The Vietnam War

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that the American involvement and error in Vietnam and Vietnam's internal strife probably began toward the end of World War II when President Franklin D. Roosevelt failed to place Indochina under a United Nations trust and when President Harry Truman (1)permitted France to return to the former French Indochina and (2)initiated U.S. military aid to Indochina in May 1950. The author points out that President Johnson needed to create a "foreign aggressor"; thus North Vietnam became a "foreign" country enabling the United States to shift its focus from the intractable problems of the South. The paper states that it is important to acknowledge the possibility of ulterior motives for the retention of a American military presence in Vietnam long after even the U.S. leadership realized that involvement in this civil war was an error and a loss was possible.

From the Paper:

"Until 1965, North Vietnam had limited itself to training and sending Native Southerners to fight in the south. Roger Hilsman, former Assistant Secretary of the State for Far Eastern Affairs, predicted the effect of bombing on North Vietnamese policy: It would be well for the advocates of bombing and other "easy" solutions to such problems to remember that Hanoi's policy was not to infiltrate North Vietnamese into South Vietnam-the infilitrators have almost all been Southerners sympathetic to communism who went North in 1954. Hanoi has kept this self-imposed limitation partly to maintain the fiction that the origins of the fighting in South Vietnam were internal, but partly to minimize the risk of retaliation against their precious factories. Once the factories are gone, so is the deterrent."

More papers on The Vietnam War:

• Book Review # 142157 : "The Vietnam War On Trial": Book Review"
• Comparison Essay # 42331 : "The Vietnam War"
• Cause and Effect Essay # 112589 : "Student Unrest and the Vietnam War"
• Book Review # 57859 : "Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War"

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