The road to America's longest and most divisive war had been long, stretching through the presidencies of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. Each chief executive had taken steps to prevent the triumph of socialism in Vietnam. Each felt that the Truman Doctrine and the policy of containment demanded these successive measures to preserve a pro-American regime in South Vietnam.

Acting upon a decision initially made by Franklin Roosevelt as World War II was drawing to an end and the Cold War was already beginning, President Truman had refused to recognize Ho Chi Minh's Democratic Republic of Vietnam because he viewed it as a Soviet proxy. Accordingly, he had helped finance French efforts to put down the socialist independence movement. Dwight Eisenhower played an instrumental role in the creation of the pro-American Republic of South Vietnam once the French had given up their fight against Ho Chi Minh. In the American government's opinion, part of the old French colony had to be saved for the West even if it meant scuttling the Geneva Accords of 1954. When military and financial aid proved insufficient by the early 1960s to secure South Vietnam from attacks by the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese, John Kennedy increased aid levels and dispatched American military advisors to train South Vietnamese forces to more efficiently wage the war effort. John Kennedy, however, never made up his mind about how far to extend the American commitment before his assassination thrust Lyndon Johnson into the presidency. Advisors proved insufficient and the new president began the "Americanization" of the war by introducing American combat personnel in early 1965.

President Johnson, reflecting the conviction of Americans that aggression had to be met forcefully and preventing the spread of communism was crucial to American interests worldwide, defended his decision time and time again in the next three years by invoking the Truman Doctrine and the policy of containment.

Judging from public opinion polls, the American people had supported each of these succeeding steps. Given the Cold War environment of the 1950s and 1960s, Americans viewed attacks on South Vietnam as overt aggression by the Soviet Union through proxies designed to expand the socialist world. Therefore, while they might have only an amorphous idea of the complex issues and characters involved and even where Vietnam was, Americans had thus far stood behind the decision to battle what was perceived to be a part of a global communist threat. That support, however, was slowly beginning to erode as the costs of the war began to skyrocket. Still, leaders of the Johnson administration issued reassuring statements in late 1967 that the conflict was beginning to wind down. According to these estimates, American intervention had proven successful - the United States was inflicting severe damage on the communists, more and more of the Vietnam countryside had been "pacified", and the day when American soldiers could return home was rapidly approaching. Then suddenly the situation changed.

In conjunction with the Tet holiday season in Southeast Asia, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese launched a massive and coordinated series of attacks on numerous American military installations and South Vietnamese population centers. For a brief period in January and February 1968 the enemy abandoned the hit-and-run tactics of guerilla warfare in favor of furious, even suicidal, frontal assaults on well-fortified targets. While the Tet Invasion was a staggering failure for the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese from a military perspective , it marked the turning point in the Vietnam experience for the American people. Having been reassured by the Johnson administration that the war was beginning to wind down to a successful conclusion, Americans reacted with astonishment, disbelief, and anger to Tet. How could such a massive invasion take place given the presence of a half million American soldiers in South Vietnam? How could the enemy, supposedly pounded and harassed to the verge of submission, mount such a widespread and coordinated assault? If indeed South Vietnam had been secured, how could a suicide squad of Vietcong guerillas invade and assault the American embassy compound in Saigon?

The student of the Vietnam experience must differentiate between military realities and perceptions of reality drawn by the American people when analyzing Tet. As stated, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese suffered staggering losses during Tet and failed to seize and permanently hold any major target, military or civilian. Yet, the military debacle so shook the confidence of the United States and the will of Americans to continue the struggle regardless of costs as to represent a tremendous psychological victory for the enemy. The parallels between Dienbienphu in 1954 and the Tet invasion in 1968 are eerie. The French had been defeated at Dienbienphu but had lost only five percent of their fighting troops. Even with assurances of continued financial and military support from the United States, the French people had turned against the war in Indochina and demanded an extrication - demands that resulted in the Geneva Accords. Tet was an equally shocking event for the American people. As they watched news coverage from Vietnam on television in early 1968, the tide of public opinion began to shift in the United States.

Rightly or wrongly, Americans who had unquestioningly supported President Johnson's Vietnam commitment now began to question both the purposes and handling of the war. Dissent against the war, which had begun slowly and quietly with the "Americanization" of the war, now rapidly and noisily broke into the open. Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy both launched campaigns to wrestle the presidential nomination of the Democratic party from the incumbent president, arguing that "Americanization" had been a mistake and American extrication from Southeast Asia should begin immediately. President Johnson, increasingly under pressure, wishing to avoid a fratricidal struggle to retain the presidency, and hoping to convince the Vietcong and North Vietnamese to begin diplomatic negotiations, withdrew from the presidential race in March, 1968. He spent the final months of his administration successfully engineering the beginning of direct negotiations in Paris with the North Vietnamese and Vietcong.

In expressing their desire for new leadership and new direction in the management of the war, American voters turned to Richard Nixon in 1968. The majority agreed with the new president that the United States had somehow to extricate itself from the quagmire of Southeast Asia but in so doing had to preserve its honor and position of global leadership. The president rejected the demands of the antiwar movement that the United States simply, unilaterally, and immediately withdraw, leaving the South Vietnamese to fight on by themselves. Such a withdrawal, President Nixon argued and the majority of citizens believed, would mortally wound American honor and prestige. Allies, seeing the superpower of the free world abandoning South Vietnam when the going got tough, would discount American pledges of support and perhaps seek an accommodation with the Soviet Union. Therefore, the United States would continue to fight until negotiations could produce a settlement that insured the survival of South Vietnam. Then, and only then, could the United States end its military involvement. Thus the fighting continued while the search for a negotiated settlement inched forward in Paris.

President Nixon realized that such a settlement might be impossible to conclude if antiwar sentiment continued to mushroom in the United States. In order to defuse if not silence totally the challenges of the antiwar movement and buy time to negotiate a peace with honor, Nixon launched a program known as "Vietnamization" early in 1969. Essentially a reversal of "Americanization" which had taken place between 1965 and 1968, "Vietnamization" called for a gradual reduction in American ground troops and a corresponding escalation of the bombing campaign against the Vietcong and North Vietnamese. Greater levels of financial aid and military equipment would also be supplied by the United States as the South Vietnamese army assumed a larger role in the ground war.

President Nixon hoped Vietnamization would achieve several goals. First, the United States could gradually begin deescalation and extrication. Secondly, since the level of antiwar dissent seemed directly proportional to the level of American casualties and fatalities, dissent would be lessened by reducing American losses which occurred predominantly in the ground war. At the same time, an increased bombing campaign would protect this transfer of responsibility to the South Vietnamese. Finally, if successful, Vietnamization would eventually produce a powerful South Vietnamese army capable of defending itself with financial support and military supplies from the United States.

While Vietnamization was reducing American losses and gradually reducing troop levels, President Nixon took radical action in other areas of the war. Keeping Congress and the people in the dark, he had ordered a secret bombing campaign against areas of adjoining Cambodia used by the Vietcong for refuge and supply depots. When reporters finally uncovered and made public this covert effort in 1970, President Nixon ordered American troops to cross the border and invade Cambodia. The military incursion, which the administration pledged would be of brief duration, was designed to capture fleeing Vietcong guerillas, deny the guerillas "privileged sanctuary" in neighboring Cambodia, to permanently sever the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and to destroy Vietcong weapons caches. This seeming enlargement of the war provoked a firestorm of criticism in the United States. Antiwar protestors took to the streets in the greatest numbers ever. Critics in Congress savaged the president for launching an undeclared and, in their opinion, unconstitutional war against Cambodia. In the aftermath, Congress began slashing appropriations for the war in hopes of pressuring the administration into speeding up withdrawal. The Cambodian Incursion, in the long run, also proved crucial in congressional passage of the War Powers Act of 1974, an attempt to curb all future presidents' ability to wage war independent of the legislative branch. Despite its enormous political costs, the Cambodian Incursion achieved only limited and temporary military gains. More importantly, it reinvigorated the antiwar movement in the United States and resulted in ever greater pressures on the Nixon administration to find some way out of Southeast Asia.

American extrication was finally achieved at the negotiating table in January, 1973 with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. Under the terms of the settlement, an immediate cease-fire began, the United States was to withdraw all of its remaining combat troops within sixty days, and the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese were to return all American prisoners of war and missing in actions during the same time frame. With respect to the political future of Vietnam, the document was far less specific. The American interpretation holds that all sides agreed to hold general elections in South Vietnam at some unspecified time in the future that would ideally lead to the formation of a coalition government including representatives of the Vietcong. This settlement was essentially the same as one rejected by the Nixon administration in 1969. Most historians agree with the statement in your textbook characterizing the Paris Peace Accords as "a disguised surrender" that allowed the United States to withdraw as gracefully as possible before the fighting resumed.

Despite verbal assurances to South Vietnamese leaders by President Nixon at the time the document was signed that they could count on continued financial aid and military supplies (and even a return of American combat troops if worst came to worst), Congress cut back further on Vietnam appropriations after withdrawal. The nation quickly became preoccupied with the Watergate scandal and interest in Vietnam waned, even though save fighting there continued. By the time South Vietnam collapsed under enemy attack in early 1975, Americans were already trying to put the Vietnam experience behind them.

Coming to grips with the Vietnam experience has proven extremely difficult for Americans both as individuals and as a nation. That process is not complete today twenty years after "peace". Never before had the United States been involved in so confusing, perplexing, and disquietening a war. Americans, who viewed Vietnam solely from the Cold War perspective, never fully grasped the anticolonial aspects of the struggle - never fully realized that many of the Vietnamese saw American intervention as an attempt to perpetuate the colonialism of the French era in a slightly different context.

This was a disquietening war because of the way it was fought. Though the United States had fought a limited war for limited political objectives in Korea, this was guerilla war such as Americans had never witnessed before. American soldiers were just as likely to be killed in Saigon by a supposed civilian ally as by Vietcong ambush in the field. Given the fact that this was a civil war as well, one never knew for certain who was friendly and who was hostile, which led inevitably to a great deal of fear and confusion and an emphasis on individual survival rather than such grand objectives as the containment of communism. It also led to numerous supposed atrocities such as those that did transpire at My Lai which shocked and dismayed the American public.

The war in Southeast Asia was also unsettling because it was never fought in unlimited fashion, whether this was an error or not. At the time, almost no one in the United States thought unlimited war was either desirable or necessary to achieve our objective of insuring the survival of South Vietnam. The war, therefore, was fought in limited fashion with the intent of using just enough force and inflicting just enough casualties and fatalities upon the enemy until they ceased their aggression. The criteria for our success or failure became the "body count", issued each Friday comparing our losses to those of the enemy. In essence, if the pile of Asian bodies was larger than that of American bodies, we were winning and sooner or later the enemy would have to submit. American forces, composed largely of officers from the professional military and infantry produced by a draft which impacted most heavily on poor and minority communities, served twelve month tours of duty in Vietnam rather than for the duration as in past conflicts. The on-off nature of fighting and the deep involvement of government officials in how the war was fought was also unique to this particular conflict.

Vietnam was an unsettling war for Americans because the country was never unified in its commitment. Unlike World War II when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had instantaneously unified the country behind the war effort, many Americans never fully understood or accepted the goals in Vietnam and, with the passage of time, more and more turned against the war. Never before had Americans fought a war in a foreign land and among themselves at home at the same time. Internal dissent against the war and conflict between Congress and chief executives further complicated the war. Never before had Americans fought such a long war and the longer it ran, the more divisive it became. This was is stark contrast to the enemy who had been fighting in earnest continuously since 1945. This was also unlike any other war in that Americans were able to see this war on television each and every night. False myths about the romanticism, heroism, and thrilling adventurism of war were wiped away by the daily televised images from Vietnam. America's war experience was all the more shattering given the belief of many Americans that Presidents Johnson and Nixon had intentionally deceived the public and had deliberately lied to their countrymen about the war.

Perhaps the saddest and most disquietening aspect of the Vietnam experience, from the American perspective, was the manner in which American veterans of war were treated by the citizens of their own country, for whom they had served valiantly in most cases. Americans, not wishing to be reminded of the first war America had ever "lost" and the bitter divisions of the era, treated the Vietnam veteran as a non-entity for a long time. For over a decade there was no national recognition of their courage or sacrifice. No parades, no celebrations, no thanks. Rather, the veteran of Vietnam was often stigmatized by his or her service. Vets were characterized as ill-adjusted and incapable of returning to the realities of peace and domestic life in this country. Others were pictured as junkies, unable to shake drug habits acquired during the war. Given the vitriolic charges during the war made by a small group of protestors that all soldiers were war criminals guilty of atrocities, the returning veteran was the last and perhaps the longest suffering victim of America's experience in Vietnam. Only recently have we as a people and a nation begun to grapple with that experience, draw lessons which might be applicable for the future, and express our appreciation for those who served in Vietnam. It is a trend which must continue.