Making the Geopolitical Intensely Personal: Lyndon Johnsons Vietnam - Essay Example

Your Your Making the Geopolitical Intensely Personal: Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam The war in Vietnam was different from most of the other conflicts in American history. There was not a clear point of entry into the conflict - a stark contrast with the horrific night of Pearl Harbor, for example. The rationale behind United States involvement lacked the hearty sentiments of Manifest Destiny or the hated enemies Kaiser Bill or Adolf Hitler. It may have been these murky beginnings that made the war such an unpopular one, and a topic that enervated rather than energized the American public. It may have been this lack of unity regarding the Vietnam conflict that offended President Johnson, who sought to turn the conflict around and make it a positive factor in American society. The conflict, of course, began when the French decided to release their colonial claims to Vietnam. The French army was driven from Vietnam in 1954, resulting in the Geneva Peace Accords. This created a temporary partition of Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel, until 1956, when nationwide elections would be held. While the Communist powers in the Soviet Union and China did want the entire nation of Vietnam to become Communist, they predicted that the 1956 election would accomplish their aims without bringing the United States into the conflict (The Wars for Vietnam: 1945 to 1975). Rather than initiate another conflict similar to Korea, the American government began a concerted effort to win the political minds of those living to the south of the Communist zone. A major part of this effort was the creation of SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization). Initially, the American efforts were successful: the 1956 elections brought Ngo Dinh Diem, a firm opponent of Communism, to power in South Vietnam. However, Diem claimed that the North Vietnamese were preparing to take the southern half of Vietnam by force, and the Americans began aiding his military maneuvers against the northern half in 1957. Diem used a variety of brutal internal measures in South Vietnam to quell the Communist insurgency, including Law 10/59, which permitted authorities to hold anyone who was suspected of being a Communist indefinitely, without bringing charges. Over time, Diem became increasingly autocratic, which made him an increasingly difficult leader for the United States to support. In response, the Communist insurgency began to increase the amount of violence in its protests (The Wars for Vietnam: 1945 to 1975). The National Liberation Front was the official organization for those in South Vietnam who wanted to overthrow Diem's government. Created on December 20, 1960, the NLF had only one requirement for membership: applicants had to be opposed to Diem's rule. While the American government scorned the NLF as a mere puppet of the North Vietnamese Communist government, giving it the slur "Viet Cong," there are many who were inside and outside the NLF who claimed that the majority of its members were not Communists - thus showing how unpopular Diem had actually become. President Kennedy's policy toward Diem was neither full assistance nor full rejection: the United States supplied advisers and equipment to the South Vietnamese government, but did not commit a large-scale complement of troops to assist Diem's military in its conflict against the NLF (The Wars for Vietnam: 1945 to 1975). This level of assistance was not sufficient to keep the South Vietnamese government stable. After Diem's brother led raids on the Buddhist pagodas throughout the country, claiming that the priests were harboring Communists, there were protests throughout the country, including one in Saigon where a Buddhist priest set himself on fire. The Americans gave some of Diem's generals support for a coup, and so on November 1, 1963, Diem and his brother were captured and later killed. On November 22, however, President Kennedy was assassinated, bringing Vice President Lyndon Johnson into the role of Chief Executive (The Wars for Vietnam: 1945 to 1975). At this point in time, there were 16,000 American military advisers stationed in Vietnam. However, the political difficulties in South Vietnam did not seem to be abating, which made many wonder what the effectiveness of those advisers was. Even before the attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin, the new President was already planning a significant increase in the American military presence in South Vietnam. Matters accelerated on August 2 and 4, 1964, when the North Vietnamese attacked an American ship in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was the American political response, which gave the President wide-ranging executive powers to use during times of war. The military response to the attacks was a series of limited air attacks against North Vietnam. There was much dissent inside the government as to how militarily involved the next steps should be - the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged an expanded air campaign over the north, while the civilians in government wanted to be more choosy about the bombing targets. While all of this arguing was going on, the NLF attacked two American army installations in the south, which led President Johnson to institute Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained bombing campaign, and to send significant troop increases into the south (The Wars for Vietnam: 1945 to 1975). This American adjustment in strategy led to a change in the Communist strategy as well. Because the Communists knew that the American government did not have a specific vision behind its military intervention in Vietnam, they believed that they would be able to defeat the technologically and numerically superior American forces by drawing the war out, and getting the United States into a slow, bogged-down conflict that would wear away at public opinion and political will. Unfortunately, President Johnson never developed a vision beyond attempting to avoid the embarrassment of a perceived loss to such a small country, and so his policy was to keep increasing the military presence in Vietnam without developing a goal for the end of that conflict, or a defining purpose that the United States was accomplishing with all of its military involvement. His desire to avoid humiliation and embarrassment appears to have been his sole motivation, and as such the military effort foundered without a central purpose or focus. Works Cited The Wars for Vietnam: 1945 to 1975. Accessed 11 October 2006 online at http://vietnam.vassar.edu/overview.html. Read More