Assess the View That Lyndon Johnson (Lbj) Had No Choice but to Send Us Troops to Vietnam in 1965.

In her book The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990, author Marilyn Young examines the series of political and military struggles between the United States and Vietnam, a nation that has been distinctively separated as the South and the North. Young chooses to express the daily, weekly, monthly progresses of the affairs collectively called the Vietnam Wars, focusing on the American interventions in the foreign soil. She seeks to provide an answer to a question that has haunted the world for years: What was the reason behind the United States interfering in the internal affairs of a foreign country in which it had no claims at all? Young discloses the overt as well as covert actions undertaken by the U.S. government officials regarding the foreign affairs with Vietnam and the true nature of the multifaceted objectives of each and every person that’s involved had.

During the Lyndon Baines Johnson presidential administration, both those policy makers who supported America’s involvement in Vietnam and those who opposed the war were part of the “containment generation.” They had reached political maturity during World War II and the early years of the Cold War and had experienced the intense anticommunism of the McCarthy era of the early 1950s. These leaders understood and applied the lessons of American nationalism, which had the primary message that the U.S. was the dominating nation that had to embrace its responsibility to aid and improve nations in America’s image. Therefore, when they saw that there was a threat of the spread of communism to areas of Southeast Asia, a majority of the

“In August of 1964, in response to the American and GVN espionage along its coast, the DRV launched a local and controlled attack against C. Turner Joy and the U.S.S. Maddox , two American ships on call in the Gulf of Tonkin” (Brigham 2). This resulted in the United States government giving Lyndon Johnson the ability to make war under the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. President Johnson then gave orders to perform air raids on Northern Vietnam pushing the United States further into the war. Compared to 1962 when only 9,000 soldiers supported the South Vietnamese, by June 1965 82,000 soldiers occupied the country. The number only continued to rise exponentially, and by 1966 370,000 soldiers had been sent in to prop their South Vietnam allies. President Richard Nixon withdrew American soldiers from Vietnam and as part of the “vietnamization” of the war. Over and 60,000 American soldiers had been lost in a war to preserve the status quo, not to win.

LBJ’s plan didn’t turn out so great when the Vietnam war caused the U.S. to lose it prestige

Reasons for United States' Involvement in Vietnam In this essay I will be writing about why America got involved in the Vietnam War, between the 1950s to the 1960s. This was a steady and slow process with many deaths all because of communism. It was very costly and bloody. This essay will focus on political reasons, military reasons and economy reasons.

I do not think that Lyndon Johnson was correct in assuming that the Eisenhower and Kennedy administration committed him to go into the Vietnam War. Personally, I believe that everyone makes their own decisions, regardless of what has happened previously. Obviously the decisions that were made in the past could affect the present decisions being made but at the end of the day, Lyndon Johnson committed himself to the War in Vietnam.

Johnson's own presidency shadows the divide of America. Johnson was brought into the continuing expansion of troubles in Vietnam. Kennedy had supported the South-Vietnamese democratic intentions, but shortly before his own

I Lyndon B. Johnson, commonly known as LBJ, am a man who was a cause of much change and debate in the United States. I was born on August 27, 1908 in the great state of Texas; a state that helped shaped me into who I am. I became involved with politics early on in my life and it seemed to be a natural progression towards presidency. In the year 1960 I started to campaign for the democratic presidential nomination. After this nomination was given to John F. Kennedy I ran for Vice President on the democratic ticket, and was sworn in to be the vice president on January 20, 1960. It was a little over two years later, on the 22nd of November in the year 1963, when the unfortunate assignation of my dear friends and leader John F. Kennedy occurred. It was because of this tragedy that I succeeded John F. Kennedy and became the 36th president of the United States of America.

In fact, remarkable similarities exist between the Korean War and the Vietnam War; from the US support of a dictatorial and corrupt anti-communist regime to its conception of communism as a monolithic entity, under which all communist nations were necessarily allies, rather than individuals to be dealt with separately. However, though those parallels, Vietnam era policy-makers did not apply the lessons of the Korean War to the Vietnam War. Rather, they did not seem to recognize those lessons as lessons at all, and repeated in

Johnson could never have envisaged what he had started. By the time of the 1968 presidential election, America had become involved in a war that was to take on far greater dimensions than anyone could have

On the 7th of April 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave one historic press conference [1]. In that conference, he announced his so called “Domino Theory”. It was a substantial aspect of the US involvement in the Vietnam War, involvement in terms of its military support and methods used in Vietnam. Even though it was greatly enhanced by other factors, such as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, it was the trigger, and therefore the source of all US involvement in the Vietnam War. The main rationale of the theory was that if one country fell down to communism, all the surrounding countries would do the same, hence why it was called the ‘Domino’ Theory. Eisenhower thought that Vietnam’s fall to communism would lead to consequential communist uprisings in neighboring countries, such as Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. He also that that it could possibly extend as far as India, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Australia and New Zealand -[1]. This gave The US enough motivation, and more importantly, justification as to why they greatly increased military presence in Vietnam. Eisenhower said, “The possible consequences of the loss [of Indochina] are just incalculable to the free world.” [2]. Even though the theory was imprecise, and only Laos and Cambodia joined communism after the US lost the war, it was significant as the foundation of the US involvement in the conflict.

Caitlin Nguyen February 10, 2015 Block - 8 Cause-and-Effect Essay Thunderous clamor erupted between a domineering, communistic state and a placid, democratic country. Infatuated with the idea of dominance, North Vietnam was determined to apprehend a vulnerable South Vietnam. Frightened by how bona fide the "domino theory" proposed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower was, the United States intervened in 1965 to assist the forlorn county. Together, they toiled diligently to contain the spread of communism through eight brutal years against the well-equipped Viet Cong. Feeble and flooded with casualty rates at approximately 58,000 American soldiers, the US resorted to the Paris Peace Accords with North Vietnam. As a part of

Introduction On March 8th, 1965, the first American combat troops landed in Vietnam. This event marked a new era of US involvement in the battle to defend South Vietnam from Northern communist expansion. In the eight years of fighting which followed, 2.7 million Americans would eventually serve in Vietnam, and the United States would end up spending $111 billion, not adjusted for inflation, on the conflict. Yet, despite large advantages both militarily and financially, the United States surprisingly failed to claim victory over the Soviet-backed North Vietnamese. The three critical reasons why the United States failed in Vietnam was because of their military strategy, failure to establish a stable infrastructure in the South, and dwindling

One of McNamara’s central claims in this book was towards how his exceptional group of coworkers and he managed to get it all wrong in Vietnam. The problems made by the administration were not a matter of intentions or calculation, but rather those of judgments and capabilities of the region (McNamara, XIX). They should not have started a war with traditional military strategy with an enemy prepared to take a significant number of casualties. Vietnam had no political stability to conduct a peaceful and stable operation; it was simply not possible (McNamara, 49). Kennedy and Johnson believed that the loss of South Vietnam to the Communists would lead to the spread of Communism across Asia. To stop Communism from spreading, the United States

This investigation is important because the Vietnam War to some extent laid the basis for future American foreign intervention; thus understanding why our failure in Vietnam is crucial to understanding how we can avoid such catastrophe in the future.