying on a cadre of Kennedy appointees including Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara (1916-2009), Secretary of State Dean Rusk (1909-1994) and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy (1919-1996), Johnson began to send American combat troops to Vietnam.
Throughout the early 1960s, North and South Vietnam fought a bloody civil war. Communist China supported the North Vietnamese, while the United States backed the regime of Ngo Dien Diem in Saigon. In early August 1964, the U.S. Navy destroyers U.S.S. Maddox and U.S.S. Turner Joy were patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam. On August 2, three North Vietnamese patrol boats engaged in a skirmish with the Maddox. Two days later, the Maddox and Turner Joy reported another attack and returned fire. However, conflicting reports stated that the American destroyers fired at what they thought was a second attack, although no North Vietnamese ships were actually spotted. In any case, President Johnson appeared live on television before the American public to report the attacks and announce his intention to retaliate. On August 7, Congress agreed to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, providing the President with wide latitude to conduct military operations in Vietnam. It was the closest the United States ever came to formally declaring war on North Vietnam. Following the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, President Johnson ordered massive bombing campaigns against North Vietnam and sent over 300,000 American troops to reinforce the South Vietnamese military. American special forces trained South Vietnamese soldiers, sent long-range reconnaissance patrols deep into the Vietnamese countryside to stop flows of weapons and supplies to communist insurgents, and helped to build up the South Vietnamese infrastructure.
Led by General William Westmoreland (1914-2005), the U.S. military in Vietnam had a large technological advantage over the North Vietnamese forces. However, the Viet Cong’s use of guerilla warfare and their widespread support among the people more than made up for this advantage. In January 1968, Viet Cong and North Vietnam forces launched the Tet Offensive, a series of attacks on over 100 American military targets throughout South Vietnam. This caused many Americans, including leading members of the media like Walter Cronkite (1916-2009), to question whether the war could still be won. Worried about the draft, thousands of young Americans took to the street to protest the war. The war became so controversial that LBJ pledged not to run for re-election in 1968. Former vice president and Communist hardliner Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994) defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey (1911-1978) to become U.S. president. Promising Americans “peace with honor,” Nixon increased bombing on North Vietnam but gradually began transferring responsibility for the defense of South Vietnam over to ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) in a process he referred to as the “Vietnamization” of the conflict.
In 1970, former Pentagon employee Daniel Ellsberg (b. 1931) published classified documents showing that American officials had greatly exaggerated American victories in Vietnam while hiding the number of American casualties from the public. Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger (b. 1923), conducted shuttle diplomacy with Soviet, Chinese and North Vietnamese diplomats to negotiate a gradual withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Vietnam. By 1973, all U.S. soldiers were withdrawn from Vietnam.
Since 1946, North Vietnamese forces had fought against the Japanese, French and Americans. In 1973, President Richard Nixon announced that the “Americanization” of the war was complete and ordered U.S. troops to turn over military operations to their South Vietnamese counterparts. Backed by the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, North Vietnamese forces began infiltrating the south. By April 1975, the North Vietnamese army approached Saigon, triggering a panic among the city’s residents. Thousands of South Vietnamese that had worked with American forces fled by sea. Helicopters evacuated American embassy personnel and their dependents. At 2:30 p.m. on April 30, South Vietnamese Doung Van Minh (1916-2001) took to the airwaves to announce that his government had surrendered and that the Republic of Vietnam no longer existed. In 1976, North and South Vietnam were merged creating the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.