Expert answer:I need help with paper on Why Did the United State
Answer & Explanation:Read: Isserman and Kazin, “Why Did the United States Fight in Vietnam” on Blackboard under: Course Material HAMAD HISTOREY 222.pdfWrite: Assignment must be typed, double-spaced, with your name at the top Write a paragraph that answers this question: Why did the Viet Cong win the hearts and minds of Vietnamese peasants according to Isserman and Kazin? Read Isserman and Kazin’s chapter about the beginnings of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and watch for the point where they address Special Forces and the strengths of the Viet Cong. Note that the question here is: what is Isserman and Kazin’s view of the situation, not what others see as the reason. Do not use the Internet to find some approximate answer to the question. Write a paragraph of at least four sentences, including a topic sentence that answers the question generally and relates to all of the sentences in the paragraph. Use NO QUOTATIONS. Write your paragraph entirely in your own words.
hamad_historey_222.pdf
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CHAPTEP
4
Wh,, DiJ thn UnitnJ Stotn’
Fight in Vintno-?
NrtrHrn you NoR I xNow rHr AurntceNs wELL,
OF THEM . . .
THAN orHER cAptrAltsr NATIoNS. THrY wtt-t-
BUT wHAT
wE Do KNow
SUCCESTS THAT THEY ARE MORE PRACTICAL AND CLEAR-SIGHTED
VtrrNnt’a
Nor
PouR THEIR RESoURCES lNTo
ENDLESSLY.
-Ho
Chi Minh, in conversation with a Communist diplomat,
autumn 19631
The Vietnam War was the longest war the United States ever fought.
It
also
proved the most demoralizing for Americans, plunging the nation into its
most bitter civil conflict in a century. Before the war ran its course, more
than 58,000 Americans, and millions of Vietnamese, would die. Before the
war ran its course, two American presidencies would be either directly or indirectly shattered by its consequences. Before the war ran its course, Americans would get used to thinking of each other as divided into polarized enemy camps: pro-war and antiwar, hawks and doves, and on from there to
ever more scurrilous epithets. No legacy of the 1960s had as long and embittering an effect on the politics and culture of the United States as that left
by the war in Vietnam.
The war in Vietnam differed from other American conflicts in which the
United States had fought for clearly defined strategic or territorial goals. In
Vietnam, the rationale for fighting the war, like the battlefront itself, was constantly shifting. The most consistent explanation for why Americans needed
to fight in Vietnam was the defense of the “credibility” of the United Statesin itself a murky, ambiguous goal.
Viernam also differed from other American wars in which clearly defined
lines divided peace and war, such as the Confederate firing on Fort Sumter
in 186L In Vietnam no single event or decision clearly marked the beginning of the war. Arguments could be made to date the real start of the con67
68
Amenca Divided
flict, or at least the point of no return, anytime from the mid-I950s until the
mid-1960s. The roots of American involvement stretch back much further.2
Vietnam, a country that is roughly the size of New Mexico in square
miles, stretches in an S-shaped curve along the eastern seaboard of Southeast
Asia. Two fertile river deltas, the Red River in the north and the Mekong
River in the south, fan out to the sea. A narrow coastal plain runs up the seacoast, while rugged mountain chains and high plateaus run north and south
the length of the country’s heavily forested interior.
When Americans first fought in Vietnam, they did so, ironically, as allies of Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. Indochina, which includes Laos and Cambodia as well as Vietnam, had been colonized by France
since the late nineteenth century, the richest and most important colony in
the French empire. For over a half century the French ruthlessly suppressed
any challenge to their authority in the region. Then, in 1940, France was itself conquered by Nazi Germany. The followingyear, French Indochina was
occupied by Japan. French colonialists offered little resistance to the Japanese invaders, but Ho Chi Minh and the Communists formed a national resistance movement, opposing both theJapanese occupation and French colonialism. Within four years the Viet Minh had a half million followers, and a
5000-man army.
In the closing days of the Second World War, a team of American intelligence agents parachuted behindJapanese lines in Vietnam to establish contact with Ho Chi Minh’s forces. These troops, the Viet Minh, had proved
themselves useflul to the Americans by rescuing downed American fliers. In
July 1945 the Americans brought medical supplies and small arms to Ho, and
trained his Viet Minh fighters in guerrilla tactics. Two months later, following the Japanese surrender, American advisers were with Ho when his troops
marched in to take control of Hanoi, the principal city of northern Vietnam.
On September 2,1945, Ho, a frail man with a wispy beard, whose bearing
suggested more a scholar than a military commander or a politician, stood
beflore a crowd of a half-million of his countrymen in a central square in
Hanoi and declared Vietnamese independence. He chose to do so in words
that sounded familiar to the American military men in attendance: “We hold
truths that all men are created equal,” Ho declared. “That they are endowed
by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights: among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”3
Though he had borrowed freely from the American declaration of independence, Ho Chi Minh was by no means a Jeffersonian democrat. He was a
hard-bitten revolutionary who had spent many years in exile from Vietnam
in the service of the Communist movement. He was born as Nguyen Tat
Thanh in 1890 in Nghe An Province in central coastal Vietnam. Though well
educated, he signed onto a ship in 1912 as a common laborer and sailed over
the next few years to Africa, Europe and North America. (During this period
–
Wy
69
FromGratd Expecrarions: The United States, 1945-1974by James
copyright @ 1996 by oxford lJnfuersity Press, Inc. IJsed by permission of ox-
Map of Vietnam. Source:
T. Pdtterson.
Did the United States Fight in Vietnam?
ford Uni,rersity Press, lnc.
70
America Diyided
he lived for nearly a year in Brooklyn, New York.) His thoughts, however,
remained anchored in his homeland, and it was during this period also that
he took a new name, Nguyen Ai-Quoc, which means “Nguyen the patriot”
in Vietnamese. He would not become known by the name Ho Chi Minh (“He
Who Enlightens” in Vietnamese) unril 1944.
During the First World War and its immediate aftermath, Ho lived in
Paris. There, in 1920, he joined the French Communist Party. Communist
leaders in Moscow had issued a call for world revolution, including the over-
throw of the colonial regimes of Asia and Africa. To Ho, the Communist
movement represented a long-sought ally for Vietnamese independence. He
rose quickly within the leadership of the international Communist movement, traveling to Moscow and China on its behalf.
In 1930 Ho held a secret meeting in Hong Kong to organize the Vietnamese Communist Party. However, the party could not function openly in
Vietnam. The French regularly executed nationalist and Communist opponents in Vietnam; Ho knew he faced a death sentence if he was captured. In
19,1I he slipped back into Viernam ro organize the Viet Minh to do battle
with the Japanese and the French.
Ho was a Communist, but his first priority was attaining Vietnamese independence. During the Second World War, he came ro hope that the United
States, for reasons of its own, could be brought to support the cause of Vietnamese independence.
America’s wartime leader, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was certainly no admirer of French colonialism. “[T]he case of Indochina is perfectly
clear,” he wrote to Secretary of State Cordell Hull inJanuary 1944. “France
has milked it for one hundred years. The people of Indochina are entitled to
something better than that.”a Beyond vague speculation about establishing
an international “trusteeship” to govern Indochina after the war, however,
Roosevelt never spelled out any definite alternatives to allowing the French
to reestablish their control of the region.
The world changed swiftly in the monrhs that followed Roosevelt’s death
in April 1945, with the unraveling of the wartime alliance of the United srates,
Britain, and the Soviet Union. In March 1947 President Harry Truman announced what became known as the Truman Doctrine, declaring it the policy
of the United States “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”5 Never before had an
American president committed the nation to a foreign policy that, potentially,
involved an unceasing series of military interventions throughout the world.
ln Vietnam, in the year following the end of the Second World War, the
contending French and viet Minh forces faced each other in an uneasy standoff. In February 1946 Ho wrore Truman and asked that the united states become the “guardian” of Vietnam. Noting that the United States had recently
granted independence to its former protectorate in the Philippine islands, Ho
-Why Did the Ilnited States Fight in
Vietnam?
7l
declared: “Like thel-1,!lni””r our goar is -full independence and full cooperarion with the UNITED
srATES. we will do our best ro make this inde_
pendence and cooperation profitable to the
whole world.,,6
In all, Ho addressed r l such messages to the American
government. His
movement received no material aid from the soviet
Union, oJrrry other Com_
munist country in those years. some American intelligence
officers who kept
tabs on Indochina in the 1940s believed Ho
had the iotential ro become rhe
“Tito of southeast d5i3″-1[21 is, like Marshar rrto
of vugorl*iu, he wourd
steer an independent course in foreign relations,
not behJldei to trr. Soviet
Union.
Truman never responded to Ho’s entreaties. Indochina
was a minor con_
cern to American policyrnakers. Their main concern
was the defense of western Europe, where France was a varued American
alry. The French,
suffered a grave narional humiliation
who had
with their defeai ,.rd o..rrpution by the
Nazis, had no intention of relinquishing control
over their coloniar empire.
To Truman and his advisers, there sermed no alternative
to backing the
French in Indochina.
In November 1946 French forces went on the offensive
against
Minh’ French warships bombarded the northern vietnailese the viet
port of
Haiph-ong, krlling 6000 civilians. The viet Minh
abandoned the ciries to the
French
and fought back_from the countryside, using the
crassic guerriila tac_
tics of stealth and surprise
other armies were on the march in Asia. In october 1949
chinese Com_
munist forces led by Mao Zedong came to power
on the chinese mainrand;
afterward, arms and ammunitioi began ro be smuggred
to the viet Minh
across the chinese-vietnamese bordei. InJune
1950 the armies of commu_
nist North Korea swept over the border into South
Korea. To American leaders, the events in China and Korea were ominously
reminiscent of Hitler,s
aggression in Europe in the late 1g30s; in 1g50 president
Truman believed
that the Korean invasion represented the opening shots
of a Third world
War.
the experience of dealing with the Nazis in the I930s,
_
American
-From
leaders concluded that appeasement only
whetted th” upp”tit” of uggr.rro.r.
The only way to deter an expansionist dictatorship,
whether led by a Hitrer
or a Stalin, was the resolute application of counterforce.
It was with this un_
derstanding rhar Truman inJune 1950 committed
America,s military might to
the aid of the beleaguered South Koreans. For
the first time, American soldiers were engaged in a fuil-scale shooting war
against a communist foe. That
same month, the United States began prorridirrg
*ititury supplies to the French
forces
in Indochina. By L954
American aid hl’d irrc.”ur”d’ti ,rr. p”i”, where
the united States was funding nearly B0 percent
of the French war effort.
The viet Minh proved a formidable enemy, and
after a series of military
.
setbacks, the French switched commanders in
Indochina. In May 1953, the
72
Amenca Divided
new French commander, General Henri Navarre, declared, “Now we can see
[victoryJ clearly, like light at rhe end of a runnel.”7 The phrase would come
back to haunt him. Seeking a climactic showdown with the viet Minh, the
French commander sent 15,000 crack troops to a remote village in north-
western vietnam called Dien Bien Phu. But in their overconfidence, the
French neglected to occupy the heights surrounding their new base.
viet Minh troops under the command of vo Nguyen Giap cut roads
through supposedly impassable rerrain, and dragged artillery to those hilltops. on March 13,1954, they launched their offensive, cutring off the French
garrison from reinforcement or retreat. Americans took part in the attempted
resupply of the garrison; two American pilots were shot down and killed in
the effort. A crisis atmosphere prevailed in washington as Admiral Arthur
Radford, chairman of the Joint chiefs of Staff, proposed to president Eisenhower that the United states relieve the defenders by means of air strikes,
possibly including the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
several influential lawmakers, including senatorJohn F. Kennedy and Senate majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson, warned against intervention, as did
Army Chief of Staff General Matthew Ridgway. No one wanred another costly
land war in Asia. Eisenhower, who had been elected in November 1952 in
part because o[ his promise to a war-weary electorate to end the Korean war,
held back. surrounded and outnumbered, the battered survivors of the French
garrison at Dien Bien Phu surrendered to the viet Minh on }y’.ay 7,1954.
In the weeks that followed, a conference of western and Communist
powers meeting in Geneva, switzerland, drew up an agreement to end the
conflict. The Geneva accords provided for the temporary division of vietnam at the 17th parallel, with viet Minh forces left in control of the northern half of the country and the vietnamese emperor Bao Dai (an ally of the
French) in control of the southern half. Nationwide elections were scheduled for 1956 to reunify the country. As president Eisenhower would later
acknowledge, Ho Chi Minh was by far rhe mosr popular political figure in
vietnam during the war and would easily have won a free election for national leader.s
shortly before the fall of Dien Bien phu, president Eisenhower likened the
Ioss of vietnam to the communists to a “falling domino”: “you have a row
of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to
the last one is rhe certainty that it will go over very quickly. . . . So, ttr” porsible consequences of the loss are just incalculable to the free world.”e over
the next few years Eisenhower committed substantial economic and military
aid to shoring up an independent anticommunist regime in southern vietnam.
Ngo Dinh Diem, a conservative nationalist from a wealthy background,
emerged as the new strong man in south Vietnamese politics. He returned
from years of exile in the United States and Belgium in 1954 to become prime
minister under Emperor Bao Dai. Diem, an ardent Catholic, enjoyed the pa-
W
Did the Ilnited States Fight in
Vietnam?
73
tronage of influential American backers, including
Senator Kennedy and New
York city’s cardinal spelrman. In ocrober t9:ioiem
organized a nadonar
referendum that led to the creation of the new Republic
of vietnam (south
vietnam), with its capital in saigon. Diem was elect”d
the republic,s firsr pres_
ident by means of a blatantly rigged erection. The followirrg
,r-rr,”, he re-
fused to allow reunification ele.tio* with northern
vietnam to be held as
scheduled by the Geneva accords. In the meantime,
the Communists consolidated their own power in the Democratic Republic
of vietnam (North
vietnam), wirh irs capital in Hanoi. when Diem visited
the United states in
May 1957, President Eisenhower hailed him as the .,miracle
man,, of Asia,
who had saved southern vietnam from communist enslavement.
without
American aid, however, Diem could never have remained
in power. In the
mid-I960s the U.S. Defense Department undertook
u ,op-r”…i study of the
origins of American involvement the vietnam war. The
authors of what be_
came known as the “pentagon papers” concluded,
simpry, that ..South vietnam was essentially the creation the United States.,,ro
As fears ofsoviet conquest ofwestern Europe
subsided in the later r950s,
the focus of Cold war competition shifted to wirat
*u, u”girring to be called
the “Third world,” the less developed nations of
Asia, Afrifa, uriLati., Amer_
ic-a’ Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev pledged
his country,r’rrppoa ro *wars
of national liberation,” and many in tire third worrd,
tit curi.o in cuba,
looked to the communist worrd for models of revolutionr.y”
,i*ggr. and economic development. But in south vietnam, the march
of co*-,,,r.rism had
apparently been stopped in its tracks. The country
was emerging in the eyes
of American policymakers as a “proving ground for
democraiy,,ls th”n-s”rrator Kennedy called it.ll
Edward Lansdale (head of the cIA mission in saigon),
forged crose relations with Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem owed a lot
ro t-anJaate, *i? n”tp”d o.ganize a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands
of northern vietnamese
catholics to south vietnam in L954. catholic refugees
became Diem,s most
reliable supporters-in a counrry with a rarge nuJdhist
majority. Lansdare
also- made generous use of CIA funds to buy
off potential south vietnamese
rivals to Diem.
. The early days of American involvement in Vietnam were armost like an
adventure-story. ogden williams, a cIA official
who worked u, u, urrirtu.,t
to colonel Lansdale in saigon, wourd later recail his
time in vietnam with
obvious nostalgia. First of ail, there was a strong *sense
of mission,, shared
by the military advisers and intelligence agents in
the counrry:
we were the nation that had won world war II and was honored
throughout the
world. To serve the United sures overseas was a dream in
trror. aryf i”lurr” yo,
had.very high standing-even low-level Americans
did. we had enormous
in that period.
presrige
74
America Divided
Americans had long cherished the belief that they had a special role to
play 1n determining the future of Asia. Generarions of rehgious missionaries
had dedicated their lives to redeeming China from pagan superstition and
barbaric custom. The Communist revolution in China had brought the expulsion of those missionaries. But some of the same impulse lived on, in more
secular form, among the young men like ogden williams who were sent to
Saigon in the I950s with the goal of preserving the south viernamese from
the political dangers that beset them from the north. And it didn’t hurt that
Vietnam was such an exotic destination:
There was that sense of a young country, which was very inspiring. . . . There
was
very graceful, traditional culture, an enormously pleasant *ry oilif”. saigon was
an elegant city. The beautiful tropical foliage, the flamboyanr trees, the cabarets,
the lovely slim women. . . . The whole thing was just elegant and romantic as
hell.
. . . It was always an enormous letdown to come back to the United states.r2
a
Those who served in vietnam in those years knew, of course, that the
Diem regime’s methods of governing were less than democratic. His American-trained police arrested tens of thousands of political opponents, many
of
whom were tortured and executed. His government reclaimed land that had
been turned over ro rhe peasanrs by the viet Minh during the first Indochinese war and distributed it to wealthy landlords and catholic refugees. But,
in the name of shoring up an anti-communist ally, Americans in Saigon and
washington were willing to overlook Diem’s shortcomings. Certainly the
North vietnamese Communists, who executed thousands of
peasant
landowners during “land re_form” campaigns in the mid-I950s, were no gentler in their own methods of governing. Given the choice, Americans belieied,
no people would of their own volition choose communism over the politicai
and material advantages offered by an alliance with the United states.
what American diplomatic and politicar srrategists overlooked was that
the vietnamese had their own way of looking at the world, one that did not
necessarily coincide with rhe assumprions guiding policymaking in wash-
ington. American policymakers looked at Ho and saw a communist; vietnamese peasants looked at Ho and saw a patriot. A thousand years before
the
start of the second world war, a vietnamese army had driven out Chinese
invaders to establish an independent kingdom. Time and again in the centuries that followed, the vietnamese fought would-be .orqr,”iorc from china
and other nations. vietnamese history was filled with stories of heroes and
martyrs in the cause of ind …
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