Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke these words from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963:

The great African-American poet Langston Hughes (1902-1967) asked in a poem called “Harlem,”

Brinkmanship was a word coined during the Cold War. It signified winning an advantage in international politics by demonstrating a willingness to push a dangerous situation to the brink of nuclear war.

In This Chapter

Background of the Vietnam War

Escalation and deception

Protest on the home front

U.S. withdrawal and communist victory

In 1964, the beacon of the Great Society shone brightly. Motivated by the memory of JFK and energized by the moral passion of Lyndon Johnson, the program of social reform, even more ambitious than the New Deal had been, seemed unstoppable.

Then, on August 2, 1964, the American destroyer Maddox, conducting electronic espionage in international waters, was attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Undamaged, Maddox was joined by a second destroyer, the C. Turner Joy. On August 4, both ships claimed to have been attacked. Although evidence of the second attack was thin (later it was discovered that the second attack had not occurred), President Johnson ordered retaliatory air, strikes and asked Congress for support. On August 7, the U.S. Senate passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution., giving LBJ almost unlimited authority to expand American involvement in a long-standing war in a part of the world few Americans knew or cared much about.

That war would wreck the Great Society, nearly tear the United States apart, spawn an idealistic albeit drug-oriented youth counterculture, and cost the lives of 58,000 young Americans.

World War II left much of the world, including Southeast Asia, dangerously unstable. During the 19th century, France had colonized Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and when France caved in to Germany in 1940, the Japanese allowed French colonial officials puppet authority in Southeast Asia until the Allied liberation of France in 1945. Japan then seized full control, purging the French police agencies and soldiery that had kept various nationalist groups in check. In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969) led the most powerful of these independence-seeking groups, the Viet Minh. Aided by U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) personnel, Viet Minh fought a guerrilla war against the Japanese occupiers.

When the war in Europe ended, Allied forces were free to turn their attention to Vietnam (and the rest of Southeast Asia). Nationalist Chinese troops (under Chiang Kai-shek) occupied northern Vietnam. The British secured southern Vietnam for re-entry of the French, who ruthlessly suppressed supporters of Ho Chi Minh. A state of low-level guerrilla warfare developed, which escalated sharply when Chiang Kai-shek, hoping to checkmate communist ambitions in the region, withdrew from northern Vietnam and turned that region over to French control.

Like Chiang Kai-shek, U.S. leaders feared communist incursions in Southeast Asia and began to supply the French with funding, military equipment, and-on August 3, 1950—the first contingent of U.S. military “advisors.” By 1953, the United States was funding 80 percent of the cost of France’s war effort.

France assigned General Henri Eugene Navarre to strike a decisive blow on the strategically located plain of Dien Bien Phu, near Laos. President Eisenhower stepped up military aid, but despite Navarre’s massing of troops, Dien Bien Phu fell to the forces of Ho Chi Minh on May 7, 1954. This disaster was followed by a string of Viet Minh victories, and, in a July peace conference, the French and the Viet Minh concluded a cease-fire and agreed to divide Vietnam along the 17th parallel.

During the thick of the Dien Bien Phu campaign, on April 7, 1954, President Eisenhower presented reporters with his rationale for aiding the French—a foreign power-in their fight against communism in Vietnam—a remote country. “You have a row of dominoes set up,” he explained, “you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty it will go over very quickly.” This off-handed metaphor was immediately christened the domino theory, and it became the basis for an escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

As a condition of the armistice agreement concluded in Geneva between Ho Chi Minh and the French, the divided Vietnam was to hold elections within two years to reunify. South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem assumed that Ho Chi Minh would win a popular election; therefore, he declined to abide by the Geneva accords, refusing to hold the promised elections. The United States, more concerned with blocking communism that with practicing democracy in Vietnam, backed Diem’s position. Under John F. Kennedy, who succeeded Eisenhower in 1961, the number of military “advisors” sent to Vietnam steadily rose. By June 30, 1962, 6,419 Americans were in South Vietnam. President Kennedy reported to the press that no U.S. combat forces were in the country, but he did admit that the “training units” were authorized to return fire if fired upon.