John F. Kennedy started the Vietnam conflict in 1962. Vietnam never attacked us. Johnson turned Vietnam into a quagmire. From 1965-1975, 58,000 lives were lost, an average of 5,800 per year.
Lots of blame to go around...both parties and many presidents.
Our involvement in Vietnam started before Kennedy.
Eisenhower...
nv.cc.va.us
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Vietnam
You have a row of dominoes set up; you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is that it will go over very quickly.
Trapped by Success
The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953-61
David L. Anderson
""Trapped By Success offers an engaging and thoughtful approach to Vietnam. It is the most thorough account available on the evolution of the U.S. commitment during the critical period after the French withdrawal. Based on systematic research in a wide range of archives, Anderson's study is destined to become the standard work on Eisenhower's Vietnam policy and, as such, an important contribution to our understanding of the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam."
–Gary R. Hess, Bowling Green State University
The Eisenhower Administration developed and implemented policies in Southeast Asia that contributed directly to the massive American military involvement in Vietnam in the decade after Dwight Eisenhower left office. Working with the most recently declassified government records on U.S. policy in Vietnam in the 1950s, David L. Anderson asserts that the Eisenhower Administration was less successful in Vietnam than the revisionists suggests.Trapped By Success is the first systematic study of the entire eight years of the Eisenhower Administration's efforts to build a nation in South Vietnam in order to protect U.S. global interests. Proclaiming success, where, in fact, failure abounded, the Eisenhower Administration trapped itself and its successors into a commitment to the survival of its own frail creation in Indochina. The book is a chronicle of clandestine plots, bureaucratic fights, cultural and strategic mistakes, and missed opportunities.
columbia.edu
You seemed to have forgotten Nixon's role? 1969 until he left office in 1973. His 1968 "secret plan" to end it was extremely secret so much so that it never really ended the war while he was prez.
In January 1973 Nixon accepted peace terms in Paris that ensured South Vietnam’s defeat: the United States would withdraw all of its troops from South Vietnam but the North Vietnamese could keep its troops there.
Under President Gerald R. Ford, the North Vietnamese launched a full scale conventional attack on South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese army collapsed.
umich.edu |
