Vietnam War(Continued)

The Geneva Accords stipulated that Vietnam would hold national elections in 1956, uniting the country. To prevent the Communists from taking the entire country, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower recommended the formation of a government, created through agreements that formed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). This government, supported by the United States, became the Government of the Republic of Vietnam, or South Vietnam, and its resulting election introduced Ngo Dinh Diem as its first president. Thus, the US assumed the position of overseer that France had previously held.

Diem, an autocrat himself, immediately made enemies. As he tried to quell his opponents by imprisoning them, even non-Communists opposed him. After several unsuccessful attempts to seize Diem's government, Communists in South Vietnam joined North Vietnam in raising arms against the government. By December 1960 the Communist Party formed the National Liberation Front (NLF), attracting many non-Communists who wished to overthrow Diem's government as well. The US called this group "Vietcong," short for Vietnamese Communist.

President John F. Kennedy, concerned that Communist forces would overtake the democratic government, sent a team to Vietnam to assess conditions. Although the resulting report called for a large-scale assault, the United State increased military support by sending arms and Green Berets, but not troops. The next year, 1962, in an effort to find Vietcong camps, the US Air Force employed a new defoliant--Agent Orange--to expose their trails. In order to control peasant defection to the NLF, Diem ordered their migration from their farms into hamlets in South Vietnam. Ironically, the Strategic Hamlet Program, as it was called, actually encouraged villagers to join the NLF as a protest for being forced off their land. As Diem's support continued to decrease, his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu decided to seize Buddhist pagodas in South Vietnam that he reported harbored Communists, an act to which the monks responded by setting themselves on fire. Pictures of this caused such an outrage that the Kennedy administration immediately withdrew their support of Diem and allowed a coup by his own generals, who eventually succeeded in capturing and executing both Diem and his brother in November 1963. That same month, President Kennedy was killed by an assassin's bullet.

As President Lyndon Johnson assumed the Presidency, US aggressions in Vietnam increased. After attacks on a US destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving the President the power to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." After attempting some limited attacks that failed, Johnson called for full-scale bombing campaigns. By this time, however, the Communist Party had decided on a strategy to wear out its opponents--to prolong the war so that only a stalemate was possible. The Tet Offensive launched by North Korea in January 1968 was the first of these ploys, seeming a limited victory for the United States but indicating that the end of the war was nowhere in sight.

Although the Johnson administration had planned a quick, precise war that would have little effect on life in America, the war succeeded in doing just the opposite. As more and more soldiers died in Vietnam, the military eventually exhausted their enlisted men. As in World War II and the Korean War, the draft went into effect. As Americans watched young men leave for Vietnam, and television reporters and cameras brought the horrors of battle to people's living rooms for the first time, patience waned and protests began. College students from Kent State in Ohio and Jackson State in Mississippi held campus protests that turned into riots, resulting in the deaths and arrests of dozens of students. Just as Americans grew weary of heavy losses of US soldiers, so did several non-Communists who had joined the NLF to battle Diem, as they watched so many of their countrymen die.

After President Richard Nixon entered office, he promised to end the war quickly by employing a policy called "Vietnamization," begun during Lyndon Johnson's last month, a process that recalled American troops to the United States and substituted South Vietnamese soldiers. He also ordered "Operation Breakfast," a secret, intense bombing campaign of North Vietnam and Viet Minh supply routes and base camps inside Cambodia. As the war continued and American public support continued to wane, Nixon proposed a peace treaty with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, or North Vietnam. When new leaders in Saigon rejected the treaty, the Nixon administration sustained a series of B-52 bombing raids in Hanoi and Haiphong to try to force their compliance. At the urging of several foreign leaders, Nixon drafted another peace treaty, the Paris Peace Agreement. As fighting continued even after the peace treaty from 1973-1975, and South Vietnam forces continued to be depleted, South Vietnam surrendered to Communist forces in April 1975, ending the Vietnam War.

Sources:
The Wars for Vietnam: 1945-1975. Vassar College.
American Experience: Vietnam Online
Edward E. Moise's Vietnam War Bibliography